Is life in today’s West really just like living in Nazi Germany? No, it’s just like living in Germany …

“It’s just like living in Nazi Germany!” – or so many excitable commentators like myself are often wont to say about life in the contemporary West whenever we see the latest egregious assault on free speech or outrageous overblown “hate crime” incident.

Except, of course, it isn’t quite like Nazi Germany at all, is it? Such statements, at least on my own behalf, are often meant more as comic or critical journalistic hyperbole and bombast, not literal statements of verbatim fact.

There are no death-camps in Europe, Australasia or America today, are there? And, say what you like about Brownshirt Biden, at least it ultimately proved possible for opponents to vote him out of office, unlike with Herr Hitler in the ‘30s and ‘40s.

Instead, a better comparison to make might be not to say, “It’s just like living in Nazi Germany!”, but “It’s just like living in Germany!” instead, actual Nazis no longer in any way being necessary, just ordinary “democratic” politicians.

Heel, Hitler!

Back in the day, the Nazis themselves didn’t particularly like being insulted, to say the least. My favourite personal example came in 1941 when Nazi diplomats made persistent legal attempts to “cancel” a Finnish gentleman named Tor Borg who had amusingly trained his pet dog to raise its paw in classic “Heil Hitler!” style whenever he said Adolf’s name. Top Nazis suspected this was meant as an insult, leading to attempts at legal prosecution. When this failed, the Nazis tried to ruin Borg’s pharmaceutical business instead.

As journalist Klaus Hillenbrand put it once news of the bizarre escapade finally emerged in 2011: “The dog affair tells us the Nazis were not only criminals and mass murderers, they were silly as hell. There are very few things you can laugh about [from the Third Reich] because what they did was so monstrous. But there were two or three dozen people discussing the affair of the dog rather than preparing for the invasion of the Soviet Union. They were crazy.”

They sure were! No politicians in the modern-day West would ever bother wasting their time with anything as trivial as that these days, would they?

Except that, in 2018, a Scottish comedian, Mark Meechan (aka Count Dankula) was successfully prosecuted in a court of British law after training his girlfriend’s pet dog to do a similar “Heil Hitler!” salute in response to his cues of “Sieg Heil!” and “Do you wanna gas the Jews?” before posting the resulting footage online to annoy his partner. Although Meechan was not actually an anti-Semite, just a prankster, he was convicted of hate speech and fined £800 nonetheless.

Accordingly, here’s a new version of Klaus Hillenbrand’s 2011 assessment of the Tor Borg affair, updated anew for the age of Count Dankula: “The dog affair tells us the self-professed anti-Nazis of today’s liberal West were not actually outright criminal mass murderers, like the real Nazis once were, but it does show they were silly as hell. You can certainly laugh about it all, but really their persecution of innocent jokers and critics is at least a little bit monstrous. At a time when Vladimir Putin had already annexed Crimea, there were two or three dozen people in the United Kingdom discussing the affair of a Sieg Heiling dog rather than preparing for the potential looming invasion of Ukraine. They were crazy.”

Indeed so – and nowhere more so than in today’s oh-so-liberal anti-Nazi Germany.

Sticks and Steins

Modern-day Germany is perhaps the most overtly anti-Nazi state in all of recorded history, for obvious reasons. Over there, under strict post-WWII de-Nazification legislation, Count Dankula would probably have received an actual prison sentence, joke or not. The odd thing is, though, that many modern day professedly anti-Nazi German politicians now seem every bit as intolerant of harmless jokes being made about them as the actual Nazis once were.

A truly shocking statistic recently emerged: that, over the past three years, thousands of German citizens have faced legal charges over insulting politicians. Perhaps badly scarred by once having been called “slightly chunky” and “physically unlovable” (or words to that effect by Silvio Berlusconi, former Chancellor Angela Merkel introduced an easily abused new law, under Section 188 of the German Criminal Code, which prohibited “defamatory remarks” about politicians, if they were deemed likely to seriously “impede their official duties”. Punishments could include fines and up to five years behind bars.

I think Merkel meant this as a handy legal tool to enable prosecution for outright libel and death threats against public figures. As one sensible German politician, Armin Laschet, said when he heard this news: “In a democracy, you can call the rulers idiots, imbeciles, idiots. In dictatorships, you are prosecuted for this. As Prime Minister, I was often suggested to pursue offensive tweets with criminal charges. To this day, I only sign such in the case of death threats.”

If only other German statesmen felt and acted similarly. Two Green Party Ministers in Berlin’s current coalition government, Robert Habeck and Annalena Baerbock, are responsible for making 1,258 known separate Section 188 complaints against members of the German public alone, 805 by Habeck and 453 by Baerbock. Persons accused of such “crimes” have had their homes forcibly entered by police to seize their phones and laptops as evidence, costing the defendants thousands of Euros to replace them and then pay subsequent legal fees.

Hair Hitler

What precisely had such “offenders” been saying? Most just seem to have been calling the easily-offended pair idiots, perhaps with very good reason.

All this came to light following a heavy-handed police dawn-raid on the home of a 64-year-old pensioner, Stefan Niehoff, in mid-November – a raid so heavy-handed that Niehoff, who is old enough to directly remember such things, specifically compared it to life in East Germany under the Communist Stasi, which at least makes a change from the more usual Nazi Gestapo comparison. Together with his wife and disabled daughter, who has Down’s Syndrome, Niehoff was forcibly awakened from his bed and made to hand over his computer and phone to invading officers after Robert Habeck, who is currently the country’s Vice-Chancellor (just like Rudolf Hess used to be) filed an official complaint about him.

And what had Niehoff done? He had dared post the following meme (only a re-tweet of someone else’s creation) to his mere 901 followers online:

It is a digitally manipulated version of the usual logo of the German hair-care product brand Schwarzkopf, which means literally “Black Head” in German. The particular shampoo and conditioner being referenced here is “Schwarzkopf Professional”. However, the letter “r” has been deliberately omitted, rendering the phrase “Schwachkopf Professional”, which means something like “Professional Moron”, in the broad sense of “Professional Dickhead” (“Schwanzkopf”). As these words appear alongside the face of Robert Habeck, the insult clearly pertains to him.

However, as was gleefully pointed out, the main result of Habeck’s completely “Schwachkopf” actions here was simply to ensure that, due to the ensuing media furore, when typing the word “Schwach” into the German version of Google, the first result that now comes up is a large picture of Habeck himself. As this would undoubtedly tend to “impede” his “official duties” in some way, by making him openly appear to all the world as the thin-skinned moron he so clearly is, is Habeck himself therefore not inadvertently now guilty of an offence of inciting serious hatred against himself under Section 188 laws? I do hope so.

Would Jew believe it?

The strangest thing of all about this whole affair is that it has been painted by the German State as being a highly important anti-Nazi operation. According to an excellent analysis by a (perhaps necessarily) pseudonymous German resident on the UK’s Daily Sceptic website, the raid on Niehoff’s house took place on the specific mid-November date it did in order to fit in with that day’s “11th Action Day Against Anti-Semitic Hate Crimes On the Internet”.

But how is calling Vice-Chancellor Habeck a moron anti-Semitic? He isn’t even Jewish. Well, earlier this year, Niehoff had posted another meme online, depicting a genuine 1930s Nazi SA man holding a placard saying “[Real] Germans don’t buy from Jews” to which the caption had then been added “True Democrats! We’ve seen it all before!” It was for this Niehoff was really being raided, it was said, the police just thought they might as well take the opportunity to persecute him for calling Habeck an idiot while they were already there, to save time.

Problem is, this isn’t an anti-Semitic meme at all. Notice the curious fact the post also features prominent full-colour images of yoghurt pots sitting on supermarket shelves above all the black-and-white stormtroopers in the lower photo. At the time Niehoff posted the images, some left-wing activists were demanding a boycott of the domestic yoghurt company Müller, after its owner turned out to be a friend of the co-leader of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) political party, who are supposedly a bunch of “Far-Right Nazis” themselves, at least in the view of certain left-wing German activists.

All Niehoff was doing was making an ironic joke, along the lines of “You lefties say the AfD are Nazis, but you’re the ones doing all the political boycotting these days, just like the Nazis themselves used to do, so you’re the real fascists here!” Admittedly, Niehoff’s comparison is wildly overblown and hyperbolic in itself, but it isn’t truly in any way motivated by hatred of Jews, as was being suggested by the authorities, is it? The reasonable suspicion of many observers was simply that the police were using this as a convenient excuse to crack down on dissenters by spuriously linking critics of the Greens, like Herr Niehoff, to the “Far-Right”.

As the current coalition government in Germany has just collapsed, by the way, Robert Habeck has just had the audacity to put himself up to stand as Germany’s next Chancellor. Hope he doesn’t win. The last time someone like him won that particular office back in 1933, the German State went crazy and started doing mad things like trying to get the joke-loving owners of “offensive” dogs arrested instead of performing more useful acts such as, oh, I don’t know preparing for a potential future war with Russia, maybe?

Heel, Habeck!

Is this a pattern which might be imitated by politicians where you live?  

AUTHOR

Steven Tucker

Steven Tucker is a UK-based writer with over ten books to his name. His latest, “Hitler’s and Stalin’s Misuse of Science”, comparing the woke pseudoscience of today to the totalitarian pseudoscience of the past, was released in 2023.

EDITORS NOTE: This Mercator column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.