In the beginning of February, we took a stand against the right. A sign against an attitude expressed by groups such as the AfD or the Identitarian movement. We had set up a checkbox on our online shop for this purpose. You couldn’t buy anything from us without an explicit declaration of opposition to right-wing extremist ideas.
Three types of reactions came promptly. Firstly: thanks, approval, respect and support. But also a shared concern about what threatens our society from the far right.
Secondly, we received friendly suggestions that we should reconsider this action. After all, ostracising those who think differently or making mandatory declarations of conviction is not an adequate means. We can well understand that.
Thirdly, there were also death threats, insults, calls for a boycott, countless hateful comments on social media and over 200 hateful emails from self-confessed AfD voters. Within ten hours alone, we also recorded 75 waves of DDOS attacks and around 2,000 injection attacks on suedhang.org.
These reactions show that it is all the more important to set an example. We publish some of these hate mails here in this blog post (see below). In doing so, we want to illustrate the danger that threatens us all socially from the right.
Out of emotional protection for our team, we have removed the checkbox for the time being. We are considering whether we should reinstall it or find other ways to take a clear stance against intolerance, xenophobia, queerophobia, chauvinism and social Darwinism.
We were also told that we should only make coffee and not take any political positions. That was not appropriate for a company. We don’t agree with that. We would like to live in a world in which we can only devote ourselves to coffee as a cultural asset. But in this day and age, being apolitical is not possible. Silence would also be a commitment.
