Red Paint attack on Obama’s Berlin speech tomorrow
Greetings from Berlin. Let me be absolutely clear — Obama was not the target of the attack– he is probably not even in Berlin. The site of his speech tomorrow was vandalized by red paint.
I am here for the International Congress of Psychology this week. Coincidentally, Obama will also give a speech — the only public event for his Europe trip — tomorrow under the Victory Column (Siegessäule). We went there tonight, and the whole area was closed in preparation for the event. We got in, nonetheless.
The platform for Obama is near complete. Notice the long flat ramp behind the platform. I think Obama will walk from the stairs of the Victory Column to the platform, which faces directly to the dignitaries who will be sitting about 50 years across the circular road around the column. Slightly to the right, Obama is expected to see anywhere between 10,000 to a million people, stretching about the mile-long Juni Strasse. The gate will open at 4pm, and the speech is scheduled at 7pm. I was told that the early birds can get as close as about 20 feet from Obama.
But as we walked closer, there was red paint all over the road the circles the Victory Column. I mean All Over — it stretched about half the circle, on the side of the speech platform. Lots of paint.
It appears that someone drove by this afternoon before this area was closed off to the public, and sprayed a ton of red paint. Spray is probably not the right word. Looks to me someone put paint in many plastic bags and just dumped them as s/he drove around. I heard the Obama team refers to the person as the "crazy guy".
I don’t know the exact time when this happened. We were there at about 7pm Berlin time. I touched the paint, and some of it was still wet.
Luckly they’ve got water truck and pressurized washer on site to clean it up. I was told that it worked alright. They are confident that it will be all gone by tomorrow. On the other hand, with so many people packed so close, there is no chance Obama will notice anything.
Photo Credit: Shiou-yuan Chen