Notable

Helmut Scvhmidt 2014. Image: Kleinschmidt/CC-BY-SA-3.0

Uninvited double call to one "wise statesman" and one "wise observer"

Now that Helmut Schmidt, after having helped to shape my life for more than forty years, is in the ground and the last strains of the state ceremony have faded away, I may dare, as perhaps the first historian, to say something less good about the dead man. I’ll say it frankly: I never liked him, the chancellor of the concrete era – the wiser and holier he became in old age, the less. Why not? This can be found here. The dogma I want to contradict is: Helmut Schmidt was wise, "the last statesman" (according to Der Spiegel), the last politician you could trust. Peter Scholl-Latour has been dead for a year already. Die beiden waren politisch uneins, aber in der Haltung ahnlich. The dogma about the latter is: Peter Scholl-Latour was an expert on Islam and a wise, because completely independent observer of world events.

The PR professional Dushan Wegner has written in his book "Talking Points" (Westend Verlag 2015) elaborates the methods used by people like Schmidt (and, I supplement, Scholl-Latour) to stage their ostensible wisdom (or, alternatively, goodness, genuineness, competence) in old age. A few ingredients:

• Specialize in a certain, but preferably comprehensive permanent topic and two or three permanent dogmas, to which you can stick for decades if possible. The hymns will be full of praise of your steadfastness and your independent, timeless judgmentalism.
• Limit yourself in the argumentation to a short chain with few details. If your opponents in the discussion bring details that contradict your interpretation, sit back quietly, take a sharp puff from your pipe or cigarette, and then jovially say something like: "Young man, you need to look at this in a broader context…"
• If possible, enrich your resume at a young age with an adventure that can later be developed into a legend – a legend that tells of your ability to courageously master a dramatic, life-threatening situation. It will allow you to dismiss almost all the critics as people who will "have not yet experienced anything existential", so, in a way, always remained useless. (This tip, which both Schmidt and Scholl have taken to heart, is discussed by Dushan Wegner in his chapter "Effect: symbolic action" Using the example of Gerhard Schroder’s role in the Elbe floods of 2002.)
• maintain some international contacts in your old age, which you can always refer to, in order to underline your worldliness. (Dushan Wegner puts it satirically: If necessary, call Beijing Information shortly before the next talk show and then say in a sonorous, meaningful voice: "I just spoke with Beijing on the phone. the mood is tense but confident.") Such personal relations and anecdotes are suitable to wisely wipe away all factual gobbledygook (e.g. climate protection reports, rustling statistics, lists of victims of German bombings), as far as they contradict your dogmas.

With Schmidt, the permanent topics were "German economic growth" and "Peace through high rust", at Scholl1 "the islamic threat", "the decline of the west" and the role of nations. The six most important dogmas of the two wise men of the West:

• "Today’s profits are tomorrow’s investments and the jobs of the day after tomorrow." (Schmidt)
• "Our prosperity depends on nuclear power plants, coal-fired power plants, highways and a secure oil supply." (Schmidt)
• "Stable relations in the world and peace in Europe depend on the military superiority of the USA on all levels." (Schmidt; at this point Scholl was not d’accord.)
• "Muslims strive for world domination. They believe: Allah is with the steadfast (i.e. the fanatics)." (Scholl)
• "The Occident tends to be inferior to the Orient, because it is decadent, non-committal and weak in decision-making."2 (Scholl; Schmidt was not d’accord.)
• "Europe fails in the admission of Eastern European states. Only the Carolingians can conquer Europe."3 (Scholl; Schmidt was not d’accord.)

Politically, Schmidt and Scholl did not have much in common. Schmidt, for example, unlike Scholl, has always remained committed to international diplomacy aimed at avoiding war.4 What they have in common, however, are two attitudes: a personal arrogance and arrogance that has left me catchless time and again; and a cutting hardness, a tendency toward brutal technocratic or – in Scholl’s case – overtly violent "Solutions", which, like all violent solutions, have never solved anything.5

Peter Scholl-Latour 2008. Image: Bernd Andres/CC-BY-SA-3.0

The arrogance with which both of them used to deliver their know-it-all lectures still had something endearingly quirky about it, taken for granted. They only became an intolerable imposition for all those who saw the world somewhat differently from the two old-Frankish worshippers of power through the completely detached admiration that they achieved in wide circles of the German public with their respective gross personal weaknesses. Yes, of course there is envy involved when I think of how often I have been rebuked: "Don’t be a know-it-all! People do not want to be lectured." That was obviously a mistake. The people want Teachings – only not from me, not from nurses’ aides, from cyclists, from idealists. "Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi", my grandfather used to rhyme. And at this point I take the arrogance not to translate the academic saying into German.

Schmidt was a wise statesman, his foresight, if you believe his necrologists, was almost superhuman. Unfortunately, it did not cover climate change, the fate of the rainforest, the nuclear waste problem, water shortages, collapsing textile factories in Bangladesh, poverty migration, or the occupational disease of depression. With Scholl we find exactly the same misrepresentations – perhaps a generational problem. Gee, guys, what do you expect from statesmen who can’t or won’t say anything about climate protection??

It was us, the useless visionaries, those who never grew up due to lack of war experience: We were the ones who recognized already in the 1970s (I was 14, 15) what deadly madness is hatched in a fast breeder. And we have not been content with the knowledge. We have used life and limb to stop this, and damn it!! We stopped it. We! We didn’t need Chernobyl and Fukushima to learn this lesson. Schmidt and Scholl – they got their Chernobyl, they got their Fukushima, and what did the wise men learn from it?? Nothing. It was part of their arrogance not to learn anything that we were ahead of them. God protect us from such stubbornness of old age disguised as steadfastness! We have good chances because, unlike the wise men, half of us are women.

I have already found suitable lids for three of the six dogma pots elsewhere:

• Profits – investments – jobs: The pro-business economists themselves admit that there is no demonstrable positive causal relationship. The evidence is more in favor of a reciprocal relationship.6 Antidogma: The profits of today are the crash of tomorrow.
• Prosperity through nuclear power plants, highways, airports, etc.The impact of these prestige projects is vastly overestimated; the jobs they create are very small and disproportionate to their enormous cost. In the service sector, on the other hand, many more jobs are created, and the work they do directly increases prosperity.7 Antidogma: We can live by helping each other.
• Muslims and world domination: It is just too obvious how the Islamic bosewight takes the vacated role of the communist bosewight in the nationalistic and militaristic propaganda of Western rulers.8 Antidogma: Those who impute plans of world domination to someone, as a rule, look from themselves to others.

Schmidt’s praise of NATO’s military superiority usually culminates in his supporters’ claim that his adherence to the NATO missile decision brought the Soviet Union to its knees. This historical legend is easy to refute. The upgrade of NATO with Pershing-2 medium-range missiles and cruise missiles was officially a response to the previous modernization of the Soviet SS-20 medium-range missiles. Thus, this Soviet upgrade could not have been a consequence of the NATO missiles. Its economic cost occurred in the late 1970s, some twelve years before the collapse of the Soviet Union. NATO buildup in Central Europe was not followed by any more Soviet arms buildup. So the fact that Schmidt made the Soviet Union stop dead in its tracks is a legend.

But the shoe is on the other foot: Meanwhile, it is on record that the world was on the brink of nuclear war two or three times in 1983 because the Soviet leadership had a very concrete fear of an imminent American nuclear attack through various high-risk American manovers. We, the peace movement, recognized precisely this danger in 1981-83 and made it an untiring subject of discussion. The incumbent German chancellors Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl did not recognize it and later, in their boundless wisdom, ignored or denied it until the end.

Mikhail Gorbachev said several times in 2006 what could really have brought the death blow to the Soviet Union: That was the nuclear catastrophe of Chernobyl in 1986.9 The struggle for "Liquidation" the immense consequences of the catastrophe was the last struggle of the revolution and war steeled Soviet we-create-that collectivism.

Another important factor may have been the war in Afghanistan: the first major war by a European power against jihadism, the forerunners of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, which was being formed. NATO called these people, including Osama bin Laden, freedom fighters at the time and massively rousted them, along with the freedom experts of the Saudi Arabian royal family. As far as I know, Helmut Schmidt never said anything self-critical about it, but Peter Scholl-Latour did. One of his most far-sighted deeds was probably his tireless criticism of the ruling caste in Riyadh.

The Scholl-Latour method was actually a joke. He always came to the microphone panting, as if he had just humped the 500 meters from the front line to the field telephone, while bullets flew around his ears: "Dull and monotonous threatened the church bells of the Christian congregation in the church of Paderborn. The Westphalian city is a religious stronghold… The unmistakable and not to be underestimated solidarity between the occidental Catholic Church and the ruling Christian party proves the entanglement of occidental religion and domination… The bells were calling to church in an inaudible way. The organ playing inside seemed threatening, obscure, almost apocalyptic; a hunchbacked figure was hammering fanatically on the instrument…"

Original sound of Scholl – almost! Thus, in 1993, the Orientalists Verena Klemm and Karin Horner caricatured his gimmicky style by replacing the religious stronghold of Qum with the religious stronghold of Paderborn, where the reactionary Archbishop Johannes Joachim Degenhardt ruled at the time.10 Scholl-Latour was probably in fact independent, insofar as he was committed only to his own fame. Therefore, the fate of mankind always had to depend exactly on the place where he was at the moment. That this was true is pretty unlikely by human standards.

The Scholl method raises a fundamental problem, the problem of media attention. At the moment, all eyes of mankind interested in war and peace rest on the morasses of the sog. IS. If Scholl were still alive, he would do his best to reinforce this damaging effect, because where the cameras go, the fame-seekers go too.

The professional fame addiction of the Scholls plays into the hands of the perverse fame addiction of the murderers. Those who are really interested in peace must instead run to Beirut and investigate how Lebanese society managed to end a decades-long civil war in the 1990s. There is the expertise for peacemaking and reconstruction that we so desperately need.