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Thursday, May 18, 2006 "Small and Mid-Sized Towns"No one seems to know if it'll be a violent World Cup or not. English soccer fans are under strict orders not to provoke German fans with a Nazi salute; the neo-Nazi NPD has promised to march in crucial tournament cities to raise their profile; an Ethiopian-born German citizen was thrashed to an inch of his life on the night before Easter just for being black, drunk, and alone in Brandenburg. Now an ex-government spokesman under Gerhard Schröder named Uwe-Karsten Heye has outraged people in the (fairly huge) state of Brandenburg, which surrounds Berlin, by saying dark-skinned World Cup tourists shouldn't venture too far outside the city. "There are small and mid-sized towns in Brandenburg and elsewhere where I would advise anyone with a different skin color not to go. They might not make it out alive," he said yesterday.It is possible to write commentary that's so full of snark about Heye and Germany in general that a firm, substantiated opinion is hard to discover. It's also possible that the threat of violence is real. And not just in the provincial towns: The tolerant baby-friendly Bezirk of Prenzlauer Berg is being slowly invaded by Nazis who don't shave their heads but still beat you up if you look too "left." That explains a recent anti-fascist march through the neighborhood. Heye, I'm afraid, just said out loud what most people already know. It's always hard to gauge the fearsomeness of the German far right -- it swells and recedes like a tide, partly because so many Nazis are cowards. But one thing that's always true in Germany is that drunken white shits pose more of a threat to foreigners than foreigners ever do to drunken white shits. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 11:22 PM
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