linksunten Archiv

During the party convention of the AfD (radical rightwing “Alternative for Germany” party) on the weekend of May 1 two articles with personal data of AfD members were published. In these articles, more than 2.000 names and address information of AfD party members taking part in their party convention in Stuttgart 2016 and almost 3.000 names and address information of AfD party members taking part in their party convention in Bremen 2015 got leaked.

Of course, the fascists were upset. They threatened to file loads of lawsuits and wrote thousands of hateful comments below the leak articles. The comments fell victim to the “filthy leftist opinion dictatorship”. The AfD party functionaries suspected an insider but until now were unable to uncover the leaker.

But Indymedia linksunten is part of a global network and leftist collectives from outside of Germany criticised us for tolerating the publication of personal data. In our last communiqué we have already mentioned this discussion: “The leaks regarding the AfD party convention in Stuttgart and the responsibility claims about the attacks on party officials were certainly not an undisputed issue within the Indymedia network – and we are still discussing our position towards this – the actions no matter made the right-wingers hate Indymedia linksunten even more.”

In our opinion, the criticism raised has it's roots in differing political cultures and practices in different parts of the world. For reasons of the Nazi past and the current rise of the rightwing movement the radical left in Germany is focused very much on antifascism which also shows on linksunten: more than 50 percent of the content is tagged with “antifascism”.

Antifascist action in Germany focuses more than elsewhere on individual Nazis. This concept of direct action is obviously in a tense relationship with the concept of privacy protection and informational self-determination. Indymedia linksunten sees itself as part of the radical left in Germany and thus supports these antifascist struggles. Apart from that, uncensored open posting is a basic principle of the Indymedia network und so we accepted the leak articles as a matter of course.

But we cannot and do not want to raise our political practice above the fundamental concerns of leftist tech collectives and the global Indymedia network. Thus, after long internal discussions, we have decided to take the leaks offline half a year after their publication. We'll remove both articles from linksunten.indymedia.org in the coming days.

We are aware that our antifascist practice is in conflict with the principles of many leftists outside of Germany. But with our historical responsibility in mind we don't want to put our point of view above the concerns raised in other parts of the world.

Stay antifascist! In solidarity,

Indymedia linksunten

Communiqué from 15.10.2016