[BBC] Germans are drinking less and less beer, but non-alcoholic varieties are more popular than ever.
Germany's Destatis federal statistics office says non-alcoholic sales have more than doubled in recent years - up 109% since 2013 - even though beer sales more broadly are at their lowest level in more than 30 years.
For the first time, they have fallen below 4bn litres in a half-year period.
German beer sales slumped by 6.3% - or 262 million litres - to around 3.9bn litres in the first half of 2025, compared with the same period last year.
The Erdinger brewery near Munich has been making beer since the 1880s, and its chief executive, Stefan Kreisz, says drinking habits are changing and these days about a quarter of their production is non-alcoholic.
"We need to find a way to make beer, even if it's non-alcoholic, attractive for young people.
"You need to understand the ways they meet and the ways they party together. There's no algorithm which tells you you need a beer now."
Stefan Kreisz still sees the culture of German beer as resilient, and nowadays his company promotes its alcohol-free beer at sporting events, as a natural alternative to energy drinks.
At the Café Kosmos in Munich, barman Louis von Tucher says many of his customers are more health aware.
"In the 2000s, I remember people being put off if you told them maybe you should have a glass of water… and they would be really offended."
Now, however, he has detected a change.
"Everybody is a little bit more conscious about their consumption. I think most people still drink alcohol, but they do it more consciously and have alcohol-free beverages in between."
However Louis says full-strength beer is not going away.
"It's a slight shift, he said, I guess we sell 150 to 500 litres of normal beer at night, compared to maybe 20 litres of alcohol-free beer. So there's still a huge gap between those two."
At the Sandkerwa folk festival in the town of Bamberg in northern Bavaria, the tradition of drinking alcoholic beer in Germany appears alive and well.
During the five-day long celebration, Bamberg's winding, medieval streets are filled with musicians, sausage stands and countless beer stalls doing a roaring trade.
In the Sandstrasse in the old town, Pascal was having a beer with a friend.
"Beer is very important for the city and we have a lot of breweries here," he said.
"People come here for the beer and for the fest. I can't imagine that consumption of beer here in Bamberg is really less than before."
Standing outside a beer garden, Magdalena, a student, agreed.
"I'm looking around, and everybody has a glass of beer in their hand. So I guess, especially in this part of Germany, beer is just a massive part of daily life, even though it's not healthy. We all know that," she said.
"I feel like, especially in my generation, people tend to drink less on a daily basis, but it's still Germany, it's still Bavaria."
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Mark Leshkevich
[REGNUM] The interview of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev with the Saudi Arabian TV channel Al Arabiya (which the republic’s state news agency carefully translated into Russian ) became a clear indicator of both Baku’s current policy and how they see their history and the origins of statehood.
The Azerbaijani president called the Russian special operation in Ukraine an “invasion” and assured that from the first days of the SVO “we (that is, the Azerbaijani state) supported the territorial integrity of Ukraine and continue to support it.”
According to Aliyev’s logic, Russia “invaded” not only Ukraine, but allegedly committed aggression against Azerbaijan as well: “In April 1920, the Russian army invaded Azerbaijan and occupied it.”
By the same logic, Azerbaijan was an occupied territory from May 1920, when the Azerbaijan SSR was proclaimed, until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991. The “Russian occupation” is mentioned, for example, in the 8th grade history textbook (including in Russian).
But it is rather strange to hear such a statement from Ilham Heydarovich Aliyev, who graduated from MGIMO in 1982 and then received a PhD in history there in 1985.
"It's one thing for the son of the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan to study in Baku, and another thing in Moscow, in a completely different environment, and at such a young age. But I didn't let my father down, I studied well at the institute, and then in graduate school," Aliyev recalled in an interview with journalist Mikhail Gusman.
Indeed, the father and immediate predecessor of the current president, Heydar Aliyevich Aliyev, was not only the third head of the Azerbaijan Republic. Before that (in 1969–1982), he worked as the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Azerbaijan SSR.
Aliyev Sr. was also a candidate member (1976–82) and a member (1982–87) of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee, the party that ruled the “occupier country.” At the same time as being a member of the Politburo, Comrade Aliyev held the post of First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, that is, the executive branch of the “occupier country.”
No less interesting is the first permanent place of work of the future head of independent Azerbaijan.
HOW COMRADE ALIYEV FOUGHT ANTI-SOVIETS
Since 1941, Heydar Aliyev was accepted to serve in the NKVD department in his small homeland, the Nakhichevan ASSR. After a break to work in the local Council of People's Commissars in 1943-44, Heydar Alievich again entered the service of the security agencies.
In 1948, he headed the 5th department of the USSR MGB Directorate for Azerbaijan. The 5th department was responsible for the fight against ideological enemies, that is, according to Aliyev’s current logic, against ideological supporters of the restoration of an independent Azerbaijan. After studying at the Leningrad school for retraining MGB operational staff, Comrade Aliyev Sr. was promoted. In June 1967, the Moscow leadership appointed him Chairman of the KGB of the Azerbaijan SSR.
In the same year, KGB Major General Aliyev published an article in the all-Union departmental collection, “More actively suppress the machinations of enemy intelligence services in border areas.”
Internal collection of the KGB of the USSR No. 4 (36) for 1967, in which an article by Heydar Aliyev was published
He spoke about the work of his senior colleagues (NKVD of the 1930s and 1940s) and gave examples from the times when he himself worked in the NKVD-MGB-KGB. How the security officers caught not only agents of the US, Turkish and Shah's Iran special services, but also deserters from the Red Army recruited by the Turks. That is, those who - according to the current ideology of Aliyev's Azerbaijan - fought the "occupiers" with the support of friends from Ankara.
The president and father of the president, who now rests in the Alley of Honor in Baku, concluded his article in the KGB collection with a promise to “honorably fulfill the tasks set before the Chekists by the party and government.”
For his faithful service both in the security agencies and along the party-Soviet line, Heydar Aliyev received from the “occupiers”: five Orders of Lenin, two Hero of Socialist Labor stars, the Order of the October Revolution and the Order of the Red Star and – despite not having been at the front – the Order of the Patriotic War, 1st degree.
It is hard to believe that Ilham Heydar oglu Aliyev disrespects his father so much. It is even harder to believe that Heydar Aliyev, while working in the Soviet secret services and the highest echelons of the Baku and Moscow nomenklatura, was a deeply secret supporter of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic – which, allegedly, was “destroyed by Russia” in 1920.
WHO WOULD ALIYEV BE WITHOUT THE “RUSSIAN OCCUPIERS”?
In the article, Aliyev Sr. repeatedly mentions the agents of the Musavatists, members of the Muslim Democratic Party "Musavat" (translated from Arabic as "Equality"), who were destroyed in the 1930s. This liberal-nationalist and pan-Turkist party, in fact, created the ADR. And ruled in this short-lived republic from May 1918 to April 1920.
More precisely, the Musavatists only pretended to govern. After all, in those years it was difficult to talk about any borders or statehood. Transcaucasia was engulfed in the chaos of the all-Russian civil war.
To understand whether “in April 1920 the Russian army invaded Azerbaijan and occupied it”, we need to briefly recall what happened in Transcaucasia after the February Revolution of 1917.
WHY AZERBAIJAN WAS ESTABLISHED IN TBILISI
Until 1918, separatism was not even considered in Transcaucasia. The Muslim Turkic-Tatar national movement (the ethnonym "Azerbaijanis" was not in use at the time, the people were more often called Transcaucasian Tatars or Turks) advocated not even for a republic, but for national autonomy within the framework of a federal Russia. The same was said by the Georgian Social Democrats and the Armenian analogue of the Socialist Revolutionaries - the Revolutionary Federation "Dashnaktsutyun".
After October 1917 and the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly in Tiflis, the Transcaucasian Commissariat (an organ created under Kerensky ) convened its own "Constituent Assembly" - with Georgian Mensheviks, Armenian Dashnaks and Transcaucasian Tatar Musavatists. In the parliament, which was called the Sejm in the Polish manner, there was also no talk of separation from Russia.
Everything changed, firstly, with the collapse of the Caucasian Front in the winter of 1917–18 (not without the influence of Bolshevik agitators), and secondly, with the signing of peace by Soviet Russia in Brest-Litovsk.
Having violated the armistice concluded in December 1917, the Ottoman Empire troops, with the support of their German allies, began to fill the military-political vacuum. Erzurum and other cities occupied by our army during the First World War were lost. In April, the Ottomans entered the Russian city of Batum.
The Bolshevik Military Revolutionary Committee of the Caucasian Front fled from Tiflis to another multi-ethnic city, the Muslim-Armenian-Russian-Georgian Baku. That was when the history of the "Baku commissars" began - the local Council of People's Commissars (aka the Baku Commune) headed by Stepan Shaumyan, Nariman Narimanov and Ivan Fioletov. The Commune began forming the Red Guard.
The "Tatar" national-liberal pan-Turkists from the "Musavat" party sat far from Baku, in Tbilisi and in Yelisavetpol - today's Ganja. But the Commune could not be called a full-fledged authority. Thus, it was unable to stop the Armenian-Muslim massacre in Baku in March 1918.
On the one hand, Armenian soldiers who had left the front and Dashnak units (who were “taking revenge” on local Turks for the Ottoman genocide of 1915) took part in the mutual ethnic cleansing, and on the other, “Caucasian-Tatar” fighters of the Wild Division.
As a result, the Musavatists lost all influence in Baku. The Commune conditionally strengthened its power, but was forced to reckon with the hostile Dashnaks. Meanwhile, the Ottomans took the Russian cities of Kars, Ardahan, Artvin and moved on to Erivan (Yerevan) and Tiflis.
There was no one to defend Tbilisi’s “moderate democracy” in the form of the Sejm and the Commissariat.
The democrats asked for peace. The Turks issued an ultimatum, one of the points of which was to de jure separate all of Transcaucasia from Russia. Therefore, in April 1918, the ZDFR - Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic - was proclaimed in Tbilisi, headed by the Georgian Menshevik Akaki Chkhenkeli. His cabinet included five representatives from the "Muslims" (the word "Azerbaijanis" was again not used), the main one of whom was the non-partisan Khan Fatali Iskander-ogly Khoysky.
The Transcaucasian Democratic Federation collapsed after a month and a week, due to the same external reasons for which this pseudo-state appeared.
On May 15, 1918, the Turks occupied Alexandropol (later called Leninakan, now Gyumri). Hundreds of thousands of Armenian refugees rushed to Tiflis. The Terek-Dagestan government of the Caucasus highlanders "closed the border" - the Armenians there were threatened with the same massacre.
Under these conditions, the Georgians in the ZDFR government decided to consider themselves a National Council and turned to the allies of the same Turks, the Germans, for help from the Turks. The German Empire issued an ultimatum: Georgia proclaims itself an independent republic under the protectorate of Kaiser Wilhelm. Which was done.
Left without “his” state of the ZDFR, Fatali Khan gathered a Muslim faction in Tiflis, which on May 28, 1918, made the following decision:
“Since the Federal Transcaucasian Republic was fragmented by the separation of Georgia from it, the National Azerbaijan Council declared… the independence of Azerbaijan.”
The Musavatists, who set the tone in the government of this involuntarily independent and essentially virtual state, outlined the borders of the ADR in an extremely arbitrary manner - "the territory consists of Eastern and Southern Transcaucasia". The proclaimed Azerbaijan Democratic Republic did not control anything in essence, but quickly found itself under control.
HOW THE TURKS TOOK BAKU FROM THE BRITISH
In June 1918, the Ottoman Empire and the ADR signed a “friendship treaty,” under which the new state formally acquired its own armed forces—the Caucasian Islamic Army. This unit of approximately 18,000 bayonets was part of the Turkish Eastern Army Group.
The commander of the troops of the democratic republic was the Turk Nuri Pasha, half-brother of Enver Pasha, the Sultan's Minister of War and one of the organizers of the Armenian genocide.
The biography of the brothers requires separate stories. Let us just mention that Enver will manage to be an emissary, and then an enemy of the Bolsheviks in Central Asia and will die in a skirmish between the Red Army and the Basmachi. Nuri will turn out to be one of the organizers of the Turkestan Legion of the SS, but will not be punished and will die after the Second World War in his native Turkey.
And in the summer of 1918, Turkish "proxies" from the Caucasian Islamic Army of Nuri Pasha launched an offensive on Baku. Although the main striking force was still Turkish troops.
They were opposed by a very strange coalition of the Red Army of the Baku Commune, Dashnaks - refugees from Western Armenia, White Cossacks under the command of the general of the Russian Imperial Army, the Ossetian Lazar Bicherakhov and soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force. The appearance of the latter was logical. In London they did not want the Baku oil fields to go to the Turks (and in fact to their senior allies, the Germans).
The Turkish group with the "ADR army" attached to it acted more successfully than the Red-White-Dashnak opponents. In the battles near Geokchai and Shemakha, the Baku coalition lost to Nuri Pasha, after which the history of the Commune ended.
In August, the Council of People's Commissars resigned, and the Central Committee of the Caspian Flotilla took power (Dictatorship of the Central Caspian). In Soviet history, the Socialist Revolutionary-Menshevik "dictators" figured as the murderers of the 26 Baku commissars. In fact, they were the ones who wanted to bring the British to Baku: at the last stage, the city was defended from the Turks by the expeditionary corps of Leonel Dunsterville and the Indian riflemen of Sir William Montgomery Thompson.
In September 1918, the British were forced to surrender Baku to Nuri Pasha, who made the city the capital of Azerbaijan. The capture of Baku was accompanied by mass murders. Unlike the events of March of the same year, the main victims of this massacre were Armenians - according to Armenian historians, from 10,000 to 30,000 people died.
This happened just a month before the Ottoman Empire's armistice with Britain and other Entente countries - the de facto capitulation of the Sultan.
But the ADR, which was essentially a colony of the Ottoman Empire, did not collapse and existed for another year and a half. It was again a matter of external circumstances.
HOW SIR WILLIAM SAVED DEMOCRACY AND DIDN'T PREVENT A MASSACRE
On November 16, 1918, the last soldiers of the Ottoman regular army left the city, and on November 17, William Thompson's Anglo-Indian troops entered Baku. After several incidents, Sir William and the Musavatists came to an agreement: the Caucasian Islamic Army and the Turkish troops that had joined it retreated to the interior. The ADR War Ministry settled in Ganja, and the British allowed the ADR government to sit in Baku.
The subsequent history of the republic essentially boiled down to a war with the Dashnak Republic of Armenia with the help of a traditional ally. The defeated Ottomans were replaced by a national movement led by Mustafa Kemal Pasha (the future Ataturk).
The Kemalists, who were building a national state, did not de jure lay claim to Transcaucasia, but were ready to help another Turkic state in the war with the Armenians, especially one with floating borders.
The epicenter of the war was the territories of Karabakh, Zangezur and Nakhichevan. The Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict of 1919-20 created the matrix of post-Soviet wars and “settlements”.
In terms of the level of violence in the capture of cities and villages, it could be compared to the Karabakh war of the first half of the 1990s. Thus, already at the end of the war, in March 1920, the Musavatists drove the Armenian troops out of Karabakh Shusha with a mixed Armenian-Azerbaijani population. This was accompanied not only by a massacre (according to the Armenian side - 20 thousand dead, the Azerbaijani side says 500 dead), but also by the deportation of Armenians.
Describing the Dashnak raid on the "Turkic" town of Boyuk Vedi in the Ararat Valley, British observers noted "the inherent inability of both sides to settle any problem except by murder or massacre."
HOW THE US FIRST WANTED TO TAKE ZANGEZUR
The first (or “zero”) Armenian-Azerbaijani war became part of the scenario that is beginning to be realized in the Transcaucasus when the restraining force – Russia – leaves.
When the fighting in Karabakh was going on, Menshevik Georgia was fighting the South Ossetians and Abkhazians, laying claim to Sochi and waging a border conflict with Armenia. From the west, from Turkey, the Kemalist army was advancing, which by December 1920 had put the very existence of the Armenian state and people into question.
In the southeast, in the Lenkoran district, the local people, the Talysh, proclaimed a Soviet republic and fought with Azerbaijan until the summer of 1919.
To the north of the Caucasus Range, from Circassia to Dagestan, there was a war between the Reds, White Cossacks, “Red-Greens” and Islamic mountain militias.
Another parallel - now with the latest events.
In the summer of 1919, the United States attempted to mediate between Armenia and Azerbaijan and at the same time take control of the zone between the two states. The Woodrow Wilson administration, through the Entente High Commissioner in Armenia, proposed the idea of creating a neutral zone under U.S. control in the Nakhichevan region.
But the project failed: Azerbaijan and Georgia accused the Americans of playing along with the Armenians. Baku set a condition - a neutral zone only on the condition of the withdrawal of Armenian troops from the Zangezur corridor (with the entry of Azerbaijanis there). The negotiations reached a dead end, and the war resumed.
External circumstances once again played a role in stopping this bloody chaos.
HOW ILYICH IMPLEMENTED THE DECOLONIZATION AGENDA
When Ilham Aliyev says that "the Russian army invaded Azerbaijan and occupied it", he is being disingenuous. Several armies operated in the territory of the disintegrated Russian Empire. And if the Armed Forces of the South of Russia (AFSR) of General Denikin, who fought for a great, united and indivisible Russia, had entered Transcaucasia, then the Democratic Republic of the Baku and Elisavetpol provinces would have had to be forgotten.
The Transcaucasian democracies were by no means allies or reliable rear of the Whites.
But in reality, by the end of 1919, the Armed Forces of South Russia on the Don and in the Ciscaucasia were defeated, the Menshevik Georgian Democratic Republic interned the retreating Denikinites. And in the spring of 1920, it was not the Russian, but the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army that entered from the eastern Caucasus and the Caspian. From a military point of view, it neutralized the non-Bolshevik forces on the outskirts of the former empire.
The political tasks were not at all about occupation and inclusion in the “united and indivisible.” The talk was about the re-creation of the Transcaucasian republics – only now not “SR-Menshevik,” but “correct” ones: Soviet and socialist.
Arrival of the armored train of the XI Red Army in Baku on April 28, 1920
Back in 1918, Vladimir Lenin told the Azerbaijani communist Dadash Buniyatzade (later head of the Council of People's Commissars of the Azerbaijan SSR): “We must once again gather our forces and re-educate the workers and peasants of Azerbaijan who were deceived by the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries and liberate them.”
At that time, even some of the Azerbaijani Bolsheviks believed that the Baku and Ganja provinces should become part of the RSFSR. Georgian communists were also skeptical about the “reset” of Azerbaijan.
However, Lenin said directly: the opinion about creating an independent republic is correct, and joining by provinces is colonialism and even stupidity.
It is curious that one of the decisive arguments in favor of this thesis was presented to Lenin by the Armenian Anastas Mikoyan, one of the active figures of the Baku Commune and a future political long-liver. In a letter to Lenin in May 1919, Mikoyan insisted: the Bolsheviks, as internationalists, must support the idea of an independent Soviet Azerbaijan in order to win the trust of the Muslim working masses.
As a result, at the insistence of Ilyich, on July 19, 1919, at a joint meeting of the Politburo and the Organizational Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP(b), a decision was made to make Azerbaijan Soviet, but sovereign.
According to the testimony of Sergei Kirov and another surviving Baku commissar, Nariman Narimanov, Lenin emphasized that the new Azerbaijan Republic should become an example for the peoples of the East.
The plan was implemented after Denikin's defeat - and very quickly: on April 27, 1920, the Azerbaijani communists rebelled, on the night of the 28th a group of armored trains moved out from Petrovsk (today's Makhachkala) and in the morning almost without fighting reached Baku. Then, on April 28, the Azerbaijani Revolutionary Committee proclaimed a Soviet republic and turned to Moscow with a request for support.
At that time, the ADR army was absorbed by a more important matter - the war with Dashnak Armenia. Therefore, the Sovietization of Azerbaijan took no more than two weeks and did not encounter any particular obstacles. Next came the turn of Armenia, which became a Soviet republic in November-December of the same 1920.
As a result, the short-lived Musavat republic with its conditional and disputed borders was replaced by a Soviet socialist state that lasted much longer – 71 years.
And it is precisely this that the Republic of Azerbaijan inherits, including because in territorial disputes with Armenia, Baku appeals to the Soviet administrative borders. Ilham Aliyev claims that by establishing these borders, the "occupiers" acted in favor of Armenia. But in reality, everything happened "exactly the opposite."
[AmericanMind] Governors and legislators must cut through the web of managerial guilds.
Conservatives often imagine that winning statewide elections means gaining control over the machinery of government. But this is wrong—and dangerously so. For far too long, red states have confused the two. The assumption that political victory automatically confers political authority is one of the chief falsehoods circulating on the Right. It is the reason Republican states often look like Democratic ones, only with different bumper stickers.
This is an uncomfortable but necessary message for conservatives to hear: red states are facing a major crisis of governance.
The State Leadership Initiative’s new Index Report lays out the evidence in extensive detail. By the most basic measures of lean, accountable, and ideologically grounded government, red states are failing. Many of the policies their representatives are voting for and their governors are signing into law are profoundly out of step with the wishes of voters. Bureaucracies are bloated, universities multiply administrators faster than scholars, there are fewer teachers than administrators in schools, New York-style regulations pile up in red states like Texas, and seven of the ten most federally dependent states wear the Republican label.
The key takeaway is not just that red states are doing poorly—it is that red states are almost indistinguishable from blue states on the metrics that matter.
This is not conservative governance. It is branding atop the chassis of managerial progressivism. Governors may cut a ribbon, sign a bill, or post a slogan, but beneath the surface, the operating code of their states are indistinguishable from California’s.
#1
Because there is a 'shadow deep-state' of association recommenders and guideline makers with progressive tendencies. I think that about sums it up.
The work ahead is not to shout louder but to actually govern—to tear down the scaffolding of association rules and build institutions that are faithful to the people they’re supposed to serve. Until that is done, every red state risks being a blue state in disguise.
Posted by: Bobby ||
09/01/2025 7:51 Comments ||
Top||
#2
Because people that want a government job are basically the same anywhere.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
09/01/2025 8:20 Comments ||
Top||
#3
The left wing and the right wing are attached to the same bird...
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
09/01/2025 12:13 Comments ||
Top||
#4
Teachers and state government employees unions. Nuff said.
#7
The answer lies in the Universities that produce the qualified individuals for the roles and provide the influential academic research and support to make policies real. Someone figured this out a while ago, hence the current problem, regardless of political leadership. Look at the judiciary and education, 2 cornerstones of any civil society.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
