Review, How to Blow Up a Pipeline: What the movie gets right and wrong.

Last October, climate activists threw soup at a Van Gogh painting. The painting was fine, but the symbolic souping became the protest version of The Dress, with the internet arguing not about blue versus gold, but “good” versus “dumb.” Climate activist and theorist Andreas Malm was, at first, team “dumb,” not because he was scandalized, but because he prefers actual sabotage, ideally directed at fossil fuel infrastructure or the wasteful carbon emissions of the rich. In one argument, Malm explains that violent groups can create a “flank effect” for nonviolent movements, making everyone else look reasonable in comparison. Contrast that with Malm, who writes that “sabotage can be done softly, even gingerly.” “They’re gonna call us terrorists because we’re doing terrorism,” Xochitl’s friend Theo observes casually, as the group kicks back after a long day of bomb-making. He argues that the term should be reserved for the destruction of something much more important than oil company property: “If terrorism is to have any analytical substance, its core definition must be the deliberate and indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians for the purpose of instilling terror or something very nearly like it.” I was surprised when Theo self-identified as a terrorist.