In Germany, Jokes are Criminal

The “Ausländer raus” controversy has proven that the German government has no tolerance for humor, especially when it pokes fun at the failings of the establishment.The phrase, which translates to “foreigners out” in English, often comes out when Gigi D'Agostino’s song “L'Amour Toujours" plays, usually at parties or clubs. Typically, everyone involved is drunk. The song plays, and, sometimes, a party’s attendees will, jokingly or not, start the chant. It’s similar to “build the wall” or “lock her up” or “Christ is king” in America. Obviously, the chant has political connotations. Saying you want foreigners out of Germany means that you probably don’t oppose efforts to remove illegal migrants from Germany, for example. Of course, six beers into a party, people aren’t pondering the intricacies of immigration policy. They are having fun, and saying edgy things is funny. Pretty much any reasonable American will understand this, regardless of their party. People laugh, the song is catchy, and they move on. Germans are much the same regarding jokes, as are most functional human beings.Germany’s government, however, has no patience for laughter. That someone, somewhere, would repeat a popular joke drunk at a party constitutes a threat to Our Democracy so profound that it necessitates the weaponization of all state and party infrastructure. A few days ago, a video surfaced of a small party on the island of Sylt where the existential threat to democracy appeared. At the bougie bar “Pony” on the island, young revelers sing the song for a few seconds and move on with their lives.The democracy, however, could not stand this serious attack on the nation of Germany. In the words of German news source Bild (translated from German, as are all quotes in this article), “It is still unclear who the Nazi screamers are. In the meantime, the police have been called in.”When the bar got pushback for political controversy on their property, the manager obviously realized that his guests had risked the ire of their police state: “When I saw the video, I immediately thought it couldn't be true.” The manager continued that he would see whether they had the option to file a criminal complaint against their customers, and encouraged anyone else who listened to do the same. To Americans, this idea is absurd. Calling the police on someone for a joke, and a relatively mild joke at that, would probably get the caller ostracized from their social circles, and when the police showed up to the slightly offensive joke, the officers would likely point and laugh at you for your pettiness. College campuses have speech codes, but even in the leftist hives of academia, those codes are enforced institutionally – calling law enforcement to handle mean words could even be considered violent racism. In Germany, as we will soon see, it is necessary to comply with the decrees of the Party.Soon after the bar’s denouncement, Bild doxed one of the revelers. She worked for a fashion influencer who was herself a migrant to Germany. The employer immediately fired her for the joke. As she herself had a following of hundreds of thousands, this action escalated the situation further, and the video “left the whole country speechless.” The shocked people of Germany had never once heard this before. This is why Gigi D’Agostino himself had even stated that he miraculously knew nothing of the joke. The music publisher had even filed a criminal complaint on the matter, evidently just for the fun of it, since nobody had heard this before. With so much attention on the incident, one could only wonder as to the shock and horror of being exposed to harmful thoughts. The answer? Germany has thought police, and jokes are not just funny: they are criminal thoughts.Following the bar Pony’s recommendations, numerous Germans definitely motivated by passionate anti-racism and absolutely not fear of state surveillance and punishment forwarded tips to police. The local police of Schleswig-Holstein began investigating the video and those inside it for alleged incitement to hatred, which could also spread to anyone in the given vicinity of the joke, lest they also possess “unconstitutional” thoughts. The police have also begun an investigation into license plates in the area, in case their numbers hint at unconstitutional memes. Once the police became involved, things escalated even further.Undeterred by Germany’s issues with migration, energy instability, wavering infrastructure, economic decline, rising crime, civil discontent, or anything of actual note that they have failed to address, the German government decided that this meme at a local bar merited full national attention. The leader of the Green Party, the German Federal Commissioner for Migration, Refugees, and Integration, and other members of the ruling “Stoplight Coalition” of the Social Democrat (red), the Greens (green), and the Free Democratic Party (yellow) all denounced this joke, which, again, nobody in Germany had ever heard before. Even the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) Prime Minister of the Schleswig-Holstein state government demanded “full severity of the rule of law” against the jokes. Without delay, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz cleared their schedules to deliver an important address on government priorities: “Clearly, such slogans are disgusting, they are not acceptable…all our activities are aimed at preventing this from becoming a thing that spreads.” The ruling coalition was tripping over itself to reassure the population that they were safe from unconstitutional jokes.Just over two weeks ago, eight Jehovah’s Witnesses, including a baby, were slaughtered in a mass shooting in nearby Hamburg. Germany has some of the strictest gun laws in Europe. Chancellor Olaf Scholz replied that his thoughts were with the victims, but after his remarks, the public largely moved on from the story.It’s easy for Americans to look at Germany’s free speech crackdown and scoff at the hypocrisies of a fellow “democracy,” but America is not so different. Yes, the First Amendment protects the rights of Americans to laugh and poke fun at the inane policies of the orthodox Left but it has provided no cover for Americans burned at the stake by the cancel culture mob. You won’t be put in prison for a racially tinged joke, but you will be doxxed online, fired from your job, and ostracized from civil society. Ultimately, the difference is negligible. Instead of the government enforcing the consequences of hate speech directly, an apparatus of far-left activists and journalists are mobilized to shut down dissent on behalf of the regime. Coupled with social media censorship, private citizens are unable to laugh at the modern ironies of a declining Republic. No different from Germany, provocative humor is deterred and relegated to the margins of society. The difference between America and Germany is that you will be punished by Black Twitter instead of the Stasi. While America’s Overton Window remains more open than Germany’s, Americans should look at the present state of Germany as a cautionary tale for the future.The current German ruling coalition is a clear warning of the Kafkaesque monster that emerges when things go wrong. When polled, the vast majority of Germans agree that their government is a failure. The Stoplight Coalition is projected to win barely a third of voters in the next election. For comparison, no incumbent American presidential candidate has ever lost by that margin. Democrats poll better in deep-red Alabama than their coalition polls nationwide. The German consensus is that they are a dumpster fire. Instead of trying to fix the situation at the heart of the issue, the deluge of migrants which threatens the native culture of German citizens by means both legal and illegal, the party’s focus is on investigating millennials for making off-color jokes.