The Irish writer C.S. Lewis had it right more than 50 years ago: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.” The line first appeared in a volume of essays called, God in the Dock. If you are familiar with Germany, as I am, go find that book and remember that line. Today the German state is screwing down censorship to silence the right-wing opposition, all for the good called “democracy.”
Germany’s Interior Ministry has now banned a right-wing media outlet that criticises its left-leaning government, in what some are calling the most aggressive move against press freedom since the Second World War. Suppressing opposition has long been a tactic employed by the Left, albeit usually with a certain amount of plausible deniability. The striking thing about this is how forcefully — how tyrannically — it was conducted.
Officers, some of whom were wearing balaclavas, raided the home and workplace of Compact magazine founder and chief editor Jürgen Elsässer in scenes reminiscent of Stalin’s purges. His assets, including his property and hard drive, were seized. The magazine website was taken down, and social media platforms as well as the official YouTube account were temporarily disabled.
Elsässer was not the only one targeted. All across Germany, employees’ private homes were raided. The outlets financial backers also had their assets seized and their homes raided. Was the presence of the mainstream media was a pure coincidence? It hardly seemed the fortuitous result of a happy chance.
brusselssignal.eu/2024/07/germany-democracy-seize-the-editor-his-property-shut-his-website/
The German authorities may have broken the law by banning the country’s most prominent hard-right publication, legal scholars have suggested.
Compact magazine, which had a circulation of 40,000 and reached hundreds of thousands more people over the internet, was shut on the orders of the national interior minister, who accused it of “stoking a climate of hatred and violence”.
Yet critics maintain that despite the magazine’s frequently xenophobic and extremist output, the prohibition was an unacceptable and possibly illegal limitation of press freedom.
Several experts on German law told LTO, a legal website, that the ban could be overturned by the courts. That is partly because it was based not on media law but on the law that governs associations, whose applicability to press outlets is a grey area.