Somewhere in Germany right now, someone is filing a complaint about this sentence.
Not because it contains anything illegal. That would be straightforward. No — because it contains something worse than illegal. It contains an opinion. And opinion, as we will see, is currently the most regulated substance in the Federal Republic.
There is a reliable test for whether an ideology can survive contact with reality.
Give it a debate.
Not a moderated panel. Not a carefully framed discussion where the right words have already been agreed upon. A real debate — two people, one argument, open questions, no script. If the idea holds, it holds. If it doesn’t, you find out in about ten seconds.
The current political-cultural left in Germany — and increasingly everywhere else — does not debate. This is not an accident and it is not cowardice. It is strategy. Because the moment the actual logic is spoken out loud, something happens that cannot be undone. The listener hears it. And once heard, it cannot be unheard.
So instead of debating, they do something more efficient. They change the words.
Freedom of Speech Must Be Protected from Those Who Use It
In Germany, Meinungsfreiheit — freedom of speech — is a constitutional right. Article 5 of the Basic Law. Not optional. Not conditional. A founding principle of the Federal Republic, written in direct response to what happens when a state decides it can determine what its citizens are permitted to think.
Fifty years later, the former editor-in-chief of ZDF — Germany’s principal public broadcaster, funded by mandatory household contributions — went on Deutschlandfunk and explained the problem with all this freedom:
„Freiheit ohne Grenzen, Freiheit ohne Verantwortung machen den Weg frei für Ausgrenzung und Hetze. So war es in der Nazi-Zeit, und so ist die Gefahr jetzt.”
“Freedom without limits, freedom without responsibility, opens the way for exclusion and hate speech. That is how it was in the Nazi period — and that is the danger now.”
Read that again slowly.
The editor of a major public broadcaster, on a public broadcast, explained that too much freedom of speech leads to the kind of thing that happens under totalitarian regimes that suppress freedom of speech.
The logic contains its own exit wound.
But wait — it gets more precise. The former Green Family Minister Lisa Paus commissioned a study which found that fewer and fewer left-leaning people dare to exercise their freedom of speech — because so many people on the right are exercising theirs. The Minister responded to this finding with what the German press described as legendäre Worte — legendary words. She announced she wanted to:
„dem Umstand Rechnung tragen, dass Hass im Netz auch unterhalb der Strafbarkeitsgrenze vorkommt. Viele Feinde der Demokratie wissen ganz genau, was auf den Social-Media-Plattformen gerade noch so unter Meinungsfreiheit fällt.”
“Take account of the fact that hate online also occurs below the threshold of criminal liability. Many enemies of democracy know exactly what still counts as freedom of speech on social media platforms.”
To translate the translation: legal speech is the problem. The fact that people are saying things that are technically permitted is precisely what requires intervention. Freedom of speech must be protected from the people who are, at this moment, freely speaking.
This logic would not survive ten seconds in a genuine debate. Which is presumably why genuine debates are no longer the preferred format.
The Ministry of Silly Complaints
The solution, naturally, was institutional.
If you cannot stop people from saying things that are legal, you create an apparatus that makes saying legal things feel sufficiently dangerous that most people will stop anyway. Enter the Meldestelle — the reporting office.
Monty Python, in their 1970s heyday, invented the Ministry of Silly Walks: a government department dedicated to the funding and development of silly walks, staffed by serious bureaucrats in serious suits, operating with the full procedural gravity of the British civil service. It was absurdist comedy. It was not meant as a blueprint.
Join our Telegram channel!
Want our newest articles delivered directly every day? Join the channel for effortless updates!
Join Now →Germany currently operates over fifty Meldestellen — taxpayer-funded online portals where citizens can report other citizens for speech offences that do not meet the threshold for criminal prosecution. Let that sentence breathe for a moment. Not illegal speech — that already has mechanisms. Speech that is legal, but that someone found objectionable.
These portals appeared, in the words of one observer, like poisonous mushrooms from the muddy soil of political correctness. They have reassuring names: REspect! Hessen gegen Hetze. They were enabled by the 2017 Network Enforcement Act, which one justice minister apparently believed would modernise civil discourse. What it actually modernised was the ancient practice of informing on your neighbours — now available, for the first time, via online form. No need to visit an office. No need to speak to anyone. A sarcastic tweet by your uncle at Christmas can find its way to a formal complaints register before the pudding arrives.
The Ministry of Silly Walks had a budget. These have fifty offices and a government mandate.
George Orwell, who wrote fiction, invented the concept of thoughtcrime — the idea that certain thoughts, regardless of whether they produced any action or harm, were themselves criminal. He intended this as a warning.
The Meldestelle doesn’t quite reach thoughtcrime. It stops just short. It contents itself with speech-below-the-threshold-of-crime. Progress.
The Blind Sharpshooter Problem
There is a thought experiment that has been circulating in German commentary — and it is worth pausing on because it illustrates the underlying logic with uncomfortable precision.
Suppose a blind man applies for a position as a sharpshooter in the Bundeswehr. He is rejected. Under contemporary anti-discrimination frameworks — specifically the concept of Ableismus, discrimination on the basis of disability — this rejection constitutes a failure to accommodate a marginalised individual. The fact that a sharpshooter who cannot see presents certain operational difficulties is, in this framework, not the point. The point is the exclusion.
The joke, of course, is that there is no joke. The framework genuinely cannot distinguish between arbitrary exclusion and exclusion based on direct logical necessity. Because the framework is not built on logic. It is built on the moral authority of the designated victim category, which overrides logical analysis in any given situation.
The ideal scenario, as one German commentator noted with perfect deadpan, would be a multiply-discriminated elderly Black lesbian in a wheelchair — when the perpetrator is a right-wing Ronny or Peggy from Saxony.
Doppelplusgut.
That last word is Orwell’s. From 1984. From the Newspeak appendix. It means doubly, maximally good — and it was invented to describe a language designed to make certain thoughts literally unthinkable by removing the words needed to think them.
The German commentator who used it was not being literary. He was being precise.
What Orwell Got Wrong
George Orwell published Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949. He got one thing wrong.
He thought Newspeak would be imposed by a totalitarian state through force and fear. What he did not anticipate was that it could be adopted voluntarily — enthusiastically — by people who genuinely believe they are protecting something. Who are convinced that the removal of certain words, the reclassification of certain speech as violence, the monitoring of expression below the criminal threshold, is not suppression but care.
This is, if anything, more difficult to argue with than a jackboot. A jackboot you can point at. A caring institution that has decided your legal speech is dangerous requires a different kind of response.
Which is perhaps why the people who built these institutions do not debate.
Debate requires that both sides accept, in advance, that the better argument might win. That the logic, when examined, might not hold. That the person across the table might be right about something.
If you have already decided that the other person’s speech is violence, and your silence is safety — the debate is over before it begins. Not because you won. Because you have removed the possibility of losing.
And that — not any particular policy, not any specific party, not any specific country — is the mechanism worth watching.
Because a mechanism, once built, does not stay in the hands of those who built it.
Who decides what is thinkable? And who decided they should be the ones to decide?
