“Terror: spreading fear and terror through violent action (especially to achieve political goals).”
Definition from the Duden
Legend has it that in ancient China, if you wanted to curse someone, you wished them to live in interesting times. Unfortunately, the times we live in today are more than “interesting”. More than that, they are stirring. And actually unbearable. As the more recent events surrounding the two AfD leaders Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla show.
Every person who has empathy must be stirred up by them. Even if this can happen differently – depending on the political “attitude”.
For me as a journalist, the events of the past few days are pushing the pain threshold.
On the one hand, massive hatred and agitation against the AfD has been spreading in our country for years. For a long time now, AfD politicians have had to fear for their safety and also their health. Not to mention the social exclusion that extends into one’s own family – which affects not only members, but also sympathizers.
The situation came to a head. The Federal President, who is obliged by his office to reconcile and integrate, makes a mockery of his oath of office and engages in agitation against a party that is not convenient for him. He deliberately expresses himself in such a way that many can take this as an invitation to attack AfD politicians – without explicitly calling for exactly that.
At the same time, Antifa, for example, posts lists with addresses of AfD politicians on the Internet and calls for them to be attacked. Even the police and the Hessian broadcasting company disseminated this list – and pretended to have done so without malicious intent.
In the face of this harassment, it was only a matter of time before – new – attacks on AfD politicians would occur.
And what is the red-green political-media complex doing where we see them? He denies them in the most cynical way and mocks the victims.
That is like kicking people who are lying on the ground and still shouting at them, “You like that!
Bavaria’s CSU Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann took the perpetrator-victim reversal to the extreme. He lamented “how infamously and deceitfully the AfD is trying to capitalize on the incidents among its own clientele in the state election campaign.” It could hardly be more indecent and brazen.
TV meteorologist Jörg Kachelmann even wished that Tino Chrupalla had never been born.
This is the language of the brutes. It is a totalitarian mindset that has exactly the same roots as what self-proclaimed “democracy saviors” like Kachelmann & Co. believe they are fighting against.
Ein Mensch liegt auf der Intensivstation und sein politischer Gegner macht sich feixend darüber lustig. #Widerlich #Ramelow pic.twitter.com/rHtmQR5H0d
— Dr. David Lütke (@DrLuetke) October 5, 2023
They do not suspect in the least how much they stand with their “attitude” in the dark tradition, as whose opponent they see themselves in a gigantic self-deception.
Ignoring violence and terror – and that is when political opponents are terrified, mockery and gloating for the victims – that is intolerable.
And tears society apart.
You have to be very jaded and/or very good at repression to watch all this without emotions running high. That’s something to be wary of – especially as a journalist.
That is one side of the coin.
But there is also another.
This is the communication disaster that the AfD presented in dealing with recent events.
The party could not have provided any better targets for those who hate it and defame it on a continuous loop.
Quite rightly, Henning Hoffgaard tears apart the party’s communication behavior in the “Junge Freiheit”.
Example: “After Weidel’s press spokesman cryptically reported a ‘security-related incident’ that also happened several days ago, the deputy chairman of the AfD in the Bundestag, Norbert Kleinwächter, suddenly speaks up and claims that his chairwoman is in a ‘safe house’. Result: Weidel’s press spokesman has to deny and late in the evening also admit that the boss is in Mallorca. What sticks and is now gratefully exploited by the political opponent? Weidel on vacation, the German Federal Criminal Police Office knows nothing.”
Critical journalists like me communicated the information from the party, according to which Weidel must have been staying at a secret location for ten days – only to learn that she had been spotted in a restaurant on Mallorca.
This is the communicative GAU – the greatest accident to be expected.
There is more. On Wednesday evening, Petr Bystron, a member of the Bundestag, told me that Chrupalla was unresponsive in the hospital. In accordance with journalistic standards, I checked this information with a second source – who confirmed it.
Later it turned out: By “unresponsive” was meant – he is not available for outsiders.
But these are two completely different things.
There was no deliberate misinformation. Petr Bystron is not a native speaker of German, and as someone who speaks Russian very well, but not as a native speaker, I know what traps lurk there. Bystron understood “unresponsive” to mean something quite different from me and my readers. And the second source was so upset and at her wits’ end that evening that she apparently wasn’t careful enough in checking.
Junge Freiheit” now accuses Bystron of being an “egotistical political loudspeaker” because of his statement to me. That is unfair. I asked Bystron myself if he knew anything about the condition of Chrupalla, he answered to the best of his knowledge and belief – just misleading.
And I, too, was not suspicious enough in the excitement, the hurry and the emotion that evening – as, unfortunately, one always has to be as a journalist – to ask him more precisely.
But the whole communication disaster could have been avoided if the AfD press office had communicated better that evening.
Anyone who claims to want to govern the country and lead it out of the current disaster should set up a functioning press office.
But again, that is only one side of the coin.
The other is: How is a party supposed to set up a functioning press office if its employees have massive problems finding even an apartment tenant and are subjected to harassment and hatred?
And how are politicians supposed to find the peace of mind to work sensibly and, for example, to organize their press work well if they can only get out of the house under personal protection, are constantly defamed and have to fear for their safety, the safety of their family and even their lives?
We are dealing with a vicious circle here.
One that Angela Merkel and her paladins, above all Steinmeier, have constructed and that reaches its climax so far today.
What is astonishing is that this devastating situation also brings new insights. Such as the fact that Cem Özdemir of the Greens, of all people, displays more decency than the CDU/CSU and the major media combined. The Minister of Agriculture wrote on Twitter: “Good that Tino Chrupalla could leave the hospital in the meantime – continue to get well! Indications of an injection are extremely worrying. Gloating is forbidden. Our democracy thrives on meeting each other without violence, no matter how great the opposition.”
As much as Özdemir deserves thanks and respect for this, despite all the political differences – the behavior of so many others is just as shabby and scurrilous. Nor is there any word yet of an apology from CSU Minister Herrmann for his gloating.
Angela Merkel has done a great job. Our society is deeply divided. Two camps are completely irreconcilable with each other.
The sad result is that we are sitting on a social powder keg. And all too many people are on the road with matches.
PS: Both the public prosecutor’s office and Chrupalla’s treated doctor have meanwhile partially distanced themselves from the information in the doctor’s letter. This explicitly mentioned a “needle stick” and also an “intramuscular injection” and an “infection with an unclear substance”.
So now the retraction by the attending physician – “after the police interrogated him.”
The police obviously did a good job in the interrogation.
PS: By the way, attacks on political opponents by spraying poison, especially in public, have a long tradition among socialist secret services. If the course of events assumed so far in the Chrupalla case is confirmed, it would be clear in whose spiritual footsteps the perpetrators are.
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Chrupalla in intensive care and with dropouts – and media downplay everything scandalously.
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