- cross-posted to:
- europe@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- europe@lemmy.ml
Left Party MP Cansin Köktürk was thrown out of a German parliament plenary chamber on Wednesday for wearing a t-shirt with the word “Palestine” printed on it, a move deemed a political statement by the parliamentary leadership.
Bundestag President Julia Klöckner intervened during the session, reminding MPs that political messages on clothing are not permitted in the chamber.
While the Bundestag does not have a detailed dress code, its rules require MPs and visitors to dress “in keeping with the prestige” of the institution. Enforcement of this standard is left to the discretion of the session chair.
I get it: in your mind if it’s “a rule” it’s unchallengeable, always correct and must be followed.
It’s the kind of mindset the NAZIs leveraged to make German people comply with and even defend what the NAZIs did because they were “the rules” - “Jews have to wear a yellow David star on their clothes because it’s the rules”.
In my mind rules are just orders created by people, not brought down from the gods fully formed and perfect, so they’re subject to be analysed just like every other form by which people try and make other people do things - What does it achieve? What are its costs? Is it well defined and strictly enforced or it’s vague, open to interpretation and its enforcement is arbitrary and down to somebody’s choice?
So here’s a rule that per the article is broad and vague, with an interpretation left to the person that chooses or not to enforce it, arbitrarily. (If you are German and ever worked in anything which is complex enough that it has a process I expect you would share my distaste for vague rules that can be applied one day but not the next at the discretion of somebody: there really is no better way to fuck up the effective work of a team than having something important have no clear boundaries of acceptability and wholly depend on somebody’s arbitrary determination ).
The gain of it is, per what the rule itself says, to keep up appearances (yeah, really, it’s about the image of the German Parliament). Maybe it’s me, but that’s a very weak reason, with as shown here the exercising of the rule itself possibly causing damage to the image of the German Parliament: it’s a bit of a hard call whether expelling a Parliamentary member from Parliament for wearing a T-shirt with the word “Palestine” and that ending up in the news makes the German Parliament look better that letting somebody wearing such a t-shirt stay and treat it like any other t-shirt.
The cost of the rule being exercised is that for a day hundreds of thousands of Germans will not be represented in Parliament. How costly is that depends on what that days session was all about - were there important votes or was it only discussions? It also depend on how strong your Democratic values are - people who have little in the way of Democratic values are fine with hundreds of thousands of Germans being deprived of their representation in Parliament so long as those people have different political opinions, people with strong Democratic values think that the only acceptable reasons to expel a member of Parliament are those related to the proper working of the Democratic process, for example if those people were stopping other members of Parliaments from properly representing their constituents by not letting others talk (and one logical interpretation of Julia Klöckner’s chosing to to enforcing this rule is this time is “stopping other members of Parliaments from properly representing their constituents”)
Something that boils down to one person deciding all by themselves and arbitrarily what “damages the image of the German Parliament” and use that to deprive hundreds of thousands of Germans of their parliamentary representation for a day for no gain other than said vague “image” (when the exercise of the rule itself as we see here can actually cause damage to the image of the German Parliament) whilst doing nothing for the good operation of Parliament (like, say, kicking somebody out for not letting others speak would do) isn’t a good rule.
Just because that rule can be used against your political adversaries doesn’t make it a good rule, quite the contrary - in Democracy it’s the tools of Democracy that should win the political fight, not the exercise of force under the cover of a vaguely defined and arbitrarily enforced “rule” to deprive voters of their representation in lawmaking bodies and even the people whose opinions you profoundly disagree with are Democratically entitled to having their representatives in Parliament representing by them, not kicked on a vague rule that very overtly is about the image of Parliament not its good operation.
And yet here you are favoring the arbitrary expelling of representatives of hundreds of thousands of Germans from the place were laws are made using a vaguely defined rule whose enforcement is wholly arbitrary and which overtly is not about maintaining the good operation of Parliament (and hence of the Democratic process), and one of your reasons for suporting it is that it can be used against people you are against politically - as I said, the very opposite of Democracy.
She could’ve just not worn the shirt dude. She was told beforehand that it’s against the house rules of the Bundestag and she did it to create a scene, which worked. She was back the next day. It’s really not that deep, however I always enjoy Americans explaining European politics to locals, so I thank you wholeheartedly for the entertainment.
That’s a logic totally anchored on the idea that “all rules are unchallengeable and undisputable”, hence from that point of view people must simply follow the rules and if they don’t it’s their fault, never that of the rules.
As I said, NAZI Germany relied on exactly that mindset to get Germans to meekly accepted what the NAZIs were doing because “it’s the rules and all people have to do is obbey them”. In fact, “people must obbey the rules and if they don’t and they get punished it’s their fault” is a general way of thinking of Fascists in general.
My entire point is that rules are no such thing - they’re made by humans, are meant to achieve certain goals and have certain costs. In a Democracy rules should be examined, evaluated and changed if they’re not more or a gain than a loss. This is even more important for rules around democratic processes such as lawmaking.
What this legislator managed to do was show the anti-Democratic nature of some of German processes, which was probably her intention.
Oh, and I’m European, not American, which is why nowadays I think Germany is a fucking disgrace (an opinion which is almost the opposite of what I thought about it a mere 5 years ago): it’s exactly because I come from a country which has Modern European Humanist values and which itself overthrew a Fascists dictatorship and transformed into a Democracy 50 years ago, that I have actual Democratic Values and am sorely dissapointed every time I find yet another way the country which had the worst version of Fascism in Human History, instead of being the strictest practicioner of Democratic Values possible, is instead doing things like civil society surveillance, supporting a massive Genocide very openly because of the ethnicity of the aggressors and their victims, trying to bypass the Rule Of Law to silence dissent, practicing overtly Discriminatory treatment of people depending on their ethnicity and as in this case suppressing free speech in the actual Bundestag by using an ill-defined rule about “protecting the image of Parliament” to override the ability of a Parliamentarian to represent their voters when there in Democracy there are very few things more important than that.
If I was from the land of Donald Trump, First Pass The Post and voting for the Lesser Evil because voting for Good instead of Evil is not a realistic option, the German Bundestag suppressing a parliamentarian’s ability to represent their voters because that parliamentarian is taking a political stand that the majority disagrees with through a perfectly legal means, with just the word “Palestine”, would seem miniscule and irrelevant in comparison.
It’s exactly when you’re used to real Democracy that the kind of shit going on in Germany really stands out as bit-by-bit continued reversion of Democracy in favor or surveillance, force and even racial selectivity in the exercise of Power.
Lmfao okay dude
LOL!