An inquiry into Fuggalu, or: How the guardians of German democracy aim to protect our democratic constitution by punishing those who argue that the pandemic response was anti-democratic
Something has gone very wrong with the way establishment politicians and journalists talk about “democracy”
“Democracy” and the various concepts associated with it have acquired a mysterious new semantic range that nobody will acknowledge or discuss. This problem has grown so obtrusive that whenever any politician or media personality begins to talk of “democracy” or “liberal values” or “human rights” or anything like that, my brain wilts, because whatever they are saying is at once so banal and hackneyed that it inspires profound cognitive exhaustion. As intended, this exhaustion also militates against the considerable challenge of trying to parse the import of what it is these advocates of “democracy” are saying and what they think “democracy” actually amounts to.
Consider this recent piece from the Süddeutsche Zeitung, on the “hard line” our political police have decided to take against civil servants it deems to be “Corona deniers.”
The Federal Administrative Court has issued a landmark decision, which in some circumstances puts Covid deniers on par with right-wing extremists. And this means that anyone who expresses such views can lose their position in the civil service. …
The court decision was issued back in June … The case in question concerns a former captain in the German Bundeswehr who had already retired but continued to draw a pension.
“I am ashamed of my country, which I served faithfully for over 30 years,” the man posted on Facebook in April 2020, alluding to political measures to contain the pandemic, such as bans on gatherings and social contact. “What are we letting them do to us? This is the true face of an emerging dictatorship.”
The Federal Administrative Court … has ruled that criticism in this vein constitutes a breach of the civil servant’s duty of loyalty to the constitution, and the state may sanction the ex-officer by reducing his pension …
The Federal Administrative Court clarifies that criticising the government or existing laws is also fundamentally legitimate for civil servants, “Because neither the state nor society has an interest in uncritical civil servants and soldiers.”
However, it crosses a boundary when one “not only criticises the state organs, but also defames their democratically elected representatives, denies them legitimacy, advocates their removal in unconstitutional proceedings or even calls for their violent overthrow.”
The ruling of the Federal Administrative Court is downstream from an earlier decision by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution to take action against those who denounced the Covid hygiene dictatorship as anti-democratic. Specifically, our guardians of democracy have decided that “disparaging democratically elected state representatives” for their anti-democratic actions amounts to “delegitimizing the state” and is therefore contrary to democracy. For this reason, their vigorous defense of democracy serves to undermine democracy and requires anti-democratic suppression at the hands of our unelected and largely unaccountable democratic guardians.
In earlier posts, I’ve suggested that our establishment have adopted a sinister outcome-oriented understanding of “democracy.” That is, they regard “democracy” to be whatever procedures are necessary to yield the political outcomes they desire. Ostensibly democratic processes that yield undesirable outcomes are therefore anti-democratic. While I still think this is essentially correct, I’ve not done full justice to the deep absurdity of this phenomenon, and I think there’s much more to say here.
For the rest of this piece, I invite you to take a small journey with me. We will pretend that we are extraterrestrial philologists from Pluto who have been sent to study what “democracy” actually means. To make this project easier, I have turned to one of the nonsense word generators that for some reason populate the internet and asked it to produce a list of fake words. On this list, I found the word frugal, which suits my purposes well, both because it has no relationship to any English word that I know, and also because it sounds ridiculous and faintly obscene.
In the ensuing investigation, we will review various statements about democracy, which I have selected to be representative and illuminating. Throughout, we will substitute all occurrences of the word “democracy” in these texts with “Fuggalu.” “Democratic” will become “Fuggalutic,” “democratically” will be “Fuggalutically,” and so on. I will also use “Fuggalu” to stand in for related terms whenever some core democratic concept seems to be indicated. Thus “human rights” will become “Fuggalus,” the “constitution” will become “the Fuggalutic Text,” and “elected representatives” will become “Fuggalutic Leaders.” Whenever our sources use other, more neutral terms in democratically loaded ways I will also substitute accordingly., but I will let references to voting and elections stand unmolested, because these are also procedures practised in non-democratic political systems, and they might help us understand the meaning of “Fuggalu.” Finally, references to anti-democratic ideologies, institutions, notions and tactics, including fascism, communism, and the like, will all be reduced to some appropriate form of “Afuggalu,” because these concepts are also central to the modern understanding of “democracy” and merely various ways of demarcating what “democracy” is not. I will bold all substitutions just to make them especially clear.
Our project, as disinterested Plutonian scholars, will be to derive some defensible definition of “Fuggalu” that fits how our sources actually use the word.
For this exercise to be effective, you must try to do two things:
1) Remember that fuggalu is pronounced with a short u. It is not foogaloo, but fuhgaloo. This is very important.
2) Resist the temptation to restore my doctored texts by trying to work out what lurks behind my verbal substitutions. Forget all about democracy and simply try, like a good philologist, to understand what “Fuggalu” could possibly mean given the context.
Ready? Excellent, let’s go.
We’ll first reread the key passages of our SZ article:
“I am ashamed of my country, which I served faithfully for over 30 years,” the man posted on Facebook … “What are we letting them do to us? This is the true face of an emerging Afuggalu.”
The Federal Administrative Court … has now ruled that criticism in this vein constitutes a breach of the civil servant’s duty of loyalty to the Fuggalutic Text …
The Federal Administrative Court clarifies that criticising the government or existing laws is also fundamentally Fuggalutic for civil servants, “Because neither the state nor society has an interest in uncritical civil servants and soldiers.”
However, it crosses a boundary when one “not only criticises state organs, but also defames their Fuggalutic Leaders, denies their Fuggaluticy, advocates their removal in Afuggalutic proceedings or even calls for their Afuggalutic overthrow.”
And here is the decision of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Fuggalutic Text that inspired the court ruling:
The Federal Office for the Protection of the Fuggalutic Text has … addressed itself to the phenomenon of the “Delegitimisation of the state relevant to the protection of the Fuggalutic Text.” Those who contribute to this phenomenon aim to shake confidence in the state and impair its ability to function. They attempt to achieve this, among other things, by:
-disparaging Fuggalutic Leaders,
-denying the Fuggaluticy of state institutions and their representatives,
-calling for court orders and decisions to be ignored,
-sabotaging state or public institutions (e.g. healthcare) by damaging property, or
-call for acts of resistance against the state order.
This behaviour is contrary to fundamental principles of the Fuggalutic Text such as Fuggalu and Fuggalutic Dictates.
I can hear your objections already. “eugyppius,” you are saying, “this is a stupid exercise. Your idiotic nonsense word substitutions have made these passages incomprehensible. What a dumb post.” I would counter that it was already very hard to understand what these statements mean, and that before my nonsense substitutions, you merely had the illusion of understanding them because they employed familiar words in very strange and novel ways. I have merely inserted strange and novel vocabulary wherever strange and novel semantics seemed to be in play, to bring the confusion closer to the surface.
One curious effect of this exercise is that it foregrounds a strong religious element in these pronouncements, which was previously obscured beneath tiresome political jargon. The Fuggalutic Text, whatever it is, seems to be a sacred thing. Attacks on this scripture can amount to the “delegitimization” of the state, so Fuggalu appears to be very closely related to political legitimacy. This is because state officials demand loyalty not to themselves but to the Fuggalu and to its incarnation in the Fuggalutic Text. While our texts thus far do not expand upon Fuggalu or define it, our official source is very eager to associate the concept with peace and order, while attaching Afuggalu to frightening things like sabotage and insurrection. Finally, state officials are very interested in denying Fuggalutic legitimacy to their critics. Those critics who denounce them for their own Afuggaluticy are themselves Afuggalutic because the targets of their criticism are Fuggalutic Leaders. Thus, while the state regards Fuggalu as a source of political legitimacy separate from itself, its actors seek to enforce a monopoly on Fuggalu and the proper interpretation of the Fuggalutic Text that vitiates the distinction.
This state monopoly on Fuggalu and its meaning, however, is still to some degree aspirational. Otherwise, nobody could ever conceive of accusing the state of Afuggalu in the first place. Our Bundeswehr captain was convinced that the repressive nature of pandemic measures was contrary to Fuggalu, suggesting that, for those outside the state at least, Fuggalu may have some relationship to personal freedom or autonomy. And indeed, when we look closer, we find that even many advocates of repressive hygiene policies believed that some measure of Afuggalu was necessary to stop Covid.
Neil Ferguson, for example, once famously spoke of his early despair that lockdowns would be impossible in the Europe because of Fuggalu:
“I think people’s sense of what is possible in terms of control changed quite dramatically between January and March,” Professor Ferguson says. When SAGE observed the “innovative intervention” out of China, of locking entire communities down and not permitting them to leave their homes, they initially presumed it would not be an available option in Western Fuggalu. “[China] is an Afuggalu, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought… and then Italy did it. And we realised we could.”
In February 2021, the German novelist Thomas Brussig wrote a controversial and widely discussed opinion piece suggesting that Fuggalu and virus containment were at odds, confirming our impressions that Fuggalu and personal liberty are intertwined, particularly in the minds of those outside the regime.
In response to the political unrest of 1968, Chancellor Willy Brandt famously said that it was time “to dare more Fuggalu,” but Brussig thought the pandemic was a moment to “dare more Afuggalu”:
The Covid crisis has been a disempowering experience, even as infections have fallen. Despite all the restrictions on daily life and the start of vaccination, there is no end in sight to the impositions … The experience of powerlessness caused by Covid is rooted in the fact that we have to overcome the pandemic crisis with the means of Fuggalu.
Just as Sigmund Freud identified the “three afflictions of mankind” … there are now the three afflictions of the Fuggalutically Inclined. Not even thirty years ago, the self-confidence of the Fuggalutically Inclined was at its peak. According to the popular thesis of the “end of history,” the market economy and Fuggalu had triumphed so convincingly that nothing stood in the way of their global spread.
This conviction was initially shaken by the Chinese economic miracle, which disproved the common thesis that Fuggalu and the market economy go together like mustard and sausage. The market economy in the Chinese Afuggalu shines with substantial growth, prosperity and technological excellence, whether in architecture, space travel or AI. The second grievance of the Fuggalutically Inclined is Trump and Brexit … which revealed the demagogic vulnerability of Fuggalu. … The third grievance for the Fuggalutically Inclined can be found in the Covid crisis, and it lies in the powerlessness of Fuggalu to deploy the tools of the successful pandemic fighter.
Here, Fuggalu emerges as a concept that is in principle good and perhaps associated with economic success, but subject to subversion by “demagogic” forces. These cause bad outcomes for the Fuggalutically Inclined. Chinese Afuggalu demonstrates that one can have economic success without Fuggalu, and also that Fuggalu is bad for stopping viruses, because in this area it suffers from “impotence”:
Is this “impotence of Fuggalu” an inherent flaw, or can the pandemic fighter also use his tools under Fuggalu? Well, the effective pandemic fighter must be at the cutting edge of research. The Fuggalutic pandemic fighter, on the other hand, has to win a Fuggaluticy... This is not the way of science. When Albert Einstein was confronted with a book entitled One Hundred Authors Against Einstein in the early days of the theory of relativity, he is held to have said: “If I were wrong, one would be enough.”
Finally, we have find some valuable clues about what Fuggalu might be. Not only is it vulnerable to demagoguery as in the cases of Trump and Brexit; it is also premised on “win[ning] a Fuggaluticy.” Whatever a Fuggaluticy is, it must be something like the one hundred authors who denounced Einstein’s theories – a large number of people who agree, perhaps some kind of consensus.
Fuggalutic Leaders conduct discourse in a way that is disconnected from science … There is a virus raging here that cannot be negotiated with, nor can it be persuaded or intimidated …
“Dare more Affugalu!” should be the order of the day. The fact that Covid deniers fear the advent of a “Covid Affugalu” should be all the more reason to want it … Once the virus has been eliminated …. we can return to our beloved Fuggalu. We need to take literally the fact that the pandemic has put us in a state of emergency. We can retain our Fuggalu in normal circumstances, with all associated Fuggalus.
In their understandable eagerness to create a bulwark against a repeat of the Nazi Afuggalu, the vaunted “fathers of the Fuggalutic Text” have presumably forgotten that the exercise of Fuggalus can pose a threat to the population as a whole during a pandemic. If the protection of life is not paramount, what else is? …
For the sake of its Fuggaluticy, Fuggalu should not attach so much importance to its rituals and formalities. Nothing would be more detrimental to Fuggalu than the suspicion that it exists only for its own sake, and not because it can solve today’s problems better than other forms of state and government. Covid has stirred up everyone; the virus has triggered a learning process and a willingness to rethink supposed certainties. It would be fatal if the lesson [we learn from this] is that Fuggalu doesn’t get it right.
Like many religions with its associated “rituals and formalities,” Fuggalu is sometimes at odds not only with pragmatic considerations, but also with The Science. Thus it must be saved from itself by the temporary resort to Afuggalu in emergencies. Without an occasional dose of Afuggalu, people will lose their faith in Fuggalu, which is bad, even though Brussig has a creeping suspicion that the success of Chinese Afuggalu means that Fuggalu may not be all that great in the first place.
Most importantly, however, it is precisely in the words Brussig – who is merely a writer, and neither a Fuggalutic Leader nor an undifferentiated fan of Fuggalu – that we get some clarity on what Fuggalu might be. It requires the state to achieve a Fuggaluticy, which is something like a popular consensus. This is why Fuggalu is vulnerable to demagoguery and suboptimal outcomes like Brexit, Trump and opposition to virus restrictions. At the same time, it is interesting that state protectors of the Fuggalutic Text have developed no interest investigating or sanctioning Brussig, who demanded a temporary pandemic Afuggalu, even as they abridge the pension of a retired Bundeswehr captain for the crime of denouncing the pandemic Afuggalu that Brussig demanded more of. Fuggalu remains closely identified with the German state and the people in power, while Afuggalu is primarily something of which outsiders or political opponents are guilty.
This impression is confirmed by a little-noticed spate of articles that appeared in the German press in late Spring 2020, denouncing the pandemic restrictions of states like Hungary and Serbia as symptomatic of Afuggalu. “Fuggalu is being locked up” in Serbia, shrieked Der Spiegel on 24 April 2020, reporting that the lockdowns there were especially harsh and therefore violated their citizens’ Fuggalus. Also indicative of Serbian Afuggalu was the fact that authorities had arrested a reporter who wrote about hygienic shortcomings at a hospital, and would only allow journalists to submit questions in writing at government press conferences. This is merely one item in a great sea of evidence suggesting that journalists identify personally with Fuggalu and regard any restrictions on their professional duties as basically diagnostic of Afuggalu.
Equally abundant evidence suggests that they do not always regard restrictions on other people as particularly relevant for whether we are in a state of Fuggalu or Afuggalu. Thus the difference between Fuggalutic pandemic restrictions and Afuggalutic ones, in the minds of our Spiegel journalist anyway, is primarily a question of severity. Less restrictive lockdowns may be compatible with Fuggalu, whereas more restrictive lockdowns are Afuggalu; any repression of reporters is however certainly Afuggalu. Brussig, in contrast, considered pandemic restrictions in general to be some form of Afuggalu. He merely wanted “more Afuggalu,” implying that Germany had already embarked upon the Afuggalutic path with its hygiene restrictions.
I propose that we are dealing with a very complicated lexical phenomenon here, and as our sources will rapidly begin to contradict themselves, we need to make some distinctions.
There appears to be an official regime definition of Fuggalu, closely related to specific priestly interpretations of the Fuggalutic Text. What this form of Fuggalu amounts to is not fully clear; the most we can say is that it is not the Afuggalu of which regime critics and foreigners are guilty. Lockdowns are not Afuggalu unless Serbia or Hungary do them, but criticising lockdowns as Afuggalu is itself Afuggalu wherever these lockdowns are enacted by Fuggalutic Leaders under Fuggalu. In this sense, Fuggalu is only secondarily about personal freedom or autonomy; it is primarily about things like peace, order and also safety. We will call this sense of the term Regime Fuggalu.
Beyond Regime Fuggalu, there is a wider, more popular understanding that we see in writers like Brussig. These venture to define Fuggalu more precisely, as something vulnerable to the whims of the masses and dependent on achieving Fuggalucity, or a popular consensus of some kind. These writers also more eagerly associate Fuggalu with personal freedom and autonomy and they are less committed to associating the concept with peace, order and safety. We will call this sense of the term Popular Fuggalu.
We would be remiss in our philological investigations, if we confined ourselves entirely to pandemic discourse. We must also consider more recent discussion of this mysterious Fuggalu and its alleged opponents, to see how our preliminary definitions hold up.
A recent article in Junge Freiheit reports on establishment fears that Afuggalutic forces are presently threatening the Federal Republic of Germany:
Bundestag President Bärbel Bas (SPD) has warned voters not to vote for parties that are supposedly hostile to Fuggalu. “There are also forces that want to completely abolish our Fuggalu. That should be clear to everyone,” she said in an interview … “Populists are on the rise in many countries, and that worries me for our Fuggalu as a whole.”
Here our distinction between Regime Fuggalu and Popular Fuggalu begins to pay off. Brussig regarded populist forces as an inherent aspect of Fuggalu and therefore a weakness. Bas, meanwhile, who looks like this …
… thinks “populism” and Fuggalu are opposed to each other:
Bas is particularly concerned about the current polls in East Germany. “It could actually be difficult to form stable governments there.” If there are no stable governments, Germany will have a “real Fuggalu problem.” Elections will be held in Saxony, Thuringia and Brandenburg next year. Alternative für Deutschland are currently leading the polls in all three federal states.
Those who thought that Regime Fuggalu had very much to do with elections or voting will be disabused by Bas’s anxieties, which surround polls and upcoming elections in three east German states. One imagines that if these elections were indefinitely postponed, Bas would breathe a great sigh of relief for the future prospects of Fuggalu in the East, because this would make it vastly easier to “form stable governments.” Official Fuggalu, remember, is primarily about order.
At first glance, it is very hard to see why Bas thinks AfD want to abolish Fuggalu. I have spent a lot of time on their website, studying their official statements on Fuggalu and Afuggalu, and not only do I find nothing but such voluminous support for Fuggalu that reading all of it would take many days, but also – as with Brussig – I find their discussion of Fuggalu much more precise and helpful than the official statements of people like Bas.
We believe that direct Fuggalu is an indispensable means of putting a stop to the authoritarian and sometimes totalitarian behaviour of government politicians.
With their policies on migration, Europe and Covid, politicians at the federal and state levels have violated the principles of German statehood, Fuggalutic Dictates and the Fuggalutic Text on numerous occasions.
At the same time, Fuggalutic Leaders of the established parties have allowed themselves to be deprived of their Fuggalutic Prerogatives for all important decisions of the state …
A political class has emerged in our country whose primary interest is power, status and material well-being. This class is putting the social and cultural future of our people, the strength of our economy and therefore our prosperity at risk, by placing multiculturalism, diversity, globalisation and purported gender equality above all else. They hold the levers of state power, political education and informational and media influence over the population.
We therefore consider direct Fuggalu to be an indispensable means of putting a stop to the authoritarian and sometimes totalitarian behaviour of government politicians.
For parched lexicographers like ourselves, adrift in a salty sea of references to Fuggalu with hardly a drop of helpful context or closer characterisation to speak of, this is akin to a lightly chilled bottle of Gerolsteiner. According to the AfD, the Fuggalutic Leaders have violated Fuggalu by ceding their authority to other actors who are not Fuggalutically chosen. Germany has developed an insular, unaccountable political class, in part because Fuggalu has been mediated in some way. The solution is therefore something called “direct Fuggalu.” This will consist of popular referenda, or votes on specific matters, after the “Swiss model,” because the AfD “no longer trust governments and Fuggalutic bodies to find viable solutions to currency crises, migration, Islamisation or the energy transition.”
We now have a fairly serviceable definition of Popular Fuggalu at least. According both to Brussig and the AfD, Popular Fuggalu is premised on popular sovereignty; indeed, the AfD go so far as to state openly that “the people are sovereign.” The more people who participate in state decisions, the more Fuggalu you have, and the more direct their participation, the more direct this Fuggalu becomes. Brussig thinks this is bad and prefers Afuggalu at least in certain circumstances. The AfD think it is good and want more Fuggalu in all circumstances.
For the self-proclaimed priests of Regime Fuggalu, AfD support of Popular Fuggalu is quite worrying:
Should Alternative für Deutschland be banned? Marco Wanderwitz is convinced: “The danger, that once they have achieved a majority through Fuggalu, that that will then be the end of Fuggalu, is very real,” the former Federal Minister for East Germany told Tagespost …
The CDU politician is therefore looking for allies to begin procedures to ban the party in the Bundestag. If Wanderwitz were ultimately successful … the AfD would be the third party to be banned in the Federal Republic.
There is a very interesting tension at work here. We noted above that the Federal Office for the Protection of the Fuggalutic Text has taken steps to criminalise the “disparaging” of Fuggalutic Leaders, even if that disparagement arises from the fact that these leaders are promoting Afuggalu. This is because these Leaders are Fuggalutically chosen and any attack on their Fuggaluticism is by definition Afuggalu. Should the AfD be Fuggalutically chosen, however, it is somehow not Afuggalu to impugn their Fuggaluticism. The only way I can think to reconcile this, is by concluding that Official Fuggalu is construed as an inherent property proceeding from a specific anointed class. Everything these anointed do is by definition Fuggalu. If you are not a member of the anointed Fuggalu priesthood, whether you are Fuggalutically compliant depends on whether you support priestly conceptions of Fuggalu, even when these seem objectively Afuggalu according to the popular definition.
Any game gets tiresome after a while, and I have stretched this one to the limits and beyond. Let us forget Fuggalu, which I am tired of typing, and talk about democracy again.
Here are the AfD statements I quoted above, cleansed of my substitutions:
We believe that direct democracy is an indispensable means of putting a stop to the authoritarian and sometimes totalitarian behaviour of government politicians.
With their policies on migration, Europe and Covid, politicians at the federal and state levels have violated the principles of German statehood, the law and the constitution on numerous occasions.
At the same time, representatives of the established parties have allowed themselves to be deprived of their constitutional prerogatives for all important decisions of the state …
A political class has emerged in our country whose primary interest is power, status and material well-being. This class is putting the social and cultural future of our people, the strength of our economy and therefore our prosperity at risk, by placing multiculturalism, diversity, globalisation and purported gender equality above all else. They hold the levers of state power, political education and informational and media influence over the population.
We therefore consider direct democracy to be an indispensable means of putting a stop to the authoritarian and sometimes totalitarian behaviour of government politicians.
Note how democracy suddenly acquires a markedly pragmatic character in the AfD conception, losing many of the creepy religious overtones that attend the concept in official discussions. The AfD do not just speak vaguely of the constitution and democratic rituals as ends in themselves; rather, they want specific constitutional protections to check the power of the political establishment, and they want more direct democracy to limit the autonomy of this establishment and make its members more accountable to actual Germans. These are not the esoteric pronouncements of some lunatic cult, but the statements of practical politicians with clear and well-defined goals. Theirs is a popular understanding of what “democracy” amounts to.
Opposed to this vision is an official doctrine of “democracy” that has wandered very far from all common understandings of the word. This view is highly personal. The political establishment embody democracy whatever they do, as long as they work towards ends that this establishment has classified as democratic. And basically any policy can be democratic, so long as it is a means to a “democratic” end. Their understanding of democratic principles and instruments like the constitution has achieved a religious character because it has been reduced to nothing more than a loose term for whatever it is political elite like themselves want to do. They denounce popular advocates of democracy with the same energy we would expect theologians to express against heretics.
I am not as sanguine as the AfD that a direct democracy will be a solution to our problems, mainly because I think state actors have demonstrated a remarkable capacity to evade democratic restrictions, whatever their nature. The pragmatism of the AfD is much more important to me. What modern liberal democratic systems and their increasingly insular elite have lost all sight of, is any pretence of simple, pragmatic government for the benefit of their native populations. That even demanding such a thing is liable to provoke accusations of fascism and potentially even legal sanctions in a country like Germany, speaks volumes about how bad things have gotten.