Adam Fletcher gives the lowdown on Germany’s anti-Islamic movement…

Hallo Mitbürger,

Have you noticed that life is a little bit hard? Are you disappointed that you didn’t become an astronaut after all? Did you make some shitty life choices and would prefer someone else to blame for them? Did you lose the job you weren’t very good at to someone who was better at it? Did you hear people on the street talking in a language you didn’t understand? Are you disillusioned by out of touch politicians?

Well, worry not, lieber Mitbürger, for we have a new miracle solution to offer you…we call it Pegida™!

Pegida™ technology offers you an instant and magical new world view, vastly superior to your previous world view, for all the following reasons:

Fact blindness

With the help of Pegida™, you become immune to the effects of inconvenient facts. If anyone from the “lying press” tries to contradict your world view, your brain will automatically short-circuit like a robot vacuum cleaner covered in milk.

Thanks to Pegida™, when someone confronts you with the so called “truth”, you’ll repeat a series of standard phrases until they go away. Phrases such as – “Lügenpresse” “Fakten. Hör mir mit all diesen Scheißfakten auf!”, “Nur 2%? Das ist mir egal, das sind schon 2% zu viel!”, “Wir müssen die Kirche im Dorf lassen”, or “Ich habe nichts gegen Ausländer, aber …”

Of course, Pegida™ doesn’t block all facts, just the most uncomfortable ones. Facts like “gravity” or “you like beer” will remain. But facts like “Although there will be problems along the way, the world is better when its people are free to live how and where they choose” will not.

And really, really difficult facts like “Open borders are not the problem, refugees are not the problem, Islam is not the problem, Europe is not the problem, in fact, Europe is part of the solution to the problem of ignorance and xenophobia” will be completely suppressed. What will be completely suppressed? Exactly.

Advanced Scapegoating

Scapegoating was an ancient tradition that involved taking a goat, projecting all of your problems, sins and disappointments upon it and then casting it out to the desert. It was a very fun and effective way to deal with your problems, because you weren’t the goat. However, until now, the scapegoating system has always required a) a goat, and b) a desert.

Not with Pegida™! Pegida™ users are able to make absolutely anything into a scapegoat for society’s problems. Are you okay with foreigners, but disappointed about something else? Your life? Politics? Asylum seekers? The GEZ? That’s fine. All are welcome at its weekly Monday meetup. Make your sign, come on down, bring your goat, and take a walk with us. Pegida™ is like the sausage of disappointment – it’s got a bit of everything in it.

Selective Amnesia

Remember when you were growing up in the GDR under that oppressive socialist regime that limited your rights to take part in really awesome verbs such as – say, do,go, travel, live, and experience? Well, with Pegida™’s selective amnesia function you won’t! You’ll forget that we’ve already tried the borders-walls-restricted-movements-points-us-vs-them-good-guys-vs-bad-guys-tribes-fear approach to running the world, and that it was a giant, bloody failure.

Instant Community

Do you get lonely sometimes? Do you wish there were other people around who shared your opinions? Do you enjoy viewing the architecture of German cities with their lights off? Are your Monday evenings usually free? Perfect! Because with Pegida™ you’re joining a community. Without it, you are just a disappointed individual who thinks no-one is listening to you.

But with it, oh boy, you get to be part of a group of disappointed individuals who think no-one is listening to them! Much better! Many don’t know exactly what it is they’re not being listened to about, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be angry about it. Rabble! Rabble! With Pegida™ you get to be one of the Volk.

Heightened Irrationality

As a default, we humans are notoriously irrational. Many of us suffer from something called dysrationalia which is being unable to think and behave rationally despite having adequate intelligence. Dysrationalia explains why otherwise smart people might believe in horoscopes, Yeti, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, or Xenu, the ruler of the Galactic Confederacy.

Pegida™ has been designed to heighten our natural irrationality so that we can believe in even more far-fetched things, like that the German way of life is somehow threatened by the economic and societal benefits of free movement, immigration and cultural exchange!

With Pegida™ this irrationality is also possible in the form of contradictions – Ausländers are taking all our jobs, yet Ausländers are only here to leech off of our social system. We are the people, yet no-one is listening to us. Some of us are fanatics, yet marching against fanaticism. Zero tolerance towards criminality when committed by immigrants, yet founded by a convicted criminal. The press lie about Pegida™, yet we won’t be interviewed to tell them the truth. With Pegida™ you can have hours of fun groping in the dark of logic.

There’s an English expression that says, “if all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail”. Pegida™ works on a similar principle. Only, it’s more like, “if all you have is Pegida™, everything starts to look like Islamisierung.”

This article is by the author of Make Me German, an entertaining look at integrating (or failing to) into every day German life. Illustrations by Romibello.

To read more about Berlin’s refugee situation (and updates on Pegida, click here. For a primer on German immigration in general, click here.