Thinking... helps.

Since 2020 gifted us with the curious thing that is the pandemic, I've been following the news. With mixed results - on the one hand, I am happy that I have more of a clue now of what's going on in the world; on the other hand, I sometimes get really depressed about all the bad news that are coming in from everywhere, from all areas of life.

A side effect of this is realising how little from the things happening in other countries actually arrive in the newsfeed of one's own one. Mostly because of international conferences - especially NESAT and the European Textile Forum - I have contacts in a handful of  other countries, and occasionally I get a snippet of news from there which is interesting, but not "important" enough to make it to German news.

So here's a current German thing that might make it to your newsfeed if you're outside the country, or it might not: the Sophie Scholl incident.

We're having troublesome protests against the anti-Corona measurements that the government is taking. These have been going on for months, and it's not troublesome per se that some people think all this pandemic is a scam (that is their right, as of German law) and say it out loud (also their right) and go stand and scream about it on the street in groups (also their right). The troublesome thing is that some fractions from the extreme Right have more or less appropriated these protests and are trying to undermine our democracy - the same one that protects, to great costs, their right to freely state their opinion. We're talking Nazis here. Fascists. And you find them right at the tip of the organisation that calls itself "Querdenker" (lateral thinkers).

Recent protests organised by these "Querdenker" have blatantly ignored the requirements for protests in the current situation (wearing masks and keeping distances, and a maximum of participants in a given area, and so on). These requirements are stated when you register for a protest - which you have to, in Germany, if you're planning a mass event. That is not new, by the way. People in these protests have also acted aggressively against the police, with several policepeople hurt in different protests. They are getting more and more violent, and those actually thinking (not laterally) are getting more and more concerned, and also a good bit scared. One of the big questions is also: Why do the people who are not right-wing fascist Nazi arseholes protest together with said arseholes, if they are trying to protest for peace and freedom? It's not like it would have been really hard to tell that there were lots of them present.

The latest thing, though, seems to have brought some people to actually re-think what is happening here. A 22-year-old woman from Kassel held a little speech that was caught on video, and has gone viral since. Young Jana told the people present who she is, what her age is, and that she feels like Sophie Scholl because she's been active protesting for months now, handing out flyers and is now even registering protests such as this one! Following that, one of the "Ordner" (a steward, usually someone from within or close to the organisation that runs the protest) came up to her, said "I'm not going to be steward for this bullshit any longer" and handed her his steward's vest. "This is belittling the Holocaust. It's bullshit." After that, Jana from Kassel rage-quit the stage.

This incident has inspired lots and lots of memes by now, and rightly so. Many people are making it clear that this is complete bullshit, indeed - Jana has been handing out some flyers and is protesting the necessity to wear a piece of cloth over her mouth and nose when she goes into a shop. Sophie Scholl tried to stop the Nazi dictator regime and lost her life for it. That she actually compared herself to Sophie shows that Jana has absolutely, absolutely nothing in common with Sophie Scholl, but that she is a petulant self-entitled stupid youngster.

It has, hopefully, at least shown a few more people that what is happening on those protests is not a good thing, and that there's too many too right-wing people in there, trying to use all the others for their own purposes. After some of the protests were rather violent, at least one that was planned (in Munich) has been forbidden, too.

So we'll see what will happen now, and how things will develop. Not least thanks to people disregarding the anti-Corona measurements and meeting up in huge groups, incidence numbers here in Germany are still way, way too high, and we're looking at increased restrictions through to the mid of January right now - probably with some special rules for Christmas, but nothing is settled yet.

Well. We do indeed live in interesting times...