The Bahá’í Faith says that a kindly tongue is a magnet for the hearts of people. But the Bahá’í Faith also says that one of the most important virtues is seeking and striving for truthfulness. And truthfulness, for me, means first of all analysing things – looking at society, its state, its stage of development, and putting it into context. For me, that is a task as a human being. Because humans have this ability, unlike AI!
And that’s why I thought about whether I should have this post written or not, and then I decided to do it after all.
It’s about Lanz again. Because, according to media reports, Lanz gets million-euro fee contracts with public broadcasting, which is financed through levies – through compulsory contributions from all citizens! And that’s why he has a responsibility for the development of our society, and I in turn, as a citizen, have the responsibility to assess Lanz and his narratives. And by now, unfortunately, I find what Lanz allows himself unbearable.
And now the question is: where is my kindly tongue now? How can my tongue be kind in the face of this blatant neglect of the responsibility of public broadcasting – and here, very specifically, by Markus Lanz with his show?
What was it about yesterday? There were two topics, but they belong together. To break it down and simplify it: yesterday the tenor, the narrative, was that the Left Party in Berlin is antisemitic. This media hog has now been chased through all the big media outlets in Germany for weeks, ever since the Berlin Left won the election in Berlin.
And yes, of course antisemitism is something we have to clean up, something we have to fight – absolutely! The only question is how we do it. And what I see here is that this topic is being instrumentalised to distract from other, even more important topics. And for that, Lanz uses pretty transparent narratives, which obviously work, though.
So what is being done? People latch onto individual statements by the Left and demonise support for the Palestinian freedom movement as terrorist. So the entire resistance of the Palestinian population against the Israeli aggressions, against Israel’s war crimes, is simply classified as antisemitic. That means, if you push it to the point, if you want to break this narrative down to an even deeper level: the children who are now starving because of Israel’s war machine, with the support of the Western world including Germany – these children are antisemitic.
And that is, I think, very sad. So nobody says that Israel has been systematically committing war crimes for years. That children are being killed in the Gaza Strip, that hardly any humanitarian aid is currently reaching the people, that they are being washed away in their tents, that they are freezing, that they are hungry, that they get no medical care. And there is above all one culprit for this: the Israeli government. And the Israeli government, with Netanyahu at the top, of course says it’s all Hamas, they’re all terrorists – and that is so clearly not true. All independent sources say so, it’s all documented. There is also an arrest warrant against Netanyahu from the International Criminal Court for committing war crimes.
And all these topics practically never come up on Lanz. They are simply kept quiet, very comfortably and cosily. And people still have to die, still have to suffer – also because shows like Lanz’s make exactly this looking away possible and socially acceptable in the end. That may be putting it sharply, but that’s exactly where this keeping quiet leads.
And another narrative that Lanz opened up yesterday in his great show also pays into the first one: his thesis is that we have a problem in Germany with migrant violence – that’s how he puts it.
That means we had the demos in several cities in Germany, and afterwards there were violent riots. And then Lanz asks a representative of the police union (Gewerkschaft der Polizei), roughly: Who are these perpetrators? Tell us their origin! And the police union chief says: Yes, they are mainly male youths between 16 and their early twenties who come from Africa, from North Africa, Morocco, but also from Afghanistan and other Muslim-majority countries. And with that, of course, gate and door are thrown open to right-wing populism. Because that’s exactly the narrative the AfD has been serving for years.
And then Lanz asks a CDU member of parliament of Turkish descent from North Rhine-Westphalia, roughly: You also have a migrant background, your parents come from Turkey, you’ve built something here, you’ve integrated wonderfully here. What do you say to that? – So this definition of “integrated” is something one would also have to look at closely.
And now comes a story that this young CDU woman of Turkish descent tells, and it’s simply outrageous once you really put it into context. She tells of her father, who worked underground as a guest worker in the Ruhr and dug out the coal there as a coal miner. Who had never been sick in his life. That means he grafted non-stop – he was a real grafter, he did a back-breaking job!
And then she says that she once asked him how he had managed never to get sick, not a single day. And then he tells her: Yes, my little daughter, there was one day when I felt really unwell in the morning, I felt very bad. And then I went to the company doctor and told him: I’m not feeling so well, can I stay at home today? And the company doctor didn’t even look at me, didn’t get up, didn’t look up from his desk, and simply said: Come on, pull yourself together, you’re fine, off down the shaft! And then her father understood: Yes, okay, he’s right, I’ll go down the shaft now, I’m healthy.
And she sells this story as successful integration!
I immediately think of Günter Wallraff, an investigative journalist by trade, who wrote the book Ganz unten (“Lowest of the Low”). And in it he shows with what brutality the guest workers, above all from Anatolia, were exploited in the Ruhr from the 1960s onwards. We’re not talking about democracy, we’re not talking about integration either, but about discrimination and exploitation! Because that’s what it was at its core. It wasn’t about building a multicultural society back then, it was about mining the coal and rebuilding the industrial base for the industrial giants and the shareholders. That was the only reason why cheap, willing workers from a very poor region, namely Anatolia, were brought here and signed up as guest workers. The goal was that they would simply mine the coal temporarily so that steel could be made again, so that Germany would recover – and then they were supposed to be sent home. There was nothing about integration! And integration surely doesn’t mean that a person who is sick is then sent back down the shaft. That’s inhumane, that’s an absolute catastrophe, that the CDU sells this as integration in the year 2026!
And the young men who are rioting there and taking out their frustration on the shops: of course they have recognised that society doesn’t need them at all now, doesn’t accept them, that they have no chance. Where are they supposed to work? Are they also supposed to go down the shaft like the father of this CDU MP of Turkish descent, and then graft until they drop? Is that really the offer German society makes to these young people?
These young people with a migration background have hardly any chances, because there are no more jobs, because they are already devalued and discriminated against at school. So society has to offer other possibilities and can’t just shift the responsibility onto the individual. And then one would also have to explain why it’s precisely these migrant youths who show so much violence, and not “the fine white Germans”.
And that’s the question hanging in the room. And in the end this narrative then solidifies at some point – that it must somehow be biological, somehow to do with genes. Of course it isn’t! These are socio-political decisions that we make here: whom do we want to accept in our society? Whom do we give which chances? These are our decisions – and not the decisions of the young people.
And Lanz would have to readjust. Or rather: in my view, Lanz passed his peak long ago, and he should actually stop.
Three questions to keep thinking. Choose an answer – you will then get an explanation and a prompt for self-reflection.
Who would you like to talk to about this thought?
Thank you. Every answer fits – take it with you into your day. Would you like to share something yourself?
