The Leadership of The European Pirate Party Casts Doubt on Pirates’ Right to Criticize Party Officials
The Pirate Movement is ostensibly a movement that stands for free speech, free criticism, free scrutiny, transparency and accountability of those in power, including party officials. Israel’s genocidal campaign against Gaza, however, laid bare the hypocrisy of the hegemonic powers within our movement. We witnessed some of the highest-ranking officers of the German Pirate Party (Piratenpartei Deutschland – PPDE) adopt and amplify far-right racist and bigoted rhetoric and conspiracy theories against the Palestinians and Muslims in general, as well as falsehoods against UNRWA and the International Criminal Court.
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In 2023, the 11th Congress of The Pirate Party of Greece approved a major update of its Statutes, taking significant steps towards clarifying our party’s ideological identity and giving it a clearly progressive direction. Among the amendments approved by the party’s Congress was the removal, from both the Statutes and the Founding Declaration, of the historically and politically illiterate reference that we do not place ourselves on the “obsolete” Left-Center-Right axis. This reference is a maxim that has hobbled the entire Pirate Movement since its beginning, as it still enjoys a fatwa-like status for most Pirate parties. Most Pirate parties’ leaderships still believe it gives them some sort of “flexibility” regarding the policies (especially fiscal ones) they will endorse in each political context, citing their desire to have a “context-dependent appeal”.
Even before the 2024 European Elections, which were an unmitigated disaster for the Pirate Movement, reading the Flaschenpost, the official news apparatus of the German Pirate Party’s (Piratenpartei Deutschland – PPDE)’s Politburo, confirmed what we suspected from reading the X (formerly Twitter) posts of several prominent members and officials of the party. What primarily gave the game away was a collection of “analyses”, written by the party’s intelligentsia and several like-minded scribes, full of context-free, laced with islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism, justifications for the genocide against Palestinians and the theft of their lands committed by the Israeli Apartheid. The arguments put forward were grotesque in their similarity to those employed by collaborationist newspapers in countries occupied by Germany in WW2 in order to justify the wholesale massacres of entire villages in “retaliation” against resistance militias.
In our previous statement[1], we spoke of a shameful incident during a meeting of the Board of the Pirate Parties International (PPI) that was staged by two delegates of the German Pirate Party (Piratenpartei Deutschland – PPDE) and the Russian Pirate Party’s delegate (PPRU) against then PPI chairwoman Ms. Florie Marie.
Back then, we wrote that we believe this dirty war against Ms. Marie could not have been waged without the PPDE’s leadership knowing about it. The fact that the two PPDE “mutineers” remained in the party and, when the “undesirable” Ms. Marie resigned from the PPI and left the Pirate Movement altogether, they were upgraded in the next PPI Board is solid proof. They were rewarded for their little “putsch”: Sebastian “Bastian” Krone became PPI treasurer, while Utz became a regular member[2]. We also wrote that this is highly suspect and stand by our position. Unfortunately, it seems that behaviors like these are not a new phenomenon.
