Parliament House Canberra protest by Extinction Rebellion self-serving anarchy
If you believe no carbon is good carbon, why would you burn a pram in protest and create the carbon you object to, asks Vikki Campion.
Opinion
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Extinction Rebellion is more a cult of the environment than a cause.
Powered by fear, motivated totally by tears, wholehearted in believing puerile acts of vandalism, such as graffiti on the Lodge, setting a pram on fire at Parliament House or tipping paint through government buildings progress their utopian dream.
You believe you are graced with greater wisdom that others are bereft of, and with time they will become aware of your enlightenment and follow you.
No movement leader in the course of history is known for saying, “I’m a bit stupid, make up your own mind about this.”
They say, “Come with us” or “Follow me, here is the promised land.”
Extinction Rebellion like, “Let’s create anarchy. We have a higher licence.”
Arrest for them is a gem in the crown of the Green Queen, a zypher for global salvation, rather than how the police see it – a general public nuisance.
During indoctrination online, Extinction Rebellion Australia asserts they have the licence to break the law at will because their belief structure tells them they are morally obliged to. They are exemplary but trust the law to protect them while they break it.
Vandalism is a “moral duty”, an arrest is “empowering”, they tell you at the introduction.
“Come to prison with us,” the ACT Extinction Rebellion grandmother Lesley Moseby, 59, pleads to the group. “Ask yourself what do you have to do which is more important than this?”
Ms Moseby is in custody on remand since being arrested during the parliament graffiti earlier this week. Her video beams into home computers across the country in an Extinction Rebellion hook-up as from behind bars, she tries to convince people to join her on the pulpit as an eco-martyr of great wisdom.
They repeatedly refer to the suffragettes, likening themselves to the women who starved in jail to fight for the right to vote. They want the police to arrest them to attain an environmental canonisation, but they want the police to protect them while they do it.
The only reason they spray their psalm on the front of our nation’s parliament, in contempt of the law, is with a firm belief that if someone came and attacked them for doing so, the police would arrest the other person.
They are happy to deface our parliament but want the police to turn up if someone of opposing views trashes their house.
Even as Ms Moseby is gently guided by the AFP into a paddy wagon, after glueing her hand to the parliament in another “protest” in May this year, her friend filming them tells viewers, “Come and join us”.
In another educational resource, members promise, “You will sleep better at night” after arrest.
An arrest is glamorised based on becoming an ecowarrior pin-up, a sort of latter age Greta Thunberg, when about the only thing separating the Extinction Rebellion’s scrawl on Parliament House from a 15-year-old kid with a can of paint under a bridge is the 15-year-old is usually more artistic.
And that the teenager doesn’t do it to become an ABC Q&A rock star, won’t get their fines crowd-funded, nor will they have a sooky-la-la online that they don’t qualify for Deductible Gift Recipient status like Vinnies when they need to pay legal bills.
Australian taxpayers spend about $11.6 billion every year on police – who have much more important things to do like busting meth dealers and stopping DV, than to pursue upper middle class tertiary educated evangelists.
If any less educated kid did the same spray-paint graffiti and public fire-lighting, we would put them in school detention and take away phone privileges with none of the grasping sympathy this crowd screams for.
What is worrying about Extinction Rebellion is not the petty vandalism, but the complex dance they go through in their thought process to burn prams, spray aerosols, or drop smoke grenades, all emitting the toxic chemicals that they believe contribute to the very crisis they are so willing to go to jail for.
If you believe no carbon is good carbon, why would you burn a pram and create the carbon you object to?
Why drive diesel trucks draped in signage protesting fossil fuels? Why block roads when it forces cars trying to get to work to remain in traffic for longer than required?
You can justify just about anything if you think you are morally obliged to do it and wiser than everyone around you.
It poses the question, is it look at the issue or look at Messianic me?
Even in the online hook up, conversation turns to themselves, the thrill and satisfaction they get, the self-empowerment and self-realisation, just a whole lot of selfs.
Interventions have been held for people deep in the Extinction Rebellion movement by their concerned families who fear they have lost their loved ones to their beliefs.
In the meantime, a heap of law-abiding, locked down, tax paying, working, cooking, cleaning, tired and frayed people, doing the right thing as best as they can, have to tolerate this subset of self-entitled, conceitedly quasi-wise pseudo-intellectuals bleeding all over the news.
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