With Dugin against the dictatorship of opinion

Protest rally in front of the trade fair in Halle against the book fair of right-wing publishers.

Protest rally in front of the trade fair in Halle against the book fair of right-wing publishers.

In the past few decades, a scene that sees itself as intellectual has emerged within the extreme right, which is primarily grouped around Götz Kubitschek. She met at the weekend at the “Page Change” book fair, which was taking place for the second time in Halle (Saale). It is organized by Susanne Dagen, who runs a bookstore in Dresden and has been working with Kubitschek for a long time.

What Kubitschek and his comrades consider intellectuality is primarily limited to “alternative” comments on the world situation and the devising of marketing strategies that are supposed to somehow lead to power. Like the academic cheerleaders of Trumpism, this is a disguised anti-intellectualism - the goal is not debate and knowledge, but the "transition of power" that Kubitschek triumphantly predicted in a recent blog post.

The reason for Kubitschek's dreams was a text in Die Welt in which the Bild columnist Harald Martenstein cited and recommended the almost grotesquely racist novel "The Army Camp of the Saints" by Jean Raspail as a "blueprint for the overrun border in Ceuta," as Kubitschek noted with satisfaction. It is a defining book for European right-wing extremists, which describes how hundreds of thousands of people from the slums of Calcutta overran France. In his article, Martenstein refers to this “bestseller that described the fall of Europe as early as 1973” to argue that such “conquest migration” is taking place in Europe today. There was even a link to Kubitschek's publishing house, which is publishing the book in Germany in a new translation by Martin Lichtmesz. Kubitschek rightly described the incident as a victory for his political camp.

It's primarily about describing over and over again, in the wildest variations, that one lives in a "dictatorship of opinion."

None other than Harald Martenstein was the big star of this year's “Page Change” trade fair. He gave a kind of opening speech in which he particularly criticized the left. First, Martenstein pompously described the “main thesis” of his new book “Guided Democracy,” which is hard to beat in terms of banality. According to this, democracy only prevails “where change and change are possible”. But he's actually concerned with something else: "A democracy in which only being on the left is allowed cannot possibly be a real democracy."

Which sums up the tenor of the event quite well: It is primarily about describing over and over again, in the wildest variations, that one lives in a “dictatorship of opinion”. The furor, the zeal and the effort that Martenstein and Co. put into proving this nonsense are impressive. In the further course of his speech, which largely consisted of passages from his book read aloud, Martenstein also dealt with the over 29,000 knife attacks counted by the police that occurred in 2024 - as expected, without classifying this number in any way or mentioning that almost half of these cases were just threats.

Another highlight of the event was a panel on the “Epstein Wars” – meaning, among other things, the current war against Iran – where “the West’s descent into archaic perversion” was stated. The creepy Russian fascist philosopher Aleksandr Dugin joined in from Moscow, who declared in all seriousness that Jeffrey Epstein was a symbol of postmodern and "posthuman" Western civilization as well as the much-invoked deep state. Epstein put the Marquis de Sade's ideology into practice, and Epstein's omnipotence over "the human slaves around him" corresponded to the character of Anglo-Saxon liberalism itself, which the investment banker and sexual criminal embodied. The only thing that can help - one suspects - is Germany's alliance with Russia in the final battle against Western liberalism. On Monday Martenstein wrote in Die Welt about his appearance in Halle: »Yes, I am a hinge. I’m happy to be.”