Germany prepares to crush protests of its first winter without Russian gas
An article appeared in the German magazine Der Spiegel this week with the characteristic title: “How right-wing extremists and their supporters are mobilising ahead of the winter of wrath”.
The gist of the article is this: For some years now, people who succumb to Russian propaganda or are just mentally deranged have been working against Germany. And who else could distrust the “system” parties of the FRG: the Social Democrats, the Demochristians (CDU), the Greens or the Liberals? Only “conspiracy theory supporters” or lunatics. Such is the logic of the German “mainstream” press.
In the article: “After the tide of mass outrage over the coronavirus restrictions, the right-wing extremists, the ‘kwerdenkers’ (a Stuttgart-based movement united in its distrust of the authorities in Germany and the EU) are betting on a new stirring topic: the gas crisis and explosive price increases. In their speeches on social media, they fantasise about the collapse of power and the approaching civil war.
The authors of the article (written by a team of nine Spiegel journalists) attack all bearers of such harmful ideas about the future of Germany and express their satisfaction with the imprisonment of Michael Balweg, the leader of the Querdenker. Balweg was put behind bars by the German authorities for a rather dubious reason: the Querdenker citizens quite legitimately sent him money, admiring his opposition to the coronavirus restrictions, and he spent some of it not only on posters, but also on his office expenses. Balweg did not build himself a luxurious house (on the contrary, he sold his former abode) and did not travel around the world as the current Green Deputy Prime Minister Robert Habeck does, urging citizens to bathe less often and only with cold water. But in the end, Habek is on top of power and Balweg is in pre-trial detention, where a court has put him “to prevent him from fleeing abroad”. Journalists at Der Spiegel are happy to state that Balweg, so far considered innocent, is behind bars, although it is easy to imagine their indignation if Russian courts would have so easily imprisoned opposition figures simply “for the purpose of avoiding fleeing abroad.
But there is a new danger to journalists:
“The motley protest crowd, where coronavirus deniers, conspiracy theorists, right-wing extremists and people simply disillusioned with today’s politics have come together in a circle – the whole caravan of absurdity is moving on. Now they have found a new theme: the gas crisis and skyrocketing prices. Naturally, it is all the fault of “the upper echelons”. Well, at least there is no change in this,” write the journalists of “Spiegel”.
The journalists do not even bother to answer the question: is the steep rise in gas prices and, accordingly, the fall in gas consumption by an average German family a fictitious problem?
In the pages of the German magazine Focus, Gabor Steingart, prominent German economist and former head of the publishing house Handelsblatt, gives very simple and memorable figures about Russia’s role in Germany’s gas supply. “There are around 40 million households in Germany. Of these, 20 million are heated with natural gas. For years now about 55 percent of these 20 million households have been supplied by Russian natural gas”, is the situation report by Steingart. He goes on to conclude that without Russia’s involvement there is no substitute for natural gas. And in the event of gas shortages in the flats, the German government, with the involvement of the Greens, has already worked out a plan: first of all, switch off the industry. Which will immediately lead to unemployment.
It is not surprising that under these conditions the number of chilled-out “conspiracy supporters” could grow exponentially in autumn and winter. “Spiegel” quotes Stefan Kramer, head of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (the German equivalent of the KGB of the USSR):
“If things go on as they are, the shortage of gas and the stoppage of industrial production will lead to such protests that the coronavirus-related pogroms will seem like a child’s birthday.”
Social Democrat Nancy Frazer, who heads the Home Office in the Scholz government, also confirms the danger of protests: “If there is a shortfall, populists and extremists will probably jump at the chance to escalate protests – just as they did during the acute phase of the coronavirus protests. The enemies of democracy are just waiting for crises to spread their fantasies of a general breakdown, to sow terror and a sense of unhappiness.”
That’s the kind of teaching from the supposedly left-wing (but certainly not extreme left-wing) social democrat Fazer.
But wait, we’ve heard that somewhere before: enemies of democracy, spreaders of panic rumours, saboteurs and “henchmen of the enemy”… (In today’s Germany they are called “Putin understanders” – Putin-Versteher.)
Yes, we have heard that in totalitarian states. The current German government, which joined American President Joe Biden at this year’s “summit of democracies” with his idea of a strict division of the world into “democracies” and “autocracies”, has itself failed to notice how Germany began to resemble a totalitarian state – that is something far worse than an “autocracy” or any “authoritarian regime”.
An authoritarian regime may punish magazines for caricatures of the president that are too vicious, or restrict the entry of professionals on its condemnation of “human rights violations” into the country. But an authoritarian regime does not pry into the domestic affairs and tastes of its citizens as totalitarians, including the current German authorities, do.
Examples? Please. Vice Chancellor Robert Habek’s call for citizens to immediately reduce the number and length of visits to showers – what is this but an attempt to determine the domestic behaviour of burghers? The fact that, according to a poll by the Bild newspaper, 62 percent of Germans are ready to support Hayek’s great cause and already wash less, is no excuse for such an intervention: the totalitarian regime is in contrast to the authoritarian regime in that in totalitarianism not only the police but also the public is subjected to pressure on everything human.
When an aggressive rally of several dozen people comes to the German concert hall where Anna Netrebko is performing and demands that she “get out of Russia” – that is not “civic engagement”, that is totalitarianism, when slogans like “death to the enemies of the people” appear “spontaneously” in the streets. Totalitarianism makes everything political: art, sport, even the temperature of your bath water. For the ostensibly leftist Robert Habek of the Green Party or Foreign Minister Annalena Berbock, Valery Gergiev’s work is not music – it is first and foremost a complete political act. So it is no coincidence that the Munich authorities gave conductor Gergiev a choice: either make a statement against Putin, or leave the city with your contract terminated. Gergiev, choosing the second option without saying a word about politics, has shown that Russia is a far freer country than today’s totalitarian Germany.
Dmitriy Babich, Antifascist News Agency
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