The protests against the G8 summit in Heiligedamm in north-eastern Germany are less than three weeks away. On May 9th, 900 police searched 40 left-wing projects across Germany, including the bookshop “Schwarze Risse”, the house project “Bethanien / New Yorck 59”, the photo archive “Umbruch Bildarchiv”, the left-wing store “Fusion”, the internet server SO36.net (all in Berlin), the cultural center “Rote Flora” (in Hamburg) and a number of offices and private apartments.

The federal prosecutors office ordered these raids as part of an investigation into “forming a terrorist organization”, prohibited by paragraph 129a of the criminal code. This paragraph is regularly used to expose left-wing structures, disrupt communication and scare protesters. 18 named suspects and further unnamed suspects are being investigated in conjunction with a supposed “militant campaign” of burning cars to disturb the G8 summit.

The accusations are inane: the state is looking for files of conspiratorial groups in the most well-known left-wing meeting points and servers. There were no arrests. No arrest warrants were issued. What have these “suspected terrorists” done? Apparently not much more than participate in public planning meetings for the G8 protests.

The police later admitted they weren’t so much looking for evidence but trying to “send a message” to the anticapitalist movement, i.e. the goal is to scare people away from the anti-G8 protests. But this attempt backfired and there was a huge wave of solidarity: around 5,000 people demonstrated the very same evening in Berlin against the raids, 2,000 in Hamburg, many more in other cities across Germany and Europe. The police were startled to see so many people – from radical leftists to reformists and greens to grandmothers – who chanted “we are all terrorists!” or carried banners like “aren’t we all just a little bit 129a?”

The “Democracy” of the G8

In the last two years quite a few cars of police, politicians and capitalists have been burned out, sometimes with claims of responsibility from militant left-wing groups hoping to send a message against the G8. We as Marxists reject this tactic of minor property destruction – all forms of resistance against the G8 are legitimate, but not all forms are necessarily useful. Our goal is to win the working class for mass resistance against the G8 summit (let’s fight to make the strike of the Telekom workers disrupt the summit!) and not to provide headlines for the tabloid press.

But you don’t have do be a Marxist to realize that such “terrorism” against cars is nothing in comparison to the bloody occupation of Iraq which has left more than half a million dead.

These raids are by no means the only preventative repression against the anti-G8 protests. The right-wing interior minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, has announced that Germany will leave the Schengen agreement for the duration of the summit, so as to block activists from other countries from entering the country. Recently he has even begun discussing the possibility of “preventative arrest” for “violence-prone hooligans”, i.e. the police could arrest people based on nothing more than the suspicion that they might be violent at some point in the future!

So while the G8 talks about spreading “democracy” around the world, they introduce measures of a police state at home. The best answer to this repression is to not be scared. The best answer to take part in the protests and show the police, the prosecutors office and the entire state that their attempts to stop our protests won’t work.

It is clear that young people like school students will have the most trouble because of this repression, having to explain to their parents why they want to participate in this “terrorist meeting”. On May 13, around 20 young people practicing peaceful road blockades in a park in Berlin were detained by police. In at least one Berlin school a planned G8 information meeting was banned by the principal with the explanation that it would lead to “terrorist cells” being formed!

We from the independent communist youth organization REVOLUTION say to the state: You can’t scare us off! We’ll meet at the fence in Heiligendamm!

iREVOLUTION Coordination, May 16, 2007