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Red Flag: All Charges Against Baki Have Been Dropped!

In his weekly column, Nathaniel looks at a legal victory for Palestine solidarity in Berlin.


11/02/2026

All Charges Against Baki Have Been Dropped

The trial was supposed to last until the evening. But on Tuesday, Baki Devrimkaya emerged from Berlin’s Regional Court before noon, where he was greeted by dozens of supporters with banners and chants. The case had been dismissed—resulting in neither a guilty nor a not guilty verdict. Instead, the charges will disappear in exchange for a €450 donation to medico international, an NGO that opposes the genocide in Gaza. 

Back in December 2023, Baki had been a steward at a pro-Palestinian protest at the Free University of Berlin. Right-wing agitators attempted to disrupt the event by destroying posters featuring images of murdered Palestinian children, insulting students as “Nazis,” and physically attacking stewards. Multiple videos show Baki standing in front of these bullies, remaining peaceful even as they shoved him.

Absurdly, Baki was charged with “assault” and “insult.” At a first trial last June, these charges had to be dropped as the evidence showed the opposite: Baki was the one being assaulted and insulted. Instead, the judge convicted Baki of “coercion” for standing in front of a person with outstretched arms for about 50 seconds. He was sentenced to a €450 fine. This would create a dangerous and bizarre legal precedent, potentially criminalizing every form of stewarding at left-wing events.

Baki appealed the charges, and yesterday his three lawyers were able to get the coercion charge dropped as well. The right-wing paper Tagespiegel is lying when it claims in a headline that Baki was sentenced to a fine—there was no determination of guilt.

Growing Repression

In the morning, 50 people demonstrated opposite the courthouse. In the afternoon, over 70 joined another rally—a protest turned into a victory rally. This included students and workers from the Free University as well as activists from Klasse Gegen Klasse, Linksjugend-Solid, BDS FU, Waffen der Kritik, Mera25, the Revolutionary Socialist Organization, Spartakist, and other groups.

Numerous police vans were positioned outside the court, forcing demonstrators onto the other side of the road. Defense lawyer Timo Winter pointed out: “Passers by will have to wonder: is this a case involving dangerous criminals?” But no—it was an attempt to criminalize political protests at a university.

Baki’s trial is part of increasing repression at Berlin universities, not just against Palestine solidarity, but against all kinds of left-wing politics—universities even banned assemblies against the AfD! That’s why this legal case was so important. Baki could have paid the fine last year, but thanks to the solidarity of hundreds of activists from around the world, he was able to beat back the repression. As defense lawyer Lennart Wolgast pointed out in a speech, this appeal couldn’t have taken place without all the moral and financial support.

Legal and Legitimate

Baki is a nurse trainee who was born and raised in Germany but doesn’t have a German passport. A conviction would have made it more difficult to get basic citizenship rights. His peaceful defense of a peaceful protest was both legal and legitimate. “In other circumstances, the press would have called this civil courage,” he said.

This case was ultimately not about him. There are over 71,000 confirmed dead in Gaza, and countless more still buried beneath the rubble. The German government has supported this genocide with hundreds of millions of euros, and is trying to ban any opposition.

A big majority of people in Germany believe that Israel is committing genocide. The government’s “reason of state,” which means unconditional support for Zionist colonialism, is extremely unpopular. That is why they need so much repression: to prevent the majority from expressing its opinions.

But resistance is growing against the militaristic and authoritarian turn. School students went on strike against conscription last December, and will strike again on March 5. Baki’s refusal to accept repression makes it easier for young people to protest.

Jewish Students

Prosecutors accused Baki of antisemitism, because one of the bullies he blocked was a Jewish student. This ignores the fact that numerous Jewish students had been part of the pro-Palestine protest. HP Loveshaft, for example, was shoved by these same pro-Israel thugs. In a joint video, Baki and HP expressed their mutual solidarity.

The same day, but a few dozen kilometers away in Potsdam, HP was also on trial for his solidarity with Palestine, with several dozen supporters outside the court. This is yet another case of the German state attacking Jews in the name of “fighting antisemitism”! HP’s trial was postponed because witnesses for the prosecution hadn’t shown up.

At the solidarity rally for Baki, supporters played an old Jewish workers song, Oy Ir Narishe Tsienistn, in a multilingual version by Daniel Kahn and Psoy Korolenko.  The German state claims that its support for Israel is about “protecting Jewish life.” This song is a reminder of the long traditions of left-wing Jewish anti-Zionism, which is experiencing a massive resurgence in the face of Israel’s genocide. 

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

15 February 2003: The world stands up against Bush’s Iraq War

This week in working class history


The attack on the World Trade Center on 11th September 2001 led President George Bush to increase US militarism.  One month later, the US invaded Afghanistan. One year later, in September 2002, Bush used fabricated stories of Weapons of Mass Destruction to prepare the way for a similar attack on Iraq. One of his motivations was to overcome the “Vietnam syndrome”. Since being ejected from Vietnam in 1975, many working class people in the US were no longer prepared to fight and die for their country.

The attack on the World Trade Center on 11th September 2001 prompted President George Bush to escalate US militarism. Just one month later, the US invaded Afghanistan. By September 2002, Bush utilized fabricated claims of Weapons of Mass Destruction to justify a similar invasion of Iraq. One of his motivations was to overcome the “Vietnam syndrome”; since the US withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975, many working-class Americans were reluctant to fight and die for their country.

As Bush prepared for war, the international anti-capitalist movement was gaining momentum. In 1999, the Battle of Seattle saw trade unionists and environmentalists unite to shut down a meeting of the World Trade Organization. The first World Social Forum took place in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in January 2001, serving as a gathering point for anti-capitalist activists and intellectuals. A corresponding European Social Forum was held in Florence in November 2002.

In Florence, the anti-capitalist and anti-war movements converged. One million people rallied against the impending war in a city with a population of less than 400,000. During the forum, an additional meeting was organized, where hundreds of activists from various countries discussed strategies to counter the looming conflict in Iraq. An international day of action was set for February 15th the following year, aiming for demonstrations across the globe.

The outcome was significant. Over a million people demonstrated in Barcelona, Rome, and London. The Rome demonstration is recorded in the Guinness Book of Records as the largest anti-war rally in history, with 3 million participants. Protests occurred on every continent, including a gathering of 50 scientists in Antarctica. An estimated 15 million people demonstrated on February 15, and 40 million participated in the three months leading up to the war’s outbreak on 20 March.

Although these demonstrations did not prevent the war, they likely deterred further attacks. Two days after the protests, New York Times columnist Patrick E. Tyler remarked that the world now had two superpowers: the USA and the international anti-war movement. Many anti-capitalists shifted their focus from advocating for taxation on speculation to actively opposing imperialism. In North Africa, where the 2003 demonstrations were relatively small due to state repression, activists learned valuable lessons that contributed to the emergence of the Arab Spring.

Regarding the comfort of others

To enact change, we need more than virtuous deeds and good intentions


09/02/2026

Who is an activist and what makes them one? An activist, by word, means someone who takes/performs/does an action. There is a common belief among many that taking action (political/social/humanitarian/environmental) is a virtue. It frames action as exceptional, morally superior, requiring a specific kind of nobility, innocence, and even godliness. In doing so, it removes action from the realm of the ordinary and places it into the realm of moral victory, something to aspire to rather than something to be expected. This belief is inherently and essentially an invitation to passivity.

If one argues that they lack this virtue and thus cannot take meaningful action, this belief distorts the possible and feasible activities necessary to interrupt the injustice of the status quo, both within and beyond where they stand, into an impossible scale to measure and therefore, to execute. The actions that could have been small, situated, and uncomplicated become measureless, global, and complex. Action is imagined only at the scale of total resolution, and anything less is dismissed as insufficient, symbolic, or meaningless.

This framing creates a shield between all that is political and what is considered normal life. Politics becomes a ground you can step onto under extraordinary circumstances, and with extreme caution, while everyday life is treated as neutral, apolitical, and normal. The violence of the status quo is thus allowed to continue uninterrupted, not because it is unseen, but because it has been rendered out of the routines of daily existence, to some participants of that so-called normal life.

But what is a “normal” life?

To many people, what is deemed as normal feels soothing. It is waking up, possibly going to work, then going back home or out with friends or family, getting some well-deserved rest, and going to bed again. It is comfortable, and it is safe, in the sense that you will wake up and know how the rest of the day will look, and it will go just like you thought it would. You can predict it, plan it, control it.

To the rest of the world,“normal” is not even close to this definition. Normal is the unknown. Something that cannot be predicted, but is expected to come down, maybe not instantly, not now, but surely, eventually. Normal is waking up with the news of executions, of political and environmental activists being sentenced their entire lives to jail, of erasure, of famine, of learning about new regulations of oppression. For many, normal is fear, and the expectation of the worst.

Some are born in times of war, while their parents hold them as babies and flee from town to town, country to country, trying to take themselves and their children to safety. To a place where normal is not defined by not knowing whether you will wake up tomorrow or not.

There is nothing wrong with what is believed to be normal for those who live in comfort. What is wrong is actively trying to unsee the “normal” to the rest of the world, and finding it natural that their normal is different from yours. To unsee the poor, the homeless, the neglected. This requires effort, because it is not easy to unsee. Those who are unseen are part of everyday life. They are the news consumed, the food brought to the table, the labour performed. They are workers, peers, classmates, friends, lovers. They are parts of the life we live, until their existence interrupts our joy, our norm, our comfort. And then: suddenly invisible. Dismissed. Suddenly, it is impossible to hear or see or notice them.

Comfort is key. Who does not want comfort? Who does not want to not be in pain, to not suffer, to not experience the most extreme forms of violence daily? But this comfort, this privilege, is built on stacks of pain and suffering, put on top of each other one after one throughout history. Comfort becomes whole only when paired with the feeling of being “one of the good ones.” Ethical. Kind. Helpful. Human.

But who is a “good one” anyway? Good to whom, and by what measures? Is goodness the smile given to a homeless person on a snowy day, or helping a “good” cause with a couple of euros? Does goodness stem from intention, or does it flow from action? Is it holding the door open for the person behind you, or chanting “none of us are free, until all of us are free” in a parade?

There is a moment in the film Parasite when the mother of the poor family remarks that the rich woman is “nice because she’s rich”. Comfort constructs a facade of seeming caring. Of listening with sad eyes and a broken smile while hearing the struggles of a Kurdish coworker. Of sighing, or shedding a tear when hearing news from the furthest parts of the world, iterated, heard, and understood in the most abstract way possible.

Susan Sontag in Regarding the Pain of Others writes that “to speak of reality becoming a spectacle is provincial. It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in wealthy parts of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment. It assumes that everyone is a spectator. It suggests, perversely, that there is no real suffering in the world.”

This mere spectatorship, this bystander effect for the consumers of politics and news of war and conflict as entertainment, also puts the burden and weight on the shoulders of the oppressed, and on the very few people and groups who continuously try to dismantle systems of injustice. Responsibility concentrates where vulnerability already exists, while those who benefit most from stability are permitted to remain spectators. Action becomes the labour only to those who cannot afford to just watch.

Within this logic, one can also argue that “I have already done the virtuous work, that I have donated to the survivors of Hurricane Catarina, that I have acted ethically elsewhere. And therefore, I do not need to speak up about the genocide in Gaza or the democide in Iran.” Virtue becomes transferable, interchangeable, and finite, stored in a moral account that can be balanced, settled, and closed.

When action becomes virtue, and comfort prioritized, witnessing turns decorative, and movement symbolic. Decency becomes something to be performed to the right audience and on a visible stage rather than something to be done, despite no one looking. To the people deliberately consuming suffering as spectators, profiting from these systems can be something they did not design, but choose to preserve through non-action.

What I want to offer as the way out is not more awareness, not louder declarations of decency, but the separation of “meaningful action” from ego, from good deeds, and from the lust of showing morality through performative acts and symbolic righteousness.

Witnessing and movement cannot remain decorative or cherished symbols of being on the right side. They have to be normalized. Stripped of moral theatricality. Detached from the performance of goodness.

Meaningful action should not be perceived as decency. It should not feel virtuous. It should feel obvious. Like duty. Like maintenance. When water floods an ant’s nest, there is no debate, no reward, and no ant begs another one to stop the ruination. There is only continuous action to prevent annihilation.

A world sustained by blood and silence does not change through kinder and more aware spectators. It changes when action stops being theatre and becomes ordinary, constant, even boring, yet unavoidable interruption of that silence.

The Castle in the Air

What do we mean by stability? And is it a good thing?


“If I try to find some useful phrase to sum up the time of my childhood and youth before the First World War, I hope I can put it most succinctly by calling it the Golden Age of Security.”  

These are the opening words written by Stefan Zweig in his memoirs, The World of Yesterday. He wrote them from a little white house on the hill overlooking suburban Rio de Janeiro as palm trees swayed in the  breeze of the evening beyond his blue-shuttered windows. In his love letter to Habsburg Vienna, he recalls the security of his youth, the progressive and cosmopolitan culture he grew up in, and the international order that allowed it to flourish. As he wrote from this little white house at the height of the Second World War, millions of his books across Central Europe were either hidden or burned because they were written by a Jewish author.

He admitted painfully in retrospect that, “Now that a great storm has long since destroyed it, we know at last that our world of security was a castle in the air. Yet my parents lived in it as if it were a solid stone house. Not once did a storm or a cold draught invade their warm, comfortable existence.” His castle in the air was  the post-Napoleonic international order.

Almost exactly one century before the outbreak of the First World War, the Great Powers gathered in Zweig’s beloved Vienna to settle the rupture to stability caused by the French Revolution, and the 23 years of continental war that followed. After Napoleon’s defeat, the European powers saw fit to construct an international order based on diplomacy, enforced by the dual hegemony of Britain and Russia. The settlement of the Congress of Vienna succeeded in preventing any major wars between the European powers. It provided a stability that remained until the continent found itself sleepwalking into the catastrophe of 1914.

But what do we mean by “stability”? The Vienna settlement established a framework of diplomacy for the Great Powers to manage their disputes – one that struck a balance between conservatism and flexibility. The Greek Revolution illustrates this. Nationalism was a threat to the multi-ethnic empires, yet the persistence of the Greek revolutionaries and the involvement of British finance led the Great Powers to carry out the first overseas intervention of a kind that we would recognise today. The Greeks were granted a state, but with a  German king on the new throne. The resolution was tolerable to the Great Powers and avoided a major war in Europe.

Yet in the absence of war on the continent, Europe turned its eyes to the periphery and to its colonies. The  Great Powers expanded through military conquest as empires grew to their greatest extent in all of human history, replacing the global economy with European monopolies as they went. The British Governor General of India wrote in 1834 that “the bones of the cotton-weavers are bleaching the plains of India”. Once the world’s leading producer of textiles, India was deindustrialised by Britain to create a market for fabrics woven by children and the working poor in cities like Manchester.

Of Manchester itself, Engels wrote that the “working-people are crowded into the worst-built parts of the town… in damp, filthy cellars, in dark, unventilated courts, where all conditions of life are combined which undermine health and destroy the human being.” In this era of “stability” then, the logic of political economists of  the time was that the poor must endure these conditions so as not to overpopulate.

So by stability we cannot mean peace, and we cannot mean justice. What made the framework stable was that it endured. The Great Powers benefited while others did not. Both Zweig and Engels describe two sides of the same coin in a post-Vienna international order.

The words of Zweig may resonate with those lamenting the death of an ‘international rules based order’ today. They say that the post-1945 world was one where laws governed international relations; where international courts restrained state power; and in which individuals could navigate predictable lives in the comfort of security and the peace of stability. They find good company with Zweig in their nostalgia of a Golden Age of Security.

Yet this narrative sits uneasily against the backdrop of the Palestinians under occupation and genocide; the Cubans behind decades of embargo; the Cambodians lost to Kissinger’s secret war; the Iraqis invaded on fabricated grounds; and the unquantifiable loss to the orthodoxy of austerity and ‘structural adjustment’.

At Davos, Mark Carney spoke of the ‘rupture’ of this order. It was a rare moment in which a beneficiary of the old world stability acknowledged a facade. One that those who have suffered under it have never had the luxury of  missing: that which had passed for an order based on universal rules was, at least in part, a facade.

None of this is to deny the gains of an age of decolonisation and generally rising living standards. But this is not a fall from grace. It is the end of a form of stability in a way we have seen before. Like the Vienna settlement, the international order that we appear to be leaving behind was neither just nor peaceful, but a stable global system of power and inequality that for a time endured.

So, what next? Perhaps a new Congress of Vienna – but who would be invited, and by whom? Like the post-Vienna and post-1945 worlds, will it be an uneven framework of those within the world of security and those outside it, or a more equitable distribution of power?

Whatever follows, it is clear that we cannot build our politics on nostalgia of a Golden Age of Security that  never existed. Perhaps one day we will recall how the images from Gaza that we saw on our phones expressed to us in the simplest of terms that the rules based international order in which we lived was our very own castle in the air.

Between culture and revolution

A prospect on the fate of technocracy


07/02/2026

Modern building in Berlin, made completely of glass windows.

Probably a good starting point will be a short and proper definition of culture, that can be taken from O. Spengler’s Decline of the West: ‘cultures are organisms, and world-history is their collective biography.’ Such a philosophical definition might be difficult to interpret, but for the use of this article we will define culture as a developing system of beliefs, prospects, conceptions of and about art and philosophy. 

One way or another the culture can be linked to the left. On one hand, this connection comes from some key characteristics: inclusion, equity, equality. Also, culture aligns with the left not for ideological reasons, but because both reject hierarchy, by allowing pluralism, offering perspectives for a better common future. The ‘left’ and the ‘culture’ can be bonded, on the other hand, on another line: the left has its own culture, it has its own understanding of philosophy—based on dialectics and reinterpretation of art. This second part is probably more important; it brings us closer to the real purpose of art and closer to the ‘world of the ideas;’ to the better world we can participate in in order to rethink art, culture, and politics. In doing so we can give them new life. 

That is the reason why we won’t talk about ‘high culture,’ ‘basic culture,’ ‘high politics,’ or ‘low politics.’ Such distinctions, whether in culture or in left-wing politics, are controversial, they go against basic principles and core ideas of our perception. We have to include every cultural act, we have to include everybody at the same time in politics and in culture. The ‘elitization’ of those  social phenomena drifts them away from their core and brings us, as individuals, away from ourselves. 

Anti-elitization is a process we have to voluntarily work for.  We have to look forward to forming new beliefs, without a conception of an elite. We are witnessing that there are different types of elites: political, economical, cultural, technological, and last but not least, educational. Those elites have different functions: the political governs, the technological designs algorithms, the cultural gives us standards, and the educational certifies worth. They claim they are neutral, but all of them depend on exclusion in order to function. 

The more elites we allow to form, the worse we allow our own situation to become, because today you are part of the elite, tomorrow—when the elite does not need you—you are out of it. The best way to counter this is to not participate in those elites at all. 

Our fight against the system has to be continuous; we cannot build new culture with elites. And we cannot build a new world without education. We need people who think, we need people who know what they want, and, last but not least, people who are familiar with different cultures and recognize art as an important part of their life. 

This brings us back to the culture and art. Bourgeois art is coming back. It returns through function. It decorates power and represses. In times of technofeudalism and global technocracy, capitalism and pseudoart are blooming. In order to fight back we need social art and a functional left, a left which has a conception, which has new ideas and is inclusive. 

One might ask, “What is a technocracy and why should I care about it?” If we define technocracy as an apolitical, professional governance, ruled by an elite of technical experts, we will give ourselves a really shallow perspective. That way, the exploitation—which is an inseparable part of the technocracy—will be missed and this work will not give you anything new. It won’t broaden your perspective. We need to focus on this misuse. Instead, let us define technocracy as a ‘performatively apolitical, repressive regime, dependent on exploitation.’ As mentioned above, technocracy and feudalism can use you, the citizen, in order to achieve the goals of their leaders of the so-called ‘elite’ you are entering. But if they are ready to sacrifice their own members, the elite will always exploit other people. 

Capitalism is also part of the problem. Technocracy without capitalism is unthinkable. The human potential can and will be used by technofeudalists and technocrats in order to achieve their own goals and accumulate power (either in the form of capital or political power) in their hands. 

This way—without noticing—people are pushed to the side and they decide to sell their own freedom for ‘professionalism’ and expertise. 

In the context of our grotesque modernity the idea of ‘professionalism’ is distorted. At first we believed in professionals, then we started believing in pseudoprofessionals, and today we are creating demi-gods. People kneel in front of the elites they support every day. 

Where in this context can we find culture? Do we really need it? Culture is not just a theoretical concept. I truly believe we have to construct an organic conception of culture, in order to feel it more applicable and create a real hunger for it. Today we have a static culture, it looks like social media which artists and the ordinary person create at the same time, but this is far from true. It is shaped not by those subjects I mentioned, it is produced by algorithms and AI. 

Looking forward to the organic conception of culture we have to put ‘AI-art’, sham intelligence and profanity aside. Modern thinkers have to stay original, they have to create, they have to influence, otherwise we are lost. Culture shapes; it shows us new areas of our collective subconscious. Once we reject the new feudal system of technocracy,  we will be at least two steps closer to the new culture; the veil of ignorance will be lifted. Without culture and education we are going nowhere. 

And lastly, regarding the left: no, here we don’t have to connect the left with a certain Left, a party or a coalition. Left ideas in their different forms have to be the antipode of technocracy and neofeudalism. We need a political color, a certain person, or a collective body to hold accountable. Those new doctrines blur the responsibility, they push us to new political regimes, that they call apolitical. But they are scarier, darker and more dangerous than the systems we know, deep down they are political. They are even more problematic. 

Those conclusions bring us back to the starting point: culture and revolution. Culture is the revolution we need today—it opens eyes and shows different points of view. Culture has to be established  before technocracy can enfold us. Technocracy is capable, we cannot risk letting it succeed. Without culture, resistance becomes façade. Without revolution, culture will be just an ornament. Our fight for a new culture and against technocracy has to be permanent, at least until we can proclaim our victory.