Baerbock at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe:
“When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant.”
These are the words of Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner. His experience of the horrors of the Shoah and the Second World War made him a lifelong believer in the need to stand up for human rights, regardless of where violations occur and to whom. Wiesel was convinced that when human rights are violated, that is a warning signal for what there is to come.
I find Baerbock pretty unlistenable. She’s banal, formulaic, as if her address was produced by the same staff cut-and-paste plagiarism that her book was. She begins a speech on Europe responding to an invasion by saying national borders have become irrelevant? „Sensitivities“ are irrelevant? Sensitivities like concern about nuclear war? The headlines are filled with Baerbock’s declaration of war, and rightly so. Germany’s shipping tanks and its foreign minister announcing that Europe is fighting a war against Russia is certainly cause for headlines, but as important to me is the level of mediocrity evident in Scholz and Baerbock’s utterances.
