Dialog International

She has a point.

Susanna Gaschke, writing in Die Welt, makes an irrefutable argument:  nearly all the evil, violent deeds that  take place anywhere on the planet are committed by men:

Nur ganz selten erstechen Frauen nachts um drei Uhr auf Volksfesten andere Leute. Ganz selten organisieren sie Nazi-Aufmärsche oder werfen Steine und Flaschen auf Polizisten. Sie schreiben selten nach Mitternacht verbitterte E-Mails an Gott und die Welt. Sie versuchen auch nur selten, Männer, die sich nicht wehren können, weil sie um ihre Karriere fürchten, in Hotelzimmern zum Sex zu zwingen. Und ebenso wenig nötigen Frauen Männer und kleine Jungen, sich von Kopf bis Fuß zu verhüllen, damit deren Anblick keine unzüchtigen Gedanken bei der weiblichen Population erregt.

Unfortunately, Frau Gaschke doesn't have a a good solution for the problem other than to exhort women to avoid men that exhibit violent, extremely sexist, tendencies.  But that would only exacerbate the problem.  I've already written about how the mass migration of talented, ambitious women from Saxony has resulted in a shortage of women in places like Chemnitz - further isolating the male population there and only intensifying their xenophobic feelings.

Women do have a moderating influence on male behavior.  Take the Roman Catholic Church, for example:  the exclusion of all female leadership and influence has allowed the church to become a criminal enterprise - attracting and protecting pedophiles from around the world (read the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report - if you have the stomach to do so - with its detailed description of child rape committed by hundreds of priests just in that US state alone.)

Of course, women are not able to inflict as much damage as men on society in part because they lack the power for the most part.  As women do attain power, is their capacity for evil really that different from men?

Full Video of Nazi Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia

No commentary necessary / kein Kommentar nötig

Save the Aryans! / Rettet die Arier!

Hilarious video about one attempt to save the Aryan race from extinction.  Beatrix von Storch and her comrades in the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) can now rest easy.

This is how the neo-Nazis see themselves:

 

This is what the "Master Race" actually looks like (photo from last week's Nazi Rock Festival in Themar /Thuringia )

Freedom to Hate / Die Freiheit, zu hassen

To follow up on my post on freedom of speech and Holocaust denial, Brendan O'Neill of the UK magazine Spiked explains why censoring speech - even what we call "hate speech" is a bad idea: 

"Zensur greift schreckliche Anschauungen nicht an, geschweige denn, dass sie sie besiegt. Zensur schiebt sie vielmehr nur an den Rand. Sie ermöglicht hasserfüllten Ideologien im Verborgenen ohne Widerstand zu wachsen, während sie uns der Möglichkeit und des Rechts beraubt, solche Ideologien zu sehen, sie zu identifizieren und ihnen entgegenzutreten. Die Zensur bestärkt die Hasserfüllten und überzeugt sie, dass ihre Gedanken wirklich herausfordernd sein müssen, wenn sie die Gesellschaft so sehr beunruhigen. Sie schwächt die Vernünftigen und entlastet uns von der menschlichen Pflicht, für das aufzustehen, was wir für richtig halten. Auch in diesem Bereich spiegelt das Campusleben das wider, was in der Gesamtgesellschaft geschehen ist, nämlich die Ausbreitung von Gesetzen gegen „Hassrede“.

Die Verfolgung der „Hassrede“ ist schlecht für uns alle. Für die, die schlicht und ergreifend kontroverse Haltungen vertreten und als Hassprediger abgestempelt werden, genauso wie für die, die wirklich hasserfüllten Ideologien entgegentreten möchten und die das nicht mehr effektiv tun können. Sie ist auch schlecht für die Minderheiten, die angeblich geschützt werden sollen und deshalb wie unmündige Kinder zu ihrem eigenen Wohl in moralische Quarantäne gesteckt werden, während Studentenführer oder Beamte bereitstehen, ihre zerbrechlichen Seelen zu schützen. Im Endeffekt müssen wir alle das Recht haben zu hassen. Hass ist ein Gefühl. Wenn eine Gesellschaft Gefühle kontrolliert, ist sie nicht frei. Sie ist dann so sehr vom Autoritarismus durchdrängt, dass selbsternannte Moralwächter sogar glauben, sie dürften uns sagen, was wir zu fühlen haben. Der Krieg gegen die Hassrede bedeutet nicht nur ein Ende der Meinungsfreiheit, sondern ein Ende der grundlegenden Gedankenfreiheit."

(Censorship doesn’t tackle, far less defeat, ugly views; it just pushes them aside. It has the terrible double effect of allowing the hateful ideology to fester and grow — unchallenged, unexposed — while depriving the rest of us of the ability, and right, to see, know and dent that ideology. It strengthens the haters, convincing them their idea must be really challenging if it freaks out society so much, and it weakens the right-thinking, absolving us of the human duty to stand up to what we think is wrong. Here, too, campus life mirrors what has happened across society as hate-speech laws have spread.

The policing of hate speech is bad for everyone. For those whose views are simply controversial, who find themselves redefined as ‘hate groups’; for those who want to challenge real hateful ideologies, who can never meaningfully confront them; for the minorities supposedly being protected, who are reduced to moral minors to be quarantined in a safe space for their own good, their fragile souls guarded by switched-on student leaders or officials. The bottom line is this: we must be free to hate. Hatred is an emotion, and when a society controls emotions, it’s not a free society. Rather, it’s a society in which authoritarianism has become so entrenched that moral guardians even think they can tell us what we may feel. The war on hate speech is the end not only of freedom of speech, but of the basic freedom of the mind.)

Hate speech is constitutionally protected in the United States under the First Amendment.  For anyone interested in learning about the history of this cornerstone of American democracy, I recommend Anthony Lewis' Freedom for the Thought We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment. 

The Open Society and its Enemies

I was a bit too young to follow the debate in the early 1970s between Herbert Marcuse and Sir Karl Popper.  But if asked to choose between the two I would have enthusiastically thrown my lot in with Marcuse - choosing hot revolution over dreary incrementalism.  What sex-crazed teenager wouldn't buy into Marcuse's Marxian/Freudian notion that Eros was the creative force behind all civilization, and "late capitalism" channeled erotic impulses into consumerism and therefore had to be transformed. But into what? Marcuse, in his Essay on Liberation, is noticeably vague on what a "liberated" society might look like, but he was an energetic supporter of Third World "revolutions":

"In Vietnam, in Cuba, in China, a revolution is being defended and driven forward which struggles to eschew the bureaucratic administration of socialism. The guerrilla forces in Latin America seem to be animated by that same subversive impulse: liberation." (Herbert Marcuse, Preface to Essay on Liberation, 1969).  

Freedom of Expression, The First Amendment?  - all manifestations of late capitalist "Repressive Tolerance". Marcuse's theory - I'm ashamed to say - made a big impression on my teenage self. It wasn't until much later - after spending time in the Arbeiter-und-Bauern-Staat (DDR) in the late 1970s and early 1980s - that I began to understand the wisdom of Sir Karl Popper's The Open society and its Enemies (1947). By then I had studied Freud's Unbehagen in der Kultur and had a different understanding of Eros - of its destructive tendencies - and had read much modern history, including accounts of Cultural Revolution and The Great Leap Forward, which led to the slaughter of 40 million Chinese citizens. Utopian thinking,as Popper illustrates with Plato, tends to morph into tyranny. 

Popper wrote his treatise just as liberal democracy had managed to survive its greatest existential threat.  Now the open society is once again facing threats which just a few years ago were unthinkable. 

Ob AfD, Pegida, Hogesa, Salafisten, Graue Wölfe, abstruse linksradikale Reste antiimperialistischer Gruppen im Umfeld der Linkspartei, Nazis, Anhänger von Verschwörungstheorien, Esoterik und diverse ökoreligiösen Strömungen – fast alle diese Gruppen wachsen mit besorgniserregender Geschwindigkeit und so unterschiedlich sie auch sind, besteht zwischen ihnen in wesentlichen Punkten Einigkeit: Sie lehnen eine offene, pluralistische Gesellschaft ab. Antiamerikanismus und Antisemitismus sind bei ihnen mindestens weit verbreitet wenn nicht sogar ideologische Grundlage. Die Medien nehmen sie nur noch als Lügenpresse wahr. Offene Debatten sind ihnen verhasst.

(Whether AfD, Pegida, Hogesa, Salafi jihadists, Grey Wolves, abstruse radical left-wing remnants of anti-imperialists groups close to the Left Party, Nazis, fans of conspiracy theories, esoteric groups, diverse eco-religious elements - nearly all of these groups are growing at a speed that of great concern.  And, as diverse as they are, they all have one essential thing in common: they reject the open, pluralist society. Anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism are widespread with them, if not the core ideology.  They see the media as the "lying-press"; any open debate is anathema to them.)

I don't want to live in a world where Donald Trump is US president and Marine LePen is president of France, where migrant children seeking security and prosperity are gunned down at the border. Question is, do we still have the will any more to defend the open society?

Was eine Offene Gesellschaft nicht erträgt ist, wenn sie gleichzeitig angegriffen wird und sich zu wenige finden, sie zu verteidigen. In diese Situation kommen wir langsam...

(What the open society cannot tolerate is that it comes under attack and very few can be found to defend it.  We are slowly coming to this predicament...)

HIgh Number of German 9/11 Truther Sites Reflects Resurgent Anti-Semitism

It seems that every time September 11 comes around there is a flurry of 9/11 Truther activity in Germany.  This past September 11 the influential left-oriented "critical" Web site NachDenkSeiten promoted a Telepolis piece by Super-Truther Mathias Bröckers (Terror und Tabu) where he stated that the WTC attacks had to have been carried out as an "inside job" ("9/11 nur als "inside job" durchführbar war").  Prominent Truthers routinely appear in magazines, or are invited by German universities to speak to packed auditoriums.  To be sure, there are plenty of conspiracy theorists in the United States - indeed, most of the "theories" originated here in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. But the "9/11 Truth Movement" has for the most been been marginalized in the US and is confined to extreme right-wing groups that hardly anyone here takes seriously.  In Germany, on the other hand, 9/11 Trutherism is mainstream, and is considered gospel on both the right and left. Trutherism is just a component of pervasive anti-Americanism, which- as the sociologist Andrei Markovits has written - is the flip-side of anti-Semitism. 

I have started to keep a list of the Web sites that routinely publish 9/11 Truther content; the list is just a start  and I welcome any suggestions to make it more complete:

RT Deutsch

Sputnik

Telepolis

NachDenkSeiten

Kopp Online

Free 21

Hintergrund

Duckhome

Wissensmanufaktur

Der Honigmann sagt

KenFM

Alles Schall und Rauch

Jens Wernicke

Compact

Mathias Bröckers

Infokrieger News

The proliferation in Germany of these Web sites is upsetting to me personally.  I worked for ten years on in lower Manhattan, five of them at 222 Broadway directly across from the World Trade Center.  Each morning I rode the PATH Train to the underground stop at the World Trade Center, or would take the Hoboken Ferry across the Hudson and walk through the South Tower to my office.  I had countless business meetings at offices in both towers, and had many breakfast meetings, luncheons and attended presentations at  Windows on the World  on the 107th floor of the North Tower.  On September 11, 2001 75 employees of Windows on the World were killed. I knew several of the bond traders at the investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald two floors down from Windows of the World.  They were killed along with every one of their colleagues. Most of the people I knew in the South Tower managed to escape - but one, a 33-year-old woman, was trapped on the 93rd floor and died a horrible death.  Altogether, 2,762 people were killed that morning in the terrorist attack.  Many others were severely injured;  all were traumatized. Hundreds of first responders and recovery workers are suffering and dying today from exposure to the toxic environment at Ground Zero.

It angers me to no end that people like Mathias Bröckers or Daniele Ganser make a living with their books and speeches from the deaths of those victims of terror.  It disturbs me that universities in Germany would invite them to speak on their campuses; it saddens me that so many people would choose to attend those presentations and applaud them.

And make no mistake: nearly all of these conspiracy theories somehow involve Jews. 

Willkommen in der Welt der Verschwörungstheoretiker: Juden haben vom Einsturz des World Trade Centers finanziell profitiert. Der israelische Geheimdienst Mossad war in die Anschlagspläne eingeweiht. Neokonservative Drahtzieher in der US-Regierung haben die Sache angezettelt, um eine neue Weltordnung durchzusetzen....Die Thesen der Verschwörungstheoretiker lauten: Nicht islamistische Terroristen haben die Anschläge auf dem Gewissen, sondern die US-Regierung und ihre Helfer. Das World Trade Center etwa sei von innen gesprengt worden. Kaum überraschend, dass auch "die Juden" ins Fadenkreuz geraten. "Da werden immer wieder Zusammenhänge hergestellt", sagte Marilyn Mayo von der amerikanischen Anti-Defamation League (ADL) der Jüdischen Allgemeinen. Mayo hat die kursierenden Theorien untersucht und sagt: "Antisemitismus ist ein wichtiger Teil in diesem Puzzlespiel".So ist von Larry Silverstein die Rede, der im Sommer 2001 den Hochhaus-Komplex gepachtet und eine Versicherung abgeschlossen habe, die verdächtigerweise auch terroristische Akte einschließe. Silverstein sei Jude und habe Verbindungen nach Israel. Merkwürdig sei auch, dass vor den Anschlägen angebliche Kunststudenten aus Israel verhaftet wurden: Mossad-Spione.

At least one in ten of the 9/11 victims were believed to have been Jewish.

I urge anyone traveling to New York City to visit the 9/11 Memorial Museum; it is a moving experience and gives a sense of what the people of New York and all Americans went through that terrible day.

 

 

Eva Herman and the Great American Smartphone Conspiracy

I haven't thought much about Eva Herman after she caused an uproar by waxing nostalgic about the wonderful treatment of mothers in the Third Reich, or after she said the 2010 Love Parade tragedy was God's punishment for German youth's embrace of sex, love and rock music.  At the time I compared Eva Herman to Sarah Palin.  But it turns out that this was an insult to Sarah Palin:  Eva Herman is much dumber.

Eva Herman has an essay on the current chaos with migrants and asylum seekers on Wissensmanufaktur, which appears to be yet another conspiracy site like Hintergrund, Kopp-Online or NachDenkSeiten (why are there so many conspiracy Web sites in Germany?). Frau Herman is really, really upset about the influx of migrants into Germany; these aliens are intent on destroying German culture. Something this bad for Germany can only be the result of a conspiracy by - yes! - the United States.  How does Eva Herman know that that America is to blame for the chaos? Here she cites the great "Oracle of Moscow" who is worshiped by both the Left and Right in Germany: Vladimir Putin. 

Auch der russische Präsident Putin warnte vor nicht allzu langer Zeit vor dieser Art Kriegsführung der US-Administration, die er ebenso für die Umstürze in der Ukraine, in Libyen, Irak, Afghanistan und Syrien, verantwortlich macht. Eine logische Frage in diesem Zusammenhang müsste lauten: Welches Interesse sollten diese Leute eigentlich haben, um nun auch Europa in Brand zu setzen? Warum wird die ganze Welt destabilisiert?

How can the United States implement this diabolical plan to drive hundreds of thousands of migrants into "white, Christian" Europe?  Eva Herman knows the answer: via Smartphones.

So wird also heute der größte Teil der Schleuser, der Flüchtlingsboote, der hunderttausende Smartphones, professionell organisiert und gelenkt. Wie einst zahlreiche sogenannte Revolutionen von fremder Hand geplant und durchgeführt wurden, so ist es diesmal ähnlich. Apropos Smartphones: Waren es nicht auch Mobiltelefone, die vor wenigen Jahren den sogenannten Arabischen Frühling erst möglich gemacht hatten? Hatten die Umstürzler in Ägypten und Tunesien, diese zahllosen jungen, starken Männer, die wir zu Abertausenden in den Abendnachrichten für „Freiheit“ und „Frieden“ demonstrieren sahen, nicht sogar eine Art gleichgeschaltete Kommandozentrale, die sie über die sozialen Netzwerke immer dort zusammentrieb, wo Proteste und Auseinandersetzungen gerade vonstattengehen sollten?

This just the latest stage in America's grand plan to create a global "apocalypse", which began on Sept. 11, 2001 with the "false flag" operation blowing up the Twin Towers in New York City:

Vorbereitung und Durchführung derartiger Ein-und Angriffe werden nicht selten unter falscher Flagge geführt, wie wir nicht erst seit den Weltkriegen wissen; vor allem das inzwischen sagenumwobene 9/11 ist ein moderneres Zeugnis für derartiges Vorgehen, dessen Zielsetzung durchaus in engem Zusammenhang mit unserer heutigen, immer desolater werdenden Situation zu tun hat: Man erschuf durch diesen tödlichen Trick den terroristischen, islamischen Feind, dessen Ziel die Vernichtung der westlichen Welt sein soll.

Frau Herman is terrified that this American Smartphone Conspiracy will result in an all-encompassing destructive Jihad on sacred German soil:

Es ist eine äußerst unangenehme Vorstellung, dass auch diese Smartphones zum großen Plan gehören könnten, und eines möglicherweise nicht mehr fernen Tages jenes Horn für einen jeden Dschihad-Kämpfer darstellen, in welches weltweit, vor allem und gerade auch in Deutschland, auf Kommando zum Halali geblasen wird. Dann Gnade uns allen Gott.

(It is a very disturbing thought that these smartphones are part of the grand scheme where in the not too distant future every Jihad fighter in world - and even here in Germany - will receive the command for Halali.  Lord have mercy on all of us.)

I must say that Frau Herman has quite an imagination.  This is the best anti-American conspiracy theory I know of since the Great Amikäfer Conspiracy of 1955.

Refugee Crisis: Two Germanys

Watching the events unfolding each day with respect to the refugees in Germany it is clear that Saxony is not Germany and the majority of Germans are repelled by the neo-Nazi hate and violence that has erupted over the refugees.

In fact it is not fair to the people of Saxony to describe the Free State as a Nazi swamp. There are plenty of people in Sachsen who sympathize with the plight of these desperate people seeking a  future for their families.

The two Germanys were very much on display this past Thursday when Chancellor Angela Merkel (belatedly) visited Heidenau.

On the one hand there were the neo-Nazi demonstrators, such as this woman who can be heard on a YouTube video screaming "Fotze, Fotze, Fotze!" over and over at the chancellor:

...and then there were the decent people who joined with the refugees in a welcoming party:

Two Germanys.  Let's hope the hateful minority is shamed to silence.

Happy Glock-Day, America!

I originally published this blog post in July of 2012 following the massacre of innocent people at a movie theater in Colorado by a deranged young white man with a Glock semi-automatic pistol.  This week a 21-year old white racist murdered nine black people at a church in Charleston, South Carolina.   The young man used a .45 caliber Glock semi-automatic pistol.

No doubt I will be republishing this post at regular intervals. 

While families in Colorado mourn yet another senseless mass killing, the finance department at Glock Ges.m.b.H. in Deutsch-Wagram is popping champagne corks.  These are halcyon days for Austria's Deadliest Import.  The Glock has cemented its position as the weapon of choice for mass killers - and not just in America: 

Norwegian far-Right extremist Anders Behring Breivik used a Glock 17 to kill most of the 67 people he shot dead during his massacre on the island of Utoya a year ago this Sunday.

Sweden's Peter Mangs, the man accused of being behind to more than a dozen shootings of immigrants in the city of Malmo, owned a Glock 19.

Germany's Robert Steinhäuser, who killed 17 people in the 2001 Erfurt massacre, used a Glock 17.

But only in America does this deadly mayhem lead to a spike in the sales of Glock pistols.  For the United States is the only place where any lunatic can walk into a gun store and purchase a Glock. And the more Americans are gunned downed by Glock owners, the more people want to own Glocks. 

It is no mystery why Glocks are coveted by mass kilers.  Glocks are excellent killing machines which can easily be optimized with enhanced magazine clips:

According to Paul Barrat, the author of Glock: The Rise of America's Gun, the magazine is the main attraction.

"This magazine is so large, it actually sticks out the bottom of the handle of the gun, of the grip," he told an American radio station earlier this year.

"And you can fire it very quickly, and you can get off that large number of rounds before you have to reload." The weapon is now used by two-thirds of US police departments and has featured in countless films.

Thanks to the cowardice of politicians and the power of the NRA, people can now take their Glocks practically everywhere in the US: churches, taverns, state houses,  - even airport lobbies.

Americans, there is an excellent chance that there will be a Glock in your future - or at least the bullet from one.

American students flocking to German universities

For years students in Germany dreamed of spending a few semesters on the bucolic campuses of American colleges and universities; not many Americans would venture to German universities, due to the language challenges, the overcrowded classrooms and the difficulty in navigating the institutional bureaucracies. But now the trend is reversed, or at least equalized: approximately the same number of Americans are matriculating at German universities as German students coming to the US to study.  The main reason behind this trend is not difficult to discern: cost.  Tuition, fees and living expenses at a private college in the US can easily cost between $40,000 and $60,0000 per year.  Tuition at a university in Germany is zero, and a foreign student can get a generous stipend courtesy of the Federal Government (DAAD).

One other attraction for American students which didn't exist when I was a student in Germany:  more and more courses are being offered in English:

Attraktiver geworden ist das Studium in Deutschland sicherlich auch, weil mehr und mehr Studieninhalte auf Englisch angeboten werden. Der Hochschulkompass der Hochschulrektorenkonferenz listet 1020 Studiengänge an deutschen Hochschulen, in denen hauptsächlich auf Englisch gelehrt wird.

But there are other benefits for Americans who study in Germany.  The American professor Mark Roche has studied both the American and German systems and sees advantages for self-motivated students at German universities, where students are not nearly as pampered and spoon-fed as they are at an American liberal arts college:

Was können die Vereinigten Staaten lernen? Erstens sind Flexibilität und Unabhängigkeit des Studenten, beides Merkmale der deutschen Universitätstradition, wichtige Prinzipien des Lernens. Studenten lernen mehr, wenn sie Selbständigkeit und Initiative beweisen müssen. Deutsche Studenten hatten die Freiheit, sich geistigen Fragen gleichsam organisch zu widmen, mithin auf ganz andere Weise, als dies die Schülermentalität an den meisten amerikanischen Universitäten nahelegt. Dort werden viele Hausaufgaben verteilt, die den Studenten nicht dazu auffordern, sich in ein Thema um seiner selbst willen zu vertiefen oder aus eigenem Antrieb die weiterführenden Fragen, die sich aus dem Studium ergeben, zu verfolgen.

("What can the US learn? First that flexibility and independence - the hallmarks of the German university tradition - are guiding principles in learning. Students learn more when they have to show self-reliance and initiative. Students in Germany had the freedom to pursue intellectual issues organically, in a completely different manner than the pupil mentality that one sees at American universities.  There a lot of homework is assigned which doesn't compel the students to research a topic in depth on their own or, at their own accord look into other issues that arise from the initial research.")

Germany could also benefit from these American students as well as students of other nationalities to contribute their creativity and different perspectives to the workforce once they complete their studies. Unfortunately, very few German companies hire foreign students, so most end up leaving Germany which generously paid for their education.