“Gen Z regulates” | Youth forward!

A little too fluffy, a little too sweet: “Gen Z” can regulate things more radically. Photo: stocksnap/pixabay We already knew it: The fact that the young demonstrators are theoretically quite weak was already evident from the slogan they came up with. “Gen Z regulates”: A motto that the FDP youth could easily have chosen for their next economic policy get-together. “Gen Z is cuddling” or “Gen Z is googling” would probably have been a more appropriate slogan. Anyone who expected that the Tiktok generation, who prefer to spend their lives between the couch and the refrigerator while practicing narcissistic self-reflection and ordering stuff from Amazon or Zalando, would be able to put together a halfway convincing and politically not too stupid protest, was proven wrong at the weekend. Of course, “Gen Z”, who still order their salad online, don’t get anything regulated.

But that shouldn't come as a surprise, because the Boomer, Generation Generation X with its anti-materialism pop drivel and postmodernism; the Millennials with their one-dimensional identity politics nonsense and their ultra-dogmatic culturalism kit.

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Basically everything is completely irrelevant. No matter how and why young people in this country who see themselves as left-wing and resistant want to protest, the result is always the same boring demonstrations in which the usual political buffoons and dogmatists hold up their bedsheets painted with letters and chant the rancid slogans from grandpa's mothbox.

This always happens reliably when, as happened again this weekend, the various ML splinter groups, Stalinist sectarians and Pali-Soli-Dullis shouting in megaphones infiltrate the so-called student demonstrations on a large scale, eagerly wave their various flags and shout those sayings that have not exactly gained in topicality in the last 40 years: “Kohl/Schröder/Merkel/Scholz/Merz must go!”, “High international solidarity!”, “Viva, viva Palestine!”, “German weapons, German money – murder all over the world!”

Politically, it all seems as fresh and as witty as a Volkskammer speech by Günter Mittag. And at the latest when the Latsch demo ends, revolution will be simulated for an evening: a few shops will be “de-glazed”, there will be a bit of pyrotechnics being used and playing “catch me, you egg-hole” with the police for two hours.

The Boomer, Generation X and Millennial bores also didn't get anything done in their respective times.

Far more disturbing and worse than the bland and politically confused performance of the "Gen Z" demonstrators ("We're really all about the basic issues") is the behavior of the police units assigned to "de-escalation", which - not only in terms of their clothing and hand-to-hand combat equipment - has become increasingly similar over the decades to the brutal paramilitaries that were previously only seen in dystopian/post-apocalyptic science fiction films knew.

Today, the police officers not only look as if they are special counter-insurgency troops, they also behave as if they had to put down communist guerrillas in a South American country at civil war. Last weekend they were originally only supposed to spend one evening guarding a handful of teenagers who were vaguely interested in social democracy and who were shouting schoolyard jokes to each other ("Merz, lick your balls!"). Which makes the entire scenario so grotesque.

On Saturday evening in Berlin and other German cities you could actually see how police officers armed to the teeth, completely uninhibited, used batons to hit bored high school graduates standing around who had gathered with a raspberry soda or a sugar-free protein bar in their hand to demonstrate for a school that no longer gets rained on and for a somewhat cozier Germany. The political naivety and frightening harmlessness of the young demonstrators, who are certainly closer to the building savings contract than Andreas Baader, was literally palpable.

They didn't shout into the rolling cameras: "All power to the councils!" They also didn't demand the eradication of capitalism along with its roots or the immediate public execution of the employers' president. Rather, they said sentences that make even the basic program of the Young Liberals seem like a radical anarchist pamphlet: "We don't feel that represented by the government at the moment," "We lack appreciation, it would be nice if people listened to us more" - "We want a perspective for the future" - "We don't want to riot at all."

A large part of the bourgeois press had previously spent a week intoxicatedly denouncing these well-behaved young citizens as a left-wing extremist terrorist gang and conjuring up the downfall of the West. And then, on Saturday evening, you had to watch in disbelief as these 15 to 20-year-old boys and girls, who politely spoke such cozy sentences into the microphones held out to them, were beaten down by the police as if they were dealing with dangerous gang members of the Mexican Sinaloa Cartel.

I am not sure whether, for the sake of a better future, the further militarization of the executive branch and the continued expansion of state repressive measures should not be countered.

In any case, one thing is certain: In the future, it will not be “Gen Z” that will “regulate” but, as always in capitalism, “the economy.”

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