Covid mania never ends in Germany
With unrest over the cost of living on the horizon, the government needs every excuse to repress dissent
While the rest of the world seems to be slowly but surely moving on from covid and onto the next current thing, Germany’s health minister Karl Lauterbach is stubbornly clinging to every excuse to keep covid restrictions going indefinitely. His increasingly hysterical prophecies of yet another “killer variant” that somehow never arrives and constantly “rising numbers” sound increasingly detached from reality, but they are enough to whip up fear in his core constituency, who are unfortunately overrepresented in the media and state bureaucracies. The current “infection protection act”, which makes wearing FFP2/KN95 masks compulsory on public transit, is set to expire in September, but this does not mean a return to normality. On the contrary, the health minister, aided by an almost homogeneous media class, is preparing the population for a third corona winter with new restrictions on individual freedom and civil liberties. Since Lauterbach owes his current job to Covid-19, his “the show must go on” imperative is understandable. The Greens and the Social Democrats, the two biggest parties in the ruling “traffic light coalition”, have always been prone to the bureaucratic micromanagement of the lives of citizens, so much so that the former is often referred to as a “Verbotspartei” or “prohibition party” by its critics. These two parties were the strongest proponents of a failed attempt to make vaccination compulsory, so it is no surprise that they kept pushing for a prolongation of the harassment of citizens in the name of public health. What surprised many was that the market liberal Free Democrats also went along with this, betraying a key election promise to end all covid mandates by March 2022.
On August the 3rd, Lauterbach and the “liberal” justice minister Marco Buschmann announced their plans for new restrictions and mandates from September onwards, including nationwide mask mandates on public transport, air traffic, and test requirements to enter a hospital or other healthcare facility as a visitor. In addition, federal states will have the option to introduce compulsory masking in schools and the retail, hospitality and leisure sectors. Compulsory testing in schools and daycare facilities is also possible. In certain circumstances, federal states are even allowed to introduce outdoor mask mandates, capacity limits on events, compulsory social distancing, and compulsory “hygiene concepts” for events and businesses, which is probably bureaucrat lingo for spraying bleach everywhere like a lunatic. School closures, business closures and night curfews are not on the table at the moment, but this announcement undoubtedly represents a huge step back from the relative normality of the summer. Another worrying element of the announcement is that everyday discrimination based on vaccination status is about to return, although not in the radical form of the former 2G/3G/2G+ (respectable sounding euphemisms for biomedical apartheid) system. From September onwards, people who received their last vaccine dose within the last three months, typically the 4th dose in Germany, are exempt from the mask requirement in specific settings. So if you want to show your face and breathe freely in Germany, you have to be willing to inject yourself every three months, and you better have your papers and QR codes ready for inspection.
There has been some noticeable backlash over these plans, primarily online. #ichmachenichtmehrmit (I am out) and #kinderhasser (child hater) were trending on German Twitter for a few days. The most furious were the supporters of the right-liberal Free Democrats (FDP), who felt betrayed by the u-turn. Not everyone from the FDP was happy with the plans. The party’s vice-chairman, Wolfgang Kubicki, said that parliament must reject this proposal in its current form.
One day after the announcement of the new mandates, Lauterbach got sick with covid “despite great caution and a 4th vaccine”. When a journalist wanted to know when he received his fourth dose, a spokesperson refused to share information in “medical matters”. As it was less than six months ago that I got kicked out of a bar for refusing to share information on “medical matters”, this excuse rings hollow to me. Lauterbach expects us to show our papers certifying our less than three months old vaccination certificates every time we take off our masks, yet he refuses to tell us if he got covid within three months following his last injection.
The most shocking thing about Germany’s covid-regime is that it is not entirely a top-down phenomenon. A significant proportion of the population seems to love it. According to a poll conducted by a public broadcaster in March 2022, 61% of Germans opposed ending mask mandates in supermarkets, schools and restaurants, while only 36% were in favour. While one might have legitimate doubts about data published by an outlet that functioned as a publically funded indoctrination machine throughout the pandemic, my anecdotal observations point in the same direction. In a wealthy district of Berlin, I was often the only maskless shopper in the local supermarket, and my presence provoked hateful looks from a faceless crowd even months after compulsory masking was abolished, although cheaper supermarkets, especially in peripheral locations or multicultural areas, saw a faster decrease in mask use. Unfortunately, voluntary over-compliance motivated by genuine fear is not the creepiest phenomenon I observed in covid-obsessed Germany. Some become enthusiastic vigilante enforcers of existing or imaginary rules, which most often means yelling at strangers but, at times, escalates into violence. On one occasion, two strangers shouted at me for not wearing a mask in an area where masking was not compulsory at the time. In shock, I responded in English only to be told to “go back to my shitty country”. While, in all fairness, correcting the behaviour of strangers had already been a popular pastime activity in Germany before the pandemic, the illiberal climate of the covid-era made it significantly worse.
The relatively homogeneous German media landscape has undoubtedly a lot to do with the shocking degree to which the country’s population is indoctrinated with covid-ideology. Although, while formally speaking, there is political and media pluralism in Germany, and indeed there are left-of-centre and right-of-centre outlets debating policy issues like taxation, nuclear energy, and the possible introduction of speed limits, there is a relatively narrow elite consensus within which all of this debate is allowed to take place, and challenging covid-orthodoxy was and still is outside this acceptable scope of opinion thus anyone who publicly dissents quickly become a non-person. While the mainstream media is rightly criticized across the world for failing to scrutinize big pharma and public health bureaucracies, there was significantly more pluralism of opinion in the English-speaking media ecosystem with outlets such as Fox News, GB News, Unherd, The Telegraph, The Spectator, The National Review, Tablet and the entire Murdoch-Empire regularly publishing critical content. German-speaking news consumers could only read dissident takes in some Springer-owned outlets like Die Welt and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung published in Switzerland. Left-wing papers, usually known for their rebellious tone, fell silent or demanded stricter measures, except for a few isolated attempts to criticize the most authoritarian excesses of the pandemic response, such as the night curfew or a tracking app. When I have a conversation with a person who exclusively consumes German media, it quickly becomes evident that were are living in different realities. Recently, someone told me that there are no epidemiologists who disagree with the German government’s covid policies. When I reminded him of the existence of Anders Tegnell and the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, I had to realize that what he meant is that there are no epidemiologists on German talk shows who disagree with the German government’s covid policy.
While celebrated as an example of responsible pandemic management in most English language legacy media, Germany’s pandemic response was and still is an erratic authoritarian mess. I will never forgive this country’s political, media and bureaucratic elite for turning my chosen home, Berlin, from the freest city in Europe, buzzing with life, culture and spontaneous human activity, into something I no longer recognize. We have been subjected to unforgivable, immoral things, which also unveiled the shallowness of the countercultural scene as all the graffiti-loving anarchists, operators of hip music venues and “subversive artists” who claimed to oppose the existing society before March 2020 fell in line and started acting as voluntary henchmen of the state. The humiliating measures came in waves. It started with a “temporary” shutdown and went to prolonged school and business closures, the prescription of absurd rituals into law, outdoor mask mandates that were enforced even on deserted streets at night, a night curfew, a total suspension of culture and social life, the demonization of the “unvaccinated” by public and private media outlets and the normalization of tracking apps and biomedical apartheid. It was impossible to leave home without having to constantly affirm one’s allegiance to the prescribed ideology by “little” things like sharing your private medical information with a barista or by making a fool of yourself by taking a mask on for a minute while moving in between tables in bars and restaurants only to sit in the same space maskless for hours after. It is a misunderstanding that the vaccine apartheid system that rewards the “good” with the ability to participate in everyday activities normally taken for granted and issues extra-judicial punishment for the “bad” by excluding them from these same activities was only directed against the “unclean” enemies of the community. It also turned the barman and the cashier in “nonessential” retail, such as the flower shop next to the cemetery, into police officers and the vaccinated into subjects ready to wave their papers to anyone who asks. The rules were and are constantly shifting, and subjugation to arbitrary authority remained the only constant. I remember being downgraded from good to ok when the country switched from a two-tier to a three-tier system, from which point people who only had two vaccine doses needed a fresh test for the privilege of drinking a freaking cup of coffee while the untouchables were still prohibited from doing so with or without a test. Paradoxically for a long time, every “opening” meant the proliferation of an ever more confusing patchwork of arbitrary rules and hierarchies. A time when one could finally go to church, to the synagogue or to the gay bathhouse as long as one was ready to share his private medical information with a stranger and register his visit with a government-funded but privately owned tracking app was celebrated as a “return to freedom”. I once had a chat with a cute blond after hooking up with him in one such bathhouse and brought up the fact that I am creeped out by the tracking app. “Don’t worry about it; this is Germany”,- he told me in a reassuring voice. I could not stop but think to myself, “Well, that is exactly the point. This is Germany.”.
When in 2020, the first news came out about a virus of unknown lethality, I started wearing a KN95 as a precaution, and they were laughing at me. As more data emerged about the risk posed by covid and the efficacy of masks, I decided to ditch it, but now they were yelling at me.
Dissenters to the madness were demonized by the media and repressed by the police. Protests against the creeping public health tyranny were outlawed in the name of public health. Self-described anti-fascists attacked people protesting against othering and discrimination. Those protesting against mandates were brutally beaten for not wearing a mask, and all of this was cheered on by “respectable” members of the chattering classes who were keen to cry wolf in other circumstances.
Video: Police brutality and the arrest of a pregnant person at an anti-lockdown protest in Berlin. (BILD)
It is undeniable that the so-called “Quredenker” scene indeed has wacky elements, from spiritualist hippies to believers in silly theories about 5G to actual nazis, and we could certainly do without some of the statements and gestures coming out of this milieu, such as wearing a yellow star of David to protest vaccine apartheid or flying Russian flags next to rainbow flags for whatever reason. I joined some of their telegram groups but decided to quit after being spammed with drawings of Geroge Soros with devil horns alongside cryptocurrency scams. This often confused and confusing tendency of some sections of the German covid-dissenting scene, however, I think, is primarily a consequence of the fact that almost anyone who possesses the necessary cultural and social capital to play a leading role in shaping the dissident movement into a more consistent and respectable form has too much to lose to do so. In any case, it is certainly not an excuse for the full-scale suspension of essential civil liberties, as freedom must include the freedom to be wacky, or it is no freedom at all. Since I am one of the few dinosaurs who still cling to this retro idea of 19th-century English liberalism, according to which talking to people is a better way to resolve disagreements than throwing things at them, I tried to engage with the “Antifa” counterprotesters while attending a demonstration in Berlin organized by Friedlich Zusammen (peacefully together), a group that aims to give covid dissenters a more respectable platform by explicitly distancing itself from the more extreme elements of the “Querdenker” scene. Since they called me a gay dude attending the demo with a brown person, a Nazi, I called to their attention the awkward fact their demo consists only of white Germans, while ours has people of all colours and faiths. I was told that no matter who I am, if I protest with nazis, I am a nazi. While I did not see any nazis that day, I am not sure if everyone in Germany who uses this logic of “guilt by association” against covid-dissidents also applies this standard to the 2014 Maidan revolution in Ukraine in which a broad popular movement, including right-wing and even neo-nazi elements led to the fall of a corrupt pro-Kremlin regime. Not only were nationalists tolerated in the Ukrainian “revolution of dignity”, but football hooligans of the right sector did much of the fighting and dying on the square that led to the victorious people being able to literally shit in president Yanukovitch’s golden toilet.
It was not only the opponents of the new infection protection act who made noise lately on German Twitter. One of the most disturbing trends I have ever encountered was #QuerdenkerSindTerroristen (Querdenkers are terrorists). The pro-state authority militants behind this campaign are exploiting the tragic death of an Austrian doctor who received threats from anti-vaxers online before committing suicide. By calling “Querdenkers”, which has become a general term of abuse by now “, terrorists”, they are preparing the ground for the further criminalization of dissent.
At the moment, millions of ordinary residents of Germany are struggling with a cost of living crisis as inflation spirals out of control as a result of lockdown-related supply chain disruption, money printing and war. As energy prices and the price of groceries increase way beyond the overall level of inflation, it is yet again the poorest who are paying for the disastrous decisions of elites like former German health minister Jens Spahn who spent the lockdown of his own making in his new four million Euro villa in the only area of Berlin were traffic signs for horses are still a thing. Low-income Germans are also asked to pick up the tap for the latest dick-waving contest between nuclear-armed superpowers while they cannot be certain that they will be able to heat their homes this winter. In Berlin, the lighting of most landmark buildings is now switched off to save energy, and in Hannover, you can’t even take a warm shower after using a public gym or swimming pool. While some interpret these measures as signs of the impending collapse of Germany’s energy supply, in reality, they are more likely to be no more than virtue-signalling efforts by the self-important moral busybodies governing these cities. It is, however, undeniable that Germany’s leaders have not yet figured out how to keep the heating on if Putin decides to completely cut-off gas supplies this winter, not to mention that German industries are already losing competitiveness due to soaring energy prices and many households will soon struggle to pay their the quadrupling heating bills. Foreign minister Annalena Baerbock warned that shortages could spark a popular uprising. It begs the question, in these dire circumstances, why is the prolongation of the irritating and often expensive covid-theatre such a strong priority for the traffic-light coalition when many other countries have abolished all measures without hell breaking loose?
While this is speculative, the cynic in me cannot stop but suspect that the logic of power dictates that when you expect your population or at least a significant part of your population to turn against you, you better prepare the narrative you will use to justify the application of the brute force necessary to suppress them well in advance. Since covid was already used for the justification of police violence and the prohibition of assemblies during the last two years, It would not be surprising to see this repeating itself when people who can’t afford to heat their homes take to the streets. If you go to a protest in Germany this winter, police batons might strike your head yet again but worry not; it is for the protection of your health.
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