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Coronavirus in Germany: The Mutations and Us - Column

2021-01-15T19:52:43.522Z


The new year has barely started when it starts again: Once again we don't know how to go forward to where we were. But who is "we" anyway? And have we ever been somewhere?


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The shopping street in Frankfurt is well attended despite closed shops

Photo: Ralph Peters / imago images / Ralph Peters

What's going on

The men's DFB national team has tainted German in German and, together with its coach, no longer deserves love, dangerous cracks are showing in handball, and the sports show reports: "The German biathlon women: the crisis is here."

The summer fairy tale has sunk in the swamp of tactical dementia, Steffi Jones disappeared overnight, Mick Schumacher still not at Ferrari.

Very sad!

Not to say: worrying.

Plus this Trump!

What will we do, what escalations are waiting for when he has tripped off into the realm of fakes with his blue Sunday coat and his mentally impaired vocabulary?

Thomas Fischer, arrow to the right

Born in 1953, is a legal scholar and was chairman of the 2nd criminal division of the Federal Court of Justice.

He is the author of an annually revised standard short commentary on the criminal code and numerous other specialist books.

Will the fight of the CDU titans tear us through the next few weeks?

Have spring and summer been saved by daily bulletins on the status of the candidates for chancellor from B for Baerbock to L for Lindner to W for Weidel?

Hard to believe.

On the other hand: Carrying on as before is not a solution for the dopamine balance.

For five years we have had to make do with the 24-hour gossip about the Federal Chancellor, the foreigner as such, the old and white men.

To be honest: you can't hear it anymore.

And what used to weld us together in the German heart of Europe: Kulenkampff, the Golf II, the new Fassbinder or the wrestling of the doped collective bargaining parties: Dahin, gone, perdu.

23 percent, as I read today, feel sufficiently informed about what is going on and the meaning of the world through YouTube;

the rest of them zaps through 10,000 forums on 250 channels, believes what they want and wants what they know.

Disasters

Now, as you know, there are at least two ways out of this situation.

One is the epidemic called "the pandemic".

I'm not sure if more than 23 percent of the population knows what the word means.

It is not an EU authority or a registered trademark for masks or vaccine vials.

It means: an epidemic with worldwide proportions, unlimited in time, that is, the one from which in 1995 in Wolfgang Petersen's "Outbreak" Mr. Dustin Hoffman and Mrs. Rene Russo saved us again.

If you replace the two with Spahn and Merkel, the film doesn't necessarily become more exciting, but the chance is clearly higher that the thing will also end well on this side of streaming services.

The second is preoccupation with who is to blame for everything.

In particular: someone who is so different from you that you can blame them for the matter.

Which thing does not matter at first: any one.

The thing that is extremely important right now is the corona disease.

It's not important because it's in the newspaper or on the Internet so often, but because it's so important.

Natural social events like these are major catastrophes and can change societies in the long term.

This is a banal realization and an often repeated experience.

It is just as common that people, as individuals and as a group, do not adjust and adjust easily and without internal resistance.

Everyone is outraged that life is changing brutally, that new dangers and imposed rules arise, that foreign responsibilities and new duties are distributed.

History has shown that these backlashes persist even in really catastrophic situations.

They have two faces: on the one hand, they objectively not make the situation better, but worse.

On the other hand, they show the will to resist, perseverance, active hope - in whatever twisted form.

Even the so-called lateral thinkers are not all stupid or just malicious.

A significant part of their arguments, however, are running out of steam.

With well over 1,000 deaths every day, even the most vigorous of faith should no longer seriously claim that the little flu was an invention of the CDU and SPD dictatorships.

If the contact restrictions did not exist, it would have been 3000 deaths a day by now.

Then a million would "die with Corona" annually, and even for the highly intelligent population statisticians of the AfD there would be no more room to move the dead of the other 1,000 causes of death.

Now, in the face of the mutations from Great Britain and South Africa, there is again a rage with all sorts of measures: 15 kilometer rule, restriction of public transport, curfews.

One can only say: Of course!

The hardships that are asserted against it are mostly small things compared to the consequences that would occur if one did not finally get serious.

One lesson from last year reads: Half-hearted and fearful tactics cannot improve anything and do not convince the virus.  

I don't mean that not many people have been hit hard, personally and economically.

But of course there are not nearly as many as whining around and camouflaging their rather petty complaints with supposedly altruistic, socially related "worries".

The Abitur 2021 could not »apply« enough in 10 years!

Schoolchildren are bored to the point, and new students sit alone in dorm rooms and only see the universities from the outside!

Public offices work more slowly and retailers en masse have little sales and income.

Yes: everything is correct.

But there is no way to prevent it from happening without wreaking havoc.

With a few exceptions, which will be judicially reviewed and, if necessary, lifted, the restriction measures are lawful and necessary, and much tougher measures are just as lawful if they soon become necessary.

This is because there is a major risk situation that has never existed since the Second World War, and it is of a complexity and threat that is typically different from other catastrophes (earthquake, major fire, storm surge, etc.): It is unlimited in time, everywhere and invisible.

This creates an extraordinarily high level of uncertainty and fear: inevitable.

There is absolutely no point whistling loudly in the cellar: the monsters who are not there do not hear it, and those who are really there cannot be chased away by whistling.

Identities

There is now a multitude of empirical values ​​and findings for such situations, in particular about how people and societies behave in times of disaster.

It is precisely not the case that the catastrophe is the hour of community, of sticking together and of being human.

On the contrary, it is usually the hour of panic, hard-heartedness, stupidity and exclusion: who is to blame?

Who is the beneficiary?

Who has it easier?

Who can save himself?

Only in beautiful films and moral transfigurations do the moments of overwhelming solidarity constitute the core of behavior.

That this is the case, however, also shows how important these moments are.

Now it is currently happening that the evolving corona disaster hits societies that are extraordinarily concerned with the strangest questions about "we" and "others".

"Identity", being at home, the feeling of we seem omnipresent as a requirement, motivation, fear.

A minority is discovered on every street corner, and those who want to suffocate all minorities in the pulp of an absurd "nationality" are, judging by their cries, the very poorest minority.

Exclusion and limitation is the overriding driving force of arguments, evaluations, conversations and theories.

This is of course no coincidence, but the harvest of what has been preached to people in this country and elsewhere for 40 years: Progress is isolation and dissolution;

Authenticity is buying behavior and loneliness.

This is how we rule the world.

So it's no wonder, of course, when people are afraid and react depending on their temperament and circumstances.

Corona only acts as a huge accelerator of fire, and the hopes that everything will be "like it used to be" are all the more desperate and deceptive.

An interesting discussion is whether the obdurate carelessness of the East Germans towards the dangers of the epidemic is an effect of the strength of the AfD there.

This is a question that twists cause and effect in a familiar and fascinating way.

A shoe turns out to be the other way around: The AfD strength is the result of the same unwillingness to be drawn into the vortex of globalization and swallowed up, as is the childish hope that if you just shut your eyes hard enough, the virus will somehow affect Saxony or fly by Thuringia.  

So in a miraculous, but from a top view quite logical way, the panic about the loss of life security is combined with the fear of the epidemic.

Both lead, individually, to a permanent search for groups of "guilty parties", for boundaries between inside and outside, self and different, familiar and foreign.

The US is performing the game as if it were on a global stage;

actually, viewed in a somewhat abstract way, it is not difficult to understand.

The alleged struggle against the elites is not an expression of the alleged self-empowerment of the masses or individuals, but an expression of the great fear that the elites have passed into a sphere of privileged arbitrariness.

If you want to get an idea of ​​this, you can read again the journey of Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver" to the island "Laputa" published in 1726: a floating island 7 km in diameter, on which the rulers of the state in the sky above their subjects stood and enslaved them from there.

Some pictures are not as new as one would think given the

breaking news

.

constitutional state

As its name suggests, this column is mostly about law.

Now the law over all the viruses and identities and mutual inclusion and exclusion has fallen a little into disrepute.

This is no coincidence, nor is it caused by a secret conspiracy, but - you guessed it - typical of such situations.

What if not the rules of the state should come into doubt, crisis and resistance when a society is in a state of unsettled ferment and fearful unrest?

Now 500 "self-appointed" identity representatives are running around each other and shouting that the law is completely wrong and that it prefers the "others" and must finally become so that all well-meaning people feel at home again under one sky.

However, this sky always happens to have exactly the same color and the same rules as the group that is scrambling.

Everyone makes fun of all the self-invented "victim" identities and supposedly "authentic" interest groups worthy of support.

And claims two sentences later that from an objective point of view one's own "we" identity is undoubtedly the most important.

display

Thomas Fischer

About punishment: law and security in a democratic society

Published by Droemer HC

Number of pages: 384

Published by Droemer HC

Number of pages: 384

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What should you do there?

There is no point in spiraling the argument up to ever new meta-levels: So talking about how you talk about something, that you talk about something.

There is always someone who has not yet contributed a systematic theory of knowledge - even if it is just a columnist.

Perhaps one should draw attention to the fact that people in general are not as stupid as it sometimes seems, and that they have a very long, on the whole quite successful experience with what it is like, alone and together, dependent and to be independent, threatened and powerful - in short: to live in societies that cannot develop any guarantees or stability from themselves before eternity.

The (almost) oldest, in any case the most visible and most successful means of taming, calming and resolving insecurities and crises in society and coexistence is the right: rules about how something is regulated.  

It is certainly no coincidence that a particularly large number of people who perceive the situation as crisis-ridden or frightening,

cry out

loudly and often for another, better, right or simply

more

right.

This begins with the so-called combating of all kinds of actual or imagined dangers and ends with the demand that even details of language, morality or social behavior should be legally regulated and deviations sanctioned.

In this respect, we are experiencing, despite claims, an astonishing renaissance of trust or hope in law.

A good opportunity to remember that not everything has to be reinvented!

That it can be a fairly reliable, orienting, fear-reducing undertaking to deal seriously with the law and to rely on its structures.

That in no way means having blind trust in an "authority".

Nor does it mean that society as a whole should or could be concerned with small-scale regulatory content and rabulistic interpretative arts.

What is meant is the fundamental, peace-making nature of law in general and the institutions of law that make it possible to balance interests other than through violence and suffering.

The state-disruptive President of the USA has just shown us more than clearly what happens when the reliability structures of the law themselves are delegitimized and destroyed.

There are also forces in Europe and Germany who strive for something similar.

They do it for the same reasons and the same misconceptions, and not all are easily recognizable.

Anyone who rants about a “constitutional crisis” in this country is lying or dreaming.

There are disputes in the matter and litigation in detail.

The institutions of law work. 

So, I think, the childish identity debates should be taken for what they are: signs of fear.

This applies across the whole spectrum from the alleged individual sex to the alleged national being.

Fear is not reprehensible, but it needs explanation, and panic reactions are not a sign of presence of mind, but the opposite.

Let us be glad that we do not have to reinvent the constitution and deliberate the Infection Protection Act every day!

The vast majority of us - certainly including the columnist - would be absolutely overwhelmed by that.

Even knowing better every day brings us to the limit of our capabilities.

I mean: It tends to be about really important things.

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Source: spiegel

All life articles on 2021-01-15

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