All changed, changed utterly/A terrible beauty is born
From Easter 1916, William Butler Yeats
On the armed revolt of the Irish Republicans, many of them his friends, who were summarily executed by the British.
Art, Resistance and Lessons learned from the Covid Catastrophe
Strange things are happening in the West. I have no doubt that we’re in the midst of another carefully timed and orchestrated assault on our way of life and the fundamental freedom to think and speak as we wish by the globalists who engineered the Covid Coup. They are not resting on their spike laurels, no not them. They’re busy helping western nations from Canada to Britain to Germany write bad legislation designed to shut everyone up in order to ‘save democracy’. It seems that ‘the people’ in western democracies are dangerously close to thinking for themselves, and we can’t have that, can we.
Scotland is the latest to fall prey to a law so badly written and open to misuse that no sooner was it passed that J.K. Rowling dared the Scottish police to arrest her since she has a habit of calling men who claim to be women, men. The police declined. The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act makes it an offense to stir up ‘hatred with threatening or abusive behavior on the basis of characteristics including age, disability, religion, sexual orientation and transgender identity’. Naturally, racial hatred was already banned under a law dating from 1986.
J.K. Rowling in The Spectator: another face of resistance
And then there’s what’s going down in Germany, the land where you may not display the Hakenkreuz even for satirical purposes. It has now caught up with the British ‘online harms bill’, the Canadian bills forbidding certain bad thoughts, and the recent Scottish absurdity, by coming up with their own version of antidemocratic law masquerading as something else. They have become subtle and devious in how they are both ‘protecting democracy’ while at the same time, making it illegal to have subversive thoughts, or God forbid, voicing actual speech, against the German Bundesrepublik. The new law makes it a crime to engage in certain ‘speech patterns’ if they seem to be against the State. That is now verboten.
Thomas Haldenwang looks like what he is, Minister watching out for dangerous, anti state ‘speech patterns’ by Germans who still believe they live in a democracy
Of course, Germany already has a bunch of laws about hate speech, but it was felt that more needed to be done in these dangerous times. So they invented something called The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), led by a creepy looking guy named Thomas Haldenwang. He has ushered in a return to the golden era of the Stasi; the East German secret police that did so much for turning citizens into snitches. Nobody believed this could happen. But it has happened and even caught the attention of Substack writer Eugyppius. Here is what he says about this wonderful new era of ‘safe speech’ in the not quite democratic Germany of today:
In theory, you can think and say whatever you want in Germany, so long as what you think and say does not violate the law. Within the range of legal expression, however, there is a grey area that Haldenwang and his minders in the Interior Ministry get to define. If you enter this danger zone, you may end up inviting the unwelcome attention of the political police even though you have not broken any laws.
Put less charitably, there is clearly illegal speech on the one hand, and on the other hand there is speech, which is alas not yet illegal, but which existing authorities will use all the administrative tools at their disposal to dissuade you from. Such speech, we might say, is pre-illegal, and only reluctantly permitted because the hurdles to banning it are too substantial.
Of course, this is a way to prevent losing at the next election. The alarming rise of ‘right wing’ parties like the ADF cannot be tolerated. They are threatening to take power from the established parties! And if my former native land is known for anything, it’s famous for its Herdeninstinkt, or herd instinct. They are simply falling in line with the rest of us, fulminating against Trump, extremists, and other illiberal monsters.
I have never regretted giving up my German citizenship and becoming Canadian at the ripe old age of 26 or so. At the time, I could not have known that my new native land would eventually turn out to be just as oppressive as the original one. I still care about what goes on in Deutschland, have spent lots of time there and also got to know my German relatives.
Among them is my famous second cousin, Dietrich Brueggemann in Berlin, one of the foremost public directors, writers and intellectuals of Germany, who directs movies, writes scripts and a novel, and does music in his spare time. A kind of all-round creative powerhouse, still young-ish.
Brueggemann during his interview with Die Berliner Zeitung
He is the kind of relative someone like me dreams of and I have always admired him immensely. He was one of the few people with a public persona in Germany who dared to question the Corona madness of his government with a series of videos under the title allesdichtmachen, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3_dHQpx8O9JT2LW1U2Beuw
which means everything tied up. It was a series of rather mild videos by his fellow actors and writers questioning the wisdom of the German Covid mandates, creating a shitstorm of controversy in the German media. For a while he was hounded and declared a dangerous man, untrustworthy, etc. All that is behind him now. He is back directing Tatort, the most popular crime show on German network TV, and he has just done a big Covid era post mortem interview with Die Berliner Zeitung in which he said,
What happened there was completely insane and I will say that it was until the day I die.
I find it rather telling that he feels compelled to insist that he won’t be bullied. Clearly, the culture bullies are still there, waiting to pounce. He is aware of that, but he has moved on and gives a highly instructive mini lesson to the interviewer re the role of art in society and its relationship to politics. Because he has also just published a new song with his band whose central message is ‘we’re all against Nazis now’. Which does sound like a political statement. Here is B’s response to the interviewer’s question re mixing politics and art:
Translation: when I speak, I am supposed to say what I mean. In Art, I can say what I want and then it must be decoded later and the guide for that one must find in the work of art itself.
Interviewer in translation: so you are in fact taking a controversial political position and then hide behind Art to be safe from attack?
DB in Translation: I don’t make any political statements whatsoever.
Interviewer, So you see Nazis everywhere?
DBTranslation: I see a society that ruminates a lot about Nazis—which is necessary since it is still the Big Bang and the vanishing point of our contemporary German society.
He goes on to explain the difference between an Editorial and Art, per se.
Translation: If you decide to read a message into it, I can’t very well stop you, but a song isn’t an editorial. Art is open, Art is like frog’s eggs, you release them into the water and all other frogs are free to impregnate them and then new frogs are created without benefit of parental oversight, the offspring is left to its own devices.
In other words, art is its own thing, don’t confuse it with other forms of communication, and it’s by its nature an open ended meme that gets into the bloodstream of the culture where it might do nothing or create a revolution or just disappear. The artist is not responsible for the interpretation of his art.
Books have been written on this tricky subject, but in one paragraph, DB has made them all redundant. It’s a just a glimpse into a mind that is both lucid and creative, a rather rare combination on full view in his debut novel, Materialermuedung, published in 2022. https://www.amazon.de/Materialermüdung-Dietrich-Brüggemann/dp/394967103X
He was still regarded as a politically troublesome figure at that time so it didn’t make the media splash it might otherwise have made. The literal translation of the title might be Material Fatigue, but it’s closer in meaning to something like Planned Obsolescence. The book is a tour de force describing the literal end of the world, nobody gets out and it is all rather grim and shot through with a satirical take on biblical tales. DB does nothing by half measures and one can only hope that this brilliant book will be translated into English before it becomes true.
There are other fascinating bits in this long interview but the take-away is short and clear: Widerstand gewinnt immer, or Resistance always wins.
I wish I could agree wholeheartedly. Given the murky law re ‘speech patterns’ in Germany, I am rather surprised that DB chose to ignore this development that goes to the heart of any creative endeavour. Perhaps DB is suffering from an unacknowledged fatigue, of his own. As a young family man with a booming career and no doubt thinking about his next moves, he might not be so keen to take on the powers of oppression once again flourishing in Germany and abroad. Indeed, all over the so called Free West. DB believes that we’re not so easily manipulated now; that we have changed, that we are more resistant to the forces of illiberalism rampant in our midst. Here is his view of how it’s going to work out for us:
I’m counting on the awake minority.
Of course, Art has to play a role and at some point, we have to talk about what happened during those years. Sooner or later, we need a novel or a movie that simply tells the sober story of what happened. I will likely try to do that at some point.
I pray that he is correct and my fear—that we are exhausted, dispirited, and unable to meet this existential struggle—are just the fears of an old woman trying to read what’s going on around her. I really want him to be right in his belief that eventually, a young generation that was at the receiving end of the Covid hysteria, will come to power and set things right. And I would read that novel and watch the movie. I hope I’m still around because then I can die thinking that we have learned our lesson and that it won’t happen again.
But at the moment, we’re still in the thick of the fight and the story of what is actually happening remains murky. We are a long way from Home.
I like this commentary! And I am quite proud that you find such wonderful words for my son Dietrich, his work and his braveness! Thank you, Monika!