Hate speech laws may seem absurd, but they do serve a purpose. Consider Germany, where a libertarian identified as Damian N. tweeted this:

No, anyone who is financed by the state pays no net taxes; they live off taxes: every civil servant, every politician, every employee in a state-owned enterprise, everyone who is subsidised and financed by the state. Not a single parasite pays any net taxes.

If bureauweenies tolerate complaints about the burden they impose on society, people might get restless. So the concept of hate speech is applied:

[P]olice acting on behalf of the Ulm public prosecutor’s office raided Damian’s home. He is suspected of the crime of inciting hatred (in violation of Section 130 of the German Criminal Code) for his rough remark about government “parasites”.

The statute is to punish those who incite hatred against “a national, racial, religious group or a group defined by their ethnic origin.” But once speech has been criminalized, anything you say might get you in trouble.

They demanded his phone and PIN and took him to the police station, where they measured him, weighed him, photographed him from various angles, and even took blood samples to get his DNA.

[A]n officer instructed our suspected speech criminal to “think carefully about what you post in future”, because “you must realise that you are now under observation”.

How did Josef K. I mean Damian N. come to the attention of the police?

This has all the hallmarks of another NGO-driven speech investigation. We have a low-visibility post containing a suggestive vocabulary item (“parasit“) that was likely uncovered via keyword search, a lazy attempt to find a distantly relevant criminal statute and then maximum police harassment and intimidation because, as in all these cases, the process is most of the punishment. They really, really like the 6am morning raids, and they also really like to confiscate phones. As the Lower Saxon prosecutor (and ‘online hate task force’ leader) Frank-Michael Laue told American reporters earlier this year: “It’s a kind of punishment if you lose your smartphone, it’s even worse than the fine you have to pay.”

At least soft tyranny is better than the Gestapo and Stasi. But soft tyranny doesn’t stay soft indefinitely. Unless people push back, there is no reason it should have to.

On a tip from seaoh.

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