Author Archives: Mrs Tilton

About Mrs Tilton

Mrs T is on hiatus from AFOE. A running-dog lackey of the bourgeoisie, Mrs Tilton is (ahem) 39+. Irish, but has lived in Germany for many years. Co-director of the Max-Planck-Institut für hiberno-schwäbische Genmischung. Liberal in the proper sense (not libertarian or leftist.) Writes The 6th International.

You must all be very kind to Tobias today

Posted on by

Regionalist tensions in Spain, murderously cold weather and French nuclear stroppiness are all important enough in their way, I suppose, but let’s not lose sight of what truly matters: Bayern Munich move ahead to the semi-finals of the DFB Cup. It will be scant comfort to Tobias, I fear, that his boys from Mainz 05 punched way above their weight, owning the pitch during the first part of the match and making Bayern worry down to the very last minutes of extra time. Special mention goes to second-string Mainz keeper Christian Wetklo, who had no reason to feel embarrassed standing on the other end of the pitch from Oliver Kahn.

Germany’s other national keeper and his Highbury comrades didn’t fair as well in their own face-off against an upstart promotee, taking a long walk off Wigan pier and out of the League Cup. But the real nailbiter is tonight in Hamburg, where piratical misfits FC St. Pauli of the northern regional league take on Bundesliga power club Werder Bremen. Come on Pauli!

UPDATE: And damned if on Pauli didn’t come! 3:1 against mighty, mighty Werder; well done the lads!

… and the cross is a symbol advocating crucifixions

Posted on by

You will all recall, I’m sure, that Germany had a problem with nazis sixty or so years ago. After this problem had been cleared up (primarily by non-Germans), the Germans resolved that they didn’t want that sort of thing to happen again. And towards that end they enacted some laws.

One of those laws is § 86a of the Criminal Code. In pertinent part it reads:

Mit Freiheitsstrafe bis zu drei Jahren oder mit Geldstrafe wird bestraft, wer … im Inland Kennzeichen einer der in § 86 Abs. 1 Nr. 1, 2 und 4 bezeichneten Parteien oder Vereinigungen verbreitet oder öffentlich … verwendet.

(Any person who, on German territory, distributes or uses symbols of a party or association listed in § 86 para. 1, 2 and 4, shall be punished with imprisonment of up to three years or with a monetary penalty.)

The parties and associations in question include what the statute somewhat coyly calls ‘the former national-socialist organisations’.

Though nobody decent likes a nazi, a prohibition against displaying their symbols on pain of criminal penalty does rub rather against the liberal grain. Still, this is Germany, and one can understand why Germans feel they need to take a sterner line against this sort of thing than would, say, Americans.

Now you have all heard about the annoyance of skinheads and other excrescences of neo-nazi yoof culture in Germany. What you might not know is that there is also a countervailing and at times rather, ehh, exuberant anti-nazi cultural stream. This ranges from admirable young students acting earnestly against racism and xenophobia to beersodden neonhaired neopunkers who (one sometimes suspects) know as little about what they oppose as their fuzzy-skulled adversaries know about what they espouse, save that it pisses off their opposite numbers. Wherever on this spectrum of seriousness Germany’s young antifascists fall, many of them are united in the use of certain popular symbols to express their disdain for the brown. These symbols are typically displayed as buttons or on patches sewn (or quite often, safety-pinned) onto one’s bomber or biker jacket. You’ll find some pictures below the fold.

Whether idealistic antifascists or mohawked louts, these are not the sort of people, surely, that § 86a was meant to sweep up. Yet as the Frankfurter Rundschau reports, a few German prosecutors have been using this law against them, and some German courts are handing down convictions.

Continue reading →

Nollaig shona daoibh

Posted on by

Now of course I cannot allow Edward to remain the only afoer offering our readers holiday greetings in an obscure Celtic tongue. And I’ll throw in a nice wee pressie to boot: nazis in disarray!

Back in September 2004 I wrote in a comment to a post about neonazi electoral gains in eastern Germany:

As many have pointed out, electoral support for the extreme right in Germany is a fickle and transitory thing, and the Union has a habit of picking up the strays. The Reps and the DVU have had their 15 minutes, now it’s the NPD’s turn. With any luck, this election will have been their high water mark.

Well, it looks like that is indeed the case, and just in time for Christmas, too.

As the Frankfurter Rundschau reports (auf Deutsch), three NPD members of Saxony’s state parliament have left the party (and its parliamentary fraction) in the past week. Two of them have signed on to a programme for those seeking to escape neonazi circles, and all have requested police protection. The NPD are left, then, with nine of the twelve seats they won in the last elections. Their shrinkage has an immediate and positive result: thanks to the reduced size of the NPD fraction, the party lose half the committee positions to which they are entitled. They also forfeit a portion of the state money every party gets.

The party itself is livid, of course, stamping their booted little feet and fuming about ‘treason’ and ‘conspiracy’. I believe the word they are looking for is ‘Dolchstoss‘.

What did Schily know, and when did he know it?

Posted on by

This much is uncontroversial: in late 2003 the CIA kidnapped Khalid al-Masri, a Lebanese-born German citizen, and carried him off to a prison in Afghanistan for interrogation. In the end they released him when they realised that his only crime was to have the same name as some other man they wanted to get their hands on. It took them five months to realise this, five months during which al-Masri says he was tortured. He must be lying about that part, though, because George Bush has said that his administration does not torture.

Now, however, it looks like an extra-large family-size jar of controversy is about to be opened. Otto Schily, who was at the time Germany’s Innenminister — in this context, an analogue to the British home secretary or American director of homeland security — knew about the matter in May 2004 because then-US ambassador Daniel Coats told him. That’s not the controversial part. This is: according to a report in this week’s Spiegel, Schily kept quiet about the Americans kidnapping and falsely imprisoning a German citizen because Coats, his good friend, asked him to.
Continue reading →

Best dead

Posted on by

You will likely have heard by now that George Best — Northern Ireland international, star of Manchester United and, later, player for a long list of increasingly obscure clubs — has died. Best was a weak and pitiable alcoholic, and also one of the greatest footballers ever to grace a pitch. My own thoughts on the matter at T6I.

Then and now

Posted on by

Billmon, in a very eloquent post, says nothing. All he does is put up a series of quotations. Yet his message couldn’t be clearer; or more correct.

Lest visiting American wingnuts misunderstand me: I do not assert that Billmon is correct in inviting us to infer that Donald Rumsfeld is guilty of war crimes. That question would be decided by a court, in the extraordinarily unlikely event that Rumsfeld ends up before one.

No, what Billmon gets undeniably right is the far bigger and broader and more fundamental idea that (to use the words of Telford Taylor with which Billmon’s post comes to a close) ‘law is not a one-way street’. Whether a government is good or bad is decided by what it does and refrains from doing; not by who its members are or by the justifications they offer for their acts and omissions. That goes for the current government of the USA, and it goes equally for every other government entrusted with the running of a state.
Continue reading →

Your mother, your rat, your infidel house, your God, etc.

Posted on by

Andrew Brown points us to an illuminating article by Bernard Nežmah on swearing in Serbian. Though the article is five years old, I daresay its theme is timeless.

According to Nežmah’s piece — published in Central Europe Review or, as we must now call it, Transitions Online — the Serbian language is blessed with a dazzling, perhaps unsurpassed richness of vulgarisms. Even English, no slouch at that sort of thing, pales in comparison: such are the subtleties of the Serbian variants on the F-word that Serbian-English dictionaries (the more comprehensive editions, one imagines) are reduced to explaining in an aside whether a given word for ‘fuck’ is jocularly offensive, just plain offensive, really really offensive, so offensive it should be used only in the event of war, etc.

A tip of the jaunty afoe fedora to Andrew (who surprises us by revealing he used to speak Serbo-Croat in addition to English, Swedish, Caenorhabditic and whatever else he has up his sleeve).

Easterners conquer Germany; southerners flee

Posted on by

Brandenburg’s Matthias Platzeck has been tapped to become new leader of the SPD. This means that Germany’s two major parties will both be led by people from the ‘new states’, the former GRD. Franz Müntefering will, however, enter the new cabinet as planned.

The CSU’s Ede Stoiber won’t be going to Prussia, though. He has decided to remain in Munich as Bavarian prime minister. Michael Glos will get Stoiber’s designated CSU place at the table instead.

Stoiber’s decision can only mean he thinks that the grand coalition will fail and that it would therefore be better to stay unconnected with it. Whether he is right about this is, of course, another matter.

(No links, sorry. This is all from the ARD teletext. I’ll try to stick in links to fuller treatments later in the day.)

A palace coup

Posted on by

This just in: Andrea Nahles has defeated Kajo Wasserhövel for the job of general secretary of Germany’s Social Democratic Party. Nahles got in with the votes of the party’s left wing. Wasserhövel, who had managed the SPD campaign in the recent elections, was the protegé of party chairman Franz Müntefering. ‘Former chairman’, I ought to have said; for Müntefering has resigned in response to this lunger contemptuously hocked in his face. It’s not even clear now whether he will take up his expected ministerial post in the grand coalition.

And speaking of that grand coalition… apparently it wants to place further limits on food retailers’ ability to compete on price. Those who find it hard to believe there’s not a Groschen‘s worth of difference between black and red are invited to consider this example of how awful the two parties can be when they really put their minds to cooperating. (Admittedly, the Union’s man in all this is Horst Seehofer, an advanced economic illiberal even by CSU standards.) Someday, maybe, my bizarre dream will come true and Germany will be governed by an FDP/Green coalition* and we will see the end of this sort of thing. I may be waiting a long time, not least because the Greens and the liberals hate each other so.

* It’d have to be rather different FDP, mind. I couldn’t abide the thought of Guido the Boy Party Chairman playing any role in government.