Facing the German Far Right w/ Musa Okwonga

For episode 170, returning guest Musa Okwonga talks to Elia Ayoub about a piece he wrote “The Hatred Is Accelerating” on racism and the far right in Germany. This was recorded on 31 August 2024, a day before the fascist AfD party won top place in Thuringia and second in Saxony in the state elections.

The Fire These Times is a proud member of ⁠From The Periphery (FTP) Media Collective⁠. How to Support: on ⁠Patreon⁠ or on ⁠Apple Podcasts⁠. You’ll get early access to all podcasts, exclusive audio and video episodes, an invitation to join ⁠our monthly hangouts⁠, and more.

Previous TFTT episodes with Musa Okwonga:

Check out:

Recommended reads and listens:

Books by Musa Okwonga (website):
Please support your local bookshops and public libraries by ordering them there whenever possible.

Transcriptions: Transcriptions will be by Antidote Zine and published on The Fire These Times.

Pluggables:

Credits:

Host(s): Elia Ayoub | Guest(s): Musa Okwonga | Producers: Aydın Yıldız, Elia Ayoub, Israa Abdel Fattah, Ayman Makarem and Leila Al-Shami | Music: ⁠⁠Rap and Revenge⁠⁠ | TFTT theme design: ⁠⁠Wenyi Geng⁠⁠ | FTP theme design: Hisham Rifai | Sound editor: Elliott Miskovicz | Team profile pics: ⁠⁠⁠⁠Molly Crabapple⁠⁠⁠ | Episode design: Elia Ayoub

From The Periphery is built by Elia Ayoub, Leila Al-Shami, Ayman Makarem, Dana El Kurd, Karena Avedissian, Daniel Voskoboynik, Anna M, Aydın Yıldız, Ed S, Alice Bonfatti, Israa Abdel Fattah, with more joining soon!

Transcript prepared by Joe Keady and Antidote Zine:

That is the positive way forward: imagine a utopia and then act upon it.

Elia J. Ayoub: Welcome, everyone, to The Fire These Times. This episode we are joined by returning guest Musa Okwonga to talk about a piece he wrote last October 2023 entitled “The Hate Is Accelerating.” The broad topic is racism in Germany, and the topic of this specific conversation, the reason I wanted to have Musa on, is that we have, in our separate contexts, seen things deteriorating in many ways. But Germany has this very specific thing about it, due to reasons we’ll get into.

Musa, would you like to briefly introduce yourself?

Musa Okwonga: Sure, yeah. I’m a writer, an author, and co-host of a football podcast called Stadio. I’m based in Berlin. I’ve been here for almost ten years now.

EA: You wrote this essay in October 2023. Let’s start with a bit of background. Why did you feel the need to write it at the time? And how have things changed since then?

MO: I had to write it before I could write anything else. I was working on some new fiction, some non-fiction, and this felt like a writer’s block, which in itself is interesting. I was struggling to write about this, and whenever I struggle to write about something, I think, Let me push in that direction, because that reluctance is telling me something. 

So for a few months prior to writing it, I’d been noticing different things, occurrences here and there. It’s a bit like with the advance of climate change: you’re seeing animals waking up earlier from hibernation because the weather’s changed. It felt like that. I was noticing stuff I hadn’t seen before. I was noticing an emboldened far right, and I felt like I was noticing more and more data points. And one data point by itself is nothing, but I was seeing so many more of them that eventually I was like, No, something’s definitely happening. So over the course of a few months, I started jotting down things I’d been noticing about the rise of fascism and the far right. 

And the culmination came—I finally got the urge to write the piece when I was at a house party only about fifteen minutes’ walk from my house. It was just before midnight, and somebody dropped a large stone slab, aimed at somebody who was sitting on a deck chair at the house party I was at. Any one of us could’ve been sitting there, and this slab of stone shattered into six or seven pieces, and it could’ve killed someone. It was dropped from the fourth floor, and the only reason it didn’t hit someone is because the aim was slightly off. But it landed an inch from this person’s skull. If it had landed on their skull, at the very least I think it puts them in a coma.

So I shared this news on social media, and two people wrote to me and said, This looks like attempted murder. Spoke to the police about it, no real follow-up, but at that point, I’m like, Yeah, this is really happening. The party was hosted by a bunch of guys from Cameroon; the majority of us were Black. There were, I think, three or four white people. This was very clearly a Black-hosted party. Apparently they’d been shouting about noise. 

The thing that struck me about it was the escalation of the violence. Then a few months later, a couple of months ago—jumping ahead slightly—a Cameroonian man was stabbed to death over a parking place dispute.

It was the escalation. What’s happening is a trend of Black people in public spaces or shared spaces having disagreements, and the disagreements escalating to a fatal level. So yeah, that’s why I felt the inclination to write it. And since the events of October seventh, since Hamas attacked Israel and killed a thousand people—

EA: Five hundred or so, yeah.

MO: Since Hamas did that, the conversation has changed in Germany for the worse, absolutely.

EA: What was the response to that piece of yours?

MO: The immediate response was four hundred hate messages on social media. The first one that came in was from a city councilor from the far-right Alternative for Germany.

EA: So they saw it in German? Because the piece was published in both languages.

MO: Yeah, German. I wanted it to be present in German, because I wanted Germans to understand what I saw was happening. The essay is a diagnostic; it’s saying, This is what’s happening. It also said, Look, here are the good things about this country, and if you don’t fight for them, you’ll lose them. They locked the comments after a certain point, actually, Die Zeit, to protect me, maybe. 

But someone—I think journalist James Jackson—wrote, The point of Musa’s essay is proven by the response to it. And the funny thing is: some of the responses came in so quick, they can’t have read the article. They came in so fast. I mean, the essay’s like four and a half thousand words, so some of them didn’t even read it. But those who did read it were still furious.

But the comments to the actual article were Germans going Hey, this guy really cares about this country and he’s trying to tell us something, and we need to read it. We need to listen. 

I wrote this essay in October 2023, and by every major metric—this is not to say there’s not resistance to fascism, there’s not strong pro-democracy movements, but it feels like German democracy is in a significantly worse state than it was when I wrote this in October. You know those videos of the icebergs melting, and nothing seems to be happening for years on end, and then in just a few months, weeks, even days, you see huge shards of ice just collapsing into the ocean? That’s how German democracy feels right now, if I’m honest.

And when you start seeing the political level and the street level converging, when you start seeing stuff at the street level that you’re seeing happen in the highest realms of politics, it’s so weird—you’re seeing stuff happen at the political level, and then you’re seeing it on the street and vice versa. When that’s happening, then its bad. I’ve got some specifics about it we’ll get into later, but yeah. Things I’m seeing on the street, sometimes in my own street, I’m seeing reflected in newspapers, in the press.

EA: It was released just a few days after October seventh, at least the English version. I don’t know if the German version was published before or after.

MO: It was delayed. It was meant to come out before, it was written before. This is the funny thing, it was written before October seventh. I was at a literature festival when the events took place, when Hamas attacked. My first instinct then was I got in touch with all my Jewish friends I knew have relatives in Israel, just to check in and be like, Look, because it’s such a small country, who’s been affected? Are you okay? And they were like, No one we know has been affected. But it felt like everyone knew someone who knew someone, because it’s a small population. 

And then it was really just the fallout of that, and the essay kind of emerged into that space. And at that point, I was like, I want this essay to just sit and people can just take it in, of itself. 

Of course Israel’s got a far-right government—and this was acknowledged. This is another side topic, but it did strike me that the conversation about Israel having a far-right government that its own people have been protesting in significant numbers, and maybe unprecedented numbers, for months kind of was forgotten in the fallout within Germany. It was almost forgotten that the Israeli government was—potentially its actions are a long-term, existential threat to the fabric of Israeli society. A lot of that was forgotten in the aftermath of October seventh.

EA: I’ve found a bunch of links I will include in the show notes, by either German Jews or Jews in Germany, in some cases Israeli Jews that have some kind of connection to Germany. 

You mentioned the metaphor earlier of seeing the iceberg, and one thing that always comes to mind is someone who’s at the beach and is quite literally seeing a tsunami coming, seeing it with their own eyes. And in my mind, I was like, I can see it, and I’m just trying to tell people, Hey, look there. It’s the whole “Don’t look up” thing in that movie.

To go back to the initial point, I’ll mention the titles, because it’s pretty straightforward: there’s one by George Prochnik, Eyal Weizman, and Emily Dische-Becker on Granta, a two-parter, and the title is “Once Again, Germany defines who is a Jew.” The three of them are Jewish, if I’m not mistaken. At least two of the three; I don’t know about the third person. There is another one, a podcast on Jewish Currents called On the Nose, and it’s called “The Trouble with Germany,” and they have a very similar conversation. 

And I’ve seen this repeated time and time again: progressive Jews—some may not have even considered themselves anti-Zionist, because that terminology hasn’t come into their world, but let’s say they are non-Zionist—finding themselves in a context (Germany, post-October) where there is this entire baggage already prepared for them in advance, and they have to either fit it or they just don’t exist. That’s the point of the article on Granta: Germany defines who is a Jew. 

There’s been a lot of arrests, of course, and repression and censorship against lots of folks in Germany who say virtually anything on Palestine, including folks who are Jews. And there’s been this very bizarre, upside-down thing where primarily non-Jewish politicians, police officers, and leaders of commissions on antisemitism (mostly non-Jewish as well)—they tend to have the legal right, essentially, to go to a Jewish person and say, What you have said right now is antisemitic. Because they have defined that term in their own ways.

MO: There’s so much to say since October seventh. Within Germany there’s a lot going on. First of all, there is a significant plurality of opinion within the Jewish community in Germany—both those visiting and those living here—and that plurality exists among friends of mine: some are extremely critical of the actions of the Israeli government, insofar as they will assess them as war crimes and genocide; and others will assess it as a just war, a just response. The challenge is, that plurality is not represented in the German conversation, the German context, in academia. 

Progressive Jews, three of whom are friends of mine who signed an open letter to this extent, are very concerned about the conflation of the actions and proclamations of Netanyahu’s government with Jewish identity. They find it extremely troubling. I find it troubling. They speak from a place of personal authority, because they’re in the center of the conversation. I have the luxury and the privilege of not being in the center of that, but they are very exposed, and they’re experiencing severe professional, personal sanction as a result of being outspoken on this issue.

The mood in Germany since October has been extremely fraught. The conflation of Jewish identity with critique of what Israel is doing—there are stars of David appearing on apartment blocks. The danger there, of course, is that a lot of the conversation about Israel is not sophisticated. “Sophisticated” maybe sounds patronizing. It’s not nuanced. “Zionism” is a specific academic term—it is also an antisemitic dog whistle. Both things can be true. But it’s used and co-opted, and the lack of nuance about that conversation has understandably unsettled a lot of Jewish people, several of whom are friends of mine, like: When they say “Zionism” what are they talking about? There’s a reason why, therefore, I don’t use a lot of terms like that in conversation. 

My initial instinct has always been: How do we address and fix this current and historic—it’s a mess; how do you address it? My primary thing is: Where’s the empathy? First of all, how do we save as many Palestinian lives as possible? How do we stop Israel, this bombing operation—how do we stop this now? How do we save the lives of as many Israeli hostages as possible now? That is a joint claim and call I’ve made on all my social media since October. That feels inadequate; I’m just one person. But that feels like the most productive way forward: let’s stop this right now, and then what is the path we can push forward from? 

And all of my—it’s not “activism,” because I’m not as brave as the activists doing the work that is really needed, but in as far as I’m writing and talking about this stuff, and the far right and the fascists: how do we emerge from this with a core of people who act in solidarity to address the threat that faces us all? Because I have no doubt the far right are advancing, and they despise Palestinians, and they despise Jewish people, and they despise Israelis, and they are coming. 

I could jump on a train around the corner from here, and I could be at the door of a regular meeting place of the violent far right in less than an hour. I can go tonight to the restaurant where they regularly meet, where they plan violence, where they’re unleashing violence that hasn’t been seen in my district for ten years in Berlin. That’s how close this stuff is.

EA: I agree, I try to be as careful as I can when I’m writing online, versus when I’m talking. When I’m talking, I have more time to add some nuance. I would hope folks, especially if they’re listening to this podcast, have a relationship of trust, because there’s almost two hundred episodes so far, and this topic has been brought up in the past, and I’ve tried to do due diligence; I’ve even had an entire episode on antisemitism specifically on the left, because it’s a very specific phenomenon that’s different than the dominant one, which is the one on the far right and on the right. 

When I’m writing online, for the most part I’m more specific. I say “pro-Netanyahu” or “apologists of the Israeli government,” because I’ve seen some controversies. This is a difficult topic; we won’t dwell too much on this, because it’s not necessarily the main point—also, I’m going to have an episode with Daniel Voskoboynik, one of my co-hosts, in the next few days, much closer to this very specific topic.

This topic is a complex one and, more importantly, the specific way a word is used is not the same as how it is heard, how it is received. And Yair Wallach had written a paper some years ago arguing that the term “Zionism” should be considered a zombie category, which is an academic term meaning it can mean everything and nothing.

MO: Like the word “woke”—a word that’s been invested with multiple meanings.

EA: Very much. Someone like Edward Said writing about Zionism is not the same as some random person on Twitter. Who is that person? What’s their positionality? But regardless of who that person is, the person reading it on the other side of the phone or the laptop may have different baggage associated with that term. So it is important not as a matter of ethics (because you don’t want to trigger people randomly, or insult someone, or even be misunderstood—why would one willingly want to be misunderstood?)—tactically it doesn’t make much sense.

MO: I like that you’ve said this, and I want to add to this as well. I’ve got Israeli friends in Germany, the most extreme case of whom has had a load of friends just cut him off, after twenty years of friendship. This is an extreme case, but they’ve said things like, I disagree with what Israel’s doing; before we meet for coffee, can I ascertain what your view is on it? and he’s like, We can’t meet for coffee yet. That’s a thing that’s happened! 

But him and I caught up and we were talking about stuff, and he said, Look, what did you expect Israel to do in relation to what Hamas did?

And I said, Hey, dude, here’s the thing: there’s a range of responses here. First of all, I’m glad you’ve asked me. They could’ve had a month of mourning where they said, ‘Look, the world is invited to grieve the mass loss of civilian life with us,’ and then they could’ve said, ‘Look, okay, your guy, Haniyeh, lives in Qatar. Qatar owns Paris Saint-Germain Football Club; let’s suspend Paris Saint-Germain from European competition for years, because that will hit you in the prestige pocket.’

And he was looking at me like…

I said, Look, I’m just saying, when you have civilians living in a dense population like Gaza, and you know a huge number of civilian deaths are inevitable, and if we look at some of the targeting—I mean, even Joe Biden called it “indiscriminate bombing.” If you know that is coming down the road, then you’re looking for solutions that are as little focused on the military as possible.

And then we had this great, hour-long conversation about all of it. Because I think he’d seen: This guy has empathy for me as an individual, and he really does care about the hostages, he cares about Israeli life as much as Palestinian life.

EA: That’s how I approach things too, from a point of empathy. And that’s an important thing, and I’ll explain why. We have seen a weird dichotomy between “different sides.” I’m not talking about in Israel-Palestine, I’m talking about outside, in the West and Europe. On the one side, you have people saying “Free the hostages,” and on the other hand you have people saying “Ceasefire now.” Those are the same thing!You cannot have one without the other. 

And we’ve seen it: the Israeli state has actually tried to have one without the other. They’ve rescued a handful of people, they’ve killed a number of people, and the rest of them are still there. I don’t want this to be a blaming thing—the day itself was very traumatic of course, and then the response was a series of traumas upon traumas upon traumas, and lots of people reacted accordingly. In and of itself, that’s not something I’m here to judge. 

Taking some distance, to the extent that’s even possible, I think it should just be concluded—it’s as objective as it can be at this point. Some folks have done this; it’s not rocket science or anything, I’m not reinventing the wheel. There were lots of folks saying ‘Ceasefire now’ equals ‘release the hostages.’ Of course! Why wouldn’t it? The entire point, even from the perspective of Hamas, was as a bargaining chip. No one has to like this! I don’t think anyone listening to this will misunderstand me on this, but that’s just how things are. 

You can’t have the attitude of We do not negotiate with terrorists, the famous Bush-era thing (even though they did, just not openly). You can apply realism to the situation and try and understand why something like this happened. Of course blame the people who did the actual horrors; there’s no reason not to do both. But then you try and take a step back, you try and understand, Well, what happened every ten, fifteen, twenty years before October seventh? And this does not lead to Therefore this was a good thing. You just have to understand how A led to B.

MO: Thank you so much. In a German context, what I’ve found not merely frustrating but dangerous for the discourse is that a lot of the German coverage—a couple weeks into October, I sent you a screenshot of Der Tagesspiegel, one of the big publications here, and it was the front cover, and it said, “Dozens of Hamas Fighters Killed in Israeli Offensive.” By this point, it had been documented that thousands of Palestinian civilians had already been killed in the Israeli offensive, and I was like Wow, you’re actually giving more dignity in death to Hamas, who killed hundreds of civilians, than to Palestinian civilians who were just going about their business.

That’s mind-blowing to me. This is extremely dangerous. Because what you’re doing is giving the impression that Israel’s actions had been some kind of surgical strike. This is the same kind of language  as “shock and awe,” “collateral damage”—sanitizing language. And these strikes have not been surgical, they’ve been far from it. So this is Der Tagesspiegel, and there was an article written in Der Spiegel, which in some ways was even worse: it was thousands of words critiquing Greta Thunberg for her comments on all of this.

Here’s the key section that didn’t really get noticed much: it was talking about Palestinians, and it said, Palestinians, who struggled for self-determination, and I was like, Okay, if you’re going to talk about that, spell it out. The only date it mentioned was 1967; it didn’t mention 1948. I was like, Hang on a minute. How can you talk about Palestinians and not mention 1948, if you’re mentioning dates in an article that’s five thousand words long? These omissions are deliberate.

EA: If you’re willing to go as far back as the sixties, why aren’t you including forty-eight? It’s not that far back.

MO: Unacceptable. On a related note, The New York Times wrote a long piece, an interview with Ismail Haniyeh, I think it came out a few weeks after. It was where he was like, Oh, this is all part of the strategy to put Palestinians at the center of the conversation again, and I’m a bit critical of that, because I felt like he fitted in that after the event, because I think he was concerned by the extent of what Hamas did. I don’t think he was expecting that to be—

EA: We know for a fact by now that he wasn’t actually informed on the day of.

MO: Right, they weren’t coordinating. But the interview he gave The New York Times implied that he’d been like Oh, I was the center all along. 

But here’s the striking thing that wasn’t picked up in the New York Times piece, as it was providing context to all of this: it didn’t talk about the fact that Netanyahu had underestimated Hamas, or treated them as a convenient enemy. They hadn’t mentioned any of that context, and I’m like, Hang on a minute! This is Tagesspiegel, Der Spiegel, New York Times. This is a failure of journalism. 

And also, you’re going to talk about Palestinian resistance and not mention the Great March of Return? This is unbelievable. The whole point of the Great March of Return was it was meant to be a peaceful space where people were going—bad-faith actors tried to claim it, but the core of the March of the Return was everything that Germany, the US, and Israeli politicians claimed to want from the Palestinian resistance. 

It wasn’t mentioned in the German discourse, and I found this enraging because now you’ve got Palestinians out in the street protesting, trying to bring about a ceasefire, and all of them were being tagged with, Oh, this is a hate march. The powerlessness so many Palestinians are feeling in Germany—every day that we talk, every second that we talk, people are starving, people are dying, hostages are in captivity. Even as I speak to you, I feel this deep frustration, because every second that passes, the pain continues. 

And the failure for that lies at the heart of the German state and the German media. Absolutely it does.

EA: I’ve paid a lot of attention to what relatives of the hostages, and some of the released hostages as well, have said themselves. If you take a step back and don’t filter it immediately through how Netanyahu wants it to be interpreted, or what the West thinks, but just as a normal human response—of course there will be some relatives of hostages who are very vengeful, and they say We must do everything, and many of them do buy into the narrative that the IDF is a “moral army” and They will do everything they can in order to rescue our loved ones. 

That’s one category of folks. Others are more straightforward, even from the very start, on October seventh or eighth: I remember one man; both of his parents were killed—not even taken hostage, but killed—on October seventh, and he was very explicit. No one is going accuse him of sympathizing with Hamas, but he still had to say he does not want this to escalate, he doesn’t want this to be used as an excuse for conflict. And we’ve actually seen quite a few folks like that. Even the couple of folks who spoke at the DNC said more humane things about Palestinians than a lot of high-ranking politicians claiming to be speaking in their names. 

That’s not unusual, even if you go back historically. If you’re going through something, like your loved one was kidnapped or killed, it’s not guaranteed, it’s not inevitable, that you will immediately think, How can I take revenge in the best, most efficient way possible? Most people are still mourning or in shock, of course, and they see that there is a group of people that did a certain act, and they are able to apply basic human nuance and see that there are 2.2 million human beings in Gaza, the vast majority of whom are under eighteen. 

So even if you want to use the argument of Oh, most people voted for Hamas—which isn’t even true, but even if you want to use that, that was in 2006! Most people who exist today were either too young or did not even exist at the time. And we’re still using this in the narrative. There’s still this kind of collective punishment being used.

I was interviewed on the Non Serviam podcast, where I mentioned a few times that I’ve felt very cynical about Germany, especially since October. Not starting in October; there are certain things about German history that still anger me. I’m still angry about the Holocaust. Maybe it’s just the way I interpret history; I don’t take for granted the distances between certain dates, as in, This finished in 1948, therefore it has nothing to do with me. Of course I don’t think that’s objectively accurate—also I don’t think ethically it’s the right thing to do. 

So I reacted (thankfully not online; thankfully I don’t have an online presence that’s that big anymore) with folks around me on Signal or on WhatsApp when I would hear speeches by Scholz or other German politicians, or German journalists and various media publications, talking about antisemitism as if it’s their personal duty to speak on behalf of Jews—that’s one thing that really pisses me off. The second thing is that they have immediately assigned antisemitism as an inherent trait of being Arab or Muslim or Palestinian, even though the vast majority of antisemitic attacks in Germany—even today—still come from the far right. 

Because why wouldn’t it?There’s more of them. That really pisses me off. That genuinely makes me—I’m not rational when I feel this. I’ve seen way too many movies, documentaries; read books by Holocaust survivors or on the Holocaust. My reaction is: How dare you? How dare you tell me this? It wasn’t my grandparents. How dare you tell me this right now? I know why they would, and I can rationalize and go through the politics of German “Staatsräson” and “memory culture,” how it’s instrumentalized and weaponized. But emotionally, it still pisses me off

MO: To your point, there’s something else going on here, and I think there’s a reason why these conversations happen. There’s a parallel with Ukraine, in one sense, and that’s the insularity of German discourse on this issue. A conversation about antisemitism in Germany, a lot of the time, is actually not a conversation about Jewish people but rather Germans having a conversation about their own identity. You see this relation to Ukraine as well: there are Ukrainian politicians begging Olaf Scholz for weapons, and he’ll be going on social media tweeting, Can one really achieve peace with war?—while Ukrainian towns are being shelled into oblivion, Olaf Scholz is on social media pontificating. 

Why does that happen? It happens for the same reason a lot of German politicians presume to speak for a singular Jewish identity in Germany, which does not exist. It’s Germans talking about Germans through the prism of this issue. That happens because Germany—yes, it’s the biggest economy in the EU, but if you think about how German culture penetrates the rest of the world, it’s not like French culture, where you have films and hip-hop, and you have more people speaking French than speak German. Because French culture exports so much, more people keep an eye on France, more people are looking into France. Because Germany doesn’t have that cultural reach, I think more stuff goes under the radar. 

So a lot of people are assessing Germany with a view of Germany that is less informed than it might be. For Germany’s political importance, its cultural imprint isn’t as broad as you’d expect. A lot of people, when they talk about Germany, are talking about the playbook of Oh, but it’s dealt with its Nazi past, it’s come to terms with its past. We both know this: Konrad Adenauer was an unrepentant antisemite, and there is a foundation named after him whose aim is to stamp out antisemitism! They do a lot of really interesting work, but they’re named after him. 

That is the extent to which it’s bone-deep. The denial is bone-deep in this country in a lot of areas, and the reason it’s so hard to have a conversation about race in Germany is a lot of people are like, We’ve dealt with that. But if you dig a bit deeper, a few hours later the conversation is like, Yeah, actually, we know we haven’t dealt with that. 

There’s a town, actually, the town of Cottbus: a lot of the major institutions there have people with prominent far-right views in the infrastructure. It’s difficult to get a lot done at a major institutional level in major parts of the East without engaging with the far right. But also in North Rhine-Westphalia and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern—this is a deep problem. We’re recording this episode in advance of the state elections in the East, so by the time this podcast drops, people will have seen the results—I think the rest of Germany is in for a big shock when those results drop, because the radicalization here of the far right is deep. 

And it’s also happening—this is the key thing—among the young. [The AfD] is the most popular party among young people. The jump in popularity among eighteen to twenty-nine year olds has risen from seven percent just two years ago to twenty-two percent now. That’s an astonishing rise in just two years.

EA: I’m curious about this as well. I had Aurelien Mondon on about a month ago, to talk about this concept of the populist hype. I’ll quickly define it, because the term can be misunderstood. It doesn’t mean “hype” in the sense that the far right is not dangerous. It’s more about the way it is covered in the media as if it’s the default politics; there is an implication—we mentioned a Guardian article that was talking about the rise of the far right in east Germany, and there was a throwaway line about racism or white supremacy, but it was about “economic anxiety,” using actual quotes by professed members of the far right.

MO: Bad framing. It’s mind-blowing! This is what gets me enraged. There’s a lot of brilliant activists doing work in east Germany. Shout out to Jakob Springfeld, who’s doing incredible work organizing on the ground in Saxony; shout out to David Begrich, a brilliant academic [studying] the far right; Philipp Ruch, who’s written a book I’m desperately trying to get published in English, which is called Five Minutes Before 1933, talking about Weimar Germany’s complacency as the far right exploded and rose in the thirties, and he says we’re there again. 

It is absolutely alarm bells ringing. We have national elections in November 2025, and as things stand, I think we’re going to see the far right form part of a coalition government with a wholly acquiescent conservative party. There are people doing work on the ground, and it’s so frustrating, because those people are also east Germans. They’re also Saxony. They’re incredible people, but none of their framing is existing. When you see these articles being written about the far right, they always get the last word. 

When is the last time we had somebody from a refugee camp that got attacked by the far right interviewed? I said to a friend of mine the other day, Why are we not going out there and saying it’s good that immigrants come to Germany? And she said, Musa, that’s electoral suicide. I said, Electoral suicide? You’re of Turkish-German heritage! At the very least I thought you would be in the corner of someone, but you’re trying to do this thing like, ‘I’ll keep my head down, they won’t come after me.’ 

When the Syrians came to Germany, almost a million of them—I think it’s the best thing the Merkel administration did when she was in office. When Merkel brought Syrians to Germany, I said, I never saw a single Syrian interviewed on national TV about what they’d been through. It was a conversation about Syrians. How many Palestinians did you see on mainstream TV talking about what they’re going through? It’s a conversation about Palestinians.

Ghayath Almadhoun, the Palestinian-Syrian poet, has lost 122 relatives in this. Where are these people being interviewed on mainstream TV? They’ve been completely marginalized. It’s just talking points.

EA: Just a couple weeks ago, there was a very good two-parter on Behind the Bastards by Robert Evans on how the liberal media failed to deal with fascism and was complicit with the rise of fascism in interwar Europe. He focuses specifically on the US, with The New York Times being a major player in the normalization at the time, with Italy and Germany being the two other main case studies. One thing that’s fascinating is that a lot of the things like that person said about “electoral suicide”—those things were quite literally said about Why don’t you condemn antisemitism? at the time.

There was even the argument that it’s better for Hitler to come to power because he will be moderated by having to deal with the realities of the state, or He’s such a buffoon, he’s such an idiot that he will expose the far right. And we are seeing this literally right now, quite close to the exact same arguments.

MO: It’s so frustrating, because I am seeing it in real time, the encroachment of the far right on all these public spaces. There was a report that came out a few months ago that there’s over a hundred far-right extremists with security passes to the German parliament. Over a hundred! There was an attempted coup. They raided hundreds of residences, and they found weapons caches—weapons caches, all over Germany! And the way it was reported was, Oh, ha-ha, look at this weird, eccentric group of people. 

They’re extremely wealthy people, and they’re connected, and they have guns. It would not take many special forces to launch a coup of some effect against Germany’s capital. It really wouldn’t! They might not need one, actually, a year from now, but what strikes me about this is the spectacular unseriousness. 

And I can’t help but think that if these people were brown, it would be taken far more seriously.Let me give you an example. A few days ago, in the town of Solingen (a town actually quite famous, because in 1993 ten [sic] refugees were burned alive by an unknown [sic] far-right assailant), a twenty-six year old man, found to have been a Syrian man who claimed asylum here, stabbed several people and killed three German people in their fifties at a festival for diversity, and the Islamic State claimed that he was one of their members. 

His thought process was, Let me attack Germany in its most vulnerable place. He didn’t attack conservatives; he attacked people who’d gathered to celebrate diversity. His rationale, his calculus was: The country will implode over this because they will ascribe my actions to all Syrian refugees and all non-white people. He was confident in that assertion. And Germany’s reaction was to deport several dozen African refugees who had criminal records. 

Here’s the thing: the level of urgency with which Germany acted in relation to this individual and others who they regarded as being in his camp—we are not seeing the same urgency in relation to the far right at all. At all. This is what frightens me.

There’s a saying—I can’t remember it entirely, and it’s a slightly ableist term, so I hesitate to use it. The saying is about Germany not being able to see out of the [right] eye, referring to Germany’s past. Germany doesn’t have the vision to look at itself, to look at its homegrown extremism, even though we know that over ninety percent of acts of extremism in this country are committed by the far right. Even though we know for a fact—the stats just came out—there are over three thousand cases more of far-right crime at this stage than there were last year. There’s almost ten thousand this year, compared to six thousand this time last year. And Germany is not acting with urgency.

EA: That’s a perfect example of why the culture war is so important, or the battle of discourses, or whatever terms you want to use. There was also a stabbing attack against children in the UK about a month or so ago, and we found that the assailant was [a teenager] and born and raised in Cardiff and then moved to England. They were born in Wales, moved to England, raised a British person. That did not stop the “debate” being about immigration, because even though he is, by definition, not an immigrant, he is still an “immigrant” because the category is racialized. 

At no point is there any debate, if we speak about the UK specifically, on the BBC, Sky News, Channel 4, The Guardian, Telegraph—at no point is there any debate whether Tommy Robinson is a British person or not. Nothing he can ever do—not a single act of hatred or antisemitism (even though he’s very pro-Israel as well; those things are not contradictory, people need to understand this), white supremacy or Islamophobia (his main obsession)—he can quite literally commit a massacre and he will not be deprived of citizenship. That’s not even conceivable in this framework, whereas if you do something very similar, or if you express a hateful ideology, let’s say Islamism (as we saw with some ISIS cases), your Britishness is being targeted first and foremost.

And that says something very specific. It doesn’t say, You are no longer British because you’re hateful, because if that were the case, then anyone who is hateful would get the same treatment—in which case you may not be comfortable with this kind of language, but you can at least argue there seems to be some fairness about this. We’d say Britishness is about fairness, diversity, inclusivity, and if you stray too far from that path you’re labeled an extremist, and your Britishness gets questioned.

MO: Yes, conditional Britishness. And beneath all of this: isn’t it incredible how the conversation, the rhetoric around statelessness, around removing citizenship, has exploded in the past few years? This discourse did not exist twenty years ago. Removing citizenship! What’s that thing about Those who burn books will one day burn people?I rank the removal of citizenship alongside book burning.

They are as insidious. The burning of books is a trailer for the feature film of mass murder and genocide, absolutely. And the mass removal of citizenship, which is what the far right are planning in Germany—a great piece came out by the investigative outlet Correctiv: they found secret plans by the German far right for the mass deportation and the removal of citizenship of millions of migrants, including “the good ones.” Now, Germany is a country that needs hundreds of thousands of immigrants every year for its economy to flourish. Hundreds of thousands. And the interesting thing with all of this is they will go on a charm offensive, on one hand: Christian Lindner, the finance minister, will go to Ghana and say, Do you want to move to Germany? and Ghanaians, who’ve got great job prospects abroad, burst out laughing. They said We’ve heard how you treat Black people!

Now, I came to Germany as a Black man, I speak good German, I pay my taxes, I earn good money here, I do my thing, I’m a “good immigrant.” And I was asked the other day how I felt about the AfD, if I was scared of the far right, and I said, No, I’m not scared of the far right, I’m scared of German complacency. Because I get told to “integrate.” Here’s the thing: my German is really good, to the extent that I teach in German schools, in German. A couple weeks ago, I officiated a wedding in German for friends of mine. I’m integrated. And that is not good enough.

And here’s the point: whether we’re “good” immigrants or “bad” ones, it will never be enough. The dangerous thing now in the discourse is, there’s no connection to economic or social reality. When the report broke, the AfD, the far right, were at twenty percent in the polls. That should’ve wiped them out. They were trying so hard to keep that meeting private. They must laughing, because they’re now between seventeen and nineteen percent. That’s a huge percentage. What that shows is a huge number of Germans actually really couldn’t care less.

EA: I also think the point about the economy is very interesting, because fundamentally, economic instability is good for fascism.Any kind of instability, of the sort that would happen if such a mass deportation were to happen, like Brexit times ten, is good for fascism. Because ultimately they believe in a form of isolationism. They want what they view as the current world to burn, because they think they will rise from the ashes.Whether they burn in the process as well is not something they calculate in the long term, but that’s part of the ideology for sure.

One thing that I find quite striking in how you’re presenting this problem right now is that an underestimated form of violence is the silences. I’ve experienced this in a different way in the months since the genocide in Gaza started—not that this is about me specifically, but I experience a version of that (either me personally or a bunch of friends of mine around me, here or in other places, people of color specifically) where we need to have two different personalities (if not more than that), or masks on. 

There’s the mask with trusted loved ones, friends, family; there’s the mask with other members of your family who are trusted only to a certain extent—they’re not racialized and may not understand certain things; maybe they want to, but they have a different experience, and that experience compels them to some form of silence. Sometimes I feel like the way their thought process works is like: If I digest too much information, that could be too destabilizing, and I would have to re-question some of my privileges and comforts. A lot of these people are not necessarily comfortable in the sense that they “have it all.” Privilege doesn’t mean that your life is amazing. That’s why we would say relative privilege.

In the case of the people I’m thinking of, it’s not that they have enough money to live comfortably until retirement and beyond, and their kids and their grandkids—they’re actually, a lot of the time, four or five steps away from precarity. They’re not immediately at the door of precarity, but it’s not that far away.This is a generous interpretation, of course; this doesn’t apply to everyone, but it does apply to a percentage. I think it’s important to see this not to paint everything with a wide brush, but to understand that there is a diversity of tactics that need to be applied in different contexts.

In the context of relatives of mine who are not racialized, who are white, the way I see it is they need to understand that the precarity that I am experiencing, or that people even in worse-off situations are experiencing, even more violently and more immediately, is something they can connect to on a human level without necessarily thinking this could happen to them immediately. Because there is a fear response that gets triggered. 

We see this a lot with global warming discourses, where if you tell people, If we don’t do something now, we’re going to die tomorrow, most people are just paralyzed: I just don’t know what to do right now. I don’t know what to do with the information you just gave me. I’m saying this with the caveat that I don’t always do this well; I fail often, and it’s very difficult to do. And as I mentioned earlier with the case of Germany, I can get very emotional very quickly, in which case I try as much as I can to just take a step back and maybe restart the conversation tomorrow. But it’s important for me at the same time, because I want to dismantle those discourses from within.

I want to weaken those discourses from within, and I don’t think it’s sufficient only to tell them, Hey, this is how much my people have suffered, isn’t this bad?Because they can say, Yes, this is bad, but the conclusion is still, What do I do with that? What can I do with this information?

MO: Bingo. This is why, when I wrote the essay, I was very careful to include a paragraph about What next?

There’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while; I’ll throw it at you now for the first time. German fascism will fail, right? It will fail because everyone will get miserable. And here’s the thing I’ve been saying to people recently about why it will fail, and what could be done to stop it before it emerges, before it comes to power: in the final year before elections, the coalition government can go bold, and they can say, You know what? There’s not enough affordable housing, the infrastructure’s not good enough, not digitized, and we are not going to get everything done that we pledged to do, but let’s start somewhere, and then throw up a ton of affordable housing in some part of Germany. Means-test it, and just build, and say, Look, here’s a pledge to build more. We’re going to throw up a thousand units of affordable housing in the next year. 

The reason I know they can do that is because they built a massive Tesla gigafactory around the corner, and they built a massive Amazon—it’s political will. They built a massive shopping mall in the east that nobody needs; they built a massive Amazon skyscraper that I heard the other day is only going to have half occupancy! They’ve got the money to do this. Because what happened? The Nazis got elected, and they embarked on the biggest infrastructure spending program that Germany had ever seen. 

That is exactly what the AfD will do when they’re in office. They’ll have a big show; they’ll put in some big infrastructure, they’ll have signature projects, and people will be like, Actually, the AfD aren’t too bad. So if progressive forces want to stop fascism rising, they have to have their big show projects in the next year. That’s what they have to do: go out there, be bold, promise some exciting things; deliver five percent of them now and say the other ninety-five are coming in office, but make the five percent super impressive so everyone can go, Great, we’ve got a plan. 

Having a plan and a unified vision—that alone will allow people to shake off their fear. Because here’s the thing: people are terrified of what’s coming.The people who’ve accepted the reality of climate change or the arrival of fascism are terrified of what’s coming. 

This is why fascism will fail from within, in German society specifically. Look at the example of Poland. What happened in Poland? There aren’t enough white babies, aren’t enough white people reproducing, so they’re trying to ban all abortion. What happens? The women of Poland went to the streets in spectacular numbers. Germany saw the biggest internal migration in modern European history, from East to West, when the wall came down, because women wanted to take advantage of economic opportunities they perceived in the West. Those women have now grown up, a lot of them have got kids, or they’re aunts, or they’re doting godmothers, or they’re just living free-spirited lives, whatever they’re doing, in the West.

What the AfD have proposed in their own manifesto: they say, Bigger families, fewer migrants. Great, let’s say their plan works. Let’s say they kick out all the migrants, including myself. They kick us all out, they put us in camps, they drown us, whatever they do to us. Great, okay, here’s the problem: you need more white babies, and you haven’t got enough white babies. What’s going to happen? Cut all women’s rights. Good luck cutting the women’s rights of millions of the most economically liberated women that Europe has ever seen. Good luck with that! 

And here’s the big question we need to be asking far-right politicians for the whole year until the election: Okay, here’s the thing, let’s assume your numbers will work out, we’ve reduced migration to this level that you want, great. How many white babies do you want me to have? Is it 5.4? Is it 6.2? Is it 7.8? How many women do you want to breed for you under your new government? 

I’ve not heard a single mainstream journalist—or any journalist—ask a far-right politician that question. It’s the same reason that the conservatives in the US were really cagey about Roe v. Wade, about abortion: they didn’t want to spook the horses. There’s a significant number of conservative and far-right white men in Germany who haven’t revealed to “their” white women how much they hate them. And there are millions of white German women who don’t yet realize just how many white German men hate them. 

That is when this whole thing implodes. Unfortunately, it’ll be long after they’ve done their terrible work on the non-white population of Germany, but that’s why it will fail. You can put money on that.

EA: I completely agree, and I think it’s very important to also be able to visualize that and to be able to visualize their failures. Because by doing so, you’re not accepting that their victory in the elections is inevitable. On the contrary, you’re demystifying it.If I dig deep within myself and try and be honest about it, there is a part of me—a very tiny part of me—that’s like, I want to see what happens.

That’s just a tiny part of me. I want to see what happens. This is not rational, and if I say this, I know if it’s here, I will be the target. So it is not rational in any way, shape, or form. But what I’m trying to say is that there is a bit of morbid curiosity that we do see expressed in the mainstream media. It’s a novelty, right? Because they’re not like the really bad ones of the thirties or forties. I’m talking about how the discourse is often presented here. They’ve tried to clean up their act! We haven’t had one in a while, what could go wrong? 

I’m being a bit facetious, a bit silly here. But this is said almost in those explicit terms. We have seen a lot of high-ranking, mainstream American politicians—and maybe now it’s a bit different since Biden dropped out—talking like, How bad can it be under Trump again? We’ve dealt with him for four years, how much worse can it be for four more years? This, of course, betrays a level of privilege, and them thinking it’s not going to affect them personally, and also a very deep cynicism about the world. Because fundamentally, Yes, of course, some people will suffer and that will be sad, but hey, I get to cover it, I get to write about it, I get to create content out of it.

MO: I get to withhold vital information of national security, of national importance, so I can publish it in my best-selling book!

EA: You’re referring here to that journalist [Maggie Haberman] who knew Trump wanted to refuse the elections, and she didn’t mention it until after it happened, and released it in her book in the US.That’s a thing. That exists. And that should also be called out for what it is. But the sentiment I’m trying to express here, this morbid curiosity, could also be not just dismantled (because that’s not rational, and not good politics; I’m antifascist in my politics)—but more like, Try and understand where that comes from; is there anything that can be done to dismantle it from within?

Because if it is about novelty, what you’re also saying (and this is the generous interpretation of it) is that you absolutely hate your life.Your current present is just not satisfying. Nothing is happening. It’s just not interesting enough. I’m not part of history; I could die tomorrow and it doesn’t matter. Here is someone who is giving me a hero arc, where I can go on the next crusade and battle the evil barbarian hordes, or whatever the fuck.

MO: I love that you’ve said this. Do you know why? One of the biggest failures in the resistance to the far right—and I say this in my essay—is the refusal to ignore the far right. What I mean by that is—of course the far right’s there, you have to pay attention to them. But when it comes to drawing up your vision for the perfect world, ignore the far right. When you’re imagining utopia, think of how you want things to be. This is what I want for German people: I want people in the rural communities in the East, many of whom are struggling with deep drug addictions, to have local bands playing in their communities; I want them to have youth centers, I want them to have transport, I want them to have economic opportunity. 

Someone said to me the other day, Ah, that’s not feasible. I said, Look, imagine if you made a Tennessee out of it. These small towns that don’t have infrastructure—imagine if you built incredible music studios there and you invested in those areas and actually gave people something to do? I’m not saying that all fascism emerges from the narrative of being left behind.

EA: No, but you’re dismantling it from within.

MO: Yeah, this is what I want. I want that for Germans. I want affordable train travel, so if you had a really tough week with the family or in your job, you can get a four-hour train to Cologne, an affordable hotel, and walk around and enjoy yourself by the waterfront. I want that to be the case. I don’t want it to be the preserve of the wealthy. This is what I want for Germans. 

The singular failure of German activism at the mainstream level and German politics is: you see the posters, and it’s like, Don’t vote for the right! or it’s We are for the right: we are for rights, we’re for human rights, women’s rights, animal rights. I’m like, You’re still using the framing of the right! If I drove past your poster or went past it on a tram or train, all I would see is the rebuttal of the right. I don’t know what you stand for. It is not empowering enough. Someone said the other day, You can’t win an election off vibes. As if Obama did not get elected off hope! Obama literally got elected on vibes.

EA: Most elections is vibes.

MO: Of course it is! And here’s the key: what fascists are very good at orchestrating right now is vibes. If you go to the German countryside, if you go to the German East, you will understand the movement very well. They have a very seductive image of home, of purity, of nature, of countryside, of walks. It is no coincidence that the place where the far right is strongest is, in my opinion, the most physically beautiful part of Germany: Thüringen. It is like a wonderland. It’s like Rivendell in The Lord of the Rings. Stunning! 

They have managed to marry a vision of utopia to a physical utopia. There is no reason why progressive forces cannot do the same, but they’re so busy chasing their tails, which is why Tim Walz is the answer. The solutions, the antidote to German fascism, will be found in the East. The progressive visions, the exciting visions of the future, the pride marches, will be found in the East. It’s no coincidence that the two biggest antifascist marches that happened in 2018, before the lockdown (they were cooking fascism before COVID; that’s another story)—one was called The Love March, and the second was called Indivisible. No reference to fascism there! 

That is the vision that existed in Germany five years ago. It’s been lost, and they have to recapture it before time runs out. But that is the positive way forward: to imagine a utopia and then act upon it. That’s what I’m doing, that’s what a lot of activists are doing. I’ve got my utopia in my head, and this podcast is part of it. But as long as we imagine that future, we’re going to be fine.

EA: We’re starting to wrap up on this one; I also think that’s a nice note to end on. Whether it’s a vibes-based politics or a policy-based politics, those do not have to be contradictory. Think of the US: one of the biggest stories of the US is the great reforms of the forties with FDR and after World War Two, rebuilding everything, massive infrastructure; and then the civil rights movement and Civil Rights Act in the sixties—of course, those policies are very concrete things, but a lot of that started with a vibe. 

If you think about the UK, just to be closer to home here: after World War II, the hero of the war, Winston Churchill, was not reelected. In fact, instead Attlee and the socialist movement around him—some of whom also had mutual aid backgrounds, especially in Wales and England—[were] proposing the NHS. As a vision, concretely, it’s just a notion that’s very easy to understand; it’s common sense decency that everyone should be taken care of under a universal health care system. It should not be fair that if you are richer than your neighbor, therefore you should have better cancer treatment than your neighbor. Just fundamentally it just feels wrong to say this out loud. 

That’s why, in the UK right now, a lot of the people who propose to effectively dismantle and privatize the NHS, they don’t use these stories. Because these stories don’t make them look good. So they use legalese, and they say “efficiency,” and they say a bunch of other things; We want to improve care—but they don’t go into the details of things, on purpose, because it doesn’t look good.

I’ve been wrestling with this a bit: we see even now in the US, with all of the caveats that I reserve toward the Democrats (and I’ve written about this extensively): there is something to be said about what can be done with a vibe shift. It doesn’t mean it’s sufficient; it doesn’t mean it cannot have people being sacrificed that you should focus on, like migrants in the case of the US at the southern border, or Palestinians. It doesn’t mean you can’t also tackle this at the same time. But this old guy drops out and within twenty-four, maybe forty-eight hours, people who were very terrified and depressed felt ecstatic.They can do something with that!

MO: Bingo! That’s huge! Okay, I love that you’ve mentioned this as we come to close. Tim Walz is a guy who has fought this stuff in the heartland, up close.This is why I think the solutions will come from the east of Germany, because they are the ones seeing it up close, and maintaining positivity—and not just positivity, but progressive and excited visions. They’re an antidote, because they can say We’re from here, and we reject what you stand for. 

Full disclosure, I give €40 a month to a mixture of pro-refugee, pro-migrant, and grassroots organizations in the east of Germany, one of which is called the Polylux Network, and another of which is International Women* Space—both outstanding, extraordinary organizations. 

There’s a couple of things to be done: the first is to articulate a politics of hope, and the second is to get an effective attack line against the AfD, similar to the “weird” tag that has stuck to the Republicans. Here’s the thing: if you look at the reason why the “weird” tag has stuck—this is fascinating. Americans, in terms of cultural output, regard themselves as the norm. Globally, they’re the norm. American culture is the norm. So “weird” is genius, because it’s like: the core American value is that We are the norm, and you’re weird.

That sounds ridiculous, but it’s powerful. The other day, I was going through a list of German values; I went through a survey of How do Germans see themselves? and compiled a list of the core German values. Then I went through the AfD’s manifesto, and I was like, Hang on a minute, these are all the ways the AfD’s core values are contrary to values that Germans express themselves. AfD is a deeply un-German party. It’s not transparent; Germans pride themselves on being transparent. It’s not efficient, the numbers don’t add up. Bang, bang. These are the seven values, and what you’re doing is contrary to German interests and values!

We haven’t had that conversation. If they’re talking about identity politics, let’s make it about identity. What is the American identity? We’re normal. Then: “They’re weird, and not good weird. They’re bad weird.” I’m good weird, they’re bad weird. In the German context, there is an efficient and effective line of attack: steer clear of calling people Nazis, because that, even though it’s an apt description, is a badge of honor. They’ll say, I’m a nationalist, I’m a socialist, I’m a revolutionary. What’s wrong with that? What you need to say is actually: What you’re doing is contrary to the values that many Germans hold dear. 

That’s powerful. If they can find a way to articulate that, both a utopian vision and an antidote, then I think the country can still pull this around. They’ve got a year—they’ve got time, it’s not over yet. But they need to get working.

EA: Speaking of “good weird,” there’s an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Picard goes to his brother’s hometown in France (because he’s supposedly a Frenchman), and he sees that his brother lives in pre-technological, almost Luddite (in the popular conception of the term Luddite) [fashion]: he works the land, he has electricity, but nothing more than that. He doesn’t have internet. And what’s fascinating about that episode of The Next Generation is that it’s implied in that world that you can have both: you can have the advanced high-tech, represented by Picard on the Enterprise, which is very diverse; and you can also have the quieter, rural life, which is also diverse—this is important in Star Trek. 

The point is, we mentioned trying to imagine a world in which fascism is already defeated, and thinking of the day after. This is the fictional version of that, in the sense that it’s three or four hundred years into the future, and we’re not even debating things like racism, because it’s an ancient thing that no one has to deal with anymore.When you take this as the premise, it opens up a number of things, because suddenly it’s like, Well, this feels easier than it felt prior!

You mentioned this yourself, and we see an element of this with the far right in France as well: when they think of the idyllic life, the village life, small-town communities—that is not a rightwing vision of the world. It becomes a rightwing vision of the world when you need to exclude a certain type of people from that same thing that you think is good for you.

That’s what I mean by dismantling it from below. Because there’s no point in being “the left” if the only thing you’re proposing feels like you don’t want that for those people, you don’t want them to have the quiet idyll, as romanticized as it is.On an emotional level, it feels good, especially if you contrast it with the epidemic of loneliness we’re all going through that is a global problem with neoliberalism. Again, all of this is romanticized to various extents, but it feels good. The point is, when we think about a vibe shift, there has to be a way to marry a politics of feeling good, a politics of hope (as abused as that term is by mainstream politicians)—we have to find a way to marry that with concrete, good progressive policies.

I’ll end on this: we’ve seen a shift even within the DNC, the Democratic National Convention—again, I have many problems with the DNC—where there’s been a re-normalization of unions and certain LGBTQ rights (again, with all of the caveats). This was already normalized in the forties, fifties, sixties, and has been slowly de-normalized under neoliberalism; being in a union became a dirty word. For those who want very concrete references, you can just watch the first five seasons of Seinfeld, in which the butt of the joke is a union man, a lazy worker. Now we’re re-normalizing being in a union as something that’s good and cool and fun and hopeful. 

And because there is also a semblance not just of collective bargaining and “fighting for your rights,” but a community—you have this thing in common, and this could be a way for moving pieces on the chessboard forward. Michelle Obama said “Hope is making a comeback” in the speech she gave; that and Barack Obama’s [speech] were meaningless in their actual content, but it felt good for a lot of people. How can we get that sense of feeling good? Because why would you want people not to feel good? That makes no sense. Let them feel good, that’s fine!

MO: Oh my goodness, I love that you’ve said this! 

To close on this, if you look at what Germany is doing really well, one thing in particular is football culture. I wonder what role football will have to play in all of this as time goes on, because the fan base and the supporters’ groups, the ultras, the ones who really galvanize the social movements, are overwhelmingly progressive. In a country that is trending towards fascism, I am very sure the role they have to play is a significant one as time goes forward. 

If you look at the huge clubs—Bayern Munich, Borussia Dortmund—these are clubs that, when smaller clubs were sanctioned for chanting antifascist slogans, they paid their bills. Babelsberg got fined because their supporters chanted Nazis out!—that was ruled to be discriminatory, they got fined for it, and St. Pauli and Borussia Dortmund paid their fines. Bayern Munich caused such uproar over being sponsored by Qatar Airways they forced the stadium to be closed down: people walked out, and that ended the sponsorship. Bayern Munich are no longer sponsored by Qatar. 

There is a huge progressive movement within football clubs in Germany, among supporter bases, and that’s a positive vision. That’s something Germans can point to and go, Look, we get this right. Our fan culture, our fan bases, our supporters, we get this right. This is something we can be proud of as Germans. So when articulating a vision of hope, Germany can say, If we treat the average German citizen as well as most German clubs treat their fans, we’re gonna be okay. And that is hugely exciting, it’s important, it’s multicultural, it’s diverse. 

The far right have got a massive problem there, because a lot of people are drawing a comparison between 1930s Germany and now. The big difference is this: in 1930s Germany, you did not have a manager of a football team that was proudly multicultural and diverse—you did not have a [national team] manager like [Julian] Nagelsmann, who came out and condemned fascism explicitly. You didn’t have that. 

This internal tension in Germany means that the far right is not going to have its own way in terms of messaging in the next five years. Whatever happens with their political prospects, they’re always going to have the biggest stars in the country speaking out against them. That is a problem for them that they have not anticipated. So if we’re talking about a politics of hope in a very concrete sense—at a social level, not just a political one—I think actually football is going to have a massive role to play.

EA: Amen to that! I don’t have anything else to add.

Where can folks follow you? Anything you’re doing? Plug away.

MO: Yeah, you can check us out. My podcast is the main thing I’m working on right now; I do that with the great Ryan Hunn, it’s called Stadio. 

At the moment I’m working on two pieces—the first time ever I’m talking about this: I’m working on a piece of fiction and a piece of non-fiction.I’m working on both of those as we speak, so please keep an eye out for those. 

And also, just one last piece of advice: solidarity. We’ve been going through it at the moment, and every little bit counts. I really believe this. Every conversation, every face-to-face, every bit of empathy you can show—it all matters. It’s given me strength for the last few months, and I think it will continue to in what could be a grim few months ahead. But I still have hope.

EA: Amazing. Musa, thanks for coming on again.

MO: My pleasure.

Elia J. Ayoub

,
,

One response to “Facing the German Far Right w/ Musa Okwonga”

  1. Our Mirror Worlds w/ Naomi Klein – The Fire These Times

    […] for it. Since October 7, one thing that I find is the elephant in the room (I mentioned this in a conversation with Musa Okwonga on this podcast) is that a lot of the calls for a ceasefire did not intersect enough with calls for the release of […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Discover more from The Fire These Times

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading