The neo-Nazi meme that became a viral hit
The pop song “L'amour toujours” has been repurposed as a call for ethnic cleansing. What explains its popularity?
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Wherever you look in Germany these days, fashionable young people are calling for ethnic cleansing.
On social media, the catchy hook of a dance song has been repurposed as a demand for a racially pure Germany.
For months now, Italian DJ Gigi D'Agostino’s song “L'amour toujours” has been trending on social media. When the hook arrives, those in the know chant: “Germany for the Germans, foreigners out.”
Occasionally, video popped up of drunk youths in rural Saxony chanting the words in the early hours in a beer tent. Largely though, this was happening at a level that was imperceptible to anyone over the age of 30.
Then, something happened that made it clear that this meme was way more popular than anyone realised.
On the luxury island of Sylt on the Whitsum holiday weekend, a smartly-dressed young woman shot a video of her and her friends bellowing out the lyrics in the middle of a packed beer garden.
This was as far from a poor east German village as you could get.
The bar charges a €150 entrance fee. The crème de la crème of German society were swaying away to a neo-Nazi slogan and no one around them seemed to care. At the end of the video, a man with a polo short draped over his shoulders even gave a Hitler salute.
The backlash was vicious. The tabloid press named and shamed the ‘Sylt snobs’, who were soon fired by their employers.
Asked for his reaction, Olaf Scholz described the chants as “disgusting and unacceptable” and said: “we need to focus on ensuring that this behaviour doesn’t spread.”
But spread it has.
Since the Sylt video went viral, the racist version of “L'amour toujours” has bubbled up all over the place.
One of the country’s most expensive private schools is investigating reports that pupils sang it at a school party. It has been heard at beer festivals and nightclubs; most recently it was sung by security guards at a refugee centre.
While this call for ethnic cleansing is spreading across the country’s dance floors, a very different atmosphere surrounds another call for mass deportations.
On university campuses from Berlin to Frankfurt, angry young students are occupying lecture halls under the banner of “decolonising Palestine.”
Mimicking their peers in the US, these righteous young activists have gone further than the usual demands of sanctions and boycotts against Israel that crop up every time war breaks out in the Middle East.
This time, the demands are noticeably more extreme.
One of the activists' favourite slogans is that “decolonisation is not a metaphor” i.e. they literally mean that the Jewish “colonisers” should be removed from the region of Palestine.
Thus, when Israeli writer Meron Mendel recently visited one such “pro-Palestine” sit-in at Frankfurt University, he was met by activists who told him that they advocated "resettling" seven million Jews “back to Europe.”
Some of the reaction to both of these phenomena has been to shrug them off, or even defend them.
Right-wing influencers on social media have tried to portray the “L'amour toujours” meme as a subversive joke that millenials and boomers don’t get. To which the words of Mark Twain spring to mind: German humour is no laughing matter.
Meanwhile, hundreds of professors at university staff have signed a letter in solidarity with the protesting students. Even if we don’t agree with their demands, we support their right to make them, the authors argue.
But should we just put this down to boisterous, drunk youths, or overly zealous students? Are these extreme sentiments harmless because they are being voiced on a dance floor or at a “peace protest?”
Hardly.
These things aren’t taking place in a vacuum.
The “L'amour toujours” meme has arisen at a time when the far-Right AfD are being ever more open about their desire to “remigrate” millions of “foreigners” (although their definition of foreigner also includes people with German citizenship.)
Mass deportation was an idea that was strictly taboo in Germany up until recently has gone mainstream - and “funny” memes like singing a Nazi slogan over a pop song are a way of making it seem harmless.
Similarly, despite the veneer of intellectual respectability that terms like “decolonialisation” are supposed to impart, the central aim is indistinguishable from the ultimate goal of Hamas of driving the Jews out of Palestine.
Hamas have been watching the student protests and adapting their strategy accordingly. At a meeting with other terror leaders in Tehran last week, terror leader Ismail Haniyeh decided to raise his negotiating demands due to the pressure student protests are putting western leaders under.
Searches for an answer to why young people appear to be embracing such radical solutions to what they believe to be social ills inevitably turn to social media, or TikTok to be exact.
The L'amour toujours meme first spread through the Chinese-owned social media site, which analyses your behaviour based on how long you watch videos for. In other words, TikTok is an echo chamber on speed.
Despite their reputation as a party of “old white men”, the AfD recognised the potential for tapping into the youth vote on TikTok long before their rivals did.
Maximilian Krah, the AfD’s leader in the EU parliament, has used TikTok to give his followers an “alternative view” of German history. “Our forefathers weren't criminals, we have every right to be proud of them,” he told viewers in one recent video.
Information on the Gaza war on TikTok is similarly dubious.
According to a recent report by the Bildungsstätte Anne Frank, the app feeds its users with a steady stream of conspiracy theories about October 7th being an inside job and Israel harvesting the organs of Palestinian babies.
In a test of what happens when you search TikTok for “Hamas deutsch”, the researchers at the institute were shown a video claiming that Hamas is not a terror organisation followed by one asserting that the group is a creation of Mossad.
The immediate reaction of the German state to this new trend has been to clamp down on it with the force of the law.
Prosecutors have opened an investigation into the participants in the Sylt video over hate speech and the banned Nazi symbols. On campus, university management has been quick to call in the police to clear out the camps.
Almost inevitably though these actions have led to accusations of state repression.
For the far-right the reaction to Sylt is proof that the state is more interested in pursuing a handful of errant drunks than the real issue of “migrant crime.”
On campus, students are convinced that they are being silenced by a ruling elite that is in hock to the Zionist overlords.
There is not really any way you can win.
The question therefore remains, is this all youthful silliness that older generations are panicking about? Or, are the generation who are coming of age now - the first to have no living connection to the Second World War - one who will once again be taken in by deceptively simple ideas?
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I dont think young people protesting a genocide and young people supporting ethnic cleansing are morally or politically equivalent. I hope that that is not being implied here. Indeed to ask for justice in Palestine is to resist the will to ethnic cleansing that some members of Israel’s government are clearly trying to achieve.
Genocide is a category and crime under international law and the ICC, which is the legitimate judiciary authority in deciding such cases, has ruled that there is a good probability that Israel is committing genocide, a judgment most competent neutral international lawyers agree with. In the end it doesnt matter what you or I think about whether this particular horrendous slaughter of innocents constitutes genocide, it matters what the legitimate authorities decide and it seems as if they will decide that it does. Which makes the now commonplace use of word valid in my view.