Enlightenment must be forced, it does not fall from the sky

Will we see a moment of truth in the matter of Corona? For that to happen, a genuine civil society would first have to be re-established.

No clarification in sight

Anyone who still remembers the argumentation pirouettes of the last weeks and months, the many assurances that were disappointed, the false promises of Freedom Day and the end of the pandemic, naturally finds it difficult to believe that there will ever be anything like a reappraisal of the corona pandemic. After all, what are the pandemic drivers from politics, the media and “science” supposed to do now: tar and feather themselves and ride out of town backwards on a donkey?

We have experienced two years of systemic failure across the board. There was hardly an institution that was not guilty: politics, media, science, churches, the legal system. However, systems never renew themselves out of themselves. They are inert. At best, they can be reformed by external shocks. For this, however, a kind of zero point is needed from which a new start can be made. It would need a fundamental renewal in terms of personnel and content. A kind of spring-cleaning and big sweep for institutions. None of this is even in sight. No round table, no reform commission, no commission of historians, no truth commission, no committee of enquiry. Nothing.

The debate about the #ichhabemitgemacht action shows it exemplarily. On a website of the journalist Burkhard Müller-Ullrich, an archive is being created to collect Corona injustice. This includes misanthropic and exclusionary comments by politicians, journalists, medical officials, scientists and celebrities addressed to critics, doubters and above all the unvaccinated. The campaign had a huge impact. The hashtag #ichhabemitgemacht has been trending strongly in social media lately (here is a compilation). And as always, hit dogs bark. They even whine. Hate speech, they say, and a pillory to boot. Those who were able to dish it out can’t take it now, of course.

But why should a collection of quotes on a homepage be a pillory at all? Those involved had assiduously pandered to the pandemic narrative and deliberately trumpeted their exclusionary comments to the public when it was particularly en vogue. Now that all the ugliness is being documented in a concentrated way, they are obviously embarrassed. But instead of standing by their public bullying of the unvaccinated, they take refuge in victimhood. Apparently, even the reporting of this action seems to touch a taboo. The “Welt” deleted an article about the action just a few hours after publication (here is the archived version).

Everything mirror-inverted

Some think we live in complex, confusing times. This does not apply to the Corona Panic Orchestra. Their strategy is of such banal simplicity that one could not wish for more clarity. It is enough to simply turn the statements around. The opposite of what is said is reliably closer to the truth. In a recent Radioeins programme, for example, Karl Lauterbach tried to drag the world-renowned evidence researcher and long-time Stanford professor John P.A. Ioannidis through the mud by outlining a system of disinformation in which scientists who have often spent even a short time at an elite university get attention for their theses via social networks. By the way, Lauterbach has been doing nothing else for the past two years. After a short stay at Harvard and a Master’s degree in health management, he now calls himself an epidemiologist and uses Twitter to hype up every study that suits him, no matter how small. For some reason, talk-show editors are electrified by the whisperings of a scientific nobody from outside the field.

Another pirouette of argumentation is “hypothetical causality”, which is basically nothing but voodoo logic, a sleight of hand of the most embarrassing kind. Here, one simply compares apples and oranges, i.e. what happened and what hypothetically could have happened, and from this one all-knowingly deduces a benefit of vaccination, boosters, etc., or precisely what one wants to propagate. There is nothing scientific about it, it is pure speculation. A comparison between a real and a hypothetical event is not scientifically possible because there is no data basis for the hypothetical event. Nevertheless, those who have been vaccinated several times and have nevertheless been infected with Corona, are now talking themselves into believing their mild course, which millions of unvaccinated people already had 1.5 years ago, when there was no vaccination at all. We know this kind of behaviour from sect members who always fill the placeholder of facts with new wishful thinking so that their imaginary edifice remains intact.

No, the reappraisal will take some time and, as always, will only come when there is no other way. Anything else would be professional suicide for those involved. The criticism of Lauterbach that has been growing in the media is a fig leaf. The resignation of Anne Spiegel is a nice smokescreen: Look, misconduct has consequences! First come the pawns, then the subordinates in the second row. Otherwise, the pandemic drivers are trying to get their heads out of the noose with the transparent strategy “attack is the best defence”.

Clarification is self-disclosure

This will be especially true for the media. They face the greatest challenge and a real existential test. Or does anyone want to expect the propagandists of the narrative to investigate failure on their own behalf? Real enlightenment is only possible with media pressure and corresponding intransigence. If the media were not dysfunctional, they would not only have been reporting critically for two years, but would have initiated and led the transparency process by now at the latest. They would plead for round tables, for committees of enquiry, there would be documentaries, books and focal points about the many inconsistencies.

But clarification harms the reputation here. For with every revelation, the media would be self-accusing, because every reader or viewer would rightly ask themselves: Why are you only coming up with this now? After all, the claim of any serious media is to deal with reality more or less synchronously in factual reports and accurate analyses. In recent years, however, the best that has been done is to create an image of a political narrative, and to such an extent that it has paved the way for mass experimental medical interventions, damage to the economy and supply bottlenecks and breaking supply chains. Almost the entire press landscape has engaged in a racket with Covid, not only falling for a panic hoax, but co-creating it. This is no longer just complicity at the expense of the citizen (and reader). This is complicity.

The lesson from two years of systemic failure in the pandemic must be that the necessary impetus for enlightenment can only come from civil society. However, society can only muster this strength if it overcomes internal divisions, because social cohesion was one of the first casualties of the pandemic, along with society’s early warning systems. A society that cannot recognise, process or stop an attack on itself, but allows itself to be arbitrarily shifted as real statists, as in a bad play, is only an object, not a subject or shaper of reality. This leads to the most important question for the future: If we are already obviously not sovereign, how will we become sovereign?

We would like to thank Dr. Matuschek for again making available an article that first appeared on his website “Freischwebende Intelligenz“. As usual, it will be translated into French and English by Expressis-Verbis for further use as a thank you.