On the past –Damien McGuinness and Paul Kirby on BBC:

‘The deputy premier of the German state of Bavaria, Hubert Aiwanger, has been asked to explain his role in a schoolboy anti-Semitic pamphlet.
The populist conservative leader denies writing the Auschwitz pamphlet which mocked the Holocaust but he has admitted having it 35 years ago.
Conservative Premier Markus Söder has asked Mr Aiwanger to reply to 25 questions on the controversy.
Bavaria holds key elections on 8 October.
Mr Söder met the leader of his coalition partner, Freie Wähler (Free Voters), on Tuesday and called for full transparency.
He said there was "no place for anti-Semitism in the Bavarian government".
The state parliament has demanded an emergency statement.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has called for clarification too, after the newspaper revelations of Mr Aiwanger's schoolboy activities emerged at the weekend in the left-leaning Süddeutsche Zeitung.
The general secretary of the chancellor's centre-left party, Kevin Kühnert, made clear when Germans talked about anti-Semitism it required "utmost vigilance and nobody should have a tactical relationship with it".
When the story of the leaflet first broke, Mr Aiwanger's initial reaction was to claim it was just a politically motivated media campaign against him. Then he simply denied writing it, saying it was someone else.
The typewritten pamphlet talked of a fictitious competition to find "who is the biggest traitor to the Fatherland", with a first prize of a "free flight through the chimney in Auschwitz".
The Auschwitz extermination camp was at the heart of the Nazi genocide of six million Jews in World War Two. Of 1.1 million people murdered at Auschwitz, about a million were Jews.
The deputy premier later admitted that "one or several" copies of the leaflet were in his schoolbag in Mallersdorf-Pfaffenberg in Lower Bavaria when he was a teenager in the late 1980s. He appeared unable to remember if he had distributed the anti-Semitic material himself but said he found the contents "disgusting and inhumane".’

Read the article here.

In American politics this would not have caused much of a stir.

Robert F. Kennedy – is het still a presidential candidate? – claimed that Covid was designed to spare the lives of Ashkenazi Jews. See here.

There is more (and less) subtlety to be found in the pamphlet that Aiwinger was carrying in his pocket, a German historian called this pamphlet both a ‘schoolboy joke’ and clearly a neo-Nazi pamphlet because of the ‘the mockery of all victims of National Socialism.’ See here.

Mockery has become and always was part of the game of politics.

But mockery and genocide, yes that’s where the masses later can declare: ‘We have been seduced by a false Messiah, pour us.’