Pepper Spray’s Scarce These Days

As you all well know, Germans don’t do guns (unlike uncivilized American types). They are a peace-loving, law-abiding Volk.

Pepper Spray

But hot diggity damn do they ever love buying pepper spray! Some would say da liegt der Hase im Pfeffer (the rabbit’s in the pepper) = And that is crux of the matter.

A spate of hundreds of sex assaults allegedly committed mostly by North African men on New Year’s Eve in Cologne has sparked an “explosion in sales” of pepper spray and non-lethal guns, German officials and an industry chief said.

Authorities are investigating more than 670 criminal complaints — almost 350 of them sexual offenses — after hundreds of women were groped and robbed by groups of men outside the main railway station in the western city.

“Die Verkäufe von Pfefferspay sind seit Sommer 2015 angestiegen. Momentan verkaufe ich an einem halben Tag so viele wie sonst in zwei Monaten, 30 bis 50 Stück können da schon mal über den Tresen gehen.”

German Of The Day: Realitätsverweigerung

That means denying reality.

Invasion

It is very popular in Germany at the moment due to the refugee invasion currently taking place, part of the denial process here being that this invasion isn’t even being referred to as one. They call it the refugee question or situation or policy or crisis instead (crisis is clearly leading at the moment).

It has a long tradition. If German reality deniers don’t like the facts, the facts – or at least the ways they view them – just get twisted around (or we are informed by them that “there are no facts at all”). And that’s a fact. Happens all the time. Everything is relative, you see. See moral relativism.

Latest example: The vast majority of perpetrators committing those infamous New Year’s Eve sex attacks were newly-arrived “migrants” from Morocco and Algeria, for instance. Rather than addressing this very real problem, German reality deniers prefer organizing protest rallies against racism instead. Needless to say, these are always well-covered by the media.

This kind of predictable, incoherent reaction makes me feel sometimes like I’m Donald Sutherland’s character in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Have the minds of these people been replaced while they sleep by copies of themselves having some weird, extraterrestrial and, in this case, irrational intelligence? Why are there so many of them acting this way? Is their number increasing? Are the body snatchers going to get me next? I’m going to lay off the sleep for a few months now just to play it safe.

Auch wenn jetzt alle davon reden, man dürfe nichts “unter den Teppich kehren”. Der so hochmoralische wie unehrliche Umgang mit der Flüchtlingsfrage droht uns um die Ohren zu fliegen.

Finally, A German Non-Word Of The Year For The Rest Of Us

Please, someone please have this 2015 winner introduced into the English language ASAP, please (did I say please?): Gutmensch.

Gutmensch

A Gutmensch is a do-gooder or a starry-eyed idealist. Or the term can also be seen as a blanket reproach for being “naive, dumb and worldly innocent, or being someone suffering from helper syndrome or moral imperialism.”

Or if you want a more concrete example of what this kind of non-word ailment can lead to, take a look at what’s going in in Germany right now. That’s right. The Gutmenschen are behind all of this.

Wer Gutmensch sagt, verdient sich seinen Shitstorm.

The Recklinghausen Connection

No, not staring Gene Hackman. This thriller stars an asylum-seeker French police killed as he tried to storm a Paris police station last week.

Paris

This guy was registered at a German asylum center in the city of Recklinghausen, had a phone with a German SIM card and carried a paper on him in which he pledged allegiance to the leader of the Islamic State. He had also been registered under four different names in Germany.

I don’t think that’s fair. That a poor refugee gets welcomed to Germany four times like that, I mean. Then there are fewer welcomes left to go around for the next wave of folks that comes in. And the next, and the next…

Der Mann posierte in seiner nordrhein-westfälischen Flüchtlingsunterkunft mit einer IS-Fahne. Die Landesbehörden stuften ihn demnach als Verdachtsfall ein, doch im Dezember 2015 verschwand er spurlos aus Recklinghausen.

PS: There’s this German turn of speech I really like: Ich glaub ich bin im schlechten Film. That means I think I’m in a bad movie. I’ve been hearing it more and more these days, too, for some reason.

German Of The Day: Wutbürger

That means outraged citizens. And although they’ve always been around (Germans are always empört/outraged about something), Angela Merkel’s ongoing open-arms refugee policy seems to be generating more and more of them all the time.

Wutbürger

And whoopee! 2016 just happens to be a big regional election year. Unless things start to change real fast (ha, ha, ha), I wonder who’s going to be getting all these votes? Not.

Originally founded as a eurosceptic movement a few years ago, the party Alternative for Germany (AfD) came close to its demise – until it split in two. Now, it has experienced a surge in public opinion. Euroscepticism is barely mentioned any more; the new party is acting as an anti-refugee party. If elections were to take place today, the AfD would probably enter parliament with a double-digit election result.

Lyrics Aren’t Everything

Especially when you don’t have any.

PEGIDA

A wordless song released by the anti-Islam group PEGIDA has knocked Adele off the top off the top of Amazon’s German downloads chart.

The song, Gemeinsam sind wir stark! or Together We Are Strong!, is being sold to raise funds for the protest movement, short for Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident.

“Unfortunately, the product does not work,” Party-Idiot Patriot wrote. “I have repeatedly listened to the song with friends, but we are neither stronger nor more German.”

German Of The Day: Heulsuse

A “howling Susie” is a crybaby here. You know, like that Palestinian refugee girl who just got granted a three-year residence permit for herself and her family for being one?

Cry

In a related story, hundreds of thousands of refugees all across Germany have suddenly broken out in a spontaneous public fit of sobbing, bawling and bewailing, the likes of which have never ever been seen or heard before in this country (Germans prefer to spontaneously moan, gripe, grumble and lament loudly in public).

Bei einer Veranstaltung mit Kanzlerin Angela Merkel (61, CDU) im Juli brach sie vor laufender Kamera in Tränen aus: Merkel hatte ihr erklärt, dass Deutschland Flüchtlinge zurückschicken müsse, wenn sie keinen Anspruch auf Bleiben hätten. Auch Reems Fall werde ganz normal geprüft und könne so enden.

German Word Of The Day About The German Word Of The Year: Abschätzig

That means pejorative. Disparaging?

Word of the Year

And the German word of the year? Like duh. Flüchtlinge. That means refugees.

But the German Society for the German Language warns us right off the bat that when we use this year’s winner we should do so very carefully because it is “tendentially pejorative” and that would be grammatically if not to say politically incorrect.

Wrestling with these German words is hard as hell sometimes, ain’t it? So I guess sometimes it’s best not to wrestle with them at all.

“GroKo”, “Rettungsroutine”, “Stresstest”, “Wutbürger”. In den vergangenen Jahren wurden Wörter zum Wort des Jahres gewählt, die nicht im Duden stehen. Wörter mit einer inneren Spannung, mit Originalität. Und mit einem Hauch von paradoxem Witz. 2015 ist das anders.

German Of The Day: Datenschutz

That means data privacy and Germans are notoriously big on that, as you well know.

Tornado

Take Germany’s planned reconnaissance flights over Syria and Iraq, for instance. Germans are so concerned about data privacy that they are already planning not to share the intelligence they might gather there with their allies. Sicher ist sicher (better safe than sorry).

The aircraft are expected to operate from Incirlik airbase in southern Turkey, and as Nato allies, the two countries would normally expect to share intelligence. But German commanders are concerned Turkey may use surveillance information from the flights to direct attacks against Kurdish forces allied to the West.

Deutscher Anti-IS-Einsatz: Berlin will Aufklärungsdaten für Türkei zensieren

German Of The Day: Massenschlägerei

That means a mass brawl or free-for-all. Like the ones that took place between refugees in Berlin (and elsewhere) last weekend.

Schlägerei

So here’s the first predictable reaction in the German media: What have we (the Germans) done wrong to have caused this?

It must get tiring always having to be in the wrong, don’t you think? My own personal theory here is that these refugees just aren’t that much into other refugees anymore.

Meanwhile… When not beating each other up in refugee centers, it appears that these folks are being singled out for recruitment by radical Islamists. Jeepers. Who would have thought that?

“You can’t put Afghans, Syrians and Eritreans in the same place because they hate each other.”