In the camp of the climate rescuers, you not only meet many people who already had the big say during the Corona crisis. Decisiveness, which tolerates no contradiction, is also back.
Does anyone remember Michael Meyer-Hermann, the man with the bun and the red trousers, the physicist from Braunschweig, who no one outside his area of expertise had heard of until he sat on every talk show to show Germans the way through the Corona -Crisis to point out?
I recently came across a video clip in which he explained to “Anne Will” that the virus could also be brought to zero in Germany if you really tried hard. Someone had uploaded the excerpt – in response to the claim that fortunately nobody in Germany had advocated the crazy China strategy.
Or do you still remember Sandra Ciesek, the woman with the icy charm of a station nurse, who would have made a bomb cast in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”? or dr Melanie Brinkmann, the figurehead of the local No-Covid initiative? The first newspapers have started to name the people of the year. Meyer-Hermann, Ciesek and Brinkmann are part of it for me, if only as a reminder of how crazy things were with us last year.
There is a website on the internet that specializes in coming to terms with the past. “I participated” is her name. The operator posts sentences from the black months of the crisis there. Earlier in the week he had arrived at number 1581. It scares you when you scroll through it. The tone is as merciless as one otherwise only knows from dictatorships. Seen from today, they are messages from a distant world, although some quotes are only a few months old.
There is talk of the fact that the air for the unvaccinated must become thin. That they had to be excluded from social life until they had admitted that they posed a threat that had to be got rid of.
Among the spokesmen were not only local politicians like the Hamburg Greens MP and spokeswoman for her party for anti-discrimination, who is immortalized with the sentence that she would like to smack anyone who has not been vaccinated voluntarily without comment. The Berlin health senator said that she recommends everyone to avoid any contact with unvaccinated people. The Mayor of Tübingen, Boris Palmer, is represented with the plea for detention and pension cuts.
Those who get vaccinated not only protect themselves but also others, was the central argument of the vaccination campaign. Today we know that vaccination helps against serious illnesses, not against infection. This is not a negligible advantage, but it is something completely different from foreign protection.
Energy has never been as expensive as it is now. But instead of panicking, you should calmly check potential savings at home. As our guide shows, there are many of them.
It’s as if a fever attack has swept the country, and not just verbally. Many have forgotten that, but in the meantime in Munich it was even forbidden to sit down with a book on a park bench. Elsewhere, the police moved out to drive children off the toboggan hill or to prevent a bratwurst from being passed on at the bratwurst stand because sharing a sausage in public was considered an administrative offence.
What does the confusion teach us? Not much I’m afraid. Unless everything is deceptive, we are about to repeat the mistake of rigorism. It looks as if the proponents of the most decisive corona measures have simply moved on.
In the camp of the climate rescuers, you not only meet many people who spoke the big word two years ago. The determination that does not tolerate any contradiction is also unbroken.
With the fervor with which the number of cases was just extrapolated, it is now being calculated how long we still have to live if social life is not stopped immediately. The climate lockdown takes the place of the corona lockdown. Anyone who has their eyes on the sinking shouldn’t hesitate, we know that all too well by now. When it comes to the survival of mankind, it would be negligent to rely on the discernment of citizens, wouldn’t it?
That the crisis would open the door to a better, fairer world, that was the hope in the summer of 2020. The fight against climate change is also a fight against the system. Many who are involved in the climate protection movement secretly dream of abolishing capitalism. Although: The dream is no longer so secret.
The “Last Generation” speaks openly about the need to turn prosperity back 50 years, to the “material level of the 1970s,” and that can only be “a foretaste,” as one of their statements puts it. No idea where they want to end up on their back-to-the-future program. When the car was invented? Or even better: before the introduction of the steam engine? Maybe you should stock up on antibiotics in good time so that you can at least survive the first wave of tuberculosis.
Where does this obsession that we only have two or three years left to save the world from collapse come from? The theory of tipping points, i.e. the assumption that climate change, once set in motion, would inevitably trigger a cascade of catastrophes, is scientifically rather weak. On the other hand: “Follow the Science” never meant that one should rely on science. What was always meant was: trustworthy science, i.e. science that you trust yourself.
It is striking how carelessly numbers are used. Luisa Neubauer says that our irresponsible behavior has serious consequences hundreds of thousands of kilometers away. Scoffers will note that the moon is also eliminated as a retreat. Luisa Neubauer probably didn’t have that in mind when she interpreted the consequences of climate change on an interplanetary basis.
Four weeks ago, I had one of the speakers from the “Last Generation” as a guest on “Is that your serious?”, my little talk show on FOCUS Online. When I was not immediately convinced of the urgency of her concern, the person I spoke to told me that people in Germany would be fighting for food as early as 2050 because the climate crisis would also bring food production to a standstill.
My objection that it was a long way before the Germans suffered from starvation edema because they would buy the food from poorer nations when in doubt, she countered with the argument that this was also bad. She was undoubtedly right about that. However, I found it amazing how quickly she gave up on a prognosis on which she had just based her argument. We also know that from the Corona crisis. One dire prediction follows another, and when things turn out very differently, they say, “Yeah, right, but that’s because people changed their behavior because of the predictions.”
In the course of research for this column, I looked again at the No-Covid concept, in which the proponents suggested dividing Germany into green and red zones. Green for virus free, red for virus infected.
There is a diagram of how the advocates imagined the contact between the two zones. It shows two areas separated by thick bars with a dotted line between them to mark the safe transition from one green zone to the other. “The residual risk in the transition areas and at the contact points is minimized by designated transit locations (e.g. specially protected petrol stations),” reads the statement.
At this point I refer to Dieter Janecek, economic policy spokesman for the Greens in the Bundestag, so that I don’t mean to be too polemical. “No Covid in China is a totalitarian reality of absolute social control,” he wrote on Twitter a few days ago. “Fortunately, in Germany it was just a totalitarian ideology that ultimately failed to gain acceptance. Still scary how far many were willing to go.”
What was it always called on the left? The womb is still fertile, from which it crept.
• Read all of Jan Fleischhauer’s columns here.
The readers love him or hate him, Jan Fleischhauer is indifferent to the least. You only have to look at the comments on his columns to get an idea of how much people are moved by what he writes. He was at SPIEGEL for 30 years, and at the beginning of August 2019 he switched to FOCUS as a columnist.
Fleischhauer himself sees his task as giving voice to a world view that he believes is underrepresented in the German media. So when in doubt, against the herd instinct, commonplaces and stereotypes. His texts are always amusing – perhaps it is this fact that provokes his opponents the most.
You can write to our author: By email to j.fleischhauer@focus-magazin.de or on Twitter @janfleischhauer.
