Welcome 2022! New Year’s Eve show at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.
Image: dpa
Ironically, the rescuers and protectors of normalcy – police officers, firefighters, paramedics, politicians – have become the target of hatred and violence. There is much speculation about the causes of this perversion. But actually there is perplexity.
E.t is an easy exercise to interpret the past year as an attack on freedom and liberalism. There are many starting points for this, unfortunately, you have to add, like every other year. However, this year was the second year of the pandemic, in which it turned out that the freedom restrictions of the first Corona year had not helped much. The reason for this was the malice of the virus, but also the blunt sword of the antidote, the mass vaccination. It remained dull because not enough citizens could be immunized. Now there is a measure in the room that supposedly overshadows everything that the state has countered the virus and has so far demanded of its citizens: the general compulsory vaccination.
Does that mean the state is crossing a border? Will authority thinking, statism and collectivism prevail once again? Is the age of exaggerated individualism, egomania, “neoliberalism” turning into its opposite? Opponents of compulsory vaccination, also the opponents of vaccination per se, see it that way. You can refer to one of the strongest roots of Western democracy, the aversion to the superiority of the state. That is what makes it so difficult to contradict them, despite all the appeal to reason, morality and public spirit.