Ralph Schoellhammer
speaker
70 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Ralph Schoellhammer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yeah, I think that's true. And it's also when we talk about censorship, right, there's always the argument that people sometimes say, well, so do you think that you should be able to show pornography to small children? And you would say, of course not. But what you see increasingly, again, that's more true in Europe than in the United States, it's the censorship of jokes.
And that's what I meant also originally. That's the most dangerous thing. Because a government that tries to control what people find funny is the most totalitarian thing you can think about. Because laughter and a good joke is an involuntary reaction, right? Somebody tells a joke, it's really funny, you're going to start laughing even if you don't want to. And that is a kind of...
a very strong emotion that governments want to control this because they're afraid that people will laugh at them if you point out their idiocies. So what are they going to do? They try to prevent jokes. And by the way, I'm not kidding. In Germany, right, the former green minister now of the economy, Robert Habeck, He had 700 lawsuits against people that were telling jokes about him.
There was an entire division of the party dedicated just to canvass the internet if anybody said anything mildly critical or funny about him so they could drag those people into court. Now, you might say, yeah, but had these court cases any chance? But that's not the point because the process is the punishment. Like one of these guys who was dragged into court- That's exactly the point.
One of these guys had a daughter with Down syndrome. He was a single parent. This is life-changing for them. Even if after a year, the court says, you know what? Actually, you had the permission to say that. It cost them energy. It cost them friends. It gave them public exposure in a way they didn't like. And this is, again, you intimidate people away from speaking freely and telling jokes.
And that's not the kind of society in which anybody would want to live.
I mean, I think yes. I think the answer is yes. Although I would always be very careful with comparisons with Germany in the 1930s, primarily also for demographic reasons, right? The Germany and Europeans in the 1930s were so much younger than they are today. And let's put it this way.
The movements in the 1930s, whether it was fascism or Bolshevism or national socialism, like very often we don't distinguish between fascism and national socialism, which I think if we actually want to be precise, we should do that because they were different in some aspects. These were self-proclaimed revolutionary movements, right?
They looked at the world and say, we have to do things entirely different. But if you look at the so-called far right in Europe today, they are basically saying, can't we go back to the 1980s? So they're not talking about some sort of hypothetical past that never existed. They say, can't we go back to the 1970s and the 1980s?
It's a little bit exaggerated, but for example, you could form a family and have a house on a single income. And I say this in all carefulness, but I think it did matter. When you went out the front door, you knew your neighbors. In schools, 60%, 70%, 80% spoke the language of the country. For example, in Vienna, we have now schools where 90% of the pupils speak Arabic.
So if you're in Austria and you send your kid to school, the kid is not going to learn anything because the teachers cannot communicate with 90% of the kids in class. So these are the problems that these parties are appealing to. It's not like what the Nazis did or what the fascists did when they said, right, we have to reestablish a massive, you know, world power, great power or something.
Look at Germany right now. They are so reluctant to spend anything on the military because they are terrified that every cent should go to the welfare state because otherwise the people are going to revolt. That is not a fascist ideology. I would say in many ways that's the opposite.
Let me, can I play devil's advocate for a second? I mean, I said at the beginning, and I still am, that I'm very much sympathetic to Donald Trump. But if you really kind of want to also intellectually, in an intellectually honest way, kind of make the, and again, I'm just steelmanning the argument, that you want to make the fascist argument.
You could, if you go back in European intellectual history, you have people like George Sorrell, right? And even a little bit further back to Friedrich Nietzsche, of course, who didn't live to see fascism and Nazism.
But of course, their argument was that one of the main distinctions between, let's say, liberal democracy and the alternative, and again, in Europe, that it might have been fascism, is that it's a philosophy of action. So the fascism was characterized by the idea it's not so much negotiating, it's not so much finding compromise, it's doing things.
Again, you even had parties in France, for example, that were called, I don't know, Action Francaise. I don't speak French. So this was very much at the core also of this ideology. So if you, and I'm not making the argument, I'm just saying if the Democrats would be smart and they actually want to make that argument, you could say, okay, this is
This Trumpian idea of it's time to get things done or the Muskian idea, even if it means breaking things and rebuilding them, you could make. Again, I'm not making it. I don't want you to misunderstand me. But you could theoretically make the argument that that has a little bit of a fascist quality because it's such a strong focus on action and the other thing and focus on willpower.
The only obstacle to change things is we don't want it enough. I'm just saying. So you could make that argument. And that would be an interesting debate. No, I get that.
What I find sad, I mean, I'm so glad that we're having this right now, there would be very interesting conversations to be had, because one thing is clear that the 90s and the 80s are over, right? The world has entered a new stage due to technological progress, right, to what's happening in China. So to have a conversation, whether or not the ways of governing
of 20, 30, 50 years ago is still the most, let's say, appropriate way to do things. That's a conversation we should have. And problematic is we always shy away from it or immediately resort to name calling. Like you say, I want to do something different. And you just point out, oh, then you must be a Nazi. You must be a fascist. But one of the beautiful things about democracy, and this is again,
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