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How the German far Right appropriates ideals of non-violent resistance
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Pegida, the largest far-Right movement in Germany, was founded in Dresden in 2014 under the name ‘Peaceful Europeans against the Islamisation of the Occident’. The group has regularly mobilised thousands of supporters for what it calls “peaceful marches” in the heart of this former East German city. These demonstrations express typical far-Right ideology, including the degradation of immigrants and the ‘leftist’ mainstream in media and politics.

Even though Pegida soon changed ‘peaceful Europeans’ to ‘patriotic Europeans’, the original name said it all. Pegida sees itself as a peaceful and non-violent resistance force in an imagined fight against what it perceives as an all-encompassing left-wing “opinion dictatorship” in Germany.

To symbolically flesh out its claim, Pegida usually stages its events near the Frauenkirche, the famous Baroque church that was almost completely destroyed by Allied bombing in the Second World War, finally rebuilt after German reunification and is now a global symbol of peace and reconciliation. Among the crowds, one can easily spot well-known peace symbols such as the dove and the 1980s German slogan about turning swords into ploughshares. No march is complete without the organisers praising themselves for “another peaceful and non-violent event".

‘Opinion dictatorship’

It’s not just Pegida: the idea – and ideal – of non-violence has become a powerful trope in contemporary far-Right thought in Germany. For instance, the Institute for State Politics (IfS), the country’s major far-Right think tank, regularly includes articles on the concept of non-violent resistance in its in-house journal Sezession. In 2017, it even hosted a conference on the subject, targeted at far-Right youth involved in the Identitarian Movement within the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party’s youth organisation.

According to Martin Sellner, leader of the Identitarian Movement of Austria (IBO) and a guest speaker at the conference, non-violent resistance must be the key strategy for the far Right to overcome what he calls the Left’s “opinion dictatorship”.

Since this supposedly totalitarian system suppresses the Right via cultural hegemony, the right-wing resistance needs to beat the system at its own game – that is, with ideas rather than violence. Sellner calls for symbolic forms of protest, such as the Identitarian Movement’s much mediatised action at Berlin’s world-famous Brandenburg Gate in 2015, or the various ‘Defend Europe’ missions in the Alps, Pyrenees and Mediterranean Sea.

Searching for intellectual depth, Sellner appropriates the classic emancipatory political thinker – the late American political philosopher Gene Sharp (1928–2018). Sharp’s works on non-violent struggle inspired pro-democratic resistance movements across the world for several decades, including the 1989 East German Peaceful Revolution against the communist dictatorship.

In an article for the IfS’s journal in 2017, Sellner uses Sharp’s writings to elaborate on the supposed parallels between Germany’s ‘leftist totalitarianism’ and military dictatorships around the world. He also claims that “For our action against the leftist education dictatorship, Sharp’s guide for liberation does not need to be appropriated by us – it was written for us.”

[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/countering-radical-right/how-german-far-right-appropriates-ideals-non-violent-resistance/