Germany at Prime Time
A few impressions of the German hatred of the UK working class, its obsession with the virus, and its declaration of reality as a right-wing conspiracy.
If you are privately or professionally interested in the concept of propaganda, and you have not watched German state television since the outbreak of the Corona virus, then you better get to work quick: no other channel, no TV presenter, no camera angles, no lights, have been more professionally installed to suggest a casual appearance of what they call ‘news and info’, but what is, in fact, an insidious manipulation of the public, than German prime time news. The perfect specimen is the ZDF’s, German “Second” State Program’s, ‘heute-journal’ (‘today journal’). Its anchorwoman, Marietta Slomka, a pale, steely chaperone of a woman whose blue darting eyes could cut ice, and whose expertly and tastefully chosen beige and nature-coloured outfits make Christine Lagarde look like Cyndi Lauper, is someone you would neither want to meet at a party, for you’d know someone has called the cops, nor a death camp, for she would probably be the last thing you see. Ms. Slomka’s haunting and sonorous voice, always imploring on the viewer to take the news extremely seriously, and making sure it will be the worst thing you have seen or heard all day, has been with the regular viewer of prime time news for some time.
It therefore did not come as a surprise when, in the evening news of Monday, July 5th, 2021, Ms Slomka gloomily looked into the camera to announce the shocking, and yet obvious truth: “As is well known, Great Britain has gone its own way with corona right from the start.” A contemptuous smile around her lips that suggests the culprit who dared to leave the Eden of the Innate Rights of Man (the EU) has not been doing that great, as we have all suspected, completes the subtle preparation of the following. Oh, and how the British have been doing it all wrong! From herd immunity to fast vaccination, all just deadly errors, safe trips to hell. And now, with the Delta variant on the horizon, the downfall is pre-programmed. “And still, Boris Johnson wants to lift all restrictions on July 19th.” This could almost be called irresponsible rings the subtext in our ears.
Cut. We now see footage from the exotic realms of the Wembley stadium where our “Deutsche Jungs” have miserably lost to the English national team just last week (no mention of it, of course. Anything that’s happened? Can’t remember it. What? Nah.). What we see instead are English football fans: women, men, kids, and teenagers, in their whites and reds and Three Lions’ shirts, cheering one of their team’s many goals, kissing each other, holding up their cups of beer, jumping up and down, crying and laughing, hugging each other again and again. Somebody lit up a Turkish fire, the smoke mysteriously hovering over the scene of celebration like an ancient Viking ritual. And the German viewer receives an instant confirmation of the terrible suspicion he was expected to have: it’s THEM. THEY SPREAD THE VIRUS. These English football fans - mostly working class - who drink together and laugh together and actually got together to cheer for their team: they are the terrible ones. They will bring harm. “60 000 fans at Wembley Stadium in the finals”, the commentator says, “England is on a frenzy. But as of yet, the organisers don’t dare to fill the whole stadium. This, on the other hand, is what they dare to do in week 2 at Wimbledon.”
Cut to the Wimbledon tournament. A shot of the audience slopes. Not one free seat. Packed.
But the German viewer does not think of the virus here. The virus is, in fact, the furthest thing on his mind right now.
White shirts, white shorts, well-built boys in the early 20s on Centre Court. You could almost smell the YSL Pour Homme on the bodies of the contestants. Not a tinge of the rancid, seedy impression one receives from wooden pub benches covered in beer and sweaty, greasy red-faced workers from Leeds or Birmingham who try to hug everyone around them, but a disciplined audience in hats and Ralph Lauren polos, low-key smiles and Thomas Henry-based G&Ts. The ZDF reporter holds a microphone into the face of such a specimen, a certain Andy Row (sunglass on head, white sweatshirt, gentle three-day beard):
“Everyone was behaving. Football fans are different. They’re rowdier, they drink more, they sing…so it’s more middle class, Wimbledon is.”
Oh, but yes. Of course. Blimey. The virus keeps away from the clean middle class. It only hits those who deserve it, who give in to the hedonism and slovenliness of a football match celebration. The UU, the unhygienic underclass.
But it’s not as though the German viewer fears the virus. What he fears more than the virus itself is people who do not take the virus seriously. And by taking the virus seriously, he means subordinating every human encounter, every activity, every pleasure, to the directives of the virus. With matter-of-factness. Do not ask what the virus can do for you. Ask what you can do for your virus. Nobody enacts this new directive better than the average German leftist with an Instagram account.
And what would you do if you were told for 18 months that the Virus Overlord demands its daily depravations? For close to a year and a half now, the German government has installed a new religion, with the so-called experts around Christian Drosten and Karl Lauterbach as its prophets. Paid prophets, of course, prophets chosen on terms of drawing up the most catastrophic scenarios – “a million dead people” – which would allow the government to “act according to preventive and repressive measures”, as one of the 200 pages of leaked emails between Seehofer’s ministry of the interior and the Robert-Koch-Institute, the main advisor in the pandemic, revealed.[i] But the German pharisaically shrugs his shoulders. If you tell them that these kids have not been in a classroom for one and a half years, the German says: But still. They could get sick if they do. The Delta variant. It is coming.
The daily ‘incidence rate’ - a distorted parameter because it does not account for the increasing harmlessness of the virus and its mutations, as well as increasing vaccination - as of July 6th, 2021, is 5. Not 500, not 50. It is 5. 5 people out of 100 000 have been infected with Covid this last week. Society is shut down in Germany, the country with the most draconian measures in Europe. 5 people per 100 000. They said a million would die. They said you, the German, would die a terrible death. As another one of the ministry of interior’s emails to the experts announced: “’You have to give the impression that people who become terminally sick and driven to hospitals by their relatives will be rejected, and die alone at home agonizingly struggling for breath.’ In this way, it is hoped to make [the measures] acceptable among citizens for, among other things, ‘sharp, but short curfews’”[ii]. And indeed, acceptance had been created. Also by the bataillon of journalists who serve as fifth column for the current state authoritarianism. Also by the likes of the German ZDF’s heute-journal.
The reason for the easy blue-pilling of the German nation can be found in what my co-author and I have elsewhere termed the ‘fascism blackmail’: the threat of the insinuation of spreading fascist views. And, whoa, nobody wants to be a fascist, a national-socialist, or a racist. Not in Germany. This does not go down well in Germany.
But this is precisely why opposition to what we can now call the fascization of a whole society - for the Corona measures have been installed for no other reason than the social, economic, political, cultural, and aesthetic re-structuring of a new accumulation regime - is virtually non-existent. The really interesting thing however is just how a fascist and conspirary theorist is defined, according to German state propaganda.
For this, I’m afraid we have to return to the prime time news program, as seen on the evening of Monday, July 5th on the ZDF. Ms Slomka mysteriously announces: “The Social Democrats had Thilo Sarrazin.[iii] The Green Party had Boris Palmer. Die Linke has the Wagenknecht-Lafontaine-couple. And now, the Christian Democrats have Hans-Georg Maassen.” This neat list suggests that the sincere, upright German party system allegedly has a problem with renegade views within their own parties. Most recently, the left-wing party Die Linke has initiated proceedings in the exclusion of their two most prominent members, Sahra Wagenknecht and her husband, ex-minister of finance (1998-9, left on protests against the war regime under the Social Democrats and the Greens) under Schröder, Oskar Lafontaine. These two are arguably the last politicians in their own ranks who bizarrely think that a left-wing party should represent the interests of the working class rather than cater to an urban and academic middle class by discussing how, when, and why language should be gendered. Logically, a left-wing party in Germany cannot accept this focus on class and inequality, or it would not be a left-wing party.
And now, the Christian Democrats have ‘their own’ renegade problem. Hans-Georg Maassen, the ex-president of the Federal Office of the Protection of the Constitution and politician in the CDU is, admittedly, not exactly the type of person I’d like to hang out with. But I would not want to hang out with Claudia Roth of the Green Party either, someone who applauded the German Luftwaffe bombing Belgrade to ashes.
But, as the report shows, Maassen insinuated that journalists for major German news outlets, like the stately “Tagesschau” on the first German state program, do not act on the principle of neutrality, and suggested that the biographies of some such journalists indicated a ‘extremist left’ background, which is why they, on suspicion of such biased reporting, would need a ‘background check’. Of course, such a demand is right-wing authoritarian. And because right-wing authoritarianism does not go down well with voters - it’s the ‘super election year’ (Superwahljahr) in Germany - Maassen backpedalled on Twitter the very next day and renounced his antiquated (and stupid) remark. But once the tea is spilled, the stains remain. And that’s why Maassen’s ‘right extremist’ views deserve a closer look, according to the ‘heute-journal’. What serves and entirely suffices for the definition of ‘conspiracy theorist’, however, is indeed astonishing. For the heute-journal invited a very young female ‘extremism-expert’ to give an interview on the criteria for ‘right-wing extremism’. Let me provide an excerpt of this report as an example of finest German journalism:
In picture (young, good looking woman in fashionable, urban style), captioned “Julia Ebner, Extremism Researcher”: “…that he, for years, has used the vocabulary and internal codes of neo-right-wing groups and conspiracy theorists. So, for example, the “Great Reset”, “globalists”, and the “New World Order.”
Wow.
No, really.
He used the term “The Great Reset” as a conspirational code? He said “New World Order”? Damn! There he is - a truly far-right conspiracy theorist!
Consequentially, and matter-of-factly, that would make Klaus Schwab of the WEF, Prince Charles, and the members of the World Economic Forum itself far-right conspiracy theorists. Is what the leading and most powerful economic forum of the world openly announces to be part of its neoliberal restructuring program no longer supposed to be mentioned - not even by those who openly advertise for it?
It is, of course, and it is out there for everyone to see. As the WEF Youtube channel announces:
“Since it made its entry on to the world stage, COVID-19 has torn up the existing script of how to govern countries, live with others, and take part in the global economy in a dramatic way. Professor Schwab and CEO and Founder of the Monthly Barometer Thierry Malleret explore these disruptions in their new book, COVID-19: The Great Reset.”[iv]
Fucking hell, they even wrote a book about it! Will it be banned for using the term “The Great Reset”? Stay tuned with the young female extremist experts from German liberal mainstream media!
Not only is the report on Maassen, as conducted by the ‘heute-journal’ – “can the CDU still afford someone who uses the term The Great Reset?” – reproducing exactly what Maassen, in stupid self-defeating terms, yes, but also as the stating of a fact, had admonished in today’s mainstream journalism. What’s more, the liberal elites and their fifth column-superstructure, the media, have entangled themselves so much in the denial of reality, of freely accessible info, of openly announced political programs, of what everyone who cares an ounce about what is going on around them, already knows. The Middle-Class Leviathan and its superstructural minion’s attempt at undermining reality and reason, hence also undermines the possibility for its critique. We are no longer supposed to mention neoliberalism anymore. Neoliberalism does not exist. For hell’s sake, capitalism does not exist: it is just a far-right conspiracy theory to suggest that people’s lives under the auspices of Covid-regimes will become even more miserable. Because none of this is true! Believe Marietta Slomka. Believe the myriads of journalists whose only mission is and has always been to make sure that the ideas of the ruling class remain the ruling ideas.
And in the year 2021, even in the face of the madness political debate has become over the last two years, it is indeed morbid to behold that despite all being out in the open - nobody cares.
[i] See https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/plus225868061/Corona-Politik-Wie-das-Innenministerium-Wissenschaftler-einspannte.html. [ii] Ibid. [iii] A xenophobic politician, expelled from the party for his views in 2020. [iv]
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Excellent. Scathing. The media’s disdain for the working class, which is also its obsession with its own status as the professional class, is a disgusting thing to behold.
A great, no bullshit piece as usual and great insight into the German propaganda apparatus, love to see the similarities with America’s own pathetic journalist class lmao. Cheers.