The Left Berlin News & Comment

This is the archive template

Category: Articles

Filipinos, solidarity allies hold People’s SONA outside PH Embassy

Report from an action in Berlin, 28th July 2025


30/07/2025

Filipinos and solidarity allies gathered outside the Philippine Embassy for the Filipino People’s State of the Nation Address (SONA)—a bold counter to the official narrative delivered annually by the Marcos-Duterte regime.

Organized by ALPAS Pilipinas, Gabriela Germany, Migrante Germany, Bayan-EU, and RESBAK Germany, with support from BPSO (Berlin Philippines Solidarity Organisation) and ICHRP (International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines) Germany, the protest was one of over 30 actions worldwide exposing the truth behind the glossy government address.

Speakers condemned the Marcos regime’s neglect of national crises, its deepening foreign dependency, and continued repression. ALPAS slammed Marcos’ recent U.S. visit amid deadly monsoon rains and flash floods in the Philippines. “While the Filipino people were literally drowning, Marcos was breaking bread with the likes of Donald Trump and selling off […] our sovereignty,” said ALPAS Pilipinas. They noted how Marcos has been accommodating foreign military interests, and how Germany, too, is complicit through the signing of a recent Germany-Philippines defense agreement.

Gabriela and Migrante spotlighted worsening conditions for women and migrant workers, linking mass migration to poverty and systemic injustice. Gabriela renewed its urgent call for a national minimum wage of ₱1,200/day, saying it’s a step toward “economic justice and dignity for every Filipino worker.” Migrante added that “Filipinos face backbreaking workloads, racism, and discrimination abroad, and this is the direct result of poverty and joblessness at home. Migration is a right, but it should never be forced by desperation.”

RESBAK and solidarity allies decried human rights abuses and the expansion of U.S.-led military influence in the region. BAYAN-EU exposed elite impunity, denouncing dynastic rule, corruption, and militarized governance. “He upholds the very machinery Duterte built—one that silences the people while protecting dynasties and plunderers.” 

As Marcos enters his his fourth year in power, Berlin’s People’s SONA echoed a growing global call: Marcos Singilin, Duterte Panagutin!

Photo Gallery: Internationalist Queer Pride 2025

Berlin-Neukölln, Saturday 26th July 2025


29/07/2025

6 August 1945: US drops a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima

This week in working class history


At 9:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, the U.S. aircraft Enola Gay dropped a nuclear bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The attack killed 140,000 people—about 40% of the city’s population. Japanese news agencies reported: “The impact of the bomb was so terrific that practically all living things, human and animals, were literally seared to death by the tremendous heat and pressure engineered by the blast. All of the dead and injured were burned beyond recognition.”

Three days later, the U.S. dropped a second nuclear bomb on Nagasaki, killing another 80,000 people. The number of civilians immediately killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was more than double the number of American troops killed during the entire Pacific War. Hundreds of thousands more would later die from radiation poisoning and its long-term effects.

U.S. President Harry S. Truman claimed the bombs were dropped to “shorten the agony of war” and “save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans.” Yet there was no ethical justification for using them. The war in Europe had ended one month earlier, and Japan was already on the verge of surrender. Even the warmongering British Prime Minister Winston Churchill admitted: “It would be a mistake to suppose that the fate of Japan was settled by the atomic bomb.”

The real reason, as Truman himself admitted, was to “put us in a position to dictate the terms of the end of war.” As World War II was drawing to a close, the Cold War with the Soviet Union was beginning. Demonstrating the U.S.’s ability to kill hundreds of thousands with a single bomb projected military dominance. In response to the bombing, U.S. Chief of Staff Admiral Leahy remarked: “We had adopted an ethical standard common to that of the barbarians of the Dark Age.”

Nuclear weapons have not stopped conventional warfare—just look at the many wars being fought today, often by nations with nuclear arsenals. What they have created is the permanent threat of total annihilation at the push of a button. They are also a symbol of how far the world’s rulers are willing to go to cling to power, even at the cost of humanity. The best way to mourn the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is to demand the complete and permanent abolition of nuclear weapons.

Berlin vs. Solidarity with Palestine

Berlin prosecutes Palestine solidarity while shielding systemic violence and silencing dissent


The German police and state have been criminalising solidarity with Palestine for decades, from resolutions against the BDS movement in 2019 to banning Nakba anniversary commemorations in 2022 and 2023.

For the past 22 months, the German government—particularly in Berlin—has intensified its attacks on the Palestine solidarity movement, justifying its actions through Staatsräson, or unconditional support for the genocidal state of Israel. Bans and cancellations of events, speakers, talks, and exhibitions have become the norm.

Peaceful demonstrations have been systematically attacked by riot police, who have made thousands of arrests and left many injured—some seriously. Riot police also evicted student occupations and camps at the so-called Free University of Berlin and Humboldt University after the university presidents reported their own students. Police investigators are now monitoring social media, likely with AI assistance, to track down the infamous “imported antisemitism”—while ignoring the homegrown kind, “made in Germany.”

Most cases involving detained individuals, and many targeted through police surveillance on social media, are handed over to the Berlin public prosecutor’s office. The latest estimates suggest that, since 7 October alone, there have been 9,000 proceedings in Berlin.

An unknown number of these cases are dismissed or settled out of court, while the rest proceed to trial. The volume of cases related to Palestinian solidarity since 7 October has been so high that the public prosecutor’s office reorganized the section responsible for hate crimes after the latest phase of the genocide. As a result, most cases are now handled by Section 231, which also investigates antisemitic offences and so-called “criminal” acts during demonstrations. All of these defendants are being tried in Berlin’s criminal court.

The court’s cases fall into three interrelated categories, all stemming from the police actions described above.

1. “Offences” related to slogans and symbols deemed antisemitic or linked to organizations designated as terrorist in Germany, such as the Samidoun network or Hamas. These include slogans like “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free,” “Zionists are fascists, they kill children and civilians,” as well as symbols like red triangles and raised fists.

2. Trials of students reported by their universities for attempting to initiate political discussions on campus and demanding an end to institutional collaboration with the genocide in Gaza. These individuals are typically charged with trespassing and disturbing the peace.

3. Arrests carried out at demonstrations and sit-ins, typically after slogans are chanted or “dangerous” symbols—such as watermelons—are displayed. Riot police then enter aggressively in groups of 10 to 15 to make arrests. For each arrest, they often detain additional people, accusing them of interference or verbal assault. Arrests also occur when police unilaterally declare a demonstration over. Recently, there has been a rise in arrests of individuals already “known” to the police.

Nearly all those arrested under these three categories are charged with resisting arrest. Those who are injured, many of whom require hospitalization, are often additionally accused of assaulting the police.

4. Trials concerning social media posts, often involving the use of “prohibited” slogans or statements considered Holocaust denial in Germany. This includes any comparison between the genocide of the Palestinian people and the German genocide of the Jewish people—even when made by anti-Zionist Jews whose families may have been exterminated by the very predecessors of those persecuting them today.

All of these cases are tried in Berlin’s central criminal court, with an excessive number assigned to the court’s high-security chambers. It is, to say the least, astonishing that 19-year-old students accused of trespassing—or peaceful protesters—are treated as dangerous criminals in a country where racist murders routinely go unpunished.

These trials offer a glimpse into the psyche of the German state. Defendants—especially Palestinians—frequently face racist and paternalistic comments, accused of disturbing the German rule of law simply for protesting the extermination of their family members and friends. Many experience their first humiliation when judges, upon asking where they come from, refuse to write “Palestine” and instead label them as stateless.

Many judges still passionately cite 7 October and the protection of Jewish life in their verdicts, while entirely ignoring the genocide, classifying it as a matter of “freedom of opinion.” In other words, the existence of an ongoing genocide is not treated as fact, but as a debatable opinion.

Verdicts and sentences often hinge on three main factors: the judge, the skin colour of the accused (with darker skin seemingly a frequent disadvantage—especially when the goal is to “teach a lesson” about integrating into German society), and whether video evidence exists from the moment of arrest. Such footage is crucial in countering the police narrative, which the courts tend to accept, sometimes despite obvious contradictions.

Particularly ridiculous are the trials for contempt of authority. The Berlin police appear genuinely offended when those they pepper-spray or beat respond by insulting them.

A new wave of trials is being driven by Zionist activists who incite violence at demonstrations and then accuse protesters of misconduct. The police, without collecting evidence, arrest the identified individuals, and prosecutors take the cases to court. Most of these trials end in “not guilty” verdicts, but this has not deterred the activists, the police, or the prosecution from continuing to criminalize whomever they choose.

A German politician known for attending anti-genocide demonstrations—flanked by at least ten police officers, holding flowers, and a sign reading “rape is not resistance”—has been raising money online while accusing anyone who challenges her. Among them is journalist Jakob Reimann, whom she accused and temporarily prevailed against in court, simply for quoting her verbatim, including a video clip of the interview. In that footage, this German Zionist made startling statements about reports then emerging concerning Israeli torture prisons, including rape.

Reimann’s statement on the day of his verdict captured the resolve of pro-Palestinian activists: no matter how relentless the state’s lawfare becomes, they will not stop until they see a free Palestine.

“We are, of course, disappointed that the right-wing influencer Karoline Preisler managed to push through her attack on press freedom. But in a Germany governed by “Staatsräson,” which unconditionally and unwaveringly sides with the far-right Israeli regime despite the extreme crimes committed by the IDF, such a verdict hardly comes as a surprise.

We reject the opposing side’s claim that Preisler’s reference to the ‘more humane actor’ was about the alleged prosecution of rape allegations in Israel, and we were able to refute this on several points. However, the presiding judge made it clear from the outset that she was siding with the plaintiff’s position. That Preisler used such words at all in the context of brutal rapes is symptomatic of the appalling brutalization we are witnessing in the German discourse on Israel-Palestine.

We will not give up and will appeal the verdict.”

Red Flag: Berlin cops beat up Queers for Palestine

In his weekly column, Nathaniel Flakin reports from Internationalist Queer Pride


28/07/2025

Hands in a crowd hold up Palestinian flags and a sign saying "No one is free until we are all free."

On Saturday, Berlin police detained a queer person for wearing a white t-shirt with a pink triangle. That symbol was forced on gay men in the concentration camps—wouldn’t German cops remember?—and has since come to stand for remembrance and resistance. Yet under an increasingly authoritarian government, a pink triangle might be a banned marker of a terrorist organization.

People at an anticapitalist pride demonstration got punched, shoved, and arrested by heavily armed cops. In previous years, police seemed hesitant to create images of such unhinged violence in a city that officially supports gay rights. But as democratic freedoms have been squashed in the name of suppressing Palestine solidarity, Berlin police have come to understand they can do whatever they want without fearing criticism from politicians, media, or judges.

This festival of queerphobic violence took place just a few kilometers down the road from the city’s main pride demonstration. 

CSD

Berlin’s right-wing mayor Kai Wegner went to Christopher Street Day (CSD), as the Pride demonstration here has been called since it was launched in 1979, to say that the rainbow flag “belongs in the center of our society.” This was a rebuke to Friedrich Merz and Julia Klöckner, Wegner’s colleagues in the CDU, for refusing to raise the rainbow flag at the Bundestag.

Hundreds of thousands of people danced at CSD alongside floats from Vattenfall, Siemens, Commerzbank, and Mercedes-Benz, companies which often only find their voices to champion queer liberation every July. The CDU—the party that deports queer refugees, voted against marriage equality, and prevented the rehabilitation of all gay men convicted under Germany’s notorious paragraph 175—had its own float, as did the far-right media company Axel Springer.

Wegner marched behind a banner that said “Homos Jews Women,” which might sound strange, giving Wegner’s long-standing connections to far-right antisemites. Yet East Pride Berlin is not a Jewish group—it appears to be older white men who support Israel’s far-right government and attacked the Dyke March for speaking out against genocide. Wegner is just another example of antisemites who love Israel.

For decades now, CSD has been a space for reactionary and queerphobic institutions to drape themselves in rainbow flags, yet only if it helps the bottom line. This year, some corporations pulled back in the face of Trump’s anti-woke offensive.

In 2016, CSD gave a stage to the Israeli ambassador, while Palestinian and Israeli queer who protested against him were beaten. Far from being a safe haven for queers, Israel carried out the deadliest attack on queer people in history when it bombed Evin prison in Teheran, murdering 100 trans people.

IQP

A couple of hours later, well over ten thousand people gathered for anticapitalist pride demonstration and chanted “Fuck pinkwashing!” Internationalist Queer Pride, organized by immigrants from all over the world, was taking place for the fifth time. Anticapitalist alternatives to Berlin’s CSD date all the way back to 1998, but certain German leftists always had a problem with Palestine solidarity. IQP was born when the organizers of a “radical” German pride demonstration called the cops to kick out Queers for Palestine—as a result it has always been primarily in English.

This year, IQP’s floats, organized by Black, Asian, and Latino immigrants, moved slowly from Südstern via Hermannplatz toward Kottbusser Tor, through the immigrant neighborhoods where Berlin’s Palestinian diaspora is concentrated. German media would have us believe these communities were particularly homophobic—but older Palestinians showed full solidarity for younger queers. Heavily armed police attacked demonstrators again and again, dissolving the demonstration at 8pm just before it reached Kotti, nowhere near its destination at Oranienplatz.

Tagesspiegel published a headline about right-wing extremists threatening CSD, in reference to a counter-demonstration of 30-50 Nazis. Ironically, the image chosen for the article shows a black-uniformed cop in front of a rainbow flag. Thus, this fervently pro-government newspaper unintentionally revealed the truth: Berlin cops, well known for their right-wing views, committed more queerphobic violence on Sunday than everyone else in the city in an entire year.

Red-Pink

While CSD was a celebration of the privileges that have been granted to wealthy white gay cis-men, IQP was a powerful display of solidarity among oppressed people. Sex workers, disabled activists, and Jewish Queers for Palestine chanted together, “None of us are free until all of us are free.”

A Red-Pink Bloc at the front, organized by revolutionary socialist groups including Klasse Gegen Klasse, drew the connection between class struggle and queer liberation. Anika, a trans electrician at a public hospital, recalled the example of Madygraf, a printshop where workers went on strike to defend a trans colleague—and ended up occupying their workplace. As Anika put it, it’s not advocacy for queer rights that divides the working class. “Queerphobia divides us,” she called out, “and strikes unite us!”

Nathaniel Flakin’s anticapitalist guide book Revolutionary Berlin is the first book to include Internationalist Queer Pride.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.