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CDU boss and candidate for chancellor Armin Laschet
Photo: Maja Hitij / Getty Images
Armin Laschet does not want to differentiate, that has now become sufficiently clear in the past week.
He does not want to distinguish between saying that someone is an anti-Semite and saying that someone has spread something anti-Semitic.
In this case, someone is Hans-Georg Maaßen, the former head of the domestic secret service, who wants to join the Bundestag for the CDU.
But it's not just about measurements.
It is about the possibility of being able to name and criticize anti-Semitism, racism, any form of structural discrimination in a meaningful way.
To do that is already extremely difficult.
Armin Laschet, the head of the CDU, candidate for Union chancellor and thus likely next Chancellor, is making sure that things will be even more difficult in the future.
Criticism on TV talk show
A good week ago, climate activist Luisa Neubauer said on the TV talk show »Anne Will« about Maaßen that it was spreading anti-Semitic codes, whereupon Armin Laschet contradicted that Maaßen was not an anti-Semite, and Neubauer later emphasized that she had not claimed that either.
In the days that followed, people bent over Maassen's tweets, texts and speeches.
And a number of experts came to the conclusion that Maassen had indeed repeatedly spread anti-Semitic codes.
Laschet's defense could have been mistaken for a misunderstanding.
A good week later, Armin Laschet was back on television, this time Linda Zervakis and Louis Klamroth interviewed him for ProSieben.
The language came back to Maaßen, Klamroth referred to those experts who said Maaßen was spreading anti-Semitic codes.
As in the previous week, Laschet reacted: »Now the theoretical debate begins, if someone says globalist, he is already anti-Semite.
And I have not yet perceived him as an anti-Semite «.
Klamroth pointed out that this was not the charge.
Laschet insisted: “Yes, but those are sophistic subtleties.” Further: “Anyone who spreads a racist thesis is a racist.
The insinuation is, that's the game, she (Neubauer) is saying that he (Maaßen) is an anti-Semite. "
Shortly afterwards he said about Maassen: “He is not right-wing extremist and he is not an anti-Semite either.
If he were, he would have to leave the CDU. "
The intention does not change the consequences
Laschet's argument goes as follows: If Maassen were to spread anti-Semitic codes, he would be an anti-Semite, and if he were an anti-Semite, he would have to leave the CDU, but he does not have to leave the CDU, so he cannot be an anti-Semite, so he cannot be anti-Semitic either Spread codes.
This is called a circular argument.
One could speculate whether Laschet knows what he is doing and why he is doing it, whether he is dull or strategic.
But that is irrelevant.
What matters is what he says.
The consequences are decisive.
The decisive factor is the first step in the argument, which applies not only to anti-Semitism, but also to racism and any form of group-related misanthropy and structural inequality.
Laschet levels every difference between anti-Semitism as a belief and anti-Semitic statements, actions and structures.
Firstly, he describes anti-Semitism as always tied to people - that is, as individual, never structural.
Second, as something that defines a person in his or her identity, as a fixed characteristic.
Someone is anti-Semite (and that also means: bad) or not.
Third, as something comprehensive - only those who are thoroughly convinced can be considered an anti-Semite.
With the result that anti-Semitism is suddenly harder to criticize, harder to recognize and harder to combat.
Difficult to criticize and harder to spot
Harder to criticize because suddenly it comes down to inner convictions that no one can recognize from the outside.
Criticism thus gets a structural problem of justification.
And that when it would have to provide a particularly large amount of evidence because it is supposed to prove a comprehensive conviction.
Harder to recognize because comparatively few people are thoroughly anti-Semitic or racist.
The occasional utterance and the resentment that appears from time to time suddenly no longer count in this perspective.
Suddenly, anti-Semitism appears as a problem for a few extreme ideologues.
Also more difficult to recognize because structures are completely out of sight - and with it a large part of the forms that anti-Semitism or racism take.
Comprehensible defense reactions
After all, it is harder to combat because criticism quickly evokes defensive reactions that are often understandable if anti-Semitism or racism is considered a character trait: Most people feel personally attacked by such criticism because there is no way of addressing certain ways of thinking, language or attitudes without them as a whole, without marking them in their identity as bad people.
If you think about anti-Semitism in this way, criticism is always a reproach, and the only reactions to criticism are: defense, self-identification as an anti-Semite, or the complete change of your own personality, the abandonment of your own identity.
Structures can neither be described nor changed in this way.
One example is the discussion of racism in the police, which has long suffered from precisely this problem.
Some refer to images of language, thought patterns, symbols, typical associations, often hidden resentments, routine courses of action.
They talk about patterns, about habits, about the unconscious and unreflected, about structures and institutions, about codes and allusions.
The others, who understand racism solely as a personal characteristic, reject the allegation.
Interior ministers then say, for example, that police officers are by no means large numbers of racists.
How structures can be described
If, on the other hand, one differentiates between people on the one hand and actions, statements, ideas on the other hand, criticism becomes less personal.
Then one can describe that many, almost all people say anti-Semitic or act racist in one way or another, sometimes even think, without this contaminating their whole person and pulling them irretrievably from the good side to the bad side.
However, some more often than others, some quite deliberately.
This enables further reactions to criticism: behavior adjustment in some points, self-criticism in some questions, changes in structures.
Anyone who is interested in seriously identifying anti-Semitism and racism and other forms of group-related enmity in all forms and combating them comprehensively must distinguish between characteristics and words, deeds, thoughts.
If Armin Laschet aggressively declares this distinction to be nonsense, he is making the fight against anti-Semitism and racism more difficult.
Establishing that doesn't mean declaring him a bad person or an anti-Semite's advocate.
First of all, it just means analyzing public statements and their consequences.
The distinction, which Laschet persistently refuses, makes criticism of him possible in the first place.
Maybe he'll still recognize her after all.