Greta’s Grinning Legions of Death
It’s party time, people! All the entertainment kicks off this Friday with a global climate strike inspired by Swedish apocalypse baby Greta Thunberg.
It’s party time, people! All the entertainment kicks off this Friday with a global climate strike inspired by Swedish apocalypse baby Greta Thunberg.
Teenage Greta isn’t much of a Happy Fun Ball herself, of course, but her followers nevertheless thrill to Thunberg’s doomy message.
They don’t mind at all that she’s lately mastered the sort of authoritarian glare a communist bloc dissident might have seen just before the round was chambered.
“I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear,” Thunberg told the World Economic Forum back in January. God bless her. She’s a perfect Freddy Krueger for the Nightmare on Carbon Street generation.
And so on Friday we’ll have possibly the biggest Halloween-style climate scare pantomime yet. The kids love this sort of thing, as you’ll have noticed from past climate protests.
Their signs shriek disaster, but their joyful smiles are a dead giveaway. These aren’t really protests at all. They’re parties in the form of participatory performance art.
By the way, as a great fan and supporter of these events, might I ask for an improvement in the standard of signage? Some of the themes are becoming more than slightly shopworn.
“There’s no Planet B” has been kicking around for years now. Frankly, as someone who has dedicated his life to destroying Planet A, this message has always come as a terrific relief. Imagine the hassle of having to start all over again.
Step it up, children. You’ll also need to ditch the “you can’t eat coal” banners. You can’t eat mobile phones either, but every schoolkid at every Friday strike will be carrying one, despite their enormous climate impact.
As Paris-based think tank The Shift Project pointed out earlier this year, digital technology generates nearly three times Australia’s carbon dioxide output.
Why, these junior climate warriors are nothing but a mob of planet-poisoning Instagram Adanis.
Brett Kavanaugh is trending and I hope its because he’s putting Greta Thunberg in jail.
— Tim Dillon (@TimJDillon) September 15, 2019
We’ll know they’re serious when the mobile phones are in the bin. For that matter, they might consider getting rid of the signs as well. Serious protests don’t involve a great many signs.
The ongoing Hong Kong democracy protests feature a few signs here and there, but the ratio of signs to people isn’t enormous, even though a properly-angled one could provide useful protection against police beatings.
Similarly, old images of the 1965 civil rights marches led by Martin Luther King Jr in Alabama are impressively sign free. Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge is shown full of people – some of them destined for Hong Kong-style bashings – who have more important matters on their minds than stupid slogans.
Crowds without signs tends to mean business and get things done. A fine example occurred in Romania 30 years ago. One stunning shot of that December’s uprising shows tens of thousands of seething Romanians outside Bucharest’s communist party headquarters, demanding the removal of dictators Nicolai and Elena Ceausescu.
Only a single sign is visible: a sheet bearing the words “Jos Tiranuc” (“Down with the tyrant”). Mere hours later the Ceausescu were dragged away and executed. Well, they never stood much of a chance against that ratio.
A day spent studying that era would be more rewarding, though admittedly less entertaining, than a day spent marching around and yelling about ScoMo. Brighter children may even be drawn to re-examine the leftist crazy talk they keep being fed by their teachers.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn isn’t exactly at the top of every teen’s “must read” list, but as US author Francis X. Maier recently observed, the late Russian novelist had a message they might grow to appreciate.
He also had those kids pegged as far back as 1968, when Solzhenitsyn published In the First Circle.
The book tells of a Soviet diplomat whose attempt to warn the US of stolen nuclear secrets fails due to American incompetence and causes the diplomat’s downfall.
“Arrested and imprisoned at the end of the novel, the diplomat’s final thought about Americans is that ‘prosperity breeds idiots’,”Maier wrote.
“Solzhenitsyn’s diplomat channels views that were clearly held by the author himself. Comfort and safety, enjoyed too long in the West, invite complacency – and complacency leads to stupidity.
“As a gulag survivor, Solzhenitsyn had a barely disguised disgust for Western elites with little experience of political murder and repression.
“Nor could he abide the legion of fools who seemed fascinated, from a secure and prosperous distance, with socialist thought.”
And right there Solzhenitsyn nails climate marchers. Too bad it won’t easily fit on a sign. Still, at least our wealthy little funsters will enjoy the support of Ghana’s prestigious Institute of Journalism.
“We hope that government will appreciate mobilisation power of young people and start implementing policies that will drastically increase the use of renewable energy,” the Institute announced last week.
Good luck with that. Ghana has long been incapable of generating sufficient energy in any form, and blackouts are so frequent they even have their own word: “dumsor”, or “off and on”.
As the intensity of blackouts increased earlier this year, the language evolved. Ghanaians now speak not of “dumsor” but of “dumdum” (off and off).
What a delightful phrase. And useful in multiple applications this Friday.