Thunbergs Are Go – still making all the right enemies
Posted by Ed on October 24, 2024, 11:09 am
Greta Thunberg – still making all the right enemies
They say she is using ‘the climate movement to throw her support behind the Palestinians’. Well, good on her. Thunberg likely understood that from the moment the then-15- year-old Swedish schoolgirl embarked on her silent, solitary protest warning of the impending climate apocalypse that she would invite a swarm of hysterical detractors who, in defence of the agreeable status quo, were conditioned to question her motives and sincerity...
...“If you, as a climate activist, don’t also fight for a free Palestine and an end to colonialism and oppression all over the world, then you should not be able to call yourself a climate activist,” Thunberg said in Milan, Italy, this month during a rally demanding an end to the genocide in Gaza.
“Silence is complicity,” Thunberg added. “You cannot be neutral in a genocide.”...
...In a lengthy yarn in the international edition of the German news magazine Der Spiegel, a host of reporters marshalled their resources late last year to pen a thinly disguised “hit” piece designed, once again, to put Thunberg in her place – all with the patina of sober Teutonic seriousness.
I have read it, so you don’t have to.
The essay oozes with the grating condescension and sloppy accusations of a gallery of English-speaking hacks that I addressed in this 2019 column.
The Der Spiegel writers begin with this patronising nugget. “[Thunberg] is no longer a girl. … Rather, she looks like a self-confident, 20-year-old woman.”
Oh, how sweet of her.
The “shy” girl turned “self-confident” woman was credited with speaking “uncomfortable truths” about the climate crisis to popes, presidents and prime ministers.
“But she was right,” Der Spiegel wrote. “And she had science on her side.”
Oh, how sweet of her – part two.
“Now”, Der Spiegel wrote, Thunberg “finds herself on the business end of serious, justified criticism” for having carried out the blasphemy of using “the climate movement to throw her support behind the Palestinians”.
Oh, how horrible of her.
Thunberg’s “recurring pattern” of defending the Palestinian cause has, according to Der Spiegel, triggered “dismay” and sown division among her disappointed followers, particularly in Germany, and on “the left” who once admired her.
Oh, how horrible of her – part two.
Still, Der Spiegel allows that “Thunberg does feel empathy – for the Palestinians. And that’s not wrong.”
I suspect that Thunberg doesn’t require Der Spiegel’s approval to “feel empathy – for the Palestinians”.
Apparently, Thunberg is no longer a youthful upstart who shares “uncomfortable truths” but a “propagandist” by virtue of her “cold” and distant “approach to Israel”.
The saint has become a “naive” sinner – even though, this time, she has history and international law, not science, on her side.
The remainder of Der Spiegel’s largely uncharitable “deep dive” into Thunberg’s present and past recycles the familiar tropes.
She was an unhappy, stubborn child whose awkwardness alienated friends and triggered 40-minute-long tantrums.
As such, her advocacy on behalf of besieged Palestinians, Der Spiegel speculates, is borne of her longing for the “respect of her peers” and to “be recognized”.
It is absurd tripe.
As I wrote more than five years ago: “[Thunberg] disdains celebrity. She makes no claim to heroism. She rebuffs efforts to idolise her. She isn’t calculating or preoccupied with fame or ego. There is no artifice about her. She speaks plainly, without affectation or embroidery.”
Thunberg’s rallying to the aid of Palestinians is a natural extension of her undeniable instinct to confront the profound human repercussions of ignorance and complacency and to do something about it – alone, if necessary.
It is the signature impulse that has driven her extraordinary activism from the start.
She has never insisted that others follow her lead in lockstep. Yet legions have because they are moved by the same impulse to confront the profound human repercussions of ignorance and complacency and to do something about it.
I’m confident that Thunberg will continue to reject Der Spiegel’s trite admonition to get back “on the right track”.
The Germans have lost their goddamned minds (again).
“Now”, Der Spiegel wrote, Thunberg “finds herself on the business end of serious, justified criticism”
What could possibly justify the criticism of genocide? How is standing up for an oppressed people who are being murdered en-masse something that should be attacked?
Det Spiegel is the one that demanded people sign loyalty pledges to the apartheid state before being employed right? Maybe it was the parent company or one of the German media giants.
Lost their minds. She'll tell them to gtf I would expect.
...no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party...So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.
Re: Thunbergs Are Go – still making all the right enemies
I might be wrong, but the impression I get (and I have to admit, it is only an impression) is that Greta used to feature in msm reports fairly often but not so often now it seems to me, since she has piped up about the Palestinians.
He knew what it meant and he's dying inside. Good. ACAC.
She's (kahlissee) a good Twitter account to follow for anyone that doesn't....no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party...So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.
I didn't know about the white rose emblem in NAZI Germany. Thanks for the information. Worth remembering. Might be worth considering as an emblem for protest here?
The White Rose was a non-violent, intellectual resistance group in Nazi Germany in 1942, which was led by five students and one professor at the University of Munich: Willi Graf, Kurt Huber, Christoph Probst, Alexander Schmorell, Hans Scholl and Sophie Scholl. (Wiki) Some truly brave people involved in the wider movement, many murdered by the regime, many died in concentration camps or prison, and three were actually guillotined - Hans and Sophie Scholl, as well as Christoph Probst . I had not previously known of the use of this apparatus of execution by the NAZIs.
Worth remembering, not all Germans were compliant, and those who weren't well knew that they might well be rewarded with their death.
Get yer White Roses and Keffiehs here. Wear them with pride at National anti fascism demo.
Germany's political royalty is firmly on the side of Israel. Chancellor Olaf Scholz, like Angela Merkel before him, has repeatedly said that Israeli security is an important element of Germany's raison d'état. Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck of the Green Party produced a powerful video in which he urged his fellow citizens to shun anti-Semitism in all its forms, noting that Germany has a special responsibility. The establishment of the country of Israel after the Holocaust, Habeck noted, was a promise of security for Jews.
The same "Green" Harbeck along with his mad political colleague Annalena Bairbock whose bellicosity and Russophobia are a good part of the cause of and the continuation of the Ukraine war and the ruination of that country and its population. They are the betrayers. Thunberg is merely restating her case as a moral person. and to hell with the politics.
on October 24, 2024, 11:09 am