<nettime> PS on my Re: the silence on the rising fascism

[Andreas Broeckmann via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

PS: I wrote this before seeing Siraj's message of 10:38 this morning...

Am 21.12.23 um 15:13 schrieb Andreas Broeckmann via nettime-l:
> Folks,
>
> please, can somebody here enlighten us on the case of the Berlin 
> cultural centre Oyoun, and how the discontinuation of its funding by the 
> new christian democrat (CDU)-led Berlin culture administration is part 
> of the "right-wing attack ... enthusiastically carried out by the left 
> in Germany"; it would be interesting to learn how this case is not 
> mainly a conservative attack on a pet-project of the local Greens in 
> Kreuzberg and Neukölln, at a site (formerly Werkstatt der Kulturen) 
> which has been the target of conservative anti-wokeism sentiments for 
> over a decade; in passing, the people who are in the know about how this 
> case relates to the IDF campaign in Gaza and the global "rise in 
> fascism", can perhaps also explain how it is not also an application of 
> the anti-BDS resolution of the German federal parliament in 2019 
> (pre-documenta 15, then supported both by the CDU-led Merkel government 
> and the Green Party) which is legally binding for public administrations 
> and for institutions receiving public funding, for better or worse; and 
> maybe somebody can also share insider-knowledge on how the socialist 
> Linke and the Green parties are masterminding this "attack" by cunningly 
> _not_ being in the city government any more since they lost the 
> elections in February.
>
> Excuse the pettiness of this argument. The more relevant point is that I 
> have doubts about how people in their statements here on the list 
> extrapolate from local cases which in fact often have less grandiose, 
> local reasons. No less problematic perhaps on the local level. But to 
> casually read them as symptoms of global trends is like interpreting 
> statistics without knowing how these were put together... Many of us 
> know stuff about the twisted reasons for local political events in 
> Vienna, Chicago or Rotterdam, and how they are complicated in a local 
> kind of way, and not easily relatable to a global picture without 
> distortion. (What do we know about the personal relations between the 
> doctors in Gaza hospitals and the tunnel-digging Hamas engineers?)
>
> The street where Oyoun is located was formerly called Wissmannstraße, 
> named after an awful German colonial officer; in 2020/2021 it was 
> renamed Lucy-Lameck-Straße, after a Tansanian feminist politician. This 
> name change was decided by the votes of the SPD, Linke and Greens in the 
> local parliament in Neukölln. The representatives of the local 
> conservative CDU, liberal FDP and far-right AfD voted against.*
> Maybe what we are seeing is part of a local tit-for-tat (a 
> 'Retourkutsche'), and Oyoun would be better served by reading their 
> current situation in the local rather than in the global political 
> context. (For the locals: talk to their critics in Rathaus Neukölln and 
> Rotes Rathaus, in Niederkirchnerstraße and Brunnenstraße, because that's 
> where the money-flow has to be reactivated.)
>
> What I'm questioning is whether the sweeping statements we are served 
> here are grounded in knowledge about the specific cases they draw on, 
> and whether what we get to read aren't reflections of the respective 
> author's personal preoccupations, rather than the "analysis" they claim 
> to offer.
>
> Best regards,
>
> -a
>
>
> * 
> https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/aus-der-wissmann-wird-die-lucy-lameck-strasse-3299224.html
>
>
> Am 21.12.23 um 00:25 schrieb Felix Stalder via nettime-l:
> > The attack on art institutions is part of a larger right-wing attack 
> > (enthusiastically carried out by the left in Germany, an issue in and 
> > of itself that requires as much psycho-analysis and political 
> > analysis) on critical discourse itself, well any kind of what used to 
> > be called “public discourse”.
> > On 12/19/23 21:19, Brian Holmes via nettime-l wrote:
> > > Seriously, how to live in this time? And how to talk about it? What's
> > > happening to the Oyoun space in Berlin is one of the many closures that
> > > public silence permits. 
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