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Comment by tormeh | Hacker News Reader

Germany does not protect free speech the way the US does. You're free to voice any opinion, but the exact wordings in which you are allowed to do it are restricted. You are allowed to say "I hate Merz" but not "Merz is a piece of garbage".

I'm not saying this is good, but it's not recent and it does not prevent free communication of ideas.

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Is Germany consistent about this? Is it equally forbidden to say “Merz is a piece of garbage” and “Weidel is a piece of garbage?”

You can't expect people to express themselves freely when a single mistatement could land them in prison.

> You're free to voice any opinion

What a bold lie. There are plenty of opinions that are literally illegal to voice such as Nazism.

Why do you want to voice or otherwise condone voicing Nazism?

That's just the easiest example that no one is even going to try and dispute to prove them wrong.

Why are you equating “Germany outlaws supporting Nazism” with supporting Nazism?

Reread what I said.

As we have seen, it is very easy to declare certain beliefs beyond contestation and any disagreement with them as insulting/inciting hate/etc.

That's why freedom of speech must entail the freedom to say things people find offensive, or there's no free communication of ideas at all. The state and ruling elites will determine that there is a set of proscribed ideas and a set of approved ideas and yours fall into the wrong set.

Banning speech and ideas also accelerates extremist - Weimar had very strong hate speech laws and prosecuted and imprisoned Nazis many many times. [1] The Nazis turned around and used the same laws on their enemies. Then the Stasi with similar motives used similar means. Suppressing speech in the name of order seems to be a German cultural value.

[1] https://www.thefire.org/news/blogs/eternally-radical-idea/wo...

“Country X should change it’s laws because Y” is a belief you can have even if Y is not shared by enough people in Germany to make that change.

Claiming that Germany recently introduced a law prohibiting criticism of politicians is an admission of belief in something demonstrably incompatible with reality.

My mistake. My comment should have been "doesn't Germany have laws criminalizing the insulting of politicians?"

Still the answer would have been “no”.

If you want to keep both narrative and truthfulness, you should ask “doesn’t Germany have laws criminalizing insults, and someone had to pay a fine after insulting a politician”.

Still not very authoritarian on a global scale. We have countries where politicians are exempt from criminal prosecution via presidential pardons and countries that kill dissidents. These countries form alliances and align their foreign policy.

This is generally the mainstream take on it. These laws are not generally seen as good. However, if dictatorship comes back, the law is meaningless, so what a dictator would use a law for is a moot point.

As for whether it's ingrained in German culture, quite possibly! These laws originate from the 1500s.

Dictators, despite the name, cannot do whatever they want. That’s even moreso the case with long democratic or republican histories and in large modern states with enormous political machineries. They require backing from large swaths of the population and have to subvert the existing institutions to their will, which requires a delicate hand.

Already having a legal infrastructure and social expectation that offensive speech is criminal is an enormous help to dictators.

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