It took a week for German authorities to admit Muslim rape gangs were running wild in the streets on New Year’s Eve, and the police are still mumbling about having insufficient resources to follow up on leads, but apparently they’ve got infinite resources to crack down on “hate speech” against the new occupants.
You’ve got to love how the Washington Post article on the new wave of censorship begins with an out-of-left field shot at a certain American political candidate:
Donald Trump may be testing the boundaries of tolerance on the U.S. campaign trail. But here in Germany, the government is effectively enforcing civility, taking aim at a surge of hate speech against refugees and Muslims.
As Western Europe’s most populous nation grapples with a historic wave of mostly-Muslim migrants, politicians and activists are decrying a rash of incendiary speech bubbling to the surface of German society. In a country whose Nazi past led to some of the strictest laws in the West protecting minorities from people inciting hatred, prosecutors are launching investigations into inflammatory comments as judges dole out fines, even probation time, to the worst offenders.
German authorities, meanwhile, have reached a deal with Facebook, Google and Twitter to get tougher on offensive content, with the outlets agreeing to apply domestic laws, rather than their own corporate policies, to reviews of posts.
The reason there is a wave of “incendiary speech bubbling to the surface of German society” is that “politicians and activists” are more interested in suppressing free speech than doing something about the violent gangs, and the only invader anyone talks about holding at the gates is Donald Trump. I hope nobody was expecting American companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter to stand up for American principles of free speech.
Exercising what remains of his speech privileges while they remain, one German complained on Twitter, “It’s not politically correct to say anything against migrants. We don’t have freedom of opinion anymore.”
The Washington Post counters with this unintentionally humorous line: “Proponents are hailing the government effort as a way to foment respect while also controlling the most savage voices in society.”
The “most savage forces” aren’t the rape gangs, you see, but the people who lose their cool while screaming at the authorities to do something about them.
Some of what the German authorities are cracking down on include threats of violence, and that’s fair enough, provided everyone’s threats of violence are equally cracked down upon. But the overall tenor of the censorship campaign is the forcible accommodation of a new demographic reality, an overwhelming surge of migrants from an alien culture (and a particularly unpleasant example of that culture, war-torn Syria) that no society could have expected to assimilate. Instead, Germany and other European nations will be made to assimilate to them.
The common citizens of Europe never voted for any of this, and they bitterly resent having the new reality imposed on them by elites. The big story across the developed world is the growing anger among populations who realize their expensive governments have failed at their most important task: the integrity of national borders. No other function of the State is so important, because invasion is a physical reality that trumps abstract talk of “rights” and “responsibilities.”
Once a few million new residents with no intention of compromising their own ideology are settled in, the universe of possibility for previous citizens shrinks, and much of what they might want to do becomes unthinkable. The politics and culture of the host country will change to agree with the new arrivals. Restricting speech is only the beginning of that process.
You can bet the amount of speech to be restricted will grow rapidly, and a growing number of angry citizens will be dismissed as “savage haters” with no legitimate role in public discourse. Yesterday’s out-of-the-mainstream views become today’s extremism, and tomorrow they’ll fall beyond the pale. Much political criticism of the government will be redefined as “hate speech,” and news that might fuel “right-wing anger” will be suppressed, as the true story of the New Year’s Eve wildings was kept under wraps for as long as possible. Victims of politically incorrect assaults will be told to lie back and think of unity.
The UK Telegraph ran a story on Thursday about German police suppressing reports of some Cologne rapists admitting to be Syrian refugees, with one of them saying bluntly, “I am Syria. You have to treat me kindly. Mrs. Merkel invited me.”
Apparently that doesn’t qualify as savage hate speech… but discussing it without exercising exquisite discretion, before the German government is ready for its citizens to hear the news, probably does.
The new wave of censorship is arriving on the one-year anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, commemorated by the Paris police shooting a suicide bomber dead. The Charlie Hebdo attack was not only the most effective act of freelance censorship in recent memory, but also a spectacular example of effective assimilation. Granted, it’s not the sort of assimilation France’s existing citizens had in mind. They thought the new arrivals would accept French and European cultural and legal norms, but instead the Charlie Hebdo massacre showed us how French and European culture are bending the knee to Islamic law.
Don’t believe me? Take a look at photos of all those “Je suis Charlie” demonstrations last January. What’s the one thing you do not see in any of them? Charlie Hebdo cartoons of Mohammed.
The magazine itself declared some months ago that it will no longer publish such cartoons. As Mark Steyn observed in his anniversary piece on the Charlie Hebdo massacre, television news shows across the Western world employ pixelated graphics, or even crudely jerk the camera away, to avoid broadcasting the Charlie Hebdo toons, or the Jyllands-Posten cartoons of Mohammed from a decade prior.
As mentioned above, the only person who might have trouble getting into Europe these days is Donald Trump, and the U.K. is debating a ban on his presence because he dared to question the wisdom of large-scale Muslim immigration. The citizens of a sovereign nation have an intrinsic right to decide how many immigrants they will allow, and from where… but if discussion of that right can be reclassified as “hate speech” and banned, it becomes entirely theoretical.
That’s one reason the United States has untold millions of illegal aliens – we’re getting close to a “hate speech” ban against using either of those words to describe them – plus a cabal of opportunistic politicians and business magnates using high-end visa programs to erase the American workforce. Alternatives have been declared unthinkable, and even complaints are unacceptable.
There is no question whatsoever that the censors are winning, and there’s really no doubt about which culture in Europe is stronger and more determined. Assimilation is a numbers game, a mathematical equation whose variables include population, passion, and time. The formula grinds relentlessly along in Europe.
Protecting saucy cartoonists and irreverent writers is too much work for the government… better to shut them up, in the name of “unity” and “respect.” Making the streets of German cities safe for women is too hard, and talking about what happened to them is a drag… easier for perky, upbeat mayors to hand out “survival guides” advising young frauleins to dress modestly and treat their new neighbors with submissive deference. Policing certain hostile districts is unpleasant, even dangerous work… better to stay away, and shout down anyone who dares to talk about the “no-go zones.”
The path of least resistance will be followed, and the assimilation formula will produce a new society, led by politicians who consider “hate speech” and provocative skirts small sacrifices for their benighted citizens to make on the altar of elite virtue. It’s not as if there’s any way to reverse the process leaders like Angela Merkel have begun, right? You can’t just kick those millions of “refugees” out of the country. Deportation is as unthinkable as effective border security, or robust free speech.
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