I’d Agree to a Quran-Burning Ban in Germany – Here’s Why

As Apollo News reports, the Youtuber Aron Pielka was sent to prison this Sunday, almost four years after his conviction.

The reasons why his once suspended sentence came into effect are his inability to appear at court and a delayed penalty payment. Pielka says that he did not pay in time because he did not receive the notification. His obligations included staying at a given home address, but for familial matters he was not present. In short, all of this suggests that he became destitute and homeless over his activism. In post-2015 Germany critics get their social and professional ties cut in so many ways that their lives get irreparably destroyed. And this is probably also the motivation behind his conviction in the first place. It’s a feature, not a bug.

The laws are incitement against (a portion of the) people and the blasphemy law. Most of the speech the judiciary indicted him for were images of a burning Quran. Technically that is rather freedom of expression than freedom of speech and you may wonder what that is for. It is for the ground you can break with low-information voters, for starters.

Many conservatives moan about the lack of right-wing arts and a supposed lack of appreciation for the arts. But this is a misconception. The political left enjoys a tight control over our communication and makes demands on others which they would never abide by. Conservatives are expected to trim off jokes and ambiguities. Anything potentially amusing can be construed as offensive and is an excuse to cut somebody away from his audience. Say ‘retard’ and you’re out. Make masturbatory gestures on a stage and you’re the Queen of Pop.

Thus the reason why Aron Pielka included videos of burning Qurans is that it works. His material was funny, sarcastic, and creative. He’d got a sizable audience for a German Youtuber. Never did he burn any of the Qurans himself and neither did he express actual rage with the imagery. There was also no way that he could have incited non-Muslim Germans against Muslims in this manner.

The ability to threaten the public order is the legal threshold to incitement according to the law. That same threshold is supposed to anchor the blasphemy law. The only problem is that German courts have already established a tradition of ignoring that threshold.

This is reflected in one of the indictments which were bundled into Aron Pielka’s verdict. The court found that he incited anti-Semitism because he altered his avatar – a portrait of the Jewish philosopher Samuel Johnson – into a bat-man chimera. I haven’t seen it, but I suspect that it looks anti-Semitic as a standalone image. However, the avatar – by definition a visual to represent the speaker – was constantly changed to reflect some mood and Aron Pielka’s body of work shows a long-standing, unwavering support for Jews and the nation of Israel. Nobody thinks that he cultivated an audience that would go on a riot after viewing a bat picture.

But the burning Qurans are different, right? We all know they are. They don’t incite violence against Muslims, but they may well incite violence. What incites violence depends on the willingness of a subsection of the population to engage in it. But this makes the law quite arbitrary and, worse, it creates an incentive for more and more sections of society to engage in violence. If your violence is followed by a punishment of those who you feel provoked by, you can determine the order. You can set the rules and call the perceived provocations on your own terms.

And that is the spiral we must break early on. We must set the criteria what society and law accepts as untenable provocation. The fewer things are acknowledged as accommodated outrage, the calmer society will remain in the long run. This means a dress-down of all legal codes tackling ‘insults’. Incitement against (a portion of the) people should be replaced with a clear ban on two things and two things only: Quran burning and Holocaust denial.

The latter is not an attempt to quiet Jews, but to pre-empt the communists who like to exploit the shoah to justify their aggression.

The reason why the law is too general has much less to do with the Third Reich (the public approval of which is also banned there) and more to do with the German legal language which oscillates wildly between extreme detail and extreme vagueness. In the process of codification the thought trail must have gone from ‘we must quiet the Nazis’ to ‘a German chisels his law for eternity.’ So on its face ALL groups can demand the punishment of ALL other groups by ANY provocation. A law for once and for all, a low for a thousand years.

Small is beautiful, however, and laws can be changed. We should only accommodate the outrage of today and dare to hope for a future when that paragraph can be erased completely.

With that said, no Muslim riots have been provoked by Aron Pielka. The technicalities that led to his imprisonment don’t matter to me. Nobody should be threatened with punishment for his harmless online commentary. And if the authorities see harm in a behaviour, they must outlaw that conduct clearly and not apply vague laws selectively. He is a political prisoner and must be freed.

The RationalWiki Fallacy

RationalWiki is a left-wing ‘encyclopedia’ of supposedly discredited views. Its condescension is prominently represented in the logo which was chosen to be an image of a brain. In its beginning the authors focussed on absurdities that most people identify as such like esoterics, alternative medicine and astrology. Also still uncontroversial were their texts about outlandish religious views and common fallacies such as red herring, appeals to authorities, straw man and so forth. Yet over time more and more was added that presented madness as somehow intrinsically connected to conservative views.

There are comparable developments in Germany where I’m based. The channels are different, though. The German-language RationalWiki-copy Psiram doesn’t enjoy nearly as much notoriety. Information gate-keeping is still mostly controlled by public broadcasters and select media houses such as Bertelsmann, Springer, Spiegel and Holtzbrinck. And they are using the trope that large swaths of views and interests in society are exclusively held by the wicket. Independent of the topic of the day, be it mass immigration, corona, criticism of Islam or something else, the predictable framing is ‘These views are commonly held by people who believe in [fill in garbage].’

And, of course, you can always find intersections of interests between any two non-related issues somewhere in the population. The dark art is to exhibit the voices of the crazies and drown everybody else. Not long ago conservatives were presented as squared, unimaginative nitwits who would benefit from LSD for its miraculous expansion of the mind. Conversely, the hippies spawned an entire New Age Movement. Generation after generation of left-wing women felt that sudden, longing urge to rush to the stores and seek out Hinduism jump-start literature and lubricant. However, if we read RationalWiki or listen to some average German media outlet, the left is all science while madness comes in business suits. The poorly defined phrase ‘conspiracy theory’ gets almost exclusively attached to the political right.

In reality its traditional and still largest resort resides within the left, filling walls in book shops and libraries. “Ms Science” herself Greta Thunberg will have you believe that everything is connected and climate were the hub of it all, widening her interests from climate justice to climate Zionism. Arguably all of their vague bogeymen from patriarchy over systemic racism to capitalism (not just identical with markets) are buckets of conspiracy theories.

It would be frivolous to discard the idea that conservatives are also speculative. There is even an argument to be made that an obsessive materialism is less rational than some element of irrationality. Leaps of faiths have paved the way of hard science most of the time. There is a reason why i and its coefficient is called the imaginary part of a complex number. What was auxiliary once is taken for granted today. Kurt Gödel proved that Hilbert’s program to develop a rigorous axiomatic approach to pure mathematics is not possible. Alonzo Church and Alan Turing demonstrated the limits of computability. Outside of pure mathematics quantum physics and black holes pose additional barriers to our understanding. We know for sure that we don’t know. Yet, if you look for academics who pry open small crevices to make outlandish claims, you’ll invariantly find left-wing cult leaders like Judith Butler and Kimberlé Crenshaw.

Most of what is presented as right-wing conspiracy theories are arms crawling over from the left. They are often tinged with anti-Americanism and anti-Israel animus. Nothing Tucker Carlson puts on the table is original. And that is good and well as long as the sane voices are well heard which is arguably still the case in most parts of America.

In Germany information gate-keeping is tight and selective nutcases get just enough airtime for mockery, but never enough to sort anything out. While leading nuclear engineer Manfred Haferburg and Hamburg’s ex-Energy-and-Environment-Senator Fritz Vahrenholt issue warning after warning against our energy policy to alternative media outlets, the big houses Bertelsmann, Springer, Spiegel, Burda and Holtzbrinck parade much less qualified academics as experts and block any public conversations between the sides. Haferburg and Vahrenholt aren’t even given their time of the day.

For years this had been the opening for Russia’s public broadcasters RT and Sputnik. Where all sane voice are quashed well-financed players can scoop up an audience of disaffected people who are willing to hear something outside the drumming propaganda and outside its bred freak show.

A second effect of the RationalWiki fallacy is that the freaks could build up their networks. While the attention is meant to discredit the parts of society who seek constructive improvements, it also forces many of the drowned out to bind themselves onto the isles of attention.

Recently the magazine ‘Compact’ was banned. I’ve never read it, but my casual observations tell me that it was basically Alex Jones on steroids. Hmmm…maybe that’s a bad way of saying it. Is Alex Jones off steroids? It is clearly more anti-American than InfoWars and its editor Jürgen Elsässer holds a wicket, long-standing grudge against Israel. In the show Deutschlandsafari host Henryk Broder walked up to Elsässer to ask whether Osamba bin Laden might not be an Islamist at all, but a CIA agent. The room erupted in laughter because, indeed, that was one of the magazine’s title stories. Later in the evening his co-host Hamed Abdel-Samad recognised a man in the audience who belongs to the Berlin-Neukölln chapter of the neo-Nazi party NPD. Moreover, Elsässer hired at least three members of that very party to work for his publication: Thorsten Thomsen, Arne Schimmer and Oliver Niedrich.

Maybe Elsässer is a neo-Nazi himself as some purport, but I refuse to allot much time to him to be 100% accurate. He may see himself as something else for this or that disagreement with the Hitler regime. That can even be true for the mentioned NPD guys. I don’t care.

The more interesting question is how many people around him share his views and how many simply hold back their own opinions because they’ve got nowhere to go.

The recent magazine ban caused quite some stir in Germany. But after years of complaining about censorship, I’m tired. On principle I’m against it. On the basis of where we are by now and how being principled is completely disrespected in this country, I’m too jaded to care. Jürgen Elsässer wouldn’t defend me. Jürgen Elsässer doesn’t believe in the principles he appeals to now. In 2014 he sued former Green-party politician and publicist Jutta Ditfurth after she called him an ‘ardent anti-Semite.’

At least he’s not a proud anti-Semite. But the crux of the matter is that the word ‘anti-Semite’ describes a category. It is always a subjective decision to place somebody into a circle of people or outside of it. Given his obsessions it’s fair to assume that some of his claims and believes are at least inspired by people who simply hate Jews – and that’s independent of whether Elsässer knows this of them or not.

So in light of the magazine ban I still stick to my principles, but I point out that karma is a bitch. I am still tired of the everybody-is-a-Nazi mania, but to drag somebody to the authorities like Elsässer did with Jutta Ditfurth in order to penalise a (perceived) mis-characterisation shows a disregard for free expression. It is not up to the courts to address the occasional definition-overextension of ugly categories. It is the job of a freely speaking citizenry to define reasonable boundaries and more importantly to sort out the anti-Semitic tropes themselves.

Granted. This sounds like a fairy-tale world. The real world is emotional and childish. The public has a short fuse. Instead of cultivating a knowledgable and respectful citizenry our institutions have done everything to erode the civil maturity of the past. Public affairs have always been a mess, but there’s no doubt that asininity and irresponsibility grew geometrically.

In Germany the main driver behind it and the reason why I walked you through the Compact magazine ban is the RationalWiki fallacy. Jürgen Elsässer matters because Manfred Haferburg and Fritz Vahrenholt don’t.

Why Nothing Moves

Over the weekend I listened to the podcast ‘indubio’ and novelist Cora Stephan was one of the guests. On the surface Mrs Stephan and I agree on many things. And yet there is this big elephant in the room: many who dissent from the left show a stunning lack of judgement on Putin’s invasion of Ukraine which cost half a million lives at least.

So she brought up the tour of Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán who met Zelensky, Putin, Erdogan and Trump. Her criticism of our politicians was that they were outraged and huffed and puffed over what were nothing but talks. ‘Behind the scenes the talks are going on anyway’, she notes and is right, of course. But what is it again that leading figures of the AfD, of Reform UK, Rassemblement National and so on are demanding? Are they pounding their fists on the table to demand something that is done anyway? What did Cora Stephan ask for when she called for a ‘new peace movement’? Something that happens anyway?

She complained that he were accused of ‘appeasement’ and this were just another way of denouncing somebody as a Nazi. I’m not a part of the outrage crowd either way. I don’t care about Orbán’s futile travels, but neither do I over-estimate the historical context of the word ‘appeasement.’ I’m even bored typing this up. Who cares?

What I see is another political activist searching for a man-bites-dog incidence to demonstrate that really the other side is doing the thing everybody complains about. It is like the left-wing idea of a ‘culture war from the right.’ Delusional. Putin invaded a country with the claim that everybody were a Nazi there and that he needs to occupy it for a complete Germany-style de-Nazification. Now, that is one big-scale Nazi accusation. Meanwhile Cora Stephan has found a word and declares that, really, that one is too much Nazi scaremongering. So the problem comes from the other side. Really.

Viktor Orbán, the AfD, Cora Stephan and most of the others in that camp can’t hope to move anything towards peace. They could, however, prolong the bloodshed because they try to disarm the very people under attack and obfuscate the motivations of the attacker. Unless some level of honesty enters the conversation nobody can tell what makes the Russians stop. The ‘something negotiations’ crowd doesn’t really think that peace is made by blindly forking over every territory the Kremlin shows some interest in. Notably, I don’t need a crystal ball, either, to tell that negotiations will mark the end of the war. That’s a safe bet. And hot air.

Suspiciously, like the Hamas crowd they keep using the word ‘ceasefire.’ I want a peace. I want Russia to stop this. I don’t seek to help them stockpiling their arsenals while I’m still in the dark about the causes. Does anybody believe that everybody or at least the authorities in Ukraine were Nazis, that NATO expansion threatened the supposedly undefeatable Russian army, that rainbow flags and Klaus Schwab’s stupid conference circus were the issue or that Zelensky’s dancing naturally asked for the deaths of half a million people? Who can honestly say that the purported motivations make any sense to them?

I’m happy to acknowledge that companies in the West, particularly in East Germany, lost Russian suppliers, customers and business opportunities. Those are valid interests to be presented to the public. With a modicum of honesty one can complain about the promotion of zero-growth freaks and climate hysterics in the public eye while people slip into poverty – facing additional economic pressures from the sanctions. Instead we get empty phrases like ‘Russia’s got interests’ and the claim that everybody who tries to hold back the invasion ‘wants war’ and were a ‘war-monger.’

But as the underlying interests are not stated explicitly, what is it that dominant circles of the AfD try to do? They can’t possibly hope to end the violence. What they can effectively do is showcase a massive deterrence to future voters. If they supposedly cannot tell who attacked whom and if they speculate about the color revolutions being successfully kicked off by outsiders with no institutional power against those with a very streamlined authoritarian infrastructure, they declare that they’ve got no sense of responsibility whatsoever and, importantly, don’t want any of it. They decidedly present themselves as fools. They are not going to deliver or to answer.

Underneath it all is a personnel and competence paucity akin to that of the US-Democratic party.

Germany’s got a huge state quota and nobody offers any ideas how to move those pseudo-employees into constructive lives. The young don’t procreate anymore because nobody does anything about the last-minute education panic dominating the twenties of far too many citizens. Red tape makes all forms of renovations in older buildings nearly impossible no matter how insignificant and ugly the architecture is. Yet that even pales in comparison to the environmental, social and investor-deterrence regulations that eliminate all but few housing and business projects. Additionally, the failed energy policy makes building materials unaffordable and sends a bankruptcy wave over the country.

While the mosquitos eat us alive, we foster endless laws and projects to save insects from extinction. Not this or that species. No. Insects. Just insects. Wetlands are recreated for insects. Farmland is reduced for insects. Conservative opponents to wind turbines voice their concerns about the technology’s toll on, on, well, on – you guess it – on insects!

Everybody has shot his mouth off at some point and nothing substantial can be done until people voice their interests directly and stop pretending that they have other interests than their real ones – be it Ukraine or something else. We are an aging atheist society that places little value on forgiveness. Everybody made some mistakes and is stubborn about it. The phrase ‘taking responsibility’ is synonymous with stepping down. Of course, a withdrawal can be responsible when one isn’t up for a task. But the unforgiving expectation to either fanatically push through with whatever was once announced or to quit a job in shame and defeat prohibits us from conceding any mistakes publicly. It renders us unable to learn. And so we keep kicking down the can.

The Tory Landslide Into The Abyss

If the U in UK means anything at all, it means that the entire country is united like a single man in its utter and complete despise for Rishi Sunak.

Ask any two men for their reasons and they’ll give you three. Rishi Sunak fought against vaping. There is not a single person who wanted him to look into that, eh, problem. He suffers from the European cold. It is this peculiar disease of our elites which makes them tinker around with utter nonsense for the sole purpose of distracting themselves from the fact that they are not competent enough to take on actual challenges.

There was more immigration under the Tories than under Blair, the conservatives moan. The schools, the roads, the economy and everything else are in shambles, Labour says. None of the EU red tape is cut, say the Brexiteers. No tariff reduction negotiations with any other nation or group of nations were advanced, say the Remainers.

And everybody is right because Rishi Sunak cared about other people’s smoking habits.

This is unfair, of course. He also initiated a nuclear power program, supported Ukraine with weapon deliveries, and tackled a little bit the migration crisis with a Rwanda deal that is soon to be rescinded by his successor. But the British have got standards and that’s fair enough. It is the reason why he did all those things with varying effects to begin with.

For comparison the Germans got in the same span of time (1) no pronouncements for new nuclear power plants, (2) some, yet a considerably more anxious support for Ukraine, and (3) absolutely nothing with even the smallest chance of immigration reduction.

But the British are not Germans. They’ve got standards. And when they signal loud and clear with their ballots that they really wanted to remove super-snob David Cameron from public office, they raise their eyebrows when Sunak invites him back into the cabinet anyways. David Cameron – who has a hard time seeing any faults on the side of Hamas – was not elected, was no member of parliament and was not qualified by any merit outside of his blind allegiance to the permanent bureaucrat-political complex that views elections as nuisances and wants Brussel’s illegitimate controls back. The same Rishi Sunak who had no scruples returning Cameron to power, ousted Home Secretary Suella Braverman for opposing violent jihad.

Yet, I, for one, will not pretend to be satisfied with the result. I believe many voters did make mistakes and that, for example, Dan Norris is the worse alternative to Jacob Rees-Mogg. I also do not believe that Labour has successfully purged its ranks from anti-Semitism to the same extent that Marine Le Pen has cleansed the Rassemblement National. We are going to see more underhanded support for campus protestors and other jihad proponents as well as an erosion of support for Israel which is attacked and threatened by Hezbollah right now.

Recently Pink Floyd singer Roger Waters claimed that there were no evidence that Hamas burned babies and raped women.

Well, there are the videos made and published by the jihadists themselves that show, for example, a baby being placed inside an oven to get actually burned. But that doesn’t count, I guess. Because stubbornness. Waters isn’t a Member of Parliament, but I daresay that this kind of extreme denial of reality will be represented in the Labour faction. And I daresay that fanaticism does always sooner or later attract the anti-Semites.

I am also worried about a growing inaccessibility and a wave of fanaticism on the political right. The Front National and the AfD refused to even listen to President Zelensky on his respective visits to France and Germany. This is no longer a debate about what type of weapons should or should not be delivered and what portions of the territory could be ceded in exchange to what trust-building security agreements. This is a full-on refusal to hear all sides of a conflict and form a complete picture of reality. It is a growing cult-like madness.

So far, however, the left of today – and, please, we are not talking about the 19th century or some other place and time – harbours the strongest magnet for anti-Semitism.

So, yes, the Tories deserved it and, no, I’m not happy about it.

The AfD Abandons Itself

The poll numbers go up. The upcoming elections in the party strongholds of East Germany have the potential of winning enough seats to gain veto options and therefore negotiation power. And, yet, the AfD is already past its prime.

When Bundestag’s member of parliament Joana Cotar left the AfD, she reported a strange new trend: Her colleagues began to fawn over the most inhumane foreign regimes. The party cosied up to China, Russia, Turkey and Iran. Yes, Iran! Maximilian Krah wrote in his book ‘Politics From The Right’: A mentally conservative thinker will always seek to continue his own tradition and not somebody else’s. This should have been clear at least since the Islamic Revolution of Iran in 1987/79. In the world outside, the West wins over exactly those individuals who are discontent with their local traditions; maybe because they are left-wing or because they belong to a sexual minority or are otherwise on the margins of their traditional societies.

It is hard to pick that apart. The first sentence is debatable because the word ‘conservative’ allows for a vast range of definitions excluding or including various social circles across history and nations. Notably, though, the shah was ousted by many people who would not identify themselves as conservatives. Back in the day the political left across all countries poured vitriol over Iran or ‘Persia’ as it was still called.

Notably the German student protest movement of 1968 was sparked by the death of Benno Ohnesorg who was shot by a police officer. The young man participated in a demonstration organised by left-wing activists. That march was a protest against a state visit by the Shah Reza Pahlavi. It was only in the very moment when Persia changed from an ally of America to a sworn enemy that the attitude of the left changed.

Inside Persia, too, it was mostly the left – including people who openly identified as socialists – who drove the uprising. In the ensuing chaos they in turn were ousted by the Islamists. Yet, even the Islamists do not quite fit Krah’s description as a force that merely tries to preserve local traditions. And the shah was definitely not a threat to people’s way of life.

It is unclear how Iran’s Islamist Revolution is an example of Krah’s point. The revolutionaries were not enticed by the West, but by the political left whose center of power at the time was Moscow, not Washington.

In my humble opinion the passage looks a lot like it was inspired by Russian propaganda. In the Kremlin’s reading of history and world affairs the political left is the only manifestation of Western civilisation. Western cultures don’t have any values of their own. There are only spheres of influence and interests and we silly human mortals have no way to decide who’s right or wrong in any given situation because all cultures must be equal all the time, particularly Russia must be an equal to Western nations.

It would be truly arrogant to acknowledge the reality of differences, of cultures that rise and fall, and of social ills that can worsen or be cured. It is no coincidence that this rhymes with long-standing left-wing notions. Countless public figures anxious of gossip girls in editorial rooms don’t want to be wronged. They created a special kind of Stockholm syndrome that makes a political party with absolutely no chance in hell to be liked by the gossip girls bow over backwards to please them.

Once you run with the proposition that all cultures must be equal at all times, there is no way of criticising Islamism anymore. Consequently Maximilian Krah praises Turkey’s president Erdogan who supposedly ‘serves the interests of his people’ (Krah) and he sides with the Iranian revolution which he paints as some preservation of the locals’ way of life.

While all of this is going on, BBC, CNN, ARD and the entire left-wing media continue to pretend that Krah and his party were driven by a rabid hatred for Islam. The AfD is barely driven by anything anymore. They are apathetic after they have hemorrhaged a great deal of their most ambitious members.

A few years back they had a suspicious internal strife. One side accused the other of cosying up too much to the established left-wing party conglomerate. The other side complained that the former had tried to make the party into a pure protest party without actual ambition to win public offices.

This can only be understood knowing that Germany has a collectivist electoral system that instilled in the public the notion that we have to live with perpetual coalition governments. An additional feature, the five-percent-entrance bar, creates a substantial hurdle for new parties to be seen. After many decades Germans have almost forgotten – or learnt to habitually dismiss the idea – that any election has the potential to give more than fifty percent of the parliamentary seats to one party and also to flush previously irrelevant parties onto the stage. In the early years of post-war Germany any party with self-esteem used to advertise its position as if it had the chance of winning the golden pot or as if it were able to find a coalition partner – maybe falling right from the sky – to get its proposals through. That attitude is notably absent in the battle between the suck-ups and the private-income-content protest-ballot collectors.

Touching on the debate the left-wing media began to only acknowledge the AfD as a pure protest party. This rankled many voters because they want the border controlled, the nuclear power plants rebuild and see other ideas materialise. They do not want to vote only to voice some discontent. They want something. The sad truth, however, is that they don’t matter. In Germany voters don’t matter much. The party leaderships matter and when they decide that sitting in some parliaments fills their pockets well enough, then that is the end of that story. Your voting ambition does not matter.

The Iran re-assessment is quite surprising for a party which used to be bashed for being too zealous against Islamism. For a variety of reasons we are still Islam illiterates in the West. Some blame Saudi Arabia and Wahhabism for the dark streaks, some the entire Islamic tradition and some blame the Iranian revolution. Depending on what social ills you have got on the top of your head there is some truth to all of it. But what concerns the outside world is not how homosexuals are killed or women are mistreated in some backyard of a desert. What concerns us is the global, violent and political ambition of jihad and that is fostered by Iran and suppressed by Western allies.

For the AfD to get that wrong means that they never worked towards understanding the problem. Immigration control is important to mitigate the spread of jihad and stabilise the situation, but it does not stop the mujahidin from fighting your country. They gun for world domination if you’re now too content with your personal income to read up on the problem or not. In this context ‘gun for’ doesn’t have to be read literally. Sometimes it’s also a knife.

Krah and his comments about Turkey and Iran aren’t the exception. Tino Chrupalla who leads the party with his colleague Alice Weidel waited until the 11th of October last year only to tweet out the following.
The assault by #Hamas against #Israel is to be condemned. Yes, the German original is as stiff as my translation here. . I mourn all the deaths of war. The countries of the region should count on de-escalation to prevent a wildfire. Diplomacy is asked. A solid solution for all sides must be the goal!

https://x.com/Tino_Chrupalla/status/1712056218640945390

Jihadists are shaking in their boots and the Washington Post must do everything in their power to stop this man from slaughtering all Muslims indiscriminately.

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

Russen veröffentlichen abgefangenes Gespräch über Angriff auf die Krimbrücke

Der gestern veröffentlichte Mitschnitt eines Gesprächs zwischen hochrangigen deutschen Militärs, in dem die Möglichkeit eines Angriffs auf die Krim-Brücke diskutiert wurde, wirft ernste Fragen auf.… pic.twitter.com/sIFF7lP3JP

— Baro (@sjw_baro) March 2, 2024

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.

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’!

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.