The entire super secret, 1100+ page report has been leaked to numerous media sources in Germany.
I can now report the bombshell findings of months of exhaustive investigative research, snooping, and spying by the finest agents available in the German intelligence community and democracy protection racket.
The repercussions of this incendiary, voluminous tome could be characterized as…
I’m not kidding.
The German police state and ruling junta have completely beclowned themselves. The document produced by the constitutional protection agency (BfV) and used as justification for declaring the populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party a ‘right-wing extremist’ group – which enabled legal surveillance of any member and all activities and the first step in banning the party completely – has been exposed as so much gossip, plagiarized news reports, and opinion differences.
No wonder the government backed off almost as soon as they released it. Not only did they drop the classification in less than two weeks’ time – in the face of a lawsuit from AfD and international pressure…
Far-right party Alternative for Germany filed a lawsuit on Monday challenging a decision last week by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency to classify the party as an extremist organisation.
…The AfD says its designation as extremist is a politically motivated attempt to discredit and criminalize it.
…but now the country – and the world – knows the ‘evidence’ comes nowhere near matching the spectacular defamatory claims against the populist party.
German intelligence probe into AfD ends in farce with ‘top secret’ report leak
A controversial top-secret German intelligence report on the right-wing Alternative for Germany party (AfD) that could lead to a total ban on the insurgent political group has been leaked in full online.
…The report had served as the foundation for BfV’s May 2 decision to categorise the entire AfD as “definitely right-wing extremist”. The judgement by the internal security agency could serve as the basis for a complete ban of AfD – which received 21 per cent of the vote in the recent General Election.
The BfV had previously tried to keep the 1,108-page report confidential with not even AfD itself been given a copy. Only a few passages had been made publicly available.
The German Interior Ministry – to which the BfV reports – had argued that the report contained sensitive sources and intelligence information and that the disclosure could jeopardise the agency’s work.
Mathias Brodkorb, a former SPD state minister refuted that charge. After reading the report, he wrote in magazine Cicero: “It was never about protecting the BfV from espionage, but of protecting it from a critical public. … There are no relevant intelligence sources to protect. The constitution protection agency has practically no intelligence findings on AfD. It relies almost entirely on publicly available sources.”
The report is in large part a compilation of quotes from public statements by AfD politicians, including AfD leaders Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla, along with state-level and local representatives. The quotes range from harmless statements to “clearly unconstitutional statements”, wrote Brodkorb. However, the BfV would declare them all without differentiation as anti-constitutional. “This is not only unconvincing, it is patently false,” Brodkorb concluded.
As one German blogger I follow pointed out, the rules for banning a political party are rigorously strict, as they should be. And the threshold for evidence is tremendously high. Thought crimes and spoken opposition are not enough, either. There has to be a physical manifestation of the party in question – and not just isolated individuals – moving to ‘overcome’ one of their three guiding principles.
…We have to be very clear about the standards here. For a party to be banned in the Federal Republic, it must be opposed to the “freiheitliche demokratische Grundordnung,” or the “free democratic basic order.” This is an ideological trinity consisting of human dignity, democracy and the rule of law. Pure opposition is however not enough; the offending party must also seek to overcome at least one of these triune deities in an “aggressive” and “combative” fashion. The antidemocratic agenda must moreover be associated with the party as a whole. Practically, this means you need to get party leadership militating aggressively against democracy, and/or the rule of law and/or human dignity.
The BfV assessment falls so far short of this standard, you have to wonder if there are saboteurs working secretly to defend the AfD inside the offices of constitutional protection. To say that this thing is s**t would be an understatement.
It’s also really intriguing that while the BfV had legal access to all sorts of surveillance tools to gather information like phone taps, undercover infiltration, and data intercepts, they failed to provide a single example of any AfD skullduggery.
Bupkiss.
…The BfV are legally required to use espionage as a last resort, but the whole point of upgrading the AfD to “suspected right-wing extremist” status in 2021 was to open the door to surveillance and infiltration. This is absolutely necessary for those who want to ban the party, because nothing their politicians have done in public meets the high legal standards for prohibition. The whole hope, this whole time, has been that the BfV have spent the last three or four years hard at work tapping phones and paying informants to deliver proof of crpytofascist right-wing extremism in the AfD. And yet, there is absolutely nothing like that in this report.
The government spies filed AfD members railing against George Soros as proof of ‘anti-Semitism‘ and AfD leader Alice Weidel’s reference to a murderous migrant as ‘one of these knifemen’ as a bona fide ‘xenophobic and anti-minority statement.’
It’s become something of a sport, according to eugyppius, for bloggers and media types to beat each other to unearthing the crazier passages cited in the report as ‘evidence’ against the party.
Here’s another example:
In the midst of the long aforementioned attempt to convict the AfD of antisemitism, the BfV decide that “globalist” is an antisemitic “cipher” deployed by the party, and that attacking Bill Gates as a “globalist” is therefore antisemitic, because Gates is “perceived as Jewish.”
HOLY CRAP
The Brussels Signal found one of its own to scratch its head in wonder over.
…Weidel referred to the widely publicised case of a German pensioner who had his house raided by police after sharing a meme online in which then Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck (Greens Party) was called a “professional moron”. Weidel called the raid “an element of intimidation”. This statement was subsequently also included in the BfV report as an indication of AfD’s anti-constitutionality.
Another European news source thought to ask why? Why were none of the statements from all the years of surveillance used in the report that was leaked, and then they answered themselves.
It’s pretty awful to think about, too.
…There are multiple reasons. For one, a big part of the apparatus of spy agencies is to obtain information, but not release it to the public. The public may not be able to stomach such personal and private information and the means that were used to obtain it. Since the Edward Snowden revelations, and even before then, we have become acutely aware that we have accepted devices into our lives and homes that can be used to spy on us on a scale never seen before in history. However, even now — even after all this information has been revealed — I believe nearly all of us still cannot quite grasp what this means — nor do we want to.
…The point is that this software and the means for surveilling people are very unsettling. In a privacy-minded country like Germany, revealing the scale of surveillance being used against the AfD may be a scandal within itself, and could taint the entire report, which at the end of the day, should be used to justify a ban of the AfD.
There may have been voices in the BfV who were calling to use secretly recorded data in the report as well, but the agency also knew this report would eventually be leaked and made public. The agency does not appear to want to divulge who they are surveilling, what information they have about them, and how they obtained this information.
…Surveillance is everywhere, it is being practiced by the left, the right, and many foreign governments are also active in the West, collecting data on targets. So, this is not a uniquely German issue by any means. However, if the establishment in Germany becomes truly desperate, there is probably a secret report waiting that includes far more information and personal details than many Germans want to believe is possible.
Police states are such fun, especially when they become ‘truly desperate.’
Remember that the next time a Democrat squawks about defending democracy when you disagree with them
Whatever the BfV has on AfD members stashed safely away, the circus surrounding the leaked report has frightened off the newly installed chancellor, who has declared his sudden aversion to political hit jobs.
In another 180°, Friedrich Merz says he’s not in favor of banning the AfD at the moment. It’s hard to read his latest reasoning reversal and not laugh out loud.
In recent months, a ban of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) appeared to be inching closer and closer, but now a key voice has clearly spoken out against such a move.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz has now said that voting on an AfD ban in the Bundestag is not the right path, saying it “smacks too much of the elimination of political rivals.” He said he does not believe the current evidence is sufficient.
He has even gone a step farther, stating that former Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, an SPD politician with far-left sympathies who wrote for Antifa Magazine, was wrong to classify the AfD as “confirmed” right-wing extremist in the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) report. Critics indicate that she rushed the report out at the last minute of her tenure, despite the BfV having no president and despite a lack of any expert review, which she had previously promised would happen.
Speaking to Die Zeit, Merz said; “Working ‘aggressively and militantly’ against the free democratic basic order must be proven. And the burden of proof lies solely with the state. That is a classic task of the executive branch. And I have always internally resisted initiating ban proceedings from within the Bundestag. That smacks too much of political competition elimination to me.”
He’s got to be hugely disappointed.
With these guys, they’re never finished, though.
It’s always back to the drawing board.
