Merkel's government is terrified of the worldwide right wing nationalist movement and wants to limit free speech and right to assemble as much as possible in an attempt to silence likely AfD supporters. Germany like much of Europe already has thoughtcrime laws, this is but a more effective way to enforce them.
Germany has no thoughtcrime laws. No laws that would have an affect on free speech or assembly have been passed recently or are under discussion formally or informally.
Indeed precisely because opposition exists, this would be an incredibly stupid move likely to cause backlash.
> No laws that would have an affect on free speech or assembly have been passed recently or are under discussion formally or informally.
Masking on a demonstration has recently been turned from an Ordnungswidrigkeit ("contravention" according to Wikipedia) to a felony in multiple states. The aim behind this is to be able to prove via video who is responsible in case violence erupts - yet the biggest perpetrators and provocateurs, the police, don't have individual name/number tags, and more often than not they wear masks.
Oh, and it's illegal to bring any kind of arms to demonstrations, most often it's even forbidden to bring glass beer bottles (and violating this can be prosecuted as a felony).
Sometimes I feel that our governments have intentionally disarmed us - mostly after a couple nasty amok runs at schools, but I believe this is rather an excuse. The real issue at hand is that in case the AfD with their fascist world view ever comes to power (hell, they already got 25% in Saxony), the population won't have anything to fight them with.
>Masking on a demonstration has recently been turned from an Ordnungswidrigkeit ("contravention" according to Wikipedia) to a felony in multiple states.
I'm pretty sure you are wrong. §17a VersG has been in place since 1985. The maximum sentence is 1 year thus it is a misdemeanour, not a felony.
> Oh, and it's illegal to bring any kind of arms to demonstrations
Doesn't seem unreasonable considering how violent they can sometimes get.
>Sometimes I feel that our governments have intentionally disarmed us
Ignoring the fact that the law is 30 years old: Disarming by not allowing to hide your face?
> Doesn't seem unreasonable considering how violent they can sometimes get.
So why are fascists allowed basically everything, the cops beat peaceful hippies up and meanwhile the ordinary left-wing activist mustn't even wear tooth protection (classified as "Schutzbewaffnung")? Seeing that multiple people got teeth knocked out during clashes with the police at the recent "Merkel muss weg" fascist march, it's ridiculous that the citizens are commanded to be defensiveless sheeps while the cops abuse them as training ground.
> Ignoring the fact that the law is 30 years old: Disarming by not allowing to hide your face?
They disarmed the citizens in multiple ways. When combining all that happened (beginning with the Radikalenerlass decades ago), there forms a clear picture: the government has a deep-rooted fear of left-wing people, while secretly funding/supporting right-wing terrorists that have killed over 200 people in the last decades.
The police in Germany falls under the authority of the states and not the federal government. Some of them, like Berlin, do require individual number tags.
Additionally you have a constitutional right to fight a government that violates the constitution by any means once legal avenues are exhausted.
And once you file a complaint against the cops for violence, you end up targeted. Either for harrassment (as happened to me) or for frivolous counter-suits ("Widerstand",happened to a couple of friends).
And even if a state like Berlin requires numbered cops, if there are supporting units from other states these do NOT have to carry numbers. Witnessed this first hand when beaten up in Berlin by cops from Dresden.
I think this is confusing to outsiders, because English media reports these as hate speech, whereas hate speech actually refers to something else in Germany. In Germany these incidents are Volksverhetzung (~demagoguery). The bar for "achieving" it is set quite high:
> Wer in einer Weise, die geeignet ist, den öffentlichen Frieden zu stören,
Who does one of the following in a way apt to disturb/destroy public peace/harmony
> (1) gegen eine nationale, rassische, religiöse oder durch ihre ethnische Herkunft bestimmte Gruppe, gegen Teile der Bevölkerung oder gegen einen Einzelnen wegen seiner Zugehörigkeit zu einer vorbezeichneten Gruppe oder zu einem Teil der Bevölkerung zum Hass aufstachelt, zu Gewalt- oder Willkürmaßnahmen auffordert oder
agitate against national/racial/religious or ethnic group, or against parts of the public or against private persons due to their belonging to a recognized group / part of the public, in order to incite hate or violence.
> (2) die Menschenwürde anderer dadurch angreift, dass er eine vorbezeichnete Gruppe, Teile der Bevölkerung oder einen Einzelnen wegen seiner Zugehörigkeit zu einer vorbezeichneten Gruppe oder zu einem Teil der Bevölkerung beschimpft, böswillig verächtlich macht oder verleumdet,
attacking the human dignity of <the same blob of text as above> or defames or libels.
In other words, to be sentenced for Volksverhetzung the court actually has to prove that you intentionallywanted to incite violence/hate against a defined group of people / person, while intentionally also fulfilling the first condition.
A bit like murder in Germany it is a crime of disposition (killing w/o disposition is Totschlag - or one of the more specific "XY with deadly outcome" crimes - not Mord), unlike murder it is not punishable in absence of disposition.
Hate speech is not illegal. Incitement of hatred is. This requires disturbing the public peace by inciting hatred, calling for violence or attacking human dignity (a human right in Germany).
There is also no law against nazi symbols specifically. Symbols of unconstitutional organizations are illegal, this is one of the aspects of being a militant democracy. The goal here is to prevent a failure of the democracy in the way it did with Hitler. Nazi symbols are illegal because of that but they're not the only ones. Communist, socialist and jihadist organizations are affected by this as well.
Ursula Haverbeck is a nazi who denies the Holocaust and publicly lies about it. She was found guilty of incitement to hatred.
That is not a violation of freedom of speech. Lies are not covered by freedom of speech in Germany, they're not covered by freedom of speech in other countries either, even the US. In fact in most countries certain types of lies are illegal and fall under laws against fraud, libel or any number of things. Germany simply also covers incitement of hatred.
Additionally the first article of the German constitution and one of its fundamental principles is that human dignity shall be inviolable and that the state has a duty to respect and protect it. In my opinion ensuring the dignity of the vicitims of the holocaust is protected requires making sure that the state fights those that would deny the holocaust.
She presented numerous historical documents as evidence that the holocaust as we know it did not happen, and that the United States viewed the German people as a threat far prior to WWII and planned to exterminate them, for example via the "Hooton Plan" to use mass immigration of non-Europeans to breed native Germans out of existence. Does this sound familiar?
For saying this, an elderly woman in her late 80s has been repeatedly imprisoned. Sounds like thoughtcrime to me.
I just read one of her blog posts[1], not knowing who she is. Unless you want to claim that Google translate deliberately mistranslates her words, she's incredibly fucking racist. I'm not a fan of Islam (and criticise it myself), but saying that all Arabic and Turkish children should be sent back to their home countries to protect German children is undeniably hate speech.
Right, the US planned to exterminate Germans via immigrants. And by the US, you mean one loony guy named Hooton. And by planned, you mean he mentioned it as a possible idea.
Effectively communicating the thought processes of characters seems to be much more prevalent among Japanese writers of popular media. I suspect this is at least in part because American writers in industries like Hollywood look down on their audiences or are encouraged to simplify and remove nuances by marketers, where Japanese writers tend to trust their audiences to handle much more.
Where Japanese writers suffer is, not unlike the American TV show writer, in the business incentive to drag a series out for as long as possible to milk the most money out of it. Anyone would run out of material under those circumstances. The best serializations are those smaller ones that either planned the arc of the story from the beginning, or never pretended to have one in the first place.
You've got it backwards. Almost nobody encompassed by the "alt-right" label approves of its usage. It was created by the left to brand and contain the movement. See this movement? They're the alt-right because I said so. Oh and they have nazis. Bingo, movement discredited. You can see the wheels turning in the old media's head.
Your post is a good example of how the left is going to lose really hard in the coming years. Politically motivated leftist outsiders like you, reaching reasonable conclusions of your ideology, are pushing the exact opposite narratives that your overlords want you to. The result can only be more infighting destroying you from the inside out.
I feel confident entering the hornet's nest to say this because I know the mob will not heed my warnings, and instead devour any of their own that stop to listen. The left can neither win with nor without people like you, and so it is doomed to either disappear or transform into something not recognizable in comparison to its former self. Something far more right wing.
This pretty much happened on 4chan with GamerGate and /pol/. Banning GamerGate discussion immediately drove a mass exodus away from the site, and persistently fucking with /pol/ pushed out many more. But 4chan didn't die. The overwhelming majority of 4chan users voted with their clicks that they would tolerate politically motivated censorship, datamining, and adverserial moderation for faster boards and a fatter meme pipeline.
Reddit is exactly the same. Keep pulling shit like this, and it will drive quality users away out of principle. But Zombie Reddit will keep lurching forward, spewing poorly compressed Facebook screencaps and cat gifs.
Mods used to edit posts to "I AM A HUGE FAGGOT" etc. all of the time, and people just laughed. Point is you are overestimating the principles of the average 4channer. The sky has fallen on them repeatedly and they just don't care. I see no reason for the drooling Redditards to be any different.
Huh. Oh well. I guess I need to brush up on my *chan history.
But I do maintain that that's a little different. That's essentially another instance of "disregard that, I suck cock," whereas spez actually altered people's stated opinions.
