Good morning, dear reader,
sometimes you do things like that, don’t you? Things that make you ask yourself: But otherwise, is everything OK?
My obsession was triggered by “25 km/h”, a really sweet road movie with Bjarne Mädel and Lars Eidinger in the leading roles. For over two years now, I have been searching classified ads, sometimes more, sometimes less intensively, but at least once a day, for a Optima 3 The Optima 3 was a moped from the Nuremberg manufacturer Herculesa classic of the eighties. I had the moped version, a Prima 5 in blue, which of course was tuned to suit its status, thick manifold, small nozzle, air filter box drilled out.
Two years after the first excursions on the internet, the Optima from Bad Salzuflen is now on the farm in Berlin. Perfectly restored, all worn parts new, repainted in this original and unique Hercules Irish green, which I always liked better than the blue of my Prima 5. It makes me happy just looking at it.
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The guy has nerve, I hear in echo of these lines. The world is burning and is facing another war in the Middle East, and he tells us something about his crazy ideas as a sentimental boomer who wants to get back some of the feeling of his youth in the Lower Iller Valley with a senseless impulse purchase.
But there is a direct line from the Hercules in Irish green to world politics and also to the Middle East. Because it turned out that I soon had to bathe my hands in two-stroke mixture like I used to. My darling, or more precisely the 40-year-old carburetor from Bing, a traditional German company like Hercules and long gone, was squeaking and sputtering. The darling didn’t respond to the gas properly at the bottom.
So a new 12-Bing was needed. Bing, Sachs, Hercules, that was the two-stroke trinity from Franconia. Long ago, long gone. But to my surprise, the carburettors were all still available, every single type, for the Hercules, the Kreidlerdie ZündappBut no longer from Fürth, where Bing was based. But from ChinaA 100% replica for just 30 euros. Just like all the other parts for the vintage two-stroke engine with its 50 cc. All of them, really all of them. Chain, pinion, Bowden cables. Everything.
Over decades, China has calmly and purposefully worked its way up to become the world’s second-largest economic power. And above all, in contrast to the still narrowly leading USA made the entire world dependent. So that today it is not just a nozzle in a Chinese carburetor that evaporates the fuel for my classic car. But everything, everything, everything depends on China and its products. Even the Big Five in the USA can no longer be sure of their monopolies. You can no longer open any page on the Internet without being Agoa Chinese Amazon, with strange offers somewhere between porn and curious junk, encouraging you to click and buy.
In sports, the Chinese now have the say even in disciplines far removed from their culture. With her machine-like perfect tennis, 22-year-old Zheng Qinwen not only ended Angelique Kerber’s career, but also won the gold in the final against a completely helpless Donna Vekić. Most of the medals in tennis went to China. In tennis! That was as far away from Beijing as the lonely tennis courts in the part of Germany where fans of the sport of the class enemy had to have their rackets smuggled into the country before 1989.
Helmut Schmidt: He saw it coming. (Source: dapd)
Helmut Schmidt saw this development coming 30 years ago, earlier than anyone else in this country. Until his last years, he denied any imperialist intentions on the part of China. China was a “Conqueror without violence” and without any geopolitical hegemonic claim. He may have had the Chinese scholar Sunzi in the head, which more than 2,500 years ago in its “Art of War” wrote: “The wise leader subdues the enemy’s troops without fighting. (…) He turns his troops against the ruler of the enemy kingdom, and his triumph will be complete without losing a man.”
Even Helmut Schmidt could be wrong, as recent events beyond tennis and moped carburetors show. China is also arming itself militarily – and at the same time asserting its claim to political power. This means in the Middle East. How viable (and how controversially unique) it was that China was able to defeat the hostile leaders of Hamas and Fatah and 14 other Palestinian splinter organizations to a truce in Beijing: It happened there, and not in Switzerland or anywhere else on neutral or Western soil. If Camp David, then it is now in Beijing, that was the message. The Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba The Chinese leadership under its ruler Xi Jinping summoned to influence the war of aggression that the country has to endure from Russia.
In an equally unspectacular and irresistible manner, Beijing is entering the power vacuum created by the two tumbling giants Russia and the USA. Russia had been relegated from this league for some time, which Wladimir Putin not want to accept it and why he wants to use force to bomb his empire back.
But the USA, the remaining hegemon and system winner since 1990 at the latest, has also passed its zenith. The statement of the former president, who would like to become president again, shows this insight without meaning to. “Make America great again” means, firstly, that it is no longer as “great” as it used to be. And it is born out of the unfortunate but justified feeling that it will never be as great as it used to be.
During his recent visit of his “dear friend” Xi to Beijing, Vladimir Putin also had to experience something he really does not like: A treatment by the host, which made clear with every gesture who was the cook and who was the waiter in this bilateral structure. My colleagues Marc von Lüpke and Florian Harms recently spoke to the historian Jorg Baberowski spoken.
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