Protesting German farmers are far-right conspiracy theorists aligned with Russia, according to German politicians and the media. Farmers are active on the private messaging app, Telegram, where “far right” voices dominate, according to a new report from Correctiv, a news and fact-checking site. The farmers are spreading “Russian propaganda” and “disinformation about Covid,” according to the article.
But the farmers aren’t far-right. They are protesting cuts to the agricultural vehicle and diesel subsidies upon which many farmers rely for their economic survival. The average German farmer earns just 33,500 Euros per year, one quarter less than the average German. Any additional costs could mean bankruptcy, especially for smaller family-owned farms.
It’s true that some of the concerns of the German farmers are unrelated to the subsidy cuts. Many farmers are angry about Covid restrictions, the destruction of the Nord Stream II pipeline, which cut off cheap natural gas to Germany, and the closure of nuclear plants. And the mainstream media note that a neo-Nazi group endorsed the farmer protests. “Stop the traitors of the people!” the group wrote on its website.
But the German Farmers Association explicitly rejected the group’s support, and many German farmers waved banners saying that “agriculture is colorful, not brown,” a reference to the brown shirts of the Storm Division of Hitler’s Nazi party.
Much else in the Correctiv article is false or misleading. The article does not specify what “Covid disinformation” the farmers spread. Nor does it offer any evidence of ties between the farmers and the Russian government, only that “some X accounts” that support the farmers wrote posts that “coincided with the methods of a pro-Russian propaganda network.”
Correctiv doesn’t mention that the worst perpetrators of Covid disinformation were the German government and news media, which claimed that those vaccinated would not get sick or transmit the disease. And the institutions with the clearest ties to the Russian government were the parties of Germany’s ruling coalition, which wholeheartedly embraced the building of the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines.
Today, concerns about energy prices and the government’s overreaction to Covid are broadly held among the German people and hardly “far right.” The loss of cheap nuclear power and natural gas due to the war in Ukraine, and the destruction of the pipelines, have resulted in the loss of major energy-intensive industries.
https://public.substack.com/p/soros-facebook-and-omidyar-money