Apart from the citation of a former SPD official “Germany is also defended in the Hindu Kush”, the one sentence from our Federal Chancellor’s latest oration that sticks is “We have to be courageous enough to commit ourselves where we have made our decisions”.
How can anybody say something like that standing before such an important congregation as our Parliament and talking about such a serious topic as Afghanistan? Why is it virtuous to feel committed to a decision once made? What is the value of feeling committed? Is it a moral quality to stick by a decision, just because you made it at one time?
Is such behaviour not more in the category of cowardice – provided you wish to think in terms of moral categories at all? To be sure, it is certainly the easy way to feel committed after you have made a decision. Courage would be to have enough moral conviction or civil disobedience to admit that you erred and stand up against a wrong decision and take it back.
But that is what our times are like. Without any further discussion, you make a moral demand that sounds good initially, and then you communicate it with all the force of your conviction. And unless you listen carefully, you will not even notice all the poorly reflected and wrong implications that are part of the rhetorically self-confident decisions.
Incidentally, the citation of the “freedom that is defended in the Hindu Kush” is even more stupid. I would like to ask our Federal Chancellor the classical question what – by her definition – freedom means. And I have my fears concerning her possible answer.
Fortunately, everybody can see easily what nonsense the “Hindu Kush” quotation is, regardless of the Federal Chancellor adding that “it is not possible to put it any better than that”. Incidentally, in terms of rhetoric, this, too, can hardly be surpassed in terms of being wrong.
And what is worse: these are the sorts of catastrophic sentences I keep hearing from our politicians. Well, those are the times when I really ask myself:
Germany, where are your elites?
RMD
(Translated by EG)
This sentence contains exactly what annoys me most about our modern times.
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