https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-16-2025
"The sixty-first Munich Security Conference, the world’s leading forum for
talking about international security policy, took place from February 14 to
February 16 this year. Begun in 1963, it was designed to be an independent
venue for experts and policymakers to discuss the most pressing security issues
around the globe.
At the conference on Friday, February 14, Vice President J.D. Vance launched
what
The Guardian’s Patrick Wintour called “a brutal ideological assault”
against Europe, attacking the values the United States used to share with
Europe but which Vance and the other members of the Trump administration are
now working to destroy.
Vance and MAGA Christian nationalists reject the principles of secular
democracy and instead align with leaders like Hungarian prime minister Viktor
Orbán. They claim that the equal rights central to democracy undermine nations
by treating women and racial, religious, and gender minorities as equal to
white Christian men. They want to see an end to the immigration that they
believe weakens a nation's people, and for government to reinforce traditional
religious and patriarchal values.
Vance attacked current European values and warned that the crisis for the
region was not external actors like Russia or China, but rather “the threat
from within.” He accused Europe of censoring free speech, but it was
clear—especially coming from the representative of a regime that has erased
great swaths of public knowledge because it objects to words like “gender”—that
what he really objected to was restrictions on the speech of far-right
ideologues.
After the rise and fall of German dictator Adolf Hitler, Germany banned Nazi
propaganda and set limits on hate speech, banning attacks on people based on
racial, national, religious, or ethnic background, as these forms of speech are
central to fascism and similar ideologies. That hampers the ability of
Germany’s far-right party Alternative for Germany, or AfD, to recruit before
upcoming elections on February 23.
After calling for Europe to “change course and take our shared civilization in
a new direction,” Vance threw his weight behind AfD. He broke protocol to
refuse a meeting with current German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and instead broke
a taboo in German politics by meeting with the leader of AfD Trump called
Vance’s speech “very brilliant.”
Bill Kristol of
The Bulwark posted: “It's heartening that today the leaders
of the two major parties in Germany are unequivocally anti-Nazi and
anti-fascist. It's horrifying that today the president and vice-president of
the United States of America are not.” German defense minister Boris Pistorius
called Vance’s speech “unacceptable,” and on Saturday, Scholz said: “Never
again fascism, never again, racism, never again aggressive war…. [T]oday’s
democracies in Germany and Europe are founded on the historic awareness and
realization that democracies can be destroyed by radical anti-democrats.”
Vance and the Trump administration have the support of billionaire Elon Musk in
their attempt to shift the globe toward the rejection of democracy in favor of
far-right authoritarianism. David Ingram and Bruna Horvath of
NBC News
reported today that Musk has “encouraged right-wing political movements,
policies and administrations in at least 18 countries in a global push to slash
immigration and curtail regulation of business.”
Musk, who cast apparent Nazi salutes before crowds on the day of President
Donald Trump’s inauguration, wrote an op-ed in favor of AfD and recently spoke
by video at an AfD rally, calling it “the best hope for Germany.” In addition
to his support for Germany’s AfD, Ingram and Horvath identified Musk’s support
for far-right movements in Brazil, Ireland, Argentina, Italy, New Zealand,
South Africa, the Netherlands, and other countries. Last month, before Trump
took office, French president Emmanuel Macron accused Musk of backing a global
reactionary movement and of intervening directly in elections, including
Germany’s."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
