PEGIDA



Pissed Evil Germans Initiating the Deportation of Arabs Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident (German: Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes), best known simply as Pegida or PEGIDA, is a German extreme far-right xenophobic mob, largely consisting of middle-class and middle-aged, but non-confessional white guys, who participate in a "stroll" every Monday since 20 October 2014 and whine about a perceived threat of an impending Islamisation of German society - even though the city where Pegida is mostly active and successful (Dresden) has a rather low Islamic population consisting of around 2000 Muslims out of a total population of 536,308, so basically a population density of 0.37 percent.

The movement/organization was founded in 2014 by Lutz "Lutzifer" Bachmann, who is an Adolf Hitler cosplayer as a pastime (more on that later). In real life he has dabbled in "theft, physical assault, drug dealing and burglary". Though he has a criminal record, he has taken advantage of the EU's free-movement "Schengen" policies to work as an overseas migrant on one of Spain's Atlantic islands, the exact thing he has railed against for his native Germany. Despite insisting that Pegida is a mobocracy, Bachmann is generally seen as the movement's de facto Führer leader. Bachmann claims repeatedly that the movement's means to its patriotic evil ends are peaceful, but Pegida continuously gets indirect blame for the increasing attacks on refugee homes and for assaults on migrants and foreigners   as xenophobic and racist crimes have increased during Pegida's rise and its supporters keep attacking reporters,  non-Whites, and police-officers.

Background
In the 50's, the US and NATO was courting Turkey as an ally, due to its control of the Bosphorus, control of the Black Sea and pretty much the bulk of European trade, and of course the proximity to Russia and all. Heck, Turkey even hosted a few nuclear weapons, which was the half of the Cuban Missile Crisis you probably didn't learn about. Turkey wanted to get rid of some poor people allow some of its workers go to Europe to, umm, work, and send money home. However, the general German population didn't want the immigrants, believing that the Turks would Turk are jerbs be too culturally different. The Social Democrats in particular complained that no foreign workers should be let into the country so long as some German workers were still unemployed. However American pressure and a bit of guilt from recent events won the day, and the German Christian Democrat led government relented.

The Turkish workers would become known as "Gastarbeiter" (guest workers). The plan was to let them work for a couple of years, making the factory owners Germany rich, then boot them out rotate them for a new set of workers to repeat the process. However, many Turks didn't want to return to Turkey, seeing as they had left Turkey due to the lack of good jobs back home. Even with the offer of bribes repatriation grants, about half stayed in Germany. Many of those who stayed managed to bring wives and family over, but seeing how there never was any intention of permanent integration into German society, the Turks became a de facto underclass in German society, continuing to do the menial jobs for lower pay than other Germans would accept.

The original Turkish immigrants were happy enough to improve their lot in life to be second-class German citizens, but their children... less so. There's now entire generations of Turkish-Germans who look around at their situation and are understandably a bit upset, have fewer opportunities for decent careers and turn to petty crime, or sometimes worse. This obviously breeds resentment from the rest of the German population, and, well, PEGIDA is just one giant cancerous polyp from this cancer. PEGIDA is thus a problem of Germany's (and US/NATO's) own creation.

Sein Kampf
Lutz Bachmann is a fine gentleman who committed multiple crimes prior to the creation of Pegida, for example drug dealing, burglary, battery, etc., essentially everything he accuses his fellow human beings of doing (when they have the misfortune of being migrants from the Middle East).

Being sentenced to a few years behind bars for some of the aformentioned charges, Mr. Lutz saw the necessity to flee the Abendland and chose South Africa as his new home, a country inhabited mostly by Black people, but well if you're on the run you could possibly let that slide for the time being, additionally South Africa's time zone is only one hour later than Germany's which makes it most likely easier to keep in contact with family & friends whom he had to leave behind.

Two years later, Bachmann was deported back to Germany due to an invalid visa. Back at home, he served fourteen months of his three and a half year prison sentence before he was set free on bail. In 2009, he was caught carrying forty grams of cocaine and on another occasion 54 grams were found in his possession. In 2010, he was convicted of unlawful sale of narcotics and sentenced to a two year prison term on bail. In 2014, he was again convicted, this time for failing to pay the child support for his son for nearly a year.

Birth of a nation
On 11 October 2014, Lutz - being disgruntled when he witnessed a rally of (better known by its handle PKK) supporters just the day before in Dresden (presumably because he saw too much non-German people on Germany's prestigious pure streets, which overloaded his xenophobia-infested synapses) - created a private Facebook group called "Friedliche Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes" (Peaceful Europeans against the Islamization of the occident).

The group protested against "the gradual Islamization" of German society and "religious wars" being fought on Germany's streets by "terrorist, Islamic forces" like ISIS, Al Qaida and the PKK, despite the fact that the last one is a secular organization that's somewhat friendly to the West... sort of. Another initial aim of the group was to draw the incumbent government's attention to its displeasure towards political correctness and its annoyance that everyone who is politically left to them constantly labels far-right activists like them as Nazis or Neo-Nazis. It was proposed to use the slogan "We are the people", reminiscent of the Monday demonstrations in East Germany in 1989/90.

Further, Bachmann insisted early on that the movement shouldn't become a cesspool of "right-wing loons, neo-nazis, etc.". However right-wing loons were immediately attracted to Pegida before he even made that statement: Siegfried Däbritz (from the Free Democratic Party (FDP), basically Germany's closest analogue to the US Libertarian Party) and Thomas Tallacker (from the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Germany's ruling party), both of them being notorious since the summer of 2013 for posting vile & racist statements about Muslims in general, Kurds, Turks and refugees. The CDU quickly saw the writing on the wall and forced Tallacker to resign from his incumbent city council post and initiated the process to have him expelled from the party. On 26 October 2014, Däbritz attended a "Hooligans Against Salafists" (HoGeSa) rally, where violent riots took place. Afterwards he tried to court "HoGeSa des Ostens" (HoGeSa of the East) into joining Pegida on one of its Facebook pages by making insulting statements about Muslims ("bearded goat fuckers"). On the same page hooligans demanded to incinerate Muslims and the public burning of Qurans.

But no, Pegida are absolutely not Nazis and Bachmann preferred the euphemistic term "patriot" to defend the members and their protests from the correct allegations by the media of them being Neo-Nazis.

Another reason for founding Pegida were "terrible events in Hamburg and Celle" on 8 October and 7 October respectively, when violent riots between Kurds and various Islamists took place. The inspiration for the movement's name were CDU election posters from the 1960s which carried the slogan "Save the occidental culture. Vote the Christian Democratic Union". Starting in 20 October 2014, Pegida called for their supporters attending weekly "strolls" in Dresden's inner-city. The first one managed a meager 350 "strollers." However the more the "strolls" gathered steam and the more the "lying press" was reporting on Pegida (even though its supporters keep on insisting that they're being ignored), the incipient movement managed to amass 25,000 people who came along "strolling" on 12 January 2015, making it possibly the hugest collective "stroll" in the history of mankind. This huge eruption was mostly triggered by the Charlie Hebdo terror attacks just a few days prior.

Pegida dictionary
Pegida uses terminology unknown to many, even to (other) native German speakers and reuses many of the linguistic conventions of their Third Reich idols and keeps up the extreme-right's tradition of using nursery rhymes to "awaken" the German masses, for example "Lügenpresse / halt die Fresse!" (translation: "lying press, shut the fuck up!").

OH MY GOD!!11! Did he really pose as Hitler or not?
The "lying press" dug up some more dirty secrets from Mr. Bachmann's past. On 21 January 2015, multiple media outlets published previous xenophobic statements by Bachmann, which surprised nobody, because most sane people in Germany already regarded him as a straight-up racist. But accompanying the disgusting statements about migrants and foreigners the media published a selfie of Bachmann posing as Hitler.

Bachmann's personal account at the time was the following: He himself acknowledges the authenticity of the photo and says that it was merely a "joke." He also claimed that the picture was made for the audio book release of Look Who's Back (a German comedic novel about Hitler's resurrection in 2012 — yes, German humor is weird!). He supposedly posted the picture onto the Facebook page of German comedic actor Christoph Maria Herbst (who is the audio book's voice actor) and that Herbst consequently "liked" the photo on Facebook. When the latter became aware of these allegations, he said that he didn't even have a Facebook profile, and made it clear through his lawyer that Bachmann's account was total bullshit. Herbst's acting agency confirmed however, that there was a Facebook fan profile for Herbst which was maintained by a person unknown to them.

Following the controversy, Bachmann stepped down as Pegida's Führer leader, which resulted in a massive dip in "strollers" from 25,000 to a pathetic 2,000 on 9 February 2015. So much for it being a mobocracy, as it was severely weakened when its head was lopped off. Bachmann was relatively soon reinstated as the Führer leader to save the ailing movement but except for a few Monday "strolls" with high turn-outs, the "strollers" stayed at home during the summer and Pegida has since then basically become a fringe movement.

As the storm died down about Bachmann's Hitler photo-shoot, he considerably changed his story of how the picture came to be. Apparently the Hitler mustache was photoshopped onto the photo, and he didn't mention it during the controversy because "nobody would have believed [him]" at that time. However to this day Bachmann has failed to show us the original photo so that everyone could judge for themselves, or at least, you know, release a photoshopped picture with the mustache removed (which PI news, arguably one of Germany's most notorious right-wing websites, actually did. )

Some right-wing blogs spread a story from the Sächsische Zeitung, which allegedly confirms that Bachmann did not have a "Hitler mustache" in the original picture. The picture was taken by a local barber who claims that she still has the particular picture on her mobile phone. The picture was made when both of them, in a cordial conversation when his hair was cut by her, mentioned that they each were listening to Look Who's Back and both of them started joking about it, resulting in the sexy (now world famous) picture of Bachmann. The article posted three pictures which were made when his "shoulder-long" hair was cut, one of them featuring both of them smiling into the camera (which could have been shot on a totally different day), and the other two showing his cut hair on the floor (which basically could be anybody's hair). Did you notice which picture is missing? Exactly the original photo without the mustache, a totally wasted opportunity to shut the "lying press" up! But it really doesn't matter because with or without the mustache, Bachmann has a stereotypical stern Hitler expression on his face, and his two different stories about the photograph are enough proof that he meant the pictures to be interpreted as such (and it surely doesn't help that he has a history of spouting countless racist and xenophobic comments). However extreme-right websites claim the other non-Hitler pictures and the barber's memory, which is nothing more than anecdotal evidence, as irrefutable proof that Bachmann didn't pose as Hitler even though we now have three different stories in which he tells that he did pose as Hitler.

Strange bed fellows
Akif Pirinçci, a German author of Turkish descent, most famous for a world famous novel about cats and also a homophobic right-wing activist, was invited as a speaker on Pegida's 19 October 2015 stroll, which was the group's first anniversary. His speech was an incoherent mess of right-wing populism, which included calling Germany a "Scheißstaat" ("shit state"), the German Green Party "Kinderfickerpartei" ("child fucker party"), the spokesperson for the mosque in Erfurt "Moslemfritzen mit Talibanbart" (Muslim freak with a Taliban beard). Further intellectual diarrhea included that Muslims want to "pump infidels full of their Muslim juice", that Germany awaits a "Muslim garbage dump" and that Islam has as much to do with German culture as "my asshole with the production of perfume." His most controversial statement however was "Unfortunately, the concentration camps are out of order at the moment!", for which he received applause from the other "strollers." But he didn't mean that Pegida's undesirables should be sent to said camps, no, he meant that Pegida critics would send the "strollers" to concentration camps if they were still active. Then why did he start the phrase with the word 'unfortunately' when he didn't mean it that way?

Afterwards all his publishers quit their contracts with him and virtually all book stores delisted his books. In a perfect case of irony, the seemingly misunderstood author said that he seriously considers emigrating from Germany. You have to wonder what right-wing loon clubs in other nations might think if someone like him, a person of Turkish-Muslim descent would set foot onto their holy pure country which needs defending from "Islamisation."

A match made in heaven?
The far-right sections of the far-right Euroskeptic Alternative für Deutschland, tried to capitalize on Pegida's notoriety and were immediately open for negotiations. Other members from the party left to the party's far-right wing (which means still pretty far-right) including then-party head Bernd Lucke were more ambivalent. While he endorsed the "peaceful" strolls and described Pegida's concerns as "legitimate," he made it clear that the people strolling should do so in defense of "occidental values" which include the guarantee of religious freedom and the strollers should not the demonize Islam as a whole. The ever opportunistic Frauke Petry, long before she ousted Lucke as party head, was quick to recommend Bachmann's resignation after his Hitler selfies were leaked.

Concurrently Bachmann has also shown interest in cuddling with the seemingly natural allies and sought an alliance with the party, believing both groups have a large overlap in their proposed policies. It has been noted that the AfD's bourgeois respectability and Pegida's populist grassroots nature could potentially change Germany's political landscape.

Yet the engagement between the two hasn't managed to result in a meaningful marriage. Despite Bachmann's outreaching efforts, he has been turned down by AfD party heads, the reasoning being that Pegida must lend itself a credence of respectability by turning the movement into a party before the AfD would take it seriously and that the party saw no need for unification and why should they? The AfD is doing exceptionally great for a third party in state elections while Pegida's numbers of strollers have been dwindling close to obscurity for some time now.

However Führer Lutz hasn't abandoned his plans of working more closely with the far-right party. In an interview he told that he believes the only obstacle to a merger is current party head Frauke Petry, whom he says is putting religious freedom above the self-determination of children by accusing her of being "scared of Germany's past with Jewish people" because apparently she doesn't want to anger the Jewish community by calling for a ban on the circumcision on minors. He seems quite confident of another coup in the AfD because according to him AfD members with Pegida ties with which he keeps in contact allegedly constitute a large part of the party's membership and they want her gone as well. His certainty may arise from a secret plan (spilled by former Pegida Führerin co-leader Tatjana Festerling) that these specific AfD members Lutz was talking about are conspiring with Pegida to get rid of Petry.

Fudge fumble
Hellbent on defending the Judeo-Christian culture not only from actual refugees and migrants, "Pegida BW - Bodensee" an offshoot from Lake Constance in Baden Würtemberg thought that the candy market was a logical frontier in waging war for the occident when they whined on May 19, 2016 about the packaging of Kinder Chocolate, a popular candy bar sold in Germany made by Italian company Ferrero. "They don't stop at anything. Can you really buy them like that? Or is that a joke?" was the group's comment to a picture they posted on their Facebook feed of two Kinderschokolade packs, one which featured a black boy and the other a Middle-Eastern boy instead of the white Italian boy who usually graces the box art. One response to the post said "They're trying to pass this shit as normal, poor Germany.&#x1f62d;" Some even went as far as boycotting the product from now on.

Pegida's cheerleaders were apparently unaware of the fact that Ferrero printed new special edition boxes for the impending which featured child pictures of players from Germany's national team including of Jérôme Boateng (whose father is from Ghana and mother is actually German ) and İlkay Gündoğan (whose parents are from Turkey ), the very images of which they had a childish fit about. So basically they could've made their racism heard by "voting with their wallets" and only buying Kinder Chocolate with child pictures from the white players which were also available. The group was rightly and deservedly mocked for their ignorance on social media and Ferrero and the German Soccer Association came out in denouncing discrimination. The aftermath was that Ferrero enjoyed the free advertisement, Kinder Chocolate possibly selling even more than before the silly incident, once again everybody got a taste of what clowns Pegida is composed of and lastly the group hoisted the white flag quickly and deleted their online presence. And all of it was set in motion just by chocolate.

It should be noted however that Germans have strong feelings when it comes to what their Kinderschokolade boxes look like as back in late 2005, a decade before this incident, when the first German kid was changed to the newer one, some people were in immature uproar over the image. The difference though was that there was no xenophobia that time. It makes you wonder why that kid was spared from those attacks...

Downfall 2: Seven decades later and even more pathetic
Despite its quick rise to prominence and minor success in the beginning, Pegida has failed to live up to its incipient glory and finds itself increasingly incapable of profiting from radical Islamic terror attacks across the globe.

Not only is the movement lethargic in making a dent in politics where even the ideological brethren from AfD snub them but Pegida's leadership has found itself in petty internal quarrels most of the time. Lutz Bachmann has come out on top in each of these because let's face it, he is Pegida. Former companions like the ones who founded the splinter group DDfE have long been forgotten and become so irrelevant that even their leaders don't know if their irrelevant group still exists. Others who have remained in the group have received gag orders from the man when they haven't been willing to let the Führer guy "proof-read" their speeches.

Bachmann has as of yet weathered the storm multiple times but it remains to be seen for how long as his supporters start to get increasingly impatient as Lutz's plans to found a new party or initiating a boycott of the have failed to transpire.

The strollers' frustration is usually expressed by insulting their Führer leader on Facebook and entertaining a conspiracy theory that Bachmann was all along an informant from the (the German domestic security agency). They are now aware that Onkel Lutz maintains a totalitarian reign over the protest group and his lip service to direct democracy only ever applied to himself. The man himself is no stranger to insulting others as his posts are littered with accusations of his critics being "rats" or "filthy traitor pigs" and if childish name-calling becomes too time-consuming critical sympathizers are simply blocked from Pegida's Facebook profile.

Anyway Pegida's immediate future looks grim as Bachmann has been convicted in May 2016 to paying 9600 Euro for incitement of hatred and Pegida's war chest only amounts to a low five-digit Euro sum.

The corpse is still twitching
It mostly flew under the radar as barely anyone gives a damn about the group nowadays but Bachmann/Pegida have finally managed to found AfD Jr. AfD 2 Pegida-Partei a party called the FDDV (Freedomly Direct-Democratic People's Party, this needs to be this literal as otherwise the right-wing slant of the name would be lost in translation). Apparently Bachmann won't be the party have no executive role in the party and promised to still be "Lutz from the streets." He merely founded the party to circumvent a possible ban of Pegida and a potential subsequent freeze of its bank account. Never mind the fact that parties can just easily be banned by Germany law as any association. Bachmann expressed his intention to not compete but to cooperate with the AfD, which in turn has unsurprisingly turned down his proposal again.

From online to offline
While Pegida continues to fail in garnering any noteworthy turnouts to thwart its impending obscurity (for example an insignificant pitiful rise of few hundred strollers is considered newsworthy these days ), Bachmann still uses social media to sermon his message to his roughly 10,000 couch-dwelling supporters who got tired of strolling. These opinions range from his typical regurgitated statements about refugees to veiled threats of execution against certain people he deems unlikeable.

But even Pegida's social media future looks less than rosy as Facebook has been habitually removing a slew of accounts related to Pegida like Bachmann's personal profile, the official profile of Pegida and other accounts to where he could flee to with his drivel. Either that, or Lutz just goes through the hassle and recreates his old accounts. However he once failed to do so quickly and the official Pegida profile got hijacked by someone who the profile's remaining subscribers deem as a "leftist troll." Their assessment would be correct if posting news about the Middle-East would be considered trolling.

Bachmann blames the deletions on the "Stasi rope team" of Angela Merkel and Joachim Gauck, the two prominent East-Germans currently leading the country.

Regional and ideological offshoots
Similar movements inspired by Pegida were created in other parts of Germany. Contrary to the original movement, most of these do not even try to hide their sympathies for neo-nazism and are often supported and sponsored by Germany's better known far-right parties. Nearly all names of the offshoots share a naming convention by substituting the "Pe" part of Pegida either by using the first two letters of the city's name where the offshoot was created (which is the most common case) or something different alltogether. What they also share is the fact that they are (fortunately) far less successful than the original.
 * Legida: Inspired by Pegida supporters from Leipzig and is arguably the largest offshoot, even attracting one of Germany's most famous wingnuts, Jürgen Elsässer. Initially both Pegida and Legida were supportive of each other, but later the relationship deteriorated, as the clone movement wants to stick to its more radical demands compared to Pegida's 'moderate' ones which were suggested to them by Bachmann. The original movement even considered to sue its copy at one point. On top of Pegida's anti-immigration demands, Legida adds Anti-Americanism and other conspiracy theories.
 * Bogida: Founded in Bonn, originally endorsed by Pegida, now disowned by it for being too far-right.
 * Dügida: Founded in Düsseldorf, originally endorsed by Pegida, now disowned by it for being too far-right.
 * Kögida: Founded in Köln (Cologne), originally endorsed by Pegida, now disowned by it for being too far-right.
 * Bärgida: Founded in Berlin, (Bär, German for bear, most likely because of the )
 * Jewgida: A smaller subsection of Bärgida, consisting of Jewish Pegida supporters, who actually believe Nazism isn't the main source of anti-Semitism, but Islamism. How someone could possibly guess, most within this far-right movement are conflicted to have Jewish brothers in arms &mdash; some believe that Jewish support of a Pegida movement makes sense, but many, obviously confused in their anti-semitic beliefs, go as far to claim that Bärgida has been subverted by Jewish people or even been controlled by them from the start. Many declared it the end of Pegida or that the movement has lost support from them by accepting Jewish sympathizers. So much for defending the Judeo-Christian culture from Islamisation.
 * Hagida: Founded in Hannover, was started by a right-wing extremist.
 * Bagida: Founded in Munich, Bayern (Bavaria), which changed its name to Pegida München, is basically a cesspool of convicted Bavarian neo-nazis, including André Eminger, who is one of the accused in the.
 * Mügida: Founded in München (Munich), Bavaria, because apparently you simply can't have enough Pegida movements in one city. Supports Bagida and is not acknowledged by Pegida.
 * Saargida: Founded in Saarland, many of its members are high-ranking members from the Saarland section of the extreme-right NPD
 * MVgida: Founded in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, mostly controlled by the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern section of the NPD.
 * Sügida: Founded in Südthüringen (South Thuringia), initiated by the fringe extreme-right party Bündnis Zukunft Hildburghausen (Alliance Future Hildburghausen) which is close to the better known NPD.
 * Thügida: Founded in Thüringen (Thuringia), a Thuringia-wide expansion of Sügida. Who says Germans don't have a sense of humor?
 * Nügida: Founded in Nürnberg (Nuremberg), became infamous when neo-Nazis among its ranks planned to bomb a refugee center. However their plan was foiled by the police.
 * PegAda: Patriotic Europeans Against the Americanization of the Occident, swaps Islamophobia for Anti-Americanism with a healthy dose of Anti-Semitism. It's basically nearly the same movement except for the fact that its adherents regard US influence as a more iminent threat to the survival of the Occident than Islam.
 * DDfE: Direct Democracy for Europe, is a Pegida successor group splintered off the original organization and founded by six of Pegida's original founders. It aims to present itself as a more "moderate" version of Pegida, renouncing all of the crazy rhetoric, the more extreme demands and even the silly repetitive naming scheme. Stripped off Pegida's lunatic language and its batshit-insane goals, the target audience is completely indifferent to the new group, turning DDfE's rented "strolling" routes into the streets of a ghost town.
 * Festung Europa
 * (Fortress Europe) is the splinter group of Tatjana Festerling, long considered the number two of Pegida until Bachmann excommunicated her from future strolls. The term "Festung Europa" itself originates from national socialist times coined by a Nazi in 1943 which refers to the areas controlled by the Third Reich during World War II. For people who adamently claim to be unaffected by Nazism, these coincidences do seem to creep up pretty often.
 * This new movement aims to form an pan-European alliance between similar populist right-wing movements but in Germany Festerling hasn't come any further than waving self-drawn posters with only four like-minded fools in front of the which took place in Dresden, something for which Bachmann mocked his old friends turned foes. But unlike Pegida, Festung Europa does more than simply strolling on safe German streets and fighting petty flame wars on social media, as Festerling has already gone all the way to Bulgaria meeting up with Bulgarian, pro-Russian, anti-Semitic and anti-democratic nationalists where they all stroll along the Bulgarian-Turkish border while scouring for illegal immigrants, all in military uniforms and boasting about their experiences flavored with the ubiquitous Islamophobic tirades on Facebook.

What do Germans think about Pegida?
Someone not living in Germany might get the impression by reading this article that the country is a very scary place. However on special dates (like Pegida's anniversary), anti-Pegida protests manage to outnumber Pegida's "strolls" with up to 100,000 protesters showing up in cities across Germany.

In December 2014, opinion polling company TMS Emnid surveyed German people if they were sympathetic of Pegida's weekly "strolls". Results for region were:

and according to party affiliation:

However according to another poll done a few days later 85% of Germans wouldn't attend any of Pegida's "strolls."