Peace marches + truck strike + parlour game

Dear Reader,

• Ever since the 1950s, Germans have been taking to the streets on Easter to march for peace. The impulse for the protest movement in the 1950s was understandable enough. Just a decade after large swathes of Europe had been reduced to rubble, the great powers were building up rivaling nuclear arsenals that would ensure the destruction of humanity if ever used. At the same time, the movement was always characterised by a certainty naivety towards the Kremlin that meant that its calls for unilateral disarmament were hopelessly divorced from reality. In the late 1970s, when the West German government decided to place mid-range nuclear missiles on its soil, protesters chanted “lieber Rot als Tot” (‘better red than dead’) to signal that they would rather live under communist dictatorship than die in a nuclear war. At the time, chancellor Helmut Schmidt orchestrated the so-called Doppelbeschluss - building up nuclear weapons on continental Europe while simultaneously demanding con…