It is not the imminent collapse of the earth that we should fear, but loony groups like Extinction Rebellion:
Communism never dies – it just mutates into different forms. The hatred of the West, the hatred of the free market, and ultimately, the hatred of people, is always with us in one form or another. And the old communist war on the West simply continues in new guises today.
The latest form it takes is radical environmentalism. West-hating lefties have not disappeared from the scene – they have simply morphed into today’s greens. But the same revolutionary zeal to destroy the West remains. One person who should know all about this is the cofounder of Greenpeace, Dr Patrick Moore. As he said in his 2010 book, Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout:
The collapse of world communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall during the 1980s added to the trend toward extremism. The Cold War was over and the peace movement was largely disbanded. The peace movement had been mainly Western-based and anti-American in its leanings. Many of its members moved into the environmental movement, bringing with them their neo-Marxist, far-left agendas. To a considerable extent the environmental movement was hijacked by political and social activists who learned to use green language to cloak agendas that had more to do with anti-capitalism and anti-globalization than with science or ecology. I remember visiting our Toronto office in 1985 and being surprised at how many of the new recruits were sporting army fatigues and red berets in support of the Sandinistas.
While not all those concerned about the environment are radical Marxists, many are, and they tend to lead astray those who are without all the political baggage into radical leftist extremism. Consider the latest manifestation of hyper-left greenism: Extinction Rebellion (ER).
This far-left activist group was first formed in the UK in May, 2018, and now is found throughout the West, including here in Australia. It declared this month to be one of international action, and it favours major disruptions in city centres with mass arrests of protestors.
The group proudly states its hatred of capitalism and the West. As one tweet from the group puts it: “This movement is the best chance that we have of bringing down capitalism.” They seem oblivious to the fact that it has been free market nations, not socialist ones, that have done the most to help the environment and help the poor and needy.
As a result of all this reckless activism, mass protests and urban disruptions, critics of the movement have emerged – even from those within the green movement. Consider one recent example of this:
The head of one of Australia’s largest environment groups has warned Extinction Rebellion protesters they could be creating division on environmental issues at a time when “cool heads” are needed. Lyndon Schneiders, national campaigns director for the Wilderness Society and a veteran activist, told Guardian Australia he hoped the XR campaign would not hand more power to the fossil fuel lobby by causing further polarisation. This week, XR groups in Australia and around the globe have stepped up activities, with an “international rebellion” that, in Australia, has focused on disrupting city centres. www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/09/extinction-rebellion-risks-polarising-public-on-climate-veteran-activist-says
But two scathing articles by Spiked Online editor Brendan O’Neill are especially worth noting and quoting from. Two days ago he wrote a piece based upon his encounter with them in London:
They demanded repentance. ‘Buy less, fly less, fry less’, said one placard. Catholics only demand the non-consumption of meat on Fridays, as an act of penance to mark the day of Christ’s death. This new religion demands an end to meat-consumption entirely, as penance for mankind’s sins of growth and progress. And like all death cultists, they handed out leaflets that contained within them ‘THE TRUTH’. The leaflets foretell floods and fire: ‘We are in trouble. Sea levels are rising… Africa and the Amazon are on fire.’ The only word that was missing was locusts. They can’t be far behind these other ghastly visitations to sinful mankind.
And if you question their TRUTH? Then, like those heretics who were hauled before The Inquisition 500 years ago, you will be denounced as a denier. A denier of their revelations, a denier of their visions. ‘Denial is not a policy’, their placards decreed. Spotting me filming their spooky, apocalyptic ceremony, one of the attendees waved that placard in my face. A warning from the cult to a corrupted outsider.
This was, of course, Extinction Rebellion. Let us no longer beat around the bush about these people. This is an upper-middle-class death cult. This is a millenarian movement that might speak of science, but which is driven by sheer irrationalism. By fear, moral exhaustion and misanthropy. This is the deflated, self-loathing bourgeoisie coming together to project their own psycho-social hang-ups on to society at large. They must be criticised and ridiculed out of existence.
As mentioned, groups like this are at heart anti-human. O’Neill continues:
Extinction Rebellion is a reactionary, regressive and elitist movement whose aim is to impose the most disturbing form of austerity imaginable on people across the world. One of the great ironies of ‘progressive’ politics today is that people of a leftist persuasion will say it is borderline fascism if the Tory government closes down a library in Wolverhampton, but then they will cheer this eco-death cult when it demands a virtual halt to economic growth with not a single thought for the devastating, immiserating and outright lethal impact such a course of action would have on the working and struggling peoples of the world.
Extinction Rebellion says mankind is doomed if we do not cut carbon emissions to Net Zero by 2025. That’s six years’ time. Think about it: they want us to halt a vast array of human activity that produces carbon. All that Australian digging for coal; all those Chinese factories employing millions of people and producing billions of things used by people around the world; all those jobs in the UK in the fossil-fuel industries; all those coal-fired power stations; all that flying; all that driving… cut it all back, rein it in, stop it. And the people who rely on these things for their work and their food and their warmth? Screw them. They’re only humans. Horrible, destructive, stupid humans.
Progressive movements, as the name suggests, used to be about pursuing progress, pushing mankind forwards, creating a better, wealthier world for all. Extinction Rebellion wants the precise opposite. It wants to propel us backwards, to the Stone Age. It wants to reverse the most important moment in human history – the Industrial Revolution. It wants to undo that revolution’s liberation of mankind from the brutishness and ignorance of life on the land and recreate that old, unforgiving world in which we all ‘ate locally’, never travelled, danced around maypoles for fun, and died of cholera when we were 38. www.spiked-online.com/2019/10/07/the-madness-of-extinction-rebellion/
And yesterday he had another article on this group in which he continues his well-deserved assault on ER madness. In it he writes:
Let’s be frank: they’re nuts. These people are crazy. If society were to cave in to their demented demands, humankind would be propelled into the most devastating form of austerity imaginable. If they got their way, the poor would stay poor, the Third World would never develop, meat would be banned, flying would be unaffordable to all but the wealthiest people, and you would be shamed for having children. These people want to inflict misery and penury and barrenness on humankind and it’s about time more of us said so.
Extinction Rebellion protests increasingly resemble cult-like gatherings. I’ve seen these people forming circles and swaying back and forth as they warn of the hellfire that will shortly consume mankind. ‘What will you do when the world gets hot, what, what?’, they chant.
Like all end-of-world sects they warn of floods and fire and pestilence. ‘Sea levels are rising’, their leaflets pronounce. They also tell us that ‘Africa is on fire’, which of course isn’t true. I can’t be the only person who finds it pretty obnoxious that these mostly white, well-off, time-rich protesters reduce the complex continent of Africa to a mere symbol, to a tragic victim of ‘fire’, and then use it as a warning sign to the rest of us. Gross.
He concludes:
Extinction Rebellion is a menace to reason and progress. It is reliant on the politics of fear. It uses exaggeration and hyperbole and emotion to try to convince us that End Times are around the corner. It demonises as a ‘denier’ anyone who questions this depressing, anti-human script. And it campaigns, tirelessly, for less — less production, less consumption, less meat, less travel, less joy.
As George Monbiot honestly put it in his 2006 book Heat, the most important thing about environmentalism is that it is a campaign ‘not for abundance but for austerity’. Exactly. And Extinction Rebellion confirms this beyond all doubt. XR is a movement of privileged, comfortable people who lecture the plebs and foreigners about our allegedly destructive habits and who want to create a more austere and punishing society. Every sensible person will reject such misanthropy and continue supporting the genuinely progressive project of liberating all of mankind from poverty. blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/10/extinction-rebellion-is-a-menace/
Oh, and if you want to know what a real ER fanatic sounds like, check out this interview with one, conducted by Neil Mitchell the Melbourne radio host – it is scary stuff indeed: www.3aw.com.au/the-debate-extinction-rebellion-in-the-studio-with-neil-mitchell/
