I've Blipped This Tree Before

Here.  

A day where I saw my Doctor and he seems pleased with my progress.  I will try to go back to work on the 10th.  But if I can't manage then I will be signed off for longer.

I spent some time today reading the news - there's a lot of it - and I found a couple of stories very disturbing, because they come from Germany and one of them from my city.

The first was about the disturbances in Chemnitz in Saxony after the murder of a 35 year old man.  Saxony has a real problem with NeoNazis. 

And I hate talking about this.

But it does.

And it's a problem from the top down.  And not just in Saxony.

And there's also the politician Sebastian Czaja (FPD Berlin) who chipped in with "Anti-fascists are also fascists"

That's up there with Rudy Giuliani's "Truth isn't truth" or Friedrich Zimmermann's "Gewaltloser Widerstand ist Gewalt" ("Nonviolent resistance is violence")

You can really only perform these kind of mental gymnastics if you are a political animal.

The second disturbing story comes from Wiesbaden where as part of an Arts Festival a statue of the Turkish president  Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was set up on the Platz der Deutschen Einheit on Monday.  

Setting up anything on the Platz der Deutschen Einheit is never going to be a good idea. 

The statue became the focus for Pro- & Anti-Erdoğan groups.  And it ended with loads of police being drafted in to disperse crowds that were starting to get "restive".

Whatever happened to tolerance?  And why am I so intolerant of intolerance?