The Peace Free Spirit
A free spirit can never be won over to any war — with „Free Spirit“ the rapper Kollegah composed an ode to just such a spirit.
Kollegah’s single „Free Spirit“ and the album of the same name appeared at precisely the right moment. In the spring and summer of 2022 the Corona-fascism was slowly fading out, while the freshly stoked war-drunkenness kept climbing to ever higher levels. Behind us lay two years in which the free spirit of the people had been brutally mistreated; rules that were never allowed to be questioned, the redefinition of the word „Querdenker“ into a term of abuse, and the infantilisation of citizens into immature order-takers.
The rapper Kollegah — who during this period repeatedly let a condemnation of the Corona madness shine through — pushed back with his then-new album „Free Spirit“. The single of the same name released from it is a plea for the rediscovery of one’s own power to act and to create, for the reactivation of our sense of responsibility, and for the renewed cultivation of the human being as an ensouled creature. It depends on this state of mind in each individual — as Kollegah works out in this track — whether we as humanity continue to shed blood for foreign interests, or finally break the cycle of war.
The transhumanist and posthumanist ideologies deny the human being his ensouledness. All the deeper spheres of being human — his intuition, his creative power, his freedom of will — are said to be nothing more than the end product of a neurochemical process. Something like a soul is supposed not to exist. In this way the human being is degraded from a — if you like — divine being into a randomly thrown-together heap of biological cells, one that may be pushed around, modified and controlled at will.
In the first part (verse) Kollegah raps against this ideology:
Original
„Eine Welt ohne Glaube wird verkomm’n, denn wie stabil
Kann menschliche Moral sein, wenn es keine Konsequenzen gibt?
Sind wir wirklich nur ein Staubkorn im All?
Ein Zufallsprodukt aus Sternenstaub eines lautlosen Knalls?
Wie passt Big-Bang-Theorie zu dem Forschungsergebnis,
Dass aus Chaos nie von selbst Ordnung entsteht?
Ist uns auch letztlich klar
Wie viel subtilem Brainwash wir schon ausgesetzt war’n, seit wir auf die Welt kam’n?
Sollten wir uns nicht befreien von dem Schleier dieser Blindheit?“
Übersetzung
„A world without faith will fall to ruin, for how stable
Can human morality be if there are no consequences?
Are we really just a speck of dust in the cosmos?
A chance product of stardust from a soundless bang?
How does Big Bang theory fit the research finding
That order never arises by itself out of chaos?
Are we truly aware
How much subtle brainwashing we’ve been exposed to ever since we came into the world?
Should we not free ourselves from the veil of this blindness?“
Kollegah once again ascribes a free will to the human being — a curse and a blessing at once, since it holds within it the potential for good and for evil in equal measure. By writing off this will in people, they are robbed of the ability to take responsibility for themselves and for others. In the end stands the image of an immature creature that has to be ordered about by the commands of a variable authority — a body of experts, military commanders, or even an artificial intelligence. Building on this, in the second part Kollegah turns to the warlike doings of the world, to war propaganda and to the profiteers of war.
Original
„Macht hat, wer es versteht, die Massen zu leiten
Und Hass zum Keimen bringt, wenn Medien Kampagnen verbreiten
Doch wenn im Sommer wieder alle Mann am Ballermann feiern
Bewirft irgendwo ein Junge grad ’nen Panzer mit Steinen
Als die Soldaten kommen, um sein Land anzugreifen
Sein Haus ist zerbombt und seine Mama am weinen
In paar Jahren wird ein Racheplan keimen
Und er wird schließlich selbst zum Killer in Guerilla-Taktik-Kampftruppeinheiten
Wer ist schuld? Wo ist der Anfang des Kreises?
Wer begann, Grenzen in Landschaften zu schreiben, um zu spalten und teilen?
Bomben fallen, der Schall tönt von Weitem
Und im Hinterzimmer der Strippenzieher klirrt grad ihr Champagnerglas leise
Kein Hoffnungsschimmer mehr da
Doch muss es wirklich so bleiben, nur weil es angeblich schon immer so war?“
Übersetzung
„Power belongs to whoever knows how to steer the masses
And make hatred sprout when the media spread their campaigns
But when in summer everyone’s partying again at the Ballermann
Somewhere a boy is just then pelting a tank with stones
As the soldiers come to attack his land
His house is bombed to pieces and his mother in tears
In a few years a plan for revenge will sprout
And in the end he himself becomes a killer in guerrilla-tactic combat units
Who is to blame? Where is the beginning of the circle?
Who began to write borders into landscapes, to split and divide?
Bombs are falling, the sound rings out from afar
And in the back room of the puppet-masters their champagne glass softly clinks
No glimmer of hope left
But does it really have to stay this way, just because it supposedly always was?“
In the second part Kollegah poses the utterly decisive question of where the bloodshed of human history took its beginning. For this question implies an age in which humanity lived in peace. The question is not answered, but handed to the listener.
It is the question that should preoccupy us all: where, when and for what reason this rupture in human history took place, the rupture that led to conflicts from then on being fought out by war. Was it the emergence of patriarchy? Was it a traumatic event of global scale in the shape of an environmental catastrophe? Or does the cause lie somewhere else entirely? This question should preoccupy us, for in the answer lies the potential key to a future for humanity free of wars. That human beings have always struck one another down in wars is something Kollegah casts doubt on towards the end of the second part.
In parallel we see in the music video two soldiers exchanging fierce fire in a forest fogged with shell-smoke, yet in the end laying down their weapons, facing each other as human beings and, with a handshake, breaking that very cycle of war.
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