Heni Ozi Cukier

The Weimar Republic was struggling with escalating polarization and violence became common.

Assassinations of key political figures, such as the finance minister in 1921 and the foreign minister in 1922, they demonstrated this.

Soon, at that time, all political factions from the right, the center, and the left, they had their own militias.

And obviously, this brought instability.

And we know the rise of authoritarianism and World War II.

What do we have today?

Very interesting and scary in some ways.

January 6, 2021, the attack on US Capitol.

Some Trump supporters contested the result of the election.

That is a clear example where

Polarization became violent.

More recently, several assassination attempts against President Trump.

Polarization and violence in the United States is coming from all sides.

But this is not only the US.

Let's look at Germany.

There is a deep surge or a big surge in political violence in Germany.

Over the last five years,

more than 10,000 attacks on politicians.

While the far-right supporters of AFD have committed a lot of attacks against other politicians, the politicians from AFD themselves, they are frequent targets for this political violence.

As you can see, the signs are really big.