Introduction & Speech by Ann Wertheimer
My name is Ann Wertheimer and I am chair of American Voices Abroad Berlin, AVA for short. We have been together since 2003 when we organized against the Iraq War. Like many of you here, I grew up in the United States. In school we learned about the founding documents of our country: first of all, about the Declaration of Independence of 1776, the document which states the principles on which our government — and our identity as Americans — is based…. Some of us learned these words by heart:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness….
Listen to how the Declaration indicted King George III almost 250 years ago. Some of it sounds like it was written yesterday.
The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny…. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
(The document continues.) Facts:
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most … necessary for the public good….
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone.…
He has … sent … swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance….
He has … (given) his Assent to … Acts of pretended Legislation:
(And here are the very words used to describe these acts.) Pretended legislation:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For depriving us in many cases of the benefit of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us….
Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A…character … thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
We rejected tyranny then, and we reject tyranny now.
So today — at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin — we indict Donald Trump and his administration. We reject racism and bigotry of every kind. We reject corruption and strongman politics, the attacks on our culture, our history, and our science; the attacks on our universities on the pretext of fighting anti-semitism; the attacks on our news organizations. We reject the subversion of our judiciary, our laws, our constitution. And we say no to the destruction of our environment.
NO KINGS is a day of action and mass mobilization — of defiance and resistance in response to the authoritarian excesses, crimes, and corruption of the Trump administration.
As we stand here today, on June 14th, his birthday, Donald Trump is holding a military parade in Washington, D.C. “He wants tanks in the streets and a made-for-TV display of dominance: a spectacle meant to look like strength. But from city blocks to small towns, from courthouse steps to community parks, Americans at home are showing the world what democracy really looks like.” (NoKings)
Instead of allowing this military parade to be the center of gravity, we will make our action today the American story everywhere else. In 2000 communities across the country — and all over the world in front of our respective embassies and consulates — we say no to the entire Trump administration. (NoKings)
American Voices Abroad Berlin is pleased to partner with the pro-democracy, pro-worker, and justice movements in the United States: with groups like Indivisible, the ACLU, Move On, Common Cause, Bend the Arc, Peace Action, Our Revolution, the National Women’s Law Center, the Progressive Democrats of America, the Democratic Socialists of America, and many, many more.
To quote Timothy Snyder: “The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew…. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism…. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.”
To help us learn more about the nature of these new threats, we have asked three Americans who know what they’re talking about. First, Susan Neiman, author and director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam. Then Isabel Fargo Cole, author and translator. And finally, Richard Peterson, emeritus professor of philosophy at Michigan State University. Then we’ll hear again from Eva Adams, who sang for us a few minutes ago. We have an info table over there with a sign-up sheet if you want to be on the AVA mailing list. When our program is over, join us at the table and we’ll talk.
Speech by Isabel Fargo Cole
I want to say a few words about one of the underlying factors in our current catastrophe: the political repercussions of tech monopolies.
Amid ever-new and escalating crises – LA, Iran – it is easy to lose sight of underlying problems that have become normalized. As the need to mobilize becomes more and more urgent, it is – understandably – tempting to postpone a reckoning with the technical tools we use to communicate and organize, or simply to cope with our everyday life.
And with Elon Musk’s political influence (ostensibly) on the wane, and Trump’s trade wars actually harming some of the interests of the tech oligarchy, it is understandably tempting to hope that Trump’s Big Tech honeymoon is over and we can turn our attention to other matters. But whether or not Musk and Trump “get divorced”, “the whole government has become DOGE now”, as the tech magazine Wired writes. It is still mining our data for unknown purposes and fantasizing about replacing civil servants with AI.
The bad news is that we still cannot afford to be complacent or defeatist about the political effects of the Big Tech products that infiltrate our lives. We can no longer ignore the fact that for-profit social media polarizes our political discourse and poisons it with misinformation and AI slop. That the political opposition has made itself vulnerable by its dependency on platforms like X, Facebook or TikTok with their toxic algorithms. We know that Big Tech has no qualms about selling our data to the highest bidder, and that our government has had no qualms about giving people like Elon Musk free access to highly sensitive information on its own citizens – and others: Even before Trump, Silicon Valley was eager to provide the tech support for ICE’s activities.
The good news is that we don’t need to be defeatist about these things. Every one of us has the means, literally in our pocket, to push back against government and corporate overreach, to refuse to play into the hands of those who are trying to destroy our democracy and set us against each other. We can invest the effort into switching away from Big Tech products to more ethical alternatives. It might actually be one of the most productive ways that we have to push back. Of course it can feel difficult to raise the subject in your social networks and encourage your friends and colleagues to migrate from WhatsApp to Signal, or from X, Facebook and Insta to Bluesky or Mastodon. Or – perhaps an even more sustainable approach – to IRL networks. Especially for political activists, it can feel tough to invest the effort in regrouping and rebuilding networks. But it is effort well-spent. It can be a way to start conversations about crucial issues. And everyone who makes the switch helps makes better alternatives more viable, and makes it easier for others to switch as well, creating positive feedback loops.
In Europe, we are especially well-placed to do this – the EU has a strong tradition of fostering ethical, non-commercial, privacy-friendly digital alternatives. With the “transatlantic relationship” in shambles, the EU has finally realized that this needs to be top priority – the catchphrase “European digital sovereignty” is everywhere these days. Of course, digital sovereignty must also mean sovereignty for the users, not for the corporations. We can let our European friends know that their digital sovereignty, done right, can actually help us Americans push back against undemocratic forces. If Europe can develop ethical digital alternatives and infrastructures that weaken the power of Big Tech, we all stand to gain. For now, we can do our part by using the alternatives that already exist and spreading the word about them. We have some information at our information stand to get you started.
Some Alternatives to Big Tech Tools
General resources/more tips
https://adminforge.de/ (in German)
https://www.topio.info/ (workshops, tech support in the Markthalle Moabit)
Search Engines
Duckduckgo.com, Startpage.com, gruble.de, Kagi.com, Ecosia.org, Mojeek
Email Providers
Mailbox.org, Posteo.de, Proton Mail, Tuta
Internet Browsers
Vivaldi, Firefox, Mullvad
Social Networks
Bluesky, Mastodon
Photosharing (Instagram alternatives)
Pixelfed
Messengers
Signal
Maps
OpenStreetMaps
MS Office Alternatives
LibreOffice, Softmaker Office
Video Conferencing
Jit.si, Open Talk, BigBlueButton
File Sharing (Dropbox Alternatives)
Nextcloud
Speech by Richard Peterson
“No Kings!” One could also say: “no dictators, no oligarchs!”
This is a call to save democracy, both the democracy we’ve inherited in liberal constitutionalism, and the democratic principle itself: the idea of shared governance by the mutually respectful members of a complex society.
Our demonstration today coincides with hundreds of actions in the US. Is this a sign of democracy?
Certainly it is an affirmation of resistance. It reminds us that Trump’s policies are appalling, but they were not inevitable. Alternatives are possible. Demonstrations are a call for political imagination.
They belong to a tradition of actions by movements that have challenged undemocratic practices and policies, including poverty, racism, patriarchy, police violence, and environmental destruction. The heritage of social movements is at stake today.
But we face a problem: though the administration is attacking democracy, Trump did win the election – even after a first term in which he was impeached two times; even after the January 6 attacks on Congress and Trump’s denial of the legitimacy of the 2020 election.
Was the vote for Trump a vote against democracy? Are his supporters like those Germans at the end of the 1920’s who thought the end of parliamentary democracy would lead to a new freedom?
The current unpopularity of the Democratic Party itself seems to reflect popular dissatisfaction with existing liberal democracy. And party leaders have mostly failed to rise to the occasion, to lead the needed resistance. Returning to the politics of the past may not be enough to reaffirm democracy now. We need a democratic renewal that speaks to the kind of world we face today.
The need for a renewal is affirmed by those who talk about the rise of fascism.
Often they talk not so much about a specific political system as about the extreme opposite of democracy – including the banning of demonstrations. And with military forces now on the streets in California and Texas, there is reasonable fear that repressive measures will be taken against today’s No Kings demonstrations.
But, so far, public protests are possible. And so many people don’t think we are facing fascism, at least not yet.
We do still have a judicial system that sometimes blocks Trump policies. We can still plan on elections – as the Democrats are doing in hopes of regaining their influence. And, although the legislative branch has effectively collapsed on the federal level, there are still legislative challenges coming from states and local governments.
But in fact the judicial restraints on Trump are limited. And we can’t rule out the possibility the coming elections may be sabotaged in some way.
Whether or not it is too soon to talk of fascism, there are striking parallels between historical fascism and today’s regime. If we identify these parallels it may help us imagine the democratic renewal and work toward it.
Historians point to fascism’s repression of progressive movements and the reversal of their gains. Under fascism there is no room for independent political voices or directions. We see this today, including the repudiation and reversal of environmental policies that were promoted by social movements.
Even more glaring has been the reversal of anti-racist politics, with the obscene claim that white people (especially men of course) have been the victims of racism.
And this ties in with another feature of fascism – its own racialized nationalism, which today includes the ugly (but popular) attack on immigrants.
This is a nationalism that identifies with an authoritarian leader – a would be king who doesn’t play by the rules. This is a nationalism affirmed by threats, military bluster and a massive military parade on the leader’s birthday.
Then there is the step by step break with the constitutional legal system. As if declaring a permanent “state of exception,” the administration invokes imaginary emergencies as it suspends the legal process, including protections for those accused of breaking the law. Emergencies become the rule, not the exception. So ends the rule of law.
Perhaps the most telling parallel with classical fascism is the how these acts illustrate the regime’s strategy to pit one part of the people against the rest — what the Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt called the politics of “friend vs. enemy.” Here it makes sense to fire all officials who didn’t vote for the leader.
Despite all his hot air about reviving national greatness, Trump rejects a fundamental ethical commitment of liberal democracy (and of socialism too, for that matter). This is the promise that everyone will be respected, that all have basic rights, that all citizens can share in exercising political power. Democracy accepts conflict and fosters debate about ends as well as means. But politics is not warfare, it is not a fight to the death.
Maybe liberal constitutionalism has never fully realized this ethical ideal, but it has preserved it as a critical standard that social movements have cited in seeking and sometimes achieving democratic change.
There is a kind of universalism in our political heritage that is now being undermined. Even if the aim of the administration is to make the rich even richer, the process it follows is that of a nihilistic politics of violence.
Where does that leave us?
The point of these demonstrations today can’t be reduced to a single theme or policy, or to a specific demand. The negative character of the slogan – No Kings! – reflects that fact.
Today the institutions we inherited are deeply compromised. Their effective relevance has been put in question. We must decide: do we think it’s possible and desirable to return to the framework the Trump is destroying? Or should we promote new approaches that would give old procedures new life?
When 20th century fascism was defeated, democratic reconstruction had to be imposed from the outside – and that came only after a world war.
The task of democratic resistance today is to see that this does not happen again. Thus our negative slogans must take on a positive, constructive content.
Is this possible? The legacy of many demonstrations promoted by past social movements gives hope that it is.
We must cultivate our political imaginations if we are to effectively resist the destruction of democracy and return to its founding ideals of a public power that is of, by, and for the people.
No kings!
