An astute commenter on this blog has prompted me to go deeper into what a genuine German anarchist collective attacking energy infrastructure would call themselves.
Based on history, I can say with certainty that left-wing extremist tracking should be watching out for names and tags like these:
- Autonome Zellen (Autonomous Cells)
- Schwarze Flamme (Black Flame)
- Klimarebellion (Climate Rebellion)
- Anti-Atom Aktion (Anti-Nuclear Action)
- Bewegung 2 Juni (date of disaster)
This clarification of identity is not about speculation as much as experience from inside anarchist hacking culture, and decades of evidence.
In complete contrast, however, “die Vulkangruppe” reads like someone in the Russian military contractor business had wanted a dramatic German-sounding name like Wagner Group. Hitler loved Wagner. Hitler loved Roman mythology.
In fact, when you look at over 100 years of anarchist naming habits, the use of Vulkan fails every single test!
- NO political descriptor – not “Revolutionary,” “Red,” “Autonomous,” “Anti-“
- NO commemorative element – no date, no martyr
- NO class signifier – no worker/proletarian reference
- WRONG frame – anarchists believe “NO gods, NO masters”
- WRONG aesthetic – Roman mythology is bourgeois classical education associated with fascism
- WRONG imagery – Forge/weapon of Vulkan god symbolizes dictator, strong man
I’ll say it again. 100 years.
Here’s another way to explain the naming problem. The left never uses anything that the Vulkan framing does. The meaning is so far removed from political conventions on the left, that its use becomes evidence of extreme right-wing symbolism.
| Category | Why Rejected by the Left |
|---|---|
| Roman/Greek mythology | Associated with classical education = bourgeois elitism |
| Gods of any kind | “No gods, no masters” is a foundational anarchist slogan |
| Forge/weapon-maker imagery | Celebrates industrial capitalism’s instruments of power |
| Nature mysticism | Associated with völkisch/fascist movements in German context |
| National mythology | Internationalist ideology explicitly rejects national symbols |
On top of that, Germans culturally reject Roman imagery because their national identity was built on defeating Rome. Russians, by contrast, embrace it: “Third Rome” ideology, Tsar derived from Caesar, imperial inheritance from Byzantium. The Vulkan name fits Moscow’s right-wing mystic vocabulary, not Berlin’s.
And what about the Icelandic volcano aliasing like the Hekla and Katla pseudonyms? Germans have no cultural connection to Iceland. Nothing. More importantly, climate activists focus on human-caused problems: fossil fuels, carbon emissions, nuclear waste. Volcanoes are natural geological events that represent the opposite of what environmentalists protest.
No genuine green anarchist would brand themselves around volcanic imagery, because why would they? Such a meaningless foreign geological reference is an implausible German activist naming story. The volcanic aliasing instead reads like backstopping by GRU; a thin cover fabricated after the fact for Russian military contractors to obfuscate Roman god worship.
The 2011 Hekla-Empfangskomitee attributed to the Vulkangruppe is even worse German! It makes no sense unless you speak Russian.
A Russian naturally would say: “Комитет по встрече Гекла” or “Committee for the reception of Hekla”. That becomes… Hekla-Empfangskomitee.
A German would say Hekla-Begrüßungsgruppe or just use the volcano name alone. In German left-wing militant groups we never see any reference to any committee:
- Fraktion (RAF)
- Zellen (Revolutionäre Zellen)
- Gruppe (Baader-Meinhof Gruppe)
- Bewegung (movement)
- Bund (league)
However, in Russian the word Комитет (Komitet) is everywhere like КГБ = Комитет государственной безопасности (Committee for State Security). I mean the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti is a canonical example because that’s the KGB. Therefore the “reception committee” phrase is alien to Germans, and practically a Russian fingerprint for the terror group.
The construction of “Hekla-Empfangskomitee” combines:
- A foreign geological reference with zero connection to Germany, zero connection to climate
- A word (“Empfang”/reception) Germans would not use
- An organizational suffix (“Komitee”) that is a default in Russian, and only appears in Germany under imposed Soviet bureaucracy
Add to all this that there have been attempts by Russian intelligence services to organize vandalism in the name of environmental activists. The recent “Be Greener!” operation proved over 270 vehicles were damaged by Russian assets across Germany to inflame public sentiment against the Green Party and Robert Habeck. The perpetrators were not climate activists but rather individuals recruited by the FSB.
“Die Vulkangruppe” appears by all accounts to be a Russian term, about as “German” as Russia’s infamous “The Wagner Group”.
