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How to Blow Up a Pipeline QUOTES

How to Blow Up a Pipeline QUOTES

1 " I once asked Bill McKibben, after an energising speech to a capacity crowd, when – given that the situation is as urgent as he portrayed it and we all know it is – we escalate. He was visibly ill at ease. The first part of his response presented what we might call the objection from asymmetry: as soon as a social movement engages in violent acts, it moves onto the terrain favoured by the enemy, who is overwhelmingly superior in military capabilities. The state loves a fight of arms; it knows it will win. Our strength is in numbers. This is a pet argument for strategic pacifists, but it is disingenuous. Violence is not the sole field where asymmetry prevails. The enemy has overwhelmingly superior capabilities in virtually all fields, including media propaganda, institutional coordination, logistical resources, political legitimacy and, above all, money. If the movement should shun uphill battles, a divestment campaign seems like the worst possible choice: trying to sap fossil capital by means of capital. "

― Andreas Malm , How to Blow Up a Pipeline

2 " So here is what this movement of millions should do, for a start: announce and enforce the prohibition. Damage and destroy new CO2-emitting devices. Put them out of commission, pick them apart, demolish them, burn them, blow them up. Let the capitalists who keep on investing in the fire know that their properties will be trashed. "

― Andreas Malm , How to Blow Up a Pipeline

3 " Climate fatalism is for those on top; its sole contribution is spoilage. The most religiously Gandhian climate activist, the most starry-eyed renewable energy entrepreneur, the most self-righteous believer in veganism as panacea, the most compromise-prone parliamentarian is infinitely preferable to the white man of the North who says, ‘We’re doomed – fall in peace.’ Within the range of positions this side of climate denial, none is more despicable. "

― Andreas Malm , How to Blow Up a Pipeline

4 " the emergency is already here, the cup of endurance fast running over – but the onrush of catastrophe does have a temporality of its own. It imposes tight constraints on those who want to fight. "

― Andreas Malm , How to Blow Up a Pipeline

5 " Or is there another phase, beyond peaceful protest? "

― Andreas Malm , How to Blow Up a Pipeline

6 " If a pandemic can induce governments to take emergency actions, why can’t a climate breakdown that threatens to kill off the very life-support systems of the planet do the same? After this, there can be no more excuses for passivity. "

― Andreas Malm , How to Blow Up a Pipeline

7 " Protest is when I say I don’t like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don’t like. Protest is when I say I refuse to go along with this anymore. Resistance is when I make sure everybody else stops going along too’, as one West German columnist wrote in 1968, relaying the words of a visiting Black Power activist. "

― Andreas Malm , How to Blow Up a Pipeline

8 " The commitment to the endless accumulation of capital wins out every time. After the past three decades, there can be no doubt that the ruling classes are constitutionally incapable of responding to the catastrophe in any other way than by expediting it; of their own accord, under their inner compulsion, they can do nothing but burn their way to the end. "

― Andreas Malm , How to Blow Up a Pipeline

9 " At what point do we escalate? When do we conclude that the time has come to also try something different? When do we start physically attacking the things that consume our planet and destroy them with our own hands? Is there a good reason we have waited this long? "

― Andreas Malm , How to Blow Up a Pipeline

10 " Texas and the prolific Permian Basin is the epicentre of the development of new pipelines’, "

― Andreas Malm , How to Blow Up a Pipeline

11 " Property destruction still happens – it’s just done by the wrong people for very wrong causes. "

― Andreas Malm , How to Blow Up a Pipeline

12 " Disease, in the Gandhian view, results from impurity and must be allowed to do its cleansing work, and the same goes for extreme weather and earthquakes: with unusual consistency, the mahatma preached that victims of such events had it coming. "

― Andreas Malm , How to Blow Up a Pipeline

13 " Even the reverend did: visiting Martin Luther King in his parsonage, soon after his home had been bombed, a journalist was about to sink into an armchair when he was alerted to a couple of loaded guns on it. ‘Just for self-defence,’ King explained. "

― Andreas Malm , How to Blow Up a Pipeline

14 " The civil rights movement won the Act of 1964 because it had a radical flank that made it appear as a lesser evil in the eyes of state power. "

― Andreas Malm , How to Blow Up a Pipeline

15 " The tolerance for subaltern violence stands in inverse relation to the absoluteness of capitalist dominance and the consequent suffusion of a social formation with violence – the American allergy, in other words, is a pathology. "

― Andreas Malm , How to Blow Up a Pipeline

16 " Property destruction was a particularly distressing prospect. If the cities burned, ‘the white man’s companies will have to take the losses’, whined one close adviser to Kennedy and Johnson. "

― Andreas Malm , How to Blow Up a Pipeline

17 " some exercise of the imagination might allow activists to neutralise CO2-emitting devices with easily accessed means. "

― Andreas Malm , How to Blow Up a Pipeline

18 " Ilona Otto and her colleagues point out that in 2017 alone – according to official rolls – forty-four individuals inherited more than $1 billion each, a total sum of $189 billion. The four largest global funds for financing adaptation to climate impacts approved projects amounting to $2.78 billion. Forty-four individuals thus cashed out sixty-eight times more unearned wealth than what the world’s victims of climate catastrophe were allocated, and most likely, some of it went straight to superyachts and the like – as if the act of injecting poison into the groundwater also coincided with snatching purification tablets out of the hands of slum-dwellers. This compounding of the crime can only intensify at higher levels. "

― Andreas Malm , How to Blow Up a Pipeline

19 " People don’t need yachts – they want yachts’, in the words of a CEO of a top superyacht manufacturer. "

― Andreas Malm , How to Blow Up a Pipeline

20 " If we cannot even get rid of the most preposterously unnecessary emissions, how are we going to begin moving towards zero? "

― Andreas Malm , How to Blow Up a Pipeline