Book and text analysis by Claus Stille, author and journalist
With the Corona pandemic, we have been asked to do a lot. First and foremost, through the measures that were enacted to combat it. Let’s keep in mind that at the beginning, in 2020, many things were still unclear. And politicians – after initially downplaying the Corona 19 virus – felt obliged to do everything they could to protect people. After all, what would they have looked like if they had done little or nothing and people had died like flies? That might have been the thinking of the politicians. Or – which is also conceivable, given what we now know – did other things play a role in driving government policy?
In any case, it is unprecedented in the history of the FRG what kind of merciless bombardment of measures and restraints rained down on the people for two years. I, who had lived in the GDR for over thirty years until the Corona pandemic came upon us, had never experienced anything like this before. Keeping a distance („social distancing“), there was talk of a „new normal“ – pardon: who thought up such a thing? And why were the terms and rules suddenly there? Had the WHO already been prepared for this for a long time? Questions arose. The measures were almost uniform in all countries. Wearing a mask – at the beginning still disposable gloves in the streetcar! Many of the measures adopted seemed contradictory, even nonsensical.
In the pedestrian zone of our Dortmund suburb, for example, only a center section was marked with a mask-wearing requirement. Did the oh-so-dangerous virus give the rest of the street a wide berth? Once, at the end of the masked area, I took off my mouth-nose protection and almost experienced my blue miracle: a masked passerby screamed as if out of his mind: „Mask on!“ When I pointed out to him that there was no mask obligation on my street piece, he ran red and he yelled at me again: „Mask on, otherwise I’ll make you pine department!“
I was genuinely startled. So this was how politics had brought people, with the help of the daily more fear-mongering press, to be willing to become violent toward other people who they thought were violating decreed measures? I got away with it at the time.
And how most people spurted! That scared me the most. Why did so many people go along with it? Elderly people were no longer allowed to sit together on a park bench? Sledding children were literally chased by a police helicopter!
At the time, it spontaneously occurred to me that the Germans‘ obedience to authority, which had often come to light in earlier decades, was so firmly anchored that it apparently took only a brief trigger to bring it back into focus. Block wariness was also back. A professor wrote on Facebook that he had just reported to the train conductor a passenger who was not wearing the mask. When I replied that the block wardens were celebrating a happy return, he demanded that I delete this reply.
But it became really bad when the vaccinations were „offered“. With a new vaccine, which had not been tested for a long time and which had initially only received a provisional approval. The pressure to be vaccinated was constantly increased. However, anyone who thought it was possible at the time that vaccination might become compulsory was ridiculed, insulted and called a mumbling contrarian. People, who expressed their doubts concerning the vaccination and went on Querdenken demonstrators, called at that time the SPD chairwoman Saskia Esken without ever having apologized for it „Covidioten“. What kind of politicians are they?
But it came even thicker. Other politicians, artists, doctors, journalists – in short, people who like to be subsumed under the term elite – insulted the unvaccinated in the most subterranean way and were in favor of excluding them. That was often close to the crime of incitement of the people.
Presenter Günter Jauch and BAP singer Wolfgang Niedecken have been guilty of using the wrong word. And World Doctors President Montgomery also in a cynical way:
„But if they can’t work unvaccinated either, they won’t need public transport to get there. Yeah, it’s that tough!“
State cabaret artist Sarah Bosetti even saw dissenters as „right-wing appendixes.“ She said, „Would the division of society really be such a bad thing? It wouldn’t break apart in the middle, but rather far to the bottom right. And such an appendix is not essential in the strict sense for the survival of the entire complex.
In other statements made during this terrible time, the term „social pests“ has also appeared in reference to vaccination refusers. Does that ring a bell?
At least Nena found clear words regarding Corona measures and demands for vaccination certificates at concerts etc.: „Dear ones, at my concerts there will continue to be no two-class society. You are always all welcome“ and, she said after later hostilities, „it depends on what we are willing to do with ourselves.
Highly paid journalist Nikolaus Blome, columnist, Spiegel Online, on the other hand, took the cake:
„I, on the other hand, would like to explicitly ask at this point for social disadvantages for all those who voluntarily forgo vaccination. May the entire republic point its finger at them.“
Outrageous. Inconceivable! What is a seasoned journalist thinking when he expresses himself like this? No trace of journalistic responsibility. And certainly not of intuition. How could the editorial staff let such a statement pass?
Marcus Klöckner and Jens Wernicke have now published an important book in the Rubikon publishing house, entitled „May the entire republic point its finger at them“.
This book is important because it must not be forgotten what was done to the people in this country who were critical of the Corona measures and reacted with refusal to a questionable vaccination – of which, contrary to earlier claims, we now know that it at most protects against serious illness but not definitively against the virus and that vaccinated people can transmit the virus to others.
Another consequence of the monstrous events that we had to experience and suffer in the Corona period is the establishment of an official committee of inquiry. What the authors also demand vehemently in the book.
The quote from Voltaire that precedes the book stands for this:
„We are responsible for what we do, but also for what we do not do.“
The introduction to the book begins like this: „Is it actually still permissible in 2022 to ask to what extent German society has been denazified?“ A good question! All of us, dear readers, should answer it for ourselves and draw the consequences.
The authors quote the philosopher Michael Andrick, whom they call probably one of the smartest thinkers in the country. Andrick had asked in Der Freitag, „Does our state have totalitarian tendencies?“ The authors: „According to Andrick, the Federal Republic has ‚in the course of the Corona policy crisis […] demonstrated its capacity for selective totalitarian action […] and the vast majority of civil servants have demonstrated unquestioning docility in implementing it: Mass protest in offices and schools was not to be observed.“ Marcus Klöckner fully endorses this finding.
It is not for nothing that the world-famous experiment „The Wave“ by Ron Jone is referred to in the introduction. In 1967, he dealt with the subject of the Third Reich in class. Since the students did not understand that the Germans could fall so quickly to National Socialism. Jones inspired his students to create a fantasy movement. The result, as we know, was most frightening. Jones concluded to his students, „We would all have made good Nazi Germans.“
So what have we learned from history and this experiment?
How thin the varnish of our civilization is!
Marcus Klöckner writes about his first visit to Buchenwald concentration camp. It occurred to him: below, high culture, Weimar, the city of Goethe and Schiller; above, fascist barbarism in the Buchenwald concentration camp. What a contrast? That was possible?
It is commendable that the authors of the book have made use of the „Archive of Corona Injustice“ maintained by the portal „I participated“ (www.ich-habe-mitgemacht.de). The worst excesses and sagas are archived there. At the moment, the site apparently needs to be restored. Meanwhile, on the portal you can read this information: „Dear visitors to this site, as you would expect, our site was „hacked“ by cybercriminals who are loyal to the government, blind to reality and fanatical about power.“
Bang the monsters on the front page, one would almost like to say in slight variation of a movie title. For posterity should have preserved who behaved how shamefully at the time. Apparently, none of the people listed there has yet apologized publicly.
Hannah Arendt is rightly remembered, who spoke of the „banality of evil“ with regard to the image that Eichmann gave at the time of his trial in Israel. We should think of this again today: „Banal evil, in Hannah Arendt’s view, is actually repeatable. For it rages, according to her image, as the extreme evil ‚like a fungus on the surface, which can spread rapidly if one does not uproot the fungus,‘ according to Hannah Arendt in a letter to Gershom Scholem (cf. fn. 10 in Ingeborg Normann, p. 94)“
The authors of the book make clear that since the existence of the FRG there has never been such a contemptuous treatment of people.
If one should perhaps not immediately speak of fascism, there were nevertheless unmistakably fascist tendencies. All of this must be put on the table and meticulously reappraised, they say. Never again may fundamental rights – which are not called fundamental rights for fun – be negotiable, or as happened: even taken away from us.
With so some, which participated, the Faschistoide in humans had come out and to the carry. The policy had used the favor of the hour, in order to support and further extend its power.
Evilly with children in the Corona time had been proceeded. Of course, we read, they were not put in the oven, but many of them were permanently disadvantaged and traumatized.
Even if Chancellor Olaf Scholz does not want to know anything about a division of society (he has difficulties with his memory anyway) – society was already divided before Corona – and is even more so now.
And the book also rightly criticizes the federal president. The office is conceived as one that stands above the parties. As such, the federal president has a duty to integrate rather than to exclude people.
It is simply incomprehensible what all has happened. The book lists it all. Let’s just think about the leaked paper from the Ministry of Interior. In which children were made afraid that if they visited grandma and grandpa, they would possibly be to blame for their deaths.
Politicians made unvaccinated people pariahs, the book scandalizes.
Much of the jurisprudence was political, it says. Is this probably connected with the fact that all judges of the Constitutional Court were invited to the Chancellor’s Office by Chancellor Merkel? A Schelm, who thinks badly thereby!
The behavior of the media in the Corona crisis is also considered reprehensible. Instead of fulfilling their function as the fourth pillar of democracy, they would have disseminated predominantly government opinion one-to-one, stirred up fear on a daily basis and in some cases demanded even harsher measures than those imposed by the government. Also that, it means must hard and without view of the person or the respective medium worked up. I myself find, that must be taken so to speak the proverbial iron broom in the hand. A reappraisal is urgently necessary. In my opinion, some editors should then also no longer work in journalism. They failed badly in the Corona crisis because they did not do their job. But they didn’t do it properly even before that. And now regarding the Ukraine war, they are not doing it again. They made and make propaganda instead of journalism. This must not be allowed to pass – to use a phrase from Willy Brandt. The book correctly says: „They have perverted journalism.
Just take the quote:
„What it needs now is not more openness, but a sharp wedge. One that divides society. […] Properly and deeply driven, it separates the dangerous from the endangered part of society.“
Christian Vooren, Editor in the Politics, Economy, Society Department of ZEIT online.
The book asks, „How far would we have gone?“ How would we have reacted if we had been ordered to enter the supermarket only on a pink pony? Yes, you laugh, maybe. People went along with almost everything, after all.
Last week I met a former colleague. We were talking about vaccination. He replied, „I’ve now had the third one. I have done my duty.“ Huh? What duty? There it was again, the obedience to authority!
Yes, the pandemic showed how little it takes to give up freedoms. Let’s think about it! In the end, however, this also shows what abyss is opening up. Have we noticed it: We have – freely after Nietzsche – looked into it. Doesn’t it already look back, the abyss?
In „The Last Word,“ Tom-Oliver Regenauer laments the „deafening silence of Justice and the fourth estate since March 2020. The media splitting mushrooms would not have missed their effect. Regenauer: „We hear the final chord of casino capitalism in the post-factum of the media age. Accompanied by conformist art and intellectual incest, it advertises the result of its Social Darwinist metamorphosis into consummate corporatism. A consummate form of state as already praised by Benito Mussolini „as the perfect union of the state and corporations.““
Whatever. We seem to be dealing with a new totalitarianism and a forgetfulness of history that should lead us into a questionable „New Normal.“ Disturbing.
In the prologue, Franz Ruppert writes something about psychotraumatological terminology regarding perpetrators and victims.
Under the heading „Attack on Human Rights,“ political scientist Ulrike Guérot has written an interesting preface. Among them she quotes Hoffmann von Fallersleben: „The greatest scoundrel in the whole country. Is and remains the denunciator“
Absolutely recommended reading! This book will upset you often – alone, if you take numerous quotations to mind! Where has our society been led? Supposedly, many measures were about health. But now society is divided and also sick. Just think of the vaccination consequences. And the people who have had their jobs taken away and their reputations damaged. All of this must be dealt with down to the smallest detail. It must not remain without tangible consequences for the perpetrators. This does not mean revenge. What happened must not be repeated under any circumstances. And what has happened must not be forgotten. The book is an important element in initiating such a process.
a-bigger-bang 
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