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