German politicians, who are not even able to make their trains run, lecture other countries like India, which is about to conquer the moon!
When German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock traveled to India earlier this year, she chided India for not helping to isolate and “ruin Russia.” While this self-proclaimed “green” government official has ensured that Germany buys fracked gas from the U.S., which is many times more expensive than the more environmentally friendly, cheap gas from Russia, the Indian government has the interests of its people in mind and wants to continue to benefit from cheap Russian energy, whether Washington and their German vassals like it or not.
And no, India would never shut down its nuclear power plants for bizarre ideological reasons, as Germany has done, and then import electricity, possibly at a much higher price, from foreign nuclear and fossil fuel power plants!
The lectures by the foreign minister of a country that is no serious role model for India or for any other country were no more well received in New Delhi than they were in Beijing, Brasília or elsewhere in the global South, where she appears with missionary zeal.
And instead of approaching actual or perceived opponents, the new German foreign policy under Baerbock focuses on avoiding dialogue with them instead of seeking conflict solutions. Even the customary handshake with the Russian foreign minister has become a no-go. The Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post calls her the Warring Queen.
Not surprisingly, the German Ministry for Conflict Promotion, as it should more honestly be called, has supplemented its revisionist approach by renaming the space in the Foreign Ministry previously dedicated to Otto von Bismarck. He was a very intelligent man and, thanks to his extraordinary diplomatic skills, became the father of a united Germany, its first chancellor in 1871, and the founder of the Foreign Ministry.
His successor today, who has no idea of history and a meager – albeit artificially inflated – resume, lacks these qualities. Like-minded woke Germans would also like to ban Bismarck’s name from squares and streets. It is only a matter of time before he too could be erased from the history books of the new Woke Germany.
The German moralism of the 19th century is back and is currently the godfather of German “woke governance”
Now the famous sentence “The world shall recover by going the German way” (Am deutschen Wesen soll die Welt genesen) applies again. It comes from a poem by the German Emanuel Geibel, a romantic lyricist of the 19th century. This message was later taken up by conservatives and nationalists such as Kaiser Wilhelm and his contemporaries, as well as by Hitler’s Nazi movement. As such, it seemed to convey a distinctly threatening undertone not captured by standard translations, except perhaps by “the German spirit shall heal the world.”
Indeed, this time Germany does not want to dominate the world militarily, but to save it — with supposedly superior values, which it wants to impose on others. (However, I must immediately put this into perspective, because Germany is in the process of militarizing itself again and the hitherto subliminal revanchism is beginning to flare up again, as I have explained here.)
Inevitably, German politicians have also traveled to China to lecture it. But unlike them, the Chinese are not trying to convert Westerners and others to their model. And in contrast to the Americans (who have been imitated by their German followers), they lack a sense of mission and proselytizing spirit, and besides, the Chinese system would be unsuitable for export because it is so specifically and inextricably interwoven with the country’s millennia-old tradition and culture (of which both German and American politicians are quite clueless).
Germany, the anti-Tianxia force
At the recent Party Congress, China’s leader Xi Jinping repeated a maxim dear to the Chinese: “Promote world peace and development, and advance the building of a community with a common future for mankind.” This reflects the millennia-old concept of tianxia (天下), which literally means “(all) under heaven.” By this is meant an inclusive world with harmony for all. Or, to put it casually and understandably for the Western confrontationists in Washington, London, Brussels and Berlin: “We leave you in peace, and you leave us in peace.” That is why the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries is so important to them. A principle that is constantly trampled on by the leaders of the U.S. Empire and its German and other Western vassals.
China has been Brazil’s most important trading partner since 2009. This has put German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock on the spot. She traveled to Brazil to “offer cooperation with Brazil in the face of Chinese attempts to exert influence,” as the Deutsche Presse-Agentur DPA reported. She could not explain in what way China exerts influence, perhaps it was just a projection of the influence she tries to exert wherever she goes. Advocating a “hard line on China,” she had called on Germany to take a “tougher stance” to counter what she labelled “China’s global ambitions.” However, she unreservedly supports the global and military-backed ambitions of her close friends in Washington who have China surrounded.
In the past, Germans were famous for their virtues of punctuality, order, modesty and diligence. Now they are notorious because their political and media elites have placed themselves on a higher pedestal from which they celebrate virtue signaling and self-righteousness. The moralizing overheating includes the monopolization of truth for themselves.
Germany back on the path of gradual forced conformation
The Ukraine conflict in particular has shown that there is no longer any diversity of opinion in today’s Germany. Voices on the causes and the background are systematically suppressed. Anyone who speaks out critically is denounced and risks legal prosecution. All the more politicians and media can drum for war escalation through more arms deliveries, without any objection. The Russian point of view is of the devil anyway and must not be reproduced under any circumstances, and certainly not fairly and objectively. Even a German party represented in parliament that dared to criticize German involvement in the Ukraine war had to be demonized. Although the party stands by the German rule of law, it is monitored by the German “Verfassungsschutz” (political police). Many Woke Germans are calling for its ban. Even satire in today’s Germany is again suspiciously observed by the “Verfassungsschutz”, as it was in Nazi Germany and in the German Democratic Republic (GDR).
It is part of the democratic rules of the game that the responsible citizen, the voter, should inform himself extensively about the goals pursued by the legal parties running for election, so that he can decide which one he wants to vote for. A free press with a broad spectrum of opinions is part of this.
Excluding parties that do not suit the establishment and denouncing people with politically incorrect views and even taking them to court is fascist. Because fascism means first of all exclusion as well as denunciation of the dissenter. Fascism also means the renunciation of any argument, of logic, of debate, of discussion. Fascism means shutting up, kicking away, putting down, renouncing any discussion of content. The woke Germany has approached this state again.
The ancient Olympic Games in Greece enabled dialogue, discussion and peace between city-states that were otherwise constantly at war. Yet German politicians, media and the German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB) demanded and succeeded in having Russian athletes banned from international sports competitions. This group was collectively punished for the actions of their government (in Ukraine).
When a Chinese tennis player complained in a social media post about her lover, a former high-ranking official, when he ended his extramarital affair with her after several years of ups and downs, Western politicians and media seized this as a welcome opportunity to lecture and defame China. Germany was at the forefront of punishing China with a boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics. The athlete was subsequently often seen in public, laughing and talking to other people. Since she apparently did not disappear into a gulag, as German politicians and media must have secretly hoped, she soon disappeared again from Western media discourse.
Dilana Dilixiati is a Chinese sports star, too. Her team had won an unexpected, sensational victory in the semifinals against basketball superpower Australia at the FIBA Women’s Basketball World Cup. Australian media reported, “They defeated the hosts 61-59 at the Sydney Superdome on Friday night in a thrilling encounter that was decided only in the final seconds.” The dramatic thriller sent shock waves. But German media did not report anything about her, even though she is Uyghur. She writes her name like this: دىلانا دىلشات, which does not look like Mandarin. Her ability to pursue a career as a top athlete and to travel, contradicts the German narrative that is ingrained in people’s minds that Uyghurs, who are totally discriminated against, are prisoners and victims of genocide and cannot leave Xinjiang. Her story, unlike that of tennis player Peng Shuai, had to be kept quiet by the media, because consumers would naturally have noticed that there was something wrong with the prevailing narrative, and who likes to be manipulated.
What many Germans don’t know is that Germany was also involved in China’s century of humiliation, when the formerly prosperous Middle Kingdom was brutally colonized and oppressed by the Western powers and Japan. “The military occupation of Kiaochow Bay a hundred years ago, the ‘unequal’ treaty and lease of the protectorate, and the establishment of a German sphere of influence in 1898 testified to Germany’s aggressive international presence,” the German Historical Museum in Berlin admitted during an exhibition in 1998. And during Nazi rule, Chinese living in Germany were persecuted and many of them brutally murdered.
The self-righteous German politicians, who once again want to lecture and humiliate the Chinese, believe they are free of guilt and show no remorse towards them.
You might dismiss it as a provincial farce, but it fits the German zeitgeist: The German city of Kiel has just canceled its twinning agreement with the Chinese city of Qingdao because “China wants to listen, overhear, eavesdrop.” While there is no evidence that China is doing this, there is evidence that Germany’s ally, the United States, is doing it very thoroughly. Gullible Germans are not aware of the fact that the spy agency NSA knows even when they fart in bed at night.
After an unsuccessful missionary attempt in China German ministers are now trying to explain the world to India — while the Asian country’s economy is booming, which is more than can be said for their own poorly managed economy.
Has any German minister actually not been to India yet?
Not only the foreign minister, but also the chancellor, the finance minister and, more recently, the economics minister and the labor minister. They have all been there.
The laughing stock that is Germany has nothing useful to offer, only moral acid.
The entire German government wants to woo the emerging and most populous country on earth locally, and it also wants to woo the IT geniuses by promoting the super-duper Federal Republic.
It doesn’t seem to be working. This could have something to do with the actions of the guests, whose perception of India is stuck between the films “Bandit Queen” and “Slumdog Millionaire.”
Patronizingly, they offer supposedly emaciated barefooters a 4,000-euro job in high-tax Jermanee as a unique chance to escape abject poverty.
Really? Didn’t anyone tell them how much good IT workers earn in India — with much less deductions?
Don’t they know that Google USA pays an average of $350,000 a year?
With respect: Who has reason to patronize whom here? Shouldn’t India rather make an offer for Germany?
An incompetent, woke sell-out government that serves Washington’s interests, not Germany’s.
Boris Palmer, the mayor of Tübingen, left the Green Party in May 2023. It is the party of Annalena Baerbock, who not only falsified her resume beyond recognition but also plagiarized her writings and covered up her past, and a major player in the German government, as well as Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s SPD, a key figure in a huge fraud case involving 100 banks and 1,000 suspects. Palmer had been active in the Green Party since 1996.
No longer bound by party ties, he now speaks his mind and rebukes the German government in an article in the daily newspaper Die Welt. According to surveys, most Germans (outside the government and media bubble) are likely to agree with his assessment. The country is going downhill, he says. He stresses that the impact is already being felt by the public, which is unsettled by closed restaurants, reports of more frequent knife attacks and rising housing costs.
The politician points to major problems in Germany, such as rampant bureaucracy, the crisis-ridden education sector, the backlog in digitization, the future of the automotive industry, the flagship of German industry, which is being called into question by misguided policies, and skyrocketing energy costs (which the German government has caused by substituting fossil and nuclear energy for inadequate alternative energy and by engaging in Washington’s economic war against Russia, a cheap energy supplier).
Investment is leaving Germany, and the main beneficiary is the United States.
He also urges the government to take steps to restore Germany’s attractiveness to business, which has been lost due to competition-distorting investment incentives offered by the U.S. government, the very government that gullible German politicians consider a great and respectful ally.
It is also not surprising that the German government was not interested in clearing up the biggest terrorist attack in Europe since World War II against the Nordstream pipelines, that is, against Germany’s energy lifeline. Berlin preferred to cover up the huge scandal instead of finding out and holding accountable those responsible, who were suspected to be on the other side of the ocean. Berlin suspended Nordstream 2 when it started down the path of sanctions in 2022 and de-industrialization of Germany (which America has used to benefit its own re-industrialization).
Germany must take people’s fears seriously and give them hope for the future in order to decisively counter the threat of economic decline, Palmer concluded.
The destructive woke policy is caught up with reality and punished
German government (along with Washington) was a cheerleader of the European Union’s suicidal economic sanctions in 2022 which resulted in skyrocketing energy costs, that are deadly for an industrial location like Germany that depends on cheap energy.
In June 2023, there were 48% more insolvencies in Germany than a year earlier. Unemployment is rising rapidly: In June 2023, the number of unemployed was 192,000 higher than a year earlier.
One sector after another is heading toward economic decline. Take the construction sector, for example: According to the German Federal Statistical Office, more than a quarter fewer building permits were issued in May 2023 than in May 2022, despite an acute housing shortage.
The energy-intensive chemical and aluminum industries are in crisis, as is the important auto industry, which also depends on cheap energy: production of new cars is 20 percent below last year’s level. The German auto industry has sold hundreds of thousands of new cars to Russia every year; VW, for example, delivered 100,000 new cars to Russia as recently as 2020. Now they are selling zero cars to Russia. The government’s anti-Russia policy has given a gift to the Chinese auto industry: It has awarded the important Russia market to Chinese competitors.
Spoiled by prosperity, a new generation of career politicians that are more woke than competent has undone Germany’s decades-long “economic miracle” within a few years. Correcting its misguided policies is a Herculean task for a government steeped in moralism that prefers to proselytize and lecture rather than address practical problems with the necessary skills and pragmatism free of ideology, keeping in mind Germany’s interests rather than those of its false allies and “friends” across the ocean.
“I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good,” wrote Johann Wolfgang von Goehte, considered the greatest German literary figure of the modern era (in Faust, A Tragedy, Scene in the Study, verse 1135-1137). And that brings us to the moralists and do-gooders. Of course, Mephisto’s sentence in Goethe’s piece can be reversed. In politics, this reversal is all too often a reality. It then reads: “I am part of that force that always wants the good and always creates the evil“. Michael Lüders, author of the book “Moral über alles? Warum sich Werte und nationale Interessen selten vertragen,” explains: “Nothing is more dangerous than ideologized morality. In case of doubt, it leads to the mass grave. This does not mean that politics cannot be ethically based. For example, by responding to the great challenges of the present in a solution-oriented way. (…) There must be no taboos. No exclusion. No prohibitions on thinking. It is about nothing less than a reformatting of the world.”
The question remains how much more pain must be inflicted on the vast majority of Germans before they come to their senses and banish the toxic and mendacious ideologized moralism of today’s political leaders to the funeral pyre of history and return to sensible pragmatism and the pursuit of their own interests. The good old German expression “Realpolitik” comes to mind.