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Title: German Government Shuts Down Indymedia Author: CrimethInc. Date: August 25, 2017 Language: en Topics: Germany, alternative media, censorship Source: Retrieved on 23rd April 2021 from https://crimethinc.com/2017/08/25/german-government-shuts-down-indymedia-what-it-means-and-what-to-do
The German government has shut down the German Indymedia site
linksunten.indymedia.org, the most widely used German-language platform
for radical politics and organizing. They have also conducted raids in
Freiburg to seize computers and harass those they accuse of maintaining
the site, absurdly justifying this on the grounds that the alleged
administrators constitute an illegal organization for the sake of
destroying the German Constitution. This represents a massive escalation
in state repression against what the authorities call “left-wing
extremism,” disingenuously suggesting an equivalence between those who
seek to build communities beyond the reach of state violence and
Neo-Nazis organizing to carry out attacks and murders like the ones in
Charlottesville last week.
Indymedia was founded in Germany in 2001 as de.indymedia.org; a second
version appeared in 2008 as linksunten.indymedia.org. The latter was
founded to focus on radical politics in southern Germany, but it soon
became the most widely used webpage for German-speaking activists. As
the original German Indymedia page became technically outdated and
swamped by trolling, more and more people switched to
linksunten.indymedia.org. In 2013, de.indymedia.org was almost shut down
because there weren’t enough people involved.
In the last couple of years, more and more attention has accumulated
around linksunten, which offers a space for people to post anonymously.
For example, in 2011, a communiqué appeared on the platform claiming
responsibility for politically motivated sabotage on the subway
infrastructure in Berlin. The site was also used to release information
about fascists and Neo-Nazis. In 2016, an article on linksunten
presented the complete data of every participant at the convention of
the far-right nationalist party Alternative for Germany (Alternative fĂĽr
Deutschland, or AfD), a total of 3000 names. This further attracted
hostile attention from far-right advocates of state repression.
Before the 2017 G20 summit took place in Hamburg, the corporate media
was already focusing on linksunten, declaring it to be the coordination
page of militant anti-G20 protestors. The AfD started a campaign against
the platform, pushing inquiries about Indymedia in Federal parliament
and trying to force local governments to ban the platform and other
forms of radical infrastructure.
All this built up to the current situation in which the Minister of
Internal Affairs Thomas de Maizière banned the site on August 25,
immediately before the election. The state raided three places,
including a social center, in Freiburg, making the whole city into a
police state for this day. During the raids, they allegedly found some
slingshots and sticks, which they are now using as further justification
for their propaganda about terrorism.
In fact, Thomas de Maizière is carrying out the agenda of the German far
right and fascists, as well as the repressive goals of AfD.
Of course, those who maintain the website have not themselves written
anything that could offer legal grounds for this attack. Even corporate
media platforms offer space for people to speak anonymously—for example,
when members of the State Department speak to the press on the condition
of anonymity. The excuse that the state is using to justify this attack
is to declare that those who maintain linksunten comprise an official
organization aimed at destroying the German Constitution. This is a
legal trick. If it succeeds, it could easily be used against other
platforms, magazines, and projects, so that everyone spreading radical
literature and ideas and documenting activism and social movements will
become targets for this kind of repression and state violence. That is
the message they want to send, in order to bully the entire population
into accepting that the current political order in Germany will persist
until the end of time.
This heavy-handed approach shows how afraid the authorities are that
radical ideas are spreading and becoming contagious following the
successful demonstrations against the G20 summit in July. Thomas de
Maizière made it clear enough in his press conference that this assault
on Indymedia is a form of revenge for the embarrassment the state
suffered during the summit. This also shows how dishonest far-right and
statist rhetoric is about free speech—in fact, these hypocrites only use
that discourse to position themselves to suppress others’ speech. The
solution to fascist organizing is not to empower the state to control
speech, but to mobilize the general population both against fascists and
against the state infrastructure that the far right intends to take
over.
In Germany and all around the world, we need radical theory and
practice; we need spaces where people can communicate anonymously, so as
not to be intimidated by the twin threats of state repression and
grassroots fascist violence. In order to understand social movements and
struggles, so our sense of history is not swept away in a torrent of
ephemera, we need databases that preserve accounts and communiqués. As
an author once put it, the struggle of humanity against authoritarian
power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. To fight back
against this authoritarian crackdown, it is now more important than ever
to spread revolutionary material and ideas everywhere and to brainstorm
alternative ways to communicate with each other and the general public
in times of intensifying state censorship and control. The more that
each of us takes on a personal role in this task, the more decentralized
and resilient our networks will be.
The attack on Indymedia is part of a much larger offensive against
radical infrastructures. In Hamburg, over 30 people have been in prison
since the G20 in July—go here to support them. As for Indymedia, you can
make donations to the support of the accused here.
---
Heartening Postscript
When we visited linksunten.indymedia.org later on the day that this
article was posted, we found the following message, along with a link to
the preceding article and an image referring to the Streisand effect,
the process by which efforts to suppress information cause it to spread
more widely. The message was comprised of quotations in German from John
Perry Barlow’s “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” This
has since disappeared from the site, but it showed that people had been
able to regain control of the URL, at least temporarily. These are the
selections that appeared:
We’ll be back soon …
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and
steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the
future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome
among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I
address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty
itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building
to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us.
You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of
enforcement we have true reason to fear.
Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.
You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You
do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie
within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it
were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature
and it grows itself through our collective actions.
[…]
In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United
States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting
guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the
contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will
soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.
[…]
These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same
position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who
had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must
declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we
continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread
ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.
While we don’t entirely share the digital utopianism that characterizes
the text from which these lines are drawn, they are inspiring in this
context, appearing in defiance of a powerful government crackdown. Hope
is as hope does. Barlow’s “Declaration” encapsulates the optimism of an
earlier era of the internet, an era of greater horizontality and
freedom—a spirit that persists despite all the attempts to crush it. As
long as people fight for spaces in which we can organize and communicate
freely, that goal will remain thinkable, a horizon we may hope to reach
yet.