ON FACING THE TRUTH IN TIME
What you are about to see was broadcast on Southwest German Television just a few days ago.?It was filmed in the Covid Ward of the University of Freiburg Clinic in the Black Forest region of the German State of Baden-Wurttemberg. Even if you do not know German, you will be able to follow the general drift of the video.?You will first see a doctor on the ward who, like most of her colleagues, both doctors and nurses, has been pulling double shifts for weeks.?She explains that now, throughout Germany, every second COVID-19 patient on a ventilator dies.?She will introduce you to a patient named Klemens who has been on a ventilator for five weeks since being hospitalized for Covid.?Klemens is a man in his early fifties, married, well-adjusted at home and at work, who led a particularly healthy and vigorous lifestyle which included hiking and mountain-climbing.?At the beginning of the video, Klemens is now very different, in a coma and barely clinging to life.?The title of the broadcast is, “COVID-19: If the Soul Leaves the Body”:
As you saw, Klemens was lucky to be one of those who survived the ventilator, over six weeks in a coma, and at least the initial effects of COVID-19.?His doctor says that a major factor on his side was that he is a fighter and is used to setting goals for himself and achieving these.?Klemens says that he is shocked to have contracted COVID-19 because he did not belong to any of the at-risk groups.?Interviewed in physical therapy before his discharge from hospital, he looks more like an eighty-year old, having lost 15 kilos of body weight (over 33 lbs.), but he did survive and he is trying to resume a normal life with the help of his wife and daughter.?Time will tell what damage has been done to his internal organs, including especially the heart, lungs, kidneys and brain, prime targets of COVID-19.?
This film was broadcast as a public service and as information directed particularly at those who still doubt the destructive power of the COVID-19 virus on the human body, even on healthy persons, and it undoubtedly has had the desired effect on millions as Germany enters into a hard nation-wide lockdown to contain this virus which seems to be mutating into a more virulent form.??But another reaction has been unleashed as well, quite unintended.?Hundreds of Germans have come together, sans PPE and sans all common sense, demonstrating in Berlin, Stuttgart, and elsewhere, even outside their country in a so-called ‘silent march’ in the site of the Nazis' most massive concentration and annihilation camp, Auschwitz I & II in O?wi?cim, Poland, this past weekend.?Without PPE, but with plenty to drink, these protests demonize the German government as ‘the new Nazis’ and German Chancellor Angela Merkel as ‘the new Hitler.’?The irony of it all is that these demonstrations are being organized by the AfD, the ‘Alternative for Germany Party,' the Nazi Party (NSDAP) reconstituted like dried urine and reorganized under a cloak of legality. The AfD is gaining more and more seats in the state and national parliaments with every election, bit by bit, just as their fascist predecessors did in the 1930s. At some point, unless this trend changes, they will have enough seats in the Bundestag to form a coalition and to dictate German foreign and domestic policy. For the time being, the AfD has to resort to threats and violence to back up those threats ( https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/world/europe/germany-thuringia-afd.html |https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZ-hyT2XBjE | https://www.dw.com/en/violence-breaks-out-at-germanys-far-right-afd-party-conference/a-54908386 | https://www.dw.com/en/germany-far-right-afd-congress-prompts-anti-racism-protest/a-55757879 ).?Sound familiar??The German far right is using the pandemic to seize political power, but a vigilant German populace and government is not going to let them get away with it.
Unless it is just a simply a profoundly stupid mistake on the part of LinkedIn, a failure perhaps of 'AI' to be actually intelligent, there appears to have been another reaction to this chronicle of life and death on a Covid ward today. That reaction--if it is one and not just a case of what American G.I.'s called 'SNAFU'--has come not only on LinkedIn but from within this platform. LinkedIn member, Mathias Piecha was the first to post this SWR documemtary on LinkedIn in thanks for which he received not only a threat of torture and death from another member but also had his account suspended--TWICE!--within the past three days. Text missives with entreaties to LinkedIn's version of Oz the All-Powerful in Sunnyvale, CA, being to no avail, members of a rather large group of chums to which Piecha and yours truly belong, focused on one Sara Weber, who seems to relate to the German-speaking segment of our happy LinkedIn community. This at least resulted in reinstatement of Mr. Piecha's account with a slight apology but no particulars, twice. Of course, three's a charm, now isn't it? So, we shall see how long Mathias Piecha, apparently regarded as a menace to the LinkedIn community because of his courtesy, his wit and his guts in posting such a graphic story--which was good enough for German television, mind you--is allowed to roam the pages of posts hereabouts.
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Now, it is just the silly habit of human beings, like all the higher primates, and dogs for that matter, to try our best to figure things out. We see dots and we do try to connect them, though, of course, we don't always get it right. Take the example of the LinkedIn 'offing,' as it were, of journalist Christian Schoger, Editor-in-bloody-Chief of the SBZ newspaper in Munich! In his LinkedIn posts, Mr. Schoger provides one of the most broad and in-depth digests cum commentary on the news of the times, whether that be COVID-19, BREXIT, resurgent Anti-Semitism or the star of all our lives, Donald J. Trump. We all know that The Donald likes lots of attention, and Schoger has probably been giving him more than is good for him, but this has not been so popular with the Trumpoid crowd. Soooo, when Christian Schoger had his image and all of his great posts--including a very clever and elegant video in English for all of us monolingual Anglophones about the two-front war on the pandemic, namely, against the spikey little microbes and the idiots who deny that the microbes even exist--and when our intrepid journalist received a little note from LinkedIn to the effect that his content was just a bit too 'political,' well, what could one conclude? Our plucky chums' group kicked into high-texting gear, and all's well that ends well, as Shakespeare said, or all's well that end well for the time-being as they say in LinkedIn.
This post is, by the way, a sort of test to see whether we are all just being a bit paranoid, or whether there really is something to our little post-facto conspiracy theories about people in general and LinkedIn in particular. I am hoping to get at least one torture and death threat out of it, perhaps from one of those intelligent-looking fellows pictured above. And, as to the other possibility with LinkedIn, I say a preemptive A Dios and, to you who are not sick of hearing it, a Very Merry Christmas! I may, as they also say, be gone for quite some time.
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???Guy Christopher Carter 2020.