Culture is mysterious. Terrible, obnoxious and repressive things can happen for a long time without anybody ever seeming to care about them – until, suddenly, for seemingly no reason at all, they spark enormous outrage.
Our Green Minister of Economic Affairs Robert Habeck has been bringing criminal speech complaints against his critics for years. As of August 2024, he had filed 805 such charges – well over half of the total raised by all Cabinet Ministers since September 2021 combined. Most of the rest (513) were brought by his fellow Green, the Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock. Their repressions have been part of a much broader campaign by the defunct ‘traffic light’ Government and its ideological allies to shut up critics, and the cases have been too numerous to keep track of. The police have gone after farmers who put up signs saying they would refuse to do business with Green voters. They searched the house of a Bavarian businessmen because he displayed satirical posters mocking Habeck, Baerbock and other prominent Greens. Calling Habeck a “dumbass” on social media can cost you €2,100 in fines; calling Baerbock the “dumbest foreign minister in the world” can cost you €6,000.
All of this is part of our new, post-Covid politics. In 2020, it was still possible for the German press to denounce Vladimir Putin for daring to fine people who mocked him on the internet. “In Germany,” journalists could yet report, “derogatory remarks about politicians are protected by the right of freedom of expression” (emphasis mine below):
The slogan ‘Putin is a thief’ is one of the most widespread battle cries of the opposition in Russia. An “absolutely offensive” formulation, as Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin, once said. But the expression is still one of the more harmless ones. Especially on internet social media networks, wild insults against the president are widespread. In response, Parliament passed a law in spring 2019 that makes it easier to punish insults against the president and state symbols.
A year has passed since then – and from the point of view of human rights activists, the law has served primarily to suppress diversity of opinion, politically persecute people, instil fear in them and promote self-censorship. “The law was enacted to protect the honour and dignity of the President,” says Stanislav Selesnev, a lawyer with the human rights organisation Agora. … He has found 51 cases in which proceedings have been initiated due to derogatory remarks about Putin. …
Pensioner Anatoly Lileykin called Putin a “criminal” who holds onto power by falsifying elections. For this, a court… imposed a fine of 70,000 rubles (about £550). … In Germany and other Western democracies, derogatory remarks about politicians are protected by the right to freedom of expression. …
According to Agora’s analysis, comments made by citizens on the internet… are being tracked. Denunciation is also widespread. Informers loyal to the Kremlin are scouring the internet to track down critics of Putin. A total of more than 1.6 million roubles in fines have been imposed so far, more than two-thirds of which were for comments about Putin, as Selesnjow has calculated. …
“I am convinced that this law exists to create self-censorship and fear among people,” says media expert Galina Arapova. “Everything is being done to make people bite their tongues – and if they do complain, they should do it at home in their kitchens, but never in public,” says the Director of the Centre for the Protection of Mass Media in Moscow. …
The nebulous wording of the law sets no limits. Experts such as Arapova believe that the aim from the outset was to curb growing criticism. … Because of the deterrent penalties, this has also been successful. The human rights activist Selesnev suspects that in view of the widespread dissatisfaction caused by the economic crisis, criticism of the Kremlin will also increase. In that case, the sentences would be even harsher in the future.
That world exists no more, but its vanishing has long escaped popular notice. We here on the dark and nefarious internet might write about the authoritarian turn in German politics, but as everyone knows we’re mere Russian trolls and what we say doesn’t matter. Something about the police raiding the home of 64 year-old Franconian pensioner Stefan Niehoff for retweeting a meme calling Habeck a moron, however, has caused the scales to fall from millions of eyes.
The case has provoked an enormous scandal all across the internet and the press, to the point that anybody who googles ‘Schwachkopf‘ (the German for moron) will find nothing but article after article about Robert Habeck.
In his zeal to stop people from calling him a moron, Habeck has associated himself with the slur for all time; he might as well have his picture printed in dictionaries next to the word, that is what a massive own-goal our ministerial moron has achieved here.
The police raided Niehoff’s home as part of their “11th Action Day against Antisemitic Hate Crimes on the Internet”. Our Interior Minister Nancy Faeser gleefully reported afterwards that this dubious holiday of judicial repression had consisted of 127 different operations, among them that against Niehoff. At this point you might be asking how calling Habeck a moron could possibly be antisemitic, and this question turns out to have a very revealing answer. The Bamberg Prosecutors’ Office later announced that, while they had raided Niehoff’s house in response to Habeck’s personally-filed criminal complaint, they were also investigating the man for the crime of incitement:
There is an initial suspicion of incitement… since the 64-year-old is also accused of having uploaded an image to the internet platform X in spring 2024, on which an SS or SA man can be seen holding a placard with the inscription “Germans don’t buy from Jews”… adding the additional text “True Democrats! We’ve seen it all before!”
We need some tedious context to understand this. It’s worth it, I promise.
Last spring, when we were having our great societal paroxysm “against the Right”, there was much hue and cry about the dairy brand Müller, because its owner, Theo Müller, turned out to be friends with Alternative für Deutschland Co-Chair Alice Weidel. The usual suspects announced boycott campaigns against Müller, and activists started pasting stickers in supermarkets telling shoppers not to buy Müller products. Niehoff committed his grave antisemitic crime in response to a tweet about this boycott campaign.
Plainly, Niehoff meant only to compare the Müller boycott to Nazi boycotts against Jews by way of rejecting both of them. That might be in poor taste and I certainly wouldn’t argue this way, but I also can’t see how this tweet has anything to do with criminal statutes against incitement.
What happened here is clear enough: insulting Cabinet Ministers may, if you squint, count as online ‘hate speech’, but it does not remotely qualify for the 11th Action Day Against Antisemitic Internet Hate Crimes. To improve their enforcement statistics against the kind of crimes that really generate headlines, while at the same time persecuting the Green Minister’s online detractors, our Bamberg prosecutors went poking around Niehoff’s account for a minimally plausible post that would justify putting him in the precious antisemitism column. In all of this, our speech police demonstrated a typical social media illiteracy – an inability to understand what retweets are (in the case of the original “Schwachkopf” repost), and an inability to understand irony (in the case of the “Deutsche-kauft-nicht-bei-Juden” post). Perhaps censors have always been towering idiots who fail even to understand the media that they are sent to control.
Habeck submitted the complaint against Niehoff personally, and this has lent the Schwachkopf controversy particular significance. Generally Habeck works with an agency called “So Done”, which files criminal complaints to protect its social media-obsessed clients from mean internet people. So Done, however, is in full retreat from this scandal, eagerly telling all and sundry that it had nothing to do with the Schwachkopf case and that it would never, ever, in a million years, have brought Niehoff’s retweet to the attention of authorities. No, Niehoff did not have his home raided via some bureaucratic accident: Habeck filed the complaint himself. Being called a moron before all 901 of this man’s followers so enraged our Minister of Economic Affairs that he went straight to the police.
That is who Habeck is, and it is a reality that the man has gone to great lengths to suppress. Online he poses as just some guy having a conversation in a pullover:
Or as an average sweaty urbanite out for a run:
He announced his hopeless candidacy for the Chancellorship sitting at some kitchen table, assuring Germans that he’s just one of us.
Habeck, however, is plainly not one of us. All of this is a standard-issue Green political fantasy – one developed by marketing agencies and focus groups, and it is very nearly the opposite of the truth. The Greens are a political elite who employ anti-elitist aesthetics and rhetoric to discredit the traditional conservative politics of the Federal Republic. The fiction is a delicate one, because people like Habeck are overtly disliked by ordinary people above all. This discontent has to be bottled up, explained away and shut down, all to maintain the myth that Habeck is just an average dude. In Habeck Land, his critics are an illusion of the algorithms, a product of Russian troll farms and also antisemitic criminals who are full of hate and deserve criminal prosecution. In this way elites who spend their days pretending that they are not elites prove to be very dangerous.
Schwachkopf-gate has generated such waves that Habeck himself has been forced to talk about it a few times. Yesterday he offered this justification to an ARD journalist:
At the beginning of the legislative period, when things were so tough, I decided to report insults and threats. There are a lot of them. This is filtered through agencies and in this case it came from the Bavarian police. Of course, “moron” is not the worst insult that has ever been uttered. But what happened then, namely that the public prosecutor’s office then confiscated the laptop or the end device – in other words went into the house – my report only triggered that, I believe. Because in the police statement, there was talk of racist or antisemitic motives. That’s why I think that… my report was only the trigger.
We’ve seen that Habeck’s personal social media snitches at So Done did not report the Schwachkopf retweet, so it’s hard to know what his appeal to mysterious filtering agencies can mean. Otherwise, Niehoff’s allegedly antisemitic post had nothing to do with the police search. Habeck would rather lie than apologise, which is very consistent with the kind of person who is deeply invested in ratting out every last one of his detractors to authorities.
Yesterday, Habeck was asked by ZDF journalists what he would do if someone called him a moron in the future. After a great sigh, he made this statement:
Then, I would look more closely at the file and consider whether to make a complaint, but I already have a policy of reporting insults, threats and hate. There are hundreds of messages like that. Afterwards, by the way, the courts decide how to deal with them. So…. what happened there is a court decision, I have no influence over that.
And in response to a follow-up question about whether he thought the police raid was disproportionate, Habeck said this:
Well, if it was just that statement, that probably would have been disproportionate, but if I remember the Bavarian police’s press release correctly, it’s about something completely different. This statement was only one of the things they mentioned. I think there were other facts to be clarified.
It is the same misdirections all over again, although you’ll note that Habeck – between his first and his second statements – has gotten a lot more careful about throwing around words like “racist” and “antisemitic”. There are presumably lawyers on the other side of this now, and Cabinet Ministers are not (yet) above the law.
More disturbing were oblique remarks Habeck made a few days ago at the recent Green Party conference. The guiding theme of his candidacy for the Chancellorship is the importance of liberal democracy and the coming clash between our European democratic order and rising (Russian or, I guess, American) authoritarianism. These are awkward topics for a man who enjoys punishing his critics, and so when Habeck came to praise “this idea of popular self-determination” or “freedom”, he felt the need to address the contradiction:
I mean freedom in the sense of the rule of law, not in the vulgar sense – if I may say that much, in view of the reporting of the last 24 hours. It is a mistake to believe that liberalism means thinking only of oneself. That is not freedom. Nor is it political freedom. Freedom is interwoven with conditions, with institutions.
I am not entirely sure what this means, and I’m not sure that Habeck does, either. What he is trying to say, though, is something like this: “Freedom” does not mean that Germans get to do whatever they want, politically or otherwise. They cannot just call Habeck a moron. “Freedom” is rather a conditional thing – some mysterious property that is mediated by “institutions”, like those institutions Habeck happens to control. Other understandings of “freedom”, particularly unconditional and institutionally unmediated understandings, are “vulgar” and mistaken.
All of that sounds pretty bad to me.
This article originally appeared on Eugyppius’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.
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I shared this story the other day so I’ll post about this instead. It would seem the German coalition government has got the same idea as the Demtard party in the U.S;
”More than 500,000 newly naturalized German citizens will cast ballots for the first time in the upcoming federal election on Feb. 23, a record figure driven by the traffic light coalition government’s progressive citizenship reforms.
Many of these new voters, primarily Syrian nationals, have been granted citizenship in the last year, facilitated by government legislative reforms to fast-track citizenship by allowing naturalization after just five years of residency (and in some cases three years), down from the previous eight-year requirement.
This unprecedented influx of new voters has resulted in significant increases in naturalizations across federal states, according to data compiled from all 16 regions.
North Rhine-Westphalia alone has naturalized over 121,000 people since the last federal election in 2021, including 22,720 Syrians in 2023. Berlin saw the sharpest year-over-year growth, with 16,470 foreigners naturalized in 2024 — nearly double the annual average prior to the reforms.
Remix News reported earlier this year that 200,000 migrants had become German citizens in 2023 alone, according to the Federal Statistical Office — and that was before the citizenship reforms entered into force.
Of those 200,000, by far the largest group was made up of Syrians with 75,485 naturalizations. In second place were migrants from Turkey, who received 10,735 German passports, while Iraq came in third place with 10,710 new citizens.
The inclusion of these new citizens is expected to influence the political landscape, particularly as many of them hail from immigrant communities traditionally supportive of progressive policies.
This change could bolster left-leaning parties like the SPD and the Greens, both of which have formed two-thirds of the federal coalition government since 2021 that has been supportive of Germany’s open-door immigration policy.”
https://rmx.news/article/over-500000-foreigners-have-acquired-voting-rights-ahead-of-germanys-snap-election/
A Tottenham player has just been banned for 7 games for sarcastically suggesting to a reporter in an interview that he might not recognise his Korean team mate’s relative because they all look the same. He claims he was joking.
Even if he wasn’t, you aren’t allowed to have that opinion even if it happens to be true for you.
(Hilariously, I was told the same thing about white people by a Chinese person in China, that we all looked the same and it didn’t offens me one bit. I found it hilarious.)
We are being trained and conditioned like little animals to behave in the way our self appointed masters deem appropriate. A few exemplary public punishments will go a long way to getting the masses to behave.
It’s a (sad) moot point whether Germany is even more f@cked than England.
There or thereabouts, I’d say.
Germany has become an ‘All you can eat’ shit sandwich buffet. The amount of bad news and general crapola coming out of that country is unreal and it just doesn’t stop. Take this video clip. Is he from Nigeria or Zimbabwe? Either way, he’s obviously not a native but look at his attitude towards German women just going about their business. And the fact he’s filmed and uploaded the footage of himself harassing passengers tells me we’re not dealing with a highly educated person here. ( sound on );
”I will beat you till you die… Look at your pig skin.”
A migrant makes sexist, racist, and anti-LGBT remarks against young women in the Berlin train system near the Tempelhof stop.”
https://x.com/RMXnews/status/1858816011987828977
”While Berlin’s crime statistics obscure foreign perpetrators, Germany as a whole keeps such statistics, which reveal the overwhelming number of foreign suspects. Foreigners only make up about 15 percent of the German population, but these same suspects account for and tremendous 59 percent of all sexual crimes at German train stations, according to federal police data obtained by the NIUS outlet.
In short, foreigners are terrorizing the German populace through sexual violence, all during a time when the ruling left-liberal government has promoted public transportation as a “green” alternative to automobiles.
The situation is deteriorating so quickly in Germany that the police are turning against the far-left interior minister, Nancy Faeser (SPD), who is responsible for security in Germany but appears to be focusing her efforts on fighting her political foe, the Alternative for Germany (AfD).
“It must not be the case that train stations become spaces of fear for women. Women must be able to travel safely in Germany. The risk of becoming a victim continues to increase every month. Interior Minister Nancy Faeser must finally wake up,” Heiko Teggatz, the federal chairman of the federal police union DPolG, told Bild newspaper in May this year.”
https://rmx.news/article/germany-foreigners-commit-59-of-all-sexual-crimes-in-trains-and-train-stations-sexual-crimes-double-since-2019/
Gays and Jews aren’t safe either. We never seem to hear about how Muslims don’t feel safe though do we? Well, unless it’s due to hurty words or any sort of criticism, that is;
”Berlin’s police chief Barbara Slowik considers certain districts of the German capital to be too unsafe for Jews and homosexuals, warning them to avoid parts of the city.
While she claims that there are ‘no no-go areas,’
By admitting parts of the capital are unsafe for ‘openly gay’ and Jewish people, the operational leader of the local police is, in effect, admitting she has lost control of her city.”
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/berlin-police-chief-tells-jews-and-gays-to-avoid-specific-districts/
If the lady was honest, she’d also advise people who are openly female to stay out of these areas unless they desire some close-contact multicultural entertainment.
Maybe satire is the answer. Then again, this is Germany and a sense of humour is an oxymoron.
Habeck is also on record for stating that Germany never meant anything to him and that the thought of patriotism always made him want to puke.
The ‘dumbest foreign minister in the world’ is German? Who knew?
Like all other Greens, Annalena Baerbock (Baerbock meaning bear-ram in English) is German by unfortunate accident of birth and because she really can’t help it. During the so-called pandemic, she was worried about public health in countries hundredthousands of kilometers away from us, ie, somewhere in space between earth and moon, and another of her famous dictums was the demand that Putin must change course by 360⁰ for a chance of peace in Ukraine.
Most her really embarrassing brain-farts are unfortunately untranslatable (Wir verenden Europa!).
Lammy has competition then.
In Germany. “Democracy dies in darkness”
I’m sure Farmer-Harmer-Starmer, Keir Stalin, Two-Tier-Free-Gear-No-Idea-Keir is watching and learning from his authoritarian buddies in German …. and China.
Germany is a bit of a lab environment where (certain¹) woke ideas are tested and experimentally refined before being applied to anglosphere countries.
¹ Due to resistance by the general population, celebration of sexually alternate lifestyles is still somewhat behind in Germany. Stuff like “drag queen story time” is not yet a mandatory part of elementary school education despite the Greens are itching for that because “It’s so beautiful.”
Why doesn’t “EUGYPPIUS” start a Free Speech Union in Germany, with advice from our fearless leader Toby, and moral support from our “RW”?