Germany has Officially gone Looney Tunes

As said: that depends on what your monthly income is reduced by taxes, health insurance and social insurances.

There isn't any "typical middle class daily unit"

Why are you being so evasive about how much these fines are? Are you embarrassed for Germany? What would the min fine of ten units have cost you when you were working full time (if you are retired) or would it cost you now?

You don't get it, we Europeans are quite happy with our way of doing things. You're the only one who seems to have a problem with it.

EDIT: and is this just another of the reasons that citizens are so pissed about the Roma working on the black market, because given that they have no income according to the state they can not be fined for their bad behavior...that theit refusal to play by the rules on employment cascades the injustice in your society??

I don't know about Roma working on the black market

And let me guess, the public assistance that immigrants suck up is not counted as income for the purposes of the daily unit is it....

It looks more like opposing views are silenced by the strong PC culture that you have.... the Germans that I worked with were quite clear that they objected to a lot of what the political class does, but they felt powerless to speak their opposition except behind closed doors with people whom they trusted .

Hawkeye is a pain looking for an arse.

hawkeye10 wrote:

It looks more like opposing views are silenced by the strong PC culture that you have.... the Germans that I worked with were quite clear that they objected to a lot of what the political class does, but they felt powerless to speak their opposition except behind closed doors with people whom they trusted .

What a load of rubbish. You really are a completely witless buffoon, not only do you have no idea what most people think, barring a few paranoid individuals, you throw a gift away. Remember this?

Ultra-traditionalist Catholic bishop Richard Williamson was fined 6,500 euros Monday by a German court for publicly denying the Holocaust in 2009, a court spokesman said. British-born Williamson, 71, who belongs to a controversial Catholic splinter group, the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), was appealing a 2010 fine of 10,000 euros for telling Swedish TV that no more than 300,000 Jews perished in the Holocaust.

He also denied in the interview the existence of gas chambers at Nazi concentration camps. Holocaust denial is a hate crime in Germany. Consensus among historians is that the Nazis killed six million Jews in the Holocaust.

Williamson’s statements became an embarrassment for the Vatican which readmitted him after a 22-year excommunication only days following the interview. In his 2010 book, Light of the World, Pope Benedict XVI said he would not have lifted the ban on Williamson if he had known of his far-right views, adding that the Vatican’s poor communications in the matter was a “total meltdown.”

German prosecutors demanded increasing the fine to 12,000 euros during the appeals process.

Don't even bother with him! Hawkeye has no clue about the United States and even less about other countries. He picks up something from the internet, presents it here and defends whatever weird opinion he forms of the topic in
question. That's his occupational therapy, he's got nothing else to do!

n the name of the “fight against right-wing extremism,” the Bundestag (Germany’s parliament) voted March 11 for sweeping restrictions on the right of association and freedom of expression. The Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Greens and the opposition Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Christian Social Union (CSU) voted to extend laws covering incitement as well as those banning or restricting demonstrations. Only the liberal Free Democratic Party voted against the new laws.
The immediate grounds for the legislation is a planned march by the right-wing extremist German National Party (NPD) in front of the Brandenburg Gate on May 8, the 60th anniversary of the end of World War Two. For weeks, there has been a debate within ruling circles about how to prevent this march.
While Germany previously outlawed the public denial of the Holocaust or other serious Nazi crimes, the new statutes also make it a crime to “celebrate, approve or justify” Nazi rule, if this disturbs the “public peace” and violates “the dignity of the victims.” The likelihood that a demonstration would produce such an offence will now be sufficient grounds for banning it.
The reference to disturbing the peace and violating the dignity of victims was introduced in order to avoid accusations that the law was aimed directly at suppressing political opinion. Otherwise, the Supreme Court would probably have found the measures unconstitutional.
But the new laws are directed precisely at the suppression of political opinion. In response to the question, When can it be assumed that such an injury to the victims of Nazism has occurred?, an official communication from the Justice Ministry notes that this can be the case if Nazi bosses are “distinguished in any special way.”
Any positive public pronouncement, no matter how this is expressed, regarding the Nazi regime or its individual representatives is to be outlawed. This could include a controversial contribution of a historian, the tasteless satire of a cabaret artist or a provocative work by an artist. An action that in itself is legal and harmless is ruled a criminal offence simply by virtue of the opinion it is alleged to express.
Moreover, the CDU had called for the “exclusion zone” around the parliament building, within which there is practically no freedom of assembly, to be extended up to the Brandenburg Gate and the adjacent Holocaust memorial. This proposal was withdrawn only after a legal expert invited by the CDU to testify before a parliamentary hearing on the matter warned that the Supreme Court would strike down such a regulation. The exclusion zone is ostensibly intended merely to protect the “functioning of parliament,” that is, to ensure members of parliament access to the Bundestag.
Neo-Nazi marches at historical sites—such as former concentration camps or the Holocaust memorial in Berlin—are to be more easily prohibited.
The new regulations enable the authorities to ban gatherings or impose onerous conditions, if there are indications of a potential affront to the dignity of the victims. The state legislatures are empowered to specify the places within their own jurisdictions where demonstrations could produce such an insult. At the federal level, the Holocaust memorial is specified as such a site.

I dont need to work very hard to show that Germany has a low tolerance for unapproved of by the state political views

hawkeye10 wrote:

I dont need to work very hard to show that Germany has a low tolerance for unapproved of by the state political views

Germans, like the English have a low tolerance for complete arseheads.

According to the Austrian court that convicted him on Monday, David Irving's offense was to have "denied, grossly played down, approved, or tried to excuse" the Holocaust in print or other media, in violation of a 1992 statute. Although he has not been tried at home in Britain, Irving was convicted and fined in Germany in 1995 for "inciting race hatred."

At best, Irving is a monumentally terrible historian, who, only after publishing dozens of books on World War II, read the notes of the Holocaust mastermind Adolf Eichmann and came around to admitting that the Nazi genocide might actually have occurred.At worst, he is an artless but unrepentant bigot, on the model of America's David Duke or Austria's own Jörg Haider, but without any independent political power.

Why, then, is Irving's Holocaust denial, like other minority and extremist views in European society, of such great concern to lawmakers? If European governments want to guard against the repetition of genocide, they should actively educate their citizens in tolerance and respect for different cultures and beliefs, not gag those who express conflicting ideas.

Europe's suppression of free speech is guaranteed to spawn and incubate precisely the kind of bigotry and sectarian violence it is intended to prevent.Hounded for the unthinkable crime of publishing false history, David Irving appears almost heroic as he stands up to censorship, fines and imprisonment, making him a kind of martyr for neo-fascist groups.

Likewise, suppression of young Muslims' rights to dress or worship as their religion requires lends government sanction to already widespread anti- Muslim attitudes. This official xenophobia in turn breeds simmering resentment that has already exploded into mass violence and been manipulated by radical Islamists to recruit willing terrorist agents from within European society.

While European leaders should be praised for their belated conversion to the cause of free speech, outraged Muslims around the world are right to allege a double standard. Until Europe consistently respects its own guarantees of free expression, and actively promotes tolerance instead of clumsily stifling dissent, its brave rhetoric will ring disappointingly false.

We in America often think that the problem in Europe is much more serious than that

Quote:

According to the Austrian court that convicted him on Monday, David Irving's offense was to have "denied, grossly played down, approved, or tried to excuse" the Holocaust in print or other media, in violation of a 1992 statute. Although he has not been tried at home in Britain, Irving was convicted and fined in Germany in 1995 for "inciting race hatred."

At best, Irving is a monumentally terrible historian, who, only after publishing dozens of books on World War II, read the notes of the Holocaust mastermind Adolf Eichmann and came around to admitting that the Nazi genocide might actually have occurred.At worst, he is an artless but unrepentant bigot, on the model of America's David Duke or Austria's own Jörg Haider, but without any independent political power.

Well I'm proud that we prosecute hate speech. Perhaps if you lot took this whole thing seriously you wouldn't have a bunch of Nazis calling the shots over there. I'm proud to live in a country where a bunch of racist clowns you call the tea party, would poll less than the Monster Raving Loony Party.

Well, even some persons with a JD and quite a large legal knowledge as the above quoted Matthew Rojansky, even those sometimes forget that there's quite some difference between common law countries (like the United States and England) and those with 'Roman', civil law like in Germany, Austria and may other continental European countries (and Scotland).