Was What Happened in Cologne a Pogrom?

The following essay by Henryk Broder on the confluence of the Groping Jihad in Cologne and the Gender/Culture Wars was first published in Die Welt. Many thanks to JLH for the translation:

Was What Happened in Cologne a Pogrom?

What links women-haters and Jew-haters becomes apparent in the attacks on New Year’s Eve and the debate afterwards.

by Henryk M. Broder

By now, everything has been said about New Year’s Eve in Cologne. Now we have to wait and see what police investigations yield, whether criminal procedures will follow and whether there will ultimately be verdicts. That could take a while. Enough time to ponder one striking feature which has thus far received no attention. How is it that the most absurd, coarsest and most misogynistic commentary is written by women, who express more understanding for the perpetrators than the victims?

Who arbitrarily interpreted, eagerly contextualized and radically relativized the happening at such length, that you have to ask: What’s all the excitement? Don’t these things happen everywhere all the time? What was so special about Cologne?

The Rape Culture, “which apparently characterized Cologne’s New Year’s Eve” — as could be read in the Berlin Tagesspiegel — was “also a part of German culture.” Since “by far the most sexual attacks and rapes are not committed by mobs in railroad stations, but by the victims’ own husbands and friends.”

Were the Women to Blame?

Even more remarkable than this logic — which could just as easily be applied to murder or manslaughter — is the fact that this article was written by two women. One of them specializes in reporting on the environment with emphasis on climate change and use of energy, the other on immigration, minorities, civil rights and gender politics.

Their cooperation led to a hypothesis which is by no means meant ironically: “Possibly there were women there who were not victims at all, but of the political persuasion that perpetrators with an immigration background or refugees who made use of the chaos on the cathedral square for sexual attacks, deserved to be deported. They may be hoping to accelerate that process with a criminal charge.”

So the men were not taking aim at the women, but the women at the men, in order to give the authorities a reason for deporting the alleged ‘perpetrators with an immigration background.” It was an open question whether the women were actually sexually molested, or the “attacks” had taken place to achieve this goal. In which case, the networking must have been optimal, otherwise a “concerted action” in 12 federal states would be inexplicable.

It Wasn’t Foreigners, It Was “A******s”

The Tagesspiegel article was possibly the crassest of its type, but not the only one by far. The word of a “rape culture” ran through the articles like a leitmotif, underlined by the notation that rape in marriage has only recently been declared a crime. It was also a popular claim that sexual attacks were the order of the day at Carnival and Oktoberfest. The ZDF (Second German Channel) moderator Dunja Hayali summarized all these insights in one sentence on her Facebook page: “It is not foreigners who molest women, but a******s” — which might be regarded as a variation on the general suspicion, this time directed at the hitherto blameless species of a******s.

As mentioned, all these articles in which self-denial was differentiated bore the signatures of women. Men who took a position on the night of horror distanced themselves unmistakably from the perpetrators. (The exception was Jakob Augstein, who fantasized about a flashmob.) A Green politician in Hamburg went so far as to say that every man is “a potential rapist, including me.”

And rounding out the picture is one more example of behavior that exceeds all boundaries of solicitude. Amelie Fried, a successful writer, TV moderator and, when necessary, also a feminist, wrote a short essay about how she and her family had organized a Christmas celebration for unaccompanied minor refugees years ago. There was gingerbread, fruit and sweets and they all sang “Silent Night” together. Anyway: “At the end of the party, our guitar was missing.”

Amelie Fried and Her Guitar

First, Mrs. Fried recalls, she was “disappointed” then “amused” and finally “ashamed.” How in Heaven’s could she assume that “the youngsters should be grateful to us”?

It was exactly the other way around. “We had reason to be grateful to them. In a single stroke, they had adjusted afresh those relationships of ours which had slipped out of kilter.” And “We were happy that the youngsters had kept the guitar. The lesson we had learned from that was easily worth more than the instrument.”

And that’s how things were today too. It must be humbling, “to take from us.” But we could “give these people back a bit of their dignity by expecting no gratitude.” And we can tell ourselves: “If we manage to integrate those people properly into our country, one day more will come back from them than we have ever given them.”

Even Mrs. Fried’s humanity is not free of cost-benefit analysis — The refugees as human capital to be invested in, so that the yield will be appropriate. Or we could just buy Greek government bonds. Is this all that Amelie Fried learned after “her guitar” had been kept by the youngsters?

Women and Jews

She is free to give away her iPad, her children’s iPods and her husband’s iPhone; to set up a soup kitchen in her living room; have as many benefit evenings as her calendar will allow. She should just please not claim she has learned some kind of lesson. Because, like many of her comrades-in-arms, she has to this day not grasped what happened in Cologne and other places on the the night from December 31st to January 1st.

It was a pogrom. It is only astonishing that no one yet has come to this idea, at a time when everyone, from vegetarians to “concentration camp chickens”[1], who feels unjustly treated competes for the title of “the Jews of today.”

As is suitable for a pogrom, there were perpetrators, victims and observers. The perpetrators were ruthless, the victims were helpless and the observers observed. It is irrelevant whether they were actual rapes or “only” sexual assaults according to penal code §177StGB. A person who has to run the gauntlet and, in the process, is grabbed, hassled, hit and mocked, is experiencing a rape. It is not necessary to be a historian or an expert in anti-Semitism to recognize parallels to the anti-Jewish pogroms from the time before the Holocaust.

Arms’ Length

Unlike Jews, women are not a minority. And no one is working on the “final solution to the woman question.” But hatred of Jews and hatred of women are close relatives. (Anyone who wants to find out more about that should read Gender and Character by Otto Weininger.)[2] An old cultural heritage which continues to have an effect despite all of the successes of emancipation and the efforts of equal-opportunity officers.

The fact that the perpetually wandering Jew has settled in Israel and that so many countries and institutions are run by women has changed nothing in either of these resentments. Both haters of women and haters of Jews feel challenged, provoked by the objects of their fury. There is no anti-Semite who would not blame “the Jew” for what he must do to him. There is no rapist of a woman who would not hold the woman responsible for what has happened to her.

There are yet more parallels. The chair of the Central Council of Jews, Josef Schuster, recently asked rhetorically “whether it is sensible in problematic areas of the city — in quarters with a high percentage of Muslims — to identify oneself as a Jew by wearing the kippa; or whether it is better to wear some other head-covering.” Cologne Mayor Henriette Reker advised women in her city to keep an “arm’s length” from strangers and “be together in groups and not let themselves be separated, even in when in a party mood.”

Women and the Stockholm Syndrome

Making yourself invisible so as not to attract attention is no better as a safety precaution than hiding in a group. The woman-hater, like the Jew-hater, can always find a reason to unleash his inner s.o.b. If it isn’t the appearance — kippa and side curls here, miniskirt and and bare-belly top here — then it’s the impudent demeanor and ultimately, after the entire chain of arguments, it is that the Jew is a Jew and the woman is a woman. That’s enough.

Finally, there remains the question of why it is difficult for some women of the educated classes to understand this connection — why they see the aggressor as someone they need to offer therapy to.

Is it the expression of suppressed motherliness? Or an act of preventive submission? In other words, the behavior of slaves — female slaves, i.e., a female-specific variation on the Stockholm Syndrome?

“We are… an immigration society,” proclaimed a (female) left-alternative commentator in German Radio, after the long Cologne night. With and among us now, “immigrants with an archaic, sexist conception of women” would be living. “They must be made accountable and not pushed away. That, you know, is the only way for us to be free of the fear of the foreigner — to make him an acquaintance.” If necessary, this can be accomplished at midnight, on the square in front of the train station.

Now we have to do it — to integrate these people into our country, so that one day we will get more back from them than we have given them. And if everything goes well, that may include a new guitar for Amelie Fried.

Notes:

1.   Consciously providing a touch of sardonic confirmation to his theme, Broder uses the nickname for battery-caged egg-laying chickens — KZ-Hühner = Concentration Camp Chickens
2.   To appreciate Broder’s inverted point here, you should know that Weininger was an Austrian Jewish philosopher who was both anti-Semitic and misogynistic.
 

Photos:

1.   Women protest against sexual violence in front of the Cologne cathedral on January 10th.
2.   Violence against women. Sexual attacks known in 12 federal sates.
3.   Cologne New Year’s Eve. First suspected perpetrators in custody.
4.   The writer Amelie Fried.
5.   Cologne’s Mayor Henriette Reker at her legendary press conference on January 5th in Cologne.
 

22 thoughts on “Was What Happened in Cologne a Pogrom?

  1. I am convinced that political correctness has reached PEAK STUPIDITY in Europe and throughout the Western world. It’s becoming clearer that it has little connection with the real world as articles like the above illustrate.
    While some of us saw through it early on, it is now becoming widely recognized as an irrelevance and a danger to sanity and society. I think we have reached tipping point and from now we should soon see it start to wither.
    The Great Grope of Cologne may go down in history as the turning point, time will tell.
    But we can look forward to the day when this ideology is no more, and has ceased to be, and it’s supporters are ex-parrots.

    • At the time I felt it in my bones that Cologne was a turning point – more so than actual terrorist attacks. People seem to be able to shrug off violent death because it’s hard to identify with its enormity. But molestation of women – well, that could be anyone’s sister, daughter or girlfriend. I think it’s that that makes the difference.

    • Oh no, it most certainly can get worse and has been worse in the past at least in certain limited environments. “political correctness” has been used to coerce women into sex.

      People think I am joking when I say “it is always possible to stay an arms length away” can turn into “just submit”. I certainly hope it doesn’t get that bad and this continues to seem like a joke, but it has been that bad before at least in some environments.

  2. When people are as indoctrinated as Amalie Fried, there appears to be no hope of reaching them. Their ideas are so out of synch with reality that they appear to be insane.

    It reminds me of the young man who was attacked (by a culture enricher) on the Paris subways but who (if I’m remembering this correctly) rationalized the attack as being justified or at least understandable because he, the young man, had such privilege and was part of the oppressive Western culture.

    So it’s not just women who react in this insane fashion.

    Perhaps characterizing this kind of attack as a pogrom will help break through the multi-culti PC intellectual stranglehold and wake some people up. One can hope. It’s worth a try.

  3. Why do people, women in particular, give any credence to what these self loathing individuals have to say? The LAW has been broken regardless of their skewed feminazi political agenda. There is no excuse for any migrants behaviour on NYE in Cologne or elsewhere for that matter. The majority needs to make its voice heard throughout Europe and not allow centre stage to the minority unchallenged just because it doesn’t want to appear politically incorrect. All men are NOT potential rapists or sexual abusers and it is ridiculous to say so. Since the open borders declaration by Merkel the crime rates in most EU countries has SOARED, a simple fact. Therefore it is not unreasonable to make a causal link between increased crime and unfettered migration accordingly.

    • That’s very true but we should not rule out a spontaneous increase in white European criminality.

      We ask too much when we expect foreigners to integrate into European countries they’ve chosen to travel to. A fortiori, Europeans who’ve lived under Western cultural oppression all their lives are always at the point of a massive psychological break. One can only take so much inauthenticity and spherical geometry.

      This could finally have taken place all over Germany. German men made contact with their inner Hun? Who knows? The idea of foreigners’ inner jihadi is a far-right construct, however.

      • That’s rather impartial Col. Bunny. The crime could have been committed by either an Inner-Hun or an Inner-Jihadi. But whom are the lady-victims identifying as the perpetrator?

        I agree, the “idea of foreigners’ inner jihadi is a far-right construct”. But should that stop one from asking the right question? Okay, lets not paint everyone a jihadi – that seems too implausible. But if groping is a criminal act and one commited by the citizen of the country, you have laws to punish him. If the crime was commited by a tourist, you have established laws to punish him. But, you have refugee seeking citizenship who commits a crime in the host nation, I would simply be stricter with his ilk and deport the accused.

        And I find the argument that “We ask too much when we expect foreigners to integrate into European countries they’ve chosen to travel to” untenable. Its equally difficult for the native to accept so many aliens and to share his limited resources with people who come from a place that is not exactly known for being friendly.

        The refugees chose the host nation for a reason. Security for their lives was the top-most priority. The native has opened his doors and security. The refugee has the obligation to integrate and embrace the land that saved his life. If he can’t integrate he has no respect or gratitude to the host, which I find extremely unacceptable.

  4. “It was a pogrom. It is only astonishing that no one yet has come to this idea, at a time when everyone, from vegetarians to “concentration camp chickens”

    Indeed, it is amazing how blind German intellectuals can be sometimes. I’d come to this conclusions on day 1 – the Cologne attack was an organised and planned ritual of humiliation and dehumanisation, like those old newsreel films of Jews being forced to clean streets with toothbrushes, while grinning SD men stand around watching.

    • And don’t forget it was done in the shadow of Cologne Cathedral, an icon of Old Europe – another layer of humiliation which implies ‘your culture is dead, you are impotent’.

      • I agree 100% ! It’s all about that Islamic ‘in your face’ supremacy. Intimidation as a weapon towards subjugation . It seems to be working ,it has been reported that fewer women are walking about town alone or in pairs, just larger groups. If the men do not come out and ‘take care of business’ the savages have won this round.

  5. So now the continent is known as “Eugrope”?
    OK, go ahead and moderate the comment. I had to get it out of my system. Thankfully that disgusting behaviour hasn’t arrived in SoCal, yet.

  6. The huge mistake of the leftists and apologists is to deny the heritability of behavior.

    They persist in constructing rationales for the groping behavior, from cultural shock to anger based on privilege. But, the underlying assumption is that the behavior is based on freedom of choice and will, and is thus subject to change through a rational process involving a finite amount of income equalization.

    The leftists never admit of the possibility that the behaviors shown are inherited, are not changeable through any process of education or persuasion, and that the mere presence of all the unfiltered immigrants will result in groping and rapes, regardless of the actions of the host society.

    The only way the genetically violent immigrants could ever be controlled was the process they encountered in their homeland: an extremely brutal dictator backed up by an extremely brutal police.

    One of the dogmas of the left is the extreme flexibility of human beings with respect to desired behaviors. The leftist utopia is reached not through manipulating situations, but by recreating people. The leftist who admits that immigrant rapists will rape regardless of how they are welcomed, is no longer a leftist.

    Another inherited, persistent character trait is general sociopathy, or complete unconcern with the welfare of any other people. There seems to be a consistent, very general tendency for Western countries such as the US, Canada, UK, and Germany to get sociopathic heads of state. The only persistent prediction that can be made is that they will not change their actions, regardless of how badly things deteriorate for their constituents. The countries involved will no more get rational policies with their present leaders than the countries will get civilized behavior with their present immigrants.

    • I don’t know how anyone would ever get to a nature vs nurture discussion when they won’t even admit that cultures might be significantly different. The only awareness of cultural difference you’ll get from most people is superficial and mostly meaningless stuff like art and cuisine.

      Beyond that there’s just total denial that what is considered criminal behavior in one culture might be considered perfectly acceptable in another. And further beyond that there is denial that such differences might not be “relative”, but might actually indicate problems in one culture that can be objectively measured in terms of human suffering.

  7. Odd, here in the states women like Lena Dunham are falling all over themselves in making false allegations of rape. While in Europe some cultural-Marxists are blaming the victims for their rape or abuse in order to get a cultural-enricher deported. So, does this mean some women want to get raped? In Sweden women are being advised to avoid scantily dress lest they “tempt” a cultural-enricher. Does that mean there is now an excuse for rape? I honestly think I need a therapist to help me understand all of this.

  8. As a feminist, I’m hugely disappointed by the response of my über – PC feminist sisters in Europe. Suggesting that mass organised sexual assaults a la Cologne were already happening in Europe or in any other Western nation before the arrival of migrants is absolutely ridiculous. Yes, sexual assaults on women are a problem and must be stopped. However, taharrush is a cultural import from the Middle East, and I believe its aim is to terrify European women into staying at home ‘where they belong,’ and to cover up as is suggested in the Koran, while simultaneously emasculating the local men – ‘you are weaklings who can’t even stop us from assaulting your women.’

    • As human we can’t be an absolute individuals. We must belong to some group. Calling yourself a feminist means you share views and policies of such group. Other groups will not relate to you according to your cherry picking attitude, but according to the dominant views of the group you belong to. So, “I am feminist, but…” will never work. You seems to be proud, to belong to the group, which is well known for its hypocrisy and all kinds of stupid and destructive ideas and actions. It is up to you. Just remember that for a real men, feminist is a failed woman.

  9. Isn’t anybody appalled by this silliness:

    “A Green politician in Hamburg went so far as to say that every man is “a potential rapist, including me.” ”

    I’m quite sure that my father and brothers are not rapists, even potentially. I couldn’t be bothered going on.

  10. I’m completely blown away….. these German thoughts are nothing more
    then mental illness…. I hope to god we can stop these people from reaching
    the States…..

    • “these German thoughts are nothing more then mental illness”

      Those whom the gods would destroy they first drive mad.

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