Ungainly Acronyms

The thing we’re trying to do, to prevent another 9/11, keeps getting rebranded.

Stylistically, the low point came with the designation “GWOT”, which stands for “Global War on Terror”.

Those who prosecute this mission, normally pronounce it “GEE-watt” (though the acronym has largely fallen out of use);  but I persist in pronouncing it as a monosyllable,  the gwot -- rhyming with blot, not, sot, rot, snot, and other words less respectable still.   “How goes the gwot?” I greet those thus engaged.

An even uglier acronym (if such be possible), likewise self-important in origin, was used, satirically, against Hitler:

Before it was over, his commanding generals  were referring to him bitterly as Gröfaz:  a name ugly enough to have served some monster of mythology, some twisted kobold or goblin  embodying and spreading evil.  In actuality, it was a contraction of the title that General Keitel bestowed upon the Führer  in June 1940:  Größter Feldherr aller Zeiten.

-- Gordon Craig, Germany 1866-1945 (1978), p. 714

As to the pronunciation of this ungainly confection:  it is best described as something between a grunt and a groan, followed by an escape of acrid gas.
(For a similar exercise in non-IPA transcription, cf. the case of "oahspe".)
[More empirically:  GRU-fahts, with "U" as in "put".]

For a nice rhyming poem about this unusual creature, click here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/08/gare-le-grofaz.html

*

Für psychologisch tiefgreifende Krimis,

in pikanter amerikanischer Mundart,

und christlich gesinnt,

klicken Sie bitte hier:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

*

The US military-diplomatic world  abounds in acronyms pronounced phonetically as words.   Another ungainly one, designating (so to speak) the “Gröfaz” of the United States, is POTUS;  he rules over CONUS.   -- In the opening episode of “West Wing”, a young fellow gets an emergency call on his cell, explaining to his girlfriend that it is from “Potus”.  She said the fellow should learn not to call at ungodly hours, and moreover “Potus” is a strange name.  “It means ‘President Of The United States’”, he explains.

Note:  The pronunciations of such things is normally alphabetic-phonetic, rather than etymological.  Thus CONUS (meaning, ‘the Lower 48’) is pronounced CONE-uss, with long “o”, even though it is from  CONtinental United States, with short.

~

Und nun:  HoGeSa.

Further, re Cambodia in May 1970:

Formation d'un gouvernement en exil, le GRUNK (gouvernement  royal d'union nationale du Kampuchéa).

-- Mémoires du XXe Siècle , vol. 8, 1970-1979 (Bordas, 1989), p. 56

.

Non-Acronym of the day: “Jason”

The saga of Jason and the Argonauts  has spun off some delightful dubbings.  One, the “Argo” escapade, we discussed here.   Another was the secret elite group of physicists called Jason.  

An intrepid historian of science  ran down the true etymology, after an initial (indeed, “initials”) red-herring:

I asked my husband’s physicist-colleagues  “What’s Jason?” and collected the following:  Jason is an acronym fof July-August-September-October-November, the months this group of academic physicists   met secretly to solve the problems  the Defense Department couldn’t.

-- Ann Finkbeiner, The Jasons (2006), p.  xii

That suggestion quickly dissolves  in the universal solvent of Common Sense:

These stories I didn’t believe.  An acronym for months sounded silly.  [But more tellingly:] Academics couldn’t meet that long during the school year because they had institutional responsibilities.

-- id.

Another false-lead was the assertion that Jason was named after one of the members’ family dog.   Not.  The true story she tells on pages 39-40:  the wife of one of the members chose it, after the Greek myth -- most appropriate for a group that was going after the scientific equivalent of Golden Fleece.

The author adds some linguistic details:

“Jason is both a collective and a proper noun:  if you belong to Jason, you are a Jason.” (p. xiv)

Jason is usually capitalized [completely],  JASON, as though it were an acronym.  I have no idea why -- maybe because, written like a name [with only the first letter a capital], it might be taken to be a personal name.  I shall not capitalize it.

(p. xxviii)

Another reason it was initially written all-caps is that DoD and the IC often so style cover-terms.

~

The choice of Jason as a group name  is typical of the playfulness of physicists.  When DoD does the dubbing, the result is likely to be humdrum. As,

The task force was called the Defense Communications Planning Group, or DCPG, a name chosen for its meaninglessness.  (p. 77)

When a secret project does get a lexical designation, this may be chosen precisely to throw off anyone to whom the term might get leaked.  Thus, the Manhattan Project:  so named because it had nothing to do with Manhatten, and indeed was centered at locations far from any city.  One of the things they worked on (my Dad did, for one) was called “Tube-alloy”, a nicely misleading alias for uranium (which is an element, not an alloy).

Homographs of the Day: ZOG/zog

Actually, these are not quite homographs, since one is capitalized and the other isn’t.  They are thus, rather, what I dubbed “Confusables” when introducing the feature of Confusables ® (paronym-disambiguation) into the Franklin spellers and dictionary products.    Anyhow, you probably haven’t heard of either;  but this one is a doozy.

(1)  The better-known of these is written in all capitals:  ZOG,  in line with its origin as an acronym.  It stands for “Zionist occupation government”;  and no, it does not refer primarily to the West Bank.   As to what-all it does refer to, you can easily find by googling (just be sure that you have your anti-malware software set on HIGH).

What is interesting about this is that it is among the very few terms -- and virtually unique among monosyllables -- whose mere utterance brands the utterer as a very particular political breed of beast.

These are harder to find than you’d think.  The only one that springs immediately to mind is “Social-Fascist” (and its German equivalent), whose use invariably revealed the user as a Third Period Stalinist (or at least someone parotting their patter).  The use of the term liberal as a sneer-word (as opposed to simply denouncing concretely various policies of liberals) does tell the listener quite a bit about the user, but of course the word is used objectively as well.  The term reactionary is almost always a sneer-word for conservative (thus revealing much about the speaker), but it can also be used, cavalierly, as a defiant synonym of laudator temporis acti (indeed, the historian John Lukacs self-applies the label).  The concept Antichrist makes sense only in a Christian context, but you can easily discuss the term (say, in comparing it to that of the Dajjâl ) without subscribing to any of the tenets of that belief-system.  ZOG is different.

It’s not just that most people don’t believe a “Zionist occupation government” (in the intended sense) exists.  After all, people use terms like Santa Claus, unicorn, phlogiston, Higgs boson, and will even predicate positive qualities of them (“Santa wears a red suit”, “the Higgs boson is necessary for the consistency of the Standard Theory”) without thereby making any existential commitment (Quine’s term) at all.

(2)  As a (somewhat nonce) term in physics, it is written in lower-case.  Here is the first (and only) passage in which I encountered the term:

Massive particles of spin 1 can be described as having three ingredients:  a left-handed zig (helicity 1), a right-handed zag (helicity -1), and a non-spinning ‘zog’ (helicity 0).

-- Roger Penrose,  The Road to Reality (2004), p. 653

Acronym of the Day: UMPS

This is a term used in particular by supporters of the FN (Front National), a blend of UMP (the center-right party of the shady exhibitionist Sarkozy) and PS (the Parti Socialo of the ineffable Francois Hollande).  These have been the traditional adversaries in French national politics  for many years, passing the sceptre of office back and forth from time to time, to little effect as regards such key questions as national identity and unchecked immigration.  The point of the hippogriffic acronym is to suggest, in the immortal phrase of the Le-Pen-ish George Wallace back when he nursed Presidential aspirations, that there wasn’t a “dime’s worth of difference” between the two major parties.   An American analogue to the blend is Republicrat.

This business of never have a practical choice between the two major parties (Democrats & Republicans in USA, UMP and PS in France) is called in French l’altérnance.   In the run-up to the recent départementales,  there has been much disenchantment with the ruling Socialistes, and increasing acrimony between PS and UMP, so that FN chief Marine Le Pen wisecracked that her party might this time enjoy the role of “troisième larron” -- literally ‘third thief’, but meaning tertium gaudens.

But it was not to be:  the FN trailed third, though the PS received a well-deserved thwacking.

~

There is an unfortunate sociohistorical dynamic that repeats itself, whenever there is a swelling elephant in the room, which the major parties studiously ignore;  any allusion to this pachydermal presence  is quickly suppressed.   To ignore the tacit gag order is to risk social and even legal sanctions. In such cases, some percentage of those who wish to found a third party to deal with the problem head-on, are those who  in any case  have little to lose, being marginalized in one way or another -- which reinforces the marginalization of the party as a whole.

In the case of the FN, the policy statements and public presence of Marine herself  have been exemplary, far more adult than those of Taubira or DSK.   But the press can always dig up some Anhänger or other, with louche views, to highlight, and to tar the party with that brush.  Lately, one of the problem children has been Jean-Marie Le Pen himself, who enjoys (in his old age -- a sort of hobby) playing the provocateur.   Alarmed, there have been repeated calls for Marine to expel her father from the Front National -- the very party he founded.  (Uncomfortable echos of Goneril and Lear.)

Daddy ... Daddy ...    One of us has to die ....

[Update 9 April 2015]  So:  The daughter has now publically called her father out.  His riposte:

    Jean-MarieLe Pen: "je vais me défendre et probablement attaquer"

We shall see, then, whether the upshot prove to be parricide, or filicide.

(For our essay on magistricide (intellectual parricide), click here.)

[Update 11 April]  A WaPo blogger offers a chrestomathy of provocative one-lines by European “Euroskeptic” third-party figures:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/05/24/8-ridiculous-racist-things-actually-said-by-far-right-eu-politicians/

The quote from J-M L-P was a reprise of something he had said before, and thus not something to be dismissed as off-mike or off-the-cuff:

En juin 2014, Jean-Marie Le Pen évoque "Monseigneur Ebola", et explique que le virus, qui a aujourd'hui causé la mort de plus de 4000 personnes, pouvait "régler" la question de la surpopulation mondiale et le "risque de submersion de la France par l'immigration"

-- http://www.metronews.fr/info/jean-marie-le-pen-petain-patrick-bruel-roms-chambres-a-gaz-les-pires-derapages/mnjn!1VdenOMHmUVZU/

What to make of such ejaculations?

Consider the background.  In Europe, there is a heavy lid on public discussion of certain subjects.  It follows from sheer physics  that such jets of steam as manage to escape this iron confinement, will tend to be superheated.

Acrônym øf thè Däy: « äRTeäS »

In the staid banking capital of Zürich,  masked black bloc activists (anarchist APOisten)  ran wild last night.   As such, that is no concern of this blog;  but we shall notice some curious linguistic detail.

Die Randalierer trugen ein Banner mit der Aufschrift «Reclaim the Streets». In den vergangenen Jahren war es unter diesem Titel mehrmals zu erheblichen Sachbeschädigungen gekommen. Am Freitag nun riefen die Veranstalter im Laufe des Tages per SMS dazu auf, sich um 22 Uhr im Sihlhölzlipark in Zürich-Wiedikon zu treffen. In Aussicht gestellt wurde der «one & only dancefloor» unter dem Motto «äRTeäS», hinter dem sich das Akronym RTS für «Reclaim the Streets» versteckt.

http://www.nzz.ch/zuerich/randale-in-der-langstrasse-1.18443879

If you read about this in the anglophone press, you might assume that this slogan, «Reclaim the Streets»,  was a translation from the German, for the convenience of English-speakers.   Not so;  the following photo from Zurich last night, provides ocular proof:

Not only that, but the expression “black block” (or “black bloc”) has gone international.  A while ago (an Egyptian friend informed me) Angela Merkel apologized to Egypt for the “black block” anarchists there, who had imported a German ideology;  when I asked him, How did that come out in Arabic, he said:  “black block”.

Strangest of all, though, is this motto äRTeäS, within which the acronym RTS (for “Reclaim The Streets”) lies perdu in plain sight.   It looks like some new offbeat flavor offering from Häagen-Dazs, or perhaps a song by Mötley Crüe.   As for orthoëpic guidance, such as we commonly offer to our glottophilic flock, we are at a loss.  Conjecturally,  the word begins with a sort of vocalic sheep-bleat, and then the majuscularity of the following two consonants is signaled by pronouncing them at top volume while waving your arms (Monty Python has an instructive video along these lines), then back to a sheep-bleat, then back to the flapping.   Either that, or the vowels are silent.

[Note:  Just kidding.  If you simply pronounce the letters "R T S" in the German fashion, it comes out rather like ärteäs. ]

A polyglot German reader of the above article comments:

Ein gewalttätiger Anarcho-Fascho-Mob holt sich die gratis Party unter allesamt englischen Organisationskürzeln für eine "friday night" nach deren Gusto.

At all events, äRTeäS is but the latest acronymic/cryptographic contribution from the German-speaking world, to the contemporary lexicon of political street-protest.   Some others we have elucidated here:  

   HoGeSa, PeGiDa, and Dügida walk into a bar…

~

The signage of one of the vandalized shops (international anarchy strikes back  against the tyranny of the corner bakery!)  is an interesting anglo-alemannic mix:

Znüni ?  It’s Schwizerdütsch for what in general German would be Imbiß (etymologically: ‘in-bite’):  ‘snack’, or rather specifically a morning snack, since etymologically it means “a nine-o’clock-er” (from the Alemannic equivalents of zu + neun).

~

Was für Krimi liest wohl Dr. Sigmund Freud?

Schauen Sie mal!

Sigmund Freud und Sherlock Holmes

~

[Update 14 December 2014]  Another aspect of German political movement names, foreign to the American way of naming, is its hospitality to Mundarten.  Thus, consider the following headlines from earlier this morning:

"Arsch huh" gegen rechte Gewalt - Künstler demonstrieren in Köln

http://www.rp-online.de/nrw/staedte/koeln/arsch-huh-gegen-rechte-gewalt-kuenstler-demonstrieren-in-koeln-aid-1.4738699

„Arsch huh“-Demo: Mit Karnevalisten und dem 1. FC Köln gegen Rechts

http://www.ksta.de/innenstadt/-arsch-huh--demo-mit-karnevalisten-und-dem-1--fc-koeln-gegen-rechts,15187556,29314086.html?piano_d=1

Um… say what?  They never taught us that in German class..

It’s the name of an anti-rightist movement in Cologne:  in full “Arsch huh, Zäng ussenander”; which, de.wikipedia  helpfully explains, is “Kölsch für Arsch hoch, Zähne auseinander”.   Umm … ‘Butt up, teeth apart’??  -- I still don’t get it.

The “rp” in rp-online stands for “Ripuarisch”, a northern dialect of German.  And indeed, Ripuarian has its own Wikipedia -- ksh.wikipedia.org  (“ksh” for “Kölsch”, after the principle regional city).   They explain:

Unger dämm Motto „Arsch huh, Zäng ussenander!“ hann sich em Johr 1992 kölsche Musikjruppe un Schauspiller, un e paa andere Künßler zesamme jeschlosse, öm jäje Fremdefeindlichkeit un Antisemitismus ze demonstriere.

The American language shows nothing comparable to such Mundarten.  Sure, Bostonians say “pahk the cah in Hahvahd yahd” -- but they don’t have their own Wikipedia.

Factoid:   Continuing with our amusement at the proliferation of umlauts (which in the case of the icecream-company and the rock-band  are completely meaningless), let us note that one of the main backers of “Arsch huh”  is a Kölner rock-band called
“Bläck Fööss “ -- which means, however, ‘bare feet’.

And, another gnarly political acronym:   Gröfaz

~

Weiteres in re Confoederatio Helvetica :

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/05/bank-robbery.html

Acronym of the Day: HoGeSa

A word worth knowing:  HoGeSa (pronounced HO-gay-sah).  German for: 

    “Hooligans gegen Salafisten”

(hooligans against salafists).   And you say:  Wha- ? - ?

(1) Historical semantics

The word hooligan (possibly related to the Irish surname Hoolihan) was first attested in England in the late 19^th century, referring initially to Irish rowdies.   It carried no ideological connotation.

The word then took a very strange detour into Russian, as Хулига́н.  For the Soviets, it functioned as a sort of defanged continuation of the ever-useful term Lumpenproletariat, which dates back to Marx.  Again, for the Soviets, it denoted no clear political current, but was still -- class-analysis being paramount in Marxism -- more or less eingestuft into a class-struggle worldview:  Lumpen and hooligans being the dregs who, logically, should fight alongside the proletariat, but who instead engage in pointless criminality.  (The very phenomenon rather jarred with the neatness of Marxist analysis, which overestimates the purely economic.)

Later, in England, from the ‘70s on, it took on a particular coloring, being associated especially with soccer rowdies, who got quite a reputation on the Continent for acting up, and were banned from some countries.  For some reason, this phenomenon was much more characteristic of England than of any of the other soccer-mad nations of the world;  to elucidate that fact might prove quite revealing.

And now, in our own day, the word pops up  borrowed once again into a foreign language, this time German, and still with a particular association with soccer (or, in European terms, football).  Colloquial abbreviation:  die Hools.

Now:  What is quite interesting  is that this German term, Hooligans, is a self-designation, not an exogenous pejorative epithet.

But: Why would any group do that?

Well, this is not the place to delve into the psychology thereof, but it’s a plucky thing to do, and many groups have done it.  Thus, Quakers, Tories, etc. etc. : the defiant adoption by an outgroup of the ingroup’s trashtalk.   The most recent (and rather close) analogy is the word behind the “N” in NWA (which, as a non-N, I am not allowed to write out).

~

Lesen Sie die Geschichte  spesenfrei !

“Der Detektiv und das Mädlein”

~

(2) Morphology

For concision, I called HoGeSa an ‘acronym’, since that is a familiar word.  It is composed, though, not of initial letters, but of initial syllables. (A linguistic term for these is stump compounds.)

Again, there is a Soviet parallel.   This sort of logopoeic confection was completely characteristic of the Russian of the time, e.g. Komsomol (roughly: COMmunist /SOviet/MOLodyets (youth).)

Somewhat similarly, in German, among the opponents of the Hooligans (who are perceived as right-wing) are the Antifa  -- those who oppose what in French are called the fachos (fascists).
Most famously:  the GeStaPo (Geheime Staatspolizei). 

Contemporary bureaucratic German  is likewise given to such things.  Thus:  LaGeSo (Landesamt fuer Gesundheit und Soziales), a virtual/vocalic palindrome of HoGeSa.

For those of my generation (for you young’uns: i.e. :  Old!  Fagedabouddit !!), these syllabic abbreviations (as Wiki calls them) have a certain relent louche,  owing to their association with the whole Proletkult/Agitprop deviations of the Soviet era.  (Twenny-thirdy-fordy-somethings:  Any idea what I’m talking about?  Never mind.)  But they have much to their credit, over against “acronyms” in the narrow, initial-letter sense. 

At the time, the issue was pronounciability.  With strict-acronyms, you never know:  FBI (letter by letter) vs. NASA (like a word).  Whereas now, in addition to that (still valid), there is the matter of cross-linguistic searchability.

Thus, strict-acronyms are often translated (FMI vs IMF;  ADN vs. DNA), which makes online string-search  perilous.  But if you confect what is obviously a word -- yet a word in no obvious language -- everyone will let it be, like a proper-name (“Washington”; “Napoleon”), which no-one would dream of “translating”.

From this strictly philological standpoint, we salute the “Hooligans” for their coinage:  HoGeSa.

(Note:  Granted, as a vocable, as a hoagie-of-syllables,  it is not especially attrayant.   Cf. Gröfaz.  Ah well.)

Gratuit !

Lisez le conte entier

“Le détective et la fillette”

~

~

So much for the linguistics.  Now we get down to brass tacks.

Today in Cologne, roughly five thousand “Hooligans” answered the call to demonstrate, against the IS-leaning Islamist extremists known broadly as Salafists.  Whence:  HoGeSa.   This led to fairly violent street-confrontations.

This very significant public demonstration has so far scarcely been reported outside of Germany:  and when so, curly and dumbed-down, simply referring to “hooligans and neo-Nazis” battling police -- apparently for no reason.

To undumb you back up, consider this:

(1) Recently in the streets of Hamburg:  400 Kurdish demonstrators were attacked by 400 IS-supporters.

(2) A cri de coeur, from the Lower Depths:

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DQEowo5XH8

Notice that the speaker invites moderate Muslims to join with them.

The speaker also seems to allude to recent beheadings in Germany.  Whether that happened, I have no idea;  if it did, it was hushed up.  But certainly it is in the offing:

German hostages of Salafists in the Phillipines

~ Sigmund Freud  und  Sherlock Holmes: ~

~ ~ Seelen-vertausch! ~ ~

(3)  Overview:

Rasantes Anwachsen der deutschen Salafisten-Szene

Die Behörden sehen sie als Sammelbecken für Kämpfer der Terrorgruppe Islamischer Staat und befürchten Stellvertreterkriege mit Kurden, Hooligans und Rechtsextremen.

http://www.nzz.ch/international/rasantes-anwachsen-der-deutschen-salafisten-szene-1.18411982

http://www.dw.de/german-domestic-intelligence-chief-warns-of-rapidly-growing-salafist-scene/a-18020976

The fact is, Germany has long been unwisely importing problems from abroad;  and now is too frightened to do anything about it.   Like the socialos in France,  the German authorities have been dithering;  it thus falls to the wretched of the earth, at last to roar in protest.

European background:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/10/word-of-day-psychosis.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2808395/Cabinet-chaos-immigration-one-minister-says-towns-swamped-EU-migrants-says-need-farm-jobs-Brits-refuse.html

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/08/rise-of-la-racaille.html

[Mise à jour, 28 oct 2014]
A parallel in Calais:
www.nzz.ch/international/ein-neonazi-profiliert-sich-1.18412750?extcid=Newsletter_28102014_Top-News_am_Morgen

[Update 9 December 2014]  And now HoGeSa is joined by two new syllabic acronyms: 

Pegida „patriotischen Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes“

Dügida, „Düsseldorfer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes“

Pronunciation of Pegida:  peh-GEE-da  (with hard "g" -- rhymes with "Uneeda").

http://www.handelsblatt.com/politik/deutschland/pegida-duegida-und-hogesa-die-unerwuenschten-retter-des-abendlandes/11093158.html

Update 13 Dec 2014]  Good heavens, and now this:  äRTeäS  (sic).

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/12/acronym-of-day-arteas.html

[Update 14 Dec 2014]  Oof, and now this (of all things):

    "Arschhuh"

[Update 5 January 2015] The latest re Pegida, in English:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/06/world/europe/pegida-rally-dresden-germany.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=photo-spot-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

As one might expect, the New York Times turns itself into pretzels trying to minimize the march, referring instead, early in the article, to the much smaller pro-immigration march in the liberal stronghold of Berlin (a few hundred), while claiming that “No figures were immediately available for the turnout in Dresden”.   (Somehow, the BBC was able to get these, stating: “A record 18,000 people turned out” -- and this, despite a chilly rain.)

The Times interviews no-one from Pegida or, indeed, from average Germans, but recur to the usual anti-Pegida crowd: “On Monday, business leaders had joined the swelling chorus against Pegida”  (well, they would, wouldn’t they;  they want a cheap workforce, importing a Reserve Army of the Unemployed to keep the unions in line).

The Times describes Pegida as “murky” -- a purely rhetorical flourish”, and quotes this remarkable dismissal of the marchers:

“For my taste,” Mr. Schneider wrote in the newspaper Die Welt, “the crowd was too white.”

Also, far too German!

For much better coverage, from a mainstream German source, try this:

http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/pegida-proteste-die-trotzigen-von-dresden-a-1011394.html

Another example of the lengths to which the bien-pensants will go, to sweep the popular upswell under the rug:

Pünktlich zum Beginn der Kögida-Demonstration um 18.30 Uhr wurde wie angekündigt die Außenbeleuchtung des Kölner Doms ausgeschaltet. Dompropst Norbert Feldhoff wollte verhindern, das eines der bekanntesten deutschen Wahrzeichen den Hintergrund der rechtspopulistischen Demonstration liefern würde.

http://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article136047671/Bei-Koegida-lief-es-von-Anfang-an-nicht-rund.html

[Update Monday, 12 January 2015]  And now Legida:

In Leipzig stellten sich am Abend rund 30.000 Menschen dem Aufmarsch des Pegida-Ablegers Legida entgegen.

Likewise Kagida (Kassel), Cegida (Chemnitz).

[Update 8 March 2015]  Another HoGeSa demo in Cologne.  The march monitors wore police-style jackets labeled, amusingly,  "HOOLIZEI"  (i.e., Hooligan Polizei).

[Update 20 March 2015]  The German mania for APO-related syllabic acronyms  proceeds apace.  The latest is Blockupy : from Block (as in Black Block) plus Occupy (Wall Street).

Here they are exercising their right to free speech

They turned out to the numbers of roughly ten thousand, in the staid old banking capital of Frankfurt-am-Main, breaking and burning and sending a hundred cops to the hospital.   Nothing done by Hogesa or Pegida or Legida or any of that, approaches that level of violence, but the bien-pensant press is much more muted in criticizing Blockupy.

[Update 26 July 2015]  And now this ungainly confection:

EnDgAmE : engagierte Demokraten gegen die Amerikanisierung Europas

[Update 23 Sept 2015]
They haven't gone away:

Rund 5000 Menschen haben sich nach Polizeiangaben in Erfurt an einer Demonstration gegen die Asylpolitik von Bundes- und Landesregierung beteiligt. Sie zogen am Mittwoch durch das Zentrum der Thüringer Landeshauptstadt bis zum zentralen Platz der Stadt, dem Anger.

http://www.welt.de/regionales/thueringen/article146781556/5000-Menschen-bei-Demonstration-gegen-Asylpolitik.html#disqus_thread

A reader comments:

Bei PEGIDA waren letzten Montag in Dresden nach meiner Überschlags-Zählung auf dem youtube-Video mehr als 15.000 Menschen dabei (die Polizei gibt offenbar keine offiziellen Zahlen mehr heraus).

Warum herrscht darüber totale Stille im Blätterwald?

[Update 17 Oct 2015]  Wertvoll:
http://sciencefiles.org/2015/10/17/feindbild-weg-pegida-demonstranten-sind-keine-nazis/

[Update]  Bilan:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/02/world/europe/germany-migrants-refugees-pegida.html?_r=0