Germany’s current political elites are even more submissive toward the US than those of West Germany during the Cold War. Which is ironic as the Cold War has long been over, and, at least after World War Two, America has never treated Germans as atrociously and with such open contempt as now. But clearly, bad old habits are dying hard in Berlin.

In fact, they are mushrooming as if there’s no tomorrow. It’s no surprise then that Germany’s mainstream political culture is also returning to smearing the domestic opposition as in cahoots with – drumroll and very scary music – Moscow!

To be fair, in a way, this is the perfect fusion of something traditionally German and some dutiful copying of the US: the nasty old trick of deriding the opposition as “vaterlandslose Gesellen” (in essence a fifth column) rooted in the mean, militarist politics of semi-authoritarian Wilhelmine Germany combined now with an imitation of slightly dated American-style Russia Rage. The “long-way-West” cult, still so beloved by dogmatic German Atlanticists, meets pre-World War One nationalist info-warring.

The victims of this dirty trick come from both the new left and the new right. When the new left BSW party, then under Sahra Wagenknecht and Amira Mohamed Ali (now under Ali and Fabio De Masi) was surging last year, it was the main target of guilt-by-association-with-Russia propaganda.

German de facto state TV, which has become extremely conformist, misleading, and – quite simply – mean, accused Wagenknecht of being “in sync with Russian propaganda.” The former minister of the economy, the catastrophic yet blissfully complacent Robert Habeck – now on a sinecure at Berkley University – even went so far as to call the BSW “totally bought” by Moscow. The party sued him, and he lost, rightly so. Wagenknecht was vindicated by the failure of Habecks’s “lies” and “fake news” to withstand legal scrutiny.

By now, however, the BSW has been excluded from the German parliament by an extremely malodorous combination of electoral miscounts and what looks like a concerted attempt by the establishment parties to delay addressing this massive failure of what remains of democracy in Germany. In the face of these moves from, as we have learned to say, the 'playbook' of electoral manipulation now apparently considered normal in the EU, the BSW has not given up and may very well still prevail. In that case, it is very likely to enter parliament, the current governing coalition of indistinguishable Centrists (CDU and SPD) fall, and German politics will be shaken up mightily – as it should be.

But for now, the German ersatz version of the American Russia-Russia-Russia........

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