Racist campaign for a police state after the New Year in Berlin

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The new year began in Germany with a vicious racist campaign for a police state. The New Year’s Eve events in Berlin are used as a pretext, with the political and media establishment claiming that unprecedented violence has been directed against the security forces.

Fireworks explode around the Berlin TV Tower during New Year’s Eve celebrations in Berlin, Germany, Sunday, January 1, 2023. [AP Photo/Markus Schreiber]

For days, hardly any other topic was picked up by the media, which sought to outdo itself with agitation and depiction of violence. The last New Year’s Eve will probably go down in Berlin’s history as one of the most brutal and chaotic, writes the Berliner Zeitung. The Sddeutsche Zeitung talks about riots without limits, and the right-wing Springer press publishes one article after another on New Year’s shame.

The same leading media and politicians are spreading racist hate speech and calling for a strong state. These riots are also a migration problem, comments the Bild newspaper, calling for the German rule of law to finally be honestly defended.

Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (Social Democrat) told Funke Media Groups newspapers on Wednesday: We have a big problem in the big German cities with some young men with a migrant background who despise our state, commit acts of violence and are barely reached by education. and integration programs. The state must now decisively lay down the law for people willing to commit violence and who refuse to integrate into our cities: with a firm hand and clear language.

Christian Democrat Member of the Bundestag (federal parliament) Christoph de Vries, quoted by numerous media outlets, tweeted in the manner of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD): If we really want to fight against riots in our big cities, contempt for the state and attacks on #police and #firefighters, we also have to talk about the role of people, phenotype: West Asians with darker skin. That’s the right way to put it.

Andrea Lindholz of the Christian Social Union, the former chairman of the Bundestag’s home affairs committee, claimed the excesses of violence were the result of years of green left laissez-faire politics in the capital. The Social Democratic/Green/Left Berlin state government, the so-called Red-Green-Red Senate, is handing out instructions to the police on the politically correct use of language, instead of effectively protecting police services. emergency with optimal equipment and political support.

This is absurd at first sight. In fact, in recent years the state government has massively reinforced Berlin’s police force, which is rife with far-right forces. Even today, they are on the front line of the campaign and deliberately transform the Berlin election campaign that has just begun into a right-wing offensive for Law and Order.

Via Twitter, Berlin Mayor Franziska Giffey (SPD) announced a summit against youth violence in response to the New Year’s Eve events and showed her support for the security forces. In the acts of New Year’s Eve, she says, “there is an incredible lack of respect for the state and its representatives”. Its full solidarity goes to the police and the fire brigade.

She also threatened: The acts occurred mainly in social hotspots, the criminal structures are closely analyzed. I expect prompt and consistent criminal investigations and punishment by police, prosecutors and courts. Punishment must immediately follow the actions.

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Top Green candidate and current Transportation Senator Bettina Jarasch immediately backed Giffey’s push: We must now consistently oppose brutality and violence against state officials. A summit, as Giffey suggested, could be useful if it builds on existing structures and strengthens them.

Cultural senator and top Left Party candidate Klaus Lederer also came out in favor of Giffey’s police state summit. We should ask ourselves very intensely what we have failed to do to give these young Berliners a good sense of belonging, of equal participation in our society, of belonging, he explained.

Lederer’s cynicism is hard to beat. As the long-time ruling party, the Left Party in Berlin, along with the pro-war, pro-austerity SPD and the Greens, have made it the capital of poverty, skyrocketing rents and destroying hospitals and the schools. According to the latest poverty report from the Parittische Gesamtverband, Berlin has one of the highest poverty rates among the German Länder. At 19.6%, nearly one in five Berliners lives in poverty.

The situation is particularly dire in migrant neighborhoods like Neuklln, where the proportion of people at risk of poverty exceeds 27%. If some young people threw firecrackers at police cars on New Year’s Eve and hampered firefighters in their extinguishing work, it is a desperate expression of anger at the dire social situation they face and the lack of prospects into which the parties in power have plunged them.

Contrary to the deafening propaganda of the political and media establishment, the events of this year do not represent a completely new quality of violence but resemble those of the previous New Year’s Eve. In terms of arrests, at 145, the number was even much lower than in 2020/21, when there were 700 arrests. According to a report by the Berliner Zeitung two years ago, emergency services were bombarded with cobblestones and fireworks, civilian investigators were shot with a scare gun and police officers were even attacked with several Molotov cocktails. Nevertheless, the police spoke at that time of a quiet New Year’s Eve.

It is now clear that the events of this year are massively exaggerated and that far-right forces are also playing a role. For example, even Der Spiegel, which like other mainstream media is involved in the racist smear campaign, had to admit that the Berlin New Year’s Eve videos turned out to be fake. A video shared by a representative of the fascist NDP as alleged evidence of excessive violence was actually created as early as 2019 in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China.

The number of arrests has also been reduced by the police in recent days. Instead of the 159 arrests originally claimed, there were in fact only 145, acknowledged a police spokesman. A total of 18 different nationalities have been registered. 45 of the suspects had German nationality, 27 had Afghan nationality and 21 had Syrian nationality. Everything suggests that most of them were detained because of their ethnic or national origin. In the meantime, all have been released.

The dirty campaign is reminiscent of previous New Year’s campaigns. In 2015/16, the media and police spread false information about migrants and refugees who sexually harassed and raped German women in major cities like Cologne and Hamburg. In 2020, false information about left-wing violence and even murders in Leipzig has spread. In both cases, the goal was to strengthen far-right forces and the police state.

This is exactly what the latest campaign is about. The ruling class knows that its policies of militarism, social devastation and repression are hated and that workers and young people are radicalizing to the left. Especially among young people, people under 30 experience very different emotions: frustration, resignation, anger. And a newly discovered love for socialist ideas, warns Der Spiegel in its current issue titled: Was Marx Right?

As the news magazine argues for the further development of capitalism, a social storm is brewing beneath the surface. Ruling parties, especially in the German capital, are preparing for this by strengthening the state apparatus of repression and increasingly adopting authoritarian methods of rule. First, the Red-Red-Green Senate tried in every way to prevent a formally and politically completely illegitimate repeat election to the Berlin House of Representatives. Now that the elections are taking place, the main slogan is law and order.

Workers and young people, whatever their national origin, should not be intimidated by this. To counter the offensive from the right, they need their own party. The Socialist Equality Party is running in the elections in Berlin in order to give a voice and a socialist perspective to the enormous social opposition of the population. The policies of war and social devastation cannot be stopped and the danger of fascism and dictatorship averted without breaking the power of banks and corporations and bringing them under democratic control.

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