The first African-born MP to enter the German parliament has announced he will not be standing in next year’s federal election, weeks after he revealed the hate mail, including racist slurs and death threats, he and his staff had received.
Karamba Diaby, 62, who entered the Bundestag in 2013 in a moment hailed as historic by equality campaigners, said he wanted to spend more time with his family and to make room for younger politicians.
Diaby said the racist slurs and death threats were “not the main reasons” for his decision, having frequently emphasised he would not be cowed by threats. But they are widely believed they have played a part.
He has increasingly faced racist abuse in recent years. His constituency office in Halle, Saxony Anhalt, has been an arson target, and has had bullets fired through the window. Some staff have faced blackmail attempts to stop them working for him and have been subjected to and threats, Diaby said.
While I applaud him for wanting to make room for younger politicians, I’m sure the death threats, arson attacks and bullets were greater factors. This world sucks.
definitely related to the AfD’s recent success during the EU election
This guy has been living in East Germany since fucking 1985. It saddens me to read this. Fuck the AfD.
Fuck the AfD Voters…I’ve been destroying years of friendships, because it turns out they voted AfD. I’m sick and tired of these fuckers enabling these clowns. This is definitely not my Germany anymore.
The friendship purge hurts… it’s tough to see that people you knew for years are lost like that.
I also feel kind of helpless with the current political climate. I don’t get why people are so hateful and stupid otherwise they would see right through the BS Höcke et al are making up all the time >.<
It sucks, for sure. As an American, I went through this back in 2016, and in the years since - with another notable wave occurring after January 6th.
It’s frustrating, but I genuinely do feel a moral duty to aggressively shun and abuse fascists, no matter how long I’ve known them or how I’m related to them before I found out.
It’s not just a moral duty, it’s a damn duty for your country. Those idiots shouting “We are the true patriots” have lost everything both our countries stood for since we lost the war and you won it. The respect for people, the respect for different cultures, the knowledge that many of the laws our societes stand on are written in blood - hell, the respect to disagree and the ability do have different opinions.
I totally sympathize. A lot of us Americans had to do the same thing back in 2016. I cut off contact with a lot of people and have never gotten back in touch.
Keeping these friendships going could combat their radicalization, but I’m not faulting you, I also cancelled friendships over this.
I have no issue if political views don’t line up, in fact I welcome discussions and I have been wrong many times on some topics. However, the line has to be drawn somewhere, and that somewhere is openly advocating for racism or other views, that simply cannot stand in a society that aligns with modern “western” views. (Too many individual points that we take for granted these days)
Meanwhile these people say the same thing about immigrants.
If I cancelled all of the friendships I have with radicalized people, I would almost certainly have to isolate my little family completely.
I do try to talk time back over the line, but I don’t think I have ever succeeded.
I wish you luck, but that simply isn’t possible with some, they are too far gone.
Do you need to include “fuck” on every comment you do just to get attention?
do you need to condescendingly question other people’s freedom of expression? if you pearl clutch over seeing a comment which says ‘fuck’, maybe the internet is a little much for you to handle.
If dropping an F-bomb is your pinnacle of free speech, maybe you need a refresher on mature discussions. The internet might be too advanced for you if that’s the best you’ve got
Oh no guys! An F-bomb is about to explode! Better take cover!
Fuck yes.
His constituency office in Halle, Saxony Anhalt, has been an arson target, and has had bullets fired through the window.
Weird that this doesn’t come up until the 10th paragraph of the article.
It says it right underneath the title.
For context the shots fired on his office were in 2020 and the arson was last year, while that is awful I wouldn’t try to frame them too much as the cause for his retirement.
That means an editor decided to draw attention to it. The journalist still buried it deep in the article.
It was still mentioned at the top of the article and you missed it.
No, I saw it there, and I was still surprised it appeared so late in the article.
This is just sad, will things ever change?
Only if we do a better job teaching our kids to not grow up to be nazis, racists, or easy marks for manipulate dishonest politicians.
I don’t think so. There are so many fronts on the war on bigotry and little progress has been made in 100 years. This feels like an innate property of human beings and humans will always be easy to manipulate to make them hate those that look a little different. About the only practical thing that might help is we criminalise bigotry that might damp it down a lot but people will still behave in bigoted ways they can get away with.
It’s Germany… probably not.
Germany needs more black politicians
Nigeria needs more white politicians
If there are white people living in Nigeria who experience socioeconomic disparities based on their race, then yes. That’s whats meant by “representative” in political bodies, in some sense
Or even just if there’s a substantial population of those people, like how there’s a million people in Germany with African heritage
His thoughts can’t go that deep. It stops at black vs white.
There have been couple of non-Western countries with politicians who are not part of local majority group. There is a white Australian who is like a governor or mayor in Papua New Guinea. Peru infamously had a dictator of Japanese-ancestry. So you get these kinds of things. If a white person wants to become an MP in India, go for it.
Why not more disabled people or women instead?
Because their one black representative got bullied out. Meanwhile a white woman was PM for a long time (Merkel)
There’s three more currently in parliament, including a Nazi (Harald Weyel, AfD).
Them too.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
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Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good
Perfect?
“Perfect” would be to have complete/proportional diverse representation.
“Good” is having any diversity.
Oh, so you think picking politicians is like selecting crayons for a coloring book—who cares about political skills, right?
No wonder we end up with clowns running the circus
just to show you how absurd and off of what was actually said your argument is, let’s do to your argument what you did to theirs:
“So you think our representatives should not be representative of the population? Only rich, white, people should be politicians? You think there are no people of colour with political skills equal or better than those already in power? You think there isn’t a single second or third generation immigrant who could do a better job than Andi Scheuer or Armin Laschet?”
They did not say that though? You want politicians that are both good at doing politics as well as be able to properly represent the people they govern.
You want politicians […] represent the people they govern
If you honestly think a millionaire working for billionaire companies represents the average worker, you’re not just delusional, you’re on another planet
What about black disabled women?
Nazis gonna nazi. Shameful.
Hey Germany…can you wait until we (the US) are not on the nazi side before doing the whole “lose a world war” thing again?
Dude, the US is the world’s biggest terrorist nation and has been for over a hunndred years. Who do you think inspired the nazis? Name three democratically elected governments the US has couped in favour of a tyrant that was happy to sell out his country to US interests in favour of power.
Come November, the US is going to have a Pro-NATO, anti-nazi leader…or the exact opposite. That is what I was referring to. Your nonsequiter comment doesn’t merit engagement.
In Germany? I thought they got rid of those…like…a while ago.
After the war most Nazis were allowed to keep working in government (and elsewhere) cause who else knew how to run the country?
And it’s less they got rid of them, and more others came over and kicked their arse forcing them to “get rid of them”.
There was a process : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification
That process was a bad joke.
I don’t think so.
Only now are Nazis getting a foot hold again, at the same time they are getting a foot hold across the world. It is the after effects of the 2008 crash and Putin putting his thumb on scales where he can (troll farms and corruption).
The fact Germany doesn’t stick out as more Nazi that France, or the US, or others, means the original denazification worked.
What? France famously did not get rid of its own collabos, and the US was always fascist leaning even back then. Given how ridiculously aggressive the AfD campaigns, I’m actually more worried about their 16% than I do about the RN’s 30%.
No, they surely didn’t just gain a foothold again. Many processes for “denazifizierung” were just a rubber stamping of the claims of the perpetrators. It’s so ridiculous and well known that the term “Persilschein” was coined because of it. High ranking judges in the federal courts were Nazi perpetrators that even by the standards back then never should have been able to hold a job in the justice system ever again.
Places like the BND or BfV were more like SS- and other Nazi perpetrator pension schemes. Himmlers daughter, glowing Nazi for her whole life, worked for the BND as a secretary in the 60s under a false name. And they knew who she was.Also, a big part of the student protest in the late 60s also was that many of their professors were just plain Nazis. Law commentaries like the “Palandt” or “Schönfelder” were named after Nazis and the names just changed in 2021.
In the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s West Germany was a poster-child for Denazification and democracy, and Nazi propaganda was and is illegal in Germany.
Even Scandinavian country Sweden, hailed for their liberal policies, had more Nazis than Germany.But after reunification the weed began to grow back. AfD popularity is very much driven by the old Communist east Germany, which was also totalitarian.
Maybe it would have been better if East and West Germany hadn’t been reunited?
Nations need to learn that you can’t just flood your natin with immigrants and expect shit to sort itself out. And yes, the irony is biting.
At a minimum immigrants should be required to declare they respect basic norms and requirements in our societies, and breach of them could result in expulsion.
I’m thinking norms like respecting equal rights for women, respect our democracy, and respect other minorities, and respect that their religion is not more important than our laws.I think to some degree the extreme right is rising because this lack of respect results in lack of respect the other way too. Which is harmful both ways, both to our democracy, and to the many immigrants that actually make an effort.
Really not too feasible. Al those eastern Germans can just lie and then vote for nazis and extremists anyway. You have to integrate in an hands-on approach or not let them in in the first place.
Nah, they just went into hiding and it took them 80 years to become openly active again. Like, OPEN-open. Dude still tries to hide it behind a fig leaf but court dismissed all his lawsuits against people calling him a facist and a nazi, because “facist” and “nazi” aren’t insults against him, they just accurately describe his political and ideological views.
People rush the party that houses him en masse. And as you can imagine, dude’s not the only Nazi in that party. But people are too retarded to see the overlap even when it hits them in the face. Like, low income morons vote for the party whose declared goal it is to reduce social security. Might as well be a sheep voting for the wolf. Fucktards.
In case anyone is curious, there’s also Aramand Zorn, SPD (just like Diaby), Awet Tesfaiesus, Greens, and Harald Weyel, AfD, of all parties. Also happens to be the only native-born German.
Diaby is member of the SPD, their left wing on top of that which makes him a target for Nazis in the first place and his skin colour of course isn’t helping. Neither is his constituency being in the east though do note that he didn’t get into the Bundestag over the party list, he won a FPTP seat.
I often wish people in these situations tough it out, because of they don’t, who will make the difference? Stepping down gets you one news article and then everyone forgets.
I respect his choice though, and it’s another kind of heroic to put yourself and your family’s safety first.
Sad he faced so much racism. I understand why he is doing this.
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Normal European behavior
Not a racist bone amongst them, until you start talking about immigration or Travelers.
Or they actually see a black person.
There are almost 30 different countries in Europe. They also have quite different cultures and policies around immigration (for example).
Who are you talking about, specifically?
Wait until you hear their thoughts on Gypsies!
Don’t you get it? This one was one of the good ones. /s
