Michael Levitin is a freelance journalist living in Berlin. He has written for Newsweek, Slate, and the Los Angeles Times, among others.
Tuesday, 5 Jun 2007
ROSTOCK, Germany
If you dress head to foot in black, set cars on fire, launch stones and beer bottles at police, and brave hand-to-hand scuffles amid clouds of tear gas with choppers thundering overhead, best bet is you’ll make the evening news. Which is too bad, because in the case of Saturday’s late-afternoon riots in Rostock, the images of unrest have obscured and altered what most of us adults would have called the real story.
Menace or blessing?
Photo: Irene Pascual
I say adults because the couple of thousand sullen-eyed, peach-fuzz-faced rabble-rousers who formed the Black Bloc averaged, say, 20 years old. Middle-class adolescents still living at home with mom and dad, the young anarchists weren’t the ones who’d spent thousands of hours organizing the Alternative Summit that’s running counter to the official G8 meeting, which starts Wednesday in nearby Heiligendamm. They di... Read more
