[Cja] Trainstopping! Come to Northern Germany this November – let’s stop the Castor-train!

Thu Sep 9 17:27:49 UTC 2010

Dear friends,

(as usual, sorry for cross-posting - there are just too many lists)
Attached you will find an English translation of a callout for the action “Trainstopping!” (“Castor Schottern!”), which will take place in early to mid-November of this year in Norther Germany. This action promises to be both one of the most exciting anti-nuclear action in Germany for many years, and one of the most promising steps forward in the development of the kind of mass civil disobedience we saw at the ‘Block G8’ actions in Heiligendamm, and the anti-Nazi blockades in Dresden earlier this year. But before you have a look at the callout – and maybe decide to spread it in your networks – I thought that an explanation of the significance of what we hope to be able to pull off in a few months might be useful. If you like the callout, please spread it far and wide. And of course, if you have any questions regarding the action, get in touch...

A “nuclear renaissance”?
The nuclear energy lobby in Germany has recently smelled blood. While for many years, it looked like nuclear energy would slowly (all too slowly, to be sure) be phased out, the recent growth in awareness of ‘Peak Oil’ and future energy scarcity, together with a largely technofix-oriented debate around climate change has led to what some have called a ‘renaissance’ of nuclear energy. It seems as though the industry feels it can finally crawl out of the PR-hole it fell into after Chernobyl, while governments around the world are looking to nuclear power for their ‘energy security’-needs. The result: a strong push from big energy companies and their allies in government to extend the lifespan of nuclear power, with a governmental profit guarantee in case anything goes wrong. This is both anti-social: why guarantee the profits of energy companies if social, education, or health-care budgets are being cut?; and anti-ecological: a recent
 study by a governmental think-tank made it clear that if we want 100% renewable energy supply in Germany, the time to stop expanding coal and nuclear power is now, not in ten years. The government’s argument that nuclear is a mere ‘bridge-technology’ is clearly bogus.
Hell no! The anti-nuclear movement in Germany
This is where we, the movements come in. For 30 years, the anti-nuclear movement has been one of the strongest social movements in Germany: not only has it been able to continuously mount powerfulmass actions, involving, over the years, hundreds of thousands of people in direct action and civil disobedience, it is also embedded in a social ‘common sense’, a social majority, that is clearly opposed to nuclear power, and that views civil disobedience and collective rule-breaking as legitimate when it comes to this form of energy.
Long ago, the movement identified the question of the disposal of nuclear waste as a key point of leverage. Organising around one particular location – the proposed nuclear waste dump in Gorleben, a small village in the Wendland-region of Northern Germany – the movement has aimed to make disposing of nuclear waste so difficult and (politically as well as economically) expensive that nuclear energy would ultimately become unprofitable. Roughly once every two years, a train filled with to the brim with highly radioactive nuclear waste – the Castor (Cask for Storage of Radioactive Materials) – running to Gorleben has thus been a flashpoint for large-scale actions of civil disobedience, and Gorleben has become the epicentre of a movement that, uniquely in Germany, unites left-radical and autonomous groups with NGOs, local residents and farmers with scientists, and all of them with the majority of society. Every time this train is on the tracks,
 thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of people get organised to slow it down, to make it more expensive, to try to stop it. Every time, the government has to deploy up to 30.000 cops to protect their dangerous cargo. Every time, they lose legitimacy, we gain it.
Civil disobedience: taking the next step
This year, another Castor will be running through Germany, at the usual time in the 1st half of November. But this year, things will be a little different. Not just because it’s decision time in energy politics. But also because the radical movements in Germany have over the last few years had some amazing successes with actions of mass civil disobedience. Pushed partly by the Interventionist Left, a network of what some call ‘post-autonomous’ groups, the idea has been for the more ‘radical’, or ‘militant’ wing of the movement to publicly state that our actions are not about fighting with the police, but about achieving our stated objective (stopping a Nazi march, or blockading a G8-summit). This commitment to transparency and calculability in turn has made it easier for more ‘moderate’ groups to get involved in forms of action that they might otherwise have shied away from: collective rule-breaking, civil disobedience, direct
 action. With these tactics, the movements in Germany mounted not only the effective blockades of the G8 in Heiligendamm in 2007, but also shut down Europe’s biggest Nazi march in Dresden in February of this year. Not by fighting with the cops, but by simply making it possible for thousands of people to sit down on the street in a way that they felt comfortable with, and the police obviously felt uncomfortable just blasting off the street (the keyword here is ‘legitimacy’).
With these experiences in mind, at this year’s Castor we are planning to go one step further. With the history and legitimacy of the anti-nuclear movement in mind, we are openly calling on people to get organised to not ‘just’ sit down on the train tracks, or the street – but to undermine the tracks, to openly dismantle the infrastructure of the everyday madness of capitalist energy politics. In this struggle, it’s the nuclear industry. But if this succeeds, we will have expanded the concept of mass civil disobedience  in Germany beyond sitting down. It will once again mean standing up. Tadzio Mueller
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