A far-right party has won a state election for the first time in post-World War II Germany in the country’s east, while it looks set to finish a very close second to mainstream conservatives in a second vote.
While quite a lot of the original Nazis went unpunished, the problem is that you can only kill people, but you can’t kill an ideology. You can only keep it small by not providing it the societal circumstances it needs to thrive.
If you have rampant social inequality, skyrocketing cost of living, stagnating wages, worsening working conditions all combined with a political establishment that is the a perfect mix of greedy, uncaring, corrupt, and incompetent, people will flock to the political extremes. If there is no left counterbalance to the right, things will get even worse, because people will now only flock to the extreme right. (the absence of an effective left wing counterbalance has brought along the current circumstances in the first place, because it allowed neoliberalism to run rampant unchecked)
While quite a lot of the original Nazis went unpunished, the problem is that you can only kill people, but you can’t kill an ideology. You can only keep it small by not providing it the societal circumstances it needs to thrive.
If you have rampant social inequality, skyrocketing cost of living, stagnating wages, worsening working conditions all combined with a political establishment that is the a perfect mix of greedy, uncaring, corrupt, and incompetent, people will flock to the political extremes. If there is no left counterbalance to the right, things will get even worse, because people will now only flock to the extreme right. (the absence of an effective left wing counterbalance has brought along the current circumstances in the first place, because it allowed neoliberalism to run rampant unchecked)