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Month: April 2025

When Protest Becomes the Punchline

The Art of Humiliating Elon Musk


13/04/2025

When it comes to satirical dissent, London is not, and never has been shy. It’s a city where nappy-wearing Donald Trump inflatables fly over Parliament, where people dress as turds to protest a council that can’t clean up its own shit, and where a clown convinced half the UK to leave Europe, oh wait, that wasn’t satire. Buffoonery aside, if there’s one thing London does consistently well, it’s mockery as a civil tradition.

Lately, though, the city has surpassed itself, graduating from headline grabbing high-jinks to calculated, viral comedy gold. Not because the issues are any less serious, on the contrary, but because the target—one Elon Musk—is begging to be ridiculed.

Over the past few weeks—and in direct response to Musk’s increasingly desperate lurch to the far right, his fascist salute photo-op, DOGE, and his ongoing display of slimy billionaire entitlement—activists have launched a series of polished stunts aimed squarely at his most visible asset, Tesla.

As well as the appearance of “Swasticar” stickers and “Musk-B-Gone” air fresheners, London bus stops and Tube carriages have been hijacked with high-gloss, high-punching mock-ads strapped with lines like “Now With White Power Steering” and “The Fast and the Führer”. Groups like Led By Donkeys, Takedown Tesla, and Everyone Hates Elon are executing increasingly coordinated actions, with the latter even inviting the public to smash a second-hand Tesla in the name of art (and catharsis). It’s guerrilla meme-fare for the man who once profoundly declared “I am meme”. 

But while the targets—electric cars and a Mars-obsessed CEO—are relatively new, fascism, notably, is not. And neither are the activists’ tactics. Satirical dissent has long been an important force in revealing truth and engaging an apathetic public in politics and debate around the world.

The Situationist International (SI), an international organisation of social revolutionaries, called it détournement, or the hijacking of the symbols of dominant culture by twisting them into critique. Turn the ad into an attack, the brand into a punchline and use public space as a stage for dissent.

It’s a spirit that has surfaced again and again. In the UK, Space Hijackers, a group of self-described “anarchitects” once attempted to bring a tank to a G20 protest and on another occasion listed the London Olympics on eBay. And in Paris, Jeudi-Noir turned squatting into protest performance, occupying luxury flats and holding press conferences from balconies to spotlight the absurdity of housing injustice in a city with thousands of empty high-end properties.

More notably, it’s a philosophy seen through the actions of the Yippies in the 1960s, a famous group of activists who also treated politics like street theatre. Knowing shouting wasn’t enough, they made protest impossible to ignore. They levitated the Pentagon (or tried to) and nominated a pig for president as a kind of pre-internet shitpost. 

Which brings us neatly back to a man who has, in recent months, become more famous for his shitposting than his rockets to Mars—rockets which, like Tesla stock, have been in freefall. According to the Financial Times, Tesla has just recorded its worst quarter since 2022, with vehicle deliveries down 13%. It’s the sharpest decline in the company’s history and analysts aren’t just blaming market competition or supply chain issues, they’re pointing to the increasingly radioactive brand of Elon Musk himself.

This shows the cultural and financial unravelling hasn’t happened in isolation. It’s been accelerated by the new wave of activist groups who’ve realised that in an age when power is performative, sometimes protest has to be too. Some might argue satirical activism makes reality and the struggles we face feel unserious—but when a 53-year old billionaire CEO can tank his company’s stock with a meme, desperately pretend to be good at video games, tweet fascist dog-whistles and conspiracy theories, and still be treated as a visionary, it’s not the protest that’s absurd, it’s the context. In that landscape, satire isn’t a sideshow, it’s a translation. A form of dissent that meets chaos with clarity and spreads faster than investor panic at a Tesla earnings call.

Note: one of the actions mentioned in the article – the smashing of the Tesla – is scheduled to take place on April 10th.

“Institutions Need Aestheticised Dissent to Maintain Legitimacy”

A conversation with badnām on cultural institutions, cinema, and dissent


As in much of the global South, the Goethe-Institut (GI) in India — also locally known as the Max Mueller Bhavan, after the Orientalist philologist Max Müller — plays a key strategic role in maintaining German soft power in the country. A particularly useful tool to reinforce this soft power has historically been the strategic use of cultural funding, to assimilate academics, artists and cultural workers into the fold. Ultimately, this is one of many tools that serve to construct Western hegemony: where (some) subjects in the global South accede to Western dominance willingly, rather than having to be coerced into it.

Since the start of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the contradictions between the desire to maintain this hegemony in the global South, and unconditional solidarity with the State of Israel, have been stretched to absolute breaking point. This is particularly true in Germany — where the cynical use of the Staatsräson has led to deportations, clampdowns on protests, the suppression of academic and artistic freedoms, and the systematic withdrawal of state support from organisations that refuse to toe the German line on Israel. This has applied to organisations both within and outside Germany.

On December 8, 2024, a small collective of queer filmmakers and activists disrupted the closing screening at EXPERIMENTA 2024, a film festival organised at the GI in Bangalore, with a guerilla recording of their conversation with the institute’s director about the GI’s “red lines” on the genocide. The collective — now called badnām (बदनाम/بدنام) [infamous] — are going to be organising their own film festival in Bangalore, from 24–26 April. You can find a longer statement about this action on their Instagram. What follows is our conversation with badnām.

The many absurdities of the German positioning on Palestine are extremely visible to those of us who live here, as are recent actions against it, like Strike Germany. How did this end up on your radar in India?

We are connected to the internet the same way most of the world is. It’s difficult not to be aware — which is exactly what we’ve been trying to say to those who continue to liaise with the GI (GI), pretending they have no idea what’s happening in Germany, or even in Gaza. For those who’ve somehow managed to become ascetics like that, who still haven’t noticed there’s an ongoing genocide being livestreamed 24/7 while they post “outfit of the day” stories or repost invitations to their next event at the Goethe Institut, our disruption was hopefully informative. But beyond that, there’s a very real political mirroring between the German state’s Islamophobia and the Hindutva state’s crackdown on dissent in India. The mechanisms of censorship, surveillance, and cultural policing are deeply familiar to us. German cultural institutions, in this context, position themselves as benevolent actors working in an “illiberal context” — while conveniently erasing their own violent complicity in Palestine.

Your film “masturbation is easy, finding the video is hard” begins with a guerilla recording of your conversation with the GI director in Bangalore on the institute’s “red lines” on Gaza. Has this resulted in any legal threats?

Not directly, but we wouldn’t be surprised if it eventually does. Institutions like the GI operate through reputational management. They don’t want public legal battles because that would draw more attention to the issue. Instead, their PR strategy is institutional memory-holing: ignoring and infantilising our work, and quietly excluding certain filmmakers or activists from future opportunities. It’s more about slow erasure than immediate confrontation.

The GI did attempt to retrospectively declare that the meeting recorded in the film was confidential and expressed “disappointment” with us. The question of consent is often raised when guerrilla recordings are involved, and curiously, it was Indian programmers and artists — who were most insistent on this point. Many of them, despite years of engaging in feminist and queer programming, suddenly and conveniently forgot the hierarchy of power between the GI (with its 151 offices worldwide) and a few individuals questioning how such an institute exercises its influence.

Ultimately, there was nothing in the guerrilla recording that had not already been publicly stated by the GI and more locally, also repeated by their director at events in Bangalore. So where does the discomfort come from? Why does listening to this conversation, one just like so many they have been part of since October 7 when trying to negotiate with this institute cause such unease?

What kind of reactions did you get from the Goethe-Institut organisers, or from participants at Experimenta?

In the time following our disruption, we wrote to the GI, attempting to further engage with the questions we were raising. Our emails were met with silence. Even when we took this to social media, their eventual response was laughably predictable: bureaucratic, paternalistic, and ultimately defensive. What felt more telling, though, was the disengagement — and in some cases, outright justifications — from within the Indian cultural milieu. People who privately expressed solidarity but refused to say anything publicly out of fear of losing future funding or festival opportunities. 

This is precisely the culture of complicity and self-censorship we were trying to confront: the way German (and Western) institutions breed the illusion of being “neutral platforms” while actively policing Palestinian solidarity. What’s worse is how they get local cultural partners to do the dirty work of manufacturing consent for them. It’s tricky, because a “progressive” institution like the GI wants to do a certain amount of queer programming every year. You can rest assured that some heterosexual, cisgendered, very well-meaning progressive will arrive at the Institut to do this “work” for them. In fact, queer and marginalised dissenters are likely to be disinvited from GI-sponsored queer “soirees” with horrible watered-down alcohol, by cisgendered and straight “friends of the institute”, who find your politics “too aggressive”, even “misplaced, no matter how urgent or relevant”. 

What is most offensive, of course, is that they imagine we’d even want to be there.

India, like a lot of the global South, relies to some extent on culture/arts funding from the global North. Though this was always the case, German anxieties around Israel have really underscored that this support comes at a price. How do you think artists can work around these institutional limitations?

Not sure we believe in “workarounds” anymore. As conflict-oriented as it might sound, we have to work despite — and even against — these structures, not around them. What workaround can there be when your very humanity is at odds with imperialism, colonialism, racism, capitalism? When you want to turn the lens on the very system that once celebrated your “political”, “radical” work — so long as it absolved and sanctified them?

For instance — the film Sab changa si [All Was Good], about the student protests against the Indian Citizenship Amendment Act, premiered at the Berlinale Forum Expanded and won the Peace Film Prize (awarded by the Heinrich Böll Institut) in 2022. Fast forward to 2023, the same institute pulls out of a conference where Masha Gessen was invited and continues to toe the peculiar German line on the genocide. It makes any validation or recognition of our struggles from these institutions feel absolutely meaningless. So yes — we are okay with making the films we want to make with what we can afford, storing them on our hard drives, or sharing them with communities organising outside of these spaces. At least then the work remains honest. If it means having a day job to pay the bills while you continue your artistic work, then that’s how. 

Until something changes. And something will change if enough people demand it. What’s amazing is how short our memories are as a newly independent country. Many Indian cultural workers who resisted censorship in the ‘90s and the early 2000s turned to Western institutions for funding, particularly when India’s economy opened up during globalisation. Institutions like the GI, the Ford Foundation, British Council, and European film funds became alternative sources of support as independent filmmakers found it nearly impossible to work within the structures of state or corporate financing. But the point can’t then be to cling to another system that is equally violent and restrictive for artistic freedom — a system that, in fact, shapes what is allowed as liberty within our local cultural industries. 

This isn’t unique to India. Filmmakers across Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East have faced similar contradictions. From when cultural funding was used as a soft power strategy during the Cold War, to today’s festival circuits that double as geopolitical gatekeepers, the pattern remains the same. If your work doesn’t absolve your funders, you will find yourselves on the outside. So what good is that freedom? What interesting work can you produce if you’re bound by these red lines? Our simple observation — subjectively of course — is that a lot of the art that emerges out of these “diplomatic negotiations” with institutions is frankly just bad. We’d say: don’t work around it. Spare us.

I’m reminded of the recent cancellation of the DJ Leila Moon in Switzerland, where a crowdfunding campaign ended up replacing the prize she was meant to be awarded. Do you think this sort of solidarity-as-praxis can be a viable stop-gap strategy for artists in the global South?

Alternative infrastructures are necessary but not a structural solution. As we understood with the Leila Moon incident, such instances perhaps highlight the fragility of institutional support but certainly do not dismantle its monopoly. The real question is whether we can build systems that don’t require institutional validation at all. Otherwise, we’re still playing the same game on harder difficulty settings.

For us, if there is a way forward, it isn’t through the fantasy that we can continue to navigate these spaces without compromise. It’s through real acts of refusal which will certainly risk exclusion and have to determinedly refuse to play by the rules of these institutions which are designed to absorb and neutralise dissent. Anything else would be purely self-serving.

The synergy between Hindutva and Zionism is easy to understand, given their shared hatred for Muslims. Yet these “outright justifications” emerge from the culture scene, from people who are (at least not openly) Hindu nationalist. Do you think this is purely cynical materialism, or is there an ideological component to it as well?

Zionism and Hindutva aren’t just about religion or nationalism; they are capitalist projects that use religious identity as a tool for mass mobilisation. Their ideological justifications — whether the “Jewish homeland” or “Akhand Bharat” [undivided India] — serve as convenient covers for resource extraction, real-estate expansion, labour exploitation, and militarisation. Religion is the language they use, but the machine itself is deeply capitalist. In Palestine, Israeli settlements are profit-driven enterprises, with multinational companies funding displacement and profiting from surveillance, arms manufacturing, and resource extraction. In India, Hindutva is aligned with crony capitalists like Adani and Ambani, whose wealth depends on land grabs, labour deregulation, and state-backed monopolies. The 2002 anti-Muslim pogroms in Gujarat were followed by a massive real estate boom — displaced Muslim neighbourhoods became prime land for developers. Ethnic cleansing isn’t just ideological; it’s profitable.

The capitalist machinery also manufactures the illusion that participation in Zionism or Hindutva offers a path to economic and social mobility. The majority are kept invested in a system that ultimately benefits only the elite, and promised that by becoming a better Zionist, a better sanghi [Hindu nationalist; pejorative], they can access power otherwise denied to them. In reality, their conditions remain the same (or worsen) while the ruling class consolidates power, using aspirational nationalism as both carrot and stick. The Hindutva/Israel alliance is often framed as being purely about Islamophobia, but in India for example, Christian institutions are frequently attacked because they provide services that challenge upper-caste and state control, like education and social work. The dominant narrative centres on a “Muslim vs. Hindu”, or “Muslim vs. Jewish” conflict because it is easier to sell.

Ultimately, this violence isn’t just about identity, but about restructuring economies in ways that concentrate power among the elite. The real challenge is disrupting the economic engines that make these pogroms profitable.

So when cultural figures and institutions justify or remain silent about Zionist and Hindutva violence, it’s because they are invested in the system that sustains them. The material stakes for people the West calls “artists at risk” are obvious: grants, residencies, film festivals, institutional support. These institutions also don’t just fund art; they shape what is considered acceptable discourse, and the longer one engages with them, the more their limits become internalised. Certain words become unspeakable and certain solidarities become untenable. A genocide can be framed as a tragedy, a war, a “complicated issue,” but never as an explicit colonial project. You can critique right-wing authoritarianism while maintaining a pragmatic silence on the industries that enable it. You can wear a keffiyeh, sign an open letter, and call a genocide a genocide (only) in private conversations or in closed rooms, to strategically maintain political credibility while staying within the safe bounds of institutional approval. In India, elite cultural spaces will programme anti-caste, queer, and feminist work — so long as it remains within digestible, upper-caste frameworks. Anything that directly implicates the institutions funding these spaces or calls out capital as the central force behind oppression is pushed to the margins. 

Institutions, of course, encourage and benefit from this kind of controlled opposition. Institutions need a certain degree of aestheticised dissent to maintain legitimacy. If every artist associated with them were completely silent on Palestine, for example, their neutrality would be too obviously compromised. So they allow for meticulously curated outrage — as long as it remains within the realm of discourse, never crossing into material action or intervention. An artist can make a film about Kashmir; Modi; or even Gaza; but if they call for a boycott of the very institutions screening their work, they will find themselves quietly disinvited from future projects for being too difficult or immature. A festival can programme radical work, but not if it directly implicates the corporations funding it. These aren’t contradictions; they are the ideological scaffolding of cultural power.

The irony is particularly apparent to us in our “independent” film spaces. Among a certain category of cultural workers and filmmakers, there has long been a clear opposition to the Indian state’s censorship, especially when it comes to the violence it inflicts on marginalised groups. Over the past two decades, filmmakers have repeatedly come together to resist state control over films and festival spaces. And yet, there is now a tacit acceptance of the way German and other western cultural institutions define what can and cannot be said in film and art. Apparently, funding — and the meagre benefits of international status in the art and film circuits — has been enough to sway them. That this censorship is not all that different from the Hindutva project (and in fact feeds into it) is something that no one wants to directly acknowledge at this moment.

What lies ahead for badnām, and what can we do to help in Berlin?

After our disruption and everything that followed, we were sitting with thoughts of how it would be possible for us, as filmmakers and artists ourselves, to ever do or distribute any meaningful work in these times. We were informed, very matter-of-factly, that this would be made impossible. Another counter was that we should do “these things” at our own festival — the implication being that putting together a festival (without being complicit with institutions like the GI) was a labour we had never attempted, and so we had no right to demand anything from those who did put in the work the best they could.

This made us truly wonder if it was actually so impossible. We thought we’d find out for ourselves, and remain(ed) open to learning that maybe there’s no way. But we had to try. That’s why we started talking to collectives and groups all over the world, and decided we’d be very ambitious — reaching out to filmmakers, etc., to see if they’d be willing to donate their works for us to screen in Bangalore. We even reached out to the Guerrilla Girls to ask if they’d design our poster — and they wrote back!

The response and enthusiasm from filmmakers who’ve been experiencing similar censorship and gatekeeping was overwhelming, even surprising. We put out a call for films in February and received over 150 submissions from more than 43 countries. We found a venue — an independent bookstore in the city with a screening space that can accommodate 100 people — and we’re now doing this festival from 24–26 April. It’s been a whirlwind, but to answer what we were left wondering, starting from that disruption at GI: is it possible at all to do cultural work that isn’t complicit? We think yes. It’s labour, undoubtedly, but it’s a labour of love.

The isolation and alienation that the system hoped we would feel isn’t really working, because the collaborations we’re building — as people first, with others all around the world — are in a small measure, what restores our hope. They’re what will allow us to return to the film work we actually want to do. We don’t want to forever be reactive to this censorship and its custodians, and carry that energy into our films.

The way we see it — and the films we received for the festival have reminded and humbled us of this again — cinema is about life itself. And life, if it is to mean anything, must be for all. At a fundamental level, what’s happening in Gaza, and in so many places around the world, is completely at odds with the spirit of film work. Of course, we want to feel open and trusting of the world and the people in it — as we inherently do, usually. And we want to be moved to film slow, beautiful, sexy, tender things. 

This festival is us carving out a little space to resolve, address, perhaps even exhaust, the disappointment and anger we’ve been feeling towards the cultural milieu. We’re even scheduling a “disruption slot” into the programme, to cheekily invite dialogue from anybody who wants to show up and have the conversations we’ve been seeking for a long time.

After the festival, we will return to the work we know and love best, which is making films, writing, and just spending time with each other. No matter the fate of our future works, we will at least have proven to ourselves that we are not alone in this. And more importantly, that cinema, as we have known and loved it, is well and alive. 

Inciting Hatred and Slinging Insults: Exploring the Legal Apparatus of the BRD

Part III: Honor – final part of Jason Oberman’s article


12/04/2025

In Part I and Part II of this series, we took a look at the Volksverhetzung and Beleidigung laws, two of the laws most weaponized to repress the anti-genocide movement in Germany. Acting as the root of both these laws we found something rather peculiar: German honor, or Ehre. And it only gets stranger the deeper we look.

In the search to discover more about this peculiar notion of honor, I stumbled upon another German law that was created to protect Ehre: the second of the Nuremberg Race Laws was titled “Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor.” This law included prohibitions of Aryan and Jewish intermarriage and sexual relations, employment of young German women by Jewish men, and Jewish people flying the Reich’s flag. It seems that simply being non-Aryan in Germany violates the German Honor Code. And one must be willing to defend even the slightest violation of honor with murder. 

Perhaps the Holocaust itself can be seen through the lens of protection of Ehre. In exploring the German duel, I came across Ehrennotwehr, which, perhaps, could have been an undercurrent of the Nazi genocide.  Ehrennotwehr, emergency self-defence of honor,  was the vicious practice of 19th century Prussian officers; if one’s honor was somehow insulted by a lower class, who was not worthy of the honorable duel, Ehrennotwehr required sudden and extreme violence, even murder, in order to defend one’s higher positionality, avoiding the sometimes lengthy bureaucratic measures of the duel, which usually required a formal invitation, mediation and witnesses. 

Although Ehrennotwehr was technically “reserved for those occasions when the physical integrity of the officer had been violated by a member of the unwashed horde who could not render formal satisfaction [a duel] … liberal interpretations led to its indiscriminate use as an effectual method for teaching any upstart his place.” (McAleer 114) As with the duel, Ehrenotwehr illustrates the idea of achieving purity and protecting honor through the annihilation of the other, an ideology embraced by Prussia, the Nazis, and the modern German state today.

So what is this peculiar German honor, or Ehre, exactly? Where does it come from? 

In the words of scholar Kevin McAleer: “In the final analysis, [German] honor was devoid of clearly conceived ethical content” (48). Ehre seems to be rooted in codes of chivalry practiced by Crusading Knights. These honorable men conducted large scale massacres across Europe and the Middle East, including ethnic cleansing of Jews during the Rhineland Massacre. 

In fact it was only through scapegoating and persecuting Jews that these Crusaders could fabricate honor: “The vices of the knights during the Crusades and their ‘extreme quarrelsomeness and pugnacity, merciless, arrogance and greed, cruelty to the vanquished, lack of a sense of common humanity, faithlessness to those outside the circles of feudal obligation, and frequently impious disregard of religion’ […] could only be transmitted as acts of heroic chivalry on the European mainland, if contrasted to Jewish vices.”

The imaginary Feindbild – the Jew, the Communist, the Palestinian – comes into play here; it is only through creating an imagined enemy that is so unfathomably and deeply dishonorable, one could claim any sort of honor while committing mass murder. This false narrative would have been critical in establishing the honorable nature and justification of the Crusaders’ ethnic cleansing of Jews in aforementioned Rhineland massacre, the genocide of Herero and Nama peoples in Namibia, the Holocaust, and the current German funded genocide in Palestine.

Germany’s own Crusading Knights, the honorable Teutonic Order, were  founded in Palestine to “avenge the dishonoring of God and His Cross and to fight so that the Holy Land, which the infidels subjected to their rule, shall belong to the Christians” (Sterns, 204) They hoped to follow in the footsteps of their peculiar reimagining of the Jewish Maccabees as knights who, in the Order’s words, “defeated and exterminated [pagans] so that they cleansed once again the Holy City which the pagans had defiled” (Sterns, 204). After they failed to ethnically cleanse Palestine, they developed their code of honor while committing atrocious wars of extermination and enslavement in north eastern Europe, laying the genocidal path Hitler would later follow through the Eastern Front. 

What’s more, the Teutonic Code of Honor even includes an early form of Beleidigung legislation: the first Book of the Order from 1264 states : “No brother shall call a Christian a traitor or a renegade or an evil smelling bastard, or abuse him in such terms.” (Sterns, 243). Remember this rule of protecting Christians from slander was conceived at a time when the Teutonic Order,  “who for love of honor and the fatherland have exterminated the enemies of the faith with a strong hand” (Sterns, 204). The Order was legislating against verbally insulting Christians while literally attempting ethnic cleansing.

Teutonic Ehre only took on greater heights as time went on. It was so highly esteemed in Germany that both the 2nd Reich (Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Kingdom of Prussia) and the Nazis adopted it: 

“By decree of its leader Heinrich Himmler[…], every SS man had ‘the right and duty to defend his honor by force of arms,’ and in a letter to the SS Legal Service in 1938 he outlined the conventional Wilhelmine guidelines for doing so. What is more, Himmler patterned his own cult of honor, like that of his Wilhelmine predecessors, on medieval archetypes. He modeled his ‘new knighthood,’ his ‘sworn liege men,’ on the ‘brutalized chivalry’ of the Teutonic Knights” (McAleer 210)  

But Teutonic Honor didn’t end with the Nazis: the modern Bundeswehr (German Military) gives out a “Badge of Honor” with the Teutonic Order’s Iron Cross. Antisemitism commissioner Uwe Becker is also a lay member of the order, and one must wonder about the role of Ehre in the “war on antisemitism.”

The German conception of honor has an interesting distinction from other honor codes: it is guided by Standesehre, caste honor (McAleer 35), defined as the collective honor of Germany’s elite class; “Its definition also denoted group solidarity over and against the lower orders, for in every ‘affair,’ or Ehrenhandel, the participants were representing not only their own interests but those of their class.” (McAleer 3) 

For elite men, individual honor and caste honor were therefore indistinguishable (McAleer 35). Therefore, the German notion of Ehre is primarily concerned with hierarchies of power — one can only be honorable if one is above those who are not. We could see clearly how this is also tied into the Christian Crusaders’ ethno-religious honor above Jews, and this honor could have evolved into the honor of the Aryan race over all others. 

The other nefarious element of German honor is its entanglement with the duel. It was the duel itself, that is murderous violence, which distinguished and guaranteed honorable positionality: 

“The duel drew a strict line of division between “men of honor” (Ehrenmänner) and the rest of society, which enjoyed none of the psychic, social, or legal entitlements of honorable status. Among German males, in order to be considered salonfähig—fit for good society—it was necessary that one also be satisfaktionsfähig— capable of dispensing satisfaction in a duel. Highly dangerous rencontres endowed this term with the real substance of character, and so upper class men of honor also pretended a moral supremacy that bolstered their claim to leadership of the German nation” (McAleer 3-4). 

One’s ability to duel determined one’s class and power, and it is through the duel that one could uphold one’s class and power positions. During the end of the 19th century and early 20th century, this was strictly limited to elite white Protestant men who made up about 5% of the population. (McAleer 35). 

These elite German males seemed to be so fearful of being insulted and lose their honor that Professor Karl Binding stated that “the eternal Angst of the German that his honor might be robbed of him by any frivolous fellow, his trembling worry that perhaps already through an upturned nose or a derisive word his whole world has gone up in smoke.” 

Binding even came up with the diagnosis “Ehren-nervosität” — a “chronic nervous affliction of the [upper class], usually characterized by acute and persistent hallucinations that someone was trying to trespass their personal integrity by belittling them.” (McAleer 40). I think many of us have met people on the streets and subways of Berlin, often in uniform, who have this condition. 

As a man of honor, it was seen as infinitely worse to quietly take an insult rather than lose one’s life in a petty pistol duel over a small insult against you or a female acquaintance. As McAleer explains, “This was the greatest infamy in a world where the essence of manhood was affectation of a serene scorn for one’s own puny existence. […] It was and is better to die/kill rather than be seen as a weak insulted person.”(McAleer 42) Given this commitment to murder and death, we can further understand the system of “ethics” which is the bedrock of German culture itself. 

Through exploring this strange German Ehre, perhaps we can see another aspect of Germany’s support of Israel. It may be a long shot, but bear with me.  As we learned from evaluation of Volksverhetzung law, human rights in Germany entails applying German notions of “human dignity” or honor to certain populations or persons. These populations, therefore, must also fall into a strict and violent hierarchical code as well. 

Through the lens of German Ehre, the Palestinian people insulted Israel through the October 7 attacks and as the German political elite and mainstream media seems to be unable to distinguish between Israel and Jewish people, Palestine therefore insulted Jews as a whole. Since Jewish people are awarded “human dignity” in modern Germany, so we are told, Jews are therefore required to defend their honor. As the German state and mainstream media, through horrific anti-Palestinian racism and persecution, has implied that Palestinians, as non-Aryan Arabic people, occupy a lower racial positionality compared to white Ashkenazi Jews, Ehrenotwehr, honorable self-defense, or extermination, is an order. It must be quick, extreme, brutal, and absolute.

As the Nuremberg Laws imply, genocide is the way a country defends honor against ‘inferior races’, and it is actually a requirement to uphold the honor of the ethno-nationstate. We should also note that Theodor Herzl, one of the founders of Zionism, valued Ehre enough to suggest that the duel might help the social position of European Jews (Schorske 160). Furthermore, Suad Hanine Shatou-Shehadeh, in her Doctoral Thesis from Columbia University, beautifully articulates in great detail how Honor is one of the fundamental bedrocks of the Zionist movement.

As was previously revealed in the Teutonic Order’s Rule Book of 1264, we discovered that the German white christian elite have long dreamed of a vision of Jews as being honorable through commiting genocide in Palestine; they had viewed the Maccabees as honorable Knights who “exterminated” pagans and “cleansed” the Holy Land (Sterns, 204). Now Zionism has begun to fulfill this vision, and the German ruling class is one of its most voracious supporters.

Because of their close ties, Germany’s honor is bound up in the honor of Israel (recall Israel is Germany’s Staatsräson). This means that Jews who refuse this challenge, who do not defend their Ehre, and oppose Zionism or simply Israeli state policies, are scorned with great hatred and resentment. They have thrown away their honor and insulted the honor of the German state, its Staatsehre one might say, by anointing them with that Ehre and “human dignity” in the first place. They are reduced to the dishonorable class and deserve punishment for insulting more honorable Jews and the German state as a whole

Moreover, given that the notion of “salonfähigkeit”, or being fit for good society, is dependant on one’s ability to support and participate in murderous violence against those who ‘insult’ your honor, we can further understand why only those people who support genocide against ‘dishonorables’ compose the German elite and ruling class. 

And if, as Whitman suggested, honor was democratized to be a privilege and responsibility of all people in Germany (catalyzed through, if you recall, the Nazi expansion of Beleidigung to protect all Aryans), all people in Germany must also follow the German Ehre code, and can therefore only be fit for society when they actively support the extermination of ‘honor insulters’.

Through this three part series, we have therefore discovered that modern Germany not only has laws that are distinctly anti-democratic, but it also has created a legal, ethical, and societal framework to require its population to avidly support genocide and ethnic cleansing of those whos mere existence insults the honor of the state.

© Jason Oberman, all rights reserved, 2025

Works Cited

  • McAleer, Kevin. Dueling: The Cult of Honor in Fin-De-Siecle Germany. Princeton University Press, 1994.
  • Schorske, Carl E. Fin-De-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture. Vintage Books, 1981. 
  • Shatou-Shehadeh, Suad Hanine. The Zionist Quest for Honor: France and Jewish Zionist Ideology and Subjectivity. Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 2021.
  • Sterns, Indrikis. “The Statutes of the Teutonic Knights: A Study of Religious Chivalry“. Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 1969. 

Whitman, James Q. “Enforcing Civility and respect: Three societies” The Yale Law Journal, vol. 109, 2000, pp. 1279–1398, .

Red Flag: What Does the Liberation of Buchenwald Mean Today?

Nathaniel Flakin’s Weekly Column for The Left Berlin


11/04/2025

On April 11, 1945, as U.S. troops approached Buchenwald, the resistance groups inside the concentration camp launched an insurrection. The secret leadership committee, made up of prisoners of different nationalities, handed out weapons to the inmates who proceeded to storm the gate house and the guard towers. Most of the SS guards had fled a few hours earlier — the rest were disarmed. When the U.S. army reached Buchenwald, they found a camp under the control of its prisoners.

In the following days, a wave of declarations were published. The most famous, the Oath of Buchenwald, ends with the line: “The eradication of Nazism as well as its roots is our guiding principle.”

Yet this document, influenced by Stalinist ideology, was contradictory. It thanked the “allied Armies of the Americans, English, Soviets and all Freedom Armies.” Yet these so-called Freedom Armies had done very little to save Europe’s Jews or other victims of the Nazis. Military commanders had refused to bomb the railroads leading to Auschwitz, for example, which could have saved countless lives. Throughout the war, the U.S. government had refused entry to Jewish refugees from Europe.

The Western allies were not interested in defending freedom and democracy — they were fighting for their own capitalist interests and colonial empires. At the end of the war against Nazi Germany, these “Freedom Armies” were carrying out massacres in Indochina, Algeria, India, Indonesia, etc.

A much more realistic assessment of the situation came from the Trotskyist prisoners, who published a Declaration of the International Communists of Buchenwald. They explained that the roots of fascism lay in the capitalist system, and demanded that the bourgeoisie pay for its crimes: “Expropriation of the banks, heavy industry and the large estates! Control of production by the unions and the workers councils!”

Today, 80 years later, the legacy of the Buchenwald resistance is more relevant than ever. A far-right party is topping the polls in Germany, with 24% of votes. Even more ominously, the new government of the CDU and SPD has committed itself to carrying out the AfD’s program. They want to eliminate, in practice, the right to asylum, a right that was established as a consequence of the German state’s crimes. 

Last Sunday, there was an official ceremony at Buchenwald, including nine survivors of the camp. Omri Boehm, an Israeli-German philosopher and a descendent of Holocaust survivors, was invited to speak and then disinvited after a campaign by the Israeli embassy. Boehm is not a leftist, a socialist, or an anti-Zionist. He defends Kantian universalism that includes human rights for all. He could probably be compared to early liberal Zionists like Martin Buber, as he has proposed a binational state for Jews and Palestinians with equal rights for all.

Yet in the eyes of Israel’s far-right government, even liberal Zionists are traitors and antisemites, and they managed to get Boehm excluded. As much as the Zionist state claims to represent all Jews, they are eager to erase the entire history of Jewish universalism, including figures such as Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, and Albert Einstein.

A young human rights activist closed her speech at the ceremony with a call to end the war in Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza. This was met with a sharp rebuke from the Buchenwald memorial, who say that reference to any other genocide amounts to an “instrumentalization” of the Holocaust. But isn’t it the other way around? Isn’t the camp being “instrumentalized” by an Israeli government with a far-right agenda?

The Oath of Buchenwald calls for a struggle against fascism — it includes nothing about defending a colonial project to build an an apartheid state. Today, Israel’s government is backing far-right parties in Europe with fascist roots.

The memory of the victims of Buchenwald — including Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, socialists, communists, etc — demands that we struggle against fascism and every form of oppression. Following their example, we need to unite across borders in the struggle for self-liberation. And as the Trotskyists’ statement reminds us, this means fighting against the system that brings forth fascism: capitalism.

Red Flag is a weekly column on Berlin politics that Nathaniel Flakin has been writing since 2020. After moving through different homes, it now appears on Friday at The Left Berlin.

Activism within the Queer Community – Attitudes and Engagement

Invitation to take part in my survey


09/04/2025

I am a PhD student at the SFU in Berlin researching how queer/ LGBTQIA* individuals define activism, and how they interact or have interacted with this concept it in their personal lives. I started out my PhD with the intention of researching online activism and social dynamics in online spaces, but soon decided to move my focus away from specifically online interactions. I instead started trying to materialise my many layers of interest in how activism works more broadly.

My contact with the idea of activism was shaped by my upbringing and the many conversations I have had with friends and acquaintances over the years discussing political topics. These conversations, especially ones with people who are more informed, more personally active, or know more about an area of the world than I do, have been very enriching and important to me. At the same time they have become the subject of my scientific curiosity.

Who had made their points in what way? What were the arguments and strategies, the points in common, the disagreements? How did people name the collection of their world views? Did these definitions differ between people? What was the significance of being called a communist, anarchist or Marxist-Leninist? How were groups and projects assessed when their labelling didn’t match up with one’s own? Where were lines in what people consider legitimate and illegitimate action?

While all of these questions popped up and were slowly crystallising in my head, I found myself more and more also focused on the issue currently most central to myself (as often happens with psychological research projects):

How come some people found a “way in” to social or political areas of action and some ended up stuck hoping they were helping in some way? How did people wind up associated with certain groups, or finding their way into different activities? What effects did these activities have on the world? Did they make the people doing them feel enriched, hopeful? What reasons were people identifying when they felt they couldn’t/didn’t want to make the step into being active themselves?

As I am a queer person and the majority of my friends use this label or would place themselves within the LGBTQIA* umbrella, I felt that my curiosity about activism at large has been strongly intertwined with my curiosity about queerness. A lot of texts I read emerged from the fields of gender studies or queer studies, and many of the lived experiences of the people around me were shaped by intersectional experiences of oppression. The awareness of being part of a minority and experiencing discrimination shaped many discussions and world views. Inside of my own in-person group as well as on the internet and in larger community spaces, discussions about the intricate political aspects of queer identities were prevalent.

Who received more privilege and why, and was this distinction even important to make? Were queer issues tied to other discriminated/ oppressed groups? And if yes, in what ways and what was to be done about it? How could solidarity between people with different identities and issues work? Was queerness inherently political, and if yes what did “queerness” and “political” even mean to the people discussing the question?

Most of these above-mentioned topics have been widely discussed and analysed across many disciplines throughout the years, as well as being thought about and figured out anew by every queer individual and friend group. I do not expect to be able to solve any of these discussions with my work.

Through my PhD project, I am only trying to condense all my questions into one project and get a multilayered pool of answers to better understand how all the factors play together to shape individuals’ interactions with the topic.

The final motivator for my project is, paradoxically, the feeling of being stuck and unable to become more politically active. Talk about not knowing where to start or not feeling qualified/ oppressed/ knowledgeable enough is everywhere I look on social media and in personal chats with friends. The worsening political situation is leaving many people feeling scared, angry and hopeless without the feeling of being able to engage meaningfully and make a change. At the same time, it seems that many people who are struggling and would like to find a way to start find it difficult to get in touch with people who are already more active and ask for guidance.

The final form of my project was developed to reflect the connection and layeredness of all the aforementioned topics.

  • I want to understand what activism means to others, so the survey explores personal definitions of activism and what activities fall under it.
  • I want to understand what helps people take agency, so the survey explores obstacles that people encounter while trying to work towards being politically active, as well as support systems and strategies that people found to break through.
  • I want to understand what role queer identities, communities and discourse around queerness plays, so the survey explores nuances of belonging and personal identities.
  • I want to understand how systems of oppression affect people trying to break through, so the survey explores factors such as economic situation, health, mental capacities and experiences of discrimination.

Hopefully the answers to these questions will shed light onto the phenomenon in general, but will also help support those that wish to engage (more). In future steps of this project, I hope to make my results available to organisations and anyone else looking for information about entry barriers to activism.

To be able to do all of this, we need your input! Experience with activism is not necessary!

As a first phase of this project, we have created an online questionnaire of about 20-30min with a mix of open and closed questions. If you identify as queer or part of the LGBTIA* community in any way and would like to share with us your views on the topic, please follow this link.

In the second phase, we will conduct in-depth qualitative interviews to really dive into the nitty-gritty of how each individual person navigates their own complex situation and how their decisions shape their interaction (or lack thereof) with activism.