It’s often hard to know what to make of phrasing which seems unconscious parody. Brave hubris? Desperate farce? So much activity both on social media and in street demonstrations seems to be pageantry for a very narrow audience of the already convinced. If this is whistling past the graveyard personally I’d just as soon avoid the graveyard and spend what is to me productive time reading in the library.

In appearances like this Wagenknecht makes perfect sense, and moderators treat her as if she’s embarrassingly naïve. Mainstream German media argues from authority, from innuendo — she’s obviously wrong because, well, she’s obviously wrong, can’t you see that? Anyone and everyone can see that. And the right-wing likes her: what more proof do you need? There is a satisfied self-righteousness at play which is very culture-specific. It’s tribal behavior, divorced from rationality, devoid of facts.

Christoph Ruf’s piece captures this phenomenon well, citing Franziska Davies‘ calling Jürgen Habermas’ essay in »Süddeutsche Zeitung« »dämlich« and »Schnodder«. Ruf speaks of »fehlende Bescheidenheit« but it’s much more than that: there’s a real absence of logic. This reminds me of similar attacks on Susan Sontag or Noam Chomsky during Gulf War II in the US. You can agree or disagree with the arguments made, but what are you thinking when you call one of these people „naïve“? It’s odd to watch this.

This is interesting.

On the morning of August 6, 1914, the very day Austria declared war on Russia, 144 badly equipped soldiers of the „First Cadre Company“ crossed the border from Galicia to Congress Poland. During the next weeks, they were joined by 2,000 Galician riflemen. In addition, they expected the predominantly Polish population to hail them as liberators from the „Russian yoke“ and to fill their ranks on their fifty miles‘ march on the regional capital Kielce. But the inhabitants of the towns and villages which the Polish soldiers passed through were hesitant, adopting a „wait and see“ attitude. Who knew when the Russian troops, which had hastily evacuated the area, would return with reinforcements? One legionnaire noted, disillusioned: “This wasn’t Cracow, this wasn’t Polish Galicia, this was Russia, and it was populated by a tribe that spoke Polish but felt Russian…[,] look[ing] with complete indifference at these madmen, who had not been asked to come here.”

—Jochen Böhler, Civil War in Central Europe, 1918-1921, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 39-40.