What is a society?
Authoritarian-technological restructuring has begun - but so has the resistance movement
If it walks like a Nazi, talks like a Nazi, acts like a Nazi, as the old saying goes, it is probably a Social Democrat. And a very specific one at that, namely Olaf Scholz, Germany’s new extreme hygienist, commander-in-chief over the Corona forces, and the herald of the happy news that for the new German government, “there are no more red lines” when it comes to crushing - not the virus, but the enemies of the state.[1] What the abolition of “red lines” means was demonstrated on December 26th, when the police pepper sprayed a 4-year-old in his mother’s arms at a Corona protest in Schweinfurt (charges were filed against the mother, not the policeman), or when a 79-year old lady’s arm was crushed by several policemen in a peaceful “stroll” (Spaziergang) against forced vaccinations and the Corona regime near Stuttgart, or when the police trespassed the plot of a 60-year old man in Saxony to beat his head in on his own front porch, when children as young as 11, the elderly, migrants (like Ali [surname unknown] who has been imprisoned in December 2021 for protecting his wife against physical attacks by a policeman during a peaceful “sit-in” protest in the city of Cuxhaven in April) have all become fair game at the mercy of tyrants. And yet, every week now, in cities all over Germany, in big to small cities, like Hamburg, Frankfurt, Munich, Augsburg, Magdeburg, Hagen, Paderborn, Ravensburg, hundreds of thousands of people are assembling every Monday and Saturday to “take a stroll”, as the new nomenclature that forbids open protests and rallies made the organisers call it. All of this, the protestors know, is happening in defiance of the unleashed forces of the police that have received leeway to violence via the “Infection Protection Law” of the German government that no longer warrants integrity of the home, or integrity of one’s own body - and making extensive use of it. The police, in other words, have become the paramilitary Freikorps for the state’s, and, by extension, the interests of the parts of capital highly endowed in the global stocks, notably Bio-Technology, Pharma, and Tech. (How appropriate that BioNtech, the manufacturer of the most widely applied “vaccine”, in tandem with its logistics supervisor Pfizer, should have “An der Goldgrube 12 (At the Goldmine), Mainz, Germany” as its headquarter address.) Profit must be protected at all costs. If it costs the physical integrity of the people the police once vowed to protect, the citizens, so be it.
There is blood on the hands of the German police on a massive scale in the year 2021, and it is not likely to dry before new blood is added to the toll of injured, harassed, abused citizens making use of their fundamental right to protest peacefully in the year 2022. The government lickspittles who blame the mothers for bringing their kids, their parents, their wheelchair-bound friends along with them to the “strolls”, have added just another item on the (very long) list of the self-contradictions the Corona’s Witnesses narrative feeds itself on[2], for no-one minded kids or the elderly at their stately and conformist Climate rallies.
In vain you ask for leftist outrage at police violence, because for two years the media - now officially exposed to have been required to “serve the government” on Corona policy, as the recent Swiss media group Ringier scandal has shown[3] - has been struggling to brand the protestors as “right-wingers”, as “Nazis”, and all the rest of it. But what would you do if you were in a comfortable position of state power, and a complete authoritarian social restructuring was required for the needs of capital? That’s right: you would brand everyone who even raised a question as a Nazi. For nothing, no other word of shame, denunciation, discredit, disavowal, or simply hatred, quite has a psychological effect as strong as that of the ultimate ghouls. No other media baiting can compare to this “no-go area” of political association. But every man, every woman, every child, whether from Germany or anywhere else, marching on Germany’s streets today (it is Monday) knows that this sort of accusation, this infinite hyperbole, is pure projection: for the real Nazis are in the government, the actual fascists are the Antifa who is always ready to re- and deport anyone who refuses to comply to state orders, like its tactical and political idol, the Gestapo, did in the 1930s-40s. Not a day goes by that an establishment press radical leftist does not laugh contemptuously at “Freedom-chatter”[4], at “crank civil liberties”, such as the demand for the restoration of civil rights like the right to protest and assemble, of movement, of free speech, and respect for the Nuremberg Code (elsewhere[5] I have shown that contempt of civil rights was a central pillar of classic National Socialist ideology).
The contempt of radical left outlets such as the former German monument to the communism of the intellectual class, konkret magazine, or the more liberal-leaning German-Swiss “Wochenzeitung”[6], a contempt at individual rights and freedoms, the result of a working class struggle through 150 years, is something to behold in itself. But have the radical left, in their endless nonsense-babbling bubble of allegedly “capital-critical” slave mentality, shrouded in heaps of intellectualism that make Adorno look like Ernst Jünger, never once asked themselves what image of society they are defending? Has the leftist vision of society digressed to a point where it becomes, in fact, indistinguishable from the one described in “1984”, or is the problem, much rather, that those “critics of society retd.” have not only no longer a vision for society in the first place - but want to get rid of society altogether? As though things could get no more insane at this point in historical time, a Steven Zeitchik from The Washington Post (“Democracy Dies in Darkness”) proudly announced in a headline on Dec 31st that “Maybe 2022 Should be the Year We Turn over Decision-Making to AI.”[7] That the left would once propose the total reification of society as a desirable goal is not something I thought I’d live to see. And yet, here we are.
Obviously, the stage of the authoritarian-managerial-technocratic implementation of society’s restructuring, the leftist’s wet dream of totally reified and controllable humans compressed into data and “nodes and vectors“ (Benjamin Bratton), has begun on the day vaccine QR codes were introduced. More importantly, no one minded. In fact, the mindlessness, the non sequitur is the point. It expresses itself in the objective of current information politics: “We need to protect our health system, and neither lockdowns nor vaccines have proven to do anything of the sort, so we need to control citizens individually, and even more, without a discernible goal that is in any way related to health issues, because as you can see”. The more unhinged the official narrative, the more aggressively the totally administered society of fear-injected individuals working on the front lines of general opinion-making are going to hammer it in. Good luck to anyone looking for an argument, a statement that makes sense. But, as in all fundamentally irrational moments of history, the more irrational the official strategy, the more compliant the subjects seem to get. Accordingly, a second strategy paper from the Ministry of the Interior registered with satisfaction that there was a "good reputation among the population for the type of crisis management carried out by the federal government" that promoted "a positive understanding of the state." The "aversion to the state" that had developed in recent years was already on the retreat.[8]
The images of hundreds and thousands of people on the streets defying police violence and harassment speak a different language. We are already seeing a broad populist movement, and it is growing by the day. For they, as many others who are beginning to see that the unleashed powers of the state are producing a divided, weak, and compliant mass of sujets, not of citoyens, are the biggest danger to the prevailing situation. Yes, the power of the elites may be stronger than it was in 1989, the last time that a large mass civil disobedience movement brought down a regime. But the parallels are obvious. We are still the sovereign.
[1] https://www.wz.de/politik/inland/bundeskanzler-olaf-scholz-gibt-keine-roten-linien-im-kampf-gegen-corona_aid-64638659
[2] Most recently, new German minister of health Karl Lauterbach’s announcement that “We cannot wait for vaccination mandates to become obsolete just because we have reached a very high level of inoculation in society” (see https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/news/lauterbach-schnelle-impflicht-aber-ohne-impfregister-li.204203) should have turned heads and stomachs in everyone used to think in coherent terms, but, alas, there have been too many nonsensical, self-contradictory statements in Dr. Lauterbach alone to even keep up with taking note (see the introduction of the “2G+”-rule: to take part in social life, you need be either vaxxed or recovered AND provide a negative test. With that logic, we could have been spared the vaccination programme altogether).
[3] https://www.dieostschweiz.ch/artikel/der-ringier-skandal-wird-immer-mehr-zur-staatsaffaere-OQG65vV
[4] «Freiheitsgeschwätz», according to the grey eminence of radical left state and capital-bootlicking, Lars Quadfasel in konkret, 12/21.
[7] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/12/31/new-year-resolutions-ai-artificial-intelligence/
[8] Formulation taken from https://thunderinparadise.org/, quote taken from https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/isolationsmuedigkeit-in-coronavirus-krise-innenministerium-befuerchtet-verrohung-der-gesellschaft/25732632.html (last consulted Jan 10th, 2021).
Great stuff, thanks Elena. The Left are so lost on this, I despair. Thank God for the ordinary people who have the guts to go out and stroll.
Excellent. Thank you.