An Irishman's Diary: The Lies of March
or Let the Blame Games begin
Greetings and salutations, once again here your newsman reporting from a small corner of the Alpine foothills in the one-time Regnum Alamanniae, an early medieval European kingdom, but one of the many states to have arisen and fallen over the storied course of Europe’s conquest and reconquest-filled past.
“Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.”
- George Santayana
Times of Darkness?
To most of us, the Early Middle Ages are more commonly known as “The Dark Ages”, describing the period following the fall of the Western Roman Empire portended by the Goths and other tribes (barbarians in the eyes of the Romans) pushing across the Roman Limes Germanicus1 in modern-day southern Germany between the Rhine and Danube. The remaining, eastern, Roman Empire (Byzantium) centered around modern-day Istanbul, although a lessened force, survived much longer as a European power in the Eastern Mediterranen until the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire many centuries later.
Mind you, it is often in hindsight that these periods and powers are retrospectively named or reinterpreted. For example, the Byzantian citizens of Constantinople reputedly considered themselves ‘Romans’ to the end, while the honorific term "Holy Roman Empire" was only first used for medieval Germany four centuries after its founding; and it was apparently first in the early renaissance that Tuscan scholar and poet, Petrarch, pejoratively described the post-Roman period as one of darkness. Modern historians sometimes joke the term merely reflects previous historians dearth of knowledge of the post-Roman period. Naming and defining a thing is a subtle power lent those who write or rewrite history books.
Times of Light?
While European empires, kingdoms, political unions or states may come and go (and while their peoples may migrate, subjugate, or merge), the land - its seasons and elements - remain. Just as the Funkenfeuer bonfires (described in a previous An Irishman’s Diary) were intended to signal the end of winter, I can report there has indeed been a sense of spring’s return these past weeks, albeit interspersed with light snowfalls and subzero nights. Winter here is a long affair and only reluctantly releases its grip months later when the last frosty vestiges are banished and spring achieves full bloom. Still, we now have incrementally more light after working hours, birdsong is returning to the garden, and the clocks will soon be officially going forward to Central European Summertime giving a further stretch to the evenings.
Daylight saving time was notably first introduced in Europe on Easter Sunday, 1916, in the twilight days of a relatively short-lived, unified Deutsches Reich (1871-1918) during the so-called Great War. Of course, that particular Easter has taken on a rather different significance in Irish history with its revolutionary struggle for subsequent secession from the British Empire which was then still at war on the continent with the aforementioned German Empire. Daylight saving time was thus, originally, a wartime measure in support of a war of attrition: the age-old strategy of attempting to grind down an opponent's ability to wage war through destruction of any and all resources by any means possible. Sound familiar in 21st century Europe? Putting the clock forward an hour (ostensibly) meant coal could be conserved and other energy savings for the German-Austro-Hungarian side from reduced artificial lighting in the early summer evenings. [EDIT: as others have pointed out, the efficacy of this measure remains highly questionable]
In the interwar period, daylight saving time was abandoned by continental Europe only to be reintroduced during World War II in 1940 (again as an intended energy-saving measure by National Socialist Germany), before being discontinued in the post-war period. The Oil Crisis of the 1970’s was grounds for France to reintroduce daylight savings in 1976, but by 1980 when both Germanys: Bundesrepublik Deutschland and Deutsche Demokratische Republik; and neighbouring Austria reintroduced daylight savings, it was now in peacetime as an economic harmonising measure. Finally, with the Swiss Federation following suit in 1981 all of Europe’s summertime clocks were aligned.
Watershed (Moments)
A quirk of my local geography is that all rain and snow falling on one side of a nearby ridge flows eventually into the Rhine, arriving ultimately in the North Sea, while all precipitation falling on the other side flows into the Danube and inexorably eastward before spilling into the Black Sea. Every time I drive across the otherwise insignificant hilltop I am reminded of this delineation of river basins reaching to the Dutch coastline through Germany’s industrial heartland in one direction and encompassing former Hapsburg and Ottoman lands on the way to the Black Sea in the other direction.
German thoughts of late have been more focused on the Baltic Sea. When news broke in September last year that the Nord Stream gas pipelines from Russia had been sabotaged in waters near a small Danish island off the northern coast of Germany, I confess to having been genuinely shaken. This had not happened in a distant land, nor did it appear a crazed terrorist spectacle designed to maximise fear or sensational media attention. No, this appeared a precision attack destroying critical energy infrastructure in the run-up to European winter. It was also personal, since many homes on my residential street are heated with gas. A direct attack in Europe, on Germany: when did this happen last, World War II? Who was responsible and wouldn’t this constitute an act of war if undertaken by a nation state?
State-Funded Media
Initial mainstream media reports remained sketchy but dutifully contended a dastardly Russia was to blame for the the attacks2. The cartoonish explanations couldn’t quite explain why Russia had elected to deploy clandestine operatives to sabotage its own pipelines at the bottom of the Baltic sea, pipelines which it had jointly built with Germany at enormous financial cost and the expense of years of political capital. After all, Russia could have simply closed the valves on dry land at the Russian-controlled end of the pipeline at any moment if the restriction or throttling of gas supplies had been the intent.
The statements of various US and Polish3 officials welcoming the news, or indeed President Biden4 who had previously threatened to "put an end to" the Nord Stream pipelines if Russia invaded Ukraine, were widely un(der)reported. Similarly, the news reports did little to explain why Germany was not officially now considered at war if it had been Russia or another state actor behind the attacks. Neither my neighbours nor I believed a word of it.
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.”
- 1984, George Orwell
And then the initial flurry of news coverage ceased, just disappeared. Instead the media reported that just as summer tyres must be swapped between October and Easter every year for winter tyres, wearing a Face Filtering Piece (FFP) mask would now become compulsory5 in the same winter months on public transport and in other designated situations. News reports about the potential for energy blackouts6 during the coldest winter months multiplied, which was rather curious as the previous months had seen such claims decried as conspiracy theory of the far-right stoking public fear. It was becoming decidedly more difficult to keep up with the flip-flopping state media missives. Oh yes, and then all our gas bills shot up (again).
Official Narratives
“Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.”
- 1984, by George Orwell
The memory-holing of the Nord Stream event was interrupted last month by the renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, Seymour Hersh, and his Substack report7 that his own government had planned and authorised the attacks in cooperation with Norwegian authorities. Seymour Hersh is considered investigative journalism royalty, first gaining recognition in 1969 for exposing the Mai Lai massacre, an American atrocity committed during the Vietnam war. He subsequently led the New York Times’ coverage of the Watergate scandal and went on to break other major stories of US malfeasance over the years in Cambodia, Chile, Libya, Iraq, and more. Interestingly, the German press which deigned to mention his reporting last month chose to question is credibility by framing him as a controversial figure relying on unverifiable anonymous sources (the staple of exposé investigative journalism).
In contrast to the reporting of legacy media last autumn, Hersh’s reporting is at the very least plausible and recommended to read for yourself, or listen to his interview with another old-school titan of journalism, the former war-correspondent, Chris Hedges: Podcast with Seymour Hersh on how the U.S. blew up the Nord Stream pipelines and why the press has ignored what is arguably an act of war against Russia.
The latest twist in this tale of “Whodunnit?”, and “Is Germany under attack, or at war, or not?”, came last week, four days after President Biden and Bundeskanzler Scholz met at the White house. Transatlantically, the New York Times and Die Zeit newspapers suddenly and simultaneously reported that their anonymous sources blamed “a pro-Ukrainian group” for carrying out the attacks. The New York Times added for good measure, “U.S. officials said no American or British nationals were involved.”
Confusingly, other senior US and German officials have publicly urged caution about drawing any conclusions from the new reporting, which allegedly is based on anonymous government sources, with both governments officially reaffirming their financial and armaments support for Ukraine, the country from which US and German outlets both now claim the attacks on critical German infrastructure initiated. And just to be clear, Germany is not at war with anyone (yet), despite both the Federal Minister for Health8 and the Federal Foreign Minister9 both making public statements, in October ‘22 and January ‘23 respectively, that Germany was at war with Russia.
With diplomatic misinformation like that, who needs Russian disinformation?
We know they are lying, they know they are lying, they know we know they are lying,
we know they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying.”
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
Nobel laureate and Soviet dissident
Perfidious Albion - “Rules for thee, but not for me”
The Lockdown Files as released by the Daily Telegraph in England have not gone entirely unnoticed in these parts. The Swiss daily, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, reports:
“In everyday British life, the Covid pandemic is only a distant memory of high infection and death rates, rigid lockdowns and Kafkaesque social distancing rules. Now, however, over 100,000 private Whatsapp messages from former Health Minister Matt Hancock have suddenly sent Britain into a blaze of Corona commotion once again.”
Die Welt, German daily newspaper writes:
“The British Telegraph gives an insight into the innermost communication of the government apparatus during the corona pandemic - and shows how chaotically decisions were made. The behavior of the then Secretary of Health, Matt Hancock, is particularly disturbing…”
The former UK Health Secretary, Matt ”Rules for thee, but not for me” Hancock, was forced to resign in disgrace for flagrantly flaunting the strict lockdown and “social-distancing” rules which he was once responsible for in 2021. Perhaps most disturbingly, the social media messages seem to confirm that at ministerial level there was an admission that what they were doing was being driven by politics and polls as much as any public health or medical science.
Hancock joins other early architects of the lockdowns in ignominy such as: SAGE (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) member, Neil Ferguson, whose never-accurate models proven deeply riddled with bugs10 yet were used around the world to justify initial lockdowns; and Dominic Cummings, the “brains” behind Britain’s Stay Home campaign. In private all of them demonstrated behaviour showing open disdain for the rules they had decreed for others - a recurring theme throughout the pandemic, extending to former Prime Minister Boris Johnson and other national leaders.
The revelations from the Telegraph have forced Hancock to deny responsibility for not following advice on testing people entering care homes which saw heavily disproportionate numbers of Covid deaths early on in the pandemic. He said the claims were “categorically untrue” and has accused the Telegraph newspaper of using “stolen messages… to create a false story”. Note, the messages’ authenticity are not disputed, he just doesn’t like how they are being reported. Have a read of the source material, because it doesn’t look good - and it can’t have been much better in Ireland. The German reporting falls shy of turning the spotlight on its own political and scientific elites to explore if there were similar levels of dysfunction in their pandemic planning.
Charlatan Lauterbach
The UK is not the only land with vacuous self-promoting health ministers (Hancock pursued lucrative celebrity TV appearances, speaking fees, and a book deal after his ignominious resignation). After coming under renewed pressure at the weekend from accusations of misrepresentations in his former university career, the current German Minister for Health blithely repeated 3 times in the course of a live satellite link television news interview on Monday that the rate of “severe vaccine injuries” from the Covid-19 vaccines in Germany is around 1 in 10,000 injections. This time the interviewer pushed back on the topic of vaccine injuries and Lauterbach reacted downright allergically to any suggestion of personal blame. Karl Lauterbach has been one of the most vociferous and public advocates of mandatory injections for all adults in Germany, and was a regular fixture on news and current affairs broadcasts throughout the pandemic.
[EDIT: Nobody has been able to confirm the source can be sure of the exact basis] of his figures cited (a common occurrence involving Lauterbach) but the Paul Ehrlich Institute, a German federal institute and medical regulatory body, announced last year the rate of reported Serious Adverse Events was 1 per 5,000 doses11 (i.e. for events that are fatal or life-threatening, require hospitalisation or the prolongation of existing hospitalisation, or lead to persistent or significant disability, incapacity, congenital anomalies or birth defects). I suspect Karl Lauterbach is claiming less than one in ten thousand because that is the cut-off to be officially categorised as very rare. Nevertheless, for someone who receives 3 doses, 1 in 10,000 doses equates to a risk of 1 in ~3,300 and is categorised as rare (1:5,000 would equate to 1 in ~1,700 for 3 doses), a rate greater than 1 in 1,000 is categorised as uncommon. It went unmentioned in the interview that such rates are, in fact, comparable to rates of hospitalisations involving Covid-19 itself [EDIT:, for example, as reported in data from England12 (rates being subject to age-group, variant and other confounders)]. Needless to say, less severe side-effects are even more frequent.
The minister deflected and back-pedalled hard trying to deny he had ever seriously contended the vaccines were effectively side-effect free (despite publicly stating so on multiple occasions) and also tried shifting some blame to his predecessor for the pharma-friendly purchasing contracts negotiated. He even went so far as to describe the profits of the manufacturers as exorbitant and suggested they should be contributing more to compensating and supporting victims of vaccine injuries. It was quite the sight and you can read a full translation of the interview segment here.
The Sins of the Father
Vergangenheitsbewältigung (compound noun): "struggle of overcoming the past" or "work of coping with the past". Relating to public debate within a country on a problematic period of its recent history - in Germany, particularly on National Socialism.
Life here in central (or is it western?) Europe in times of war and pestilence is further complicated by Germany’s at times tortured relationship to its early 20th century past. Guilt looms large in the collective psyche, and unlike other former military empires, the horrors of their past are not shied away from - the period is given particular emphasis here in the educational system. For example, a visit to concentration camp memorials is a staple of schooling and the syllabus ensures every student is confronted with the ugly nature of its forefather’s time.
Guilt and fear have played significant roles in the current approach toward both the war in Ukraine and the attitude toward the pandemic. For some, the current conflict offers an opportunity to, in a sense, atone for the past and this time be on the “right-side” of European history against a nationalistic dictator invading neighbouring lands. For others, the pandemic response and vaccination campaign similarly provided an opportunity to rally together for a “just cause” and demonstrate solidarity with the more vulnerable in society. As my grandmother might have said, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
The history books are yet to be written on these turbulent times and this “Lies of March” report is my mini chronicle of some of the ongoing recriminations, denials, and shifting of blame as authorities struggle to come to terms with the very recent past, and present. Remember:
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
- 1984, George Orwell
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Excellent and inspiring write-up. Thanks