Na, also happy that Veganuary will soon be over and that you can indulge in your desire for meat again without any inhibitions, even if only for a few days or weeks, because Lent or Ramadan is about to begin? The Muslims also have it better in this respect because they can at least eat to their heart's content at night and they don't feel like eating a pork knuckle anyway. As a good Catholic you were at least allowed to grill a beaver in the past, but you shouldn't even think about that anymore.
Nowadays you should confess to a lot, but you should give up everything possible so that you feel better and live a long life on earth. And at least at the beginning of the year you still go into these must-win battles against yourself with flying colors. But you probably also know the voice that seductively whispers to you like Mephistopheles: Come on, once is not once. And then: Now that you have sinned, you can still eat the other half bar/the second schnitzel. And now they are just smoke and mirrors, the bittersweet resolutions from the beginning of Veganuary.
Scholz is not prone to megalomania
It's not just good Protestants who are often plagued by a massive feeling of guilt afterwards, not to mention heartburn. Then he/she/it knows: Now is high time for self-criticism. But you don't know (anymore) how it works? Then just listen to the EKD these days. Or follow the example of our Chancellor, who, after a critical look in the merciless mirror of the polls, changed from Saul to Paul. He openly admitted to “Die Zeit” that it would be absurd to claim that he had no one as Chancellor contribution to the poor appearance of his government. Like the Pope, he, Scholz, also knows self-doubt. Although he is a tough fighter and not a coward, he is not prone to megalomania.
Well, we still lacked the conviction of Stalinist self-accusations. But when his Hamburg colleagues asked, just to be on the safe side, whether Scholzen's statements were “a form of self-criticism,” he said succinctly: yes. And who should know that better than the man about whom another Hamburg publication wrote that he was a know-it-all?
Looking forward to Merkel's memoirs
The time somehow seems to be ripe for self-critical confessions that we have so far waited in vain for. Now we're really excited about Merkel's memoirs. And of course we apologize for believing politicians to be unreasonable and sometimes portraying them that way. We maintain that one should not expect genuine conservatives such as Markus Söder to be particularly willing to check their own positions for errors and then consistently change them. But on the left things are completely different.
For example, look at where Winfried Kretschmann, once a Maoist, albeit a poorly informed one, stands today – to the right of his close friend Markus! Joseph Fischer calls for nuclear weapons for Europe. And Oskar Lafontaine has now joined the fifth party, if we haven't miscounted. Well, Gerhard Schröder, unlike Lafo, is still hanging out with the Socialists, but is already married for the fifth time, which is only possible if you admit a certain amount of failure every now and then.
Donald Trump doesn't doubt himself
But is self-criticism really as sexy as many people think? At least in politics, two phenomena speak a different language. One is called Trump. He hasn't doubted for a second that he's a scumbag. And his followers love him for it.
The AfD benefits from similar feelings here. The most their leadership regrets is that they initially distanced themselves from this purely private Potsdam conference to solve the migration question, even if only half-heartedly. Because the reports about this meeting and the demonstrations against it are giving the AfD considerable support. However, the party also refrains from requiring its members to eat a vegan diet for a month. Hitler wasn't a pure-blooded vegetarian either.
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