On Free Expression: Answers to Some Questions

Yesterday, I covered the case of a Bavarian pensioner who has been sentenced to 75 days in prison for the crime of repeating a three-word phrase that the Sturmabteilung were wont to carve into their daggers 90 years ago.

Valued commenter and friend-of-the-blog Intelligent Dasein asks some important questions in this connection:

I think we need to move beyond merely pointing out instances of this kind. The important questions are, what does it all mean and what is going to happen next …

In the first place, are you actually committed to “free speech” as a principle, or do you just object to the specific content of the speech being criminalized? …

In the second place, do you actually agree with the criminalized content and/or do you perceive the speaker to be akin to you in some way, such that a prosecution of him is a prosecution of yourself? …

In the third place, what, if anything, will be or ought to be done about this? Legal challenges, protests, letters to the government, nothing? What do you think can or should be the response? Moreover, what is the positive content of your vision for reform? …

These are fair questions.

Thus far I’ve avoided addressing broader themes in my posts on German speech crime prosecutions. My aim has been to get some portion of these stories into English so that others will know what is happening in the Federal Republic, and that project entails keeping my own commentary minimal.

To be honest, these stories bother me for overwhelmingly personal reasons. Germany has become a fairly repressive place in a very short period of time. Our rulers never quite relaxed or recovered from their Covidian fever dreams; they never quite averted their paranoid gaze from their citizenry. I think weakened, repressive, directionless states are dangerous, and I worry not only about myself but about everyone who lives here and ventures to speak out against any of the manifold nonsense the last five years have visited upon us.

That said, my subscribers at least deserve to have plain statements from me on what I think about freedom of expression, the opinions my government is fighting to suppress and my positive vision for the future. So, below the fold, I will answer Intelligent Dasein’s queries.