The German liberal elite ambling in their walled garden of free speech

Soren Kierkegaard

Once you label me you negate me.

Soren Kierkegaard

"Facebook needs to do more than before, so that its platform is not a playground for right-wing extremists", German Minister of Justice Heiko Maas said to the Bild newspaper.

Freedom of expression is a "valuable asset", the Minister said. He added: "However, the Internet is not a lawless area where racist agitation and criminal utterances may be spread uncontrolled."

Interesting how the able minister, who has not spent a single day in his life as a lawyer, equates right-wingers and people with other opinions with extremists, racist agitation and criminal utterances. As if his own coalition party and ordinary bourgeois people would not hold and publicly express such views. Why else are the comments functions disabled on websites of German news websites?

Here is the Minister for Family Affairs, blonde Manuela Schwesig, aka 'Küsten-

Heiko & Manuela, ready to pounce on free hate speech

Barbie':

"Hatred is not an opinion. Neither on the Internet. With the 'No hate speech' campaign we in Germany want to set another example against hatred and violence. We want to support the people to engage themselves for democracy and to fight against hatred and discrimination - online and offline," said Manuela Schwesig.

If hatred is not an opinion, why bother? Of course, the sentence is plain nonsense. When somebody is called an asshole, that is without doubt an opinion. Whether it is true or false, is a different matter.

Let's listen in to an interview between Yasmin Nair and Walter Benn Michaels:

YN: Hate crimes...

WBM: Complete  bullshit.

Both ministers are united in one desire, to have such opinions deleted from Twitter and Facebook in order to create a clean environment. An environment with attuned people that "engage ... for democracy and to fight against hatred and discrimination". An environment in which the IDENTITY of a refugee is created, attended to and celebrated. Untainted, pristine and resting in itself. This self is the self of inequality and nobody is nor wants to be bothered by this. The proponents of free speech are indifferent to it. They strive for an antiseptic communication.

While they correctly see the impetus of the German government's 'No hate speech' campaign as an assault on free speech and celebrate their intellectual prowess as proof of their noble intentions, they are nonchalant about the plight of the refugees. It is free speech they pay obeisance to. This is their holy right, their altar, while at the same time humanitarian thoughts and compassion fall by the wayside. The neoliberalism of the ego.

Here again Walter Benn Michaels.

YN: You  write  in  your  book,  “The  preferred  crimes  of  neoliberalism are  always  hate  crimes;  when  our  favorite  victims  are  the  victims  of prejudice,  we  are  all  neoliberals.”  What  do  you  mean?

WBM: You  and  others  have  analyzed  the  various  practical  ways  in which   hate   crimes   laws  perpetrate   or  extend   inequalities   that already  exist.  I  think  that  analysis  is  totally  convincing.  But  my  own opposition   is   somewhat   more   primitive:   that   hate   crimes   are precisely  defined  as  crimes  of  identity. The  biggest  of  all  hate  crimes  in  our  culture  is  the  Holocaust.  The point  of  course  is  not  to  defend  the  Holocaust  but  to  suggest  that the  murder  of  six  million  people  is  sufficient  unto  itself  as  a  crime. The first point is that it’s not as if we want to legitimate these crimes. 

The second point is that insofar as we make hate crimes foundational for us, we end up imagining the just society as a society without hatred, without prejudice. My argument is not for prejudice; only that the elimination of prejudice has nothing to do with the elimination of exploitation. And that insofar as we focus on the idea of social justice as the elimination of prejudice, with hate crimes being a kind of ne plus ultra of that form, what we are doing is focusing on something which, even if we should succeed, would make no difference whatsoever in the principal inequalities that currently confront us.

That should give the nobly-intentioned liberals enough food for thought. Fighting the ban of hate speech is all about having a good conscience while disregarding inequalities in society. Guaranteeing those disadvantaged their identity means safeguarding them from so-called ill speech/hate speech and keeping them on their predetermined rung on the ladder of society and the economy. A cynical indifference in a walled garden of good conduct.

What both ministers unite is their complete disregard of the inequality of these people the hatred is directed at, while being naive about the origin of the perpetrators of hate crimes.

YN: It’s  also  true  that  poor  white  people  are  often  held  as  the  most phobic  and  hate-prone.

WBM: Let’s  say  for  the  sake  of  argument  that  poor  white  people  are more  characteristically  racist  and  homophobic  than  middle-class white  people.  Let’s  say  for  the  sake  of  argument  it’s  true.  The argument  here  is  not  to  defend  their  homophobia,  or  their  racism; it’s  not  defensible.  But  my  deeper  argument  is  that  they  are  not  the enemy.  That  is  to  say,  if  you  turned  the  world  into  a  world  where  the elimination  of  prejudice  is  the  sole  desideratum  then  you’ve  got  a face-off.  Between  the  upper-middle  class,  committed  to  its  own sense  of  virtue,  which  is  completely  tolerant  of  the  inequalities  which make  poor  white  people  poor  and  completely  intolerant  of  the racism  and  sexism  that  poor  whites  exemplify. 

Denouncing and banning free speech, err, hate speech to bask in a virtuous circle of life, while shoving the fact of inequality under the carpet. Indifference to economic inequality and to guarantee the disadvantaged their identity lays the groundwork for their future status in society as a dependable and frugal source of cheap labor, with state-guaranteed dignity. Unless they get deported.

The  liberal  elite  that conservatives  criticize  really  does  exist.  It’s  an  elite  whose  liberalism consists   in  its  opposition  to  discrimination,  in  its  cultivation  of identity,  and  in  complete  indifference  to  economic  inequality.  So,  for the   liberal   elites,   the   poor  whites  are  the  people  they  love  to hate.  And  the  liberal  elites  are  the  people  the  poor  whites  love  to hate.  If  the  liberal  elite  began  to  think  of  its  liberalism  as  a  challenge to  its  elitism,  we  would  have  a  different  world.  A  world  where  the goal  was  not  to  diversify  the  elite  but  to  eliminate  elites.  Whereas now  we’re  just  diversifying  the  elite. 

It is exactly for this purpose that the German government has turned to the Bertelsmann company Arvato and the notorious Amadeu Antonio Foundation, whose chairwomen is an ex Stasi member like her late father, to go against, what they consider to be, hate speech.

How identity is celebrated and cynically utilized and conveniently discarded is shown by the Amadeu Antonio Foundation, which seems to be a financially pretty successful investment fund. Here is an excerpt from the German Wikipedia page (there is no English version!). Please note that his last name is Kiowa. That probably had too much of an African ring to qualify for inclusion in the name of the foundation.

Kiowa left behind his pregnant girlfriend Gabriele Schimanski. Their son was born on January 9, 1991, the same day, Kiowa's corpse was transferred to Angola. There Antonio was buried in the cemetery of Sant'Ana in Luanda. Since September 3, 2011 decorated with a wooden cross be previously covered only by earth grave. Antonios wife and son hostilities were suspended in Eberswalde other, so among other things, the pram was daubed with swastikas and later destroyed. Gabriele Schimanski died in 2015. The cause of death is unclear.

The mother of Kiowa, who belongs to the people of the Bakongo, lives with her family in the slums Rocha Pinto in the Angolan capital Luanda. For the funeral, and repair of the tomb of her son there was in 2011 an appeal, in which the mother could be handed over 1,500 euros. Whether a promised financial support for the family that had decided in 1990 the Eberswalde council, has been received by the members, is currently being investigated. To demonstrate the relationship between Antonio and his family undoubtedly, his mother was a hair sample for genetic matching from. In addition, the Eberswalde council decided on 30 September 2011, the Antonios family occasion of the 20th anniversary of the death to send 5,000 euros support performance.

(Google translate)

Read also: Adolph Reed: Identity Politics Is Neoliberalism