Press Review

Anne Roth's presentation on the 24th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin, 27.12.2007.

• Part I: Download as mp3 (24mb) | Listen
• Part II: Download as mp3 (26mb) | Listen

Extreme cases of surveillance carried out against punk-bands, members of the "Eastern German magazine" 'telegraph' and other press representatives is raising the degree of uneasiness felt throughout the country. More and more details emerge in relation to the investigations into the authorities' conduct concerning the "militante gruppe" (mg) [militant group] and the suspects associated with it.

The Venezuelan opposition is once again crying about the "terrible repression" the poor rich suffer from the "Chavez regime." Strikingly, they never compare their situation to the pre-Bolivarian period, nor other Latin American countries, nor to the United States, nor to Europe. It's clear why: such a comparison would come out negatively for the opposition. The following is small example of the repression, which has occurred in Germany, a country often serving as "model" of modern bourgeois ideology.

Germany's highest court has overturned the arrest warrant of a Humboldt University academic who was detained for more than three weeks this past summer on suspicion of conspiracy with an alleged terrorist group accused of arson attacks against German military vehicles.

A German federal court has overturned an arrest warrant for a Berlin-based university professor accused of links to a left-wing terrorist group.

Neil Smith, author of the seminal book "The urban frontier" (1996) and countless articles on gentrification, spatial scales, globalization and state revanchism, came to Berlin in May and agreed to answer a few of our questions concerning gentrification in Berlin.

Over the past years, political opposition and investigative journalism have come under attack by police and secret services in Germany. In line with a general erosion of civil liberties in Europe, exacerbated by the "war on terror" and egged on by shady secret service activities, investigative journalists have been spied on (see Statewatch Bulletin vol 16 no 1), G8 protesters have been criminalised (see Statewatch Bulletin vol 17 no 2), and most recently critical social scientists have been accused of membership of a terrorist organisation for being associated with social movements and using words such as ‘gentrification', ‘precarisation' and ‘Marxist-Leninist' in their publications; words that also appeared in letters by a group claiming responsibility for arson attacks against cars and buildings in and around Berlin since 2001. Next to the social scientists, one of whom was also arrested, three activists were arrested and accused of having attempted to set fire to military vans on an industrial terrain near Berlin.