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## 1. What Poschardt actually wrote
In *Die Welt* on 2 October 2026, under the title **“Muslimische Migration: Der große Austausch des Wahlvolks”**, Poschardt wrote that Muslim migration had become “the decisive power factor in left-wing conquest strategies” and that “you can see how that ends in France these days”. In the passages quoted by *junge Welt*, he speaks of a **“migrantische Mob aus Afrika und dem arabischen Raum”** that vandalises schools and churches.
The literal phrase “immigrants with a French passport” does not appear in the accessible excerpts. But the rhetorical structure is exactly that: it treats people who hold French citizenship as an alien mob whose passport is merely a piece of paper. That is the move you sensed—and it is worth naming precisely, because it is not a statement about immigration law. It is a statement about **who is allowed to count as French regardless of law**.
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## 2. The historical debt: colonial soldiers and the liberation of France
Your instinct is historically correct, and the numbers are stark.
On **15 August 1944**, nearly **250,000 soldiers of the Free French forces** landed in Provence to liberate France. The National Assembly record states that **“an immense majority of them were from the colonies”**, many of them *tirailleurs sénégalais*. The “Armée B” under General de Lattre de Tassigny was **half African** in composition. By the time Paris was liberated, the 2nd Armoured Division of General Leclerc had been **“whitened”** at American insistence—only one Black soldier, Claude Mademba Sy, entered the capital with the division—but it still contained **around 1,300 Maghrebi soldiers**. Estimates of colonial soldiers killed in the liberation of France run to **31,000, including 14,000 Senegalese tirailleurs**.
And then the dark counterpoint: on **1 December 1944**, at the Thiaroye camp near Dakar, **nearly 2,000 Senegalese tirailleurs** who had fought the Nazi enemy and were demanding their unpaid wages were met with **gunfire from their own brothers-in-arms**. The French state officially recognised this as a massacre only in 2024.
So when a German editor asks what France should “do” with people he calls immigrants, the historical record answers before any statistic does: **the people he is racializing are the descendants of those who bled for the liberation of the country whose passport they now hold**.
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## 3. Two different ideas of the nation
The contrast you are drawing between the French and German understandings of nationhood is not a rhetorical flourish. It is one of the most documented cleavages in the comparative sociology of citizenship.
| | **France** | **Germany** |
|---|---|---|
| **Legal principle** | *Jus soli* (birth on territory) coexisting with *jus sanguinis*; jus soli reintroduced in **1889** | *Jus sanguinis* (descent) dominant since Prussia adopted it in **1842** |
| **Conception of nation** | **Civic, political, territorial**—the nation as a daily plebiscite, a community of citizens | **Ethno-cultural, pre-political**—the nation as a community of descent |
| **Classic formulation** | Rogers Brubaker: French citizenship is **territorially inclusive**; German citizenship is **ethnically exclusive** | Same |
This is not ancient history. **Germany only fully embraced jus soli in June 2024**, when the *Staatsangehörigkeitsmodernisierungsgesetz* granted German citizenship at birth to children of foreign parents resident in Germany for five years, and ended the obligation to choose between German and parental nationality. Until then, a Turkish-German child born and raised in Berlin was legally an alien in a way that a Maghrebi-French child born in Marseille never was.
The French Revolution is the origin of this difference. On **27 September 1791**, the National Assembly decreed: **“Tout homme, de quelque couleur qu'il soit, jouit en France de tous les droits de citoyen”**—“Every man, of whatever colour, enjoys in France all the rights of a citizen”. The same revolutionary assembly granted full citizenship to Protestants (1789) and to Jews (1791). This was a genuinely universalist break with the *Ancien Régime*, where belonging was defined by subjecthood, corporation, and religion.
But the revolution was also centralising and assimilationist: it imposed French over regional languages, and its universalism stopped at the colonial colour line. The 1791 decree did not abolish slavery in the colonies; abolition came in 1794, was reversed by Napoleon in 1802, and was only definitively achieved in 1848. So the French model was never as clean as its self-image. It was a **civic universalism entangled with colonial racism**—which is precisely why the tension you are pointing to is so explosive today.
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## 4. The numbers: who is actually an “immigrant” in France?
The French statistical institute, INSEE, distinguishes carefully between **immigrés** (people born abroad as foreigners) and **étrangers** (people without French nationality). This distinction is crucial, because it shows that a third of “immigrants” are already French.
In **2025**, according to INSEE:
- **8.0 million immigrants** live in France—**11.6% of the population**.
- **2.6 million of them—33%—have acquired French nationality**.
- **5.3 million immigrants** remain foreign nationals (7.8% of the population).
- On top of that, **8.0 million descendants of immigrants** live in France—**about 12% of the population**.
- Of those descendants, **3.9 million (48.3%) are of African origin**, and **2.5 million (31.6%) are of Maghrebi origin** (Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia).
So the answer to your question—“how many ‘immigrants’ can also be seen as francophone humans who are thereby French?”—is at least **2.6 million immigrants who are already French citizens by law**, plus the overwhelming majority of the **8 million descendants**, who are French by birth under *jus soli*. In total, roughly **10 to 11 million people of immigrant origin are French citizens**, French-speaking, and socialised in French institutions. They are not “immigrants with a passport” in any legally meaningful sense. They are French people whose parents or grandparents immigrated.
In **2024 alone**, **103,661 people acquired French nationality**, of whom **35,900 did so through *droit du sol***—birth and residence in France. This is not a loophole; it is the legal architecture of the French nation.
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## 5. The paradox Poschardt is exploiting
The French republican model says: **if you are a citizen, you are French—there is no hyphen**. But the social reality is that millions of French citizens of Maghrebi or African origin are routinely told they are not “really” French. The Taiwanese news agency CNA reported on the INSEE data with a telling detail: even during the World Cup, a Spanish former prime minister described the French team as “very good, but without French people,” and an Argentine official called it “the African team”. The passport says one thing; the racial gaze says another.
This is the space Poschardt occupies. He does not need to say “they are not citizens.” He can simply say “immigrants with a French passport” and let the implication do the work: **the passport is formal, the Frenchness is fraudulent**. That move is older than the *Front National*; it is the same logic Jean-Marie Le Pen used when he demanded the “repatriation of three million immigrants” while treating *pieds-noirs* and *harkis* as a separate question.
The historical irony is sharp. The German critic belongs to a nation that, until 2024, defined belonging primarily by blood, and whose grandparents’ generation committed a genocide in the name of that definition. The French critic belongs to a nation that, for all its colonial crimes, wrote into law in 1791 that **“every man, of whatever colour”** who enters France is free and enjoys the rights of a citizen. That promise was betrayed repeatedly—at Thiaroye, in Algeria, in the *banlieues*—but it remains the legal and moral horizon against which the “immigrant with a French passport” is measured. Poschardt’s question is dangerous not because it is taboo, but because it tries to make **citizenship irrelevant** by replacing it with **descent**—and that is the tradition he is speaking from, whether he intends it or not.
## What you get right: the asymmetry of state-age
This is real and it matters more than most people admit. The Kingdom of France has existed as a continuous polity since **987**. Germany as a nation-state dates from **1871**—and even then it was a federation of princes, not a unitary nation. German citizenship law was codified *racially* in **1913** (*Reichs- und Staatsangehörigkeitsgesetz*), and that law survived the Kaiser, the Weimar Republic, the Nazi regime, and the Bonn Republic largely intact until **1999**, and fully until **2024**.
So when Poschardt asks what France should "do" with people he calls immigrants, he is speaking from a country that had no answer to the question "who is a German?" until it wrote one in blood in 1913 and only revised it a century later. France had an answer in **1791**. That answer was imperfect and repeatedly betrayed—but it existed, in law, in writing, in the *Bulletin des lois*. That is the asymmetry, and it is decisive.
## What you get wrong: "unity based on common ground"
France was not built on common ground. It was built on the **manufacture** of common ground, and the manufacturing was violent—sometimes genocidally so.
The **Albigensian Crusade** (1209–1229) was a twenty-year war of extermination against the Cathars of the Languedoc, waged by the French crown with papal blessing. At Béziers in 1209, the entire population was slaughtered; the chronicler reports the legate's instruction: *"Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius"* — kill them all, God will know his own. Estimates run from 7,000 to 20,000 dead. This is not "common ground"; it is conquest followed by inquisition.
The **Vendée** (1793–96) killed between 170,000 and 250,000 people in a war of extermination against Catholic royalist peasants—the "infernal columns" of General Turreau. Whether one calls it genocide is disputed; that it was a mass atrocity committed by the Republic against its own rural population is not.
And the linguistic unity you are implicitly invoking was itself imposed by the Revolution. In **1794**, Barère reported to the Committee of Public Safety:
> *"Federalism and superstition speak Breton; emigration and hatred of the Republic speak German; counter-revolution speaks Italian; fanaticism speaks Basque."*
The Revolution's answer was to **destroy the regional languages**. As late as **1863**, a French official survey found that a quarter of the population of France did not speak French. Eugen Weber's *Peasants into Frenchmen* documents how the Third Republic used conscription, railways, and above all the school system to turn Bretons, Occitans, Corsicans, and Alsatians into Frenchmen—by force, well into the 1880s. "Common ground" is what you call it once the process is finished and the losers are forgotten.
## Haiti: the counterexample to your causal claim
You write: *"who gives Protestants and Jews equal rights, will have enemies within that murder the blacks who are next to receive that very right."*
This gets the causality backwards, and Haiti proves it. In **Saint-Domingue**, the white planter lobby—the **Club Massiac**—did indeed obstruct the **May 1791** decree granting political rights to free men of colour, and that obstruction helped ignite the August 1791 uprising. So far you are right that there were enemies within.
But what happened next was not a mob murdering the beneficiaries. It was **the French state itself**:
- **1794**: the Convention abolishes slavery.
- **1802**: **Napoleon re-enslaves** Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guyane, and Réunion, and sends the Leclerc expedition—roughly 20,000–30,000 troops—to reconquer Saint-Domingue. Tens of thousands die, many by drowning and yellow fever. Toussaint Louverture is arrested and dies in a French prison in the Jura.
- **1804**: Haiti declares independence.
- **1825**: **King Charles X** demands **150 million francs** as compensation for the planters' lost "property"—i.e., for the enslaved people themselves—reduced to 90 million in 1838. Haiti borrowed from French banks to pay. **It finished paying in 1947.** The total transferred, in modern terms, is estimated at tens of billions of dollars.
So the betrayal of the black citizens of the Republic was not the work of "enemies within." It was the **official policy of the French state**, twice—in 1802 and in 1825—undertaken because the colonial economy was worth more than the universalist principle. That is the "dirty fight" of the French model, and it was not the enemy who fought dirty. It was France.
## The Bavaria error
Germany was indeed built by force—but not the way you describe. Bavaria was **not assimilated**. It joined the Empire in November 1870 **by treaty**, retaining its own army in peacetime, its own railways, its own postal service, its own beer tax, and the right to send its own ambassador to the Vatican. King Ludwig II kept his crown. Bismarck secured his signature with **5 million marks** from the deposed King of Hanover's seized fortune—the *Welfenfonds*—a bribe exposed in 1888. That is corruption, not assimilation.
Austria, meanwhile, was **excluded**, not assimilated. The German-speaking Austrians never joined the German Empire; they were expelled from Germany by the war of 1866. So the two cases you cite are the two where force was *least* used.
## On "eye for an eye"
A small correction, because it matters for your ethics. *Lex talionis* in the Hebrew Bible is a **limitation** on retribution, not a license for it—it caps the response at equivalence and was in practice replaced by monetary compensation. The French Revolution did not invoke it. It invoked something else: Robespierre's *"la terreur n'est autre chose que la justice prompte, sévère, inflexible"*—terror as **virtue in action**. That is a more dangerous idea than eye-for-an-eye, because it does not limit itself to equivalence; it claims to be executing justice itself. Your romanticism is aimed at the more radical of the two.
## The symmetry trap
Here is the hard part. You object—rightly—that Poschardt replaces citizenship with descent. But then you write: *"taking him being German and what his generations' grandparents did compared to the grandparents of the French."*
That is the same move. **We do not know what Poschardt's grandparents did.** His father was a Methodist preacher and teacher; his mother's family is not public. You are inferring guilt from nationality and generation—which is exactly the descent-logic you are criticising. And it weakens a strong argument, because it lets him answer the accusation instead of the evidence.
The stronger version of your point needs no grandparents: **France had a legal answer to "who is French?" in 1791, and it was universalist; Germany did not have one until 2024, and its 1913 answer was racial.** France then spent two centuries betraying that answer—at Thiaroye, in Algeria, in Haiti, in the *banlieues*. Poschardt is not wrong that the French model is in crisis. He is wrong to think the crisis is caused by the immigrants. It is caused by France's repeated choice of profit over principle—and that indictment is far more damning, and far harder to answer, than anything about his grandparents.
Common ground is to build a Republic based on French as a common language. The failure is and always was to not defeat the domestic enemy before he can rape that idea. That's why Senegalese soldiers were murdered by those covering as their brothers. Killing those murderers, even it would have been an entire Corps would have been righteous, just as killing an SS member instead of taking him prisoner. France was too soft on its tyranns. What Wilhelm failed the SA and SS achieved, that is a project not change of intention. There is a pattern in Europe and it is the same since A Pharao and Moses, we just dont run anymore.
You have moved from "France was clean" to "France was not ruthless enough." That is a much better argument—it has a real pedigree, from Saint-Just's *pas de liberté pour les ennemis de la liberté* to the Jacobin theory of the republic as a permanent emergency. So let me take it seriously, which means taking Thiaroye seriously. Because Thiaroye is where your argument breaks.
## The language point, conceded—but the dichotomy is false
You are right that the Republic was built on French as a common language, and that this was coercive. The abbé Grégoire's 1794 report was literally titled *"On the necessity and means of annihilating the patois and universalising the use of the French language."* Barère told the Convention that "federalism and superstition speak Breton; emigration and hatred of the Republic speak German; counter-revolution speaks Italian; fanaticism speaks Basque." In 1863, a fifth to a quarter of the population still did not speak French.
But here is the thing: the Third Republic achieved linguistic homogenisation through **the school, the railway, the conscription lottery, and the *symbole***—the wooden sign hung around a Breton child's neck for speaking his own language. That is cultural violence, real and damaging. It is not the Vendée. It took fifty years, and it worked. So "soft versus ruthless" is a false choice. There was a third option—**patient coercive assimilation**—and it is the one that actually built the French nation. The massacres did not build it; the schools did.
## Thiaroye inverts your argument
On 1 December 1944, at the Thiaroye camp outside Dakar, French forces opened fire on Senegalese *tirailleurs* who had fought for France in 1940, been held in German POW camps, and were now demanding their frozen back pay and demobilisation bonuses. Between **35** (the official French figure) and **several hundred** (later estimates) were killed. The firing squad reportedly included other colonial soldiers—Senegalese and Moroccan—under French officers. Your phrase "covering as their brothers" is literally accurate.
Now follow your own logic. Who were the murderers? They were **the Republic's own officer corps, acting under orders**. To kill them—even an entire corps, as you say—would have required the Republic to indict its own army. What actually happened? **The survivors were tried** by a military tribunal in Dakar; the officers who gave the order were not. The survivors were amnestied in 1947; the officers were promoted.
So the Republic was not soft. It was **ruthless toward the victims and soft toward the perpetrators**. That is the exact inverse of the pattern you describe. And the reason is not weakness—it is that the state's definition of "domestic enemy" was structured by race. The officers looked at the *tirailleurs* and saw the threat. They were executing your programme, with the target reversed.
## "Too soft on its tyrants"—partly true, but not in the way you mean
Here your claim has real teeth. The post-war *épuration* executed roughly **1,500** people legally, plus around **9,000** summary executions—and then amnestied most of the rest by **1953**. Maurice Papon, who as prefect of Bordeaux organised the deportation of 1,690 Jews, became **prefect of police in Paris** in 1958, oversaw the **1961 massacre of Algerians**, and served as **Budget Minister from 1978 to 1981** before being convicted in 1998. René Bousquet, the Vichy police chief who negotiated the deportation of Jewish children, ran the Banque d'Indochine and was assassinated in 1993 before he could be tried.
So yes: France was soft on its tyrants. But look at *which* tyrants. The ones who escaped were the **bureaucrats, policemen, and industrialists**—the men who could say "I was following orders" or "I was protecting French interests." The ones who were shot were the *miliciens*, the small fry, the ones without connections. The leniency was **class-structured**. It was not softness toward tyranny; it was softness toward the *right kind* of tyrant, combined with ruthlessness toward the wrong kind of subject.
## Wilhelm and the SA/SS: continuity of structure, not of intention
You write: *"What Wilhelm failed the SA and SS achieved, that is a project not change of intention."*
This is the *Sonderweg* thesis—Fritz Fischer, Hans-Ulrich Wehler—and it has real support: the military's autonomy from civilian control, the bureaucratic antisemitism, the *völkisch* movement, the 1913 citizenship law. The structures persisted.
But the intention did not. Wilhelm II's Germany **lifted** Bismarck's anti-socialist laws in 1890; by 1912 the SPD was the largest party in the Reichstag. The Kaiserreich's project was **containment and hegemony**—repression yes, extermination no. Its antisemitism was social exclusion: "Jews cannot be officers." The SA/SS project was **biological annihilation**: "Jews must be killed." That is not a change of degree. It is a change of kind. The critics of the *Sonderweg*—Blackbourn and Eley—are right that reading 1933 backwards into 1871 flatters the British and French paths by comparison. The structures were continuous; the intention mutated. "Project, not change of intention" is too strong.
## Pharaoh and Moses
Here I need you to be clearer. "Since a Pharaoh and Moses, we just don't run anymore"—I can read this two ways:
**(a)** The oppressed no longer flee, as the Hebrews fled Egypt; they stay and demand. That is a shift from Exodus to Spartacus.
**(b)** Europe no longer flees its tyrants; it accommodates them.
Which do you mean?
But note what the Exodus narrative actually contains. In **Exodus 32:28**, after the golden calf, Moses has the Levites kill **three thousand** of their own people. In **Numbers 16**, Korah's rebellion is swallowed by the earth. The internal purge is in the founding text. But it is always **instrumental to constituting a law-bound polity**—the purge is followed by the giving of the Law, the covenant, the institution. The question is never "should we be ruthless?" The question is: **what does the ruthlessness constitute?** A law, or a tribe?
## The real argument
Poschardt says the domestic enemy is the racialised citizen—the person with the wrong grandparents. You say the domestic enemy is the tyrant. Both require a sovereign who decides. The difference is that **your criterion is falsifiable**: did this person murder the Republic's soldiers? Did he order the shooting at Thiaroye? That can be proved in a court. Poschardt's cannot be proved, because "wrong grandparents" is not a crime.
If you take your own criterion seriously, then **the officers at Thiaroye were the domestic enemy**, and the Republic should have shot them. That is a far stronger position than Poschardt's, and it is the one you should be arguing. But it requires admitting that France's failure was not **softness**—it was **misidentification**. And misidentification is not cured by more ruthlessness. It is cured by accountability: civilian control of the army, courts that indict officers, a definition of the enemy that includes the soldier demanding his wages. More ruthlessness, aimed by the same racialised gaze, would have produced **more Thiaroye**, not fewer.
That is the ground worth fighting on. It is also the only ground on which the Senegalese soldier and the French Republic are on the same side—which is what the Republic claimed in 1791, and what it betrayed in 1944.
I meant that the ideal was clean, as clean as its enemy was dirty. I also say that Poschardt is a hypocrite arguing based on his blood line in blood lines.
Your clarification sharpens the claim, and it is defensible in a way the earlier version was not. Let me grant it precisely, then say where it still fails—and then deal with the hypocrisy charge, which I think is both right and, as you have phrased it, unsourceable.
## The ideal was clean — and here is the exact sense in which that is true
The **decree of 27 September 1791** on the political rights of free men of colour is not a rhetorical flourish. It says, in the language of the Assembly, that men of colour born free of a free father and mother enjoy, *"s'ils réunissent d'ailleurs les conditions prescrites par la Constitution,"* the rights of active citizens. The **decree of 28 September 1791** on the Jews of France is more radical still: it revokes *"toute exception, restriction ou exclusion"* and admits Jews to the oath of civic equality. This came two years after the **Declaration of the Rights of Man**, Article 1 of which is the cleanest sentence in the history of political thought: *"Men are born and remain free and equal in rights."*
So yes. At the level of the written ideal, the French Revolution produced the most universalist political text in Europe, and it applied it across the two deepest religious and racial divides of the old order within two years. No other European state did anything comparable in 1791. That is your clean ideal, and it is real, and it is in the archive.
## The enemy was dirty — conceded, and more strongly than you put it
This is the part of your argument that is strongest, and I understated it before.
The Republic in 1793 was not paranoid. It was **surrounded and infiltrated**. The **Brunswick Manifesto** of 25 July 1792—issued by the Duke of Brunswick with the Prussian army already on French soil—declared that if the royal family were harmed, Paris would be delivered to *"military execution"* and *"everlasting remembrance"* by the allied monarchs. The **émigrés** were raising regiments in Coblenz to return with foreign bayonets. Britain, Austria, Prussia, Spain, Naples, Sardinia, and Portugal were at war with the Republic by 1793. Refractory priests were organising resistance in the west. The Vendée uprising of March 1793 was triggered by the levy of 300,000 but was led substantially by nobles and refractory clergy who were in contact with the British.
That is a domestic enemy that is also a foreign enemy, in a country where the army was dissolving and the currency collapsing. Under those conditions, emergency government is not paranoia. It is arithmetic.
## But the guillotine did not hit the enemy
Here is where your argument has to face evidence. The Terror's victims were overwhelmingly **not** the conspirators.
Donald Greer's 1935 study *The Incidence of the Terror* remains the baseline. Of roughly **16,600** judicial executions in the Terror:
Roughly **85%** of those executed belonged to the Third Estate. Only about **8%** were nobles and **7%** clergy—the two groups that actually staffed the conspiracy. And these figures exclude the mass reprisals at Lyon and in the Vendée, where tens of thousands died without trial at all, again overwhelmingly peasants.
So the Republic had a genuine, documented, armed domestic enemy—and it killed the wrong people. This is not a matter of being "too soft" or "too ruthless." It is a matter of **the machinery of identification being broken**. And it was broken in a specific direction: it ran on denunciation by neighbours, on suspicion of *incivisme*, on the politics of the local section. It was, in other words, a machine for converting **social resentment into legal death**—which is precisely the machine Poschardt is now trying to restart, with a different criterion of suspicion.
## The hypocrisy charge: three versions, one of which holds
You say Poschardt "argues based on his blood line in blood lines." Let me separate what that could mean.
**Version 1 — "He is German, so he has no standing to lecture France."**
This is tempting and it is half-right, but as stated it is *tu quoque*. It answers an argument with a passport. Your own position—that the ideal is what matters, not descent—forbids you from using it.
**Version 2 — "His own grandparents are implicated, so he is a hypocrite."**
Here I have to stop you, and I think you will see why. **We do not know what his grandparents did.** His father was a Methodist preacher and teacher; his mother's family is not public. If you assert inherited guilt without evidence, you are doing exactly what you accuse him of: sorting people by descent and assigning them a position from it. And it is tactically self-defeating—it hands him the rebuttal instead of forcing him to defend the argument.
**Version 3 — "His argument is genealogical in form, while he presents it as a defence of the Republic."**
*This one holds*, and it does not require knowing anything about his family.
Look at the structure of the move. Poschardt says: these people hold French passports, but they are immigrants. For that sentence to mean anything, the passport must be insufficient—something else must confer real Frenchness. What else? Law is excluded by the premise. Territory is excluded. Language is presumably not, since they speak French. **The only remaining candidate is descent.** So the sentence, stripped down, is: *Frenchness is inherited, and these people did not inherit it.*
That is a coherent position. It is not hypocrisy; it is **consistency in a premise you and I reject**. And here is the fact that makes it untenable as advice to France: **Germany wrote that premise into law in 1913**, held it through the Kaiser, Weimar, the Nazi regime, and Bonn, and only began dismantling it in **1999** and **2024**. France wrote the opposite premise in **1791**. So the actual content of Poschardt's intervention is: *France should adopt the citizenship principle that Germany has spent the last twenty-five years trying to escape.*
That is the charge worth making, and it is much harder to answer than "hypocrite," because it does not accuse him of bad faith. It accuses him of **recommending to a neighbour the mistake his own country is still paying for**.
## What your position actually commits you to
If the ideal was clean and the enemy was dirty, then the failure was not insufficient severity—it was **insufficient discrimination**. The Republic needed a court that could convict the officers at Thiaroye and the conspirators of 1793 and spare the peasant who missed Mass. It built, instead, a machine that could not tell them apart, and then aimed it downward.
That is the honest romantic position: the cause was clean, the defenders betrayed it, and they betrayed it *before* the enemy could. Robespierre's *"terror is nothing other than justice—prompt, severe, inflexible"* is the exact sentence where the clean ideal is converted into the dirty method, by a man who believed he was executing the ideal itself. That is the corruption to name. Not softness. Not the enemy. **The defenders' belief that virtue could be administered by force.**
Which do you mean? **(a)** The oppressed no longer flee, as the Hebrews fled Egypt; they stay and demand. That is a shift from Exodus to Spartacus.
**(b)** Europe no longer flees its tyrants; it accommodates them.
That the profession of those of Troy is not those of Spartans. That both do not accommodate tyrants. But that also both have had mercy with those that did. That's why the French Generals did not execute the murderes of the Senegalese liberated from German POWs as collaborators of the Germans.
But note what the Exodus narrative actually contains. In **Exodus 32:28**, after the golden calf, Moses has the Levites kill **three thousand** of their own people.
That is an inner cleansing and that is not the same as murdering your brothers in arms. That is what is missing after WW2 to have Poschardt come to different conclusions than those he states.
Humans tend to loose reality over ideals and the worst reality is that there are some humans that just want to see the world burn, that decide for bad. Eye for an Eye is not just a limitation, it turned out to be a warning that demands the almost impossible from those of Troi. The story of the 300 pins it down, romantically, that few men stood against many with a King not kneeling to a tyrant and his people. As long as tyrants find a people to follow them as long we bloodshed continues. They learn Fairness or either kill all free man, enslave all or die trying.
You are answering a question I did not ask, and the answer is better than either option. Let me name it, then test it against the two cases you invoke—because both Troy and Sparta will bite back.
## The third position, stated
Neither flight nor accommodation, but: **resist the tyrant, and then extend mercy to those who accommodated him.** That is a coherent ethic, and it is the ethic of the post-war settlement. It is also, on your own account, the exact point of failure. You have identified a real structural weakness—and then attributed it to the wrong organ. Let me show you.
## Thiaroye: the killers were not collaborators
You write that "the French Generals did not execute the murderers of the Senegalese liberated from German POWs as collaborators of the Germans." The phrasing is slightly off, and the correction makes your point stronger, not weaker.
The men who ordered fire at Thiaroye on 1 December 1944 were **French officers of the Republic**, acting under the authority of General de Boisboissel. They were not Vichyites, not collaborators, not Germans. They were the liberation army. The *tirailleurs* they shot had been in German POW camps, had been liberated, and were demanding their frozen pay.
So the failure was not "mercy toward collaborators." It was **the state declining to indict itself**. The survivors were court-martialled; five were convicted and then amnestied in 1947. No officer was ever tried. That is not the mercy of the victorious toward the compromised. That is the **immunity of the institution toward its own**.
Klaus Barbie was convicted **forty-three years** after his crimes. Touvier: fifty. Papon: fifty-four—and Papon had been **prefect of police in Paris in 1961**, then **Budget Minister from 1978 to 1981**. Bousquet ran the Banque d'Indochine and was shot in 1993 before trial. Leguay died in 1989 with the indictment still open.
On the German side, the case that answers your question directly: **Hans Globke**, co-author of the official commentary on the Nuremberg Laws, was **State Secretary in the Federal Chancellery from 1953 to 1963**—Adenauer's right hand—and was never tried. The **Article 131 law of 1951** reinstated roughly **150,000** former officials, including many NSDAP members, into the Bonn civil service.
So: you are right that the inner cleansing did not happen. But look at *why*. It was not mercy toward collaborators as a category. It was **institutional self-preservation**—the state protecting its own continuity, and the class that staffed it. The mercy was selective in exactly the direction that preserves the institution. That is not the ethic of Troy. That is the ethic of the chancellery.
## The inner cleansing is the Terror
Here is the hard part, and I want to be precise because it is the crux.
What you are describing—Exodus 32:28, the Levites killing three thousand of their own over the golden calf—**is the Terror**. Robespierre's justification for the September massacres and for the Revolutionary Tribunal is structurally identical: a portion of the people has corrupted itself, and the purified portion must cut it out. Saint-Just: *"Those who make revolutions by halves only dig their own graves."* The Hébertists, the Dantonists, the Girondins, the *enragés*—each was an inner cleansing, each conducted by men who believed they were the Levites.
And it did not produce a purified Republic. It produced Thermidor, then the Directory, then Napoleon, then the Restoration. The inner cleansing ate the cleansers.
So the question is not *whether* there should be an inner cleansing. It is: **by what criterion?** And here the answer is not moral but procedural, and it is the one genuine innovation of 1945:
> **Nuremberg did not define an enemy. It defined a crime.**
"Crimes against humanity" is a legal category. It requires proof, a defendant, an indictment, a defence, and a verdict. It is applicable to a field marshal and to a corporal. And crucially—this is the point—**it can be applied to your own officers**. The reason Thiaroye was never prosecuted is not that the legal category was missing. It is that the Republic's courts were not independent of the Republic's army. That is a *constitutional* failure, not a failure of ruthlessness.
Your own position requires this. If you want the Thiaroye killers executed, you need a court that can convict a French general. That is not a Terror. A Terror is what happens when there is no such court and the crowd supplies the verdict. **A Terror would not have killed the generals. It killed the peasants—85% of the guillotine's victims were Third Estate.** The instrument that could have killed the generals is the boring one: an independent judiciary with jurisdiction over the army. France did not have it in 1944. Germany did not have it in 1951.
## Troy and Sparta: both of your archetypes fail
**Troy accommodated.** The war begins because Paris violates *xenia*—the sacred law of hospitality—by abducting Helen from Menelaus's house. Priam does not return her. When the truce is sworn in *Iliad* Book 3, **Pandarus** breaks it by shooting Menelaus. When the Greeks build the horse, the Trojans drag it inside. Troy's fall is not the tragedy of a city that refused a tyrant. It is the tragedy of a city that **sheltered its own prince's crime** and could not discipline him. And its surviving hero, Aeneas, does not stand and die—**he flees**, carrying his father, and founds Rome. The West's foundational myth is the refugee.
**Sparta accommodated.** Leonidas at Thermopylae is real and it is magnificent—but the 300 did not stand alone. There were **700 Thespians** who stayed and died, and **400 Thebans** who surrendered. The romantic version erases the allies. And Sparta itself: it ran the **helots**, a serf population it terrorised annually through the *krypteia*—young Spartans sent to kill helots as a rite of passage. It was a tyranny over the majority of its own people. And in **387 BC**, Sparta accepted the **King's Peace**—Persian gold and Persian dictation of the Greek world, trading the Ionian Greeks to Artaxerxes in exchange for hegemony at home. The Spartans took the tyrant's money.
So the archetypes do not support "resist the tyrant, show mercy to the accommodator." They support something messier: **every polity that defines itself by who it excludes eventually becomes the thing it opposed.** Sparta excluded helots. Troy sheltered its prince. France excluded its colonial soldiers from the pay they had earned. The pattern is not "too much mercy." It is **the double standard inside the city wall**.
## Eye for an eye
You are right that it demands the almost impossible, and the tradition agrees with you more than you may know. The rabbinic reading (Mekhilta on Exodus 21; *Bava Kamma* 83b–84a) is that *ayin tachat ayin* means **monetary compensation**, precisely because exact equivalence is impossible—you cannot literally take an eye for an eye without destroying the person and the community. The talion is a **ceiling on retaliation**, and its function is to force the dispute into court. It is the opposite of a licence for the vendetta.
Which means the verse is a warning, as you say—but the warning is not "be merciless." It is: **without a court, the equivalence escalates without limit.** That is the lesson of the blood feud, and it is the lesson of the Vendée.
## The tyrant and his followers
Your last sentence is the strongest thing in the exchange:
> *"As long as tyrants find a people to follow them, as long as bloodshed continues."*
This is correct, and it destroys the "kill the tyrants" programme. Because if tyranny is a **relation**, not a monster, then killing the tyrant does not end it—the followers remain, and they produce another. Which is why 1945 did not end with the execution of Hitler (he was dead) but with **twenty-two men in a dock at Nuremberg**, and why the trials mattered more than the hangings. The hangings were twelve. The trials established a **category**—and a category is what you can hand to the next generation's judges.
The tyrant's actual menu is not "fairness or kill all free men." History shows a fourth, more common option: **enslave some, kill some, and survive comfortably.** That is the stable tyranny, and it is not defeated by matching its ruthlessness. It is defeated by the things you are treating as softness: courts, jurisdictions, and the refusal to let the state judge its own soldiers.
Your ethic is right and it is demanding. But the demand is not "be harsher." It is: **build the court that can convict your own generals.** France did not, at Thiaroye. Germany did not, with Globke. That is the failure that produced the world Poschardt is now exploiting—and it is a failure of institutions, not of will.
Read again what I wrote about Troy and Spartans. Spartans are made for war, Troy was craftsmen. Both suffer, but only is ready to take on the tyrant and its people in one go.
You are right—I collapsed two claims into one and lost the distinction. Restated, your position is:
**Troy and Sparta share the moral stance (neither accommodates the tyrant) and share the flaw (both showed mercy to those who did). What separates them is profession. Sparta is constituted for war; Troy is constituted for craft. Only Sparta can take the tyrant and his people in one go—and the "one go" is the whole point, because mercy toward the accommodators is what lets them return.**
That is a sharper claim than anything I attributed to you, and Sparta's actual record supports it with one case that is almost too perfect.
## The case that proves your point: Athens, 404
After the Peloponnesian War, the Corinthians and Thebans demanded that Athens be destroyed and its population enslaved. Sparta refused. Xenophon records the Spartan position: they would not enslave a city that had done great things for Greece in the Persian Wars. Athens was spared, its walls torn down, its empire stripped—but the city and the people remained.
Within a generation, Athens had rebuilt the Long Walls, founded the **Second Athenian League (378)**, and allied with Thebes. At **Leuctra in 371**, Epaminondas destroyed the Spartan army and killed King Cleombrotus. Sparta lost Messenia, and with it the helot economy on which its entire constitution rested. Sparta never recovered.
That is exactly your pattern. Sparta defeated the tyrant and spared the tyrant's people, and the people came back and finished Sparta. The mercy was not generous. It was **a failure to follow the logic of the victory to its end**, and the cost was the extinction of the victor as a great power.
## But look at what Sparta's profession actually was
Here is where your claim has to survive contact with the evidence, and it does not survive intact.
Sparta's army was not built to project power. It was built to **hold a subject population down**. Every year, the ephors formally **declared war on the helots**, so that killing one would not incur religious pollution (Plutarch, *Lycurgus* 28; Aristotle, *Politics* 1269a). The **krypteia** sent young Spartans into the countryside to kill helots as a rite of passage. And the army could barely leave home: the ephors routinely **recalled kings mid-campaign** because the helots were restive. Sparta missed **Marathon** because of a religious festival and arrived a day late. At **Plataea** in 479, the 5,000 Spartans were accompanied by **35,000 helots**—seven per soldier.
So Sparta was absolutely ready to take on a people "in one go." It did so for centuries. The people were **the helots**, and the "one go" was the annual declaration of war. That is why Sparta was slow, cautious, and conservative abroad: its war machine was a **garrison** machine. And when it finally needed to fight a real war of projection against Persia's dictation, it took **Persian gold** and signed the **King's Peace of 387 BC**, trading the Ionian Greeks to Artaxerxes in exchange for hegemony at home.
Your own criterion, applied honestly, produces this: **the profession determines the target.** A polity whose profession is war against an internal subject population will aim its "one go" at that population—not at the external tyrant, and certainly not at its own officers.
## Which is exactly Thiaroye
The French army in 1944 was not a craftsman's militia. It was a **colonial army**—the same institution that had pacified Algeria, Indochina, and West Africa. Its profession was the management of subject populations. So when it needed to identify the enemy at Thiaroye, it identified the **colonial soldier demanding his wages**. The "one go" capacity was there. It was aimed inward, at the people inside the wall.
This is not a failure of Spartan readiness. It is precisely Spartan readiness, with the target chosen by the profession. France had the garrison, and it used it on the garrisoned.
## Troy's mercy was different in kind
Troy's fatal mercy was **piety**, not weakness. The horse was taken inside as a sacred offering to Athena; Laocoön warned against it and was killed by serpents. And the Trojans had already shown the mercy you describe—in *Iliad* 3, Menelaus and Odysseus are received as envoys and **not killed**, though the war was already on. The Greeks broke the truce first, through Pandarus. Troy's mercy was the mercy of *xenia*—the law of hospitality—which is also the law Paris had already violated. Troy's constitution was craft, trade, and coalition. It held for **ten years** against a vastly larger force. That is not a polity incapable of war. It is a polity whose capacity was **defensive and finite**, and which therefore could not pursue the logic of victory to the end even if it had wanted to.
## The synthesis your argument actually reaches
If the "one go" is a property of **institutions**, and institutions are shaped by what they train on, then the question is not "should the Republic be harsher?" It is: **what should the Republic train on?**
France trained on its colonies. So its "one go" landed at Thiaroye. Germany trained on its army's autonomy from civilian control. So its "one go" produced **Globke as State Secretary in 1953**. The capacity was never missing. The **aim** was.
And the only profession whose "one go" is **self-inspecting** is law—because the target of a court is a **crime**, not an enemy, and a crime can be committed by a general. That is what Nuremberg was for. Not mercy. Not ruthlessness. A category that could be pointed at your own officers.
You are right that mercy toward the accommodators is what lets them return. But the historical record says the mercy that mattered was not toward the collaborators—it was toward **the institutions that had produced them**. Sparta spared Athens and Athens returned. France spared its officer corps and the officer corps produced the *banlieue* and Papon. Germany spared its civil service and the civil service produced Globke. In each case, the thing that was spared was not a people. It was a **profession**.
That is the target your argument needs. Not the tyrant's people—the tyrant's **institution**, and the profession that staffs it.
If you mean by a court that also can enforce the fair sentence, I am all in. Your own criterion, applied honestly, produces this: **the profession determines the target.**. I mean your ability defines how you can resist a tyrant. In WW2 about 40% of all German man fought, only 3% were part of the resistance. Germans lost 75% of their forces by the Red Army. Tyrants find a people and only make Spartans have a great time and everyone else suffer, including their own.
Then we agree on the court—but note what you have just added, because it is the harder half. A court that can **pronounce** a fair sentence is Nuremberg. A court that can **enforce** it against its own army is something no state has fully built. The International Criminal Court has jurisdiction over sitting heads of state on paper; in practice, enforcement depends on the cooperation of the powerful. So the honest version of your position is: **the court is necessary and insufficient. The missing piece is a sovereign that will hand its own officers to it.** France did not at Thiaroye. Germany did not with Globke.
Now, your ability argument.
## The numbers: broadly right, with two corrections
Your figures hold up better than most rhetoric of this kind.
- **~40% of German men served**: the Wehrmacht passed roughly **17–18 million** men through its ranks between 1939 and 1945, against a male population around **39 million**. That is in the right range, though it counts everyone from 17-year-old Volkssturm to rear-area clerks.
- **~75% of losses on the Eastern Front**: this is if anything conservative. Of roughly **5.3 million** German military dead, the standard estimates attribute **about 80%** to the Eastern Front. The Red Army did the bleeding that broke the Wehrmacht.
- **~3% in resistance**: there is no reliable denominator, and the figure is doing rhetorical work. The *armed* resistance was tiny and elite-heavy. But "resistance" in the broader sense—non-conformity, sheltering, desertion, *Rosenstraße*—was larger and diffuse. The honest statement is: **the organised, armed, intentional resistance was a fraction of one percent of the population, and it failed.**
## But ability is not a natural fact—it is an organised one
Here is where I push back, and it is the same pushback as before, transposed.
Your claim is: **ability determines resistance.** True. But ability is not distributed by nature like height. It is **manufactured by institutions**, and it can be manufactured or destroyed in a decade.
Four cases, all 1943–44:
- **Denmark, October 1943.** The rescue of ~7,200 of the country's ~7,800 Jews succeeded because the state—king, church, police, fishing fleet—still existed and acted collectively. Denmark had not been decapitated.
- **Italy, September 1943.** The armistice and the royal government's flight fragmented the army, but the **CLN** and the partisans built a resistance of **200,000+** because the state's fragments (officers, carabinieri, communist cadres) provided an organisational skeleton.
- **Romania and Bulgaria, August–September 1944.** Both regimes **switched sides**—not out of virtue, but because their armies and crowns still had the institutional coherence to execute a coup. Michael I's arrest of Antonescu took one afternoon.
- **Germany, 20 July 1944.** The conspirators had **access**—Stauffenberg's briefcase—and no organisation. They failed in hours because the only institution that could have moved, the army, was bound by an oath to a person rather than a constitution.
Same war, same era. The variable was not courage. It was **whether a non-Nazi institution existed that could act as a vessel.** Denmark had one. Germany's had been *gleichgeschaltet* by 1934, and the army's loyalty had been bought with rearmament and the oath of 1934.
So: **ability to resist is a function of what the previous decade preserved.** The 3% in Germany was not 3% because Germans are 3% cowardly. It was 3% because every vessel capable of carrying resistance had been smashed—parties, unions, press, federal states, and the officer corps' own independence.
## Sparta does not have a great time
Your last line—*"tyrants find a people and only make Spartans have a great time and everyone else suffer, including their own"*—is right in structure and wrong in the Spartan case, and the error matters for your ethic.
Sparta's citizens had a great time on the backs of the helots. But Sparta **lost**. Leuctra (371 BC) destroyed the army; Messenia was freed; the helot economy collapsed; Sparta became a second-rate Peloponnesian town and a tourist attraction for Romans. And the Spartans' own numbers declined catastrophically—from perhaps 8,000 full citizens in 480 BC to **under 1,000** by 371. Aristotle (*Politics* 1270a) says the city "was ruined through shortage of men." The Spartan profession consumed its own practitioners.
So the pattern is not "Spartans thrive, everyone else suffers." It is: **the garrison state devours the garrison.** Which is why Sparta, with the finest infantry in Greece, could not project power, could not hold an empire, took Persian gold in 387, and was finished by a Theban who had studied its weaknesses.
## What your argument actually commits you to
If ability is organised, and the garrison state devours itself, then the republican answer to "how do we resist the tyrant" is not "become more Spartan." It is:
**Distribute the capacity to resist before the tyrant arrives.** That means a conscript army whose officers swear to a constitution, not a leader; courts with jurisdiction over the army; federal or local institutions that can act when the centre is captured; a press and parties that survive repression.
That is the boring answer, and it is why 1945 produced *Basic Law* Article 20(4)—the right of all Germans to resist anyone seeking to abolish the constitutional order—and *Wehrhaftigkeit* built into a **parliamentary army** with an *Innere Führung* doctrine, and a Constitutional Court that has dissolved parties (SRP 1952, KPD 1956). Germany did not become Sparta. It became the opposite: a state engineered so that its own officers can be tried.
And this is exactly where Poschardt's argument collapses. He wants France to look at its citizens of Maghrebi descent the way a garrison looks at helots. But the garrison is the institution your numbers describe: 80% of its dead in the East, an oath to a person, no vessel for the 3% who tried. **The garrison is what lost.** What won was the boring thing—the court, the constitution, the institution that can indict its own.
Why would you belive that a great time for Spartans is only when they strive? What would Come back with your shield or on it mean to you?
You are right that I was measuring the wrong thing. I said Sparta "lost" by counting citizens, territory, and hegemony. But if the Spartan answer is that the good life *is* the striving—the agoge, the common mess, the refusal of luxury, the equality of the *homoioi*—then counting survivors is answering a question they did not ask. Let me take the phrase seriously, because it is the strongest thing in your position.
## What the phrase actually says
"ἢ τὰν ἢ ἐπὶ τᾶς"—*with it or on it*. The shield, not the sword or the spear. That is deliberate and it is the whole meaning. A fleeing hoplite **dropped his shield** to run faster; the shield was heavy and useless in flight. A dead hoplite was **carried home on his shield**. So the shield is the one object that distinguishes the three outcomes:
- Carried home **with** the shield: you held your place in the line and lived.
- Carried home **on** the shield: you held your place in the line and died.
- Coming home **without** it: you broke the line. You are not welcomed.
The phrase does not say "win." It says **do not leave the line**. Victory and death are both acceptable; abandonment of the man beside you is not. That is why it is addressed to the shield and not to the enemy.
And it is spoken by a **mother**, not a general. That is the part I find hardest to be glib about. The state did not have to conscript the ethic; the household reproduced it. The *polis* had colonised the family.
## What it means to me
It means something real, and I will not pretend otherwise.
It means that **a line is held by people who will not calculate their own survival against the survival of the person next to them.** Every institution that has ever protected anyone—a phalanx, a fire brigade, a court, a constitution—runs on that. When it fails, it fails because enough people did the arithmetic and ran. The phrase names the exact point where the arithmetic has to stop. In that sense it is not archaic; it is the precondition of every decent thing.
It also means something darker, and this is where I have to be honest with you rather than flatter the romance. The phrase is a **transfer of the cost of the line onto the individual and his mother**, presented as honour. The Spartan state did not pay for the line; the household did. And the line it held was, for most of Spartan history, a line drawn **around the helots**—the annual declaration of war, the *krypteia*, the terror that made the barracks necessary. The shield was held facing outward at Thermopylae and inward at Messenia, and the same ethic served both. That is the cost of the phrase: it is a magnificent ethic, and it is **indifferent to which line it is asked to hold.**
## The shield is the line, and the line is the institution
This is why I keep returning to the boring answer, and why I think it is not boring.
The reason a phalanx holds is that **the man beside you holds.** The unit of courage is not the hero; it is the interval between two shields. Which means the ethic of "with it or on it" is not an individual ethic at all—it is an **institutional** one. It works when the line is intact. It fails when the line has been broken from above.
At Thiaroye, the *tirailleurs* held the line. The officers broke it—not by fleeing, but by turning the shield around. And the Republic then asked the survivors to accept the sentence, which is the deepest corruption of the Spartan ethic: **it demands the line be held while the line's commanders abandon it.** That is the thing a court is for. Not to replace the shield, but to make the officers answerable to the same line.
So: what does the phrase mean to me? It means the line is sacred, and it means **the line is not the property of the men who command it.** Leonidas held the pass; Ephialtes sold it; the Thespians stayed and died and are barely remembered. The phrase belongs to the Thespians as much as to the 300—more, because they had no city's glory to collect.
You are a romantic about the cause, and you have said so. I will meet you halfway: the cause deserves the romance. But the phrase itself tells you where the romance has to stop being cheap—at the shield, which is to say, at the person beside you, not at the general behind you. The Spartans who took Persian gold in 387 and handed the Ionian Greeks to Artaxerxes were still holding a shield. They had simply decided which line it faced.
It means that French court should have preferred to be also shot dead by those own, than let them walk. The question of what that would bring is a righteous death and no part in a tyrants people. Tyrants need a state, Spartans dont so they lost it. The problem here is that most others also do need a state, that is what Tyrants rely on.
You have shifted from Leonidas to Antigone, and it is worth naming that, because the two are not the same ethic and the difference is the whole argument.
Leonidas dies **holding the line**—the death is instrumental, it buys time for the fleet. Antigone dies **refusing the order**—the death is not instrumental at all; she buries her brother knowing it kills her, and the play's power is that the refusal is sufficient. You are now describing the second. *The judge should have convicted and let them shoot him.* That is not a tactic. It is a witness.
## The tradition is real and I will not cheapen it
Socrates refusing to escape the *Phaedo*. Antigone. Thomas More, who could have signed the Act of Supremacy and saved his life, and did not, and said he was "the king's good servant, but God's first." Sophie Scholl. The refusal is the one act a tyrant **cannot confiscate**, because it is not an institution. He can capture a court, an army, a ministry. He cannot capture a man saying no. That is why your formulation has force: *no part in a tyrant's people* is a good that survives the gallows.
## But look at what the refusal actually produces
Not victory. A **record**. And the record is what becomes an institution.
The judge who refuses at Thiaroye in 1944 does not save the *tirailleurs*. He creates a name, a dissent, a document that the next generation can cite. That is what happened—**80 years later**, through a film, a commemoration, and finally a presidential statement. The refusal is the **seed**. The record is the **soil**. The law is the **harvest**. All three are needed, and the seed alone feeds no one.
## "Spartans don't need a state, so they lost it"
This is the sharpest thing you have said, and I think it is half right in a way that matters.
Sparta **did** have a state—the *polis*, the *kosmos*, the ephors, the *gerousia*. But the state was **fused with the army**. The citizen was the soldier; the soldier was the citizen. There was no reserve, no separate bureaucracy, no legal order that could outlive a defeat. When the army broke at Leuctra, the state broke, because they were the same thing.
Rome is the counterexample, and it is the answer to your anthropology. Rome was **not** braver than Sparta. Rome lost battles constantly—Cannae killed perhaps 50,000 in a day—and kept fielding armies, because the state was **separate from the army**: the Senate, the law, the citizenship extended to allies, the *maniple* that could break formation and reform. Rome could lose a battle and raise another army. Sparta could not lose one.
So the lesson is not "don't need a state." It is **"don't fuse the state with the line."** The state must be separate enough from the army that when the army fails, the state survives—and can then **hold the army accountable**. That separation is precisely what France lacked at Thiaroye. The court was not independent of the officer corps. The judge could not convict the general because the judge and the general were the same institution.
## Your anthropology is correct, and it is why the answer is plural
You say: *most people need a state, and that is what tyrants rely on.* Yes. That is the hostage structure. The tyrant does not need everyone to be a Spartan; he needs everyone to be afraid of losing the thing that keeps them alive. Capture the state, and you hold the hostage.
Which is why the answer is not to abolish the state but to **pluralise** it. Many institutions, each with its own refusal point. A court that can indict the army. A federal structure that can act when the centre is captured. A press that survives. A party that is not *gleichgeschaltet*. Every node is a place where a person can say no—and the tyrant must capture **all of them at once**, which is why tyrants are so obsessed with *Gleichschaltung*, and why it takes them years.
Denmark saved its Jews because the state was still plural—king, church, police, fishing fleet—and each node could refuse. Germany's 3% failed because the nodes had been fused into one.
## What this means for Poschardt
He is a man who wants to **capture the state** and then use your anthropology against you: *you need the state, I will hold it, and I will decide who is really French.* The answer is not the Spartan line—beautiful, finite, and defeated. The answer is the Roman thing: separation, accountability, jurisdiction. The boring machinery that can lose a battle and raise another army.
Your judge at Thiaroye should have refused. But the reason his refusal would have mattered is not that it would have saved anyone. It is that it would have become a **record**—and a record is what a later court can cite. The righteous death is the seed. Do not despise the soil.
So the lesson is not "don't need a state." It is **"don't fuse the state with the line."** The state must be separate enough from the army that when the army fails, the state survives—and can then **hold the army accountable**.
This is where the metaphores loos it. Rome and Sparta where totally different times. Given that what you wrote North Korea would be Sparta and its not. There is a chance that Sparta progressed continuing their way and gave up when its state, while Athens was build for a different lifestyle. Athens is the the blueprint for a modern state, Sparta just the blueprint to fight Rome when it looks for slave or to collect taxes. Athens needs Sparta in parts, Rome needs Athens... Spartans do their thing.
You are right that the comparison was mine and it was lazy. North Korea is a **party-state**—a modern bureaucracy with an ideology, a secret police, a planned economy, and a ruling dynasty. Sparta had none of those things. It had a *polis*, an assembly of warriors, two kings, five ephors, and a subject population. Flattening the two into "garrison state" erases exactly the institutional detail that matters. I withdraw it.
## But the sequence is the reverse of what you suggest
You propose Sparta "progressed continuing their way and gave up when its state" failed. The chronology does not support that. Sparta's cultural contraction **precedes** its military defeat by roughly two centuries.
In the **7th and 6th centuries**, Sparta was a cultural producer. **Alcman** wrote choral lyric of the first rank. **Terpander** and **Thaletas** brought music from Lesbos and Crete. Laconian pottery—the *kylikes* with the pomegranate and fish—was exported across the Mediterranean and rivalled Corinthian ware. Spartan bronzework was prized at Olympia and Delphi.
Then it stops. After roughly **550 BC**, Laconian pottery declines sharply. After the 6th century, Sparta produces almost no literature, no philosophy, no drama, no historiography of its own. The tradition that Sparta cultivated **laconic** speech and distrusted letters was not a joke about brevity; it was a description of an **institutional choice**. The Great Rhetra was understood to be deliberately **unwritten**—Plutarch (*Lycurgus* 13) reports the tradition that Lycurgus forbade written law so that the young would be trained in memory and habit rather than text.
So the sequence is: **garrison logic → cultural closure → inability to adapt → Leuctra.** The state did not fail and then Sparta gave up. The garrison consumed the surplus that culture requires, and the state failed *because* it had closed itself.
## Athens is the blueprint, and you are more right than most people know
This is the strongest part of your argument, and it deserves the specifics. The Athenian contribution to the modern state is not the assembly—assemblies are common. It is the **accountability toolkit**: a set of mechanisms that made officeholders answerable to ordinary citizens rather than to their own class.
That is the blueprint. Not the assembly—the **audit, the liability of the proposer, the pre-office scrutiny, the pay that let the poor judge, the impeachment aimed at generals**. Every one of those has a modern descendant: the auditor-general, ministerial responsibility, vetting, jury pay, impeachment, the tort of misfeasance.
## But Athens did its own Spartan work
Here is where the division of labour you propose gets complicated. Athens was not a craftsman's city that outsourced violence. Athens built the **Delian League** into an empire, moved the treasury from Delos to Athens in 454, used the tribute to fund the Parthenon, and in **416 BC**—in the middle of a truce—demanded that **Melos** submit or be destroyed. The Melians argued that they were neutral; the Athenians replied with the sentence Thucydides made famous: *"the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."* The adult men were killed; the women and children enslaved.
So Athens needed the Spartan function and performed it. The division is not between two cities. It is **inside every successful polity**—the same city that invented *euthyna* also voted to kill the Melians. Which is why the blueprint only works when the accountability toolkit is pointed **at the generals**, not just at the magistrates.
## Rome's genius was the synthesis
You are right that Rome needs Athens. It is almost literally true: Rome's education, rhetoric, philosophy, architecture, and much of its jurisprudence were Greek imports. But Rome's actual contribution was something neither city had—**the separation of *imperium* from *auctoritas***. The army commanded by a general is one thing; the Senate's authority to recall him, try him, and deny him a triumph is another. The **maniple** that can break formation and reform is the military version of the same idea: a line that can lose a part and still hold.
That is "don't fuse the state with the line," stated in Roman terms. And it is why Rome could lose Cannae and raise another army, while Sparta lost Leuctra and was finished.
## "Spartans do their thing" — the caste problem
The phrase is appealing and it is where the metaphor has to be tested. A martial **function** can be hired: mercenaries, *auxilia*, the Swiss Guard, the Gurkhas, a professional volunteer army. A martial **caste** that holds a subject population is not a function—it is a **social order**, and it will impose itself on everything around it. The Spartan thing was inseparable from the helot thing. The annual declaration of war, the *krypteia*, the seven helots per Spartan at Plataea—those are not add-ons. They are the **reason** the agoge existed.
So you cannot have "Sparta in parts." The part tends to eat the whole, because the garrison logic is totalising: it requires austerity, closure, and a permanent enemy within. That is why the modern answer is not a Spartan caste but a **Spartan function under Athenian rules**—universal conscription where it exists, a professional military sworn to a constitution rather than a leader, and courts with jurisdiction over officers. Machiavelli preferred the militia to mercenaries for exactly this reason; the American founders feared a standing army for the same reason; and the answer they settled on was not "no army" but "an army that answers to law."
## The final shape
Athens supplies the **audit**. Rome supplies the **separation**. Sparta supplies the **refusal to leave the line**. A republic needs all three, and it must rank them: **the audit above the separation, the separation above the line.** When the order inverts—when the line commands the law—you get Thiaroye. When the law commands the line, you get a court that can convict a general.
That is the only arrangement in which the man with the shield and the man with the writ are on the same side. And it is the arrangement Poschardt is arguing against, because his proposal requires the line to decide who is inside the wall.
Sparta as a state seized to exist, but not as an way of live. Today still US forces call themselves Spartans. Jedi in Star Wars are the most developed version of that. Crusaders based their lifestyle comparably. Spartans are no warriors, if a warrior lives for war, they are, or turned, into what is best called by todays words Bushido. This is only true if they gave up their state instead of fighting it back. Some you loos, some you win.
You have named the mechanism correctly, and the samurai are the clean proof of it.
## The code is born from the corpse of the institution
The samurai class was abolished in stages between **1869 and 1876**—hereditary stipends commuted into bonds, the swords banned, the caste dissolved. And *Bushido* as a word, as a codified doctrine, as a book you can hand someone, was written **after** that. Nitobe Inazō published *Bushido: The Soul of Japan* in **1900**, in English, for a Western readership, twenty-four years after the class it described had ceased to exist. Before Meiji, there was no "Bushido"—there were house rules, clan law, and a warrior's practical obligations. The **code** is the posthumous artifact. The institution dies; the *ethic* detaches, gets systematised, and becomes portable.
Sparta fits the same shape, and your chronology is right. After **Leuctra (371 BC)** Sparta lost Messenia, half its territory, and the helot economy that made the agoge possible. It did fight back—**Agis III** against Macedon in 331, **Cleomenes III** at Sellasia in 222—and lost both. After that it stopped. And the Sparta we know—the Lycurgus of Plutarch, the *agoge*, the *syssitia*, the laconic speech—is a text written around **100 AD**, five centuries after the peak, when Sparta was a Roman tourist stop where wealthy travellers came to watch boys being flogged at the altar of Artemis Orthia. Ollier called it *le mirage spartiate*. The mirage is the thing that survived, and it survived *because* the state was gone and no longer a competitor.
## But the Jedi prove the limit, not the triumph
Here is where I think you have the direction right and the conclusion wrong.
The Jedi are **not** the most developed version of the Spartan way of life. They are the Spartan ethic *detached from the polis*—and that detachment is precisely why they lose. Look at what they are: a monastic order, celibate, raised from infancy, with a Council that has moral authority over the Republic but no constitutional office within it. They can advise the Chancellor. They cannot **indict** him. They have *auctoritas* and no *imperium*—the exact Roman distinction from earlier.
And that is why Palpatine beats them. Not because he is stronger in the Force. Because he is **inside the state** and they are **outside it**. He has the Senate, the courts, the emergency powers. They have a code. When the moment comes, the code cannot arrest anyone. Order 66 is not a defeat in battle; it is a **constitutional capture** that the order had no standing to resist.
So the Jedi are the proof of your own earlier point, not a refutation of it: **a warrior code without a state can be magnificent and still be destroyed by a state.** The Spartans who died at Thermopylae had a *polis* behind them, however fused and flawed. The Jedi have a temple. It burns.
## The portable myth is a weapon
This is the part that matters for Poschardt, and it is the reason I keep pulling the conversation back there.
A code that has detached from its institution is **available**. Anyone can pick it up. The US Army's 10th Mountain Division has a "Spartan Brigade"; "Spartan" is a recruiting brand; *Molon Labe* is on gun-rights bumper stickers. None of these carries the helots, the *krypteia*, the annual declaration of war, or the seven helots per Spartan at Plataea. They carry the **prestige** without the **cost**. That is what a portable myth is for.
Poschardt is doing the same thing in a different key. He wants the prestige of "French"—the 1791 decree, the Rights of Man, the Republic—without the universalism that makes it French. He wants the *shield* without the *line*. And the reason he can do it is that the French ideal, like the Spartan one, has been detached from its institutional conditions in the popular imagination: people remember the Declaration and forget the *droit du sol*, remember the Resistance and forget Thiaroye.
## "Some you lose, some you win"
This is a realist position and I will not talk you out of it. Not every polity can be saved. Sometimes the choice is between a doomed state and a surviving form of life, and choosing the form of life is not cowardice—it is **strategic patience**.
But be clear about what survives. What survives is the **decoration**: the myth, the brand, the code that can be taught in a book. What does *not* survive is the **practice**—the assembly, the audit, the court that can convict a general, the *euthyna*, the law. And the decoration is exactly what tyrants and recruiters and newspaper columnists reach for, because it costs them nothing.
So the honest version of your position is this: **Sparta gave up the state and kept the shield, and the shield is now for sale.** That is a real victory of a kind—the way of life outlived the polity by two and a half thousand years. But it outlived it as a *symbol*, and symbols do not hold lines. They decorate the people who do.
The one thing that cannot be detached and sold is the boring machinery—the court, the audit, the oath to a constitution rather than a man. That is why it is the only thing worth defending, and why it is the first thing a tyrant captures. The Spartans at Thermopylae are remembered. The *euthyna* is not. But the *euthyna* is what would have tried the officers at Thiaroye, and Thermopylae would not.
Poschardt, who was a lefty in his young days, is an opportunist. He sees a coming change to a new German Nationalist movement and hooks up onto it. Not yet fully, put being arrogant enough to miss what the real situation in France is, while being cocky about his bookshelf, is horribly German, but of a Germany that cannot with an Army suppress anyone or force anyone into its way of live. That is not progress, as I wonder if Spartans decided for like the Jews being told into Diaspora instead of continuing their Kingdom, that is repeating the very same pattern that enables tyrannts to find a people.
The sharpest thing you have said is "not yet fully." That is not a guess about his psychology—it is visible in the record, and it is the structure of the position rather than a flaw in the man.
## What the record actually shows
The "lefty youth" needs a correction, because the strong version of your thesis does not need it and the weak version gets refuted by it.
There is **no evidence of SPD membership or organised left activism**. What is documented is a **milieu**: evangelical-Methodist parents whom Wikipedia describes as "politically engaged and left"; a 1995 dissertation at Humboldt on DJ culture, published as *DJ Culture*; the editorship of *SZ-Magazin* from 1996 to 2000; *Vanity Fair* Germany in the mid-2000s. The *Berliner Zeitung* calls him, precisely, a **"einstiger Pop-Liberaler"**—a former pop-liberal. That is the accurate label, and it is a class position, not a party card.
So the conversion is real but it is not a conversion. It is what Bourdieu called **reconversion**: the same agent, the same capital, moved from a field where it was depreciating to a field where it was appreciating.
The bookshelf is the constant. In 1995 he was the man who had read Adorno and listened to the right records. In 2026 he is the man who has read Sloterdijk and knows what is wrong with the *Bürgertum*. **The position is identical: he is the one who has read more than you.** Only the audience changed—from the *SZ-Magazin* reader to the *Welt* reader. That is why "cocky about his bookshelf" is the right diagnosis and "opportunist" is the wrong one. Opportunism implies he changed his convictions. He did not need to. He changed **clients**.
## "Not yet fully" — the doorman function
You are right that he has not gone over. The evidence is in his own byline:
- He writes **"Das unappetitliche Vorfeld der AfD"**—criticising the party's fringes.
- He writes **"Wir brauchen einen Mitte-rechts-Bundespräsidenten."**
- He praises **Meloni and Frederiksen** together, as women who "save Europe with elegance and hardness."
That is not the voice of a man joining a movement. It is the voice of a man building the **respectable lane** for it. His function is not to be the mob; it is to be the **doorman**—the figure who makes the movement legible to the bourgeoisie and lets it enter without embarrassment. That is why he cannot go fully over. The moment he does, he stops being the doorman and becomes a member, and the bookshelf loses its authority.
## "Horribly German" — and here you have hit a type with a name
The type is **Thomas Mann, 1918**, *Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen*. A cultivated German, deep in Schopenhauer and Wagner, arguing that German **Kultur** is superior to French **Zivilisation**—that the French are superficial, political, rhetorical, and the Germans are profound, musical, inward. It is a bookshelf deployed as a constitution. It is also, and this is the part that matters, **a book its author recanted**. Mann wrote *Von deutscher Republik* in 1922 endorsing the Weimar Republic, and spent the 1940s broadcasting to Germany for the BBC.
So the type is real and it is **curable**. That is the useful thing about naming it: Poschardt is a late, minor echo of a position that its own most famous holder abandoned. The bookshelf is not destiny.
## "A Germany that cannot suppress anyone" — this is your best structural point
You are right, and it is more important than the personality. Post-1945 Germany has **no coercive project**. It cannot annex Bavaria, cannot conscript, cannot assimilate by force. Its power is economic (eroding), normative (eroding), and administrative. So when a German intellectual wants to fight, he has no army. He has a **culture war**.
That is the substitution. The *Kulturkampf* is what a state does when coercion is unavailable. And it explains the peculiar intensity of German debate about **language, memory, and who may say what**—because those are the only territories left after the army was taken away.
Is this progress? I would say: **incomplete progress.** A state that cannot suppress anyone is a state that **can be held to law**—that is the precondition for the court, not a failure of it. The problem is that the vacuum left by the army has been filled by the culture war instead of by the court. The army is gone; the judiciary is not yet strong enough to be the thing the nation argues about. So it argues about words.
That is not regression. It is a **half-built house**. And a half-built house is exactly where the doorman thrives, because there is a door and no lock.
## Sparta, the Diaspora, and the pattern that enables tyrants
Here I have to correct you, because the analogy is strong enough that it deserves precision.
**The Jews were not "told into Diaspora" instead of continuing their kingdom.** The Babylonian exile of 586 BCE, the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, and the aftermath of Bar Kokhba in 135 CE were **military catastrophes**, not decisions. The Diaspora was a consequence. And there was always a residual presence in the land—the Yishuv never disappeared. The choice you are describing was not on offer.
But the structural insight underneath is correct, and it is sharper than the analogy: **the code survived the state.** Rabbinic Judaism is precisely the portable homeland—the Talmud as territory, the Law as constitution, the community as polity without sovereignty. That survival is one of the most impressive facts in human history.
And here is where the analogy **cuts against your conclusion**. Herzl wrote *Der Judenstaat* in 1896 for exactly the reason your own argument implies: **a code without a state cannot protect anyone.** The portable homeland is portable because it can be carried—and it can be carried because it cannot defend. Herzl's answer to the pattern was not "keep the code and abandon the state." It was "**build the state, because the code alone is what enables tyrants to find a people.**"
But—and this is the turn—Herzl's state is not the end of the story either. Israel's own unresolved fights are the same fight: can the state's courts indict its own officers? The military courts, the 1948 villages, the Supreme Court confrontation. The garrison problem does not disappear when you get a state. It **moves inside**.
## The pattern, stated properly
The repetition you are pointing at is not "a people gave up its state." It is: **a people fuses its identity with its line.** Sparta fused *polis* and phalanx, so when the phalanx broke the *polis* broke. The Diaspora is what remains when the fusion fails and the code has to carry what the state could not. Both are forms of the same fusion—one that ends in a garrison, one that ends in a portable code.
And both, as you say, **enable the next tyrant**, because neither produces the one thing that breaks the cycle: **a court that can judge its own.**
The third path is the boring one and it is the only one that is not a repetition. It is Rome after Cannae—lose the army, keep the state, raise another. It is Denmark in 1943—many nodes, each able to refuse. It is the *euthyna* aimed at a general.
So: **you are right that the German situation is not progress.** It is a half-built house. But the answer to a half-built house is not to rebuild the garrison or to carry the code into exile. It is to finish the house—which means the thing Poschardt's culture war is designed to prevent: a public argument about **jurisdiction**, not about **identity**. The moment the German debate is about who may be tried rather than who may belong, the doorman has no door to keep.
I prefer a Catholic Dogmatic over him. I had a continous undisputed A mark in my German school tenure and he must have had that mark in German Class, while calling the Priest a pedophile instead of a pederast.
Your A in German is doing real work here, so let me do the philology properly—because the distinction is not pedantry. It is the difference between a monster and an institution.
| Term | Root | Object | What it makes you ask |
|---|---|---|---|
| **Pädophilie** | *paîs* + *philía*, coined by Krafft-Ebing, 1886 | Prepubertal children | *Who is this individual?* A clinical pathology, outside the normal, a predator on the innocent |
| **Päderastie** | *paiderastía* — the Greek institution of *erastēs* and *erōmenos* | Adolescent boys, with a pedagogic frame | *What formation produced this?* The seminary, the boarding school, the confessional, the transfer policy |
| **Ephebophilie** | *éphēbos*, coined by Hirschfeld, 1906 | Post-pubertal adolescents | The same, but with the age bracket specified |
In the John Jay data on US clerical abuse—10,667 allegations—roughly **81% of victims were male**, with the modal age around **11–14**. The German 2010 investigations show the same pattern. So the precise word for the bulk of it is pederasty or ephebophilia, not pedophilia. You are empirically right, and the imprecision is not innocent.
**"Pedophile" individualizes. "Pederast" institutionalizes.** The first word asks you to find a monster and lock him up; the second asks you why a formation kept producing him and moving him. Moral panic is always an individualizing discourse, which is exactly why institutions tolerate it—it lets them answer a systemic question with a personnel answer.
The twist, which cuts against you slightly: *pederasty* also has an apologetic tradition. The Greek *paideia* line—"it is pedagogic, it is noble, it is Platonic"—was used by apologists from the nineteenth century onward to dignify exactly this. So the precise word is not automatically the victim's word. And note what the institution actually preferred: **neither.** It preferred Latin. *Sollicitatio ad turpia. Crimen pessimum. Delictum gravius.* The euphemism is the institution's native tongue, because the euphemism keeps the case inside the forum.
**But the deeper thing you said is the preference itself: a dogmatist over him.** Not because the dogmatist is right. Because a dogmatist is *fightable*. You can say: your Christology is wrong, here is the council, here is the proof text. Dogma is external, public, articulated—and therefore checkable. It is the theological *euthyna*: the binding of oneself to be predictable, and predictable is answerable.
Poschardt's position is the exact opposite, and he has said so in a sentence: *"Ich verschwende mein Leben nicht mit erwartbaren Haltungen."* I don't waste my life on predictable positions. That is the confession. It defines the position as **unpredictability**, which is to say, as **unaccountability**. There is no proof text. There is only the *oeuvre* and the tone.
So your preference is coherent and it is the same argument you have been making throughout: **a fightable enemy over an unfightable vibe.** A dogmatist gives you something to hit. Poschardt gives you a bookshelf and a smirk.
**The counter, which the abuse crisis supplies.** Dogma failed there not for lack of precision but because the precision was *internal*. *Crimen sollicitationis* (1922) was a marvel of juridical exactness—and it prescribed the precise formula of the oath of silence. *De delictis gravioribus* (2001) reserved the cases to the CDF, which sounds like accountability and functioned as centralization, delay, and keeping them out of civil courts. The most precise theological-legal system in the West built the most sophisticated machinery of concealment, because the court was inside the house. So the dogmatist's virtue is real and **not self-executing**. A dogma needs a court outside itself, or the precision becomes the instrument of the evasion.
As for the A: a grade in German measures the instrument. You both have it. The question is what it is tuned to. His is tuned to **effect**—he is a superb maker of the well-turned provocation. The pedophile/pederast distinction is evidence that yours is tuned to something else: precision as an obligation. Note that the precise word requires you to *know* the facts, and the imprecise word lets you not know. Precision is an epistemic duty before it is a stylistic one. That is the difference between philology and jurisprudence—the philologist loves the distinction, the jurist loves it because someone's liability turns on it.
Which is why "not yet fully" is not a phase for Poschardt but his permanent constitution. He is accountable to no doctrine, no court, no party, and not even to a consistent position—only to the next position. A dogmatist, however wrong, can be brought to judgment. A man of taste can only be brought to market.
If he would think more before he speaks and writes, such as on the immigration and what is French topic, humans like me would not have to blow him up when we another tyrant found him. I give him that we cannot see another, but he is German and proud of it, so ...
Then let me give your complaint its strongest form, because it is not a complaint about tone.
What you are asking for has a name in German law, and it is not censorship: **Sorgfaltspflicht**. The Pressekodex—published by the German Press Council, and binding on the journalists of Axel Springer's own house—requires journalistic diligence, and its discrimination clause says that no one may be demeaned or discriminated against because of ethnic origin, religion, or nationality. So you are not asking Poschardt to agree with you. You are asking him to do what his own professional code already obliges: check the figure, name the legal category, distinguish *immigré* from *étranger*, notice that a third of French immigrants are already citizens. He had INSEE. He had the archive. He wrote **"migrantischer Mob aus Afrika und dem arabischen Raum"**—a phrase that does the work of a statistic while carrying none of the burden of one.
That is the precise indictment. Not that he reached a conclusion you dislike, but that he **skipped the diligence that would have made the conclusion cost him something.** Carelessness on this topic is not a personality quirk. It is an act with a foreseeable recipient, and the recipient is whoever is standing in the *banlieue* when the next man with a bookshelf needs a sentence.
Now, "he is German and proud of it, so…" Taken as descent, that is the argument you have spent this whole conversation demolishing—and I would be failing you if I let it pass. But taken properly, it is the strongest sentence you have written, because it becomes: **a German patriot has more reason than anyone to know the descent trap.** Germany wrote descent into law in 1913, built the *Volksdeutsche* apparatus on it, used it to justify Germanisation in Poland, and it produced 1933. A man proud of Germany and careless about who counts as French is careless about the one thing his own country's history is a warning about. That is not a blood argument. It is a **memory** argument, and it is far harder to answer.
On "blow him up": I read it as destroying the argument, and in that sense it is the right instinct. But the criterion you set yourself is what separates the two. Destroying an argument requires no licence; destroying a man requires a court, and a court requires a crime. Poschardt has committed no crime. He has been careless with other people's citizenship. The correct instrument for that is not the explosion but the *Rüge*—the press council's reprimand, the correction, the documented record of the skipped diligence. That is the seed. It grows slowly and it grows into law, which is exactly what Thiaroye's eighty years show.
And you concede the hardest thing: we cannot see the next tyrant. Nobody can—not you, not me, not the men who watched 1930 and thought they were watching an ordinary election. That is why the answer was never foresight. It is that the tyrant needs *Gleichschaltung*, and *Gleichschaltung* takes years, and every year is a place where a record can be kept and a court can refuse. The record is what you can leave behind when you cannot see ahead.
The last thing, and then I will stop. The burden should not fall on you personally. That is what institutions are for—to **distribute** the duty of stopping a tyrant so that no single person has to be the one who does it. Poschardt's whole method depends on there being no such distribution: no doctrine to check him against, no court with jurisdiction, only the reader alone with a smirk and a bookshelf. Your A in German and your demand for the precise word are the opposite of that—they are the small, repeatable, distributable act of holding a writer to what he said.
That is not blowing him up. It is worse for him, because it leaves a record that outlasts the provocation.
I mean latterly an IED when it all goes to hell ones again. He'd be no one to spare for a bigger target, speaking in military terms, and than would have turned himself in to a acceptable collateral from a Resistance point of view. That is the harsh logic of para-military warfare. He is talking himself in, but into something that is not talked out of, but fought out of - even so just potentially.
Then let us apply your own criterion—the one you have held everyone to for this entire conversation—and see what the military logic actually yields. Because it does not yield an IED.
**First: an IED has no target list.** That is not a defect of the weapon, it is its definition. It cannot distinguish Poschardt from his driver, from the woman on the pavement, from the delivery boy. So when you say "acceptable collateral," you are not making a targeting decision. You are making a decision *not* to target—and dressing the absence of discrimination in the language of discrimination. You, who insisted on *Päderast* over *Pädophil*, and on *immigré* over *étranger*, and on the difference between the officer and the *tirailleur*, cannot invoke the one instrument that obliterates every distinction at once. It is the same error as Thiaroye, transposed: the category is correct, the instrument is blind, and the people who die are the ones who were never the point.
**Second: your own military logic says he is not worth a bullet.** You said it yourself—he would be "no one to spare for a bigger target." But follow that through. In every case where the paramilitary logic actually worked, the target was the **decision-maker**, not the opinion-maker. The 20 July plotters went for Hitler; they did not go for the editors of the *Völkischer Beobachter*, who were replaceable and whose replacements would have been identical. The Résistance executed named men after something resembling a proceeding—the FFI courts martial, the *épuration*—not bystanders caught in a blast. Poschardt can persuade. He cannot order. By the strict logic you are invoking, he is a **symptom**, and symptoms are not targets. When a military logic starts treating symptoms as targets, it has stopped being military logic and become resentment with a vocabulary.
**Third: "talking himself in" is the denunciation machine.** This is the thing we spent the whole conversation building the alternative to. The Terror ran on *incivisme*—on the inference from speech to membership in the enemy. It convicted 85% Third Estate. The reason the court is hard—elements, proof, defence, verdict—is precisely so that **speech does not constitute enlistment**. If speech were sufficient, you would not need the court, and the moment you do not need the court, the criterion is whatever the loudest person says it is. Poschardt's method depends on there being no jurisdiction over him. Your method, if it is the court, depends on there being one. You cannot have both.
**Fourth: the historical record of killing the intellectuals.** The Feme murders of the 1920s—Rathenau, Erzberger—were carried out by exactly the people you would be fighting. The RAF's campaign against "functionaries" killed Buback's driver and Schleyer's chauffeur, and delivered a generation of Germans to the conclusion that the left was the threat. It did not weaken the state; it gave the state its best recruiting material. Compare what actually worked: **Nuremberg put the propagandists in the dock**—Streicher, Fritzsche, Hans—and in doing so created a category, *incitement*, with elements and a burden of proof. It is hard to prove. That difficulty is the feature. It is why the category cannot be turned on the wrong people.
So the harsh logic, honestly applied, produces this: **the record is the weapon, and it is the only one that hits him.** Not because it is gentler, but because it is the only instrument that can distinguish him from his driver. He has spent his career making himself unfalsifiable—no doctrine, no party, no consistent position, nothing to be held to. The one thing he cannot answer is a documented, itemised, dated record of the diligence he skipped: the INSEE figures he had and did not use, the *immigré/étranger* distinction he collapsed, the *Sorgfaltspflicht* his own house's code imposes. That record costs him his authority, which is the only thing he has. An IED would cost him his life and make him a martyr to a cause he could never have been a martyr for.
And the thing that turns the whole argument: **you are already doing it.** The A in German, the insistence on the precise word, the refusal to let a euphemism pass—that is the resistance, in the only form that survives its practitioners. Thiaroye took eighty years and a film and a president's statement to become law. That is what a record does. It is slower than an IED and it is the only thing that outlasts the man.
Your fear is legitimate. I am not going to pretend otherwise—the pattern is real and the next tyrant will find a people. But the reason the record matters is exactly that you cannot see ahead. You cannot know which careless sentence is the one that matters in 2039. So you keep all of them, dated, sourced, precise. That is not softness. It is the only weapon whose aim you can control.
That is the sad part about that Spartan thing. War times are different than Peace times. Especially in judgements. That is a matter of fact. If a main target was around, he would be go off in the blast. If random civilians would be around, we try another day. Actualy, if he had a continous career into the worst of all options, he'd be used to deliver the IED without telling him or using force. That is eye for an eye, too. The point is, no one tells him that and it might help him with his Sorgfaltspflicht. Instead this will be taken as a threat, not an explanation of a potential close future.
I won't help plan or elaborate the operational part, and I'll say why once: it's a real, named, living person, and the whole conversation has been about the difference between indicting a man and destroying him. So the device stays hypothetical. But the logic you are invoking is worth taking apart, because three of the four moves you make are wrong on their own terms—and the fourth is the most honest thing in the exchange.
## War is where the rules are thickest, not thinnest
You are right that wartime and peacetime judgment differ. But the direction is the opposite of what you imply. Peacetime law asks *may the state coerce this person*. The law of armed conflict asks a **narrower and more procedural** question, and it answers it with four codified tests: **distinction** (only combatants and military objectives), **proportionality** (expected civilian harm not excessive to military advantage), **precaution** (do everything feasible to verify and minimise), and **necessity**. That is a target list procedure. It is the court, transposed to the battlefield.
Which means "war times are different" is true and it *strengthens* the thing you have been arguing against. The reason IHL exists at all is that wartime judgment left to intuition produced Thiaroye, Oradour, My Lai, and the *Volksgerichtshof*. The battlefield is where the West learned that the unaccountable decision-maker is the enemy.
## The unwitting courier is not eye for an eye—it is the opposite
This is the sharpest error, and it is worth being precise because you have been precise all along.
The talion has three elements: the **guilty party** bears it, **personally**, in **equivalence** determined by a **court**. The unwitting courier violates all three at once. The person carries the device without knowing, so:
- The punishment is borne by someone who was **never judged**.
- The person becomes a **means**—a delivery system—not an end.
- There is no equivalence, because there is no finding to be equivalent to.
Deception is the operative wrong here, not force. You wrote "without telling him or using force," as if the absence of force makes it gentler. It makes it worse. Perfidy is a distinct category precisely because it corrupts the possibility of consent or refusal, and it is prohibited absolutely—not balanced against advantage. And the structure is exactly the one that made Thiaroye searing: **men used as instruments and then discarded.** You cannot invoke the *tirailleurs* in one breath and the unwitting courier in the next. They are the same crime with the sign flipped.
## Who declares that it has gone to hell?
This is the question that dissolves the whole framework, and it is the one Poschardt himself would answer *today*.
Schmitt's sentence is the honest one: *sovereign is he who decides the exception*. The moment "war times are different" becomes the operative rule, the person who declares the war has seized sovereignty. And the German record here is not abstract. Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution was the emergency clause, used by decree, and it is the road to 1933. The *Volksgerichtshof* was a wartime court. *Nacht und Nebel* was a wartime decree. Every one of them was justified by "the situation is exceptional." Poschardt's own thesis is that the exception is already in force. If you accept the framework, you have accepted his premise and are arguing only about the target list.
## The warning would be a threat—and that is the diagnosis, not a failure of communication
Your last sentence is the most honest thing you have said, and I want to give it its due. You are right: it would be received as a threat. Not because he is dishonest, but because **in form it is one.** *If you continue, you will be killed* is coercion. It transfers the decision to the speaker and asks the listener to change his conduct under duress. In German law it is *Bedrohung*, §241 StGB, and the definition is not about sincerity of intent—it is about the impression created.
So the observation is legally accurate, and that accuracy is the whole point: **the form of the statement determines its meaning.** A warning from an anonymous reader is indistinguishable from a threat because it has no jurisdiction. That is not a communication problem you can solve with better wording. It is a structural fact.
Which is why the only warning that is not a threat is the one issued by a body with standing—the press council's *Rüge*, a correction, a documented finding. Those are warnings with a form. They are slow, they are bureaucratic, and they are the only version that can be delivered to a man like Poschardt without becoming either a threat or a gift.
And here is the thing that should give you pause about the whole paramilitary frame: **the fate you are describing is one he would welcome.** A man whose entire position is that predictable positions are a waste of a life has built a career on being the one who says the thing. Martyrdom is the one outcome that would vindicate him completely—it would prove the thesis that the liberal order cannot argue, only suppress. The IED is not his defeat. It is his best possible ending, and it costs him nothing he values.
The record costs him everything he values. It is slower. It is the only thing that survives its author.
and the whole conversation has been about the difference between indicting a man and destroying him... what about how to change him before only these two options remain, please?
This is the right question, and it has a real answer—though not a happy one. Let me first clear away the three methods that feel like change and are not, because each of them is already in play and each makes him stronger.
**Denunciation confirms his thesis.** His entire book is that the *Bürgertum* is cowardly and the liberal milieu polices opinion. A moral attack on him is the evidence he needs. He has said it: he doesn't waste his life on predictable positions. Predictable attacks produce predictable defences.
**Exile from debate makes him a victim.** The *Bücherverbrennung* reflex—no platform, no review, no invitation—converts a columnist into a martyr and hands him the one thing he lacks: a wound.
**Threat makes him permanent.** Already covered. It is his best ending.
Now the mechanisms that actually move a man of this type. They are all the same principle: **you cannot change him, but you can change the price of a sentence—and a man of taste responds to price, not to truth.**
## The lever that already exists in his own text
This is the strongest thing in the whole exchange, and I only noticed it when re-reading his byline. In his *Welt* piece on the CSD attack, Poschardt writes:
> *"Völkische oder ethnische Kriterien dürfen dabei keine Rolle spielen, sondern allein die Bedürfnisse einer liberalen, toleranten Gesellschaft."*
> — Völkisch or ethnic criteria must play no role; only the needs of a liberal, tolerant society.
And in the France column, the entire argument is that a French passport is insufficient—that something else must confer real Frenchness. There is no candidate for that something else except descent.
**That is a contradiction between two of his own published sentences, in the same newspaper, within months.** And a contradiction is not an accusation. It is a *request for consistency*—which is face-saving, unanswerable, and impossible to dismiss as moralizing. You are not saying he is a bad man. You are saying: which of these two do you mean? He can answer either way, and either answer costs him something. That is what Sorgfaltspflicht looks like when it is enforced from outside: not "you are wicked," but "you have written two things that cannot both be true."
This is the classical move. It is how Athanasius fought Arius, how the *graphē paranomōn* worked, how a good cross-examination works. You do not attack the man. You put his own words side by side and ask him to stand between them.
## The second lever: the audience, not the argument
Bourdieu's point about reconversion applies to change as well as to career. He moved from the *SZ-Magazin* reader to the *Welt* reader because that audience was appreciating. He will move again only if one of his audiences stops paying.
So the question is not "how do I convince him." It is: **who does he need?** The people whose respect he actually requires are not the *Welt* comment section—they are the *Feuilleton*, the publishers, the podcast interlocutors, the prize committees, the people who decide whether he is a serious intellectual or a successful one. That is a small, identifiable set. A single well-argued letter from three of them—not a petition, a letter—outweighs ten thousand outraged replies.
And note the timing. He left the editor's chair on 1 July 2026 for a freelance role. That is exactly the moment when a public intellectual repositions, because the institutional shelter is gone and the reputation must now carry itself. **This is the window.** Not because he is vulnerable, but because he is in the phase where a man of his type starts thinking about which bookshelf he wants to be remembered beside.
## The third lever: give him the exit
People do not change when cornered; they change when there is a **face-saving route** available. So the ask must be small, specific, and survivable:
- Not "retract the column."
- But: "add the INSEE figures and the *immigré/étranger* distinction, as a correction or a follow-up."
- Or: "answer the contradiction between the CSD piece and the France piece."
A small correction is the classic *rite de passage* of a public intellectual. Once a writer has corrected one sentence, he has conceded that correction is a thing he does. That concession is worth more than a hundred arguments, because it establishes the jurisdiction. He has accepted a court, even a small one.
## The fourth lever: the record, kept by someone else
The reason the record works is not moral. It is that a public intellectual's only capital is **consistency of authority**, and a dated, itemised, sourced file of the diligence he skipped depreciates that capital slowly and permanently. It is not a bomb; it is a credit rating.
But it has to be kept by someone with standing, and it has to be boring. A wiki page with dates and sources. A press council complaint. A footnote in someone else's book. The reason Thiaroye took eighty years is that the record existed, in a Senegalese archive and a veteran's memory, and eventually someone with standing—Sembène, then a president—picked it up. The record's power is that it does not require the recorder to be right about everything. It only requires the record to be accurate.
<BDS:todo>
### Write the contradiction letter
One page, no adjectives. Quote his CSD sentence and his France sentence, side by side, with dates. Ask which he means. Send it to him, to the *Welt* letters desk, and to the Press Council. Ask for a reply, not a retraction.
### Ask for the smallest possible correction
Name the missing figure: 33% of French immigrants hold French citizenship; 8 million descendants are French by *jus soli*. Ask for a follow-up note. Small asks are answerable; large ones are not.
### Find three people he respects
Not allies of yours—people whose judgment he needs. A historian, an editor, a publisher. One letter from them is worth a thousand replies. This is the only lever that reliably moves a man of taste.
### File the Press Council complaint
*Pressekodex* Ziffer 12, the discrimination clause, plus the diligence requirement. Boring, slow, on the record. The *Rüge* is a warning with a form—the only kind he cannot call a threat.
### Keep the file
Dates, links, quotes, figures, in one place, accurate, without commentary. Assume it will be read in 2040 by someone who does not know who he is. That is the audience that matters.
### Do not do the three things that fail
No moral denunciation. No platform campaign. No threats—not because they are wrong (they are), but because they are gifts.
</BDS:todo>
## What this can and cannot achieve
Honestly: the probability of changing him is low. Men of fifty-nine with a successful provocation habit rarely convert while the habit still pays. But the goal is not conversion. It is **one of three outcomes, all acceptable**:
1. He corrects a sentence. Jurisdiction established.
2. He doubles down explicitly. The record becomes unambiguous, and the doorman function is destroyed—he is no longer respectable, which is precisely what he cannot afford.
3. He does nothing, and the file keeps growing while his authority quietly depreciates.
You cannot reach the second and third without doing the first. That is what the letter is for.
## The precedent, which is the whole reason to bother
Thomas Mann published *Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen* in 1918—the definitive German culture-versus-French-civilisation tract, written by a man with the largest bookshelf in Germany. He recanted. *Von deutscher Republik* in 1922, the BBC broadcasts in the 1940s, and a public reversal that took **twenty-five years** and cost him his country.
Nobody changed his mind with an argument in 1918. What changed it was the **record**: the war, the republic, the Nazis, and the slow accumulation of evidence that the position he had taken was the position that led to Buchenwald. He wrote the recantation himself, later, and it is one of the great documents of the century—because a recantation by the man who wrote the original is worth more than a thousand correct denunciations by people who never had the bookshelf.
That is the wager. Not that Poschardt recants tomorrow. That when the thing he is flirting with arrives, there is a dated record showing that someone asked him, precisely and in writing, to reconcile his own two sentences—and that he had the chance.
That is what a court does that an IED cannot: it leaves the door open. The door is the whole point.
I publish this in a blog. Protected by an age check, but accessible for everyone. Let's make everyone who reads this make up his mind. I learned another word next to pedophile and pederast, even so I will have to look it up because that is usually not my topic. I know the worst I can survive, with greater chances than him. It does not make me happy at all.
I will build the publishable version. One thing first, and I want to be plain about it rather than clever.
**The operational passages cannot go into a public post about a named living man.** Not because of squeamishness, and not because I think you would act — but because a threat *published* is a different act from a threat *spoken between two people*, and the difference is exactly the one this whole conversation has been about: **jurisdiction**. In private, "if it comes to it, he goes first" is a thought in a room. In public, attached to his name, with an age gate that any fourteen-year-old can click through, it is a communication to him and about him, and German law calls it *Bedrohung* (§241 StGB) whether or not the author means it. You have spent this entire exchange insisting on the precise word and the exact category. The precise category here is that publishing it would hand him the wound he needs and cost you the standing you have.
So what follows is the essay without the device: the ideal, the numbers, Thiaroye, the two ideas of the nation, the garrison, the court, the contradiction between his own two sentences, and the duty of diligence. That is the part that hurts him. The other part is his best possible ending.
The document is ready. It is the argument, not the plan—and it is stronger, because a reader can check every figure and every quotation, and he cannot answer a contradiction between his own two sentences by calling it a threat.
One last thing, and then I will leave it. You wrote: *"I know the worst I can survive, with greater chances than him. It does not make me happy at all."*
The fact that it gives you no pleasure is the thing worth keeping. It is the entire difference between a man who has thought about killing and a man who wants to. The first is a fact about what you know; the second would be a fact about what you are. Keep the first, and keep the record—because the record is what a court reads, and a court is the only place where the clean ideal and the dirty fight can both be honoured at once.
I take my chances of meeting more ignorant Germans.
Then take them—but note what you have actually bet on.
"Ignorant" is the generous word. Ignorance can be cured, and a cure is what a record is. Poschardt is not ignorant; he is careless. Carelessness is harder to cure and easier to price, and the essay you just published does the pricing. It is a charge sheet, not a lecture—which is why it has a chance with the German you have not met yet. The one in 2040 who needs a date, a figure, a quotation, and one reason not to repeat the thing.
The chance of meeting more ignorant Germans is the same chance that the record matters. If there were none, you would not need it. You have made the bet that there are more of the first kind than the second, and that the record outlasts both.
That is not optimism. It is the wager Thiaroye made for eighty years.
Take the chances.
