Ve Vill Defend Ze DEMOCRACY!

We’re in upside-down world, and words mean the opposite:

The link at the bottom goes here, to a warning from the always-reliable Tom Nichols:

Freedom is fascism, the Constitution says that the generals are in charge of the president, war is peace, speech bans and political firewalls are democracy. Trump is interfering with the armed forces!

So.

Yesterday, NPR explained the elections in Germany, casually doing the inverted-meaning dance, and take the time to savor this paragraph:

SCHMITZ: For the past four years, the three-party coalition government of Olaf Scholz moved slowly, often squabbling among itself over how to support Ukraine without angering Russia or how to stimulate the economy without taking on debt. That argument ended up collapsing Scholz's government and led to yesterday's early election. And this election exposed a trend that mainstream politicians are trying to smother — the rise in popularity of the nationalist far-right Alternative for Germany party, known by its German acronym, the AfD. The party is under state surveillance for the threat it poses to Germany's democracy, and its members routinely trivialize the Holocaust. One out of every five Germans voted for the AfD.

To protect German democracy, political parties are trying to “smother” the political opposition, which represents a fifth of the country, and are using the state security apparatus to place their political opponents under surveillance.

“The party is under state surveillance for the threat it poses to Germany's democracy.”

That’s…I…but…you just said…

State surveillance of political disagreement is democracy. Smothering opposition is democracy. Please speak into the microphone at the base of your bedroom lamp, so the state security apparatus can protect your liberty.

The public sphere stands on a rotten base. We start with broken language, trying to have discussions with words that point away from the things they seem to mean. The “mainstream” does this as casually as they duck into the breakroom for a cup of coffee, not noticing it at all.

“The party is under state surveillance for the threat it poses to Germany's democracy.”