I’m aware, that I skipped one day, but since I provided you guys yesterday already with quite an amazing post, I couldn’t risk it to confound you with too much awesomeness.

_Source

The next track was a big part of my…troubled youth. But see for yourself (jokes on you, it’s German again, so you have to read the translation anyway).

Johnny Mauser - Halt dein Mund

I wasn’t always the greedy and inherently evil capitalist I am today. For many years I was an active part of the political left. Including the usual stuff of taking part in demonstrations against so-called fascists, bad government decisions, evil companies and so on. Whatever seemed to endanger the communist utopia, we fought it.
But eventually I grew older (and wiser), abandoned my former political home (and many friends with it) – just to be cursed to wander aimlessly around for eternity. Whenever I now take part in a political discussion, I usually end up getting blamed for everything – from every political party there is. During the recent years I got insulted as a fascist, Nazi, anarchist, socialist, liberal (for some this indeed an insult), communist and so on. Pick one. Apparently, the far-right as well as the far-left are quite similar when it comes to defining friend and foe. They have much more in common than they realize. Which doesn’t surprise me much – they are both collectivists and statists after all.

But let me get the translation for you:

Shut up! Germany shut up!
Here's the track about senselessness of pride
about craziness of the people
In a frenzy of flags in black, red and gold
Be proud of what you have achieved or if you have done something
But not to any content that passport or I.D. tells you
Is that what you're telling me?
You can simply choose your own citizenship?
You come with the nonsense, the pride is made of wood.
Just like a head that thinks that, what the hell?
If I had wealth chauvinists on red lists
My red pencil would be empty and the rainforest would come along
You secure the profit from Munich to Hamburg
And do everything, everything for your beloved location
Corporations you like, so that Germans multiply
Because we learn to better defend ourselves against competitors

Shut up and think about what you're saying
Cause you can't be proud of that kind of thing
And I've been singing this song for years
Rave versus Germany

The Hartz4 recipient from Billstedt
And the guy who lives like in Beverly Hills
stick together, because both are Germany
And when I see this, it could be that I cry!
States are pure invention,
You speak of sentience but have no connection
I'm as unpopular in the middle of nowhere as Michael Moore.
Take action with the culture of conflict against your dominant culture
To which a part of the team adapts
Which I don't touch, at most treat like a punching bag.
When countries destroy each other
And a look at the proud German history
Betray the fallacy of the construction
The national, Nazi shit, nation
Play this track on a demonstration
For more antinational flows on radio stations!

Shut up and think about what you're saying
Cause you can't be proud of that kind of thing
And I've been singing this song for years
Rave versus Germany

First they kill in the war and then they swear by victory
Like the World Cup, but I'm disturbing the euphoria
Mix my stones between the grains you pick
But not in the sense of conspiracy theories.
I have nothing against good-humored football fans
Just something against these diffuse trends
if a flag, a crew,
a feeling, an anthem, a country restores your self-confidence
There's just too much bad going on here.
There are marching too many rights in front of far too many smiles
Tons of people with far too few rights
And humiliated countries that you continue to oppress
Johnny Mauser keeps a critical eye
like a poker player at a table
With sunglasses on for a deeper view
to normality in my songs for you!

So, what was so special about this song? Well, it combined two things I liked: hip-hop and opposition towards patriotism/nationalism, especially the German one.
And although most of the things of my political past are of no value to me anymore, there is still one thing, which never changed:
I consider any kind of patriotism a trait of the weak and simple-minded. Or as Schopenhauer famously put it:

“The cheapest sort of pride is national pride; for if a man is proud of his own nation, it argues that he has no qualities of his own of which he can be proud; otherwise he would not have recourse to those which he shares with so many millions of his fellowmen. The man who is endowed with important personal qualities will be only too ready to see clearly in what respects his own nation falls short, since their failings will be constantly before his eyes. But every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud adopts, as a last resource, pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and glad to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.”

There is nothing left to add.

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