Sorry, but I read the Tagesspiegel piece BEFORE posting. I was initially curious to see whether this was an artifect of translation, and found it was a direct quote.

I think perhaps you did yourself a disservice by citing the Tagesspiegel article, because it is (IMO) little more than a puff piece about Fischer, with no serious analysis and few actual facts (except perhaps the "rolling of the eyes" in the first sentence).

Specifically, it does not explain what Fischer means by "Don't feed the beast"; this is merely the closing tagline. This vacuum certainly facilitated my association.

More generally, we are all judged by the quality of our metaphors, and people like Fischer moreso. The scorn that W received for talking about a "crusade" was entirely justified. I personally would have hoped that Fischer would have been savvy enough to avoid this kind of pitfall.

The fact is that what we're experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. -Paul Krugman