https://www.globalresearch.ca/greetings-new-normal-germany/5746231
Greetings from “New Normal” Germany!
On April 1, 1933, shortly after Hitler was appointed chancellor, the Nazis staged a boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany. Members of the Storm Troopers (“die Sturmabteilung,” or the “Storm Department,” as I like to think of them) stood around outside of Jewish-owned stores with Gothic-lettered placards reading “Germans! Defend yourselves! Do not buy from Jews!” The boycott itself was a total disaster — most Germans ignored it and just went on with their lives — but it was the beginning of the official persecution of the Jews and totalitarianism in Nazi Germany.
Last week, here in “New Normal” Germany, the government (which, it goes without saying, bears no resemblance to the Nazi regime, or any other totalitarian regime) implemented a social-segregation system that bans anyone who refuses to publicly conform to the official “New Normal” ideology from participating in German society. From now on, only those who have an official “vaccination pass” or proof of a negative PCR test are allowed to sit down and eat at restaurants, shop at a “non-essential” stores, or go to bars, or the cinema, or wherever.
Here’s a notice from the website of Prater, a popular beer garden in Berlin:
Of course, there is absolutely no valid comparison to be made between these two events, or between Nazi Germany and “New Normal” Germany, nor would I ever imply that there was. That would be illegal in “New Normal” Germany, as it would be considered “relativizing the Holocaust,” not to mention being “anti-democratic and/or delegitimizing the state in a way that endangers security,” or whatever.
Plus, it’s not like there are SA goons standing outside shops and restaurants with signs reading “Germans! Defend yourselves! Don’t sell to the Unvaccinated and Untested!” It’s just that it’s now illegal to do that, i.e., sell anything to those of us whom the media and the government have systematically stigmatized as “Covid deniers” because we haven’t converted to the new official ideology and submitted to being “vaccinated” or “tested.”
Protesting the new official ideology is also illegal in “New Normal” Germany. OK, I think I should probably rephrase that. I certainly don’t want to misinform anyone. Protesting the “New Normal” isn’t outlawed per se. You’re totally allowed to apply for a permit to protest against the “Covid restrictions” on the condition that everyone taking part in your protest wears a medical-looking N95 mask and maintains a distance of 1.5 meters from every other medical-masked protester … which is kind of like permitting anti-racism protests as long as the protesters all wear Ku Klux Klan robes and perform a choreographed karaoke of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama.
Who says the Germans don’t have a sense of humor?
I don’t mean to single out the Germans. There is nothing inherently totalitarian, or fascist, or robotically authoritarian and hyper-conformist about the Germans, as a people. The fact that the vast majority of Germans clicked their heels and started mindlessly following orders, like they did in Nazi Germany, the moment the “New Normal” was introduced last year doesn’t mean that all Germans are fascists by nature.
Most Americans did the same thing. So did the British, the Australians, the Spanish, the French, the Canadians, and a long list of others. It’s just that, well, I happen to live here, so I’ve watched as Germany has been transformed into “New Normal Germany” up close and personal, and it has definitely made an impression on me.
The ease with which the German authorities implemented the new official ideology, and how fanatically it has been embraced by the majority of Germans, came as something of a shock. I had naively believed that, in light of their history, the Germans would be among the first to recognize a nascent totalitarian movement predicated on textbook Goebbelsian Big Lies (i.e., manipulated Covid “case” and “death” statistics), and would resist it en masse, or at least take a moment to question the lies their leaders were hysterically barking at them.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Here we are, over a year later, and waiters and shop clerks are “checking papers” to enforce compliance with the new official ideology. (And, yes, the “New Normal” is an official ideology. When you strip away the illusion of an apocalyptic plague, there isn’t any other description for it).
Perfectly healthy, medical-masked people are lining up in the streets to be experimentally “vaccinated.” Lockdown-bankrupted shops and restaurants have been converted into walk-in “PCR-test stations.” The government is debating mandatory “vaccination” of children in kindergarten. Goon squads are arresting octogenarians for picnicking on the sidewalk without permission. And so on. At this point, I’m just sitting here waiting for the news that mass “disinfection camps” are being set up to solve the “Unvaccinated Question.”
Whoops … there I go again, “relativizing the Holocaust.” I really need to stop doing that. The Germans take this stuff very seriously, especially with Israel under relentless attack by the desperately impoverished people it has locked inside an enormous walled ghetto, and is self-defensively ethnically cleansing.
But, seriously, there is no similarity whatsoever between Nazi Germany and “New Normal” Germany. Sure, both systems suspended the constitution, declared a national “state of emergency” enabling the government to rule by decree, inundated the masses with insane propaganda and manipulated “scientific facts,” outlawed protests, criminalized dissent, implemented a variety of public rituals, and symbols, and a social segregation system, to enforce compliance with their official ideologies, and demonized anyone who refused to comply … but, other than that, there’s no similarity, and anyone who suggests there is is a dangerous social-deviant extremist who probably needs to be quarantined somewhere, or perhaps dealt with in some other “special” way.
Plus, the two ideologies are completely different. One was a fanatical totalitarian ideology based on imaginary racial superiority and the other is a fanatical totalitarian ideology based on an imaginary “apocalyptic plague” … so what the hell am I even talking about? On top of which, no swastikas, right? No swastikas, no totalitarianism! And nobody’s mass murdering the Jews, that I know of, and that’s the critical thing, after all!
So, never mind. Just ignore all that crazy stuff I just told you about “New Normal” Germany. Don’t worry about “New Normal” America, either. Or “New Normal” Great Britain. Or “New Normal” wherever. Get experimentally “vaccinated.” Experimentally “vaccinate” your kids. Prove your loyalty to the Reich … sorry, I meant to global capitalism. Ignore those reports of people dying and suffering horrible adverse effects. Wear your mask. Wear it forever. God knows what other viruses are out there, just waiting to defile your bodily fluids and cause you to experience a flu-like illness, or cut you down in the prime of your seventies or eighties … and, Jesus, I almost forgot “long Covid.” That in itself is certainly enough to justify radically restructuring society so that it resembles an upscale hospital theme park staffed by paranoid, smiley-faced fascists in fanciful designer Hazmat suits.
Oh, and keep your “vaccination papers” in order. You never know when you’re going to have to show them to some official at the airport, or a shop, or restaurant, or to your boss, or your landlord, or the police, or your bank, or your ISP, or your Tinder date … or some other “New Normal” authority figure. I mean, you don’t want to be mistaken for a “Covid denier,” or an “anti-vaxxer,” or a “conspiracy theorist,” or some other type of ideological deviant, and be banished from society, do you?
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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/05/26/the-us-empire-is-a-self-reinforcing-trauma-factory/
The US Empire Is A Self-Reinforcing Trauma Factory
American corporate media are having a field day with a rise in violent crime across the country, seizing on the opportunity to declare that it proves last year’s calls to defund police have been thoroughly invalidated. They’ve been making these claims despite the absence of any evidence that these two things are connected, and despite the fact that no actual police departments have been meaningfully defunded at all.
“Defund the police encounters resistance as violent crime spikes” blares a new headline from CNN, which then admits that “One year since a nationwide movement sparked calls for slashing police funding in favor of other nontraditional forms of public safety, it’s not clear whether any city achieved anything resembling what protesters demanded: massively defunded or abolished police departments.”
“There has not been a universal defund movement across major cities,” executive director of the Major Cities Chiefs Association Laura Cooper says later in the article. “I think there was a little bit of retooling of the department budgets, but I can’t say that defund has actually played out.”
The complete and total absence of any evidentiary basis for the claim that defunding police departments caused a spike in violent crime hasn’t stopped Murdoch outlets Fox News and Sky News from airing segment after segment after segment after segment advancing that exact claim, while The New York Times tells us in an article titled “A Year After George Floyd: Pressure to Add Police Amid Rising Crime” that “The surge is prompting cities whose leaders embraced the values of the movement last year to reassess how far they are willing to go to reimagine public safety and divert money away from the police and toward social services.”
Right guys. Violent crime can only be the result of this imaginary alternate reality in which there are fewer worthless police officers patrolling American streets. Couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the fact that this is a nation with the worst income inequality in the developed world, where people are being squeezed harder than ever in a pandemic which the government did virtually nothing to help them through financially.
Violent crime has a direct causal relationship with childhood trauma; not everyone with childhood trauma is a violent criminal, but violent criminals are overwhelmingly victims of childhood trauma. Growing up in crushing poverty is inherently traumatizing; spending your formative years saturating in an environment of lack, stress, desperation and difficulty coping causes deep psychological scarring that takes a lot of inner work to heal, inner work that most people in poverty simply don’t have the luxury of time and energy for.
The US status quo is inherently traumatizing, because a status quo which maintains a permanent underclass working for slave wages 100 percent guarantees generation after generation of highly traumatized people. This in turn guarantees more violent crime, which in turn has led to the largest prison population on the planet. Prison is itself an inherently traumatizing place to be. They traumatize each new generation, guaranteeing more and more cops and more and more prisons year after year.
Hurt people hurt people, and the US status quo is like a factory conveyor belt churning out generation after generation of hurt people. Those who support the status quo politics of the Democratic Party or the Republican Party are choosing to support this abusive dynamic.
And that’s just domestic policy. Every aspect of the US-centralized empire is inherently traumatizing, and it gets a lot worse outside US borders. If growing up poor in America is traumatizing, think how it must be for children who are deliberately starved by US sanctions in Venezuela or US-backed blockades in Yemen. Think how it must be for the children in Gaza as US-sponsored explosives kill their family members. Think how it must be for survivors of America’s “war on terror” in the Middle East and Africa.
The trauma inflicted by the “war on terror” is a self-reinforcing feedback loop which creates more extremism which in turn is used to justify more bombings and more military expansionism in those regions. Suicide bombings have been unequivocally shown to be almost entirely the result of western interventionism; they were simply a non-issue in Iraq and Afghanistan prior to US invasions there for example. The “war on terror” is not only terrorism itself, it is an established fact that it actually creates more of the type of terrorism it purports to eliminate.
And why wouldn’t it? Why wouldn’t destroying and destabilizing entire nations cause people to want to fight back against you? It is self-evident that it would, just using your own empathy and understanding of human nature. As Jonathan Marshall wrote for Consortium News in 2017:
The most authoritative new study of the sources of terrorism and insurgency on the continent, Journey to Extremism in Africa (September 2017), finds that what triggers many individuals to join violent groups are incidents of government-sponsored violence, such as “killing of a family member or friend” or “arrest of a family member or friend.”
“These findings throw into stark relief the question of how counter-terrorism and wider security functions of governments in at-risk environments conduct themselves with regard to human rights and due process,” concludes the report, based on interviews with more than 500 former members of militant organizations.
“State security-actor conduct is revealed as a prominent accelerator of recruitment, rather than the reverse. . . These findings suggest that a dramatic reappraisal of state security-focused interventions is urgently required.”
Numerous other experts have drawn similar conclusions from conflict zones in the Middle East and Asia. In 2008, a RAND Corporation report on Lessons for Countering al-Qa’ida warned the U.S. military to “resist being drawn into combat operations in Muslim societies, since its presence is likely to increase terrorist recruitment. . . . Military force usually has the opposite effect from what is intended: It is often overused, alienates the local population by its heavy-handed nature, and provides a window of opportunity for terrorist-group recruitment.”
Similarly, the Stimson Task Force on U.S. Drone Policy, composed of former senior officials of the CIA, Defense Department and State Department, warned in 2014 that U.S. strikes had strengthened radical Islamic groups in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia.
The status quo of the US empire guarantees that there will always be new offenders to imprison, new extremists to bomb, new justifications for blockades, sanctions and apartheid oppression. Every aspect of it creates traumatized people, whose resultant behavior is then cited to justify the existence of the power structure which caused their trauma in the first place.
And then Hollywood goes and makes movies about the heroic cops arresting the violent criminals, about the brave soldiers killing the evil terrorists, while in real life the criminals and terrorists only exist because of the trauma inflicted upon them by the same force that pays the cops and soldiers, and Hollywood is a US propaganda operation.
And those who support all this, those who support Democrats and Republicans and believe what the mainstream news media tell them, are called “moderates”. Supporters of a self-reinforcing trauma generation machine, with all its wars, starvation sanctions, nuclear brinkmanship, economic oppression, corporate exploitation, and ecocide for profit, are “moderates”, looking down their noses at traumatized populations and hoping the armed goon squads arrive in time to put them away or put them down.
The US empire is evil. The status quo is evil. We must end these evil things before they end us.
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