Unprecedented Nine activists are being imprisoned pending trial fallowing Monday road clearing to open the heart of the forest to RWE’s lignite extraction. Three of the comrades are in Aachen, and six in Cologne Ossendorf having been declared to be a flight risk for remaining anonymous.
With the reluctance and the inability of the North Rhine Westphalia and German national governments to cut its dependence on coal the crossectional Forest and Climate struggles have gained considerably in diversity and strenght making the following possible:
1. This barricade clearing action being the largest and longest in 6 year history of the Forest occupation.
2. Parts of the forest roads remaining blockaded with monopods and tripod after oprox 1000 cops left the forest.
3. Over 30 treehouses and platforms in 13 forest barrio occupations protecting this millenarian Forest remain standing and safe for the time being.
As “The 9” were being pulled off skypods, walkways, monopods, tripods, treehouses, from the tops of eviction equipment and after 11 hours also out of a 5 meter hole and as those “dangerous”, “criminal”, “autonome” and “terrorist” poets, writers, punks and musicians were being brutalised the ruling class parties of SPD, and AFD showed up at this RWE planetary crime/disaster scene playing their extractionist multinational puppet roles turning all of this into a PR photo op.
They brought with them thousand cops, (helicopters, dogs, mounted police and mass equipment, and “public” ambulances “for police only”) yeah they also brought with them, whether they realised or not, sinister overtones of nationalist politicians once again present and supervising forces of repression in action. With members of the resistance this time not being armed and killing their invaders instead this time immobilizing themselves with chains, bike locks and concrete and standing there in plain sight awaiting arrival of their oppressors. Fascists would refer to partisans as bandits – this time we* are being referred to as terrorists. Terrorist is orders of magnitude more loaded and antagonizing propaganda term so appropriately instead of capture being followed by intense torture and then summarily execution what takes place now is infiltration, electronic surveillance and psychological warfare followed by evictions, arrests and imprisonment with a tail end comprising a holocaust of irreversible deforestation, climate change and extinction.
RWE’s opencast mines devouring towns,villages and ancient forests that are our homes, poisoning the whole planet with their cocktail of toxins and largest single CO2 emissions in Europe. Solid reminder that We* at the Hambacher Forest and countless other environmental, indigenous and anti-capitalist direct action struggles world-wide are truly not just fighting for our lives but also defending the lives of countless other species, and not just fighting for a world worth living on but for a Planet on which life as we know it is possible at all. Justice simplified here as mere global survival.
Justice which the Hambi 9 are not awaiting but of which they have become a symbol and harbringers of. They stepped up, now it is our* turn to warm ourselves and cook on the fires of mutual support and solidarity taking the resulting food, ideas, music and action into the streets and forests, sharing it with the oppressed, atomized and alienated in communities and forests under attack.
FOR THE EARTH!!
FOR THE HAMBI 9!!!
* Hambacher Forest is a horizontalist anti-authoritarian struggle in which all present speak for themselves and nobody else. The Pronouns: “We” and “Us”(with other pronouns remaining anonymous and ambigious) here refers to the community of countless organisms that form the web of coexistence and mutual support of all organisms functioning in unison, forming the larger Superorganism we know as Earth.