Police in Baden-Württemburg break up a perfectly legal private political meeting and ban Martin Sellner from an entire town……
Sun 4:33 pm +01:00, 4 Aug 2024 in this, the best and most democratic Germany of all timeNothing threatens German democracy more than our rights to free expression and assembly. If our constitutional order is to survive, our constitutional freedoms must be abridged.
The past four years have been a very amazing time in Germany – a time in which I’ve learned many new and exciting things about my country. For example, I’ve learned that the state can use emergency provisions to literally house-arrest its entire population indefinitely. I’ve learned that our politicians can forbid protests on the slightest pretence, that they can conduct a public hate campaign against millions of their own citizens who refuse to comply with nonsense hygienic measures, and then after the hysteria has passed, use the towering indifference of a complicit media to impose an enduring regime of near-absolute silence upon their misdeeds. I’ve learned that the Interior Ministry and its enforcers can pursue those who “mock the state” as they would organised criminal gangs, that they can ban entire newspapers overnight and without a scintilla of due process, and that state politicians can ignore their statutory obligations to neutrality in the exercise of their office and call for nationwide regime-sponsored protests against their political opposition. Almost every day is a learning experience in this, the best and most democratic Germany of all time. Rarely does a week pass that I don’t learn something entirely new. Today, I learned that the German police in Baden-Württemberg can use an obscure aspect of their statutory authority to ban individuals from entire municipal districts. All they need to do is claim these individuals have the potential to commit a criminal offence. They don’t need to have a good reason; they can just show up at your pub or your apartment and demand that you leave. This is an incredible power, as it would seem to vitiate entirely and at the very least whatever it is that remains of our rights to freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, freedom of association and freedom of movement (Articles 5, 8, 9 and 11 of our Basic Law). From the deutsche-presse agentur, via Welt:
Sellner has been a target of political hysteria in Germany since the false scandal surrounding his talk in Potsdam in January – a scandal that was likely stirred up with the assistance of domestic intelligence, for the purpose of smearing Alternative für Deutschland as dangerous right-wing extremists ahead of the European elections. Authorities in Potsdam previously tried to ban Sellner from entering Germany for a period of three years, but their order was reversed by the Potsdam administrative court, and so now our hysterical schoolmarms are trying out different methods to forbid the speech that so terrifies them. In this video (source) we see a whole troop of riot police entering the venue where Sellner was speaking yesterday … … and here (source) we see the police stopping Sellner’s reading and issuing him the ban. Sellner and his audience call their actions a scandal while they march him out: I reviewed the subject of Sellner’s talk – his book on Remigration – back in March. It contains nothing that is remotely illegal, but because mass migration has become one of the most sacred political doctrines of the Federal Republic, the schoolmarmocracy are determined to suppress his critique anyway. Of course, they’re too stupid to see that their hysteria serves merely to drive more attention to Sellner’s political programme, and that at this point they’re basically running a guerilla marketing campaign for his book. That’s little comfort if you take the longer view. The state are developing legal tactics in the course of this false controversy that I fear they’ll begin to deploy far more widely against their critics. |