[The Greens are a moderate, centrist party, reluctant to pander to
any eruption of social conflict and more than cautious in its dealings
with big business interests.]
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THE GREENS ARE IN GOVERNMENT, BUT ENVIRONMENTALISTS ARE
‘CRIMINALS’  
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Marco Bascetta
January 19, 2023
Il Manifesto Global
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_ The Greens are a moderate, centrist party, reluctant to pander to
any eruption of social conflict and more than cautious in its dealings
with big business interests. _

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Lützerath, the name of a small farming village in
Nordrhein-Westfalen, will remain in the political memory of the German
Republic for a long time. And not just because of the
not-entirely-peaceful clashes that are taking place these days between
the activists, who are occupying it and intend to defend it to the
bitter end, and a massive police deployment tasked with clearing the
village at any cost, so that it can be demolished and make room for
the expansion of the already enormous coal mine owned by the energy
giant RWE.

It is not easy to explain how and why, in a country where the Greens
are part of the federal government in a position of the highest
importance, and in a state where they’re in the local government
(but here together with the Christian Democrat CDU), they are
supporting police eviction and increased mining exploitation, among
the most harmful activities for climate change. For a long time, the
Greens have been proponents of a form of “political realism” that
becomes hard to separate from a vocation for being in government which
seems to take precedence over every other consideration, and now they
are claiming credit for securing an early exit from the use of coal
energy in exchange for the extension of the Lützerath hole.

The party leadership says this is a very good compromise. But the fact
of the matter is that, beyond commitments for the future, which are
always made-up numbers that get suspended due to this or that crisis
factor, the immediate political signal that is being sent is in a
radically opposite direction to any avenue to fight climate change and
land devastation, let alone one marked by environmentalist
sensibilities. A decision that is all the more incomprehensible after
the verdict of several research centers, which confirmed the complete
uselessness of an expansion of mining in the Rhine region for the
country’s energy needs.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has dealt a good hand to the lords of
fossil fuels and nuclear power, so that one cannot rule out that, when
the war is over, Russia itself might reap benefits when it puts its
enormous fossil fuel deposits back into play. Moreover, against the
backdrop of the conflict, the German Greens had already been converted
to supporters of Germany’s massive rearmament and its stratospheric
cost, both symbolic and financial.

The Greens are a moderate, centrist party, reluctant to pander to any
eruption of social conflict and more than cautious in its dealings
with big business interests, and it was inevitable that they would end
up on a collision course with the environmentalist and pacifist
movements, not to mention the much-maligned Last Generation, as well
as with its own youth organization, which is siding with the occupiers
in Lützerath (a phenomenon that also happened to the SPD in the
1960s, with the secession of the SDS). This place now symbolizes a
great paradox, and the number one reason for it to be demolished is in
order to reestablish a political order of priorities that would push
the climate crisis far away in the background, so cosmically dark and
unreachable that it could be kept hidden from view whenever
convenient.

In any case, the eviction of Lützerath is not an easy matter that can
be resolved in hours or days. The occupiers, barricaded in huts built
in trees, on rooftops and in attics, have organized themselves so as
to remain as long as possible in the eye of public opinion, which has
little sympathy for the coal giant. As time goes on, it is likely that
the confrontation will tend to escalate, and so will the tensions
between parties, institutions and movements, with all their repressive
consequences.

There has been no shortage of warnings, and for weeks now some have
ranted about the supposed birth of a “Green RAF.” Since 1991, a
group of intellectuals and linguists at Philipps University in Marburg
has been choosing, from thousands of crowdsourced proposals, the
“Unwort of the Year,” that is, the “non-word” or the
“unworthy” word, malignantly lacking in meaning, as we might
roughly translate it. For 2022, the dubious honor has gone to the
word _Klimaterroristen_ (“climate terrorists”), a label often
slapped onto Last Generation activists, and one that combines complete
nonsense (who is actually being terrorized, and how?) with an obvious
intent to “criminalize nonviolent protests, civil disobedience and
democratic resistance” (according to the rationale of those who
awarded the distinction), which is practiced by movements fighting
against a development model that is now generally deemed
unsustainable.

In every way, it’s an awkward attempt to discredit the noble –
while somewhat utopian – aims of environmentalism by juxtaposing
them with the (imaginary) illegality and violence of the means used to
further them. However, this framing has shown little propensity to
sway public opinion. The demolition of Lützerath is proving to be a
major misstep, a definitive blow to the already discredited
“diversity” of the Greens (with likely repercussions on the
upcoming Berlin elections), and ultimately a caving in to RWE’s
profit motives rather than a necessary support for the country’s
energy needs.

* Environmental Justice
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* Coal Mines
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* German Greens
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* Germany
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