i am a terrorist

the last couple of days have been quiet after all of Wednesday's excitement. The main final demonstration towards heiligendam at the end of the g8 summit has apparently been cancelled by the police. The state's nervosity is becoming increasingly visible. I've had enough of seeing policemen and women - it's the first time that I'm so closely confronted with state repression and that the physical involvement of resistance appear so visibly to me. How so state repression? It started with the police suddenly appearing everywhere on the streets. I was walking with C the asylum seeker and could feel the tension in him as everywhere we headed police groups stood around. As an asylum-seeker in Germany, he has no freedom of movement and is supposed to stay within a ridiculously small perimeter. If he's found walking beyond the perimeter, he has to pay a fine. Out of the 40 euros a month he gets from the state - oh, I forgot, asylum seekers are not allowed to work. In any case, he's black and that's an easy pray for bored police who are told to be on the streets and make the state's muscles visible to scare those lefty. C and i turned round and stepped into a small restaurant. Freedom reduction #1.

Wednesday was a moment of random state intervention - hundreds of police were sent to search through left cultural centres and meeting points throughout Germany - Berlin, Hamburg and Bremen in first place. They know there's been a lot of activities around the g8 and networks are so loose and difficult to see through, they just decided to come in and take what they needed - computers, emails, servers. It scares people in the region where the g8 summit will take place, who think that hordes of terrorists will come and destroy their region. Well, we will be hordes, and we will create chaos and confusion, but I refuse that the state uses the blanket scary word "terrorist" to describe actions that are visibly critical of official policies. Where's the killing? Where's the attempt to violently blackmail large portions of the population? The police will have the right to preventatively lock up people they think might be willing to use violence (whatever the definition of violence may be in this case). Preventatively!

Nonviolent resistance isn't free of violence. As this video of parents in Belleville (paris) trying to stop the police from taking away an undocumented grandfather away who was coming to pick up his grandchild from school also shows. I should probably read some gandhi before i travel off to northern germany.