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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.
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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