Extremist Discussion

Since Tuesday and the Halle 'shooting' business....a lot of hype has occurred over violent right-wing extremism in Germany.  Virtually all of the political parties have talked about how they are going to get a handle on this, and German journalists mention extremism on almost every news segment now. 

So the number thrown around is 12,000 violent and potentially dangerous right-wing extremists. 

Where does the number come from?  The suggestion is mostly foundation studies and looking at social media behavior.  So it's not exactly a number you can rely upon.  That's the first problem.  Could there be 100,000?  Oh....absolutely.  Or it could be just 600 of these extreme types.

The use of harsh language or words used by these folks, and that's the identifier to label them?  In simple terms....yes.

Back in 2014/2015.....when journalists used harsh rhetoric commentary against the anti-migration Germans....shouldn't that have been corrected real quick?  Well....now that you bring that up....yeah, those commentaries really set the path to where things are today.  It inflamed a certain segment of society.

But let's get to the real worry here.  Open up the history books and read through the period of  the fall of 1918 to the mid-20s.  As WW I had ended, and troops started to return home, with the Kaiser having 'left'.....there was this atmosphere existing where folks got radical, violent, and near-civil war started in places like Munich, Berlin and Frankfurt. 

Mayors were requiring protection around the clock.  Go look up the Bavarian Soviet Republic and the Soviet Republic of Saxony.  In Bremen alone....over 400 residents were killed in street fighting.  An accounting of dead over this six-month period in Germany?  It's never really been collected, and there's a fair number of reports of mass burials to avoid identifying the dead or scoring the actual numbers.  It could be between 10,000 and 20,000 killed in this period.

I think Germans worry to some degree that you don't want civil behavior to reach a crisis stage, and this extremist thing needs to be corrected.  The problem though....it only takes one single assault with some migrant accidentally killing a German citizen, and suddenly you have another build-up starting.

As for the question of revolts being part of German society?  It's best not to bring this up.  One of the classical cases for this discussion is the 1525 'Peasant-Revolt', where 300,000 peasants and farmers took up a civil action, and by the end (a year later).....roughly one-third of them were dead.  You can go through a dozen-odd occurrences since the 1860s and find that things often went to an extreme point where patience was lost. 

In this past five years....the landscape has rapidly changed, and virtually all Germans now have an opinion which relates to left-wing and right-wing topics.  Violence so far for the most part.....has been avoided.