"The Hate-Crime Commissar of New Normal Berlin" by CJ Hopkins

 

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Source: CJ Hopkins

e The Hate-Crime Commissar of New Normal Berlin CJ Hopkins Sep 15   READ IN APP   The column you are about to read is a “hate crime.” Or, rather, an alleged “hate crime,” as I believe my attorney would like me to put it. We’re still sorting that distinction out in criminal court. Or, rather, we are about to sort it out again, on September 30, in Berlin Superior Court. We already sorted it out once, in January, in District Court, where I was summarily acquitted, following which, for a few weeks, it wasn’t a “hate crime.” But the Hate-Crime Commissar of New Normal Berlin wasn’t happy about that verdict, so she appealed to have it overturned, whereupon it became a “hate crime” again, or an alleged “hate crime,” or whatever it is, currently. OK, I’m going to go ahead and re-perpetrate my “hate crime,” or alleged “hate crime,” or whatever its legal status actually is at the moment. I want to get that out of the way now so I don’t go off on a tangent and forget to do it later. If you don’t want be a party to that, this would be the time to click away. Still with me? OK, here comes the “hate crime” … There you go. That’s my “hate crime” … those two Tweets from 2022, criticizing the Covid mask mandates. I’m not going to bother translating them again and going over all the details of my prosecution. I have done that ad nauseam. There is only so much repetition my regular readers can take. If you’re unfamiliar with the background of my case, you can read about it in The Atlantic, Racket News, Berliner Zeitung, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Multipolar, Weltwoche, Sky New Australia, Epoch Times, Discourse Magazine, and assorted other outlets, or you can watch this video by The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or refer to this chronological fact-sheet I published in a recent column. Instead (i.e., instead of reciting all the details of my prosecution again, like late Lenny Bruce reading his trial transcripts onstage, which, I promised I was really going to try not to do that), let me introduce you to Frau Ines Karl, the Hate-Crime Commissar of New Normal Berlin. That isn’t her real title, of course. Her official title, in German, is “Oberstaatsanwältin als Hauptabteilungsleiterin der Zentralstelle Hasskriminalität Berlin,” which basically means “Senior Public Prosecutor and Head of the Berlin Central Hate Crime Office.” Senior Public Hate-Crime Prosecutor Ines Karl began her distinguished prosecutorial career back in the GDR, i.e., the German Democratic Republic, the judiciary of which convicted roughly 200,000 people of political crimes during its 40-year existence. I couldn’t find any details about her distinguished prosecutions during her GDR days, but Der Tagesspiegel, a German newspaper, did a profile of her in 2021, and assured us that Karl had been “lengthily reviewed” before being allowed to prosecute people and run “Hate-Crime Offices” in the reunified Germany. Here’s an excerpt from that piece [translation and emphasis mine] … “In April, Ines Karl will have been a public prosecutor in Berlin Moabit for 30 years. She knew early on that this was her dream job – it almost came to an abrupt end with reunification. She grew up in Berlin-Mitte and Lichtenberg, studied Law in Jena in the 1980s, and worked as a public prosecutor in Weißensee before the wall came down. Only after a lengthy review process, including by the Judges' Election Committee and the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, was she allowed to continue the profession she learned and practiced in the GDR in the Federal Republic. The experiences of that time are still with her today, with mixed feelings.” -- Der Tagesspiegel, 2021 Given that Ines Karl was cleared by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (i.e., Germany’s domestic Intelligence agency), there is absolutely no reason to hold her East-German prosecutorial “experiences” against her, or to go fishing around in the GDR archive to determine the exact nature of those prosecutorial “experiences.” In fact, doing so would probably be a “hate crime.” So, I definitely won’t be doing that. I’ve got enough “hate crime” troubles as it is. What I did, though, after I stumbled onto Senior Public Hate-Crime Prosecutor Ines Karl’s background, was Google around a bit, you know, just to refresh my memory of other people’s “experiences” in the German Democratic Republic. One thing I found was this article in Deutsche Welle (East Germany’s Tortured Political Prisoners). Here’s an excerpt [emphasis mine] … “Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there remain Germans who tout the legacy of the German Democratic Republic. The oft-heard claim that ‘not everything was bad about the GDR’ and that the Soviet-allied state had great day care facilities, as some still assert, strikes 68-year-old Manfred Wilhelm as utterly absurd. He was a political prisoner. In 1981, Wilhelm was sentenced to eight and a half years behind bars for the crime of inciting hatred against the state — just for telling a few political jokes to friends and in bars.” So that made me feel a little better about being re-prosecuted by Senior Public Hate-Crime Prosecutor Karl, and being defamed, and having my reputation and income as author damaged. At least she’s not looking to lock me up for eight years! Three years is the maximum sentence for my “hate crime.” Or, I don’t know, if she feels she really needs to send a message to other alleged “hate criminals,” I guess she could count up all the times I’ve published the Tweets that I just republished again above and charge me with multiple counts of my “hate crime.” In fact, her office has already launched a second criminal investigation of me based on just that! Another thing I found while just idly Googling around, which didn’t make me feel so much better, but maybe kind of explains a few things, was an article, in two different German outlets, in which Senior Public Hate-Crime Prosecutor Ines Karl was quoted referring to one of her colleagues’ participation at a demonstration and his criticism of Germany’s Covid measures on social-media networks as “crimes.” Here’s the quote [translation and emphasis mine] … “Karl emphasized that the debates about possible right-wing extremist attitudes in the security services were being 'monitored very closely.' The case of a Berlin public prosecutor who took part in the Corona-denier demonstrations and spread corresponding posts on social networks is being extensively discussed in the public prosecutor's office, for example 'whether this should be socially acceptable here. If such crimes are committed, investigations will also be carried out within our own ranks,' emphasized Karl.” -- Evangelisch Magazine, MiGAZIN, 2020 The fact that Senior Public Hate-Crime Prosecutor Karl would refer to the expression of political dissent as a “crime,” on the record, without a second thought, may explain why her office is unabashedly prosecuting me on fabricated “hate crime” charges (i.e., using a swastika in my artwork), and not Der Spiegel, Stern, Karl Lauterbach, and many others, for doing exactly the same thing. I don’t want to impugn her competence as a Senior Public Hate-Crime Prosecutor or in any way suggest that the “lengthy review process” of her understanding of the law (including the concept of “the rule of law” in non-totalitarian societies) conducted by the Judges' Election Committee and the Office for the Protection of the Constitution prior to turning her loose on the public following the collapse of the GDR was … well, anything less than adequate, but, if Germany is going to continue to claim that it has any respect for basic democratic principles — not to mention its own constitution — someone might want to take Ines Karl aside and explain that political dissent is not a crime. Or, on second thought, maybe it is now. In which case, it would helpful if the German authorities would drop the “Germany is a democratic state under the rule of law” crap and just go openly totalitarian. It would certainly be less confusing. After all, in New Normal Germany, it is once again a crime to “delegitimize the state,” as it was in East Germany and Nazi Germany. I reported this in May 2021 in a column called The Criminalization of Dissent, as did The New York Times. Here’s an excerpt from my column … “Yes, that’s right, in ‘New Normal’ Germany, if you dissent from the official state ideology, you are now officially a dangerous ‘extremist.’ The German Intelligence agency (the ‘BfV’) has even invented a new category of ‘extremists’ in order to allow themselves to legally monitor anyone suspected of being ‘anti-democratic and/or delegitimizing the state in a way that endangers security’ … I’m not joking. Not even slightly. The Federal Office for Protection of the Constitution (‘Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz’) is actively monitoring anyone questioning or challenging the official ‘New Normal’ ideology … the ‘Covid Deniers,’ the ‘conspiracy theorists,’ the ‘anti-vaxxers,’ the dreaded ‘Querdenkers,’ and anyone else they feel like monitoring who has refused to join the Covidian Cult. We’re now official enemies of the state, no different than any other ‘terrorists’ … or, OK, technically, a little different. As The New York Times reported last week (German Intelligence Puts Coronavirus Deniers Under Surveillance), ‘the danger from coronavirus deniers and conspiracy theorists does not fit the mold posed by the usual politically driven groups, including those on the far left and right, or by Islamic extremists.’ Still, according to the German Interior Ministry, we diabolical ‘Covid deniers,’ ‘conspiracy theorists,’ and ‘anti-vaxxers’ have ‘targeted the state itself, its leaders, businesses, the press, and globalism,’ and have ‘attacked police officers’ and ‘defied civil authorities.’” As I mentioned above, it’s a bit confusing, the “delegitimizing-the-state as opposed to political dissent” thing, and the selective-prosecution-of-“hate-crimes” thing, and the German justice system, generally. I reached out to some of the German state media, and even to Marco Buschmann, the Minister of Justice, and requested more clarity on the German justice system, and the “Is Germany a totalitarian state again?” question. Sadly, I have received no response. Maybe Senior Public Hate-Crime Prosecutor Ines Karl can help me out with that. In light of her “experiences” as a prosecutor in the GDR, she probably has a pretty good understanding of how things work in totalitarian systems. And, if she needs to brush up on the “democratic rights” thing, she could have a look at Article 5, and Article 2, and Article 3, and Article 8, of the German constitution. Or, I’d be happy to go over those articles with her, personally. Perhaps she’ll show up in court this time. Last time, she sent one of her junior colleagues who appeared to be a bit … well, under the weather, or on some sort of heavy medication, or maybe he had just emerged from a strenuous “New Normal” struggle session. In any event, if you’ve never witnessed a “hate-crime” trial in New Normal Germany, and you don’t mind being subjected to the anti-terrorism-style “Security protocols” that the Court has ordered in effect in the courtroom — not to discourage the public and the press from attending and reporting on the trial, of course, but on account of what the Superior Court describes as “the overall tense security situation” — you’re welcome to attend on September 30. Be advised, though, I might commit a few more alleged “hate crimes,” right there in the courtroom, assuming I’m allowed to speak. I’m not sure what the rules are these days in terms of what we’re allowed to say … which is kind of the point of this entire exercise, in case that wasn’t already clear. Oh well, I guess I’ll take my chances. I hear the New Normal political prisons aren’t nearly as bad as the old East German ones. Maybe they’ve even added toilet seats!

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"An Autopsy of the Occupy Movement" from Nevermore Media

 

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Source: Nevermore Media

AN AUTOPSY OF THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT

It's been 12 years since #OccupyWallStreet. Let's revisit it.

NEVERMORE MEDIA Sep 14

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Hey Folks,

Twelve years ago this week, a ragtag band of anarchists from New York Street set out to occupy Wall Street, the beating heart of Global Capitalism.

This movement started strong, capturing the imagination of millions before fizzling out, leaving a bad taste in everyone’s mouth.

Because of how disappointing the movement ultimately was, many people who participated in it don’t like to talk about it. I am one of those people.

Now that it’s been 12 years, though, I think that it’s high time we did a post-mortem.

Why, you ask? Well, for one thing, because it’s the last mass movement in the U.S. that everyone can agree wasn’t a psy-op. Although this might seem unbelievable to many of you, I think that the Occupy Movement already scared the shit of the Powers That Shouldn’t Be…. for about fifteen minutes.

This makes sense when you consider the fact that many powerful U.S. think tanks were predicting widespread civil unrest following the banker bailouts of 2008. After all, many formerly-middle-class Americans were hopelessly indebted, poor, unemployed or underemployed, and precariously housed.

Soon enough, it became apparent that the Occupy movement suffered from a lack of vision, a lack of strategy, and a lack of basic political literacy.

To be fair, I can’t speak knowledgeably about Occupy in general - I can only speak about my experience, which was just with one encampment, Occupy Ottawa.

I know that other people had different experiences. Occupy Toronto is very fondly remembered by many people, and I do not mean to portray the whole Occupy movement as one big failure.

That said, as a political movement it fizzled out pretty quickly. I personally feel like there was a concerted part on the part of the U.S. national security state to disrupt the movement, using ideological subversion, weaponized rape accusations, delegitimizing narratives promoted by mainstream media, and many other tactics. This are all part of what I call the New COINTELPRO.

THE SECRET HISTORY OF ANTIFA, THE ANARCHIST INQUISITION & THE NEW COINTELPRO

NEVERMORE MEDIA · October 26, 2023

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The Death of Aziz Choudry

NEVERMORE MEDIA · Sep 2

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AN AUTOPSY OF THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT

So what went wrong? It really did seem like a window of possibility had opened up in September 2012. What could we have done differently? And how can we learn from both the successes and failures of the Occupy Movement? How can we best prepare for the next mass movement which aims to challenge the Empire on its own turf?

As I have said before, I think that there are two possibilities for the near-term future of America - Revolution or Civil War.

AMERICA AT A CROSSROADS: REVOLUTION OR CIVIL WAR

NEVERMORE MEDIA · May 5

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I also think that we need to understand that the death of the Occupy Movement was also a key moment in the slow death of the U.S. left, which suffered a debilitating stroke on 9/11 and gave up the ghost in March 2020.

Partly, my message will be directly to those who still identify as leftists. It’s time to face the truth. The U.S. Left is dead as a doorknob. If we want to organize mass movements in the New Normal, that means we’re going to have to take the whole idea of the Left-Right political divide and chuck it in the “Fuck It” bucket.

There are many different lessons I think that we can draw from Occupy. Some of the ones I can think of are unlikely to be popular. But I don’t want for this to just be about my ideas. I am hoping to inspire others to write about their experiences with Occupy. I know that Occupy meant a lot to a lot of people.

So I’m inviting everyone reading this to please get in touch if you’d like to share your experiences. Or you can just post in the comments. I can be reached at nevermorezine@gmail.com

It’s time to do a proper autopsy of the Occupy Movement..

WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO START RAMBLING ON ABOUT DAVID GRAEBER?

Chill out. I was getting to that.

As my regular readers will be aware, I’m a huge fan of David Graeber, and I believe that he was assassinated in 2020.

I’ve made it my mission to continue his life’s work, and I am currently making my way through his oeuvre. It’s quite voluminous, and it will take me some time to read it all. He left behind over 5000 pages of published material, and from what I’m seen, every bit of it is worth reading.

Okay, okay, fine, maybe Direct Action: An Ethnography could have been tightened up a bit. But that was specifically written for posterity. Let’s check in about that one in 50 years.

By now, I’ve probably listened to The Democracy Project three or four times. It i is not one of his more acclaimed books, which I think is both strange and unfortunate. Indeed, I came to it not knowing anything about what it was even about. The one thing that I did know about it was that the exceedingly milquetoast title was not his first choice. He wanted to call it As if we were Already Free. Oh, the irony.

It’s a shame this book isn’t better-known, because it’s actually amazing. Seriously, go download it now. You won’t regret it. If it were written by anyone else, it would be considered a minor masterpiece. Sadly, all of David Graeber’s books must forever live in the shadow of Debt: The First Five Thousand Years, one of the finest books of political philosophy ever written. Hey, there are worse fates that having written so many great books that some of them get forgotten about!

As if we were already free is about the events leading up to the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011, which Graeber basically started.

David Graeber would often brush away accolades and downplay his own importance. To hear him tell it, you would think that he just happened to be in the right place at the right time. But if you listen to As if we were Already Free, it becomes apparent that David Graeber was largely responsible for starting the Occupy Movement.

He would want us to remember that political actions are the result of the cumulative actions of groups of people, but the fact is that Occupy Wall Street would not have happened were it not for him. The movement was completely infused with his politics and his spirit. No one who reads As if we were Already Free could reasonably think otherwise.

Basically, David Graeber succeeded in resurrecting the spirit of the anti-globalization movement, which most people had forgotten about by 2011. He was able to pass along many lessons that he learned back in the days where everyone was an anarchist and we all knew what the IMF and the World Bank were up to.

Anyway, I understand Graeber’s reasons for not wanting to hog the spotlight. For one thing, he was clearly aware that the state would target him if he was seen as a leader. For another, he was extremely committed to the anarchist virtue of horizontality.

Also, I have to wonder whether he knew that the more attention he got, the more drama would cluster around around him. Activist drama sucks.

Another possibility is that he didn’t want to take credit for Occupy because it was kind of a shitshow.

I should know. I participated. I was Occupy Ottawa’s night watchman. At the time, my girlfriend had a big Husky-Malamute sled dog named Grizz and I spent many nights quietly patrolling the camp with him. Partly I was keeping an eye out for cops and suspicious activity from outside camp, but I was also keeping an eye on the camp’s residents. Occupy Ottawa had become a refuge for a significant number of the city’s homeless population. Some of them were wonderful people, but a lot of energy went into caring for them. And we’re talking about people with severe mental health problems and/or addictions.

I don’t know how I would feel if I started a massive international movement which quickly fizzled out. On one hand, it initially seemed like it had the potential to kick off an actual revolutionary movement. Many people were exposed to radical politics for the first time. But the whole thing left a bad taste in everyone’s mouths, and for good reason. Not only was it abundantly clear that very few people had any idea about how to organize politically, Occupy was also plagued by people with all kinds of problems. Some were insufferably self-righteous wokesters, some were Maoists, others were clueless ninnies who were too clueless to know they were clueless, and others just wanted to talk about trivial things all day long. There were also a lot of great people there, some of whom I continue to be friends with. But the main problem is that pretty much every camp was quickly overwhelmed by more troubled people than it could feasibly care for. The movement existed to challenge the system, not to be a daycare for drug addicts.

Furthermore, the consensus process which anarchists had developed during the Global Justice Movement a decade earlier simply was ineffective. Maybe it worked in some places, but from what I saw, it was a giant waste of everyone’s time. I’m not shitting on consensus process in general, but in order to have a functional consensus process you need a whole list of ingredients that were not present in hastily convened gatherings of casual acquaintances, strangers, and undercover cops. It was simply ineffective, and in the case of Occupy Ottawa ended up giving way too much space to people to air endless grievances which were never important to begin with. The end result was that the more-serious-minded people stopped attending the General Assemblies.

All this makes more sense when you understand the historical context. Anarchists back then were reacting to the top-down steering committees of the old Left, which contained a hodgepodge of Marxist-Leninists, Trotskyists, Maoists, mostly pacifist Christians, feminists, and miscellaneous trade unions with agendas of their own.

If we want to talk about forms of participatory democracy that would actually be effective, then we should analyze what was so wrong with how Occupy attempted to do consensus process.

I think that it would be tragic if people reached the facile conclusion that consensus process simply doesn’t work. To make such a claim would be to disregard innumerable cases in which it does work, such as amongst the Zapatistas of Chiapas.

Also, as critiques of electoral democracy have become increasingly widely accepted, the simple fact is that we need ways to make decisions together if we’re going to have participatory social movements.

The alternative is vanguardism.

WHAT IS DEMOCRACY?

As we get closer to the American election, I also think that it will be valuable to reflect about what democracy even is. Since Orwell’s day, “democracy” has been a worb, a word lacking a clear definition.

If you ask an anarchist whether anarchists are for or against democracy, they will most likely answer “that depends what you mean by democracy”. That would certainly be my response.

The classical anarchists, just as Bakunin, Kropotkin, Malatesta, and Goldman, were opposed to majoritarian democracy, which they saw as basically a ruling class scam to trick disempowered people into supporting their oppressors.

IS VOTING EVIL?

NEVERMORE MEDIA · Jul 8

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But more recent anarchist theorists distinguish between electoral democracy and “horizontal” or “participatory” democracy, as practiced by the Zapatistas and in many indigenous cultures all around the world.

Personally, I don’t like using words I can’t define, and no one on Earth can define the word democracy in a satisfactory way, because it means different things to different people.

But there are things more important than semantic preferences. How are we to organize politically in a world where everything is changing so quickly, where people have such wildly different interpretations of what’s even happening?

I don’t claim to have good answers to these questions, but I think that David Graeber’s book contains a lot of the right questions. I truly believe that the best thing that we can possibly do is pick up where he left off. Why start from scratch when you don’t have it?

Over the course of the coming days, I’m going to be posting selections from As if we were already free (a.k.a. The Democracy Project).

I also invite people to send writing about Occupy my way. I’m hoping that someone else out there agrees with me that it’s time to revisit #OccupyWallStreet, think about decision-making in groups, and start building a movement that’s actually capable of achieving real victories.

Stay tuned!

In Solidarity (with the Ghosts of Movements Past),

Crow Qu’appelle

P.S. If you want to download a PDF of As if we were already Free, you can download it here.