The deputy FDP federal chairman Wolfgang Kubicki wrote the following column for Cicero Online:
On Saturday at 1 p.m., Kai Wegner was playing tennis with his partner – hours after left-wing terrorists cut off the power supply to a large part of his city. An attack that was more than an inconvenience for the citizens of Berlin. An attack that risked and probably cost human lives.
The enormous danger was immediately clear to any averagely intelligent person with access to a weather report. Kai Wegner was playing tennis. “Clear your head,” he added apologetically in an interview with Jan Philipp Burgard. And that the cell phone was loud. So he was reachable. Anyone who had wondered up to this point why Berlin was so hesitant to declare a major disaster, why the city found itself in a communicative vacuum, then asked no more questions.
What is more serious is the audacity with which Kai Wegner lied to the public about his involvement in the crisis. Of course he didn’t “put his feet up,” he let the public know in a poorly acted indignation. He basically locked himself in and just made phone calls.
When you see the chutzpah with which the CDU leader lied to Berlin’s journalists, you are no longer surprised at the demands of his Schleswig-Holstein party colleague Daniel Günther, who, with disturbing self-evidence, expressed his crazy and authoritarian ideas about media control in the ZDF program Markus Lanz. Of course, it comes too late to save Kai Wegner – but the next crisis is certainly just around the corner.
The fact that Kai Wegner escapes from the tennis court after a left-wing extremist terrorist attack is almost symbolic of how we deal with the real danger from the left. “The greatest danger comes from the right,” is what many politicians have decided. When research of poor quality wrote about a right-wing extremist secret meeting in Potsdam, the leaders of the state stood in the front row of mass demonstrations organized across the country with an expression of dismay. When left-wing extremists carry out an attack on Berlin’s power grid, the first thing they do is play tennis. Such is the political situation.
Now one can argue for a long time about where the greatest danger comes from: from the right, from the left, from Islamism. In the end, such determinations don’t matter. Right-wing extremism was also downplayed in Germany for a long time; just think of the right-wing extremist murders of the NSU, which were long dismissed as “döner kebab murders”. And Islamist terrorism still does not receive the attention it deserves. But what is dangerous and what is not cannot be determined politically. That’s why warnings “against the right” that are recited like a creed are as clumsy as they are useless. The danger does not come from the right or the left, but from the willingness to violently combat the foundations of our state and its free-democratic constitution. There is no right in wrong. Anyone who cannot tolerate or support this minimal democratic consensus is not a democrat.
And that takes us away from the amateurish performance of Kai Wegner towards Jan van Aken and the left. He once explained that left-wing crimes served the common good and that a difference had to be made. This is probably called “tactical militancy” in left-wing circles, which are always very well trained in theory.
The “Volcano Group” would certainly agree to that. One sees oneself acting in the interest of the common good – or rather in the interest of the survival of humanity. In any case, the letter of confession consists of the confused bits and pieces of climate extremism and anti-capitalism that we from the left – but also from the left-wing Greens – know only too well. The end justifies the means: This is what many leftists believe, with the clear advocacy of their federal chairman. It is of little use that he and his co-chairwoman condemned the arson attack. “The spirits that I called…” the constantly verbally escalating van Aken may often think to himself. The two left-wing chairmen also had to distance themselves from the attacks on the Brandenburg anti-Semitism commissioner Andreas Büttner. An arson attack recently took place on his house, under the sign of the red triangle that left-wing extremist Hamas supporters use to mark their enemies.
To round out the picture of this party, we should also mention the pro-Maduro demonstration in Berlin, which the Left called for. A party that sits in the German Bundestag is demonstrating for an unscrupulous and brutal dictator. The left, which sometimes can hardly run because of youthful strength, partly feeds on the anti-democratic morass in which dictators are defended, terror is trivialized and people are threatened. It turns itself into the parliamentary arm of these people by not being able to credibly distance itself from violence.
Jan van Aken made a significant contribution to this radicalization. When it was still called the PDS, the Left was the party of the East German (small) bourgeoisie. The renamed SED adhered to certain limits in reunified Germany despite its heavy historical guilt, the unresolved questions about missing billions, Stalinist tendencies and the constant trivialization of the GDR dictatorship. In the meantime, a radical disinhibition has occurred in manners, forms and political decency. The Left is a dangerous party, and I certainly don’t consider it a state-supporting force. Today, 35 years after reunification, I have to say: The problem of the left is less its SED past than its present.
In the constant preoccupation with the AfD, there is hardly any space to keep an eye on this party. There are considerable parallels: for example in the selective worship of despots, in the linguistic disinhibition and in the desperate attempts by party leaders to distance themselves from particularly radical members. The fact that these observations are hardly discussed in public is probably due to widespread sympathy or indifference towards left-wing anti-democrats in too many editorial offices.
Just a thought experiment: Imagine if the attack on the power grid had been carried out by right-wing extremist perpetrators. Do you think Kai Wegner would have survived politically if he had met his girlfriend and Senate colleague to play tennis shortly after the attack? And what would the reporting have looked like? We would probably have experienced one or two flashpoints in which the AfD and its relationship with extremists would have been examined. And where are the “demonstrations against the left”?
“Being on the left isn’t a crime,” some people will now think furiously. True. But neither is being right. As someone from the political center, I can explain both sides: The border runs at exactly the same place on the edges – where our free-democratic basic order is under attack. She was attacked in Berlin. From left-wing extremists. Despite all the outrage over Kai Wegner, we must not forget that. However, his resignation remains unavoidable if a minimum level of political responsibility and decency is ever to apply again in Germany.
