After French Rail Sabotage, Some See Signs of a Murky ‘Ultraleft’

From The New York Times by Aurelien Breeden and Catherine Porter

Experts say the arson attacks before the opening of the Paris Olympics bear the hallmarks of insurrectionary anarchists opposed to the state.

Who sabotaged France’s high-speed train lines last month?

Clear answers to that question have been elusive so far, more than a week after coordinated arson attacks that disrupted rail travel for hundreds of thousands of travelers before the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games.

There have been no arrests, and no suspects have been publicly identified. For now, the country appears far more invested in its Olympic medal count than in the outcome of the investigation. That is probably a good thing for the authorities, because such cases, though not uncommon, are notoriously difficult to solve.

Officials are not ruling out any possibilities, including foreign interference. But much suspicion has fallen on what French authorities label as “ultraleft,” anticapitalist groups that are less interested in gaining notoriety for their actions than in disrupting the workings of the state.

Railway sabotage is a “traditional method of action” for such groups, Gérald Darmanin, France’s interior minister, said in the aftermath of the attacks.

France’s domestic intelligence agency also has said that arson has been “a preferred modus operandi” for the “ultraleft” movement, “which regularly launches campaigns aimed mainly at energy and telecommunications infrastructures.”

But in France and elsewhere in Europe, “the number of arrests for left-wing and anarchist terrorist and extremist offenses is generally not very high,” Europol, the European Union agency for law enforcement cooperation, said in a report last year.

While experts caution that last week’s sabotage case remains open, they also say it bears some hallmarks of the insurrectionary anarchists, who frequently use low-tech methods like arson and cutting cables to target railway or telecommunication sites.

One potential clue being examined by investigators is an anonymous email which was sent a day after the attack to The New York Times and other media organizations and which celebrated the sabotage. It claimed that the attacks were intended to disrupt the Olympics, which the email called a “celebration of nationalism” and a “testing ground” for mass policing that shows how states “subjugate populations.”

It is unclear if the email came from the actual saboteurs, but the Paris prosecutor’s office, which is handling the investigation, said that was being examined. Several experts on far-left movements and sabotage said that the tone and arguments of the email were consistent with an anarchist ideology, and they noted that sabotage carried out by anarchist groups was often followed by similarly fuzzy claims of responsibility.

Victor Cachard, a French author who has written extensively about the history of sabotage, said that it was hard to ascertain with any confidence who was behind the attacks. Still, he said, “when you look at the recent history of claims that come after this kind of action, the insurrectionist anarchist movement is often behind it.”

The email, which was signed “an unexpected delegation,” in a reference to the Olympics, was sent from an anonymous email address created on Riseup, a platform that “provides online communication tools for people and groups working on liberatory social change,” according to its website.

The text of the email criticized France’s weapons export industry, condemned police brutality, castigated French companies like Total or Alstom for wreaking social and environmental havoc and took a dim view of France’s high-speed train system.

“Railroads are not an innocuous infrastructure,” the email said. “They have always been a means of colonizing new territories, a prerequisite for their devastation, and a ready-made path for the extension of capitalism and state control.”

Practically speaking, targeting railway systems or telecommunication networks “requires the least energy for the greatest efficiency,” Mr. Cachard said. France’s rail system is especially vulnerable — too vast to be completely secure, and centralized, with all four main high-speed lines running out of Paris.

That makes creating a bottleneck easy, though train traffic quickly returned to normal after France’s railway company scrambled to repair the damage after the rail attacks. Another spate of vandalism last week against fiber optic cables caused limited disruption.

“The goal of the sabotage is to frustrate the state and to send the message to other groups with similar ideas,” said Thomas Dekeyser, a researcher at Aberystwyth University in Wales who has studied past cases of sabotage in Europe.

He and other experts say that in recent years more activists have become attracted to sabotage. They include climate activists who believe that traditional methods like petitions or protests have made little headway, as well as militants who object to the spread of infrastructure like 5G antennas.

France’s telecommunications infrastructure — phone lines, fiber optic cables, relay antennas — is targeted by about a dozen small-scale acts of vandalism or sabotage every month.

“There is a willingness to push the boundaries, to act not against human life but infrastructure,” Mr. Cachard said. “Throughout history, you see that sabotage goes up a notch when the state is unresponsive to traditional modes of action.”

Indeed, infrastructure sabotage is hardly a new phenomenon.

Aurélien Dubuisson, a historian and affiliated researcher at Sciences Po in Paris, who is an expert on extreme-left movements, said that sabotage was sometimes used in the labor movement’s early days. For instance, figures like Émile Pouget, an anarchist journalist and trade unionist who was active in the late 19th century and early 20th century, advocated such tactics.

Sabotage of railway lines was famously used by French resistance fighters of all political stripes during World War II. Disruptions like temporary power cuts have also been used by French labor unionists opposed to President Emmanuel Macron.

Last year, France’s interior minister said that the authorities were monitoring about 3,000 “ultraleft” activists. But Mr. Dubuisson and other experts caution that officials often use a broad brush that is not always helpful in understanding whom they are talking about.

“It’s a bit of a catchall term,” he said. “The ultraleft label has become a political and media expression for almost anything on the left that involves the use of illegal practices, whether violent or nonviolent, within a political framework.”

And arrests are rare in sabotage cases, making it even more complicated to establish a pattern or blame a specific group, experts say.

Mr. Dekeyser, who made a documentary about a series of arsons and bombs set in the 1980s by an anti-computer group, said that despite a claim published in newspapers under the acronym C.L.O.D.O., the saboteurs were never caught. After two years, the group disappeared.

Insurrectionist anarchists and similar groups are rarely interested in converting the general public to their cause or in using the press or the legal system to their advantage, experts said. They are generally loosely organized, with no formal hierarchy or structure; smaller groups may form to take specific action before disbanding just as quickly.

Anarchists and other fringe, left-wing activists are also accustomed to working with like-minded groups in countries like Italy, Germany or Spain, making it easy to slip across the border, experts say.

In Germany, Tesla was forced to halt production at an assembly plant in March after someone started a fire at a high-voltage pylon that cut electricity to the factory and the surrounding region. A group declaring ties to the antifascist movement claimed responsibility for the attack, but there have been no arrests in this case either.

“They don’t want to draw attention to themselves, but instead focus on action and vulnerability of the infrastructures,” Mr. Dekeyser said of groups like insurrectionist anarchists. “They are not interested in building a platform from which to speak.”

Comments

anon (not verified) Thu, 08/08/2024 - 14:50

They call it a celebration?

From Act for Freedom Now!

France: Claim of sabotage of TGV lines a few hours before the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.

They call it a celebration? We see it as a celebration of nationalism, a gigantic staging of the subjugation of populations by states.

Underneath their friendly, playful guise, the Olympic Games provide a testing ground for police crowd management and the generalized control of our movements.

Like all major sporting events, they are also an opportunity to worship the values that underpin the world of power and money, generalized competition, performance at all costs, sacrifice for the sake of national interest and glory.

The call to identify with an imaginary community and to support the side to which one supposedly belongs is no less harmful than the permanent incitement to see one’s salvation in the health of one’s national economy and the strength of one’s national army.

Today, it takes ever greater doses of bad faith and denial not to see the full horror generated by consumer society and the pursuit of so-called “Western-style well-being”. France would like to make this great mass a showcase for its excellence. The only people who will be able to delude themselves about its virtuous role are those who have decided to put on blinkers, and who are content to put up with it. Our deepest contempt goes out to them.

France’s influence is based on its arms production, whose sales volume makes it the world’s second largest exporter. The French state is proud of its military-industrial complex and its “made in France” arsenal. Spreading the means of terror, death and devastation around the world to ensure its prosperity? Cock-a-doodle-doo!

To the displeasure of the gullible who still believe in democratic fables, the French state also employs its repressive panoply to confront its own population. Whether to quell the riots following the police murder of Nahel in June 2023, or to try and stop the anti-colonial uprising in Kanaky recently. As long as it exists, the state will never stop using it to combat those who challenge its authority.

The activities of French companies around the world make ever more obvious the social and environmental devastation wrought by the capitalist system. Those necessary to reproduce the current social organization, and those inherent in scientific and technological progress. Progress that sees the chain of past, present and future disasters only as an opportunity to leap forward.

TotalEnergies continues to plunder and despoil new regions in search of oil and shale gas (East Africa, Argentina, etc.). Under the guise of its new green label, the nuclear industry and the export of French know-how in the field ensure that, sooner or later, our planet will be irradiated and therefore literally uninhabitable. Nothing more than another crisis for the atom’s promoters to manage. They can’t do without cooperating with the Russian state through its giant Rosatom and the support of its army to crush the uprising in Kazakstan in 2022, a major supplier of uranium. The ore that powers France’s 58 reactors.

So, what is the human, social and environmental cost of a privileged few traveling fast and far by TGV? Infinitely too much. The railroad is not an insignificant infrastructure. It has always been a means of colonizing new territories, a prerequisite for their devastation, and a ready-made path for the extension of capitalism and state control. The Tren Maya line in Mexico, on which Alstom and NGE are collaborating, is a good illustration of this.

What about the electric batteries essential to the so-called “energy transition”? Talk to the workers at the Bou-azeer mine and the inhabitants of the oases in this Moroccan region, for example, who are paying the price for this 21st century gold rush. Renault extracts the minerals needed to ease the conscience of the ecologists in the metropolises, at the cost of sacrificed lives. Talk to the “forest people” on the island of Halmahera in northeast Indonesia, the Hongana Manyawa, who despair of seeing the forest where they live destroyed on the altar of “ecological transition”. The French state, via Eramet, is participating in the devastation of previously untouched land. Nor does it want to let go of the Melanesian rock in order to continue extracting the precious nickel.

We won’t go into the impossible inventory of the mortifying and predatory activities of every state and capitalist economy. It would be no help at all to break away from a dull and depressing life, a life of the exploited, and to confront the violence of states and religious leaders, family patriarchs and police patrols, patriots and employed militias, as well as that of shareholders, entrepreneurs, engineers, planners and architects of the ongoing devastation. Fortunately, the arrogance of those in power continues to clash with the anger of the rebellious oppressed. From riots to insurrection, in offensive demonstrations and uprisings, through daily struggles and underground resistance.

Let the sabotage of TGV lines linking Paris to the four corners of France, the cries of “femme, vie, liberté” (woman, life, freedom) from Iran, the struggles of the Amazonians, the “nique la france” (fuck France) from Oceania, the desire for freedom that reaches us from the Levant and Sudan, the battles that continue behind prison walls and the insubordination of deserters the world over, all resonate on this day.

To those who criticize these acts for spoiling the stay of tourists or disrupting vacation departures, we reply that it’s still so little. So little compared to the event in which we wish to participate and which we call with all our hearts: the fall of a world based on exploitation and domination. Then we’ll have something to celebrate.

An unexpected delegation

anon (not verified) Fri, 08/09/2024 - 08:02

The article also mentions the anti-Tesla actions in jurrmany - here are the communiqués regarding those:

Berlin (Germany): sabotage of a high-voltage pylon brings Tesla factory to a standstill
https://actforfree.noblogs.org/2024/03/14/berlin-germany-sabotage-of-a-…

Berlin,Germany : news from Tesla and a second communique from the Volcano Group
https://actforfree.noblogs.org/2024/04/10/berlingermany-news-from-tesla…

Luke from DC (not verified) Sun, 08/11/2024 - 21:58

In the runup to the Olympics, French cops ordered many "persons of interest" living anywhere near the Games to stay at home for the duration or stay in jail instead. Still more were told to stay in a limited area and check in daily at police stations. QR code scanning shit was reported to be in use (was it?) to control and track people's movements all in the name of securing the Games.

For all that policing, France laid a big fat ZERO on keeping the Games from being attacked. The railroads were a soft target and they were hit. No leads, probably never will be. Guerillas struck with impunity and hit hard. All those controls could not even intimidate spectators out of greeting Israeli athletes with mass booing and Palestine's team with thunderous cheers

What are the odds all that policing was the CAUSE of the railroad attacks as well as failing to prevent them? The police harassment no doubt pissed off a lot of people including some with no obvious connections to those being watched.

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