This is complicity in genocide.

Independence doesn’t mean no bias. Also what outlet has no bias?

Look, like I repeated multiple times in this discussion, nobody is saying Germany is a totalitarian state. There are worrying signs. I get that in your immediate experience those might not be there. But lived experience is not a substitute for structural analysis. The article is not saying that they are pervasive, but that they are becoming more common and that’s alarming.

We are on the same side here: the side that wants Germany to be a free and democratic country. Sounding an alarm should not be cause for defensiveness but for vigilance.

I’m a dual EU-Canadian citizen. Canada is not an authoritarian country. However in the past few years, more and more, provincial governments are using a constitutional trick called the Notwithstanding Clause to push various political agendas without having to care about judicial oversight. If someone rings the alarm that this is an authoritarian tendency, a slippery slope that could fundamentally erode our rights as Canadians, should I start calling them anti-Canadian propagandists? Or should I take stock and weigh the danger and maybe use my position as a citizen of a democracy to make noise about it?

«The price of liberty is eternal vigilance» because democracies don’t fail overnight. They erode at the margins, starting with the people it is easiest to vilify. The time to speak up is not when repression becomes universal, but when it becomes noticeable at all.

I would assume the author focuses on them because they are retail facing and therefore somewhat vulnerable to consumer behaviour.

But for sure, any company profitting off of apartheid and genocide should be shamed.

What makes things worse is that such posts critical of Germany’s and Europe’s stance on rights violations often come from accounts praising China, Russia, and other autocracies for their politics. This is the case also here.

This is a blatant ad hominem attack here. I’m a bit flabbergasted at this kind of unfounded vitriol and smear, presented in such a passive aggressive manner. What are your receipts?

a cheap propaganda piece published via Substack

Zeteo is a real new media organization, with “Mostly Factual” rating on MBFC, only because of the reviewer’s perception that it does “one-sided reporting that can sometimes lack opposing counterpoints”, without any failed fact checks in its history. Their choice of publishing platform is irrelevant: as far as I can see in the sidebar, !europe@feddit.org does not have a rule about Substack, this is not !world@lemmy.world.

written by a person who runs a YT channel called “Mad in Germany.” This person has no idea what is going on in Germany.

Wrong: “James Jackson is a freelance reporter and broadcaster based in Berlin and covering news, business and culture in Germany and Central Eastern Europe for publications like the BBC, Sunday Times, Time Magazine and others. A former trainee at Deutsche Welle, he produced an award-winning documentary about the trans history of Berlin and is a Poland fellow of the International Journalist Programme.” That bio definitely does not scream “has no idea what is going on in Germany”. Source: https://www.madingermany.org/about

I don’t understand why such a post is not deleted.

So, first you call me a bootlicker of autocracies, then you ask for the post to be deleted. You are creating an extremely toxic discussion and at this point, I’m pretty sure you’ve broken Rule 3 of the community.

Beyond that, for what it’s worth: Your Ai Weiwei point also misses the point. A private magazine can decline to publish, but spiking a commissioned piece for its political content is still evidence of a chilling climate. The article’s core claims are about escalating repression, police violence at protests, and the narrowing of acceptable speech. These are contestable on facts, not on the author’s YouTube channel. If you think the claims are false, show counter-evidence on policing, on protest bans, on international warnings, and on the treatment of Palestine-solidarity voices.

Further, you are choosing to double down on your smear precisely in response to a comment where I very very clearly say “I agree, absolutely agree, that Germany has not crossed the line yet, but the line is getting closer, and pretending the raising of the alarm is the problem is exactly how democracies sleepwalk into disaster.”

Do you have anything to contribute beyond toxicity, smears and paranoia?

I hear you, and nobody is claiming Germany is already living under a totalitarian police state. Yet pretending the article says dissenters are immediately jailed is a misread, precisely the misrepresentation you’re accusing me of.

The article is documenting escalating repression, police violence against elected officials, chilling of speech, and a political culture that treats Palestine solidarity as criminal suspicion by default. You can choose to read it as hysteria, or you take the rise of authoritarianism world-wide actually seriously and read it as a useful warning.

Look at how UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese was smeared, disinvited from institutions, and treated as an existential threat simply for applying international law. That pattern should disturb anyone who cares about democratic norms.

And when people like @hendrik@palaver.p3x.de and @JensSpahnpasta@feddit.org and @Hotznplotzn@lemmy.sdf.org jump in all over this thread and call critical journalism “propaganda” and accuse me of “scrapping the web for negative news to spread [my] propaganda”, it kind of confirms the point, doesn’t it? Criticism of state violence is instantly pathologized and viewed with suspicion. If this is what’s happening on fucking …lemmy, I honestly am a bit uncomfortable about what it means for mainstream discourse in the country! And yes, I agree, absolutely agree, that Germany has not crossed the line yet, but the line is getting closer, and pretending the raising of the alarm is the problem is exactly how democracies sleepwalk into disaster.

Why would anyone install a proprietary freeware browser?

“The European Union should realise that Israel […] should be treated fairly”

Absolutely, 100% agree. Israel should be treated fairly, with entirely in accordance and respect to international treaties, international law, without double standards and without prejudice. You do the crime, your do the time, nothing less nothing more.

Now, where were we, the ICJ has ruled the occupation illegal and the system imposed as apartheid, has imposed provisional measures and is considering a genocide case. Oh and the ICC has some arrest warrants pending.

Fair is fair motherfuckers.

Lemmy Americans when the rest of the world warns them about authoritarian tendencies in their political system: “yea we know it sucks”.

Lemmy Germans when the rest of the world warns them about authoritarian tendencies in their political system: “you must be the victim of propaganda”.

One can’t be a Greek millenial and not have some idea.

I find problematic the framing of “scraping the internet for negative news to spread propaganda”. It is deeply bad faith and conspiratorial.

What do you mean “my rant here”? The text above is a reproduction of the paywalled article, not my composition.

I like you ask in hypotheticals.

Resist now.

Not properly fascist of course, but some very disturbing authoritarian tendencies have surfaced. It would be inconceivable until a few years ago that UN human rights experts would be wagging their finger at the Federal Republic of Germany. This is not normal.

Article beyond the paywall:

Two politicians from the Left Party were beaten by police at separate pro-Palestine protests in Berlin this month while acting as parliamentary observers. Shocking footage shows a police officer punching one female MP in the face, completely unprovoked. Another MP was beaten at another protest and arrested – despite parliamentarians having immunity in Germany. The police said, without presenting evidence, that the second MP had attacked them, which the lawmaker forcefully denies. This claim has been repeated in much of the media, despite the Berlin police being caught previously lying by an independent forensic investigation.

But even the self-censorship of the German media, which an analysis found used Israeli sources nine times more than Palestinian, isn’t enough for the country’s bloated antisemitism bureaucracy.

The federal commissioner for antisemitism, Felix Klein, who was silent when leftist Jewish activists had their bank accounts illegally frozen by the state, has now called for media organizations to have specific antisemitism officers whose role would be to point out that any atrocities that taken place in Gaza are the result of an “unprecedented” terror attack, ignoring that Israel has targeted civilians, journalists, hospitals, schools, soccer fields, entire families. The Far-Right Sets the Agenda

Much is made of the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), who now sit comfortably at the top of the polls and is set to sweep to majorities in state elections next year. And, once again, the German conservatives look on helplessly.

Though Chancellor Merz promised to halve the support of the AfD when he took over the conservative Christian Democrat party, their support has since more than doubled.

One recent study says that the approach of mainstream parties has been to let the far-right set the agenda by constantly talking about their favorite political battlegrounds of Islam and immigration.

In one particularly egregious example, Merz recently complained about the “city image” problem caused by migration, which caused outrage among liberal Germans. Some have even pointed out similarities between that and a statement by Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels, who said Jews ruined the “street image” of German cities. But Merz doubled down on the statement, saying “ask your daughters,” and a third of Germans afterwards told pollsters “people with non-white skin color or non-Christian religious clothing ‘disturb’ the city’s image in Germany. Given Germany’s history, that should disturb us all. Mounting International Criticism

The good news is that after two years, international institutions are finally beginning to watch and comment on police violence and repression in Germany.

UN experts forcefully called on Germany to stop repressing the Palestinian solidarity movement in a fresh statement. “We are alarmed by the persistent pattern of police violence and apparent suppression of Palestine solidarity activism by Germany,” the experts said. “Germany must support, not suppress, actions aiming to stop atrocity crimes and genocide,” the experts said. “No circumstances can justify unnecessary and excessive police violence or unjust criminalisation for exercising fundamental freedoms.”

And the European Commissioner for Human Rights visited Germany this month, also raising concerns about freedom of peaceful assembly and expression in the context of Gaza protests. He noted that “the distinction between what constitutes legitimate criticism of Israel and what constitutes antisemitic hate speech has become increasingly blurred,” leading to “undue restrictions of the right to freedom of expression.”

Palestine solidarity activists are frequently treated and portrayed as something closer to a marauding mob of violent Jew-haters than activists trying to stop atrocities. Their marches were frequently described as “Jew-hate marches” in newspapers owned by the Axel Springer media group, whose CEO was just given the Israeli Presidential medal of honor.

But a study showed researchers that participants at the largest ever German demonstration for Palestine in late September were “predominantly young, highly educated, and politically left-leaning.”

“While there was clear support for the recognition of a Palestinian state,” the study noted, “they simultaneously advocated for special protection of Jewish life in Germany.”

As a reporter, I frequently go to these demonstrations, and I’ve noticed that you are far more likely to meet Jews demonstrating for Palestine in Berlin than you are at the small pro-Israel counter demonstrations.

Will this mounting international criticism that they have gone too far in repressing democratic voices, along with the growing consensus that Israel committed genocide in Gaza, lead to a shift in the German elite? I won’t hold my breath.

“Facts are acknowledged partially, forgotten deliberately, or swallowed by collective silence. And so we repeat catastrophe – again and again, in cycles,” Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei recently wrote when he was commissioned by Germany’s Zeit Magazin to write about “what I wished I had known about Germany before.” After excoriating German self-censorship and conformism, he was, in fact, censored, with the newspaper spiking the commission.

As an activist from a group called Germans against Genocide told me, four consecutive German generations have been involved in genocide: supporting the Armenian genocide, against the Herero and Nama, the multiple Nazi genocides, and now supplying arms and diplomatic cover to Israel against the Palestinians. So what is German history, other than catastrophe, again and again?

James Jackson is a Berlin-based independent journalist and host of the Mad in Germany YouTube podcast.

All 30 if us who play it agree.

And because they are using it, you are saying that we should not talk about how some topics are becoming more and more taboo. You are making a meta-taboo, and that’s self defeating.

I’m not talking about some silly/dangerous “debate the fascists on the topics they choose” strategy of course. We don’t debate fascists, period.

I’m talking about the fact that the fascists always use a kernel of truth to spin their house of lies from. And that kernel of truth is that indeed the liberal mainstream doesn’t talk about certain things, with the brain-dead German mainstream consensus on denying the Gaza Genocide being a prime case study.

Thank you. A bad instinct is “why are you picking on me!”. A good instinct is “this is a useful case study for all to learn from!”.

And some statements are so ambiguous that they are ready to be used by the very enemies of democracy and freedom for their own purposes.

He called you out already: “When conversation becomes avoidance, when topics must not be mentioned, we are already living under the quiet logic of authoritarianism.”

The Franco-German rivalry I had in mind is much older. WW2 was the very final phase of it, but it is clearly present and recognizable at least as early as 1871, ie 70 years earlier, whereas the supposed chronology goes all the way back to the 1400s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French–German_enmity

Regardless, I don’t have the answer, obviously, but I wouldn’t underestimate the capacity of the Israelis and Palestinians to actually get to a (likely implicit/de facto) agreement of what they think is an acceptable answer. But for that, I would imagine serious external pressure to Israel would be needed, similar as the one exerted to the white Afrikaners…