Neo-Nazis and ‘Defensive Democracy’ - Miller-McCune
The weird revelations in Germany this month about a small group of neo-Nazi terrorists who killed at least nine foreigners and survived “underground” for 13 years by knocking over the occasional bank have, understandably, embarrassed a number of law enforcement officials.
It’s even more confusing to Germans that the group managed to kill a policewoman in 2007 and plot against a very specific list of 88 politicians and public figures without coming to the attention of “Verfassungsschutz” authorities — Germany’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution, or BfV.
The BfV is a peculiar domestic-intelligence institution set up for West Germany under the Allies after World War II. It’s similar to the FBI, but it focuses on threats to “democracy”: the BfV existed from the start to defend the fledgling state from Nazi holdouts and communist spies. It was a Cold War creation, but it found plenty of extracurricular work: after 2001 it focused on Islamic terrorism, and for decades it’s kept an eye on Scientologists, who are suspected of running an authoritarian cult with anti-government tendencies.
Michael Scott Moore complements his standing feature in Miller-McCune magazine with frequent posts on the policy challenges and solutions popping up on the other side of the pond.sounds un-American, and until George W. Bush established the Office of Homeland Security it was hard to find a U.S. agency with a similar explicit mandate. But the BfV embodies the principle of “defensive democracy,” which says that some non-democratic methods should be used to keep a democratic state intact. The idea has caught on in America since 2001, without much formal discussion.