[Note of Sans Nom: In Germany’s seventh largest city, Düsseldorf, located in the North Rhine-Westphalia region, the “Angry Birds Commando” has been making headlines regularly for several years. In August 2024, for example, it claimed responsibility for a fire involving railway signaling cables in Mettmann, adding to its previous acts of sabotage against rail traffic: one in Düsseldorf in January 2024, and five others in the same city claimed in May 2023. After generously sharing a manual entitled “Burning Cables for Beginners” in the fall of 2024, it revisited its own vision of collapse in its Communiqué No. 4 published in January 2025, then claimed responsibility for the sabotage of three new telecommunications antennas in June 2025.
In the middle of summer, the “Angry Birds Commando” has caused yet another disruption just days before a huge rush: on the night of Wednesday, July 30 to Thursday, July 31, on one of Germany’s most important railway lines, between Duisburg and Düsseldorf, where more than 620 trains pass daily (excluding freight trains) and just a stone’s throw from the airport, a double simultaneous attack was carried out on the cables along the tracks. The first damaged nearly 60 meters of cable near a signal box, and the second, a kilometer further on, destroyed five fist-sized cables, each measuring 20 meters in length. Responsibility for this sabotage was claimed in Angry Bird Commando’s communiqué no. 6, published on July 31 on de.indymedia, which we have translated from German below.]
Railway sabotage – Communiqué No. 6
Switch off the system of destruction
The Rhine-Alpine corridor connects Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Duisburg, Cologne, Frankfurt, Mannheim, Basel, Zurich, Milan, and Genoa, some of Europe’s most significant economic centers. In the Duisburg-Düsseldorf-Cologne region, this corridor encounters one of its many bottlenecks. Any disruption to rail traffic at this location has direct or indirect repercussions on this economic area due to the rerouting of the impacted trains.
We have just caused a disruption of this kind north of Düsseldorf Airport. To do so, we once again used the ice block timer from our manual “Kabel Anzünden für Beginner” (Burning Cables for Beginners).
We have already explained our motivations in detail in our own words. This time, we would like to borrow those of Emmanuel Sieyès:
The aim of this text is fairly simple. We must ask ourselves three questions.
1. What is nature? Everything.
2. What has it been until now in society? Nothing.
3. What does it ask to be? Something.
Who is bold enough to maintain that nature does not contain within itself everything necessary to constitute a good life? It is like someone strong and robust with one arm still in chains. If industry were removed, the world would not be something less but something more. What then is nature? Everything; but an everything that is fettered and oppressed. What would it be without industry? It would be everything; but free and flourishing. Nothing will go well without nature; everything would go considerably better without the industrial system.
The most capable people in the mainstream environmental movement are obliged to practise flattery and devote themselves to the service of the powerful to earn a living. Perhaps the boldest champions of industry within the established climate movement are to be found among those endowed at birth with plenty of intelligence but very little soul, who are as greedy for money, power and pats on the back from the powerful as they are incapable of understanding the value of freedom.
No, it is too late to work for the conciliation of all parties. What sort of an agreement could one hope for between the energy of the oppressed and the fury of the oppressors? They have dared utter the word corporate migration as a nightmare scenario. Heavens! How fortunate it would be if so desirable an exodus could be perpetuated! How easy it would be to do without the corporations! How difficult it will be to induce them to become sustainable!
I can sense that these truths, however certain they might be, are likely to provoke something like embarrassment in a culture which was not formed under the auspices of sustainability. Nothing, however, can be done about this. If the house that you built is held together by all sorts of artificial devices and supported by scaffolding put in place without any other taste or design than to prop up its various parts as and when they threaten to fall down, then you will either have to rebuild it or resign yourself to living, as they say, from one day to the next, constantly short of ease or comfort and perpetually anxious about being finally crushed under its debris.
I know that such principles will seem extravagant to most readers. Truth must seem as strange to prejudice as prejudice must seem to truth. What better can I do than help with all my strength to disseminate what is true as the way to prepare the ground? Initially, this may not be well received. Gradually, however, it will come to be accepted; public opinion will take shape and principles that at first were taken to be wildly illusory will finally come to be felt to be entirely practicable. With almost every kind of prejudice, if no one was not at first willing to be described as mad, the world today would be very much the less wise.
You might yet say that minds are still not ready to understand you and that you are bound to offend a large number of people. So be it. The truth that it is most useful to publicize will not be the one that is already almost visible and almost ready to be accepted. On the contrary, it is precisely a truth that offends the most prejudices and the most personal interests that is the one that it is most essential to spread.
Reason and justice cannot bend to convenience. In the end it is not worth asking what the right balance is between industry and nature. It is like asking what kind of place a malignant tumor should have in the body of someone who is ill, as it devours and ruins their health. It simply has to be neutralized.
(What is the Third Estate, Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, 1789)
Angry Birds Commando
Translated by Act for freedom now!