Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The Federalist has accused The New Yorker of amplifying calls for ecoterrorism, in the wake of the recent publication of “How to Blow Up a Pipeline“, and a New Yorker podcast titled “Should the Climate Movement Embrace Sabotage?“.
New Yorker Amplifies Calls For Pipeline Bombings To Save The Planet
SEPTEMBER 27, 2021 By Jordan Davidson
The New Yorker amplified calls for eco-terrorism in the name of sparking action on climate change last week by inviting Andreas Malm, the Swedish author of “How To Blow Up A Pipeline,” onto its podcast.
In the episode titled “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” Malm explains how it’s time for the climate change movement to “diversify its tactics and move away from an exclusive focus on polite, gentle, and perfectly peaceful civil disobedience.”
Malm stopped his recommendations short of “kidnapping oil workers” but said that “civil disobedience” ostensibly to save the planet should include mass acts of “intelligent sabotage” and property destruction, such as blowing up pipelines.
“I’m not saying we should stop strikes or square occupations or demonstrations of the usual kind. I’m all in favor of that. But I do think we need to step up because so little has changed and so many investments are still being poured into new fossil fuel projects,” Malm said. “So I am in favor of destroying machines, property — not harming people, that’s a very, very important distinction there. And I think property can be destroyed in all manner of ways, or it can be neutralized in a very gentle fashion as when we defeated the SUVs, or in a more spectacular fashion, as in potentially blowing up a pipeline that’s under construction. That’s something that people have done.”
…
Read more: https://thefederalist.com/2021/09/27/new-yorker-amplifies-calls-for-pipeline-bombings-to-save-the-planet/
The New Yorker podcast by David Remnick is available here.
I tried listening to the podcast. The climate portion of the podcast, the friendly interview with the author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline, starts at 17:00 minutes, with author Professor Andreas Malm boasting about how he and his friends used to roam around rich suburbs in Sweden deflating SUV tires.
Andreas credits his group’s sabotage campaign with crashing sales of SUVs in Sweden. That may be, but in my opinion he is lucky he and his friends weren’t busted causing a fatal vehicle crash. Andreas claims his technique caused a slow deflation over a few hours, like planting a small stone under the air valve cap, to gently press on the valve and cause the tyre to slowly deflate. So if the owner started driving shortly after the attack, the driver might not notice one or more of their tyres was slowly going flat.
Their technique was subtle, if there was a fatal crash, and the coroner found the small stone in the valve cap, it could have been ruled an accident. I’m sure most of us have had an unpleasant experience with a tyre suddenly failing – a very possible outcome of Andreas’ subtle SUV tyre sabotage campaign.
I mentioned the exact technique, because this is something SUV owners in climate activist areas should maybe start to watch out for. Next time you have a tyre failure, check your tyre valve.
At 22 minutes into the podcast, author Andreas Malm appears to recommend blowing up pipelines.
At 25 minutes, Andreas whines ordinary people are not engaged with the climate crisis “the people don’t rise up!”, and criticises the “dogmatic commitment to non-violence” of other climate activists.
At 27 minutes, “burning down police stations is an integral part of the uprising”.
At 30 minutes, Andreas concedes killing people, kidnapping oil CEOs and murdering them, would cause a backlash.
At 32 minutes, “A strategy which does not involve oil getting more expensive is not a strategy at all”.
At 32:48, New Yorker’s David Remnick suggests Fox News might spoil the campaign by pointing out the eco-terrorists were causing widespread fuel price misery. Andreas responds “Well, I don’t think that we should adapt our tactics after the enemy’s script”.
At 34:30, “Normal protests work best when they target fossil fuel production … peacefully breaking through police lines, shutting down gas pipelines”.
At 37 minutes, the Andreas Malm interview finally ends. The podcast then goes on to discuss sea level, but I’m afraid I stopped listening, 20 minutes of this nonsense is about as much as I can take in one sitting.
As far as I can recall, throughout the entire interview, the closest The New Yorker host David Remnick came to criticising Andreas Malm’s position, was questioning whether murder might cause a political backlash which could undermine Andreas’ climate campaign.
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Why haven’t the police in his country knocked on his door? What more evidence do they need other than his confession?
Apparently, pre-crime only counts when a bunch of crazy teens schedule a Columbine-like attack 3 years in advance.
No, he has openly admitted to flattening tires in his hometown, that is vandalism of private property.
He should be looking out through iron bars right now
People don’t actually, really, literally go to jail in Sweden. Some spend the night there but are released on weekends or to go to work or to a child’s recital, and so on. It is very civilized.
No doubt the weekends are reserved for personal counseling to help the cons deal with the stresses of incarceration.
Statute of limitations … look it up for Sweden
Even though we disagree with things you need to remember the law.
Remember Mao said power or interpretation of law are best exercised at the end of a gun. Just sayin’
They have committed a world wide range of a very grave sabotage by depriving hundreds of millions of children of proper education. I can’t think of any any kind of physical sabotage doing more damage to the well being of the many western democracies economics.
Actually, it would be great if this dude blew up a pipeline, or inspired someone else to do it. The blowback would be immense – both the environmental damage, and the spike in oil and gas prices from interruptions in supply (people are already getting very angry about the recent runup in oil and gas prices, partly due to increase demand, and also partly due to supply disruptions in American production due to Hurricane Ida this year).
I remember well the “Monkey Wrench Gang” mythology of how great it was to destroy stuff you don’t like .. but then they started spiking a lot of trees and got a lot of loggers killed and seriously injured .. and the blowback was immense. Many of the perps got time in the big house, and all of the mystique of blowing stuff up was destroyed by the picture of blue collar guys just trying to provide for their families getting hurt and killed by metrosexual dilletantes claiming to be green heroes.
These ignorant idiots do not have the intelligence or rationality to conduct a sensible argument with those who disagree with their views but do not resort to terrorism. Like all terrorists they can only argue with a gun in their hand; a situation that will get worse unless our law enforcement agencies do what they did yesteryear and slap these imbicliles behind bars.
Looks like it is about time that some persons think about defending their way of life. These eco-terrorists are willing to seriously injure or even kill persons in their mad rush to judgement. I gave classes to both ranchers and geologists about the confrontation of eco-terrorists and the use of civil law as a transition into criminal law and at what level in the escalating sequence what force response was legally permitted. This transition, usually either a gross misdemeanor or a felony, varies state to state.
No kidding, remember when those crazy eco loons spiked trees in the NW?
Sick people.
I think one of those tree spikers is in congress.
Tracy Stone-Manning, a nominee to run the Bureau of Land Management, proving that the Universe has a perverse sense of humor.
I predict that if someone actually pulls the trigger on such an act, David Remnick will receive an off-hours visitation from those affected, after which his whereabouts will be unknown.
Oh, his whereabouts will be exactly known. He most assuredly will be found playing gin rummy with Jimmy Hoffa.
https://www.cfact.org/2021/07/17/how-does-anyone-write-this/
So he’s in favour of destroying things but not harming people? How do people get this stupid? Just imagine the loss of life with a blown-up pipeline or two in the middle of a northern winter. What is truly scary is that he will likely get away with inciting criminal behavior in an age where we can be arrested for using the wrong pronoun or not wearing a mask. Maybe, in addition to fertilizing plants and contributing to a slight and beneficial rise in temperature, the increase in atmospheric CO2 is destroying brain cells in a segment of the population.
Aren’t pipelines an “infrastructure”? Whether blown up, or simply not completed?
Destroying Pipelines don’t just kill people in the destruction, it kills people who freeze because they do not have fuel to keep warm, or for food transportation or adequate cooling on the hottest days.
[please fix your email so I don’t have to keep fixing it for you.-mod]
“So he’s in favour of destroying things but not harming people? How do people get this stupid?”
First-order thinking. Nobody considers the ramifications of actions. Or they simply don’t care. In this case, most likely both.
There was a “Funky Winkerbean” cartoon decades ago, where a radical demanded that a nuclear power station be turned off, so it was turned off, and the lights in the room of the radical went off, much to his dismay. Sounds similar.
I would think that leftists should be advocating for more and cheaper energy (fossil fuels) so as to lift the poor up higher out of poverty and give them the comforts there afforded. But as usual, they have everything backwards.
Those “leftists” who advocate for such stuff are the most equal of all animals.
And their goal is to reduce world population to > 500 mio .
(And you have to be very rich and influential to get the permission to set up stuff like the Georgia Guidestones(estimated cost 800k inflation adjusted ) at the end of the world
and to do it in such a way that its impossible to find out who arranged and financed it.
Those Georgia Guidestones…what a standing challenge to graffiti artists.
Some of us leftists do exactly that.
Noone denied that such people don’t exist.
But you are a tiny tiny minority.
Equal to the percentage of co2 in our atmosphere.
Even smaller than that: So far i have only found one lefty white activist who follows his values with strict logic = Pat Condell.
Remember how fast the millions strong anti war movement turned to nothing just because the mass murdering psychopath who continued bushs war was black.
Can you imagine how dangerous such a group is where 99.9% can be so easily controlled.
Don’t you get it? Greenies hate people – they’re all misanthropes who believe humans are a viral disease of their beloved Gaia.
They couldn’t care less about billions of under nourished deprived persons trying to scratch out a living due to lack of cheap energy availability – after all, the greenies ride around in their jet fuel hogging luxury jets and $100K Teslas,and live in McMansions in Malibu and Martha’s Vineyard, and lecture the rest of us on how we need to live on less.
Bingo
It’s the same reason they insist on doing everything they can to encourage subsistence farming over large-scale farming in the developing world. Large-scale farming is vastly more productive, more robust against drought/pests, and generates MUCH greater food security for the population. They can’t have that. They need those fleas off Gaia’s back. It’s also why they fight against life-saving GMO breakthroughs like golden rice that has the potential to save millions of children from vitamin A deficiency-related mortality. Can’t have that. They need LESS filthy humans on Gaia, not more. Those flea larvae must die.
The leftists do not want to lift anyone out of poverty, they want more people in poverty so more people will be dependent on the Government. This gives them more control over us.
Or committing arson to cause California wildfires to be blamed on ‘Climate Change’…
That seems to be a popular faculty lounge topic and hobby.
It’ s all part of Alynskies “Rules for radicals” strategies.
Anarchy was Trotsky’s means to an end.. The change was to empower the disenfranchised not save the globe from a false problem. A way of building cadre and opportunity for power grab. Alinsky wasn’t a anarchist either but saw civil disobedience as a way to build cadre and political power for change Now we have anarchists whose end is anarchy. They are so easily leveraged because their end has a series of dramas with no end in sight. The only end I see is a global struggle over market share and price setting for fossil fuels. All the rest of the propaganda and dramas are ultimately in service of it… not revolution for solving climate change… (cause it will solve itself by continuing to change).
The irony of Anarchy is that it is actually what you get with ultimate freedom.
You can be free or you can be fair. To be fair you need to define what is fair using rules and then you need a method to enforce them.
The Left – typically – likes to think they are moving towards a fair and just society, however the more ‘fair’ they make it the more ‘rules’ are involved and the more enforcing that is required. Enforcing rules removes freedoms. You could for example make rules requiring that everyone obtains exactly the same amount of pizza, but then someone has to audit the pizza slice sizes and ensure no one attempts to scrap melted cheese off the bottom of the box at the expense of others. Or, heaven forbid, decides they are not that hungry and give their slice to Bob.
The Right – typically – wants to be left alone to enjoy their freedoms and to – perhaps somewhat selfishly – look after their immediate loved ones.
The compromise of society is that you always need SOME rules. Which side of the road you drive on. The concept of ownership. The concepts of how ‘money’ works. Stuff like that. However if you have too many rules then no one has freedoms. But if you have no rules you have Anarchy.
Anarchy, the beloved status of many Left Wing activists, is actually an Extreme Right concept obtained by granting ultimate freedom.
False flag operations, one of the oldest techniques in combat or politics.
Such was the pretense used by Hitler to justify his invasion of Poland. His Gestapo attacked a German radio and border observation station near the Polish border, killing all the German soldiers therein. Then their goons murdered a couple of concentration camp prisoners, dressed them in Polish Army uniforms, and planted their bodies amongst the German dead. Within a few days the German tanks and Stuka dive bombers rolled into Poland. The Soviets (Stalin) concocted their own excuse to invade Poland from the east a few weeks later, dividing up Poland between the Nazis and the Soviets per the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact signed in mid August 1939.
Blowing up oil or gas pipelines does incur a carbon-cost.
Perhaps, the eco-terrorists could blow themselves up thereby limiting their carbon footprint.
In 1970 the Weather Underground made a bomb that did prematurely explode and kill 3 members…the Students for Democratic Society and other Left Wing groups were active …maybe a Climate Underground will appear?
Or as the mullah who was about to demonstrate an explosives vest to a suicide bombers squad told them –
“pay attention. I’m only going to show you this once”
Malm is normal for a hard core green in being nihilist and misanthropic. He is just more open about it.
Fanatics for any cause (usually a mission to save something from imaginary doom) cannot respond to reason because ipso facto, they were bereft of reason to start with.
I don’t know what the solution to this dilemma is.
I suggest that the freedom movement embrace the tactic of ratting out as many arsonists, and wanna-bes, as we possibly can, and then demanding harsh sentences for them.
If that isn’t enough to shut them down for good and all (for example BLM/Antifa terrorists) then it may be necessary to consider stronger measures, probably directed at their organizers and sources of funding (*cough*Soros*cough*).
The possible problem here for Malm and the NYer is that his advocacy of violence here is not necessarily going to be one way. There are those who are critical of the environmental movement in its present form who might (I suggest) decide to push back and make it a two-way battle of violence.
I of course condemn all violence. However, if he and the NYer are willing to make the environmental and climate alarmist movements a violent one, Molotov Cocktails are not hard to make when it comes time to retaliate. The offices of the environmental and climate movements are probably not hard to find.
Can you imagine the screaming, rhetoric, FBI involvement if you changed one or two words to the title “vaccine clinic”.
Yeesh…The morning shows talking about the horrors of the terrorists, the man hunts, the TwitFace shutting down accounts…
Another nut from academia.
This is not nut.
It’ s part of a plan.Call it predictive programming or priming.
Same as with racism or AGW.
Noone cared about it 35 years ago ,but then they started repeating the mantra over and over again until they got the needed number of people following the nonsense.
If you would use such an argument to suggest terror attacks on the owners of the New Yorker (and all the other Epstein island pedos)
you’ d be under total attack by the msm for inflammatory hate speech etc.
A spoilt child who cannot get his way will do horrible things to his parents and siblings without thinking of the consequences. However, when an adult behaves in a similar fashion, it is truly reprehensible and deserving of real punishment and being publicly shamed.
Let me see if I’ve got this right: we have a society now where if someone dares to reveal secrets that a government should not hold from the people it’s supposed to serve in the first place (Assange, Snowden), ‘authority’ hounds them to all corners of the earth and effectively imprisons them. OTOH, we let people who advocate destructive terrorism against everyone but government to walk and speak freely.
How many think that a society operating with those principles can survive, much less be free and just? Who is designing and implementing this?
The purpose of all this ranting and wailing is exactly to bring it down. To raze society to the ground, and start all over again. Build Back Better
Anarchy can hardly expect protection from the legal system it rejects.
That behavior justifies standing off 300 yards with a Barrett .308 and “saving” them from the horrors of their climate apocalypse.
You have to kill the planet in order to save the planet, or so the saying goes.
If they want to blow up pipelines, why stop there. Powerline towers are easy targets too.
But also good targets are wind farms and solar projects, both panels and thermal units. A few well placed rounds from a 300 Win Mag would take out a turbine generator in no time. And a very small round, say a 223/5.7 would do wonders for a solar panel. Considering how remote some of these sites are, and the range of some good long rifles, this would be child’s play.
Be careful now….. If you initiate violence, don’t complain if it gets to rough for you!
John Kerry’s Raiders
None of the green solutions have a beneficial ending to them
They have to burn the village to save the village . And given the chance they will.
Murder is only wrong if it creates a political backlash. These guys are sick. Then again, they are leftists, they start that way.
Like many religions sometimes the line between morality and beliefs blur
There is no line here. It is all the same to them.
If the eco warriors believe in democracy, they should stand for office on a platform of what they bekieve in or want, and if they don’t get elected they should go away and shut up.
Obviously they don’t believe in democracy, they prefer dictatorships where they are the dictators.
So let them go and live in a dictatorship, there are plenty of them about, except that I don’t think that there are any dictatorships that want what the eco warriors want so they work out their frustrations by annoying the people they want to influence by blocking motorways and planning to blow up pipelines.
I would put them all on an uninhabited island somewhere with minimal facilkities and let them run their own dictatorship. Plenty of places like that around. South Sandwich Islands? South Georgia? Kerguelan for French speakers?
believe not bekieve.
Greenies have been embracing sabotage for decades. Good greif, these forest fires haven’t been lighting themselves you know.
Waiting for this guy to get banned for life from Twitter and Facebook for advocating illegal acts…Ok, still waiting…waiting…*crickets*
Hardly anything new. The left has always been comfortable advocating violence.
Beyond that, this is just another example of the affluent yet economically useless promoting ways to punish the economically useful who have better things to do with their lives. And it will continue unabated until there are real consequences to this sort of behavior.
I’ve always maintained that if the ‘depopulate to save Gaia’ bunch ever achieves their goal of getting the population down to 500 million, it will be the wrong 500 million people that remain.
The people who are too busy working to make and maintain our modern technological world are not the academics and basement dwellers that expect to be among the 500 million remaining.
Don’t count on that bunch to keep the lights on and your furnace and air conditioner working, your planes and helicopters flying, or your smart phone being good for anything but a paperweight.