Andrew Bolt: Climate crusaders’ bullying would have appalled van Gogh

If the protesters who threw soup at van Gogh’s painting had a skerrick curiosity and love of truth like he did, they’d realise their climate catastrophism was based on lies.

Seven years before he painted the sunflowers picture which two climate protesters vandalised last week, Vincent van Gogh wrote the most brilliant letter in art history.

To his brother Theo, it showed a humility and sense of civilisation totally missing in protesters Anna Holland and Phoebe Plummer, aka “’Ziggy Stardyke”.

Van Gogh had not yet painted one picture and had failed at everything else.

“It seems that things are going very badly for me,” he confessed, but he had “a great fire” in his soul and surely was good for something!

“My existence is not without reason! … How can I be of use, how can I be of service?”

Soon afterwards, and 10 years before he shot himself, van Gogh decided his “service” would be to paint, once he’d learned how. His sunflower paintings are part of that service to us all, giving joy and inspiration to millions.

Knowing this, this attack on one of his masterpieces, in London’s National Gallery, is an obscenity.

Van Gogh painted out of love. As he said in his letter: “Love this friend, this person, this thing, whatever you like, and you will be on the right road to understanding Him (God) better.”

But Holland, a 20-year-old student, and Plummer, a 21-year-old graduate, showed only hate, throwing soup over the most loved painting they could find before gluing themselves to the wall and shouting about the global warming Plummer falsely claims is causing “genocide”.

Climate crusaders glued their hands to the wall under Vincent van Gogh's "Sunflowers" after throwing tomato soup on the painting.

Their only love seems a love of power and themselves.

Plummer’s Facebook page, for instance, is littered with self-admiring selfies.

The two women have also blocked traffic in their global warming crusade, a bullying that would have appalled van Gogh.

What’s more, if the protesters had a skerrick of van Gogh’s curiosity and love of truth, they’d realise their climate catastrophism was based on lies.

Holland explained the soup-throwing by claiming: “Families in the UK will be forced to choose between heating or eating this winter.”

Yet Britain’s rising power prices are not caused by fossil fuels but the global warmists who stopped fracking for gas and burning coal for electricity, leaving Britain critically short of cheap power.

Global warming, in contrast, has actually helped us grow record crops, because carbon dioxide is a plant food.

Don’t these barbarians care about these truths, preferring instead the lies that excuse their bullying?

In that, too, they’re unlike van Gogh, who sought the truth to delight and serve.