On Jan. 12, thousands joined an annual commemorative march in Berlin to honor the memory of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht — two revolutionaries murdered 106 years ago on Jan. 15, 1919 by centrist-backed proto-fascists. For decades, the march has taken place on the second Sunday of January, bringing together activists, trade unionists, feminists, and others who make up the German radical left. Among the marchers, those who perhaps best embodied Luxemburg’s spirit of anti-imperialism were a bloc of pro-Palestinian demonstrators who walked through the streets chanting, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” before being attacked by German police officers.
Germany’s tradition of cracking down on left-wing activists harks back to Luxemburg’s time. In 1913, on the eve of World War I, Luxemburg gave a series of famous speeches across Germany in which she called on soldiers to refuse to serve the German war machine. She would be put on trial a year later in the Frankfurt Criminal Court for these speeches and other acts of alleged “incitement,” and was sentenced to one year in prison, which she served from February 1915 to February 1916. At the end of that devastating war — with 40 million dead, and Germany defeated — and following the crushing of the January uprising in Berlin, she and Leibknecht were assassinated by a gang of right-wing army officers, with the tacit approval of leaders of the SPD party, in which she had been active her entire political life before its rightward swing…..more
