New Yorker Interviews an Eco-Terrorist Who Calls on Activists to Blow Up Pipelines
The New Yorker interviewed an eco-terrorist who called on activists to destroy pipelines, “machines” and “property.”
David Remnick interviewed Andreas Malm for an episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour, which was released on Friday.
“Andreas Malm insists that the environmental movement rethink its roots in nonviolence and instead embrace ‘intelligent sabotage,’” reads the description of the interview.
“I am recommending that the movement continues with mass action and civil disobedience, but also opens up for property destruction,” said Malm, a human ecology professor at Sweden’s Lund University and the author of the book How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire, which was released earlier this year.
Malm elaborated that he is in favor of harming property, but not people.
“I am in favor of destroying machines, property, not harming people, that’s very important distinction there, and I think property can be destroyed in all manner of ways or it can be neutralized in a very gentle fashion … or in a more spectacular fashion as in potentially blowing up a pipeline that’s under construction,” he said. “That’s something that people have done.”
As an example of property damage in “a very gentle fashion,” Malm cited the time he deflated tires of SUVs in rich Swedish neighborhoods in 2007. Looking back, Malm said that wasn’t property damage, rather an “inconvenience” for the SUV owners. Malm said there was only one arrest over this activity but not before thousands of SUVs had their tires deflated.
Malm praised the property damage done during the riots following the 2020 killing of George Floyd, a black man in Minneapolis, Minnesota, murdered by Derek Chauvin, a white police officer who put his left knee onto Floyd’s neck in order to restrain him even though Floyd was in handcuffs, on the ground and no longer resisting.
“That was an integral part of an uprising that brought more millions of people into the streets of the U.S. than any other in American history,” said Malm. Remnick noted that the majority of demonstrators were peaceful and that there’s been criticism that the rioting was “a hinderance” and “alienating in terms of public opinion.” Malm called that “a faulty reading.”
Listen above.
