Post photo: pocket watch on map with sand | © Pixabay
Now that we're having a very up-to-date discussion about what's worse: a self-confessed Nazi or a self-confessed Stalinist? we should all remember that in fact one should and can only distinguish between democrats and anti-democrats. I am happy to name all of the latter, and this freely after Hannah Arendt, Karl Popper or George Orwell, totalitarians.
And I can't help but quote a poem that a German teacher recommended to us students back in the 1970s. The poem is from Ernest Jandl.
clearing
some think
Ernest Jandl
right and left
cannot be exchanged
what an illum
At least when I was at school, you still learned for life, although there was already a big mistake here, because Seneca must be correctly quoted as follows:
"Quemadmodum omnium rerum, sic litterarum quoque intemperantia laboramus: non vitae sed scholae discimus. "
Seneca, Epistulae morales ad Lucilium, CVI. SENECA LVCILIO SVO SALVTEM: 12
You realize that neither life nor school nor big politics are easy to understand.
Especially our today's and particularly successful democracies are suffering more and more from this, because many of their inhabitants are no longer citizens, let alone democrats, because since the ancient Greeks there have been minimum requirements for them to be able to create or maintain democracy at all.
The ancient Greeks not only divided mankind into Greeks and barbarians, but also into humanity in general Aristotle reduced to the zoon politikon, ergo man is seen as a social, political being. And they even went so far as to deny the very humanity of those who have withdrawn from society and politics.
Approximately 2 years later, one has to state that democracies live solely from democrats, and democrats are citizens who not only profess democracy, but also fill it with life, so participate instead of just complaining!
Anyone who spends the whole day only looking after themselves and their own interests, and only pays attention when they fear that something is being withheld from them or when they find something they feel like doing, in order to get morally indignant , and only then demands changes from politics and these immediately, and in addition sues for these immediate changes all alone in his favor or according to his current moral concepts, he is not a citizen and certainly not a democrat! Also, he clearly did not understand how democracy works!
And this lack of democrats, or, as I have already formulated it in several contributions, the majority presence of "bought democrats" or expense democrats, is what is undermining democracies from within and slowly but surely abolishing them; the Weimar Republic was a very good example of this.
The gradual disintegration of the Berlin Republic coming from the eastern zone will be another example of this. One should never have allowed a successor organization to an unjust state to temporarily put on a democratic cloak, nor should a democratic representative of the people make common cause with self-confessed totalitarians, worse still with proud racists!
It is precisely these lazy compromises that ultimately destroy our world again and again, no matter who or where and when they are made.
That is why I strongly recommend the book On Compromise and Rotten Compromise to all our democratic elected representatives Avishai Margalit to read. There would not have been 200 pages to read, and we would all have spared ourselves yesterday's pathetic spectacle in Thuringia.
Common sense might have done the trick, but most of the politicians working there have long since lost it.
Even if, due to the sometimes violent reactions from the rest of the Federal Republic, people are already thinking about striving for new elections, the 2019 election result remains the same. a voting majority of over 54%.
This problem has been known since the evening of the election, and many probably speculated that the biggest election winner, the left, would ultimately be allowed to form a minority government.
This would have been recognized for the first time by all democratic parties, including the CDU, as a legitimate democratic force. At least some of the people's representatives of the bourgeois parties would have had to make a rotten compromise that others made years ago, and which has now led to this first tragic situation in the Berlin Republic with the 2019 election in Thuringia.
With the recent election of an FDP deputy as prime minister of a minority government, the above-mentioned deputies ultimately replaced one rotten compromise with another rotten compromise, which for the first time since 1945 legitimized National Socialists as fully democratic.
This is the second time that the child in the Berlin Republic has fallen into the ditch, with both extreme fringes being recognized as fully democratic in the parliaments. This not only legalized totalitarianism, but also legitimized it through universal recognition.
Right from the start it was clear to both the left and the AfD - unfortunately not the other parties - that it was a classic win-win situation for the two named parties.
And as it turns out now, the democratic parties have also managed to push both the left and the AfD into a typical victim role, into which both parties, frankly Goethe, more sank than were drawn.
All that's missing now to complete the electoral success of both fringes is a new election that will allow these parties to play their newfound victim roles to the full, and certainly propel both to new heights in the process.
Bearing this in mind, it would be necessary for the CDU, which in my opinion performed so poorly in Thuringia because in its own ranks it pays homage to the right-wing fringe rather than its basic democratic attitude, to pull the emergency brake now and immediately and arrange for the following:
- Talked to the FDP Thuringia and persuaded the prime minister to resign;
- Talks to the left — preferring one rotten compromise to two rotten compromises — and officially approves a left-wing minority government for the first time. This, however, only considering the fact that she is not responsible for this first rotten compromise, but is now spooning it out purely out of democratic responsibility.
I dare say that this measure will give the CDU a new profile in Thuringia and, as a result of constructive opposition work, will win elections again.
"You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages—they haven't ended yet."
Kurt Vonnegut, Dead Eye Dick (1982)
