Proud of It

A kid bleeding against a wall. The man who put him there is grinning at the camera, thumb raised. The photo made its rounds through social media with comments underneath: Well done, keep hitting the red scum! Someone else suggested that the left should solve the problem by killing themselves. This is Germany, apparently, in the year of someone’s Lord 2015.

What’s shifted about right-wing extremism isn’t that it’s grown more extreme—it’s that it’s grown comfortable. Social media handed the population a mechanism for broadcasting hatred under the thinnest veil of anonymity, and a meaningful portion of that population took the offer without much hesitation. It isn’t just the obvious end of the bell curve anymore. The digital hate cuts across demographics: tabloid readers, academics, people who consider themselves reasonable, people who would be furious at the comparison. All of them, at some point, in some comment thread, typing things their faces shouldn’t have to own.

The blog Kartoffeln im Netz—"Potatoes Online," a self-deprecating German slang term for Germans—does the grim archival work of screenshotting the worst of it and posting it publicly. Necessary documentation, genuinely difficult to read in quantity. The hatred itself I can almost process. What stays with me is the pride—the grin, the thumbs-up, the total absence of any impulse to hide. That’s the part that corrodes something.