What a shock or something.

Around a third of Germany’s far-left Left Party’s parliamentarians are under observation by the country’s Verfassungsschutz or BfV (the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution), a domestic intelligence agency designed to, well, protect the German constitution.

This is outrageous, I guess, and Germans everywhere are empört (scandalized), as usual. How could it possibly be, they ask themselves, that a political party having members who…

belonging to the “Communist Platform,” claim that in order to introduce a new social order, “illogical, unobjective, unjust and pure power” will be necessary at first…

belonging to the “Marxist Forum,” maintain that “the ruling elite” must be removed from the “operating levers of state power” and have their “economical power base wrested from them…”

get enthusiastic about a party leader (Gesine Lötzsch) who congratulates Fidel Castro on his “fullfilled life of armed struggle and many accomplished works…”

having belonged to the Stasi (the GDR’s Ministry of State Security) still, in essence, belong to the GDR’s Ministry of State Security…

How could it be, like I said, that they could possibly, by any wild stretch of the imagination, ever be considered to be a threat to modern German democratic society based as it is upon the rule of law?

Like I said, what a shock or something.

Es geht nicht darum, eine Partei unter Generalverdacht zu stellen. Es geht darum, verfassungsfeindliche Bestrebungen zu orten, bevor sie Schaden anrichten. Hat man dem Verfassungsschutz nicht gerade – zu Recht – vorgeworfen, das Undenkbare nicht gedacht zu haben? Extremismus kann auf vielerlei Humus wachsen. Auch auf linkem.

PS: By the way, Left Party members are big fans of Iran and Syria, too, to name just a few. I’m just sayin’, it’s none of my business or anything.