[D66] European governments seize upon terrorist attacks in France and Vienna to build a police state

[R.O.]

(erratum: achter Macron gaan staan was iets te voorbarig.)

wsws.org:

European governments seize upon terrorist attacks in France and Vienna 
to build a police state
Johannes Stern
2 hours ago

European governments are responding to the recent terrorist attacks in 
Paris, Nice, Dresden and Vienna by adopting the political agenda of the 
far right. Under the pretext of the “war on terror,” EU leaders and 
European leaders on Tuesday agreed on a massive expansion of “Fortress 
Europe,” the de facto abolition of the right of asylum, and the creation 
of what amounts to a Europe-wide police state.

“The work at government level is aimed at bringing our various services 
and authorities into line and better coordinating our efforts to fight 
terrorism, radicalisation with many targeted measures,” declared French 
President Emmanuel Macron, at a joint press conference with German 
Chancellor Angela Merkel, Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz and Ursula 
von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission and former 
German Defence Minister.

“The task now is to implement these measures consistently, for example 
the interoperability of databases, the linking of our databases and the 
cooperation of our security services also at the external borders.” 
Another topic “we discussed was the determination with which we want to 
combat terrorist propaganda and hate speech on the internet,” Macron 
added. “We are working to ensure that in the coming weeks a regulation 
on the removal and deletion of terrorist content within one hour is 
adopted.”

“We must also work on a reform of the Schengen rules,” Macron said. 
“This means that we must strengthen and better defend the external 
borders of the European Union and that we must better control and 
implement the functioning of the Schengen rules … I hope that we will 
soon be able to establish a real Security Council.”

Merkel also pleaded for a strengthening of Europe’s external borders and 
stepped-up censorship, stressing that “the German Presidency of the 
Council still wanted to finalise the regulation on preventing the 
distribution of terrorist content on the internet.” She boasted: “We 
have recently given our security authorities in Germany new 
opportunities” for monitoring “messenger services [such as Telegram] and 
surveillance.”

Von der Leyen took the same line, announcing that the EU Commission’s 
2018 proposal to prevent terrorist content online “will now be finalised 
in the Council and Parliament trialogue.” She said it was important to 
“focus on the speed of deleting such terrorist content. It is crucial to 
be fast.” This will also involve “giving greater responsibility to the 
major Internet platforms in the fight against illegal and harmful online 
content.” To this end, the so-called Digital Services Act will be 
“presented in a few weeks’ time.”

It is clear what this means. Under the guise of the fight against 
“terrorist content,” the censorship of left-wing content and websites in 
particular will be expanded. Only on October 28, Sundar Pichai, CEO of 
Google’s parent company Alphabet, admitted at a hearing before the US 
Senate that Google’s search engine censors the World Socialist Web Site.

The new directive will oblige internet giants such as YouTube and 
Facebook, which work closely with the secret services and governments 
and already censor left-wing and progressive content on a massive scale, 
to delete “harmful” articles, videos or other postings even faster.

In order to justify the construction of a European police state, the 
ruling class is seizing upon the horrific terrorist attacks of recent 
weeks and fueling fears of a continuing terrorist threat.

“We have a constant danger among us. We have thousands of ‘foreign 
terrorist fighters’ who either survived the fighting in Syria, in Iraq 
for the IS and returned or who did not get through at all because they 
were stopped somewhere when they left,” warned the Austrian Chancellor 
Sebastian Kurz. He therefore called for a “more robust approach to the 
threats throughout Europe.” If we want to “protect the freedoms of all, 
we have to restrict the freedom of these people.”

What Kurz concealed was that European governments are in many ways 
responsible for the terrible terrorist attacks of recent weeks. The 
thousands of “foreign terrorist fighters” did not fall from the sky, but 
were used by the imperialist powers and their reactionary regional 
allies—above all Saudi Arabia—as shock troops in the wars for regime 
change in Libya and Syria.

Almost all the assassins of the major terrorist attacks in recent years 
were known to the security authorities: Anis Amri, who drove a truck 
into a Berlin Christmas market on December 19, 2016, the Kouachi 
brothers who stormed the offices of the French satirical magazine 
Charlie He bdo in early 2015, and also Kujtim Fejzulai, the assassin in 
Vienna.

Kurz’s assertion that European governments are concerned with 
“protecting freedom” is a blatant lie. In fact, the policies of the 
ruling class do not protect freedom and life, but bring oppression and 
death. Due to the lethal “herd immunity” strategy, over 300,000 people 
have died in Europe alone since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In previous years, tens of millions of people had already been killed, 
injured or made refugees in the EU-backed neo-colonial wars in Central 
Asia and the Middle East. Tens of thousands have drowned in the 
Mediterranean. Within Europe, the ruling class is cultivating and using 
extreme right-wing and fascist forces to intimidate and suppress the 
growing opposition of the working class and youth.

The latest police-state measures are part of this strategy. The 
coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the advanced economic, social and 
political crisis of the capitalist system. The ruling class feels it is 
sitting on a social and political powder keg. In recent days and weeks, 
teachers and students in Greece, Poland and France have protested 
against the unsafe reopening of schools.

These protests are only an anticipation of massive working-class 
struggles that will be directed against the entire capitalist system, 
including in the US. There, the Democrats not only play down the coup 
plans by President Donald Trump, who seeks to overturn the election 
results and establish a fascistic dictatorship. They themselves appeal 
to the military and the state apparatus out of fear of a revolutionary 
development of the working class.

The same fear is also driving the nominally left-wing bourgeois parties 
on this side of the Atlantic. In Germany, the Greens and the Left Party, 
which articulate the interests of affluent sections of the middle 
classes, stand at the forefront of a sharp shift of the entire political 
establishment to the right.

Last weekend, excerpts from a so-called “eleven-point action plan” drawn 
up by Green Party leader Robert Habeck and others became known. Both in 
terms of its form and content, the paper could have also been drawn up 
by the right-wing extremist AfD. According to the paper, so-called 
Islamist “Gefährder” (potential offenders) must be “consistently and 
closely monitored”. For that, more police and secret service agents are 
needed.

The Greens attack the grand coalition and its notoriously right-wing 
Minister of the Interior Horst Seehofer (CSU) from the right. They 
demand that arrest warrants against “Islamist perpetrators” be executed 
more consistently and that deportations be organized more quickly.

At the European level, according to a report in the Frankfurter 
Allgemeine Zeitung, the Greens demand the establishment of “a European 
Criminal Police Office with its own investigative teams, a uniform 
definition of the term ‘Gefährder’ and more cross-border cooperation 
between national security authorities.”

This is a blueprint for the creation of a pan-European police state 
where nobody is safe. If one takes the recent tightening of the Berlin 
police law by the “Red-Red-Green” (SPD-Left Party-Green) Senate 
majority, any person who might be willing and seems able to commit a 
terrorist crime can be classified as a “Gefährder.” This means that 
anyone can be classified as a “Gefährder” on the basis of a mere 
presumption and thus prosecuted by the security authorities.

The Left Party leadership is also calling for a strong state, combining 
this with anti-Islamic agitation. In a commentary for the right-wing 
Springer newspaper Die Welt, Dietmar Bartsch, the leader of the Left 
Party’s parliamentary group in the Bundestag (German parliament), called 
for an end to “ambiguity and inaction” and a “clear reaction of a 
well-fortified democracy.”

By this Bartsch obviously understands the oppression of Muslims—among 
other things, he pleads for a headscarf ban “in day-care centers and 
primary schools”—and the criminalisation of any opposition to racism and 
the police state.

“It was shocking that demonstrations took place in this country after 
the attacks in France—against the French President,” he wrote angrily in 
Die Welt.

Bartsch could hardly make it clearer where he and the Left Party stand 
on the class struggle. Protests against the hated “President of the 
Rich” Macron—who praised Nazi collaborationist Philippe Pétain as a hero 
and has ordered the suppression of the “yellow vest” protests—are just 
as taboo for the former Stalinist state party of East Germany as 
protests against police violence.

In early June, the Red-Red-Green senate in Berlin organized police 
violence against peaceful demonstrators protesting against the police 
murder of George Floyd in the USA. At the time Bartsch repeatedly 
praised the police forces, which are permeated by right-wing extremist 
networks, and declared that “the police do not deserve less, but rather 
more social recognition and personnel, especially on the streets.”