A German man named Stefan Niehoff used a parody of a shampoo advertisement to put forward the view on Twitter that Germany’s Minister of Economic Affairs and Climate Action, Robert Habeck, was a moron – or a “Schwachkopf” in the original German.
That did not please Mr Habeck. As has become customary for German government ministers since the Covid pandemic, he decided to retaliate against an ordinary citizen who had mocked him by filing a criminal complaint against Mr Niehoff for “hate crime”, and arranging for two cops to turn up at the latter’s house at six fifteen one morning.
Many such incidents of repression in Germany have been chronicled by the German blogger “Eugyppius”. In his latest article, simply titled “Schwachkopf”, Eugyppius writes,
Our Green Minister of Economic Affairs Robert Habeck has been bringing criminal speech complaints against his critics for years. As of August 2024, he had filed 805 such charges – well over half of the total raised by all cabinet ministers since September 2021 combined.
Even in Germany as it now is, on its own that attempt to bring the criminal law down on someone for insulting a politician might have provoked enough ridicule to deter Mr Habeck from proceeding. But Habeck had another card up his sleeve – or rather, his membership of the ruling class gave him the power to keep turning over cards until he found one he could use.
In the course of the trawl through Niehoff’s Twitter history that Mr Habeck got his friends in the police to carry out in support of his hate crime prosecution, some bright spark turned up something that they could twist against Niehoff in the fashion of the American media talking about Donald Trump.
Some time before calling Mr Habeck a “Schwachkopf”, Stefan Niehoff had posted another tweet, this time in opposition to a boycott by left-wingers of the dairy brand Müller. Niehoff posted a pair of pictures of stickers plastered over supermarket shelves that urged people not to buy Müller products, juxtaposed against a historical photo from the Nazi era showing a man in SS or SA uniform holding a placard with the words “Germans, do not buy from Jews!”. Niehoff gave the whole group of photos the caption “We’ve seen it all before!”.
Do you think that Mr Niehoff’s use of a picture of a Nazi in that tweet demonstrated that he (a) did, or (b) did not admire the Nazis?
Any normal person would say (b). I have no doubt that the German authorities know perfectly well that Niehoff’s tweet was anti-Nazi. But they could suck up to Habeck and make his charges look less moronic by pretending to think (a). So that’s what they did. They announced that they were not just investigating Niehoff for insulting a member of the government, but also for incitement. Anti-semitic incitement. As Eugyppius writes,
Plainly, Niehoff meant only to compare the Müller boycott to Nazi boycotts against Jews by way of rejecting both of them. That might be in poor taste and I certainly wouldn’t argue this way, but I also can’t see how this tweet has anything to do with criminal statutes against incitement.
What happened here is clear enough: Insulting cabinet ministers may, if you squint, count as online “hate speech,” but it does not remotely qualify for the Eleventh Action Day Against Antisemitic Internet Hate Crimes. To improve their enforcement statistics against the kind of crimes that really generate headlines, while at the same time persecuting the Green Minister’s online detractors, our Bamberg prosecutors went poking around Niehoff’s account for a minimally plausible post that would justify putting him in the precious antisemitism column.
There is an amusing silver lining to this dark cloud of moronic malice. Click on the link to the word “Schwachkopf” above to find out what it is.
Where do the bulk of the German people stand on this? Are they outraged? Or are they quietly and smugly happy about how those damned right-wingers are getting their comeuppance?
Makes a difference in how the free world interacts with Germany in the future.
Eugyppius says that “The massive furore around Schwachkopf-Gate – in which a German pensioner had his house raided by police for the crime of calling the Green Minister of Economic Affairs a moron – has brought a wealth of further incidents to light.”
It seems that only Green politicians are likely to sue (spurred on by Green activists who do all the paperwork).
To (partially) address bobby’s question: it seems that there is a backlash, eg ‘Habeck’ has become a synonym of Schwachkopf’.
It would seem that Habeck has never heard if the Streisand Effect. Anyone in any doubt as to whether he is a moron now has all the proof they need.
It is however worrying that a state such as Germany still has laws to make mocking a politician, of all people, a criminal offence. How secure we are in Britain that no-one would ever go to prison over a tweet.
My simplified view of contemporary German politics:
– AfD: based.
– BsW: somewhat mistaken but honourable.
– Everyone else except Greens: complete bastards.
– Greens: up there with US Democrats/UK Labour as most evil party in western world.
AfD is full of halfwits who look back at Socialist East Germany fondly because there were less niggers. Is that all it takes to make them “based”?
Is that a fair representation of AfD’s platform?
https://en.langenscheidt.com/german-english/schwachkopf translates Schwachkopf as meaning “Maskulinum”. I mention this because it is the single most useless traslation I have ever encountered in my life. I’m a native English speaker with a well-above average vocabulary, and I could make a hell of a lot more sense of the German than the “English”.
They’re against mass immigration, multiculturalism, net zero, deindustrialisation, the EU, and gay race communism, so seems good to me.
“translates Schwachkopf as meaning “Maskulinum”. … well, no, that’s the gender. The meaning is given as ‘dimwit’.
Looks good to me too, until i think about what the list fails to include.
What is their position on the nationalization of the means of production, transportation, and exchange?
What is their position on rule by Moscow over Germany and beyond?
The fact is, almost all tyrannies in the last several millennia, either could ignore that list, or else took the same position as the AfD — which is not finger-pointing at the AfD, just pointing out that those positions do not give guarantees about the AfD.
What does Eugyppius say about the AfD? I did a search on his substack, but there are too many posts with the word.
Just look at wikipedia (hardly a source to expect to be favourable to Afd but does fairly show they aren’t a Marxist party):
”AfD is an economically liberal party.[12][223] Despite the 2015 split of economic liberals, AfD can still be broadly characterized as neoliberal on economic terms, emphasizing deregulation and much limited state intervention. Attempts of some party factions to emphasize small and medium-sized enterprises, and advocate protectionism over free trade, did not have much success.[161]
AfD is anti-communist and engaged in red-baiting by comparing Angela Merkel and her government to the secret police in East Germany.[224] In May 2018, a statue of the founding father of communism Karl Marx, donated by the Chinese government, was unveiled in Marx’s hometown of Trier. AfD’s Alexander Gauland said the city should not accept the statue, saying that it disrespects victims of communism.[225] AfD went on to organise a silent march to remember the victims of communist regimes.[226]”
In 2024 Germany you have the regime parties (CDU-CSU/FDP/SDP/Greens/Die Linke) or you have AfD (populist right) or BSW (populist left). Given these choices I can look past any shortcomings of AfD have for now.
The German government is made up of totalitarians – they send the police to arrest people who mock them. The “Greens” are especially prone to this behaviour.
Will the CDU and CSU (the German conservatives and their sister party in Bavaria) pledge to get rid of these tyrannical laws? Not “the laws are correct in principle, but are being misapplied” (we just had 14 years of that bovine excrement in the United Kingdom) REPEAL these laws.
If (if) not then the only thing to do is vote AfD (Alternative for Germany) – if the German conservatives refuse to repeal these censorship laws and follow other conservative policies, for example kicking out the immigrants who openly hate Germany – indeed hate the West in general, then people will vote AfD – and the German conservatives will have only themselves to blame.
If conservatives will not follow conservative policies, then people will find other political parties to vote for – and not just in Germany.
By the way – Germany has Proportional Representation, so the argument that “vote AfD and you will split the vote and let the left back in” does not work. If the CDU and CSU do not pledge themselves to follow conservative policies (end censorship – and end the invasion of Germany by anti Western groups), they will lose votes to the AfD.
On this mass immigration by people whose belief system is hostile to the West (it is NOT immigration as-such it is who is immigrating into Germany – and the beliefs they pass on to the children and children’s children in an ever growing population) Hungary and Poland are more fortunate – they have not allowed it, it is much easier to not let people in, in the first place, than it is to remove them.
Poland and Hungary and other Eastern European nations must not make the mistake that Western European nations have made – no matter how much the European Union, and the rest of the accused “international community” try to blackmail them.
Losing your country is worse than losing MONEY – if the condition of getting the money is ending Freedom of Speech and opening the borders of your nation to its enemies, then say NO to the money.
I forgot to add, in my previous comments, that this sort of things is why i hope that Germany never gets nuclear weapons.
The money would be better spent on nukes for Poland and Ukraine.
Snorri on balance I think that nuclear war would be a bad thing.
As for saying that Germany should not have nuclear weapons, but Ukraine, which is presently at war, should have nuclear weapons – well that is a good way to create a nuclear war. Nuclear weapons can only act as a deterrent before war has started – once the war has started deterrence is over. Giving nuclear weapons to Ukraine would, at this point, mean nuclear war.
And that nuclear war would not be confined to the Ukraine and Russia – Russia and China would also launch nuclear attacks on the nations who had provided nuclear weapons to Ukraine.
But I am sounding like John Bright – and, sadly, he was ignored in the 1850s.
No, not at this point!
But there will be peace in Ukraine pretty soon.
That is what Trump said, so it must be true…