Insight: Europe cracks down after rise in 'direct action' climate protests
Insight: Europe cracks down after rise in 'direct action' climate protests
Simon Lachner had plans to glue himself to a German city thoroughfare in June to call public attention to climate change. Instead, he ended up in police custody before he'd even left his home.
The police protecting the capital class? Say it ain’t so.
50Funny. I've never rooted for a "criminal organization" before.
I am going to look into how I can donate to this "Last Generation"
24Bourgeois democracy showing it's face. Anything that challenges their hegemonic power, including climate action against oil companies, will be labeled as eco-terrorists. When that happens, it will either successfully silence the people trying to prevent climate chaos or lead to more extreme action.
23Still more free than most of the world, unfortunately.
-1I agree, but you can leave out the bourgeois democracy part.
-6
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Roadblocks on major motorways in Britain have caused traffic chaos, protests at oil installations in Germany have disrupted supplies, and in France, thousands of activists and police clashed over water usage, leaving dozens injured.
State authorities in Germany are widely using preventative detention to stop people from protesting, including holding at least one person for as long as 30 days without charge, which is permissible under Bavarian law, the prosecutors consulted by Reuters said.
Responding to a Reuters question about sharing intelligence about climate activists between European governments, Germany's interior ministry said it held regular information exchanges with foreign partners, but declined to give details.
Bavaria’s prosecutor has led a clampdown on The Last Generation, along with an investigation into whether to classify it as a criminal organization under a law that allows widespread telephone surveillance, GPS tracking and property searches.
Late in 2022, climate activists dressed in white hazmat-style suits, entered a French cement factory owned by Lafarge Holcim at night, chopping power connections with bolt cutters and smashing installations with hammers, according to a video released by a network called Les Soulevements de La Terre (SLT).
In March, SLT members joined a protest that aimed to disable under-construction irrigation reservoirs that will pump groundwater for large farms in a drought-hit wetland in Deux-Sevres in the Nouvelle Aquitaine region.
I'm a bot and I'm open source!
20I'm only ok with cracking down any war protests, but not ok with cracking down on these types.
1Weird that people willing to throw their lives away protesting don't just start killing oil barons.
1Don't advocate violence
-4I wasn't. I was merely commenting on the strangeness of their focus.
-2
Protests at oil installations make sense, and people protesting in a way that inconveniences politicians is something I love to see.
But I don’t know what Just Stop Oil is hoping to achieve with a lot of their protests in Britain. They seem to do more harm than good, and actually turn a lot of people who are on the fence against their cause.
They don’t seem to bring attention to the issues, only attention to themselves. And they’ve managed to turn a lot of people from “not interested” to actively against them and their cause.
-2If anyone is "actively against them" then the media is failing to properly inform. We are talking about the end of civilisation as we know it, this is not "their cause", this affects every single person on earth.
It's not true that "everybody talks about it anyway". They don't. It's rarely spoken about with the candor required. When was the last time you saw a climate scientist on the news?
As long as awareness of the crisis goes up (which it does), then Just Stop Oil popularity doesn't matter.
7From this point on awareness inevitably goes up as we start to see the effects of climate change first hand.
I don’t know what news you’ve been watching, but I see climate change discussed near daily. ULEZ has been in the news recently and people are talking about the politics surrounding how we actually take action when it’s being impeded by NIMBY people, which is a productive discussion to have.
Meanwhile, all the talk about Just Stop Oil is around the disruption they cause and people saying they hate them. Nobody brings up Just Stop Oil and talks about their cause.
Morally they’re in the right, but in reality they’re harming their cause more than helping it. 10+ years ago these tactics would’ve brought more attention than climate change was getting, now they’re a distraction.
-4
It's publicity. Bad publicity yes, but the message is being seen even if it's not being recieved well
5They're basically the PETA of climate change. Where they often harm their own cause because they operate by the creed that more people would be on their side "if they only knew", so most of what they do is designed mainly to get attention from the public.
A great example being the video of a medical professional yelling a bunch of them. Because they glued themselves to the main road ambulances used to get to the ER.
-5The message is known by everyone, it’s constantly being talked about regardless of Just Stop Oil.
If anything it detracts from the conversation because when people talk about climate change, some people’s go to response is saying “those Just Stop Oil protesters are a nuisance”.
Their actions seem to frequently cross the line of just getting people to pay attention, as they don’t just try and use events to be seen, they actively try to ruin those events entirely.
-6
Good. They are in the wrong with their doing, even if their course might be right.
-16Good. Worthless rats like them need to be shown their place
-29