Germany’s Latest War on Freedom

There is no censorship here in Germany,” according to Steffen Meyer, a top spokesman for the German government. In reality, Germans have freedom of speech except for ideas that politicians and government contractors and nonprofit activists don’t like. Germany is providing a road map for freedom can be squashed throughout the western world.

Germany was the scene of some of the twentieth century’s worst tyranny but today’s German leaders have only noble intentions for oppression. Berlin’s Best and Brightest “improved” democracy by turning politicians into a privileged caste. After a conservative editor mocked a top German law enforcement official by posting a meme showing her holding a sign, “I hate freedom of opinion,” he was convicted and sentenced to a seven months in jail for “abuse, slander or defamation against persons in political life.” The editor is on probation while the sentence is suspended but many other Germans have been locked up for similar offenses. The U.S. State Department Human Rights Report stated that German police “routinely raided homes, confiscated electronic devices, interrogated suspects and prosecuted individuals for the exercise of freedom of speech, including online.” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz personally filed almost 5,000 complaints against his online critics, sometimes resulting in police raids against people he accused.

The German media are gung-ho for government censorship of average Germans. The New York Times noted, “Authorities in Lower Saxony raid homes up to multiple times per month, sometimes with a local television crew in tow.”  The Times reported that in 2022, “Christian Endt, a journalist in Berlin whose coverage of Covid drew a steady stream of insults online, reached a breaking point. After an anonymous Twitter user had called him ‘stupid’ and mentally ill, he embarked on a mission to see if he could get the person prosecuted.” The Twitter account didn’t have a real name but Endt used an image search of his picture and tracked it down to a small-business owner. Local prosecutors fined that guy more than a thousand dollars. Endt told The New York Times, “I was not even sure if whatthis guy wrote was a crime or not. In the end, I’m happy they did something about it and this person got a signal that there are some limits on free speech.” But is there no limit to the cowardliness of some German journalists? Publicly admitting that you ran crying to the authorities after some dweeb called you stupid and crazy makes a journalist unfit for writing about anything that offends anyone.

Journalist J.D. Tuccille, writing in Reason, notes:

“Last November, a Bavarian man was investigated for referring online to then-Deputy Chancellor Robert Habeck with a pun that roughly translates as ‘idiot.’ Police raided the home of a Hamburg man for calling a local politician a ‘pimmel’ (dick). Berlin banned the pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel slogan ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.’ And Irish protesters in Germany were forbidden to speak in Gaelic because police wouldn’t be able to tell if they were saying verboten things.”

Going back almost a decade, Germany was the most aggressive online censor among advanced nations. I noted in USA Today in 2017:

“In June, German police raided dozens of homes across the nation suspected of offensive social media postings and “conducted home searches and interrogations,” according to The New York Times. Facebook is deleting 15,000 posts a month in Germany but the government is threatening a $50-million-plus fine unless Facebook suppresses far more comments. Judith Bergman of the Gatestone Institute commented on the German mandate: ‘When employees of social media companies are appointed as the state’s private thought police…free speech becomes nothing more than a fairy tale. Or is that perhaps the point?’”

Writing in The Hill, I warned in late 2017 that American politicians sought the “Germanification of Facebook here,” with pervasive censorship on political command. That vision was fulfilled during the Covid pandemic. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg later publicly complained that the Joe Biden administration had forced his company to suppress even true information during the pandemic.

The plight of freedom in Germany continues to worsen. The Future of Free Speech, a think tank at Vanderbilt University, did a massive study examining the nature of deleted comments in Germany, France, and Sweden in 2023. That study found that 99.7% of the deleted comments by Germans on Facebook and 98.9% of the deleted comments on YouTube were actually legally permissible. The social media companies, intimidated by the German Network Enforcement Act, were far more censorious than the law demanded. The Vanderbilt study found that most censored comments were simply “’general expressions of opinion’…that did not contain linguistic attacks, hate speech or illegal content, such as expressing the support for a controversial candidate in the abstract.”

Censorship defines down self-government to “one person, one vote, one time.” Whoever wins a national election will exploit the censorship regime to perpetuate their own power. German politicians are conniving to outlaw the second largest political party, the Alliance for Deutschland (AfD) and its ideas because elitists disapprove of its positions. But it is not the AfD’s fault that Germans’ trust in politicians and government has plunged in recent years.

German government funding for censorship increased five-fold since 2020. Andrew Lowenthal, the founder and CEO of Liber-net, commented, “In Germany large swathes of civil society have abandoned their traditional role as watch-dogs of power. Instead, they have joined forces with the State to suppress popular discontent.” There are 330 different organizations now part of the German censorship machine. (See the graphic produced by Liber-net.) As journalist Mario Nawfal wrote, “When your “fact-checkers” are on government payroll, they’re not checking facts—they’re enforcing narratives. The objectivity claim is window dressing. The real damage? Public trust is collapsing faster than the censorship can contain it.”

The Aspen Institute Germany, founded in Berlin in 1974, is massively subsidized by the German  Foreign Office (the equivalent of the U.S. State Department) to proselytize for the destruction of free speech across Europe. In December, the institute published a report: Hybrid Realities: Disinformation, Influencers, and the Defense of Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe. Here’s the painfully portentous first paragraph of the Executive Summary:

“Democracy depends on the integrity and credibility of public discourse. It functions most effectively, when citizens can exchange ideas freely, engage in respectful disagreement, and make collective choices informed by reliable information. Transparent and inclusive dialogue fosters trust between individuals and institutions, which in turn underpins the legitimacy of democratic decision-making and helps ensure that differences of opinion do not lead to societal division. Sustaining this foundation requires an information environment that upholds transparency, enables verification, and encourages responsibility in maintaining fact-based public communication.”

That pious prattle sounds like “good government” gobbledy-gook but the reality is that those goals create endless penalty flags for government-subsidized referees to throw at private citizens and social media. As a New York Timesarticle on German censorship explained in 2022, “The authorities in Germany argue that they are encouraging and defending free speech by providing a space where people can share opinions without fear of being attacked or abused.” So to have the space for free speech, government officials must have unlimited power to assure that nothing improper or insulting is said.

The new German report echoes the same themes and goals as a 2022 Aspen Institute report championing censorship for the United States. That report called for the Biden administration to “establish a comprehensive strategic approach to countering disinformation and the spread of misinformation, including a centralized national response strategy, defining roles and responsibilities across the Executive Branch.” It portrayed objectivity as an enemy of truth. Aspen Institute commissioners “discussed the need to adjust journalistic norms to avoid false equivalencies between lies and empirical fact in the pursuit of ‘both sides’ and ‘objectivity,’ particularly in areas of public health, civil rights, or election outcomes.” The report called for creation of a “Public Restoration Fund…with a mandate to develop systemic misinformation countermeasures through education, research, and investment in local institutions.”

The Aspen Institute also urged government officials to impose “Superspreader Accountability,” to “hold superspreaders of mis- and disinformation to account with clear, transparent, and consistently applied policies.” The Aspen Institute neglected to condemn President Joe Biden as the Supreme Superspreader for his false promise that the COVID vaccine would prevent COVID infections. “Disinformation” is often simply the lag time between the pronouncement and the debunking of government falsehoods.

The new censors in Germany and beyond want to protect government against alleged private falsehoods but offer no remedy for government lies that deceive the citizenry. Instead, Germany’s censorship champions promise to protect “the integrity and credibility of public discourse” based on the notion that government is morally and intellectually superior to private citizens. As German journalist Jasmin Kosubek observed, “Germany’s censorship machine creates digital ‘priests’ who claim the truth—and silence those who challenge them.” Today’s Germans are haunted by the intellectual ghost of a philosopher bootlicker from two hundred years ago. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel declared, “Men are as foolish as to forget, in their enthusiasm for liberty of conscience and political freedom, the truth which lies in power.” Hegel bluntly equated government and truth:  “For Truth is the Unity of the universal and subjective Will; and the Universal is to be found in the State, in its laws, its universal and rational arrangements.”

Hegel probably did more to propel modern totalitarianism than perhaps any other philosopher. German philosopher Ernst Cassirer, who fled the Third Reich, commented, “These words, written in 1801, contain the clearest and most ruthless program of fascism that has ever been propounded by any political or philosophy writer.”

Actually, maybe another Hegel doctrine explains why the ruling class continues to proclaim that Germans are free. Hegel asserted that “the State is that in which Freedom obtains objectivity, and lives in the enjoyment of this objectivity.” So, objectively, Germans have free speech because the government attaches so many muzzles and blindfolds to the citizenry.

And the government will always be there to protect the “freedom” of oversensitive journalists by harshly punishing anyone who calls them a dummkoff.

An earlier version of this piece was published by the Libertarian Institute.

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