Originally Published in The Left Berlin
On Saturday, the Austrian Nazi Martin Sellner was detained by Swiss police and expelled from the country. Sellner is known internationally for his calls to deport millions of non-white people from Germany (which he calls “remigration”). When reports were published about a meeting he had with leading members of the far-right AfD last November, millions of people took to the streets of Germany to protest against racism. Sellner also had connections to the fascist mass murderer in Christchurch.
When he posted a video on Twitter about being expelled from Switzerland (his own “remigration”), he got a reply from the platform’s owner. Elon Musk asked: “Is this legal?”
Sellner, leader of the fascist Identitarian Movement, had been banned from Twitter in 2020. He was welcomed back to the platform just last week, and he thanked Musk personally.
Musk has been increasingly open about his fascist and antisemitic views. He has endorsed the conspiracy theory that Jews control migration and promote “hatred against whites” — this is, in Musk’s words, “the actual truth.” He has attacked the Jewish billionaire George Soros (who “hates humanity,” according to Musk) and supported the AfD. He has used his billions to make Twitter a safe space for Nazis.
Yet none of this stopped Berlin mayor Kai Wegner (CDU) from embracing Musk last week, as did Brandenburg’s prime minister, Dietmar Woidke (SPD). Responding to criticism about posing with such a well-known antisemite, Wegner only said that “Tesla is an important employer for the whole region.” He explicitly refused to condemn Musk’s far-right and antisemitic views.
When Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers at the Berlinale film festival called for equality, Wegner said such views should be banned. “There is no space for antisemitism in Berlin,” he declared.
What Wegner meant to say: There is space for antisemitism as long as you’re a billionaire. Musk is not the only antisemite Wegner admires.
- The biggest donors to the CDU are the Quandt siblings, who inherited billions from Nazi war criminals.
- Horst Seehofer, the former German interior minister and a CDU/CSU leader, supported a historical association that relativized the crimes of the Nazi army and denied the facts of the Holocaust.
- The hotel where Sellner met with AfD leaders to discuss mass deportations was provided by Wilhelm Wilderink, a CDU member.
- Peter Kurth, a former Berlin economics senator and another CDU member, has been revealed to be one of the main sponsors of Sellner’s Identitarians.
- Hans-Georg Maaßen, the former head of the internal secret service and yet another CDU member, has been spouting antisemitic conspiracy theories.
- An early leader of the CDU, Hans Globke, was the author of the Nazis’ Nuremberg Race Laws against Jews.
A few of these people, such as Kurth and Maaßen, recently resigned from the CDU voluntarily. Others, like Seehofer, have faced no consequences for their far-right views. The CDU is still trying to protect the memory of the fascist mass murderer Globke.
In other words, Wegner is absolutely surrounded by antisemites. He was himself in far-right Facebook groups. He only talks about “antisemitism” to voice support for Israel’s right-wing government and its genocidal assault against Gaza. All genuine antisemites get a “Persilschein,” a bill of clean health, from Wegner.
As I’ve written before, it’s not that the German state is overzealous in its fight against antisemitism, and is thus accidentally including left-wing Jews. All these “Antisemitism Bureaucrats” are about protecting actual antisemites, who tend to be right-wing Germans. The accusations of antisemitism against leftists, immigrants, and Jews are a smokescreen to distract from the state’s deep hostility to Jews.
