Mad Men, episode 4.10, running commentary -- finally!!

( Spoilers )

Bad times for protesters

In Stuttgart, which is a notoriously peaceful city of industry, engineering, productivity, technical innovation and annoying attention to details (suburbs are home to the headquarters of Mercedes Benz and Porsche, both), an unholy alliance of conservative politicians and a few big businesses (among them Bilfinger Berger, the large construction company implicated in the corruption scandal in Cologne where less materials were used in building a new subway tunnel than was billed, quality checks were falsified, and structures in the middle of the city collapsed in consequence, among them the historical archive, and two people died) is trying to put the train station underground and sell the swathe of inner-city land at a high price for business and residential development.

Usually something like that will be welcome to the Stuttgarters, whose motto notionally is 'Schaffe, schaffe, Häusle baue', that is 'Work, work, and build your own home' -- people dedicated to industriousness and the self-absorbed increase of their own wealth and security.

However, this projects has met with heavy doubts as a) an expertise conducted by a firm of civil engineers revealing that there are unexpected cavities and potentially unstable gypsum pockets in the city's underground has been summarily ignored by the conservative politicians and the corporations involved, shocking the over-careful, security-minded Suebian bourgeois population with unheard-of arrogance and dismissal of measurable facts, which simply is not done there, b) most of the current main station would be torn down -- and that is a momentous monument of very early modernist architecture, and c) 300 very old trees in the city park will have to be felled.

The volume of protests was remarkable. Anything from school children to old age pensioners turned up in droves every since the first parts of the historical buildings were demolished. At once point, there were 40,000 protesters at one single protest march -- remarkable in a city of 600,000!

German chancellor Angela Merkel, of the Christian Democrats (= conservatives) was quoted with the remarkable words that politicians can't ignore valid contracts, no matter how many people are standing around on the street at one point, but have to enforce decisions made. For great ironic context: Merkel is from the former East Germany and started out her career in the grassroots movement that toppled the East German regime and ultimately the iron curtain, ending the cold war that way, almost entirely through pressure from the street and mass protest of completely ordinary people.

Yesterday, the politicians in the pockets of Bilfinger Berger and the other companies involved sent out the riot police against completely non-violent protesters who were chaining themselves to the trees and trying to stop the destruction of their park. Without warning, they fired tear gas and water cannons at the protesters (the usual mix of school kids, concerned housewives, old age pensioners, students, and some opposition politicians, plus random freelancers like one writer of detective novels quoted in some news blogs, who can pick when they work and when they protest -- the rest of the people who'd come to a demonstration on a Saturday were of course busy with the 'schaffe, schaffe' part of the Suebian lifestyle), broke them up using mounted police, riot batons, armoured and/or sand-filled gloves, and possibly even rubber bullets.

This vid shows random eight minutes from the protests, with a policeman spontaneously spraying pepper spray on people doing exactly nothing at 4:10. Oh yes, and German police don't have to wear name tags, don't have to give their names when asked, and are allowed to cover their faces in any situation. Similarity to Star Wars' Imperial Stormtroopers has been remarked on several times around German language blogs.

Here, for example, is a number of pictures on one of the blogs that come up on my blogroll at Blogger.de, taken by the blogger himself.

Hundreds of protesters were injured, some of them badly; one person had at least one eye shot out by the water cannons.

Scenes ensued that remind you of a) the movie 'Avatar', b) police and army trying to squash the 1989 protests in East Germany which our present politicians laud for its great civil courage, and as the foundation of a renewed and reunified modern democratic Germany, and c) what happened in Iran in the summer of 2009.

For some reason, the horrifying scenes have not yet spread out into international media (even the English language version of Der Spiegel doesn't mention it with a single word as of now -- compare the Love Parade disaster going international within a day!), which is why I offer this write-up. It probably belongs on ontd_political, but I don't like dealing with large and busy comms.

There is one picture from the protests that is already becoming sort-of iconic after only one day. It shows an old man bleeding from his eyes because of the tear-gas, supported by a middle-ages man and a very young man. From their looks, they might be three generations of the same family.

I put it under a cut because nobody ought to have a picture like that sprung on them on their open flist. Nobody died (yet), but other than that, it shocks you in the way video footage from Iran did...

( Picture under cut for serious RL gore and shock value )

Remember, this happened yesterday, in a park, during a protest about a contested infrastructure project, and some old trees.

Something is very wrong here.-

P.S. Stuttgart 21

Der Spiegel finally deigned to translate an article about the escalating protests in Stuttgart for its English online edition.

Seems their translators were just working on it, and nobody was intentionally obtuse, as I suspected. Now you can read it all for yourself.


Warning! They open the article with the picture of the injured old man I had used in my other post as well. It's quickly becoming iconic, as I suspected it would.

Mephist: Do not want walkies!!

I just tried whether Mephi would be interested in going outside.

He wasn't.

He didn't just cling to the ground like Lucifer had, he clung to me, and yowled very loudly a few times. When I put him on the grass, he curled up like a dead thing. Sitting on my shoulder, he at least looked around.

He looked cute in that red harness I'd bought for him, but wasn't having any of it.

Back inside, he stalked around accusingly, then fled under the chair. Now, from the sound of it, he's attacking my house key which is in the lock, as usual.

He never wants the door to open again, it seems.

Such a coward!