Friday 29th of March 2024

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wall

Germany marks 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall

Berlin was the scene of day-long celebrations to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the fall of the wall that divided the city. Angela Merkel vowed during a memorial "that no wall will separate people ever again."

Germany celebrated on Saturday the 30th anniversary of the opening of the Berlin Wall, a decisive event in the fall of communism in Eastern Europe.

Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Frank-Walter Steinmeier led the official ceremonies, which took place at the iconic Brandenburg Gate and Bernauer Strasse, where one of the last sections of the wall remains.

Elsewhere in the city, light installations, concerts and public debates took place, including a concert at the Brandenburg Gate.

Read more: The day the Berlin Wall came down

Among the festivities, the Trabant Club Middle Hesse, which promotes the old East German car, rode through the city in a procession. One of the city's football clubs, Hertha Berlin, also had a wall-tearing fan choreography ahead of its home game.

 

Read more:

https://www.dw.com/en/germany-marks-30-years-since-the-fall-of-the-berli...

 

a few pictures of berlin post-wall...

wall2

CPC

 

BGate

 

(all pictures by Gus Leonisky)

meinungsfreiheit...

...

It was Wednesday, Oct. 30, the day before Halloween, the day of the year on which evil spirits are driven away, and the sun was shining. The physics department at the University of Hamburg lies far away from the main campus, in the shadow of the city's convention center and next to the municipal jail. The Karoviertel and the Schanze, neighborhoods crawling with the city's left-wing resistance, are both located nearby. Two years ago, in fact, the edge of the restricted area during the G-20 summit ran somewhere through here and the police are familiar with every nook and cranny. This time, though, it wasn't about protecting the world's most powerful leaders -- it was about making it possible for a former politician named Bernd Lucke to finally hold a lecture with the rather benign title of "Macroeconomics II." 

The lecture had been cancelled twice in the previous two weeks due to pressure from students and activists with the local left-wing Antifa antifascist movement. The first time, they shouted at Lucke, decrying him as a "Nazi pig." The second, a few of them raided the lecture hall, which had little security. 

Students have prevented lectures by unpopular professors time and again in decades past, and the development never really seemed all that ominous in retrospect. Young people have always had something of a human right to protest and cross lines -- at times in more prudent ways than others. And perhaps a little more composure would have been appropriate this time around. 

But where is that composure supposed to come from? Especially in a society that has grown a little emotionally overheated of late? In addition to the two lectures by Lucke that were forestalled, a book reading by former German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière in the city of Göttingen was also impeded. Meanwhile, an event in which Christian Lindner, the head of the business-friendly Free Democratic Party (FDP), was to speak to his party's university arm also had to be cancelled. This confluence of events, along with some rather unfortunate statements made by Hamburg politicians, even prompted the Bundestag, Germany's federal parliament, to hold a very lively special session on "Defending the Freedom of Expression in Germany."


Two-Thirds of Germans Afraid to Say What They Think?


There has been a flood of articles in the media on the issue as well, and they often make reference to the same poll indicating that two-thirds of the German people are afraid to say what they think. The phrase "the limits of what can be said" is heard frequently these days, as is "PC dictatorship." At times, the discussion makes it sound almost as if National Socialism and Stalinism have joined forces to abolish fundamental rights. But what the entire debate suggests more than anything else is that freedom of expression is actually alive and well in Germany. And rather exhausting.

 

 

Read more:

 

https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/germany-struggles-to-define...

 

See also:

the terrible state of french media, via senegal legalese: propaganda versus fake news, while lying for the president...

 

one word is missing from the free press (media) rhetoric: ASSANGE...

 

cartoon controversy...

 

to PC or not PC?

 

former robocop now in charge of robolaws to decide your freedom to know nothing ...

 

the ritual of news: slants, opinions, lies, 10,000 “false or misleading claims”, fake seaweed, facts, alternative facts...

 

 

And many more articles on this site about "freedom of speech" (meinungsfreiheit)...

 

decay of political culture...

The biting tone in political struggle is wrecking democracy


Germany 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall


by Karl Müller

 


If you want to believe what the CDU (Christlich Demokratische Union) front-runner for the federal state elections in Thuringia Mike Mohring in unison with several Green top-ranking politicians says about Björn Höcke, the lead candidate of the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland),  Germany or at least East Germany is being threatened by a “Nazi”, respectively a “facist”. That is what also some well-known Greens as well called the same person on election eve.


There is no convincing evidence for such judgements known, and they who choose such terms, are do obviously discard what National Socialism actually meant for Germany and the whole world, respectively what fascism actually consisted or consists of. However, that does not matter for those party-politicians. They know that the courts and the mainstream-media side with them and so they rely on the impact of the term.


However, in spite of countless public statements of the sort, 23.7 per cent of the voters did not believe these warnings against the AfD and their lead candidate on 27 October in Thuringia, and neither at the elections in Saxony and Brandenburg on 1st Septmber, when 27.5 respectively 23.5 percent voted for the very party at which such broadsides, namely “right-wing extremist” or “fascist” or “national-socialist” have been fired, for a long time now.


There were commentators who after the Thuringia elections met trouble halfway by drafting a  scenario like the situation at the final stage stage of the Weimar Republic, when KPD (Communist Party of Germany) and NSDAP (German National Socialist Party) had won the majority of parliamentary seats in the “Reichstag” – just like Die Linke (the Left) and the AfD in the new “Landtag” (state parliament) in Thuringia. Simultaneously the CDU is being admonished to abstain from prejudices against Die Linke in Thuringia  – which is allegedly something very special – and form a coalition with this party. This is the new logic of parliamentary debates in Germany.

 


Decay of political culture


It is very unlikely that the percentage of the votes for the AfD will be reduced by demonising the party. However, the anti-AfD campaign is going to further poison the political atmosphere – and to deepen the fission within Germany as a whole, let alone the politicians‘ loss of credibility. It is alarming and also a result of this campaign that today a majority of the German population hold the view that one can no longer speak one’s mind on certain political issues. On 31st October the Deutschlandfunk broadcast an interview with a CDU-Landrat from Thuringia. Here is what he said about the electors who voted for the AfD: “Here, in this region the CDU at times had about 70 per cent of votes after the turnaround (German reunification). Many who vote for the AfD today came from the conservative party CDU. It is complete nonsense to claim that they are all radicals. They are people who request more transparency and truthfulness in political daily business. I believe what they say is not much different from what I am saying here just now.” Such voices are the exception.

 


What is it all really about?


Those who conduct this campaign (against the AfD) are not fully disclosing their interests. They attack the AfD – may be that is what the party was especially created for in the  beginning – in order to render any alternative to today’s policies impossible, an alternative aiming at freedom and the equal rights of people and peoples. And what is this ruling policy like? It is de facto hostile towards freedom, the rule of law and sovereignty. It denies the significance of an evolved cultural identity and pursues globalist ideologies and interests.  


There are many – in particular in Eastern Germany – who are convinced that the public dealings with the AfD have nothing whatsoever to do with the party itself, whose members are well-known to them on scene. 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall they feel like the East Germans of 30 years ago. With the ballot they react against a policy that has nothing to do with democracy, however, a lot with totalitarianism. Could they eventually have realised that they are to be a pawn in the game of certain transformation processes? 30 years ago it was not possible to realise such schemings. There was hardly anyone who was familiar with the geo-strategical plans that were conjured up in certain US think tanks, which – very shortly after 1990 – were termed “End of History”, “New World Order” and the alike from the same quarters. Today, however, we should discuss the question, in how much the end of the GDR (German Democratic Republik)  was actually the result of its citizens’  courageous protesting. Another issue must also be discussed, namely that the world is not willing to live through the “End of History” again.    

 

1    There are many German courts which do not consider such terms as allegations of fact but as value judgements which are legitimate and therefore not suable within a wide interpretation of the basic freedom of expression right.

 

 

Source:

https://www.zeit-fragen.ch/en/numbers/2019/no-24-12-november-2019/the-bi...

the australian car park connection...

For nearly 20 years, this three-tonne section of the Berlin Wall lay forgotten in a western Sydney warehouse.

Key points:
  • A German-Australian man shipped the slab of Berlin Wall to Sydney in the '90s
  • Following his death, his daughter Jennifer wondered about its whereabouts
  • It was discovered in a Sydney warehouse and put on display in Woollahra

 

The slab of concrete and steel, daubed with graffiti, was shipped to Australia in the early 1990s by German-Australian businessman Peter Kubiak.

Raymond Chim owns the Blacktown warehouse where the wall section had, until recently, been sitting for the past 17 years.

Mr Chim initially agreed to store the piece of the wall until Mr Kubiak decided what he wanted to do with it.

But by 2002, the Cold War relic had been all but forgotten.

"We lost contact with Peter, and the story of his piece of the Berlin wall kind of went with him," Mr Chim said.

"Eventually we moved it out to the car park and it's sat there ever since."

 

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-23/berlin-wall-on-display-in-sydney-...