Daily Scroll
Your Timeline digest, updated throughout the day
Berlin’s BMW-burnin’ mob is here to stay
“We’re not going to let this left-wing mob take over our streets,” said Berlin’s interior minister the day after a left-wing mob took over Berlin’s streets. A reported 50 bicyclists belonging to the Social Democratic People’s Bicycle Commando Germany took to Berlin’s streets and burned 48 luxury cars. The aforementioned interior minister said that “these left-wing anarchists are bent on destruction and have no respect for private property,” which, yeah.
This isn’t even the worst spate of man-on-car violence. Over 400 vehicles were burned in 2011. The luxury automobiles are a symbol of a German economy that leaves many in the dust — not just in Greece, but in the homeland as well.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the far left found a home in Berlin. This was because the West-East German merger devastated the city: West German corporations seized the most profitable assets in East Germany, especially those in Berlin.
“With unification, East Germany converted almost overnight from one of the most to one of the least industrialized regions in Europe.”
Gareth Dale, “What Reunification Wrought”
This left the East in a pit. Unemployment was at 19% in 2005, and the city’s debt was spiraling out of control. As historian Quinn Slobodian put it in The Baffler, “Berlin was not bailing out Athens. Berlin was Athens.”
Berlin’s mayor had a plan — he rebranded Germany’s capital as “poor, but sexy.” For a city that was already plenty of the former, all this meant was ramping up the latter: more bespectacled creative types, more art galleries, and most importantly more investment. This wasn’t necessarily bad, but it was expensive.
“By 2010, Californians were serving eight-euro huevos rancheros to Parisians wearing Aztec-printed pants, while Danes dressed in shapeless black sacks sipped lychee Bionade”
— Quinn Slobodian, “The Sacking of Berlin”
You probably know how this goes. In 2011, two entrepreneurs (one named Schuyler) founded “Silicon Allee.” They proudly claim that it has become “synonymous with Berlin’s tech ecosystem.” Unfortunately for them and their ilk, Berlin’s tech ecosystem is still housed within Berlin’s political ecosystem. And plenty of the working-class reds who resisted the Stasi and a nuclear war — and taught their children how to do the same — are still around and still pissed off. The question isn’t why BMWs were burned on Berlin streets, but what they were doing there in the first place.
But I made the revolution. So I have to pay for this now. Not only me but also my son, because we cannot have nice holidays. … There’s not enough money at home. So my son pays for the revolution too.
— Dirck Moldt, East German activist in the 1980s-’90s
Who needs nukes with pythons like these?
Qassem Soleimani is an Iranian general, the commander of the elite Quds Force, and one of the most dangerous men in the Syrian conflict. As it so happens, he’s also a tremendous fan of the weightlifting arts. The most recent bodybuilding championship in Iran featured “The Shadow Commander,” as the American press calls Soleimani, overlooking the competitors.
It’s not just the 58-year-old soldier; Iran takes getting yoked seriously. At the 2012 Olympics, Iran won four gold medals. Three were in Greco-Roman wrestling and the fourth was in weightlifting. Iran’s eight other medals? Three weightlifting, three wrestling, a discus thrower…and one lonely, skinny, taekwondo silver medalist.
India has yoga, England has soccer, and Iran has varzesh-e bastani, “the ancient sport.” It’s basically a communal exercise involving heavy weights, periodic chanting, and delicate balance. The sport demonstrates the tenets Iranian masculinity: remain calm, stay centered, and look damn good doing it.
The hirsute man’s crossfit hasn’t quite taken off in America. It can’t even be found in Los Angeles, the home of a huge Iranian population. But it has followed millennia-old Persian empires into the Caucasus, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Much of the legendary skill of Caucasus fighters (Ronda Rousey, for example, trained in an Armenian gym in California) dates back to their encounters with this Iranian sport. An older crowd may remember Hossein Khosrow Ali Vaziri — the 1980s’ Iron Sheik.
Who cares about the 300 workout? They lost, after all. The greatest beneficiary of warming Iran-US relations may be abs, pecs and the people who love them: Eventually a zurkhaneh (literally “house of strength”) or two will make its way to American shores and we’ll all get ripped like Qassem.
Civil wars like Syria’s don’t stop, they just change names
The Syrian government has all-but reclaimed Aleppo from rebel forces. It’s a stunning turn-around in the civil war: back in 2012, it was the largest city in Syria and its fall to the Free Syrian Army seemed to demonstrate that the country would shake off the Assad regime. Things were looking up! And then ISIS happened.
Four years later, the somewhat-less-free Syrian Army has encircled the city. Millions have fled, the country is in tatters, and even if this offensive means checkmate on “the Syrian chessboard” as the more sociopathic members of the Washington analyst crew call the conflict that has killed over 200,000 … it hardly means that peace is on the way.
For example, the Lebanese civil war nominally ended with the Taif Agreement in 1989. But both Israel and Syria occupied parts of the country for years afterwards, and Lebanon has not returned to its pre-1975 glory. The Greek civil war began right after World War II and though it “only” lasted four years, the violence set the country on the path to political infighting and eventual economic collapse.
In the United States, the 150th anniversary of the surrender at Appomattox was was celebrated just last spring. But the South’s unconditional surrender was followed by 14 years of Reconstruction. And the whole equality between blacks and whites in the US? Yeah, still working on that.
Even if a conflict ends, the root causes of it often remain in the ground. This probably sounds bleak, but, well, history can be pretty awful. Wanton violence can leave scars, and Aleppo has a few. Can Bashar Assad’s army reclaim Aleppo and with it, Syria? It’s possible, but that doesn’t mean Syria will look anything like he left it.
Vapers might augur the next American election
There are approximately 10 million Americans who smoke e-cigarettes. At least one politician thinks that they are the country’s rebels, patriots or even new Tea Partiers (either 19th- or 21st-century versions). Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, has spoken:
“The next election, at the presidential level, and a lot of other levels, is going to be determined by the vaping community.”
How you feel about this probably hinges on how you feel about vaping. A lot of folks have strong feelings about what they put into their bodies and why! Norquist believes that vapers will unite against government regulation of their tobacco products and vote for the most tax-phobic politicians out there. Others disagree and say that e-cigarette smokers may care about foreign policy, or maybe even health care.
But Norquist may have a point about tobacco use and societal trends. By 1901, there were 3.5 billion cigarettes sold. Cigarettes became even more popular during World War I; their paper covering made them more rugged than cigars, which fell apart in the muddy trenches. Cigarettes even became a form of currency throughout the British, French and American forces.
Paper-wrapped tobacco became the first cheap mass-produced consumer good. All along the Ford’s Model T assembly line, stencils admonished workers by ensuring there was “POSITIVELY NO SMOKING” on the premises. The first working shift was followed quickly by the first cigarette break.
Recalling the times of Sikh-Mexican love stories
It is deeply weird and bad that Waris Ahluwalia was asked to remove his turban before an Aeromexico flight. No airline should force someone to compromise religious obligations to get on a flight. That much is simple.
Ahluwalia was born in Punjab and moved to New York as a boy. His story echoes that of many generations of Sikh travelers, but there’s one community in particular that may empathize with his pain: Punjabi Sikh-Mexican Americans.
In the early 1900s, California was a land of opportunity not just for Americans coming west but Indians coming east. A PBS documentary places 5,000 Punjabis in the West by 1910 — mostly in California. Many of these migrants went into farming in California’s Central Valley. The oldest Sikh religious building, the Stockton Gurdwara, opened in 1912.
America’s immigration laws were obscene by today’s standards and didn’t allow female South Asians into the country, so the vast majority of these Punjabi pioneers were male (a few females were able to sneak through). The idea was that the farmers would leave after tilling the soil for a decade or two. Many did just that, but many more wanted to put down roots.
Anti-miscegenation laws forbade the marriage of a European American and a Sikh, but things were a bit fuzzier where Mexican Americans were involved. Under the United States’ Crayola race system, both South Asians and Mexicans were “brown.” The government said they could marry, have children, and cook them foods like chicken karahi enchiladas.
That doesn’t mean life was a walk in the park. Many of these Mexican women were widowed by Mexico’s revolutionary violence, and marrying a non-Mexican put them at risk of being disowned by their families. For Sikhs, it meant having children who were twice a foreigner — both South Asian and Mexican — in the only country they would ever know.
But it’s a lovely reminder that not every migrant story ends in tragedy, and that being seen as “brown” could mean meeting the love of your life and not just being hassled by one border guard or another. If Ahluwalia was in Mexico City 100 years ago, he may have been treated much differently than he was treated this week.
