Alice Weidel: Oligarch Tool

Corriere Della Serra (Weidel and her Nazi military judge grandfather)

From the very start Hitler was financially supported and groomed by elements of the German establishment. As that establishment’s hold on the German people was challenged by the Great Depression they decided to move from liberalism (control the population through a hegemonic culture and false consciousness) to fascism. Hitler’s Nazi Party was very fully funded by German big business, but its vote share fell in the November 1932 election (from 37.3% in the July 1932 election to 33.1%). So the German establishment quickly installed him as the Chancellor of Germany (January 30th 1933). With this new power he utilized the state and the SA to fix the 1933 elections in his favour. Hitler was always a creation of the German oligarchs for the benefit of the German oligarchs.

Once in power Hitler rapidly moved to crush the SA, which was the arm of the Nazi Party most committed to real social change to benefit the working people. He then also rounded up the communists (hence the first line of the famous Niemoller poem “first they came for the communists”), banned independent trades unions, privatized state enterprizes, and removed many labour regulations - all to serve the German oligarchy. The latter lost control a little as Hitler went to war but were more than happy to make endless profits off the dispossession of Jewish properties, the looting of the occupied territories, the mass use of slave labour, and the colossally profitable armaments spending. After WW2 most of these war criminals got off scot free and in many cases prospered in post-WW2 Germany, like the Nazi family that now controls BMW.

The AfD was founded by a group of neoliberal professors (Lucke, Ederer, Homburg, Starbatty) who wanted to “gut the state, minimize the tax burden and overhaul the social market economy according to libertarian ideas” while being socially conservative and nationalist. This article provides the details of how the AfD is “neoliberal to the core”. The party really took off with the German refugee crisis, benefitting from the growing anti-immigrant wave. Much of the new membership was more traditionally right wing, not neoliberal, and a multi-year fight within the party resulted; with some members being expelled from the party. The more traditional right-wing members can be seen as the equivalent of the Nazi SA, hating “the bosses” as much as the immigrants. From early on the Swiss-based German billionaire August von Finck financially supported the AfD; mirroring the early financial support given to the Nazis by Fritz Thyssen, I. G. Farben and Krupp. He also funded a newspaper The Deutschland Kurier that both editorially supports the AfD and provides services to the party. Finck and other rich donors to the AfD can be seen as political venture capitalists, who fund and keep alive political parties which may be useful to them in the future. Finck’s father was a leading and influential banker during both the Weimar Republic and the Nazi Reich, helped fund the Nazi Party during the 1930s, and was part owner of Merck, Finck & Co. which served as Hitler’s personal bank.

The two groupings within the AfD have managed to come together and paper over their differences to achieve electoral success. The party is co-headed by Tino Chrupella and Alice Weidel, with the latter being put forward for the position of German Chancellor in the current election campaign. She is the perfect candidate to keep the AfD on the extremist neoliberal path. Die Linke, the socialist party that should have thrived in an East Germany utterly exploited by the West German oligarchs destroyed itself through the usual infiltration of “critical theory” and identity politics (as so many left wing parties have in the West) that were nurtured by the Western security states to force out actual real socialism during the Cold War. As usually happens when the left alternative is extinguished, the working people turned to the right, the AfD.

Weidel is the leader that the oligarchy has selected. She is a fully paid up member of the neoliberal extremists, a member of the Frederick Hayeck Society since 2016. Her employment history includes Goldman Sachs, the Bank of China and Allianz Global Investors (the latter founded by Finck’s father); hardly that of someone fighting for the working people. Her PhD thesis advisor was Peter Oberender, a neoliberal economist and founder of the predecessor party to the AfD, Wahlalternative 2013. She is his political protege. Her first political campaign was found to be illegally funded by Finck, the AfD ended up having to pay a big fine but Weidel went unpunished. She is also very usefully fluent in Mandarin, something that will be helpful if the German oligarchy takes a more nationalist stance and needs to mend bridges with China. No more of the Baerbock idiocy. Weidel is also a woman and a lesbian, fitting the bill to widen the appeal of a fascist leader.

Her Wikipedia entry interestingly does not follow the usual norm of naming both parents, perhaps because that may lead us to her grandfather who was a Nazi military judge directly appointed by Hitler. No wonder she calls for an end to what her party defines as a “cult of shame” over the Nazi atrocities. Or tries to label Hitler as a socialist and communist during an interview with Elon Musk (starts at the 22 second mark).

Weidel is far too intelligent and well educated to not know that such statements are utter lies; pure propaganda. Elon Musk’s maternal grandparents moved from Canada to South Africa because they preferred the apartheid system. It is also interesting that oligarch Trump backer Peter Thiel was born in Germany, and his father’s doings during the Nazi era are utterly obfuscated. Thiel lived with his family in South Africa for a few years during his childhood. Now both Thiel and Musk are very much supporters of Weidel. Below is Musk’s full interview with Weidel, where she shows herself to be an arch propagandist in mixing facts with half truths, manipulations, and absolute lies while leaving out important facts that are problematic for her narrative.

The AfD will most probably not win a place in the next German government, which will most probably be a CDS/CDU one lead by the oligarch vassal tool Merz. A recent poll shows the CDS/CDU at 29%, the AfD at 23%, and the SPD at 15%, which once the parties that did not gain at least 5% of the vote have been removed may just allow for a CDS/CDU-SPD ruling coalition. Otherwise the Green Party polling at 13% would have to be added to the anti-AfD coalition. The truly left wing BSW hovering just above the 5% cutoff and the FDP and Die Linke on or below it. As with other right-wing parties, the polls may understate the support for the AfD due to reticence among those surveyed to say that they will be voting for such a party.

Like the Nazis, the AfD is a longer term investment initiative, being held back for use in case the current dominant parties start to be fully rejected by the populace. Then, as in 1932 the fascist alternative can be placed in power by the German establishment. As it is no longer acceptable to use the Jewish community as the official Other it will now be the turn of the Arabs/Moslems. As the German economy continues to decline the probable CDS/CDU-SPD coalition will begin to “own” the decline and fall in popularity. In parallel Ms. Weidel will be normalized by the German establishment so that the AfD can be accepted into a ruling coalition. She has already established her dominance in the AfD, being put forward as the proposed AfD Chancellor in the February elections.

Weidel is just like Meloni in Italy, the leader of a fascist party that fully serves the oligarchs. Also a parallel of Starmer, who was used to fully co-opt the British Labour Party into serving the oligarchy. In the UK the oligarchs are already working on their next backup candidate, the utterly fascist oligarch tool Farage. She is also like the oligarch-serving Freeland in Canada, who was raised at the feet of her Nazi-serving fascist grandfather. In many ways Weidel is also a “sane” and calm version of the fake populist Milei in Argentina. National oligarchies can produce an endless procession of new “protest” political alternatives that will in reality keep all state policies that serve the oligarchs while removing state support and protections for the majority. Just like Trump, the business disaster who is fully bought and paid for by real billionaires. A man so rich he desperately plays every cheap money-raising trick in the book, the latest being his and his wife’s shitcoins. We see his financial assets, but his financial liabilities remain extremely opaque.

In the last great crisis of Western capitalism, the 1930s, the oligarchs had a choice between fascism and some other form of capitalism. In the US a compromise with the working people was chosen given that it could be aligned with the high profits of Fordism; a compromise that the oligarchs set about undermining nearly immediately. Fascism had actually been used, from 1917 to 1921, to force an unwilling US population into WW1 and to destroy the core of the working class movements (e.g. “The Wobblies”) under the leadership of the racist bigot President Wilson. In Britain the stopgap of Bonapartism was utilized with a “national” government papering over the cracks but not resolving anything. In France there was the chaos of the dying embers of the French Third Republic, resolved with the German invasion and the fascist Vichy regime followed by the fascist de Gaulle. In Italy, Germany, Spain, Portugal and Japan fascism was chosen. In the post-war period many of the Western “democracies” had extremely fascist elements, how else could the 1950s McCarthyism and security services widespread spying and involvement in politics be typified. Or the Italian post-war era, culminating in the Strategy of Tension. Or the reams of Nazi criminals that took senior positions in the governments of both Germany and Austria? Or the fascist South American governments, fully backed by the US, that terrorized their own populations into subjugation?

Fascism never went away because it is a tool of capitalist oligarchy always kept in reserve in case “liberalism” fails to control the population with its more subtle methods. As Gramsci so well identified, the utilization of a hegemonic culture to control the population does not mean that the state and oligarch weapons of coercion and violence are put away. They are always kept available for use, and many times used in specific instances requiring a “heavier hand”.

It is sad that so many of the “alternative” commentators mistake the Trumps, the Melonis, the Farages, the Weidels for agents of real change. But that is the genius of the oligarchy, it excels at co-option, corruption and misdirection to keep the eyes of the working majority away from the greatest problem in society; themselves. And also to mislead the majority into serving the interests of the small oligarch minority.