A joke has been going around Germany lately: Putin should be awarded this year’s Nobel Prize for Medicine. Why? Because he eradicated the coronavirus in a single day. You can take the joke literally. Before the Ukraine crisis, German politics and its fervently statesmanlike citizens knew only two things: the virus, or more precisely the campaign against the unvaccinated, and the fight against climate change. Krisztina Koenen reports.
The unvaccinated can breathe a sigh of relief, at least for the time being, after months of the ruling coalition being busy riling up the unvaccinated, saying that the unvaccinated are the reason the virus is still with us. While it has long been established that it makes almost no difference whether one is vaccinated or not, the government has continued to be preoccupied with who can devise even more painful measures against the unvaccinated; and just when the epidemic is beginning to ease considerably, it wants to introduce universal vaccination at all costs, taking advantage of the hysteria in Ukraine.
This has succeeded in getting half the population — not the demonstrator kind — out onto the streets, where the police, following orders from the high command, have treated them like common criminals, sometimes with unprecedented brutality.
Meanwhile, the state-worshippers, souls easily stirred and agitated into movements, spread apocalyptic visions and demanded that vaccine-renitent people be completely excluded from public life. This has been going on ever since, and without a vaccination certificate and/or a recent negative test, it is still not possible to go to a restaurant, see a photographer, visit the town hall or take a train.
But now — thanks to Putin — the viral apocalypse has been replaced by a popular Russophobia deliberately fueled by the media and the ruling elite.
Thus the joke quoted above.
Since 2011, there has been one wave of hysteria after another among the German population. Thanks to the Greens, and Merkel in particular, rational politicking has been replaced by political moralizing. Decisions are no longer taken on the basis of logical analysis, but as a result of emotions fueled by the mainstream media and the political elite.
In 2011, Merkel tested for the first time whether this dramatic turnaround in the way political decision-making is done can be implemented: In the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the political leadership, in conjunction with the mainstream media, first created anti-nuclear hysteria and then whipped it up to even higher levels.
Merkel then decided, in response to popular demand, to shut down German nuclear power plants and introduce the so-called energy transition.
The next bout of hysteria was also systematically orchestrated: the opening of the German border in 2015, which would have been unthinkable without the frenzy of people joyfully throwing teddy bears in railway stations. This political decision, too, was morally motivated: Germany was supposed to rescue millions of poor young Arab and African men who, without it, would probably have died a fatal death in one of the peaceful countries they had to cross to reach Germany.
When emotions prevail, no one cares anymore about the lies of migrants, the consequences of mass immigration into social systems, and cultural differences, to name but a few problems; the main thing is to be on the right side.
After two or three hot summers, it was not difficult at all to warn especially children and adolescents about the climate disaster that was inevitably coming in the foreseeable future. A whole generation of young people firmly believe that we only have a few years before Germany becomes a desert and we all burn. The media have been incessantly stirring up climate panic, and as a result, the fight against carbon dioxide emissions has taken increasingly violent forms, and
and it seems that we have succeeded in raising this hysteria to the point where we now have to fear climate terrorism.
Then came the epidemic hysteria, the final stages of which we are now experiencing. Nothing shows better that it really is just hysteria than the fact that the minute Russia attacked Ukraine, almost overnight, the threats that had been thought to be existential began to disappear. A war is a serious matter, it seems, even in the minds of spoiled elite girls. But once the green-left elite have tried a method, they won’t just give it up. We could have properly considered the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, the different interests at stake, and thought about what to do in the knowledge that we will have to live with Russia going forward and that we will even have common interests in the future.
This is not what happened. The regime media immediately started idealizing Ukraine — the victim — on moral grounds. Here we have a heroic people who want nothing more than to live in peace and freedom, and therefore even sacrifice their lives.
There is no mention of oligarchs, corruption, atrocities against minorities, antisemitism, none of that really exists at all.
The Ukrainian is inherently good, a hero who needs our help. He is opposed by the brutal Russian, and because the entire Russian people are evil by birth, it is the task of the freedom-loving German to drive all Russians and everything Russian out of the country. It happens again, as it has happened many times before: The state says who is to be hated at the moment, and the ready-to-hate gang jumps in.
That is why one of the world’s best opera singers, Anna Netrebko, should have her contract terminated with immediate effect and the conductor of the Munich Philharmonic, Valery Gergiev, should be sacked. The director of a clinic in Munich put up a poster proclaiming that her clinic would not treat Russians (which she later withdrew because it threatened her medical license). Schoolchildren of Russian origin report that others „do not play with Russians.” Large grocery stores, including Aldi, have announced that they are throwing out all Russian goods, while more radical pro-Ukrainians have smeared paint on Russian grocery stores.
„Anyone who speaks Russian is living a dangerous life in Germany,” wrote an author of the opposition web magazine Tichys Einblick. „Anyone with a Russian-sounding name is suspected of being a lackey of Russian ruler Vladimir Putin … Instead of being liberal towards other people and views in these dangerous times, activists once again think it is their job to judge others.”
The media, loyal to the state, ignore any retaliatory measures and are happy to report on the collapse of the ruble. Even Mathias Döpfner, the hitherto relatively sober president of the powerful Springer publishing house (Die Welt, publisher of Bild), has called for immediate military intervention by NATO in an article,
for the greater good of course – what do we care if World War III breaks out.
Leading politicians such as the head of the Free Democrats (FDP), Christian Lindner, are considering cutting off Russian oil and gas supplies, saying it is a matter of honor and glory to freeze in the dark for the Ukrainian cause without heating and electricity.
Of course, there is a reason for the rapid rise in anti-Russian hysteria. Putin, and with him the majority of Russians, have never left any doubt that the West’s woke frenzy is seen as a sign of decadence and is not something they wish to follow. Now is the time for the woke generation of the West to repay this insult. Bodo Ramelow, the communist Minister-President of Thuringia, has brilliantly summed up Russophobia and wokeism in a single proposal.
He came up with the idea of confiscating the yachts of Russian oligarchs and donating them to the illegal migrant smuggling organization Sea Watch.
This is the German mood in a nutshell.
