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Far-right AfD win in Germany is ‘grave moment’ for Europe, politicians warn
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2026
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Show me one far-right party or government that hasn't been absolutely useless, or caused more problems than they've solved.
You've got to let these things play out. People will realise they are a bunch of morons, just you wait.
This is false. Have you ever been around just a single AfD voter? They aren't driven by "reason". They hate reason. To them, it's just another devious tool of the "elite," i.e. academics, Greens, and the "leftist" establishment.
What the AfD achieves or not hardly matters, except for one thing: "the immigrants." If you paid any attention, their voters have been screaming for quite a while, mouths foaming:
"AfD is the strongest party in this city/ county/ state, and has been for more than a month. And yet, yesterday I saw another immigrant on the streets! When will this finally be cleaned up?"
That's what we are up against. Not in any way rational actors.
Well, no, I'm not German. But they sound an awful lot like Brexiteers and Reform/Restore UK voters.
That's exactly my point.
Fine, but what's your solution?
A parallel state. You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into. They're a lost cause. The solution is to create a parallel state within the state that can support a coalition of the willing while the far right suffers the consequences of their own failed policies. The most viable path to this is to hide such a parallel state under the protections of religious freedom, forming a "church" that can mirror the effective role of the state, and form a legally protected logistical and administrative backbone for resistance.
That's actually a pretty clever idea. But its not something an individual can do alone.
Oh if you try to fight this on an individual level, you're just going to fail. Full stop, cannot make a difference. You can nibble at the edges by developing relationships with those only weakly attached to such movements. Don't try to change their minds make them reliant on you and when you matter more to them than groups like MAGA and AfD then you can start getting them to question their prior assumptions, but that's going to be slow and ultimately futile in the grand scheme. Solidarity and organization is the only possible way forward. Start at the community level and work outward, gradually connecting different local groups.
No. It would be vastly preferable if this were nipped in the bud. Need I remind you how many people died in WWII, not to mention the human cost of fascism elsewhere?
While I do agree with the general trend that many of these populist fascists are incomponent at leading, it's better to not roll those in the first place. We should never accept it as inevitable.
You cannot force those who are too dumb to see the error of their ways to do something. You'll only breed contempt and embolden them more. There is no nipping this in the bud. You won't convince these people they're wrong. They must come to it on their own. Hopefully not many of us have to die.
Take the MAGA movement for example. We've been telling these idiots for years that they're wrong and they won't listen. Only now that the policies negatively affect them do you see some changing their tunes.
Did you just... Does your primary argument contain "Hopefully, not many of us have to die." ???
Jesus Christ.
Look, you're right that it's just as impossible to convince a zealot (idiots who stand to gain from being obedient), as it is to insult someone back into logic (idiots who don't, but are too stupid to realize).
But don't despair and give up, because you'll be giving fascists what they invested for, with all their propaganda aimed at making you despair.
Just keep in mind, the way to change things is not to fight the vulnerable zealots for their cooperation with the authoritarian, it's to fight the authoritarian. The rich fucks are the ones who give the speeches, and lie and manipulate the zealots.
Fight the rich fucks, and fight them as early as possible. That's what nipping this in the bud (or in this case, early stalk lol) means.
It's not giving up, it's more concentrating my efforts where I can affect progress. I've been dealing with the MAGA morons for a decade now and have made ZERO progress convincing even a single member of anything. I'm willing to bet the German far-right aren't much different. I'd much rather focus my efforts at my own political party that I can actually change.
Agreed on both counts, but how? Here in UK we've had brexit and Reform. You can try to talk these people out of believing right-wing nonsense until you're blue in the face. It doesn't work - they'll call 'fake news' or accuse you of talking down to them. The only thing that seems to work is letting it happen and allowing them to draw their own conclusions.
If you have any good ideas on what to do I'm all ears.
These are all complicated, and every country is different, but a necessary part of the short term solution, is to focus on the people doing the manipulating, and fighting them, and their interests.
Long term, right-wing nonsense doesn't hold up, and you can convince people, and help them move past that if they let go, but short term, they are just subservient to whatever the head of the movement-cult says.
The people leading those movements, are people. In very, very extreme cases, Luigi can help, but most of the time, they're rich fucks who want to get richer.
Direct opposition to their interests, works.
Greece where I'm from, has a "sold out government" problem, and our public sector is being dismantled and sold for parts, but there's a few tiny victories, where the routes for capital investment are blocked, in the last few years. Both 1) Anarchist squats block international hotel chain investment firms, and 2) beureaucratic safety laws do hold up, and block private colleges from trying to make a quick buck, resulting in reduced political pressure against the public education system.
Fighting on whichever level one has capacity for, works, whether it's from inside or outside the law. Just make it more expensive for the rich fucks to get richer.
Yeah, it worked really well historically, and with absolutely no negative side effects whatsoever
That's not lost on me, my point is what exactly is to be done about it?
I hope that fair and extensive education and a transparent discussion of issues in the society would help. I'm yet to see a society that tries this, so maybe it's also not going to work