Do you remember this coordinated arson attack on the French rail system? Beege wrote about it here. It happened just about two weeks ago as the Olympics were starting in Paris. Some unknown group set fires that wound up snarling the country's high-speed rail system for most of the day. On the day it happened there was no claim of responsibility so everyone was left wondering. What authorities did know was that whoever did it had a detailed knowledge of the French system.

As the country’s train system jewel, the high-speed network remains its most protected, Mr. Dansart said, with fences, security cameras, protected access doors and tours by agents at the most critical locations.

That spurred speculation that the attackers had access to internal information.

“People had to know how the trains work and the location of these boxes,” said Guillaume Farde, a security expert who teaches at the Sciences Po university in Paris. “You have to have the right information.”

Today the NY Times revealed that one day after the attack, they and other media outlets did receive a claim of responsibility from a group which appears to be part of the French ultraleft. The email itself was anonymous but based on the arguments made in the email, I don't have much doubt that's who sent it.

One potential clue being examined by investigators is an anonymous email which was sent a day after the attack to The New York Times and other media organizations and which celebrated the sabotage. It claimed that the attacks were intended to disrupt the Olympics, which the email called a “celebration of nationalism” and a “testing ground” for mass policing that shows how states “subjugate populations.”

The email, which was signed “an unexpected delegation,” in a reference to the Olympics, was sent from an anonymous email address created on Riseup, a platform that “provides online communication tools for people and groups working on liberatory social change,” according to its website.

The text of the email criticized France’s weapons export industry, condemned police brutality, castigated French companies like Total or Alstom for wreaking social and environmental havoc and took a dim view of France’s high-speed train system.

“Railroads are not an innocuous infrastructure,” the email said. “They have always been a means of colonizing new territories, a prerequisite for their devastation, and a ready-made path for the extension of capitalism and state control.”

Let me get this straight. They sabotaged the French high-speed rail system, the kind of system AOC and the Squad want to see adopted here as part of the Green New Deal, because trains are historically connected to colonialism and capitalism? It's hard to imagine writing something like railroads bad as a serious justification for sabotage. It really does feel like anti-colonial wokeism has rotted some people's brains beyond the point of recovery. This is the logical equivalent of saying: Hitler wore pants, therefore fascist trousers must be destroyed! 

Fortunately, no one was injured by this stunt, but they did manage to seriously inconvenience about a million people, not to mention scaring millions more who wondered if this was part of a terrorist attack planned to coincide with the Olympics. Remember, it hasn't been that long since coordinated terror attacks in Paris killed 130 people.

To be clear, no one had identified who sent the email or verified that those people were actually behind the attacks, but experts on French leftism say it all rings true.

Several experts on far-left movements and sabotage said that the tone and arguments of the email were consistent with an anarchist ideology, and they noted that sabotage carried out by anarchist groups was often followed by similarly fuzzy claims of responsibility.

Victor Cachard, a French author who has written extensively about the history of sabotage, said that it was hard to ascertain with any confidence who was behind the attacks. Still, he said, “when you look at the recent history of claims that come after this kind of action, the insurrectionist anarchist movement is often behind it.”

I guess we'll have to wait and see if the authorities can identify the people involved. But as of now it sure looks likely this was a bunch of twenty-something idiots who've imbibed a bit too much American wokeism.