Satire on Trial: C.J. Hopkins and the Perils of Criticizing the 'New Normal'
In August 2022, U.S playwright and satirist C.J. Hopkins, while a resident of Berlin, tweeted cover art from his book on The Rise of the New Normal Reich, which included a satirical representation of the swastika overlaying a medical mask. For that, he has been found guilty in a German court of spreading pro-Nazi propaganda, and is now facing a hefty fine and potentially a prison sentence.
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The image Hopkins tweeted out featured a medical mask with a faded white swastika superimposed over it. In his first tweet, Hopkins wrote (in German) that “Masks are symbols of ideological conformity. That’s all that they are, and that’s all they ever were. Stop pretending that they were ever anything else or get used to wearing them.” In his second tweet, Hopkins quoted Health Minister Karl Lauterbach’s statement that “Masks always send a signal.”
For these two tweets, Amazon Germany banned Hopkin’s book, and the Berlin state prosecutor investigated him for violating German criminal statutes against “the use of symbols of unconstititional and terrorist organisations.” In January 2024, Hopkins was tried before the Tiergarten Berlin District Court and acquitted. The public prosecutor appealed the decision before the Berlin Court of Appeals, which overturned his acquittal on September 30th and found him guilty as charged.
In his statement before the Berlin Court of Appeals, which bizarrely instituted anti-terrorism protocols for his trial, Hopkin’s exposed the extraordinary hypocrisy of a public prosecutor going after an author for using a swastika image to question Covid policies, yet effectively turning a blind eye to uses of the swastika by other political commentators in Germany, who are more in line with government policy. It’s fine to use the swastika to satirise “right-wing extremism” (as Der Spiegel did, for example) because the “far right” is fair game. But if you use the swastika to satirise the German State, may God help you.
For over thirty years, I have written and spoken out against fascism, authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and so on…And yet, I am accused by the German authorities of spreading pro-Nazi propaganda….In August 2022, as Germany was debating whether to end its Covid mask mandates, I tweeted those two Tweets. I challenged the official Covid narrative. I compared the New Normal to Nazi Germany. I did that with the cover art of one of my books. I did what anyone is allowed to do according to German law. I did what Karl Lauterbach (German Minister for Health) has done. I did what German celebrities like Jessica Berlin have done. I did what major German newspapers and magazines have done.
The charges against Hopkins, as helpfully explained by substack blogger Eugiptius, are based on sections 86 and 86a of the German Criminal Code, which forbid the “dissemination” of propaganda material or symbols that are “intended to further the activities of a former National Socialist organisation.” Yet the plain intent of Hopkins’ tweets, and the Swastika-bearing mask images that accompanied them, was to warn that the new German public health regime was heading in a dangerously authoritarian direction, not to promote Nazi propaganda.
Clearly, the Tiergarten Berlin District Court which acquitted him in January understood this. Yet the appelate court, in a weirdly convoluted and manifestly wrong-headed interpretation of German law proscribing certain uses of Nazi symbols, overturned this acquittal, exposing Hopkins to either a hefty fine, or a substantial prison sentence, to be fixed by the lower court.
The fact that a public critic of the German State was found guilty of what amounts to a trumped-up charge of promoting national socialism, only serves to corroborate Hopkins’ claim that the “new normal” Germany is heading down the road of fascism. The story is not over yet, since Hopkins has announced he will attempt to seek redress in Germany’s highest court, the Federal Constitutional Court. But it is one of the most alarming signs in the post-Nazi era that the German constitutional order may be repeating some of the errors of its authoritarian and fascistic past.
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