Killer Vegetables and the German Nuclear Shutdown

The recent German panic over an E. Coli outbreak would seem completely unrelated to the recent decision by the German Government to shut down Germany's nuclear power plants as the reach a certain age. Yet both the cucumber panic, and the German nuclear power panic are examples of an irrational and potentially sinister pattern of social behavior, the social panic.

An E. Coli infection outbreak in Germany, that has resulted in 2000 illnesses and 18 deaths was initially blamed on Spanish cucumbers, but the cucumbers have been exonerated. Prior to the determination of EU authorities that Spanish cucumbers were not to blame for the German E. Coli outbreak, European salad eaters were throwing out their salads. German authorities treated Spanish produce as undesirable aliens to be stopped at the border.

The source of the German cucumber scare was a banquet attended by German trade-union officials who were meeting in Lübeck. Thirty four of them got sick, and suspicion fell on the salad. People got sick all over North Germany, although quite obviously not from eating the Lübeck salad. Indeed German authorities have not come up with evidence beyond all doubt that the salad was to blame, or that the toxic E. Coli entered the salad via tainted vegetables. Perhaps the salad preparer neglected to wash his hands.

The Irish Times observes,

Despite a reputation for being calm, sober people, Germans have a record of emotional reactions to threats, real and imagined.

The fact that the German E. Coli strain is resists all antibiotics, suggests that it came from a hospital, where anti-biotic bacteria strains are likely to originate and not from a Spanish cucumber field. But German irrationality has reached an absurd level. Scott Rooney points commented to the BBC,

I live in a part of Germany which is not affected by the outbreak but we, and a lot of people I know, have stopped eating all raw vegetables and have also stopped buying cucumbers, tomatoes and all types of lettuce.

The vegetable sections at most shops are empty - people are not buying fresh produce at the moment.

One local greengrocer has already gone bust.

We have also stopped eating fruit which cannot be disinfected and skinned, for example strawberries. This may be a bit paranoid, but until a source has been found, no-one can tell what is safe to eat.

Irrational social panics are not only common, but nations that lack a means of checking them may find themselves doing all sorts of crazy things. In the current E. Coli, outbreak, irrational panic has lead to the destruction of tons of harmless Spanish cucumbers. While we may see this as a joke, past social panic episodes have lead to some very unfunny consequences. For example. Canadian writer Jonathan Kay described the source of a panic that lead to the destruction, not of cucumbers but of millions of people:

In August, 1897, Theodor Herzl and two hundred fellow activists convened at a concert hall in Basel, Switzerland, to attend the First Zionist Congress. The capstone of their deliberations was The Basel Program, a landmark manifesto aimed at "establishing for the Jewish people a publicly and legally assured home in Palestine." The delegates also officially adopted the Hatikvah, a song that, six decades later, would become the national anthem for the country we call Israel.

But as legend has it, it was all an elaborate act -just a respectable set-piece to divert gentile journalists and spies from the real meeting taking place at a secret location nearby. There, Herzl delivered a clandestine 24part lecture series for Jewish ears only. In these speeches, "protocols" as Herzl called them, there was little talk of carving a small country out of the Middle Eastern desert. What he proposed was nothing less than a plan for total world domination.

Europe's gentiles -or goyim, as they were described in Yiddish -generally were a happy, earnest lot, Herzl told his audience. They worked their farms and small businesses assiduously, prayed to a benevolent Christian God, and prospered under the kindly, lawful aristocrats who rose up from among their ranks.

But they were also gullible, lustful, greedy and unstable in their attitudes -human frailties that the calculating, ascetic Jew could exploit in order to rob them of their entitlements.

The Jewish strategy, Herzl explained, would target all strata of goyim. To corrupt the proles, Jewish smut merchants would provide pornography and "alcoholic liquors." To ensnare middleclass farmers and merchants, Jewish moneylenders would practice usury. Ambitious gentile politicians would be co-opted through extortion and outright bribery; or else installed as quislings in Europe's Masonic lodges, which Jews secretly controlled.

Meanwhile, gentile intellectuals, such as they were, would be beguiled by democracy, liberalism, Marxism, socialism, communism, Darwinism, anarchism, "Nietzsche-ism," and all the other fangled creeds the Jew had created.

Ironically, the Jews' most powerful weapon in the campaign to enslave gentiles would be none other than the lure of sweet liberty itself: "The abstraction of freedom has enabled us to persuade the mob in all countries that ... the steward may be replaced like a worn-out glove," Herzl explained to the assembled Elders. "It is this possibility of replacing the representatives of the people, which has placed at our disposal, and ... given us the power of appointment."

Of course, God-fearing men would never willingly succumb to Jewish tyranny. But Herzl had an answer to that: Jews would not only annihilate Europe's earthly rulers, but also "the very principle of God-head and the spirit," whose presence in men's souls shielded them from the "arithmetical calculations and material needs" upon which the Jew preyed. No longer would the peoples of the world "walk contentedly and humbly under the guiding hand of [their] spiritual pastor submitting to the dispositions of God upon Earth." Instead, "all nations will be swallowed up in the pursuit of gain, and in the race for it will not take note of their common foe [the Jew]."

As his plan played out, Herzl explained, Jews would cycle the world through an endless series of bloody wars and economic depressions, which would serve both to enrich Jewish war profiteers and speculators, and cast the rest of the globe into poverty. Traumatized to the point of total despair, the peoples of the world would have no choice but to succumb.

When Herzl was done with his 24 protocols, the conference disbanded and the Jewish Elders returned to their homes in order to prepare their plots. The world might never have learned of the protocols' existence -but for a single Russian police agent who, through means unknown, intercepted one of Herzl's acolytes at a German Masonic lodge.

In exchange for what one must assume to have been an extravagant sum, the Jew agreed to turn over his handwritten transcription of Herzl's protocols -but only till the next morning. All through the night, a team of Russian scribes feverishly copied out the Hebrew text. When sunrise broke, the fruits of their labour were sent to translators in Moscow, who would go on to warn the world of the Jewish menace.

Thus ends the fairy tale, known to history as The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion -a document that would become the most influential conspiracist tract since the era of the French Revolution. Millions of readers were taken in by this poisonous fraud following its widespread publication in 1919. Adolf Hitler and other war criminals would be inspired to act on it, setting in motion a wave of anti-Semitic hatred so intense that, by the end of the Second World War, Central and Eastern Europe were left virtually Judenrein. . . .

The Protocols was a lie. But like all successful conspiracy theories, it was a lie that people wanted to hear.

The Protocols was exposed as a fraud concocted by The Russian Czarist Secret Police. The
exposure of the Protocols as a fraud did not prevent the German people from experiencing an ongoing Judaophobic panic. That ultimately lead the Nazi Party to power in Germany and ultimately to the death of millions of Jews.

Like the the Judaophobic social panic triggered among Germans by the The Protocols, the German social panic over nuclear energy can have serious and negative consequences for people who are not Germans. Dan Yurman has don an excellent job of documenting consequences of the German social panic over Nuclear Energy. However, Dan does not document the panic itself.

The Green anti-nuclear message has always sold well in Germany, and Chernobyl related fears were sold by food contamination panics. Spiegel International Online reported,

For weeks, there were food and health scares as a result of radioactive contamination, but few could agree on the degree of danger it represented.

In 1986 following the Chenobyl accident Der Spiegel reported

But no one is touching the salad buffets in the country's steakhouses. Some scientists, including those at Hanover's Ecological Institute and at the University of Oldenburg, are warning against drinking milk again. The term "radiation-free" has become part of advertisements for fresh vegetables, like the one used by Dutch farmers. . . .

Politicians tried desperately to jump on the bandwagon of the new anti-nuclear sentiment. Electoral candidate Ernst Albrecht discovered his love for solar energy, announcing the creation of an institute devoted to solar technology, and the general secretary of the Free Democratic Party, Helmut Haussmann, did a 180° turn by declaring that the German nuclear reactor in the western German town of Kalkar was unnecessary.

Yet as the 1986 Der Spiegel story pointed out the fallout from Chernobyl posed minimal risks to Germans, and no German deaths have ever been linked to the Chernobyl incident, although Greenpeace claims otherwise. But the German fear of food poison runs deeper than that. A Nazi children's book, "The Poisonous Mushroom," written by the infamous Julius Streicher drummed into the brains of German children the link between poisoned food and Jews:

Jewish Toadstools photo courtesy of German Propaganda Archive

A mother and her young boy are gathering mushrooms in the German forest. The boy finds some poisonous ones. The mother explains that there are good mushrooms and poisonous ones, and, as they go home, says:

"Look, Franz, human beings in this world are like the mushrooms in the forest. There are good mushrooms and there are good people. There are poisonous, bad mushrooms and there are bad people. And we have to be on our guard against bad people just as we have to be on guard against poisonous mushrooms. Do you understand that?"

"Yes, mother," Franz replies. "I understand that in dealing with bad people trouble may arise, just as when one eats a poisonous mushroom. One may even die!"

"And do you know, too, who these bad men are, these poisonous mushrooms of mankind?" the mother continued.

Franz slaps his chest in pride: "Of course I know, mother! They are the Jews! Our teacher has often told us about them."

The mother praises her boy for his intelligence, and goes on to explain the different kinds of "poisonous" Jews: the Jewish pedlar, the Jewish cattle-dealer, the Kosher butcher, the Jewish doctor, the baptised Jew, and so on.

"However they disguise themselves, or however friendly they try to be, affirming a thousand times their good intentions to us, one must not believe them. Jews they are and Jews they remain. For our Volk they are poison."

"Like the poisonous mushroom!" says Franz.

Little Franz Gets A Lesson photo courtesy of Yad Vashem

"Yes, my child! Just as a single poisonous mushrooms can kill a whole family, so a solitary Jew can destroy a whole village, a whole city, even an entire Volk."

Franz has understood.

"Tell me, mother, do all non-Jews know that the Jew is as dangerous as a poisonous mushroom?"

Mother shakes her head.

"Unfortunately not, my child. There are millions of non-Jews who do not yet know the Jews. So we have to enlighten people and warn them against the Jews. Our young people, too, must be warned. Our boys and girls must learn to know the Jew. They must learn that the Jew is the most dangerous poison-mushroom in existence. Just as poisonous mushrooms spring up everywhere, so the Jew is found in every country in the world. Just as poisonous mushrooms often lead to the most dreadful calamity, so the Jew is the cause of misery and distress, illness and death."

The story concludes,

German youth must learn to recognise the Jewish Poison-mushroom. They must learn what a danger the Jew is for the German Volk and for the whole world. They must learn that the Jewish problem involves the destiny of us all.

"The following tales tell the truth about the Jewish poison-mushroom. They show the many shapes the Jew assumes. They show the depravity and baseness of the Jewish race. They show the Jew for what he really is:

The Devil in human form."

For Germans in 2011, the Devil has taken the form of the nuclear power plant, and the Spanish cucumber.