Berlin police declined to investigate FSFE Nazi comparisons
Editor's note: Seeing that there is a 'bulk action' confiscation of domains critical of the FSFE and Debian (the Nazi Party would have approved of this move; Debian is now led by a German), and moreover as we did not fully reproduce this article when it had been published, today we make a full 'backup' copy of it, including images. Making it harder for censors to 'disappear' or 'vanish' unflattering content means they may stop bothering to do, or even trying to. Opponents of Techrights wondered aloud (in public) how to hijack techrights.org, i.e. the entire domain with almost 50,000 articles and many hundreds of thousands of important files. That was months ago. How very 'nazi' of them...
[Article 3 months old]
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
Unwarranted Nazi comparisons are considered to be a serious crime in Germany, a country that has retained criminal speech laws even decades after the demise of Gobels.
In one case, a driver insulted a cyclist. For uttering the phrase a-hole, the driver was hit with a fine of EUR 1,600. Calling somebody a Nazi appears to be far more offensive, unless it is true.
In the open source software world, we can't find evidence of calling somebody a Nazi. What we do find is comparisons to censorship and the abolition of elections in the German FSFE.
FSFE leader Matthias Kirschner, who doesn't code, has been making complaints to the Berlin police asking them to help cover up news about FSFE canceling the Fellowship elections. Here is an example of a letter Berlin police have sent to volunteers:
The bulk of the complaint, written in German, concerns web sites displaying pictures of a Swastika. The last words of the complaint mention people trying to inform Kirschner's wife Kristina about all the women Kirschner sacked, Galia Mancheva and Susanne Eiswirt. Galia took legal action against the FSFE to obtain compensation. Galia complained about Kirschner coming to her home uninvited.
Most people would find the attempts to contact their wife far more disturbing than the Nazi comparisons. Why is the bit about Kirschner's wife only tacked on to the end of his police complaint? It seems that the Nazi comparisons have struck a chord with some people after the FSFE canceled the Fellowship elections.
In 2013, Germany prosecuted over 22,000 people for criminal speech and sent more than 1,000 people to prison for this "offence".. Nonetheless, they have decided not to proceed with a prosecution for the FSFE complaint about Nazi comparisons. Here is the letter Berlin police have sent to volunteers at the close of the investigation.
Background to the story
The last Fellowship election was conducted using the Cornell University CIVS online poll in 2017. The winner was an Irish Australian, the Debian Developer Daniel Pocock.
The Cornell University result page tells us that 1,532 people were register to vote in the election:
In the minutes of the 2019 annual meeting, we can see that just 26 people voted for Matthias Kirschner to be President of the FSFE for another two years. The other 1,500 voters were expelled by the changes to the FSFE constitution. Matthias Kirschner was the only candidate after he expelled all the fellowship.
In the last German elections before World War II, voters were only allowed to vote for one candidate too: â–ˆ
