Indymedia Linksunten banned by German govt

international | rights, freedoms and repression | news report Sunday August 27, 2017 02:20 by 1 of indy

The German minister of the Interior announced today (Fri 25th Aug) early in the morning that Indymedia Linksunten, a local German IMC, was declared illegal.

This seems partially as a result of the media coverage the site gave to the recent G20 protests in Hamburg that embarrassed the government on the world stage and for the crime of airing the grievance of the populace that they don't like predatory capitalism.

It comes also as the government faces into an election and that the entire political system shifts further to the right and all things Left are to be discredited such as free health or education, equality etc. Instead fear is the new norm these days and at the very same time when it is plain to see that practically all European governments are now simply vassals of the USA as evident in the way their foreign policies match in lockstep the dictates of the US war machine and the financial policies imposing austerity, privatisation and the stripping away of the social gains of the last century match those of the "Washington Neo-Liberal & Banking Parasitic" class.

If they come for us tonight, you can be sure they will come for you in the morning

The German minister of the Interior announced today early in the morning that Indymedia Linksunten, a local German IMC, was declared illegal.

See e.g. http://www.dw.com/en/interior-ministry-shuts-down-raids...32965

In a press release and later in a press conference the ministry said that several houses were raided, that logos and twitter accounts are also banned. Among the reasons given are incitement to violents esp. in relation to the recent protests against the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, and specifically violence against police.

(In German) https://www.bmi.bund.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilungen/D....html

Crimethinc article on the news
German Government Shuts Down Indymedia

The German government has shut down the German Indymedia site linksunten.indymedia.org, the most widely used German-language platform for radical politics and organizing. They have also conducted raids in Freiburg to seize computers and harass those they accuse of maintaining the site, absurdly justifying this on the grounds that the alleged administrators constitute an illegal organization for the sake of destroying the German Constitution. This represents a massive escalation in state repression against what the authorities call “left-wing extremism,” disingenuously suggesting an equivalence between those who seek to build communities beyond the reach of state violence and Neo-Nazis organizing to carry out attacks and murders like the ones in Charlottesville last week https://crimethinc.com/2017/08/12/one-dead-in-charlottesville-why-the-right-can-kill-us-now

Indymedia was founded in Germany in 2001 as de.indymedia.org; a second version appeared in 2008 as linksunten.indymedia.org. The latter was founded to focus on radical politics in southern Germany, but it soon became the most widely used webpage for German-speaking activists. As the original German Indymedia page became technically outdated and swamped by trolling, more and more people switched to linksunten.indymedia.org. In 2013, de.indymedia.org was almost shut down because there weren’t enough people involved. http://www.taz.de/!5078322/

In the last couple of years, more and more attention has accumulated around linksunten, which offers a space for people to post anonymously. For example, in 2011, a communiqué http://www.n-tv.de/politik/Anschlag-verursacht-Kabelbrand-article3396656.html appeared on the platform claiming responsibility for politically motivated sabotage on the subway infrastructure in Berlin. The site was also used to release information about fascists and Neo-Nazis. In 2016, an article on linksunten presented the complete data of every participant at the convention of the far-right nationalist party Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD), a total of 3000 names. This further attracted hostile attention from far-right advocates of state repression.

Before the 2017 G20 summit https://crimethinc.com/2017/08/08/total-policing-total-defiance-the-2017-g20-and-the-battle-of-hamburg-a-full-account-and-analysis took place in Hamburg, the corporate media was already focusing on linksunten, declaring it to be the coordination page of militant anti-G20 protestors. The AfD started a campaign against the platform, pushing inquiries about Indymedia in Federal parliament and trying to force local governments to ban the platform and other forms of radical infrastructure. https://kleineanfragen.de/search?q=indymedia

All this built up to the current situation in which the Minister of Internal Affairs Thomas de Maizière banned the site on August 25, immediately before the election. The state raided three places, including a social center, in Freiburg, making the whole city into a police state for this day. During the raids, they allegedly found some slingshots and sticks, which they are now using as further justification for their propaganda about terrorism. https://www.golem.de/news/linksextremismus-innenminister-macht-linksunten-indymedia-dicht-1708-129678.html

In fact, Thomas de Maizière is carrying out the agenda of the German far right and fascists, as well as the repressive goals of AfD.

Of course, those who maintain the website have not themselves written anything that could offer legal grounds for this attack. Even corporate media platforms offer space for people to speak anonymously—for example, when members of the State Department speak to the press on the condition of anonymity. The excuse that the state is using to justify this attack is to declare that those who maintain linksunten comprise an official organization aimed at destroying the German Constitution. This is a legal trick. If it succeeds, it could easily be used against other platforms, magazines, and projects, so that everyone spreading radical literature and ideas and documenting activism and social movements will become targets for this kind of repression and state violence. That is the message they want to send, in order to bully the entire population into accepting that the current political order in Germany will persist until the end of time.

This heavy-handed approach shows how afraid the authorities are that radical ideas are spreading and becoming contagious following the successful demonstrations against the G20 summit https://crimethinc.com/2017/08/08/total-policing-total-defiance-the-2017-g20-and-the-battle-of-hamburg-a-full-account-and-analysis in July. Thomas de Maizière made it clear enough in his press conference that this assault on Indymedia is a form of revenge for the embarrassment the state suffered during the summit. This also shows how dishonest far-right and statist rhetoric is about free speech https://crimethinc.com/2017/01/26/this-is-not-a-dialogue-not-just-free-speech-but-freedom-itself —in fact, these hypocrites only use that discourse to position themselves to suppress others’ speech. The solution to fascist organizing is not to empower the state to control speech, but to mobilize the general population both against fascists and against the state infrastructure that the far right intends to take over.

In Germany and all around the world, we need radical theory and practice; we need spaces where people can communicate anonymously, so as not to be intimidated by the twin threats of state repression and grassroots fascist violence. https://crimethinc.com/2017/08/18/from-j20-to-charlottesville-repressing-dissent-from-above-and-below In order to understand social movements and struggles, so our sense of history is not swept away in a torrent of ephemera, we need databases that preserve accounts and communiqués. As an author once put it, the struggle of humanity against authoritarian power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. To fight back against this authoritarian crackdown, it is now more important than ever to spread revolutionary material and ideas everywhere and to brainstorm alternative ways to communicate with each other and the general public in times of intensifying state censorship and control. The more that each of us takes on a personal role in this task, the more decentralized and resilient our networks will be.

The attack on Indymedia is part of a much larger offensive against radical infrastructures. In Hamburg, over 30 people have been in prison since the G20 in July—go here https://unitedwestand.blackblogs.org/ to support them. As for Indymedia, there will soon be support pages for it as well. We will post them here when they appear.