By Sabine BEPPLER-SHAHL
We Berliners now know what life without fossil fuels looks and feels like.
In the early morning hours of Saturday, January 3rd, an arson attack on cables supplying southwestern Berlin with gas-generated electricity led to a massive blackout. It left more than 45,000 households and thousands of companies, shops, care homes, and streets without light and heating for four long days, as temperatures dropped to minus 7 degrees.
This was the second such attack within less than five months-the previous major blackout in September had been the worst since World War II, affecting over 50,000 households and businesses.
These blackouts have been threatening lives, especially those of the elderly and young children.
A letter from a radical left-wing anarchist group calling itself "Vulkangruppe" claiming responsibility is considered credible by authorities. It's the same group that claimed responsibility for the September arson attack and many others.
The most striking aspect of the letter is how grimly familiar it sounds. It's a poorly copied medley of statements found in Left and Green party programs and student activist flyers. Here are some extracts:
We can no longer afford the rich and the 'imperial mode of life'. We can stop the overexploitation of the earth. Because of greed for energy, the earth is being depleted, sucked dry, burned, ravaged, set aflame, raped, destroyed. Heat has rendered entire regions uninhabitable. They are simply burning up. Or habitats are disappearing under floodwaters or due to rising sea levels...
Of course, few would not be outraged at the cynicism of this letter. But it has left a significant sector of Germany's governing elites deeply embarrassed. Though it claims to be anti-mainstream-clearly a document of hate against the normal population-it is in fact a mirror image of our government and mainstream's long-standing very own pet ideologies. Intended as an indictment of modern civilized society, it has inadvertently become an indictment of the green-left vision that has held the German elite in its thrall for far too long.
The state's failure to protect
The first point raised by angry citizens is why our government and state are so obviously failing in their most basic duty: protecting critical infrastructure. The attack has mercilessly highlighted Germany's vulnerability to this type of terrorism-and the weakness of our state institutions.
It's not just the fact that nothing seems to have been done after September's attacks. Many Berliners were also shocked to learn that the Vulkan group (or groups, as it might be a loose network) is believed to have been active since 2011 (the name reportedly hearkens back to the 2010 eruption of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull). Since then, the groups have carried out many crippling attacks, including
- Repeated fires at important railway lines and public transportation hubs (most prominently attacks on Berlin's Ostkreuz and the Berlin-Hamburg line), affecting thousands of commuters
- Fires at mobile phone towers and logistics centers
- Car arsons
- One of its most spectacular attacks: forcing a production stop of several days at Brandenburg's Tesla works in 2024
What have those responsible for the state's anti-terror measures been doing ? Why are the groups' members and supporters still at large ? The question is especially pertinent given that the authorities have been warning of terrorism and attacks against Germany's infrastructure for years-except that their warnings have been directed almost exclusively at the far-right.
A tale of two terrorisms
The accusation that the state is not neutral grows louder. Many remember the large-scale nationwide raids against a suspected right-wing terrorist group, the so-called Reichsbürger, in 2022. The raid dominated the news for days, accompanied by live reports and insinuations that Germany had narrowly escaped a coup. A central charge against the group (many of whose members remain in custody) was that they had allegedly planned attacks on critical infrastructure facilities such as electricity grids.
While the far left has, at best, been seen as an annoyance, the far right is viewed as a threat to the current elite in these times of populist upheaval.
A brief look at the priorities set by Germany's notorious Office for the Protection of the Constitution (which is leading the charges against the right-populist AfD, attempting to have it banned) confirms this view. The office, which has branches across Germany and employs well over 7,000 people, has been at the forefront of peddling the message-repeated tirelessly by politicians and media pundits-that the far right is Germany's biggest threat. This claim has been proven wrong many times, not least by the numerous Islamist-related terror attacks the country has also suffered.
The incompetence of the 'caring state'
Then there's the unsettling question of how reliable and resilient Germany's services are when disaster strikes. The worrying response: Not reliable at all.
The disaster has exposed serious problems despite Germany's huge, bloated state sector. (At the beginning of the year, the Federal Statistical Office published employment figures showing that while hundreds of thousands of industrial jobs have disappeared, publicly funded jobs have simultaneously increased by hundreds of thousands since 2019). Yet the "caring" welfare state, with its cohorts of social workers, psychologists, and educators, presented itself as conspicuously paralyzed in this crisis.
As news spread that the blackout would last several days, despair set in. By comparison, Bild noted, Ukraine repairs damaged grids within 24 hours-even under wartime conditions.
Residents were advised to move to hotels. There was fear of looting and burglaries as neighborhoods went pitch black. Entering the blackout area after darkness set in, around 4:30 p.m., felt like entering a dangerous forbidden land-much like in a science fiction story. Only some streetlamps (ironically, the few vintage lamps still using gas) gave dim light in some streets. A few residents had diesel generators to light and heat their homes, but most, of course, didn't.
Rather than ensuring children received care and education during the day, making their lives a bit better in this situation, all schools and kindergartens in the area remained closed. Closing schools rather than ensuring children can learn even in difficult conditions has become the default solution since COVID.
"Everything that is wrong with the German state"
Nothing was heard from Berlin's mayor for about 10 hours (it has, in the meantime, been revealed that he was playing tennis).
A Welt report, showing a middle-aged man shouting at the mayor because a wheelchair-bound friend was forced to sleep in a poorly equipped shelter, has gone viral on social media .
The pro-populist broadcaster Nius showed the mayor leaning over a nonagenarian covered in blankets. Editor-in-chief Julius Reichelt remarked that had the lady been a young, healthy man from Syria or Afghanistan, the state would surely have provided a good hotel room. The picture, Reichelt said, showed "everything that is wrong with the German state."
When asked whether the city had done enough to rescue elderly and vulnerable people who might be stuck in dark and cold flats (possibly behind electric shutters that would no longer open, as mobile phones were also not working), Berlin's Senator for Health had to concede, "We don't have a list of such people and therefore don't know where they are."
The Berliner Zeitung published an interview with a former disaster relief worker and firefighter who remarked that for years, the government had obviously been more concerned with the width of cycle paths and with enforcing politically correct gender language. One should also point to the tremendous amount of energy spent on policing speech, with police raiding homes of people whose tweets were deemed threatening.
True, the massive popular pressure on the Berlin government was not without effect. Work to repair the cables sped up. Though the blackout was originally announced to end on Thursday, it finally ended Wednesday at 11 a.m. Residents have also been told that their hotel expenses will be reimbursed (appeasing discontented citizens with money is easier than providing help).
The mayor has also announced that the perpetrators would now be pursued "with all our might." Left-wing terrorism, he declared, has "returned to Germany," as if it hadn't been around for years.
"Poor, nasty, brutish and short"
Nothing could highlight better what is at stake when civilization breaks down and services that must be core state responsibilities are nonexistent than the words of Thomas Hobbes, who, in his Leviathan of 1651, wrote:
In such condition, there is no place for industry... no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Whoever carried out the attack remains to be confirmed (there are still speculations about Putin being involved). One thing, however, is clear: this was an assault on the normal, good people of Berlin. It was also an attack on our Western lifestyle and the achievements of civilization that we citizens cherish and without which our society cannot survive.
The attacks have occurred at a time when the unpopularity of the elite's climate ideology is becoming increasingly palpable. Never truly popular, radical climate groups have always resorted to undemocratic measures like using courts to push through their ideas (see Germany's ' climate action law' and the 2021 Supreme Court ruling). In their desperation, some of these groups now seem to have resorted to terrorism.
However, as well as dealing with these radical fringe groups, we must recognize what is truly at stake. The long-standing ideologies and fixations of our elite, from the German Left Party's slogan 'We're taking on the rich' (which won them over 8% of the vote, largely from young middle-class voters, in 2025) to our former economic minister's rants about 'the world's insatiable hunger for fossil fuels,' have caused tremendous harm. So too have our politicians' attempts to shield themselves from popular pressure.
Whatever the outcome of the police investigations, Berlin's blackout is an indictment of the grave dangers brought about by the incompetence and misguided ideologies of our own elites. Citizens should not forget that.
Original article: europeanconservative.com