Attention Needed: Iran & Venezuela – Attention Received: Greenland

Everybody seems to have a different opinion on why Trump “needs” Greenland. My best bet is that the US military fears WWIII being launched by the Chinese. In his New Year’s address, Xi Jinping called a ‘reunification’ with Taiwan ‘unstoppable’ . Taiwan had never been under the control of the Chinese communist party, neither united or divided, but that is were the island belongs, says Beijing. Speaking of the capital, there is a construction site nearby for the largest underground bunker complex in history.

It’s nuke-proof. You don’t need that to sack Taiwan or Japan. You’d need that for a world war.
While Greenland did not extend the moratorium of understanding MOU with the United States that allowed for a joint exploration and future mining of the country’s rare minerals, it does, however, still have such an MOU with China. In 2018 China announced the Polar Silk Road and it is exactly what you’d expect. Greenland had to be pressured by Washington and Copenhagen to turn down multiple Chinese offers. Ever so often, Greenlanders and Europeans in general sound totally oblivious to the concerns that come with a Chinese monopoly on rare minerals and other bottleneck resources.

The security community likes to talk a big deal about how unreliable America had become under Trump. But can we digest for a moment that the entire Western defense architecture rests on the US precisely because all other partners are much less reliable? I don’t think that I have to reiterate the entire anti-Israel sh*t-show that followed the Hamas attack (‘October 7th’). You know who you are. Civilized nations don’t stand together when savages attack. Instead our leaders act like short-sighted wannabe war profiteers. Not even the most wicket Islamist voter can be foregone.

European elites won’t even commit to defending their own. ‘Erratic’ is maybe the most polite way to describe Viktor Orbán of Hungary. His forces go through a NATO-funded ‘rejuvenation’ makeover. Senior officers are replaced in big numbers. An audio was leaked in which his Defense Minister rallied the troops to get on a path to war as soon as possible. He announced to break with all previous ‘peacekeeping activities’. And, indeed, the peace gestures ceased around the time of the recording, at least all those towards Western and pro-Western peoples. Meanwhile, Orbán went out of his way to block sanctions and weapon deliveries to Ukraine because public encouragement of Russia’s attack, he insists, is just ‘wanting peace.’

Germany keeps destroying its own power stations, nuclear and otherwise, even though our grid becomes increasingly unstable and the Russian elites remain antagonistic for the foreseeable future. At the beginning of Putin’s ‘Special Operation’ Energy Minister Robert Habeck lied to the parliament in order to see some of them destroyed. No scruples. No reliability.

Before the Ukraine War changed into a drone nightmare, artillery shells were the main supply concern. Not one letter of the environmental and workplace regulation could be temporarily altered to speed up production and save lives on the front. Europe is hitting the wall with its stubborn elites.

The crossroads: either ‘net zero’ or an effective deterrence of China. Either (scheming) environmentalists get out of the way or we risk another world war.

Will the leadership of the EU educate the anti-nuclear energy advocates? Will they use the available carbon-free technology such as uranium reactors to reduce the demand for fossil fuels? Will they thus guarantee that it will be Western nations who extract key resources from the Arctic? Right now they look like they don’t want to guarantee anything.

In 1966, Project Iceworm, an attempt to station nuclear missiles on Greenland, got abandoned; officially because the ice shield were not stable. Notably, the Americans didn’t ask Denmark for permission. That’s diplomatic for ‘they probably did ask, did hear from them, but didn’t take a no for an answer.’ Why on earth did the Danes not offer that remote place to improve NATO’s nuclear cover? Greenland isn’t France! It’s not densely populated.

That’s why Trump “needs” Greenland. But he shouldn’t. Europe could yield. That’s the deadlock.
If Europe does yield, a treaty would probably include:
– The mining around the Arctic will not be threatened by their Net Zero environmentalism. Europe doesn’t bother to accept its de-industrialisation while it boosts dirtier production sites in China. If CO2 doesn’t matter when it emanates from China, it won’t when it comes out of the Arctic, either.
– The US comes to station nuclear-powered machines and weapons on Greenland.

The military theater around the island is silliness, but it does distract from the people in Caracas and Tehran who rest hunkered down and are torn between hopes and fears.

I may say that I’m none of the 4D-chess freaks. Whatever good reasons Trump may have – and I’m not privy to the intelligence information that imply a sudden urgency in that matter – his public communication is a complete disaster right now.

A Comprehensive Report about Germany’s Speech Curation

Click to access de-report-en.pdf

German Cargo Transport Heralds Disaster

Last week Sigrid Nikutta was axed from the management of DB Cargo, a daughter of German transport company Deutsche Bahn. Her unit runs red numbers. Since she took over in 2020 they accumulated a sum total of 3.1 billion euro in losses. As DB Cargo like their main competitors Captrain Deutschland, TX Logistik and SBB Cargo belong to a larger corporation and hence don’t publish detailed financial reports, it is hard to assess who’s still in good shape. All circumstantial evidence suggests that the whole cargo market is in trouble.

Following Covid, EU-red-tape avalanches, hyper-environmentalism and the destruction of all affordable energy producers, Germany’s economy comes to a screeching halt and cargo traffic is the artery system of the business world.

Arteries retract when less tissue must be supplied with oxigen. And this is what Sigrid Nikutta did. She wanted to reduce the workforce of approximately 17,000 staffers to 10,000 employees. Garages were set to close, vehicles be sold and dynamically leased from third parties.

Naturally she was confronted by the trade union EVG and it was their letter to the CEO of Deutsche Bahn that cost her job. They demand a new start with a ‘new leadership and strategy.’

They didn’t bother to propose any such strategy. I can think of the following alternatives to Nikutta’s plans.
– beg the taxpayer to pick the bills
– let the Chinese or other potentially hostile players take over

Sure enough the Chinese are as interested in building up blackmail potential for their widely expected attack on Taiwan as the Russians had been before they launched their large-scale invasion of Ukraine. But that is the most likely outcome after the EU Commission has banned Deutsche Bahn from shifting more funds into its daughter.

But there has always been a third rail: raising prices to cover the expenses as the economics of scale dwindle. It is not politically convenient. In a first loop it would have raised the cost of everything in the consumer market. Businesses would have gone to the competition. Since other railway cargo services run red numbers, too, clients would have resorted to lorries on the streets. It would have forced politicians to tax those motorised vehicles for their wear on the infrastructure and to build new lanes. That in turn would have raised consumer prices again. At some point the lorry transport cost would have surpassed the hiked rail cargo prices and the market share of Deutsche Bahn would have rebounded.

That’s inconvenient. On the other hand a Chinese takeover that grants insights into crucial military vulnerabilities and allows the installation of ransomware while MediaMarkt, an electronics retailer which changed hands just recently, threatens to release drones like Operation Spidernet does at least not alert the wider German public. ‘Does drone warfare mean my Amazon parcels are delivered faster?’

Of course, that was just some comic relief on my part, but even such a path would mean little more, but kicking the can down the road. Eventually consumer prices will hike following the dynamics described above. It will become inconvenient no matter who controls DB Cargo.

Sigrid Nikutta had the spine to tell her co-workers that they will have to give up many, if not all, of the things they worked on for many, many years. She is not bold enough, however, to address her own managerial class and the wider public with uncomfortable truths. And yet she’s almost certainly going to be replaced by somebody who’s even worse, who’s more coward, who will toe the line of the trade unions more slavishly and who will put all his efforts in cosmetics and delay.

The shrinking tissue isn’t fate, but it’s a matter that cannot be resolved internally. What DB Cargo would need is a confrontation with the economic decline induced by the fanaticised political left. Who is questioning publicly why almost everybody on TV is a communists or some other business illiterate? Who says that we want less environmental protections? Who dares to suggest that Ursula von der Leyen is not qualified enough for her job?

The managerial class hopes for a quiet solution that will not come. They waited too long and saw the fanaticization of the left unfold right in front of their eyes. The moment one of them will publicly weigh the risks of nuclear energy against the risks of not using it, he will be bombarded with accusations. He will be painted as a thug who’s keen to pour all of his fluorescent nuclear goo into the pond until each and everyone of us is a comicbook superhero. It wasn’t just Sigrid Nikutta alone who didn’t bother to say that green mutant slime doesn’t exist. It was all of them.

Some of My Misgivings About The German Election System

This is not the most pressing or amusing thing I have to share. Those are collected notes I jotted down over the years. Only concept. Everybody’s got to clear the desk once in a while.

The key motivations for an electoral reform should be:

(1) the sense of abandonment. (Does the government care about us?)
(2) uneducated elites
(3) responsibility pooling. (Who’s accountable for what? Deep state/The blob)
(4) inability to decouple the jobs of the government
(5) the Neonazi paranoia
(6) expertism – the reliance on real and fake experts, over-participation of the uninformed and a felt obligation to partake in every election
(7) breaking media power
(8) demagoguery

A first look at the problems

The sense of abandonment

While US Americans react to erratic government intrusions with a resounding ‘Leave me alone!’ cry, Germans feel alone already. Our problems are habitually ignored and hand outs are not a fulfilling sedative. People want to advance their ambitions, mainly their professional ones, and not be shut down or exhausted on bureaucratic grounds while the elites occupy themselves with their genitals and the rainbow flag. A discussion about the appropriate size of the government cannot be entertained until people have any sense of agency, unless your average citizen knows that his individual rights are guaranteed while he seeks to organise a majority in his interest.

As of now Germany has got no substantial racism problem, but a loss of control poses the question who’s in charge while our unaccountable elites occupy themselves with self-interests and childish infighting, perfectly ignorant of the concerns of the population. Historically those sentiments gave rise to hostilities to foreign nations and towards Jews. Scapegoats are a shortcut to research. And people who wake up in large numbers to politics because of a crisis are likely to be unfamiliar with the self-interests, the obsessions, the sub-clinical mental disorders and the psychological group-think dynamics that explain reality. Some hostile, rational profiteer in the background is an easy answer that can pop through any crisis window. At the same time elites historically showed to be happy about such witch-hunts because they distract from their actual decisions and the actual consequences of such.

Uneducated elites

In the face of the upcoming crises it is also likely for our elites to lose their own sense of control. One of the reasons why our elites and the mainstream media aren’t in a crisis mode and are not having honest unfettered discussions is that they still operate in their silly fake-it-until-you-make-it mode. The Dunning-Kruger effect lets them drag more and more responsibilities onto their desks. You must be smart to note the complexity of an issue. If you think a triangle is just a triangle anyway, you are not Archimedes.

In Germany there’s popular proposal to bar candidates with no professional background from running for elected offices. This is based on the observation that a lot of our leading politicians entered parliament during or after some academic efforts and hold neither degrees nor professional merits. Since this is not nearly as extreme in any other Western country, literally any change to the election system does already solve the problem. The downside of this proposal is that it gives political power to whatever group is supposed to certify the work and opens unnecessary discussions about the work of housewives, artists, novelists, part-time versus full-time, pseudo-employments from interest groups among other contentions.

Responsibility pooling

I coin the phrase ‘responsibility pooling’ because I noted a deliberate design of our government bodies to cover their tracks. Responsibility pooling is when citizens cannot trace who made what decision, when ominous committees or bureaucracies rule and you don’t know how to affect their governance. The underlying problem is the gradual loss of legitimacy of delegates. Delegation is the institutional equivalent of the game ‘Chinese whispers.’ Administrations consist of chains of positions in which one assigns the job of the next. The further down the chain a position is, the more remote it is from a direct election and the less clout an official should have over the public. Responsibility pooling makes individuals unaccountable and causes the mounting wrath to wear down institutions as a whole.

Decoupling problems

We will soon face an avalanche of crises. Energy becomes scares, inflation shoots through the roof, production sites will be shut, mass unemployment will ensue and European countries will admit bankruptcy. As the unresolved problems underneath those crises persist, they become more and more intertwined. It is in our human nature to assume that a complex problem needs a single complex solution, a man, a program, a remedy, that can fix this. In reality complex problems are solved by tackling parts of them at a time. Elected offices should be as independent as possible from party headquarters and other offices. Cooperation must be based on individual initiative. Instead of assigning the best experts to a public office we move all-round generalists into these positions. And this is driven by our tribal occupation with party ideologies. The goal is not to find the best man for a job. The unspoken goal has become to cast the influence of a party and its leadership over as many institutions as possible. The party leaders and the public officials base their legitimacy not on competence but on the number of votes. Their campaigns and the affiliated “independent” media rally as many people to all available poll stations as possible. They moralise on the supposed importance of everybody’s constant participation in everything which forces citizens to rely on real and fake experts.

Neonazi paranoia

The Neonazi paranoia or ‘woke’ is particularly effective when you have this attitude that either your party foists its generalists across all public offices or evil people will do it instead. If the election system does not allow the wholesale sweeping of offices for this or that ideology, the scare of extremism would be more easily countered. As of now the German system is designed such that a peaceful transition of power in various independent areas of government cannot occur independently. To substantially reduce immigration the AfD (if even competent enough …) would need more than half of the seats of both chambers of parliament, assign new judges and fend off sanctions from the EU, the UN and other international bodies. Alternatively, they can bargain a deal with a left-wing party. There is no option but to sweep ALL institutions with supporters of one policy until it gets implemented. Interestingly, those who engage in the everybody-is-a-Nazi scare don’t find that prospect scary enough to grant other options to the public. For whatever reason they decided that unfiltered mass immigration is so important to them that they designated it the hill they desperately want to die on.

Expertism

The corona pandemic has illustrated how the powerful can further almost every policy proposal when they come to select the experts who talk to the public. In a specialised society we are used to consult experts. We try different doctors until we know to trust and then we blindly trust them. And if its not the doctor, it’s the lawyer, the accountant or somebody else. There is a limit of what one can be knowledgeable about. When it comes to everyday experts chances are high that they have your interest at heart. When a society as a whole becomes reliant on the expertise of others, it falls pray to manipulative ideologues. This reliance is created by the assumed obligation of your average citizen to have to be part of every decision. If you cannot decide all these complex matters on your own, you blindly go by trust and this is largely the evolutionary basis for group-think behavior.

Media power

The current system allows a handful of chief editors to rally masses of poorly informed citizens to the defense of one group or the attack of another. Instead of providing people with the most essential information to understand current affairs and to present both sides of a given conflict in a fair manner, they are usually party of various conflicts and rather distract than sharpen people’s focus and attention on the unfolding events.

How Germans talk about the election system so far

Most proposals from mainstream parties on election reforms in Germany circle around the voting procedure of the ‘Bundestag.’ The current method is so arcane that I have yet to meet a single German who actually knows where which parliamentarian came from and how to vote him out of office or defend him against what competitors. In what constituency is one supposed to organise any majority to get what policy supporter into the chamber? This undermines the very idea of a representative democracy. Citizens don’t know how to effect what change. More than half of the seats are alotted by party lists. How these lists are composed is a mystery to most voters and a substantial participation fence against the public. They tend to be combinations of ‘state lists’ (Länderliste), but the ‘hows’ and ‘whats’ of those details are a matter of party statutes. Most people only know that they don’t know where what parliamentarian exactly came from and how to get somebody more representative in his place. But without transparency democracy is a farce. Either people know how to determine their destiny or they don’t. Influence, determination and representation of interests are not the goals that are publicly discussed. And the underlying reason is that the years of responsibility pooling have led to the idea that delegation does not take away from the legitimacy granted by the voters. The party-list-derived larger half of the Bundestag is seen as delegations of the parties.

According to the constitution Grundgesetz a member of parliament is only subject to his own conscience. In everyday practice they are treated as if they owe their seat to the party. The fear of being isolated from the parties causes the chambers behavior to be highly predictable. The quality of speeches are extremely low because they don’t matter. No “representative” votes according to his conscience, the feedback of his constituency or the insights from the debate. Speakers follow theatrical ambitions and react only homeopathically to questions from peers. Why should they care when the results of the sessions are known in advance? The bills are mostly drafted in the ministries or by external business consultants and are only flushed through the institution that was once thought of as the heart of our democracy.

When the election system is discussed the only metric of interest to the media is whether it establishes more fairness between party leaders. A reform is sold to the public as an attempt to create the perfect representative composition of set-in-stone ideologies who supposedly have a right to blindly run down their agendas no matter what happens to the country. What matters to them is that the parties get as many delegates into public and administrative positions as possibles. And it is the fairness between those networks depending on the party headquarters that is the exclusive concern. Not only do I care little about this, I hold that it is not even a legitimate interest at all. If democracy were simply about replacing one fanatic king with another, we wouldn’t need the entire parliamentarian system at all. We could just grant some time of monarchical power to one party leader and exchange him for another thereafter. There are good reasons for the structures of Western democracy and voting is the exercise by which we render judgement on our officials so that we remain in charge of our destiny in the face of dynamically changing times.

Proposal

The representative should be answerable to a local community and organising majorities in that constituency for a given interest is how that interest is cared for in the chamber. A clear, normal first-past-the-post selection is the first part of the solution, removing party names from the ballot sheets is the second.

In the discussion how to establish fairness between the leaders, first-past-the-post gets brushed under the ominous ‘lost votes’ argument. Isn’t it unfair that my voters did not see their candidate take any seat or office at all even though they are also support of my party leader just like those who live in constituencies replete with his fans? To outsiders it is hard to believe that this is an actual argument in Germany and an unchallenged one. Nobody actually says, ‘No, you lost! Suck it up!’ The “lost votes” are still supposed to count somehow. The whole point of a decision is that one thing happens and the other thing DOES NOT HAPPEN! If the other thing also happens, you haven’t made a decision. And foiling the decision-making disempowers the sovereign, the voter.

There are voting systems that do this to a smaller degree like the Australian “instant run-off system”. In Australia the second choices of the least popular candidates are added. But why should people who have made an unpopular first choice have more weight? Those voters are actually supposed to ‘lose their vote.’ Another argument is that the candidates with fewer votes may still be closer to the overall intent of the electorate than the winning candidate. They still have lost. If candidates feel close to each other in their skills and ambitions, they are free to hold primary elections between them. There is no reason why the official election set-up should take care of bundling forces. Losing voters should continue their public debate efforts and maybe in a future election their space-shuttle parking lot will make the day. There is no system in which everybody will always get his way and be the monarch over everybody else. In Australia the decisions are still felt clearly enough, but the bundle-choice system in Germany disenfranchises the voters entirely.

The major reason why politics all across the West is so terribly tribal along party lines is that some people actually profit from it. The media can only rally against a party when low-information voters identify members en masse on their ballot sheets. High-information voters will find their candidates by name and independent of media recommendations. It is the masses of people who need the orientation with party labels that can be manipulated. Requiring voters to know the name of the candidate that represents them best in a public office reduces the participation.

The question over whether or not participation grants democratic legitimacy is hotly debated. The prevailing sense of abandonment in Germany leads to election abstention as a last signal of defiance. It is the idea that the elites would see their legitimacy shrink when voters abstain. After all this is what they say. If elites constantly try to lower the voting age, try to get immigrants who don’t understand the language and what’s going on to vote and overall drive up the participation rate with their rhetoric, they really must care about those numbers, right? Wrong. They care about drowning the informed with the uninformed. Of course, they wouldn’t admit it and so the original argument for political legitimacy as a function of participation is usually that democracy (δημοκρατία) simply means the rule of the people and that is just as many as you get. In the United States this meets the popular contention that the country is a republic (res publica) and not a democracy by which Americans mean that its’s not a mob rule (ochlocracy, ochlocratia, ὀχλοκρατία). The ancient Greek saw the danger of a kyklos (κύκλος), a cycle of government models. The best developed kyklos idea was described by the historian Polybios (Πολύβιος). In his view the natural next stage after a democracy is the descent into a mob. Powerful people in control of the means to manipulate can stir up masses to serve their interests under the guise of expressing the interest of the vast majority.
In antiquity the power of the demagogues (δημαγωγός) was based from their rhetorical tactics. Instead of presenting logical arguments they improved their own standing by supporting already popular ideas independent from their match with reality. We observe the exact same dynamics in our media. The difference is that those low-integrity speakers today also deny attention to counter-arguments, a depravity the demagogues of ancient Athens usually didn’t engaged in. The folly of the masses is the reason why representation matters and referenda alone – albeit a welcome addition to the political process – will not solve the core problems. It is not a design problem when representatives will occasionally act differently from what they promised during their campaigns. They are supposed to work their way into complex problems and it is likely that they realise something they did not know before. Contrary to popular wisdom this is not always a sign of a lack of integrity. It is the duty of a representative to explain why he was mistaken before. He is not supposed to blindly follow polls and hide behind a consent. However, he is neither supposed to place the responsibility for his diverging behavior on the complexity of an issue if he does not deign to explain any of that complexity.

In order to reverse the descend into a mob society we have to find criteria of legitimacy outside of a blind quantification of mobilisation and support. Reducing participation is historically associated with barring people from it. Thus the idea causes visceral discomfort. Occasionally people annoyed by the current mass craze and its downstream political effects bite the bullet and propose outright bans like limiting election rights to taxpayers. Where ever you want to set the axe, however, you will meet a lot of resistance. You can achieve what you seek to achieve without the friction by simply raising the cognitive bar. Ballots should only be available in the main administrative language of a country, i.e. in German, and people should remember the names of the candidates they hope to be best represented by. This is also the more palatable option simply because all of us would at the same time be included and excluded from elections; indeed, each of us would be excluded from most elections. If the legitimacy of a public office is derived from the support of people who care about it and not by the sheer number of cast votes, elections in a representative democracy become an ordinary human resources decision. This requires unprecedented humbleness in an age of narcissism. But if you imagine to run a business you would never hire somebody whose name you cannot remember. You would neither choose a craftsman based on his looks or how close his believes are to those of somebody else. Why would you choose a public representative that way? If you can desist from partaking in every election, you will also become less reliant on experts, real and fake ones. Experts can err, too, and they also have their own set of interest. You either know on your own who would be your best representative for a given public office or nobody does. If you cannot delegate decisions to other voting peers, you ultimately delegate it to a manipulative authority like the media, influential billionaires and (pseudo-)experts.

Not every official of the sprawling administration of our government can be elected. Even if we expand the number of electable offices (which we should do), we don’t want to strain the public with constant calls to the ballots. But administrations should be answerable to a ministry, a state or a federal one. And there is no reason why the entire executive branch should pend on only one single elected office. Ministers can be and should be entirely independent offices. It is the nature of executive bodies to be responsive to the changing circumstances. As such ministries are often created or reorganised. The establishment, budgeting and discontinuation of them can be placed in the hands of the parliament. When a new ministry is created, it should be the right of the people to elect its leader. As of now the responsibilities of the cabinet members are still pooled. Ministers should cooperate, but they should not work primarily on other ministries’ affairs or shed responsibility when matters in their domain go out of hand.

In a number of American states judges are elected. The European Union slammed its member nation Poland as supposedly undemocratic when the Poles considered a system of judicial oversight to punish misbehavior on the benches. Who does check the courts? The public, a committee or nobody? Courts like any institutions can corrupt and they are also as susceptible to ideological fashions as any of the others.

A German saying goes, “On the sea and in the court we are left in the hand of the Lord.”(Auf See und vor Gericht ist man in Gottes Hand.) Germany appoints her judges by parliament decision. The main argument for appointments over elections is that the courts are supposed to apply the law stoically and not ideologically. The saying suggests, though, that many Germans don’t feel that way. They feel that, for instance, foreigners are given more lenient sentences than citizens.

My proposal to scrap all party information from ballot sheets entirely is called ‘nonpartisan elections’ in the context of US judicial elections. These elections exist in Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, North Dakota, Oregon, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin. The quality of elected judges versus appointed judges is difficult to measure. In a paper of the University of Chicago Law School with the title ‘Professionals or Politicians: The Uncertain Empirical Case for an Elected Rather Than Appointed Judiciary’ the authors tried to create measurements for skill, effort and independence, anyway. The result was that they did not find a superiority by any metric for one group or the other, but they noted that the appointed judges were more likely to leave a legacy behind in the form of high quality opinions while elected judges write more of them. Whenever I read the verdicts of German courts I am shocked by the low quality of the reasoning. It’s safe to say that elections, at least, wouldn’t do harm. What speaks for elections is that ideologies are often pushed down top-down corrupting all institutions in their way and elections provide one of only few options to reverse dangerous trends. The usual counter-argument is that courts are pressured and influenced by the fickle masses. But this has always been the case. The musical ‘Chicago’ is actually based on a real-life observation. What drives malleable judges into dubious verdicts is media frenzy and not voters. Citizens who take part in judicial elections are less likely to be the uninformed outrage mob that are whipped up by the press.

Notes On The Oval Office Tiff

Zelensky, Trump and Vance had a bad day. Maybe they were hungry and tired. Maybe the impact will be huge. And maybe they calm down and prioritise peace over mood.

As far as I see Trump’s Minerals Deal was a good one and even superior to Zelensky’s offer. The latter sought to ensure Ukrainian control over the raw resources fund with which some of the reconstruction efforts should have been financed. Even with all US corruption scandals in mind, America’s susceptibility to that kind of corrosion is much more limited than Ukraine’s own. The country would benefit from external oversight which is also one of the reason why some have high (and unrealistic) hopes for the European Union and their iron fist.

Zelensky’s second mistake was his public drive. He could have re-negotiated or accepted the deal for weeks now and by private means of communication. Instead he joined the choir of the European chatting class who aren’t used to any serious work and any heavy lifting whatsoever. They spend day in and day out insulting Trump and portraiting him as incapable of any good choice whatsoever. You cannot get these hate driven people to admit as much as that he may have put on a pretty tie. I keep listening to Anne Applebaum and her cross-Atlantik circles for years and they contort all of their claims on the axiomatic basis that Trump is dirt, that he can’t do anything right.

Contrary to their claims the White House is acutely aware that Vladimir Putin is the reason for this war and that Ukraine needs robust security guarantees. But that’s like admitting that he’s got a sense of humor.

Volodymyr Zelensky did not use offensive speech or make wild claims about Trump unlike many other European counterparts. But he is in a weaker position and he sounds too much like them. When J D Vance addressed European authoritarianism with many example’s, he felt like he should retort it somehow. He’s got all hands full with his own troubles and should’ve left it for other Europeans to heed the call. He doesn’t know sh*t about the EU except from the fact that it’s still less authoritarian than Belarus and Russia. By that he fueled the misconception that his nation which suspended free speech and banned political parties would not care about authoritarianism anyway. Given the gravity of the war a temporary suspension of democratic principles is indeed justified, but any public statement must emphasize its temporary nature. Comments of ignorance about concerns over a rise in authoritarianism elsewhere are a public relations disaster.

Overall Zelensky is not as harsh as other Europeans and maybe he can set the tone for others as everybody calms down again. He’s got high hopes that his relationship with President Trump can be mended. In recent weeks Emmanuel Macron played a pragmatic role and may facilitate the process. In the past Macron questioned the benefit of Western solidarity and proposed not to help Taiwan when push comes to shove. But now he seems to stand for a united free world which can overcome its internal frictions. Italy under Giorgia Meloni may also help getting Trump and Zelensky back on track. For the days to follow we are likely to see some emotional fall out. Nutty goons harass J D Vance and his family right now. Trump doesn’t want to talk to crazy Europeans for a moment. Maybe he scares the sh*t out of them as he forces them to organise weapon supplies. Huff, puff, boom. All is well as long as this remains a short blow-over.

Trump is showing American muscles. In Europe the talk is about a ‘rules-based world’ and that the ‘stronger must not dictate.’ That’s somewhat reasonable, but the problem with us Europeans is that we don’t just ignore power dynamics. We enter the room very aggressively and condescendingly lecture everybody DESPITE being in the weaker position. And this bossiness is the thing Zelenky should consider to apologise for. You cannot ask for money and tell people who to meet and what to say. Arrogance is the downfall of Europe. You cannot be part of the partisan choir that constantly seeks to shame and insult Donald Trump, painting him as a complete fool that he simply isn’t.

Trump and Vance made their own mistakes. As long as everybody gets back on track mistakes are okay. Key follies in the Republican party right now that fuel the misunderstanding:
– You cannot say that free speech works and than blindly repeat Russian propaganda unchecked. I saw the dancing-Zelensky video a million times. Thanks. Whatever point you tried to made, the actual message you send to all the Anne-Applebaum-types was that we are not mature enough for the First Amendment. Also Russia was never weaker since Stalin got the bomb. So dial back the WWIII talk.
– The price-tag talk comes after America poured gazillions into Afghanistan and Iraq. Ukraine is a highly educated population of 40 million people who risked a lot to adapt our lifestyle and become our partners. The Orange Revolution and Euro-Maiden were heroic acts and not just CIA projects (the CIA is clearly overrated, ludicrously overrated). Does your moral compass really tell you to let them down?
– The left roots for Ukraine because of Hunter Biden’s corruption and Hillary Clinton’s failure to accept her electoral defeat of 2016. They are very bad reasons. Historically, the left has always rooted for Russia and any other adversary of the United States. It’s a folly of history that the roles are reversed on this matter. If conservatives also allow fashionable opinion fads to override reason, Israel has got no future. There are more anti-Semites than Jews and mass immigration will dictate that the current war would be the last in which Israel can rely on the necessary weapon deliveries. Also remember what this entails for free-speech advocacy and the future of liberty as a whole!
– The popular talking point that ‘Russia is not the Soviet Union’ is nothing more than a slogan. In crucial matters it still is. Maybe Republicans relied too long on the economic argument that communism leads to authoritarianism. It does. But independently, Russia is also a brutalised nation with a long-standing authoritarian history spanning many centuries. And that’s not just over.

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 sciences 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 voices 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 of the freak show it breeds.

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 is 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 the 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.

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