Saturday 15 January 2022
Criticism of refugee policy
Candidate Trabert draws a comparison to the Nazi era
In his speech, the Left Party’s presidential candidate, Gerhard Trabert, reads lines from a Nazi diary. Finally, he refers to the ignorance and controversy of refugee policy. It’s not about “historical equation”, but about the appeal not to look the other way, he explains.
The left candidate for the office of Federal President, Gerhard Trabert, drew a parallel to the persecution of Jews during the Nazi era with regard to the social exclusion of poor and refugee people. At the digital start of the year for the left, the social physician quoted a Jewish youth who died in 1945 in the Bergen-Belsen Nazi concentration camp.
In his diary, the boy complained that society ignored the fate of the Jews. Trabert said: “Why this quote? Just as many Germans knew back then what was happening to the Jews, today we know what is happening to people who have fled in the Mediterranean, in Libyan and Syrian camps. We know how they do it Poverty is increasing, we know about the increased death rate of poor people here in Germany too. If you compare the richest with the poorest quarter, poor women die 4.4 years earlier and poor men 8.6 years earlier. It’s all a scandal.”
“Resistance” against an anti-social policy
The causes lie in economic, social, trade and foreign policy. “We must not stop naming this, this form of structural violence,” said Trabert. The candidate later clarified on Twitter: “I’m not interested in a historical equation. The suffering of many people caused by the National Socialists was indescribably greater and cannot be compared. But the tendency to look the other way must be clearly criticized. I’m about looking, especially in the present time and about learning from the past.”
The non-party was nominated by the left this week as a candidate for the election of the Federal President in February. The doctor has been working in the health care of homeless and refugees for decades. He said about the situation today: “The courts also abuse their power to silence criticism in this democracy. We must not accept that.” Trabert referred to the Frenchman Stéphane Hessel and his criticism of financial capitalism and emphasized that “resistance” to anti-social politics was necessary. The left must also become more profiled.