Populist, Pernicious and Perilous : Germany's Growing Hate Problem

[unhappycamper]

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/a-1059357.html



Even as an image of a Germany taking great pains to welcome hundreds of thousands of refugees has bolstered the country's image abroad, it has also been accompanied by a wave of hatred that cannot be played down. At the center of this second, disturbing narrative is Patriots against the Islamization of the West, or Pegida, a xenophobic grassroots movement that has manifested itself with demonstrations each Monday mostly in Dresden in the east, but also in other parts of Germany. But Pegida is only one part of a much larger problem, as the following feature from the new issue of SPIEGEL illustrates.

Populist, Pernicious and Perilous : Germany's Growing Hate Problem
By SPIEGEL Staff
October 23, 2015 – 07:42 PM

Germany has a hate problem -- one that is growing.

"You're as big of an asshole as that idiot Ralf Stegner," a certain Birgit M. recently wrote in a letter to Thomas Kutschaty, justice minister of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. It was a referrence to the deputy party leader of state chapter of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), who recently said the organizers of the weekly Pegida marches in Dresden and elsewhere should be investigated by intelligence services. "You should all be put in a sack and have a hammer taken to you," Birgit M. wrote in her tirade.

Then there was the man who called Dorothea Moesch, a local SPD politician in Dortmund, late in the evening on June 30. "We're going to get you," he threatened. "We're at your door."

Another local SPD politician in Hesse, district administrator Erich Pipa, has been similarly threatened. "We can have you taken out at any time," he was informed in a letter.

[MisterP]

1. ugh, that's an anti-Nazi flag they're flouncing around with

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Wirmer