<nettime> the sun barely rises.

[Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>]

The steady drip of horrors that ran through 2016 just doesn't stop.

After the Berlin terror attack, even if many of the details are
still unclear, the rhetoric in Germany is already shifting. While
the far right (afd) predictably calls the victims "the Merkel dead",
even within her own party, an influential interior minister speaks
of "being at war" and the CSU is making a change in refugees/border
policy a condition for the continuation of the cooperation with
Merkel's CDU (which was seen as unbreakable for all of Germany's
post-war history). Merkels risks to become the Hillary Clinton of
Germany, the presentative of a status quo that is widely despised
(Thought in Germany, at least the popular majority actually wins the
elections).

In the US, Trump links the shooting at the Swiss mosque (likely to be an
act of private revenge, rather than an act of political terrorism), to
the shooting of the Russian Ambassador (an act against a representative
of a country which conducts a massive war operation in the neighboring
country) to the Berlin killings (which fit the ISIS template most closely).

While the three cases are unlikely to be directly related, Trump's tweet
doesn't indicate ignorance, but a political program that is entirely
consistent with everything he said so far: clash of civilization with a
hefty dose of white nationalism.

(In general, Trump's counterfactual statements, it seems to me, should
not be read as lies or stupidity (though they are both) but as how he
wants to the world to be, aka the closest we get to his political program).

On the day of the fall of Aleppo, the heads of the Austrian far right,
which had just narrowly lost the presidential election, went to Moscow
to sign a "cooperation agreement" which is probably how they are going
to finance the next election campaigns. In the same Facebook post where
Strache (the far right leader) announced this trip, he mentioned also in
passing, that he had met with Mike Flynn, the designated National
Security Advisor.

In the mean time, Turkey, Iran and Russia congratulate themselves for
bringing peace to Syria.

It's the 21st of December. The darkest day in the year.


-- 

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