19 hours Ago
'Alternativ fur Deutschland" (AfD) means "The Alternative for Germany", and the alternative on offer is fascism. Not actual Naziism, but the AfD uses fascist rhetoric and tactics to attract German voters. It has also attracted some improbable foreign admirers.
One of those admirers is Talib al-Abdulmohsen, the Saudi Arabian psychiatrist who has now been charged with five murders and 200 attempted murders after deliberately driving into a holiday crowd at high speed in the Christmas market in the German city of Magdeburg last Saturday. Another admirer of the AfD is Elon Musk, the tech billionaire and, in his own mind at least, the true co-president-elect of the United States. Last week Mr Musk reposted a video by Naomi Seibt, a German extreme right-wing influencer close to the AfD, posting at the top "Only the AfD can save Germany!" AfD leader Alice Weidel excitedly replied "Yes! You are perfectly right @elonmusk!" But how did these two fans of the AfD reach the same conclusions? Their conclusions are pretty standard on the not-quite-fascist right: extremely nationalist, anti-immigrant, racist, climate-change-denying, and so forth.
Perhaps we should start with the fact that both Dr Abdulmohsen and Mr Musk chose to live a long way from where they grew up. Mr Musk was born into a wealthy South African family, went to university in Canada, and only moved to the United States when he was 20. Dr Abdulmohsen grew up in a Shia Muslim family (deeply unfashionable in Sunni Saudi Arabia) and moved to Germany in his mid-30s.
They both uprooted themselves, although Mr Musk doesn't talk about it. Dr Abdulmohsen is that rare thing, an ex-Muslim Arab who is a self-declared atheist. The "rare" bit in that sentence is "self-declared": of all the Muslims I have known, only two close friends have ever revealed to me that they no longer believed in their birth faith -- but they both said that many others just keep their lack of belief to themselves.
That made perfect sense to me, because I grew up in a place and time where publicly rejecting Christian belief would have had dire consequences for me: expulsion from school, conflict with my family, and a fair amount of casual violence whenever the topic came up. Even at the age of 13, when I stopped believing, I knew enough to tell nobody about it. Things are very different in the "post-Christian" West now, but it's still about 1960 on religious matters even in the better-educated parts of the Muslim world.
The older generation are still in power and overwhelmingly still believers, but quite a few of the young have silently, secretly moved on. Only a tiny minority, like Talib al-Abdulmohsen, stand up and declare their disbelief. In Saudi Arabia, as in most Muslim countries, apostasy from Islam is a crime.
So he became a refugee, was granted asylum by Germany, and devoted his life to helping other Saudi Arabians being persecuted for abandoning their religion to follow his example. Some did, but not many, and Dr Abdulmohsen grew progressively angrier at the German state for letting in so many Muslim believers. He was a man of strong right-wing convictions -- atheists are not always leftists -- so the AfD was a good match for his beliefs and values.
The only point on which they differ (at least publicly) is the legitimacy of violence. The case of Elon Musk, like the man himself, is much simpler. Being the richest person in the world would distort anybody's judgement, and Mr Musk also brings an autistic disorder to the table.
He attributes his success at least in part to this condition, but it has clearly grown over the years. Mr Musk used to be a typically apolitical tech bro. When he did talk politics, he deplored Mr Trump's views on climate change and most other topics.
As recently as 2022, he said that "It's time for Trump to hang up his hat & sail into the sunset." Now, he supports even Mr Trump's most ignorant statements, although at some level, he still clearly knows them to be wrong. The date gives it away as 2022 was when Mr Musk's oldest surviving child, "transitioning" from male to female, went to court at 18 to change her name from Xavier Musk to Vivian Jenna Wilson (her mother's surname).
He had been brutally intolerant about her gender difficulties, she said, and she wanted no further contact with her father. And Mr Musk lost the plot. Entirely.
"I lost my son, essentially," he said. His son was now dead to him, "killed by the woke mind virus". Any explanation will do when you're furious and desperate, and that is one that serves his purposes.
Both Mr Trump's Republicans and the AfD serve it up for free. Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries. His latest book is 'Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World's Climate Engineers'.
Last year's book, 'The Shortest History of War', is also still available..
