They give children their toxic thoughts and they instilled enormous toxicity in Thunberg. She just parroted the lines pinkish intellectuals chant all the time.
The liberal establishment all over the world has discarded propriety, reason and shame. Nothing else explains their cowardly move to shoot from the shoulders of the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg. They have made her, to use an American conservative’s term, their “spokes-child”. Andrew Bolt, an Australian broadcaster, correctly said that Thunberg was the victim of child abuse, for indoctrinating an adolescent and using her to air certain views was nothing but abuse.
I have not been able to firm up my views on climate change, primarily because the folks who have made it their cause are professional revolutionaries and eco-nuts; whatever else they say is the exact opposite of the truth. But that is beside the point; the issue here is simple: how on earth can we take seriously the views of a girl who is supposed to be learning rather than preaching what governments and societies should be doing?
A girl, or boy, of her age—she actually began her activism when she was 15, and she was taken seriously—is not expected to have a developed mind and body; this is the reason that in most countries children as young as 15 and 16 are not allowed to vote. Sex with them is regarded as rape, as their consent is regarded inconsequential. Nor is their knowledge base wide and deep enough to comprehend any subject. This is the reason that most universities in the world would not admit Thunberg for one or two years.
In her speech at the UN, Thunberg said, “This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be standing here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to me for hope? How dare you!”
She got it all right, except the fact that she should have been saying this to the Left-liberal tricksters who are hiding behind her innocence and ignorance, who have made her miss her school. How dare they!
They brainwashed Thunberg so that she could utter Marxist claptrap: “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”
In his celebrated poem, “On Children”, Kahlil Gibran wrote, “Your children are not your children./They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself./They come through you but not from you,/And though they are with you yet they belong not to you./You may give them your love but not your thoughts,/For they have their own thoughts.”
But such noble sentiments have no meaning for Left-liberals; they give children not only their toxic thoughts but also noxious words; they certainly instilled enormous toxicity in Thunberg. She just parroted the lines pinkish intellectuals chant all the time.
They have been talking about “the crisis of capitalism” for decades, which, unfortunately for them, never becomes severe enough to end the market economy in democracies. So, now they talk about a “mass extinction”; or, to be precise, prompt children to talk about it.
In effect, Left-liberals are coaxing children to fight their own war; they are using children just as jihadists do. The terror organisation, Hamas, uses kids as cover against Israeli forces; any retaliation and casualties of children are highlighted by them, and the liberal establishment, as proof of Israel’s barbarity.
Green jihadists are one up on the Islamic terrorists: while the latter just use kids as cover, the former have even weaponised the cover. Thunberg and her kid comrades have become warriors against climate change.
This is not to say that climate change is a myth; perhaps it’s real. But then, the solutions too have to be real; and they certainly can’t be predicated upon abandoning economic growth and money making. In fact, the measures suggested to launch remedial measures would need a lot of money.
No issue can be addressed with a doctrinaire approach, but that is the only one that green activists offer. Nor can a problem as mammoth as climate change—assuming it is there—can be solved by theatrics. Sadly, this is what Left-liberals are keen on; Thunberg’s UN speech, for one, was pure theatre. Such stunts just infantilise public discourse and degenerate childhood.
Of course, stunts also help score brownie points. The liberal establishment is mighty pleased with the discomfort it has caused to the conservatives in the West; anybody who has reacted to Thunberg has been hauled over the coals. The fact, however, is that liberals have exhibited their own cowardice and shamelessness by using Thunberg.
Ravi Shanker Kapoor is Editor, www.thehinduchronicle.com