By Luther
Ray Abel
Tuesday,
October 11, 2022
“Vee haf
vays of making you not talk”
-German
Police Officer to a Hamburg Memelord, probably
Germany
has an interesting relationship with speech, one that has become more and more
hostile to contradictory voices in the service of “freeing speech.”
Adam
Satariano and Christopher Schuetze report for
the New
York Times:
When the police pounded the door before dawn at a home in northwest
Germany, a bleary-eyed young man in his boxer shorts answered. The officers
asked for his father, who was at work.
They told him that his 51-year-old father was accused of violating laws
against online hate speech, insults and misinformation. He had shared an image
on Facebook with an inflammatory statement about immigration falsely attributed
to a German politician. “Just because someone rapes, robs or is a serious
criminal is not a reason for deportation,” the fake remark said.
The police then scoured the home for about 30 minutes, seizing a laptop
and tablet as evidence, prosecutors said.
At that exact moment in March, a similar scene was playing out at about
100 other homes across Germany, part of a coordinated nationwide crackdown that
continues to this day. After sharing images circulating on Facebook that
carried a fake statement, the perpetrators had devices confiscated and some
were fined.
“We are making it clear that anyone who posts hate messages must expect
the police to be at the front door afterward,” Holger Münch, the head of the
Federal Criminal Police Office, said after the March raids.
“Free
speech” as a concept has been an object of debate ever since its conception as
“parrhesia” with the Greeks — those political and philosophical forebears of
ours known for reclining on the city lawn and telling each other what they
thought of the government, one another, and the neighbor’s sheep. It should
come as no surprise, then, that polities and governments will have their
personal definitions for the best way to understand and preserve free speech
(if they’re interested in the concept at all).
The
modern German approach makes sense at the most superficial level. “If we remove
the nastiest and most serially deceptive posters on the Internet, that will
reduce the toxicity of social media for everyone else. Every day will be a
digitized Munich Oktoberfest ever after, once the bad guys are taken care of.”
But we know better.
Dispatching
police to citizens’ homes for stupid, ill-considered posts, or posts that are
simply counter-cultural, chills the speech of all others. Should I observe my
neighbor’s house invaded and his possessions seized for a third-tier boomer
meme about our councilman, I’m not posting online. It wouldn’t be worth the
potential risk, no matter what I might offer as a writer and journalist.
Furthermore,
a truth standard in the hands of the government is an ever-shifting one, easily
applied to punish opponents as easily as the common man — not to mention we can
never be certain what the truth is, and that unfettered speech is one of the
best methods to discover the truth.
Finally,
it’s not the government’s job to protect politicians from defamation and
citizens from the fibs of one another. It infantilizes the populace to suggest
that so many are deceived by ridiculous posts and images that the state has to
step in. How embarrassing to be a German and know that your government thinks
you an analytical incompetent — a boob who cannot ascertain the veracity of
your neighbor’s comment or image.
I’m not
a speech absolutist; there are necessary guardrails when it comes to explicit
calls to violence. But we should so rarely implement the restrictions that we
almost cease to think of them. The speech of others is often grotesque, but the
rest of us are not diminished by it; rather, we should be proud that we can
suffer idiots while going about and communicating with one another as we see
fit. Another reason to be grateful we’re American this morning.
This is what I imagine would
happen were one to visit Germany and retweet a Babylon Bee post.
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