How to Blow Up a Pipeline Quotes

“non-violence is not to be treated as a holy covenant or rite, then one must adopt the explicitly anti-Gandhian position of Mandela: ‘I called for non-violent protest for as long as it was effective’, as ‘a tactic that should be abandoned when it no longer worked.”
― Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“If SUV drivers were a nation, in 2018 they would have ranked seventh for CO2 emissions.”
― Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

“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

“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

“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

“The context for hope is radical uncertainty; anything could happen, and whether we act or not has everything to do with it.”
― Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

“The oil being taken out of the ground and the machinery that does it and the infrastructure which supports it – this is violent’,”
― Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

“Or is there another phase, beyond peaceful protest?”
― Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

“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

“People wielding that axe have always been told that we’re fucked, we’re doomed, we should just try to scrape by, nothing will ever change for the better; from the slave barracks to the Judenräte and onwards, every revolt has been discouraged by the elders of defeatism.”
― Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

“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

“Property destruction still happens – it’s just done by the wrong people for very wrong causes.”
― Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

“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

“Gandhi’s strategy for national liberation never – this is true – condoned violence against the British, but it did include violence with them.”
― Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

“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

“rich people cannot have the right to combust others to death”
― Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

“After the past three decades, there can be no doubt that the ruling classes are constitutionally incapable of responding to the catastrophe in any way other 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

“The pith of non-violence, in Gandhi’s philosophy, was abstention from sexual intercourse: the soul would reach exalted heights only if it learned to ‘crucify the flesh’.”
― Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

“In November 1938, in the days after Kristallnacht, the mahatma published an open letter to the Jews of Germany exhorting them to stick to the principles of non-violence and to delight in the results. ‘Suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength”
― Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

“votes for women, Pankhurst explained, were of such pressing importance that ‘we had to discredit the Government and Parliament in the eyes of the world; we had to spoil English sports, hurt businesses, destroy valuable property, demoralise the world of society, shame the churches, upset the whole orderly conduct of life’.”
― Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

“After the hope of attaining the vote by constitutional means was dashed once more in early 1913, the movement switched gears. In a systematic campaign of arson, the suffragettes set fire to or blew up villas, tea pavilions, boathouses, hotels, haystacks, churches, post offices, aqueducts, theatres and a liberal range of other targets around the country.”
― Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

“in the summer of 2019, 6,000 people closed the largest point source of emissions in Germany, backed up by several thousands more in the camp and some 40,000 in a Fridays for Future demonstration.”
― Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

“Young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us I say we will never forgive you’ – ‘change is coming, whether you like it or not’.”
― Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

“How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying’,”
― Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

“Now the likelihood of the ruling classes implementing a global prohibition of all new CO2-emitting devices because scientists tell them to, or because billions of people would otherwise suffer grievous harm, or because the planet could spin into a hothouse, is about the same as them lining up at the summit of the steepest mountain and meekly proceeding to throw themselves off the edge. 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