Tag: germany

What Happens Where Free Speech Is Unprotected

C.j. hopkins is one of the very few Americans to follow through on the quadrennial promise, sworn by countless millions, to leave the country because they didn’t like the result of a particular general election.

You probably haven’t heard of C. J. Hopkins. A playwright, satirist, and self-described “old lefty,” Hopkins, who is now 62, was working in New York’s downtown experimental-theater scene in the early years of the 21st century when he began to “grow sick of the atmosphere” during the run-up to the Iraq War. “I helped organize those big protests before the invasion,” Hopkins told me, and “was active a little bit in the anti-globalization stuff, the anarchists.” Serendipitously, around that time, one of his plays took off in Europe, and in the summer of 2004, he packed his bags for Berlin, thus sparing himself the agony of witnessing George W. Bush’s reelection up close.

Having fled his native country for Germany nearly 20 years ago because of what he describes as America’s “really oppressive” climate of opinion, Hopkins now has reason to reconsider the wisdom of that decision. Facing criminal charges for a tweet, he is getting a taste of his adopted country’s limited tolerance for free expression.

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Eisenhower’s Dirty WWII Secret

A vast field is filled as far as the eye can see with miserable and gaunt men in remnants of military uniform. It’s May 1945 and the war in Europe has ended. By rights, these surrendered soldiers will be allowed to return to their families, but many will not leave this muddy ground alive. There is no food, no shelter, and no medicine. The Rheinwiesenlager (Rhine meadow camps) were the killing fields of one of the worst war crimes in modern history, committed by General Dwight Eisenhower and the US Army.

The cull of German troops was a closely-guarded secret until four decades after the war, when a Canadian researcher was writing a book on a French resistance hero. James Bacque found that his subject, Raou Laporterie, had been saved by a German soldier, Hans Goertz. In gratitude, in 1946, Laporterie got Goertz out of a French prison camp to work in his chain of drapery stores. Goertz told of mass deaths of inmates through lack of sustenance.

After pursuing leads in the French records, Bacque came to realise that Allied military leaders had ‘committed an appalling crime against humanity’. His investigation culminated in Bacque’s harrowing book Other Losses: The Shocking Truth Behind the Mass Deaths Of Disarmed German Soldiers And Civilians Under General Eisenhower’s Command (1989). The foreword to this expose was written by Ernest Fisher, a retired colonel of the US Army, and war historian noted for his book Cassino to the Alps. Fisher set the scene: –

‘Over most of the western front in April 1945, the thunder of artillery had been replaced by the shuffling of millions of pairs of boots as columns of disarmed German soldiers marched wearily towards Allied barbed wire enclosures. Scattered enemy detachments fired a few volleys before fading into the countryside and eventual capture by Allied soldiers.’

As Fisher explained, German soldiers did everything they could to evade capture by the Russians, who raped and pillaged as they advanced over eastern Germany:

‘The mass surrenders in the west contrasted markedly with the final weeks on the eastern front where surviving Wehrmacht units still fought the advancing Red Army to enable as many of their comrades as possible to evade capture by the Russians. This was the final strategy of the German High Command then under Grand Admiral Doenitz who had been designated Commander-in-Chief by Adolf Hitler.’

But crossing to the Allied side was not the sanctuary that the defeated Germans expected, due to the visceral hatred of Eisenhower. The supreme military commander, of Swedish-Jewish background, had wriiten in a letter to his wife ‘God, I hate the Germans’. In September 1944, in the presence of the British ambassador to Washington, Eisenhower proposed that the entire German general staff, all officers of the Gestapo and all leaders of the Nazi party from mayor upwards should be exterminated (around a hundred thousand men).

Fisher had met Bacque in Washington in 1987 where they uncovered evidence, deeply buried in national archives, of a systematic slaughter. ‘More than five million German soldiers in the American and French zones were crowded into barbed wire cages, many of them literally shoulder to shoulder. The ground beneath them became a quagmire of filth and disease. Open to the weather, lacking even primitive sanitary facilities, underfed, the prisoners soon began dying of starvation.’

Shockingly, more German soldiers died in the camps from April 1945 onwards than died in combat.

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Medieval ‘curse tablet’ summoning Satan discovered at the bottom of a latrine in Germany

Archaeologists in Germany have discovered a rolled-up piece of lead that they think could be a medieval “curse tablet” that invokes “Beelzebub,” or Satan. 

Upon first glance, the researchers thought the “inconspicuous piece of metal” was simply scrap, since it was found at the bottom of a latrine at a construction site in Rostock, a city in northern Germany, according to a translated statement.

However, once they unfurled it, archaeologists realized that the 15th-century artifact contained a cryptic message etched in Gothic minuscule that was barely visible to the naked eye. It read, “sathanas taleke belzebuk hinrik berith.” Researchers deciphered the text as a curse that was directed toward a woman named Taleke and a man named Hinrik (Heinrich) and summoned Beelzebub (another name for Satan) and Berith (a demonic spirit).

While researchers may never know who these people were, they did offer some ideas for the reasoning behind the bad blood.

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Germany Delays Final Vote On Marijuana Legalization Bill Until Next Year

A final vote on a bill to legalize marijuana in Germany that was initially planned for this week has been called off amid concerns from leaders of the country’s Social Democratic Party (SPD). The delay means that action on the landmark proposal will be postponed until next year.

“It always has to be approved by the parliamentary groups in the end,” Dirk Heidenblut, an SPD member of Germany’s Bundestag who is responsible for the party’s cannabis policy, said in an Instagram post. “And if a faction leader, in this case the SPD, has concerns, then it cannot be set up yet.”

Despite the delay, Heidenblut added that as long as the measure advances by the end of January, the delay shouldn’t meaningfully impact the schedule for implementing legalization.

If lawmakers pass the bill, the early stages of reform—including home cultivation for personal use—would begin as soon as April.

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Germany’s Top Health Official Defends Marijuana Legalization Bill Against Critics Ahead Of Next Week’s Vote

As German lawmaker prepare to vote on a revised marijuana legalization bill next week, the country’s health minister defended the reform against critics in the legislature, while briefly outlining next steps for a commercial sales pilot program. Meanwhile, one German state is signaling that it will pursue legal action to block the reform from taking effect within its borders.

At a meeting before the Bundestag on Wednesday, Health Minister Karl Lauterbach took a series of questions from members, some of whom oppose legalization and others who expressed interest in expeditiously enacting the reform.

At several points, he pushed back against lawmakers who suggested that legalization would send the wrong message to youth and lead to increased underage consumption, saying their arguments “misrepresented” the legislation, according to a translation.

“The fact remains that child and youth protection is carried out through education, and sales to children and young people remain prohibited,” Lauterbach said. “That is the only change we have made in this area: a tightening.”

“As part of this legalization, we are pushing back the black market,” he said. “The less of the black market there is, the lower the risk that our children will be brought into consumption through the black market.”

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German Lawmakers Delay Marijuana Legalization Bill Debate Due To Conflict In Israel

German lawmakers say that initial consideration of a bill to legalize marijuana will be delayed until at least next week due to the ongoing conflict in Israel that’s shifted international attention—though one legislator outlined a revised schedule that still puts the country on track to enact the first part of the government’s legal cannabis plan by early next year.

While Germany’s federal parliament, called the Bundestag, was scheduled to take up the cannabis reform legislation for a first reading on Friday, the scheduled debate has been postponed until next week, according to Carmen Wegge and Dirk Heidenblut of the Social Democratic Party.

They said the “global political situation” is the reason for the delay, but lawmakers “will make sure that everything gets done somehow in the next week,” according to a translation.

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CIA-run Nord Stream Attack Was Aimed at Germany

A US intelligence source has told journalist Seymour Hersh that President Joe Biden ordered the destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipelines to prevent Germany from backtracking on promises to abandon Russian energy.

In a blog post on Tuesday, the veteran reporter alleged that the German economy was of no concern to the White House.

The Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines, which connected Russia and Germany through the Baltic Sea, were destroyed in a series of underwater explosions a year ago. Competing theories have emerged as to who was to blame, with mainstream media in the West blaming a Ukrainian commando unit and Hersh claiming that the CIA carried out the operation under direct orders from Biden.

In his blog post, Hersh alleged that US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan convened a series of meetings in late 2021, tasking intelligence officials with coming up with a means of deterring Russian President Vladimir Putin from sending troops into Ukraine.

The White House’s policy was to deter Russia from an attack,” an intelligence source told Hersh. “The challenge it gave to the intelligence community was to come up with a way that was powerful enough to do that, and to make a strong statement of American capability.”

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GERMANY: Pro-Prostitution Picture Book Offered To Children By Government Officials

The city of Berlin has prompted outrage from locals after offering a graphic picture book on prostitution to children via its official website. The book, titled Rosie Needs Money (Rosi sucht Geld), is advertised as a resource for youth aged 6 to 12 years old.

According to Equal Opportunities Officer Kerstin Drobick, the book is a “helpful tool” for explaining prostitution to children of families residing in a red-light district of Berlin, located in Kurfürstenkiez, known as Kurfürstenstraße.

“In the years in which the Tiergarten Süd and Schöneberger Norden neighborhood management offices dealt with the issue of street prostitution and also had many conversations with residents, this was one of the topics: What do I say to the child? The Tiergarten Süd district management has faced this courageously,” Dobrick says in her defense of the book.

“An order was placed for a children’s book that tried to explain to the children what was happening there. Interestingly, extensive research has shown that educational books for children aged 10 and over avoid this explanation.”

Drobick also explains that the book on prostitution, which features graphic illustrations, was created “with primary school children and other people [in mind].”

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Writer C.J. Hopkins Is Ordered To Jail or Pay a Fine For Using Nazi Imagery on Anti-Authoritarianism Book

In a fresh blow to free speech, American satirist and playwright C.J. Hopkins is facing a legal punishment in Germany that could send him to jail for 60 days or slap him with a 3,600 euro fine. The start of this legal tangle is rooted in Hopkins’ critique of the German health minister and using an almost invisible image of a swastika on a mask in a book, all in an attempt to lampoon the worldwide response to the global pandemic crisis.

Hopkins was charged with disseminating propaganda contents intended to further the objectives of an erstwhile National Socialist organization.

The judge, who had already rejected Hopkins’ free speech argument, delivered the punishment order, given the case’s non-jury misdemeanor status. As reported by Racket, Hopkins will, however, have the opportunity to argue for mitigation, though judgment has already been passed.

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Germany’s new whistleblower law ‘risks return to Stasi era’

Germany is quietly building a “huge surveillance apparatus” that risks creating a denunciation culture similar to those of the Nazis and the Stasi, one of the country’s leading historians has claimed.

Hubertus Knabe claimed Berlin was setting up a sprawling system of “tip-off points” inside companies and in government authorities that will facilitate people snitching on co-workers, and was doing so “unnoticed by the public”.

Germany’s “whistleblower protection law” came into force in July with the stated purpose of protecting people who report on workplace abuses. All companies with more than 49 members of staff must set up an office where staff can anonymously report on suspected abuses of the law without fear of retribution.

But according to Mr Knabe, who ran the Hohenschönhausen Memorial on the site of the Stasi’s political prison in Berlin for close to two decades, the law is more far-reaching than simple whistleblower protection.

“The tip-off points won’t only pursue suspicions of criminality, they will also deal with misdemeanours subject to fines,” he wrote in an article for Germany’s Die Welt newspaper this week. “They will even be responsible for statements by officials that ‘constitute a violation of the obligation of loyalty to the constitution’.” 

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