You will notice what these have in common, of course. They are from my 2019 trip. They stood for years.
The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra has said it made “an error” in cancelling the performance of an acclaimed pianist who dedicated a piece to slain journalists in Gaza.
Jayson Gillham was scheduled to perform Mozart and Brahms at the Melbourne Town Hall on Thursday with the MSO, but was removed from the event after the orchestra said he made “a series of introductory remarks” that were “beyond the remit of his contract” at a previous performance.
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“Over the last 10 months, Israel has killed more than one hundred Palestinian journalists,” Gillham told the crowd on Sunday, according to his management.
“A number of these have been targeted assassinations of prominent journalists as they were travelling in marked press vehicles or wearing their press jackets. The killing of journalists is a war crime in international law, and it is done in an effort to prevent the documentation and broadcasting of war crimes to the world.
“In addition to the role of journalists who bear witness, the word witness in Arabic is shaheed, which also means martyr.”
Israel’s offensive in Gaza has become the deadliest conflict for journalists in recent history, with the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists recording at least 113 killings of Palestinian journalists and media workers in the war in Gaza.
That concentration camps were ultimately provided for the same groups in all countries, even though there were considerable differences in the treatment of their inmates, was all the more characteristic as the selection of the groups was left exclusively to the initiative of the totalitarian regimes: if the Nazis put a person in a concentration camp and if he made a successful escape, say, to Holland, the Dutch would put him in an internment camp. Thus, long before the outbreak of the war the police in a number of Western countries, under the pretext of ’national security,‘ had on their own initiative established close connections with the Gestapo and the GPU, so that one might say there existed an independent foreign policy of the police. This police-directed foreign policy functioned quite independently of the official governments; the relations between the Gestapo and the French police were never more cordial than at the time of Léon Blum’s popular-front government, which was guided by a decidedly anti-German policy. Contrary to the governments, the various police organizations were never overburdened with ‚prejudices‘ against any totalitarian regime; the information and denunciations received from GPU agents were just as welcome to them as those from Fascist or Gestapo agents. They knew about the eminent role of the police apparatus in all totalitarian regimes, they knew about its elevated social status and political importance, and they never bothered to conceal their sympathies. That the Nazis eventually met with so disgracefully little resistance from the police in the countries they occupied, and that they were able to organize terror as much as they did with the assistance of these local police forces, was due at least in part to the powerful position which the police had achieved over the years in their unrestricted and arbitrary domination of stateless and refugees.
Ω Ω Ω
For the nation-state cannot exist once its principle of equality before the law has broken down. Without this legal equality, which originally was destined to replace the older laws and orders of the feudal society, the nation dissolves into an anarchic mass of over- and underprivileged individuals. Laws that are not equal for all revert to rights and privileges, something contradictory to the very nature of nation-states. The clearer the proof of their inability to treat stateless people as legal persons and the greater the extension of arbitrary rule by police decree, the more difficult it is for states to resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them with an omnipotent police.
—Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, (Great Britain: Penguin, 2017), 377-379.
The best criterion by which to decide whether someone has been forced outside the pale of the law is to ask if he would benefit by committing a crime. If a small burglary is likely to improve his legal position, at least temporarily, one may be sure he has been deprived of human rights. For then a criminal offense becomes the best opportunity to regain some kind of human equality, even if it be as a recognized exception to the norm. The one important fact is that this exception is provided for by law. As a criminal even a stateless person will not be treated worse than another criminal, that is, he will be treated like everybody else. Only as an offender against the law can he gain protection from it. As long as his trial and his sentence last, he will be safe from that arbitrary police rule against which there are no lawyers and no appeals. The same man who was in jail yesterday because of his mere presence in this world, who had no rights whatever and lived under threat of deportation, or who was dispatched without sentence and without trial to some kind of internment because he had tried to work and make a living, may become almost a full-fledged citizen because of a little theft. Even if he is penniless he can now get a lawyer, complain about his jailers, and he will be listened to respectfully. He is no longer the scum of the earth but important enough to be informed of all the details of the law under which he will be tried. He has become a respectable person.
—Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, (Great Britain: Penguin, 2017), 374-375.
Wolfgang Streeck, reviewing Ronen Steinke’s »Verfassungsschutz: Wie der Geheimdienst Politik macht«:
Maaßen made public the notes for a speech he had given at a secret international meeting of domestic intelligence services. In them he claimed that the SPD, Merkel’s coalition partner, had ‘radical leftists’ in its ranks. The SPD demanded Maaßen’s dismissal, and in November 2018 he was sacked.
His successor, Thomas Haldenwang, was also a CDU member, though of a more Merkelian sort. According to Steinke, in January 2021 he was about to publish a report announcing that his office had found the AfD suspect of anti-constitutional ‘extremism’ and was placing it under formal observation (which would allow intelligence methods such as wiretapping and infiltration by undercover agents), when he was called to Seehofer’s office. The draft report, which Seehofer had been sent, had cited a prominent AfD politician saying ‘Islam does not belong to Germany.’ Seehofer’s problem was that he and other leading CSU members had repeatedly used those same words.
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In the summer of 2023 Friedrich Merz, the new CDU leader and a long-standing opponent of Merkel, ended the battle between the CDU and CSU, and declared, as Merkel had, that the AfD should be seen as an enemy rather than as a potential coalition partner. Facing regional elections in September 2024 in three eastern states where the AfD was leading the CDU in the polls, as well as a federal election a year later, Merz bet on what was effectively a grand coalition of ‘all democratic parties’ united in a ‘Kampf gegen Rechts’, a battle against the right. (This was not without risk: quite a few of the CDU’s fellow combatants consider Merz and his party to be more on the other side than on their own, while many of Merz’s supporters would prefer a Kampf gegen Links.) This battle involved erecting an institutional, political and social ‘firewall’ against the AfD, with the aim of excluding it from elections – not quite getting it banned by the constitutional court, but with much the same effect.
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As long as a party is judged to possess a covert substructure that might allow it to attempt the overthrow of the state – as might have been the case with the SRP and the DKP – the argument for banning it is relatively easy to make. There was no suspicion that the NPD had such a capacity, however; or that the AfD does.
For some time, the four Staatsparteien (the CDU/CSU, Greens, SPD and Free Democrats), which describe themselves as ‘democratic’ as opposed to ‘populist’ or ‘extremist’, have co-operated to exclude AfD MPs from parliamentary business as far as legally possible, for instance by keeping them out of key parliamentary committees. There have also been various forms of social ostracism: for example, the management of the 2024 Berlin Film Festival, at the behest of the state government, disinvited a number of AfD politicians from its opening ceremony, for which all parties in the Berlin parliament traditionally receive free tickets. In March the Bundestag football team announced that AfD MPs and their staff would no longer be allowed to play. But since the Kampf gegen Rechts began, support for the AfD has remained fairly steady, around 15 per cent. (In early July, two weeks after the European elections, the AfD came second in a nationwide poll, with 16.9 per cent, one percentage point above its result in the elections and close to its highest ever poll result of 17.2 per cent in 2023. The AfD was followed by the SPD on 14.6 per cent. As a rule of thumb, what the battle against the right removes from the party’s support in West Germany is balanced by what it adds in the East.) Earlier this year, the AfD reported that its membership has exceeded forty thousand, an increase of more than 60 per cent on 2023.
Whereas the BfV used to operate more or less behind the scenes, under Haldenwang and the SPD’s Nancy Faeser, minister of the interior since 2021, public announcements on investigations into AfD-related right-wing activity have become common. Today the BfV and its Länder equivalents inform the public of their work not only in yearly reports, but also in regular press conferences. Their labelling of enemies of the constitution can be challenged in administrative courts, but it takes time for cases to be heard. Decisions on the status of potentially ‘extremist’ individuals and organisations are made in camera, without those under suspicion being interviewed. Despite its past disasters, Verfassungsschutz agencies are still highly respected by a German public eager for reassurance. Once someone is placed under observation, declared ‘suspect’ or classified as a ‘proven extremist’, the media always notes this status.
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Today, the BfV and the sixteen Landesämter form a central pillar of an institutional regime that bridges state and civil society, and aims at the manufacture of political consent and what has recently come to be called ‘social cohesion’. Underlying this is the peculiar readiness of German elites to carry out orders even before they are given, which means that they may not have to be given at all. Visitors from countries with a tradition of accepting or even respecting eccentricity, such as the UK, France and Italy, or from a country as fundamentally disorderly as the United States, tend to be struck by the monolithic appearance of German politics and society, the way everything seems to fall in line with everything else. This is enabled by the interplay between institutions, formal and informal, and by a culture that perceives dissent as selfish and as a threat to social and political unity (it’s also seen as pointless). A recent example is the wave of accusations of antisemitism against protesters, many of them from outside Germany, who have voiced their horror over the Israeli destruction of Gazan society.
On Nov. 9, the day after Donald J. Trump shocked the world, Larry Coryell was sitting in his Orlando home, cussing out the president-elect, fuming about the outcome of the election and plotting an exit strategy for himself and his wife, Tracey. “We’re going to move to Europe,” he declared. “Now that Trump is in … we’re going to make good on our promise to each other to move to either Germany or Ireland.”
Coryell was clearly agitated as the reality of a Trump presidency was sinking in. “This is an unacceptable situation,” he snarled into his phone. “We cannot let all the work we’ve done as jazz musicians to help relationships between people … we can’t let all that go to hell. And that’s what this election is going to do. It’ll take us back to the Dark Ages and people will think that it’s OK to be prejudiced again. Well, I don’t accept it. We have to stand up. … [Trump is] an impostor, a huckster, and he’s got to go. And because I’m a Buddhist I’m going to chant about it and try to turn poison into medicine, and just get deeper and deeper into my music.”
—Bill Milkowski, (2017, February). Remembering Larry Coryell. Downbeat.
On August 4th, it was reported another attack occurred. It was not clear then that that attack had occurred. We made every possible effort to determine whether it had or not. I was in direct communication with the Commander-in-Chief of all of our forces in the Pacific (CINCPAC) by telephone several times during that day, to find out whether it had or hadn’t occurred. He had reports from the commanders of the destroyers on the scene: they had what were known as sonar readings — these are sound readings. There were eyewitness reports. And ultimately it was concluded that almost certainly the attack had occurred. But even at the time there was some recognition of a margin of error, so we thought it highly probable but not entirely certain. And because it was highly probable — and because even if it hadn’t occurred, there was strong feeling we should have responded to the first attack, which we were positive had occurred — President Johnson decided to respond to the second [attack]. I think it is now clear [the second attack] did not occur. I asked [North Vietnamese] General Giap myself, when I visited Hanoi in November of 1995, whether it had occurred, and he said no. I accept that.
