The Left Berlin News & Comment

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Month: May 2025

Red Flag: The German Bourgeoisie Suddenly Notices the Genocide in Gaza

In his weekly column, Nathaniel Flakin analyzes a radical shift in ruling-class rhetoric


31/05/2025

I was away from Berlin for almost a month, and I returned just in time for a whiplash-inducing shift in Germany’s official discourse. For 19 months, all politicians and journalists offered unwavering and passionate support for the genocide in Gaza, not just in the form of declarations about “Israel’s right to defend itself” and “Hamas command centers under hospitals,” but also in the form of bombs and bullets.

This extremely unpopular policy (with around 80 percent of the country disagreeing) has been reinforced with unprecedented repression, including assaults, firings, and deportations. Supposedly, this was about “learning from history” and “protecting Jewish life” — yet Jews have been vastly overrepresented among the victims of police violence and official cancellations

From one day to the next, however, the entire German regime changed its position. This started with a video from the Greens last Friday. Luise Amtsberg, who denied Israel was committing war crimes only last year, suddenly expressed concern that “there are hardly any hospitals left” in Gaza (I wonder what happened to them!). This is the same Green Party whose leader declared last October that bombing hospitals was ok (“civilian sites could lose their protected status if terrorists abuse this status”).

It’s easy for the Greens, thrown into opposition, to rediscover their humanitarian conscience. But this was followed by the conservative chancellor Friedrich Merz, who spoke on TV the following Monday about a “humanitarian tragedy” in Gaza that could “no longer be justified with the struggle against Hamas terrorism.” The same politician who insisted on inviting Netanyahu to Berlin despite an ICC arrest warrant is now accusing Israel of violating international law. The next day, Merz’s foreign minister made vague threats of “further steps” that could include a stop to weapons shipments. 

Even Felix Klein, the government’s non-Jewish “Antisemitism Czar,” who not long ago endorsed Trump’s plan to expel two million people from Gaza, started criticizing Israel. This is strange, because Klein’s job is defaming anyone who protests against the genocide in Gaza, including Jews. By Tuesday, he spoke of Israel “starving the Palestinians and deliberately, dramatically worsening the humanitarian situation.”

Newspapers and TV stations have also abruptly changed their line, just like Oceania in 1984. 

These politicians and journalists have been supporting war crimes for 19 months — what explains the sudden shift? When asked directly (“Where does this … criticism suddenly come from? The things we see now, we have been seeing for weeks and months”), Klein could only stammer unintelligibly.

So where does this really come from? Der Spiegel published a ridiculous title about Merz “long remaining silent” — even though a brief look at the magazine’s own reporting shows Merz being very loud about his support for genocide.

This definitely has nothing to do with morals. Germany’s capitalist politicians have long abandoned any claim to defending humanitarian principles. But it also has little to do with fears of future ICC persecutions. These imperialist politicians can be certain that the institutions of so-called international law will never go against the interest of imperialism.

This has more to do with banal electoral schedules, with politicians more willing to take risks after the voting is over. All of them were terrified of being accused of antisemitism by the far-right tabloid BILD or any of the numerous state-funded pro-Zionist NGOs. There are herd dynamics at work: As soon as one of them sticks out their neck, others are less afraid.

I suspect the main reason, however, is a shift in U.S. foreign policy under Trump, who has been increasingly giving Netanyahu the cold shoulder in pursuit of his own interests in the Middle East. This is a notable difference to Biden, who had a deep ideological commitment to Zionism. With U.S. interest in Gaza waning, the Europe’s rulers don’t want to be the last ones holding the bag when it comes to supporting genocide.

This is not about morals and not about public opinion in Germany — it’s more about German imperialism’s investments and “soft power” in the Arab world, which are suffering terrible losses. 

Despite the new rhetoric, the Greens, the CDU, and the rest of the bunch have declared their intention to keep sending weapons to Israel. They might be “concerned” about the “humanitarian catastrophe” — but they want to keep facilitating it. This is all empty posturing. 

As the full account of the carnage becomes harder to deny, politicians want to get their opposition on the record. Omar El Akkad predicted: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. We are witnessing the first careful steps in this direction. This rhetorical shift is not accountability — it is the German bourgeoisie’s latest attempt to avoid accountability.

Red Flag is a weekly column on Berlin politics that Nathaniel Flakin has been writing since 2020. After moving through different homes, it now appears at The Left Berlin.

Some Thoughts on Responses to the Gaza Genocide

It is great that new people have noticed the genocide in Gaza but we still need an independent political pole


Ever since Israel’s genocidal intentions became evident in October 2023, we’ve witnessed successive “roads to Damascus” by various layers of people, politically situated at different, sometimes completely opposite, parts of the political spectrum.

The motivations for these conversions range from sincere critical self-reflection, to facing a more conducive political climate to express criticism, to blatant opportunism, to the fear of public opinion and/or the possibility of being faced with legal consequences of being complicit in the “crime of all crimes”.

The first wave occurred relatively quickly. It was a layer of “soft left” intellectuals, academics, journalists, and others, who in the immediate aftermath of October 7th peddled the narrative that somehow the main issue was not the predictable result of 16 years of incremental genocide of the Gaza Strip by the Israeli state, but the fact that some leftists were “cheering for Hamas”. 

This layer quickly uttered the word “genocide”, even as it attempted to impose its own framing on the debate, which censored terms such as “resistance”. In Germany, this takes the form of an increasingly unhealthy obsession with the “German psyche”, as if these issues somehow take precedence over the broader dynamics of state and class formation (both in Germany and Israel), as well as imperialism. The genocidal onslaught was being implicitly placed in the context of a “global far right resurgence”, which is, of course, true to some extent but does not represent the entire picture.

My suspicion is that these theoretical weaknesses partly lie in the reverberating influence of a kind of thinking which oscillates between early 2000s alter-globalisation autonomism and its silence on the realities of inter-state competition on the one hand, and a left reformist instinct of trailing “public opinion” on the other.

The second wave concerns left reformist figureheads and political forces that refused to call this a genocide immediately, such as Bernie Sanders, who until today, quite brazenly, insists on calling this “Netanyahu’s war”, as if somehow any other political force in Israel would act differently. 

It also includes parties like Die Linke in Germany. After one year of genocide, Linke leader Ines Schwerdtner was still describing October 7th as an example of “eliminatory antisemitism”, thereby decontextualising it and relativising the Holocaust. Now, and riding the coattails of a global insurgent movement, these forces feel more comfortable in expressing more robust criticisms of Israel, although, as the saying goes, “too little, too late”.

The third and fourth waves are occurring simultaneously. On the one hand, we have celebrities and intellectuals in full awareness of the detrimental effects that continuing silence could have on their social capital (e.g. Piers Morgan). On the other hand, we have Merz, Starmer, Macron, the German Greens, and other cretins, who are now discovering that Israel “has gone too far”.

I don’t agree with the defeatist sentiment that these people realise that the genocide is now over (“one day, everyone will have been against this”) and are now ritualistically saying “sorry”. This amounts to a bizarre underestimation on the proven Palestinian capacity for resistance, as well as a very pessimistic appraisal of the strength of imperialism in the region, of which Israel is a constituent component.

I think that this has more to do with public opinion, reinforced by the actions of movements in different countries, as well as by the real fear of legal consequences for complicity. Not that Merz, Macron and co cared about international law before. But a more transactional foreign policy under Trump makes everything more unpredictable, and these people might be motivated by the need to cling on to some semblance (not necessarily the substance) of a “rules-based order”.

We can make of these successive waves whatever we want – genuine introspection, the power of the movement in the streets, the inability of Israel to act according to the role assigned to it by its backers.

Nevertheless: While all these developments are welcome, those who realised pretty soon what was going to happen, who had studied the dynamics as they developed in the preceding decades, who had placed the issue in a wider regional and global framework of what are in the end pretty mundane capitalist and imperialist interests, should develop or further build their own independent political pole, instead of trailing celebrity intellectuals, “brave journalists”, or deciding that “now is the time to work in X or Y party” “to be more effective”.

XPOSED Queer Film Festival: “We want queer people to see themselves on screen”

Interview with David Bakum, one of the programmers from the XPOSED Queer Film Festival Berlin.


30/05/2025

Xposed Queer Film Festival Berlin

Could you start by telling our readers about yourself and your background? 

I’m David. I grew up in Germany, and my family is from Ukraine. I moved to Scotland for my film and theatre studies degree at university, and now I have come back to Germany this year for a job, but also to see how Germany has changed, if at all. My job is in political education with a small organisation, but while doing my studies, I started working at film festivals and finding out what felt right for me. I’m slowly understanding that I like to curate, so I’m still new to that, but I’m coming into a routine and trying to expand what it means to be a curator and learning how to do it.

You are one of the programmers at the XPOSED Queer Film Festival Berlin—can you tell us more about the festival and what the vision is? 

The festival started in 2006; this will be the 19th edition. It started as a passion project by a couple of people here in Berlin—which it still is to date. I would consider us to be a collective of queer people who either live in Berlin, are tied to Berlin somehow, or are simply tied to the festival, who come together every year to organise it. Many of us are migrants; some of us grew up in Germany, but we face different layers of discrimination here. It’s a political festival because we are people who are affected by politics in this country. As a festival, we try to show different perspectives of what it means to be queer, but also what queerness could be—not only tied to sexuality or gender but also to what convention society has and how queerness goes against that and tries to dismantle it. We try to show global perspectives of queerness, so we try to involve many different views of what it means to be queer in this world. Whether that is successful, that’s always debatable. 

How would you define queerness or queer cinema? 

At the moment, we have five curators, and we all work together to curate the programme. All of us have different ways of defining queerness for ourselves, so it’s enriching when we watch films and discuss together if they fit the festival or not. We often discuss a film and say, “This is so XPOSED”. I guess at this point, we have a sort of style, something you can expect, and the overlap is about imagining film outside of what’s on the mainstream. There are many ways of what queerness could be—one is that we want to see stories of queerness told by queer people. Very few of our films, if any, are made by non-queer filmmakers—our focus is not only on the director but if it’s a queer production. Sometimes you can sense how people have worked—you can tell if it was queer inclusive, rather than just pink-washing. Often, we are in touch with filmmakers whose work we know already and keep track of, so that’s how we get a feeling for whether they actually practice what they put into the film. At the same time, queerness doesn’t have to be in the topics of the films; it can be about the form. Very rarely do we take something that follows an Aristotelian arch. It’s more about playing with form, with convention, and then just destroying that. There are very original films that provoke us to see something for the very first time in a certain way. That’s what we are usually looking for. 

XPOSED screens both features and short films, as well as newer and older films. On your website, it also mentions that you hope that your curatorial choices counteract oppressive structures. Can you say more about the selection process? How do you decide what is a good fit for the festival? 

There are two ways in which films get to us: we have open submissions that people can submit for free, and we also do our own research, so the team is always on the lookout not only for what’s going on at festivals, but also in smaller queer productions—including locally, and we like to focus on migrant queer cinema in Berlin. Sometimes, we only need one person watching a film, and they really see why it’s important to give it the space. Very often, it happens that we all agree. It can be that there is a topic that is important at the moment to give certain people a voice, and in those cases it needs to be included so that people come to the festival and see a glimpse of what is one way of being queer in that country or region, for example. Even if it’s a 5-minute short, it can already trigger something and move people to imagine what queerness is in that country, to want to know more, and to want to research, and think of ways in which they can show solidarity or support. Sometimes, there are interesting discussions of why someone thinks a certain film is “XPOSED”, and someone else doesn’t agree, but very rarely do we have a strong disagreement. This is because we are all very open to understanding our different positionalities and experiences of how we live in Berlin or elsewhere. We also try to learn from each other and what each curator found in their practice.

The submissions come from many different countries. We try to spread the word as much as possible, but there are many regions from which we do not get submissions from. For those, we wonder if it’s because of the political situation, access to filmmaking, access to finding out about festivals, or even filmmakers not being interested in showing films in Germany. 

Since your 20th anniversary is happening soon, when reflecting on the festival, what is the importance of having a film festival dedicated to queerness in a city like Berlin? 

There are many other amazing film festivals and venues. I think what XPOSED does well is create a community around the festival, people who look forward to it every year. We also tried to make it more accessible, even though inflation and funding have been difficult. That also makes it harder to claim that we are accessible because it’s this vicious cycle of wanting to be for the queer community but also being queer ourselves and not having the best access to things. We want queer people to see themselves on screen and imagine what their future could be like, but also to irritate people who might disagree if they happen to be at our festival. 

Some of the films would struggle to find a spot at a festival, either because there are requirements that are not accessible to short films, or some wouldn’t get picked for their stories, for their aesthetics, or their production budgets. For many people, it’s a big opportunity to be able to premiere in Berlin. 

We don’t have a lot of funding to fly people in, but we try to take care of each other by hosting people, offering meals, or even spontaneously hosting a film screening at 10 pm on a Sunday because many people want to watch it. Those are tiny things we can do, but it’s important to connect people who share a struggle and feel they are not alone. 

XPOSED receives public funding. At the end of last year, the Berlin Senate announced a 12% cut to the city’s cultural budget. The campaign Berlin Ist Kultur was created in response, to protest it. What are your thoughts on that? 

I am still trying to understand how it affects us, and we are looking for funding opportunities all the time. Fewer things are accessible to us for application. I also feel that different things are stopping from existing in the social and cultural sector; it’s scary. How can we even still run a festival for queer people, if they will not have the money to attend; it’s definitely an existential threat to us and many venues and festivals. We feel affected and are in solidarity with everyone impacted. It’s sad that suddenly it feels like we are in a competition for who deserves the funding over each other. We are taking a moment to reflect on where we can look for funding without it being taken away from other affected communities.

Part of what you’ve been highlighting is that a film festival is not only a cultural and artistic event, but also a political one. You published a statement denouncing the actions of the German government. What can you tell us about that, and especially about your commitment to not “censor yourselves from your responsibility as a festival”? 

It’s an ongoing discussion within the team. We never had to have a moment to get each other on the same page—we always knew we shared and relied on each other’s values. Since October 2023, there has been this urge in Germany to position yourself politically—but before then, it was already important to be political; since then, we felt we should position ourselves because saying nothing is already a statement, and we owe it to the people who come to the festival. So we sat down as a team and thought that a statement is one thing we can do. Strike Germany was also happening at the time, as were other boycott initiatives. We also had selected filmmakers to showcase at our festival, and then they refused because they didn’t want to show in Germany—which we understand, and tried to highlight that in the programme. It’s difficult to realise that we are tied to this country and the money from it, but we also tried to highlight the oppressed voices. We were worried about getting our funding cut and then possible extinction—then there’s no stage where this can happen. 

I hope the statement we wrote was in support and solidarity. At our open speech last year, we also discussed the subject and wore symbols at the festival to show people what we believe in and make people more comfortable. We also organised a community event with Palestinian filmmakers and poetry, based on an existing project. The day before, just outside the cinema Moviemento, there was a protest where police applied a lot of violence. We felt we couldn’t build a safe space in this environment, and this country doesn’t make us feel safe. We can at least let people tell their stories, but even that is apparently seen as violent and illegal. 

XPOSED started yesterday and runs until the 1st of June. What are your plans and highlights for this year’s festival? What should people know? 

The opening will be a big screening, with some filmmakers present, and it’s always nice to see the whole team on stage after the whole exhaustion. We are really proud of the short films program we curate; a lot of work goes into that. Some people’s favourite is a short film program about blooming and flowers. It is beautiful and carries great importance in both obvious and hidden meanings through flowers. 

We have one feature that celebrates its 10th anniversary, Tchindas, about a trans woman and activist from Cape Verde who died last year. There is a film called “If I Die, It Will Be of Joy” about older queers from France—it’s very beautiful, and the director will be there. Many directors decided to attend with their own money or got some funding from embassies and our team’s support. It’s amazing to be able to speak with them and immerse in other realities and be vulnerable with each other. Another feature is a film about trans and indigenous people and identity from the Philippines with four team members coming—I’m really excited about that. But people should just come to everything!

Is there anything else you would like to mention?

In a venue called aquarium, by Südblock, we are offering workshops: one is a Wikipedia marathon, where you can learn how to write articles about queer filmmakers to give them more recognition—might not be the best platform to get your knowledge from, but since many people use it, we might as well queer it. Additionally, there will be an initiative where people can pitch their short film ideas. The winners get some financial aid and mentorship to develop the films. Very often we end up also selecting the short films that come out of it—it’s great, local, queer work. Last year’s winner will be shown at this edition. There are other events, such as a conversation about working with new media forms and having an interdisciplinary approach to film, audio, and visual means. On Sunday, we’ll announce the Lolly Awards winners. 

News from Berlin and Germany

Weekly news round-up from Berlin and Germany


28/05/2025

NEWS FROM BERLIN

BDS “anti-constitutional” for the first time

Berlin’s domestic intelligence service has listed the BDS (“Boykott, Desinvestition und Sanktionen”), a Palestinian-led movement, as a “proven anti-constitutional endeavour” for the first time. However, this designation appeared in a 2024 report on the ‘protection of the constitution’. According to the Senate Chancellery, the reason for this is the alleged anti-constitutional ideology of BDS, which negates Israel’s “right to exist”, as well as its central role within an “anti-Israeli scene in Berlin”. BDS, a transnational political campaign, is directed against trade with Israel and co-operation in culture and science, among other things. Source: Jungewelt

Mass accommodation Tempelhofer Feld?

More places for refugees are to be created on Tempelhofer Feld. As reported by “rbb24”, this is to compensate for the loss of places at a planned refugee centre in Köpenick. The containers and hangars on the edge of Tempelhofer Feld already have space for more than 2,000 refugees. Elif Eralp, spokesperson for The Left (die Linke) in the House of Representatives, takes a critical view of this: she is concerned that further expansion will lead to situations that ‘harbour conflicts’, for example due to a lack of privacy. The Senate wants to decide on additional container accommodation in a fortnight’s time. Source: berliner Zeitung

NEWS FROM GERMANY

SPD members see arms exports as possible involvement in war crimes

The way in which Israel is fighting Hamas is now beginning to be criticised. Although some aid is being delivered to the Gaza Strip again, at the same time a major offensive is exacerbating the suffering of civilians. Therefore, influential SPD MPs are calling on the German government to stop German arms exports to Israel in view of possible war crimes in Gaza. In the party´s Berlin conference, the SPD passed an initial motion calling for a stop to all arms deliveries to Israel. So far, the German government has made an exception for Israel from the practice of not supplying weapons to conflict areas for good reasons. Source: n-tv

The good guys and the bad guys

Instead of thinking about the victims, ethnic origin is discussed first and foremost after attacks. When breaking news of an attack appears on the mobile phone screen, the victims are no longer the focus of reporting. Instead, we are preoccupied with the question: which ethnicities are those involved? It is believe that ethnic origin – “race” – says something about whether a person is “good” or ‘bad’. In last fridays knife attack in Hamburg Central Station, Muhammad Al Muhammad, a Syrian refugee, stopped an attacker, who injured 18 people, from even stabbing more people. Source: taz

More refugees are living in Germany than ever before – but new arrivals have fallen significantly

There are more refugees are living in Germany than ever before. At the end of 2024, approximately 3.45 million foreign nationals who came to the country as refugees were registered. On the other hand, far fewer refugees arrived in 2024 than in previous years: approximately 124,000 more in the country on New Year’s Eve 2024 than the year before. Furthermore, under the new coalition’s asylum policy, a lot could change for refugees in Germany. Federal Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (CSU) has said that that the family reunification rule for refugees with subsidiary protection status, which has been in effect since 2018, might end in a few weeks for at least two years. Source: welt


Right-wing extremist? Raids on police officers

According to a report, a 27-year-old police officer from the Emsland/Grafschaft Bentheim police station and a 21-year-old police trainee from Hann. Münden (Göttingen district) are accused of having shown the Hitler salute and distributed photos of foreign citizens in cells, among other things. They were suspended from duty for the time being as part of disciplinary proceedings. Investigators said they had seized mobile phones, laptops and electronic data carriers. In a joint statement, Andrea Menke, Police Vice President of the Osnabrück Police Directorate, and Carsten Rose, Director of the Lower Saxony Police Academy, spoke out clearly against right-wing extremist ideas. Source: ndr


Antisemitism Commissioner Klein calls for debate on “raison d’état”

The German government’s antisemitism commissioner, Klein, has called for a debate on the term “Staatsräson” (purpose of state) considering Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip. The term is blurred, as he mentioned to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. The Staatsräson is vague, but the sentiment is that Germany must do everything in its power to preserve the security of Israel and Jews worldwide, and is widely accepted amoung many politicians. However, now it is being questioned with some proponents saying that it must also be made clear that this is not justification for anything. Starving Palestinians and deliberately making the humanitarian situation dramatically worse has nothing to do with safeguarding Israel’s right to exist, Klein has said. Source: deutschlandfunk

Just Stop Oil: the shock-factor campaign that actually achieved its goal

You’ve probably heard of them, even if you think you haven’t


Two Just Stop Oil protestors kneel in front of the Van Gogh sunflowers painting that they have just covered in soup. One holds the empty can of soup in their hand.

Spattering tomato soup across Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, invading Rugby pitches in Twickenham, exploding confetti on an unsuspecting Sigourney Weaver mid-soliloquy: Just Stop Oil’s (JSO) infamy is impressive considering its mere three-year tenure. Branded petty, absurd, and obnoxious by a bevy of media outlets, and trolled relentlessly online, they shot into public consciousness with the subtlety of a flying brick and a burning planet as their backdrop. On April 26th, 2025, the group held its last demonstration in the centre of London––a peaceful and comparatively mundane march from parliament to the headquarters of Shell. Having ostensibly achieved its original aim––the United Kingdom’s government stopping the issue of new oil or gas exploration licences––their neon hi-vis jackets have been hung up. Direct action has officially been called to a heel. But the group is not surrendering in the fight for climate justice. 

During JSO’s three years in action, its supporters were reported to have been arrested 3,300 times, imprisoned 180 times, and currently 11 of its members remain incarcerated. Sentences range from conspiring to create a public nuisance, to criminal damage, to disruption of traffic. Just this week, nine of its activists avoided jail, with the judge ruling that no harm was caused. Despite her ruling, she reprimanded the protestors––arrested at Heathrow Terminal 5––for treating the courtroom as an “extension of the protest.” Her reprimand was due to what she considered to be a lack of remorse and accountability. For JSO members, however, it seems that they differ from the judge as to where accountability ought to be taken. 

They worked in extremes. But the crux of their argument was that the situation was extreme. Their high-profile tactics were disruptive, but nonviolent. The effects of climate change are more than a nuisance: they are fatal. 

 “In spite of the guilty verdict, of being held in prison and of my impending sentencing, I feel completely at peace. I acted in line with my conscience and moral convictions. I told the truth at trial, both about the climate crisis and about my actions and intentions. I know I acted nonviolently: without violence and actively against violence. I acted to prevent the real Public Nuisance that is climate breakdown,” wrote Ella, a 22-year-old member currently serving time in a women’s prison in Manchester after being found guilty of conspiring to create a public nuisance. 

Protesting laws in the UK have become more stringent in the years since the conception of Just Stop Oil; the Public Order Act 2023 was specifically introduced to target climate activists, providing law enforcement agencies with greater powers to combat so-called “disruptive” protests. The new legislations countering such activity have not been met with universal acclaim. UN Special Rapporteur Michel Forst expressed his concerns to the BBC following the imprisonment of Dr Patrick Hart, who caused thousands of pounds of damage to fuel pumps during a JSO demonstration, saying, “In France you would receive a small fine, never prison. But in the UK peaceful protesters receive 12 months in prison.” The Joint Committee on Human Rights also called for the measures within the act to be watered down, citing the importance for residents of the UK to exercise their democratic rights. 

The blockage of roads, interference of public events, damage to art and culture, and impact on emergency services spawned by JSO-led protests dampened its popularity somewhat in the public eye: inevitably, vandalism and inconvenience can lead to alienation. But their methods are the same that have been employed by activists throughout history: it could be argued that high-profile, disruptive, obnoxious tactics are those that have spurred the most change. 

The Suffragettes engaged in relentless civil obedience under the motto “Deeds, not words.” Much like JSO, they were viewed as nuisances, the subjects of much mockery and accusations of overblown hysteria. Criticisms of JSO’s actions as ostentatious, unruly, or inconvenient prove that their formula worked as planned: isn’t every protest intended to be attention-grabbing, to disrupt, and dismantle? The response of the government to introduce stringent laws against such protestors seems to send a message that compliance and submission must be practiced, even when infringements on human rights occur around us. Peaceful marches may not immediately seem to challenge or disrupt, but they are still fundamentally radical, still conceived with the intent to draw eyes, change minds, and crucially, show solidarity. 

“This is how civil resistance works: applying nonviolent pressure until we force change to happen,” the Just Stop Oil website reads. “It’s how the Freedom Riders forced an end to segregated buses in 1961. It’s how disabled people won accessible transport in the nineties and how Just Stop Oil won no new oil and gas licenses in 2024. We know how to win, but it’s going to take all of us.”

The fierce crackdown on activism was undoubtedly a factor in the group drawing to a close. The official line remains that the battle was won, their demand realized. But they’ve advised they will be taking a “different approach.” Coy as they have been about future plans, the message seems to be that outrageous antics will be dialled down. But while they may be retiring from civil disobedience, they are not retiring from their climate goals. The end of JSO is less of a shutdown and more of a reassembling. Like any good team preparing for battle, they are overhauling strategy based on the opposition. Public hostility and controversy were necessary tools for applying pressure to the government to stop oil. Now they need new devices. 

In 2023, John Wight wrote a piece for Medium asserting that JSO was a failure. Echoing sentiments of many of the British public, he qualified their protests as devoid of self-awareness and empathy for the everyman. Theatregoers largely booed as Sigourney Weaver was wheeled offstage in the midst of The Tempest. Yet JSO protestors remained resolute, always remaining at the scene of the crime to take ownership of disturbances. “I can’t sleepwalk [my children] into a future of food shortages, life-threatening storms and wars for resources,” lecturer Hayley Walsh, one of the activists arrested at the West End said in a group statement. “Years of writing to MPs, going on marches and teaching my students to be more sustainable hasn’t seen the urgent change needed.”

A new podcast, Sabotage, launched with the goal of examining JSO’s tactics. Its hosts are nothing if not thorough: they worked to gain the trust of JSO and obtain interviews––no mean feat considering how tightly their ranks were closed. They approach the group with curiosity and openness, and what comes of that is a deeply human depiction of a coalition steeped in infamy. It’s a peek behind the curtain, but instead of revealing a man masquerading as a wizard, it’s a vibrant ecosystem stocked with plentiful courage, brains, and heart. The hosts noted that many of the activists were quiet, shy, self-possessed: not the dramatic, over-stimulated troublemakers painted by the media, but compassionate beings led by deep conviction. 

The podcast also contradicts what naysayers have been alleging for years: it posits that their demonstrations were successes. Yes, they were lambasted by politicians and citizens alike, they were arrested and sometimes locked up, and they were widely mocked––but every stunt saw a sharp increase in donations. Even the ramping-up of police action against protestors has indicated success: a reaction wouldn’t be necessary if the action didn’t cause concern from above. 

Their website now turns focus towards the necessity of a political and economic revolution, citing the role of corrupt politicians and self-serving billionaires in the climate calamity. “We’re just getting started,” they promise. They’ve already proven themselves as one of the world’s most effective climate campaigns: the lull is momentary, but the rebellion is still in motion.