The Power of Purity
After JD Vance's historic Munich speech: The truth bombs dropped by the Vice President have shaken Europe's firewall against reality. Can Germany's progressive voters be cured from their delusions?
Lately, I suffered from paralysis. It manifested itself as writer's block, which is so unlike me. But also as a general feeling of sedation, a strange disconnection from the dramatic rush of events and the increasingly absurd stubbornness of the woad wounded social arrangement that they call “democracy”. Our democracy, to be exact. Ourdemocracy. The expression, so frequently used by those who farm this furrow like their God-given latifundium that it has merged into one single word, rings truer than they care to admit: It is their democracy and theirs alone.
But the noun with the possessive pronoun is about to be replaced by something else. This, too, will be happening quite differently than the cartel parties and their gatekeepers in the media would have us believe, that much is certain. And as far as I can see, there are only two possible replacements for what will soon be discarded one way or another. I'm trying to understand in which of the two directions the switch will be set, if not in both at the same time, as a typically competent Deutsche Bahn operations manager would do. That's the beauty of paralysis: you're forced to let everything pass you by. Meanwhile, while indulding in apathy, you can thoroughly process the inferno to which you are exposed. A great luxury these days.
Today, however, I am forcing an end to the paralysis. Yes, if JD Vance can do that by giving Europe a lecture, I can do it by giving myself a kick in the ass. It takes a lot of self-discipline to chisel the first fine cracks in the solidified matrix, but then - at least that's how it's always been - the avalanche of insight and realization starts rolling. It's not as if paralysis is wholly unproductive. It rumbles under the crust in such a state. There is friction, tension, resistance, attraction fights against repulsion, a precariously balanced static comes under increasing pressure. Concepts from the outside force their way in as if with a chisel, lava that has been tamed for a long time builds up from the inside and pushes towards eruption - before it breaks through the gap offered to it and sweeps the rubble of what has solidified for too long downhill.
For many years, Germany and the entire “West” (to which the country does not even belong historically and geographically) was like me. And like me, “we the people” are in the process of rediscovering our almost silenced voices.
We are currently experiencing the staging of an election campaign, which I cannot ignore even if all my strength is mustered. I walk through the city and find myself tormented by posters everywhere, unsure whether I'm more depressed by the slogans or the faces on them. Every single one of these billboards has been put up by someone who either believes in them or, as a non-believer, is paid enough. As I pass by, I register one such act of hanging: a life-scarred activist from a milieu that would once have proudly called itself working class (when there was still work for these people instead of bottle deposits) fixes Peter Tschentscher to a lamppost with cable ties at head height. “Prosperity and Solidarity” promises the freshly hung SPD mayor of Hamburg, who split the people of his city into two groups during the pandemic: the vaccinated and the untouchables.
Compared to this, the surprisingly large number of cardboard comrades on display for an obscure party simulation named “Volt” are a little more bearable. Because with them, I get the impression that all the candidate portraits could have been generated by an AI. Each “photo” is accompanied by no more than a first name with a suspiciously artificial vibe to match. And the only two program points I can find on the posters - future, climate change - at least keep the content-related impositions within pleasantly narrow limits. This overall surreal presentation almost seems electable to me.
Meanwhile, in this inferno of grins and slogans, I can't see a single poster of the AfD, now probably the second strongest party in Germany, except in tatters in the slush on the ground. “All of Hamburg” is proud of this, because “all of Hamburg hates the AfD”: Ourdemocracy is fighting courageously against a group of neo-liberal conservatives, positioned somewhere between the old FDP of Count Otto Lambsdorff and the former CDU of the late Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who have almost unwillingly risen to become the people's party. They want to abolish the euro and expel knife-wielding foreigners from the country. These are intolerable thought crimes against the governing nihilism prevalent from the far left to the extreme left. And the squads of opposition exterminators are efficient, you have to give them that. They never miss an opportunity to dehumanize political dissent and equate it with dogs:
90 years ago, this sign would have said, “Jews are not permitted in the play and sunbathing area.” And so it all comes back, but in the contemporary, fresh style of Antifa. What is also new is that this time the cartel is turning against its own flesh and blood like an autoimmune defect. Because this time, the “CDU” (nobody knows what the C stands for anymore), which has been greenwashed and thoroughly deconstructed since Merkel, is also getting the full “fight the right” treatment: shouting down, cancelling, stigmatizing, threatening, attacking. Their election posters are transformed by ourdemocrats into Dadaist collages of senselessness.
Not that the conciseness of the poster's content has suffered greatly by this, on the contrary: If you look very closely, it now conveys the core message of the left-wing nihilist cartel to the people of ourdemocracy, scrawled with thin felt-tip pen: Fuck you! So close to the election, the cartel repeats this message at every opportunity. Fortunately for the senders, there are many of those. Just four days ago, another chance presented itself.
On February 13, 2025, in Munich a rejected asylum seeker with “tolerated status” used his car to cause a massacre among citizens of the people who were forced to tolerate him without being asked. This is nothing new, just like the deadly act of terror committed by an Arab at the Magdeburg Christmas market a few weeks earlier, which in turn had many previous incidents that cannot be overlooked. In between: deadly knife attacks, mutilations and rapes in more cities than I can remember. Every single time, the cartel's message to the German victims of this violence was, Fuck you! You know, the cartel is only capable of empathy when it comes to “mentally disturbed” murderers with a history of migration. When Germans are concerned, whom its policies turn into widows and orphans, compassion atrophies into cynical soundbites from a text generator.
What was new in Munich, however: For the first time, the carnage hit demonstrators from the Verdi trade union and thus a German organization that is rabidly campaigning for unconditional immigration, i.e. against the sovereignty of the German people. Mind you, it did this not only before the latest attack, but also immediately afterwards: Red flags flew on Königsplatz, following an emotional appeal against “racist instrumentalization”: These morons dared to turn the aftermath of a massacre into an anti-racism protest “because we are disgusted by the reactions of politicians who want to turn this attack on us and our friends into an attack on our migrant and refugee colleagues!” According to the call, a “car” had driven into the crowd. A driverless car. Bad car!
There I see probably the main reason for my recent paralysis. As an author and economic historian, I depend on being able to work with words that are as precise as possible. Words that name problems, causes and effects, responsibilities and motives. But the ruling class in the country where I live has taken over the meaning of words. During decades of strategic diligence, it has managed to charge central terms with new, mostly contradictory and often criminalizing meanings. It has robbed the country of a truthful language and thus rendered it dysfunctional.
Racism is now what used to be common sense or the pursuit of self-preservation. Nazis are no longer Nazis as we knew them from black-and-white newsreels at school, but resurrected as fascists, meaning advocates of something that would once have been called realpolitik. Today, the destruction of identity is called diversity, a word which at the same time denotes strict uniformity under the rainbow flag. Climate protection is something that has very little to do with climate, but everything to do with protecting money streams and discourse sovereignty. Government organizations are now called NGOs. Energy emergency is energy transition. Center? That would be the new right-wing. What used to be SA (Sturm-Abteilung or Storm Troopers) is now called Antifa.
Only ourdemocracy has remained ourdemocracy. However, if you had used this then-unknown word combo before 1998, you would have been observed by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which in turn would have to be called Office for the Protection of the Government today. Back then, democracy was still considered to be a voting procedure without a possessive pronoun, existing to determine changing majorities.
The systematic linguistic deformation, essential for a form of decadence that Nietzsche called “revaluation of all values”, had the most devastating effect on my confused country in an area where the philosopher also diagnosed the worst disorder: in the manipulation of weakness into strength and vice versa. This central deceptive maneuver was ideally suited for a vassal state under its hegemon’s nuclear umbrella, for here the weak could simulate strength without consequences. Perceiving weakness as strength is inextricably linked to the now almost complete defencelessness, emasculation, feminization and “trans”-formation of our society.
But in the rest of the “Western” hemisphere, too, the trick has led to the strong sex being stigmatized as weak and in need of support. An entire generation of young men has been plunged into the despair of a lack of perspective and worth. Immobilized by girl-centered behavioral codes since childhood and forced into obedient passivity, discouraged from releasing their motor energies in “violent” ways, no longer taught to strive valiantly and boldly, an epidemic of ADHD has gripped male adolescents. Militant feminism only has Ritalin in store for them.
None of this was a coincidence without a purpose. Today, a feminized, codified and language-twisted political elite is dominated by women dyed in leftist and green wool. Their strength is their weakness, their sword is hypermorality, their shield is the ban on discrimination. Whereas until shortly after the turn of the millennium the type of male top politician possessed rationality and diplomacy, they have an inexhaustible reservoir of gut feeling and “attitude”. They have, if not a complete educational and professional background, at least countless front organizations behind them that bring such figures to power: left-wing schools, left-wing universities, left-wing foundations, left-wing trade unions, left-wing churches, left-wing broadcasters and newspapers.
Germany's institutions have been dominated by socialism across the board since 1968 at the latest. You know, there was nothing else, not even in the western part of the divided nation. The 16 years of Kohl’s administrations were a serious malfunction incident for the establishment, which would have prevented German reunification without him. It never forgave him for it, and the consequences were thorough. It took four long election periods for the maturing network of interdependent left-wing cadres to become so firmly entrenched in the long shadow of the “Palatine” that it was able to push through its cliques and permanently prevent further Kohls.
The neo-Marxist US “Democrats” later accomplished something similar during Trump's first term in office in just four years - or so they believed. In Germany, the long march was won with the advent of Schröder/Fischer, which by now means 26 years of a permanent red-green reign (and cultural hegemony, as I said, for almost six decades). Please don't tell me that Merkel was a Christian Democrat after all. It was she who unleashed the full totalitarian potential of a barely disguised cartel.
Who plans something like this, who works so systematically and patiently on a neo-socialist cultural revolution of this magnitude with all its political consequences? It needs discreet champions with prior knowledge, one of whom I got to know unpleasantly closely in my early days as a journalist (sorry, no English version of that story yet – it is about a journalism teacher who was later exposed as an operative for the East German intelligence service). The media provided a fertile breeding ground for old socialist foxes. Much later, I made the acquaintance of a much younger man who, as a nice but anonymous neighbor, was inconspicuously and systematically working on having the German Wikipedia rewritten in a “progressive” way. Both times, my intuition told me to stay away from their secretive business. And both times I consciously only understood afterwards.
While many of the male backers are content with discrete water-carrier roles, the shrill and disasterously wrong tone is set by the frontwomen. Our feminist Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, who once publically explained - if not declared – “our” war against Russia with naïve honesty, has recently “warned” US President Trump against his intended peace talks with Putin. Her concern: that there a “fake peace” might result. Involuntarily, one thinks of the armored presidential limousine nicknamed “The Beast”, which famously does not stop for anyone in its path, not even for children. With luck, Baerbock was not run into the ground in Munich. As a result of the security conference that ended there yesterday, she and her numerous female co-participants have to deal with a trauma anyway: Their supposed protecting power, the USA, is pulling in its umbrella and leaving them standing in the rain, expensively styled.
Not Trump, but Vice President JD Vance, who he sent to Munich, caused the second carnage in the city within 24 hours, this time a political one. In his conference speech, which has already been classified as historic, the future “JFK of the right” slammed the Europeans from the left-green government camps time and time again: migration policy, internal security, defense policy, social policy - let’s just say there were loud sounds produced manually, but they were not applause. More like clips round the ears of the European dignitaries in the auditorium, dispensed by the speaker. I hope you saw their faces on TV. They were petrified.
Vance enumerated with irritation a long list of anti-freedom measures by Brussels and the countries of the EU. The man from America, which has recently freed itself from the power-grabbing left-wing totalitarianism through democratic elections, didn’t spare Germany in his survey. He reminded everyone that German police “have carried out raids against citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online”. He also mentioned how “the organizers of this very conference have banned lawmakers representing populist parties on both the left and the right from participating in these conversations”. And so on and on, imposition after imposition.
They couldn't believe their ears: wasn't this the deputy head of the superpower from whose political establishment our left-wing green feminists had learned to ally themselves with the tech bros and other billionaire sugar daddies who strive for total control over Western societies just like them? Wasn't this the nation whose corporations dominate the World Economic Forum, a firmly allied fighting machine for the total dissolution of borders and unleashed migrant caravans? Wasn't the WEF the strategic promoter and developer of all their feminist careers? And this manly man dared to morally challenge them?
Then came a paragraph that, after four years of Joe Biden - some prefer to call it Obama's third term - was thought unimaginable coming from a US vice president: “To many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet-era words like ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion or, God forbid, vote a different way or even worse, win an election.”
There were many more truth bombs like this, causing devastating craters in the matrix. Here on European soil, this was a first: after long years in the dark, finally a speech by a governing US politician that was free from “progressive” distortion of language and meaning. The power of purity, right there.
At this point, however, I have to withdraw from the Munich conference hall to the safety of my desk so as not to go mad with hope. As Alexander Wendt recently put it, being German means having to follow every impasse all the way to its end, and that is what our rulers will do. In this country, just a few days before the Bundestag elections, the two options mentioned at the beginning of this essay are now clearly on the table: the monstrous figment “ourdemocracy” will either be replaced by the completion of the left-green totalitarian Reich at national and EU level, in which case the familiar D-word would be reduced to folklore. Or the pronoun “our” will be removed and the venerable system of freely electable majority government will be reverted to – in other words, a turn to right-wing populism. Because that would be the government majority if coalition politics were free.
However, both these terms, “right-wing” and “populism”, have of course also been poisoned by the neo-Marxist linguistic engineers according to the tried and tested pattern. So this turnaround is even more difficult to achieve in Nazi-traumatized Germany than in the USA. Even well-intentioned Germans flinch at the mere sound of “right-wing populism”, having been indoctrinated to hate it. It doesn’t help when you tell them that until recently, “right-wing” was something that was perhaps once embodied by Wolfgang Schäuble, who was not exactly considered an enemy of the constitution. Or that populism is simply a policy that implements the majority interest of a people (lat. populus). This has been forgotten in my country: Democracy was meant to determine majorities and act on their behalf, not to hold the stirrup for militant and missionary minorities.
But none of this currently counts for much in the firewall state of Germany. The hysteria into which the old “elites” have descended knows no measure and no goal other than maintaining their own power. Cue Katrin Göring-Eckardt, the Green party’s Vice-President of the Bundestag, who after the Munich speech bravely returned fire at Vance on the enemy’s own platform X: “The problem is to imply an alleged opinion of ‘the people’ that has not been heard. No, we are a free country, a democracy.”
Tweeted by a Protestant who has notoriously been “looking forward to how Germany will change now, religiously too” since Merkel’s opening of the borders 2015. Whether the people, whom KGE has placed in distancing quotation marks and over whom she presides at the people's expense, are also looking forward to this? That is a wholly different question. But even if you ask them tomorrow, you don't have to do what they answer in ourdemocracy. Which is why there is no shaking it.
So there is a real threat of continued paralysis, agony and even more blatant dysfunctionality. Possibly new elections after the new elections or brash corrections of “unacceptable” results along the lines of the Thuringia state election until everything suits the establishment. But even if Trump, Musk and Vance had sufficiently stimulated us to move forward, our fundamental weakness in an emasculated society is that we always need foreign white knights for our peaceful revolutions. Whether Gorbatchev in 1989 or The Donald in 2025 - Germans have never successfully brought down a regime that had not already been shot to shreds by foreign long-range missiles. That, my compatriots, is not sustainable. The push must come from within.
A while ago, my old boss wrote me a few lines again. His message: please continue to avoid radicalization. Don't worry, boss, I will. Let it suffice that there are hundreds of thousands of radicalized protesters on TV every other weekend. Whenever Berlin calls them, they will stage their marches, human chains, vigils and blockades against the “right” and for “diversity” until the day of the election. They will once again shoulder their children and hold up their colorful and hilariously contradictory signs: “Hate is not an opinion!” “All of (city name) hates the AfD!” They will feel great and think they are on the right side of history. They will vote with a clear conscience at the ballot box. They will strengthen ourdemocracy.
And they will be the ones to vote democracy of office.
I used to wonder what it was like to live in Europe during the 1930s, with totalitarianism rising everywhere and an eerie unease that a conflict like that which we had not seen in history was on the horizon...
I don't wonder anymore. I just turn on DW or the BBC.
Unter den Linden in Berlin should be renamed to Christoph Heusgen Boulevard. He is the perfect avatar of the new Germany: a vainglorious cry-bully who is utterly impotent.
Also I never cease to point out that since 1929 Antifa is just the rebranded Roter Frontkämpferbund, Ernst Thälmann‘s outfit.