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

Comments

[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.