Spiegel-Online May 15th 2007

By Reinhard Mohr in Berlin
The storm of protest against the G-8 summit in Germany next month amounts to a scripted ritual. Leftists need to ask themselves whether violence is a legitimate form of resistance, and if so, how much is acceptable.

People need rituals. Presents under the Christmas tree, summer barbeques in the park, and massive protests against the Group of Eight (G-8) summit every year. The G-8 meeting — started as cozy fireside chat by German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in 1975, in the Château de Rambouillet — has long since morphed into an annual geopolitical mega-event.
Its real importance, though, seems to shrink as the cost and hype around it grows. (more…)Some 2,000 participants from government delegations will head to the Baltic Sea resort of Heiligendamm in June. They will be joined by 4,000 journalists and 16,000 police officers. Around 100,000 angry protesters are likely to show up as well — just what the world needs for intimate talks about the global economy, aid to Africa and climate change.

Kidding aside, it remains debatable just how useful such summits can be when their results are laid out beforehand in formal communiqués. If the leaders of the world’s leading industrialized nations really wanted to meet once a year for frank and open talks they should probably meet on an isolated South Pacific island or a luxury cruise ship.
But now the annual summit has become a ritual that apes medieval traditions: Feudal lords sit with their maidens in a heavily fortified keep while the peasants outside brandish pitchforks and — lacking a moat — rush the high-security razor-

wired fence. It’s political symbolism — empty gestures on both sides. Those outside can’t come in, and those inside won’t come out. The insiders are full of hot air; the outsiders are blowing off steam. Huffing and hissing at each other. Or even firing guns.
The raid by German federal prosecutors last Wednesday (more…) on 40 suspicious “targets” linked to G-8 opponents was a sign that it could indeed come to violence next month. Of course, it was more of a warning shot meant to intimidate. But the main targets, at the very least, have toyed with the notion of using violence to further their causes.

Were Protesters “Criminalized”?

The vast majority of G-8 critics, whatever their political leanings, don’t support the use of violence. The limit for physical resistance is usually met when demonstrators have a sit-in or set up a blockade and tussle with police as they’re carted away.

But it would be naïve to assume there were no radical leftist or militant anarchist groups that would use this opportunity to make an explosive point. That’s part of the ritual, too: They know they can’t stop the G-8 summit, but it might be enough to create a few images for TV showing “revolutionary” resistance to the “imperialistic world domination” by US President George Bush, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and their cohorts.

The chairman of Germany’s police union, Konrad Freiberg, is certainly warning of an increased likelihood of attacks this year. In fact he talks about a “whole new dimension” of leftist extremism. The left-wing scene, naturally, sees things otherwise. After the “anti-RAF campaign” of the last few months — during the 30th anniversary year of some of the Red Army Faction’s bloodiest deeds in West Germany — comes a string of nationwide raids against anti-G-8 leftists last Wednesday. German left-wingers are convinced that legitimate democratic opposition to the destructive machinations of the global capitalist system is being equated — once again, just like in the ’70s and ’80s — with breaking the law.

Both the Left Party and the Greens — who until recently governed in Berlin and attended G-8 summits alongside that model democrat, Gerhard Schröder — accept this logic. And what does the Left Party, which in Germany is an ideological heir to the East German Communist party, say to the “criminalization” of people who try to exercise freedom of speech in Russia (also a G-8 member), where death sentences for journalists are carried out on the street?

The question of violence, which has been politically present ever since the student protests of 1968, still hasn’t yet been answered satisfactorily. Even if the once influential “new left” no longer exists to make a distinction between “violence against property” and “violence against people,” the question remains the same as it did when a protestor was killed during the G-8 summit in Genoa, Italy, in 2001. When peaceful protests are ineffective, at least in the eyes of activists, can violence “help”? And if so, how?
Are street battles with stones, Molotov cocktails, burning cars and smoldering barricades okay? Or even assassinations and bombings? Can they change anything? It all heads quickly in the direction of urban guerillas, terror and a paramilitary underground. RAF lite? RAF Reloaded? Does anyone want that? To really set things alight once again? Isn’t al-Qaida enough?

The Aspirin Method

The RAF, or Red Army Faction — which spun off from the Baader-Meinhof gang — was convinced in the 1970s that it could hurry along a Marxist revolution by bombing capitalist targets in West Germany. The recent debate about ex-RAF terrorist Christian Klar’s petition for a pardon shows where it can all lead when fantasies about the end of days lead to atavistic contradictions with no way out: victory or death, man or pig, revolution or destruction.

The politically radicalized generation of Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, Joschka Fischer and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Rudi Dutschke and Giangiacomo Feltrinelli all experienced it firsthand decades ago — even up to their own deaths or suicides. It was Baader and his cohorts who created the legend of the RAF’s “radical consistency” that morally blackmailed the rest the left, who in their world were too cowardly for “armed struggle.” Some 30 years later, the revolutionaries are reduced to asking for mercy from the president of the once-so-hated state.
It’s a sad story, based on a fatal mistake.

And something we can learn from.

It’s true that people don’t learn from history. But the trench warfare of some imaginary “worldwide resistance,” especially when it relies on radical vocabulary to pretend to change reality, is no more than a kind of aspirin method — in which taking more is the only answer to the pain of the real world. More radicalism, more militancy, more violence, more ritualized knee-jerk opposition. That’s the point of the “criminalization” rhetoric we heard after last week’s raids of possibly violent groups. It’s supposed to convince people who would normally be okay with just one aspirin tablet.

What remains beyond violent protest, of course, are good arguments in a political dispute.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,483070,00.html