The following essay originally appeared in German at Tichys Einblick. Translated by Russell A. Berman, who has written a separate note on the topic here.
At the outset I want to make clear that I view the stipulations of the governments for containing the corona pandemic as appropriate and that it is necessary to obey them.
Yet this is not the central issue. Instead, the central issue is that the BLM demonstration against racism was widely praised and tolerated, while the demonstration of August 1 [against corona restrictions—trans.] was widely condemned, despite posing identical dangers.
The most valuable good for a government is its credibility. One does not need it in a dictatorship, as long as the arguments come from the barrel of a gun. In a democracy, however, credibility is one of the foundational conditions for domestic peace.
If the government and the press treat the danger of spreading the disease as a function of the opinions of the potential spreaders, they damage their own credibility. Trying to convince us that spreading the disease is acceptable in the struggle for a good end is of the same intellectual quality as Trump’s suggestion that one should inject a disinfectant.
The decline of credibility did not begin with the differential judgment on the two demonstrations. This was just an extension of a process already underway. It began with the introduction of obligatory wearing of masks, despite the previous message that masks were useless, as long as none were available for sale. In Communist East Germany, the Party used to spread the claim that bananas [a rarity in East Germany—trans.] were not very healthy.
Every month we are learning more about East Germany. The brazen minimization of the participant numbers on August 1 is reminiscent of the nonsense of a “riot of a small number of rowdies,” as which the East German media tried at first to trivialize the demonstrations in fall 1989. The more dangerous effort to keep the streets empty involved the insinuation that demonstrators were agents of the CIA or West German intelligence services. Today, the analogous effort to keep the streets empty works with the warning: Watch out who you are demonstrating with. That amounts to a threat of being denounced as a Nazi, a social disaster if one is spotted at a demonstration, where someone else, whom one may not even know or have even seen in the crowd, is described as wearing a piece of clothing that “right-wingers” like. The Nazis punished the families and relatives of the accused, while in Germany today we have a kind of collective guilt. It could be organized easily. It has even been tried already in Chemnitz. Unfortunately, the experiment failed because the man photographed giving the Hitler salute forgot to cover up his tattoo, which showed a symbol favored in left-wing circles. [1]
In the autumn of 1989, we shouted: “We are the people!”—and we had no idea how lucky we were. It is unthinkable what might have happened if the language police had been able to counter us with the claim: “You have no right, to call yourselves ‘the people,’ because no one can claim to represent the whole people!” The next step in the escalation would have been to use bullets against the demonstrators.
Back to corona: My goal with these comments is to get our press and the administration to recognize that the fight against corona and every future and possibly worse plague cannot be won by eroding their own credibility. The more corona is instrumentalized to build up images of enemies, such Trump, Bolsonaro, and Kurz, and the more the infringements of corona regulations are implemented inconsistently—for the left one way and for the right in another way—the more the belief will spread that the fight against corona is less a goal for politics than a political instrument.
Whoever permits that to happen is spreading the disease.
Note
1. Translator’s note: He may be referring to a 2018 incident in Chemnitz (during the Communist regime, this was “Karl-Marx-Stadt”), when heated demonstrations between left and right took place. At least one participant on the right gave the Hitler salute, only to reveal a left-wing tattoo (the acronym RAF, i.e., Red Army Faction, the so-called Baader-Meinhof Group). The suspicion has been raised that he was a provocateur from the left attempting to have the opponents on the right deemed to be neo-Nazi. At stake are therefore two logics: guilt by association and the assumption that anyone right of center is already fascist and therefore a valid target for Antifa.
