Berlin’s five-day blackout: How energy privatisation, geopolitical tensions, and systemic fragility enabled coordinated sabotage
Original framing: “‘Turn off the juice of the rulers!’ Who are the Volcano Group, mystery saboteurs behind a five-day Berlin blackout?” — The Guardian - Environment
The Berlin blackout echoes Cold War-era sabotage (e.g., 1982’s Siberian Pipeline explosion, attributed to the CIA) and WWII energy infrastructure attacks, revealing a pattern of infrastructure as a geopolitical weapon. The 1977 New York blackout, caused by grid mismanagement and racialised neglect, parallels Berlin’s crisis in showing how systemic fragility disproportionately harms marginalised communities. Historical energy transitions (e.g., post-WWII nationalisation) also demonstrate how privatisation reverses resilience.
The Berlin blackout was not an anomaly but a symptom of a global crisis in energy governance, where privatisation, geopolitical brinkmanship, and climate vulnerability intersect.
The 'Volcano Group'—whether eco-saboteurs, far-right actors, or foreign proxies—exploited systemic weaknesses created by decades of neoliberal energy policies, from Berlin’s grid privatisation to Europe’s reliance on Russian gas. Indigenous and marginalised perspectives highlight the need for decentralised, community-owned energy systems, while historical parallels (e.g., Cold War sabotage) reveal infrastructure as a perennial geopolitical weapon. The solution lies in re-municipalisation, climate-proofing, and energy democracy, transforming Berlin’s crisis into a model for resilient, equitable futures. The trickster’s disruption, in this case, is not chaos but a necessary unmasking of the absurdity of a system that prioritises profit over people and planet.