Plan to use communist-era program in attempt to defuse G8 protests
The German government is planning to take a leaf out of the old East German anti-dissident playbook in a vain attempt to thwart anti-globalism protests slated for the June 6-8 gathering of the Group of Eight leading developed nations.
According to reports, the Germans have taken “scent profiles” of dissidents, an astounding 100,000 of whom are expected to converge on the Baltic town of Heiligendamm, a resort near Rostock. The scents are to be used to tip off police dogs to track targeted protesters. The catalogue of scents was allegedly put together from samples taken from people detained after a nationwide series of raids on suspected dissenters, whose palms were swabbed.
While the plan seems like a parody of the Hollywood-driven ethnic characterization of Germans as humorless authoritarians, the creepy process is a continuation of a practice common in the former “workers’ paradise” of the Marxist German Democratic Republic, where up to one-third of the population informed for the Stasi, the dreaded secret police. (Ironically, Heiligendamm was a part of East Germany). In the GDR, the armpits and crotches of suspected anti-communists were swabbed and the samples carefully sealed in containers and numbered for reference.The German sweat plan is one in a series of crackdown efforts from the increasingly-panicked German government, fearful of the massive resistance set for the G8 summit, which will bring together anti-globalists from across the political spectrum. On top of the raids, the Germans have also threatened to employ a law that allows the “preventative detention” of anyone deemed a threat, without charge and for up to two weeks. They have also built a security fence 12 kilometers long, to be guarded by thousands of riot police, while declaring that “extremists” are planning violence. One aim of the various operations seems to be to associate anti-globalism with “extremism” and scare off the growing numbers of “ordinary people” who have had enough of the ruination of their nations. Similar attempts have been seen elsewhere, with government and special interest groups working hard to sideline protest about such issues as Third World immigration and the war on Iraq.
The spectacle of a cowering group of powerful politicians hiding behind phalanxes of armed police as chanting citizens roar outside is indicative of the increasing gap between the ruling elites, their policies and the people they rule. The arrogance of these elites, which decide issues ranging from outsourcing to free trade to immigration and war has led to a grassroots upsurge among many in the West. As a result, some issues like Third World immigration have become “legitimate” areas of concern for people who once believed the lie that such questions were “extreme.”
The German government seems immune to irony. While basing its own legitimacy on an explicit rejection of the Nazi and GDR dictatorships, the present government pursues many of the same policies of both. Numerous dissidents are in German prison cells because of non-violent thought crimes, books are still today banned and burned, and opponents face investigation and jail. Internationally, Germany is again flexing its muscles, recently securing a Europe-wide speech law that criminalizes those who dare question European Union immigration policy. And in 1999, the German government attacked former rival Serbia as part of the NATO air war, the first deployment of German soldiers outside Germany since 1945.
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