The People’s Court of New Normal Germany (Part Three)

And on and on and on it goes. Today, at the eleventh hour, the Berlin Superior Court postponed my trial, which was scheduled to take place tomorrow, August 15, 2024, for reasons that remain unclear.

It would be wrong, and bad, to speculate about the Superior Court’s reasons for this eleventh-hour postponement. Such unwarranted speculation might even qualify as “misinformation,” and call down the wrath of the German authorities, or the UK authorities, or … God help me, Thierry Breton Himself!

Nevertheless, here’s what happened during the lead-up to my suddenly postponed trial.

On August 12, my attorney filed a motion alleging bias on the part of the Superior Court judge that issued the so-called “Security Order” that I reported on in Part One and Part Two of this series of columns. We filed this motion after our earlier motions to have the Order lifted were summarily denied.

And this morning, a rather extensive article about my prosecution was published in the Berliner Zeitung, a major German newspaper. Despite the fact that this story has received a considerable amount of international press coverage, this is the first piece published by the mainstream German press.

Until today, the mainstream German press had been diligently refusing to report the story, despite the fact that it has been reported in The Atlantic …

And The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (“FIRE”) just released this video feature and published an extensive piece about it …

And Sky News Australia just published this piece …

And Neue Zürcher Zeitung, in Switzerland, also covered it …

And Matt Taibbi in Racket News…

And Aya Velázquez, a German independent journalist who, along with her colleagues Bastian Barucker and Stefan Homburg, has recently rocketed to fame for releasing the “Robert Koch-Institute Leaks,” which are currently shaking things up in Germany …

And too many more independent media sources to mention and post big pictures of here.

But that Berliner Zeitung article (and all that other press) probably didn’t have anything to do with the Court’s decision to postpone the trial. I mean, it’s not like they are ashamed of what they’re doing, i.e., criminally prosecuting an author for two Tweets.

No, the impression I get is that the German authorities are proud of what they are doing, and want everyone to know it. After all, in the space of only a year, with the assistance of Amazon and Twitter/X, they have dragged me into criminal court, reported me to the German FBI and Germany’s domestic Intelligence agency, they have damaged my income and reputation as an author, they forced me to spend over 10,000 Euros to defend myself against their trumped-up charges, they had my book banned in Germany, censored my speech, and just generally made my life extremely stressful.

So, it’s unlikely that this one article, or this recent round of press, has shamed the Court into postponing my trial at the eleventh hour. I’m sure the Court does this all the time, you know, abruptly postpone a trial the day before it’s scheduled for totally unspecified reasons. This is modern Germany, after all! It’s New Normal Germany! Not old, bad Nazi Germany, where the courts were just an arm of the Nazi government! New Normal Germany is absolutely nothing like that! It’s a totally democratic country where everyone is equal in the eyes of the law and “The Land of Poets and Thinkers” and “Unity and Justice and Freedom,” and … whatever.

In any event, don’t show up at the Kammergericht tomorrow … I mean, unless you’re on trial, yourself, for something, or if you just want to get groped by a German court officer. (See Part Two of this series for details on that.)

Seriously, though, all joking aside, I’m very grateful to Ralf Hutter and Berliner Zeitung, and FIRE, and all the other journalists and outlets that have covered this story. Focusing public attention on what the New Normal “authorities” are doing, not just in Germany, but throughout the West, not just to me, but to many, many others just like me, is one of the only weapons we have to fight back against the criminalization of dissent with. As I have explained in earlier essays, this new, nascent form of totalitarianism — which I think is becoming more and more obvious to people at this point — is not 20th-Century totalitarianism. It can’t go goose-stepping around in jackboots. It has to maintain a “democratic” facade.

Stripping away that facade, calling its bluff, forcing it to show itself as what it actually is, in all its authoritarian ugliness, works. Not always, not perfectly, but it works.

Or at least it works a lot better than frontally attacking it, which is futile, and which is exactly what it wants, so that it can use that as an excuse to further ratchet up the totalitarianism, or, you know, to reduce your entire territory to a pile of rubble.

If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, maybe ask some of those January 6 rioters, or those UK rioters, or Hamas.