Germany’s interior ministry has shut down the country’s most influential right-wing publication for “inciting hatred” as the liberal-left government continues its campaign to suppress its political rival, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party.
In the early hours of Tuesday morning the interior ministry declared a ban on the monthly Compact magazine – which is closely associated with AfD – along with its website, the company that publishes it and its film production company.
The magazine, which had a print run of about 40,000 copies and a considerably larger online following, was characterised by Germany’s domestic intelligence agencies as a nexus for various strands of right-wing extremism, from the AfD to groups such as the Pegida and Identitarian movements.
The ministry said Compact – which shouldn’t be confused with the US-based online magazine Compact Mag – had “stirred up hatred against Jews” and spread “racist, anti-minority, historically revisionist and conspiracy theory-laden content” to a wide audience, aiming to exclude “ethnic strangers” from the German nation.
German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser described the ban on the magazine as a blow to “intellectual arsonists who stoke a climate of hatred and violence against refugees and minorities, and want to defeat our democratic state”.
“Our signal is quite clear: we will not permit people to define in ethnic terms who belongs to Germany and who does not,” she said.
The ban comes after the recent revival of the AfD’s electoral fortunes, which came second in the European parliament election last month and has won first place across most east German states.
However, this isn’t the first time in recent months that the German “far-right” has been subjected to attempted state-led censorship.
Earlier this year, Faeser announced a raft of measures designed to counter the popularity of AfD in the run-up to next year’s federal election that she described as “instruments of rule of law to protect our democracy”.
One such measure was to freeze the bank accounts of those found to have donated money to any group the government declares to be “far-right”. Faeser was worryingly vague as to how this politically motivated financial censorship will work in practice, how “right wing extremism” will be defined, whether Germany’s left-leaning government will get to decide on that definition, and what penalties will be directed at those who donate to right-wing parties or organisations.
Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Office of the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), would handle the specifics, she said: “No one who donates to a right-wing extremist party should remain undetected. … Those who mock the state must deal with a strong state.”
In several German states the foundation for this new approach has already been laid, with the BfV labelling the AfD a “definitive case of right-wing extremism”, meaning the party is subject to extreme surveillance. Last year, for instance, AfD co-leader Tino Chrupalla revealed that Postbank, a retail banking division of Deutsche Bank, had terminated his account because he is an AfD member.
Several AfD politicians have decried the government’s ban on Compact magazine, describing it as a heavy-handed intrusion on free expression. Hans-Christoph Berndt, the party’s lead candidate in Brandenburg, where the magazine is headquartered, accused the government of using “methods like those of an authoritarian police state”.
Ben Brechtken, a prominent right-wing commentator, said Compact had been “appalling and right-wing extremist” but the decision to ban it was “very alarming”.
“The ban is totally counterproductive: most Germans may only have heard of Compact for the first time today. They’re creating martyrs,” Brechtken wrote on Twitter/X.
A similar point was made by FSU General Secretary Toby Young earlier this week during an interview with Spectator TV Australia, in which he reflected on the perilous state of free speech across the Anglosphere. (You can watch a clip here).
Until about 15 years ago, the prevailing wisdom among our ruling elites across the western world was the ‘counterspeech doctrine’, namely, that the best way to deal with allegedly ‘harmful’ or ‘misleading’ speech was not to suppress it, but to counter it with more and better speech.
However, following Donald Trump’s triumph in 2016, the British decision to leave the EU that same year and the rise of insurgent populist parties that reject ‘progressive’ policies on globalisation, gender ideology and migration, those same elites somehow managed to convince themselves the only reason they were losing electoral contests was because incredulous voters lacked the intelligence to discriminate between false and true information and were being duped by so-called ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ pumped out by bad actors.
The solution they came up with was internet censorship, which as Toby pointed out, obviously isn’t working. Indeed, if the recent triumph of various populist parties in the European parliamentary elections, the likely victory of Donald Trump in the US presidential election, and Reform’s success in the UK general election tell us anything it’s that attempts to suppress arguments that you find offensive only serve to draw attention to them.
As if to demonstrate the point, a recent survey carried out by the Civey Opinion Research Centre for the liberal newspaper Der Spiegel, indicated that 47% of respondents nationwide said they would find it acceptable if the AfD were involved in governments at the state level in the future, reflecting a growing disconnect between the opinions held by the German public and the country’s political elites.
Last month, the AfD also reported a surge in membership after jumping to second place in nationwide polls – since January, membership grew by 60% to 46,881.
It’s also worth pointing out that similar attempts to suppress the Nazi party were unsuccessful. In the early 1920s, the Nazi Party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, was temporarily suspended multiple times. Joseph Goebbels’ paper, Der Angriff, was banned 13 times, enabling him to boast it was Germany’s “most frequently banned daily”, and during Heinrich Brüning’s chancellorship of Germany from 1930 to 1932, 284 newspapers were temporarily banned in Prussia alone, 99 of which were Nazi and 43 were far-right. None of these measures stopped the Nazis coming first in Germany’s federal election in 1932.
