(Lady Justice on Old Bailey, London: Lonpicman, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

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The occasion for this is a series of objections that lawyers have raised against the view that a European country could solve its immigration problems on its own at the national level. These objections are purely legal in nature. They have nothing to do with the logistical question of border protection. They are not aimed at the fact that a common European border protection would be more efficient than control at each individual national border. Nor do these objections arise because of international power politics, i.e., that a single European state that deviates from the liberal-Western line in immigration policy would be put under pressure from outside and therefore a European self-assertion through unification would be the basis for combating the migration problem.

Both arguments are raised elsewhere, and both deserve to be examined on their own merits. But that is for another time. The legal objection is in any case a different one. It states that immigration policy has already been Europeanized and therefore a different immigration policy can only be achieved at the European level. Anyone who claims to be able to pursue a national immigration policy is selling populist snake oil, making promises that he can never keep.

There is a superficial criticism of this objection that is wrong, but nevertheless immediately suggests itself and therefore deserves to be addressed: It says that the problem is only legally constructed in the first place. If immigration policy had been Europeanized as a field of jurisdiction, then it could just as easily be brought back to the national level. This would just be a question of the distribution of jurisdictions in the treaties of the European Union. If necessary, one could reclaim it as a sovereign state anyway.

Why this is shortsighted has been shown above all by Gerhard Vierfuß1, the lawyer who advised Martin Sellner on his remigration concept. The Europeanization of immigration policy should not be imagined as if somewhere in the Treaty of Maastricht or Lisbon it says: “Immigration policy is regulated by the European Union.” On the contrary: What we call the Europeanization of immigration policy is a whole mycelium of different treaty provisions, some of which, like the European Convention on Human Rights or the Geneva Refugee Convention, are outside the actual EU treaties. Then there are the human rights guarantees in the national constitutions themselves. In addition, there is the interlocking of many European migration regulations with intra-European freedom of movement and the common market.

But there is not only this web of substantive law that prevents an end to asylum immigration, but also in procedural law a web of jurisdictions. The most important ones are the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights. For members of the European Union, European law and decisions of the European Court of Justice are on principle superior to any national law.

There is therefore no simple, precise exit way, no abolition of a specific law, not even a constitutional amendment, which would allow the deportation of asylum seekers. As long as this mycelium of laws, treaties and jurisdictions remains intact, every member state of the EU and even some non-EU countries like Britain will remain obligated to grant every asylum seeker a procedure that in legal practice allows them to stay in the country for an indefinite period. In Germany we would have to withdraw not only from the European Convention on Human Rights, but also from the European Union, and even if some play with this Dexit idea, it would be politically unfeasible solely due to our economic entanglement with other European markets, not to mention the subsequent geopolitical isolation.

As a result, Vierfuß and a whole series of other right-wing lawyers argue for a European solution. For example, they support the Danish-Italian initiative to reform the European Convention on Human Rights. Well, there is nothing to object to the latter proposal. One could at most speak against it if it were to result in a further shift of national jurisdictions to the European level. But at present, it looks in no way like that.

But it is no coincidence that it is the lawyers who think and argue this way. That it is the lawyers who can only imagine a solution to the immigration question at the European level. In the legal debate on mass immigration, the direction of legal thinking becomes apparent. This direction runs from the smaller association to the larger one. Or more precisely: it shifts competencies to the respectively more comprehensive level. One could also say that legal thinking is by its nature against subsidiarity. Most people are probably familiar with the primacy of European law over the national law of the individual states in the European Union. Some criticize this precisely because this primacy was not laid down in any treaty, but was simply declared by the European Court of Justice. However, this is not a coup by the court against the sovereignty of the European nation-states. If it were, then we would not have this fundamental conflict with always the same solution in every kind of federal system. In the Federal Republic of Germany, federal law notoriously breaks state law. The history of the United States is a single textbook example of how, contrary to the best federal intentions, competencies are increasingly centralized. Fundamentally, a common legal space centralizes. Why?

This is because Hans Kelsen’s doctrine, according to which law is to be understood as a system of norms that refer to each other without contradiction2, is factually obvious nonsense, but as a fiction it is the basis of the everyday work of every lawyer. The lawyer must pretend as if it where like that. Because if he did not, then two equally justified claims could collide, and thus no judgment would be possible. Of course, even in a Kelsenian system, mutually exclusive claims can exist. This happens in every bankruptcy, since here the sum of the claims of all creditors simply cannot be paid from the bankruptcy estate, otherwise there would be no bankruptcy. But the judge must at least pretend that the law prescribes which claim has priority over which other claim. Otherwise, he would have to award the same good to several parties and thus render a judgment that contradicts itself.

For this reason, a common legal system like that of the European Union leads to lawyers resolving emerging contradictions between norms through the primacy of the law of the more comprehensive unit. This also follows Kelsenian logic. Kelsen was well aware that two norms can be in circulation at the same time that contradict each other. He tried to solve this problem through a hierarchization of norms, in which the higher norm annuls the lower norm in case of conflict. If in an intra-European legal dispute German law says one thing and Italian law says something else, then the only option left is to appeal to European law if one does not want to terminate the common legal system altogether.

So far, the legal logic. And this caveat is crucial. This is the purely legal logic of a “pure theory of law.” From here, one could ask the question why we have not yet arrived at a world state. This is not a rhetorical question. The lawyers who devised the Charter of the United Nations wanted exactly that to a good part, and to this day there is a not insignificant number of doctrinaires of UN international law who demand exactly that.

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The reasons for this are intuitively clear to everyone. Capturing them cleanly is much more difficult. Because it is not one reason, but a thousand reasons. It is not the case that the will for freedom of the peoples alone prevents the world state, otherwise there would never have been a multi-ethnic state. It is also not solely due to the special interests of the elite structures in the individual states, otherwise several states would never have united, as in 1776 or 1871. If one wants to summarize these thousand reasons, then only the word frictions remains, in the plural, and in the same meaning in which Carl von Clausewitz uses this word in his theory of war: As the set of all reasons that prevent things from proceeding in reality as they do in theory. Such frictions cause a reduction in efficiency compared to the theoretical value.

That is at least the case in most instances. It should be said that in social systems, there can in principle also be something that we could call anti-friction: that is, efficiency-enhancing factors not considered in the theoretical planning. This is because social systems consist of independently acting agents. To stick with a military example: During the Afghanistan war, the Bundeswehr procurement office had not provided a sufficient number of targeting scopes. In a then-famous case, a soldier ordered a corresponding scope for €89.90 from online retailer Tchibo. That was anti-friction against the frictions in the Bundeswehr procurement office.

But what we see in this example is that anti-friction is much more likely on a small scale than on a large one. It is more likely that an individual soldier will privately buy missing equipment than, for example, the non-commissioned officers at the location organizing a collective order.

With that, we are already close to the reason why societal frictions counteract the legal tendency toward the universal state. Since I am not free from vanity, I would like to henceforth refer to this reason as Poensgen’s Law of Societal Friction:

Theorem: If two organizations differ only in the number of their members, then there are more frictions per member in the larger organization3 than in the smaller one.

Proof:

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(Lady Justice on Old Bailey, London: Lonpicman, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

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(Table for lethal injections: Ken Piorkowski, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

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What we see on the video of Iryna Zarutska’s murder is hard to bear. And I consider myself one of the more callous contemporaries in that regard. Why this particular murder had an effect that tens of thousands before it did not? Only the gods of the algorithm know. Yet we do know why this murder could have such an impact: because it stands for tens of thousands of others.

Taking a life for a life seems, in the face of such senseless brutality, the only right thing to do. When one then learns that the perpetrator had been arrested 14 times, spent five years in prison for armed robbery, the question inevitably arises whether this could not have been resolved earlier.

The very thought of a bureaucracy decreeing a person’s death makes my stomach turn. And even if lawyers are eager to see it differently: a court is bureaucratic institution. One of the basic features of bureaucratic institutions is that officials have little to no personal stake in the consequences of their decisions—no “skin in the game.” Courts are designed this way quite deliberately; it is no design flaw, no unintended side effect. No civil servant is more shielded from the consequences of his actions than the judge. This is called judicial independence and is a technical necessity of the office. Without it, impartiality is simply impossible. But at the same time, it means that the judge—especially the criminal judge—decides over human fate without being personally invested. This, as said, is necessary.

Concerning capital punishment, however, this detachment of the judge gives the act its special character, setting it apart from all other killings. There are many reasons to kill a person: revenge, anger, necessity, hatred, greed, error, enmity. Good or bad, heroic or cowardly—each of these reasons is in some way an expression of the struggle, which is life itself. The judge, by contrast, orders a killing through the application of a paragraph. He stays outside of the story of that killing. Death sentence and execution are administrative acts of the state—the Leviathan, which, whatever its advantages, by its very nature degrades the humans living within it to units of administration, even if it elevates “human dignity” to the rank of a fundamental constitutional right.

The act of execution, the bureaucratic killing of a human being by official decree, has always aroused far greater unease than killing itself. The soldier is a hero. The hangman an outcast. So it has always been, especially in the early modern period, when the death penalty reached its peak in European criminal law. The profession of executioner formally belonged to the dishonorable trades. In many towns, it was held in personal union with that of the knacker, the disposer of animal carcasses. Socially, most executioners stood closer to the condemned they executed than to the bourgeois society that offloaded this task onto them. This is one of the most disturbing aspects of the death penalty. The principle that the one who pronounces the sentence must also swing the sword exists only in fantasy novels. All real societies in history have shifted executions onto social outcasts and people whose lives had already been destroyed by some tragedy or another.

That has not changed to this day. In the United States, the identities of execution team members are secret. In 2006, however, Missouri’s staff list was leaked. The doctor responsible for administering the lethal injection was dyslexic and had more than 20 malpractice suits against him. Other members had similar backgrounds. In 2009, the state reacted to the scandal by criminalizing the publication of such information.

The bourgeois citizen demands that “justice be served,” but carrying out what he declares to be justice he cannot stomach doing that. Hence all those contraptions, from the gallows to the guillotine to the lethal injection, designed to automate execution. This has nothing to do with efficiency. Crushing a skull doesn’t take any longer. It serves only psychological distancing. And while in the past religion and concern for the condemned’s soul offered a cope, modern states have instead fixated on keeping the entire process as hidden as possible1.

Bureaucratic procedure and flight from responsibility are essential features of the death penalty. In a modern administrative state, which is and must be a managerial state, these features are even more pronounced than in times past. Yet as much as this bureaucratic killing repels us, one cannot deny this much: as the thing it is—as an administrative measure—it is very effective. What we call crime-fighting is, in reality, crime management, albeit with the goal of reducing that which is managed. Policing is applied statistics. It is about lowering crime rates, and it is a truism that the best way to do so is by eliminating criminals.

A long-term Swedish study in 20132 found that 1% of the population accounted for 63% of all violent crimes. The study concluded:

“The vast majority of violent crimes are perpetrated by a small number of persistent violent offenders, almost all males, who have an early onset of violent criminality and display substance use problems, personality disorders, and nonviolent criminality. These findings support the provision of far-reaching interventions among young individuals who have committed one or two violent crimes and are at risk of developing persistent violent criminal behavior. ”

The latter is precisely what early modern criminal law did, where “far-reaching interventions” after one or two violent crimes—or even other offenses—consisted of execution, often at a young age. That not only eliminated an offender who, with high probability, would have committed another crime at some point. Unlike the alternative solution of mass incarceration, it also avoided the problem of prison gangs, which in every modern state form a separate criminal ecosystem—especially in the United States, where, despite capital punishment still being on the books in most states, mass incarceration has largely replaced the death penalty as a method of crime prevention. One in 200 Americans lives behind bars. That prevents the worst, but you cannot deny that the death penalty is a more efficient method of crime control.

Schattenmacher3 recently even made the return to high execution figures the benchmark of a “happening” real change, as opposed to the endless outrage over senseless brutality. His unsurprising conclusion: This is unlikely. In the short term, yes, but in the long run? The greater the crime problem grows through an imported underclass, the more likely it is that administrative pragmatism will prevail over human revulsion and the will to deny the Leviathan direct authority over the life and death of its administered masses. Some may see this as a return to the historical norm. But it will cost us yet another piece of what it means to be human.

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(Table for lethal injections: Ken Piorkowski, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

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(Picture: Midjourney)

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The dispute over what is actually right-wing is not (!) as old as the Right itself. Instead it is one that has increased in intensity and decreased in clarity over time. In the beginning, it was quite clear. The Right stood for the social order from the time before the French Revolution. The Right was for throne and altar. In fact, one would hardly have used this term independently back then. One was a conservative, or in the language of the opponent: a reactionary.

Today, people call themselves right-wing, and they write philosophical treatises about what this right-wing is, without arriving at a reasonable result. The reason for this is very simple: The Right is nothing in itself. The Right is not the Left. The Right is negatively defined, and the Left was already there long before the Right. But both are the product of a transitional period.

When we draw the broad lines of our era, we tend to forget that we are living in a historical transitional period, the likes of which last occurred five millennia ago. Back then, the first high cultures of the agrarian age emerged. In a relatively short time, not agriculture itself developed—that is older—but something less tangible yet equally significant: organization beyond local settlements in the first empires on the Nile and Euphrates. Enabled by writing and, through writing, by administration. When cuneiform was deciphered, romantics expected to read the oldest poetry in the world, religious seekers hoped for secrets from the time of the creation of the Bible. Instead, museums' storage halls house several hundred tons of baked clay inventory lists, invoices, and complaint letters. The poetic and religious romantics were disappointed, but these prosaic relics testify to much more than a poem about Moses' exodus from Egypt.

These invoices and inventory lists are the material remnants of a way of organizing human coexistence that, in its basic features, did not change from the days of King Narmer to those of Frederick the Great: A broad base of rural population, at least 80 percent of the total population, works in food production. This makes large landowners the dominant social class. As an estate with its own customs and culture, these landowners develop into the nobility. The rural population generates a modest agricultural surplus that feeds the cities with their artisans. These cities are also home to the comparatively tiny number of magistrates, merchants, and priests, who are indispensable for materially and spiritually organizing this society—many times more complex than the preceding village and tribal communities. And they do this with the help of writing, without which none of it would have been possible. Even the more abstract institutions of this agrarian age, such as theology or credit, are all demonstrable in antiquity. How quickly this change occurred back then exactly can no longer be said with certainty today due to sources almost not existing, but it must have been a matter of a few generations, not a slow development over many centuries or even millennia. Even if we are wont to throw around such numbers when talking about in the furthest past. I consider it not unlikely that there were people who were born as inhabitants of a village by the river and died as subjects of the god-king Horus of Upper and Lower Egypt.

What triggered our change of an era? Was it, as Rolf Peter Sieferle wrote, the use of energy sources not dependent on the current photosynthesis on this planet, or something else? This is a question we do not need to answer here. What is certain is that we are living through this monumental change or, if the technical change is now slowing down again, as some believe it does, we have just left it behind.

The political directions of the Left and the Right are fundamentally tied to this turn of an era. They only arose when the old, organically grown social orders were no longer sustainable. This raised the question: "How shall we shape our society?"

To anyone for whom this question seems very left-wing, reminding them of the babble from university politics, they are correct. This question was only raised because, with the end of agrarian society, a space suddenly opened up that was not filled by orders that had arisen through long social evolution. The Enlightenment thinkers believed that an age of obscurantism was finally coming to an end and that people, now finally making use of their own reason, would suddenly recognize that there was no rational justification for the rule of monarchs or the privileges of the nobility. This image has persisted even among reactionary opponents, who then saw in this use of one's own reason human hubris against an eternal order ordained by God. Even in conservative lamentations about the disenchantment of the world, this reactionary error has persisted. Ironically, this granted the revolutionary order, which soon settled down in moderation as the liberal order, an equal standing with the traditional order that the former does not deserve. For the traditional order was not the result of a rationalistic social experiment, but the result of social evolution, of trial and error over centuries and millennia. As long as the basic conditions of its existence in the agrarian age persisted, these organically arisen societies were vastly superior to any artificial construction. But to the extent that humanity left the agrarian age behind, they became obsolete and untenable.

This created space for rationally devised social concepts. Of these, the Left one, based on the legal equality of all people, is the most easy to intellectually convey. This concept leads to the idea of the social contract. The social contract starts from a set of equal people who conclude a contract with each other that founds society. That this contract conclusion never actually took place was, of course, already clear to Hobbes and Locke, but the social contract was not meant to describe the practical founding of a state, as was the goal of Machiavelli's writings, but to provide its ethical justification, actually its justification in natural law. According to this idea, people have certain rights by nature, and based on these natural rights, society is legally constructed. Anyone who has read the contract theorists of the Baroque will notice that they argue in a formal, legalistic way. The social contract and thus the powers of the state are founded through transfers of rights, whose legality is examined, as every law student still learns today. For example, no one can transfer a right that he did not have in the first place. This leads to difficulties, for instance, in justifying the death penalty if one—like Locke—rejects the right to suicide.

In some form or another, the ethical justifications of all left-wing theories are variations of the social contract. There are leftist social theories that dispense with a fundamental justification of their goals and simply presuppose the value of their slogans. And because in intellectual history there is nothing that does not exist, there are even leftist theories that explicitly reject natural law, but then suddenly make a fuss about human rights. But all left social theory that attempts to cleanly justify its goals is based on the social contract. Even the "veil of ignorance" of the American ethicist John Rawls is a conceptual aid with which the question is to be answered as to which social contract is the just one, by placing us in the hypothetical situation where we do not know what position we will occupy in society. From Hobbes to Rawls, however, the core assumption of all these intellectual edifices is the legal equality of humans.

This idea of the legal equality of all human beeings is not ín itself new. From antiquity through Mazdak, who preached the community of goods and women in 6th-century Persia, to the Peasants' Wars, it has repeatedly arisen throughout history. Christianity alone has produced countless sects that preached the equality of people. Contrary to the progressive view of history, no special progress, no enlightenment, was needed for people to ask the question: "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?" And back then as today, no, back then far more than today, hardly anyone could give a rational answer to it.

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(Picture: Midjourney)

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(Photo montage: Fragen zur Zeit; Map: Виктор В, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons; Nuclear Hazard: MaxxL, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

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Who you consider the "good" or "bad" actor in the Middle East is largely irrelevant for assessing the strategic situation. The reality is this: Israel possesses nuclear weapons and reserves the right to attack its neighboring states, far beyond just Iran. These attacks extend to outright state terrorism, such as the airstrike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus on April 1, 2024, the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh during a diplomatic visit in Tehran on July 31, 2024, or the recent strikes on Iranian leadership.

In terms of global politics, this state terrorism is far more dangerous than the genocide in Gaza. One may be morally outraged about the latter, but the harsh reality is that Israel can eradicate the Palestinians without them having any meaningful means to resist. There’s a reason state terrorism is relatively rare, despite the considerable damage it can inflict, as Israel has demonstrated. That reason isn’t moral restraint. It’s the fact that the other side can retaliate, and defending against terrorism executed by professional intelligence services is extraordinarily difficult. Especially when it comes to assassinations of leadership, defense against a modern adversary becomes a nightmare. Just ask those who’ve gone up against the mafia and live under police protection, a life barely less restrictetd than in jail. A state intelligence service has even far greater logistical and technological capabilities. Nowadays, a sniper isn’t even necessary. A drone can be positioned near a target’s home, activated remotely after the assassin is long gone, with the target’s location confirmed electronically or via satellite. To be safe from such threats, one would have to live in a bunker. This is likely why Iranian personnel were unprotected: even generals and nuclear program engineers want to spend time with their families. This is why mutual assassinations are rare, even among bitterly hostile states. They haven’t occurred in the Russia-Ukraine war, for instance. Just because some people asked about the difference between Israeli an Russian actions, as of late.

Israel is the only country in its region with a nuclear deterrent. Its enemies must therefore factor in the possibility that Israel could escalate to nuclear annihilation in response to their actions. Israel wouldn’t do so lightly, but what if it lost a missile and drone exchange? For Iran, the problem is that any retaliation to an Israeli attack carries the risk of total annihilation.

Iran is in a difficult position. Diplomatically, it relies on Russian and Chinese goodwill almost as much as Israel depends on American support. Neither Russia nor China wants to expand the nuclear club. An Iranian nuclear bomb would trigger a nuclear arms race, at least in Saudi Arabia and Turkey, if not across the entire region. Iran’s solution has been to forgo building a nuclear weapon while maintaining the capacity to quickly develop one if necessary. This isn’t unusual.

Building a nuclear warhead is no longer difficult. The technology is 80 years old. Most developed countries could do so relatively quickly, and the NPT guarantees every member state the right to a civilian nuclear program, which can always provide the material for nuclear armament. The real challenge lies in delivery systems. But any well-equipped military today possesses these, at least for medium-range capabilities, due to the increased precision of modern ballistic missiles. Ballistic missiles, with their high terminal velocity and altitude, are by far the most reliable delivery system for nuclear warheads and the backbone of any nuclear deterrent. During the Cold War, they were so imprecise that only nuclear warheads made sense as payloads. With a nuclear weapon, missing the target by a few hundred meters is not a big deal. Non-nuclear states therefor often lacked such systems. Germany’s Bundeswehr, for example, still doesn’t have them. But the Ukraine war has shown that modern medium-range ballistic missiles are precise enough for conventional use. A modern army without them has a significant capability gap. In Iran, such missiles have long been a key part of military doctrine and bore the brunt of all strikes against Israel. Even without considering Iran, these technological advancements have made nuclear non-proliferation harder to maintain.

Iran’s status as a near-nuclear power has created a certain balance, as evidenced by the fact that this solution to the Iranian-Israeli conflict has held for two decades. It’s always shaky to retroactively apply theories to past events, but I’d wager that Israel and the U.S. also had strong incentives to exercise restraint toward Iran. A series of conventional attacks failing to destroy Iran’s nuclear program would push Iran to build a bomb, giving it justification before its Russian and Chinese patrons. Israel would then face the choice of launching a nuclear strike, becoming a global pariah, or tolerating a rival with its own nuclear deterrent. From this perspective, the status quo was a tolerable situation for Israel.

Much has changed in both Israel and the U.S. I don’t have to say much about America ant this point, just yesterday, the Democratic House Speaker from Minnesota was assassinated after voting with Republicans against healthcare for illegal immigrants. In Israel, Netanyahu, after multiple government crises, elections, and an ongoing corruption trial, leads a coalition of seven parties, relying on religious extremists and ultra-Zionists to stay in power and out of jail. In his war, he’s not only starving Gaza but has occupied parts of Syria beyond the Golan Heights, up to 20 km from Damascus.

In recent negotiations, American officials have either fully aligned with Netanyahu’s demand for the complete dismantling of Iran’s nuclear program like special envoy Steve Witkoff and Secretary of State Marco Rubio or, as shown in documents available to Axios1, at least insisted on severe restrictions. This is unacceptable to Iran and upends the previous balance, especially since the U.S., during Trump’s first term, already tore up its predecessor’s nuclear deal with Iran, shredding its credibility.

This has brought the balance—Israel’s sole nuclear deterrence alongside Iran’s nuclear program—to a knife’s edge. If Iran builds a bomb, Turkey and Saudi Arabia will follow, collapsing the non-proliferation regime in the Middle East and perhaps beyond. Ironically, Israel, which never signed the NPT, is leveraging the potential collapse of the non-proliferation regime it’s causing. Netanyahu can tell Western leaders that either Iran must be swiftly subdued or the non-proliferation regime is at risk. European countries could conceivably withdraw conventional support from Israel, but they are secondary at best. In the U.S., Trump needs at least 50 Republican senators to pass his reconciliation bill and keep the government afloat. With 53 Republicans in the Senate, the Israel lobby has more than enough power to derail his presidency. No U.S. president could withdraw support from Israel.

As long as Israel is supported with the conventional capacity to attack Iran, it can continue its current policy, where an Iran without a nuclear deterrent faces the prospect of nuclear annihilation in every escalation. One needn’t sympathize with the Islamic Republic to see that this is not a stable situation.

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(Photo montage: Fragen zur Zeit; Map: Виктор В, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons; Nuclear Hazard: MaxxL, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

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(Photo composition: Fragen zur Zeit; Elon Musk: Prime Minister's Office (GODL-India), GODL-India <https://data.gov.in/sites/default/files/Gazette_Notification_OGDL.pdf>, via Wikimedia Commons; Jewgeni Prigoschin: Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation (passport)PLATEL (restoration), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; Hintergrund: ADARSHluck, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons)

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Elon Musk has reached the next station of his Prigozhin arc. He has apologized to Trump. The contradiction remains unresolved. How it will end is uncertain.

There are more similarities between Elon Musk and Yevgeny Prigozhin than just the fact that both, at some point, turned against their masters with loud accusations of malice and incompetence. Indeed, the parallels, despite all superficial differences, are striking. Both were brought in as outsiders by a chief of state during a crisis of government institutions. Only the scale with Musk is vastly larger. What Wagner did for the Russian army, DOGE was supposed to do for the entire American government: accomplish a task that government institutions, due to their internal structure, were incapable of handling. However, while the regular Russian army soon adapted to the demands of the Ukrainian battlefield, there is not the slightest indication that the Washington swamp is making even the smallest effort to get its spending problem under control.

Thus, there is a significant difference between Musk and Prigozhin. Both Putin and Trump got rid of their man at the behest of the apparatus to avoid making enemies of the officials in state institutions for the sake of a favorite. But Putin cut Prigozhin loose after he had accomplished his given task. Trump, because he abandoned the goal of somehow curbing the rampant national debt. Trump is lucky that, just now in Los Angeles, some illegal immigrants threatened with deportation—along with, above all, left-wing professional protesters—are causing a ruckus. This allows him to distract from the fact that the second Trump administration has just thrown in the towel on one of its two most important goals. On the immigration issue, despite all the tough talk, they’ve also hit a dead end. Trump is arguing with provincial judges over the deportation of illegals. White Americans will inevitably become a minority under Donald Trump’s course. Behind this looms the big question:

Whoever comes to power must govern. But how? In the rift between Elon Musk and Donald Trump, the threads of two crises intertwine into a Gordian knot of impossibilities. On one hand, mass immigration. Its core lies in the fact that immigrants acquire personal rights to stay, and under conditions of political normality, it is always far more difficult to get them out of the country than it is for the migration lobby to bring new immigrants in1. The other great crisis, addressed here, is public finances. The problem, as Musk noted on his way out and as anyone has known for decades, is only secondarily the nominal national debt, which in the U.S. currently stands at $36.2 trillion, but rather the obligations from pensions, healthcare, and social security. According to a calculation by Jagadeesh Gokhale and Kent Smetters from the University of Pennsylvania, this implicit national debt amounts to a staggering $65.7 trillion2. Combined with the $36.2 trillion in explicit national debt, we arrive at $101.9 trillion3. Musk was supposed to save $2 trillion per year through DOGE. That’s the scale that would be necessary. DOGE has so far achieved $180 billion. Not only is that far too little, but it’s also being more than offset by spending elsewhere. In fact, new borrowing under Trump in 2025, as of April 2025, is $1,051 billion, about 22 percent higher than under Biden in the same month the previous year4.

Implicit national debt, by the way, has a peculiarity compared to explicit national debt: since many of these benefit obligations are tied to inflation in one way or another, implicit national debt can only be inflated away to a limited extent. All claims to certain material benefits, like medical care or nursing, are based on the price of those services anyway, without needing to calculate any inflation rates. While inflation doesn’t improve anyone’s standard of living except for a few profiteers and parasites, it has a crucial advantage for politicians: it just happens. No one has to stand up and make the decision to take something away from someone. This also means: more than any other type of debt, implicit debt endangers political stability. Not all debts are equal. Inflation, as long as it’s not galloping inflation, has the political advantage of avoiding a clear conflict point that could destabilize the system. If, instead, it becomes necessary to publicly negotiate at a specific point in time who will lose what, that’s the occasion for revolutions.

With a shrinking demography, government cannot pay what it has promised. Even less can it deliver the actual goods services expected. $36.2 trillion, or $65.7 trillion, or $101.9 trillion are numbers that no one can truly comprehend. Gokhale and Smetters have kindly converted this into the additional net tax burden over the lifetime of an average 20-year-old American. The net tax burden is the tax burden minus the benefits received from the state. On average, for a 20-year-old American today, this amounts to $132,000. That’s how much they’ll have to pay over their lifetime. If you include the implicit national debt and assume it will be financed solely through higher taxes, this net tax burden for today’s 20-year-old would have to rise to $426,000! That’s an increase of 223%!

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Since the left has saturated the public sphere with their sanctimonious phrases, the bad habit of adopting this language out of convenience has taken hold. So, when talking about the plight of South African Boers, a plight for which the Western countries are indeed partly responsible, as they dismantled the white republic, people speaks of genocide.

What is happening in South Africa is not a genocide, even though the grotesque scale of everyday violence might have the effect of driving the Boers out of their country.

What is happening in South Africa is simultaneously milder and far worse than genocide. It is not as if the government under Cyril Ramaphosa is systematically murdering or planning to murder the white population. This restraint may be due to the fact that Nelson Mandela’s successors are incapable of systematically planing or doing anything. Nevertheless, a genocide in the way Western observers usually understand this term, is not taking place in South Africa. Over the past decade, an average of about 50–100 out of every hundred thousand white farmers have been murdered each year. For comparison, in Germany during the same period, the general murder rate was less than one per hundred thousand.

It is difficult to find an appropriate term for whatever is happening in South Africa. I have called it racial-communist anarcho-tyranny; Carl Benjamin has tried the term stochastic terrorism. Perhaps someone will come up with something better. On one hand, there are the Economic Freedom Fighters, a black party with round about 10 percent support, openly calling for mass murder. This allows the ruling ANC, the African National Congress, Mandela’s old party, to present itself as the moderates, even as it expropriates white farmers without compensation.

The expropriations, however, are only the tip of the iceberg. The country has a multitude of racial laws targeting whites. Most of them are economic laws. The country openly practices something called Black Economic Empowerment. This is a points system where a company earns more points the more black employees it has and the higher the proportion of black ownership. For many business dealings, especially those involving the government, a certain number of points is required. In practice, this means a white person needs a black business partner who, in the best case, does nothing except being black to meet the quota but still he needs to be paid. The ANC uses this system to place its cronies in positions and sinecures at the expense of whites. It is understandable that under these circumstances, more and more Boers are leaving the country where their ancestors have lived for a longer time than the current Bantu majority. As a result, racial-communist anarcho-tyranny does indeed lead to violent ethnic displacement.

If a conventional genocide were taking place in South Africa, it would be relatively easy to address. Think whatever you will of the United Nations, but you could bring the issue before the Security Council, impose sanctions, send blue helmets, and, if all else fails, overthrow the government with a so-called humanitarian intervention. Unfortunately, it is not that simple.

Currently, a very telling defense of the South African government is making the rounds: After Donald Trump put the issue on the international agenda, the usual suspects are now fact-checking the claim that a genocide of whites is taking place there. Of course, they say, there is no genocide; South Africa simply has high crime rates, and besides, one must understand that whites are so much wealthier than blacks. Inadvertently, these people hit the nail on the head. South Africa has one of the highest murder rates in the world. These murder rates are at least as much due to the incompetence of the black government as to its malice. The economic strangulation of whites stems from the government’s corruption. And that does indeed have something to do with wealth distribution, only the wealth wasn’t distributed by Santa Claus.

Whites in South Africa are many times more productive than blacks. As a result, they act on South Africa’s political system like foreign aid or an oil discovery in other Third World countries. They function as an external source of wealth. As long as a country generates its own wealth, however well or poorly, the status of elites depends on their role in the country’s economic activities. But when great wealth comes from outside, you become rich by appropriating this unearned wealth. Wealth that a country does not generate itself makes the fight for its distribution the main focus of politics. Total corruption is the only possible outcome.

For Palladium, Lawrence Thomas has described how South African politics since the end of apartheid has become a struggle for such sinecures. However, he places too much emphasis on the ANC having been influenced in the past by communism from the Eastern Bloc. The bigger problem lies in the current incentive structures. For a black government in South Africa, there is nothing more lucrative than plundering the whites. Thomas calls for the overthrow of the ANC. But any black government would become like the ANC.

There are essentially two options. A return to white rule is unacceptable to blacks for reasons of pride, even if they would be materially better off under it. The other solution is a Boer state.

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Politically, our people is organized in the state, not in families, clans, or religious communities. This simple fact means that all attempts to separate the civic nation (Staatsvolk) from the ethnic nation (ethnisches Volk) and to reabsorb the latter into society are doomed to fail. Why would anyone even try to do this? The reason for such considerations is that the alignment of the ethnic nation with the civic nation has been identified by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the courts as a pivotal point for a potential ban procedure against the AfD. The core of this argumentation can be found on page 114 of the version of the secret report published by Junge Freiheit regarding the classification of the AfD as confirmed right-wing extremist1:

“The concept of the ethnic nation is based on the distinction between a civic nation composed of German nationals and an ethnically defined nation, which leads to not all German nationals being regarded as members of the German nation.”

Paul Strieder has described the “logic”2 outlined in this passage as the core of what he sees as the problematic identification of the ethnic nation with the civic nation in the nation-state. His solution lies in separating the state from the nation, as he believes was the case before modernity. According to him and Maximilian Krah, the ethnic German nation could then exist as a mere societal phenomenon without coming into conflict with the rights of non-German citizens of the Federal Republic.

As always, when the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution targets the AfD with the concept of the ethnic nation in mind, discussions flare up about whether one could somehow circumvent this central issue of our time. I have outlined the fundamental problem sufficiently3: the moment a democratic constitutional state allows mass immigration, liberal immigration policy is transformed into the personal rights of individuals. The individual immigrant gains a right to residency. If, at some point, someone naturalizes him under any circumstances, it becomes nearly impossible to get rid of him within the legal system.

Now, two things are true at the same time:

First: Whoever accepts this hands to the operators of population replacement a ratchet that they will keep tightening, which can only be stalled for a limited time but never loosened. In the process, the national foundation of the democratic nation-state, without which it cannot exist, erodes. At best, what would emerge is a state as a ruling construct based on the inertia of mere legality, which would eventually fall apart in bloody pieces.

Second: According to prevailing jurisprudence, the concept of the ethnic nation is grounds for a ban if it leads in any way to the preferential legal treatment of ethnic Germans over citizens of non-German ethnicities. In this, Maximilian Krah is simply correct.

However, it is crucial to note that this prevailing legal opinion stems from the political realities of the existing multiethnic society, not from constitutional paragraph-juggling. “The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law,” said the American constitutional judge Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. In the sense of legal realism, Jakob Maria Mierscheid4 has analyzed the prospects of a ban procedure against the AfD better than I could. My aim in the following section is solely to highlight how little the demand for a party ban is based on legal logic and how much it stems from the political situation of the current powerholders. In fact, it would be difficult, based solely on the constitution, to derive grounds for a ban even from a demand for denaturalization based on ethnic criteria or the retroactive revocation of naturalizations. However, I would advise against taking the following argument before a current German court:

The party ban is regulated in Article 21 of the German Constitution, the Basic Law or Grundgesetz, a designation originally invented to highlight the provisional nature of the order created in West Germany after the Second World War, which nevertheless, as most provisional arrangements has proven to be quite permanent and is at least since the reunification of Germany in 1990 de facto the constitution of the Federal Republic. The decisive section is Section 2, which reads:

“Parties that, by their aims or the behavior of their supporters, seek to impair or abolish the free democratic basic order or endanger the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany are unconstitutional.”

The free democratic basic order (freiheitliche demokratische Grundordnung) refers here to the preceding Article 20. To “this order” in paragraph 4 for which, in case someone should try to abolish it, the Basic Law provides a right of resistance to every German. Such a right of resistance can hardly be arbitrarily applied to any sections of the Basic Law. Neither discrimination, nor the position on citizenship law, nor even the guarantee of human dignity from Article 1 is listed as grounds for a party ban. There are other articles of the Basic Law that prohibit ethnic discrimination and denaturalization, but these are neither mentioned in Article 21, Section 2, nor do they fall under the eternity clause, which protects Articles 1 and 20 under Article 79, Section 3.

By constantly referring to human dignity, our opponents, by the way, show how shaky the demand for an AfD ban would be, even if they were factually correct in all their claims about what the AfD stands for. I am honestly surprised that this is so rarely noted in analyses on our side. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the compliant judiciary argue as follows: the concept of the ethnic nation demands the discrimination or denaturalization of non-German citizens of the Federal Republic, and this discrimination or denaturalization violates their human dignity, which in turn justifies a ban.

This argumentation has three awkward leaps: The first, and by far the simplest to overcome, is that someone who politically refers to the concept of the ethnic nation thereby intends to discriminate against members of other ethnic groups. This is understandable insofar as any political organization representing the interests of its members tries to secure rights and privileges for them. These rights and privileges come at the expense of others, who are then discriminated against. The current preferential treatment of all sorts of minorities follows exactly the same pattern. The second leap, that discrimination—i.e., legal differentiation between people—constitutes a violation of human dignity, is absurd because every legal system, at all times, discriminates between people in some way. The question is only on what criteria and with what consequences. And no one would seriously claim that people without German citizenship lack human dignity. If they did, it would imply a right to German citizenship for the entire world.

However, even if one were to accept this premise, the goal of violating human dignity is still not listed as a ground for prohibition in Article 21, Section 2. This was not simply forgotten but has a good reason: human dignity is a very vague term. Courts have considerable leeway in interpreting it. This vagueness can be quite useful when understanding the right to human dignity, as provided in the Basic Law Articel 1, as an individual’s defensive right against the state. In that case, Article 1 enables courts to issue rulings against severe forms of state abuse of power when such abuse does not literally violate the specifically defined fundamental rights in Articles 2–19. Article 1 serves as a catch-all for anything either overlooked in the other fundamental rights or not regulated in detail. Therefore, its classic fields of application are, on the one hand, issues related to the detention of prisoners or inmates of psychiatric institutions. If these were to be written into the Basic Law, it would consist of two-thirds administrative instructions for prison guards and psychiatrists. On the other hand, it applies to issues like gene therapy, which arise due to new technologies that could not have been anticipated when the Basic Law was drafted in 1949. Thus, it is left to the discretion of judges to determine on a case-by-case basis what is considered consistent with human dignity and what is not. However, if Article 1 is used as the basis for banning a political organization, its nature changes from an individual’s defensive right against the state to a legal basis for state repression, opening the door to arbitrariness. This is especially true if one follows the bastardized Kantian interpretation of human dignity, which current jurisprudence and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution rely on. They see human dignity as being violated by using a person as a means or by subordinating the individual to a collective.5 The latter is the basis of all politics, and the former is constantly done by every administration. By these standards, every real existing system violates human dignity. The accusation of unconstitutionality here takes on the logic of a puritanical morality trial, where the only thing that matters is who is the accuser and who is the accused, because by the standards applied, everyone is guilty. If one accepted the violation of human dignity as a legitimate ground for banning a party, the AfD, once in power, could have all its current competitors banned based solely on their stance on abortion or their attempts to bully people into accepting prophylactic gene therapy not so long ago. Both could be construed as violating human dignity with at least the same plausibility as ethnic discrimination.

The reason our opponents constantly refer to human dignity is that Article 1, the article in the Basic Law that guarantees human dignity, like Article 20, is subject to the eternity clause, allowing it to be rhetorically linked to Article 20, which is referenced in Article 21, Section 2, when talking about the free democratic basic order. The entire prohibition rhetoric works with such three-cornered chains of association. A rather comical example of this shoddy argumentation can be found on page 111 of the secret report:

“Article 1, Paragraph 1 of the Basic Law postulates human dignity as the highest value of the constitution. Central to the concept of human dignity are the chara of each individual as a subject with a corresponding claim to respect, as well as equality, which is reflected in legal equality.

Incompatible with human dignity are, for example, ethno-nationalist, xenophobic, anti-minority, anti-Muslim, anti-Islamic, and anti-Semitic positions.”

An undigested chunk of Kantian ethics (the quality of each individual as a subject) is regurgitated with a vague demand for equality, which is supposed to establish legal equality, though it is unclear what kind of legal equality is meant here, legal equality in everything we have to assume, considering the obviously limited cognitive capacity of the author of this passage. This elaborate gibberish, whose logical consequence would be the anarcho-syndicalist commune from the famous Monty Python sketch, then culminates in a list of groups particularly protected by the regime, thus not equal but privileged.

Nevertheless, as I said, I would advise no one to use this argumentation in court. What I aim to demonstrate is that the significance of the ethnic concept of the people in the debate about a possible AfD ban does not stem from a narrow reading of the Basic Law. Anyone who creates a dichotomy between legality and political objectives misses the point. Equally futile are all attempts to find a legal loophole to save the German people. The criminalization of the concept of the people does not arise from legal logic. Nor is it the result of mere ideological arbitrariness. The latter mistake is made by those who explain the population replacement solely as a product of left-wing cultural hegemony. This thesis seems plausible at first glance, as even the most superficial look at the media, universities, and the arts reveals this left-wing cultural hegemony. And there are indeed more than enough leftists who want Germans to become a minority in their own country. But any unbiased look at the history of migration shows that population replacement was never at the center of the Overton window. The fact that the great replacement is taking place is regularly denied. In reality, it is the product of the ratchet effect mentioned above: it is simply easier to let people in than to deport them, because every individual immigrant receives subjective legal entitlements to stay, which would have to be revoked before deportation. Given the massive prosperity gap between Germany and most of the rest of the world, population replacement could only have been prevented with an extremely restrictive immigration policy, as Japan long practiced. Instead, we had five decades of muddling through. Sometimes immigration was restricted, as in the 1993 asylum compromise, and sometimes borders were opened wide, as in 2015. But the development moved in only one direction, albeit at different speeds. This muddling through has created the current realities of a multi-ethnic society. Since the multi-ethnic society is now a reality, every government in Germany must somehow manage it.

Remigration would be complex and fraught with conflicts. Therefore, the governments of the current party cartel have opted for an approach that is by no means new in the history of multi-ethnic states. When a multi-ethnic state becomes a burden for the core population that sustains it, the nationalism of that core population becomes the greatest threat to its continued existencen and with it, to all the positions and privileges tied to that state. This is why the late Habsburg Empire pursued no nationalism as relentlessly as German nationalism. Vienna could negotiate with the nationalisms of other ethnic groups, but if German-Austrians lost their willingness to uphold the system, collapse loomed. Similarly, Putin can accommodate Chechens but jails Russian nationalists who protest the settlement of Caucasian peoples in Moscow and St. Petersburg. This logic applies even more strongly to today’s Federal Republic of Germany. Despite alarmist claims from liberal critics of Islam, we are not on the verge of a getting subjected to a caliphate. In fact, none of the ethnic groups that have migrated to Germany are anywhere near the numbers needed to overthrow or take over the state. However, they are often capable of locally overwhelming the state’s policing capacity.

Recently, a Dortmund resident told me how a friend’s stolen bicycle was located in Dortmund’s north end quarter via a tracker. The police responded, “We don’t go there.” This erosion of policing capability can stem from political influence when local politicians rely on the support of ethnic group leaders. The most drastic example in Europe is likely the integration of the specifically Pakistani form of patronage politics, the Baraderi or Biradari system, into English local politics, particularly within the Labour Party. It is no coincidence that grooming gangs have emerged from Pakistani communities in England for decades, often with tacit tolerance from local British politicians who depend on the block votes of clan leaders.

But in most cases, policing does not fail due to political influence from new citizens but rather due to the frictions brought about by populations with short time horizons and high impulsivity. Even a police officer does not come back to life if the person who stabbed him in the stomach is convicted. So, he avoids going to places where the likelihood of being stabbed for a trivial reason is high. While IQ 70 knife-wielders may pose a threat to citizens and police officers, they certainly do not threaten the state-supporting elites. The local loss of control is far too geographically dispersed to lead to separatist movements. Every major city has its neighbourhoods. However, the Turks or Arabs in Germany are not Chechens or Kurds, who have a cohesive settlement area they could declare an independent state. Political organization of individual migrant groups is also something that, from the system’s perspective, is manageable. Where such organization extends beyond the local level, individual migrant groups, due to their limited numbers, have no choice but to become client groups of established parties. And we are always talking about individual migrant groups. While all migrants combined already have the numerical strength to overthrow the state, they are far too different from one another for political, let alone revolutionary, organization. It is, of course, foreseeable that this will change in the coming decades, just as the current situation was foreseeable in Enoch Powell’s time. But just as the great replacement was not a tangible part of daily life outside a few underclass neighbourhoods until well into the 1990s, the system destabilization caused by immigrants and their descendants still plays no role today. Today’s decision-makers do not base their policies on the demographics ten years from now. Otherwise, the debate about the pension system would be entirely different. They certainly do not base their policies on the demographics forty years from now. They operate on a short-term basis, lurching from crisis to crisis for two decades at this point. Objectively, the systemic danger—the danger to what they call “our democracy” but actually mean “their democracy”—lies in the Germans becoming aware of their ethnic interests, refusing to tolerate these conditions any longer, and organizing as ethnic Germans toward this goal. Thus, there is an objective and irreconcilable conflict of interest between the interests of the German ethnic group and the ruling interests of the Federal Republic’s elites.

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This is a double-edged sword for the Federal Republic’s elites themselves. On one hand, the functional interest of the existing system, combined with the existing demographic situation, gives them a legitimization to criminalize their political opponents. On the other hand, it forces them into the absurd position of having to criminalize the core nation of the state they govern as such. The Constitutional Protection Report is the culmination so far of the internal contradiction into which the system has maneuvered itself through immigration: after its publication, it was widely considered a laughingstock. Since the report relies on publicly accessible sources, the claim of source protection as a reason for secrecy was obviously a pretext—apparently to prevent the public from knowing what it is actually based on. However, the problem for the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and its political clients is not that the report is ridiculous, but that its ridiculousness is a consistent consequence of their position. To manage the multiethnic society, the German nation must be abolished, and the mere mention of its existence criminalized, because the German nation’s claim to its homeland collides with the multiethnic society. This puts them in an even more difficult situation than the one of those who want to preserve Germany as a country of the Germans. The latter is, in principle, possible. But no state can abolish its core nation, at least not by decree. Moreover, the Federal Republic is not just any state but a democratic nation-state. It is designed as such, with “democratic” being the adjective and “nation-state” the noun. The multiethnic society, with its legal and ideological superstructure, is not only on a collision course with the ethnic reality of the German nation—which, according to this ideology, should not exist and stands in the way of the multiethnic administrative logic of the Federal Republic’s elites—but also with the structure of the state as laid out in the Basic Law, whose institutions are not designed for a multiethnic society. Of course, in such a conflict, those who, as political dissidents, are exposed to the arbitrary application of governmental force are in the greatest danger.

Maximilian Krah and Paul Strieder seek to avoid this direct political and legal confrontation by openly recognizing the Federal Republic of Germany as a multiethnic state while simultaneously demanding a separation of the civic nation (Staatsvolk) and the ethnic nation (ethnisches Volk). This way, in an ethnically neutral state, a German nation could exist alongside other nations with members holding German citizenship. Even those who are fundamentally unwilling to relinquish the right of our nation to our fatherland in this manner would be ill-advised to simply ignore such considerations. As mentioned, every government faces the necessity of managing the existing multiethnic society. This has so far applied to all governments elected in protest against mass immigration. None of them have yet been able to make a clean break that would relieve them of this necessity. Therefore, it is quite possible that a future right-wing government might try the approach of Krah and Strieder, whether it can succeed or not.

A good rule of thumb for dealing with political ideas is to first ask who they are directed against. In this case, Krah and Strieder specifically target Martin Sellner’s remigration concept6, succinctly summarized as a step-by-step reversal of the population replacement. Krah has summarized his criticism as follows:

“Sellner’s concept is unfortunately underdeveloped, internally contradictory, based on unmet assumptions, ignores obstacles, and provides a pretext for massive repression. It is therefore doomed to fail but ties up valuable forces that are temporarily misled. Paul Strieder has explained how the German ethnicity can actually be preserved: as an Ethnos, not as a Demos. This also takes the legal situation into account and, as Kisoudis pointed out, keeps the potential of the emerging new great power order open for the German state.”7

I have myself pointed out8 that Sellner significantly overestimates the effectiveness of metapolitical means. But the practical core of this criticism is different. It lies in the accusation that the demand for remigration legitimizes state repression because it distinguishes between citizens who are Germans and citizens who are not and seeks to encourage the latter to leave. This is, of course, true insofar as the state criminalizes the concept of the ethnic nation. The question would be with what trick or maneuver this could be circumvented, with what prospects of success, and at what cost.

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(Montage: Fragen zur Zeit; Revolution 1848: See page for author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; Reichsgründung 1871: Anton von Werner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

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I had originally planned to publish a substantive analysis today of the classification of the AfD as a “confirmed right-wing extremist” party. The reasoning based on the ethnic concept of the nation has already sparked one or two fundamental debates within the right. Above all, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Verfassungsschutz) has inadvertently exposed the wound that its political masters have inflicted on constitutional reality. But now Friedrich Merz has failed to be elected Chancellor in the Bundestag in the first round, and albeit he won the second round, no candidate for the chancellorship has ever failed to win this formality in the first round, so that will have to wait.

What just happened? There’s speculation about whether it was Union or SPD deputies who let Merz fail. The most likely answer: both. There’s been noticeable unrest in both parties since the election. But the question is wrong. The right question is: How many deputies could the black-red coalition afford to lose? Or conversely: How many of the potentially dissatisfied deputies did the leaderships of both coalition partners need to persuade to vote for Merz anyway? The Union and SPD together have 328 deputies. 310 voted for Merz in the first round. The absolute majority in the current Bundestag is 316. The headline that “6 votes were missing” is factually correct but somewhat misleading. In total, 18 deputies from the would-be coalition parties did not vote for Merz.

From the perspective of the party leaderships before the chancellor election the situation was this: It was known that not everyone in the Union or the SPD was on board with the new coalition. The reasons are opposing, Union dissenters come from the right wing, SPD dissenters from the left wing of their respective parties. But the coalition parties have 12 more deputies than needed. So, they could afford to lose 12 for the chancellor election. This means that if no more than 12 of the SPD’s 120 deputies break party discipline, Merz and the coalition will get through, provided the Union votes for him unanimously. The smaller the proportion of SPD dissenters, the more dissenters the Union can tolerate. So far, so trivial. The key point is: From the perspective of the party leaderships before the election, the situation wasn’t “We’re missing 6 votes.” It was: “We need to get 316 out of 328 deputies to vote for Merz.” All of this gets lost in the headline “6 votes missing!” which is why I’m elaborating here.

Now, let’s put ourselves in the shoes of the SPD leadership. The leadership knows there are some intransigent members in their ranks. An I mean intransigent. The coalition negotiations amounted to the unconditional surrender of the Union. The chancellor election should really have been scheduled for May 8 or 9, not May 6.

But any SPD deputy refusing to vote for Merz, claiming he’s a neoliberal fascist or some such nonsense, is out of his mind. The SPD turned a crushing election defeat into a total victory at the negotiating table. Until a few hours ago, people forgot how high SPD chairman Klingbeil had gambled. The only reason the SPD could demand anything, the only reason it was even considered, let alone indispensable, as a coalition partner for the Union, is the firewall, the refusal of all other parties in Germany to forma coalition with the AfD. But the Union can abandon this firewall doctrine at any time. In fact, it’s not only pointless for the Union but has become highly damaging. The firewall against the right made sense for the Union as long as it could prevent the rise of parties to its right. The basic agreement of the Federal Republic’s party cartel was that the left-wing parties set the societal agenda, while the Union, as a conservative brake, could capture the votes of the majority who didn’t lean left but had no alternative to the Union. The AfD changed that, and it’s unclear how the party cartel could reverse this democratically. There’s a reason why people like Wanderwitz, who want to return to the old party cartel, demand the AfD’s ban: It’s their only chance to achieve their goal.

This has turned the situation on it’s head for the Union. Previously, the firewall reliably made the Union the strongest party. While the SPD had to share the left-wing voter spectrum first with the Greens and then with the Left Party, the Union could capture the entire right-wing spectrum and compete for the center without losing right-wing voters to a competitor. Angela Merkel perfected this, embodying the unwritten cartel agreement between the established parties like no one else: 16 years of Union dominance while jettisoning even the last conservative remnants.

That era is now irrevocably gone. Before the Bundestag election, I had bet on a black-blue (Union-AfD) government (here and here). Though I must admit I misjudged Friedrich Merz. After the Bundestag’s vote on refugee caps, he looked stronger than he does now. But my prediction wasn’t based on the Union suddenly embracing its patriotic duty, but on the assumption that the Union has enough self-preservation instinct and political savvy to see that times have changed. If the Union clings to the firewall, it will be ground to powder at the firewall. If nothing else, the last two months have shown that. It will be programmatically blackmailed from the left and lose its voters to the AfD.

It’s sheer inertia that keeps the Union tied to the firewall, solely the fear of every top Union official of being the first to state the obvious. You need to keep this in mind to grasp how high the stakes are for the SPD. For Merz, this chancellor election was about his lifelong dream, but the vast majority of the Union could do without it. For the SPD, Merz’s chancellorship is about the party’s future. If the firewall breaks, the SPD becomes a mid-sized party on a downward trajectory.

Let’s consider the alternative available to the Union: a coalition with the Alternative. The Union and AfD together have 359 seats. Before Sieghard Knodel’s exit from the AfD due to its “confirmed right-wing extremist” classification, it was even one more. Instead of just 12, a black-blue coalition could tolerate 43 dissenters. In percentages: 12 out of 328 is 3.7% dissenter tolerance for black-red. 43 out of 359 is a full 11.9% dissenter tolerance for black-blue. If it’s said that black-blue is impossible because some deputies would rebel, well, the same problem proved to be the case with black-red. But black-blue could afford a more than three times higher share of rebels.

The vote in the German Bundestag on the influx restriction law1 on January 31, 2025, was essentially a vote within the Union faction on how many deputies were willing to follow the party leadership if it tore down the firewall. The result2: 184 out of 196 in favor. The twelve remaining Merkelians didn’t even abstain—they didn’t show up at all and were recorded as “not cast.” It was this vote, and the one on January 29, that led me to my black-blue prediction. After the Bundestag election Merz lacked the courage to follow through on what he started with these votes. But Jens Spahn has since subtly positioned himself by demanding that the AfD be treated like other parties. The firewall is grinding down the Union, and deep cracks are appearing in the Federal Republic’s political elite.

None of this is a secret at Willy-Brandt-Haus3. For the SPD, everything is at stake. That’s why the AfD was classified as “confirmed right-wing extremist.” The SPD tried, through the internal security agency, to whip Union deputies into voting for their own candidate! Welcome to the Federal Republic of 2025!

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German original published on Feb. 10, 2024



Since Correctiv published the alleged secret meeting in Potsdam, the right-wing opposition has faced unprecedented repression.1 This won’t simply fade away. The supposed scandal surrounding Martin Sellner’s speech is, in fact, entirely secondary.

What we are witnessing is a learning process of the system through trial and error. For years, various civil society actors have launched attacks against the right, sometimes in one way, sometimes in another. The points of attack and methods that prove successful are adopted by other actors, discussed by regime journalists, and analyzed by academic experts on right-wing extremism. This way, the system as a whole learns, not just individual people within it. It is a learning process driven by societal forces.

A major step in the system’s learning process was the discovery, made a few years ago, that the right can be attacked through the contrast between an ethnic concept of nationhood and the legal concept of citizenry, the latter being the sum of all passport holders of a given state. The system realized that by emphasizing that the ethnic group, which the right considers the true political community, no longer aligns with the set of citizens. The right can thus be portrayed as in conflict with the legal order, since this suggests it proposes at least two different degrees of belonging to the political in group, thereby violating the equality of all citizens regardless of their ethnicity. The system thus pits the ethnic concept of nationhood against the civil and residency rights of naturalized migrants, which the system itself has granted them.

What we are dealing with here is an ancient technique of dominion used by elites in multi-ethnic states. They position themselves as the guarantors of all rights granted to ethnic groups and their individual members. The message is clear: “You may be dissatisfied with us, and perhaps we’re not the best rulers, but your rights stem from us. If we are no longer in power, there will be no one left to enforce them. Your choice is us or fundamental legal uncertainty. Us or chaos.” This technique has persisted for millennia because it works. Whoever manages to become the sole barrier between a country’s inhabitants and the collapse of the legal order rallies behind himself all those with anything to lose.

The stigmatization of the term “remigration,” which has now begun, is the next major stage in the learning process through which the system identifies the positions best suited for defending its own power.

Why does focusing on the ethnic concept of the nation and remigration work, while other accusations like “Nazi” or “conspiracy theorist” never went beyond mere defamation? Because the sociologically driven learning process of the system is, in its own way, approaching the fundamental dilemma of all politics in the face of mass migration.

I call it: The Magic Triangle of Migration Policy.

The term is inspired by the “magic square” known from economic policy, which consists of four core goals: price stability, full employment, economic growth, and trade balance. It is called “magic” because achieving all four simultaneously would require magic. There are inherent conflicts. Measures that advance one goal often harm another, so only some can be pursued at once.

The same problem exists in the magic triangle of migration policy. Its three goals are:

1. Democracy. The state should be democratically governed. Here, I don’t mean the definition of democracy popular among professional and volunteer defenders of “our Democracy”, which equates to “democracy is when my side is in power.” Quite the opposite. The essential feature of democracy for the magic triangle is that different political factions can alternately come to power. This means no policy can succeed if it relies on never allowing opponents to gain power.

2. Preservation of the Nation. This includes, long before its physical preservation, the maintenance of its political self-determination. Both, however, require strict limits on external immigration. They are particularly incompatible with significant groups of foreigners as equal members of the political community. Otherwise, the nation-state risks fragmenting into a multi-ethnic state, and democracy risks deteriorating into ethnic-based clientelism.

3. Rule of Law for Immigrants. The state should not keep anyone on its territory in a perpetual state of legal uncertainty. This applies especially to those who have, in whatever way, acquired citizenship. This goal demands that these rights not be subject to renegotiation with every change in political power.

In every country confronted with mass immigration, the population demands that all three goals be achieved. Some may argue that preserving the nation is no longer desired by a majority. Yet, polls have consistently opposed further immigration for decades. The will to preserve the nation is strong enough among voters that no senior official of an otherwise globalist elite would openly advocate for its destruction. You’ll never hear such a thing from Olaf Scholz, nor even from Robert Habeck. On the contrary, they too speak fondly of “our Germany.” How the current system navigates the magic triangle is a topic we’ll return to.

But why is there a conflict between these goals? I argue that only two of the three can ever be achieved simultaneously. The reason is this: If democracy exists, pro-immigration forces can win elections and come to power or at least manage to push pro-immigration policies through the complex negotiations of democracy. If immigrants, especially naturalized ones, are then granted the protection of the rule of law, the consequences of such policies cannot be undone even after a subsequent democratic transfer of power. This creates a dynamic where only immigration advocates can change the status quo in their favor, while opponents can, at best, try to maintain the existing status quo for as long as they hold democratic power.

Thus, it is possible to have democracy and the protection of the rule of law for immigrants, this is the state we are in now. A democratic nation-state is also conceivable, where anti-immigration forces, after election victories, revoke rights granted to immigrants by previous governments, creating legal uncertainty that drastically curbs immigration. In a similar way, for example, the Greens in Germany destroyed nuclear power. Decades before the last reactor was shut down, they undermined legal certainty for operators, exposing them to non-economic political risks. Finally, a scenario is imaginable where both the nation is preserved and immigrants are granted the protection of the rule of law, but democracy is absent. This would be a stabilization dictatorship, where an authoritarian ruler codifies and guarantees a specific status quo.

For those who think the latter is unrealistic: I think otherwise. Such stabilizing authoritarianism may well be the only equilibrium a society that fails to manage the immigration crisis can achieve. Whether the dictatorship comes from the left or the right will, in the long term, be secondary. Both will converge due to the practical constraints of the situation.

Since all three goals are demanded in a society undergoing mass immigration, but only two can be achieved at best, public debate on immigration becomes a game where everyone can corner everyone else by demanding the impossible.

The current system seeks to delegitimize its right-wing opposition by pointing out that their goals can only be achieved by disenfranchising immigrants. At the same time, it must address the accusation that its own policies lead to the dissolution of the nation. It does so in the only way possible: through a rhetorical tactic known in as “motte and bailey”.

In early medieval castles, the “motte” was the fortified keep, often wooden, while the “bailey” was the less defensible courtyard protected only by a palisade. In any serious attack, the bailey was abandoned, and defenders retreated to the motte.

The motte-and-bailey tactic works as follows: One holds not one position but two. The first, the bailey, is the position one wants to advance but is difficult to defend in an argument. The second, the motte, is related but far easier to justify. It doesn’t encompass everything one wants but serves as a fallback position in debates.

In the immigration debate, the globalists’ bailey is the demand to dissolve the nation and transform the nation-state into an international settlement and economic zone, abandoning one of the magic triangle’s three goals, thus an achievable aim.

The motte is the appeal to the other two goals: democracy and immigrants’ rights under the rule of law. They claim to only want to preserve these. This leads to a peculiar doublethink, where one simultaneously knows and doesn’t know that all three goals cannot be achieved at once. From the motte, they accuse opponents of pursuing a goal, preserving the nation, that conflicts with democracy and immigrants’ rights under the rule of law. At the same time, they deny that their own goal, a democracy guaranteeing the rule of law for immigrants, endangers the nation, dismissing the “great replacement” as a conspiracy theory.

The system as a whole, not just individual representatives, employs this motte-and-bailey tactic by speaking through different persons. An Olaf Scholz or Robert Habeck will not demand the abolition of the German nation. A left-wing journalist, academic, or artist, however, might do so very well, as do lower-ranking members of left-wing parties, especially their youth organizations, and members of various pro-immigration NGOs.

While the system’s top representatives deny any intent to destroy the nation from the motte and derive legitimacy from defending democracy and the rule of law, less prominent figures directly attack the nation from the bailey. This not only weakens the public’s commitment to preserving the nation on a metapolitical level. More importantly, since the bailey includes not just metapolitical actors like the press, education, and arts but also less visible political players, these can push further immigration measures, especially the granting of additional rights to immigrants,. through democratic negotiations. Thus, the “great replacement” is cemented step by step without the head of government needing to call for the destruction of the nation.

This works because no Scholz or Habeck would ever distance himself from the more radical actors in the bailey, nor does anyone in the system demand they do so.

Through this systemic learning process, a set of behavioral patterns has emerged that, despite the magic triangle’s dilemma, enables the system to maintain its power, positions, and privileges while advancing its long-term goals.

While navigating the magic triangle itself, the system can simultaneously trap its political enemies in their own contradictions and deligitimize them this way.

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German original published on Feb. 10, 2024

(Picture: Midjourney)

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Before I address substantive criticism, I must say something about the accusation that is all too clearly implied behind this criticism: Was this really necessary? Did you have to say it out loud? Of all the points of criticism, I take this barely articulated one the most seriously. I would have done our cause a disservice if, out of intellectual vanity, I had voiced an ugly truth that serves no purpose other than to fuel the enemy’s propaganda.

Of all the reasons that compelled me to elaborate and publish these thoughts on the failure of the New Right, which I have carried with me for the past few years, the most significant is that over the past year, I have witnessed the erosion of the political middle structure of the right. Of the intelligent people who, despite often significant commitment, do not live off politics, have no financial dependence, and have no reason for their engagement other than their belief in the cause.

This belief has suffered greatly under the populist circus, the repeated betrayal by those one is forced to regard as ones own political representatives, and the realization that the methods and strategies of the last decade are obviously no longer sufficient. The frustration tolerance of good people, who don’t need to put up with this, is a limited resource. Collapses come quickly and drastically. At first, people grumble and carry on, no one says anything. But when a shock comes, the house of cards collapses.

This brings us to the methods and strategies of the last decade. I wrote that one must understand the history of the New Right to understand its failure. Understanding history is different from giving belated advice. I have no intention of going back to 2012 and saying how things could have been done better. Back then, actions were taken based on the situation at the time. This is a historical justice that New Right representatives today, with appropriate distance and sine ira et studio, should also grant to the old right of the skinhead era. Given the influx of this last youth culture of the working class into the political right and a middle class that was still far from being affected by population replacement, a New Right strategy paper in 1990 would have been pointless as well.

This historical justice also includes recognizing that the views and statements of a political movement are not the product of pure thought but arise under an external selection pressure that may have nothing to do with the truthfulness of a statement.

The best example is this depiction of the so-called “circular flow of power” from Martin Sellner’s Regime Change von Rechts1:

This “circular flow of power” has been standard Identitarian training material for many years. Anyone looking at it will surely wonder why the power flows in one direction and not the other one. Why, above all, the state cannot create a dominant ideology. The reason is that this circular flow of power and the underlying models and theories primarily served the purpose of preventing twenty-year-olds from acquiring an illegal firearm for “Day X.” If something like that happens even once, it’s enough to criminalize a movement like the Identitarian Movement. Accuracy and completeness are not even secondary considerations, and naturally, such courses do not provide a comprehensive theory of political power, be it simply because such a theory would have to address the role of violence, and that section would be a citation mine for political persecution. So, you simply don’t to this.

Every era has its own requirements. A mistake or falsehood that is irrelevant in one era can be deadly in another. We are stuck in a dead end today, and the way out of this dead end, if we find one, will change what the Right is at least as much as the transition from the Old Right to the New Right once did.

Now let’s turn to the substantive criticism. One demand I simply refuse is to provide a timetable to support my claim that the New Right has failed. One can only speak of failure, it’s argued, if the set goal is not achieved by the deadline. By this logic, someone who sets out on a hike in the morning, intending to arrive by evening, cannot realize at noon that his map is wrong. Not even if he is already hopelessly lost. I have demonstrated the structural inferiority of the New Right’s metapolitics compared to the populist circus strategy under the conditions of democracy and the rule of law. If I am right, then the New Right, which largely defined itself through the metapolitical approach, has failed. If I am wrong, well, I am no more wrong than if I had provided an incorrect timetable.

Regarding the most significant reason for this—the fact that immigration creates facts on the ground and personal rights that, in a state governed by the rule of law, are not inherently irreversible but require far greater efforts to reverse than the other side needs to let new immigrants in after winning a democratic election, meaning there is no democratic equality of arms and, in practice, a ratchet effect that protects population replacement from effective remigration—two objections have been raised:

The first objection is the accusation that I am engaging in the opponent’s framing. Framing is the presentation of a situation. Honestly, I cannot imagine how one could frame this situation more favorably than as a game with loaded dice. The other possible frames for the same situation can be read at Correctiv2 or in the domestic intelligence agency’s reports3.

More significant is the objection that immigration also involves breaking the law. Wasn’t the migrant wave of 2015 a million-fold breach of the law? Yes, it was, and this specific topic deserves its own analysis. But the short version is that the rule of law is based on the personal rights of individuals. In 2015, the general legal order was somehow violated. Fine, but who is now entitled to sue? When it comes to the rights of each individual who arrived back then, it’s very clear. The sentence attributed to Angela Merkel, “I don’t care if I’m to blame, they’re here now,” perfectly summed up the situation. As soon as they were here, within the scope of German legal order, they became legal persons within that very order. The fact that they achieved this status through a breach of the law was irrelevant. The legal order undermines itself in the process. Under the title “Erosion of the Legal Order and Resilient Communication,” I already addressed over a year ago how we should deal with this in our public relations.


Two further serious objections fundamentally challenge the elite theory, which I have drawn upon for part of my considerations. The first has been particularly emphasized by Martin Sellner. He considers elite theory overrated because it has not provided an alternative strategy to right-wing Gramscianism and metapolitics. Indeed, elite theory is initially a cold shower for anyone politically active, as it establishes the position from which one can act politically at all. Building elites is always quickly called for but very difficult to implement. But there’s no way around it! If a group that currently lacks political power pursues a political goal, every strategy must be measured by whether it answers the question of how this group can become one of those organized minorities that can actually shape politics. The means and methods summarized under the term metapolitics can be useful here. But not if one has magical notions of the power of cultural hegemony in his mind. That it is equally unhelpful to replace the hypostasis of “cultural hegemony” with the hypostasis of “power” is something I have already explained against Parvini under the title “Power Does Nothing.” I am fundamentally opposed to political shamanism.

These magical notions bring us to the second objection, which Simon Dettmann has formulated as follows:

“The overestimation of the scope and explanatory power of elite sociology is a mistake, primarily for substantive reasons. For its proponents persistently ignore that what applies to people in general also applies to representatives of the ruling class: they are entangled in perceptual and cognitive frameworks that Michel Foucault, in The Order of Things, called episteme. It is only through the epistemic ‘lens’ that the empirically experienced world becomes comprehensible at all. The mutual interdependence of the largely time- and culture-dependent episteme, characterized by more general ordering frameworks, on the one hand, and the discourses shaped by more specific attitudes, which take on the structure of discourse formations, on the other, leads in Foucault to an epistemic infinite regress in which the human as an actor, and thus as a subject of himself, disappears. But one need not follow Foucault that far to admit that the triad of episteme, discourse, and discourse formation so strongly determines the thinking and actions of elites that it is impossible to regard them as autonomous or sovereign.”

Now, I don’t recall writing about the autonomy of the elite. Certainly not in the sense implied here, that the elite is detached from the world around them and could thus do whatever they want if only they could want what they want. On the contrary, I wrote: “With power postion comes position, and with position comes structurally determined interest.” This also turns me against the view for which Dettmann provides the best example here, namely that politics is solely determined by recursive opinions. Such recursive opinions exist, and they play a role, but in this schema of episteme, discourse, and discourse formation, reality vanishes.

Yet this reality affects the political opinions of elites far more strongly than those of the general population. For most people, politics is another form of football. Whether their opinions on it are valid or not has no bearing on their lives. Those who actually engage in politics, however, often receive painful feedback from reality. The result is far from perfect error correction—otherwise, we wouldn’t be where we are. But this feedback from reality is there. It comes with the fact that, for the politician, politics is indeed his world, not another world that only exists on television.

This, by the way, is why the metapolitical theory of power is now criticized everywhere in the Right, whereas ten, or perhaps even five years ago, such criticism would have been ivory-tower parlor games. Over the course of these years, partly through our own efforts, partly through circumstances, and partly through our opponents’ mistakes, we have reached a position where we can at least reach for power. In doing so, we also learn its limits. The New Right has failed because it emerged from a state of complete powerlessness and was adapted to it. It was never designed for the challenges of actual power possession. But it leaves behind a legacy of people and institutions that must be utilized. It must neither be squandered in populism nor burned out in frustration.

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(Picture: Midjourney)