Germany was perhaps a bit later in the game, but by now we've caught up and people are polarized to an extent we haven't seen since the end of WWII. Any news that doesn't fit your particular point of view is quickly decried as Systemmedien, a term whose usage makes me ache as it is borrowed from what the Nazis called the press in the Weimar Republic ("Systempresse"). I just read an article how the COVID pandemic has dug the trenches even deeper and how fringe groups that never had much to with one another like anti-migration, anti-vaxxers, anti-EU, anti-conservation and anti-Germany-in-its-current-form-as-a-carrier-of-statehood have morphed together into this numb nihilist anti-stance.
It's incredible how closely your summation matches the position of the far right here. It seems odd to me that COVID was a factor deepening the divide in both countries, but something about medications seems to bring out the conspiracy types everywhere. I don't know how we can get past this posturing and division, but I'd like to get back to honest differences of opinion instead of knee-jerk opposition.
In the US, I see the right using the label "socialism" more often than "communism", which was more popular during the cold war. Maybe that's why I think of the James Cagney movie "One, Two Three" in this context. Uwe, have you ever seen it? It takes place in West Berlin during the cold war and I think you'd find it howlingly funny.
