Paul Viktor Podolay, January 16, 2020, Organ Donation

Paul Viktor Podolay

Organ Donation

German Bundestag, January 16, 2020, Plenarprotokoll 19/140, p. 174147

[Paul Viktor Podolay is an Alternative für Deutschland Bundestag member from Bavaria. He is a cardiologist. The Widerspruchlösung is an implied consent law pertaining to organ donation introduced by Health Minister Jens Spahn (CDU) and recently rejected by the Bundestag.]

Right honorable Herr President. Right honorable ladies and gentlemen.

In this legislative period, we have already once decided on the theme of organ donation. The organ donation law took effect on April 1, 2019, with the aim of significantly increasing the number of organ donations. Yet it does not interest Herr Spahn whether the donation numbers were thereby increased, just as little as whether the introduction of a duty to vaccinate hinders the recurrence of measles in Germany. He will not wait for the results of this law and wants to introduce the Widersprichlösung [lit., contradiction solution; implied consent or opt-out]. The initiators thereby guarantee a very much higher number of organ donations.

It generally does not interest Herr Spahn that both of the major churches have considerable legal, ethical and spiritual doubts about this draft law from a ministry led by the CDU. Thus far has come the once Christian party. As for the SPD, I am not surprised.

Scientific studies cast doubt on a causal relation between the Widerspruchlösung and an increased number of organ receipts. They do support that the increased numbers in other countries arise primarily from an improved medical infrastructure and from changed criteria for declaration of death, as for example, in Spain. I urgently caution against such proceedings, since the state would thereby intrude deeply into the core areas of human existence and values which man retains throughout dying and death.

The decision concerning organ donation is therefore a very personal decision over one’s own death. One who is brain dead is at most a dying man, but not a corpse. What actually kills him is the taking of the organ. Yet a donation cannot be compelled for an act of high moral value. There exists no moral duty to posthumously donate one’s organs. On that basis, there can thus be no legal obligation.

Autonomy over one’s own body and personal data is becoming greatly proscribed in Germany. Without explicit consent, a doctor may not administer an injection, – that we have heard of today – no advertiser may send a newsletter without the subscription of the recipient. No means no, yes is actually yes – except generally for the organ donation, according to the CDU man Jens Spahn and the SPD man Karl Lauterbach. Then, suddenly, a silence becomes a yes – a legal innovation of our judicial system and which makes no exception even for a 16 year old child – a madness. It is an ethical abyss at which the state claims to be able to have at its disposal the bodies of its citizens, and these to quasi-expropriate.

The socialism does not stop even at the death bed. Who dies shall, if you please, still be useful to the collective. I personally experienced this socialistic manipulation when previously I was resettled from socialist Czechoslovakia in 1982 and my children and grandchildren remained separated. And now this socialistic thinking is again presented to me by a formerly conservative CDU. It is really too much! That re-confirms my correct decision to have left the CDU and entered the one middle-class [bürgerlichen], conservative and free party, the AfD.

Daniela Ludwig (CDU/CSU): You still do not know at all what it is about! That is so besides the point! Unbelievable!

Fundamental to a functioning organ donation system however is public trust in the transplant system. Only a transparent organization conforming to the constitution as demanded by the AfD can do that. No foundations or associations can do that. That is the right way.

The state-socialistic pressure does not lead to more donations. I presume the opposite and appeal to you: Give a clear refusal to the Widerspruchlösung. Let us instead in common increase the number of voluntary donations by means of better education campaigns. For me, it would be yet more important to reduce the number of necessary organ donations by means of more prevention. Let us not in the future make spare parts people, otherwise we will be threatened with a commercialization of the body. That is the absolutely false way in medicine.

Many thanks for your attention.

[Translated by Todd Martin]

Gottfried Curio, December 20, 2019, Migration

Gottfried Curio

Migration

German Bundestag, December 20, 2019, Plenarprotokoll 19/138, pp. 17315-17316

[Gottfried Curio is an Alternative für Deutschland Bundestag member from Berlin. He is a physicist and musician and is the AfD’s spokesman for immigration and integration policy in the Bundestag. Heiko Maas (SPD) is the German Foreign Minister]

Right honorable Herr President. Ladies and gentlemen.

For Germany, the Global Refugees Pact will chisel into stone the essentially flawed decisions of the year 2015. It wishes a fair, international distribution of refugees by means of increased, new settlements. It wishes a path of legal reception and it wishes a possibility of legal employment for “people who are underway.” The aim is to declare every internal refugee of inner Africa to be Europe’s problem.

Resettlement means the reception of persons from a state in which they already enjoy secure protection – a program of resettlement to Germany and Europe. Initially, the UNHCR [United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees] was thinking of just one and a half million persons. Nevertheless, when refugees are resettled in Germany, they remit money back home. What use is best made of that money there? Right; to migrate to Germany.

The result of the non-functional distribution principle, as tried for years in Europe, is that instead of distribution there is repeat reception, before all in Germany. That corresponds with Heiko Maas’s agreement to the progressive expansion of the reception programs in the coming years. In that regard, it should not be forgotten that Germany, among the Western, industrialized countries, already now, and by a wide margin, leads in the ranking of reception of refugees – at a cost of billions.

            Helin Evrim Sommer (Linke): Did you read the study?

Those concerned shall thus not seek shelter in some close-by, neighboring country or indeed remain as internal refugees –

            Helin Evrim Sommer (Linke): Fake News Department!

– but they shall be detached from their cultural society and distributed over the globe. A return at the end of the conflict will therefore be considerably more difficult. It is, however, not masses of men that shall be shifted around the world but, in the best case, aid money.

Such a resettlement is a profoundly inhumane, population-policy, plumbing job. It means the cultural and and linguistic alienation of those concerned. For the reception society, it means social disadvantages, dangers to domestic security and domestic peace, loss of identity, a psychological and material excess demand. It is an insanity of willful, unnecessary burdens for Germany – this rich Germany, where there is no housing, no teachers, no day-care, but debts and EU liabilities, decrepit bridges, streets, schools, and where our elders feed themselves at the Tafel.

            Karamba Diaby (SPD): In what country are you living?

(Members of the CDU/CSU and FDP turn their backs on the speaker. 

Members of the AfD take photos. Cries of “Herr President, photos are 

being made!” Unrest.)

Presently, over 50 percent of young men in Arab territories wish to emigrate – 53 million men. Many millions of people in the Syrian camps await their resettlement in Europe. With the addition of an expected doubling of the African population to 2.4 billion people by 2050, the most prominent origin of refugees is likely soon to be over-populated – and clearly with the right to be distributed around the world.

These persons shall have extensive rights in the host countries: Integration into the labor and training sectors, participation in education, health care, stipends, student visas. A citation:

In common, we can aim for the result by which the life…of the recipient 

communities will be fundamentally altered.

Truly.

That is already established by the over-burdening of the schools, police, courts, of the housing market and social system, and that is due only to the refugees who are already here.

And: The refugees and recipient society shall be mutually accommodating. Mark well: We ourselves shall accommodate. Integration is a two-way street which requires effort from all parties – and the readiness of the recipient community to conform to the requirements of a diverse population.  

            René Röspel (SPD): What has gone so wrong in your life that you make such 

            speeches?

            Helin Evrim Sommer (Linke): What have you been smoking?

A truly perverse understanding of integration which actually means a leveling and non-recognition of one’s own culture. This pact manifests a deep disregard of democracy – not surprising, considering “no nations, no borders.” Autonomous states stand in the way, as do societies true to their traditions which resist this pact’s inherent subordination of one’s own culture.

(Members of the CDU/CSU and FDP turn their backs on the speaker. 

Member Beatrix von Storch, AfD, takes photos on the floor…Unrest.)

Ladies and gentlemen, I must say to you: We really have had enough of this endlessly swaggering, insatiable, raucous, Big Spender complex of a German feeling [Gemüter] which, on its imaginary little hill of moral superiority, wishes to manage a world government [Weltenlenkung] of permanent rescue using other people’s money, instead of concerning itself with the real problems of one’s own country. We will concern ourselves with the problems of our German citizens, tax payers, automobile drivers, renters, students and day care providers, mothers and pensioners. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the right mindset. We will concern ourselves, and indeed do so as the government, and soon. Germany deserves it.

[Translated by Todd Martin]

Peter Felser, December 20, 2019, Artificial Intelligence

Peter Felser

Artificial Intelligence

German Bundestag, December 20, 2019, Plenarprotokoll 19/138, p. 17240

[Peter Felser is an Alternative für Deutschland Bundestag member from Bavaria. He is an IT businessman.]

Right honorable Herr President. Dear colleagues.

I wish to use the present opportunity to address some self-evident postulates of KI [artificial intelligence] use, for which neither strategy papers nor experts discussions are needed and which will make clear where the problem lies, in Germany and in Europe.

First: Society. There is not one European firm among the top ten hardware manufacturers. Among the top ten internet firms, there is found not one from Europe. And among the top ten software makers is only one European firm: The well known firm of SAP in Walldorf. Our future mobile telephone indeed will be Chinese. That is the situation. Dear government, how will you then retain control of our citizens data, concerning which we are speaking of today?

Generalleutnant Leinhos, Inspector of the Bundeswehr command for cyber and information space, has often warned of the digital defense situation and the consequences for our society. Of the particularly influential application areas of artificial intelligence – of which we have already heard today – data security is the most important basic principle; for example, for health care, or for de-bureaucratization or for slimming down the officialdom. For that, we require promptly dedicated European data rooms.

Second: Citizens’ rights. In regards the possible processing of data by the administration, it must be guaranteed that neither officials nor firms be able to benefit from the data collected to the  disadvantage of the citizen. We want no Chinese or American situation, dear colleagues. A policy must not be allowed which so optimizes insurance contributions, credit terms or access to medical care that individuals or entire groups are systematically disadvantaged. For that, our democracy requires control bodies, citizen participation at all levels and a commitment to transparency.

Third: Education. Solid, fundamental KI research and a widely presented application training are prerequisites of a socially useful and, before all, socially acceptable use of artificial intelligence. We need a central KI campus and a research center for new technologies.

Here, also, the government has shown itself to be a master of advertising. With their strategy, they want to hire 100 KI professors. So far, they have added two. Dear colleagues, two KI professors! According to the Fraunhofer Institute, Germany lacks 85,000 with academic credentials in the areas of data analysis and big data. With hand-wringing will be sought more than 10,000 IT experts with knowledge of advanced analytics and data science. How in the next years will these deficits be filled? Improve, finally, the research conditions. When there is a lack of money, terminate the gender professors! That is still perhaps possible…It must happen, ja.

Fourth: KMU [small and mid-sized businesses], Mittelstand. Should we grant unrestricted access to European markets of the future to the great data gatherers like Google, Amazon or Tencent, then there will remain of the German Mittelstand only a vague memory. Data availability is the all-limiting factor; you know that. For the small and mid-sized firms, it is much more difficult to train their own algorithms when the training data is potentially to be stored by Google, AWS, or Citrix. It is a platitude of the digital business: He always profits who has the greater amount of data at his disposal. I very much doubt that he will later become the carpenter from Kempton or the machine builder from Göppingen.

The policy must create the framework for a European open data solution. I want our children to be able to buy a hand-carved Christmas manger from the Erzgebirge and not just the artificial product of a 3-D printer in Shenzhen. I wish you Merry Christmas.

Thank you kindly.

[Translated by Todd Martin]