by Eugyppius
I’ve covered a lot of speech crime indictments here at the plague chronicle. Before Covid, these things hardly ever happened. Occasionally you’d find the odd article about a dumb tourist who was cited for throwing a Nazi salute in public or something, but that was it. The whole area just didn’t matter.
The German state acquired a kind of political Long Covid from the pandemic. Its agents learned from their virus repressions that they could get away with a lot more than they ever thought, and they also learned to view ordinary people as their adversaries. A third thing happened too, in that lockdowns moved a lot of discourse to the internet, and the German elite discovered for the first time that they and their policies suffer a popularity deficit there. To explain this, our baffled and offended if powerful social media naïfs borrowed the malevolent concept of ‘disinformation’ from the Anglosphere. They began whining and crying and beating their breasts and clutching their pearls about disinformation. None of them did this so hard and so insistently as the Greens, because the Greens represent the views of the German political elite, and as an elite they feel entitled to scold, control discourse and tell other people what to do.
That’s my potted history of how we got to this world, with pensioners being sent to jail for typing the wrong three-word phrase on the internet and YouTubers being fined thousands of Euros because some computer programme hallucinated into their banal complaints about poor internet reception a contextually incoherent Nazism. If you’re unlucky enough, you can get nailed for literally anything, and we only hear about a tiny minority of these cases. For a lot of people, the summary judgments they receive from the court are embarrassing, baffling and not worth the trouble. Those who can will just quietly eat the fine and try to get on with their lives.
In past pieces, I’ve drawn comparisons to the old East German DDR, and I’ve also tried to characterise political repression as something that all states get up to when their ruling classes become threatened. I stand by all of that, but I’ve neglected to explain why our present situation is unique.
Europe and particularly Germany have entered a totally new era when it comes to government interference with personal expression. We’ve never seen anything like this before, it is going to get a lot worse, and nobody anywhere has the slightest interest in dialling this back. The prosecutions are escalating and they will only become more pervasive and ridiculous.
What is happening resembles classic ‘totalitarian’ political tactics only superficially. The DDR employed literal bureaucrats and secret policemen whose job it was to censor speech according to defined standards and to punish or intimidate those who said inconvenient things. An analogy would be the farmer who decides there are too many rabbits eating his cabbages, and so he goes out and shoots them.
Modern Germany just can’t go out and shoot rabbits, and the reason has nothing to do with liberal democratic freedoms. We can’t even build bridges. Over a century ago, the Kingdom of Saxony required only two or three years to build the first Carola Bridge over the Elbe in Dresden. The SS destroyed that monument in 1945 to slow the Soviet advance, but the DDR needed only four years to build a replacement – the one that finally collapsed in September of last year. Today, in the best Germany of all time, we will require at least 10 years and almost certainly more to build our third Carola Bridge. That is a very rough scale of how much ability the state has lost in the space of just a few generations.
The sclerotic, hyper-managerialised state that cannot build an uncomplicated 500-metre bridge across a river also finds censorship really, really hard. And so it has signed over this project to a whole world of NGOs, many of which now devote incredible resources to policing the internet all day. We once had a farmer shooting rabbits, and that was bad enough if you happened to be a rabbit. Now we have an obese, bed-ridden, day-drinking farmer who can no longer fit through his front door. To solve his rabbit problem he has deputised a lot of autonomous agents, like the myxoma virus, to get rid of the hated rabbits instead. This means he’s no longer in control of the process at all. The censorship happens all on its own, and for reasons of its own too. It’s just something that a growing number of state-adjacent organisations do now, because there are institutional interests (jobs, funding) behind it.
How this happened is insidious. To take but one example: during Covid, German politicians didn’t like the fact that people were calling them names on the internet. They therefore voted to enhance penalties for insults directed against those ‘in political life’. Then, some of them ran off and founded an internet censorship NGO-cum-startup called So Done, the entire business model of which involves using AI tools to find people insulting politicians and referring these politician-insulters for prosecution. When these malefactors are ordered to pay compensation to their ‘victims’, the insulted politicians split the money with So Done, and everybody is happy.
That case is especially egregious, but it is much the same story with the ‘trusted flaggers’ deputised by the Digital Services Act and the swarm of other speech-suppressing NGOs who have descended upon German discourse like a bunch of fleas. We are looking here at a whole niche profession premised upon censoring and punishing people for saying naughty things. The not-so-subtle problem is that anyone employed under these auspices, being a professional, can never stop finding people saying naughty things, regardless of what people are actually saying. In this the new censors are much different than their DDR-era predecessors. They work not to influence discourse, not to protect the delicate feelings of wealthy invulnerable politicians, not to enforce a new online civility, not to defend the legitimacy of state institutions and not even because it is fun to see AfD voters shamed in court and deprived of their savings. No, they do it because it is their job, and that is the most terrifying thing of all.
Consider REspect!, just one of these garbage organisations. We’ve met it before – it’s the hate speech NGO run by a weird Egyptian man named Ahmed Haykel Gaafar. As of last year anyway, 10 people worked at REspect!, their salaries paid in part by the government. From their quarterly reports, we learn that in 2024 REspect! processed an average of 89 speech reports a day, 31 of which they referred to prosecutors. (As always, we’re asked to believe that people just come to REspect! with all the hate speech they’ve found online, and that REspect! then uses its prerogative as a trusted flagger to get naughty speakers banned and censored. The problem with this story, is that it requires us to believe that thousands of Germans are actually going to the dumb REspect! website and using its retarded speech report form, which I find highly unlikely. Maybe the odd offended Greenling actually does all of that, but what is actually happening here, almost certainly, is that REspect! is itself trawling the internet every day for hate speech. This would be why it needs to have a staff of at least 10 people, which you would not need if the offended and terrorised masses were doing all the reporting for you via web form.) These guys are by far most active on X and Facebook, and their all-time favourite speech offence is violations of section 86a of the German criminal code, the statute that forbids the use of NSDAP-associated slogans and symbols. This one law accounted for 64% of its entire haul last year. The reason for this is obvious: Nazi slogans are easily searchable and therefore offer the greatest payoff for the least effort. For everything else, somebody might actually have to read something, and that’s no good if you need to maintain your quota of 90 daily speech naughties.
The final step is the most frustrating: media naturally report on a subset of the prosecutions that REspect! helps generate, which causes the forbidden and highly dangerous Nazi phrases to recur all across the internet, where our word-searchers find them and initiate new prosecutions. It is like sowing the seeds of one’s future harvest.
I am not exaggerating or making this up. Consider the fate of that most deplorable of National Socialist slogans (from which I distance myself utterly), ‘Alles für Deutschland‘ (‘Everything for Germany’). Nobody except Nazi memorabilia enthusiasts knew this was a Sturmabteilung phrase until somebody caught the AfD politician Björn Höcke saying it in 2021. Since then, we have had a poor pensioner from Traunstein facing jail time for repeating ‘Alles für D–‘ in two separate tweets, in ironic commentary related to Höcke’s case. We have this guy from my old district in Bavaria who got his house searched and a €7,000 fine for merely repeating an ‘Alles für D–‘ hashtag on X, also in relation to Höcke’s prosecution. We have this pensioner from Münster hit with a €4,000 fine merely for citing the evil magical phrase, with quotation marks and everything, also in the course of discussing Höcke’s prosecution. And then finally we have the prominent social media personality Stefan Homburg convicted and fined €10,400, also for merely citing the forbidden phrase in the course of a broader discussion about the absurdity of it all. And again, these are the only the cases we know about. That can’t be emphasised enough.
Plainly, none of this is reducing the amount of ambient Nazi phraseology on the internet. If anything, the tactics before us have only served to increase the circulation of these darkly magical incantations. These morons have raised ‘Alles für D–‘ from near total obscurity to a household proverb in the space of just a few years, and they’ll keep going.
Except for the AfD, all the major German parties just love this stuff, or at least they have no idea what is going on and no conception that it might be a good idea to stop this. Our new CDU-led Government has just promoted the extremely noxious NGO HateAid to trusted flagger status alongside REspect!, and as artificial intelligence offers these people ever-improving tools, the prosecutions will just get crazier and wider-reaching.
We have established an autonomous, self-reinforcing censorship regime that serves no real purpose other than its own propagation, and for the foreseeable future we just have to live with that. It sucks.
This article originally appeared on Eugyppius’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.
They still deny covid1984 came from a cock-up in the French built laboratories, carrying out off-shored US GoF research using Australian trained [Chinese] scientists, in Wuhan. Fauci was up to his neck in it.
Jan. 28, 2025
“it’s also certain that the theory that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese lab will persist, despite the absence of any evidence to support it.
As I’ve written before, this fact-free claim periodically receives a shot of life-extending plasma from credulous news organizations, congressional Republicans, and former and current Trump acolytes.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-01-28/column-a-cia-assessment-revives-the-fact-free-claim-that-covid-started-in-a-chinese-lab
Journals such as Nature and Science still push the wild animal narrative.
The censorship in Britain is across the board, the thought police have large ears and eyes on stalks. Germany, after over 70 years of being denazified, now has allied induced post National Socialist schizophrenia… wir schaffen das
I’d like to end by thanking Elon Musk. Had it not been for his explosive tweets there would be no inquiry into you know what. Top man.
What are “tweets”? Please explain.
Tweets: A term used for social media posts.
I believe it originated on Twitter.
A term used for social media posts on Twitter, which no longer exists.
the name was changed from twitter.com to X.com, shortly after new management. best account of which may be the 2023 Isaacson biography of a certain character EM: [not reading for the faint-of-heart]
Yes I know. My point, which was apparently too subtle, is that we should stop calling them “tweets”, mainly because it’s a stupid word.
He X’d about it doesn’t quite work though.
well, maybe it does. But good luck getting people to change
We still “dial” our phones, and they “ring” even though none have dials or bells. Terms are simply convenient because they are understood, not necessarily descriptive.
A sound made by birds, akin to chirping. As in the character Tweety-Bird.
Also this, the plural form of tweet is twitter:
Common Usage:It’s often used to describe a situation where people are gossiping or speculating about something. For example, the phrase “the office was all atwitter” might mean that there was a lot of nervous chatter and speculation about a potential layoff.
It appears to me that Germany urgently needs a Free Speech Union like the one Toby Young founded in the UK.
https://freespeechunion.org/
Maybe the german regime will go through all of Hitler’s speeches, and if they find the words “free speech” they’ll also ban that … if they don’t find anything, they’ll expand the search to all the NSDAP party members … “Wer sucht, der findet…”
The new Malleus Maleficarum. The original published in Cologne, in 1487. James Sprenger and Henry Kramer discovered witches wherever they went.
It was self-perpetuating, for sure, and lasted 300 years, until the Enlightenment put a stop to it.
And so it goes again today. The Digital Services Act —
a Malleus Malloquentis which pretends its, “main goal is to prevent illegal and harmful activities online and the spread of disinformation.”
— is instead a manual of discovery and persecution of people speaking freely, prosecuted by latter-day Romantics ensconced in government bureaus and NGOs. Where questioners (bad-speakers, the malloquentis) are the new witches.
Religious nut-cases then, Progressive nut-cases now. They are the same sort of people; reflexively fixated in an ideology. They insisted witchcraft caused crop failure then, and insist free speech causes fascism now. Old poison, new bottle.
To be fair, some people accused of 14th century witchcraft were probably sarcastic a-holes.
Lots of them were not pleasant people. But torture and burning at the stake in response is a bit over the top
Bringing back that mindlessly accusatory collectivism is no path forward.
I’m quite happy about what happened to Robespierre …
Today there’s a citation for the elderly: use it or lose it …
The truth or doubt has become misinformation. Before COVID was politicized there was considerable discussion by visitors to the Wuhan lab that it had very poor biosecurity. That disappeared when COVID was politicized. The academic science community supported the animal hypothesis since they didn’t want bio-research regulated.
And the UK is proposing to make pub banter illegal if anyone within hearing finds it offensive.
I find Starmer and his rotten party offensive. Using their own logic, can they be banned?
Before Covid, these things hardly ever happened.
Not sure I agree. They’ve just become more blatant and obvious.
I grew up believing that “free speech” was a nearly universal ideal of modern western nations. I was actually quite surprised to learn just a few years ago that the US is virtually the only major country to enshrine the right of free speech in its most fundamental law. I seems that we are the only country where it is correct to say “hey, it’s a free country”. No wonder so many people want to immigrate here.
As i recall Alejandro Mayorkas established the Department of Homeland Security Disinformation Governance Board. It was so offensive and Un-American that it was quicky disbanded.
But they tried to limit and censor speech in the US.
As Reagan said we are only generation away from losing our freedoms and when the US is done there wil be no where to run
I understand the urge to suppress Nazism. Germany has suffered a great deal due to that odious ideology. But can they really not see the irony of how they are applying their speech crime laws? Perhaps if the sprachpolizei wore brown shirts it would become more obvious.
Suppressing any ideology = no freedom of speech. I understand the urge, but I choose freedom of speech.
There’s an example or two that I keep in mind to show that this self-censorship problem has little to do with the NSDAP-period (’33 – ’45) or even with Germany per se.
Klaus Mann was exiled by 1934 and promptly wrote an prescient little book ‘Mephisto: Roman einer Karriere‘, which translates roughly as ‘Mephistopheles [as in the Satan-figure of the Faust legend]: Novel of a Careerist’. (See also the 1981 movie with Klaus-Maria Brandauer in the title role).
It shows, in published form, how from the very beginning one could discern the criminal aspects of the Third Reich.
Despite being as anti-NSDAP as any book could possibly be, it turned out to be impossible legally to publish in postwar Germany, because it ran afoul of middle-european libel law / traditions.
Anyway, this is something that an American just cannot understand in the abstract; it has to be experienced.
And in reverse. It helps to ask a european guest in the USA ‘do you know why americans are so excessively polite?’ (for example in the Westerns). The answer being because we (americans) are always ARMED (or at least assumed to be).
If it really had to do with Nazism, Germany wouldn’t be supporting Ukraine where the presence of Nazi ideology and groups is really blatant (e.g Azov battalion). What they don’t like is critique for their blatant incompetence … but don’t worry there’s a “bacon of hope” at the UN now …
As we evolve to the hive mind.
See Story Tip: https://brownstone.org/articles/the-invisible-leash/
Story Tip: https://brownstone.org/articles/the-invisible-leash/
Well, the guy thinks Grok is intelligent…
Nothing comes close to the aggravation I got in Germany taking some car share people across the border from France. (and it continues each time I cross the border – last time sitting on the side of the road for 2hrs while they bang on about do I have a right to go there within Schengen zone!!)
Accused of human trafficking about 2yrs ago – I got arrested and got stuffed in a Polizei cell for hours removing my shoes so I couldn’t hang myself by boot laces or so they said.
A pregnant lady I was taking on the wonderful Blabla car share was strip searched until she burst into tears then dragged back to the railway station after to sit there for hours.
Those sh..tters I very nearly turned to and told – YOU ARE PRECISELY tHE SAME A-holes my grandfather was fighting back in Ypres in 1915m but I restrained myself from producing a nazi handshake.
I picked up the poor pregnant lady who had the bad luck to be BLACK….and took her at 1am after my ordeal to Frankfurt just about staying awake on their now empty autobahn..
Germany?
Nah it’s going back to the 1930s.
When the US government passed Bush’s 2001 Patriot Act with nearly universal government support, and when that support continued even when it quickly became clear that the Act was being used to go after citizens almost entirely (the very few “terrorists” turned out to be idiots talked into it by the FBI), we could see where Western governments were going.
If the ruling class can’t justify what it’s doing – or what it wants to do – to the citizenry, then it must resort to ever more extreme suppression justified by ever more extreme views of them. In short, the corrupt Western bureaucratic rulers have come to regard citizens – and the very idea of citizenship – as their enemy, and are instituting policies based on little more than the gnostic belief that any act or law that harms citizens must be for their own good and are a display of the rulers’ righteousness.
Also,
Dynasticism is a constant of every bureaucracy. It’s amusing that government bureaucracies are now starting new bureaucracies to protect themselves from the consequences of their cultural proclivities, but at some point – not so far in the future, now – they’re going to run out of those hateful productive citizens to pay for it all.