- cross-posted to:
- genzedongde
- cross-posted to:
- genzedongde
Transcript/translation:
Her: I believe we mustn’t forget that, even though Russians look European, they are not Europeans, that in a cultural sense they have a different relationship to violence, a different relationship to death…
Interviewer: That they’re more capable/tolerant of enduring suffering or what do you mean?
Her: Well…there they don’t have this liberal, postmodern approach to life, life as a project that everyone shapes for themselves individually, but that life can just end rather quickly with death. I mean eg Russia has a relatively low life-expectancy, I believe 70 for men. That’s just…then one just deals differently with people dying there [Ukraine], right?
This was on Lanz, Germanys biggest political talk-show on German state television. This woman, Florence Gaub, is a political scientist and Deputy Director at the European Union Institute for Security Studies (EUISS) in Paris. This is the institutional racism guiding current European politics.
Literally just the old dehumanizing, orientalist, racist “Russians are just barely human violent hordes that don’t care about their own lives” bs used to justify WW2 and to legitimize the suffering and mass deaths of Russians in the 90s.
And, of course, the “freedom and democracy” crowd’s gonna come in yelling about how censoring the press is actually defending press freedom!!
“Freedom of speech?? RED FASCIST!!”
I mean in that tweet the police themselves are literally saying they are upholding the right to assembly…they’ll just film, record and charge you with criminal offenses if you do stuff they don’t like. They and the politicians pushing this are saying exactly what you said - they are defending constitutional rights, freedom and democracy by doing this somehow.
Brownshirts marching with torches through the streets, raging against foreigners, migrants and calling these very politicians “traitors to the people”, Covid denier protests undermining life-saving Covid mandates, that’s all fine and good. Can’t undermine the freedoms and democracy after all.
Germany doesn’t even have freedom of speech, they have “freedom of opinion” as well as the freedom to silence opinions they don’t like.