Culture 2

Peoples are the carriers of cultures. Peoples differ in language, origin, historical experience, religion, values and consciousness. Peoples become particularly aware of their cultural uniqueness when and where it is endangered. The preservation of peoples serves to preserve culture. Societies alone do not develop culture, but at best civilizations whose supreme values are material. “Multicultural” societies are in fact cultureless societies. The diversity of peoples must be preserved.

NPD (1996): Parteiprogramm.

Party manifesto of the NPD. The extreme right-wing National Democratic Party of Germany was founded in 1964. In 2017, the Federal Constitutional Court ruled that they bore a resemblance to the NSDAP in language and programme.

The concept of culture is also used by right-wing extremists and charged with ethnic ideology (around blood and soil). The idea of purity and the segregation of cultures builds on the construct of race, as does that of the superiority or inferiority of individual cultures. In 2002, the NPD published a position paper on ethnopluralism, one of the New Right’s concepts. According to Kurt Lenk (2008), this is a mixture of social Darwinism (the struggle for existence) and racism, under the pretext of cultural self-determination. Ethnopluralism propagates the notion that each culture is self-contained and should not mix with others. This ideology has followers in Austria and France (the identitarian movement), as well as in Greece, the USA and South Africa.

DW.com (2019): Germany: Identitarian Movement Classified as Right-Wing Extremist.

1996