When it comes to fabrications in warfare, it was the ancient Greeks who invented the Trojan Horse. They also invented ἀπὸ μηχανῆς θεός - he has come down to us from the Latin,
deus ex machina, meaning the god out of the machine. He's the culprit or the cause which resolves the inexplicable ending of a story by a device which drops out of the heavens, or rises through a trapdoor on stage.
Aristotle didn't think much of it because it's too plainly unbelievable.
The deus ex machina, he thought, was the invention of the incompetent for an audience of simpletons.
Germany's Foreign Minister Heiko Maas doesn't know his ancient Greek. He also doesn't know his fellow Germans. They have removed him from the running to lead the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in next year's German national election. On his road to political oblivion, Maas has needed a public platform on which to regain his footing, he thinks. According to very well-informed Berlin sources,
Maas is the official responsible, behind fifteen journalists of Der Spiegel, for fabricating the evidence of the case of Alexei Navalny (lead image, left), after he landed in Berlin.
After their first account of the Novichok poisoning of Navalny failed the standard biochemical and forensic tests,
they have invented a new one. This is "harder", they have
reported, claiming for source a secret briefing in a Berlin bunker by the BND, Germany's secret intelligence service.
But according to leading British organophosphate chemists,
the new "Novichok" is not more credible than the first. This is also the reason no details of the substance have been handed over to the Russian Prosecutor-General, presented to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), or published in the German press.
Maas's deus ex machina isn't visible, as even the ancient Greek audience demanded. It's offstage, in the dark.
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