In the late 60s the German fun guerrilla movement, with Fritz Teufel being the most famous member, used all kinds of pranks to protest against state authorities and right wing policies. "Assassination" were planed, the plans announced and pudding was bought to be used as the deadly weapon. State authorities were ridiculed when they took such plots seriously.

Yesterday saw an unexpected comeback of fun guerrilla means.

Some 570,000 facebook members, many of them likely fake, "liked" a group page for the return of Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, the former populist defense minister recently relieved after plagiarizing his Ph.D. thesis. They had called for Pro-Guttenberg demonstrations on Saturday in several German cities. The facebook group and the call for demonstrations received large media coverage.

A few demonstration did indeed happen yesterday, but only a few dozens people appeared in Berlin, Hamburg and Cologne. The people taking part turned out to be mostly fun guerrilla pranksters.

Slogans shown included "Gutti for Kaiser", "We are your people", "Lead us to light" and "Gutti has hair nice". In Cologne the "Communist League Pro Guttenberg" rallied in support of Guttenberg's proven dislike of copyrights, "cut+paste=communism" was their slogan. "Cut & paste" hair paste tubes with Guttenberg's stylish picture on them were offered for sale. In Berlin the Hedonist International movement presented itself as instigator of the demonstration. When its spokesman was interviewed he rallied against the "far left media like Die Welt and FAZ which destroyed Guttenberg". Both papers are well known for their rather right wing stand.

All this ridicule, widely reported, likely destroyed any chance for Guttenberg's comeback. His alleged mass support was shown to be none at all and the facebook numbers as virtual junk with no base in reality.

The only real Pro-Guttenberg demonstration seems to have happened in his small hometown. In front of a few hundred party followers zu Guttenberg's father, the conductor Enoch zu Guttenberg, spoke of a "man hunt campaign" against his son something "I haven't seen since 1945". Enoch zu Guttenberg was born in 1946.

Yesterday's well covered return of fun guerrilla protest is likely, at least in Germany, to start a new wave of anti-right wing action using ridicule as its major tool. I wonder how effective it would be if people in the U.S. would start to use fun guerrilla style action to expose the tea party's hypocrisy.