German anti-racism activist is outraged

taketonews

For today’s Rammstein concert in Munich (June 7th), fans have announced a solidarity campaign with the singer in the wake of the abuse allegations against Till Lindemann: They want to get on their knees in front of the band – and thus return Rammstein’s gesture that the band practiced at concerts for many years. The author and anti-racism activist Jasmina Kuhnke (also known as Quattromilf on social media) is fundamentally critical of this.

“I can’t do any of this anymore: I just want to scream,” writes Kuhnke (who describes herself as an “Afro-German Serbo-Croatian or Serbo-Croatian Afro-German”) on Twitter — and posts an excerpt from Wikipedia alongside a screenshot of an article about the Rammstein solidarity campaign -Page about “Taking the Knee”. In doing so, she associates the kneeling planned by Rammstein fans with a politically explosive gesture by American football player Colin Kaepernick. Kaepernick would kneel during the US anthem at NFL games in 2016 instead of standing up as usual. He demonstrated against racial discrimination and police violence in the United States. The gesture made waves around the world and is an important part of the “Black Lives Matter” discourse – and also because Kaepernick’s career never recovered, which is interpreted as an indication of structural racism.

Encouragement and criticism for Kuhnke

Kuhnke’s outrage is met with understanding by many Twitter users. “That’s blatantly disgusting and despicable”, “That’s really just repulsive, wow” or “These disgusting ones” are just some of the comments. “Whenever I believe that the case and handling of the situation can’t get any worse, I’m taught otherwise,” says one person. Kuhnke himself followed up: “White people really aren’t okay! Ufff,” she writes.

However, there are also users who do not see the connection between the fan campaign and the Kaepernick gesture. “I may be leaning a bit far out of the window here, but this gesture exists in many areas and also from all kinds of times, for example: In the Middle Ages and even before that, knights showed their loyalty to their master by kneeling in front of him ‘ wrote one user of the short message service.

“Unfortunately, I can’t answer Ms. Kuhnke. But according to my research, Rammstein was kneeling before kneeling was a form of protest in the US,” another person said.

In fact, the band’s kneeling at the end of the show has been part of Rammstein concerts for many years, as can be seen in this photo, among others:

Kuhnke himself then followed up several times – and explained, among other things, in a tweet: “I said what I said: Rammstein is for people who would actually like to celebrate Onkelz, but no longer dare to hear them because they would otherwise be called right-wing !“



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