Well-Meaning Germans Attempt To Stifle Neo-Nazis By Trademarking Their Coded Slogans

We've seen this sort of thing before, but it never really works. One of the symptoms of the permission culture we've built for ourselves, largely in the Western world, is that people or organizations think they can game otherwise legitimate systems in order to silence others. Intellectual property is one of those systems, where we've seen everything from churches to corporations attempting to use things like trademarks to silence speech they don't like. The idea is to trademark some word, term, or slogan that has become a nuisance in order to preclude the victim from using it.

As I said, this never works. Either the speech changes just enough so that it continues or else the backlash is so overwhelming that the opposite end is achieved, not unlike the Streisand Effect. And in the case of some otherwise well-meaning Germans attempting to trademark a neo-Nazi slogan, it almost certainly won't work for them either.

Here's the background. Last year a video was taken at a club on the island of Sylt in which a bunch of Germans danced to an Italian song and chanted an anti-immigrant slogan along with it. The slogan roughly translated to Germany for the Germans, foreigners out." From there, the video unfortunately went viral, as did the chant. While much of this happened out in public, the neo-Nazi population in the country also took note. But since that is a group that can't exactly come out and say the direct things they want to say, these racist assbags instead have to use code, such as:

Meanwhile, the musical motif -Dop do do dop"- which alludes to the tune of theAuslander rauslyric, was adopted as a coded meme in neo-Nazi circles. One especially popular far-right clothing supplier,Druck 18, has been selling t-shirts referencing the Sylt song since summer last year.

And that's when some activist groups got involved, thinking they could combat the neo-Nazis through trademark law. One group managed to secure the trademark rights to the meme. Then, either due to direct contact or due to platforms like Druck 18 proactively taking action, merch with the slogan was quickly taken down.

According to the activists, this helps cut off a vital source of funding for neo-Nazi groups.

They finance their right-wing extremist activities by selling the merchandise," campaign chairman Jorn Menge told Tagesspiegel on Thursday. We are putting an end to this behaviour."

That's true and they just got a shit ton of free advertising as all kinds of media outlets are writing about this, both in Germany and internationally. I, for one, had never heard of Druck 18 until working on this story, for instance, but now I doubt I'll forget the name anytime soon. And, while I'm not exactly the target audience for a place like that, being, you know, not an asshole, other fascists or those who are fascist-curious will be.

Rule of thumb: defeating fascists by employing fascist tactics, such as the attempt to silence speech, doesn't generally work out well. And, even if you get some short-term wins out of it, you still end up getting some of the fascist on you.