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Hate demo against the YouTuber »Drachenlord« (August 2018): Here a person is tormented with no way out
Photo: DPA / NEWS5
Every day, Internet mobs in Germany drive innocent people into despair and even further. But never before have a German public prosecutor and a German judge actually headed a highly organized Internet mob. And then the victim humiliated, imprisoned and branded. But that is exactly what happened in the middle of Germany on October 21, 2021, and great injustice was done with it. There was a short palaver in public, then something else happened, the weekend brought the Bundesliga and practically no one was interested in the "Dragon Lord" any more.
Rainer Winkler, the real name behind the pseudonym Drachenlord, was sentenced on this day by the district court of Neustadt an der Aisch to two years' imprisonment without parole. An outrageous verdict that testifies to the ignorance, unwillingness and incomprehension of the district court and the public prosecutor.
Rainer Winkler aka Drachenlord is a YouTuber, he earns his money by putting some facets of his life online. It's not necessarily that special. But Winkler himself is special. He has a broad, Franconian accent. He's fat. He sometimes has skin problems. An expert report, read out in front of the court, confirmed that he had "reduced intelligence". Because he is who he is and dares to show himself on the net, he has been tormented every day by tens of thousands of hate mobs without exception since 2013. Really every single day.
The story of the dragon lord is a story of the hate folklore of an entire generation, a kind of collective squid game with a single victim, many thousands of perpetrators and an audience of millions. It is also a story of the contempt of outsiders, of hating fat and not particularly smart people. The story of the Dragon Lord shows that the most extreme form of cyberbullying in Germany can lead to the state not protecting the victim - but being made to join in the bullying. The story of the Dragon Lord is thus a catastrophic failure story of the digital society, for which the media, politics, executive, jurisdiction and the public are responsible.
The insults, threats, and degradation that Rainer Winkler has to endure online can no longer be counted, they literally run into the hundreds of thousands. But the hate mob from the Internet extends into the man's private life. And how. His house in a small Franconian village is repeatedly pelted with stones, rubbish and paint. Hundreds if not thousands of times things are ordered on his behalf. He is being physically attacked. His completely uninvolved sister is threatened. His father's grave is desecrated, and recordings of it are posted on the Internet. The worst insults patter down on him every day to this day. At times, aggressive groups of onlookers stand in front of his house almost every day, often trying to provoke him in order to post recordings of them like trophies on the Internet.
According to the police, more than two dozen police operations take place around Winkler's house at times - every day.
Winkler is shown several times in inhuman ways, for example when a young woman pretends to love him, feigns a relationship with him and gets him to propose to her live streamed online - whereupon she humiliates him in front of the assembled audience: » You're the fattest, dumbest idiot I've seen in my entire life. ”Winkler cries, the mob cheers and spreads the video of the crying Winkler.
The "haters" lie.
It's not a game
The hate mob has a name, these people call themselves "Haider", pronounced half Franconian, half pseudo-English, because Winkler calls these people "haters" in his dialect. The Haider claim that tormenting Rainer Winkler is a game, the dragon game. This is a lie, with which especially those who follow the hate mob, the media and thus the inexperienced audience are to be reassured.
The rumor is spread over and over again and also spread by major media that Winkler wants it that way himself. In truth, he never had a choice, tried to fight back for years and eventually somehow come to terms with it. It's not a game, here a person is tortured with no way out, with the goal of driving Rainer Winkler to suicide, which has been declared on the internet. With the jail sentence for Winkler, the hate mob only achieved one interim goal.
The Haider, even those who just want to take a look or swim a little, are fascist misanthropists. They deserve contempt and severe punishment, but - laypeople often cannot quite believe it - cyberbullying is not a criminal offense in Germany so far. A deeper analysis of the Haider's most important motivation reveals something monstrous, which is reflected in a quote in one of the many chat channels: "The dragon lord deserves all of this because he is stupid." The dragon lord martyrdom is therefore also the downside of the already difficult one , social fetish intelligence.
The list of torments goes on and on, if one is halfway in sense and empathy, it is hardly bearable even while reading.
Winkler becomes the first German victim of so-called swatting.
Under false pretenses, a police SWAT team is instigated to storm an apartment.
This is not a prank, swatting has already claimed several lives in the United States.
With every rampage, with every attack, the Haider spread false rumors that Rainer Winkler was actually the culprit.
It is not uncommon for news sites to fall for it, most recently when Haider claimed that the bow and arrow murders in Norway in mid-October were carried out by a Rainar Winklarson and that they distributed a photo of Winkler while archery.
The Federal Republic has nothing to counter the hate mob
In the hot late summer of 2018, several thousand people meet in front of Winkler's house, a few YouTubers have called for it. In the end, around 800 people from all over Germany, Austria and Switzerland stand near the house of the Dragon Lord. The village has 41 inhabitants. Stones, eggs, firecrackers are thrown from the local hate mob, and the patio door of his house was presumably shattered by a stone some time ago. At some point a dry meadow is set on fire. Rainer Winkler is sitting in the house and is terrified of a real, obviously violent, internet-based mob. Because although the police are on site with a large contingent at this hateful event and presumably prevent the worst, they can ultimately not protect Winkler.Otherwise he wouldn't be harassed or even besieged in his house almost every day since 2017 at the latest.
The bitter realization of the case of the Dragon Lord is: If a hate mob of thousands of people on the Internet decides to finish off a person - the Federal Republic of Germany can do nothing to counter this. Worse still - the ignorance and cynicism of state organs and the media and social media public means that the hate mob is able to turn the state into an accomplice.
"We're going to put Winkler in jail," the Haider shouted on the film they made of the attacks on him, which is also played in court. Where they irritate him, try to get him to defend himself with strategies that have been tried and tested in advance. Which sentences are particularly offensive to him? Where can he hardly help but react? The Haider are weak, malicious people. The self-defense of Rainer Winkler filmed by them in the highest desperation that had been pent up for years should be interpreted as dangerous bodily harm. The judge falls for it in a specularly naive way and then says a sentence that is one of the worst mockery of victims in German post-war history: "This trial is a sad example of the consequences of hatred and bullying on the Internet." Yes, namely,that the state co-bullies in the form of imprisonment for the victim.
The court's deal would have thrown him nowhere
At the beginning of the trial, the court had offered Winkler a deal that was nothing but a farce. He would have received a suspended sentence if he "completely gives up his work as an Internet stimulus figure." A perpetrator-victim reversal and a grotesque distortion of reality, because Winkler's job is to make YouTube films. He is an Internet stimulus because thousands of misanthropists forced him to do so against his often pleading will. Winkler earns his money with his web presence, he can do nothing else. Giving up that would plunge him into nowhere, exactly where the Haider want him in their annihilation madness. The agony would not stop with that anyway, Winkler had paused several times over months on individual platforms,the hate mob attacked him almost unabated bitterly - to provoke the end of his breaks.
The court's proposed deal was roughly like telling a victim of more frequent robberies to simply stop going to work in order for the robberies to stop.
Winkler had to refuse, and the judge mocked him for that too ("I'll keep my mouth shut").
Winkler suggests that his work is keeping him alive, and who would doubt that?
more on the subject
Hate crime: "My family and I are unprotected" By Maik Baumgärtner, Roman Höfner and Ann-Katrin Müller
Missing broadcasting license: YouNow livestreams are prohibited from "Drachenlord" by Markus Böhm
YouTuber from a Franconian village: "Schanzenfest" at the Drachenlord with large numbers prevented
The journalist Lars Wienand followed the process closely on site and wrote one of the few clever articles on the Dragon Lord.
He also has an almost verbatim record of the court hearing.
It is a harrowing document because it makes the pathetic failure of the prosecutor and judge so tangible.
Wienand writes: “The public prosecutor accuses Winkler of always looking for blame on others, even though he was also involved.
Winkler is both a victim and a perpetrator, that is often heard in the process «(including from the judge, among others).
The hate mob is working on a perpetrator-victim reversal
Winkler is not a victim and a perpetrator. Winkler is a victim who was tortured unspeakably and who had nothing left to defend himself. The public prosecutor and judge have thus precisely lashed the perpetrator-victim reversal, which the hate mob has deliberately been working on for many years. With the most costly means. There are many forgeries of videos circulating in which Winkler put words in his mouth that he never said. Likewise, the Haider have made it their task to stimulate him again and again in order to elicit certain sentences from him, some of which seem monstrous when taken out of context. On this basis they claim that Winkler is a Holocaust denier, a racist, a misogynist and so on and so forth.
For years the Haider have ensured that the results of superficial research make Winkler appear as a bad person. A person who is hesitant to help and that is the goal. The isolation of Winkler is part of the hate strategy of the mob, the social price of supporting him is pushed up, one can easily become the target of the Haider oneself.
If you publicly jump to the side of the Dragon Lord, people will reliably appear who, in a supposedly friendly manner, ask whether you really want to defend a "convicted violent criminal, racist and Holocaust denier". Including alleged evidence, the manipulated and out of context clips are often used there. The Haider take advantage of the fact that in many parts of society there is a higher sensitivity for discriminatory statements - and that Winkler is easier to provoke and rash because of his constitution. To outsiders, his reactions to the organized bullying may seem very clumsy, but this does not play a role in assessing the situation, nor does it in any way justify the actions of the perpetrators.
Of course, Winkler has changed in the years of the online-offline siege by the hate mob, on the surface not only for the better, who wouldn't have that? He has become more irritable, is disillusioned with the state protection for psyche, body and life. He has found protective mechanisms for himself in order to be able to endure the forced martyrdom at all. And of course, strictly speaking, Winkler behaved incorrectly - but out of a deep, inescapable despair and a forced lack of alternatives.
Rainer Winkler, the dragon lord, cannot help the fact that thousands have tormented him with the greatest joy for years, around the clock.
The plain truth is that Winkler is simply not always able to recognize the traps that have been set for him.
In this way, the public and also the followers-Haider are to be deceived: It would only go against someone who is malicious himself.
Psychologically, it is about the same self-exoneration with which executioners in dictatorships persuade themselves that it does not hit the wrong people.
The perpetrators must be held accountable en masse
And unfortunately, in the media reports about Winkler, there are almost always echoes of Haider's strategy: that Winkler was somehow also a perpetrator. That somehow both sides had a responsibility. Anyone who writes something like this falls for a sophisticated bullying strategy. In SPIEGEL, a cyber psychologist said it was a complex conflict. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is a very simple, but creepy, evil conflict: Many thousands of people torment a recognizably simple, fat man.
It is the bitterest school yarding of the German public, Lord of the Flies meets social media.
It is as if the class bullies put little Willi in the trash can and the headmaster punished Willi for misusing the trash can.
And because he resisted.
That and nothing else is the core, everything else is absurd misinterpretation, provoked by the Haidern.
The fact that Winkler himself fought back must be seen as the self-defense of a man whose martyrdom nothing and no one has been able to stop for almost ten years.
Which is ridiculed even by the big media.
Who is the victim of a collective hate folklore and the mockery of an entire generation.
Rainer Winkler is the first person in Germany to be specifically destroyed in this way with the help of the network.
It will not be the last if society does not find out how cyberbullying can be effectively contained and if the protagonists are not held accountable on a massive scale.
For example, for the formation of an organized online hate mob.
If Winkler actually does go to jail for years or if he should take his own life at some point - then there are specific guilty parties.
Not only the hate mob and its spectators and onlookers, but also those who participated in its martyrdom in various ways.
Or allow it.
Or thought it wasn't that bad.
Or found it kind of entertaining.
In the meantime, the public prosecutor has appealed - the punishment for Rainer Winkler is not severe enough for her.
What kind of person is she, you have to ask yourself inevitably.
My answer would be: The public prosecutor and the judge are people who have hidden their humanity behind a toxic mixture of ignorance, unwillingness and raving about principles.
You are part of the problem.