Berlin was the first stop for that son of a humiliated warlord, that Texas executioner whom less than half of the few who did vote at all had voted for back in the days when air travel did not involve plastic cutlery. The oil man had chosen Europe in order to win support for his daddy’s vengeful fantasies involving the spectacular capture of an ally turned anti-christ who had remained a global somebody long after his arch enemy had been voted out of office for a sax playing hedonist with a soft spot for blow jobs. American politics, eh? But check out what happened in Germany these past few days.
In spite of the fact that many people here believe that Bush is a brainless fuckwit, they got scared by the recent war mongering. His visit is widely regarded as an evil omen of more wars to come. People don’t want any wars. Not here and not anywhere. Still, on Tuesday there was a singular event of appreciation for big brother USA. 200 people had congregated at a tourist recreation of a cold war checkpoint in the centre of town where that wall once divided the ones who thought they lived in the free world from the ones who knew they didn’t. Almost all of them were officials of the local conservative party who had just recently experienced their biggest electoral defeat in the city’s history. They had to be guarded by the police in order to conduct their little ceremony. And there are a lot of police about in Berlin, these days.
More than ten thousand cops have been deployed in the city in order to guarantee that the "most powerful man in the world” will not be ripped apart by an outraged multitude. People are angry and people are scared. Many of them came together a day before the oil man’s arrival to show their protest at a big demonstration organised by an alliance which aptly called itself "axis of peace”. There must have been some 40.000 or maybe even more. The demonstration was big and peaceful and there were all kinds of people marching together. Old ones from the East of the country many of whom are still organised in the communist party and old ones from the West, among them Christian bases who were already out on the streets back in the 1980s protesting the deployment of US-American nuclear missiles in Europe. They were carrying banners like "There is no way to peace, peace is the way”. And there were youngsters, students and workers, kids organised in various movements like Attac which criticise corporate globalisation. There were Palestinians, Turks and Kurds, members of all Ethnic groups which make our country such a colourful place. And there were radicals, too, anarchists and the like, even though the Autonoms had scheduled their protest for the following day, the day when Bush actually got here.
On that day even more people showed up, for many of the ones who had been the day before went again. The whole part of town around the hotel where the oil man stayed with his bodyguards was sealed off from the public and we didn’t even get near there. Nobody even made any serious attempt with tanks complete with machine guns blocking the access. You never see tanks like that in Germany, you don’t even see guns in public. They are all tucked away from view until they are deployed somewhere like the Persian Gulf. (The German government actually tells the people here that they don’t exactly know why they have recently deployed some tanks there. Bloody liars!) At that second demonstration yesterday the mood was a much more determined. There were drums and shouts and banners everywhere. Ever since that unfortunate incident when the con man almost choked and was resuscitated, the Pretzel has turned into a symbol of defiance which is universally understood around here. And there were many pretzels about yesterday. Again, the make-up of the march was diverse, ranging from the raving pink and silver gays and lesbians to the black clad hooded hard cores who shouted all the old slogans like "USA – international genocidal agency”, "Poison gas, war and genocide – These are Germany’s export goods”, "Nato strategists, war mongerers – we’ll put an end to your business”, of course you have to imagine all of these in German and in rhyme.
There were occasional arrests, when people within the march were especially targeted by the cops. Still, there wasn’t a constant presence of rows of armed police marching right next to the demo like at similar occasions. This may have had something to do with the fact that they wanted to focus on guarding that part of town where the big fish was hanging out or with the fact that any confrontation would have lead to more publicity for the protests. The clashes did come but only after the march was over. People had spread over a large area in front of the city’s main cathedral drumming, dancing and talking to each other when a line of cops started to advance towards the crowds after they had sealed off the area. The idea was clearly to drive people out of the city centre in order to prevent any direct actions. But since there were so many of us it took hours until people started thinning out. Since the place was so crowded with protesters and the cops moved about in groups of 20 to 50 this wasn’t your classic street battle situation. What are you gonna do? Throw a bottle? Most of the stuff lying about was plastic anyway. But some people actually did that and there were sporadic and muddled cop attacs on the crowd before and after somebody had thrown a bottle at them. In this, the agents were rather brutal randomly injuring anyone they could with their batons and boots. There sure was a lot of energy about but what are you going to do with that on a huge patch of grass? There wasn’t a target like a bank or a McDonalds anywhere near, just that big old cathedral. Instead, there were tens of thousands of people who were mostly having a good old time cheering and shouting abuse at the cops who in all their gear looked reminiscent of that star wars clone army they have up on all the bill boards these days. Later on some shrubbery was set alight (burning bush, get it?) and the more adventurous actually made it to the commercial centre trashing some shop windows and I believe the yellow arches were among them.
Today some inner city train traffic was blocked by some more creative resistance but I doubt the man himself will have taken much notice of all this. But that wasn’t what this was about anyway. You people out there are the ones who this is addressed to more than anyone, may it be an encouragement. In the afternoon, the bone of contention got into his armoured limo and left for Moscow. I wonder how they’ll receive him there and I sure hope there will be some resistance.