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I get asked often if the German response to white supremacist violence gives me hope and/or is a useful model for the US. My answers are no and mostly no. Here is a thread about why. 1/ https://twitter.com/ForeignAffairs/status/1339578788875804672
First, let’s start with the good. As @milleridriss rightly points out, Germany's far ahead of the US when it comes to collecting data on far-right extremism, both in & outside of law enforcement. This is vital for understanding the scope of the problem. 2/ https://www.thedailybeast.com/fbi-sits-on-report-detailing-white-supremacist-terror-threat
It is also striking that the German military chose to disband a KSK (special forces) platoon full of far-right extremists rather than try to paper over the discovery. I simply cannot imagine the US military responding similarly. 3/ https://www.dw.com/en/ksk-german-special-forces-company-dissolved-due-to-far-right-concerns/a-54386661
Yet here my optimism begins to waver. These moves are significant, and also, I hear repeatedly from German policymakers that past security sector reforms in response to white supremacist violence haven’t changed much. How do we square this circle? 4/
Horst Seehofer’s comments are a good place to start. Right-wing extremism is the “biggest security threat to the nation,” Seehofer has said. He also called in 2010 for Turks and Arabs to be banned from immigrating to Germany. 5/
In 2018, Seehofer demanded Germany construct migrant detention centers along its southern border—a move that should frighten any observer of US migration policy. In 2020, he shelved a study on racial profiling among German law enforcement. 6/ https://www.dw.com/en/germany-police-racism-study/a-54124311
Seehofer and other German political leaders can talk all they want about the threat of white supremacy. But talk is cheap, and their actions promote the kinds of ideologies that allow white supremacy to flourish as a social macrostructure that makes violence permissible. 7/
If we want a clearer parallel b/n US and German law enforcement, we’d need to talk about anti-Black & anti-migrant racism among German police in the same breath as racist policing in the US. Convos about this are rare in Germany. 8/ https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/04/style/black-germans-say-its-time-to-look-inward.html
My point isn’t that the US has nothing to learn from Germany. My point is that Germany is no gold standard, and I worry casual readers of the “look to Germany” argument will miss both the persistence of white supremacy in Germany & the nuanced lessons the case holds. 9/
Last thing: German authorities do indeed understand national security as linked to defense of the constitution, w/ “anti-constitutional” being a common descriptor for violence in a similar way to how some US actors use “terrorist.” This is NOT something to model! 10/
Linking security to national identity raises Qs of who counts as German & invokes narrow, nativist identity categories. It becomes that much easier to exclude Muslims and/or migrants from the narrative of who deserves security within a democratic constitutional framework. 11/
Reading white supremacist violence as a national security threat requires a *broader* sense of German (or US) identity, *disconnected* from traditional liberal values that make white supremacy less overt without challenging it, allowing it to fester. 12/
tl;dr: Germany does some things right, but it hasn’t figured out how to dismantle the white supremacist ideologies that permit white supremacist violence, & that’s really the linchpin. Given its history, this should scare us—and give us few reasons for optimism. /fin
P.S. Where do I actually look for optimism? The streets. Young, radical BlPOC activists who push all of us to be better, do more, and demand systemic change.
