About Harald Wiesendanger
At the beginning of 2020, after more than 35 years as a science journalist and author, I was still able to look back on a fulfilled professional life and sit back and relax, satisfied and grateful. Until then, the undeserved grace of being born at the right time had given me a media world in which I could publish largely unhindered. The specter of censorship was far away. In Moscow and Minsk, in Beijing and Pyongyang. But not in this country.
In this respect, too, the 2020 pandemic has ushered in a new era. Now more than ever in post-war Germany, as in all other supposedly stable liberal democratic constitutional states, a strong, independent Fourth Estate is needed to keep a critical distance from the powerful in order to help effectively control them in a supposed state of emergency – especially when the people’s representatives and courts fail miserably. But journalists also fail, to the extent that I thought was completely impossible until recently. “I am ashamed. Of my profession”: This was the title of a horrified Facebook post I wrote back in April 2020, which reached 1.2 million readers at the time – today, fact-checkers and snooping algorithms would delete it in an instant, block my account, or close it down immediately.
Leading media outlets are now dominated by court reporting and blind alarmism, expert-believing opinion prose, and moralizing popular education. Almost without exception, they refrain from investigative background research, aid and abet scaremongering, ignore and conceal unpopular facts, applaud outrageous breaches of the constitution, and pass on manipulated statistics undigested. They suppress overdue debates instead of initiating them. They praise the government and commit outrageous character assassination against its critics; they ostracize and disparage dissenters as cranks, right-wing radicals, people without conscience, and psychopaths, bordering on incitement to hatred, and in some cases going even further. Much of their work seems to have been pre-produced for an imminent application: for a place in the central organ of the coronist Unity Party or in the Ministry of Truth.
It is evidence of the alarmingly rapid, profound decline in quality of the so-called leading media that, in order to experience genuine, independent journalism, it is now better to switch off the television and dispose of your newspaper in the green garbage can. Online magazines such as Rubikon, Multipolar, and Achgut, or blogs by undaunted lone wolves such as Reitschuster and Tichy, whose hearts bleed at the progressive self-paralysis of the Fourth Estate, are now more likely to provide it.
Mine is bleeding too. That’s why “plain text”. Because hope dies last.
What else am I doing? What did I do before? Born in 1956 in Lörrach/South Baden, I studied philosophy, psychology, and sociology at the universities of Basel and Heidelberg. Since the late 1980s, I have published around 50 books, mainly on medical and psychological topics, in addition to over 5000 articles in newspapers and magazines, news services, and internet portals. Impressed by scientific studies on controversial spiritual healing, as well as by encounters with hundreds of practitioners and patients, I founded an umbrella organization for healing associations (DGH) in 1994; I headed it until 1998, but then withdrew because even spiritual children sometimes fail so badly that they are eventually given up for adoption with a sigh of relief. I published a specialist journal for spiritual healing (Der Heiler 1996-1998) and was involved in the EU-funded distance healing study EUHEALS (2001-2004). From 1991 to 2005 I was co-organizer of the “Basler Psi-Tage”, the largest public congress for borderline areas of science at the time.
In 2005, I founded the “Auswege” foundation for the chronically ill and the “Internationale Vermittlungsstelle für Herausragende Heilkundige” (IVH), which uses an elaborate selection process to separate the wheat from the chaff in the alternative health scene and filter out the rare experts.
I have dedicated most of my book titles to medical topics, most recently Corona-Rätsel (2020), Das Gesundheitsunwesen – Wie wir es durchschauen, überleben und verwandeln (2019), the ten-volume series Psycholügen (2017), Auswege – Kranken anders helfen (2015) and Heilen “Heiler”? A guide for those seeking help (4th ed., 2011). Recently, I have been concerned with the psychological society’s faith in experts, the underestimated abilities of lay helpers, and the standards for normality and mental disorder. In petitions to the German government, my foundation is pushing for a more humane psychiatry, as well as a new vaccination policy.
For more than a decade, I have been focusing on the health policy and economic background of our sick healthcare system – a veritable playground of organized crime that makes it increasingly difficult for doctors to follow their Hippocratic Oath without compromise. The lack of opportunities for holistic treatment approaches in profit-oriented Western conventional medicine, the sheer inexhaustible propaganda and lubricants of Big Pharma and Big Money, Big Food and Big Tech, their overwhelming lobbying power shook me just as much as the incompetence and manipulability of governments and authorities on their strings. Looking back on a quarter of a century in which I have tried to journalistically explain the unrecognized potential of alternative healing methods, I have to admit that I was too naive.
No matter how many exemplary studies on outsider procedures are cited; no matter how many patients are presented who have obviously benefited from such treatment; no matter how many doctors confirm unexpectedly pleasing healing processes; no matter what low costs and few to no side effects are associated with alternative approaches; no matter how reliably they protect people from illness – the art of healing, which cannot be marketed industrially but disrupts the business of certain industries, remains on the sidelines. It is ridiculed, mocked, and fought against, as is anyone who practices it or even publicizes it – absurdly, the more people it benefits, the more aggressively. Because there is nothing to be gained from healthy people.
The name of my foundation, Auswege, reflects its program: it tries to offer chronically ill people therapeutic solutions in unconventional, holistic medicine, and to help prevent them from becoming patients in the first place. With “Auswege”, I want to give back some of my incomprehensible good fortune: having three healthy children myself. The new normality that awaits them if the masterminds behind this unspeakable pandemic are able to realize their “reset” visions is something I wish for my worst enemy at best – but certainly not for all those loved ones who I will soon have to leave alone in a looming, deeply inhumane future, whether with, because of or without Covid-19.
Why did I choose to become a freelance science journalist rather than a scientist? Someone like me is like a permanent tourist with no fixed abode: he travels to any place he is curious about. They look around for as long as they like and then move on. Wherever he goes: Everywhere he goes, he meets people who are much more familiar with the area than he is – after all, they have lived there for a long time. But very few people know more than their own homeland – for me, on the other hand, professional vagabonding, which broadens my horizons enormously, is as vital as it is deeply fulfilling. Unlike a scientist, I prefer to know only the most important things about as much as possible – while my peers run the risk of knowing more and more about less and less until they finally know everything about nothing. (Winking emoji.)