I don't usually get into 'spot news,' but....

Yesterday's Berlin "police action" against would-be peace-makers crossed a line.

BERLIN (13. April, 2024) — It’s been some time since I had a client who paid me to describe events happening last year, much less something occurring yesterday. (I take greater pleasure in thinking and writing about history of all kinds. Always have.)

That said, I’m on Yanis Veroufakis’ mailing list — or that of the solid organization that he and others have built over time, the Democracy in Europe Movement (DiEM). DiEM has since become a European political party, one of many running candidates in national and state elections in Germany and elsewhere. (Full disclosure: I’ve donated to DiEM, attracted by its stated vision of the European Union as a peaceful, prosperous and cooperative, democratic-socialist European community. DiEM’s goals are clearly utopian — very much like those of my best “Berlin Stories” protagonists.)

A few hundred of us were tuned-in to last evening’s conference here in Berlin — a meeting to discuss new, perhaps “radical”-sounding possibilities for peace among the conference-goers. This live event included many Europeans, as well as people who are suffering different kinds of exile here — Palestinians and Israelis, Muslims and Jews, Christians and others — all meeting and talking peacefully about solutions together (though not necessarily representing the views of their own religious or national leaders, both here and overseas).

The event featured out-of-town guest speakers (writers and thinkers), transmitting their messages from abroad, via Zoom and via YouTube (as below). One of these was speaking during the moment that Berlin police arrived, went onstage and forcably took microphones from the facilitators. Then, after a few minutes, they shut down the transmission. Police claimed that speakers’ challenges to military policy from Tel Aviv — as, now, even the US president has done — amounts to “antisemitism.” (For some time, German authorities have experienced difficulty in capturing and conveying a common understanding of the term, not to mention identifying its transgressors.)

During last night’s event, we could hear conference moderators telling everyone in the crowd to “remain seated” — and not to do anything to provoke violence from the police. (This, of course, remains a deeply scary prospect, especially here.) In these appeals for peace and calm among the meeting’s diverse participants, one heard the voices of other historical peace-makers — Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King….