Columnist Klaus Brinkbäumer worries about the violent language used by populists, politicians and the media in the USA and also in Saxony. “Bullet” column.
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It is happening in the US, it is happening in Germany, and because it began earlier and has progressed in America, we could learn something in Germany if we wanted to. Belittling is hardly going to help.
The fact that the Federal Republic asks the supposedly social medium Telegram for self-reports after eight years of astonished ignorance is progress and remains lovely.
The answer from Dubai is indifferent silence. Chancellor Olaf Scholz does not want to immediately diagnose a polarization of the country recently ruled by him.
“Because a vocal minority is now proceeding very radically, we must not assume a division for the entire society,” said Scholz to the ARD team Tina Hassel and Oliver Köhr.
The word “entire” is geometrically and rhetorically crooked: if an ax separates a mere 20 percent of a log from the rest, it does what it is supposed to do and splits.
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First in the USA. In the capital, Washington, insults and threats have become normal. Those who hold office there on the democratic side fear and experience constant defamation and verbal violence, women more than men, because a large part of the hatred has to do with misogyny. In a country that, in a different way than Germany, also has a history of violence, one party today declares the members of the other to be traitors.
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© Tobias Everke
In Ohio, a Republican candidate for the Senate, Josh Gandel speaks of the “tyranny” of the incumbent government that recommends (not mandates) vaccinations. At a Republican event in Idaho, a man asked when he could shoot the Democrats. “How many elections are these people stealing before we can kill them?” Those were “reasonable questions,” said MPs present.
[Klaus Brinkbäumer ist Programmdirektor des MDR in Leipzig. Sie erreichen ihn unter [email protected] oder auf Twitter.]
Kyle Rittenhouse did so, shot dead two protesters in Wisconsin, was acquitted. What is new is that an election victory by the other party is no longer accepted, but is declared a lie and fraud, which is why ex-President Trump is defending the people who stormed the Capitol on January 6th to get him back into office.
That violence, which in the only real reality attacks no less than democracy, is declared to be the opposite in the worldview of the violent: the means that are necessary to defend democracy. The political present is so delicate, the North American Republic is so fragile.
A stylish, calm change of power
Not ours, not yet. The change of power in Berlin was stylish, calm. When the “Bild” newspaper incites against scientists, the protest unites society, with the exception of those who incite via Telegram and Facebook. But parts of German society are also caught up in the madness.
The media and politicians spark, benefit, spark a little more. Commentators who argue in favor of vaccination receive death threats, as do Saxon Prime Minister Michael Kretschmer. On Telegram, according to the “SZ”, police officers swaggered who had received orders to shoot demonstrators.
There is a mighty whisper, most of it is fictitious, an appointment for an armed fight follows. Stephan Kramer, President of the State Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Thuringia, observed an “unrestrained escalation”, “Murder and violence fantasies have increased excessively.”
