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.
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Tailor made militant angry activist who has conveniently Parted company with the indigenous mother of his child as he rises to the top of another stinking pile of shit ! We know someone in Scotland just like that ! Strange isn’t it – NOT !
I’ve said for a long time that there’s one way to sort this issue. Separate a vast tract of land in the Americas or Africa and allow all these SJWs to create their own country with all their laws that they believe are fair. Let them establish their ultimate wet dream ‘anti-racist’, ‘anti-fascist’, ‘progressive’, virtue signalling, ‘anti-transphobic’, green, SJW state and give people who want to live in that state a grant to let them move there. Let them go. Let them be a beacon of ‘kindness’ in the world and let the rest of us stay here and be the squalid, ‘fascist’, ‘racist’, ‘intolerant’, ‘micro-aggression’-orientated hellholes they claim we are.
Some sort of diaspora is the only way we can solve this problem. These people are nihilists and misanthropes who want to corrupt our children, intellectually and sexually. Let them have their own country, let all the teachers, the activists and politicians and members of the public who think that way have a nice sunny, warm country to live in and try to achieve their idea of perfection and let the people left behind sort out the education system for ourselves. The Guardian can move there as the state newspaper, the unions can close in the UK and set up shop there, virtue-signalling corporations that don’t mind vast green taxes can set up shop there, the British police constabularies can head over there. Everyone can wear masks to show how ‘kind’ they are.
It’s going to have to be this way sooner or later – national divorces – or there’s going to be civil war. And I wish that were hyperbole. As we’ve seen with motorists dishing it out to eco-loons, the public aren’t going to tolerate much more.
They would fail abysmally. Insisting that things are as you wish them to be rather than as they actually are will lead to disaster and misery.
Exactly. But it’ll be their problem, not ours. They can sit there and blame each other and us. Ultimately, their utopia will be the same sort of totalitarian hellhole all the others have been. But they won’t be buggering up our lives!
It’s a lovely thought.
Would also like to see Saint Greta go and live with the Amish, see how she likes Hard Work. Then again, I admire the Amish so perhaps it’s unkind to wish her upon them.
Definitely. With the arrival of smart technology, I’m increasingly liking the Amish. As long as I can get my books printed and I have a gas lamp to read them by at night, I’d be very happy to get away from the modern world!
I’ve never understood the beard-but-no-moustache look: you still need to shave.
And that’s just the wives
They can have Liberia. Established so that former slaves from the US would face better chances for freedom and prosperity in Africa than in the United States. They are currently around 180th on the list of nations wealth, and suffering from civil war, corruption and a level of sexual violence that would make your hair curl. Life expectancy is around 64 years, which puts them in the bottom 50 globally. But, you know…white folks, etc etc.
It’s about installing a Labour government – nothing else.
Unquestionably. Militant union leaders have been pushing for national strikes for years. We were naive enough to think that by the end of the 1980s the unions had been put back in their box. The only route is to outlaw the public sector unions. The only place unions have a right to exist is the private sector, with private companies being given the right to recognise them or not!
The current round of public sector strikes have nothing to do with changing the name of the nominal party of government. We now are most definitely living in a one party state and whichever lickspittles make up the executive they rank only as middle managers at best within the Davos Deviants hierarchy.
The only difference a change of Downing Street incumbents will make to this country is in the immediate degree of suffering the people are forced to tolerate.
The public sector leeches will suffer less.
Close down state education and use the money saved to reduce taxes on the working less-well-off.
Most of the big Union leaders have been bought by the Davos Deviants. I have been making this point for months.
These strikes from big public unions are not really about money they are about disrupting society which is just what the DD’s want. The government has a part to play of course so they string the game along and this will probably continue until public pressure means the government gives way a little.
Not all teachers support this and I have two neices in the industry who refuse to strike but many have had almost a two year holiday on full pay and obviously enjoyed themselves and are quite happy for this to continue.
Public sector disruptions will continue for at least the next two years if not longer. In the case of teachers once this pantomime is over things will appear to calm down for a while until the DD’s issue a new set of orders to the leadership – pensions or working conditions, whatever; anything to spark another round of disruption. And where teachers are concerned it doesn’t take much for this left-wing blob to find a new grievance to raise their “out brothers out,” placards. Whoops, sisters too.
All so blatant and obvious.
Reminds me of Jack Harper from On The Buses: “Brothers…”
Incidentally, what exactly does the “Labour” party think of working class English men in the private sector these days? Was Emily Thornberry’s white van man tweet from Strood a warning sign or a mere “slip of the tongue”? We wonders…
You can see how the Liebour party thinks of all the people by looking at the devolved administration in Wales. Sometime ago they decided to experiment on children by giving them bugs and insects to eat at school.
More recently they decided to force ‘sex education’ (really perversion) on children; when a group of parents tried to stop it, Drakefords gang forced them to raise substantial sums of money to go to Court. (Does anyone know what the outcome of that is?)
Now they have said that they will give £1500 a month to any and all the asylum seekers in Wales to help with their living expenses asylum applications!!
Complete contempt and disdain for the people of Wales. The Liebour Party (i.e. Starmer) has done NOTHING to stop any of these policies THEREFORE they should be considered as Liebour policy, so no-one should cast their vote for Liebour in the comming local elections. No-one!
I’m no fan of woke indoctrinators, but why is it unreasonable to want your salary to keep up with government-created inflation?
I’ve been putting up my charges to my clients by what I estimate inflation to be.
A perfectly reasonable desire of course, and likewise reasonable to want interest rates to be above inflation, and have a prospect of a return on your savings. What was unreasonable was for teaching unions to demand lockdowns and related restrictions, and then demand that others pay for the cost of this – if these people maintain their standard of living, it will be at the expense of others given that overall we are all poorer as a result of policies they supported – the cost of lockdown crisis.
Thank you for putting this so nicely into words. There’s obviously nothing wrong with wanting one’s salary to keep up with inflation, however, for the vast majority of people, that’s not an option and inflation also devalues their savings. What the teaching unions want is a Get Out of Corona Free! card to be paid for by the people who don’t have the slighest bit of a chance of getting inflation-matching pay rises.
Further, they also want to government to increase the money supply yet more, potentially driving inflation even higher. There’s a possible positive feedback loop here:
1) Inflation becomes higher.
2) Therefore, public sector unions demand more pay.
3) Public sector works get union demanded payrises, which increases the money supply.
4) goto 1
Is that how you get hyperinflation?
Actually, I was reading about this the other day in a book called The Great Deception (2021 edition, revised). Apparently in Germany’s case, as I recall, a French army of some 70,000 (stuffed with colonials) invaded Germany’s industrial heartland in 1923, committed a lot of human rights abuses (“a large number of colonial troops who were allowed to run amok”), buggered up production (“deliberate wrecking of Germany’s infrastructure”) – with disastrous consequences: “collapse of industrial output”, “mass unemployment”. The German government then “guaranteed the wages of dispossessed workers”, triggering hyperinflation. Apparently, for some reason not a lot is said about this episode in modern history textbooks. Plus ca change? One of the most worrying developments in recent times is Germany conceding to measures which will inevitably stoke inflation.
That’s the so-called Ruhrkampf (fight on the Ruhr). French troops occupied the Ruhr area because it was conjectured that Germany didn’t do as much to pay war tributes (reparations) to France as it could. The idea was they could extract more of what they had awarded to themselves by direct management under military occupation. The German reaction to that was the so-called passiver Widerstand (passive resistance), essentially a general strike paid for by the unoccupied parts of Germany, which eventually collapsed/ was eventually abandoned because of inflation.
But there’s also a more shady aspect to this: The Reich was heavily indebted to its own citiziens because of a series of war loans they had financed. Hyperinflation, which eventually lead to the collapse of the original German currency (the 1871 Mark), enabled the ‘democratic’ authorities to get comfortably rid of all this debt by swindling their creditors, ie paying the loans back with worthless pieces of paper printed for this purpose. I’m not aware of any history books mentioning this, it just happened.
5 out of 3 maths teachers can’t do fractions.
You are undoubtedly working in the private sector, where your fees are solely a matter between you and your clients. If you increase your fees beyond the value of your services then your clients will not stay with you and choose one of your competitors instead. Public sector employees are paid by us dumb taxpayers and are monopoly suppliers. The teaching unions were a major driver of school closures, while of course their members were still being paid, so their increased salary demands are the exact opposite of “reasonable”. It’s blackmail, pure and simple.
There’s another aspect to that: Pay rises in the private sector must come from somewhere. If pay is supposed to rise, either, profits must fall or economically valuable output must be increased. This is not the case in the public sector and especially not here, where the unions specifically demand that the government must increase its spending to finance the sought-after pay rises. The government could do that by raising taxes but this tends to be very unpopular. The government could also do that by simply increasing the amount of money in circulation, the method already used to pay for all of Corona so far. The teaching unions basically demand that this warm rain of freshly-minted pound coins must continue even in absence of a so-called pandemic.
Public sector leeches get what the private sector tax-payer can afford. If inflation goes up, their remuneration should go down, as I now have less to spend.
God forbid the teechers should ever go back to skool and teech
All these lefties would argue vehemently against the evils of monopolies in the economy but funnily enough a monopoly in their union dominated profession is perfectly acceptable. Hypocritical bar stewards.
To deprive children of proper education and disrupt working families.
Sun Tzu, rule 1: understand your enemy.