Germany Shuts Down an ‘Extremist’ Left-Wing Website for the First Time

[amw]

The debate over “free speech” in the United States is complicated (a lotta ins, lotta outs, lotta what-have-yous). Sometimes, supporting “free speech” means opposing state censorship; other times, it means opposing activists who try to preempt speech they disapprove of through protest or pressure campaigns - which is to say, through free speech. So

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[lied_ohne_worte]

It's quite hard to have any sympathies for the violent wing of the recent G20 protests once you've seen the material of them going through residential streets systematically setting on fire small cars of the type driven by people who are already poor, or burning/looting small independently run shops that are not connected to any big bad evil corporation whatsoever, but rather run by people who probably sympathise with anti-G20 protests. That wasn't about any high-minded goals, it was about having fun destroying things.

Then, the German government is in fact putting pressure on Facebook, Twitter and the likes, and that is mostly about rightwing propaganda / incitement to hatred etc.

In that light, this quote from one of the articles is downright humourous:

In fact, Thomas de Maizière is carrying out the agenda of the German far right and fascists, as well as the repressive goals of AfD.

Normally, rightwingers accuse de Maizière of being an extreme leftist and suppressing them.

All in all, while what you posted mostly seems to look at this in relation to the US (as is usual with articles about other countries posted in this community), German laws against incitement to hatred and similar have historic context and are mostly used to repress Nazis. We sort of have experience with letting those run unchecked.

There are problems with how the government and police are dealing with right-wing and left-wing crimes here, respectively. But that doesn't mean our government is acting as agents of fascism or whatever.

[amw]

Disclaimer: many of my friends and ex-colleagues were in Hamburg during the G20 to protest, so my views are understandably sympathetic to the protestors.

I have been traveling for the last 5 months so was not able to follow the G20 news as closely as i could when i lived in Germany, so i will give you the benefit of the doubt that the property of "poor" people did get torched. However, focusing on these individuals instead of the capitalist system that inspired the direct action in the first place is missing the point of the protest.

Some anti-capitalist activists choose to destroy property. They do it to demonstrate the effects of gentrification, economic oppression and environmental exploitation. Even if "poor" people are unintentionally caught up in the crossfire, let's be honest - it's the insurance companies that will really foot the bill of the sabotage. The important message to take away from the action is that there is a huge class of people suffering this kind of oppression every single day due to the ignorance and selfishness of the rich and privileged.

I think it is disingenuous to equate Nazis with anti-capitalist activists, because anti-capitalist activists do not advocate violence against people - they focus on property damage. (Some anti-fascist groups do justify proactive attacks on racists, but whether that is problematic is a different discussion.)

Plenty of people far smarter than me have written about how the destruction of property plays a role in protest. The most famous recent piece was in Time magazine: In Defense of Rioting. (Sorry i cannot check that link right now because i am behind the Great Firewall.) CrimethInc also has plenty of articles on their website, since they are a collective that promotes direct action. One example: Why Break Windows? I can only share a personal anecdote.

When i lived in the Friedrichshainer Nordkiez last year, the right-wing police administrator decided to send hundreds of riot police into a formerly-squatted building in my neighborhood, acting as a private army of the foreign property owner. For weeks (!!!) every day as i walked home from work i had to walk past several vans of heavily-armed riot police. Some nights the police kettled working professionals like me simply because we lived in the same kiez as some old squatters and a few street punks. All of this, just so that the CDU could look tough on left-wing "extremists". Eventually a street protest was organized because we were sick of being used as political pawns. Thousands of riot police from all over Germany were shipped in to "defend" the police who had already invaded our neighborhood. Those police violently attacked the young people who were standing up for our rights. Several cars got set on fire. Some windows got smashed. That protest made international news, and the next day the CDU realized what a PR disaster they had caused and pulled the police out. Too late. The CDU tried to court AfD voters and just ended up looking equally fascist. Now Berlin is green/red/red. I had never really understood the point of property destruction and violent protest until that day.

[lied_ohne_worte]

Why the constant scare-quotes around "poor"? What criteria have people to fulfill for you to consider them poor enough not to destroy their property? If your things had been torched, would you have deserved it?

What about this woman? How "rich and privileged" is she? Whom is she victimising?

As for insurance... yes, people who are well-off are going to have Vollkasko on their cars and will get the damage replaced. Poor people will have Haftpflicht, which they are required to have, but nothing more. The woman in the article: Her insurance will replace the car windows, what a great help. And yes, the city supposedly wants to give people money (paid from everyone's taxes, including poor people, hooray!), but last I read that was proceeding very slowly.

From what I read, locals saw violent protesters that spoke foreign languages, so had clearly traveled here. They wore brand clothing made by exploiting poor countries. Someone will presumably have paid for that clothing. How many, I wonder, went back home to their well-off middle-class parents afterward where they get whatever they want?

I've voted for the Green party since I have been able to vote. I'm not a right-wing or even Conservative person. But those people (and I don't mean the peaceful protesters, I mean the black block who went on a jolly destruction party that's no better than if it had been done by football hooligans or drunk tourists) can go screw themselves.

[amw]

We are literally talking about a meeting of 20 of the richest countries in the world here. I don't think it's a stretch to scare-quote "poor" when talking about property owners who live in the fourth-largest economy in the world.

The G20 is specifically an international meeting, so it should come as no surprise that people would come from overseas to protest it. Hamburgers complaining about foreigners invading their city should take a second to think about what the protests were about in the first place. They might start by considering how they are complicit in the exploitation of people and destruction of the environment all over the rest of the world.

That said, i get your point that there are plenty of opportunistic hooligans who jump on the anti-capitalist bandwagon as an excuse to smash things. I don't like that either. The problem is these blocs are formed by independent cells, so there is not much the ideologically-motivated activists can do to shut out the hooligans. More cynical activists might say that they shouldn't do anything about it because hooligans pad out the numbers, which increases the effectiveness of the bloc.

To get back on-topic, i can say that it used to annoy me when reading Linksunten that certain posters would repeatedly refer to the police using the same terms Nazis used to dehumanize Jews and other minorities. And this is speaking as someone who has experienced nothing but oppression at the hands of the German police. But in my opinion the presence of a few bad apples is no reason to shut down the site, which was also used to help legitimate groups organize protests and share safety/legal information.

[icetypejim]

Poor and working class people suffer every day under capitalism, but the only time people seem to explicitly care about the destruction of their livelihoods and their dignity is when a protester breaks a window and it's always in service of shutting down any real conversation on how capitalism does that and worse to them every day.