On March 21, 1933, the Nazi-controlled Reichstag passed a law making it a crime to speak out against the government. The “Regulations of the Reich President for Defense from Treacherous Attacks against the Government of the National Uprising” made even the slightest expression of dissent from Nazi ideology a criminal offense.
This new law, among other totalitarian measures, was part of a process known as Gleichschaltung... the process of achieving rigid and total ideological coordination and uniformity in politics, culture, and private communication by forcibly repressing (or eliminating) independence and freedom of thought and expression.
GloboCap hasn’t done anything that heavy-handed in the course of rolling out the New Normal totalitarianism, but that’s mainly because they do not have to. When you control the vast majority of the global corporate media, you don’t need to pass a lot of ham-fisted laws banning all dissent from your totalitarian ideology. This isn’t the 1930s, after all. Over the last ninety years, the arts of propaganda, disinformation, and perception management have advanced to a point that even Goebbels couldn’t have imagined.
The skill with which GloboCap and the corporate media delegitimized the anti-New Normal demonstrations in Berlin, London, and other cities last weekend is a perfect example of the state of those arts. I’ll focus on Berlin, as that’s where I live, and the so-called “Storming of the Reichstag” incident, but it works pretty much the same way everywhere. I believe there was a curious incident involving a person with a fascist flag in London, and that the UK media have now officially chosen David Icke to be the movement’s figurehead.
In Berlin, in the days leading up to the protests, government officials and corporate media propagandists did what officials and propagandists do... they relentlessly repeated their official narrative, namely, that anyone protesting the New Normal (or doubting the official Coronavirus narrative) is a “violent neo-Nazi extremist,” or “conspiracy theorist,” or some other form of existential “threat to democracy.”
This official narrative was originally disseminated following the August 1 protest in Berlin, the scale of which took the authorities by surprise. Tens or hundreds of thousands of people (depending on whose narrative you believe) gathered in the city to protest the New Normal and its increasingly absurd “emergency measures.” The German media, CNN, The New York Times, and other “respectable news outlets” uniformly condemned them as “neo-Nazis,” or insinuated that they were “neo-Nazi-sympathizers.”
Despite the finding of Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution that only “individual members of far-right-groups” had taken part in the August 1 protest, and that “far-right extremists had no formative influence on the demos,” both the German and international corporate media pumped out story after story about the ultra-violent neo-Nazi hordes that were about to descend on Berlin, again!
Der Tagespiegel, a major German newspaper, reported that the demo was being “infiltrated by Nazis.” Die Tagesschau, the German BBC, shrieked that “neo-Nazis are mobilizing!” RBB, another public broadcaster, reported that the “traveling circus of Corona-deniers” was heading straight for the city! (N.B. Any reference to any kind of “deniers” in Germany evokes Holocaust deniers, i.e., Nazis). Ver.di, the German journalists union, warned their members that they were expecting reporters to suffer “double-digit physical attacks.” And these are just a few of countless examples.
The American and UK corporate media also did their Gleichschaltung duty, disseminating the official “Nazis are Coming!” narrative. (I don’t need to do the citations, do I?) And, of course, Antifa joined in the chorus.
On Wednesday, three days before the demo, having successfully whipped the New Normal masses up into a state of wide-eyed panic over the imminent neo-Nazi invasion, the Berlin government banned the protests. The New Normal masses celebrated. A few concerns about … you know, democracy, were perfunctorily voiced, but they were quickly silenced when Interior Senator Andreas Geisel explained that abrogating the people’s constitutional right to freedom of assembly, and freedom of speech, and to petition their government, was not in any way a totalitarian act, but was purely a matter of “protecting the public health.”
Then, in a particularly Orwellian twist, although the protest itself had now been banned, the Berlin government decided to approve a “counter-protest” against the banned protest. I’m not quite sure how that was supposed to work.
The night before the demo, an administrative court overturned the protest ban. It didn’t really matter, as the authorities knew they couldn’t stop the demo in any event. Banning the protest was just part of the show (and the Gleichschaltung process the show was part of), meant to emphasize the existential threat posed by the bloodthirsty Nazi legion that was on its way to sack the city.
On Saturday, hundreds of thousands of protesters (the overwhelming majority of whom were not neo-Nazis, or Nazi-sympathizers, or any other kind of monsters) poured into the streets of central Berlin. The police surrounded them, trapping them on the avenues, closed off the side streets so they couldn’t get out, and, once again, tried to ban the protest on the grounds that they weren’t “social distancing.” Everyone sat down in the street. Cops stalked around in their masks and body armor, sweating heavily, and occasionally pushing people. Lawyers made phone calls. It was very hot. This went on for quite a while.
Eventually, the court instructed the police to let the demonstration go ahead.
And the rest is history... except that it isn’t.
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