The Paul Wells Show - The plot to overthrow Germany

Episode Date: December 14, 2022

Last week, German police arrested 25 members of a far-right group who were plotting a coup. What is the Reichsbürger movement? How dangerous are they? And what does this incident tell us about the na...ture of political extremism in Europe -- and closer to home? To answer these questions, Paul Wells is joined by Dr. Hans-Jakob Schindler, senior director of the Counter Extremism Project.

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Everything's moving so fast these days, it's amazing which stories you might have missed. Like this one. Earlier this month, some people tried to take over Germany. You can be delusional and dangerous. That's not a mutually exclusive thing, just because you have wacky ideas. This week, tracking Europe's extremist threat. I'm Paul Wells. Welcome to The Paul Wells Show. exclusive thing just because the Iraqi idea is. This week, tracking Europe's extremist threat. I'm Paul Wells. Welcome to The Paul Wells Show. On December 7th, German police executed raids in more than 130 locations across Germany, in 11 of Germany's 16 federal states, and arrested 25 people for planning a coup d'etat. The suspects include
Starting point is 00:00:46 current and former police officers, soldiers, a doctor, a pilot, an opera singer, and a judge. They belong to a group that hadn't had much international attention before now called the Reichsbürger movement. Police say they wanted to overthrow Germany's democratically elected government, storm the federal parliament with inside help, and restore the monarchy. And look, it's a pretty safe bet they wouldn't have succeeded. But when you're aiming that high, it's dangerous enough just to try. Who are these people? How do they fit into currents of violent right-wing extremism across Europe? How do they recruit? Where do they train? And where do they go in the summer to unwind with a few concerts of Nazi-inspired rock and roll? I know just the guy who can tell us all of this. His name is Hans Jakob Schindler.
Starting point is 00:01:30 He's senior director of the Counter-Extremism Project, an international think tank designed to understand and track violent political extremist groups. He's been awfully busy lately, but he found the time to give me a tremendously informative interview from Berlin. After the break, my interview with Hans-Jakob Schindler. Hans Schindler, thank you for joining me. Thank you for having me. This was surprising news to a lot of people. 25 arrests across Germany, people who were planning to overthrow the government. How surprising surprising news to a lot of people. 25 arrests across Germany, people who were planning to overthrow the government. How surprising was it to you? Well, I mean, the fact that people try it,
Starting point is 00:02:11 unfortunately, is no longer really that surprising in Germany. There was another attempt a couple of years ago called the network Hannibal, like the puny general who got killed by the by the Romans or killed himself by the roms who had tried something very similar had purchased 20 000 body bags made military style plans on how to do the overthrow made death lists but they came not quite as close as these guys came now obviously this cell had no chance on earth to really destabilize Germany or the German government. However, if they had gone ahead with their plans, there would have been at least several people dead and a large-scale violence in Germany, including inside the Federal Parliament of Germany.
Starting point is 00:02:57 So, yes, not surprising as far as the general attempt is concerned. Right-wing extremism is unfortunately including individuals like this in Germany. But the scale, scope and depth of this planning, that was new. Let's jump right to speculating. If they had attacked parliament, would they have had sympathizers within the parliament? That is very hard to say. Their access point to the federal parliament was a former member of Parliament from the Alternative for Germany, AFD party, who had got unelected in the last election and was now back working as a judge of all people in Berlin. That would have potentially worked because former members of the
Starting point is 00:03:38 Federal Parliament continue to have access to the Parliament without security checks. And so their idea, their bright idea, was that this IFD member would get in the parliament with a weapon and then would let another armed group inside the parliament. Now, I don't think that there is sympathies within the IFD party parliament members of the current ones for actions like this, but one has to ask why it is always the AFD who seems to have a very serious extremism problem, and this is really the most serious extremism incident of an AFD member in quite a few months or years, and an elite member of the AFD because she was a parliamentarian of the federal parliament. Not every AFD member gets selected to be that, so she was really part of the AFD because she was a parliamentarian of the federal parliament. Not every AFD member
Starting point is 00:04:26 gets selected to be that. So she was really part of the inner circle. And they now make everyone believe they had no idea that she had these kind of wacky ideas and would be able to, you know, organize this. Absolutely unbelievable in my point of view. You've been studying extremism for a long time, but it used to be a different kind of extremism. Was it harder in the early days of your interest in violent right-wing extremism to take it as seriously as you've been taking al-Qaeda? Look, it's a different kind of threat. And that is actually one of the reasons why our defensive systems are not quite as good as it is with Islamist extremism. We have unlearned since 2001, and that's what I always say, that terrorists can look like us, right? So if you had
Starting point is 00:05:05 to ask any German on the street, tell me what is a terrorist, in the 1960s and 70s they would have said Red Army faction, or if they're a little bit more internationally minded, the IRA in Ireland, the ETA in Spain, or the anarchists in Italy, they would not really immediately would have responded some kind of Islamist terrorist organization like Hamas or Hezbollah. It was simply not a factor at that point. And then after 2001, everything has geared towards the Islamist terrorist threat, including still thinking about a terrorist threat as a very hierarchical, organized threat.
Starting point is 00:05:43 There is a hierarchy. There is a leader that gives instructions, there is long-term planning for attacks, and this doesn't fit not even the Islamist terrorism threat of today very well anymore. It certainly doesn't fit really good the right-wing extremist threat, which is more a milieu, much less hierarchical. So the group that was arrested 48 hours ago in Germany is atypical, because it was hierarchical, it was much more organized, it did make long-term plans. The threat is much more diffuse. There are networks and milieus that are transnationally connected on the right-wing extremism. So rather than not taking it serious, it takes a different approach
Starting point is 00:06:26 to think about terrorism threats. Now, we had politicians being murdered in Germany. We had two very significant right-wing extremist attacks in the last couple of years, since 2019. Before that, we had the National Socialist Underground, which was a classical terror cell, who murdered 10 people over 10 years all over Germany. So, you know, I think Germany was earlier than most other countries in recognizing that this violent, violent extremism is a clear threat to domestic security. And since 2019, consistently, the previous and the current governments have said that
Starting point is 00:07:01 this is the bigger threat to domestic security compared to Islamist terrorism at this point. Bigger in terms of numbers? Bigger in terms of the danger to individual citizens, if you can count that? Both. So we have this category called Gefährder in Germany, which are individuals that are deemed by the security forces willing and able to always, to at any point, exert violence to further their political and ideological aims. Now, that number on the Islamist extremism side of things has been fairly stable
Starting point is 00:07:33 since 2017-18. It's been growing exponentially on the violent right-wing extremist side. So, that's one aspect. Secondly, the primary threat from Islamist terrorism at the moment, we'll have to see what happens, you know, in a couple of years in Afghanistan. I very much remember the discussions on how their relationship between the Taliban and Al-Qaeda is not that bad from the late 1990s, from quite a few commentators, and I hear the same echoes again, so we are about to make the same mistake. We have to see what happens in West Africa, but at the moment, clearly, there is not the same external attack capability from Ayatollah or even ISIL than there was prior to 9-11, and maybe they're not going to come back to that way to do terrorism, but I think the jury is still out on that one. So the primary threat is lone,
Starting point is 00:08:20 inspired, possibly even directed actors, but individuals, very small cells, not a possibility to pull off something like 9-11 from the Islamist terrorism side. While there is a constant stream of attacks, most of which are not quite as spectacular as Islamist terrorist attacks, but if you are a migrant in Germany, you have a not insignificant chance that you may get affected by this. At least, you know, have hate speech directed towards you, but very likely also some physical danger for you in Germany. So these networks are growing and they've only been accelerated through this pandemic where everyone tried to take advantage. The left-wing extremists tried to, the Islamist extremists tried to,
Starting point is 00:09:10 but the one milieu that was singularly successful in adopting this, in opening itself up for recruitment to further strata of societies that were inaccessible to it before the pandemic was the violent right-wing extremist milieu in Germany and in other countries, of course. Plus, once this was, you know, a little bit better, now we are mostly out of the pandemic in Germany, immediately, through the senseless invasion of Russia to Ukraine, we are slithering into a cost of living crisis, an inflation crisis, and an energy crisis, and nothing is better air to the lungs of fascists and Nazis than conflict and war. So it's just a double whammy at the moment.
Starting point is 00:09:49 And that scene has not only grown through the last couple of years, it's also deepened and further radicalized. And 48 hours ago, the arrests in Germany really are the worst aspects of this, but no way the only aspect of this. I want to grab something you said in passing, which is a mention of left-wing extremism, because I know a lot of my readers and listeners are going to say, why are you going on and on about right-wing extremism? Is it the only kind? How would you answer that? Well, first of all, unfortunately, for all who say there is not a balance here,
Starting point is 00:10:21 we had a, what can only be described, a serious coup d'etat attempt yesterday from the right-wing extremism side. Nothing even remotely close has so far been organized by the left-wing extremists. Yes, there is a very important shift. It started with the G20 summit meeting in Hamburg, where the left-wing extremist side who until that time primarily and ideologically said violence against things, never violence against people, shifted. And they now are attacking people. They are attacking police forces. They are attacking security organs.
Starting point is 00:11:00 There was arson attacks against police stations in Germany a couple of months ago and a couple of years ago So there is a shift here, but these guys these guys really try to overthrow the German government. So Absolutely at the moment that is threat number one Then there is Islamist terrorism and its ability to inspire and direct people in Europe as threat number two And then of course there is also a violent left-wing extremism threat, but it's not to the same scale, scope, or depth at this particular point compared to the two others. Tell me about this Reichsberger group.
Starting point is 00:11:39 Who belongs to it? How do they recruit? What are they angry about? There is an equivalent on your side of the Atlantic called the Sovereign Citizens Movement in the US. The general idea of the Reichsbürger is that the Federal Republic of Germany is not a legitimate government structure. This is an old idea prevalent in neo-Nazi circles really since the end of the Second World War. The Reichsbürger say essentially what happened was not the end of the German Reich, hence the names of the German Empire in 1945 or 1949 when the Federal Republic of Germany was established, but a continuing occupation.
Starting point is 00:12:20 And at best, the German government structure and the current political structure is a company and Not a legitimate political structure democracy doesn't really happen because everything is manipulated That idea this rice burger movement really took off in the 1980s and for the first Decade and a half they did weird stuff Which was annoying but not harmful, right? So they printed their own passport and their own driver's licenses. They refused to pay taxes, which was the annoying part. They harassed local administrations with letters that, you know, any instructions would be totally illegal and, you know, they have no jurisdiction over them, blah blah blah.
Starting point is 00:12:59 But in the last couple of years parts of them really radicalized and became violent. There was a Bahraini policeman who was shot a couple of years ago in Germany when they raided a house of a Reichsbürger because he didn't pay taxes, which is not legal in Germany, right? And we had more and more of these incidents. And you saw the, if you saw the pictures of the arrests, this was the special police forces who did the arrests because they assumed there would be violence at these arrests because of their experience over the last couple of years. Now, this particular group that was arrested was really a hodgepodge of conspiratorial
Starting point is 00:13:36 narratives. So you had at the core this Reichsbürger idea, right? German government structure illegal. right? German government structure illegal. How a particular member of parliament from the alternative of Germany can justify in her own mind that she was a member of the federal parliament of a political structure that in her mind doesn't exist is something only a deeply troubled person would be able to combine in their own mind. But there was also other elements. There was also QAnon, QAnon narratives. So in their mind, Germany is run by a deep state, right? QAnon. And there was an alliance of some murky intelligence services, security agencies about to start a fight against the German deep state and their operations were supposed to support that. Okay. Absolutely delusional. And then there's an element of Covid deniers here as well that are part of this wider network because ironically the investigation into this cell didn't start
Starting point is 00:14:39 with this cell. It started with investigations into the Reisberger milieu of a cell who tried to kidnap and murder the Federal Ministry of Health of Germany, Karl Lauterbach, after a talk show. And in that framework of that investigations, they came across these idiots, right? So it really is a hodgepodge of Covid denier, Reisbürger ideology combined with QAnon. By the way, I'm not sure if you're aware, QAnon is an ideology that singularly caught on into German right-wing extremist milieus. No other country that is not English-speaking has such a wide adoption rate of QAnon ideology outside the US, then Germany. It's fascinating. I'm not quite sure why, but right-wing extremists really found this QAnon,
Starting point is 00:15:34 or parts of them found this QAnon ideology quite appealing. You say that the COVID period, the last two years, have been radicalizing for this group and for a lot of similar groups. My read on it is that when a state that was already perceived as not being legitimate starts to extend its reach, then that aggravates people who were already aggravated, radicalizes people who were already tending in that direction. Have I kind of got it? Yeah, absolutely. Look, I mean, this was a period of deep uncertainty, not just in Germany, globally, right? So there were very unusual restrictions that were necessary. And Angela Merkel, the former chancellor, actually said so in an interview
Starting point is 00:16:12 that she was really wrestling with herself. She came out of a country, the former East Germany, which really restricted individual rights. And so it took a lot for her to decide, we have to have a lockdown. We'll have to enforce a mask mandate, not make it voluntarily, in order to ensure that our health system doesn't overheat and thousands are going to needlessly die because we don't have the capacities to take care of them. So, of course, this not only created this broader reach and more personally affecting reach of the government into personal lives of individuals in Germany, but also economic worries. What happens to my company?
Starting point is 00:16:52 Am I still having work when this is all is finished? Or is my company going bust, right? International supply lines, and Germany is an export-oriented country, international supply line disruptions, which happened during COVID, deeply affected the German industry, right? Yes, there were COVID programs and the wave of companies going bust was much smaller than everyone initially feared. But as an individual, this is a stressful time. And in come the people who say, this either doesn't exist, and this is something very different, right? This is the government trying to dominate your life, and there is really no pandemic. This is just a little flu epidemic, right? People die from the flu every year, so
Starting point is 00:17:36 why is everyone so panicking about? Or they say, this is really the German government who is illegitimate anyway, and now we have the point where finally they let their guards down and they develop into a real dictatorship. Look what they do. They tell you you can't leave your apartment. This is a dictatorship. And we have the simple solution. You know, we have to go back to the former values.
Starting point is 00:17:59 We have to recreate strong leadership and decisive decision-making in our country. And by the way, if you look for anyone who's fault, look at the guy who doesn't look like you. There is the genesis of all your problems. Populist, extremist, simple answers in time of really uncertainty, where even the government can't tell you what exactly is going to happen, are always falling on very fertile grounds. I'll come back to my conversation with Dr. Hans-Jacob Schindler in a minute. Hey, if you live in Toronto or you're up for a road trip, you can come see the show live in the new year. I'm going to be hosting four live interviews at the University of Toronto's Monk School
Starting point is 00:18:47 the week of January 23rd. I'll have the former finance minister, Bill Morneau, who's going to talk about his fascinating new book. Cameron Bailey, who's the CEO of the Toronto International Film Festival on the future of movies. Historian Margaret McMillan. And Sarah Milroy, the former Globe and Mail art critic, who's now the chief curator at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. We'll have tickets available soon on the website of the University of Toronto's Munk School. And speaking of the Munk School, a lot of people come together to make this show happen. The University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, the National Arts Centre, our founding sponsor, TELUS, our title sponsor, Compass Rose. And our publishing partners, the Toronto Star and iPolitics. These groups, because there are comparable groups that communicate all over the world,
Starting point is 00:19:37 certainly all over Europe, they have networks of training facilities and a kind of a social scene, something we talked about when we met in Halifax that I find weirdly fascinating. Tell me about that. Yeah. Now, this is the broader violent right-wing extremist milieu of which the Reichsbürger are one sliver of it, right? Now, that broader milieu, there was a real sea change about a decade ago. Traditionally, violent right-wing extremists were hypernationalists. So if I say Germany for the Germans, it's not for the French or the Polish, right? And I do have a problem cooperating with them. However, if the narrative shifts as it has towards narratives like the Great Replacement Theory or white genocide, so no longer the idea Germany for the Germans, but we need
Starting point is 00:20:24 to defend European culture because there's some murky elite who tries to replace everyone with migrants so that they can govern the country easier. Then all of a sudden, Poles and Germans, Italians and French, Americans and Canadians, Americans and Greek guys have a lot to talk to each other. So this transnational connectivity, this feeling we are all in the same movement, became much stronger, both online and here social media and messenger services, as it did with this operational cell a couple of days ago, play a very significant role. This is how these people communicate across borders. This is how they plan and cooperate with Israel. But also, it developed a social physical, what we call network nodes. There's large-scale events, big concerts, Germany, Slovakia, France, Greece, Italy, thousands of participants, MMA tournaments, festivals where you have concert and MMA events at the same time, mixed martial arts events at the same time,
Starting point is 00:21:32 massive demonstrations, 11th of November, if you cast your eye towards Warsaw, several hundred thousand again took part, and the Grème de la Grème of the Violent Right-Wing Extremists congregated again one more time on Warsaw a couple of weeks ago. And through this network, you have a music industry that sprang up. You have a merchandising industry that is set up. You can buy your protein powder from your neighborhood Nazi these days if you want to. If you are into sports and mixed martial arts, there are mixed martial arts gyms, which are absolutely totally dominated by violent right- arts gyms, which are absolutely totally
Starting point is 00:22:05 dominated by violent fighting extremists, which combines this healthy body and, hey, violence is really what we do as a job, right? Very neatly in one thing. So there is this conglomerate. It's really a lifestyle that has to develop that wasn't really there 10, 15 years ago. It's much stronger now and much more transnational. So inevitably, there's a debate about how seriously to take these organizations and these movements. I mean, I believe even in the last couple of days, in the wake of the latest event, there's a bit of a lively debate in Germany about whether these people are clowns. Do you understand that impulse? And what would you say about that?
Starting point is 00:22:49 Well, I would first say you can be delusional and dangerous. That's not a mutually exclusive thing, just because you have wacky ideas. If you have military training, as some of those members of the cell had, if you have planning skills, as some of these members of the cell had, you're still dangerous, however delusional your idea is. So, we don't give the same kind of points towards our
Starting point is 00:23:13 Islamist extremists, right? No one says, well, they are clowns because they believe the Sharia should be imposed in Germany. It's never going to happen. Of course, the Sharia is not going to be imposed in Germany, nor would have this worked, right? Both are equally delusional, and both are equally dangerous. I think it's a really dangerous misunderstanding, and I can't help the fact that the other looks like us in these cases, is some of the fundamental reasons why we are not quite as scared of them as we would be of a Muslim extremist trying the same thing. Is it also more personal for you? These are Germans making claims about German history and using iconography that is reminiscent of Nazism. is this something that speaks to your sense of yourself as a German? Yeah, absolutely.
Starting point is 00:24:08 It's deeply insulting. I mean, first of all, it's not totally surprising. I hope it's not too much French language for your podcast, but I always say the asshole distribution in any society is a Gauss curve, right? So you have extremely good people and you have extremely awful people, and you will never have no extremely awful people, right? And in the middle is the rest of society, right? So it's not surprising.
Starting point is 00:24:33 But of course, storming the federal parliament really brings home some very bad memories of the 30s, right? Saying that this democratically elected government and the structure, which really, apart from a very brief period between 1919 and 1933, is the only other democratic experiment on German soil and singularly successful if you look at our economic situation now compared to our economic situation at the end of the Second World War, that this is not legitimate is absolutely offending. And then on the sharper end of things, you have then individuals who even deny the Holocaust happened,
Starting point is 00:25:14 which again, the one thing the Nazis did was they were very meticulous Germans in their administration. I mean, there is at the Wannsee Conference House, it still exists, it's a museum, you can read the plans. You can look at the list of people they were purposefully murdering. I mean, they documented themselves. There is no conspiracy here, right? But society will have to deal with this, right? To a certain extent, you will have to accept wacky ideas as long as those wacky ideas don't result in something that
Starting point is 00:25:46 we have seen two days ago. But of course, right-wing extremism is always going to touch a particular nerve in Germany, including with myself. Now you talk about storming the Reichstag. This is not something that this group was planning to do or considering to do this month. This is something that happened in very haphazard fashion at the latter part of 2020. We've all been so preoccupied with the long-term protest on Parliament Hill here in Ottawa that I certainly needed a reminding that members of this group or members sympathetic to this group, the Reichsberger Group, took a run at the Reichstag in the latter part of 2020. Yes, August 2020.
Starting point is 00:26:28 Pretty much a preview of what the Americans would see in January 6, right? And I can't help but think that those pictures were so widely distributed that it may or may not have given some ideas to some people on the other side of the Atlantic. Tried to storm. This was a COVID protest in Berlin. Several 10,000 people took part, among them hardcore right-wing extremists, including Reichsbürger. And they tried to storm the parliament and were luckily stopped
Starting point is 00:26:55 by a few very brave Berlin policemen and policemen from the federal parliament. But as a reminder, the group that got arrested planned to actually infiltrate with weapons the federal parliament, the Reichstag in Germany, as part of their operations. So these guys in August 2020 tried to storm it, but were unarmed. The group that got arrested planned an infiltration, so not a storming, but an infiltration with weapons, which would have been far more serious than what was happening in August. So now what do we do about all of this? Is this just a tide that has to wash out? Or are there actions that governments and individuals can undertake?
Starting point is 00:27:38 Well, there is no real quick fix and there is no silver bullet, as always with extremism terrorism. So number one, you need to push back against populist parties, including parties like the AfD in Germany. They really don't offer any solutions. It's basically simple answers to complex problems that never gonna work and make things worse. That's the policy here. They also very consistently now in the second parliament term, as they did in the first term, try to really diminish respect for parliamentary procedures and for the parliament itself. That has to be countered by the democratic parties.
Starting point is 00:28:15 By the way, the AFD officially is declared an extremist party by the German security services, confirmed by several court judgments. So we can really call them an extremist party. So that's the political job. Make sure that these populist answers are unmasked for what they are. Not solutions, just talk. Dangerous talk that undermines in the long run democracy. Secondly, you really need to make sure that you broaden the appeal of democratic parties again to broader aspects of society, taking serious that these crises, COVID, energy, inflation, cost of living, are making people's lives fairly difficult and in some cases desperate.
Starting point is 00:29:02 There needs to be a political answer to this. Secondly, we do really need to understand we have a multifaceted terrorist threat now in Germany, in Europe, in the United States, and that must go beyond the political understanding, i.e., do we have the appropriate tools to deal with it, right? For example, there is a terrorism financing charge in Germany which doesn't apply to anyone who's not officially considered a terrorist. And fairly few of the groups and networks within the right-wing violent extremist spectrum are officially classified as terrorism. So there is really a lot you cannot do to hinder their finances, which is the basis of whatever operations they're going to do. So is our understanding and administrative setup, which is perfect if you have a hierarchically
Starting point is 00:29:50 organized foreign terrorist organization, right, really fitting the bill here of this domestic threat? The third thing is, and here Europe is far ahead of what the United States are doing and still ahead of what Canada is contemplating. We need to understand social media and messenger platforms, crowdfunding platforms, have a lot to do, but they are not the protectors of freedom of speech. These are commercial enterprises set up primarily to make money. As Bill Maher once said, humans are just not good people. So there are scientific studies that disinformation, hateful content, dangerous content, very much faster and
Starting point is 00:30:34 much deeper. It creates engagement on social media. And more engagement is what these platforms need for their advertisers. If we believe this is important for speech in our political systems, we need to make sure that there is a democratic rule on how you regulate the content and don't let some commercial consideration be the prime mover of what content gets promoted and what content does not get promoted. And we need to set up some compliance standards. what content does not get promoted. And we need to set up some compliance standards. We have bought into this mirage that Facebook is facilitating free speech. It's not. It's making money. Is there a country that's leading on this sort of regulation?
Starting point is 00:31:16 On the good side, of course, dictatorships always want to regulate how internet works. And there are really hopeful examples. You can see this in Russia. You can see this in China I can see this increasingly in Iran and you know very bad means so in North Korea But on the democratic side really there was Germany with its Network Enforcement Act's nets DG first-ever legislation to attempt to do something like that which states from when That dates from 2019 okay, that's so very late in the game, really. The UK has a duty of care law that says platform providers have a duty of care to their customers.
Starting point is 00:31:54 The European Union now has just passed the terrorism content online directive, which means that platforms will have to immediately delete within 24 hours terrorism content that gets notified to them. And now it's about to put into law the Digital Services Act, which really is the basic law of anything that happens on the Internet, including what happens to illegal content, including risk mitigating measures for very large platforms, i.e. 20 million plus users in the European Union. for very large platforms, i.e. 20 million plus users in the European Union. And the Digital Market Act, which says the argument, we are Facebook, we're earning millions in the European Union, but our headquarters in Palo Alto, so if you want to know anything, why don't you do an M&A, a mutual legal assistance request,
Starting point is 00:32:41 to the U.S. authorities, and then we'll deal with it in a year or never, right? That's no longer going to work. If you earn money in European Union, you will be addressed by European authorities, and you will respond to European authorities. So there are building blocks in place. There are some critical points that I and my organizations have pointed out, you know, notice and takedown system, notice and active system. So platforms only take down what is notified. It's like how many millions of notifiers do we expect to have in the European Union? These platforms should be doing this themselves according to rules, not wait for someone to tell them to do something specific, right?
Starting point is 00:33:17 The auditing systems that the DSA for the very large platforms previews are very much reminiscent of the auditing systems in the 1990s of the financial system. And we had then Enron in the 2008 crash and Wirecard really showing some of the basic pitfalls, right, of if you do auditing systems in the way that they are previewed in the DSA, which have not been taken into account. But at least it's better than nothing. And it's a very important first step. And it shows that you can combine, funnily enough, making money with democracy in the European Union, even if you're a social media platform.
Starting point is 00:33:54 So a very general response to what you've just been saying. It's all so exhausting. Does the modern era never get better? Do people simply not at any point learn to get along? Or are we going to have to get down into the weeds on all of these files the way we've had to learn to do recently? I mean, we all hope for the evolution of human nature and that we all become more peaceful. But the matter of the fact is, this is life. Of course, there is going to be extremist ideas.
Starting point is 00:34:28 Of course, there is going to be injustice and war and people getting angry. This is an unavoidable aspect of the life. The same thing is with technology. No one who built these social media platforms did this thinking, ah, this is great for criminals and even better for terrorism extremists. Or the cryptocurrency guys, right, didn't start out thinking, ah, this is great for criminals and even better for terrorism extremists. Or the cryptocurrency guys, right, didn't start out thinking, I am building something that is perfect for extortion. And even better for terrorists who want to hide their funds.
Starting point is 00:34:53 No, of course they went out with this notion that, you know, connecting the world will make us all happier. It is, of course, an absolutely fundamentally naive image of human beings. My example of this is that the wheel was possibly single-handedly the best innovation that humanity had ever had. But pretty much the first thing humans did was to stick it on both sides of a chariot and wage better war with it, right? That's not the fault of the wheel or the inventor of the wheel. That's just how
Starting point is 00:35:25 human nature is. Anything that is invented will be misused for nefarious purposes. And you should not posit that your technology is now the solution to humanity's extremism, terrorism, or criminality problem. It will be not. It will be another way that it will be misused, and you should take that into consideration and not be surprised or defensive if that happens. Not your fault. You've just forgotten that this will definitely 100% happen. Okay. On that cheerful note, Hans-Jakob Schindler, thank you so much for joining me today. Pleasure to be with you. From my side, anytime again. Thanks for listening to The Paul Wells Show. The Paul Wells Show is produced by Antica
Starting point is 00:36:07 in partnership with the National Arts Centre and the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. It's published by the Toronto Star and iPolitics. Thanks to our founding sponsor, TELUS, and our title sponsor, Compass Rose. Our senior producer is Kevin Sexton. Our associate producer is Hayley Choi.
Starting point is 00:36:25 Our executive producer is Lisa Gabriel. Stuart Cox is the president of ANACA. If you like this show, help it grow. Tell a friend. We're going to take some time off. Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. We'll see you in 2023. Thank you.

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