August 11, 2012

During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Germans loved to refer to themselves as das Volk der Dichter und Denker (the people of poets and thinkers). Indeed, my home country is the birthplace of many ideas that went around the globe, some of them great: letterpress printing, quantum physics, and German beer. Some were not great: communism, Nazism, and Cultural Marxism. So while German thinkers did quite well in the field of technology and engineering, they failed miserably when it came to political thinking.

Say what you will about my fellow countrymen, but whatever they start, they”€™ll bring to an end. Despite their continued failure in developing reasonable political ideas, they just don”€™t quit trying to tell everybody what to think and how to live. We like to call that aus der Geschichte lernen (learning from history). Although we didn”€™t invent political correctness”€”that’s one of the few stupid ideas we had to import from abroad”€”we can proudly claim that today no country on Earth is as politisch korrekt as Germany.

In Germany, PC is so important that we developed a whole language around the concept. We”€”meaning our politicians, teachers, and journalists”€”took words from our dictionary and, step by step, shifted and changed their meaning completely. If you learned German in school outside Germany, hardly anything a politisch korrekter German says will make any sense to you. (Even for most Germans it’s hard to understand.)

“€œWe might not have invented political correctness, but we mastered it.”€

A great opportunity to study PC German is the ongoing outrage about the athlete and Olympic participant Nadja Drygalla. The young woman from Rostock was part of the German rowing team”€”until the zeitgeist got her. Her case is quite similar to that of Voula Papachristou, and yet it’s completely different. The similarity: Both women got verboten for some korrekt reason. The difference: Papachristou got sanctioned for saying something stupid, while Drygalla didn”€™t say or do or”€”as far as we know”€”even think anything unkorrekt.

Drygalla’s boyfriend was a member of the right-wing extremist party NPD (National Democratic Party of Germany). When several German journalists realized this, the ex-Nazi had already left his party a few months previously. But too late: Drygalla’s Nazi Apocalypse had already begun. After a talk with several German Olympic functionaries, Drygalla left freiwillig (voluntarily).

For all those lucky specimens who are not familiar with that madhouse we call Politik: To Germans, the NPD isn”€™t merely an unappetizing bunch of racist weirdoes. They are pure evil. And every member of this party, everyone who ever voted for them, everyone who is friends with them, and everyone who ever listened or talked or spoke to them is an Adolf Hitler clone.

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