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

Wed Sep 22 01:12:00 UTC 2010

*Dear friends,*

* *

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.

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 powerful mass 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 1^st 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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