ZPS set up a website with pictures of the 1,500 rioters they’d identified, but visitors to the site could only see 20 pictures at a time. So frantic fascists went to the site’s search bar to see if they’d been named.
“The first thing they’re doing is using the search function on the website to input their own name, or somebody they know, but who nobody else knows, in order to see if this website really works,” Ruch said, “to see if it’s really possible that we identified 1,500 people.”
The site received a traffic boost after a far-right website linked to it, Ruch said. ZPS built a map of names that appeared in the same users’ searches. From those searches, alone, they learned the names and associates of approximately 25 rioters they hadn’t previously identified.
“What we got was quite a network of who knows who, and who else was in Chemnitz,” Ruch said.
U.S. anti-fascists have pulled similar stunts. This summer, undercover activists cozied up to the organizers of a far-right march, and offered to make a website and coordinate T-shirt orders for the event. The website, which did not charge for T-shirts, asked participants for their names and addresses, supposedly to calculate shipping costs. Instead of sending free T-shirts, the activists behind the website published the names and addresses they received.
ZPS’s performances have previously landed it on far-right extremists’ hit lists. In April, German police arrested a soldier who was suspected of planning far-right terror attacks, which he allegedly wanted to blame on refugees. The man also reportedly kept a list of leftist figures he wanted to murder, among them ZPS affiliates.
A September investigation into the alleged would-be-terrorist revealed a larger ring of suspected extremism among Germany’s military elite. Germany’s FOCUS magazine reported that the criminal investigation had uncovered a network of far-right soldiers and officers planning for apocalyptic violence on “Day X,” when they would take over the country.
“It’s terrifying, but I don’t want to live in a country where I can’t do radical political art,” Ruch said. “We need to know who this is, who finances it, who the driving forces are.”
good on ZPS for sure but uhhhhhh holy fucking shit that bolded paragraph made my stomach flip upside down
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