Rrrevolution! We are rrrevolutionaries! ("Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung", Germany)
Why are the riots in Frankfurt now mentioned simultaneously with the Maidan of Kiev? How did Blockupy activists come up with a similar idea? Here a new conflict of systems manifests itself - and the euro takes part in it. Analysis.
Among the absurd reactions to the violent and destructive outburst of the militant participants in the demonstration held in Frankfurt, we can mention the comment made on Wednesday by Heike Haensel, a Bundestag deputy from the Left Party. She was outraged by the “dirty campaign” against the organizers of this protest action, that is, against the Blockupy alliance. “On the Maidan in Kiev, the smoke from burning tires was a symbol of the freedom movement!” She emphasized. In other words: there you praise freedom fighters, and when we start fighting for freedom, we are condemned as the instigators of unrest.
But why they began to recall the Maidan, when protests against the euro policy were held in Frankfurt? What do the “resistance” to the European Central Bank and the troika’s financial policy towards Greece have in common with the freedom movement in Ukraine, which the representatives of the Left Party, in the style of Russian propaganda, constantly condemn, calling a recurrence of fascism?
The smell of burning that combines
Approximately 50 groups and small groups, together, formed the Blockupy movement, including “Left”, “Attac” (Attac), “Autonomes” (Autonome), “Syriza” (Syriza), “Revolutionary Socialists” and “Interventionist Left” and many other critics of the system, and two things are common to them: anti-capitalism and an understanding of democracy that is hostile to parliamentary democracy. The appeals and slogans that were chanted on Wednesday at the European Central Bank building (“Pro-revolution! We are revolutionary!”) Are the same revolutionary slogans that Frankfurt knows from previous times - as well as the associated smell of burning. That is, nothing new?
However, the key word “Maidan” suggests that there is something else, and this very word does not arise by chance. It annoys the “revolutionary-minded” leftists, like 25 years ago they were annoyed by the fact that in the states of the “eastern bloc”, “in the middle kingdom” located between Russia and the “old” European community, it was not their ideas of democracy and freedom that won , and the "bourgeois" ideas of the West. For some time the impression might have been that they actually turned out to be the losers in this conflict of systems. But now they have a new ally and a new image of the enemy, each of which is able to breathe new life into them.
With the new image of the enemy, everything is clear: global (American) financial capitalism, the European branches of which are the “troika” and the euro, which enslave and suppress countries such as Greece; and “post-democracy” in the spirit of Colin Crouch (Colin Crouch), is such only in name, and regularly organizes elections (Alibiwahlen) as an alibi, however, it is managed by concerns and financial jugglers that deprive people of sovereignty. “Brussels” and “Frankfurt” became symbols of this “suppression”.
Even more interesting are the new old allies: these are the “people's democracies” that countries such as Russia, China or, under Chavez, Venezuela are trying to present themselves. But it is these systems that are considered “2.0 dictatorships”, and they are characterized by precisely those features that are attributed to Western democracies when they are called “post-democracies,” that is, they are alibi-democracies under the leadership of a corrupt elite. Nevertheless, in a paradoxical way, they serve as “revolutionary” movements as a model for the future, in which the capitalist system will be limited to the “will of the people,” while this will may well manifest itself in one party or in one person - in a “revolutionary leader.”
In this case, the “revolutionaries” of our time with their admirers of Putin are in the wake of the pernicious tradition of worshiping Stalin, Fidel Castro or Paul Pot, and here, by the way, left and right critics of the system come together: a poster with the words “Putin, help us” could be coined and the party "Left". Only the participants of the walk through the city under the slogan “We are the people” in Dresden turned out to be more agile. The unrest on Wednesday in Frankfurt had both familiar and very new features. The fact is that in addition to the foreign and military confrontation between the East and the West, represented by the war in Ukraine as a new “cold war,” these systems were once again marked by a conflict of systems. The euro and European politicians, whom the representatives of right and left forces mockingly called “European rescuers,” unexpectedly found themselves between the two front lines.
But even this phenomenon has a certain tradition: the integration of the European Community in the Cold War era was a response to the contradictions between the East and the West. The initial political function of the single currency of the Community, which consisted precisely in that - who today recalls this? - To "limit" Germany, faded into the background. The euro plays a different role today - it is the currency of the West in the competition of systems.
- Jasper von Altenbockum (Jasper von Altenbockum)
- http://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/inland/krawalle-in-frankfurt-wir-sind-revoluzzer-13491493.html
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