4 Mar 2020
The Saltpork & Rind ran an op-ed today from Mat Savelli, who is the undergraduate Chair at the Department of Health, Aging, and Society at McMaster University. It is not clear what particular expertise he has behind the opinions he expressed. He decided to condemn a political party in Germany, called the Alternative for Germany (AfD), for a mass murder conducted in that country last month. The usual progressive logic of Guilt by Accusation is employed.
Progressives rarely miss an opportunity to politicize a tragedy, and Mat Savelli did not disappoint. The tragedy in question is the mass shooting in Germany, in which Tobias Rathjen shot and killed nine people and wounding several others. Savelli’s theory implicates the “far-right” (is there any other kind?) Alternative for Germany party (AfD) in the murders. (How a mad-man like Rathjen got a firearm in heavily gun-controlled Germany is another question.)
After a discursive admission that Rathjen was likely a clinical case of schizophrenia, Savelli implicates the AfD in the murders by drawing the in the “context” in which Rathjen’s schizophrenia expressed itself. AfD was started in reaction against Angela Merkel’s admission of over a million Syrian refugees into Germany, and one of its central platform planks is opposition to immigration. Rathjen chose to shoot-up “shisha” bars because that is where he expected to find “foreigners.” Since the AfD is opposed to immigration, ergo, AfD is implicated in Rathjen’s mad killings. It’s the context, you understand.
“Would Rathjen have chosen to murder…without the rise of AfD and its propaganda of anti-immigrant policies and discourse? It’s possible, but it’s also extraordinarily unlikely,” says Savelli.
Funny, but nobody blamed Bernie Sanders when a “Bernie Bro” shot and nearly killed Republican Representative Steve Scalise.
Smearing political opponents for remote and unrelated tragedies is an old tactic of the Left. That’s the game played by Mat Savelli.
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