Sometimes the Ship Has to Sink for the Rats to Desert

^[1]1,181 words

There is no lord so high in the land,
that he does not live by farmer’s hand.
— German farmers’ wisdom

The second week of January 2024 is seeing nationwide protests by farmers, truckers, and trade- and craftsmen, as well as ordinary citizens in Germany. It started out as a protest against the government’s plan to scrap diesel and vehicle tax breaks for farmers, but that was only the tip of the iceberg. Whether that plan was drawn up because of the 17-billion-euro deficit in the 2024 national budget or because of Germany’s “green” goals, or both, is anybody’s guess. It doesn’t matter, I suppose, since both come down to the same thing.

“German Farmers Revolt,” ^[2] proclaimed a slightly overdramatic headline on YouTube. In fact, there has been no revolt whatsoever. People have been behaving in an orderly manner and complying with the police’s instructions. Many policemen, by the way, are sympathetic to the protests. Nobody has tried to burn down cities, and nobody has incited anyone to storm the Bundestag. I therefore felt that the excitement the demonstrations elicited on social media was a bit overblown, and I didn’t even plan on writing about them. But after watching videos by two of my favorite ^[3] Bavarian ^[4] YouTubers who had attended the protest in Traunstein, I reconsidered. The protests might not achieve much; I don’t expect them to. But they are part of a larger trend, and it will be interesting to see how it plays out.

I woke early on Monday the 8th, the day of the “big protest,” to the sound of what I thought was the snow plow going by on the main street. Since I had the luxury of being on holiday, it took me quite a while to finally leave my warm bed and check out why the darn snowplow seemed to be taking forever to get the job done. In fact the snow had already been cleared away, but what was in fact going by was a long line of local farmers on their tractors on their way to either Hanover or Hildesheim, the two largest cities in the region. That was quite a sight, and had I not been dependent on public transport, which was on strike that day in solidarity with the farmers, I might have joined the demonstrations.

Again, the excitement online seems disproportionate to the effect the protests have had so far. The only thing that really got a reaction from our politicians happened a few days before, when Minister for Economic Affairs Robert Habeck fled from protesters who had blocked the ferry he was about to leave. (Politicians were indignant, of course, and now blame the incident on “far Right extremists.” A police investigation is ongoing.)

The farmers’ protests are part of a larger movement that we are seeing all over the West nowadays. A certain optimism can be felt in everything from conservative to far Right circles. The more “the system” pushes, the more resistance it meets. It’s certainly not sweeping the nations yet, but still, people have had enough and they are beginning to see that they are neither alone in their opinions, nor are they powerless. It’s a start, especially in Germany. Unlike the French, we Germans are not revolutionaries. We like peace and order. It might be a cliché, but clichés do not come into being without a reason, and this one is definitely true. In all my life, I can remember only two meaningful large-scale demonstrations in Germany: the protests that ultimately resulted in the fall of the Iron Curtain (yes, I’m aware there was more to it than that), and the protests against the Iraq War. So for the German people — including even some people from neighboring countries — to come together like they did and stand with the farmers, that alone was incredibly uplifting to see.

People are unhappy with the ruling coalition and with the direction things have taken since Angela Merkel stepped down. They are tired of their taxpayer money being given away to all the world. (Cycle tracks in Peru, anyone?) They are tired of the working people being worse off than those who are unwilling to work. They are tired of their benefits getting cut while masses of immigrants receive free housing and pocket money, and then as a thank you commit 75% of all the crime in Germany. They are tired of so many things: ever-increasing mandatory fees for the state-sponsored media, 137,000 euros per year for Minister for Foreign Affairs Annalena Baerbock’s makeup artist (prompting the predictable joke about how horrible she might look underneath all that expensive makeup), financing foreign wars, “climate-friendly” laws and taxes, energy costs rising with no end in sight, deindustrialization, a tanking economy, and on, and on, all ultimately coming down to one thing: The government cares neither for its people nor its country. “We are no longer allowing ourselves to be shoved into the Right-wing corner, as has been the custom since COVID,” said one speaker at the Traunstein demonstration to loud applause. It’s a spirit reminiscent of “Wir sind das Volk”: “We are the people,” the battle cry of East Germany’s citizens in 1989.

Not that I see anything wrong with being Right wing, obviously. But what the speaker was referring to is the popular tactic employed by politicians and the mainstream media of discrediting anyone who criticizes the way things are going down in Germany as far Right.

That is in fact still a problem, as YouTuber Vanessa Blank found out on her way to Traunstein. Nobody wanted to talk on camera, she reported. They were fine with explaining their reasons for taking part in the protests to her, but they feared negative consequences at their workplace if they went public with their opinions. In an age when an employer fires an employee for fear of bad publicity (from the organized Left, for the most part), it’s a reasonable concern.

Commentators from all over the world have remarked on the similarities between the demonstrations in Germany and those in Canada and the Netherlands in recent years, given both the shared reasons for the protests and the narrative that’s being spun by the establishment about them. One video that puts it all together very well in just 12 minutes is on the YouTube channel Clyde Do Something ^[7].

German Farmers Take to the Streets – Gov’t Uses Tired Old Narrative

In the meantime, the self-declared fact checkers are already hard at work. “Dramatic posters at farmers’ protests: But how much of a threat do consumers really face?” writes Marie Illner on GMX ^[8], referring to the warning that slashing the tax breaks would result in even higher prices for food. She concludes that maybe, perhaps, prices might go up less than 1% — and farmers are known to be greedy whiners, anyway. It’s reminiscent of an earlier campaign that tried to convince people that inflation was much lower than they thought. Don’t trust your own eyes, trust us.

There was one poster I saw at the protests in Bavaria that put it best: “Sometimes the ship has to sink for the rats to desert.”