Green politicians, or indeed those of a greenish tinge, are typically not too keen on dissent.

It is not exactly news that Angela Merkel is no friend of free speech. Stung by the criticism of her reckless and self-indulgent migrant policy that had appeared on social media (the legacy media were cheering her on), she clamped down.

I wrote about this here in 2018 (and on other occasions):

Merkel began by bullying social-media companies to clamp down on what she regarded as hate speech. When they did not, in her view, do enough, she looked to her parliamentary colleagues for assistance. The result, prompted also by scaremongering over “fake news,” the switched-on censor’s excuse du jour, was Germany’s social-media law — the notorious Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz. It represents an attack on free speech so draconian (for example, if a social-media company fails to take down “manifestly unlawful . . . hate speech” or “fake news” within 24 hours of a complaint, it can be fined up to 50 million euros) that it has provided useful cover for Russian legislators looking to shut down undesirable talk online…

In due course, this inspired imitators in the West as well as in Russia. And, with its Digital Services Act (DSA), the EU has now provided a further framework for online censorship.

I wrote about that piece of legislation, which is now being wielded against X, here. Hillary Clinton has been a fan:

“For too long, tech platforms have amplified disinformation and extremism with no accountability. The EU is poised to do something about it.”

In 2017, Merkel also agreed to the prosecution of Jan Böhmermann, a comedian, for reciting an insulting poem he had written about Turkey’s thuggish President Erdoğan. Erdoğan filed a complaint with prosecutors. This was possible under an archaic law prohibiting defamation of foreign heads of state. More on that here. In the end, the case was dropped, and the law was repealed.

But, in a recent article for the German Review, Jörg Luyken explains that the matter did not end there. Not only does the poem (which was indeed insulting) remain banned, but the German parliament passed a new law that was a variant of the old one.

Luyken:

A 2021 law on hate speech created a new category of crime called “insulting political figures.” Handing special privileges to politicians, the law allowed for prison sentences of up to three years in prison for people who insult holders of public offices.

Online hate attempts to “silence people who express themselves politically” and thus constitutes a “threat to democracy,” the government said at the time.

Since then, German politicians have been filing criminal complaints at a rate that puts Erdogan to shame. A list published by the government in August showed that Vice-chancellor Robert Habeck has filed over 800 criminal complaints over the past three years; foreign minister Annalena Baerbock has filed over a hundred; and several other ministers have made dozens each. While some of these involve more serious crimes such as physical threats, the vast majority are for the crime of “insulting political figures.”

Habeck is a Green, as is Baerbock, and Green politicians, or indeed those of a greenish tinge, are typically not too keen on dissent.

To take one example, in my article on disinformation, I noted:

The DSA’s broad language could easily be used to impose de facto censorship on all sorts of theoretically legal speech, in the interest of preventing “harms” that exist only in the progressive imagination and that are hinted at in, among other places, the law’s preamble, but also elsewhere. Thus on its website the EU Commission warns of the dangers of “climate disinformation.” Tackling that is, it states, incorporated within its general approach to disinformation, including making it “more difficult for disinformation actors to misuse online platforms.”

But the criticism to which Habeck responded in one case has been of a different nature. It was a pun.

Luigi Vercotti (via Monty Python):

Everyone was terrified of Doug. I’ve seen grown men pull their own heads off rather than see Doug. Even Dinsdale was frightened of Doug . . . He used sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor, bathos, puns, parody, litotes and satire.

Habeck wouldn’t put up with that sort of nonsense. He filed a complaint against an insulting punster. Pun one day, putsch the next. The punster, after all, turned out to live in Bavaria.

Luyken:

Earlier this month, police raided the home of a Bavarian pensioner who posted a photo of Habeck on the internet that mocked him up as a model for the hair product company Schwarzkopf. But the name of the company had been replaced with the word Schwachkopf, meaning moron.

Stop laughing at the back.

The meme was posted on X (suspicious!).

But the raid, which included confiscating the punster’s laptop, was no laughing matter.

And this, if anything, is more ominous still.

Luyken:

Der Spiegel wrote this week that insults were a gateway drug to harder forms of criminality and needed to be dealt with with the full force of the law.

“Countering the Wild West atmosphere on the internet with criminal complaints is the right thing to do – that is the only way deterrence works,” the magazine argued. “If the state does not take action against insults (against politicians) it will encourage more incitement and hatred.”

In other words: if people start calling politicians idiots, who knows what they could end up doing next? A truly remarkable argument to be put forward by a “liberal” news outlet!

Well, it ought to be. But, as Habeck reminds us, authoritarian progressives are no friends of free speech.