Jim Button had a hard time with the pseudo-giants. They got smaller and smaller the closer you got to them. They want to be active again next week, so let them announce it on all channels. And the cameras are already waiting for the pictures as longingly as if we were living in an endlessly long, completely uneventful pickle era. Linguistic exaggerations like “Climate RAF” are welcome because they spice up everyday life and provide the usual suspects with the right ammunition for debate.
Another term from the old days of terror was more appropriate, even if it cannot be associated with non-violent resistance. But it brings closer to what has happened so far if we refer to the so-called last generation as “urban guerrillas”. Because they want to create focal points in Berlin and Munich. In addition, their demands expose them as children of the big city. They want the nine-euro ticket back: City dwellers should be rewarded for living in the city or its surroundings and for having public transport right outside their door. It would have been much more revolutionary to ask the state to pay for people living in rural areas to take a taxi to the S-Bahn station.
The second demand on the banners – that of 100 km/h – protects its own clientele in the cities and again burdens the third of Germans who live in the countryside and also the drivers whose job takes them to the Autobahn.
What remains is the demand for climate protection, raised in front of as many drivers as possible who are forced into traffic jams. In these winter days, they sit in their cars, laboriously kept warm by combustion engines that emit unpolluted exhaust gases because the catalytic converters have not yet reached their operating temperature. Not only the climate, but also the local people will not like it.
When they get stuck somewhere, this “urban guerrilla” is apparently not concerned with the topic, but with images in the cities where the demonstrators and as many cameras as possible have short distances to protest. So far they have been successful and drowned out the reports about energy problems, austerity programs, price caps and even about the Russian war of aggression. The expert bows before this cleverly engineered PR success. Only the climate has none of it. (Peter Schwerdtmann/cen)
