For the offence of tweeting three thumbs-up emojis, a 64 year-old German woman has been fined €1,800

Thoughts on the anarcho-tyranny of the mass migrationist state

Speech crime prosecutions in Germany are initiated with “penalty orders” (Strafbefehle). Basically, to save increasingly scarce judicial resources, the prosecutor can apply for a kind of summary judgment with the court, and the accused gets a letter in the mail, describing their offence and ordering them to pay a fine.

Below, I translate an excerpt from the Strafbefehl that a 64 year-old German woman received last autumn from the prosecutor’s office in Kassel. It details why she is accused of violating section 140 of the German criminal code, which prohibits expressing public approval of criminal acts. I’ve preserved the awkward bureaucratese because it is essential to appreciating how grotesque these prosecutions are. Despite the burdensome syntax, I promise that it’s worth the read:

Against the backdrop of an incident in Sweden in which a 15-year-old girl who had allegedly been raped lured her alleged perpetrator into an ambush long after the alleged crime, under false pretenses, where she, together with her boyfriend and his three brothers, in an act of unjustified vigilante justice, caused him to be robbed and then hanged in what amounted to an execution, for which all five teenagers were sentenced by a Swedish court to prison terms ranging from 3.5 years to life imprisonment, user “Free-Web” posted the following message on 26 October 2024, on “X” (formerly Twitter), where it was publicly accessible:

“A 15-YEAR-OLD SWEDISH GIRL HANGED THE MIGRANT WHO RAPED HER” with the addition “Does he have 77 virgins now?”

As user [redacted], you agreed with this post on the same day at around 7:25 p.m. by clicking “thumbs up” three times. In doing so, you were aware that you were publicly condoning intentional killing by way of unjustified vigilante justice, and you were particularly pleased that this vigilante justice was carried out on a migrant, whom you also – by adopting the statements of user “Free-Web” as your own – sought to mock further by referring to heavenly virgins (you had no objective knowledge that the victim of the vigilante justice was a Muslim).

A picture of the penalty order, which the always excellent @tomdabassman has provided in the course of drawing attention to this scandalous case.

For the offence of tweeting three thumbs-up emojis, the woman has been slapped with an €1,800 fine. The penalty is not yet binding, and she can elect to challenge the charges at trial if she wishes – with all the costs that entails.

It is helpful to contrast her case with other stories in the press. For example, there is the leftist Kurdish rapper Dahabflex, who has taken to appearing in social media videos with Ferat Koçak, a Bundestag representative for Die Linke, or the Left Party. His latest song calls AfD supporters “fascists” and demands that fellow leftists convene to “burn the fascists” and knock them out. Unlike our Twitter user, Dahabflex will never be prosecuted for violating section 140 of the German criminal code, despite the vastly greater reach and significance of his calls for violence.

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A few days ago, my partner and I dined at a pub in rural Thüringen. We sat on a terrace in the summer sun, with views of an imposing castle and a small winding river. I was on my third pils when two migrants stumbled around the corner, screaming at each other in a foreign language. Soon they started fighting. The table next to us looked on, bemused; at another table further back, two tattooed gen-Xers remarked loudly on the people our tax dollars were being wasted on. Before long, the pugilists ran off, and then the police showed up, asking for witness statements. I denied having seen anything, but the poor previously bemused sods at the neighbouring table ended up providing all their contact information. If they’re particularly unlucky, they could be dealing with this for months and months. Around this time, one of the disorderly migrants reappeared, complaining of jaw pain. The police summoned a whole entire ambulance, and before long he was standing in the midst of a small crowd of police officers and paramedics, holding a state-issued ice pack to his face. The very fat pub owner waddled outside at this point, demanding to know what was happening. This great hullabaloo was still unfolding as we paid our bill and left. By my count, around 15 Germans had at this point become entangled in the random, inexplicable escapades of two men from the developing world, with whom we have nothing to do and who don’t belong here.

Things like this are happening all across Europe, every day. Our institutions find themselves pouring enormous resources into sorting out the frequently serious but even more frequently quite trivial mayhem stirred up by a bunch of idle, ill-mannered imposters from distant lands. The state has stumbled here into a massive quagmire that it barely understands and that it has no hope of solving.

How it did the stumbling, nobody can say for sure; it's a problem of the egg and the chicken. Maybe the ruling class became so enamoured of human rights that they actually decided border enforcement was inhumane, or maybe mass migration is just something that started happening when our rulers’ attention was elsewhere – at first in small ways, and then in bigger ones – and as they proved unequal to the basic task of border security, they began inflating their conceptions of liberal humanitarianism to justify the crisis. The how and the why aren’t totally clear, which seems odd given the historical momentousness of mass migration, but that’s just how it is. Causality is very hard to establish in complex systems, and complex systems are what govern us.

All we can really say for sure, is that in the beginning the people in charge had no idea what they were doing, and no clue whatsoever of the consequences even in the near term. You can tell because of the bitterly naive myths they tried to sell in 2015, for example about all the Syrian doctors we were about to import, and how great it would be – perhaps a little bit of trouble but no big deal, and nothing some donated clothes and volunteered time couldn’t solve. If they had any inkling of what it meant, they would’ve framed the influx in literally any other way, and they would’ve avoided like the plague all ideological insistence on the essential interchangeability of humanity. The way you keep fragile myths alive is by never stress-testing them in the first place.

But it happened, and it keeps happening, and there are no illusions anymore. Everybody knows this is bad. Even the migrationists themselves have figured it out, which is why they are doubling and tripling down on the crazy slow-motion catastrophe that they authored. Some of them are malicious but a lot of them are just screamingly archetypal cases of cognitive dissonance.

The stabbing, the raping, the fighting, the public urinating, the vandalising, the retail thieving, the loitering, the littering, the U-Bahn groping, the drug abusing, the opportunistic harassing, the street racing, the defrauding, the fare dodging – all of this is totally beyond the criminal enforcement capacity of our flabby late-liberal states. The migrants don’t care, for one; the penalties for all of this strike them as laughable and if anything inspire contempt. Our entire criminal justice system is not calibrated to deal with people like this, for another. Migrants are enormously mobile, they inhabit illegible parallel societies in which nobody cares about their criminality, many of them have multiple identities. Nobody knows who they are, or where they are, or anything.

To that comes this quite depressing fact: The disorder caused by migrants is not in itself a threat to the state, so the state has at best a limited interest in finding solutions for all the problems caused by migrants. What the state really doesn’t like, though – and what the state might well find threatening – is the growing discontent of Germans over the declining security, cleanliness and order of their communities. This discontent has placed our political system under extreme stress. Having no solution to the migrant problem, and lacking even the ability to close the borders, the state has instead elected to crack down on the proximate threat. Not migrant crime and disorder, but the public outcry over migrant crime and disorder, is now in the cross-hairs, must now be criminalised.

The strategy makes plenty of sense. Unlike the migrants, Germans are immensely vulnerable to the criminal justice system. They are legible to state enforcers, with fixed addresses, clear identity papers and reputations to protect. Their immediate communities disapprove of crime. Being summoned by the police or receiving a penalty order is an occasion for intense shame. Ordinary Germans are the perfect nail for the state’s hammer. The aim is to teach people to live with this and to shut up about it, one Strafbefehl at a time. The more ridiculous the charges, the better; people must learn that they can get hammered for anything, or even for nothing. We are still on the anarcho-tyrannical upswing; nobody knows how bad it will get.