(By Ray D.)
SPIEGEL ONLINE has returned to its old modus operandi. It goes something like this: First, find an extreme and unusual act of grotesque violence or some other extreme form of social deviancy related to the United States. Second, extrapolate the incident onto the entire nation. Earlier cases include: The New York power outage. SPIEGEL reacted with a sensational cover accompanied by articles insisting that the United States was a faltering superpower with a third rate power grid. Then there was Abu Ghraib, which SPIEGEL exploited two years after the fact to proclaim the the incident was “America’s Shame” and represented “torture in the name of freedom.” The magazine also labeled US troops “mercenaries” and “torturers.” And let’s not forget that story on unemployment in Kannapolis, North Carolina (where unemployment is actually dramatically lower than in most of Germany) used to paint the United States as a land of predatory capitalism and heartless Social Darwinism.
The latest installment is an article entitled: ‘Brutal “Trendsport” in the USA: Teenagers Hunt the Homeless‘. That’s right folks: According to SPIEGEL ONLINE, it’s the latest hip trend sweeping the United States. Young people can’t get enough of this new sport: Everywhere you look, homeless people are being mercilessly beaten by roving bands of drunk and high teenagers. The bodies are piling up left and right and the hospitals are overflowing. Right.
To prove that brutalizing homeless people is in fact a new “Trendsport” in America, SPIEGEL ONLINE notes that, according to National Coalition of the Homeless, there were 122 attacks, 20 of them fatal, against homeless individuals last year in a nation of 300 million. This is presented as more evidence that America is the home of a brutal, heartless capitalism where rich, dope-smoking teenagers prey on the downtrodden and oppressed underclass.
But wait. If we are going to follow that logic and those standards, then beating and killing the homeless has long been a “Trendsport” in Germany as well. Take these examples:
- Tageszeitung reported on January 17, 2007 that a 45 year old homeless man was attacked by two young men in Hannover (reportedly the second such attack in the new year alone in Hannover!) The man sustained injuries to the face and ribs.
- In December 2006, a homeless man was beaten down in the Prenzlauer Berg section of Berlin by a 23 year old who filmed the incident.
- In 2003, eight German youth, aged 12 to 19, beat a homeless man to death in a forest near Neulussheim, Germany.
Johann Babies, a German homeless man beaten to death in 2003 by German youth aged 12 to 19.
- In 2001, five men beat a 61 year-old homeless man to death in Brandenburg and in 2000 a 45 year-old homeless man was beaten to death by three Skinheads in Greifswald.
- In 2000, two drunken Skinheads beat a homeless man to death in Schleswig.
These cases listed above took ten minutes to Google. There are undoubtedly further recent examples of beatings and murders of German homeless. Suffice it to say that such attacks represent neither a trend nor a sport in either Germany or the USA. They are the senseless acts of deranged individuals that in no way reflect on the larger state of either nation. Unfortunately, SPIEGEL ONLINE has again chosen to vilify the United States in the most crude manner by implying that these incidents reflect the society at large. Nowhere does the publication bother to mention that the American people spend unprecedented amounts of time and money (through both the public and private sectors) to help the homeless at home and abroad.
Frankly put: The “Trendsport” article is both an ugly smear of the United States and an unabashed example of trashy German media hypocrisy of the worst sort. Here again, German media have demonstrated that it is far more convenient and comfortable to vilify World-Scapegoat-America than it is to look in the mirror at the many social, economic and political problems that plague Germans in their own backyard. The only surprise about this piece? That they didn’t find a way to blame it all on Bush.
Endnote: If their is any “Trendsport” to speak of in all of this, it is the tireless anti-Americanism that has grown to disease-like proportions in German media including SPIEGEL ONLINE and among the consumers of this form of media. The fact that SPIEGEL has published so many articles and covers like this is a clear indicator that Hate-America is an all too popular “Trendsport” in Germany.
UPDATE: It is relatively difficult to find statistics on violence against the homeless in Germany. According to the Berliner Tenants’ Association website, at least 20 homeless people were murdered in Germany in 2000. That’s the same number of fatalities reported by SPIEGEL to have occurred in the US in 2006. If anyone can locate official government statistics on this for Germany, please point them out in our comments section.
UPDATE #2: Several commenters correctly point to another trend at SPIEGEL ONLINE: Like so much of their recent “reporting” on the United States, this article is little more than a regurgitated translation of English-language media excerpts that fit the magazine’s ideological bill. In this specific case, it was a CNN report.
