What it is ain’t exactly clear.
PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against Islamisation of the West) has grown rapidly since its inception in October, a peaceful ‘strolling’ movement opposing the exceptional violence seen in street battles between Salafist Muslims and ethnic Kurds seen in many German cities this year and enormous immigration. Now on it’s tenth ‘evening stroll’, it has grown from a couple of hundred people, to 15,000 last week, to more than 17,500 last night.
In addition to the hundreds of banners with slogans such as ‘Against Hatred, Violence, and the Quran’, ‘Against Religious Fanaticism’, and ‘No Sharia in Europe’, the thousands attending brought song sheets which had been distributed online and sang favourite Christmas carols.
Despite the essentially ordinary character of many of the people taking to the streets for the peaceful strolls, and the admission by senior government and police figures that a great many of those joining in are families bringing their children, the organisation has come in for stiff criticism and rejection by the heights of the German elite.
I think it’s time we stop.
Children, what’s that sound?
Everybody look what’s goin’ down.
There’s battle lines bein’ drawn.
Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong.
Young people speakin’ their minds
A-gettin’ so much resistance from behind.
Chancellor Merkel has suggested the leadership of PEGIDA have an ulterior motive, despite their focus on non-violent protest and apolitical principles. She even went as far to warn people thinking of going on the weekly stroll to “watch out that they are not instrumentalised by the organisers”. The SPD, Germany’s Labour-party equivalent have gone as far as calling PEGIDA “Nazis in pinstripes”.
This is despite a report by the German police that there are significantly more known troublemakers in the counter-protest movements, than in PEGIDA itself.
It is not only German politics which is putting its weight behind the counter-PEGIDA movement. Apparently dismayed that 17,500 people had turned out in bad weather to sing Christian carols, the Protestant Bishop of Dresden said PEGIDA were trying “to exploit a Christian symbol and a Christian tradition” for political ends.
Germany’s art elite also showed their disapproval last night. The directors of Dresden’s Bavarian State Opera house, outside which the protests take place turned off the lights on the building, cloaking it in darkness during the stroll. Colossal 50-foot banners were draped in front of the building reading “humanity, respect, and diversity”.
The irony of it all. The people peeping outside their office windows, cursing the people in the streets used to be the people in the streets. Now they are pigs on two legs.
As a German, let me thank you for bringing these developments to the attention of your readers.
Some added details that might interest you: The movement started in the city of Dresden, the second city after Berlin in what used to be the GDR, and that still is where the biggest crowds assemble (the 17,500 you quote). However, there are also now franchises so to speak in a number of other (West) German cities, though they are much smaller in scale.
The fact that these protests always take place on Mondays is symbolic as well. During the final years of the GDR, when the socialist structures were already crumbling and when Gorbatchev had signaled that the USSR this time likely wouldn’t intervene violently, so-called Monday demonstrations were being held regularly in many cities of the GDR, demanding more civic rights, the freedom to travel etc. (calling overtly for the overthrow of the regime or of socialism would have been to risky). So it’s into this framework and continuity of civic protest against a ruling elite that the PEGIDA movement is placing itself. This also accounts for the regularity of the event, on each Monday afresh, emulating the GDR protests of 25 years ago.
We’ll see how it all plays out. Nothing definitive is won yet, but some cracks are appearing in the Cathedral, and they may be widening.
The other day the lame duck prime minister of Lesser Britain, the impressionable David Cameron, said that he fully expected in his lifetime to see a muslim as prime minister of his ‘country.’*
Oddly, that was not the sort of message the handful of people who still think the Tory party speaks for Britain wanted to hear. The conservatives are supposed to be conservative, but Cameron (who allegedly would have once wanted to run the Labour party if they hadn’t already chosen Blair) knows nothing of this. He thinks we are wowed by the prospect of having an alien culture in charge. Sharia law instead of Habeas Corpus? Why not… we are all insanely modern now, right?
It’s the shadow of diversity, again, and it increasingly looks like this is the reason people are turning to UKIP instead of the time honoured tradition of voting Tory to reject the crawling socialist decay of Labour. But Cameron will tell us that we must love the people who hate us and who plot to subjugate life and threaten freedom.
Germany is clearly having the same problem. Merkel, as befits a former communist, finds it annoying that people don’t just accept being walked all over. But they don’t, and to the horror of the elite they never will accept islam as their future.
*I use ‘country’ instead of country because the EU sees places like Britain as a region. It irritates them that there are national identities, with their own flags. They would rather have one flag (featuring the infamous ring of bum holes) though they haven’t spotted that the flag that islam wants tends to be green (or black) instead of blue with yellow bum holes — sorry, stars — on it.
Too bad Germany is occupied by the American Empire.