“Modern man has a fatal propensity for attempting to free himself of his own feelings of guilt, his own anxieties and terrors, by projecting them onto some scapegoat, some incarnation of absolute evil, which he burdens with all the sins, all the shortcomings that he cannot face within himself.” - Ernst Jünger, The Peace
Introduction
Hannah Arendt was a Jew who fled Germany in 1933 after being detained by the Gestapo. Settling in Paris, she was forced to flee again once the National Socialists invaded. As a philosopher mentored by two of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century—Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers—Arendt became great in her own right, and spent years of her life dedicated to exploring the phenomenon of totalitarian ideology.
In her 1951 work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt describes “the perpetual motion mania of totalitarian movements which can remain in power only so long as they keep moving and set everything around them in motion.” Over recent years, as many Western readers may agree, we have been experiencing such “perpetual motion mania”. Moreover, we have been experiencing it across fronts as seemingly disparate as social justice, environmental stewardship, and pandemic response: ‘All white people are racist and transwomen are women you far right working class scum’; ‘Eat vegan bug protein and give up your cars you Gaia raping science-denying parasite’; ‘Don’t question our Chinese Communist inspired lockdowns or the fact you need to partake in a Nuremberg defying medical experiment you granny killing conspiracy theorist’. Core components of this ideology include the weaponization of compassion related virtue, identitarian power hierarchies, aspirational victimhood and, perhaps most importantly, the use of scapegoats.
This essay uses Germany as a case study to look at this new totalitarian ideology. Part 1 will explore my labelling of this ideology, along with illustrating how it has manifested in German Covid response and aspects of environmental policy. Part 2 will explore how this ideology has had real world effects across Europe at large and how this is resulting in common sense political pushback. Part 3 will explore how this ideology is manifesting in quite a fascistic looking censorship regime in Germany.
My aim here is to avoid being alarmist while, at the same time, unapologetically keeping in mind that totalitarian concept creep is a very real and insidious phenomenon. Any honest historical read of 1930s Germany illustrates this quite clearly. This is why warnings by Jewish canaries in the coalmine are so startling.
Part 1
At a 2023 symposium in Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, entitled “Perils for Science in Democracies and Authoritarian Countries”, Professor Ute Deichmann issued a startling warning. In Science and the Ideology of Race in Western Democracies, Deichmann highlights how Western academia is increasingly abandoning equality of opportunity in favour of equality of outcome and, in doing so, elevating identity characteristics over merit: “A new maxim, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, puts ethnicity and gender before individual merit.” Most concerningly, Deichmann suggests this trend shares strong parallels with Nazi Germany because of “the introduction of race into academia”. In a more recent piece for Jewish magazine Tablet, Welcome to America’s Racialized Medical Schools, John Sailer describes how identity focussed psychosis is even taking hold in academic medicine. Sailer describes how policies based on DEI—Diversity, Equity, Inclusion—may sound benign in theory, but that they “promote a narrow set of ideological views that elevate race and gender to matters of supreme importance.” And that under “the banner of DEI, medical institutions that are supposed to focus on protecting human life are being sacrificed on the altar of the racialist ideology.” (In a piece for Heterodox STEM, I explored numerous such impediments to academic science in extensive depth.)
Unfortunately, the infection of academia and medicine with totalitarian identitarianism may come as no surprise to even a half attentive student of Nazi history. “On May 10, 1933,” wrote PBS News, “university students in 34 university towns across Germany burned over 25,000 books.” And it wasn’t just idealist young students who bought into the ideology. Later that year, in November 1933, nearly 900 educators—including Arendt’s mentor and lover, Martin Heidegger—signed the “Vow of allegiance of the Professors of the German Universities and High-Schools to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialistic State”. On the medicine front, Omar Haque and colleagues have described how “during the Weimar Republic nearly 50% of German physicians became early joiners of the Nazi Party, a greater percentage enrollment than for any other profession at the time, topping even lawyers and businessmen”. Elite education and social status are no indicators of immunity against totalitarian ideology. On the contrary, they may even indicate greater susceptibility to infection. In his increasingly important book, Free Speech: A Global History from Socrates to Social Media, Jacob Mchangama writes:
“Studies have shown that Nazi propaganda was most effective on young Germans—more impressionable, with little experience of living in a free society and subject to institutional indoctrination in schools and Hitler Youth organizations—and in districts where anti-Semitism was already prevalent before the Nazi takeover. On the other hand, the effects of propaganda targeting the population at large in the radio, cinema, and press seem to have been less significant, with the working class and Catholics proving most resistant to Nazi ideology.”
Worryingly, it seems the incorporation of identity based DEI into academia is occurring in present day Germany. A 2019 report by the European University Association described how “the Stifterverband — an organisation dedicated to the support of research, education and innovation — carries out ‘diversity audits’ which evaluate the activities and structures of universities with respect to diversity and also give advice and promote dialogue within the institution.” The report also describes how university leadership across Germany could use the Excellence Initiative—an initiative “which provides highly competitive funding to strategically develop universities”—as “an occasion to formulate the strategic objectives for equity, diversity and inclusion as part of the application for funding.”
Readers may recognize DEI nonsense as part of an identitarian ideology that, depending on who you talk to, has come to be known as “Wokeness”, or the “Successor Ideology”, or “Critical Social Justice”, or “Radical Progressivism”, or “Political Correctness Gone Mad”. In the European Parliament, this ideology was described, in convincing fashion, as “Maoism with American Characteristics”. However, in an essay for First Things magazine, R.R. Reno referred to this new totalitarian movement as the “Rainbow Reich”. In a more recent essay, Reno described how “the rainbow flag is the progressive battle flag. It is a divisive symbol, not a unifying one.” In the same issue Michael Hanby suggests that “the forces of a new totalitarianism, more total if less outwardly violent than the old, march under a rainbow flag rather than a swastika.” As someone who uses the Hitler Youth knife pictured above as a paperweight reminder on the ever-present danger of totalitarian ideology, this label resonates greatly. In Germany, even institutional Catholicism is submitting to the Rainbow Reich and, as George Weigel has suggested, is “hurtling into apostasy” as a result. Perhaps an image which has “caused anxiety” worthy of being arrested by UK police is apt at this point:
The weaponization of compassion related virtue found in DEI Wokism is also to be found in the totalitarian fervour of alarmist Climatism and puritanical Covidianism. René Girard pointed to this phenomenon as the reign of “victimism, which uses the ideology of concern for victims to gain political or economic or spiritual power.” George Carlin, with typically blunt erudition, famously said that “political correctness is fascism pretending to be manners.” Taken altogether, we see a weaponization of compassion related virtue which employs outward concern for victims in order to gain power and justify intolerance for non-conformity. Intolerance which, as we will see, begins to look awfully fascist. With the aim of capturing something usefully novel on a conceptual level, I have labelled this ideology Compascism.
Like Fascism, Compascism is an identitarian mind virus that can be recognized through its accusatory and divisive scapegoating of villains, and its zealous intolerance of dissent. Then in diametric opposition to Fascism, which was deliberately non-compassionate, Compascism can also be characterised by its weaponized aspirational victimhood, and its deference toward identitarian power hierarchies that have been inverted such that whoever collects the most victim points gets placed on the throne (more on this hierarchy below).
As concerning as Germany’s capitulation to Compascism is in general, capitulation on the Covid front is perhaps most alarming. This is because the Compascist response to the plague in Germany resulted in some concerning parallels to Nazi division of society into the pure volk in need of protection, and the impure cancers in need of cleansing from the social organism. In his collection of essays from late 2021, The Vaccine Moment, Paul Kingsnorth writes:
“I see that in Germany, politicians are also considering interning the ‘vaccine hesitant’, and are currently discussing forcing vaccination upon every citizen. By the end of the winter, says Germany’s bracingly honest health minister, Germans will be ‘vaccinated, cured or dead.’ There is apparently no fourth option.
They have been busy in Germany. Recently they put up fences in Hamburg to separate the Bad Unvaxxed from the Good Vaxxed at the Christmas markets. Outdoors. Perhaps they will also provide the Good people with rocks to throw across those fences. The mood certainly seems ripe. A cartoon recently published in the mainstream, high-circulation newspaper Frankfürter Allgemeine Zeitung featured a man sitting on his sofa playing a first-person shooter game in which the targets were unvaccinated people. The caption described it as “a big hit under the Christmas tree.”
Ha ha ha, I think. Germany. Fences. Internment. Forced injections. Armed police. Scan your code. Shoot the unvaxxed.
Ha ha ha.”
A December 2021 Guardian piece described how Angela Merkel announced “a lockdown of the unvaccinated”. Further, Merkel suggested that vaccination for those over 18 could become mandatory in Germany from February 2022. All this puritanical scapegoating was happening—I have argued at length in a December 2021 essay, Covid is Over—while it was scientifically clear that the vaccines failed to stop transmission of the virus, and that they were also having a disproportionately harmful effect on healthy young males in particular who were, it was also clear by then, at little risk from the actual virus. While these vaccine mandates were thankfully rejected a few months later, the fact that forcing experimental treatments onto people was even considered by German leaders remains hard to believe. After all, as medical ethicist Dr Aaron Kheriaty wrote in his book, The New Abnormal, it was the 1947 Nuremberg Code that enshrined the need for “free and informed consent of the research subject or the patient”. This ethical code was, of course, established in response to the Nazi atrocities which were, at the time, claimed to have been carried out for the greater good. Kheriaty writes:
“Fast forward to 2020. During the covid pandemic, the public health and medical establishment once again abandoned the principle of free and informed consent to advance a supposed greater good. Vaccine mandates, for example, forced individuals to take products authorized only for emergency use, and thus still experimental by [US] federal governments definition. Those claiming that these novel genetic therapies were no longer experimental because they had been given to millions of people only confirmed that this ongoing medical experiment was an enormous one.”
Also concerning because of economic realities that will impact Europe more broadly, is that Germany has for a long time been bending the knee on the Climatism front of Compascism. Professor Ralph Schoellhammer of Webster University of Vienna, Austria, has argued in Spiked that the “green elites are sabotaging Europe’s most powerful economy.” Schoellhammer described how Germany got a lucky break energy wise during the 2022-23 winter because of historically high temperatures which “significantly reduced the demand for gas needed for heating.” He then describes how, apart from hobbled industrial production, they have had huge increases in coal burning:
“To add insult to injury, in 2022, even Germany’s much-vaunted environmental goals have been missed. If Germany’s green zealots thought that sacrificing industry would be good for the planet, they were wrong. Coal, one of the most polluting energy sources of all, provided a vital lifeline in 2022, with Germany’s coal power output increasing by 20 per cent on the previous year.”
In a Pirate Wires piece from April 2023, Mike Solana writes of a decision so absurdly stupid that totalitarian capture genuinely seems the most simple explanation:
“Saturday, the German government closed its last four nuclear power plants, finally fulfilling Angela Merkel’s Fukushima-era promise to destroy her nation’s most abundant source of safe, clean, cheap power — in the middle of an energy crisis. To fill the giant hole in the nation’s energy portfolio, the famously “environmentally conscious” Germans will be burning more coal, a degree of stupidity almost impossible to fathom.”
Schoellhammer suggested in the pages of Unherd that the once massive German industrial economy “is on the brink” but explicitly states that Putin should not be blamed for this. “An ideological fixation on renewables,” he writes, “paired with the rejection of nuclear energy and an addiction to Russian gas, led to a focus on everything except the things that matter. … One can only hope that this clash with reality will put an end to a cognitive dissonance that could derail the entire European economy and, with it, the European project.” A more recent piece by Jeremy Warner in The Telegraph, The sense of decline in Germany is palpable, corroborates this sentiment with a rather bleak depiction: “A country famous for discipline and punctiliousness has given way to one of growing self-doubt, ageing infrastructure, crushing bureaucracy, and underinvestment in new industries where even the trains no longer run on time.”
All of this madness does, I believe, start to make more sense when we unpack how a Compascist lens demands we view the world.
Part 2
Compascism sees power differentials between identity groups as the fundamental lens through which to view human society, while also idolizing whoever has the most victim points which it calculates through an “intersectional” framework.
This intersectionality, in short, is a bastardized application of Matthew 20:16: “So those who are last now will be first then, and those who are first will be last.” In his revelatory book, Dominion, historian Tom Holland writes about the 2017 Women’s March. Holland describes the inverted hierarchy asserted by this intersectionality:
“Wealth and rank, in Trump’s America, were not the only indices of status. So too were their opposites. Against the priapic thrust of towers fitted with gold-plated lifts, the organizers of the Women’s March sought to invoke the authority of those who lay at the bottom of the pile. The last were to be first, and the first were to be last. Yet how to measure who ranked as the last and the first? As they had ever done, all the multiple intersections of power, all the various dimensions of stratification in society, served to marginalise some more than others…’Black women, indigenous women, poor women, immigrant women, disabled women, Muslim women, lesbian, queer and trans women.’ The disadvantaged too might boast their own hierarchy.”
Such a view of human relations—one that seeks to categorise individuals not as unique kaleidoscopic panoplies of virtue and vice, but through the lens of intersecting identity characteristics—leaves us open to the “fatal propensity” toward scapegoat projection described in Jünger’s epigraph above.
We have seen that such a hierarchy carries heavy social cost. For example, what are we to make of the bizarre stigma and accusations of “racism” or “xenophobia” encountered when questioning policy around reckless immigration into Europe? Such accusations abound in spite of the very real difficulty of integrating large amounts of people with extremely different views on how society should function. France for instance, recently looted and ablaze, has seen the highest rates of Islamist violence in the EU including teachers decapitated and journalists shot dead because of images Islamists didn’t like. England has seen a decades long “grooming-gangs scandal” involving thousands of girls being raped by men of immigrant stock which has been swept under the rug. “Over and over again,” writes Rakib Ehsan, “we have seen the same story unfold. Local councils and police forces, paralysed by the forces of political correctness and identity politics, have failed spectacularly to protect the children and young people in their care.” “Too often”, continues Ehsan, “politically correct identitarianism is getting in the way of protecting young, vulnerable members of the public.” The authorities, “fearful of appearing racist, did nothing.” And Sweden, writes Jacob Sundberg, “now has the highest rate of fatal gun violence in Europe.” Moreover, there is also an average of “one bombing a week in Sweden, with over 90 attacks involving explosives recorded in 2022 alone.” Unfortunately, the progressive cultural elites have been attempting to trivialize and downplay this violence because of its intersectional component:
“What’s more, it is sadly the case that this problem has emanated largely from immigrant communities – especially criminal gangs made up of foreign-born youths, as the Swedish police put it. This should not be used to indulge nasty anti-immigrant prejudices. The majority of foreign-born residents are not guilty of anything, and no social or ethnic group should be blamed for the actions of a very small number of people. Still, many Swedish commentators want to deny there is any problem at all, seemingly out of fear of encouraging the dark forces of the far right. This is a very dangerous approach.”
Such dangerous dismissal of reality becomes a tad more understandable, however, if we take seriously Holland’s argument on post-Hitlerian Western morality. Holland argues that the Nazi atrocities have given the West a “whole new post-Christian mythology”:
“Because the reason that we in the West regard the Nazis as more evil than the Communists, by and large, is because they practiced genocide for unacceptable reasons; for racist reasons; for reasons to do with contempt for the weak. And that in turn means that in a society that is increasingly turning its back on the Church, our horror at what the Nazis did give us a moral framework that remains Christian. So it’s a moral framework in which Hitler is the Devil, Nazis are demons, Auschwitz is hell. And if before the Second World War, people in the West would say ‘What should I do? I will do as Jesus did’, now when people say ‘What should I do?’, by and large people say ‘I will do the opposite of what Hitler did.’”
Perhaps it is no surprise then, if Holland is correct in the founding role of anti-Hitlerianism in present day Western morality, that Germany, with infamous Nazi guilt, has embraced this suicidal ideology. Unfortunately, Compascists are only partly doing the “opposite of what Hitler did.” As described above, they have inverted the identitarian power hierarchy from Nazi Fascism such that victimhood is a beneficial means of achieving status and influence. But just like Fascism, Compascism utilizes scapegoats and persecutes ideological dissent.
Compascism exploits a quasi-religious drive to present oneself as being as far away from Hitler and his regime as possible. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28) Compascist identitarian calculus, just like Nazi racial puritanism, explicitly disregards this radical teaching of St Paul’s: a teaching that grounds each person in cosmic equality. Compascism just so happens to disregard this foundation stone of individual dignity and sanctity in the name of anti-Hitlerianism: ‘All white people are racist and trans-women are women you far right domestic terrorist’. This anti-Hitlerian intersectional approach—one that relentlessly cries “WOLF!” when scapegoating even reasonable dissenters from the latest regime dogma as “far right” villains—also serves to ignore the dignity and sanctity of the individual. The problem, of course, is that if the public cannot offer functional dissent, they cannot offer informed consent to policies or the all-too-human politicians who make them. German dissident writer, Eugyppius, has described the monocultural state of much of the “democratic” West with some dreadfully accurate cynicism:
“Democracy is when you want what the late-stage liberal system wants to give you, and the system gives it to you. If you don’t want what the system wants to give you, your preferences are undemocratic and the system gives it to you anyway. You’re free to protest the things the system hates, but if you protest the system or any of its agenda, that’s undemocratic and you’ll be water cannoned to protect democracy. You’re free to believe in the principles espoused by late-stage liberal democratic politicians, but if you dispute them, you’re a danger to the free world and should be arrested."
At this point, sceptical readers may accuse me of crying “WOLF!” about the dangers of Compascism. They may accuse me of doing precisely as Jünger described and that I am attempting to free myself of my “own feelings of guilt,” my “own anxieties and terrors,” by “projecting them onto some scapegoat, some incarnation of absolute evil,” which I burden “with all the sins, all the shortcomings” that I “cannot face” within myself. To this accusation I offer two quick responses.
Firstly, to quote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from his book, The Gulag Archipelago, “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” My issue with Compascist ideologues is not that I think they are entirely evil, it is that their bizarre ideology deters them from acknowledging the possibility for evil within themselves, and hence the corresponding possibility for goodness within those they look to persecute and scapegoat.
Secondly, to quote the large crowd gleefully celebrating outside Sydney Opera House after the rape, butchery and murder of October 7th, “Gas the Jews”. Compascist ideology, in myopically demonizing white males, Christianity, and even Western civilization at large, has prevented us from effectively dealing with dangers presented by ideologies imported from outside the West such as worrying components of Islam. The irony here, of course, is that since October 7th, the personal impacts of anti-Hitlerian Compascism in the West have most strongly been felt by Jews. Bari Weiss and Oliver Wiseman of The Free Press, in an October 25th piece that opens describing how anti-Semitic graffiti was spray painted outside their offices in New York, provide some examples:
“A synagogue in Berlin was firebombed. In Paris, the door of an elderly Jewish couple’s apartment was burned; theirs was the only one in the building to display a mezuzah. According to London police, there were 218 antisemitic hate crimes reported in the capital between October 1 and 18, a 1,350 percent increase over the same period last year. Mobs across the world have gathered to cheer for Hamas’s barbarism. And, as we have reported, Jews have been intimidated and demeaned in American cities and on U.S. university campuses in recent weeks.”
Thankfully, pushback against Compascism has been occurring across Europe to various degrees. The Irish have delivered what I said would be “a long overdue two fingered salute to ruling elites” by emphatically rejecting politically correct changes to our Constitution. Portugal is seeing a swing to the Right with relative electoral success for the Chega party. Hungary and Poland have, in previously resisting immigration policy, been thorns in the side of the EU establishment for daring to assert their own national interests. In the pages of The European Conservative, Dieter Stein describes how Meloni’s right-wing coalition had been exceeding expectations in Italy, and that Spain, France, Sweden, Finland, and Austria had all been seeing upsurges in support toward the Right. Of greatest relevance here, serious pushback seems to be emerging in Germany with the farmers’ and tradesmen protests. Interestingly, the regime have been scrambling to distract the public from the farmers’ revolt as “German Chancellor Olaf Scholz calls for nationwide protests to defend democracy against the consequences of his own policies”. In terms of party politics, Stein writes how, despite the “relentless persecution and repression of non-conforming opposition movements on the Right in Germany”, the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party ranked third in the country (now commonly second with 21% or more support). Stein argues that the “resurgence of migration pressures” has been central to this:
“On the key issue of mass migration, Berlin has, for a long time, destabilised the continent by not acting decisively and preventing an effective system of border checks. Germany is still the magnet for immigration into the welfare system. The rest of Europe, especially the southern and eastern countries, was left to do the dirty work of checking the flow of migration at the outer borders—while being called racist for doing so.”
German “hyper-moralism”, he writes, has been “rightly identified by conservatives from other countries as the central problem of European politics.” German hyper-moralism seems to be so intense, so totalitarian, that supposedly serious people in the elite establishment are considering destroying German democracy under the banner of saving it. Eugyppius has described what I see as a predictable Compascist reaction to the rise of AfD support: “German media and political establishment ponder whether to ban the political preferences of a fifth of the population”. Eugyppius also described quite worrying violence toward and intimidation of AfD members which, even if one disagrees with everything they stand for, doesn’t bode well for the future of social stability or political freedom:
“On Friday night, the Augsburg AfD politician Andreas Jurca was beaten unconscious by immigrants in a targeted political attack, which left him with severe facial bruising and a broken ankle. . . . Hessen Antifa have also published the personal addresses of all AfD candidates for the state parliamentary elections in October. I doubt it is very easy to come by such information without help from the state.”
“The elites say they are defending democracy”, writes Fraser Myers about possible AfD banning in Spiked. “But their aim is to put troublesome voters back in their box. Make no mistake, the real threat to German democracy comes not from the populist right, but from an increasingly authoritarian establishment.”
Might the Compascist elites not use this as an opportunity to introspect, to self-reflect, and to discover why so many people are supporting AfD? Might they ponder their totalitarian Covid response, their self-annihilating green agenda, and what increasingly many Europeans perceive to be reckless immigration policy? Or the fact that, as Myers wrote, “according to recent polls, some 77 per cent of German voters feel they have no power over what the government does. It is this democratic deficit that is driving voters towards the AfD.”
Of course not. The deplorable scapegoats have been identified and the persecution must begin. Compascist scapegoating plays out most clearly, I believe, in attempts to control the expression of views unacceptable to the regime.
Part 3
There is no consent without dissent. If normal citizens of a democratic nation cannot have free and open discourse around relevant topics—regime preference and social pressure be damned—totalitarian forces are almost certainly at play.
Perhaps the prevailing feeling of enforced conformity is contributing to why, in the UK, despite a political and mainstream media landscape saturated with Rainbow Reich and climate-alarmist propaganda, the vast majority of people do not seem to be going along with Compascist nonsense. In an interview on the Maiden Mother Matriarch podcast, Professor of Politics at the University of Kent, Matthew Goodwin, describes how such “radical progressives” make up “only about 15%” of the UK population. He then describes how they are disproportionately powerful “because they’re very vocal, they’re very prominent on social media, and they’re also deeply intolerant of anyone who expresses a different view to their own, or who challenges what they consider to be sacred values.” “Often the moderates in the room”, Goodwin continues, “are basically silenced or stigmatized as being socially unacceptable or as having a discredited voice.”
In my home country of Ireland, hopeful resistance to Compascist “hyper-moralism” was revealed when Ben Scanlan reported for Gript that 73% of people did NOT support the new “hate speech” laws being foisted on us. Helen Joyce has described these laws as “literally Orwellian”. I fully agree. Jacob Mchangama has described how, historically, "the introduction of hate-speech prohibitions into international law was championed in its heyday by the Soviet Union and allies. ... The communist countries sought to exploit such laws to limit free speech." Hitler might even call “hate speech” laws a “big lie”:
“In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility … the broad masses of a nation … more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.”
Totalitarians of all stripes have known that they need to control the flow of information and stifle human expression in order to consolidate and expand power. The fact that free speech is central to resisting oppression is to be found nowhere more clearly than in the opinions of those who have lived under it. In a brilliant 2022 essay for Foreign Affairs, the aforementioned Mchangama used direct quotations to illustrate the importance of free speech to major pro-democracy leaders of the 20th century: India’s Mahatma Gandhi, South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, Czechoslovakia’s Vaclav Havel, and Poland’s Lech Walesa. Free speech is also, of course, absolutely fundamental for people living under the boots of tyrannical regimes currently:
“The importance of free speech in the digital space is clear to embattled pro-democracy activists in places such as Belarus, Egypt, Hong Kong, Myanmar, Russia, and Venezuela, where they depend on the ability to communicate and organize—and to the regimes of these countries, which view such activities as an existential threat.”
Should the fact that authoritarian regimes require censorship and suppression of heterodox viewpoints not incentivize us toward doing the exact opposite? If only. Mchangama describes how the informational policing in our own “liberal democracies” are making things worse for pro-democracy activists elsewhere:
“And when liberal democracies pass censorship laws or when Big Tech platforms prohibit certain kinds of speech or bar certain users, they make it easier for authoritarian regimes to justify their repression of dissent. In this way, democracies and the companies that thrive in them sometimes unwittingly help entrench regimes that fuel propaganda and disinformation in those very same democracies.”
“Threats to digital expression and Internet freedom are more pronounced than ever,” writes Sean Williams, quoting a UN special rapporteur. “Internet shutdowns have emerged as a popular means of information control.” Williams wrote that in Wired magazine about the 2020 protest movement in Belarus. He outlines the key role that communications app Telegram was playing in helping protestors organize despite internet clampdowns by Lukashenko, “Europe’s Last Dictator”:
“The “March for Freedom,” as demonstrators had labelled it, was the largest in independent Belarusian history. … But the march was unique for more than size alone. Opposition leaders were jailed, or in exile. Nobody led the crowd through Minsk’s vast, Olympian streets – at least, nobody in person. … Instead, as the demonstrators reached the memorial, they glanced at messages posted to Telegram, the encrypted messaging app that had become, amid a government-imposed internet blackout, Belarus’s leading source of information. Telegram wasn’t just broadcasting news. It was orchestrating the entire movement.”
Similarly, in a 2019 piece for the BBC, Danny Vincent described how Telegram also played a key role in the pro-democracy Hong Kong protests against Chinese Communist Party encroachment:
“Behind his laptop computer, Tony (not his real name) monitors scores of groups on private messaging app Telegram and online forums. … Organisers say volunteers like Tony are running hundreds of Telegram groups that are powering Hong Kong's protest turned civil disobedience campaign.”
Despite the proven power of Telegram to assist freedom seekers in resisting despotic oppression, German political leaders have called for its banning. If it is eventually banned, Germany will join Iran and China in having done so. Robert Semonsen, in a 2021 piece for The European Conservative, writes:
“High-level, establishment officials in the German government, all of whom outwardly extol liberal values like freedom of expression, have called for Telegram—the hugely popular encrypted messaging application—to be expunged from the Apple and Google app store, claiming that the app is a tool for radicalization commonly used to spread misinformation and incite mass protests.”
“What is spread on Telegram is disgusting, indecent, and criminal,” Semonsen quotes Federal Justice Minister Marco Buschmann as saying. “My wish is that we do not take a special German path, but rather create a common European legal framework that enables us to take action against hatred and agitation on the Internet”.
To be clear, I have little doubt that there is, in fact, a lot of very horrible and factually inaccurate content shared on Telegram. But this is no reason to ban it. Quite the contrary: I’d argue that the most important reason to keep it is its function as a tool for the public to share information regime elites don’t like, and to organize resistance against rule they deem unjust. Powerful institutions can always be captured or corrupted, and Germans should understand this better than literally anyone. The assumption that predatory figures will gain power eventually should be front and centre of their minds. After all, as I described when writing for Free Speech Ireland about “hate speech” laws in the context of Ireland's crazy new bill, it was the naïve assumptions of Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution—an assumption that pro-democracy leaders would always be in charge—that helped Germany fall through a “trapdoor” into Nazi dictatorship. Take whatever powers you want to hold over other people, and imagine those same powers in the hands of whoever concerns you the most. This is the essence of Predator Politics. Predator Politics is the opposite to Utopian Politics because it assumes the existence of psychopathy, narcissism, sadism, and other human traits which are generally problematic when given access to power. As a useful contrast to the Utopian Political assumption around human nature within the Weimar Constitution, the Constitution of the United States might offer us a good example of effective Predator Politics. While no system is perfect, a historical comparison would suggest that, at least so far, the checks and balances between various centres of power within the US Constitution do a much more robust job at constraining the darker aspects of human nature in a political sense.
Hatred exists, but people will not stop hating because of tyrannical speech restrictions. Deeyah Khan, a Muslim woman of Afghan and Pakistani heritage, has shown a much better way of dealing with hate. In meeting committed racists face to face and openly asking them about their hatred for people like her, Khan helped them to reveal to themselves the shallowness and inhumanity of their preconceptions. Darryl Davis did something similar. A black musician who befriended Ku Klux Klan members, Davis is responsible for hundreds of them leaving the organization. Importantly, neither Khan nor Davis could have done what they did if the US didn't have free speech protections. I don’t, however, think that dealing with hate on a human to human level is even remotely on the horizon of options for Compascist tyrants who want to control human expression and inquiry. In his deeply insightful and prescient book, The Revolt of the Public, Martin Gurri writes:
“Their hope is to silence the public, not persuade it. Hillary Clinton ran for president on a promise to keep the deplorables in their place. Angela Merkel clings to office to suppress the secret Nazi inside every German voter. Europe’s hate-speech laws ban conversations that are offensive to the elites.”
And so, when it comes to the Hitlerian “big lie” of Soviet Union championed “hate speech” laws, I agree with journalist, author, and free speech activist Michael Shellenberger when he suggests that Elites Manufacture Fake “Hate” Crisis As Pretext For Mass Spying, Blacklists, And Censorship. Regarding the current “perpetual motion mania” in Hannah Arendt’s homeland, Shellenberger writes:
“Germany is leading the West into a totalitarian future. Currently, the government is investigating 8,500 cases of wrongspeech and, according to the New York Times, “more than 1,000 people have been charged or punished since 2018.” … The government has brought charges against citizens for mere insults. “The police have raided homes, confiscated electronics, and brought people in for questioning,” reports the Times. … “We are making it clear that anyone who posts hate messages must expect the police to be at the front door afterward,” said the head of Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office last year.”
Tyrants require villains and crises in order to justify expansions of power and control. "The whole aim of practical politics”, wrote H.L. Mencken, “is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary." A prime example of German “practical politics” of late, is the persecution of playwright and essayist C.J. Hopkins. Matt Taibbi has described in Racket News how Hopkins “has been placed under investigation by a Berlin prosecutor for tweeting an image of his book, The Rise of the New Normal Reich. A scathing criticism of global pandemic policy, his cover features a white mask with a white swastika you have to squint to see”. Taibbi explains:
“According to German authorities, the author through this image is “disseminating propaganda, the contents of which are intended to further the aims of a former National Socialist organization.” … the Nazi imagery in C.J.’s book is used to make a satirical point. … One thing The New Normal Reich is not is a celebration of Nazi imagery. Hopkins is taking current governments around the world that used the pandemic to assert sweeping power and comparing them to Nazi rule.”
By persecuting a writer who compared aspects of extant political regimes to totalitarian Nazism of the past, German authorities have proved his point. And if this investigation wasn’t bad enough, as I have detailed for Gript, they have not only given him a punishment order of 3600 euros or 60 days in jail, but have since then gone about issuing yet another prosecution for the apparent crime of re-posting the images he was initially being investigated for. Even worse again, after Hopkins was finally acquitted by a Covid-mask wearing judge in January, the authorities have since appealed the decision thereby dragging Hopkins back into the courts:
“So, the German authorities have filed an appeal to overturn my acquittal in criminal court last week. Apparently, their plan is to keep putting me on trial until they get a judge who is willing to convict me of something, or to bankrupt me with legal costs. Silly me, for a moment there, I was actually starting to believe this was over.”
This is what passes for “democracy” in the Federal Republic. “What’s more dangerous than outlawing hate speech?”, asked Taibbi? “Giving someone the authority to define hate speech.”
Further, even if there were an actual “hate crisis” worthy of real concern, historical precedent suggests that a censorial approach will backfire terribly. In his truly excellent aforementioned book, Free Speech, Mchangama describes the counterproductive censorship regime that took place in pre-Nazi Germany. Hitler, for instance, was for a time banned from public speaking in a number of states only for him to conclude that it was “a net benefit, boosting his fame and popularity.” To the “many Germans who had lost faith in the authorities of Weimar Germany . . . convictions for speech crimes became badges of honour.” The banning of Nazi publications also helped increase Nazi support due to the “Streisand effect”. Mchangama summarizes the counterproductive failure of censorship in preventing the capture and consolidation of power by Nazis:
“the fact that the Weimar Republic unsuccessfully tried to stem the tide of totalitarianism with illiberal laws of increasingly harsh censorship should at the very least give pause to those who demand that democracies today must also sacrifice free speech to counter organized hatred. So should Hitler’s use of Weimar Germany’s illiberal precedents to destroy the democracy they were supposed to protect.”
A more perfect illustration of good intentions paving the road to Hell is hard to fathom. Mchangama also highlights that victory was achieved over communism—an ideology whose “global spread, duration, and death toll” has “exceeded that of fascism and Nazism”—without most liberal democracies needing to resort to compromising free speech, the “most democratic freedom of all”. That people in the present day seem Hell bent on repeating such glaring mistakes of the past is a sign of hopeless naiveté, predatory malevolence, or both.
Conclusion
Hannah Arendt would be horrified. Germany seems to have escaped Third Reich Fascism only to surrender, just a few generations later, to Rainbow Reich Compascism. On an ice cold intellectual level, it is intriguing to observe a divisive and accusatory new ideology gaining traction in a country so blatantly scarred by the touchstone of totalitarian regimes. Though on a boiling hot emotional level, a bleak question begs: if even Germans haven’t learned from the dangers of totalitarianism, what hope have the rest of us?
In concluding The Peace, during far darker days than our own, Ernst Jünger suggested that “the individual tends to underestimate the importance of the role assigned to him”, and that “each one of us is like a light which as it grows overcomes the surrounding gloom.” Perhaps then, if Jünger is correct, it may be through the sort of spiritual undertaking that frees us from susceptibility toward the scapegoat projection required by Compascism, that hopeful illumination is to be found.
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So much truth! With family in Germany that we have visited regularly since 1977 we are witnesses to the changes/move back toward totalitarianism you have written about so well! We also witnessed the early total “buy in” of the medical community to the Covid response. Praying for the speakers of truth to continue to hold the line. Excellent article. Well done!
Compascism: This is termed "culture of victimhood" by some, and "identity trap" in the Yascha Mounk book. All describe the identitarian intersectionality framework in which the elevation of "marginalized" groups is the sine-qua-none of moral & social justice. Those who adhere to this culture of victimhood have left behind the "culture of dignity" in which individual effort is rewarded.