MP allegedly greeted a party colleague at German parliament building ‘with a heel click and a Hitler salute’
Berlin prosecutors say they have charged a member of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party with making a Nazi salute in parliament.
The suspect allegedly “greeted a party colleague … at the east entrance to the Reichstag building with a heel click and a Hitler salute” in June 2023, the prosecutors said in a statement issued on Monday.
Making such a salute is illegal in Germany and is punishable by up to three years in prison.
The newspaper Bild named the politician as Matthias Moosdorf, 60, a member of parliament for Zwickau in the former East German state of Saxony.
Germany abolished the death penalty and for good reason.
You should never give the state the right to execute its own citizens
I would normally agree with you, but the paradox of tolerence comes to mind.
Just because you’re not willing to kill someone doesn’t mean you’re tolerating their behavior.
This is quite literally a post about this guy being charged with a crime. If he’s in prison for 3 years that’s going to derail his politics.
The state could also ban the AFD and probably should.
We don’t have to jump straight to capital punishment
A very reasonable take, in unreasonable times.
I guarentee they will regret not having done so sooner.
I have voted against the abolition of the death penality in Hesse back in 2018 (if i remember correctly) when there was a public vote on that matter… you never know when it may become handy…
It will never be handy. You should never trust the state to have that power over its citizens. There’s not a country on the planet I trust with that authority.
The death penalty, especially for political offenses, always seems nice when its your side in power.
If you reject the states power to execute it’s own citizens and make that idea unacceptable to the people then you take away one of the fascists’ best tools for oppressing the people.
When “our side” is no longer in power, “they” might introduce the death penalty. What’s to stop “them”, once they are in control? Our good faith?
Limits on state power do not reliably prevent bad governments from abusing it, because bad governments can and do weaken and circumvent those limits. Are constitutional limits meaningfully stopping Trump? Did they keep Putin from the presidency?
In my view, this logic is another case of “when they go low, we go high”. The only reliable way to prevent the abuse of state power is to keep those who would abuse state power from attaining it in the first place.
Execution may be unacceptable to some of us, but –crucially– it is acceptable to those who would most abuse it, and they will cheer its reintroduction.
You can’t live your life by becoming worse than what those you fear may become. Honestly this is the rhetoric fascists use.
But to engage the point, you do this by making the death penalty something the populace opposes. If it becomes unthinkable a “non-starter” that’s a good thing.
Then make the idea so repugnant only a minority of a minority of people would be okay with it.
Honestly I don’t get your argument. It’s basically you should be afraid that those people over there will kill you so you must kill them first. I think we’ve heard that one before…
As times are now use the systems in place that will prevent the rise of the AFD. If the fascists take control then feel free to start killing fascists. Be sure to be early, but you do that after the systems failed.
It’s like they haven’t even tried to disband the party and it’s jumping straight to murder. That’s not a nation anyone would want to live in
You propose to instill a deep conviction –that the death penalty is unacceptable– in a broad majority of people:
How?
You put it like we haven’t tried. You put it like we can somehow do it. That contradicts current trends: political violence in particular and violence more broadly are becoming more and more acceptable again.
By then it will be far too late.
The system and all its guardrails are actively failing before your eyes and have been for over a decade at this point. In fact, the system –capitalism– isn’t really failing, but simply succumbing to its own contradictions and evolving into its next stage: fascism.
No. It’s neither fear nor hate. It’s not a tribal proposition either. It’s an instrument of last resort to preserve our chance of building a fair system.