DRESDEN, GERMANY – on the night of Aug. 8, two men, soldiers in the German army, painted swastikas on the walls of a building at Forststrasse No. 9 and set it on fire. The 25 Italian construction workers who lived in the barrackslike hostel were away, but the building was reduced to rubble. A month later, the swastikas were still visible on the surviving walls.
There were no flowers at the site of the torched abode. No one made an angry speech against intolerance. Even the anti-fascist watchdog groups expressed more weariness than rage.
“We weren’t surprised,” said Daniel, a 20-something college student, and anti-fascist activist, “it happens all the time. A month ago, another shelter for immigrants was burned down. Before that a theater troupe from Poland was attacked.”
The same week the Forststrasse building was torched, 350 members of the National Democratic Party (NDP) — one of the three far-right parties now active in Germany — marched on a village outside Dresden. Save for 50 youthful activists — who were separated from the marchers by the police — no one came forward to confront the new brownshirts.
Late last month, another far right group, the German People’s Union (DVU), fell just 200 votes short of winning a seat in the city legislature of Hamburg — Germany’s second largest metropolis — with 4.9 percent of the vote, an increase from 2.8 percent in 1993. Most experts consider the 25,000 member DVU Germany’s strongest neo-fascist political machine.
German Chancellor Helmut Kohl says the importance of the neo-fascist parties shouldn’t be “overdramatized.” And Kohl is correct: In many ways the DVU and its right-wing allies the NPD and the Republicans — like similar parties in Poland, Denmark and Sweden — remain at the margins of political life.
But Europe’s youthful new brownshirts do make their will felt in the streets through beatings, murders and arson. As the DVU saturated Hamburg with advertising and direct mail (sample slogans: “Hamburg for Germans, Istanbul for Turks”), neo-Nazi thugs were busy clubbing and stomping environmentalists in Saxony and people of color in eastern Berlin.
Indeed much of post-Wall Europe is simmering with a low intensity war. In Germany, violent assaults by neo-Nazis have declined from a high of 2,285 in 1992 — including more than 700 incidents of arson and 17 fatalities — but “propaganda-related” crimes of the extreme right are increasing. And while the headline-grabbing mass pogroms have faded, right-wingers now work in small terrorist cells designed to elude authorities.
This is not happening only in high unemployment zones like eastern Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic. The prosperous, nearly classless Scandinavian countries have witnessed some of the worst attacks in recent years. Immigrants, gays, leftists and environmentalists are favorite targets.
On July 29, a campground set up by environmentalists to protest a highway project outside Dresden was blitzed, the green activists beaten and their tents set afire. One eco warrior said he felt lucky: “Last year, when we protested the road project the ‘faschos’ came, 30 or 40 of them, with baseball bats. They beat us until we were unconscious. One person had a cracked skull. Four of us went to hospital.”
But there is emerging an increasingly militant response. German authorities acknowledge that they keep tabs on 30,000 “left extremists” who may be willing to take it the streets. And many do. Last year, police attributed 35 incidents of “extreme property damage” and 18 individuals permanently disabled or placed in critical condition due to left-wing assaults. One anti-fascist action poster slapped up all over Berlin depicts ski-masked “antifas” literally chasing skinheads onto a train out of town. Another pictures a phalanx of black clad, motorcycle-helmeted street fighters on the hunt for neo-Nazis.
Throughout Europe the groups targeted by right-wingers have become combative. On Aug. 16 near Roskilde, Denmark, 150 neo-Nazis marching to mark Rudolf Hess’ death day were met by about 1,000 counter-demonstrators determined to shut down the rally by any means necessary. Armed with bats, molotov cocktails, pipe bombs, slingshots and stones, the mob — most masked — skirmished with riot squads and forced the extreme rightists to move their march to a secret spot.
“The Nazis were scared to show up. The police couldn’t protect them,” said Jen, an American living in Copenhagen, “so we stormed the commuter train about 500 deep and went to their headquarters.” At Nazi leader Jonny Hanson’s home base in the town of Greve, the antifas squared off with a battalion of riot cops. Police fired round after round of tear gas at the rampaging leftists who, having run out of pipe bombs and molotovs, were hurling anything from street signs to small trees; at one point. About 30 desperate antifas tipped over a bottle recycling dumpster to replenish their supply of projectiles.
That night in Copenhagen, after the chaos had dissipated and Danish TV was beaming images of the clash into people’s living rooms, the antifas — punks, hip-hoppers, ravers, socialists and anarchists — were still fired up. “We have to get their base,” one Danish woman said, “After all, it’s defensive, they burned out our places. We have no choice but to fight.”
CASCADIA FREE STATE, OREGON –
A10-foot-high wall of downed trees, boulders, steel and cement stands where Forest Service Road 2408 ends and the Autonomous Zone begins. To the right is the rock face of the mountain — to the left is a steep descent several hundred feet down. A grubby,
dreadlocked young man hangs in a climbing harness from a three-legged tower that straddles the wall. A banner emblazoned with a clenched fist and an anarchist black flag hangs from the tripod.
We’re at the outer gates of Cascadia Free State, where environmentalists and eco-anarchists are in the eleventh month of their occupation of the Warner Creek area of the Willamette National Forest. While elsewhere in America anti-government militants organize themselves into armed underground militia, set up fortified camps or plot acts of violent sabotage, the self-styled Forest Defenders are waging what they say is a non-violent war to save the final five percent of old growth forest remaining in the U.S.
The occupation was sparked by a federal appeals court ruling
last Sept. 6 voiding the environmental protections that safeguarded the woodlands. Judge Michael Hogan ruled that the “Timber Salvage rider” signed into law by President Clinton in July 1995 overrode Warner Creek’s status as habitat for the endangered northern spotted owl.
The ruling was a green light for timber companies to come into the area, chainsaws at the ready. But forest activists — mobilized by Cascadia Forest Defenders and
Earth First! – had different ideas: They blockaded the access road to Warner Creek and claimed the region as their home. They call these besieged woodlands “Cascadia Free State” and some of them regard America as a hostile foreign nation.
Here at the lower camp, tents and tarps provide shelter for some 10 to 20 people — a melange of hippies, punks and outdoorsy types. Hundreds of people have devoted time and energy to the cause of Cascadia, but it’s these grassroots radicals whose constant presence has made the project possible. Weekend eco-warriors often swell the population to 50 or 60. Natural food stores in nearby Eugene donate a constant supply of food. A mountain stream provides water.
With his grimy Anarchy Ale T-shirt, patched shorts and dreads,
Jake, 24, has been at the siege since day one, enduring one of the
harshest winters in Oregon’s recent history. “When I first came to Oregon I totally fell in love with the trees, all the animals and wildlife, the feeling you get from leaving civilization,” says the one-time urban squatter. “I feel it’s important that places be left alone for future generations, for the children.”
A 26-year-old college dropout from southern California who goes by the initial “C” says he’s dedicated the last six months to Warner Creek
because “it’s the most successful forest blockade in U.S. history, and
because it’s an anarchist community. It’s not about trees — it’s a total
revolution against the government.”
Three-quarters of a mile further up the mountain, a watchtower looks out over the timbers of the inner fortress wall and
drawbridge. Behind the barrier, several half-ton concrete “lockdown”
points are set in the road. In an emergency, the forest defenders will
insert their arms into the lockdowns and chain their wrists to a metal
post inside. “We have a couple of lockdowns that are essentially concrete coffins with air holes. If people have food and water down there, I don’t know how the Rangers would get them out,” claims C.
The Cascadians have also decimated the six-mile access road to the
disputed woodlands with logs, stone walls, and vast holes. One trench is six feet deep and 15 feet across, and features a stream-fed bathtub and shower.
The Forest Service plans to prosecute the Cascadians for felony damage to federal property. But after an 11-month siege, Free Staters are claiming a major triumph following a directive by Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman forbidding further “salvage” logging in roadless forest areas such as Warner Creek. The order nullifies a second, larger sale of Warner Creek timber that was to be bid on this month. Cascadia Free Staters say the Feds wouldn’t have acted without pressure brought about by the occupation.
Meanwhile, the Siskiyou Forest Defenders in southern Oregon have turned an attempted old-growth logging operation in the
Siskiyou National Forest into a Free State. Enviros are blockading an 8,000 acre logging operation in federally-owned Cove/Mallard wilderness Area in Idaho. And activists are discussing the possibility of a Headwaters Free State in Northern California if negotiations for the long disputed Redwood groves there falter.
The Cascadian Free Staters are hesitant to claim total victory. “All we
know is that we’ve kept chain saws off the mountain for almost a year,” says Tim Ream, a former Environmental Protection Administration employee who staged a 75-day hunger strike earlier this year. The Cascadians say they won’t relinquish their fledgling homeland until an acceptable, binding settlement is reached.
“And if we leave,” says activist Cindy Noblitt, “we’ll never take our eyes off them.”
Copyright © Pacific News Service
Quote of the day
All God’s children
“My Webchildren have God-sightings all the time. They stub their toes and have memories, or get visions of space porpoises during sex. I too sometimes feel I have been hit by lightning — but I’m making a slow somersault into acceptance. I now believe in the God that people
who don’t believe in God believe in. As I tell my congregation, ‘God has got to be here somewhere.’ “
The “Reverend Billy,” aka Bill Talen, who broadcasts “services” daily via RealAudio at pseudo.com. (From “Surfing The Net For God: ‘Reverend Billy’ offers guidance to ‘Webchildren’,” in Tuesday’s San Francisco Chronicle.
BERKELEY, Calif. —
At a body piercing studio on Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue, a grimy, dreadlocked, pierced, 18-year-old punk named Brian is about to make a lifelong commitment to social deviance. Brian is tattooing his face.
Black bars will soon cut horizontally across Brian’s cheeks, forming a
geometric pattern with three black dashes that already adorn his goatee zone. The warpaint-like lines will set Brian apart from other urban primitives, most of whom advertise their dedication to their subculture on body regions that don’t require 24-hour exposure: the upper arms, torso, back or legs.
Body modifications like tattoos and body piercing, once associated with bikers, inmates and others at the lower end of the social scale, have now become mainstream fashion statements. But tattooing the face remains taboo. Even the most hardcore, in-it-for-life tattoo artists refrain from indelibly marking their own mugs. Not a single Bay Area tattoo studio interviewed said they were willing to ink up a customer’s face. Those, like Brian, who want their cheeks, chin, nose or forehead adorned have to look for inkslingers who work out of bedrooms and vans and, typically, bear facial tattoos themselves.
Why would anyone want to wear a tattoo where everyone — including employers, landlords, creditors and law enforcers — can see it?
“My actions are a rebellion against the mainstream,” says Brian, whose face is being done by a friend. “They let everyone know I’m not a part of your society. No matter what you take away from me, you can’t take away that.”
But more than defiance is involved. Brian believes those who live in high-tech industrial cultures should regain the ancient pagan knowledge of tribal peoples. One way to spread the knowledge, he says, is by “forging my own tribe.”
Brian’s ideas echo those of scores of disaffected Westerners, from
devotees of Eastern religions to the hippies of yesteryear. But unlike
many of the ’60s counterculturalists — who eventually cut their hair
and went yuppie — Brian will have a hard time changing his mind and rejoining the nine-to-fivers with tribal markings all over his face.
That, he says, is the point. “This is a commitment. Someone could get a mohawk and then grow it out, or cut it off in a second. I can’t cut this off.” As for turning off would-be employers, Brian isn’t worried. “I know people with facial tattoos who have jobs. I could work at a co-op or a recycling place, or I could deliver phone books.”
Alan, a 21-year-old piercer and sometime inkslinger, also sports two
neo-tribal tattoos. A black diamond graces the crest of his forehead, and a gray, Native American-derived design covers his chin. More prominent than the tattoos are his enormous, Buddha-like stretched ear piercings.
Like Brian, Alan says he feels an affinity for non-Western traditions.
His bookcase is jammed with tomes on Buddhism, the Kaballah and Native America. Part Algonquin, he sees the chin tattoo as a revival of an Algonquin Indian ritual. But unlike Brian, Alan wants to bring tribal knowledge and aesthetics to the widest audience possible. With that end in mind, he did some modeling for Levi’s, with his piercings and tattoos in full view. “I’m using Levi’s to assimilate,” he says. “I’m getting to people through them.”
Ben, 25, isn’t so sure about the ultimate worth of face markings.
“Sometimes I hate these things,” he says of the black scratch marks he’s worn on his face for six years. A veteran of the New York City squat scene, Ben has found that facial tattoos don’t go over as well in Grain Silo, Iowa, as they do on New York’s Lower East Side or San Francisco’s Lower Haight. Ben concedes that he sometimes wishes he could go “incognito.”
Brett Reed, drummer for the platinum-selling punk act Rancid, is one tattoo-wearer who has retained that option. Reed has a couple of black stars on his forehead, but they are minuscule and close to his hairline, easily concealed with a comb.
He may be wise to hedge his countercultural bets. If the pagan look becomes passi, Alan — who supports himself by tattooing and piercing his contemporaries — may have a hard time finding a new career. And while Brian may feel he’s assured at least a subsistence-level job, if corporations keep downsizing and real wages keep falling, he may find himself competing with tattoo-free Berkeley grads for minimum wage work.
Quotes of the day
Innocent, 18 years too late.
“It’s been pure hell….The police just picked up the first four young black men they could and that was it. They didn’t care if we were guilty or innocent.”
— Dennis Williams, 39, freed by the Cook County Criminal Court after spending 18 years in prison, most of them on Death Row, following his wrongful conviction for murdering a white couple.
“We are victims of this crime, too. I want people to know that this could happen to anybody and that’s a crime.”
— Kenneth Adams, 39, who along with Williams and Willie Rainge, 38, was also released yesterday. A fourth man, Verneal Jimerson, 43, was cleared of the crime last month. (From “After 18 years in Prison, 3 Are Cleared of Murders,” in Wednesday’s New York Times.
