Rostock: Who’s at Fault?

There’s probably a bit of truth in all of the above, and yet that still doesn’t help because the question itself is a false one. Of course it’s ridiculous to think that the actions of scattered agents provocateurs were THE trigger for all the rioting. That said, agents provocateurs were surely at this party and contributed to the escalation. Similarly, it must be assumed that neo-Nazis also managed to mix themselves into the crowd. It’s especially plausible, first because the Nazi demo in Schwerin wasn’t allowed to take place and so they spread out from there, and, second, because already before the G8 Nazi forums were calling for people to “dress lefty style” and blend into the demos. Of course, it wasn’t just Nazis and agent provocateurs who masked themselves. It was also the so-called “anti-kids” who had to – and wanted to – openly channel their rage in this manner. And there were also demonstrators who wore black but who didn’t mask themselves and go into action until they saw the violence of the police indiscriminately and pointlessly beating and spraying CS-gas into the crowd. To maintain inner composure before a sight like that really demands enormous self-control. It wasn’t the mere presence of police troops that provoked, so much as the wild, unrestrained character of their violence when they finally charged the crowd. The intensity of the police violence can’t be explained away as “esprit de corps” – an attempt to “avenge” a few attacks made against them. It wasn’t just one side that was ready to be violent.

The mainstream media now makes those demonstrators who threw rocks and bottles, as well as others acting violently whose backgrounds are not so clear, into one homogenous mass of “Autonome.” This is just as wrong as when the left imagines itself as a unified “we.” The rioting is provoked by diverse people for diverse reasons, and given this diversity it seems certain that any single explanation of “who and how it really was” and “who actually started it” isn’t going to enlighten anything. Nor will it help to put all the pieces of the puzzle together with the help of Indymedia and other sources. The violence of the power to define the truth comes from the power of the one speaking, and this violence is always at work. The press offices of the police, the public prosecutor and the Ministry of the Interior all speak the “truth” of the state, and the mainstream media which broadcast the press releases, the moderators of the talk shows and all the other forums of early evening chatter, all fall in line because they don’t know any better and don’t want to. The story of Rostock was already written long before the last pieces of the puzzle will be found. No ifs or buts needed: over there are the bad ones, over there the good ones, we always said so, and there’s nothing more to say about it. Manufacturing consent.

Criticism of the ones who throw stones and whatever else – criticism that is fully justified since people have to demonstrate without protective gear – should be guided by caution regarding who should bear the guilt. Demonstrators or police? Put this way, the question is a false one. The demonstrators are not some unified collectivity that acts together after taking a vote, nor are they some group of 4000 all-powerful “Autonomen” who militantly go in the front. On the demonstrator’s side there are, above all, disagreements and disunity. For a long time now, there has been no single esprit de corps among them, and that is a good thing. And now many are reproachfully citing some presumed consensus (How was it broken? Who was the first to break it?) that the demonstration should take place without any rioting – a consensus, presumably even shared by the police, that led to the expectation that the event on June 2 should be a gigantic and colorful festival (What actually was there to celebrate?). Apparently no one expected anything other than a peaceful and colorful festival. (And this is why deployments of aggressively armed police were ordered into the side streets of Rostock, to be ready for anything???) Whoever thought that managed to completely forget that in the context of an open invitation bringing together people from all parts of society in a political atmosphere that is already highly charged, any such consensus can only be fragile. As always, if this consensus is then broken, then there must be more sides to it than just one.

The one violence, so far as everyone can see, came from a scattered minority, measured against the number of demonstrators. The other violence was carried out by thousands and had behind it the organized violence of orders radioed in from above – orders to go forward, to charge, to attack with riots sticks, to spray, to arrest; orders to fall back, to withdraw, to wait and then to go back into action. The other side, insofar as they actually belonged to the demonstration, acted in the immediate chaos, mostly without any coordination, running in and out of side streets, dangerously throwing things in a totally shitty way from the back ranks of the demonstrators, some people stupidly acting in isolation or merely out of reflex instead of reflection – reaction and counter-reaction, captured and arrested in cool images for Spiegel-online and the Minister of the Interior who finally has a chance to really deploy his apparatus as well as the permission to do so. (Still, it’s not the fault of the “Autonomen” that they let themselves be instrumentalized in the name of Law and Order; it’s Law and Order that has already instrumentalized in advance everything that will happen.)

In any case, for all these reasons no leftist (strictly speaking) can identify with the militancy of “the Autonomen” (and who is that exactly?) or stand behind them, but then neither can they distance themselves from them. Question what supposedly has happened, then. Ask if, what and why it has happened, if you really want to know about it. Criticize it (or not), argue with those who found this (what, exactly?) good or that (what, exactly?) bad. But refrain from unsubstantiated, general ascriptions of blame that the media welcome because these oversimplified images reinforce their distorted picture of the world. Dispute together, but don’t do it for the mainstream media. Don’t collaborate with the mainstream whose aims are completely different and is happy to turn all against all. Reflect calmly, and allow reflections to be corrected as things become clearer.

Again: the guilt question is a false one insofar as it implies that two groups – demonstrators and police – had reached an agreement that there should be no violence, and that one (the bad ones) didn’t keep to the agreement, so that the other (the good ones) unhappily were forced to hand out beatings. Even if there was some kind of unity in the foreground before, now it is grounded only in a drastic asymmetry of power. It’s clear enough that the police has two things all other people lack: elaborate means of exercising physical violence and – still more essentially – the monopoly on exercising violence. The police are allowed to give beatings and even in cases when they are not supposed to do so, they can still do it because no one can identify them individually in their uniforms and because they have the institutional apparatus of justice around them to protect them from legal consequences. It shouldn’t surprise anyone now, if police are pelted with rocks.

Given all this, two questions should be asked which are never heard on television: Why does someone throw stones at a violence that has the whip hand, so to speak? And: How is it that police never even once allow the demonstrators to negotiate together and decide for themselves how to handle physical violence when it comes from their own ranks (in the literal sense)? The police press office’s greatly over-exaggerated number of up to 4000 “perpetrators of violence” and its greatly under-exaggerated number of 25,000 total demonstrators (an absurd proportion: no way was the demo that “black”) itself suggests that it would be reasonable to expect the latter to find all by themselves a way to work something out with the former. Then a car might still be trashed or a few windows broken, but it wouldn’t necessarily come to an escalation on the scale seen Saturday. And even that has to be put into perspective: given the number of demonstrators, it was after all hardly soooo wild. Kreuzberg has lived through much worse. To the disappointment of the glass and construction firms, the property damage didn’t amount to much, and broken arms heal.

The de-escalating demonstrators who were not involved in the violence and who in the face of the pointless police actions became collateral damage didn’t cry a single tear in the radio and television reports. Nor did the police offer a single apology. The media with its autistic obsession with images of violence reduced the demonstration to a spectacle that was partly an orgy of violence and the rest a carnival. According to this fantasy, without the riots and police special command, the colorful party would dominated the news. And now the weather.