Democracy Devours Its Children – Remarks on the New Right-Wing Extremism

First published in German in 1993

The Logic of Democracy

Historical victors cannot look like this. The monstrous stupidity and ugliness of the new right-wing extremism, however, did not originate on its own, but must be booked to the account of precisely that market-based democracy which has been proclaimed to be the final version of mankind. For this ideological AIDS cannot have fallen from heaven and been the work of extraterrestrials. Nor is there an unknown pathogen swimming in the blood of an isolatable group of people. Democracy refuses to admit that these are treacherous ulcers on its own face. It represses the banal truth that the phenomena of a society always emerge from within that society, from its own potential for contradiction. Democracy is itself the womb from which this crawled.

That one’s own intrinsically good order is threatened by external forces of darkness alien to the species and to one’s own nature was the standard phrase of the modernizing dictatorships in the West and the East, with which they denied their own potential for contradiction; and the repetition of this transparently defensive argument in the attempt by popular democratic thought to segregate the new right-wing extremism already points to the inner connection of the mature market-based democracy with its dictatorial predecessors. But because that which must not be cannot be, because modern Western democracy should not be exposed as the cause and breeding ground of burgeoning barbarism, democratic consciousness diligently searches for constructs that can justify it. For what irony: under the leadership of NATO’s torture partner Turkey and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, a UN resolution was drafted in which the Western democracies, first and foremost the FRG, are put in the dock for racism and xenophobia. The Western diplomats, otherwise habitual censors in matters of human rights, speak excitedly like the emissaries of any banana- and oil-exporting obscurantist regime of “one-sidedness” and “distortion of the facts.” Western democracy is supposed to be the solution everywhere and not the problem, the good and not the evil. Wherever racism, right-wing extremism and ethno-nationalism carry out their murderous program in a world that has gone off the rails since the end of the bipolar post-war order, democracy is recommended as a historical superglue. So just don’t let the tables turn.

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The complete text is published on exitinenglish.com.