Radical climate protectors: Fridays for Terror

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Police officers and demonstrators at the Garzweiler open-cast lignite mine

Photo: Tim Wagner / imago images / Tim Wagner

Will lignite excavators soon be blowing up?

I've been asking myself this question since I read a SPIEGEL interview with activist Tadzio Müller, 45, a few days ago.

»Destroyed car showrooms, destroyed cars, sabotage in gas-fired power plants or on pipelines.

There will definitely be next summer, «says Müller.

»Whoever prevents climate protection creates the green RAF.

Or climate partisans.

Or sabotage for future.

Whatever they call themselves then. "

Now you don't have to take everything literally what a professional activist says, who for years has been overtaken by police officers in the fight against the pig system.

Much is just PR.

But in fact, part of the climate protection movement has not only radicalized itself verbally.

Tree squatters in the Hambach Forest threw Molotov cocktails and excrement at the approaching police officers.

The anti-coal movement "End of Terrain" is being observed by the Berlin Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which it considers to be left-wing extremists.

A current bestseller in the scene is called "How to Blow Up a Pipeline";

In it, the Swedish author Andreas Malm dreams of "ecological Leninism", thoughts that, according to the "taz", should be taken seriously.

Do I have to fear that my children will become terrorists if they join Fridays for Future again?

Two weeks ago, activists met with Germany's prospective Chancellor for a conversation that they had achieved through a hunger strike. They issued an ultimatum. “By the end of the year” Olaf Scholz has time to pass a law against food waste and to take action against agriculture that is harmful to the climate. Otherwise Germany would be "brought to a standstill" through an "uprising of the last generation."

Amazingly, the mood escalates here at a time when the movement is successful. The activists treated Scholz as if he were a German Donald Trump and not the first German chancellor to declare climate protection "top priority" in the coalition agreement. Greta Thunberg accused the climate summit in Glasgow of celebrating "business as usual and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah", while progress has been made in phasing out coal, avoiding methane, and protecting forests. While eco-activists fantasize about Lenin, the world's largest asset manager Blackrock punishes companies that neglect their carbon footprint.

So where does the anger come from?

Perhaps it is also due to the sound of doom that dominates the debate in politics and the media.

When German municipalities declare a “climate emergency” and editorialists declare the forest fire in California a world fire, it is no wonder when activists get the idea that peaceful protest is not enough.

It is enough to describe climate change as a "climate crisis"; there is no need for a "climate catastrophe".

If you don't want Terror for Future, you should disarm linguistically.