Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by VWWHFSfQ 1586 days ago
Why do the German people allow their government to do this kind of stuff? Do they want it?
9 comments

Do you live in a country that allows ISIS to communicate freely and openly?

I live in the US, I know infinitely more people that have been hurt by rogue showerheads than ISIS, yet even publicly saying that you support them and their aims can get you put in prison.

edit: "Shouting fire in a crowded theater" was a reason given for jailing US socialists who were protesting against the WWI draft.

> edit: "Shouting fire in a crowded theater" was a reason given for jailing US socialists who were protesting against the WWI draft.

This is no longer standing case law as it was overturned by Brandbenburg v. Ohio

Of course. Only mentioning it because the only explanation of the limits of free speech that an American can quote was formulated to keep peaceniks from passing out flyers.
It's an irrelevant exception because it hasn't been law for over half a century now.
Because Germany is a representative democracy where you cannot change the minds of a few elected leaders for at least 3 more years, once elected.

Also, Germans aren't really the kind of people to protest on the streets. They'd much rather complain and complain and maybe change the position of their cross on the next ballot to a party just a small tip further left or right, only to then start complaining that nothing ever really changes and readjust their cross in the opposite direction in the following election. This cycle repeats since about 70 years.

So yes, if the Germans really did not want this kind of stuff, they would have to drastically change their votes. And bear in mind that the current government, which is the most dramatic change (to the left) in the last 16 years since the Merkel era, has already lost the goodwill according to surveys, with people already again favoring the Merkel party (e. g. said readjustment).

Do the people of your country have great control over what their government does and have the legal right to remove them when they are unhappy? What country is that, i wanna move there :)
They do. German public is overwhelmingly anti-nazi.
> Do they want it?

Does it matter? No mainstream party is going to legalize the Nazis again. At best they would look like they approve of nazis. Worst outcome is that nazis become political rivals.

I think everyone was fine until some of the people who are against the Covid regulations started with comparing the vaccinations to the holocaust, wearing stars which resembled the "Judenstern" given out by the Nazis with the word "unvaccinated" on them to demontrations and alike.

You can do lots of crazy stuff and talk a lot of shit in Germany, but relavating the holocaust is off-bounds for good reason.

I do not understand this logic. The "Judenstern" predated the Holocaust by a long time, so they are comparing mandatory vaccination to a slippery slope rather than the to end of the slope. The "Judenstern" is how it all started, i.e (in their view), by segregating clean and unclean groups with vaccine checks.

It is insensitive, but by doing it they are clearly anti-Nazi. They are not belittling the Holocaust and they are not comparing vaccine mandates to the Holocaust.

The Judenstern as referenced here is specifically the yellow star jews were forced to wear during and just before WW2. That is how they're entirely styled. The rhetoric that is used by people doing this is very much comparing vaccine mandates to the Nazi regime's crimes.
If German law forbids people from drawing analogies to the Nazis and saying "this is bad, it looks like Nazi-ism and we shouldn't do this" then the law is truly backwards. The whole point of not denying the Holocaust is to learn generalizable lessons from it.
Again, that is not what is happening here. The antivaxxers and covidiots who are running around with the yellow stars are trivializing or denying the holocaust with their actions.

You are allowed to make analogies and say "this looks bad, looks like Nazi-ism". But putting on the yellow star is way and far above and beyond that, it is claiming your situation is as bad as the people in those camps. So unless Antivaxxers/Covidiots are being treated just as badle as people in those campls, it's trivializing the holocaust.

You're just proving my point without realizing it. If your attitude is widespread in Germany then truly its people have failed to learn anything from the past. What a total failure by the Allies that would represent. Your argument boils down to "you may make analogies to Nazi-ism unless I happen to dislike those analogies, in which case it should be illegal".

Don't you realize that making comparisons to the Nazis is only useful before it gets as bad as Treblinka? If you literally have to wait until people are being rounded up and killed before you're allowed to say, gee guys, this looks kinda like Nazi-ism, then it's far too late. If that's the case then in fact you're not learning from the past but rather, forbidding learning from the past until the point at which it cannot matter.

The Nazis were horrific partly because they did forced medical experiments on people. Regardless of what our ruling classes try to claim, the mRNA vaccines are in fact experimental and people are being forced to take them. That is a policy straight out of Hitler's playbook. Making that comparison is not trivializing what he did, let alone "denying the Holocaust" - which is a complete non-sequitur. They're doing the opposite of denying the Nazi's actions, they're directly calling attention to them.

I think you should just face the music here: you don't like the yellow stars because they're a direct assertion that a policy you support is evil of the type seen in the past, and that therefore, maybe you are evil. Man up and argue why it's not marching in the same direction despite the overt similarities. Don't try and claim anyone pointing out those similarities are "denying the Holocaust" because that's quite evidently not true.

Sorry for being unclear, I'm talking about this "Judenstern": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_badge

That one clearly has a Nazi background.

I think largely the whole world, as well as the German people, benefit from preventing a resurgence of Nazism there.
A lot of it is about banning Nazis. What do you think?
The stuff we are talking about is unconstitional in Germany so I guess yes we want it.
To play devils advocate, both the constitutions of Germany and Japan were written by the United States and the other Allied Powers. We made sure to include restrictions that would otherwise not have had high enough citizen support to make it into an organically drafted constitution.
Yeah, I know we are just the Germany GmBH. What an idiotic statement.