COMMENT: As expected, the Ger­man Pirate Party did well in the recent state elec­tions in Ger­many. A recent New York Times arti­cle high­lights some con­sid­er­a­tions raised by the party’s recent mete­oric rise. 

We sup­ple­ment these with some of our own ruminations:

• Part of the group’s appeal is trans­parency, facil­i­tated by use of the Inter­net as a vehi­cle for polit­i­cal networking.
• Trans­parency is cer­tainly desir­able, how­ever super­fi­cial­ity has its draw­backs. I would note that Peter Ack­er­man, part­ner of con­victed junk-bond king Michael Milken, asso­ciate of intel­li­gence ele­ments con­nected to the supposedly-spontaneous “Arab Spring,” is the dri­ving force behind Amer­i­cans Elect, an Internet/electoral orga­ni­za­tion that seeks “greater trans­parency” in polit­i­cal nom­i­nat­ing using the Internet.
• Amer­i­cans Elect has been very kind indeed to the overtly Nazi-linked Ron Paul, who, in turn, is joined at the hip with “the ver­MIT­Tler,” as I call him–Mitt Rom­ney. (“Ver­mit­tler” is the Ger­man word for “agent.”) Ron Paul’s Super PAC has  been heav­ily cap­i­tal­ized by ultra-right winger Peter Thiel, one of the dri­ving forces in the high-tech field.
• Although “anarcho/Utopian” in polit­i­cal  out­look,  the Pirate milieu (Pirate Bay and the closely linked Pirate Par­ties) don’t seem to have fig­ured out the fas­cist sugar daddy Carl Lund­strom (the chief financier of Pirate Bay) or the Wik­iLeaks oper­a­tion, a far-right, Nazi-linked entity whose anti-U.S./anti-Western stance endeared it to ele­ments of the so-called pro­gres­sive sector.
• Will  the Pirate Party ulti­mately become a Ger­man ver­sion of Amer­i­cans Elect or the “Arab Spring”? The lat­ter, as we saw in FTR #‘s 733 through 739, was an intel­li­gence oper­a­tion, begun   dur­ing the lat­ter days of George W. Bush’s admin­is­tra­tion and con­tin­ued by the Obama admin­is­tra­tion. As pre­dicted in that series, the event has become the “Mus­lim Broth­er­hood Spring.”
• Will the Pirate Party make the same mis­take the fol­low­ers of the increas­ingly destruc­tive “Occupy Wall Street” move­ment have made–overlooking the fascist/right-wing ele­ments present at their birth?  
• One of the dynam­ics fuel­ing the Pirate Party’s rise to promi­nence is the resent­ment on the part of the Ger­man peo­ple over hav­ing to bail out other EU coun­tries. (They are over­look­ing the fact that Germany’s rel­a­tive pros­per­ity has come from the intro­duc­tion of the weak EURO, whose appear­ance has also wreaked much of the havoc on other Euro­pean nations that has plunged them into their cur­rent dire straits.)
• Might the Ger­man resent­ment meta­mor­phose into a fascis­tic dynamic? “Deutsch­land Uber Alles.”
• Although not included in the online ver­sion of the New York Times arti­cle pre­sented here, a printed ver­sion men­tioned that many of the Ger­man Pirate Party’s sup­port­ers are eth­nic Danes. In the 1990’s, even as Ger­many was tout­ing “volksgruppenrechte”–the rights of Native Peo­ples and the rights of “Threat­ened Peo­ples” the Fed­eral Repub­lic sup­pressed the lin­guis­tic iden­tity of the North Frisians and the Sorbs–an eth­nic Dan­ish minor­ity and a Slavic minor­ity with their own lan­guages. (The Sorbs should not be con­fused with the Serbs of the for­mer Yugoslavia, another Slavic group). Are the Danes referred to in the arti­cle part of the Frisian lin­guis­tic minor­ity? What role might their lin­guis­tic sup­pres­sion have played in their grav­i­ta­tion toward the Pirates?
• We cer­tainly hope that the Pirate milieu–the Pirate Bay folks, the asso­ci­ated Pirate Par­ties, the over­lap­ping Chaos Com­puter Club and Anony­mous milieu and related elements–will use the infor­ma­tion pre­sented on this web­site to edu­cate them­selves and steer clear of the fas­cist pit­falls that await any and all who would stray from the beaten polit­i­cal path. Listeners/readers may want to make it a point to get some of this infor­ma­tion to them.

“Upstarts Con­tinue to Hijack Votes in Ger­many” by Melissa Eddy; The New York Times; 5/8/2012.

EXCERPT: When the results in Germany’s most recent state elec­tion came down, the Pirate Party cued up what could be their new theme song: “We are the Cham­pi­ons” by the rock group Queen blared from the speak­ers as exit polls showed the young party enter­ing the third regional leg­is­la­ture in three elections.

The 8.2 per­cent share of the vote the Pirates won on Sun­day in Schleswig-Holstein, the largely rural, north­ern­most state, solid­i­fied the pres­ence of the upstart party in Germany’s polit­i­cal land­scape, prov­ing its abil­ity to attract vot­ers beyond the Twit­ter­sphere who are fed up with a polit­i­cal bureau­cracy they view as dis­con­nected from the peo­ple. The Pirates drew thou­sands of vot­ers from the tra­di­tional center-right and center-left par­ties, an analy­sis of the results showed, in addi­tion to about 10,000 vot­ers who cast bal­lots for the first time. Their next chal­lenge comes this Sun­day, when an elec­tion will be held in Germany’s most pop­u­lous state, North Rhine-Westphalia.

Although the Pirate Party, formed six years ago in Berlin, has dropped recently in the polls, it looks poised to earn enough bal­lots to clear the 5 per­cent thresh­old needed to win seats in the state leg­is­la­ture there as well. Such a show­ing would be an impor­tant mile­stone for the party, given that nearly a quar­ter of the Ger­man pop­u­la­tion calls the state home, and it would undoubt­edly add a new dimen­sion to the polit­i­cal pres­sures heaped on Chan­cel­lor Angela Merkel as she tries to nav­i­gate the com­pet­ing domes­tic and European-wide demands about how best to address the euro crisis.

“If the Pirates can do well in an unfa­vor­able envi­ron­ment, like North Rhine-Westphalia,” said Oskar Nie­der­mayer, a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist at the Free Uni­ver­sity in Berlin, “then it is a good rea­son to say that they have a strong chance in the next gen­eral elec­tion.” The Pirates have built their suc­cess on lit­tle more than a vague plat­form of greater open­ness in gov­ern­ment, using technology.

Though they have failed to offer their own solu­tions to the Continent’s eco­nomic cri­sis, the Pirates have suc­ceeded in attract­ing protest vot­ers, an angry share of the elec­torate that is expand­ing even in Ger­many, though for rea­sons oppo­site those of many other parts of Europe. Weary of the pains of aus­ter­ity, vot­ers in France on Sun­day elected the Social­ist François Hol­lande, who has promised to make growth Europe’s new pri­or­ity. In par­lia­men­tary elec­tions, Greek vot­ers, too, balked at the heavy costs of the belt-tightening that Ms. Merkel has demanded.

Ger­mans, on the other hand, appear increas­ingly wary of the costs that the bailouts and pro-growth poli­cies advo­cated by Euro­peans else­where may end up cost­ing them. The Pirates have expanded their base by tap­ping into those fears, as well as address­ing the feel­ing among many Ger­mans that deci­sions regard­ing the euro cri­sis have been made over their heads, in ways not fully trans­par­ent. Many feel that Ger­mans, unlike other Euro­peans, did the hard work of reform for them­selves in the 1990s and that the trou­bles of their neigh­bors now threaten to strip them of the rewards. . . . .

. . . . One of the biggest prob­lems they face is a lack of con­crete posi­tions on heavy­weight issues, like the euro cri­sis or mil­i­tary deploy­ments abroad. So far the party’s lead­ers have ducked this prob­lem, argu­ing that they have not yet had the time to come up with a clear posi­tion. What they do know is how to rally vot­ers around the idea of increased trans­parency and direct voter par­tic­i­pa­tion through tech­nol­ogy and the Internet.

Issues are to be devel­oped, debated and amended directly by party mem­bers through Liq­uid Feed­back, an open source plat­form devel­oped in Berlin. A local branch of the Pirates in the south­west­ern region of Trier held their first decen­tral­ized party con­gress last week, link­ing mem­bers in three dif­fer­ent loca­tions via video con­fer­ence, while the lead­ing Pirate in Kiel, Torge Schmidt, wants all of the legislature’s com­mit­tee meet­ings to be streamed live over the Internet.

Those changes in favor of greater open­ness, many now argue, can­not be ignored. “The Pirates have brought about an impor­tant value sys­tem by say­ing, we want a very trans­par­ent polit­i­cal sys­tem, and we want cit­i­zens to par­tic­i­pate in this,” Mr. Nie­der­mayer said. “That is what has elec­tri­fied many voters.” . .

EXCERPT FROM HARD COPY VERSION OF SAME STORY, 5/9/2012. p. A10. . . . . The upstart Pirates formed only six years ago in Berlin and made up partly of eth­nic Danes, are expected to win at least 5 per­cent of the ballots, . . .