By Gunnar Schupelius
The slogan of expropriation is a dangerous populism that attacks our successful economy and also the rule of law, says Gunnar Schupelius.
At the beginning of October, the American entrepreneur Elon Musk sharply criticized German migration policy on the short message service X (formerly Twitter) and revealed his sympathy for the AfD.
A storm of indignation then swept through the short message service X.
The federal chairman of the Green Youth, Timon Dzienus, then called Musk “a danger to democracy” and called for his “expropriation”. And Jan-Philipp Albrecht from the board of the Heinrich Böll Foundation also called for “official intervention” against Musk.
The Green Youth is the youth organization of the Greens. The Böll Foundation is also part of the Green Party. So what Dzenius and Albrecht say is important because the Greens are involved in the government and provide the vice chancellor.
The call for expropriation went unchallenged and there was no protest from the Green Party.
This is astonishing, because what Timon Dzienus is demanding is unconstitutional. Nobody may be dispossessed because of their views. Anyone who demands it anyway is an extremist. The Green Youth should now actually be monitored by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, as should the “Junge Alternative”, the youth organization of the AfD.
The fact that Timon Dzienus spoke so easily about expropriation is alarming, but no longer astonishing. The “Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co.” initiative made it socially acceptable with its successful referendum. The left-wing groups behind this initiative made a more factual connection and claimed that rents would fall if home ownership was nationalized. Dzienus, on the other hand, simply wanted to use expropriation to punish a different opinion, so he went one step further.
Expropriation is a word that sends shivers down the spines of all history-conscious people. When the Bolsheviks came to power in Russia in 1917, the mass expropriation of the peasants began. These policies led to hunger, misery and mass murder. Nevertheless, in the 1950s the SED repeated the policy of “land reform”, which once again led to impoverishment and the GDR collapsed due to the planned economy. Numerous other countries followed this path, most recently Venezuela.
The Marxist principle always prevailed that private property was the cause of all evil and that the elimination of private property would bring about paradise on earth (communism). The opposite is true. Responsibly managed private property makes citizens free and independent of the state and ensures prosperity. The social market economy of the Federal Republic of Germany has proven this over the last 74 years. Rents also fall when supply on the housing market increases, as was the case in Berlin until 2010.
The slogan of expropriation is a dangerous populism that attacks our successful economy and also the rule of law.
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