The precautionary principle is thoroughly ingrained in the self-conception of Germany and a disregard for it is often met with a general feeling of incomprehension and emotional outrage. what bothers me apropos of the recent comeback of human rights is that they rely on what Nietzsche identified as the moralistic ressentiment and envy: they imply the fake gesture of the disavowed politics, of assuming a ‘moral’, depoliticized stance in order to make a stronger political case. We are dealing here with a perverted version of what, in the good old days of dissidence, Vaclav Havel called the 'power of the powerless’: one manipulates one’s powerlessness as a stratageme in order to gain more power, in exactly the same way that today, in our politically correct times, in order for one’s voice to gain authority, one has to legitimize oneself as being some kind of a (potential or actual) victim of power.

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