Anti-Street Name Campaign

ZEIT online has started an inofficial campaign against street names. There has been some kind of intellectual civil war in Germany for some time on a regional level that is now picked up and staged for the federal republic. In Germany most streets are often named after famous people, politicians, inventors, artists, scientists and in earlier times, military heroes.

That has to go like the statues that remind of the Conferacy, at least according to the iconoclastic left. Zeit charmed in with an innocuous warm-up. A database tool that lets you search how often a person is honoured that way, with a map to show the distribution accross the country. I knew instantly where this is going. The accompanying articles still spoke about how street names represent our culture and some drivel about other names like ‘train station street’ (Bahnhofstrasse).

The core is that leftists don’t want to honour people. They honour the collective, the ideology. Faces and stories are in the  way of a utopian future. So an article was already about ‘flowers and nazis’ as street names. And now one about ‘colonialists’. I think the most surprising thing about the left is that they are not suprising. A broken record forever.

But there is something more than just the collectivism. It is the utter hate. The wish to bring enemies to exinction, not only physically but also the memory of them. Nothing can stay. And there is no intent to look into details, into the three dimesions of a character. Under a label like ‘colonialist’ everybody has to go, no matter how justified and even-handed the activity in question was and what else the person did. Extinction must be complete in the mind of totalitarians.

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