The relentless pressure of fools

Expat kiwi Chris Wheeler now living in Germany describes the situation for the unvaxxed in his adopted land, drawing startling parallels to the Nazi era.

‘Tolerance will reach such a level that intelligent people will be banned from thinking so as not to offend the imbeciles.’ Fyodor Dostoevsky

We were raided at dawn in late May by the specialist German Polizei “Booster Squad” under the command of a Fraulein Buchholz, a Kriminal Haupt Commissar or Chief Detective, whose cold and professional manner rather reminded me of the astringently intellectual Alice Weidel, current parliamentary leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, member of the Libertarian “Austrian School” economics club (Friedrich A. von Hayek Society) and true believer in Margaret Thatcher, who (Alice) would have definitely disapproved of the whole operation.

Cop raids in these parts are popularly termed a “razzia” and this was, in newspaper headline terms, a “Rentner Razzia” or raid on pensioners (many of us were in our late 70s or 80s) who had inadvertently been swept up in some dystopian State surveillance net for contrary thinking (“querdenkers” in German media parlance). Those recent Xinjiang Police Files revealing Uighur persecution look bad, but Heh! This is Europe in 2022!

Apart from old age, the Booster Squad’s interest in us all was that somehow we had fallen into the Berlin government’s radar-trap as “impfgegners” or “anti-vaxxers” and therefore potential rockers of the official German Covid/SARS2 Hysteria boat, still paddling into the future despite the apparent reversal of government interest into the Ukraine War and promotion of rocketing German tank and missile sales into those NATO border marches to the East once ruled (often more effectively!) by Prussia and those ancient orders of Teutonic Knights.

Police photographers have been pursuing local town anti-Covid lockdown demos all over Germany and arrests and trials are the latest development in a Green & Socialist-flavoured government’s strategy apparently modelled on the Peking/Beijing government’s present gulag policy towards their Uighur minority in the wild’s of the Gobi desert.

Our local Polizei Booster Squad is a simple byproduct of Berlin directives to heavily clamp down on that recently calculated thirteen percent or so of German citizenry opposing Covid/SARS2 control measures that over the past year have turned anyone offering an alternative narrative to current Covid hysteria into the actual cause, if not carriers of the disease itself, besides opening them to condemnation as under-educated conspiracy theory dupes who deserve to die from the next monkey or bat plague our superiors plus Billy Gates direct down the disease turnpike.

It demands a certain ironic sensibility to remind oneself that Alice’s AfD, usually accused of “neo-Nazi” tendencies, were the only political party to strongly criticise the wave of lockdown measures introduced by the purse-lipped Angela Merkel and her ex-used-car-salesman health minister, Jens Spahn; measures which paralysed the German economy and resulted in closed-down small businesses, created empty shops on village main streets and general mental health issues in a nation whose latent authoritarianism is still easily misdirected into extremism of the sort favoured by late fuehrer Adolf.

Alice Weidel and her AfD are appropriate to this account because as Wikipedia acidly notes: “Weidel accused the Catholic Church and the Evangelical Church of Germany of ‘playing the same inglorious role that they played in (Hitler’s) Third Reich’, accusing both churches of being (via their associations with former-chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats – Ed) ‘thoroughly politicised’ and stating that AfD is ‘the only Christian party that still exists’ in Germany” as well as being the only political party to roundly condemn the whole current Covid Hysteria charade and advise a return to commonsense, and normal social and commercial life.

Quite a few of us old geezers are also nominally Christian, besides any anti-State views we might hold, and none of us could give two hoots over dying with Covid as long as we can get into a pub and have a beer without being interrogated over vax passes, whether we love Big Brother, and all the other Covid regulatory bullshit that has turned just stepping out onto the street into an exercise more complex than the boarding process for an international flight to North Korea!

Post Hitler German Christianity itself is simply summed up by the fact that at the height of Covid Hysteria it was actually more difficult to get into a church and pray for God’s deliverance (a traditional European Black Death strategy) than it was to get into a pub and buy that beer, which more or less summed up the modern Christian predicament – Beer beats Faith as a solution to Life problems!

Shortly before our raid by the Booster Squad I had reported, in another context regarding the heavily EU-wide promoted Covid/SARS2 hysteria, that the newly installed Socialist/Green/Liberal coalition under Olaf Scholz was still seriously working on a plan, heavily supported from the Green side, which would not only force every citizen to register their precise vaccine status apropos Covid, but impose fines on dissidents refusing such registration and any government-demanded Covid vaxxing that followed.

Furthermore, under recently discussed potential regulations heavily favoured by provincial parliaments in the German federal system, along with backup from medical experts and the media in general, dissident “querdenkers” and “impfgegners” (“anti-vaxxers” in English epithet terms) could be forced into state-monitored counselling and thought-reform re-education sessions on grounds – that would have gained easy acceptance in 1935 Germany – that opposition to Covid vaxxing could only be the consequence of obdurate, hence illogical, opposition to the State and its residual Nazi sympathies that still rule the north European Teutonic narrative whatever the politically correct may try to convince you otherwise.

It’s also somewhat ironic that in 2022 Germany, some 80 years after that Nazi Wannsee Conference of January 1942 that put the seal on “the Jewish Solution”, jailing, fines and/or forced compliance with Covid and later, probably Monkey Pox, measures are still high on the agenda of a German government where “socialists”, “greens” and “liberals” alike are strongly backing measures with roots back in 1942 Wannsee, while the only organised political opposition to the whole damned package is Alice’s AfD with its accompanying raft of neo-Nazi sympathies and current surveillance status under Germany’s somewhat STASI-like internal “intelligence” service, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, a slightly upgraded but similarly paranoid version of my New Zealand’s pathetic Security “Intelligence” Service), presently taxed with shadowing every move of Alice and her fellow AfD Gauleiters in case they further rattle that fascist box Germany’s current coalition is apparently bent on shoving that whole sorry nation back into.

Old habits die hard and as the frenetic-eyed, current German ruling health minister (probably not for much longer given his lack of style?!) Karl Lauterbach, demonstrates now in his daily German media health rants advocating full Covid vaxxing for everyone, Josef Goebbels never really died, simply re-birthed somewhat later, somewhere around 1963 in North Rhine-Westphalia. Reincarnation needs to be taken, in fact, as a serious subject for deeper psychic study in the University of Cologne’s Department of Health Economics & Epidemiology where our Karl is presently on sabbatical leave.

Karl’s major, somewhat autistic, problem is that he has virtually no experience in normal human life, which is daily demonstrated in his twitching, rolling-eyed regular television appearances where his repeat of Boris Karloff’s role as Dr Heinrich von Frankenstein in that Universal Pictures’ 1935 sequel, Bride of Frankenstein, keeps German kinder in a state of terror every 8pm news-hour.

That still leaves me scanning my German dictionary, however, over the accusations in my recent “Beglaubigte Abschrift” from the local town Staatsanwaltschaft – appropriately signed off in Tory Eton surnames-only style by the brother “Grimm” – that somewhere down the track of my 85-year-old later nefarious career in Deutschland I have fallen under suspicion of offences against Wannsee’s Infektionsschutzgesetz 75 Abs. sub-paragraph 3 IfSG and must present myself before that Booster Squads interrogation chamber, bringing with me a blood and stool sample, a yellow Star of David armband to identify my pariah status and “Mund-Nasen-Schutz” whatever that is!

All joking aside (Beware! Germans, in general, and particularly apparatchiki “Beamter” Germans are almost totally lacking in any sense of irony or, for that matter, sense of humour!), the wearing of that Jewish star armband as an anti-vaxxer protest symbol is heavily sanctioned against in Germany, as is addressing your local Polizist with the formerly popular “Heil Hitler!” salute or referring to their possibly Gestapo-like behaviour using the “G-word”. Josef Mengele, that “Doctor of Death” behind those pre-Covid Wannsee Holocaust provisions he utilised in the murder of thousands including kids at his Auschwitz death camp, apparently visited his relatives in southern Germany regularly over several decades without ever being dobbed in by the locals as a wanted war criminal.

Ex-Nazis, under NATO protection and encouragement virtually ran Germany into this century and although they drag the odd lower-ranking Nazi death camp functionary – these days normally senile, demented and in their late 90s – through the law courts, they are now apparently having to dig down deeper into my mid-80s echelon, where we were just kids in shorts, picking our noses at the side of the road and grabbing chocolate bars from the Yanks and Tommies as the Allies swept into Germany. In all truth, in my World War II period I fell into Jewish “Mischling” status where instead of writing this vituperative piece against Deutsche authoritarianism I could easily have ended up as a bar of Auschwitz-brand soap!

Nevertheless, it’s hard to know – strictly speaking – whether we ageing, thinking, pensioners qualify as the New Jews or just that wider category of querdenkers, which is now the generally popular term of abuse used for anyone, anti-Covid or otherwise, who simply shows signs of intellectual acuity according to Dostoevsky’s original quote. As one trenchant critic, Australian psychologist Phil Shannon, recently noted (<quadrant.org.au>, 4.2.22):

“The whole world has gone nuts, clinically-speaking, in this age of COVID. What was it that was going on inside people’s heads that has made almost everyone shut themselves up at home, wear germy rags over their mouths, keep their kids out of school, sanitise until their hands bleed, hoard toilet paper, queue for hours to take a meaningless test to see if they have the Corona-doom, demand Novak Djokovic’s head on a pike, salivate at the prospect of booster upon booster of an experimental, liability-free, gene-therapy product from the corporate suits of Big Pharma and all the rest of the bizarre behaviour and superstitious ‘safety’ rituals we have had to endure for two years of unrelenting virus hysteria?”

Way back in the early 20th Century, when Russia’s then Tsar (not Vladimir!) was sending Russians to war somewhere west of the Ukraine, the Greek/Georgian philosopher, George Gurdjieff noted to his recorder, Peter Ouspensky, of the passing trucks heading to the war front loaded with piles of crutches for legs that were yet to be blown off: “What do you expect? People are machines. Machines have to be blind and unconscious; they cannot be otherwise, and all their actions have to correspond to their nature. Everything happens. No one does anything. ‘Progress’ and ‘civilisation’, in the real meaning of these words, can appear only as the result of conscious efforts. And only each single man can make conscious efforts.”

Little has changed since. Have we really learnt anything about our species’ truly awful habit of group hysteria from two World Wars and endless brushfire wars since from the Middle East and Africa now to modern-day Russia’s war in the Ukraine?

In his recently published book (ChelseaGreen, June 2022), The Psychology of Totalitarianism, Belgian psychologist Mattias Desmet coins the term “mass formation” to explain the group psychosis that was assiduously wound up by health “authorities” and governments worldwide over nearly three years and led to ANY opposition to ruling Covid theology being met with widespread excoriation and the sort of legal persecution now being handed out in just my own small German burg of 200,000 or so inhabitants to some 140 souls who simply announced opposition and took some form of stand against economic and social crippling Covid regulations.

As the Amazon.com review of Desmet’s book notes: “The world is in the grips of mass formation―a dangerous, collective type of hypnosis―as we bear witness to loneliness, free-floating anxiety, and fear giving way to censorship, loss of privacy, and surrendered freedoms. It is all spurred by a singular, focused crisis narrative that forbids dissident views and relies on destructive groupthink.”

Nowhere is the absence of a really effective science and social psychology critique of the whole Covid Hysteria disaster more apparent than in this modern European land where I recently sought a home after giving up on my own south Pacific dalliance among Kiwis and Kangaroos. While all my friends around me have since succumbed to repeated bouts of Covid virus variants after even second, third and – now – even fourth jabs that were supposed to have immunised them forever, I still can’t find anyone amongst the whole damned lot who can break out of the dreadful Grimm brothers Earl King thrall and simply admit to submission to those very same conditions that permitted the German churches of whatever Christian persuasion to fall totally under those Nazi group-think regulations that led so easily to the Holocaust and World War II.

Hannah Arendt’s own essential contribution to the understanding of both German and general human totalitarianism, examined in her own The Origins of Totalitarianism, of course predates Mattias Desmet’s own account by some sixty years or so and as my Gurdjieff quote from shortly before World War I demonstrates, neither Desmet nor Arendt are really offering unique data on the behaviour of our species under a flu germ attack that was so easily media-manipulated into that collective psychosis that has typified human group behaviour since well before the burning of witches and pogroms against Jews became popular public recreations.

But watch your back in modern Germany if you show ANY opposition to the ruling theology over Covid policy. Olaf Scholz and his Greens may have let Jews off the hook via modern political correctnesses, but old habits of thinking didn’t simply stop with the end of those Nuremberg War trials or that notable avoidance of bringing Josef Mengele or even Werner von Braun and his V2 rockets to book. All that’s happened in modern Germany since 1945 is that querdenkers of any variety – and particularly Covid querdenkers – have easily been slotted into that persecution slot, supposedly vacated by the Jews a few decades ago, and are now the New Jew, just waiting Karl Lauterbach’s, the Greens and Olaf Scholz’s new pogrom measures now being talked up for October later this year when jailings of impfgegners and querdenkers will probably get the same stamp of approval from media and that Catholic Church and the Evangelical Church of Germany still “playing the same inglorious role that they played in (Hitler’s) Third Reich” that has accompanied the Berlin State Bundestag Orchestra’s performance of the Covid/SARS2 Hysteria symphony since Donald Trump’s evocatively-named “Kung Flu” jetted off from that Wuhan airport some time in 2019.

Chris Wheeler is a former New Zealand pensioner and now fully-registered German querdenker.