Apollo News is reporting on the substantial speech crime sentence handed to a 73 year-old pensioner from the district of Traunstein in Upper Bavaria. Twice last year, the man repeated the expression “Alles für Deutschland”1 in posts on X – apparently in the course of discussing the indictment of Alternative für Deutschland politician Björn Höcke for the use of the same phrase. The words are forbidden in Germany by Section 86a of the German Criminal Code, which bans National Socialist slogans and symbols. While “Alles für Deutschland” occurs in various contexts, the phrase is associated particularly with the Sturmabteilung, or the SA, who carved the words onto their uniform daggers.
The Traunstein Public Prosecutor brought charges against our pensioner last autumn. The District Court convicted him in November and imposed a fine of €4,500, which he was unable to pay due to financial hardship. Rather than granting the usual deferral or instalment plan, prosecutors have summoned him to serve 75 days in prison instead. He will begin his sentence on June 5th.
This is the latest in a long string of speech crime prosecutions in Germany, as our political establishment collaborates with police and prosecutors to intimidate ordinary people who say untoward things on social media. Last November, another German pensioner from Bavaria had his house raided by police for the crime of sharing a meme on X that called former Economics Minister Robert Habeck a “moron”. Others have been prosecuted for such trivialities as tweeting the poop emoji at a cabinet minister, calling Greens fat and stupid, imprecisely quoting important politicians and reproducing a picture of former Health Minister Karl Lauterbach with his hand raised at an unfortunate angle. In most such cases, convicted speech criminals receive fines (however ruinous), although harsher sentences are not unheard-of.
What makes this most recent prosecution noteworthy, is the fact that the offending tweets were referred for prosecution by the so-called “trusted flaggers” at the creepy government-funded anti-hate organisation calling itself REspect! The EU Digital Services Act has helped empower the schoolmarm scolds at REspect! to police the German internet for “disallowed speech”, and with our Bavarian pensioner they claim yet another scalp. This industrial operation in crying to teacher is headed by a literal Egyptian Islamic scholar named Ahmed Haykel Gaafar, and on their website they claim to have referred nearly 25,000 cases of criminal speech for prosecution over the years.
1 I distance myself from this and all deplorable National Socialist slogans and symbols.
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