Woke, Voke and Cancelling the Muppets
German politics is, at its core, incredibly boring. This isn’t an insult by any means, coming from Britain it’s high praise. The stilted speeches, the badly fitting suits, the seriousness that borders on morose and the almost DIY nature of German politics is the anathema of everything I’ve seen back in Britain. One of my favourite aspects of German politics is the scandals; in Britain, the government dishes out millions in government contracts to their friends and donors, in Germany a politician could be sacked for plagiarising a PHD from decades ago. That’s the kind of scandal all countries should be wishing for. When I tell non-Germans, especially British friends, about the PHD scandals of the Bundestag they look at me incredulously and ask, “German politicians have PHDs!?”.
Even when things heat up, it still manages to remain at best tepid. Take the last Bundestagswahl (General election) in 2017. The story of the night was the surge in support for the right-wing Alternative Für Deutschland. It might be easy to forget those heady days, the world was still getting used to Donald Trump’s White House and his rule by Twitter approach to governance (or non-governance as it would turn out) and Britain was out cold on its feet after a year of Brexit dominated headlines. The storm wasn’t so much coming, it had arrived. The election of the AfD to the Bundestag felt like the moment Germany turned towards Trump and Brexit. The headlines were dominated by breathless reporting on what this all meant for Germany. What we perhaps failed to see in 2017, but now know, is that the political shifts happening in America and Britain weren’t going to play out in the same manner here.
Photo by Alana Harris on Unsplash
As it turned out, the AfD getting into the Bundestag was the point where the wheels started to come off. The farcical press conference the day after the election, where former party chair Frauke Petry theatrically walked out on her colleagues at the dais was just the beginning. The AfD have lurched from scandal to scandal, with occasional verbal pummeling during Bundestag debates. They are far from a spent force, but they don’t seem to have had the success that their cousins UKIP achieved in the UK or Trump in the US. It turns out that the it’s far harder for right-wing parties in Germany to succeed without a single charismatic leader such as a Donald Trump, Nigel Farage or Boris Johnson, for obvious reasons. Instead the leadership is a constantly competing set of egos, like the Hydra except each head secretly hates the other and dreams of being the only one in control.
One of the failures of the AfD, and ultimate successes of UKIP and Trump, was to pull traditional centre-right parties to their side of the fence. Despite some small success, the attempts to outflank Angela Merkel’s Christlich Demokratische Union didn’t really work, mainly because the only people who like AfD ideas in the Bundestag are the AfD politicians. Looking at speeches over the last four years the contempt for these newcomers can be heard dripping from every syllable spoken against them. However, I don’t want to speak too soon. This will be my first election in Germany where I can actually vote, this might sound selfish, but this migrant would prefer it not to be tarnished by the gloating, gurning visage of some sweaty celebratory right-wing blowhard.
There is more than one way to shift the debate though. UKIP, after all, succeeded despite having only one MP elected. What has begun to concern me is the growing prevalence of imported ideas from both Britain and America that seem to be causing daily fissures in the German body politic. More and more I come across articles that are tagged with “cancel-culture” and “political correctness”, hand wringing screeds about “the left” or radical students shutting down debate, or comedians getting “cancelled”. Just this week I was reading an overwrought, pearl clutching article about Disney’s decision to put disclaimers in front of episodes of The Muppet Show on its streaming platform and how it was a disgrace to the legacy of Jim Henson. I would like to think Henson’s reaction would be something similar to mine, namely a shrugging disinterest. That Disney, a global money-making juggernaut, should feel the need to put disclaimers in front of a show that originally aired in the 80s is not the global onslaught of Cultural Marxism or woke culture that some would like us to believe. This might come as a surprise, but Disney like making their fans happy, happy fans spend money and if there is one truth in this world it’s that global corporations love profit above all else, even wokeness.
ErikaWittlieb
The problem, as I see it, is that the arguments about “cancel-culture” or “wokeness” are simply ways of distracting from the debate for real change. After all, “Woke” is a term emanating from the black community in the US and the Black Lives Matter protests, the fact that is has been appropriated and frequently misappropriated gives an indication of how pernicious the opposition to “wokeness” really is. Now, woke is a multipurpose term in English speaking countries, for anything that is perceived to be “lefty” overreach. Disney putting up disclaimers is not the same as the fight against systemic racism and racially motivated violence. Yet, by drawing a connection between corporate overreach, edge cases and wokeness, opponents of any form of change can dismiss anything and everything as simply “woke”. Furthermore, criticism can be labelled as “cancel-culture” and dismissed just as readily. The reason this makes me angry is that I lived through Brexit, I saw what happens once a country furiously divides itself, so that no debate can be had. Discussions with people back in the UK would often descend into labeling any argument as disingenuous since I was a “Remainer” and any argument against Brexit was simply “Project Fear”. The articles I’m now reading in Germany concern me as the same strategy seems to be working here.
The current model for these articles, whether a shitstorm on Twitter or complaints about radical left-wing students, is to first educate the German audience on the important, mostly English terms, that are used in these discussions. The fact that journalists must first teach their readers a raft of new terminology before getting to the point makes me wonder who’s trying to indoctrinate who. The next step is to pull a handful of examples, edge cases at best, to illustrate their point. Of course, like the language itself these tales of wokeness unchained are not from Germany, but instead from the US, usually without much context or understanding of the differences between debates there and here. Viewed through this prism, the stories often sound far more alarming than the reality. Interestingly, “woke”, a term used as a stick to beat any non-orthodox opinion in the US, and especially now in the UK, is not so popular. Whether German journalists feel their readers aren’t ready for the term just yet is an open question, perhaps it’s the knowledge that Vs and Ws are pronounced differently in Germany and “Voke” just sounds rather daft. No matter, going by the narrowness of the debate at the moment, I can imagine we’ll start seeing it more and more as we head towards the election in the Autumn.
Of course, this brings me back to the point. The more well-meaning and not so well-meaning journalists in Germany write articles boosting the noise of this vapid debate over “cancelling” and “political correctness” the more they play into the hands of right-wingers. Being loudly anti-woke, whatever that term actually means, is a strategy employed by Trump and now being actively employed by an embattled Prime Minster and his cabinet of nonentities in the UK. It’s powerful as it avoids the actual debate on racism and inequality, and portrays it all as an overreaction As we head towards 26th September, I fear the noise will only increase, giving ammunition to those who wish to use the anti-woke strategy to make electoral gains. Perhaps it’s time the media actually engaged seriously with the discussions of those so often dismissed for “cancelling” and took time to listen, rather than browbeat with borrowed words and arguments.
Photo Credit:
ErikaWittlieb link
Photo by Sushil Nash on Unsplash
Photo by Bank Phrom on Unsplash
Photo by Alana Harris on Unsplash
