Bilderberg 2016 in Dresden - Nutjob Conspiracy Tourism or Civil Rights Activism?

I usually do not blog in english, as it is not my best language (which is German). I originally posted this on my  blog 1.0 about a month ago and asked for a small Bitcoin tip if anyone wants me to blog in English. No tips yet, so obviously the english speaking Internt does not give a f**** about what I have to say, but now there is Steemit, so I try it  again :-)

Monday, 13th of June 2016:

As this is my very first english speaking blogpost, I feel I should give a short introduction of myself for any new reader. My name is Fabio, 40, currently sitting at my laptop in marvelous Berlin-Kreuzberg, after having spent the last four days in Dresden at and around the "famous secret" meeting called "the Bilderberg conference". 

So yes, this will be a rather fringy kind of political post and probably a longer one, but wait, I`ll try to make it as sane and entertaining as possible. 

For starters, I myself am part of a conspiracy group. I am a genoese-bavarian voluntarist aka anarcho-capitalist former Ron Paul activist. Yes, I take pride in the words: Ich bin ein Paultard. 

 As such, I diligently plot to take over the world and leave you alone.

I actually currently consider myself kind of retired, because the only politician I ever really wanted to impose on other people in my whole life is Ron Paul and - as a German citizen - I was not even allowed to vote for him, so I started to be a grassroot activist. Lately I only used this blog to write in German about my new passion, Bitcoin and the cryptocurrency revolution, but after having met so many english speaking people in the last few years AND having been to a Bilderberg meeting for the first time in my life, I thought some of the people I know around the world might be interested in what I have to tell about it. Plus, I am getting sick and tired of the divisiveness of the topic "Bilderberg" and "conspiracy theories" and "left" and "right" among smart, politically and socially caring well-intentioned people and I want to try to bridge some gaps.

To be fair to those who want to stick to their very own confirmation bias and keep thinking that everyone who cares about Bilderberg is a nutjob, I do not want to waste your time, but yes, I am going to try to convince you that yes, there is something fishy about it and yes, there are reasonable, friendly, open-minded and well-intentioned people who care deeply about legitimate questions being answered at last and you should care too.

I first heard about Bilderberg around 22 years ago, at age 18, when I was in german college, a bavarian "Gymnasium" (its most famous alumnus, later german defense minister and long time minister-president of Bavaria, Franz-Joseph Strauss, is said to have attended Bilderberg as well).
I was an idealistic, politically interested, left-leaning pacifist and I was (and still am) deeply worried and troubled about the ongoing atrocities and geo-political machinations in the world. I later came to work in the financial industry, e.g. as a global macro fund manager, where I lost many illusions and became intrigued by the money system and the powers that shape our understanding of it.
A person I respected, a future and now former mentor of mine, told me about Bilderberg and gave me some literature, but I remember having many doubts about it, because there never seemed to be sources I considered "official" at that time. It was the time when there was no internet yet. People had to rely on friends and family, hear-say, TV and newspapers, books, academia and - of course - "Vater Staat", "Father State", as the german expression goes - to learn about important developments and groups that might endanger "democracy". A secret meeting of highest ranking politicians, royals, military, secret service, bankers, industrialists and high ranking media people and some obscure guys know about it but no word of it in "Der Spiegel" and "Süddeutsche Zeitung", respected newspapers I used to worhship as a young man? It sounded simply too outlandish. So imagine how thrilled I was when I eventually found of a short article in the well respected "mainstream media outlet" "Wirtschaftswoche" about a Bilderberg meeting in the USA in the 90ies with a picture of Bill Gates because it finally removed the last doubt this thing even existed!

Fast forward 22 years, and I still feel I know almost nothing about Bilderberg. When the internet arrived, things slowly but surely changed. You could read some news, you could find the venues and dates of their meetings in advance, online, if you dared venturing on "alternative media" websites and Bilderberg itself became more transparent. Since 2010, they even have their very own official homepage: http://www.bilderbergmeetings.org/. 

But among those who had even heard about it, the narrative of the sceptics had changed from "there is no such thing as a Bilderberg meeting" to "there is nothing bad in having a private discussion without the pesky media, nothing to see here". And I was still caught in the middle, unsure whether to be worried or not. After all I had learned about the realities of politics in the meantime, Bilderberg did not seem so particularly evil or important any longer, but they themselves kept this strange obsession with being as secret as possible, even in the new age of information.
So when I heard they would meet just around the corner in the very center of the beautiful city of Dresden, I simply had to go. When I arrived at the site on Wednesday 8th, the day before the official conference kick-off, I found the luxurious Taschenbergpalais  surrounded by a fence and heavily guarded by police force. Once again I wondered why the Bilderberger would choose such a public place to meet, in a city where the "precariat and middle class" - discussion topic nr. 9 of 10 according to the official press  release - had gathered to protest "the establishment" in the thousands in the recent past. Usually Bilderberg meets in places easier to hide and protect and much harder to reach for ordinary citizen and journalists.
I joined the small crowd of alternative media journalists who where already present and eager to catch any arriving attendee on camera. I was particularly pleased to see Charles Skelton from Britain, a hero to Bilderberg watchers. He had originally begun tracking Bilderberg in 2009, when they met in Greece, writing for the Guardian. I remember thinking at first he only got there to make fun of the "tinfoil hat wearing Bilderberg protesters" when he started his now famous "Bilderblog", but as he became more and more appaled by the authoritarian behavior of security forces around the venues he attended and about the fact that he was pretty much the only journalist from a major newspaper reporting in a critical fashion, his articles morphed more and more into a gentle and witty but still scathing critique. He and his wifeHannah turned out to be the very first victims of police repression, because they had dared to roll out a banner saying "Bilderberg - It`s lobbying, stupid" to inform the participants of a corporate running event passing just past the fence of the hotel. I felt anger rising for the first of many times to come in the next days, when I had to witness how the police talked to this gentle and innocuous british couple and confiscated the banner, claiming they had to check whether it presented an "insult" under § 185 of the German penal code, as one of the officers explained to me. Charlie and his wife where taken to one of the many  police busses, had their passports checked and were handed a form documenting the confiscated object and where to get it back later. Many other incidents followed and have been documented by brave alternative journalists like Dan Dicks from Canada or Luke Rudkowski from the US. Even the german tabloid BILD ran a story in its local section and made fun of the tough style the police displayed (the headline translates as "Did a Brit (32) want to blow up Bilderberg with Bread?" because the police had told they considered the loaf of bread he carried a potential projectile). Little did the BILD-Dresden journalist know her supreme boss Mathias Döpfner was sitting in the hotel, but when asked, at least she was not aware of any gag orders.
Luke Rudkowski interviewed Charlie Skelton on the relevance of Bilderberg and you can see the result here as well as many different reports about police harrasment. But it probably won`t change anyones mind, as we all know media people can be annoying, police just do their jobs etc etc., right?
Well, the last story I`m going to tell will soon be radio-broadcast by yet another Bilderberg veteran, former BBC journalist Tony Gosling, but I`m going to reproduce part of it, as Klaus, the man who Tonyinterviewed, told it to me, because it is to me the perfect example of where the Bilderbergers simply crossed a line and misbehaved at least in the past, even if they might have by now all turned into philantropists in the meantime.
Klaus was a student of political science back in the mid 90ies in Hamburg, Germany and had stumbled upon Bilderberg by pure coincidence, having read about them in some obscure book he bought when he was bored at some train station in Austria. He soon forgot about it, but when he later started his studies and went unprepared in a meeting with his professor and fellow students, and was asked about the subject of his master thesis, he shot "the Bilderberg meetings" without really knowing what he was getting into. The political science professor had never heard about it but initially encouraged Klaus to gather some material to see if there was anything worth researching.Klaus went to university libraries and public press archives, and managed to gather some pieces of evidence he could present to his professor. As it still was not much, his professor started to discourage him and told him to pick another subject, but the investigative researcher in Klaus was challenged and he told his professor that even Egon Bahr had attended one of the meetings. Now in the Germany of the mid-90ies, you knew who Egon Bahr was, but to give you a short impression, let me quote his Wikipedia page:

"The former journalist was the creator of the "Ostpolitik" promoted by West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, for whom he served as Secretary of the Chancellor's Office from 1969 until 1972. Between 1972 and 1990 he was an MP in the Bundestag of the Federal Republic of Germany and from 1972 until 1976 was also a Minister of the Federal Government.

Bahr was a key figure in multiple negotiation sessions between not only East and West Germany, but also Germany and the Soviets. In addition to his instrumental role in Ostpolitik, Bahr was also an influential voice in negotiating the Treaty of Moscow, the Treaty of Warsaw, the Transit Treaty of 1971 and the Basic Treaty of 1972."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egon_Bahr

Klaus` professor answered: "What? Egon was there? Ok, I meet him this week-end anyway and will ask him."
When they met the next time, the professor told Klaus:

"Egon told me to tell you this:

If you proceed with your master thesis on this subject, your academical career finishes here.

You won`t find out anything anyway.

If you do, you might get problems."

He told Klaus he was not going to stop him, but he also should not expect any support by him, his very own professor. Regardless, Klauswent on with his efforts for a few years of hard and frustrating research work but eventually quit and chose another topic. But he still follows Bilderberg and that`s how we met, in sunny Dresden 2016, more than twenty years after we both heard about Bilderberg for the first time.
Now if this does not make you angry, I guess I can`t do anything else to get you concerned. But I won`t betray my heroes of the White Rose. They did not sacrifice their lives to the Nazies for a German university professor and a high ranking German politician discouraging - or shall I say threatening - a young German student in that way. 
And now listen, Bilderberg:
I will keep watching you guys behind your fences and in your black limousines. I will take the reputation risk and have people laugh at me because I am oh so crazy. Until you guys open up and explain this shit, I`ll be watching  you. Expect us.