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Three days ago, my hometown Berlin witnessed an event (German news article) that combines several culture war flashpoints into an almost absurdist melange: a cyclist was driven over by a concrete mixer truck (who was at fault is unclear at the moment, initial statements by the police indicate that the cyclist fell over by her own and that the driver could not react in time, though he might still be at fault for driving too close to her), the driver, as he was leaving his vehicle to call for help, was attacked and wounded with a knife by an unknown and currently fugitive
homeless* person, resulting in him needing hospital care, and finally, to top it all off, the special emergency service vehicle purpose built for rescuing people stuck under heavy vehicles was hindered in its approach to the scene of the accident by a traffic jam caused by climate activists who had glued themselves to one of the main highways of the city, losing valuable time and forcing personnel that had made it to the scene to "improvise", in their own words. The woman has died of her injuries today, the driver will survive, as far as is known.It goes without saying that this story has something for everyone: car drivers vs bikers & new urbanists; crime, homelessness and decay of public spaces; climate activists vs people wanting to go about their day without disruption; and of course the extra comedic cherry on top that this happened in Berlin, notorious for incompetence and embarrassing gaffes.
In the days that followed, several notable people weighed in on social media. One particular take by one of the luminaries of German climate activism quickly made waves on social and legacy media for its display of a pretty cold-bloded pragmatism:
(image of the now deleted original)
Now, this guy in particular was always pretty radical, but until now this exact scenario was always waved away as something improbable that no activist of good conscience would allow to happen. As already mentioned, after the backlash he quickly deleted it and apologized, but his output since then has been to basically affirm the content of the tweet in a more polite tone, and the scene around him seems to agree AFAICT.
The last few months have seen an increase in highly visible stunts by climate activists, most notably a constant flow of people gluing themselves to the glass casings around famous paintings throughout Europe's museums. Highway blockades such as the one from this event are becoming a regular occurrence here in Berlin and other large German cities. It seems as though climate activism is becoming more and more serious. Up until now, reactions have been more annoyed than angry, with most people I talked to or saw posting on social media dismissing these activities as childish stunts. This and the rather unapologetic stance of the people involved might change things a bit. It remains to be seen if the reaction will be a decrease in happenings as activists are slapped down by prohibitive fines or a further radicalization. Demographically, the protestor seem to be a mixture of almost entirely urban and college-educated young people and a few younger Boomers and older Gen-Xers. I don't know if that's the stuff which refinery bombers or electricity-cable cutters are made of, but perhaps an event approaching significant eco-terrorism might be on the horizon.
* I remember reading something to this effect initially, but that seems to have been retracted or deleted. For now, nothing but the assailant's gender is confirmed.
On the one hand, there is constant low-stakes disruptive protest or mini-terrorism, depending on what side you're on. Someone possibly died due to it, sad, but numerically insignificant. Yesterday Der Spiegel ran an article (https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/berliner-radfahrerin-nach-unfall-hirntot-druck-auf-klima-aktivisten-steigt-a-1e33ffee-ecd4-47f0-8683-e5c8c696ff79) in which they reported on the event as is, quoting politicians who decry the protest as excessive but also emphasizing that it was the truck that killed the cyclist and that it was unseemly or politically motivated for anyone to jump to conclusions about any causal link between the protests and the cyclist's death.
On the other hand, saving the climate seems to be synonymous with destroying our economy. I don't have the hard numbers here, but banning all energy sources other than renewables and banning combustion engines while promoting electric cars seems like a recipe for disaster in general, and honestly the best recipe I can imagine for accelerated and total disaster in a country the economy of which depends in large parts on exporting cars that foreigners actually want to drive.
This event gives me a glimmer of hope that the public discourse becomes more likely to identify the destructive effects of environmentalism. But by tomorrow it may just as well be gone in a puff of forgettable outrage. Ultimately only two people were hurt here, and most of the country is still comfortable, and our wealth will sustain our comforts for a while yet before things become undone that cannot be ignored.
Or maybe I'm a doomer and the ecos are right; they sure have lots of people agreeing with them. It used to be crackpots and students, then it was housewives and teachers, now it's just about anyone who's not inordinately attached to economic security, and now you even get gems like the FDP (supposedly classical liberal party, often maligned as neoliberal lobbyists) arguing that we need fracking and nuclear power - but not for economic reasons, but to save the climate! Climate ideology has permeated public discourse, and as far as I can see it's impossible to tell fact from fancy in an environment where everyone chants a litany against climate change every time they consider economic questions.
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A combination of bad UX decisions in the browser, OS, and website ate the comment I was drafting, so 5x more briefly - what do the climate change protest stunts actually accomplish? Governments, unrelated companies, and all sorts of startups are working on climate change. It's been a very important topic in the 'mainstream' for decades. Obviously - the climate protestors believe hundreds of millions will die if things continue as they are, and the capitalists are just pretending to solve it, doing too little too late to pacify and get money while not threatening their core business of destroying nature, etc. But more attention on climate change itself, as a topic, isn't gonna help much - everyone's heard of it, most people think it's bad. The obvious point against that is the george floyd protests or generally anti-racism protests recently - clearly everyone knows about racism, maybe they didn't "accomplish much" in a 'material conditions for black people' sense, but they succeeded on their own terms and were massive. But is there some societal opportunity like that for these climate protestors to latch onto today, and effect change or grow more? I'm not seeing it. What large government initiative or private enterprise will happen but wouldn't if 50 roads weren't blocked and 10 paintings weren't glued? Protests certainly can and sometimes do cause large changes, but here?
It'd be interesting to read a piece about what the inside of one of these groups looks like in the current_year, or even better a close look at their members' social media. I did a really basic search for 3min, there seem to be a bunch of different groups, one had a subreddit that isn't super active, something like r/collapse is only vaguely related but more active.
What are these "own terms" you're referring to? I can't really rate the 2020 protests as a success on any metric, and I don't think the organisers would claim to have achieved any of their stated goals, but I'm open to correction.
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Not sure how much help it'll be to you, but here's a page containing all the articles the author of the tweet I quoted published for the Rosa Luxemburg institute, which is institutionally and ideologically very close to the "Die Linke" ("The Left") party. Most of this material is German only, but if you switch to English a few have been translated, like this latest one from May 2020.
From what I can tell from reading a few articles, what he's saying here largely conforms with what I've seen elsewhere: dismissal of market based solutions (interestingly, in an article from 2015 carbon taxes are mentioned as a valid tool in tandem with more direct interventions like mandating the phase-out of coal, in the 2020 article however he advocates full on socialization of the means of production as a precondition for success), the need for faster and way more radical action right now (society waking up to the reality of climate change 10 years too alte is a common theme of the newer stuff) and a focus on climate justice aspects, especially with regards to Global North vs. Global South.
So in other words, he's not hoping for an initiative of current governments or private enterprise as anything more than a temporary thing, he wants a total transformation of society along broadly Marxist lines which would then be able to tackle climate change effectively and ethically (I guess, the things he mentions and the party association obviously imply that, but he doesn't mention Marx or communism by name). I'm sure this doesn't reflect on the entire movement, I'd say the median member is much more concerned about climate change than about climate justice, but among the leadership this line of thinking seems very common to me.
Kind of what I expected, I'll throw a few into google translate
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Beyond policy changes, disruptive protests impose direct and indirect costs which in turn change behavior. Imagine you own two cars, one ICE and one electric, and you saw social media posts of tires being slashed by activists in the central business district. This knowledge incentivizes you to take the electric car, and at the margin might make you dispose of the ICE sooner than you otherwise would. If enough car traffic is disrupted by protesters gluing them at intersections, some people just might work remotely more or even take the subway.
Are ICE tire slashings common though? I don't think that specifically is a factor because the slashing/ICE vehicle ratio is very low and that, depending on how it plays out, could just make some people dislike the 'green activists' and the cars. Similarly for car traffic disruption - blocking traffic has been a very common protest tactic for a century (just this week in brazil over elections), and compared to everyone using a car it isn't enough to encourage large-scale car use reduction i think
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A feeling of success and the ability to claim part of it, without having to actually do the hard work.
Even if that's true, you can't stop analysis there - why are they doing that, as opposed to more fruitful activity, how did the movement develop, how are they different from the clear successes (the sky isn't gray anymore, the rivers don't burn, lots of wildland protection, the pesticides are less poisonous) of the past environmental movement (and how did protests contribute to that?)
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Wait a minute. How do they already know he(?) is homeless? Did the eyewitnesses, if there were any, report anything that might be interesting to us?
I could swear I read in one of the news articles that witnesses described the assailant as a man with unkempt hair and tattered clothing, but as of now all articles I could find only confirm his gender, but nothing else. I'll edit it.
That's like 1 out of every 7-8 men on a Berlin street, I presume.
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Three thoughts:
Fascinating melange, as you say. Could easily be repurposed into a partisan documentary, or a general black comedy.
Yet in terms of pure outcome, this seems like a fairly mundane happenstance, no? Every day people die of car accidents or delayed first aid. This one in particular happens to intersect with multiple culture wars, but insofar as reducing total accidental deaths is concerned, the political/cultural energy is likely more effective if redirected to fundamentals, like economic growth or technological advancement.
These roadblock and gluing-oneself stunts seem to disproportionately take place in the EU+UK, rather than the US. Perhaps copycats will soon ensue stateside, in defiance of the traditional trend of European politics and culture being Americanized. But I suspect it won't stick on this side of the pond, primarily because America is more violent. Protests are more costly when there is a nontrivial chance of a road raging American simply running you over or shooting you. If true, this violence-as-a-check-on-protest is a tricky phenomenon: on the one hand, I'd rather live in a less violent society, but on the other hand, it sure is nice to not need to worry about roads being blocked by climate protesters.
noice
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I agree: I've seen too many video of angry American drivers getting out of their cars to cuss out protestors blocking the way, often taking their signs and destroying them and otherwise escalating the situation, that I imagine most protestors will be hesitant to embrace a style of protest where you cannot run away.
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Haven’t there been cases elsewhere in Europe where climate activists blocked ambulances?
There was one in Stockholm recently where two "ambulances" were held up and one person died, possibly as a result of the holdup.
The activists have now been tried in court and sentenced to jail sentences. Everyone will appeal of course but it seems likely to me that most will spend some time in jail, the question is mostly how long.
Why the scare quotes?
One was a state ambulance and one was a private person driving someone very sick to the hospital. Both were referred to as ambulances in the press initially and it technically isn't incorrect to refer to the private vehicle as "driving ambulance" but it's a bit strange and old fashioned.
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Sardonic suggestion: both sides might agree they should be jailed until the seas rise.
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Yeah, I think the way I've seen this play out has mostly just been a fascinating illustration of many ways in which public discourse is toxic. I'm about the furthest possible from being a fan of the German Green party or climate change activism, but, well, Mueller is right. Protest generally entails disruption, and disruption means that at the margins, sometimes, somewhere, something like this will happen. That German society is now treating this as a totally unprecedented and horrifying situation that either nobody could have seen coming or nobody realised the protesters implicitly acquiesced to as an acceptable risk seems disingenuous at best, like if a year into the COVID-era BLM priotests the NYT suddenly carried an article like "Random downtown coffeeshop got smashed up. Did BLM go too far after all?". As far as disruption goes, a ten-minute delay suffered by rescue services does not even seem that unusual in terms of impacts of societal tradeoff. Should we also have big societal reckonings over labour rights next time an ambulance is too late on a Monday because of road construction, when construction could have been completed if the workers didn't get the day off on the day before? Seoul just saw 140-something dead because people decided to have a large halloween street party, and I don't see them debating (someone correct me if I'm wrong about this) whether mass gatherings for entertainment should be made a thing of the past, even though protest (yes, even that of people I consider to be performative idiots) surely is more important to society than parties.
The German "public"s habitual response to anything going wrong is pearlclutching and cries along the lines of "something needs to be done about this (by the federal government)!". The sole criterion for getting this response is getting people's attention, which in turn mostly comes down to whether the media pick up a topic.
It's routine and that it takes place has nothing to say about the material significance of the events that nominally caused it.
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I see a rather clear difference between the practical matters of scheduling roadwork and not overworking construction workers vs activists gluing themselves to the road.
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What I am pissed off is that nobody is doing the most simple and logical thing - rip those people from the asphalt and throw them away and resume traffic. That should be every citizen right for unsanctioned protests.
Climate protests are sanctioned, NGO (i.e. government) backed activists insisting the government do the stuff they want to do anyway
I doubt they had permission from the municipality to glue themselves to the road
Not explicitly. But the police always let them hang out on the road for a lot longer than they need to and there is a conspicuous lack of security present when they vandalize those totally real paintings. They're funded in large part by Aileen Getty of the Getty family.
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I believe most government structures are sophisticated enough that they can support someone without literally giving them a piece of paper saying they have support.
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I see sentiments like this pretty consistently, that protestors need to be able to impede others and disrupt them to make them listen. What I don't follow is how this doesn't grant full license for retaliation and escalation - is that simply ruled out as a possibility on the basis that the protestor is righteous, so there is no license to response to impedance with violence? Surely if one of these protestors was doxxed and I went to their house and simply refused to allow them to exit their door, they'd have legitimate license to use force against me, right?
I'm not being sardonic, I genuinely don't understand why refusing to allow someone to pass isn't provocation to violence.
There's a number of differences - the obstruction is targeted against random rather than specific people, the glue people don't seem to be doing the "you are not going anywhere" thing implicit in refusing too allow someone to exit their house, and of course the first speaker doctrine. The objective of free speech as I see it is strictly to expose people to more viewpoints. Actions that increase the number of known viewpoints are therefore to be supported, and actions that decrease them (such as interfering with/retaliating against viewpoint-pushers) are to be opposed.
I hope you are not trying to imply that I'm making this argument because of any sort of agreement with climate protesters. To be sure, I would be saying the same thing if this happened with a neonazi protest, although of course then there would be little controversy regarding the interpretation of this event in German society.
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If it's only protesters that are righteous, and allowed to disrupt others for attention, then that still grants license for me to temporarily become a counter-protester and disruptively protest your protest by pushing you out the way.
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If the protester was predominantly agreed to be righteous, the protest would be unnecessary; the contra-factual target(s) and/or their society(s) would already be trying to carry out the protester's desires.
What protest historically has relied upon, though, is the possibility of revealing a disagreement between the target and society on just how unrighteous the protestor is being, which may then even lead society to reconsider whether the protester is being unrighteous at all. Half the point of the protest is to get the immediate target to overreact, which then may get society to "come and see the violence inherent in the system", which then may prompt society to change the system rather than acquiesce to enabling further violence.
Society does indeed give license to respond to impedance with violence, albeit to such a limited extent that a non-libertarian might not recognize it as violence. The last climate protest video I saw ended in cheering as bystanders dragged protesters out of the street they were blocking, for example. I bet the bystanders would have burst into song if an ambulance had been among the stuck cars. But there are limits. The public response to running over protesters has been pretty heavily negative, and if you were to go about hunting protesters down at their houses after the fact then I doubt you'd achieve more than a footnote in future textbooks near the photos of Birmingham police water hoses. Serious violence even to stop a crime in progress is already a PR nightmare; retaliation is widely agreed upon to be the government's sole prerogative these days.
In general, I can agree that somebody is right about an issue without approving of their tactics in trying to convince others.
More specifically, I can agree that my wife is correct that we need to replace the carpets, and still be annoyed if she slashes my car's tires every morning before I leave for work until I agree to call the carpet store immediately.
Of course it's possible to believe that someone's cause is righteous even though their tactics are not.
But what I'm doubting in the statement you quoted is that it's possible to believe that someone's tactics are too righteous to deserve a standard punishment even though their cause is not righteous enough to support. Could you think that your wife is incorrect that you need to replace the carpets, but agree that her slashing your cars tires is a reasonable way for her to handle that disagreement and should be consequence-free?
I guess even there I'm neglecting grey areas. There are surely minor crimes (large/loud public assemblies without permits, when they're not badly obstructing traffic?) which most people would want to overlook if committed in service of a political demonstration they disagreed with but would not want to overlook if committed for a more "trivial" reason (a block party, concert, etc).
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Not a chance?
Banning dissent against the government is far less a totalitarian overreach than banning fun.
There are many more alternative ways of having fun to mass parties in the street than there are of dissent to disruptive protest. If you don't think existence of alternatives counts for evaluating totalitarianness of a measure, is NY state (which bans unlicensed private use of most fireworks) thereby more totalitarian than Germany (with its very limited understanding of free speech)?
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Well, Wuhan virus is more often used as a cudgel for those with this particular axe to grind.
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I've been shocked at how much they'd ramped up the fringe insanity, assuming they'd try to keep quiet until the crisis blows over. Do they just not have any response other than "radicalize and escalate harder," because that's always won social conflicts for them in the past?
When they seize power and try to play escalation chicken against the brick wall of physical reality, they're going to hurt a lot of people.
Do you see any reason this won't work this time?
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Who, exactly, do you mean by “they?” What’s the crisis that’s supposed to blow over?
If you’re talking about climate fanatics, the premise kind of implies that the crisis won’t blow over.
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We're 50 years out from these people bombing things. We're not getting more radical, we're getting more squeamish about safety and death when one person dying possibly as the result of a delay caused by an activist is a large news story.
Can you imagine the hoopla if a climate activist blows up a bomb in NYC? As opposed to it just being another Tuesday in 1972.
These things have gone up and down. As wild as the events detailed in Days of Rage were, the LA Riots were also quite the to-do and the nationwide scope of the 2020 riots was similarly wild. When random towns like Kenosha are subject to burned buildings and street violence, it is emphatically not a setting where all that's going on is sqeamishness.
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I'm not talking about bombings. If the only response they have to failure is radical escalation to ramp up social coercion, how do they deal with the actual physical problem of rolling blackouts?
I'm saying that when they're running the government, solar panels not working when the sun goes down will be blamed on climate wreckers, Soviet style.
The same way they do right now: the price goes up, and the people who can't afford it (either on their own, or because the resulting economic downturn by not being able to make goods when power is nonexistent or not at competitive rates resulted in them losing their jobs) are simply left to freeze.
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Wow. Tragic in the classic sense—no one wanted any of these outcomes, except maybe the knife-wielder, and yet one thing led to another. It really does beggar belief.
I remain confident that radicalization and counter-radicalization will not meaningfully escalate. Radicals and edgelords say shit on Twitter all the time; the unusual thing about this case is that outlets happened to run with it. As for backlash, I don’t think that any number of tweets will convince random people that environmentalists are a threatening entity. They will (correctly) continue to be viewed as something that happens other people.
Twitter is okay at convincing other users that one believes/will act on something. It’s pretty abysmal at convincing outsiders that such a belief has accrued a meaningful following. News sites will say such-and-such is trending, and show screenshots of one or two inflammatory examples. This will fail to mobilize counter-radicals as long as they aren’t affected personally by one of them.
"Wanted" as in consciously acted towards this world-state? Probably not.
But preferring it to one in which a highway wasn't protested and the green movement didn't gain a "martyr"? Well, there is at least Mr. Mueller.
To the degree one conflates these two, depends on how charitable one is.
From the other side of the aisle, the right is often accused of "wanting" muslim terror-attacks or anti-European hate-crimes, because it can use them to build a cae against immigration.
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Hah! And they said the showrunners of our simulation are getting lazy!
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