More than 150 police hurt at G8

Source: Agence France-Presse: "From correspondents in Rostock, Germany"

More than 150 police hurt at G8

MORE than 150 police have been injured in violent clashes with protesters at a demonstration in northern Germany against next week's G8 summit, a police spokesman says.

Some of the injuries were serious, the spokesman said, after updating an earlier injured figure of 100.

Masked demonstrators hurled Molotov cocktails, stones and bottles at police as tens of thousands of people marched through the streets of Rostock, a port city near Heiligendamm where the Group of Eight leaders will gather for three days of talks from Wednesday.

...

Police said 20,000 people were taking part in the march, while the organisers - a collection of anti-globalisation and anti-poverty campaigners - put the figure at 80,000.

The Rostock demonstration kicks off a week of protests against the summit of the leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the US.
...


Read more: http://www.news.com.au/sundaytelegraph/story/0,,21840795-5001028,00.html

---

Update to http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=2867614&mesg_id=2867614

video: http://news.sky.com/skynews/video/videoplayer/0,,30000-1268745,.html

I guess we balance that out over here with our overwhelming passivity.

Shouldn't we be the ones rioting in the street, outraged by the actions of our government, refusing to conduct business as normal until they cave in?

It sounds like the protestors are the ones being attacked-



http://de.indymedia.org/ticker/en/

no pity from mitchum

..oughta know better when outnumbered at the rate of 10:1

Idiots!

spraying people throwing firebombs with water is a much more polite response that would be drawn from the police in say NYC or Atlanta. A 10:1 advantage goes away with any number of less than lethal things like cs gas, baton rounds, or pvc jacketed rifle rounds (rubber bullet).

So they can burn a few cars and "fight the man" and as long as nobody dies it just makes for good tv.

but in this situation it seems to be O.K.

The hypocrisy on DU is so fucking thick you can't even wade through it at times.

for the Blessed Saint Hugo crowd.

to attack police. no good reason to be violent. These ass clowns make the people who carry out legitimate protest look bad.

"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!"

Mario Savio -- Wonderful Human Being: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Savio


The machine that is the Global World Order MUST BE STOPPED by any means necessary!!

I can't believe some of what I'm reading.

or are you making this up?

"people here were slamming the protestors in Venezuela for injuring police"

Who??? How many "people"? More than one???



Anyhoo, you don't seem to realize that the folks who are protesting the G8 in Europe are the folks who ARE the government in Venezuela...

The hypocrisy among the anti-Venezuela crowd is so thick you can cut it with a knife.

:evilgrin:

at the treatment of the poor by the wealthy corporate elite.

I think it possible that this kind of protest will grow and spread until it's pervasive around the world.

It is possible that what we are seeing now is the beginning of a change in the world order.

But at the rate this is growing, it's not false hope!:evilgrin: :nuke:

O8) I would hope the revolution could be more peaceful, but it appears the only things the wealthy/ruler society understands is violence. This time, we need to make sure they don't try this shit EVER again in the history of the world. Until the wealthy/ruler society understands that it's by the sweat of working people's labor that they become wealthy, and until they understand that the workers DESERVE AND ARE ENTITLED TO share in that wealth, there can and will be no peace in the world. Greed and oppression is what causes wars and all matters that disturb the peaceful arrangement of society.


:kick::kick::kick:

A tiny burst of violence in a violent world - it is a fart in a hurricane and indicative of nothing more then wishfull thinking.

About the G-8 and such.

don't we?

The MIC learned from Viet-Nam that the sure fire way to curtail riots in the streets was to abolish the draft. Hence, the limited and peaceful anti-war marches.

However, as the gap between rich and poor continues to grow and the middle class becomes the working poor, hell will be unleashed.:nuke:

is about the violence, their cause is not being covered.

There's a lesson to be learned there. I understand the passion. I disagree with harming people. After all, whatever they are protesting about...it in the end would have to do with anger over (drum roll, please)...people being harmed in some way.

So...looks like those protestors are really in no position to criticize others.

That liberal democracy as we have experienced it is a failed project.

Violence doesn't hurt their cause. Violence hurts your liberal democratic view of how causes should operate, which is precisely what is in question. The Tsar wasn't displaced by non-violent action. Neither, incidentally, were the other kings of Europe. The bourgeois revolution was among the bloodiest in history.

violence has a way of spinning out of control - how sure are you that something will be created?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gf-Q2rDd6Tw


you can count me out

A bit like turning down a prom date without having been asked, no?

:rofl:

prom date ?



btw
Are these the people you dance with?

* 12:20:
The National Democratic Party (neo-Nazis) are demonstrating at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. There are some 200 Nazis in Güstrow. Another 5 buses of Nazis are on their way to Berlin.

* 12:30:
Rostock: The demo coordination group said that all buses carrying protesters have arrived in Rostock without any police controls.


http://de.indymedia.org/ticker/en

yes?

What a bizarre response.

as pointed out in indie_ana_500 # 40 post
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=2867955&mesg_id=2868549

and Those masked "demonstrators" in arikara # 34

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=2867955&mesg_id=2868372

are the core element. They travel the world for the sole purpose of nipping at this conferences heels. Take away the masks and the identity would reveal a criminal record in many cities in the world that coincide with G8 meetings.
jmo, Instead of just stopping at the "violence broke out" cookie cutter story angle and an actual in depth report was done on the individual criminal records of those arrested,
dots could be connected as to who really is behind these protests.


If these conferences were held in North Korea, for example,you would NEVER see them risk their passports being confiscated and worse......

Daddy's money won't allow them to enter a real area like North Korea that needs to be protested.

"..violence is by a few arrogant youthful know it alls...."

I suspect that if one did some real empirical work on the demographics of these groups (rather than engaging in raw ideological chest-pumping and name calling) one might find something utterly different. In any case, such charges have always been made against protesters of all stripes, so it appears to me to be little more than a trope for the aggrieved status quo. I'll leave you to it.

I was merely describing (not prescribing) the situation.

In any case, violence has been known to "usher in" a better world, at least from the perspective of the victors. The transition from feudalism to capitalism was marked by outrageous violence, against the feudal class structure and its proponents, against the new working class, against the colonial populations whose labor was at the heart of the industrial revolution as suppliers of raw materials, etc. Violence, as far as the eye could see. This was the bourgeois revolution - a horror. But you think capitalism is better than feudalism, right? Or no?

But what better world beyond capitalism will this violence create? Sometimes nothing but grief and suffering result - the cultural revolution and Pol Pot's Cambodia coming immediately to mind. My only point is that change through violence is fraught with uncertainly - to say with certainly that it can be controlled and the result can be predicted is ridiculous.

That was my only point. As to what can be created beyond this one, that's neither here nor there. I am not one of the protesters, and I don't agree with their tactics. But I understand them.

Of course the result can't be predicted. That's of the nature of the FUTURE.

Tell me something I didn't know when I woke up this morning.

for gosh sakes. Hardly the same thing. And violence is VERY negative for their supposed causes.

As for violence overturning oppressive governments, oftentimes the violence is by a few arrogant youthful know it alls, who think it's high time that they share in the riches. They overthrow the govt, and they themselves become a government as bad as the prior one. In the meantime, the "little people" continue with their lives as before....oftentimes nothing is better for them at all. Russia comes to mind.

Democracies don't need to be overthrown, which is one of that type of government's strengths.

But back to the main point...we're talking about some people protesting a G8 conference. Not an oppressed people protesting its evil leader for taking away the rice rations or something.

The specifics in this case are beside the point.

was change through violence.

Is that what you mean?

The so-called revolution replaced rule by white males from the other side of the Atlantic with rule by white males from this side. Slavery was encouraged and women had zero rights. We're doing a lot better than that now, but despite the quasi-historical mythology we're taught in 4th grade, it's not clear that the violence of the late 18th century was a necessary step to get us here.

at the jr high/high school level
The 54 - 40 is a lattitude reference.

Many in in DC wanted Manifest Destiny to absorb most of Canada, almost to the Tundra region.
England wanted no part of that fight and let go of The Dominion.

Maybe memories of the French assist given to the uppity revolution types in the new world made the Hudson Bay holdings not worth the fight americans were printing in the papers.

from a federal government that it views as oppressive. And the Am. Rev. was of necessity, since the colonials had tried to avoid it and asked to be set free. But we all know how Great Britain is about its colonial possessions. So fighting was a necessary evil.

Protestors at the G8, protesting the IW or harm to man and creatures from global warming .... hardly the same situation.

It has already begun to unravel...

This is another symptom of its impending demise.

Unfortunately, capitalism will probably take all mammalian life with it..

These are supposedly "peace" protestors from various countries, protesting leaders of various countries, for doing various things.

Say this to yourself over and over:

Violence is bad. Violence is wrong. Violence is immoral, unless defending yourself or others from an immediate physical threat.

There is a universal rightness and wrongness, I believe. Violence is on the wrong side of the fence. It causes much suffering and damage. It is done by perpetrators who are not good people seeking to bring the earth to a higher level.

To think that protestors in the G8 situation are helping their cause by being violent is to be naive. It makes a joke out of whatever they were trying to say. The protestees are surely laughing...if they notice at all.

In american the media doens't cover protest unless there is violence, so the peaceful protestors have almost no voice here.

They are making a movie about Seattle, I hope it is focused more on how they effectively shut down the WTO using non-violent direct action than on the violence.

The G8 are the major purveyors, supporters and perpetrators of violence on the face of the Earth.

Between the covert widening of the gap between the haves and have nothings in the world to the overt supplying of weapons for the wars of the world these FUCKS get no god damn sympathy or pity from me.

Fuck 'EM!


"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!"

all these scumbags understand is a punch in the face and a kick in the ass.

if you go by that then there is no room to complain when they punch in the face and kick in the ass.

(and, incidentally, was bought and paid for by Germany)

Since your post mentions a German connection that changed the tactics on a war front being fought in eastern Europe into Russia

They installed our current system in large part.

One can, of course, claim that they didn't work out so well either (I'd agree with this). But it's easy to point to the failure of the soviet revolution, and thus decry violence. A bit harder to look at the way capitalism emerged in bloody conflict, idinit?

If Fox News were around in the 1770's, they certainly would have denigrated the revolutionaries as "terrorists."

got a source for that that isnt vehemently anti-communist? you think the ordinary russian people were 100% behind wwI and the provisional govnt and the bolsheviks conducted the revolution of 1917 all by themselves?

if they would be helpful. I grew up in the USSR and Russian is my native language, so I have done a lot of reading on the subject that cites archival documents that only became available in the mid-1990s, showing that the Bolsheviks were largely funded by Germany. I don't think labels like "communist" and "anticommunist" are particularly useful when it comes to archival texts. Some of them are quoted in a book called "The Party's Gold," but I do not believe it is translated into Russian.

also you don't have to be a true idealist to stage a revolution: a smart mercenary can inspire idealism in the masses. Alternately, you can be an opportunist visionary, and take funding in the "politics make strange bedmates" kind of scenario, and use it for your own means. Doesn't change the fact that the Soviet regime was a disaster, and that Germany helped subsidize the coup that brought it about.

but if you want to provide sources (that is, if you dont mind translating them please :) ) then i'd be totally glad to take your word for it

but it doesnt take an historian to understand the soviet union didnt develop in isolation, right? how about the invasions that occured during the revolution through the civil war? and why did lenin take such a drastic turn from his pro-union, pro-parliamentary positions to stifling dissent, throwing out the constituent assembly, etc? was it because he was a tyrant (this is where your irrefutable post-overthrow archives would be especially enlightening)

and how could a young govnt stand this kind of external pressure? trotsky wanted to shut down the unions against lenin's wishes initially (to my knowledge) and he did not give a fuck about party-democracy until stalin showed his intentions to outmaneuver him (and exile/kill him). the bolsheviks made every effort to reach out to the US and the rest of the West who wouldn't have them. they were screwed from the start, and not necessarily because of "communism." the USSR was screwed from the start because they had popular support & because of various historical circumstances unrelated to the october revolution itself (in my humble opinion)

i'd love to hear about your experiences in the USSR if you dont mind. at what age did you leave? and why? and as for the relatives i'm sure you left behind, how are they faring? what is life like for them?

one place to look for you if you want primary sources in English is a collection edited by a historian Richard Pipes called, I believe, "Unknown Lenin" that has over 3000 archival documents including Lenin's letters with some truly atrocious content.

the full text of the book I mentioned is here: http://lib.ru/HIST/BUNICH/zoloto.txt
but, it's in Russian :)

according to the book, Lenin and some of his top comrades (not Bukharin and not some others) were opportunistic mercenaries, who were never committed to the agenda they spouted in order to get the masses with the program.

I will translate a short piece w/r/t the German subsidy:

"In March of 1917 when the question of Lenin's passage into Russia and the details of the Brest Ageement were discussed, the German leadership, along with providing the bolshevics with the finances necessary for their subversive activities, made a decision to help them in case of their success at securing power. For this purpose, in April of 1917 colonel of the central German division, Henrick Von Rupert arrived in Petrograd with a fake Swedish Passport, bearing secret orders for German and Austrian prisoners of war to provide military assistance to the Bolshvisks who would, in turn, provide them with weapons. These orders, signed by German and Austro-Hungartian commanders were discovered by Americans in German archives after World War II. Near Petrograd there were several camps with German and austrian prisoners of war, including the elite prisoners..." it goes on to describe how they were provided with German weapons, because they were unfamiliar with Russian ones, etc.

I left USSR (then Russia) when I was a teenager, but my childhood/early adolescence was still very Soviet--young pioneer, and all that. My parents always wanted to leave, and took the opportunity when it arose. About half of my family is still there (the non-Jewish half; the Jewish half immigrated, for the most part) :)

apparently he was a rabid cold warrior w/ a vendetta against the USSR: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2003/11/02/the_hard_liner/

i'll check him out, but i'll tread lightly ok?
when did you get a look at the old soviet archives, by the way? i dont mean to intrude, i'm just curious what your age is. i hope your extended family's alright :) my family are immigrants too and we know how tough life can be here away from wherever we came from

I know Pipes has huge bias, but he is the editor, not the writer of that book, and it just has primary sources, so I thought they might be of interest to you.

I didn't look at the archives, they are quoted in the book I referenced by Bunich, who researched them after they became open for study.

I am 28, about to turn 29 :)

from what i've gathered, an historical revisionist who seems happy to sacrifice honesty for his commitment to anti-stalinism, and i'm not sure if that doesnt make him a liar, and i can't read russian (which you know already)

feel free to disabuse me of these notions about him though :)

there is such a thing as documented historical facts. From everything I have read, I find the argument that Germany financed the 1917 coup compelling and reasonable. Bunich, in his prose, is fond of attribution of motives, and I would take those parts of his books with a huge grain of salt, but he is also a thorough researcher, and presents documents that allow readers to make their own conclusions--which, for me, in a lot of cases, coincide with his.

just look at the run up to the Iraq invasion...

translation.

than the tsars 'tender mercies' did...

think of Ghandi and MLK JR

That is the hegemony of liberal democracy itself. We cannot think OUTSIDE the models of Ghandi and MLK. There's something truly suspicious about THAT, I should think, when power itself holds up a particular model of "protest" as the only legitimate model.

Listen, I think people are interpreting my posts here the wrong way. I think the violence in these protests is tactically wrong (I'm not commenting on whether they're morally wrong). It misreads historical shifts in the forms of power. I disagree with it because it is problematic as a tactic. I also, however, disagree with the universal ascension of Ghandi and MLK style protests (or the forgetful myth of their ultimate efficacy), and for the same reason. Political tactics have to be calibrated to historically specific forms of power. There is no universal, timeless law of protest. So, the Ghandi/MLK style protest may have been somewhat (or very, depending on your reading of history) effective for a particular form of power, but may be less effective once that form of power has learned how to work with it, and thus mutated into something else. Think of a football game. If you run a flea-flicker from time to time, it may be remarkably effective. If you run it every single play, the defense will grow accustomed to it, and it will be ineffective. The same thing can happen with protest tactics.

Let me be very clear here: I am NOT commenting on the moral dimension of any protest tactic. It's not that I don't care about this dimension, but that I am simply not talking about that. I am talking about rhetorical/tactical effectiveness in a field of power. The tired old line about Ghandi and MLK (now taught as dogma in every venue of the ideological state apparatuses) sounds a bit like the defense insisting that the other team run that flea flicker, again, and again, and again. And forget that there are other plays altogether. Absolutely forget about all other plays. That's very suspicious to me.

:)

because when they became truly radical they were taken out.

When they started really attacking the economic (capitalist) world order, they were no longer tolerated or allowed to exist. In addition, their messages have been watered down to the extent that they have no real meaning anymore -- just empty words to be trotted out by the power structure to further befog our minds.

I mean, fuck, gwb at Coretta King's funeral????? If there were a god, she'd have blasted his ass right there.

This supporter of Liberal Democracy says take your love of violence and SHOVE IT!

I never said I loved violence, and indeed I don't.

Watch that knee, Odin. It's jerking wildly.

...And thus fuck everything up for the rest of the protesters. :banghead:

just like in Chicago '68.


"Those damn anarchist type cops, just fucking it up for all of those peaceful governments in the G8 -- divvying up the Earth for their own enrichment."

you've got it back-asswards.

It's usually the cop's over-reactions in fulfilling their basic mission -- protect the ubber classes at all costs -- that fuck everything up for the rest of the protesters.

have a purpose to cause trouble and make the legitimate protesters look bad. And unfortunately it works. The message of the protest is never reported, only that they rioted, damaged property and injured police.

A friend of mine is writng some sort of narative set (or rock opera) for his band about this.

Not the most reliable of sources but what do you expect on short notice;





Red Army Faction
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search

Red Army Faction Insignia - ...., was one of postwar West Germany's most active and prominent militant left-wing groups.
It described itself as a communist "urban guerrilla" group engaged in armed resistance, while it was described by the West German government as a terrorist group. The RAF was formally founded in 1970 .....
The Red Army Faction operated from the 1970s to 1998 , committing numerous crimes, especially in the autumn of 1977 , which led to a national crisis that became known as "German Autumn". It was responsible for 34 deaths including many secondary targets such as chauffeurs and bodyguards — and many injuries in its almost 30 years of existence.

snip

The RAF in the 1980s and 1990s
The collapse of the Soviet Union was a serious blow to left-wing groups, but well into the 1990s attacks were still being committed under the name "RAF". Among these were the killing of CEO of MTU, a German engineering company, Ernst Zimmermann; another bombing at the US Air Force's Rhein-Main Air Base (near Frankfurt), which targeted the base commander and killed three bystanders; the death in a car-bombing of Siemens executive Karl-Heinz Beckurts and his driver; and the shooting of Gerold von Braunmühl, a leading official at Germany's foreign ministry. On November 30, 1989, Deutsche Bank chairman Alfred Herrhausen was killed with a highly complex bomb when his car triggered a photo sensor, in Bad Homburg. On April 1, 1991, Detlev Karsten Rohwedder, leader of the government Treuhand organization responsible for the privatization of the East German state economy, was shot dead. The assassins of Zimmermann, von Braunmühl, Herrhausen and Rohwedder were never reliably identified .

After German reunification in 1990, it was discovered that the RAF had received financial and logistic support from the Stasi, the security and intelligence organization of East Germany, which had given several members shelter and new identities, although this was already generally suspected at the time.<1>


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_Faction



Black Block in Rostock
short-docu // german // 02.06.2007 22:51 // Hits: 16462 During the Demostration on the 2nd of June there was a large masked Black Block taking part. During the demo there where a few small confrontations and some windows of banks got smashed. At the end of the demonstration the police parked a single police car. The plan worked and some people demolished more ...
Team: block tv
Licence: CCL A-NC-SA 3.0
More Information: http://de.indymedia.org/
http://g8-tv.org/index.php?play_id=1685&autostart=true&caption=eng&PHPSESSID=141e6566e54c7d85c603214695f2b2d5

Source: Yahoo News

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akX4MX99U84

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070602/ap_on_re_eu/g8_demonstration

ROSTOCK, Germany - Protesters with black hoods and bandanas covering their faces showered police with rocks and beer bottles Saturday, before the heavily armored officers drove them back with water cannon and tear gas during a rally against an upcoming Group of Eight summit.



Black smoke from burning cars mingled with the sting of tear gas in the harbor-front area of the northern German town of Rostock, where tens of thousands of people had gathered peacefully at the start of the day. The clashes broke out among hundreds of stone-throwing demonstrators and police on the edges of the crowd as the rally progressed.
<snip>


Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070602/ap_on_re_eu/g8_demonstration

Polarization can be positive or negative to the progressive side. It's positive when it favorable and results in empowerment. I think, for instance, there is a positive polarization in the war against Iraq. Sharpening it can be to the advantage of anti-war forces.

dunno about both sides but at least one side is responsible for pushing the buttons

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=e11_1180891490

These kids are not the RAF. There is QUITE a difference between throwing stones at a demonstration and killing people on purpose.

They are idiots and they're harming everybody who critizises G8. I wish they'd find something else. Throw stones and burn cars after soccer games, for instance. That's so common it's hardly worth mentioning anymore. Before anybody gets funny ideas: I'm against violence, always, and detest Hooligans.

I'm pretty angry at all these discussions, though, here and in the German media. Fact ist: about 78 000 people protested absolutely peaceful. Now do we look at what they had to say? Do we even look at who they are (Unions, Pax Christi, Attac...)? Hell, no. We gratefully pick out young people throwing stones at policemen and burning cars (three cars, in fact, and, yes, I'd be very, very angry if it had been mine) and chew this up to the last morsel until finally everybody has understood that the protest against the summit is all around BAD. German Spiegel online yesterday searched and searched until they could finally report a broken window at a bus stop. Now come on...

I just wish that people stop throwing the well known Black Bloc and the rightful and peaceful protest together.

-------------------------

Remember Fallujah

Bush to The Hague!

Fuckin' MSM!!!

Source: Reuters

Police use water cannons on protesters at G8 summit
06 Jun 2007 11:23:05 GMT
Source: Reuters

HEILIGENDAMM, Germany, June 6 (Reuters) - Police used water
cannon to disperse groups of protesters trying to disrupt a
Group of Eight (G8) meeting of world leaders on Wednesday,
police said.

Police spokesman Luedger Behrens said officers "used water
cannons twice after demonstrators bombarded police with
stones".

He said roughly 10,000 demonstrators were violating a ban on
demonstrations in the area around the summit and risked being
detained.

-snip-

Read more: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L06901849.htm

---

Source: Associated Press

Protesters Block Roads at G-8 Summit

Wednesday June 6, 2007 12:16 PM

By DAVID McHUGH

Associated Press Writer

KUEHLUNGSBORN, Germany (AP) - Police used water cannon on
scattered stone-throwing demonstrators Wednesday as several
hundred protesters swarmed a seven-mile fence surrounding the
G-8 summit where President Bush and German Chancellor Angela
Merkel were to meet.

Other protesters blocked roads leading from the airport to the
summit site of Heiligendamm on the Baltic Sea coast in northern
Germany, police said, as leaders began arriving on the first day
of the three-day summit.

One group swarmed over a small-gauge railway used to transport
journalists to Heiligendamm from the summit center in nearby
Kuehlungsborn, running in various directions until a detachment
in riot gear corralled them in one area.

-snip-

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-6687824,00.html