Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro is working on a draft law that might create an anti-censorship regime for social media platforms operating in Poland. Failing to reinstate legal posts despite formal judicial review could carry hefty fines between 50,000 and 50 million Zloty (currently around $13,300 and $13.3 million).
After the platform does not respond positively to the users complaint, he can digitally file a ‘court petition’ which leads to a legal review of his post. If the judge upholds the legality of the post and the platform does not react, the case will go to a newly created ‘free speech council’ that has the power to mete out the penalties.
I actually said that it makes little sense to comment on WELT because hardly any comments get through anyway. Still from time to time I feel like dropping a line or two.
Under an article blaming the Pittsburg synagogue slaughter on Donald Trump, I wrote “You are sick. SICK.” (German: Ihr seid krank. KRANK).
Hurt and wounded, writhing in pain, WELT took many, many hours to send me the above pseudo-automatic email.
I apologize. And I apologize with the same stern seriousness with which Megyn Kelly apologized.
I was wrong. Of course, I also distance myself from Otto Warmbier who had also committed a very grave “crime-task” by stealing a very “important poster” from the “Democratic Republic of North Korea” DRNK to hurt the morals of the workers.
Freedom of Opinion on The Web – The logo of the new free speech initiative
With growing bewilderment we observe how Germany is damaged by illegal mass immigration. We are in solidarity with those who peacefully protest so that the rule of law is restored again on the borders of our country.
This is the full text of the petition “Declaration 2018.” The details of the motion were presented to the parliamentarian committee after a sufficient number of signatures supported it. These lines were posted on Facebook by a user who asked people to sign up. Facebook deleted his post as “hate speech.”
The text was already examined by the petition committee of the parliament Bundestag and also published on its website. The Facebook user was ready to sue and civil rights hero Vera Lengsfeld, Jewish blogger Henryk M. Broder and journalist Alexander Wendt called for donations to pay the legal fees. The support was enormous. Thousands of citizens, who in some cases even made available several thousand euros individually, allowed the court case to go forward, but also to carry it through several circuits. It is one victory in a series of many.
To back citizens’ right to speech Joachim Steinhoefel has set up the Initiative for Freedom of Opinion on the Web (German: Initiative für Meinungsfreiheit im Netz). The initiative will pick up law suits strategically to widen the range of what can be said. It is politically neutral and can benefit antifa, Islamists, and conservatives alike.
Please, help seek a way to support the initiative. You can donate to cover for the legal costs. You can offer your help when you are a legal professional. You can ask people around you if they can help in one way or another. And you can use your various platforms to make people aware of the cause.
The State office of Saxony’s Verfassungsschutz recently fired a man for giving an interview with the TV show Panorama (linked to public broadcaster ARD and ZEIT). The man said that he does not see a need to put the Generation Identity under surveillance. Their forms of protest were exclusively peaceful.
Before I come to explore the actual topic of this article, I want to clarify that the activist group is not surveilled in its entirety. The intelligence service says that it observes some members. From my perspective it is inacceptable to tap phones, read emails, search property and so on from any citizen that is not under criminal investigation. But I also must say that I cannot know every individual of every group. I cannot give a blanket verdict of innocence for any circle of people. Many members of the Generation Identity have been former neo-Nazis. However, I have no doubt that most have genuinely changed their ways. I cannot guarantee for everybody.
In any event, the man was interviewed because Panorama wanted to know how he can combine his job with his membership at the AfD. He spoke as a private citizen and did not give his assessment as a representative of the Verfassungsschutz. If he had given his assessment as a speaker of the agency, his words would have been unacceptable. For Verfassungsschutz Saxony it made no difference and they fired him.
AfD has planned a number of websites so that pupils can anonymously denounce their teachers for taking a partisan position in the classroom. I am always for as much speech as possible, but I must admit that the situation asks me to revisit my view on teaching professionals who work for state schools. In the breaks, before and after class, they can indoctrinate the hell out of their students. However, in the classroom, as an authority and a representative of the state, they cannot speak for or against a political group. Other representatives of the state, like police or military, don’t have that privilege either. If the websites are morally acceptable has a lot to do with how they are run. If the pupils only denounce their teachers and AfD is just asking the principles to take action, there is little to object to (although I believe that no anonymous denouncement will result in any robust action anyway). If the websites were a pillory and the names of the teachers could be read by everybody, this ambition would be an unacceptable scandal.
The left-wing punk band “Feine Sahne Fischfilet” is often criticized for their violent texts. Public broadcaster ZDF wanted to stage a concert with them at the Bauhaus. After protests Bauhaus refused to let the band play. Their reasoning was that there should be no stage for extremist bands. Bauhaus is partly state-funded. In my eyes this makes them a public institution and as such they should not provide a platform based on political views. The violent texts are no imminent threats and should therefore not be a part of the consideration.
At that point it should be clear that I support Muslim teachers who want to wear their veils in class. I don’t see this as speech in representation of the state. This is often the argument from people who try to separate religion and state in Germany. We still have religious instruction as a school subject, so the secularism argument does not fly. No student would mistake the headscarf as a political position that is dispensed with the authority of the state.
Edit: A previous version of this text spoke of rumors about threats to the Bauhaus. The director has denied that left-wing myth since.
The left stages witchhunt after witchhunt to get rid of Mr Maaßen, the head of Verfassungsschutz
Thousands and thousands marched in Chemnitz against Angela Merkel’s immigration policy last week. The media has footage of less than a dozen individuals showing the Hitler salute, footage they shove into our faces constantly. It is safe to assume that few incidents like these occurred because otherwise we would see diverse imagery of it day after day.
Every big protest march or policy proposal comes with crazy people in support of it. Try to campaign for tax breaks without corporations that don’t want to sell uranium centrifuges to Iran. Try to have an anti-abortion rally without religious zealots who just wait for a mic to also demand death penalty for the homosexuals. You won’t get it. That is why there are official statements. Every protest or campaign is about a specific proposal and uses a neutral wording without frills so that the other ideas of the participants can be sidelined and the cause takes center stage.
I find it baffling that after years people have not thought about the problem before. There will always be agent provocateurs. There will always be abject people with the same cause. The left claims in various newspaper articles that mingling with neonazis were the new “strategy” of conservatives. They demand that conservatives do “something” against it.
Show me one leftist who blushes over the fact that neonazis hold their position on the Middle East conflict. THEY don’t do anything about neonazis in their own ranks! So maybe before panicking, conservatives should brush off demands from outside and ask for an even playing field. Just offer to do the same about neonazis in favor of our cause for everything THEY do to counter neonazis, Islamists, Maoists, pedophiles, drug lords and other scum in THEIR ranks! We will take the very same measures once they start doing something.
I can predict that the left will politicize the inland intelligence agency Verfassungsschutz. The agency was always meant to be a political weapon against any opposition. The head of the agency Hans-Georg Maaßen, however, is resisting pressure from politicians and the media and tries to monitor aggressive groups like Islamists as his job description requires him to do.
Consequently, his Wikipedia entry has a section “Controversies.” It began when he asked for the deportation of Murat Kurnaz whose residence permission expired while he was in Guantanamo Bay. Back then the entire media painted Kurnaz as an innocent victim of three different militaries (Pakistan, Afghanistan, USA). The Turkish citizen claimed that he was just visiting a Pakistani friend of his and that he was captured without reason. Maaßen also met with leaders of conservative party AfD to advice them how to tackle crazy people within the party. Given that the left is demanding that conservatives should tackle the crazies in their own ranks, one would think that they were pleased. The opposite is the case. They openly complain that this was helping the party to avoid an investigation. How would one want a problem to arise so that an investigation of sorts became necessary? Seriously, how depraved does one have to be?
There were a number of other witchhunts against him. Currently, he is in the crosshairs because he questioned Merkel’s version of the Chemnitz protests. There were no substantial evidence of lynch mobs taking justice into their own hands, no manhunts, and so forth. One video is constantly shown because it does show some aggression. A man faces a group of approaching protesters. What he says is inaudible. For an unknown reason another man runs into the picture and chases him away for a few meters. The preceding situation is unclear. The video was first published by antifa. In an interview Maaßen said that he has seen no evidence for the authenticity of the video. Multiple leading politicians ask for his head because he questioned antifa.
When Maaßen goes, there will be a radicalized head of Verfassungsschutz who will call everything conservatives do unconstitutional all the time. And this is when the persecution will become violent. Antifa and co just need the ultimate justification from authorities to commit all kind of crimes. This is how Mao purged his own party during the “Culture Revolution” and this is what we will see in Germany.
Germans don’t understand that they must defend a principle and defending a person has the purpose of defending the principle. If somebody in your group gets attacked, you don’t have to like him to defend him. This is not about selecting a leader which obviously comes with higher standards. We will hear more and more voices within the conservative movement caving in to the left and asking to isolate first this then that person for supposed transgressions. Learn to ignore them. You stand for your views and for your principles.
The new public forum is the internet. In the long run activist offline methods are there to get people to check out things online. In the short run they are immensely important to talk to technically illiterate demographics like elderly women who are Merkel’s main voting block. So your comments on the Identitarian movement and how citizens can learn from them are very appreciated.
Still, the internet is the place where arguments can be backed up with evidence (video, audio, official statements). And this biotope must be prepared to entice people into a different line of thinking. However, the internet has one big problem, people only read and don’t know how they can become time-efficient active users.
I will discuss social media strategies in other posts. This article is about the platforms and how you can aide the conversation while you are reading your news.
As I have written here one should always favor places where people of other persuasions come to see one’s writings. One easy way is the comment sections of the large newspapers. I have chronicled my history of getting blocked here, but your very newspaper is the best place to start. You will eventually get blocked or see some reasons why it is ineffective (clumsy design throws off potential readers, too effective censors like those of WELT….). Don’t bother and move to the next platform. A platform that I have not mentioned so far, are the comment sections of conservative blogs. I will talk about it when I come to discussing strategies. For now I just look at the classic social media sites and blogging (which is the same).
The Big Fish: Facebook and Twitter
If you have no reason to be anonymous and no qualms about sharing personal information, the places with the largest reach are the social media giants. You could and maybe should use them while you also comment on the newspapers.
Facebook
Copy the comment from under your news paper and paste it to Facebook. Then copy and paste the link of the article to the same place. Do this before you submit the comment. Most German newspapers have a strict censorship regime and you have no time for the trash bin.
Of course, you can also add freestyle content of your own, distribute videos and so on.
The Russian competitor VP.com does not allow anonymity, either. You can double post on both platforms, building audiences on both places and have a leg left for the periods when you are banned on Facebook.
Twitter
While you read an article in your newspaper, write down the keyword into the composition area for a new tweet. Preface each keyword with a #-sign. Then copy the link to the article to the area and click submit. The more keywords with #-signs you add, the more visible your post is.
Mind the Gab between the Platforms
If you don’t dare to speak in publc, get yourself a google account with a pseudonym for a name. While you are at it, register with Youtube and Google plus. At some point, you might return to that.
Gab.ai and minds.com are basically like twitter and you can handle it in the described fashion. Minds allows for more characters, but this does not mean that you have to. It rather gives you a chance to copy your comment from under a newspaper article in the same way as I described in the Facebook section.
Gab.ai has a fair amount of neonazis. Don’t feel disheartened and ignore them! They disappear quickly. I have tested with old, but timeless articles if gab.ai improves my traffic and it did. The software is similar to Twitter’s, but the social interaction works like a previous time on twitter because of its smaller user base. It is basically about what I call “comment riding.” It’s about going to a topic and leave a number of short funny lines with little to no substance or reference to outside sources. On gab.ai the hashtags are less important than on twitter because this vibrant “comment riding” needs places where a substantial number of people aggregate. Gab.ai has therefore introduced additional categories, the “topics.”
Use the main topics when possible. News is where your crime story goes. Politics is about discussions of a policy proposal. Philosophy is all that relates to what different people think is good or evil (If you are smart, you’ll notice that politics is all about that). Art is about all TV shows, Hollywood, games, comics and other forms of entertainment and not just about what the left sanctions as art. Faith and humor should need no explanation. I guess that English language posts have a better chance to create traffic, but this will change with time. There is a “topic” that has been lifted up by Gab as one of the main “topics” and that is “Gab Brasil.” The sheer size made Portuguese a language to reckon with.
The strategy with double posting everything on mind and gab is something to be tried, but I have not a lot of confidence in minds. They aggregate users for comment riding in groups. You can join a group and post your comment on their board. I see nothing German there whatsoever. Therefore I would only advice to make an effort with minds when you want to raise awareness for English-language texts. (Gab has German-speaking users.)
Minds is low traffic and has little interaction. You can help it, by copying your gab.ai text right into the minds writing area before you submit on both sites. You can leave longer texts there, but it is absolutly not worth your time. I would open them on separate taps of your browser at the same time when you start reading the news. Loading takes its time, so you switch right back to reading once you click to open the writing area for a new post or when you press “submit”.
Blogger, WordPress, Poly-Upload
If you get banned from all kind of places and or you don’t like the features of a platform, you can leave free-standing texts on the internet that will be indexed by the search engines.
I think I save us a lot of time when I say, “Trust me! Blogger does nothing better than WordPress!” WordPress blogs are likely to be privileged across the internet. For example, gab, minds and twitter turn a link to a wordpress page inside a post automatically into something that Twitter calls “twitter cards.” They are these nice-looking links composed of the first picture on the page and a certain amout of words.
Tweet with twitter card
Thanks to twitter cards, vistors know to click on an image to visit a website (DailyWire in the example image). WordPress provides the relevant post settings to make these twitter cards for you and therefore entices users to your blog. I personally don’t even see how a double posting on WordPress and Blogger would get more eyeballs.
WordPress can be used exactly like Facebook and Twitter. It also has a surprisingly big user base, and 21 billion clicks per months and 401 million viewers. For comparison, Facebook gains 23.17 billion clicks per months and twitter 4.14 billion.
The real strength, though, is its integration with other platform. You can easily display a tweet, a video or a sound track. Across WordPress you enjoy the same features Twitter provides. Your mentions will be shown to you, you can encourage good content with “likes” and there is a feature to follow tags (without the hash).
A news/post aggregator tool, called “reader”, let’s you follow other WordPress blogs and also every other website with an RSS feed (which is basically every website with regular updates). Use it like you would use either Twitter or Facebook. You can link to the place on your minds and gab platform to increase visibility.
WordPress allows for automatic co-uploads on a variety of social media sites. I have been kicked from Twitter and Facebook, and I don’t know their policies, but I think that Twitter has forbidden automatic uploads. To be safe, use it manually with these two platforms to avoid a ban. Google+ and LinkedIn are low traffic platforms. Just let the machine catch some eyeballs for you and leave them alone otherwise.
Video Platforms
Size matters. BitChute.com gets hyped a lot at the moment because everybody fawns over the block chain technology. Block chain does not do anything for you if you want to get the word out. It does not add more privacy when it comes to your visibility to your (future) employers and social environment. And when the government cares to get you punished for your writing, you bet that they will find a way. This is hyped by idiots. BitChute has less than 4 million clicks per months. Nobody will find you there. People don’t hang around to browse BitChute videos. The big fish in the market is YouTube with 24,55 billion clicks per months. If you have video material, it must go there. You can also co-upload it to Facebook and DailyMotion. DailyMotion has about 400 million clicks per month and is to be reckoned with. All other mentioned and unmentioned video platforms aren’t worth your time at the moment.
YouTube has a comment section. If you find channels where leftists comment frequently, you can take the discussion there as well.
Soundcloud and MixCloud
If you only have audio content maybe because it suits your privacy parameters better, you can upload it to SoundCloud or MixCould. I don’t think that they gain traffic on their own, they just store your content and provide a player. I think MixCould looks a bit better than soundcloud, but it ultimately makes little difference. You can easily embed the upload on Twitter, gab.ai, WordPress and probably Facebook. I would co-upload the content on YouTube. Add your sound track to a still image and upload it to a channel. Youtube creates traffic on its own.
Google Plus, Reddit, Small Fish
I threw a number of articles down the Reddit hole and included the reddit share button on my blog. The procedure is that one clicks the button and edit the resulting post. You can also go to reddit.com directly and start a new post into which you include a link to an article that you want to share. Then You are asked to select a group. Thankfully this comes with a search function. So you type some topics and keywords and once you have found a group that looks into a topic of your article you send it over. My experience is that most simply disappear without feedback. All commenters that had budged were antisemites without exception. This could be a coincidence, but it doesn’t seem that people there are interested in intellectual reflection. They just junk read some garbage.
Google plus has the advantage that a) WordPress sends your articles there automatically, so you don’t even have to visit the place ever and b) that the share bottom is usually rather prominent on most blog and video sites. Occasionally when I check my emails I see that somebody saw and liked a post. Once in a blue moon. So somehow the stuff is visible although nobody follows me there.
LinkedIn is even worse. The software is fine, but I have no evidence whatsoever that somebody ever saw something from me in this place. I just keep the auto-upload on.
Summary
The platforms talked about so far under the category “Strategy” are the comment sections under the big newspapers and the classical social media sites/blogs (this post). I only talked about what platforms are reasonable. At first re-posting and sharing, adding little thoughts here and there, is a big contribution everyone can make while reading the papers.
What I realized writing this article is that the reasonable means of communication are fewer than I expected. The main topic of any oppositional movement must be to demand access to the general public.
I think, what we need most are people who make videos or audio commentary. At least audio should be in the range of a comfortable privacy level for most. It is hard for future employers to search for a voice. If you speak German, you can take Timm Klewer as an example or seek out to cooperate with him.
At the moment few people in Germany are capable of writing blogs or providing content that is not somewhat dumb. The reason is the lack of free speech and it will take some years in the sunlight until the crazy stuff will give way to solid, ethical information & entertainment. It is important that we get it going. Sunlight is the best desinfectant.
P.S. The logos above are also links that lead to the websites in question.
Germans are hardly on social media. I wrote a piece about in-group out-group communication that talks briefly about the platforms available in Germany. The most obvious ones are the comment sections under the newspapers. In the mentioned article I recalled my experience with ZEIT online. It took me only a weekend to get blocked from the place. I also registered with Tagesspiegel. I spent little time and got also blocked there after a few weeks. The next step was WELT.
What is WELT? WELT is the third most popular political news outlet after Spiegel and Süddeutsche, and enjoys 69.8 million visits per month. It belongs to the publisher Springer, which also owns the tabloid BILD (and a myriad other papers and book publishers). BILD is technically the news outlet with the largest reach, but is usually not considered political. Springer used to be a conservative publisher and became a target of a bombing by the communist terror organisation Red Army Faction RAF in 1972.
Under Merkel the media aligned and Springer is now on the political left. However, WELT is still less screechy than the Washington Post. The sound is comparable to the Wall Street Journal.
I did not read WELT for a while because it had a monthly budget per IP for some time and their views did not clearly enough represent the views of those who actually run the show in media, culture and politics. The power elites are best represented by my usual paper ZEIT. WELT is considered a quality paper and their job is to speak to ordinary citizens. They do so with lacing the cover page with mildly conservative viewpoints.
Yes, they do call Trump a sociopath and compare him with mass murderers, but there is the occasional article that is overall pro-Israel and just makes a nasty self-righteous turn towards the end. Sometimes the White House gets praise, but purely on economic grounds. Left-wingers also want their taxes cut, but not other people’s. Sometimes even an immigrant crime story makes its way to the front page.
Because I did not read it for a while, I also did not pay attention to the comment section. A superficial look at it surprises. It seems to contradict my usual allegations that conservative voices are hardly heard anywhere because of the absurd level of censorship. People say that they want less immigration, that they like Israel, want their taxes cut, prefer less regulation, less nannying, and even favor openly the conservative party AfD.
So I felt that I could finally wrap up by blog. No, of course, not. I became suspicious and registered as a user.
The first thing that meets the eye is that there are no messages to indicate what should and shouldn’t be said. ZEIT online controls their forum with an iron fist because media types know that comment sections do more to persuade people than articles. Tagesspiegel like WELT did not offer any guidelines. So I grew used to that during my ongoing experiment.
Both Tagesspiegel and WELT check each comment before it goes up. An obvious difference is the size of both platforms. While Tagesspiegel is quick to run through a comment, WELT will have to deal with a flood of texts and each takes its time. A discussion is not possible for the time that an article remains on the front page. The big advantage of WELT is that the likes on your profile page indicate how much of what you wrote is read once a comment of yours goes through.
Did I write “once a comment goes through”? Yes, it is only a tiny, tiny fraction of your comments that will see the light. And this is what intrigues me. What is the selection based on?
Given the very small number of comments that go through, I believe that the censors make a positive selection. They don’t read everything and therefore will also never block a user. They just skim through the messages and pick what they like.
But how does the comment section then look like a conservative outpost? I see safe selects. The comments don’t contain material that is rare knowledge. What is out there is the kind of general sentiment that you cannot help spreading over the kitchen tables. People say that they vote conservative party AfD or that they want less immigration. Important is that it does not get too specific and that no individual member of the elite is called upon to do this or that. There is the occasional oddball that makes conservatives look stupid. Jokes are completely absent because the messaging of jokes cannot be controlled and people are more likely to be convinced with jokes than with long-winding texts.
This is what Noam Chomsky famously called the “controlled opposition.” You give the impression that some criticism is heard, but you don’t show the full range of options or new information. Criticism looks repetitive and dull. The German left repeats over and over again that the right “would not have answers.” Of course, Clinton did the same, but Trump was putting out his policy papers online and could leapfrog the media. In Germany information is so tight that people who are not actively seeking will come to the conclusion that there are no ideas but the “throw tax money at it” solution for every problem. I understand that some Americans are also caught in that CNN bubble which makes them believe there was no Trumpian policy. They simultaneously believe that he is enforcing fascism and also that he does nothing but eat fast food and watch TV. Imagine almost an entire country in such a CNN-like bubble.
What is ironic about this is that for the lack of policy discussions German media almost exclusively talks about foreign countries, much like the media in totalitarian regimes. When it does talk about German politicians – which is different from policies – they talk a lot about their calendars: who meets whom where. This is why you see so many international summits that all have no results but vague “declarations” of their intentions. They come with smiles and photos. And the media outside the English-speaking world is reporting things like when the plane lands, what is discussed on the lavish dinner table, the general “topic”, the location of the conference etc. As if they worked. In summer the parliament goes on holiday and outside the Putinesque Merkel-holiday reports the media openly admits that it turns to other yellow press rubbish. This is called “Sommerloch”, German for “summer hole.” I’m not kidding.
The bottom line is that commenting on WELT is not worth the time. Even the most innocuous posts don’t get through because of the random selection of comments that are chosen for publication.
Followers of my blog know that I’m a fan of Rebecca Hargreave’s, alias Blonde in the Belly of the Beast. Outside of her brief video seminars she also joins up with Matt Christiansen for a weekly podcast called The Beauty and The Beta (all on Bitchute and YouTube).
My positions are more often with Matt than with Rebecca. He has a measured approach to everything and does not allow any double standards. People like him are the guarantee that the right does not become as batshit crazy as the left. Rebecca on the other hand pulls no punches and goes for the jugular, Ann Coulter style. A breeze of fresh air.
One moral question arises again and again: Should the right engage in the same tactics like the left? I also had this problem with my blog. I set out with rules for my site to ensure that it is squeaky clean. There is no way to verify who I am at the moment so the trust of my readers is solely based on due diligence. If I lied shamelessly like the mainstream media, nobody would bother to read. Not only do I have to be at least as credible as them, I need to have higher standards because I don’t have a brand behind me to lend me trust. Example: With few exceptions I refrain from calling people anything that they would feel uncomfortable with. I do not use “left-wing extremist”, “do-gooders” and so on.
But that has a price. The other side will not understand that they are aggressive unless they become victims of their own tactics. It’s human nature. If everybody were as squeaky clean as my blog, Angela Merkel would never feel the pitchfork in her back. Nice people don’t shout at her “Nazi! Nazi!” and warn of a potential mass murder if she were not “fought” with all “courage” that we can muster. I don’t necessarily want her to feel that pitchfork in her back, but unless somebody makes her suffer, and I really mean suffer, she will not realize that she was leading a pitchfork mob herself for many years.
ZEIT has some silly article about how our country were proto-fascist and I use it as an example of how I cannot keep up with the left-wing depravity. The thesis is that we face the advent of a new fascism because we were seeing already the “destruction of moral standards, liberal/libertarian/pro-freedom achievements and disrespect for moral attitudes and policies which are friendly to human beings.” I have a hard time to pour buckets of glib over my own policy wishes although I also believe that they are “friendly to human beings.”
While such phrases are not outright lies, they smack of dishonesty. I have interests. Tobias Haberkorn, the author of the ZEIT article, also furthers his own interests.
Then there is the vaguely phrased attack. Of course, he does not say that the left is destroying moral standards. He accuses the right. This is not elaborated. What libertarian/liberal/pro-freedom achievement does the right try to destroy? He just leaves it dangling. His readers are conditioned to never ask questions anyway.
And I ask myself as somebody who is not a pacifist: Why would I consider killing another person, but have so much scruple about lying? And I think this is rooted in religion. If you have a connection with the Bible, and with history as such, you will find that many scholars at all times judged that all evil comes from deception. You cannot help but kill somebody who attacks you, but you can make sure that there is as much clarity as possible to reduce the risk of killing an innocent person. Many people who have looked over the course of history came to this conclusion and for religious people, and some others, the world did not start with them. People had wisdom that precedes us. So I won’t go down the dishonesty lane “to give false testimony against my neighbour.”
Then he complains about the fact that the fascism accusation loses its power. He does not ask why that is and how to change that again. There is no realization that false accusations have destroyed the meaning of the word. He only sees an “over-sensitivity.” And while the fascism claim is ubiquitous, he says that the right just needed to moan, “they are wielding the Nazi club against us” and the accusations would fail. That is not true, of course. Cars burn, windows get smashed, people who plaster posters get shot and so on because left-wingers actually believe that all these claims were honest and not exaggerated.
I could not employ the same tactic because I will not stand on the graves of those who died under fascism and dishonor them. I just cannot. Even if I had no soul – like leftists – and did not care, it would not work because conservatives are not a rabid mob. They fact-check and have often been falsely accused themselves. Nobody will burn down Angela Merkel’s car only because I call her a Nazi and claim that she is dangerous.
Another problem is that people really forget history when the Holocaust and fascism are trivialized. In Germany the attack goes mostly one way. The left accuses the right of being fascist. When right-wingers try to fight back they preface the word “fascist” with the German word for “left” to make sure that history is not trivialized (German: Linksfaschismus, i.e. left-fascism). In America these precautions have gone completely and we see some wild mud-slinging with no person involved who knows a thing or two about Mussolini, the fascist manifesto, Hitler’s brand and whether or not any of it is distinct enough to place it outside the epoch. Fascism has been downgraded to “bad” and to “I don’t like you.”
Rebecca Hargreaves sees this problem and is torn. On the one hand, she feels that the danger of losing the culture war is so big that ignoring any weapons could risk failure. On the other hand, the “fascism” mud-slinging shows that many left-wingers don’t even understand their aggression when they do get their own medicine served. The step to make them grasp it would be to use violence, antifa-style, and even that could produce idiots who cannot see that their side is causing this response. It would be a downward spiral.
I believe that one has to go down into the mudpit – a bit. Some people wake up when they have it coming. I believe in a measured approach. You use the same tactics, but you make sure that you use them more mildly. You must also react timely so that the original attack and your response are understood as connected. Fairness is an innate trait. Our ancestors divvied out their foods fairly or they would have died once hunting luck and the collection of berries, salads and fruits had not produced enough for one part of the group or another. As a consequence people today react to double-standards when they are pointed out. Donald Trump won because Twitter users made sure to clarify that Hillary Clinton had lower moral standards than him.
P.S. This covers only a small portion of the mentioned ZEIT article. The transgressions go on. Interior Minister Horst Seehofer is called “latently despotic” and “autocratic” for cancelling an appointment for a stupid “Integration Conference.” A participant of said conference likened him to Hitler. The very basic vocabulary to protect our freedom is eroded and again there is no way to fight back. The leftist depravity goes on and on and on.
Goldstein 