The Stubborn Diplomatic Circles Cannot Be Pleased

The Guardian reports that the presient of the EU Commission Ursula von der Leyen will soon plead for a ‘humanitarian pause that will lead to a sustainable ceasefire.’ She is well-known for her unintelligible gibberish, but if I dissect the phrase ‘sustainable ceasefire’ correctly, she’s going to ask Israel to wrap up its mission entirely. This would allow the jihadists to completely rebuild their military capacities and to continue the perpetual stream of violence against Israel until it is completely destroyed.

And she isn’t alone. For months the diplomatic circles have made it perfectly clear that they use phrases such as ‘Israel’s got a right to defend itself’ as some kind of protocol. What they actually believe, however, is that Israel were simply emoting some nasty revenge with its little war. Sure enough, October 7th was a bad-hair day, but now it is time again to grow up and put up. Biden graciously offers the continuation of the iron dome missile deliveries. How nice.

The condescension is palpable. Those funny Israelis think they have reasons. Bwaohahaha. Religious fools. In reality only some synapses fire through their upper-neck meat and, yet, they believe to think. Of course, the left-wing circles in foreign offices, UN bureaus and in the media know better. Those silly hotheaded Jews feel that they have to do something about Hamas. Feelings. You see? Better they’d sit idly by, block nine in ten missiles with their fancy-schmancy iron dome and replace their dead with some immigration.

Only weeks after the Simchat-Torah massacre the two-state solution was the big talk again as if nobody had noticed the rockets fired out of Gaza year after year and as if the pogrom hadn’t happened. An international recognition of a statehood would accomplish nothing but make it easier to accuse Israel whenever it has to enter Gaza’s territory and stop attacks. Then the enclave would be a sovereign country under attack. And this is what they want. Arabs don’t lack countries of their own. Those who live in the contested territories could also become a part of Israel if they commit to disengage from violence or they could become a separate administrative unit sharing selective administrative structures and installations with its mostly Jewish neighbour under the same condition. But in reality there is jihad, of course, and this reality is hard to swallow.

Inside Israel the eradication of Hamas enjoys massive support even among those who believed otherwise until recently. Maybe those who changed their minds hold the key to understanding the delusion of the diplomatic circles. Maybe we human beings can only be happy when we think higher of others than they actually are. Those who danced at the Supernova Rave festival lived right on the border. They had heard of the indoctrination. They had seen military action or their family and friends had. And yet the madness of it all remained unfathomable. One very generous peace offer after the other was rejected by the “Palestinian” terrorists, but the hope to live a life without fear in exchange for some compromise is an almost irresistible dream.

According to the Oxford Research Group the entire invasion phase of the Iraq War 2003 that toppled Saddam Hussein cost only 6,616 civilian lives. This count comes from a pacifist group. Add some decent military men who’d only tried to financially support their families to the tally and also some undocumented victims for good measure and you’ll still wonder why the current Gaza war is so much more brutal even if you consider that the Hamas numbers are completely fabricated. The uncomfortable answer is that in our quest to assuage the ire of the world and to pursue ideas of humanitarianism Israel has to be more brutal than it otherwise would be. Shock and Awe would have left many limbs complete, many human beings alive, and many homes intact. During the Syrian civil war the IDF sent ambulances into the hellhole to get the sick and wounded out of it and into the care of medical professionals. There is no good reason why fuel is funneled to hospitals which, we know, are co-opted as terror shelters. There is no reason why electricity and water wasn’t cut off from the start and why the Hamas leadership wasn’t forced out within a matter of days. Except for one. We want to be seen as caring.

And I support that people do their best to care for others. What do I know, really? Maybe I’m all wrong and there were no shortcuts in this war. Yet, I want to see considered that care is more important than the appearance of care. I do not believe that there is a way to satisfy the critics of Israel. Some may be deluded, some may be fooled, but some will always hate. And this hate is an unprovoked one, an animus that cannot be appeased.

Does Ursula von der Leyen care about the Arabs? Does Antony Blinken? I’m flubberghasted by the ease with which they suggest that the Arabs should remain under Islamist rule forever and ever for the “higher good” of avoiding a phase of de-Nazification. To me this is not merely irresponsible. It is callous. It guarantees that Israel will continue to be forced to sacrifice its young in order to put out jihadi fires and it guarantees that more and more Arabs will lose their health, their property and their lives over many more decades. It also solidifies poverty and despair across Gaza, but this solution, the two-state solution, the solution of letting Islamism reign, is supposed to be the only solution to the Middle East conflict. At least this is what the uncaring say in order to look caring.

Don’t the Arabs have a right to openly investigate and talk about what Hamas and the PLO under the iron fist of the corrupt Fatah have done to them? But this is the wrong question. The uncaring don’t care about them. They care about the left because a de-Nazification would open a can of worms for them. It would reveal that not only Western cultures, but also those angelic other societies have ills that should be cured. And THAT we can’t have. That is a sacrilege on par with Quran burning. The Arabs have to suffer, no matter how much, so that left-wingers don’t have to admit mistakes.

The surprising fighting capacity of Hamas comes from the flow of illegal weapons into Gaza, most of it through Rafah. The border crossing there is guarded by the EU Border Assistance Mission. In other words this was in the responsibility of Ursula von der Leyen. The Arabs are doomed.

The Taurus Leak

Russia eavesdropped on a conference call between high-ranking German militaries. According to German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius, General Frank Gräfe who joined in from Singapore failed to establish a secure connection. Hence, the good news is that this was possibly a one-off mistake in the setting of a hotel room and not a continuous leakage.

The conversation did not reveal much. However, it showed that the German hesitance to deliver the Taurus cruise missile can be explained pragmatically. It is difficult to operate and was never fitted to any of the fighter jets in use right now. The Taurus needs adaptations to attach them to the aircraft and the producer would need months to make them. Both mounting and operation require intense, possibly long training. This could be shouldered by the weapon manufacturer or the British troops who already supply Ukraine with their own cruise missiles. The training for the easier targets, the weapon depots, however, could be done much quicker. The standard training which is not limited to specific targets and situations usually takes German soldiers over a year to complete. This opens the door for bespoke short-track training solutions before deployments.

The live satellite data for the targeting is collected by the German troops. Delivering it to the Ukrainians, possibly combined with mission planning stations, could be seen as direct military intervention by the Russians and must be avoided. Feeding the missile with an ad hoc data stream from somewhere else risks precision and precision is the whole point of the weapon. Usually the satellite data is processed on the Büchel Air Base before the weapon can achieve its three-meter-range accuracy.

Taurus is the Swedish-German alternative to the British French models ‘Storm Shadow’ and ‘Scalp’ which are already deployed. The targets that are more likely to be reached with Taurus than by the mentioned alternatives are some ammunition depots and an unnamed bridge in the east. If I attribute the voices correctly, it is Air Force Inspector Ingo Gerhartz who explains that the bridge would be a complex target for Tarsus, too.

The Ukrainian army lacks artillery equipment, now. This is what people should talk about. Russia ramped up its ammunition production and we did not. This is the actual failure of the West whose elites rather spent their time allotting money to rebuilding fantasies and pointless EU ascension delusions.

Does Yascha Mounk Get #MeToo’ed?

Following an interview with news show Tagesschau Yascha Mounk’s got a bad reputation among German conservatives. People over-reacted to a single line, ‘We dare a historically unique experiment in changing a mono-ethnic, mono-cultural democracy into a multi-ethnic one.’ The interview itself is mixed. He paints Trump and the AfD – as a whole – as extremists, which is something, I suggest, he and others should eventually apologise for. He also made some salient conservative points. He rightly complains that perpetual formations of party coalition necessarily result in the erosion of alternatives on the ballots. This view alone could ignite the negative attention of our secret service Verfassungsschutz. He also figured that the all-is-well propanda did not match people’s real-life career experience.

The next time I saw him was when he gave a Ted Talk in which he also threw around vague notions of extremism. That showing was also very mixed. Leaving the European Union counts as populism, he opined. I suppose that in this vein his current home America is extremist, radical and fascist, too. They did not even join. Most countries on earth are far-right and populist by this token.

But then he suprised me.

Fed up with the everybody-is-a-Nazi hoax, he made the rounds through conservative podcasts.

But was he? I didn’t pay much attention to him because I found his insights rather lame and shallow as if he simply straddled talking points and not try to find out what was going on. I knew at the time that he is a co-publisher of my favorite news outlet ZEIT – the German equivalent of haAretz, the Guardian and the New York Times. His colleague Giovanni di Lorenzo, formally at the head of the weekly print leg of the ZEIT enterprise, is notorious for making statements which suggested that he never ever, nevernevernever ever, read his own g-d awful, nutcase newspaper (my favorite – I’m a hate reader).

So I pondered whether Yascha Mounk simply learnt it from the best, from Yassir Arafat. Make at least twice the money and profess a totally different viewpoint in each language!

But then I saw an interview of conservative novelist and screenwrite Andrew Klavan with columnist Caitlin Flanagan. She is a friend of both Andrew and Yascha and she mentioned that in private Mounk quips about the ‘short march through the institutions’ to refer to the avalanche of left-wing madness. (It’s around minute 34).

Today, journalist Celeste Marcus calls him her rapist. Mounk’s newspaper The Atlantic cut ties with him and his involvement with ZEIT is suspended. Celeste Marcus writes on her Libertis Journal, ‘Every rape survivor who has shared her story with me was also told by her rapist that what he did to her was not rape.’ Isn’t that peculiar? I bet you can ask any Hamas victim and you can search the Congo up and down and not find a single rape victim who’d been told that. In July 2023, the brutish writer besmirched Israel’s government as follows: ‘Liberal Zionists, freighted with the responsibility to cleanse and heal the country which Netanyahu and his brutish government every day besmirch, have taken to the streets of many cities and towns each Saturday evening since the seventh of January.’

Sure enough, I can’t know for sure whether the allegations that she kept for herself for two years are honest or not. Courts are to decide. I’m not saying that she had not been beaten, throttled or threatened while Yascha Mounk penetrated her only to end it all with ‘Oh, that wasn’t rape.’ I don’t know. Less dramatically she could have said, ‘Hey, what about red whine?’, prompting Mounk to push her down with a macho ‘I am already drunk enough!’ It’s all possible. Her little magazine and her Twitter feed are craving attention, too. And there is a war in Israel she douses with sanctimonous tweets whilst Mounk lambasts the American left.

The Division in Germany

Recently Fraser Myers of Sp!ked magazine had an article about a potential ban of the AfD. In reality such talks are a continuous background noise in the country, President Frank-Walter Steinmeier did not name the AfD directly and he was also not particularly specific. What is real, though, is that the political division in Germany which caused the stir is worse than in America or the UK. For cultural reasons this is an admission you will usually not hear from Germans, but I’m going to explain it anyway.

But before I come to that I begin by weeding out some of the other mistakes in the article. Fraser Myer uses the word ‘populist’ to describe the AfD. There is no mutually accepted definition of the word and as far as I know the editors of US magazine Breitbart are the only people who use the terminology to describe themselves. A German word that is spelled the same way would only be used as a slur and as such should be avoided. Neither the English nor the German word are descriptive and the AfD does not hold identical views to the editorial board of Breitbart.

Whilst I agree with Sp!ked that some circles within the AfD hold views that I would also describe as obnoxious, I would not describe them as right-wing. Indeed, the example of views Myers offers are innocuous ones.

The party’s opposition to immigration can stray into outright xenophobia and racism. It is not uncommon to hear AfD spokespeople distinguish between ‘real Germans’ and ‘passport Germans’ – that is, German citizens who are not ethnically German. Prominent AfD politicians have spoken at rallies organised by the far-right, anti-Islam Pegida movement. And the increasingly influential Björn Höcke, who leads the party in Thuringia, has been accused of downplaying the Holocaust.

The AfD is not xenophobic and during the Covid lockdown they even asked for more foreign harvest helpers. As far as I’m concerned this makes them stray too much towards open borders. There is nothing wrong with distinguishing between ethnic Germans and those people the left showers with passports to create a solid voting block at the cost of public security and economic prosperity. Pegida is neither far-right nor anti-Islam per se. Also it is not a moral failure to be anti-Islam as long as one is fair. What you dare to say about ‘the god of the old testament’ is fair to say about the god of the Koran. Even though left-wingers seem to be confused about it, Adolf Hitler murdered around six million Jews, not six million Muslims. Nobody’s got an obligation to make more ado about Muslims than about Jews. And Björn Höcke did not deny the Holocaust.

Most of the article is correct, though, and I begin my dive into the division of the nation with a quote from it.

Each of the mainstream parties has long maintained a strict cordon sanitaire around the AfD, refusing to work with it in government.

This can be illustrated by a recent remark of our Chancellor Olaf SCholz. He suggested that local communities who are confronted with a good AfD initiative, should still vote against it and re-issue the exact same proposal on their own.

And whilst the president did not say that the AfD should be outlawed, such remarks were made by Chancellor Scholz and others. A recent petition of blog ‘Volksverpetzer’ has collected 67,000 signatures to bolster such ambitions.

Saskia Esken, one half of the leadership duo of the Social Democrats, said in an interview that the AfD should be banned if the secret service Verfassungsschutz classified it as right-wing extremist. She says, “The fight against AfD is one that all of society, all male and female democrats must fight in unison.”

Banning political parties is, of course, a human rights violation (freedom of association, article 20 of the UN Charter on Human Rights), but even such an aggressive move would change little. One in five Germans say to pollsters that they would vote for them. They are likely to wriggle their way through the institutions when push comes to shove. Those twenty so per cent are the lowest estimate of deeply dissatisfied citizens. Other surveys suggest a much broader dissatisfaction. A direct result of an AfD ban would be an immediate relocation of the electorate to some random alternative currently hidden under the 5%-parliament-entry threshold. In the city of Bremen the AfD failed to register their candidacies which led to their seats being taken by the group ‘citizens in anger.’ This is not how a representative democracy should work, but at this point the quality of all political candidates are so low that they are exchangeable on all levels and people just want to voice their sense of disaffection. The reasons for the general low quality of our essentially faceless mandarins run deep and are beyond the scope of this article. The AfD is no exception. All parties here are only protest parties against all other parties.

54% of Germans said in a poll (conducted by Körber-Stiftung) that they don’t have confidence in the “current form of democracy” in Germany. 90% say that living in a free democracy is important to them, but only 9% trust the organised political parties.

The mathematically astute may have noticed that a 90% who consider a life in a democracy important to them implies that one in ten would feel differently. Note that a temporary life in a dictatorship like China or Kuwait is a fairly normal CV trajectory for Westerners and such a stay is perfectly safe in a world that is still broadly led by freedom and peace promoting democracies.

But opposition to democracy is real. And one of the ways the pathologically driven among the left try to anger conservatives is by showing that now with power being effectively concentrated in their hands, they do not think much of freedom and democracy. Recently Mark Schieritz, Harvard alumni, of course, and chief editor of the economics section of ZEIT, wrote an op-ed that the country should simply be changed against the will of the people.

As I mentioned the co-leader of the Social Democrats Saskia Esken wants to justify a ban of the AfD with a public verdict of the secret service Verfassungsschutz. Said agency is currently investigating Hans-Georg Maaßen. The following is maybe a little bit confusing. Remember that this article is not about the AfD, but the overall division! Hans-Georg Maaßen is, indeed, not a member of the AfD and never was. He is a member of Angela Merkel’s party CDU. Before Thomas Haldenwang, the current president of Verfassungsschutz, got the job, his predecessor was chased out of office in a crazy thunderstorm of media hostility. And this former colleague of Haldenwang was Hans-Georg Maaßen. This is division.

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Maaßen is accused to have been a part of a conspiracy to overthrow the government because he sent a Whatsapp birthday message to bestselling author Markus Krall which includes the line ‘we must keep fighting.’ Markus Krall had written an email to a dude called Heinrich Reuss in which Krall used the phrase ‘The time for a change is near.’ That’s like a coup by selfy with feet on Pelosi’s desk.

Heinrich Reuss is most likely a psychologically unstable guy. He is accused of having an ambition to become king of Germany. King! There is this whole silly narrative in the media that we had an opposition group that wished to reestablish the late 19th century mode of government. Before Merkel opened the borders to mass immigration, nobody has ever heard of such a political current. Interestingly, it used to be a popular joke among left-wingers socialised in the student movement of the late 1960s that all of their opponents were supposedly so backwards that ‘they want their Wilhelm back.’ Wilhelm was, of course, the name of the Kaiser who escalated WWI and also the name of his predecessor. It is quite a “coincidence” that such a joke suddenly manifests when the elites need some Orwellian 1984-villain group, a “Brotherhood.” I would not be surprised when psychologically unstable and dumb individuals were manipulated on purpose by circles within the security apparatus. But that is speculation, of course.

Irme Stetter-Karp of the Central Committee of Catholics says that people should be screened for AfD opinions before they serve in the church. This includes lay men. Maybe this is a good sign, though, because she seems to feel the heat from the twenty-plus percent who want their religious, cultural and governmental institutions back.

Lina E. organised violent attacks on people she sees as neo-Nazis. Judge Hans Schlüter-Staat spoke of a ‘respectable motivation’ and regrets that the state in general supposedly had a ‘deplorable’ deficit facing right-wing extremism. She’s sentenced to five and a half years in prison. The violence committed by her group included crushing somebody’s knee caps with an iron rod and smashing a hammer into the face of a guy. The head had to be reconstructed with metal inlets.

Andreas Jurca was allegedly beaten up by a group of migrant men who shouted ‘Sh*t Nazi’!Screenshot from 2023-08-19 09-04-52

But there is also some hope in all of the division. The SED, the party that led the communist East German dictatorship, falls apart. Amira Mohammed Ali stepped down from the leadership position of the parliamentary group in the Bundestag. Her co-partner in that same position, Dietmar Bartsch, followed her a few days later. Sahra Wagenknecht, who also held that same position before Ali and Bartsch, considers founding a new party. The SED, now a mere fringe party, is not the key issue here. The split could be a blue print for others. With our catastrophic voting system it is nearly impossible to shoot newcomers up onto the political stage. The fraction of parliamentary groups on various levels of government could immediately flush new political forces onto the scene. So far this is not noticed by many and it is not a likely scenario, but it shows that the game is not over yet.

Merkel’s Party The Union Is Trash

As you glean from the title ‘The Union’ is Merkel’s party. What is more to say about it? It is formally registered as two parties, a Bavarian leg called CSU and one with the name CDU that runs for all offices outside of Bavaria. Booooorring! I hear you. Don’t they have a platform that I could talk about? No. So they are boring? Yes.

But not so fast. Friedrich Merz, the leader of the bigger part CDU, found Nazis. In his ancestry, you ask? Probably. But he’s more concerned with Hans-Georg Maaßen, the former head of the secret service Verfassungsschutz and the newly elected head of the conservative caucus ‘Value Union’ (Werteunion).

Merz is flabbergasted by ‘the language’ and ‘the rhetoric’ of Maaßen. The quote held against the latter is: “According to the red-green [left-wing/environmentalist] race theory whites are an inferior race.” Now, that is undeniably true. There are countless articles and books that suggest whites were inherently racist, irredeemable, oppressive and beyond reform. There is even an English word for the race theory, ‘whiteness,’ and because the racists don’t show any signs of shame they pretend it were an academic discipline and as such referred to as ‘critical race theory.’

So now we have this dilemma that the racists are proud because some of them are whites, too, and have found a silly pathway to cheap applause and that, at the same time, mentioning that racism is denounced as a sign of racism itself, but bad racism this time. I’m so jaded from the racism debate that I don’t care anymore about who’s more racist. This whole fire must be tamed. So ‘They are the real racists’ doesn’t fly with me, either. But, also, do we have to start the next round of tabooing everything with making suggestions that the other side were racist into a punishable offense? I’m so tired.
So Merz tries to kick Maaßen out of his party.

But why are people still voting for The Union anyways? Merz has recognised that people like me would rather vote for the ‘party of park bench pissers’ than for him. He’d have to reform so much that he doesn’t bother. But who is still voting for them? Are they masochists?

Germans have some issues, masochism being potentially one of them, but there are two relevant points of indoctrination that are more worthwhile to focus on.

1) Germans fear to ‘lose their vote’.
A vote is supposed to be cast. It is not supposed to be reused again or to be found somewhere after an election. You have a day on which you show your support to a party or candidate. Either that support manifests itself in a seat or it does in the encouragement of the candidate to try again something similar. The German election system doesn’t allow parties with less than 5% of the votes to enter parliament. So unless many people come together in huge numbers as outsiders under difficult conditions (civil rights aren’t much protected) a vote to a party that doesn’t sit in the parliament is unlikely to result in a representative. Hence people keep voting parties that they hate. I don’t think that the CDU is a loved party.

2) Germans try to vote strategically.
Another quirk is that Germans try to slow-down progressives by voting for slower progressives. To not vote for the slow progressives risks fast progression. This is the only place where ‘German angst’ makes any sense. People here vote exclusively against others because they fear the others. All the attention at the division in America makes many forget that Germany is a much, much more divided country. We are the country where people vote the CDU to not be ruled by the Greens. A country where the CDU tries to kick out somebody who shares a piece of common wisdom in an interview. A country where people are constantly shamed for being seen with people from another group. A country where people vote CDU because they are even afraid to identify as dissidents. Merz and a variety of media outlets speak of ‘provocations.’ And Germans don’t understand how such vague notions justifying exclusion and discrimination sound authoritarian to any outsider’s ears.

‘The Union’ has no merit. Sensible members who linger around do so because they see it as another institution to be reconquered. I wish them good luck. The voters can only support individual candidates in few cases where the elections/constituency allows some targeting. For the rest of us The Union is nothing but utter trash.

Climate Terrorists

The village of Lützerath is deserted. It’s inhabitants have been resettled and financially compensated for their property. A nearby coal mine is set to be expanded. Did I say ‘deserted’? No, not deserted. A battalion of climate activists occupy the village to protest the project. And with ‘protest’ I mean sabotage. And with ‘battalion’ I mean battalion.

The police was welcomed with a barrage of molotov cocktail, fire crackers, empty bottles and stones. And whilst the clashes were going on, the police headquarters announced that the removal of the occupiers is going well and that resistance to the police to the point where the officers have to carry the seated rebels physically out of the zone were a reasonable form of protest. The speaker added that he had no information yet about injured officers.

Great! If it should be true that no officer was injured, it is not because things ‘went very well,’ but because of pure luck. Things don’t go well when security forces are attacked. Things don’t go well, either, when the tax-payer has to pay such expenses because ever more freaks get away with ever more crime and are emboldened by the media and politicians every step on the way. Said cost is habitually added to the ledger of coal mining and serves as an additional argument for the freaks that coal were supposedly more expensive than the much subsidised and privileged “renewable” energies.

It is cynical how the speaker of the police depreciates the value of his colleague’s safety in that manner. We have become used to the idea that police officers should suck up everything that comes their way. Each new year violence against them is ramping up. The men and women who signed up to guarantee law and order do not receive a staggering risk premium. They expect to enjoy a normal job and a normal life like everybody else. They are not supposed to be maimed or killed and their children are not supposed to be traumatised by whatever happens to them. They are first and foremost fellow citizens. Their bodily integrity is not just cheap.

On New Year’s Eve riots shook Berlin. This time it wasn’t climate freaks, but stray goons mostly from migrant milieus. They, too, attacked security forces, but also ambulances and the fire brigade. The lacklustre response from the elites also reflected how little they value the attacked. In this case, unsurprisingly, any effort to learn anything about it and to work towards a solution was foiled by the overriding interest to not name the perpetrators. Media and politicians did their best to force the incidence into an irrelevant pattern so they don’t have to deal with the matching one. So instead of figuring out how the specific subgroup of Muslim men must be handled, we hear that ‘young men’ went rogue, that social workers are overworked and underpaid, and that fire crackers should be banned. The lives of firefighters, police officers and first-aid medics are apparently just too cheap to care.

In Lützerath the climate “protestors” have revealed themselves to be utter terrorists. They prepared their forceful removal with pales to cling on to. They deliberately planned not to cooperate with law enforcement. Lucky for them, popular news show Tagesschau had announced a “non-word” only a few days ago. It was, drum roll, ‘climate terrorist.’ What a “non-word” is, you ask? Well, that is a baddy-bad word which you should no longer use in polite company. That sounds straight-up Orwellian, you say? Yes. But don’t Germans have some antenna for such creepy, obviously totalitarian practices? No. The answer is: no, really not. Indeed, at that point the tradition of news anchors announcing “non-words” goes back many decades without people talking back. This short year Tagesschau had even announced a second “non-terminology”. If you just thought that the pronunciation of ‘climate terrorist’ as a no-no sounds very 1984, you have not heard that one. It’s ‘freedom’. I kid you not. Just follow this link to google translate. The AI cannot handle the word ‘non-terminology’ (or more verbatim: vapid expression of the year, German: Floskel des Jahres) and renders it as ‘phrase’, but you get the dismissive vibe anyways. And Tagesschau still remains to be seen as a respectable news show.

And the reason is, of course, that democracy had always been largely performative in this country. Voting is casting a paper into a box. Free speech is repeating what the news anchors suggest. Freedom is an eye-roller that one has to endure to have democracy. And democracy is whatever the elites do. Germany is progressive. A progressive is somebody who never wondered what something is for, but knows already that it can be removed.

Recently, Interior Minister Nancy Faser argued that the burden of proof should be with the defendant. That would make the conviction easier. Yes, sure. Thankfully she talked to some people later who had advised her not to upend the entire legal foundation of the Western world. The bummer is that she is a trained lawyer. I’d be shocked to hear such words out of anybody’s mouth, but I find it even more irritating that somebody can graduate in law and speak of the ease of convictions like that. But then again I’m not a progressive. I’m a person who occasionally wonders what something is for.

The German face of Fridays for Future Luisa Neubauer recently said that we don’t have the ‘choice between time and democracy.’ Her poor verbal skills save her from easy quoting, but she responded with that phrase to the argument that it takes some time to organise a majority in a democracy. And this is where I have to concede some sympathy with the overall radicalisation. Her generation is not used to debate, organisation of new political majorities for any purposes, or really any democratic procedures. The current Chancellor was Angela Merkel’s Finance Minister and Merkel headed the government for 16 years straight. Civil rights are not respected and freedom is an eye-roller among the snobs. So what pathway do climate activists have outside of violence? Leave alone that I don’t agree with their cause and that I think that they have to consider their fallibility real fast. What procedure is available to advance their extreme proposals? On what stage would they have to concede their mistakes? I’m not saying that I condone violence. What I’m saying is that if all pathways are cut, people do resort to violence. And the pathways are cut. The cost of participation is deliberately driven to prohibitive levels. You either have democracy or violence and I predict that we will see more and more violence.

The Criticism-Laced Obituary Reel for Benedict XVI

The obituary reel of the past days was laced with criticism of the late Roman Catholic pope Benedict XVI, née Joseph Ratzinger. Other public figures also meet media criticism on the day of their death, but – let’s be real – the news casters have announced the death of dictators with less emphasise on the darker sides of the deceased.

This is a little bit hidden under the shroud of balance. Some lame praises about his intellect or charisma are the run up to the big “but” that introduces what the news room actually wants to talk about. And this is tactically necessary because the pope didn’t annoy the masses on a day-to-day basis. Politicians and journalists do. So they have to buckle down to his popularity like a creepy, resentful butler stooge in a horror movie.

I don’t want to repeat bromides like that the media only scorns what they see as an obstruction of left-wing interests. The left is not an organisation with a military command line for their thoughts and narratives. They are a swarm with a certain group think. And to understand where their resentment comes from – outside of their strategic interest of replacing Catholicism with their own fanaticism – one’s got to understand who they are criticizing and what fuels their emotions.

On the face value they say that they obsess over the pedophilia scandal and its supposed cover-up. After Jeffrey Epstein, the UK grooming gangs scandal, the lack of interest in child marriages and the “family-friendly drag shows”, it is safe to assume that this is not what enrages them. This is what angers normal people. And none of the scorn obituaries give any details as to what Joseph Ratzinger supposedly did to cover up any crime. What exactly did he do that stopped the police from doing their work? Is it the job of employers to punish employees in addition to the sentences of the legal system? If a convict continues to be a threat to children, isn’t it the job of the courts to issue a professional ban for vulnerable occupations? Do those journalists want the church to take a government function? It is fair to assume that they are not clamouring for an end of secularism in favour of a church intervention scheme. They just try to throw mud.

A second criticism they offer is that Joseph Ratzinger stood for a church that does not change, that were too conservative. Again this is something that sounds like we all would agree on, but don’t. Their criticism of the Catholic church has three pillars. The first is that they want all Christian churches to waffle even more about climate change, open borders and other talking points to advance the political left. The second is that women cannot become priests and the third circles around homosexuals and their suggested priesthood. A minor variation of the third which has got its little extension for straight people is the wailing about sins. This one should make up the better part of psychological research  at this point since it makes absolutely no sense to freak out over the mentioning of sinfulness if one ostensibly isn’t very religious anyways. Either you are comfortable with your lack of religion and you don’t care or you scream like a madmen whenever somebody mentions a potential sin because you are tense. Another combination that holds is that you are relaxed with your pick-and-choose religion and you are thus relaxed about your level of sinfulness as well (and no matter what people say, they all pick and choose). What does not hold water is the standard left-wing identity of not caring about religion while making a huge fuss over each proposal of what should be considered as sinful.

None of these typical points of criticism ring with normal people. Former news anchor Peter Hahne who also served in the leading council of the German Lutheran Church summed it up as ‘The mess is too much news show.’ He was referring to the Lutheran counterpart, of course, but most normal people, independent of their faith, don’t want to hear zeitgeist hogwash when they go to their temple. Normal people don’t think that being a priest is a terribly attractive job that women must have access to in order to be complete. Normal people don’t care about gay marriage at all. What most people find inhumane about the Catholic church is the celibacy. But that point, the only relevant point, is completely absent from the typical diatribe.

And this brings me to the person who made me aware of the man Joseph Ratzinger at first, his former student colleague Uta Ranke-Heinemann URH. She was the daughter of former German president Gustav Heinemann who was also at other times a member of the leading council of the Lutheran Church. After her marriage to a Catholic and a near complete university degree in Lutheran theology she converted. Lucky for her she aced academically and chased through the exams of Catholic theology in no time. Eventually she found herself in the same doctorate seminar with Josef Ratzinger. They would regularly meet and translate ancient Greek texts into German together.

After she became the first female professor of Catholic theology she realised the cruelty of the celibacy and began a vendetta against the sex obsession of the ‘bachelors’ as she liked to mock them. Lucky for her she was good ammunition for the left who saw the church only as some nasty competition. The story a superficial observer would be told by the media is that Josef Ratzinger represented the backwards and Uta Ranke-Heinemann the modern side of the church.

In her last years Uta Ranke-Heinemann fell out of favour, too. It was a silent, creeping disaffection. Her last media appearances could be found on fringe communist newspapers. She did not want to introduce more left-wing agenda points into the church or obsess over sin, gay marriage, women priests and CO2. She had her own mind and that mind was concerned about lonely or morally compromised priests whose basic human instincts had been denied by the grotesque celibacy regime of their employer. The political left lost its patience with her like they lost their interest in all working rights concerns.

In 2006 Ratzinger shocked with a speech in which he dared to tacitly describe Islam as violent. Back in those days I was also foolish enough to point to the history of Catholicism to wash away concerns over Islam. Since then Jihad has gained considerable momentum and today it strikes normal people as absurd that there was an outrage circus around this observation. At this point we all go by the Russian saying, ‘We know that they are lying. They know that we know that they are lying. We know that they know that we know that they are lying, but it continues anyway.’

For Josef Ratzinger there was also too much ‘news show in the mess’, too much focus on the institution, and too little contemplation of the faith. He also called for change, but he distinguished between the changes of the painting of the house and a change of substance. In his words the church had become ‘too worldly.’ It is the spirit of the zeitgeist, the news room, that spoils the church. He asked for the church not only be seen as an institution, but as the individuals, the community of the believers, who should change and turn to their creator.

So in the end both Uta Ranke-Heinemann and Josef Ratzingers were rebels. And they both shared the same opponent. Ranke-Heinemann being (informally, but effectively) excommunicated comparably early in her life, wielded the sharper tongue. And she made it perfectly clear that her issue was mostly with the dull and intellectually blunt mediocrity in prestigious robes. People who confused their social status with their smarts argued that Mary remained a virgin when she gave birth to the descendant of King David through her husband Josef ‘because we say so.’

But did the student friends Uta Ranke-Heinemann and Josef Ratzinger win? Yes and no. The perpetual ‘there was also criticism’ remark following concessions to the late pope’s strengths reveal that the dull, spineless creeps know that it is at least not them who have won over everyone just yet. Those who had an affinity to Josef Ratzinger and what he actually represented are still around. By the end of her life Uta Ranke-Heinemann believed that she had failed and not changed anything at all. And, yes, celibacy is still in place, but her rampage started a reflection on the church and an exodus of government membership registrations (in Germany church membership gets registered with local government authorities). And most people do not leave their formal, institutional status to leave the church. In the sense of Josef Ratzing they are the church and always will be. They leave the worldly, the zeitgeistly and the corrupt. The winner takes it all. Rest in peace!

Brainstorming European Crises

Despite the necessity to face an impending food crisis the European Union and the Dutch government have shoved down an anti-agriculture directive which keeps stirring up mass protests and violent altercations in the Netherlands. The German parliament Bundestag has turned down the option to continue nuclear energy. The ECB keeps flooding the place with money, but given the inflation that is going to change. A disorganised brainstorm.

Dark Grey Pill

I haven’t uploaded anything in a while. So I do a little explaining here. A lot of terrible things are happening. Additionally, I try to work on improvements. After all my reach is small (and I suspect nefarious reasons). Eventually I will need some kind of breakthrough and have to find new ways to raise the quality.

The Trustworthiness of The Media in Russia And The West (Konstantin Kisin)

People hate the media. Media dishonesty has accelerated considerably in the West since around 2015. The well-deserved loss of trust has made some jump onto the irrational assumption that whatever sounds the most remote from the media’s explanation is the reality. This “logic” has absurd side effects such as the mainstream media still remaining the compass and that their inconsistency must be mirrored whenever they knot their narrative into a pretzel.

In need of finding a standpoint that looks – at first glance – like the most remote one from that of Western media, a variety of political influencers have blindly trusted Russian media. The irony is big, literally, since Russian propaganda is infamous for its absurd level of inconsistency.