Tag: free speech

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 naifs 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 judgements 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 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 ten 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.

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The state is losing control over the dominant narratives in the competition of prevailing stories. Its apparatus of power responds predictably invasively and reveals its hostility toward dissenting opinions.

The German Bundestag’s Vice President Bodo Ramelow calls for stricter control of social media. “The platforms must be regulated,” Ramelow warns, demanding that operators “be held liable for what happens on their platforms.” In view of the “coarsening of language and writing” in the digital space, he advocates clear identity verification of users.

Of course, the former Prime Minister of Thuringia and self-confessed fanboy of cultivated socialism is as far removed from protecting free speech as he is from a fair exchange of arguments among different interest groups on an equal footing, where the state takes on the role of a passive guardian. No, Ramelow is a representative of the autonomously reproducing caste of statists, whose clearly articulated goal is to develop the state from a referee role into the dominant actor in the societal power field.

Socialism as a Viral Disease

A state that abandons its neutral role inevitably degenerates into an overbearing actor — socialism as a power construct is the consequence. One can also understand socialism in its revolving character as a kind of intellectual viral disease. Resentment, inferiority complexes, and failure translate in unstable personalities prone to one-dimensionality in societal disputes into vulgar fantasies of expropriation. Economic and cultural crises cause the rapid spread of this civilizationally deforming ideology — a mental pandemic gaining energy, whose discharge dissolves the pillars of civilization: private property, autonomy of action, family, religion, and cultural life.

It is of fundamental importance to understand at what point in the cyclical course of our society we have arrived. Ramelow’s talk can of course be dismissed as infantile utterances of a provincial politician and salon communist, who, like so many of his comrades, has carved a path through bureaucratic positions, public service, and NGO activism to eke out a life at maximum distance from normal reality. Yet in my opinion, this would be a superficial judgment. Ramelow’s unrestrained demands for control of the supposed sovereign are an expression of the final phase of the societal cycle. We stand at a turning point where representatives of the state feel the overstretching of their power, shaped in growing public debt, collapsing economies, and an as yet unspecific unrest among the people.

State Activates Last Resources

The left-wing power machine’s fight against dissenting opinions and political movements has long been institutionalized. In laws such as the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act, the EU undertakes as a kind of “Ministry of Truth” the obscene attempt to bring social media platforms under state control to counteract its loss of power. Soft, emotionally charged, the enforcers of control cite transparency and youth protection to justify their overreach. The obligation to moderate content and disclose algorithms opens the door wide to political influence.

The citizen’s digital sovereignty as a counter-public, as a new regulatory mechanism against state media dominance, has become the newest battlefield of a society that passively watched the rise of initially gentle socialism and must now experience how from climate moralism and diversity hype emerges a passive-aggressive classic control socialism, which spares no effort to deploy state organs like the judiciary apparatus against the growing dissident movement. In this way, the state forges ever new weapons in the war of memes, a war long lost but seemingly continued as a rearguard action until the bitter end. Consider the flood of lawsuits with which failed representatives of societal transformation like Robert Habeck defend their criticism-immune safe zones.

The judiciary’s assault on U.S. President Donald Trump during last year’s election campaign, intended to sideline the Republican, will go down as a unique case in American judicial history. These cases accumulate into a fundamental problem, drawing the battle line between the state apparatus and the civic sphere so sharply that one can already fairly confidently predict the failure of this pathological control fetish. That the U.S. government has actually managed in recent geopolitical turmoil to initiate the first budget cuts to the propaganda vehicle USAID can be seen as a milestone victory in the open culture war against civic freedom.

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