Speech from the Demo on Elbe – Mobilitychange Action Day

This speech was held on the bridge across the river Elbe on the mobility change action day on the 5th of june

Hey people, how is it going? First I would like to say thank you to the people organizing the demonstration for the invitation to speak here.
I came from Moni forest occupation where I´ve spent last one and half month. Many of us in Moni have been to Danni or other occupations before where we´ve learnt many skills but especially we´ve learnt that we want to do a lot of things differently.
First of all we don´t want to have here a division between activists in the forest and supporters who bring them oat milk while both groups keep distance from each other.
We chose to occupy the forest as our form of action but we are aware that this action is just same important as all the others. Some people build treehouses, other organize demonstrations, another people take care of the train station in Seehausen while other people grow nice organic food. Diversity of tactics is important for any movement which want to be successful.
For me I don´t see it here just as a try to prevent this highway neither just as a campaign for Verkehrswende. Highway is not a problem. It is just a symptom of a bigger problem. We live in a fucked up world and A14 takes just a little part in it.
It is difficult to find some positive points about the highway construction but I would have one. Because of the highway we are all standing here together and we could use this as a starting point for creating a movement which would be not just against the highway but which stands against all other oppressive structures and challenges all authorities.
We can already see beginning of the process with A14 resistance and anti-fascism. The highway resistance attracted a lot of attention from right wing assholes and once again showed us how big problem we have with rise of fascism, especially here on countryside. Because of the
attacks all people who are against A14 had to take a stand against fascists as well.
It´s great and I hope we can expand it bit further. We started with being against highway we added anti-fascism maybe next we can add anti-patriarchal and anti-state struggle while in the same time we can put in it fight against monocultures and for localized sustainable food
production and here we have a complex movement.
In Danni we focused too much on stopping the highway. We had 150 treehouses, we climbed more than 40 metres from the ground above the canopies of trees, all roads in forests got barricaded, there were thousands of people on demonstrations, machines were burning, people were signing petitions, highways were getting blocked and much more. Well it didn´t work. All three forests got cut and A49 is getting build now. Why?
In my opinion one of the reasons is that we focused too much on the highway and that if we want to have more success this time we need to create a movement which offers more than just protest against a stupid
highway. I don´t want to sit for next two years in a treehouse waiting for eviction. I want to be active. I want to connect with all people around who want to live free of oppressions and in better harmony with environment. I want to be part of the movement I´ve just described. That´s the reasons why I came to Altmark and why I took part in occupying the stupid monoculture forest next to Seehausen.
Thanks for listening and feel free to always come to Moni. You can just come by for a dinner or to learn climbing or if you want to stay over night we can always find some free place to sleep for you. If you would want to move to forest and start living up in trees with us it would be the nicest.
I would also like to remind us that not everyone can be here today. There are many people locked up in fucked up prisons. Last year many of us faced police repressions while protecting the Dannenroder forest.
Many people got arrested, some of them end up in prison. By others UP1, unidentified person number 1, friend of mine. UP1 is Locked up in Frankfurt prison for more then 6 months now. She is imprisoned for protecting environment, for protecting the forest, for protecting her home. She is being accused for serious body harm. A cop grabbed her foot and was pulling her down while she was climbing in the trees. Apparently she should have moved with the foot and tried to hurt the cop. On her first court hearing she was refused two of her three legal defenders. One of the reasons was that they are known to be against highways. Well this is what democracy looks like.
In the case you want to support her the next court hearing of UP1 is on 8 of June.