this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2025
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If this is happening in east Germany, it would not surprise anyone that hate speech is on an insanely high and dangerous level. Most of the afd nazi voters are in east Germany. Should you be criminally charge for a call to murder, voilence genocide and other racism, holocaust denial? Absolutely. Lets not pretend that neo Nazis are political satire geniuses.
I'm not from East Germany, and not inclined to argue with those justifications. They sound valid and despicable.
Let's also not pretend that this law which is justified for the reasons in your post is being consistently applied to those ends.
The article mentions that they are hitting 95% rate of failure to convict, which tells me that the laws are being applied capriciously.
Speech laws being applied capriciously are definitely a tool in the despot's pocket, and the article also mentions seizures that were unlawful and apparently politically driven. Insulting politicians should never result in charges or property seizure like this, especially when the laws being wielded purport to protect the vulnerable.
A quick search and you will notice that the people suddenly concerned about Germanies hatespeech laws are trustworthy folks like jd vance, trump and other far right actors. Also the fact that procecusion doesn't happen often, shows that it is enforced with causion and not arbitrary like in the case of the current US deportation nightmare. That is abuse of power. Maybe the US wouldn't have trumps fascist takeover, if they had speech laws, like in Germany.
So just because people you don't like express concern about something means that it automatically must be false? This type of "logic" is very dangerous. And prosecution clearly does happen a lot. Literally 10 cases a day in one German state according to the article and only 0.5 of those cases actually result in conviction, which means that clearly this is used to intimidate and punish people generally rather than a sincere attempt to enforce the law.
Lol, no one who just "expresses concern" will be sued in Germany. It will always be insults and incitement to violence that will lead to this.
However I would say that there have been trials because of really "easy" insults, started by politicians. And here you've got a point IMO that these laws are also used for intimidation. As a politician you should be able to tolerate some insults without having to sue each and every offender out there.
95% failure to convict indicates the defendants may have shown rehabilitation and regret so the judge applied jurisprudence. I know this may be a foreign concept to a US american but in the civilised world, prison is a rehabilitation solution, not a "for profit" slavery distributor to help GAP and McDonald's get free labour.
The laws will always be applied inconsistently.
The article focuses on Lower Saxony, which is in West Germany. These cases are not about inciting violence or denying a genocide but about saying something about a politician that that person doesn't like. Many American liberals would be prosecuted under these laws right now for the stuff that is said on e.g. Reddit, presumably BlueSky and Lemmy.world. Reminder that this sort of stuff also affects pro-Palestine activists and in fact from what I gather that is in fact the case in Germany today.
For calling a politician a pimmel?
Imagine if half of liberal America was prosecuted for calling Trump "orange cheeto" or saying he has small hands. WTF is this even.
Imagine trump was procecuted each time he called for genocide of an entire ethnicity.
It doesn't take calls for murder or genocide. In Germany you can have your house raided for posting a meme which calls the minister of economy an idiot. The same minister of economy who doesn't know what a bankruptcy is, and whose entire working experience is as an author of children's books.
In another case the office of an opposition newspaper was raided, all their computers and even office chairs were taken away by police. All under the pretense that it was an ordinary association and not protected by freedom of the press. However courts found that this was unjustified, and so police had to carry all the items back inside a few days later.
Uh, did your account get hacked?
That's like literal AfD propaganda you are repeating here.
And while there is some very limited truth to the first (but he has had similar competences on state level for many years), the "opposition newspaper" is like an actual extreme right wing rag and the legal process is still ongoing, the courts just ruled that the minister of interior overstepped her official competence by trying to shut it down in the legal grey area way she tried doing it.