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pebbleanttoast's avatar

I live in Germany and have been tempted to demonstrate since summer 2020, but there has always been police brutality which frightened me. Plus you need official permission to demonstrate, which was denied due to the pandemic. The law courts generally also denied most appeals against banned protests. There are instances of judges who made sensible rulings and then they suddenly get their chambers searched by the police or were otherwise intimidated. Even the highest court (stacked with political appointees) just ruled that everything the government did last year was fine. People are now saying the Constitution is dead.

Doctors, lawyers, politicians, scientists, public personalities who put their head above the parapet in the last 1.5 years were very effectively targeted and intimidated. Some have left the country.

There are now significant protests in Sachsen and Thueringen (former DDR) and the numbers of people going to hundreds of smaller unauthorized marches (or walks) appear to be more than the police can squash. Austria also has large well organized protests that are not backing down. This gives me hope.

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KLG's avatar

I just watched the movie "Betrayed" about the Jews that were in Norway when the Nazis invaded. I was really struck by the parallels with today. Some people say "well, people can choose to get vaccinated." But the Jews in Norway had the chance to renounce their religion too. They had to fill out paperwork claiming their Jewish religion long before anything happened to them. Nothing stopped them from simply claiming that they weren't Jewish and abandoning their religious practices. Does that make it okay to discriminate against them? It wasn't long before nobody would hire Jews. Then their businesses were shut down. It is really frightening in light of what we see today.

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