There is no word for “irony” in German

The article German Group Won’t Present Arendt Prize to Masha Gessen Over Gaza Essay by Brett Wilkins (Scheer Post) is just one example among many recent ones, where both the German government and its cultural institutions are in increasing lockstep in controlling the narrative—controlling how its citizens are allowed to think.

German ultranationalist intelligentsiaIn the case cited in the article, Masha Gessen will still receive the Hannah Arendt award, but it will be presented “without the participation of the Heinrich Böll Foundation”, whatever the hell that means.[1] Maybe they withdrew the cash prize? No idea. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is how demonstratively stupid, petty, and anti-intellectual the actions of the grand viziers of German culture are. Right now, I guess, but maybe they’ve always been this way and the moment has allowed them to emerge (entpuppen), spread their filthy wings, and soar.

I mean, I don’t really care about Masha Gessen particularly. I stopped reading her a long time ago, after they[2] went off the rails for Russiagate. I haven’t heard whether they’ve retracted any of the hysteria or fear-mongering from those years. But here they’re being punished for being on the right side of history, for writing absolutely factual information. Here is part of what they wrote,

“For the last 17 years, Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound where only a small fraction of the population had the right to leave for even a short amount of time—in other words, a ghetto. Not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America but like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany. In the two months since Hamas attacked Israel, all Gazans have suffered from the barely interrupted onslaught of Israeli forces. Thousands have died. On average, a child is killed in Gaza every 10 minutes. Israeli bombs have struck hospitals, maternity wards, and ambulances. Eight out of 10 Gazans are now homeless, moving from one place to another, never able to get to safety.”

None of this is disputed. Israeli newscasters would proudly read that paragraph out loud in a primetime newscast.

The intelligentsia of Germany seems to have read that far, and then decided that it was beyond the pale to compare any possible situation—either in the past, the present or millennia into the future—with the awfulness that was a Jewish ghetto under Nazi occupation.

To them, Nothing will ever compare. Anyone who attempts a comparison is dead to Germany. They consider it antisemitic to even suggest that anyone has ever suffered or could ever suffer as much as the Jews. Jesus, it’s like watching that albino monk[3] castigate himself with that cat-o-nine-tails in The Da Vinci Code.

Gessen did go on, though, to differentiate the situations, properly crediting Germans for their unsurpassable cruelty and Jews for their unsurpassable victimhood—granting those features the fealty that Germany expects.

“The Nazis claimed that ghettos were necessary to protect non-Jews from
diseases spread by Jews. Israel has claimed that the isolation of Gaza, like the wall in the West Bank, is required to protect Israelis from terrorist attacks carried out by Palestinians. The Nazi claim had no basis in reality, while the Israeli claim stems from actual and repeated acts of violence. These are essential differences. Yet both claims propose that an occupying authority can choose to isolate, immiserate–and, now, mortally endanger–an entire population of people in the name of protecting its own.”

I’m quite convinced that they made these sweeping declarations about Gessen without having read—or perhaps without having understood—their essay. If this is a sign of things to come, then Germany has already gone completely off the rails. They’ve “lost the plot”. There is no coming back from where they’re going, not if they don’t control themselves soon. They can spend another century in the wilderness if they want to keep up this bullshit.

I’ve always said that Germany plummets headlong after its Lord and Master the United States, their slavish devotion to their conqueror a national fucking embarrassment. Now, they’re full-bore emulating U.S. anti-intellectualism and love of Israel. I’m really quite shocked that the German art and literature world is so riddled with idiots. I’d hoped for better.

The article leads with an unsourced tweet:

““The irony of calling for the suspension of a prize named after an anti-totalitarian political theorist in order to appease the authoritarian government of a rogue state currently committing genocide against an already-subjugated people seems to be lost,” said one critic.”