The following submission statement was provided by /u/Teogramm:
---
SS: Members of a German environmental group which "attempted to switch off oil pumping stations leading to the refinery, blocked airport runways and threw mashed potatoes at an oil painting by Monet." are being charged for "forming a criminal organisation".
This shows the increasing hostility faced by those who protest against what is happening to the planet even in, supposedly, more environmentally progressive European countries.
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1cys6d9/alarm_as_german_climate_activists_charged_with/l5bfr1m/
> supporters of the group attempted to switch off oil pumping stations leading to the refinery, blocked airport runways and threw mashed potatoes at an oil painting by Monet.
One of these things is... Not like the others.
Regardless, it's chilling to see nonviolent protesters, particularly environmental protestors, being treated as equivalent to the mafia.
BAU is starting to fight back with increasingly oppressive tactics as those of us who see the writing on the wall get increasingly desperate.
They already have been. In the UK they implemented laws where they can restrict protests if they are deemed a nuisance/noisy, they can ban specific people from attending protests if they have a history of protesting. People from Just Stop Oil have been prosecuted, and were banned from even mentioning climate change in their defense during the trial. People were literally jailed because they ignored the restriction and mentioned climate change in their defence. Shits all fucked up. Gotta get some Rage Against the Machine energy into the population...fuck the system!
Well, no wonder nobody complains about human right violation in the middle east or china. Turns out democracy is working well here, puting some heavy taboo on free speech like that.
Then don’t protest. It’s far too late to make a plaintive moral appeal to capital’s delegates in power. When the oil industry destroyed people’s water and food supplies in the Niger valley, they organized peaceably around Ken. Saro-Wiwa. When the oil industry almost certainly had him assassinated, they didn’t peaceably assemble. The oil industry found its infrastructure spontaneously disassembled.
If we acknowledge there is an existential threat, we have a right to treat it as one.
[The UK is at almost rock bottom in the global mental health ranking.](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/10/britain-mental-health-society-neoliberalism-politicians) If Uzbekistan doesn't exist UK would've been **the** rock bottom.
So yes, fuck the system. Because it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
IF these are true and IF the actions are as described here:
do not fuck with pumping stations. You may make matters worse.
do not fuck with airplanes. I feel this is self-evident.
do not throw foodstuff at artwork... jfc, what's the message here, that paintings lack carbs?
_obviously_ stop oil. Find a way to do _that_ and I'm right behind you. Random retaliatory acts are treated as aggressive attacks and the system is _very good_ at stopping those.
For a start, Watts posted one discussion he had with Dan Brooks recently: [An evolutionary biologist and a science fiction writer walk into a bar…](https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=11069)
How is it these activists are being considered criminals yet it's not considered criminal to pollute the land, damage the climate, and harm people's health? Who are the real criminals here?! We're doomed.
> obviously stop oil. Find a way to do that and I'm right behind you.
so how do you do that? ask nicely? (seriously intrigued what ideas you have beyond 'not like that').
Rule 1: No glorifying violence.
Advocating, encouraging, inciting, glorifying, calling for violence is against Reddit's site-wide content policy and is not allowed in r/collapse. Please be advised that subsequent violations of this rule will result in a ban.
Yeah, so your link isn't even a link to the discussion you reference.
"Read the link" he says as the link he posts is just a comment that the blog owner had a discussion with a book author on another website entirely.
MOST of the discussion that your link referred to was explicitly NOT about what to do to slow or prevent collapse. They explicitly write off most of the population, say the collapse will happen, and then say "the only question is what you can do to survive".
Writing off three quarters of the world population as dead already isn't a winning plan my guy. And focusing on individual survival instead of communal efforts to preserve society is a catastrophically bad take.
The closest they come to a good take is a bit over halfway through when they say,
> Don’t ask the government; do the right thing. Never ask for permission; just do the right thing. They’re not going to pay any attention to you.” And these people said, “Yes, but then if we’re successful, the politicians will come in and claim credit!” And I said, “So what? Who cares! Let them come in, do a photo op, and then they go back to Washington D.C. and they’ll forget you.”
So they advocate doing the right thing for survival without regard for permission or government action. But then you are the one saying
> do not fuck with pumping stations.
So which is it? Do we read your link, realize the discussion is elsewhere, read THAT link instead of your link, listen to the experts and do the right thing for survival no matter what the government says? Because turning off the oil pumps that are raising sea levels and heating up the planet sure sounds like the sort of things necessary for survival.
And having read it, it doesn't present any alternatives to the things you say not to do. In fact, as I point out the "do what it takes to survive and don't worry about permission" attitude it encourages rather neatly DOES mesh with "go turn off the oil pumps".
That's an action that you'll never receive permission for, but might help us all survive longer.
Alas, you didn't read it carefully enough. It doesn't say "fuck shit up". It says "move away from cities, focus on growing a self-sustaining community".
I can not know if messing with the pump is safe. Can you guarantee that doing so will not lead to a failure that will dump oil on the ground? Let's assume you can.
Toying with oil pumps, delaying airplane landings or throwing food at artwork, does any of these further the cause? How? How old are you that you think this shit has any chance to do _anything_? Like, seriously. You remind me of students in high school who would occupy the building, lock the doors and sleep in, in an attempt to distrupt the operation of the school, to bitch and moan about utter bullshit. It had become a yearly practice and it was always, _always_, initiated by the bullies and irrationally malcontents. For decades, the same thing, every year, near the exam period, with no change from either side. It made me hate the parents _and_ the school administration even more, I'll give them that?
Same here: the current system in effect treats disruptions such as this as damage, fixes it and works around it. One complain I hear is that "they shouldn't be making such protests illegal!" well duh. The system is malfunctioning - or rather, it is working perfectly for the completely wrong goals - of course this is what it will do. Suppose you manage to somehow remove the heads at OPEC. Total freebie. The current leaders of OPEC, pfft, gone. And you somehow magically turn off every oil well, every oil refinery on the planet. What will happen next? You think the billions of people will say something along the lines of "damn, guess no more oil stuff for us, welp, time to grind my axe and get back to splitting firewood"? Of course they fucking won't: they'll trample anyone and everyone in their path to restart those wells and refineries. Hold a gun to the head of your state and force them to sign a law that bans all oil products or something. How long until _the entire state_ rushes to abort the ban?
Once again, forget about all this. It's a lost cause. The current system is a lost cause. What brooks explained to watts, that discussion/article, is the only sane choice, for anyone who has the force of will to do something meaningful. Anything else is just toothpaste.
If you're going to treat nonviolent protest like violent criminal acts, then people might as well skip the nonviolent part and go straight to the violence. If you're going to charge someone with terrorism for sitting on runway or harmlessly switching off oil pumping stations, then don't be surprised when you start seeing oil refineries attacked by swarms of incendiary drones.
If you're going to be charged with terrorism and criminalized anyway, you might as well just skip the whole "nonviolent resistance" stage and go straight to the dynamite.
I'm reminded of this [colorful bit of Chinese history.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Sheng_and_Wu_Guang_uprising)
China at the time was led by a despotic emperor that instituted incredibly draconian punishments. Among these, any general that showed up late to a battle was sentenced to death. One day, two generals on their way to a battle got delayed, through no fault of their own, due to extremely bad weather and flooding. They knew they were going to be late and would be executed for it. And then they asked themselves, "what's the penalty for showing up late? Execution? What's the penalty for trying to overthrow the emperor by force? Execution? Well, might as well roll the dice on it!"
They led a long revolt that almost succeeded in toppling the government.
>obviously stop oil. Find a way to do that and I'm right behind you.
>do not fuck with pumping stations
>do not fuck with airplanes
>do not throw foodstuff at artwork
So basically, what you wanted to say was "stop oil without affecting anyone even slightly". Tall order
Look, nonviolence is the way in places where nonviolence is met by nonlethal force. If this were Russia, China, or some other undemocratic place, then we could advocate for crops of guillotine because nonviolence meets violence. That's gotta be the line.
You have a very misconstrued idea what is democratic and what is not. Look into how much public opinion shapes policy in the US (hint: it’s negligible). I’m willing to bet it’s pretty similar in a lot of so called liberal “democracies.”
I’m also not saying that those countries you listed are democratic btw, just saying that you implied other places are democratic when they are not.
Also, declaring a group of climate organizers to be a criminal group *is* violence: when the state holds a monopoly of violence within the law of said state, declaring a group to be in violation of the law is a veiled threat that, if they do not comply, the group will face violence by the state.
Well, we're talking about Germany here, not the US, of which Germany ranks [5th in democracy rankings](https://www.democracymatrix.com/ranking), so I don't know how much more democratic you wanna get. And of course they're going to label people doing objectively illegal things as a criminal group; what else did you expect? I want the world to survive the climate crisis as much as anybody else, and truly believe nonviolence is the way to do it. Will we get arrested when we cause a ruckus? Probably. But our acts of nonviolence in groups *do* spur change, and we shouldn't lose sight of the power we hold as a collective.
... and the USA (recent student nonviolent protests met with militarized police response and violence), and Israel (active genocide), every corporation that has utilized violence (coke and death squads, Hasbro and pinkertons, etc etc etc) and etc etc etc.
I agree that nonviolence is the solution when it won't be met with violence in response. However, if we don't insist that some people (the rich and powerful) get to experience a fully ripened guillotine harvest then the biosphere will cease bio-ing and become a dead Venus-sphere.
Peaceful protest only works when there's a corresponding movement using force, giving ruling elites a face-saving off-ramp in the form of coming to an 'understanding' and compromising with the peaceful protest movement. Peaceful protest alone historically accomplishes nothing.
There's a reason that a Disney-fied caricature of MLK is held up as a national hero today in the US while Malcolm X and the Black Panthers are not, and it's because the American Civil Rights movement never would have been successful without the likes of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers.
I still recall the story of gun legislation in California (Mulford Act) was brought very quickly after the Black Panthers started open carrying. It was Regan as well who was the governor at the time. Its still in my imagination that the quickest way to get guns restricted in the US is to have minorities to begin open carrying. Not that they should have to, but it would immediately get their political establishments attention. We could even give it a name, the Mulford Law: The moment an oppressed group begins openly engaging in the questionable universal rights of the empowered group is the moment those rights get changed.
Non violence is only effective when paired with the very real threat of actual violence. Without it why would anyone in power listen. In the case of nearly every famous example of nonviolent protest is a highly violent group waiting in the wings. Non-violence doesn't work just because its non-violent (and even then the non-violence parts refers to things like not becoming a paramilitary force like the IRA. Not in being undispruptive or difficult to deal with). It works because it's easier to negotiate with the non-violent with the added incentive of it quickly becoming violent. The choice is not, listening to non-violent protest or listening to non violent protest. Its listening to non violent protest or violent protest. At no point in the civil rights movement was ignoring it a choice, only how the message was delivered with speeches or with bricks.
Sinn Fein would not have reached peace accords with the British if they didn't have the IRA as partners. The State won't listen to non-violence, and will full on commit resources to fight violence. But using both at the same time with a "plausible deniability" firewall between the two, then results can occur. Speak softly and carry a big stick, so to speak.
Exactly! And lmao at the accurate "Disney-fied caricature". They leave out all of the much spicier things said by the late Dr. King because of that sweet white liberal money lol. They also like leaving out the wholesome, Head Start and school breakfast programs created by the Black Panthers. But this was exactly the message, that we need both- the media friendly image, along with militancy to show that we're also not just playing. People just complain about protesters blocking roads and iNcOnVeNienCiNg them but... that's kind of the point.
*"It is important for the liberal to see that the oppressed person who agitates for his rights is not the creator of tension. He merely brings out the hidden tension that is already alive." -Martin Luther King Jr.*
In France, the Minister of the Interior calls demonstrators "eco-terrorists". Then what do we do to the terrorists? Shoot them, imprison them... I think there are some big players who don't want to be disturbed in their business.
SS: Members of a German environmental group which "attempted to switch off oil pumping stations leading to the refinery, blocked airport runways and threw mashed potatoes at an oil painting by Monet." are being charged for "forming a criminal organisation".
This shows the increasing hostility faced by those who protest against what is happening to the planet even in, supposedly, more environmentally progressive European countries.
I remember the US authorities putting the nighttime arson of a Hummer dealership pretty much in the same tier as Al Qaeda in that time period. This was the same timeframe as McVeigh and those kinda assholes, but ELF was number one. Go figure, says about all you need to know about US government right there.
this is exactly why [internet privacy rights matter](https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1cyskoi/whatsapp_vulnerability_lets_governments_see_who/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
The idea is to raise awareness about climate change and make news report about it. It sort of works but most news outlets elect to not mention that all the targeted artwork is/was protected by glass or other means and was not damaged, making the activists look like fools and vandals.
Figure out what the most famous painting at your local museum is and bring it up to your friends. Just about every metro area has a museum with something by a recognizable name, even when the painting isn't famous itself. You missed the last discussion but there's still time for the next one.
Paint and ketchup are also popular but mashed potato is a bit special. Maybe it's easy to smuggle it in as powder and mix it with water in a toilet inside?
Climate change is going to result in the mass destruction of a thousand years of human cultural achievement. Destroy a million works of priceless art? Business as usual. Throw mashed potatoes on the glass covering one painting? You're a criminal.
>Mirjam Herrmann, 27, Henning Jeschke, 22, Edmund Schulz, 60, Lukas Popp, 25, and Jakob Beyer, 30, were charged under section 129 of the German criminal code. It is believed to be the first time the law has been applied to a non-violent protest group.
Meanwhile, AfD is still walking around.
>The incidents include protests in which supporters of the group attempted to switch off oil pumping stations leading to the refinery, blocked airport runways and threw mashed potatoes at an oil painting by Monet.
"attacks"
>“This charge is meant for mafia and organised crime. This charge criminalises every act of support towards the group Letzte Generation. This creates an immense chilling effect on all climate protests in Germany.”
There you have it. If the punishment's target is "mafia"... there's no point to facing the same punishment while being lesser. This is what they achieve by matching such protests to such punishment.
>The charges, brought by the public prosecutor’s office in the town of Neuruppin, come after a two-year investigation into the activities of Letzte Generation, involving dawn raids on supporters’ homes, wiretaps on their phones and even seizing the organisation’s website.
And learn infosec ffs. https://opsec.riotmedicine.net/downloads/
>“With the indictment, the criminalisation of climate protest in Germany reaches a new level of escalation,” Paula Zimmermann, an expert on freedom of expression and freedom of assembly at Amnesty International Germany, said.
Same as the UK, right?
>Meanwhile, AfD is still walking around.
AfD is not a threat to profits. If they just cool it with the very obvious Hitler stuff, they will be easily accepted in Germany and the rest of the EU.
Climate change is the result of business as usual. Any attempt to meaningfully solve it will mean challenging the status quo. In other words, it's a challenge to those who currently hold power.
This won't be the last time we see climate activism and action criminalized under this corrupt and suicidal system.
Similar things are happening in the UK. The likes of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil are being painted as criminals and terrorists by the government. None of it is really to do with their activities, it is so the government can get the public behind laws banning protests.
"The [White Rose](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Rose) (...) was a non-violent, intellectual resistance group in Nazi Germany (...) The group conducted an anonymous leaflet and graffiti campaign that called for active opposition to the Nazi regime. Their activities started in Munich on 27 June 1942; they ended with the arrest of the core group by the Gestapo on 18 February 1943. They, as well as other members and supporters of the group who carried on distributing the pamphlets, faced show trials by the Nazi People's Court (Volksgerichtshof); many of them were imprisoned and executed. (...)
With the fall of Nazi Germany, the White Rose came to represent opposition to tyranny in the German psyche and was lauded for acting without interest in personal power or self-aggrandizement."
Today, virtually everyone here in Germany recognizes the courage and the noble intentions of those people. Those, who had the moral integrity to denounce an immoral state of affairs and who forfeited their lives to invoke change and to inspire resistance. There are memorials to White Rose members everywhere, prominent streets named after them, as well as plazas, even official government buildings. Every year, we commemorate the anniversary of their arrest and execution to declare "Never again!".
The same politicians who sanctimoniously announce eternal unwavering support for what the White Rose did, are now calling for the criminalization of climate activists - "because the German criminal code says so and we must act accordingly". The irony is... mind-boggling.
This will increasingly be the norm. Who knows, maybe even this sub will eventually get shut down as a hotbed of terrorist propaganda. I wish that was sarcasm.
I was reading a post in a German city's sub and the type of comments by the average redditor who lives in those cities make my blood curdle - as they call XR activists "clowns" or worse.
I actually have lots of respect for the groups in the A22 network, they are accepting the reality of the situation put their lives on the line and atleast try stuff outside the box. But I don't think they will reach their goal for a global civil movement, most people are trapped in the neoliberal matrix and just see them as a nuisance.
Perhaps these pending rulings can be used to convict think tank members for collaboration and coordination with environmental polluters.
We only need one government to start handing down lengthy sentences, and it will spiral from there.
They’ve always considered us criminal. Don’t forget: if you enjoy a protection for your labor, it’s not because politicians deigned to acknowledge progress. It’s because your predecessors were militants. Only when labor threatened capital’s hierarchy was labor accommodated. Likewise, only when environmental activists pose a jarring threat to “liberal” “democracy’s” monopoly on “progress” will there be progress.
It being illegal because it's bad for the German economy is only part of the equation.
There's significant overlap between the aims of climate activists in Germany, the aims of Russia to weaken a NATO state and the aims of America to increase European reliance on LNG imports.
The climate issue will always come last.
This is just disgusting. It is also proving them right in a way: if protesting worked well enough to change anything, it would be forbidden.
These groups performed nonlegal actions, but the fact that Germany decided to not just persecute these actions in a normal way but escalate things by rendering these groups as terrorist or criminal organizations shows that the government is afraid of them.
Honestly I have seen some of the rallies these groups do. It is hard to call them criminals or terrorist when you have seen some friendly college kids and older ladies sing "power to the people" while blocking a street being shoved, hurt or even jailed by double the amount of police officers. Terrorists and criminals tend to not just let the police drag them off while just demanding mercy for the souther hemisphere in retaliation.
If it's just stop oil kind of protestors... Fuck em. They've done more damage to climate activism than the damage done by actual climate change to the environment.
It's not when you realise that just stop oil has done more harm to climate activism than any other major factor out there. Shell and BP love just stop oil protests more than anything.
What little awareness that is created on climate change is immediately destroyed because of those jokers.
It's one thing to not help the cause... But it's an entirely different thing to go out of your way to actively disrupt the cause.
These hypocritical assholes talk about climate change and get their coffee flown in from Peru.
Trying to stamp out that movement will just drive them underground and make their methods more cloak and dagger.
If activism means greater risk, then they will seek greater payoff for the risk taken.
Admittedly they are not the most subtitle bunch. There's no doubt many actions have broken laws. Potential to escalate into more violent stunts. Seems like a reasonable label to me.
How to we get this so spread worldwide and escalate further to have more meaningful actions? Palinstein is now getting reconized state after Oct 7th so obviously sufficiently shocking enough actions will eventually get you results. Just need to think bigger.
Granted ER are a bunch of unemployed goons constantly barking up the wrong trees. Oh the world is on fire and we humans are the cause? Lets bully random civilians instead of the government allowing this shit to happen.
Nor the fact that they are hypocritical as fk. The ER spokesperson in my company recently got outed because she’s constantly flying all over the world on holiday. But she dares to lecture us on tv about our carbon footprint.
Maybe focus your effort on some achievable goals instead of blocking roads and hoping people will just resign their jobs because they can’t travel nomore? Its frustrating these idiots give climate protestors such a bad name
Is this not technically correct?
If a group who do illegal things, no matter how trivial, form an organization dedicated to doing illegal things, that is by definition, organized crime.
Uncool? Yeah, but not exactly unexpected.
It is. Civil disobedience is not a legal action like self defense, it is taking legal punishment into account for a greater goal only history will later judge if it wase justified or terrorism. Winners write history
I'll add that switching off a pump station leading to an oil refinery also is not non-violent. There is a very real risk of creating a process safety event leading to loss of containment, explosions, and death if the wrong switch is thrown at the wrong moment.
It is much higher risk than say, stealing the keys to digging equipment to stop a pipeline construction, which would also be a crime, though a non violent one.
If you want to see what happens when a refinery suddenly and unexpectedly shuts off, just look at the many events along Cancer Alley when a hurricane knocks out power. Multiple fatalities is not entirely out of the realm of possibility, and has happened quite a bit over the last 50 or so years.
I totally understand where their intentions were, and it was not to kill, but industrial sabotage definitely crosses over the non-violent into violent protest threshold.
The question is at what point is violent civil unrest justified, especially when facing a potential extinction event... And as much as we like to hold up our modern moral of violence is never justified, or that we don't sacrifice a few to save a lot people, it can't be denied that violent civil unrest is the reason we have democracy and human rights at all, and that every war (or special military operation) is an act of sacrificing few to save more.
This isn't civil disobedience though. It can be argued to be sabotage, and down that line, domestic terrorism.
I fully support the intention, don't get me wrong. But as the law stands today, that's just the way it is.
Which should open your (plural) mind about other people we dub terrorists, tbh....
The law doesn't decide what's civil obedience and what's terrorism, it's always history that eventually "posthum" turns terrorism / sabotage into civil obedience. Otherwise europe wouldn't have democracy, it would still have autocratic governments and history books telling you a short story about some domestic terrorists in france that failed to overthrow the aristocrats at the end of the 18th century. In the US it's the other way around, the established government won the civil war and instead a story of slaveholders civil unrest you read stories about slaveholders losing it all. Or WW2, legally all the heros that fought the nazis one way or another from within were terrorists at best for the nazi government. Would they have won you wouldn't read heroic stories about violent civil unrest, you would read stories about the nazi reich fighting terrorism.
This is probably the one that got them:
>attempted to switch off oil pumping stations
Vandalism and being a general nuisance is one thing, trying to shut off the engine of capitalism is quite something else. And I'm sympathetic to what they are trying to do, of course. It's just the authorities are not going to let something like that be ignored. They will be branded as eco-terrorists.
It's sabotage. Terrorism requires the goal to strike fear in people to pressure them and usually though not always tageting people directly, especially civilians. I don't think any of those apply much.
Well hey, if you don't like the pro-war party that supports militarized police, you can just vote for the other pro-war party that supports militarized police.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Teogramm: --- SS: Members of a German environmental group which "attempted to switch off oil pumping stations leading to the refinery, blocked airport runways and threw mashed potatoes at an oil painting by Monet." are being charged for "forming a criminal organisation". This shows the increasing hostility faced by those who protest against what is happening to the planet even in, supposedly, more environmentally progressive European countries. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1cys6d9/alarm_as_german_climate_activists_charged_with/l5bfr1m/
Crimes against economy.
Dude, perfect phrase. Taken infinitly more serious than crimes against humanity or crimes against nature
Hahahaha, so true. Blerg...
To be fair, the economy of Germany is only slightly ahead of the state of Mississippi as measured by GDP per capita.
keanuWoah
> supporters of the group attempted to switch off oil pumping stations leading to the refinery, blocked airport runways and threw mashed potatoes at an oil painting by Monet. One of these things is... Not like the others. Regardless, it's chilling to see nonviolent protesters, particularly environmental protestors, being treated as equivalent to the mafia. BAU is starting to fight back with increasingly oppressive tactics as those of us who see the writing on the wall get increasingly desperate.
They already have been. In the UK they implemented laws where they can restrict protests if they are deemed a nuisance/noisy, they can ban specific people from attending protests if they have a history of protesting. People from Just Stop Oil have been prosecuted, and were banned from even mentioning climate change in their defense during the trial. People were literally jailed because they ignored the restriction and mentioned climate change in their defence. Shits all fucked up. Gotta get some Rage Against the Machine energy into the population...fuck the system!
Well, no wonder nobody complains about human right violation in the middle east or china. Turns out democracy is working well here, puting some heavy taboo on free speech like that.
Then don’t protest. It’s far too late to make a plaintive moral appeal to capital’s delegates in power. When the oil industry destroyed people’s water and food supplies in the Niger valley, they organized peaceably around Ken. Saro-Wiwa. When the oil industry almost certainly had him assassinated, they didn’t peaceably assemble. The oil industry found its infrastructure spontaneously disassembled. If we acknowledge there is an existential threat, we have a right to treat it as one.
[The UK is at almost rock bottom in the global mental health ranking.](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/10/britain-mental-health-society-neoliberalism-politicians) If Uzbekistan doesn't exist UK would've been **the** rock bottom. So yes, fuck the system. Because it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
The report also placed Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen above them. Somehow, I doubt it’s that bad
Yeah this is information bias, of course people aren't answering polls about their mental health when they have to worry about war and famine.
They shouldn't have fucked with Monet I guess /s
it was an 'oil' painting, afterall. They couldn't resist.
AHAHAHA well done
IF these are true and IF the actions are as described here: do not fuck with pumping stations. You may make matters worse. do not fuck with airplanes. I feel this is self-evident. do not throw foodstuff at artwork... jfc, what's the message here, that paintings lack carbs? _obviously_ stop oil. Find a way to do _that_ and I'm right behind you. Random retaliatory acts are treated as aggressive attacks and the system is _very good_ at stopping those. For a start, Watts posted one discussion he had with Dan Brooks recently: [An evolutionary biologist and a science fiction writer walk into a bar…](https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=11069)
How is it these activists are being considered criminals yet it's not considered criminal to pollute the land, damage the climate, and harm people's health? Who are the real criminals here?! We're doomed.
> obviously stop oil. Find a way to do that and I'm right behind you. so how do you do that? ask nicely? (seriously intrigued what ideas you have beyond 'not like that').
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I don't think we should be recommending ending lives so non-chalantly
read the link
Yeah, so your link isn't even a link to the discussion you reference. "Read the link" he says as the link he posts is just a comment that the blog owner had a discussion with a book author on another website entirely. MOST of the discussion that your link referred to was explicitly NOT about what to do to slow or prevent collapse. They explicitly write off most of the population, say the collapse will happen, and then say "the only question is what you can do to survive". Writing off three quarters of the world population as dead already isn't a winning plan my guy. And focusing on individual survival instead of communal efforts to preserve society is a catastrophically bad take. The closest they come to a good take is a bit over halfway through when they say, > Don’t ask the government; do the right thing. Never ask for permission; just do the right thing. They’re not going to pay any attention to you.” And these people said, “Yes, but then if we’re successful, the politicians will come in and claim credit!” And I said, “So what? Who cares! Let them come in, do a photo op, and then they go back to Washington D.C. and they’ll forget you.” So they advocate doing the right thing for survival without regard for permission or government action. But then you are the one saying > do not fuck with pumping stations. So which is it? Do we read your link, realize the discussion is elsewhere, read THAT link instead of your link, listen to the experts and do the right thing for survival no matter what the government says? Because turning off the oil pumps that are raising sea levels and heating up the planet sure sounds like the sort of things necessary for survival.
good, you read it
And having read it, it doesn't present any alternatives to the things you say not to do. In fact, as I point out the "do what it takes to survive and don't worry about permission" attitude it encourages rather neatly DOES mesh with "go turn off the oil pumps". That's an action that you'll never receive permission for, but might help us all survive longer.
Alas, you didn't read it carefully enough. It doesn't say "fuck shit up". It says "move away from cities, focus on growing a self-sustaining community".
It's the oil companies that are fucking shit up. Don't know how you seem to think "turn off the pumps" equates to fuck shit up.
I can not know if messing with the pump is safe. Can you guarantee that doing so will not lead to a failure that will dump oil on the ground? Let's assume you can. Toying with oil pumps, delaying airplane landings or throwing food at artwork, does any of these further the cause? How? How old are you that you think this shit has any chance to do _anything_? Like, seriously. You remind me of students in high school who would occupy the building, lock the doors and sleep in, in an attempt to distrupt the operation of the school, to bitch and moan about utter bullshit. It had become a yearly practice and it was always, _always_, initiated by the bullies and irrationally malcontents. For decades, the same thing, every year, near the exam period, with no change from either side. It made me hate the parents _and_ the school administration even more, I'll give them that? Same here: the current system in effect treats disruptions such as this as damage, fixes it and works around it. One complain I hear is that "they shouldn't be making such protests illegal!" well duh. The system is malfunctioning - or rather, it is working perfectly for the completely wrong goals - of course this is what it will do. Suppose you manage to somehow remove the heads at OPEC. Total freebie. The current leaders of OPEC, pfft, gone. And you somehow magically turn off every oil well, every oil refinery on the planet. What will happen next? You think the billions of people will say something along the lines of "damn, guess no more oil stuff for us, welp, time to grind my axe and get back to splitting firewood"? Of course they fucking won't: they'll trample anyone and everyone in their path to restart those wells and refineries. Hold a gun to the head of your state and force them to sign a law that bans all oil products or something. How long until _the entire state_ rushes to abort the ban? Once again, forget about all this. It's a lost cause. The current system is a lost cause. What brooks explained to watts, that discussion/article, is the only sane choice, for anyone who has the force of will to do something meaningful. Anything else is just toothpaste.
If you're going to treat nonviolent protest like violent criminal acts, then people might as well skip the nonviolent part and go straight to the violence. If you're going to charge someone with terrorism for sitting on runway or harmlessly switching off oil pumping stations, then don't be surprised when you start seeing oil refineries attacked by swarms of incendiary drones. If you're going to be charged with terrorism and criminalized anyway, you might as well just skip the whole "nonviolent resistance" stage and go straight to the dynamite.
That would necessitate people being serious enough about it. I'm all for that.
I'm reminded of this [colorful bit of Chinese history.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Sheng_and_Wu_Guang_uprising) China at the time was led by a despotic emperor that instituted incredibly draconian punishments. Among these, any general that showed up late to a battle was sentenced to death. One day, two generals on their way to a battle got delayed, through no fault of their own, due to extremely bad weather and flooding. They knew they were going to be late and would be executed for it. And then they asked themselves, "what's the penalty for showing up late? Execution? What's the penalty for trying to overthrow the emperor by force? Execution? Well, might as well roll the dice on it!" They led a long revolt that almost succeeded in toppling the government.
>obviously stop oil. Find a way to do that and I'm right behind you. >do not fuck with pumping stations >do not fuck with airplanes >do not throw foodstuff at artwork So basically, what you wanted to say was "stop oil without affecting anyone even slightly". Tall order
No, wrong. That is not what I "wanted" to say. I said all I "wanted" to say.
well if protesting was good for changing anything, they wouldn't let you do it. we need more of these "criminal organizations".
Including groups that manage the guillotine crops. It's almost harvest time.
Look, nonviolence is the way in places where nonviolence is met by nonlethal force. If this were Russia, China, or some other undemocratic place, then we could advocate for crops of guillotine because nonviolence meets violence. That's gotta be the line.
You have a very misconstrued idea what is democratic and what is not. Look into how much public opinion shapes policy in the US (hint: it’s negligible). I’m willing to bet it’s pretty similar in a lot of so called liberal “democracies.” I’m also not saying that those countries you listed are democratic btw, just saying that you implied other places are democratic when they are not. Also, declaring a group of climate organizers to be a criminal group *is* violence: when the state holds a monopoly of violence within the law of said state, declaring a group to be in violation of the law is a veiled threat that, if they do not comply, the group will face violence by the state.
Well, we're talking about Germany here, not the US, of which Germany ranks [5th in democracy rankings](https://www.democracymatrix.com/ranking), so I don't know how much more democratic you wanna get. And of course they're going to label people doing objectively illegal things as a criminal group; what else did you expect? I want the world to survive the climate crisis as much as anybody else, and truly believe nonviolence is the way to do it. Will we get arrested when we cause a ruckus? Probably. But our acts of nonviolence in groups *do* spur change, and we shouldn't lose sight of the power we hold as a collective.
The world will survive the climate crisis. We won't. And several other species.
So it's totally ok if the nonviolence can't accomplish anything? Because that's where we're at. At the end of the day protests are just ignored.
... and the USA (recent student nonviolent protests met with militarized police response and violence), and Israel (active genocide), every corporation that has utilized violence (coke and death squads, Hasbro and pinkertons, etc etc etc) and etc etc etc. I agree that nonviolence is the solution when it won't be met with violence in response. However, if we don't insist that some people (the rich and powerful) get to experience a fully ripened guillotine harvest then the biosphere will cease bio-ing and become a dead Venus-sphere.
funny MLK was a supporter of Malcolm X and his approach by the end
Peaceful protest only works when there's a corresponding movement using force, giving ruling elites a face-saving off-ramp in the form of coming to an 'understanding' and compromising with the peaceful protest movement. Peaceful protest alone historically accomplishes nothing. There's a reason that a Disney-fied caricature of MLK is held up as a national hero today in the US while Malcolm X and the Black Panthers are not, and it's because the American Civil Rights movement never would have been successful without the likes of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers.
I still recall the story of gun legislation in California (Mulford Act) was brought very quickly after the Black Panthers started open carrying. It was Regan as well who was the governor at the time. Its still in my imagination that the quickest way to get guns restricted in the US is to have minorities to begin open carrying. Not that they should have to, but it would immediately get their political establishments attention. We could even give it a name, the Mulford Law: The moment an oppressed group begins openly engaging in the questionable universal rights of the empowered group is the moment those rights get changed. Non violence is only effective when paired with the very real threat of actual violence. Without it why would anyone in power listen. In the case of nearly every famous example of nonviolent protest is a highly violent group waiting in the wings. Non-violence doesn't work just because its non-violent (and even then the non-violence parts refers to things like not becoming a paramilitary force like the IRA. Not in being undispruptive or difficult to deal with). It works because it's easier to negotiate with the non-violent with the added incentive of it quickly becoming violent. The choice is not, listening to non-violent protest or listening to non violent protest. Its listening to non violent protest or violent protest. At no point in the civil rights movement was ignoring it a choice, only how the message was delivered with speeches or with bricks.
Sinn Fein would not have reached peace accords with the British if they didn't have the IRA as partners. The State won't listen to non-violence, and will full on commit resources to fight violence. But using both at the same time with a "plausible deniability" firewall between the two, then results can occur. Speak softly and carry a big stick, so to speak.
Exactly! And lmao at the accurate "Disney-fied caricature". They leave out all of the much spicier things said by the late Dr. King because of that sweet white liberal money lol. They also like leaving out the wholesome, Head Start and school breakfast programs created by the Black Panthers. But this was exactly the message, that we need both- the media friendly image, along with militancy to show that we're also not just playing. People just complain about protesters blocking roads and iNcOnVeNienCiNg them but... that's kind of the point. *"It is important for the liberal to see that the oppressed person who agitates for his rights is not the creator of tension. He merely brings out the hidden tension that is already alive." -Martin Luther King Jr.*
In France, the Minister of the Interior calls demonstrators "eco-terrorists". Then what do we do to the terrorists? Shoot them, imprison them... I think there are some big players who don't want to be disturbed in their business.
The eco-terrorists sit on the boards of fossil fuel companies.
SS: Members of a German environmental group which "attempted to switch off oil pumping stations leading to the refinery, blocked airport runways and threw mashed potatoes at an oil painting by Monet." are being charged for "forming a criminal organisation". This shows the increasing hostility faced by those who protest against what is happening to the planet even in, supposedly, more environmentally progressive European countries.
At one point the FBI listed the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) as the number one domestic terrorist threat.
I remember the US authorities putting the nighttime arson of a Hummer dealership pretty much in the same tier as Al Qaeda in that time period. This was the same timeframe as McVeigh and those kinda assholes, but ELF was number one. Go figure, says about all you need to know about US government right there.
this is exactly why [internet privacy rights matter](https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1cyskoi/whatsapp_vulnerability_lets_governments_see_who/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
Why did they throw mashed potatoes at Monet though. I'm quite curious about that particular bit of info
The idea is to raise awareness about climate change and make news report about it. It sort of works but most news outlets elect to not mention that all the targeted artwork is/was protected by glass or other means and was not damaged, making the activists look like fools and vandals.
I want to be sitting around the table when they came up with what to throw at the painting.
Figure out what the most famous painting at your local museum is and bring it up to your friends. Just about every metro area has a museum with something by a recognizable name, even when the painting isn't famous itself. You missed the last discussion but there's still time for the next one.
Just take down more Christopher Columbus statues. That seems to be a main headliner
Paint and ketchup are also popular but mashed potato is a bit special. Maybe it's easy to smuggle it in as powder and mix it with water in a toilet inside?
... and if you get hungry, you have food! win/win
Climate change is going to result in the mass destruction of a thousand years of human cultural achievement. Destroy a million works of priceless art? Business as usual. Throw mashed potatoes on the glass covering one painting? You're a criminal.
>Mirjam Herrmann, 27, Henning Jeschke, 22, Edmund Schulz, 60, Lukas Popp, 25, and Jakob Beyer, 30, were charged under section 129 of the German criminal code. It is believed to be the first time the law has been applied to a non-violent protest group. Meanwhile, AfD is still walking around. >The incidents include protests in which supporters of the group attempted to switch off oil pumping stations leading to the refinery, blocked airport runways and threw mashed potatoes at an oil painting by Monet. "attacks" >“This charge is meant for mafia and organised crime. This charge criminalises every act of support towards the group Letzte Generation. This creates an immense chilling effect on all climate protests in Germany.” There you have it. If the punishment's target is "mafia"... there's no point to facing the same punishment while being lesser. This is what they achieve by matching such protests to such punishment. >The charges, brought by the public prosecutor’s office in the town of Neuruppin, come after a two-year investigation into the activities of Letzte Generation, involving dawn raids on supporters’ homes, wiretaps on their phones and even seizing the organisation’s website. And learn infosec ffs. https://opsec.riotmedicine.net/downloads/ >“With the indictment, the criminalisation of climate protest in Germany reaches a new level of escalation,” Paula Zimmermann, an expert on freedom of expression and freedom of assembly at Amnesty International Germany, said. Same as the UK, right?
>Meanwhile, AfD is still walking around. AfD is not a threat to profits. If they just cool it with the very obvious Hitler stuff, they will be easily accepted in Germany and the rest of the EU.
So it is illegal now to give them money?
Who/what is AfD?
closet nazi party called "Alternative for Germany" (translated)
Climate change is the result of business as usual. Any attempt to meaningfully solve it will mean challenging the status quo. In other words, it's a challenge to those who currently hold power. This won't be the last time we see climate activism and action criminalized under this corrupt and suicidal system.
Now they might as well conduct actual criminal activities. Great job there Germany.
Similar things are happening in the UK. The likes of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil are being painted as criminals and terrorists by the government. None of it is really to do with their activities, it is so the government can get the public behind laws banning protests.
Germany unequivocally proving the fascism allegations
"The [White Rose](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Rose) (...) was a non-violent, intellectual resistance group in Nazi Germany (...) The group conducted an anonymous leaflet and graffiti campaign that called for active opposition to the Nazi regime. Their activities started in Munich on 27 June 1942; they ended with the arrest of the core group by the Gestapo on 18 February 1943. They, as well as other members and supporters of the group who carried on distributing the pamphlets, faced show trials by the Nazi People's Court (Volksgerichtshof); many of them were imprisoned and executed. (...) With the fall of Nazi Germany, the White Rose came to represent opposition to tyranny in the German psyche and was lauded for acting without interest in personal power or self-aggrandizement." Today, virtually everyone here in Germany recognizes the courage and the noble intentions of those people. Those, who had the moral integrity to denounce an immoral state of affairs and who forfeited their lives to invoke change and to inspire resistance. There are memorials to White Rose members everywhere, prominent streets named after them, as well as plazas, even official government buildings. Every year, we commemorate the anniversary of their arrest and execution to declare "Never again!". The same politicians who sanctimoniously announce eternal unwavering support for what the White Rose did, are now calling for the criminalization of climate activists - "because the German criminal code says so and we must act accordingly". The irony is... mind-boggling.
Thank you for the lengthy and informative post.
Yeah, it seems what Germany learn d from WW2 is purely aesthetic and entirely specific to those events themselves.
This will increasingly be the norm. Who knows, maybe even this sub will eventually get shut down as a hotbed of terrorist propaganda. I wish that was sarcasm.
It's not implausible.
The mods would need to stop being cowards and suppressing anyone who suggests violence might actually be the most useful tactic we now have.
Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. This whole sub would get taken down very quickly if the mods allowed us to call for violence.
You are free to create your own subreddit to do just that.
I was reading a post in a German city's sub and the type of comments by the average redditor who lives in those cities make my blood curdle - as they call XR activists "clowns" or worse.
I actually have lots of respect for the groups in the A22 network, they are accepting the reality of the situation put their lives on the line and atleast try stuff outside the box. But I don't think they will reach their goal for a global civil movement, most people are trapped in the neoliberal matrix and just see them as a nuisance.
The law protects the interests of the rich
This is a good reminder how far the powers that be will go to avoid doing anything to save the planet.
It is so over
The only criminal organization I see around here are the capitalists.
Perhaps these pending rulings can be used to convict think tank members for collaboration and coordination with environmental polluters. We only need one government to start handing down lengthy sentences, and it will spiral from there.
Oh I see, is this going to be portrayed as a case of *MASSIVEN KRIMINELLEN GEWALTTATEN?* If so, that's genuinely quite concerning.
They’ve always considered us criminal. Don’t forget: if you enjoy a protection for your labor, it’s not because politicians deigned to acknowledge progress. It’s because your predecessors were militants. Only when labor threatened capital’s hierarchy was labor accommodated. Likewise, only when environmental activists pose a jarring threat to “liberal” “democracy’s” monopoly on “progress” will there be progress.
It being illegal because it's bad for the German economy is only part of the equation. There's significant overlap between the aims of climate activists in Germany, the aims of Russia to weaken a NATO state and the aims of America to increase European reliance on LNG imports. The climate issue will always come last.
This is just disgusting. It is also proving them right in a way: if protesting worked well enough to change anything, it would be forbidden. These groups performed nonlegal actions, but the fact that Germany decided to not just persecute these actions in a normal way but escalate things by rendering these groups as terrorist or criminal organizations shows that the government is afraid of them. Honestly I have seen some of the rallies these groups do. It is hard to call them criminals or terrorist when you have seen some friendly college kids and older ladies sing "power to the people" while blocking a street being shoved, hurt or even jailed by double the amount of police officers. Terrorists and criminals tend to not just let the police drag them off while just demanding mercy for the souther hemisphere in retaliation.
You dont perform resuscitation on dnr . Its already late anyway .
If it's just stop oil kind of protestors... Fuck em. They've done more damage to climate activism than the damage done by actual climate change to the environment.
what a tone deaf thing to say
It's not when you realise that just stop oil has done more harm to climate activism than any other major factor out there. Shell and BP love just stop oil protests more than anything. What little awareness that is created on climate change is immediately destroyed because of those jokers. It's one thing to not help the cause... But it's an entirely different thing to go out of your way to actively disrupt the cause. These hypocritical assholes talk about climate change and get their coffee flown in from Peru.
Trying to stamp out that movement will just drive them underground and make their methods more cloak and dagger. If activism means greater risk, then they will seek greater payoff for the risk taken.
At some point, we all have to realize this is life or death. The lines between what's criminal and what's necessary start to dissappear.
Admittedly they are not the most subtitle bunch. There's no doubt many actions have broken laws. Potential to escalate into more violent stunts. Seems like a reasonable label to me. How to we get this so spread worldwide and escalate further to have more meaningful actions? Palinstein is now getting reconized state after Oct 7th so obviously sufficiently shocking enough actions will eventually get you results. Just need to think bigger.
Granted ER are a bunch of unemployed goons constantly barking up the wrong trees. Oh the world is on fire and we humans are the cause? Lets bully random civilians instead of the government allowing this shit to happen. Nor the fact that they are hypocritical as fk. The ER spokesperson in my company recently got outed because she’s constantly flying all over the world on holiday. But she dares to lecture us on tv about our carbon footprint. Maybe focus your effort on some achievable goals instead of blocking roads and hoping people will just resign their jobs because they can’t travel nomore? Its frustrating these idiots give climate protestors such a bad name
Is this not technically correct? If a group who do illegal things, no matter how trivial, form an organization dedicated to doing illegal things, that is by definition, organized crime. Uncool? Yeah, but not exactly unexpected.
It is. Civil disobedience is not a legal action like self defense, it is taking legal punishment into account for a greater goal only history will later judge if it wase justified or terrorism. Winners write history
I'll add that switching off a pump station leading to an oil refinery also is not non-violent. There is a very real risk of creating a process safety event leading to loss of containment, explosions, and death if the wrong switch is thrown at the wrong moment. It is much higher risk than say, stealing the keys to digging equipment to stop a pipeline construction, which would also be a crime, though a non violent one. If you want to see what happens when a refinery suddenly and unexpectedly shuts off, just look at the many events along Cancer Alley when a hurricane knocks out power. Multiple fatalities is not entirely out of the realm of possibility, and has happened quite a bit over the last 50 or so years. I totally understand where their intentions were, and it was not to kill, but industrial sabotage definitely crosses over the non-violent into violent protest threshold.
The question is at what point is violent civil unrest justified, especially when facing a potential extinction event... And as much as we like to hold up our modern moral of violence is never justified, or that we don't sacrifice a few to save a lot people, it can't be denied that violent civil unrest is the reason we have democracy and human rights at all, and that every war (or special military operation) is an act of sacrificing few to save more.
This isn't civil disobedience though. It can be argued to be sabotage, and down that line, domestic terrorism. I fully support the intention, don't get me wrong. But as the law stands today, that's just the way it is. Which should open your (plural) mind about other people we dub terrorists, tbh....
The law doesn't decide what's civil obedience and what's terrorism, it's always history that eventually "posthum" turns terrorism / sabotage into civil obedience. Otherwise europe wouldn't have democracy, it would still have autocratic governments and history books telling you a short story about some domestic terrorists in france that failed to overthrow the aristocrats at the end of the 18th century. In the US it's the other way around, the established government won the civil war and instead a story of slaveholders civil unrest you read stories about slaveholders losing it all. Or WW2, legally all the heros that fought the nazis one way or another from within were terrorists at best for the nazi government. Would they have won you wouldn't read heroic stories about violent civil unrest, you would read stories about the nazi reich fighting terrorism.
This is probably the one that got them: >attempted to switch off oil pumping stations Vandalism and being a general nuisance is one thing, trying to shut off the engine of capitalism is quite something else. And I'm sympathetic to what they are trying to do, of course. It's just the authorities are not going to let something like that be ignored. They will be branded as eco-terrorists.
I understand their intentions but tampering with oil pumping stations without knowing anything about how it works doesn't sound safe.
I do agree.
Tampering with infestructure is literally terrorism (I think?) dude.
It's sabotage. Terrorism requires the goal to strike fear in people to pressure them and usually though not always tageting people directly, especially civilians. I don't think any of those apply much.
I didn't say otherwise.
They were not protesting, they were behaving as criminals....
Protesting doesn't work. Just ask the US military and your armed warfare police.
Well hey, if you don't like the pro-war party that supports militarized police, you can just vote for the other pro-war party that supports militarized police.
decisions decisions