At a time when empathy and reverence have become rare luxuries, Savings Bank Cologne-Bonn (Sparkasse) has reached a new low: an ‘external service provider,’ as the bank hastened to clarify, had expressed its condolences on the bank’s Instagram account over the murder of US activist Charlie Kirk. ‘Rest in peace,’ one of its employees had written there. Of course, this was the wrong reaction in the conformist left-wing milieu of hateful do-gooders: to mock Kirk’s murder (as ‘El Kotzo’ & Co), hurling hate speech and lies at him (as Hayali and Theveßen did on public broadcaster ZDF) or blaming him for his own murder (as ZDF’s smear -monger Jan Böhmermann did) is fully accepted and applauded by Germany’s left-wing establishment.
But those who show human emotion are denounced. The Sparkasse therefore did not respond by defending humanity, but by dismissing the person responsible for the condolences on its account; it is a scandal that has less to do with the content than with the absurd scandalisation of grief.
The hypocrisy of the left-wing fascists, which is also reflected in the German media outlets that reported on the case and used terms such as ‘controversial post’ to turn the expression of sympathy for Kirk into an alleged scandal, is becoming increasingly difficult to bear. Once again, it is clear who the real hate preachers and agitators in this society are: not the evil ‘right-wingers’, but their opponents and model democrats. The provincial bankers at the Sparkasse had probably already had the shits when they read the utterly mendacious and morally depraved newspaper articles in the local press: what the Bonn-based ‘Generalanzeiger’ in particular allowed itself to do here falls below all standards of decency and journalistic integrity.
Instead of standing by the post, the bank caved in to the expected storm of outrage – and summarily fired the employee of its service provider who had written the post. It wrote that it was ‘shocked’ – not by the murder, mind you, but by the fact that human concern had been shown about it. It is sheer cowardice in the face of the mob of the self-righteous. A society in which grief and empathy, universal human emotions, are defamed as ‘controversial’ after the murder of an icon of free speech has once again reached the point that we never wanted to return to. It is a disgrace. The first calls for a boycott of Sparkasse Köln-Bonn are already circulating online – and in this case, quite rightly so.
Hitler would be proud.