Ok, mad props to the guy for doing this, but I don’t think there’s any country in the world, including the US, where you can set up a PA in front of some other country’s embassy to amplify you insulting their leader.
That is to say, I think everyone should take every opportunity to insult that goat-fucker, anywhere and everywhere, including in front of the turkish embassy, but I don’t see what the cops did here as being incredibly out of line. The right answer is to have another crowd there insulting Erdogan tomorrow, and they can do it for a while until the cops detain them, and then come back the next day…
The things he loves the most/ are shagging goats/ and oppressing minorities…
Is there ever…
Some of the German near-equivalents are: hinterlistig, verschlagen, unredlich, unehrlich, unaufrichtiig and arglistig.
You know, like the cops pretending to have come for the issue with the loudspeakers and microphone.
Jan Böhmermann did knowingly, flagrantly break the law to make a political point.
And the lèse-majesté-paragraph 103 StGB, while still applicable, will be struck because of him. Gutsy.
Are you suggesting that everybody supporting Böhmermann, free speech, freedom of the press and Kunstfreiheit should enjoy prison-time, lest their support be meaningless? Should I break the law, stating Erdowahn was a pedophile goatfucker? I think not.
Not even the US has enough facilities to lock away that high a percentage of population.
I think it’s a lot more complicated than that. I agree that RT is slavishly uncritical of Putin, but it has surprised me on occasions by reporting things that the mainstream have downplayed, only for them to be more widely published later.
Substitute “Putin” for “Wall Street” and “RT” for “WSJ” and I could make exactly the same remark, until Murdoch took over the WSJ and my principles stopped me from reading it.
Of course not. Not all of us have what it takes to be Gandhi. I don’t. And for that reason, I don’t expect the jails to fill up any time soon - at least in the US. Maybe if Trump beats Clinton, who knows?
Knowing the local language, listening to the video and consulting other (German-language) sources reveal a little more:
A court hat ruled before that the protest in front of the embassy would be allowed to take place, but explicitly prohibited any recitation of or quotation from Böhmermann’s poem.
At the very point when Kramm violated that condition by going from pure literary analysis (which he seems to have a hard time reading because it contains so many big words) to explicitly quoting the poem, police step in.
They do so quite politely (“I’m sorry but…”) and Kramm of course plays it for effect. I couldn’t understand everything that was said in the video, but Kramm then continues in a load voice:
Kramm: “How about I continue to talk about this without my microphone?” (readying his notes).
Policeman: “Then I would have to take steps to prevent [that]”.
Kramm: "So if I now say that… " (at this point he reads from his notes again, apparently from the paragraph just before the direct quote).
This is the point when police take him away.
The immediate reason was to prevent the violation of the court-imposed conditions for that particular protest. They had no grounds to imprison him, I gather they just did the “usual”, which is to take him to a police station to formally take down & verify his name and address, and then let him go.
He’s being charged for violating the regulations concerning the public protest he organised (which might get him a fine), and he might theoretically be charged according to the same Lèse majesté paragraph as Böhnermann, seeing that he did essentially the same thing.
That, though, is a thing that the courts need to decide before anyone spends a single night in prison.
Ah, Bruno. I remember him from his days as a gothic techno musician in Das Ich and when he was the owner of Danse Macabre Records. A nice guy who had to wear a head scarf whenever we met due to his stage hair (head shaved and two Krampus horns made of what wasn’t shaved). I am not surprised that he did this.
RT is supportive of Putin. No surprise there.
What is the free press’s excuse then (for its bias)?
Or is it all relative (if RT does it, everyone else can too)? A race to the bottom in other words.
If so, it kind of makes a mockery of the claim to hold the moral high ground for journalism doesn’t it? And just makes them hypocrites.
Liberal democracy is falling in the west. China, Russia, Europe, America, one sweeping authoritarian state conglomerate serving a hand full of people and corporations.
