Inverted World

Inverted World

Due to the influence of propaganda, many terms today say the opposite of what was originally meant.

Criticizing anti-constitutional politicians is "de-legitimizing the state." "Friends and helpers" from the police are hostile to citizens. Robbery is called "privatization," and war is peace. If you think of George Orwell, you've got the right idea. The author has taken his technique of dystopian satire to the extreme and lists further examples of absurd twisting of reality. Actually, it is our politicians who have developed such creativity that it makes us dizzy. And if anyone ever gets the state-destroying idea that a man could be a man and oppression could be oppression, intimidation makes sure that people don't dare speak their insights out loud. In case we have become too tired to fight this avalanche of nonsense, there is one last resort: not even ignoring it!

by Michael Sailer

[This article posted on 8/11/2023 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.manova.news/artikel/verkehrte-welt-2.]

Times of galloping totalitarian insanity can (also) be recognized by the fact that the propaganda of the rulers makes tremendous efforts to redefine everything that exists in social, political and cultural phenomena into its opposite and to push the corresponding attitude demanded from the subjects ruthlessly and unconditionally into every niche of existence, no matter how small. This has the same effect as when a pipe bursts in the upstairs neighbor's toilet and the stinking water pours out of the ceiling lamp: It inevitably spreads everywhere; even into the smallest crack between the floorboards, the brew seeps and remains there bappen after drying.

However, there is an essential difference between the liquid filthy stink and the re-education broth of missionary sects that, as a result of a historical slip or an inevitable development, have arrived at what is called "the power" to disguise, that the commanding functionaries are also nothing more than recipients of orders from the truly powerful, who traditionally meet in the executive suites of big business and, strictly speaking, are also interchangeable cogs of an anonymous mechanism popularly called "BlackRock" and the like.

Let's not digress: the difference is that the misdirected sewage of the neighbor drips into the person's home, but not into the person himself. This, on the other hand, is what totalitarian thought does, or rather the thought prescription that leads us to call everything we know its opposite and then, of necessity, to perceive it as such.

A typical example for this are all the muddle-headed pseudo-scientists from Pia Lamberty and Michael Butter up to parastatal "institutions" like CEMAS and LibMod, who occupy freely invented pseudo-subjects, cobble together most insane theories about conspiracies of "conspiracy theorists" - or more recently: "conspirators" - and spread this nonsense over all channels of public sonication and instruction. If you boil down to the essence the bullshit, which is convoluted to the point of illegibility, that sloshes towards you from the "works" of these master conspirators, the same thing always comes out: recognized and highly respectable scientists are unmasked as "conspirators" and "pseudo-scientists", the terms are thus turned by a hundred and eighty degrees, and in the end the current main enemy is always to blame, currently Putin and the climate deniers.

In the process, criticism of an anti-constitutional government team becomes "delegitimization of the state," i.e. the government becomes the state, and vice versa. The Office for the Protection of the Constitution, whose genuine task it is to protect the constitution and the free democratic basic order from the malicious machinations of just such government people - because they learned in the Nazi empire what can come out of this and where one can get into it -, from this Office for the Protection of the Constitution becomes a kind of secret state police, which is there exclusively to protect those in power from the constitution and its advocates.

The fundamental rights guaranteed in the constitution are turned into their opposite, redefined as duties and, if necessary, abolished altogether, but continue to be invoked in flaming words. The police, supposedly the friend and helper of the responsible citizen, turn out to be an auxiliary army in the war of the rulers against the rebellious subjects. Health is transformed from a feeling of general well-being into a precarious, merely untested state of limbo, which can only be kept from tipping over into horror by the constant supply of experimental pharmaceutical preparations.

Wars of aggression and sanctions against half the world are called "defense", "education" means paramilitary drill for usability in the profit industry under strict avoidance of any real formation of mind and feeling, the robbery of common goods is called "privatization", and self-evident areas of welfare mutate into dysfunctional "service".

On closer examination, one can hardly find any term that does not mean its exact opposite, right down to the seemingly harmless "soccer game," behind which inhumane showdowns of profit-minded billionaire mafias are hidden. Or let's take "democracy" itself, which today is to be sold to us as a kind of armed fortress, as an offspring of the identical twin of the National Socialist "people's body", which must be defended by all means - including "undemocratic" ones, as a WDR employee recently wrote in self-revealingly exuberant fanaticism - against intangible "enemies", by means of their exposure, insult, discrimination, expulsion and ultimately annihilation.

War is peace, peace is war, attack defense and defense ("unprovoked, brutal") attack. NATO, for example, the phalanx of vassals with which the U.S. blankets the globe with wars, calls itself a "defense alliance." Defense, however, always needs an enemy willing to attack, and that has never existed, not only since the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact.

Already at the foundation of NATO there was nobody worldwide and possibly also in the depths of the universe who would have dared to attack the USA, which is why the USSR, bombed, depopulated, ruined and completely exhausted by the Germans in the Second World War, had to serve as a "substitute enemy", although the USSR, even under the notoriously murderous criminal Stalin as its leader, wanted nothing but its peace and finally to live in at least external peace.

So truth is also lie, and lie "official information". Well-read people know all this from George Orwell's novel "1984", which recently appeared in a "new translation", to which, absurdly enough, the supreme totalitarian Robert Habeck, of all people, was allowed to write a preface - which, however, could possibly be of importance as a historical document - as if one wanted to stick one's tongue out at the poor author into his grave, in order to show him that one can also cope with something like him.

Likewise, right-wing extremist fanaticism is now liberal-democratic "tolerance"; health is disease, submission is solidarity, religion is science and science is religion, stultification is education, education is "disinformation"; the issuing of orders is called "discussion" or "debate", hate and hate speech is sold as "cabaret", midsummer as "heat pandemic", overall social uniformity as "diverse"; Dogmas without alternatives and unchallengeably holy are called "consensus," and skepticism about such dogmas - once the origin and basis of all science - is fortunately not yet persecuted as "lateral thinking" quite as strictly as the heresy that critically worked off the equally idiotic dogmas of another ruling sect.

Meanwhile, anyone who doesn't get the creeps in the face of the ubiquitous rainbow flags from the pub to the seat of government should open an illustrated history book again.

But let's go back to democracy - to its reversal or better: perversion, because in Latin the intentional turn into the opposite is even more obvious and at the same time a secondary meaning ("to ground" and "to destroy"). Here the process shines particularly brightly, even if one understands by "democracy" only its already perverted "representative" form.

According to this theory, the population - or, for my part, the people - sends representatives to a parliament, where they then debate the interests of their respective senders in fruitful disputes and in the end agree on reasonable compromises that everyone can somehow live with. When a sufficient number can no longer do that, new elections are held and new delegations are sent, whereby the majority ratios can of course change, sometimes fundamentally, but never for a duration that religion calls "eternal."

In the "Western" model of this representative pseudo-democracy, according to the theory, so-called "parties" are interposed on the path of the formation of wills for the representation of interests, which are supposed to bundle the wishes, needs and interests of the citizens, so to speak. We don't really know what this is good for, but that's the way it is.

Or no: That's not how it is. It's the other way around.

Recently, for example, the propaganda of the government, which has been redefined as a state, has been proclaiming messages and slogans like this at every available opportunity: Whoever is against the war against Russia, whoever is against arms deliveries to the Ukrainian regime, whoever demands a reappraisal and legal prosecution of the "Corona" crimes, whoever doubts the carbon dioxide dogma, whoever wants to reintroduce fundamental rights, whoever claims that climates can neither be "protected" nor "saved" and that there is no such thing as a "world climate" ... whoever adopts any of this as their own, "support" the AfD. But one must not "support" them, but the decent democrat "supports" the national united front from all other parties sitting in parliament.

So the entire representative pseudo-democracy has turned itself inside out: Accordingly, it is not the parties that are there to represent the interests of their voters and, in the best case, to enforce them, but the voters are to represent the interests of the parties and help them to enforce these interests by all means.

The fact that the needs, wants and desires of the voters themselves (and also of the non-voters) are completely lost sight of and no longer play any role whatsoever is the inevitable and desired consequence - after all, the point is to educate people, to drill them into line, to make them into a better, new model so that the divine kingdom may be realized.

So today all social institutions serve only one purpose: From kindergartens and schools, where people used to learn critical thinking and practice a bit of public spirit, to parties, associations and trade unions, which were once supposed to represent our interests, to the German armed forces, in which formerly at least allegedly - please don't laugh - "citizens in uniform" were supposed to defend their country in a democratic manner; all of them are now only there to incapacitate, humiliate, subjugate and drill people, so that they serve the one great God, the one holy goal. What goal?

Oh, take your pick. And please don't ask me what can or should be done about it. Fighting all this rubbish under the motto "Peace to the huts, war to the parties"? Isn't there already too much fighting going on in this world, and has it ever been any good?

Maybe it's best to do what you used to do with the schoolhouse when you happened to pass it during the summer vacations: not even ignore it, in the (surely vain) hope that it will then eventually disappear all by itself or, in a miraculous act of reversal or rather reconsideration, turn into its exact opposite.

And meanwhile: It's best to think of something completely different. Happy vacations!

Editorial note: This article first appeared under the title "Peace to the Huts, War to the Parties" on the author's blog.

Michael Sailer, born in 1963, writes novels, stories, columns, stage texts and a blog. He was a regular author of the reading stage "Schwabinger Schaumschläger" until the beginning of the 2G discrimination, sporadically still a musician. He studied German and history, worked as an author or editor for Musikexpress, taz, Konkret and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, among others. He was awarded the "Schwabing Art Prize" in 2001, lives and lounges in Schwabing and at Lake Lerchenau. More information at sailersblog.de.