NM's blog

In Germany, the far-right, anti-immigration party  Alternative for Germany (AfD)  routinely achieves its most substantial electoral victories in rural, remote, and economically marginalised areas—particularly in the former  East Germany —where the actual percentage of foreign-born residents and immigrants is exceptionally low.  This trend was starkly illustrated by the AfD's historic landslide victory in the eastern state of  Saxony-Anhalt , a region with a very low proportion of foreigners. In November 2019 Gareth Dale provided a background .

I wouldn’t use the word ‘mistake’ in the title; as the writer elaborates in the article , it was rather a weakness that stems of the absence of a well-organised revolutionary organisation. In fact, insurrection stopped short of taking the levers of powers. There was not an open general strike to pose the question of power.  “Despite the revolutionaries’ battlefield triumph, little was achieved at the structural level in the centuries-long popular fight against the police state. Unlike what happened with the Stasi in East Germany after the 1989 revolution, Egyptians still know very little about the SSI [the State Security Investigation Service]. The problem for those rebelling against Egypt’s police state was primarily their limited capacity—as well as lack of a strategy and the necessary political imagination. The liberal human rights discourse also reduced the police state to a problem of its repression and illegality, preventing a deeper understanding of its constructive role, it...