Correspondence from Hamburg from Supporters of Bob Avakian’s New Communism
July 8, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Supporters of Bob Avakian’s new communism rallied protesters who were attacked by police in Hamburg, and reached thousands with leaflets promoting the new communism and the statement from Refuse Fascism: NO! In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America! Drive out the Trump/Pence Regime! Credit: Special to Revolution
Thursday night—Following a murderous jihadist attack last year, Donald Trump had contemptuously thrown out the word “hell” to deride Europe’s inner cities—and its rebel youth had not forgotten. A huge banner rode high over the crowd who assembled on a warm summer’s day along Hamburg’s centuries-old harbor proclaiming defiantly to Trump and the G-20 leaders: “Welcome to Hell!” The 12,000 protesters, with several thousand militant “black bloc” anarchists in the fore, had marched barely 300 meters when they were stopped by a phalanx of riot police some 10 rows deep. Within minutes, the riot police ran with truncheons raised into the protestors, trying to cut off and isolate what they considered the hard-core militants. Hamburg has deployed an arsenal of 33 water cannon at all times for several days now and three opened up on the protestors—much of even Germany’s mainstream press expressed amazement at the viciousness and large scale of the unprovoked attack.
As thousands backtracked in the face of the police onslaught, the team of supporters of the new communism unfurled two of their banners and acted as a rallying point. They quickly brought together a couple of hundred of the dispersed protestors on an almost hour-long wildcat march through Hamburg’s back streets. The marchers were greeted warmly by the residents of social housing blocks, who included some of the newly arrived refugees from Syria and the Mideast. The march was tracked overhead by one of the 23 police helicopters that now buzz through the city’s skies almost 24 hours a day—eventually squads of riot police were mobilized to disperse the march—but not before word of revolution and the new communism had gotten out broadly in a new part of the city.
Several thousand leaflets were distributed and the team had aroused widespread respect and curiosity for its bold promotion of revolution and the new communism, not only from many of the radical youth who’d come, mostly from Germany but from throughout northern Europe and even further, but also from press from over a dozen countries. Interviews were conducted with Russian and Chinese national media curious about the “new communism,” and many others.
One question that came especially from some of the more mainstream media was about the violence—this, in the shadow of the summit of G-20 leaders whose wars have spilled the blood of many hundreds of thousands, who incarcerate millions, who have driven millions out of their homes, watching idly as several thousand drown every year in the sea “protecting,” in their eyes, Europe from Africa and the Middle East.
Friday—as the summit actually began, the city shuddered to a halt. A large-scale student strike brought hundreds of students from the high schools and universities down to the edge of the “blue zone”—a large buffer area surrounding the inner “red zone” reserved solely for attendees of the summit. The students, joined by the team, set off boldly, and marched through the city streets, past the dozens of riot police guarding every major cross street into the blue zone.
By the end of Saturday’s mass protest, over 20,000 copies of a leaflet, titled in German, “Humanity Needs Revolution and the New Communism,” will have been distributed, along with many thousands of the statement from Refuse Fascism: NO! In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America! Drive out the Trump/Pence Regime!
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