THE CASE OF ANDREAS MALM

Is Flop26 Triggering an Escalation of British Sponsored Eco-Terrorism?

by Stephanie Ezrol

[Print version of this article]

Nov. 1—Andreas Malm, a self-proclaimed advocate of destroying “CO₂ emitting devices,” who is currently an associate professor and senior lecturer in the Department of Human Geography at Sweden’s Lund University, is now publicly calling for the blowing up of pipelines and other such terrorist actions as a new phase of “saving the planet and its climate,” which he calls “intelligent sabotage.” He burst into the American media on Sept. 24 with a 38-minute podcast interview with The New Yorker magazine’s Pulitzer Prize winning editor, David Remnick, “Should the Climate Movement Embrace Sabotage?”

Why is a man advocating criminal activity now a media darling? In that interview he called directly for sabotaging the pipeline that the French company Total is now building between Uganda and Tanzania. He repeated his threats on October 1, in an interview with the news magazine Vox, which reported that he was asking people to—

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 investing in the fire know that their properties will be trashed.

Vox continues, “For Malm, we have a choice: Destroy the property that’s destroying the planet, or sacrifice the Earth on the altar of that property.” Malm’s targetting of the French company escalated in this interview:

A country that’s not so often discussed in this context is France. The single largest company in France is Total [TotalEnergies SE], which is one of the major oil and gas companies in the world, currently constructing what will be the world’s longest heated oil pipeline in Tanzania and Uganda. They just signed a contract with Iraq for a massive expansion of the oil and gas infrastructure there. They want to go into the Arctic to get even more fossil gas.

Now, this company cannot continue to exist as such. It cannot continue in this fashion, if we’re going to have a planet where we can live without going up in flames. I think that company should be taken over by the state in France. It should be socialized, nationalized, and forced to quit fossil fuel production and do something else, such as cleaning up the atmosphere instead of polluting it even more.

Who is this monster? Who or what is paving the road for this gilded anarchist? A pathway to the answer is looking at the publisher of his book, How To Blow Up a Pipeline, released as an English language paperback in January 2021 by Verso Books. Verso describes itself as “the largest independent, radical publishing house in the English-speaking world, publishing one hundred books a year.” The publisher, as it makes clear on its website, is the child of “New Left Books,” which itself was “launched by New Left Review in 1970.” The very British New Left Review (NLR) focused “initially on translating works of European political and social theory, economics and philosophy,” including Theodor Adorno, Georg Lukács, Ernest Mandel, Herbert Marcuse, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Max Weber.”

For longtime readers of EIR, that list itself will set off alarm bells. Add to that New Left Review’s love affair with Bertrand Russell’s 1950s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the same Russell who called for a preemptive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, and its promotion of what became the 1968 student-based terrorist wave. The magazine reports:

NLR was founded in 1960, from a merger between the Boards of Universities and Left Review and The New Reasoner—… The common political focus uniting these two currents was provided by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), the first anti-nuclear peace movement.…

From 1962 to 1963 … with the dispersal of the New Left movement as such, NLR retrenched as a theoretical journal whose intellectual orientation was on the whole more geared to the emerging preoccupations of Continental theory. Articles by Claude Lévi-Strauss, R.D. Laing and Ernest Mandel signalled these new interests.

These were no mere academics. These people are key to British-based psychological and physical terror operations. Mr. Malm is now being mainstreamed in the British Royal Family’s endgame operation now being unfurled in its full colors at the Glasgow COP26 Climate Change Conference.

In an interview with the French green internet site Reporterre, Malm makes even more clear his link to the British Royal Family and the Davos Billionaires, saying the climate movement should take as its model Black Lives Matter, another darling of the media and the billionaire glitterati class, saying:

I don’t think it’s wise for the climate movement to take perpetual vows of absolute non-violence.… The Black Lives Matter movement, for example, inflicts a complete disclaimer on the theory of strategic pacifism. It really took off when Minneapolis residents stormed and burned down the Minneapolis police station. If strategic pacifism were true, this event should have led to the demonization of Black Lives Matter. However, the exact opposite happened. This fire was a wake-up call that the police are not above the law in the United States. Black Lives Matter went on to bring together a wide range of currents; some choosing to destroy property, toppling statues erected to the glory of slave owners, others confronting the police in urban riots.… The role of the radical activist fringe is to instill in those who do not want to engage in active activism the courage to take to the streets and make their voices heard.… to seek modes of action that are equivalent to destroying the police station in Minneapolis or toppling statues.

Malm followed his eye-catching short book, How To Blow Up a Pipeline with the much longer, and even more insane White Skin, Black Fuel, on the Danger of Fossil Fascism in May 2021, also published by Verso. He and his coauthor, “The Zetkin Collective,” claim to prove that fossil fuels are intrinsically an invention (and a tool) of white supremacists. Therefore, fighting the use and production of fossil fuel is tantamount to fighting fascism and racism. This would be laughable, except that the people sponsoring such madness intend to eliminate what they consider to be the excess six billion people on the planet. With this brief report, EIR is reopening its file on eco-terrorism and its sponsors.