Blame the Jews, the immigrants, the trans, and then people will grudgingly accept the Gestapo, ICE, prosecution without proof or courts.
Which then allows you to target the opposition without proof.
Contemporary examples include the Philippines, Hungary, Poland's Law and Justice Party, and arguably Russia, Turkey and India. Modi is a Hindu nationalist. The United States unfortunately is shaping up to count as an example as well.
Extreme forms of nationalism tend to have a narrative of grievance, a desire to restore a once a great national identity, and a tendency to divide the world into loyal citizens, and enemies without and within, against whom authoritarians powers must be mobilized.
So there's a conceptual basis, in terms of setting the stage for rationalizing authoritarianism, as well as abundant historical examples demonstrating the marriage of nationalism and authoritarianism in action. There's nothing wrong with not knowing, but I would say there's an extremely strong and familiar historical canon to those who study the topic.
Those also had:
- grievance narratives;
- a tendency to divide the world into loyal citizens and enemies; and,
- use the above to justify authoritarian powers.
You haven’t shown that nationalism played a particular part in that cycle; just that it also happened in nationalist states. Almost like the problem is those factors, rather than nationalism.
As did the CCP [1]:
> Ideals and convictions are the spiritual banners for the united struggle of a country, nation and party, wavering ideals and convictions are the most harmful form of wavering.
[0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/nationalities-papers...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideology_of_the_Chinese_Commun...
I think the major difference in their respective cases pertain to the ideological dynamics of the particular strains of communism that manifested in those countries. What they lack is a fixation on the purity of national heritage as a primary source of moral truth and a foundation for a self conception. Instead they tended to regard themselves as part of universal, international struggle and understood conflict in economic and ideological terms. What they had in common was the sense that conflict with this chosen enemy necessitated authoritarianism.
There's more than one path to authoritarianism, and they overlap. Different mechanisms don't disprove one another, they exist side by side.
Their conclusion is that "[...] ethnic and elitist forms of nationalism, which combine to forge exclusive nationalism, help to perpetuate autocratic regimes by continually legitimating minority exclusions [...]"
Right-wing nationalism as we're currently experiencing it is exclusive. It broadly advocates for restoring revised historical cultural narratives of a particular ethnic group, for immigration restriction and immigrant removal, for further minority culture erasure, and so on.
1: https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:859c6af4-d4fd-461e-b605-42...
You are getting downvoted because this pretty basic stuff. Either you’re part of today’s lucky 10k, or your post reads very much like far-right Gish galloping.
Germans, and Germany are obviously quite sensitive to the dangers of nationalism and authoritarianism. Not just because of WW2, but also the experience of East Germany.
Feudalism did not have this concept; a country was the land belonging to a king (or equivalent), mediated through a set of nobles. There was no concept of illegal or legal immigration; the population of a country were the people who worked for, or were owned by, the nobles ruling that country. There were land rights granted to peasants who had historically lived in that place, but these could and were often overruled by nobles.
European nobility had no such idea of ethnicity or national grouping; the English monarchy is a German family, and most of European nobility were related to each other much more closely than to the citizens of their country.
Early post-monarchy states didn't have this concept. The English Civil War and the French Revolution didn't create states that had a defined concept of the citizen as a member of any ethnic grouping. Again, there's no mention of immigration in any of the documents from this period. It just wasn't a concept they thought about.
The whole concept that a nation-state is a formalisation of a historical grouping of ethnically related people is a very recent one, only a couple of hundred years old.
So to answer your question: It is very easy to have a sovereign country without a policy that prevents unfettered immigration; you just don't care about your population being ethnically diverse. Your citizens are the people who live in your country, and have undergone whatever ceremony and formality you decide makes them citizens.
This is, after all, how America historically did this; if you arrived in America and pledged allegiance, you became a citizen of America.
>https://www.bundestag.de/webarchiv/textarchiv/2018/kw08-de-v...
Other European countries like Switzerland, also banned full face veils(burqas) in public. Try entering a bank, city hall, school, etc with a balaclava, ski mask or motorcycle helmet see how that goes.
>https://dserver.bundestag.de/btd/19/304/1930412.pdf
Allowing the surveillance of minors if they show signs of radicalization? This to me makes sense under existing child protection laws. If kids are being raised in environments that are harmful to themselves and society, should we just sit by and let them get permanently wrecked till they reach adulthood, over a technicality? The earlier you can catch the issues the better for everyone and the higher the chance you can rescue the child. Existing child protection laws in Germany already allow the state a lot of power to take children away from parents if they're seen as unfit.
>https://dserver.bundestag.de/btd/19/111/1911127.pdf
Taking citizenship away from those who voluntarily join terrorist organizations like ISIS? 100% agree with this, how could you not?
These are common sense viewpoints a lot of Europeans agree with, not authoritarian ones.
Taking rights away from people labelled as terrorists is a pretty standard way for governments to control viewpoints. It gives them the power to add any group they don't like to a list, and deport/imprison them with minimal judicial process.
I don't know enough about surveillance of minors to comment on that one.
Freedom of religion only goes so far, because the culture of the host country takes precedence. To take it to the extreme, if there were a religion where part of standard practice involved assaulting women and children, we would obviously limit those practices.
Non-consensual violence is prohibited because it directly harms other people. Face coverings don't directly harm anyone and laws that exist only for the government's convenience are authoritarian laws. There are ways to investigate bank robberies even if the robbers are wearing masks and in fact a law against masks is fairly ridiculous because anyone willing to break the law against robbing banks would be willing to break a law against wearing a face covering, so such laws only afflict innocent people.
With this type of logic, all laws authoritarian then, like speeding laws, theft laws, and anything else that prevents you from doing what you want to do becomes authoritarian.
The ban on swastikas would be considered authoritarian because it's only purpose is to limit expression.
Considering Germany's recent history though, it seems like a reasonable response.
You don't want the government to have the power to decide things like that. It's better that they censor nothing.
How would the world react if Germany decided to repel such law? It doesn't paint a good picture
You're making it sound like under these rules, the government can force you to wear GAP jeans instead of Levi Strauss, when in reality the government has always enforced laws on public attire in public to preserve decency and security.
Otherwise it would be tyrannical since I'm not allowed to go naked in public or wearing the loincloths and Tribal Penis Gourd of my ancestors near schools.
Similarly, burkas are a security risk in public since people could hide and smuggle weapons under that, or there could be men hiding underneath using it to enter female only spaces like bathrooms and changing rooms, or so much more nefarious cases.
Then on top of that, you also have the cultural and optics aspect, that burkas are a symbol of a backwards oppressive culture that's incompatible with western progressive liberal and feminist values that the west cherishes or at least pretends to.
Rights are always on a spectrum with a large amount of grey area.
> burkas are a security risk in public since people could hide and smuggle weapons under that
This is silly. Everyone wears coats in the winter.
> there could be men hiding underneath using it to enter female only spaces like bathrooms and changing rooms
Is this actually a concern? AFAICT this isn't happening, it's just something that could theoretically happen, which doesn't make it a reason to decrease people rights. That would be another standard tactic for pushing authoritarian laws.
> Then on top of that, you also have the cultural and optics aspect, that burkas are a symbol of a backwards oppressive culture that's incompatible with western progressive liberal and feminist values that the west cherishes or at least pretends to.
This seems valid, but I'm pretty hesitant to force my cultural values on people. It hasn't gone well historically.
How do you know it isn't happening if their faces and bodies are always covered? Did you undress all of them to check?
> it's just something that could theoretically happen
Welcome to the real world where a lot of laws are made to cover things that could happen precisely so that when they DO happen, there's a law ready to enforce. Why? Because if something CAN happen, it WILL definitely happen.
> but I'm pretty hesitant to force my cultural values on people.
I'm not. You come to my house, you follow my rules, you come to our country you follow our values, simple. If you want to live in the west and benefit from the western system that brings you free education, healthcare, justice, financial opportunities, welfare, freedom of speech, then you must follow the western values that built that system you came here to enjoy. Otherwise if you want to live like in Afghanistan, then go live in Afghanistan, not in our country.
Otherwise if you allow one flavor of imported oppressive cultures out of suicidal empathy, just so you don't "force your values on other people", then why not allow domestic oppressive cultures too, like fascism, nazism, communism, antisemitism, sexism, homofobia, etc? Why open your doors and only tolerate the foreign imported ones?
>It hasn't gone well historically.
Then you need to go back to the schools you went to and ask for a refund, because historically it definitely has. The federal government forced their values over the confederacy via war in 1865 and the US of today is better off from it. Allied powers forced their values over the Axis in WW2 and the world was better off from it. So many historic examples why you're wrong.
I wish it was this simple, so badly, but that strategy has been tried many times before and it always ends in violence. First off, who is "our"? Is it the majority? That leaves every minority group vulnerable. Is it the most powerful (it usually is)? That leave everyone screwed. It all seems great, until you end up as a target. This is why we base our systems of rights to more universal, and not based on our ethnicity.
For example, some of the historical opinions of my fairly recent ancestors: All Jewish people should be dead; ditto for Homo/Tran-sexual; also the Irish; black people aren't humans; the middle east should be owned by Western Europeans, and if not, designed to minimize the chances of them forming successful nations; same for Africa
Seeing this as bad assumes you think hurting other people is bad, which I do. If you don't agree, then there isn't much to discuss, you are entirely correct withing your framework
> Otherwise if you allow one flavor of imported oppressive culture so you don't ":force yurt values on other people" why not allow domestic oppressive cultures too, like fascism? Why only tolerate imported ones?
Where I'm from being a Nazi is completely legal. We tolerate both. There is still an ongoing discussion about where to draw the line, but the standards are always higher than wearing clothes that you don't like. Germany may not tolerate Nazi's for obvious historical reasons.
I would recommend "They Thought They Were Free" for a more of a look into this. It's an interesting book.
Edit: This is not true, almost all laws are passed to deal with a situation that is already occurring.
> Welcome to the real world where a lot of laws are made to cover things that could happen precisely so that when they do happen, there's a law ready to enforce.
Why isn't it simple?
>but that strategy has been tried many times before and it always ends in violence
Then don't import people of divergent/adversarial cultures who aren't willing to integrate into your country and are only there to extract the monetary benefits of your society without conforming to the laws, customs, social contracts, cultures and obligations that society requires.
If you only accept people who gladly accept your culture and values, there is no violence. History has proven this yet it seems like uncharted territory to some people. "you mean putting the fox in the hen house ends in violence?!"
>First off, who is "our"? Is it the majority?
It's the amalgamation of culture, history, collection of laws, constitution, 'Volk Geist' and the voice of the democratic majority of the citizens of the country where you choose to emigrate that compose the concept of "our country", which you need to accept when you choose move somewhere, or GTFO. You can't move to a different culture and expect them to accept your alien values that might go against theirs. Their values hold precedence over yours.
> That leaves every minority group vulnerable
No it doesn't, this is just an empty appeal to emotional manipulation.
In most western democracies, minorities and legal immigrants have the same human rights and equal access to healthcare, education, justice system, etc as everyone else so they're not "more vulnerable" just because they can't wear a burka in public. To receive those rights, it requires them to accept and conform to the laws and values of the society they chose to move to, like the law of not wearing burkas for example, or the law to tolerate LGBT people. Not wearing burkas in public is not making the wearer more vulnerable. On the contrary, foreigners wearing burkas in public makes the locals feel uncomfortable and vulnerable in their own country.
>For example, some of the historical opinions of my fairly recent ancestors: All Jewish people should be dead;
You see, since all your arguments are just empty appeals to emotional manipulation or moving the goalposts from laws banning burkas to somehow being similar to genocide of jews, I will stop the conversation here since you're clearly arguing in bad faith. I've already covered all your points with arguments, there's nothing more I can add. If you want to accept them fine, if not, also fine. Good day.
I intended for that to be a direct reference to the concept of "tyranny of the majority".
> You see, since all your arguments are just empty appeals to emotional manipulation ... you're clearly arguing in bad faith
Man, I really did my best. Why'd you have to be mean?
In general it's not authoritarians that are winning everywhere, but anti-globalists - which is disingenuously framed as authoritarianism. Globalist views were adopted on a wide scale, and they simply didn't lead to positive results, and so it's an ideology which is on the decline, ironically - globally.
The stock market, and your housing and investment portfolios going up, didn't mean that everyone was happy, just the asset holders like yourself and those in your bubble but you're not majority of the working population.
You need to learn to differentiate between "the stock market" and "the economy". Working class people can easily be getting poorer while the stock market is going up. So of course they're mad.
>People who got a yearly raise over the inflation correction for a decade
Huh? Who? Where? When? Maybe in your tech bubble but in the real world a lot of people's salaries haven't kept up with inflation, let alone consistency get raises ABOVE inflation. In France for example the average pension is now higher than the average salary.
>while I count my blessings and money globalist stylez.
Top 10%er can't understand why those bottom 90% without assets who got screwed by globalism and saw their jobs offshored and salaries and savings obliterated by inflation caused by endless money printing are mad at the globalism that caused this massive wealth transfer from the working class to the upper asset owning classes.
You can't make this up. The sheer ignorance of reality of most people and the "fuck you I got mine" attitude is shattering. No wonder young people are flirting with communism.
-- a young-ish person flirting with communism.
In a contemporary democracy we could, at least in theory, completely vote out literally every single pro-corporate, pro-war talking head in the next election. Now of course this won't ever happen, but at least in theory its an option. By contrast in communism, if one ends up unhappy with the system you have very little ability to change it.
Furthermore, in a capitalist system one can even start a communist sub-society. In fact there are many communes throughout the country, at least in the US. But in a communist system, you can't simply start a capitalist sub-society. The centralized nature of the system entails limits on freedoms, to ensure that every person is contributing to society as a whole. And this, in practice, trends towards dystopic authoritarianism in terms of how non-compliant individuals are treated.
The reason that people always claim that various efforts at communism weren't "real" communism is because the concept and theory of communism doesn't, and probably cannot, survive first contact with the interests and whims of humanity. By contrast I'd look at the overwhelming majority of the history of the US as an argument for capitalism. It's only relatively recent times, particularly after 1971 [1], that things have gone so terribly wrong.
I disagree with this assessment. The reason systems are breaking are inherent contradictions in capitalism that inevitably lead to crisis. See Crisis Theory [0] for a more thorough description of the mechanisms at play.
Communism doesn't need to be authoritarian either - Salvador Allende famously tried for a more democratic socialism before the CIA couped him away - can't have the systemic competitor look good...
This was a radical economic shift. And at first it yielded massive returns as one could expect with the ability to suddenly have infinite money in a world where, to date, money had been very "real." But over time, it turns out that pumping endless 'funny money' into an economy causes lots of bad things to happen, even when we can export much of the immediately apparent inflation.
Essentially the modern economic system we have only truly began in 1971. And it's separate from capitalism itself. The powers that be wanted the power to print unlimited money. And so they claimed that power. Prior to that year we lived in an entirely different world. For instance one interesting inflation index is a can of Campbell's tomato soup. From its introduction in 1897 to 1973 it cost about $0.10. Today it costs $1.24.
Labor value and market value have been out of sync since the beginning of market capitalism. You might have a point about the end of Bretton-Woods making it worse, but it has been broken since the beginning.
This is why the older generations were initially so aloof about the economic state of the US. They grew up in a time where they could go to college, graduate debt free, have a decent car, and even enough saved up for a down payment on their [first] house - all on income from a part time job.
You literally could not get a much more fair compensation for labor, because that's a huge chunk of the entire GDP being derived from median wages! Of course now we live in a time when the median wage is something like $50k and the GDP/capita is $90k. And many critical things, like housing, have increased in cost way beyond the rate of inflation, to the point that a median house is now something like 7 years of median labor which is just lol stupid driven by funny money that, again, mostly did not exist before 1971.
But getting back to 1960 - how would this, in any way, seem to suggest an out of sync labor value? If anything the flaw in my argument is that labor compensation was perhaps unsustainably high, because wages that high were only possible when you had a relatively large chunk of the population not working. On the other hand if we're going to create a society with a sustainable fertility rate and well raised children, then it's completely sustainable.
This is the context for Kennedy stating things like, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." Now a days even a pretty ardent nationalist would have to hold back a groan on hearing things like that, but it was a different world in the 60s.
Calling the people you disagree with as "authoritarians", "-phobes", "racist", "nazis" and all kinds of slurs, without any arguments, doesn't work in your favor or help the conversation in any way, on the contrary.
Agreeing with common sense takes doesn't make one "authoritarians".
Learn to do critical thinking and augmenting, instead of heard mentality parroting oppressive slurs against people you disagree with, just because you convicted yourself (or propaganda has) that you're on the right side of history, and everyone else with contrary viewpoints is evil reincarnate that needs to be crushed or silenced.
Given the UK's recent use of anti-terrorist legislation to arbitrarily classify a protest organisation as terrorists, this is really dangerous. If the government can classify any organisation as terrorists, and then remove citizenship from any members of that organisation, that is horrifying.
So yes, I very, very, strongly disagree with this measure, for very good reasons. How could anyone with any common sense support it?
If your current laws allow for such oppressive abuse on the population without due process, then these new laws won't make things any worse for the people and you're fighting the wrong things here, if you think that taking citizenship away form registered ISIS members is the biggest problem.
You keep saying "ISIS" like it's some magic incantation that makes everything else OK. Try saying "any organisation the government disapproves of" instead, and see how that fits your mental model of what's acceptable. For example:
> you're fighting the wrong things here, if you think that taking citizenship away from any organisation that the government disapproves of is the biggest problem.
I think you'll agree that this would be a big f**ing problem.
Which other organizations who didn't kill or committed acts of violence to people in order to be wrongly considered terrorists by the government in the same vein as ISIS was?
>I think you'll agree that this would be a big f*ing problem.
It isn't. In most western democracies, if not all, gaining dual citizenship via naturalization is a voluntary privilege, not a right, that can always be revoked for crimes such as being part of a terrorist group. It's part of the contract you sign when you apply for citizenship. As it should be. That's who the law is targeting.
Your primary citizenship gained via by birth or by descent cannot be taken away from you almost anywhere.
I’m sorry but you’re badly misinformed here. There is no concept of “primary citizenship”, you’re either a citizen or you’re not. If your government has a right to strip your citizenship, then mechanism by which you acquired citizenship is relevant. The whole point of citizenship is to declare that everyone with citizenship has identical rights and protections from their government.
There has been one person in the UK who had her citizenship revoked for joining ISIS. She was a born in UK, and was a British citizen from birth by right of decency. She is now stateless, a citizen of no country. These are the actual laws you’re defending, the hypothetical laws that only apply to naturalised citizens don’t exist, and aren’t being proposed.
>However, the UK government contended that Begum was a dual national, also holding citizenship of Bangladesh, and was not therefore made stateless by the decision.
>However, the Special Immigration Appeals Commission found that as a matter of the Bangladeshi nationality law, Begum also holds Bangladeshi citizenship through her parents, under section 5 of the Citizenship Act, 1951.
Due to her parent Bangladeshi origins, she had a separate right to claim Bangladeshi citizenship, but at the point she lost her British citizenship had not claim that right. She has also never lived in Bangladesh, and has never held a Bangladeshi passport.
At the time UK was going to remove her citizenship, Bangladesh said the following:
> The Government of Bangladesh stated that Begum did not currently hold Bangladeshi citizenship and, without it, would not be allowed to enter Bangladesh.
You’ve made some pretty silly claims about countries not removing people’s “primary” citizenship. Begum is quite clearly a case where their “primary” citizenship based on the parameters you provided, was her British citizenship, and the UK has quite clearly stripped her of that citizenship. Bangladesh has also refused to acknowledge her as a citizen, which seems a lot fair that the UKs stance, given she’s never lived, worked, or paid taxes in Bangladesh, so it not clear why they should be responsible for her, rather than the country where she was born and raised.
Her parents were not UK citizens, they were Bangladeshi citizens making her Bangladeshi first. Her parents had "settled" status in the UK granting her UK citizenship but her parents were not UK citizens. It's literally in the wiki link you shared.
"Begum was born in London to immigrant parents of Bangladeshi Muslim origin and citizenship"
I naively assumed that given she was born in the UK to legally settled parents, given British citizenship in the UK at birth, grew up in the UK, was educated in the UK, radicalised in the UK. That would make her “primary citizenship” British. But obviously not, she’s obviously secretly a citizen of a country she’s never visited, just hiding in the UK until she could show her true colours.
What’s your view of people with mixed heritage? If one of her parents was born in the UK so she’s “50% British”, does that make her primary citizenship British? What if she was 25% or 75% how about 90%? Where do you draw the line?
If I read this right, you're thinking that only naturalised citizens would be affected by such a law; those with dual nationality that can be "sent back to where they came from". Which explains why you think this is a good idea.
That's not how citizenship works. If you allow for removing citizenship, then all citizens, regardless of "primary" nationality, can be made non-citizens. There's no second-class citizenship that can be revoked while still retaining a first-class citizenship that cannot.
Sounds great on paper, until it starts happening to X, which is your group, now suddenly a terrorist organization, and you happened to have joined in their view.
With that logic we shouldn't ever punish or jail criminals because you too might be a criminal one day.
Because governments shouldn’t be allowed to just wash their hands of any responsibility to a citizen, just because they don’t like their views, regardless of how extreme and vile those views maybe.
We have judicial systems for a reason. If someone joins a terrorist organisation, you arrest them and allow the justice system to determine the consequences. Allow governments to strip citizenships is effectively a mechanism to allow governments to avoid due process and their own judicial systems. Those are never healthy behaviours in any democracy.
Societies should deal with their own citizens properly, not just strip them of citizenship and declare them someone else’s problem. I have no idea why anyone would believe making it effectively impossible to ever leave, except by dying, terrorist organisation would be a good idea. That must ensure all members of terrorist organisations literally have nothing else to live for. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to ensure that all terrorist go out with a bang.
What are you on? Taking away someone's naturalized dual citizenship is done by the judicial system via due process according to the draft proposal, not on the spot by police or whatever nonsense you imagine it.
If only you would have skimmed the proposal paper before commenting instead of getting your knickers in a twist over stuff you made up in your head, you would have saved us all the wasted time.
>I have no idea why anyone would believe making it effectively impossible to ever leave
They can leave with their other citizenship, genius. This law applies only to dual citizens, since you aren't allowed to make citizens stateless, Einstein. It's even written in the proposal which of course you haven't read but have strong options against it.
Extreme collectivism affects both extreme, that is the concept that people are nothing but sacrificial lambs for the religion, the country, or the revolution.
In addition to the authoritarian aspect pointed out by a sibling comment, the far-right generally consider the ends to justify the means because of their sense of righteousness. They will compromise their values to get what they want (control over others). Just look at the hypocrisy of the free-speech absolutists on twitter who have no complaints over Lonnie shutting down Leftist accounts.
It’s an odd phenomenon called a mass formation in large populations, when groups of people get fixated or obsessed with a certain concept or even a thing that the group ourself becomes self-reinforcing; usually until a point of exhaustion is reached or self-destruction. It can also be effectively injected into a culture as it was in Germany’s case after the war through endless and limitless collective and hereditary blame abuse to the point that Germans generally do not have self-respect, and if they show even a slight bit of self-respect they are branded far right, as of that means anything being the subconscious conditioning people have been subjected to.
It’s kind of sad and unfortunate and humanity should never have allowed the collective torture, abuse, and punishment of Germans even to this day 80 years later. It’s a sick and depraved thing only the most devious and evil people would condone, let alone perpetrate.
We seem to have a general problem with people not understanding that democracies have regular elections and the other party is going to get back in at some point. So then whenever one party is in power, instead of thinking ahead by five minutes and realizing that adding new constraints on the government and adding rather than eroding checks and balances will help you the next time the other team gets in, everybody thinks of them as an impediment to doing whatever they want immediately.
And then like clockwork they get butthurt when they checks they eroded or failed to put into place aren't there after the next election, as if they had nothing to do with it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Germany
https://www.lto.de/recht/hintergruende/h/russia-today-verbot...
1. Censorship in German constitutional law is only defined as the state pre-screening before publication. That's a very narrow area and rarely applies. Most people from an US legal tradition will consider censorship to include other things such as mandating removal of certain content after the fact, but that's different legal branches with different mechanisms (i.e. libel).
2. What Schulz is talking about in the second link definitely is state censorship (blocking a TV station), but it's not implemented by Germany but on the EU level. (Germany is still involved - complicated matter).
Finally we should appreciate that the US government's opinion on censorship seems to have pivoted quite a lot, so I would expect free speech maximalism to not remain a very popular position on the government level (even though many people may still support it, either naïvely or with robust arguments).
Such as removals because of copyright claims?
Yes, you read that right. German law is especially protective of politicians, which is why politicians are very active suing random supporters of their opponents, because that is an effective way to police speech, open specifically to politicians.
I do think a lot of people care, but censorship in Germany does a lot to protect the people who could change the law. That law obviously needs to be abolished, politicians are uniquely unworthy of protection when it comes to speech.
For example, the concept of privacy protecting against media coverage is actually weaker for politicians (when in official duty) than for ordinary citizens (Allgemeines Persönlichkeitsrecht).
And libel only applies to statements of facts. I.e. you can't (easily) be prosecuted for opinions, just for making harmful false claims.
Is that an opinion or a harmful false claim?
Together with a fellow activist, who also served as informal legal counsel, they gave a talk on this case at the 38th Chaos Communication Congress: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5RmTOGucZo
And if you look at how these laws are used by politicians they look quite spectacular.
>And libel only applies to statements of facts. I.e. you can't (easily) be prosecuted for opinions, just for making harmful false claims.
The Wikipedia article and how the law was applied article disagrees.
Do not forget that this applies to insults. E.g. calling a politician "dumb" is enough to get sued. These laws create a way for politicians specifically to prosecute people criticizing them. This isn't a hypothetical, it is how the law is actually used.
You make it sound like it happens all the time and everyone is used to it. I know of once case (Pimmel-Andy), and that led to a shitstorm, including part of the police operation being declared unlawful after the fact.
https://www.lto.de/recht/nachrichten/n/landgericht-hamburg-a...
As Lee Kuan Yew pointed out, the idea that you should be able to slander anyone in power is a nice underdog philosophy (particularly popular in the US, where the underdog is always right) but what it gets you is a post-truth environment in which reputation means nothing.
And as a German what a lot of people don't get, we're very much an honour based society, not an English or French liberal society. People in power aren't suspicious just because they have power, the crank is not correct just because he's the little guy. I think Lee Kuan Yew was largely correct if one looks at Anglosphere media and politics, where truth and reputation have entirely been replaced by conspiracy and tantrums. Far from the wisdom of the crowds being some truth finding mechanism you just enable the most charismatic nutjob.
We aren't. We are a totally Americanized failed state governed by mentally ill losers who continue to destroy this country in every possible way imaginable.
The German society which was the basis for this law does not exist anymore. Politicians are all complete clueless losers who do not deserve an ounce of respect.
That's the problem with these proposed laws.
We (privacy advocates) have to constantly fight and win over and over again. The nations that want this mass spying only have to win once.
We need a way to permanently stop these proposals once defeated the first time so that they cannot just continue to try over and over again until it passes.
We do have a way to reinforce our position, though!
We can design and consume technology that makes this hard.
We can stop working for companies that build centralized platforms for messaging.
We can teach our neighbors how important rights to privacy and speech are in language that they understand.
There can be enough friction that this becomes harder for politicians. Remember the Reddit Sopa and Pipa protests? - that was pretty epic! I don't think Reddit will help us in its current state, but we can absolutely mount those defenses on Wikipedia, Mastodon, Bluesky, and others.
And we should continue to move off of platforms that don't align with our freedoms. And build our platforms in a way that encourages "normies" to join.
A billionaire pedophile ran a covert sex ring with a suspected who's who of a client list who was almost barely prosecuted for "reasons™"
Social media companies caught red-handed psychologically manipulating users for various ends
Damn near everyone helping to destroy actual free speech and privacy willingly because they've been talked into it (ironic)
Governments that engage in mass surveillance so egregious if you had tried it 40 years ago there would have been an uprising. Aided by the tech community I might add.
Industries that abuse data and algorithms to manipulate pricing or commit outright fraud.
A pharma corp addicting countless americans to opioids with almost no real consequence, killing hundreds of thousands and ruining millions of families.
Several industries have poisoned the planet and its inhabitants in various long term ways for profit.
And yet if you suggest something is a conspiracy it is dismissed as the ravings of a lunatic. Speaking of conspiracies that doesn't sound like an accident... The trick to conspiracy theories is critical thinking and not uncritical dismissal.
If I have any words of consolation: when the "conspiracy theory" turns out to be more practice than theory you get to say I told you so.
Edit: typo
The cage is real, it's not a state of mind. It's not something that can be recycled out of. You'll know when you're really doing something when you can give people a time and a place to show up; when that showing up isn't to stand in the street and socialize with each other, burn down a Starbucks, or spit in the face of a cop who makes less than you do; and when most of you end up dead or in prison.
I always reply like this, but some people think everybody else in the world is so weak and naïve, when they themselves aren't doing anything important and have not taken a fraction of the risks or suffered a fraction of the loss of the people they're asking to speak up. Speaking against power is an impotent magic spell. You can recognize journalists who speak against real power by their deaths.
Everybody is just aping the US black civil rights struggle, where watching the violence done in their name to nicely dressed, well-behaved people filled enough people with disgust that politicians wouldn't get a boost from continuing to support it. That was how a small minority population faced with irrational restrictions in a media-saturated society was able to barely overcome explicitly unfair laws (and go no further, we're still the underclass, we're still dying.)
The history of effective, revolutionary, positive protest by what are often majorities involved people getting out into the streets as a show of strength, not a show of weakness. It always involves converting and including portions of the army and the police forces. It involves building strong shadow governments. Not this pantomime where everybody pretends to be black, and the people who are the blackest, weakest, most undeserving of their treatment win because mommy parliament or daddy supreme court are moved enough to declare them the winner.
Fighting corruption only works when enough people fight it at enough levels, and continue to fight it. There is no getting around the fact that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
They only need to succeed once, we (the ones opposing the law) have to succeed every time.
I'm borderline not joking that there should be warning labels like those on cigarettes on the ballot when voting.