Merkel
With Obama: Internet ‘Disruptive’ Force that Has to Be ‘Contained, Managed, and
Steered’ by Government, by Oliver JJ Lane, 11/18/16
Speaking at a joint press conference with outgoing
American President Barack Obama on his farewell tour, German Chancellor Angela
Merkel made chilling remarks about her views on the need for government to
control the internet and slammed anti-Islamization protesters who she
accused of hijacking the German spirit for liberty.
German Chancellor Merkel, who is
presently deciding whether to run for a historic fourth term on the strength of
her pro-migrant policies which have seen her lauded with praise by President
Obama, moved to address populism in her joint address.
Calling the surge of interest in
right-wing politics a “wave” that “engulfs us,” Ms. Merkel noted the sentiment
“seems to come from the United States,” but in an oblique reference to
President-Elect Donald Trump said it was an issue she was dealing with in
Europe, too. She said:
“Look at the European parliament. There
are a lot of people who are looking for simplistic solutions and are preaching
simplistic solutions which are very unfriendly policies. We have them here in
Europe, too, we have them in Germany too.”
Apparently blaming this rising populism
— politics that are popular with voters — on the internet, the German
chancellor implied the internet would have to be subject to restrictive
censorship laws as were enacted by many European nations to stem the disruptive
effect of the printing press. She said:
“Digitisation is a disruptive
technological force that brings about deep-seated change and transformation in
society. Look at the history of the printing press, when this was invented what
kind of consequences it had. Or industrialization, what consequences that had.
“Very often, it led to
enormous transformational processes within individual societies and it took a
while until societies learned to find the right kinds of policies to contain
this, to manage and steer this. We live in a period of profound
transformation.”
The chancellor also took
time to speak out against the populists within her own country, blaming the
exporting of manufacturing jobs abroad for discontent about mass migration.
Picking up on the slogan for anti-mass migration and counter-Islamisation movement
PEGIDA ‘Wir Sind Das Volk’ ‘We Are The
People’ the chancellor said:
“The most important and
noble task of politicians these days is to see that each and every person can
find his place. But those who purportedly belong to certain groups say ‘we are
the people, and not others’.”
The saying has been
inherited by PEGIDA from the counter-Communist rule movements in East Germany
in the 1980’s. Merkel, a former member of an East German Communist group, said
those words as a protest against overbearing government power and had brought
joy to her then but not today. She said:
“At the time when we had
[this saying] in the GDR [East Germany] when the people stood in the streets
and said ‘we are the people’ it filled me with great joy, but the fact these
people have hijacked it does not fill me with joy.”
Ms. Merkel’s comments on
web censorship may be welcomed by many in the traditional mainstream media,
whose grip on news narratives has been weakened by digital news services like
Breitbart.
This week
Germany’s Zeit newspaper published a piece calling for
controls to prevent “a German Donald Trump”, while Britain’s Independent former
newspaper website published a list of “fake” news sites which they claimed
may have “swayed votes towards Donald Trump”. One of those listed was Breitbart
News.
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