New Retarded German Speech Prosecution Just Dropped

This woman is named Ramona Storm. She’s an AfD representative in the Bavarian state parliament, and that makes her an extremely evil and dangerous woman. Like everyone else affiliated with the AfD, Storm may at any moment erupt in a spontaneous fascism. Too many such spontaneous fascisms will destroy Our Democracy and reconstitute the Third Reich, which is why all spontaneous fascisms must be resisted and suppressed, lest we find ourselves back in 1933 again.

The last time Storm emitted a spontaneous fascism was two years ago, when she attended a rally held by a local right-leaning populist group called the “Citizens’ Initiative for Franconia.” Storm met some counter-protesters at that rally, one of whom was a crazy old man who threw up his right hand in a Nazi salute while with two of his left fingers touching the space below his nose to mime a Hitler moustache. He did this, obviously, to suggest that the Citizens’ Initiative for Franconia are evil Nazi Hitler fascists, which I’m sure we can all agree is a deeply original and compelling political critique the likes of which nobody has ever heard before.

Now, it is generally speaking illegal to throw Nazi salutes in Germany. They are among those very dangerous spontaneous fascisms I mentioned in my first paragraph. Thus Storm took video of the incident and the organisers of our rally even informed the police. Our Nazi-saluting man turned out to be an 83 year-old retired teacher, and prosecutors indicted him before the Aschaffenburg District Court. There, he explained that he was not actually doing a fascism, but that he was rather trying to warn against fascism, and although it turns out that there is no optical distinction whatsoever between real fascisms and warning fascisms, the court dismissed all charges after our elderly antifascist said he had spent his whole life opposing “right-wing extremism” and after he furthermore promised to perform 30 hours of community service.

Storm, however, managed to turn our counter-protestor’s false and merely apparent fascism (because it was actually an antifascism) into a true fascism, by posting the video she had taken of his Hitler mimicry on her Facebook page, with the caption “Here’s an opponent of the Citizens’ Initiative for Franconia … take a close look.” For the fascistic act of republishing this video of an antifascist’s merely apparent fascism, Storm had her parliamentary immunity lifted, and then prosecutors sent her a Strafbefehl, or a summary judgement, requesting that she pay a fine of €24,000 for violating Section 86a of the German Criminal Code. A fine that high exceeds the threshold for being “previously convicted,” which means that accepting the penalty would give Storm a criminal record. Spontaneous fascisms require vigorous resistance, even when they are Facebook posts of merely apparent fascisms. Storm objected and her trial was set to happen today in the Aschaffenburg District Court, but the judge got sick and so it has been delayed.

Storm’s case recalls that of another Bavarian woman, whom prosecutors in Schweinfurt also charged under Section 86a, for the crime of reproducing an image of former Health Minister Karl Lauterbach raising his arm at a strangely Hitlerian angle. Nobody believes that Lauterbach, a Social Democrat, actually intended to offer the Nazi salute to anyone, and so this woman’s case raises even more philosophically profound problems than Storm’s. It drives us, for example, to ask how publishing a photograph of a gesture can possibly amount to punishable “use of symbols of unconstitutional … organisations” when the photographed gesture itself is not in fact that symbol at all – the noxious fascistic Hitler greeting being painfully non-specific and thus subject to accidental replication anytime somebody waves or tries to shield his eyes from the sun.

Fascism turns out to be a very complicated thing.