Monday 17 May 2021, the famous millionaire boss of SpaceX and Tesla Elon Musk moved to Grünheide, a small town situated east of the German capital in the Brandebourg, to visit the site of his future luxury electric cars factory, which will be his fourth « Gigafactory » in the world (after those of the United States and China), exploiting 12 000 people. He announced its opening programmed for the end of 2021, where Tesla should produce a quota of 500 000 Model Y cars, but also battery cells, making it the biggest factory in Europe in the field.
In the night of 25 to Wednesday 26 at around 3am, his beautiful projects got a little smoke in their wings however and will be delayed. In fact, at about 250 metres from the Tesla factory site of Berlin/Grünheide – more precisely right next to the A10 motorway at the level of the Freienbrink exit – the Volcan group successfully set fire to six high voltage electric cables (110,000 volts) of the Edis company which supplied the site and were in a dedicated corridor behind a fence.
We remember that this is not a first for this Berlin group who already in 2020 sabotaged the cables of the Fraunhofer Institut for telecommunications responsible for developing the State tracking application for smartphone on the Covid-19, and in March 2018 set fire to two large fibre optic links and electric cables situated under the Mörschbrücke bridge (at Charlottenburg) belonging to various big civil and military operators, causing substantial damage. The first attacks of the Volcan Group against electrical or fibre optic infrastructures dates back to May of 2011 at Ostkreuz station, causing disruption of train traffic for several days, plus in May 2013 against a cable duct at Zehlendorf, again disrupting the rail traffic.
[Synthesis from the German press 26 May 2021]
The original claim of the Volcan Group can be found here in German, which we have translated the beginning of followed by a second excerpt.
« In the night of 25 to 26 May 2021, we attacked the power supply of the construction site of the Tesla Giga-Factory in Berlin-Grünheide, by setting fire to six main high voltage cables. Our fire opposes itself to the ecological car lie. The goal was sabotage of the construction site of the Tesla Giga-Factory. Putting an end to the ideology of unlimited technological progress and the global destruction of the planet will not be done with fine words alone.
We oppose sabotage to the advance of the destruction [of the planet]
Climate strike for a different world ! »
(…)
« Why are we sabotaging Tesla ?
A car factory is under construction at Grünheide near Berlin. Tesla is building a «Giga-Factory». Its promoter, Elon Musk, is as arrogant as the name and the project. His patriarchal fantasies of omnipotence are meant to save the world? That would make us laugh if it wasn’t so serious: the production of battery-powered vehicles that are «clean and climate friendly» is no more than a new contribution to the destruction of the planet.Our action demonstrated this project’s vulnerability, it undermines the supposed «omnipotence» that Musk is inflicting on Brandebourg. There he is setting up building regulations like a feudal lord, ignoring, for example, all the objections to the impending water shortage in the region. He wants to place his factory strategically, near the Polish workers on the one side, near Berlin on the other, as it could soon be governed by the Greens and where the future buyers are. The politicians, administration and their media outlets, who hunker down before Musk because of new jobs and advantages of the expected economic situation will strongly condemn our action and slander us treat us as terrorists. This is a misrepresentation of the facts – our attack destroys material goods, sabotages the work process and destroys money, not the means of subsistence. If we have excluded all danger for human life in this action, we also carried it out as a fiery statement against the lies of green capitalism. We stand up against the continued destruction of our livelihoods both local and global, and against the exploitation of people through expansive technological madness. Our attack is a call to attack the « Green Deal ». In support of social struggles around the world. For ecological reasons. For anticolonial reasons. For feminist reasons. For reasons of the class struggle. For ultimately revolutionary and anti-authoritarian reasons. »
