Yellow Vest and Antifa Story

On Saturday here in Wiesbaden (Wiesbadenaktuell reports most of the happening).....we had the 'Yellow Vest' crowd show up (100 in number approximately).  The Yellow Vest idea is a French creation, and to be honest, there haven't been that many demonstrations with them in Germany.

So the group met up at the train station in Wiesbaden around 1 PM, and were to do a 'march' down toward the city center (about a 1-mile hike).  Somewhere in this hike of one-mile....a counter-protest started up with the Antifa people (50).

Things become a bit interesting at this point.  There's a clear and understood rule.....if you want to have an organized protest in Wiesbaden (or any city), then you register it with the police and indicate where you intend to walk from.  Normally, all protests in Wiesbaden....no matter what group is doing it.....starts at the train station and walk the one-mile to the open courtyard by the town-hall.  In this case, the Yellow Vest group declined to register with the police.  The Antifa people?  They declined to register with the police.

Cops did their best to keep the two groups separate.

So, the Wiesbadenaktuell notes this circumstance.....it just didn't appear that members of either group, were from the actual city of Wiesbaden.  To be honest here, we just don't have many protests, and the ones that usually get noted are revolving around unions on strike.

But lets get to the key bits of this Yellow Vest demonstration.  Their protest?  Social injustice material....everyone needs pay increases, pensions are geared too low, rising taxation, diesel car bans, rent out of control, incompetent politicians, better social benefits, etc.  Somewhere in the mix, they uttered "Germans first" (the German version of Make America Great Again).  Then they got around to redistribution of wealth.

So I previewed this 'slant', and it just seems odd.....about half of the Yellow Vest 'chatter' are absolute things that Antifa would support.

What are the odds that an unannounced Yellow Vest group would show up in Wiesbaden, and a unannounced Antifa group would also show up....same time?

Were the two groups really just one group?  I hate to suggest that this whole protest thing seemed 'fake', but the minute that the journalist noted that none of the Yellow Vest folks seemed to be from the city, I wondered the same thing about the Antifa crowd.

The curious thing is that the journalist with Wiesbadenaktuell sat and worried toward the end of their writing about this all bringing up radicalization among Wiesbaden folks.

In general, if you stood in a group of a hundred working-class Germans.....they would all whine about taxation, pensions being screwed-up, social benefits being unfair, the diesel ban, crazy rent issues, and stupid politics.  It's just that they never seem to get pepped up before elections.  The last two national elections in Germany haven't really had any major issues to drive intense interest in the outcome.  Low-key....would be a great word to describe those two elections.

The odds that the Yellow Vest and Antifa groups were all fake, and led by one central planning group?  I would suggest better than 50-percent chance.  And if this were going on in forty urbanized areas across Germany?  Yeah, it might be a problem.