Be Vigilant!

On his „Rüm Hart“ tour in 2002, Reinhard Mey gave a nearly three-minute speech that preceded his song „Sei wachsam“. In it Mey describes how important it is to grant oneself a little rest now and then and to take things a bit more calmly, to step out of the hamster wheel for a brief moment, to turn one’s gaze to what is, quote: truly important, to the heart of all things, to the short time we have on this blue planet. But the hanging out and cooling down is over in an instant as soon as the word „children“ comes up. For it is they whom they want to dispose of, with their deployment plans that already lie in the drawers of the ministries. Whom they, quote:

want to and will push back and forth like little plastic playing pieces on a ‚Mensch ärger Dich nicht’-board, and, depending on the move and the state of play, are also prepared to sacrifice. But they are precisely not little plastic figures, red, green, yellow or black; they are our children, with whom they want to play their games.

Those 500,000 dead children in Iraq, for example, who according to the then US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright were worth dying for. At the end of his speech Mey sums up that he has no other choice than to fight for it already today, to be ready to stand up for it and to be watchful.

His speech inspired me then, as it does now, so much that in February 2018 I gave it unannounced at our song evening „Große Lieder, echte Gefühle“ at the Theater Oberhausen. The reaction to it back then was such that the theater’s director reprimanded me afterwards backstage and threatened that if I ever did such a thing again, I would be out of the song evening.

The Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (WAZ) then wrote in its review: The theatergoers, by contrast, reacted to Burak Hoffmann with mild annoyance. „When will he finally stop?“, murmured through the rows. His time-consuming introduction to „Weck mich auf“ by Sammy Deluxe for a better world was apparently not what people wanted to hear that evening.

But what was it, then, that they wanted to hear, if they couldn’t even endure the three minutes – time-consuming introduction? – for a better world? What about these three minutes was unbearable amid 90 well-fed minutes of entertainment, glamour and glitter?

They cry out for the crucifix, for custom and for good morals.
Yet their messages are nothing but ass and tits,
Brutalization, dumbing-down, violence are the commandments.
Their gods are circulation and ratings.

The best proof of this is the fact that billions are spent on propaganda in order to convince people of the opposite for a brief, expedient moment. And because lies are not sustainable, the propaganda has to be recharged and reinvented again and again.

The only thing one can counter this propaganda with is to be constantly watchful, for the means they use are the same. In 2003 Angela Merkel campaigned in the “Washington Post under the title Schroeder Doesn’t Speak for All Germans for closer cooperation with the USA. The danger from Iraq, said Merkel, was not fictitious, but real. Europe, in the closest cooperation with the USA, must take responsibility again and keep up the international pressure on Saddam Hussein.

Real were the fears, but fictitious the alleged weapons of mass destruction with which these fears were stoked. Real too were the many thousands of dead who had to die for their war, based on a lie. Equally real are our friends, relatives and acquaintances, who then may perhaps no longer exist if we let ourselves be dragged into another war. People we love and who mean nothing to them. For in the end it will not be they who share their grief. Once again, they will have known nothing of it all.

When people were called into the „war against the virus“ and urged to get vaccinated, the real victims afterwards meant nothing to them either. Today the caring state, so concerned about its citizens' well-being, wants to know nothing more about the thousands harmed by vaccination, who under the mafia-like threat of psychological and physical violence let themselves be vaccinated, in part against their will.

Precisely in these times it is more important than ever to form alliances, to fight, to stand up for justice and peace, and to be watchful. Mey’s song shakes the listener to the core and reminds us that we are all human beings and that we can stand up for peace. That we are not powerless spectators shunted onto a siding. So be watchful when, on 18 February 2023 – to the very day 80 years after Goebbels’ Sportpalast speech, in which he demanded total victory – DIE ZEIT runs the headline I wish for total victory.

That same ZEIT which, already at the height of the Corona propaganda in November 2021, ran the headline Society must divide. Strack-Zimmermann, who as early as 2019 drew attention to herself with bizarre statements about the Volkssturm and the Russian who had better watch out, recently told the RND that the Bundeswehr needed an enemy image, namely the Russian. All of this is nothing but shabby war propaganda. Strack-Zimmermann will profit from many people dying; that is her business. So be watchful!

When they call for contempt of humankind, we answer them with love of humankind. And offer it to them too. And say:

I long for people who do not deceive me,
Who don’t lie their heads off at me with every ceremonial speech,
And spare me the falsely honest ones.
The falsely honest, the truly dangerous!
I long for a piece of truthfulness,
For a bit of backbone in this crooked time

One of the best tools for this is music. And that’s the beauty of music, as it says in Frank Darabont’s 1994 film drama „Die Verurteilten“, they can’t take it away from you; you need music so as not to forget, not to forget that there are still places in the world that are not made of stone, that there is something inside you that they can’t get at, that belongs to you alone” In this spirit: