Update from Berlin (DG)

A quick update from here. My version of the news or something. I mean the level of silencing of speech just beggars belief. I guess what happened when you were here, with the documenta situation, was a first stage in the rolling back of possible, if gradual and small-scale, rearticulations of the de facto position that had been taking place in recent years--the coming together of the white left and of young kids from migrant backgrounds organising themselves against fascists, in solidarity with Palestine, etc, the presence of Palestinian or pro-Palestinian art in galleries, etc etc. Over the past week the cops have banned any and every Palestine demo, every university and cultural institution has put out out blanket pro-Israel statements, you'll have seen what happened with the Frankfurt Book Fair, etc. The white left seems to have totally evaporated and just merged with the de facto position of the government. So no possibility of big, cathartic, or even just effective expressions of mass outrage at the ongoing ethnic cleansing. Just the streets as normal, tourists coming and going, hypocrisy hanging heavy on the streets like a knife. "Sonst sagt niemand etwas" says Bachmann and it feels like we're living through the truth of that line. On Sunday I did manage to go to the demo on Potsdamer Platz after hearing someone shouting about it on the train. There were a fair few people there gathered in the square. The cops were broadcasting a statement through a megaphone telling people the assembly was illegal and to go home. Occasionally about thirty of them would single out and arrest one kid and pepper spray people around them. Obviously they were filming and you could see plain clothes talking to them occasionally.  The people in the crowd were families, teens and pre-teens, up to old people. Very few white leftists that I could see. The newspaper coverage across the political spectrum is racist like nothing I've seen. Because of the level of the suppression, at the moment the demos are mainly, it seems, kids in Neukölln assembling on the street. Leftists/liberals are either liberal/apathetic, openly in sympathy with the de facto position, or--particularly in the case of those who are not white and/or European--worried that they will lose their jobs, be targeted, or deported. (Clearly this latter is going to be used as an excuse not just to arrest and imprison people but to deport them, and fits very clearly with racist and anti-migrant practices of the state). The pattern in Berlin at least is of the police using support for Palestine as a way to target migrant and post-migrant communities, Palestinian, Turkish, Kurdish and so on, particularly in schools, where wearing a keffiyeh or displaying any kind of Palestinian symbol is banned: you'll have seen the video of the teacher punching the kid in Neukölln. In that sense I guess it has parallels with Macron's rhetoric after the stabbing in France, but it's very specific to Germany and much more extreme than anywhere else in Europe, as far as I can tell. The total effect is that any position other than unconditional support for what is becoming ethnic cleansing is effectively a thought crime. (Imagine the contortions and defensive manouevres that you identify in Judith Butler's piece, L, multiplied by a thousand.)