Thursday, December 1, 2022

What Happened To (Once) Mighty Bundesmachine...

This is not a question. As famous Gary Lineker stated in 1990: "Football is a simple game. Twenty-two men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans always win." Not the case anymore. In 2018 in the World Cup in Russia tens of millions of Russian fans, including millions who love German football, were salivating in their eager anticipation of seeing 2014 World Champions performing a football equivalent of the 1942 Panzer division on the offensive, but instead... Germany lost to Mexico in the opener and then simply bowed out of the group stage to the astonishment of the fans the world over, including by showing a rather unimpressive game. 

Boy, enter World Cup 2022. In the group of death with Germany, Spain, Japan and Costa Rica, naturally, everyone expected Japan and Costa-Rica to be a fodder for mighty Germany and Spain, but Japanese had their own plans--first they beat Germany and today they dispatched Spain, topped the group and sent Germany packing, again!! Germany not getting into the play-off of the World Cup twice in a row is akin to Brazil winning World Championship in... ice- hockey. Yes, these are actually legendary Pele's words that Russia will win WC in football, when Brazil wins world championship in ice-hockey. Russians were a good sport and agreed with Pele wholeheartedly, but that is the scale of the event with Germany not getting in the play-offs like this twice. And the geopolitical symbolism here is inescapable. Recall this a few days ago?

When even Belgium's top player has to comment:

Belgium forward Eden Hazard has spoken out against Germany’s protest against FIFA which took place prior to their shock 2-1 World Cup defeat to Japan on Wednesday. Germany’s players, the German FA (DFB) later explained, took it upon themselves to express their dissatisfaction at the FIFA mandate which stated that any players who wore anti-discrimination ‘One Love’ armbands during World Cup matches were liable for sanctions, including immediate yellow cards. FIFA’s stance is that it believes politics and sport should be kept separate, though world football’s governing body did institute its own ‘No Discrimination’ campaign and provided players with the option of wearing armbands featuring various messages supporting human rights which had been approved by football chiefs. The ‘One Love’ armband is designed to highlight instances of human rights abuses and discrimination in the Gulf state in which homosexuality remains illegal.

Looks like "Go woke, go broke" principle applies here extremely well. This time to football. But it is symbolic across the board when one looks at Germany today. The country is being de-industrialized and culturally obliterated with incredible speed, yet, it seems that Germany is afflicted with mass psychosis--I mean that--and doesn't want to see what is going on. Well, while Bundestag is too busy with condemning Russia, one cannot deny a complete surrealism of the situation. But it is real, and in the manner once mighty Bundesmachine fails to qualify for the best 16, the same could be easily stated about Germany as a whole and this symbolism is, well... very symbolic.  

Germany will speed up the procurement of US-made F-35 fighter jets to maintain its capability to deploy nuclear weapons as part of NATO’s shared deterrence, Chancellor Olaf Scholz has said. Russia perceives the global expansion of the US-led military bloc’s reach as a major threat. Berlin needs to be able to deploy nuclear weapons as long as Russia has a nuclear arsenal, the German leader said on Wednesday at a Security Conference in Berlin. Anything short of that “would mean making us vulnerable to blackmail”, he added. Scholz was referring to Western claims that Moscow was threatening to use nuclear weapons to gain the upper hand in the Ukraine conflict. Russian officials have rejected that narrative, saying its warnings were simply a reiteration of the country’s nuclear posture. Russia’s position is that “any military confrontation between nuclear nations, even a conventional one, must be avoided” due to risks of escalation, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Wednesday during a strategic security event in Moscow.

Somebody tell this imbecile Scholz that Germany is not a nuclear armed state and never will be, plus, in real, God forbids, war those F-35s will not be able to take off by the time, in case of nuclear exchange, the first salvo of land and sea based nuclear tipped Zircons will reach Berlin. It takes about 3 minutes. Somebody, show Bundestag and German government what happens when you go woke--you fail to qualify. It is one thing to fail to qualify in football World Cup, the real World Cup in geopolitics is a much more serious affair and Germany is not even in the contention there.

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