Attack on the Coal-Fired Power Plant in Berlin – Sabotage as Strike – Life as Sabotage
Le enviamos saludos de apoyo, solidaridad y libertad. We send you greetings of support, solidarity and freedom. No estáis solos: ¡juntos liberaremos la Tierra! You are not alone – together we will liberate the earth! Give back the earth! ¡Devuelvan la tierra!
Our action is a powerful salute in support of the Indigenous struggles in Colombia against coal mining and a sabotage of the German climate and industrial policies. In response to the eviction of Lützerath, this action is a belated receipt, and a declaration of solidarity with the “Last Generation”.
This morning, on 12.06.2023. we glued an incendiary device to the Reuter coal power plant in Berlin and set it on fire. At the scene we didn’t leave behind any superglue but in the early morning hours we ignited a large incendiary device. With this we wanted to hit the Reuter coal-fired power plant in the industrial and commercial area around the “Wiesendamm” and the “Freiheit”: We did not find any Wiesendamm (meadows) or Freiheit (freedom) there, only an excavation pit about three to four meters deep, in which more than ten power cables were exposed. To set the fire, we descended with a ladder into the shaft, which was about two by two meters wide.
Our main target was the Reuter coal-fired power plant and a section of its power supply, which has maintained an impressive cable bridge at the level of the construction pit over the Spree river almost since the power plant was built. This quite significant cable bridge is not marked on either old analog maps or current digital ones! It is at the height of the curve at the “Wiesendamm”, where construction work is currently being carried out on the power supply, and runs across the Spree through the lower-lying allotment garden. The power plant operator VATTENFALL will not be interested in commenting on the impact of the attack, so as not to admit its vulnerability to militant climate activism.
While Lützerath is being cleared for the energy giant RWE and while people are dying for the “blood coal” in Colombia for the energy giants STEAG, GLENCORE and RWE, we are attacking parts of the large hard coal power plant here as a self-defense measure. Unlike the energy companies, we have not endangered human lives with our action.
Around the “Freiheit”, the scraps of civilization are recycled for industry. Concrete and cement plants (CEMEX, DEUTAG, Deutsche Teer- and Asphaltschotterwerke and others) are also located here. CEMEX is anything but a small fish. We also encountered security companies (e.g. Berlin Security Group) and logistics companies such as Tanklager Berlin, storage facilities and train trucks for petroleum products in the industrial district.
We see our action as a brake against the destruction of our environment and living conditions.
We feel that the red line of tolerability is being crossed every day. We are witnessing the unbridled glorification of brutal economic growth, boundless progress, and the associated devastation on a global scale beyond measure. We constantly see, hear and read about horrible situations for humans, animals and the environment, which are triggered by environmental destruction and wars.
Is there a lack of arguments? Or a lack of knowledge? Is there any need for persuasion at all? And to whom? Shouldn’t we switch to active resistance? It’s all been said a thousand times, out of the mouths of women, children, men, countless people. Spoken, screamed, desperate, silenced. Her skin was brown, it was black, it was red or yellow and sometimes it was light. It wasn’t all said yesterday, it’s been said for centuries.
COLOMBIA? FOR EXAMPLE:
Here at home, the supposed end of hard coal is celebrated as an example of ecological sustainability, while in Colombia death and destruction are exchanged for energy for German industry – that is colonialism today – in green.
“El Cerrejón” in Colombia was a crime against people and nature even before the attack on Ukraine. The coal mine covers almost 70,000 hectares in a semi-desert area in Colombia. Forced expropriations, evictions, threats and murders of Indigenous environmental activists are not unknown to the Yukpa and other Indigenous groups. On their land, a gaping wound has been torn into the earth. In addition, there is murder by environmental poisoning. Infant mortality is extremely high. Members of the Indigenous Wayuu ethnic group also describe the environmental pollution caused by the El Cerrejón coal mine and the associated Puerto Bolívar seaport as threatening their existence.
Every day(!), the mine, popularly known as the “monster,” swallows more than 30 million liters of water and contaminates the groundwater. All the coal that is ripped out of the earth there is destined for export to Europe, China and the USA. So that we can satisfy our greed for energy here, 30 million tons of coal a year were exported to Germany and burned even before the Ukraine war. According to RBB (a German free-to-air TV station), a wave from Chancellor Scholz to the Colombian president by telephone on April 6, 2022, led to the expansion of a controversial coal mine in Colombia. On the same day of the conversation between Scholz and President Duque, Indigenous communities were “informed” by the “environment” ministry, according to RBB, that they must now leave to make way for the expansion of the “monster.” Germany secured the export of hard coal with agreements during the Ukraine war and accepts a further increase of CO². Indigenous, Afro-Colombian and peasant communities, on the other hand, have their backs against the wall, for example, in their struggle for water and the protection of the Bruno Stream in La Guajira. “The Bruno Stream is the largest tributary of the only river in the Río Ranchería region. Already,” according to TAZ (a German newspaper), “they would have to drill deeper and deeper, some wells are already contaminated. The water of the stream is sacred to them, it has spiritual and cultural significance.”
One of the beneficiaries is one of the largest Swiss companies. GLENCORE, active in the raw materials business, maintains its own mines worldwide. One of these is the “monster” in Colombia. In the wake of the war, GLENCORE increased coal production by 14 percent to 53 million tons between January and June 2022. This is mainly attributed to production at the El Cerrejón mine in Colombia.
500 years ago, the Wayuu were among the first to be invaded by European conquerors. Later, they were among the first victims of drug cartels, extorted, displaced and murdered for the North American and European drug markets, among others. Now the Wayuu, the Yukpas and other Indigenous groups are in danger again due to the proximity of the black gold, also called “blood coal”: Colonialism is rewritten again and again, only the signatures change. The conquerors were always concerned with material power – with gold, with cocaine, and today with energy. The business Colombia does with coal amounts to several billion euros, and the energy companies double and even triple this profit.
Since the Ukraine war and the subsequent visit of Scholz to Colombia, the import of hard coal to Germany increased to 690,000 tons in March – (about three times as much as in the previous month). Of course, the colonial energy project is flanked and accompanied by an economic agreement and the associated military agreement; war and economy are not independent phenomena – they are traits of colonialism. The conquest of markets and the theft of labor and resources, the exploitation of nature are warlike relations. We see the struggles against these relations in other countries – those of the Yukpas and the Wayuu, for example – and we want to contribute now – here and now – to interrupt the life-destroying interaction.
The Swedish energy giant VATTENFALL still wants to continue with hard coal and its two thermal power plants in the city of Berlin. So VATTENFALL (along with energy giants GLENCORE, RWE and STEAG) must also be considered a war winner. STEAG, for example, operates coal-fired power plants at six sites in Germany, accounting for about five percent of total electricity generation in Germany. The Essen-based group is Germany’s fifth-largest power producer; managed by Kommunale Beteiligungsgesellschaft GmbH & CoKG. Behind it are Stadtwerke Duisburg AG (19%), Dortmunder Stadtwerke AG (36%), Stadtwerke Bochum (18%), Stadtwerke Essen (15%) and others. VATTENFALL shows a 62% increase in sales in its 1st quarterly report of 2023 – the Swedish group’s profits are correspondingly high. So war is profitable.
The murder business with fossil energy must not be allowed to profit one more day! We cannot wait until VATTENFALL (maybe!) shuts down its two coal-fired power plants in Berlin in 2030. We don’t have enough time.
May 4 is “Earth Overshoot Day” in Germany. As far as natural resources are concerned, we in Germany are living at the expense of the planet as of this date. This makes us one of the biggest climate killers by international standards.
Our hunger for energy is constantly fueled by new smart technology that we supposedly need. Concrete manufacturing, steel & aluminum production and processing, sealing, farmland destruction, energy-intensive supply chains, SUVs, (increasing) air travel, luxury yachts, “smart cities” and so much more fuel global warming. In the business sector, short-haul flights grew to a total of 100,000 in 2022.
The digitization of all areas of life creates further hunger for energy. The individual human being is the object of exploitation with simultaneous (self-)optimized surveillance. In this country we still need be reminded that the control of people by authoritarian systems can also lead to destruction if people are labeled as “unworthy”. When the “Sommerlove” capsizes in the Central Mediterranean or the right of asylum is further gutted and dehumanized, it is because of the “double standards” of human life. We call it blatant racism.
TROUBLE IN THE ENGINE ROOM? FOR EXAMPLE:
We no longer want to have anything to do with the logic of profit, with the belief in progress as a promise of happiness nor with an unwritten social contract of “prosperity at the expense of others”.
But no life, no matter how reflective, liberates us. We do not escape by emigrating to an island or to Mars, not by inner exile, not by fair organic food, not by participation or boycott of elections. We cannot get out of the dynamics of our conditioning from the system if we do not fundamentally refuse.
We ourselves sit in the engine room, in the metropolises, in the global North – often without being aware of it. With every payment transaction, with every smartphone useage, with every productive participation in the unwritten social contract that has cemented inequality and domination as an immutable law of nature, we are cogs in the wheels of the machine.
And together with many others we have most of the tools at hand in everyday life to stop the machine!
Here we adopt the discussion and the preparatory work of other Volcano groups as our own and refer to it. When we are in the engine room, our sabotage is a form of strike to stop the machine. Life as sabotage, sabotage as strike. Sabotage is a super means of intervening and attacking: in the economy, exploitation and neocolonial exploitation and global destruction. Practiced broadly, it can support struggles.
Who, if not we, can stop the machine at the place of economic surplus value absorption. The revolution is permanent. And it is social. Together! we can refuse the daily collaboration. Or in the words of the Angry Birds Commando, “Our loyalty must no longer be able to be bought by cheap toys and shallow entertainment, or coerced by heavy-handed violence. Every grain of sand in the gears helps block the expansion of the machinery.”
In our case, if no one in authority wants to take a coal plant off the grid, then we do it. If more than a few groups do it, we can cause the machinery to stumble.
We want to discuss sabotage of the infrastructure within the movement as a modern form of machine storming.
In its function as a business location, the machine room is crisscrossed with veins, cable strands, data highways, rail lines, control centers, nodes, administrative and monitoring units.
Switching off, shutting down and destroying radio towers, telecommunications, power plants, goods traffic, transformers and power lines in a targeted and deliberate manner interrupts the functioning of the engine room, briefly stops the machinery at selected points and can also force the end of destructive projects on a broad scale. Above all, the destructive exploitation of the earth’s resources far beyond the use of fossil energy requires the courage to act.
With our action we locate ourselves within the continuity of the Volcano groups. We also decided on the name because the eviction of Lützerath should have consequences for all of us. We greet the approximately 35,000 people who tried to defend Lützerath with their bodies and ingenuity in all kinds of weather, even if we did not dare to do everything in Lützerath. We salute all those who built up the resistance for years.
RWE and the economy should pay dearly for the clearing of Lützerath. And with them the hypocrites in politics and the Robocops.
Our action was one small contribution among many. With our fear – but also with our courage – we went out into the night.
ARE SUPER ADHESIVES WEAPONS OF THE GUERILLA? FOR EXAMPLE:
The criminalizations against climate activists are currently ramping up. Already activists who glued themselves to the street were commented on as being the emergence of a “climate RAF (Red Army Faction)”. The Senator of Justice in Berlin is seriously investigating whether the “Last Generation” is a criminal organization. The union of the beat cops “GdP” claims that the climate activists have “become even more militant in the guerrilla actions of recent weeks”.
This was followed with a raid by terror investigators in Bavaria and other German states against the “Last Generation”. It is clear: the attack on the climate movement is politically motivated and sanctioned by higher authorities.
The judiciary, as a weapon of politics, economy and unjust property relations, is used because an organized structure dares to leave symbolic forms of action and to stop the “natural law” mobility of individual traffic and to paralyze cities. And this in a country where the car is king. Even with the beginnings of “civil disobedience”, which so far has not allowed itself to be intimidated, attempts have been made to eliminate it with a paragraph like §129.
This attack on a part of the climate justice movement means an attack on all of us, far beyond the climate struggles. Criminalizations are the harbingers of an authoritarian state, when social tensions increase as a result of climate destruction and wars. Combining struggles of the climate justice movement with other struggles, e.g. anti-fascism, makes §129 a blunt weapon (we send solidarity greetings to Lina and all fighting and persecuted antifascists).
In our opinion, the state attacks on the high-profile climate actions have at least two functions: they are intended to divide the movement, to desolidarize it from its supporters, thus weakening it and pushing part of it underground so that it can be better dealt with as an isolated problem.
But the time of militant action or guerrilla activities is decided by a revolutionary movement according to political criteria, not by repression!
The defense against state attacks can succeed through the expansion of radical and public actions on the one hand and militant support by groups like ours on the other.
And the second function of the state’s attack on the activists: blinding grenades. Attention is diverted from the actual social upheavals in society and the discontent about them, the social consequences of climate destruction are blurred and an image of the enemy is built up. Superglue becomes the tool of “criminals” who can be targeted. This is how anger is channeled. The concept has long been tried and tested – against refugees, for example. It is not the perpetrators of global social injustices who are targeted – not the ruthless rich who enrich themselves immeasurably at the expense of the planet and trigger global refugee movements, but groups such as the “Last Generation,” who, strictly speaking, represent moderate and staid positions, but do so penetratingly. One is not afraid of the superglue, the little bit of congestion, the apparently manageable demands – but of the fact that this could be the beginning of something bigger and perhaps already is. From Bild (German right-wing tabloid) to FDP (Free Democratic Party – a center right political party), Greens & AfD (Alternative For Deutschland – a far-right political party) to Scholz, who declares the activists “crazy”, everyone agrees on the enemy image.
The antidote here too; expansion of activities and linking of struggles, for example with the struggles of Indigenous groups in Colombia. Against precarious living conditions and climate destruction, against misogyny, against patriarchal alliances like those of the fascists, many forces can be bundled to oppose domination as a whole. If a climate movement also addresses the other social rejections, or allies itself with other movements, the attempts at division through the criminalization of activists come to nothing. And if we support each other, communicate our intentions socially and allow different forms of action, the accusation of terrorism also comes to nothing. In the case of this action: discuss the political intent behind the act, but laugh at the politicians, cops and movement leaders who call on us to denounce actions.
There is no reason to distance yourself from something you did not do yourself. Above all: politically we do not distance ourselves from ourselves, we have different political strategies as climate activists and should leave no stone unturned to save the earth from destruction. Our strength lies in the diversity of our resistance.
Those who burn the earth for endless profit are criminals, not the resistance against them. The terrorists wear suits and sit in the supervisory boards and in the boardrooms at RWE, at VATTENFALL, at AMAZON, at BAYER and at RHEINMETALL and watch alternately on their screens the rising stock exchange prices and the Robocops destroying Lützerath.
We return the accusations of criminal association and terrorism with fiery greetings.
In this country, “freedom” is proclaimed profusely, but the foundation of “freedom” is based on stolen land, while its raw scaffolding was and is built from stolen lives.
FOR EXAMPLE:
Defend the lives of Indigenous people in Colombia
“Give back the earth! ¡Devuelvan la tierra!”
Defend the lives of Indigenous people in Mexico – Stop Train Maya
Alto a la guerra contra los pueblos zapatistas! – Stop the war against the Pueblos Zapatistas!
Si tocan a un@, nos tocan a tod@s – If they touch one of us, they touch us all.
Stop fossil energy production by sabotage
Attack GLENCORE, RWE, STEAG
Impunity for all climate activists
Impunity for all antifascists
Sabotage as Strike – Life as Sabotage
Friends of the Last Generation – Volcano Group Lützerath
source: https://de.indymedia.org/node/285115
translated for Abolition Media by Nae Midion