A few years ago, remarking on the more aggressive federalist tendencies within the European Union, Mikhail Gorbachev observed that the most puzzling development in European politics since the end of the Cold War was the “apparent determination of politicians to recreate the Soviet Union in Western Europe.” Today we might update this to say that the most puzzling development in European politics is the apparent determination of the leaders of a unified, liberal, and democratic Germany to recreate and otherwise emulate the propagandist methodologies of East Germany and National Socialist Germany — certainly in terms of their bridling of the press and directing of the headlines away from dissent and towards a prefabricated officially-approved narrative (and, unlike Mr Gorbachev, we could not heartily be accused of exaggeration). In the wake of the Cologne crisis (as we can now rightly call it — again, without exaggeration) many worrying trends in German society came to light. Few of them were more worrying than revelations regarding the sheer scale of the censorship and self-censorship of the German media when …