Eight days ago on Saturday, hundreds of people participated in a large anti-fascist demonstration in Freiburg. After the police attacked the demonstration, it fought back decisively, injuring some police officers. An editor of the bourgeois local press therefore wrote a commentary condemning the justified fight of the antifascists.

Just one day later, Peter Disch published his commentary in the Badische Zeitung under the title "It's fatal that Freiburg's Antifa won't let go of violence."

As a good apologist of the bourgeois order, he first expresses a bit of sympathy for those affected and acts angry about the two attacks and the role that the police have to play there:
"They [Antifa] had good reasons to take to the streets on Saturday. If an AfD representative injures a man with a knife, if a foreigner is massively threatened, both on June 12, this must not remain without consequences. [...]The fact that two police officers were involved in the aforementioned, allegedly racist incident, provided additional explosiveness."
So far, so good. Why an assault that began with shouts of "Foreigners out!" is merely "allegedly racist" is probably beyond most people. However, he says that these attacks must not remain without consequences. What Mr. Disch does not talk about, however, is the fact that such attacks generally have no consequences, especially when police officers are involved. This is also evident from the strategy of secrecy that the Freiburg police applied to the second incident mentioned.
Similar attacks happen every day in German working-class neighborhoods and are perpetrated by police officers not only outside but also and especially on duty. They harass the masses, control people indiscriminately because they have the "wrong" skin color and if someone talks back, they simply beat them up. If someone then gets the idea to press charges against the officers involved, it is not the ofiicers who are condemned but the accuser.
Of course, we can also give Mr. Disch some more drastic examples of the fools' freedomof the cops. For the murder of Oury Jalloh in 2005, no one has been held accountable to this day. The pigs who shot Adel B. are still at large today. And let's not fool ourselves: The police chiefs who took part in a racist hunt on June 12 will not face any serious consequences.
So, after expressing his sympathy for the cause of the demonstration, Mr. Disch goes on to deny the demonstration its legitimacy because by insisting on the route planned by the participants, the demonstration had allegedly accepted violence and injuries. He speaks of an attack on the police officers, ignoring the fact that they harassed the demonstration from the beginning and wanted to bring it to a halt by using force.
His comment then ends with the following moral:
"The state made free expression possible anyway. This proves what Antifa and Autonomy negate: Our democracy is intact."
First of all, Mr. Disch would have to specify what he means by "our democracy". For no one negates the functionality of the bourgeois parliamentary system. On the contrary, as Marxists we know that the democratic republic is the "best conceivable shell" of capitalism.
We do not negate that bourgeois democracy is intact. Mr. Disch negates the class character of the state.
It is exactly as he says. His democracy, that is, the democracy of the exploiters works quite excellently. But it is only a democracy only for the bourgeoisie. This state does not serve our interests and it never will. As long as there is democracy for the bourgeoisie, there is none for the proletariat.
The pacifism that the BZ editor propagates here is therefore also correspondingly mendacious. In accordance with his class position, he speaks only of the "left" violence, but not of the violence that the bourgeois state uses every day against the masses, not of the violence that German imperialism unleashes in the oppressed nations.
His problem is not violence, but against whom it is directed. If the violence is directed against the workers and against the oppressed peoples, then Mr. Disch does not write articles. If the Freiburg cops once again beat up a foreigner, he probably doesn't even notice.
But if some anti-fascists fight back and defend themselves against police harassment, then that is a big scandal and someone urgently has to say again that violence is not a means of political dispute.
But violence is a means that the rulers use every day. Their whole exploitative order is only kept upright by violence and it will not fall without violence. The struggle that Mr. Disch denigrates here has not been directed against innocent people, but against the lackeys of the bourgeois state. Against uniformed thugs who protect their racist colleagues and have proven often enough that they are bitter enemies of every progressive movement. That Freiburg antifascists do not want to let go of violence is therefore not "fatal" but the only correct conclusion.