Autonomous struggle, infrastructure sabotage, and propaganda: A political ecology of media manipulation in the case of Lützerath

In this visual intervention, I demonstrate the connections between corporate-state propaganda and anti-mining struggles through four film-scenes that document the defense of Lützerath, a squatted hamlet in the German Rhineland. This essay demonstrates and seeks to explain the deceptive communication entailed in dominant media narratives, which delegitimizes acts of sabotage on mining infrastructure through de-contextualizing Lützerath's defense. The essay does so by contrasting dominant media narratives to audio-visual material that conveys the Lützerath struggle in its historical and political context: as a space of creative and regionally rooted resistance, collective belonging, and diverse tactics in opposition to industrial expansion. While many scholars have juxtaposed dominant and counter narratives in the context of socio-ecological conflicts, this essay embeds such a contrast within a theory of propaganda and audio-visual recordings from living in Lützerath at the edge of the opencast lignite mine Garzweiler II.