WTF is going on in Europe, generally?
We don’t hear much about it in the American news, but I check various German and Dutch news sources, both because I want to maintain my language skills, and because I have a stepdaughter in Berlin.
(On edit: My mouse went bezirk and posted this, so I will continue my OP in a reply. Please hold off on any reply until I finish)
So to continue: Yesterday, apparently, was supposed to be what they call “Queen’s Day” in The Netherlands, I imagine something like the “official Queen’s Birthday” in the UK. There was a public appearance of some sort going on in Apeldoorn, when a deranged man attempted to kill Queen Beatrix by ramming her with his car. Most of the royal Family were present, but neither they nor the Queen was hurt. However, a half-dozen or so bystanders were killed, and about twice as many gravely injured. The driver has since died of his injuries.
And now Berlin is in the throes of its annual May Day violence, the basic conflict apparently being between leftist radicals and right-wing neo-Nazis they imagine to be on the rise. It sounds like 1932 all over again. The S-Bahn (Elevated) was offline for an hour as leftists occupied a station to prevent the arrival of right wing supporters. Clearly the city was/is paralyzed, and it sounds much worse than London a few weeks ago. A radical left wing gang, the Schwarzer Blok, apparently was behind an attempted attack on a city politician a day or two ago. He was cornered in a pub by twenty or so black-clothed cadres and had to duck out through the back door to safety. As of the article’s writing, five thousand police officers were struggling to maintain some semblance of order as thousands of rioters attacked them, and each other, with rocks, bottles, and incendiary objects.
What are they all so mad about? Sure there’s the economic crisis, but by all accounts it isn’t as bad in Europe as it is in America. And there’s always been the NPD ultra right wing fringe, but does anyone really take them seriously? Are they so much of a threat as to be worth stopping a city and getting in a million people’s way? Besides the NPD and the right wingers, much of the protest is just generally against the status quo, and capitalism in particular. But you can’t say that the capitalist state, as it exists in Germany, doesn’t take much better care of its hindmost than can be said of America.
Besides all that, there have been several killing sprees or other violent attacks in France, The Netherlands, and Germany.
And why would somebody try to run his car into Queen Beatrix? Yes, the monarchy is an elitist anachronism that sucks the blood of the State. But it’s not as if the Dutch people are downtrodden wage slaves, either. And the monarch herself, though she may be rich, doesn’t do anything to the average Dutch citizen to get mad about. It’s not as if she’s a politician. What gives? Is civil order in Europe on the verge of collapse?
A small correction: the Schwarzer Blockisn’t an organized gang but a feature of German left-wing militancy since the 1980’s, i.e. that is older than most of its participants. I’d describe it more as a style and tactic than as a coherent group.
One feature of this year’s First May is that the far Right has managed to leverage its feeble strength by staging marches on 1 May, of all days, which pushes all the Left’s buttons. They want a large backlash because they wouldn’t be noticed else (for example, in June 2007 in Tübingen where I live, the lineup was: about 230 neo-Nazis doing a 15-minute rally, which mobilized ~10k counter-demonstrators (the city declared a tolerance festival; I didn’t see the Neo-Nazis at all as I had to supervise a bouncy castle two hundred meters behind the front line 
) and necessitated ~1k police officers to protect the 230 from the 10k - i.e. they mobilized almost fifty times their own number. Not bad for the purposes of looking like they’d amount to something.
It’s a mutual dependance - the far Left also needs the far Right to justify their existence. A reasonably steady state over the last few decades IMO, with tactical innovations every few years.
Apart from the change of date for the neo-Nazi marches, from news report to date it looks like the regular scheduled Autonome riots in Hamburg and Berlin - same procedure as every year (in Berlin it was much worse in some yers in the 1990s). Unless some unlucky Autonomer should happen to get himself killed it’ll be unremarkable, really.
Just out of curiosity - why do the police protect the neo-nazis, as opposed to arresting them. Not that I think these people should be arrested, loathesome as they are - I think the best cure to stupid, hateful speech is counter-speech, not criminal sanctions. But I had thought that German law banned many aspects of neo-nazi activism.
Because they walk a fine line - everyone calls them neo-Nazis and they seem to be OK to be called that by others (because that proves nothing against them, in law), but officially they call themselves nationalist. Their organizations would be banned if they could be proven to advocate Nazism so they thumb their noses at the rest of society by making clear by not-quite-identical symbolism and by allusion and code words where their sympathies lie, but as long as they keep on one side of that fine line the state is bound by the rule of law (which trumps desirable outcomes) to let them be, and to protect their right of assembly when exercised.
We have the same sort of thing here; the right to free speech doesn’t necessarily mean you have to like what someone says.
In this country, the KKK is tiny in terms of actual members, and considered repugnant by everyone else. But their notoriety is apt to think they are bigger and more powerful than they are, as indeed they once were. Could the neo-Nazi groups in Germany be regarded in much the same light?