A League of Discontent

“THIS IS AN EMERGENCY. Life on Earth is in crisis. Our climate is changing faster than scientists predicted and the stakes are high. Biodiversity loss. Crop failure. Social and ecological collapse. Mass extinction. We are running out of time, and our governments have failed to act. Extinction Rebellion was formed to fix this.” This catastrophic prediction assails the reader when we visits https://rebellion.global. Up to the 20th century such ghastly, disturbing and bleak visions were conjured up by individuals who the modern man is inclined to call religious fanatics, religious fundamentalists or – more scientifically – mentally deranged. It is the proverbial Middle Ages that were fraught with itinerant preachers who would scare their listeners out of their wits, who would call on them to repent and put their life to rights or else. It is by no means different nowadays. Present-day moralizers have merely changed the religion. It is no longer imaginary hell – spiritual death – but extinction of all life; it is no longer eternal salvation but comfortable existence here and now; it is no longer Satan and his devils but technology and governments; it is no longer God and his angels but humanity in its many manifestations like “ethnicity, race, class, gender, gender identity, gender presentation, sexuality, age, income, ability, education, appearance, immigration status, belief or non-belief and activist experience” (the usual string of words); it is no longer moral sin but pollution of the environment; no longer virtuous life but life dedicated to ecology; no longer God’s wrath but nature’s wrath; no longer the Mother of God but Mother Earth.

The 21st century crusaders – operating in 75 countries and forming 568 local groups that are present at Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube – demand aggressively that governments:

1. TELL THE TRUTH i.e. declare a climate and ecological emergency;

2. ACT NOW i.e. halt biodiversity loss and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025; and

3. GO BEYOND POLITICS i.e. create and be led by the decisions of a Citizens’ Assembly on climate and ecological justice.

Whoop-de-doo! Net zero greenhouse gas emissions in just four years’ time! Climate and ecological justice! What does the latter mean? An equal spread of precipitation and temperature across the globe? Wow! 

When we read more, we learn that the strategy of the XR movement aims at safeguarding “a world that is fit for the next 7 generations to live in.” Quite a modest demand. Why seven in the first place? Why seven only? Whence the number? Does it have anything to do with numerology?

One really needs a lot of patience to struggle through the jabber of this and related websites. In a fragment like this one:

“Ecosystem development brings diverse movements together to work autonomously and collectively around a focal leverage point. Through our network and portfolio, we identify emerging and effective movements to increase visibility of movements, encourage collaboration, and connect funders, movements and broader stakeholders” (from https://www.climate2025.org/). 

the word movement occurs four times but the message is blurred and the terms like “focal leverage point”, “network and portfolio” or “broader stakeholders” remain as baffling and bewildering as ever. Everything is submerged in overwhelming – not to say nauseating – love which allows the XR activists to “embrace change that creates unity in diversity (…) to set right the relationships (…) [to] avoid the interpersonal traps that come from games we may inadvertently play (…) [to] ask each other for good grace in how we share emotion and to return to a baseline of love, respect and conviviality (…) to be compassionate when mistakes are made (…) [to] look for ways to connect and understand (…) to listen to those of us that come from groups whose voices tend to be silenced.” Whoop-de-doo, again! 

The jabber of the XR movement

If you are determined enough to read such and similar devout ejaculations, you can glean a few eye-opening items of information here and there. Here they are.

[1] The Extinction Rebellion movement is confident in its ability to change the future. They quote experts that it is enough for there to be 3.5% of engaged members of a society to take charge of the course of history.

[2] These 3.5% will be organized in citizens’ assemblies (in good old times in north-eastern latitudes such structures were known as soviets which means councils) which through civil disobedience – i.e. acts of occupying roads, blockading bridges, disrupting businesses and creatively disrupting the work of banks which finance the climate crisis, with all this coupled with “ceremony and prayer (in ways that are neither dogmatic nor expected) as formats to find inspiration from things bigger than ourselves” – all in an attempt to capture government and media attention and demand deep decarbonization.

[3] Citizens’ assemblies will make up participative democracy where decisions will be made collectively. An assembly like that might comprise “a mother of three from the east of the country, a teenaged university student from an ethnic minority group, and a retired police officer from the north” who will “deliberate and delivers its recommendations to the government.”

[4] The current toxic(!) system with its hierarchy of – yes, you guessed it right! – race, class, gender, sexuality, etc. (read the whole list earlier in this text, if you wish) must be challenged and “broken down” because such a world is deeply unjust and not safe for “those lower down these hierarchies” because for the world to be a “safe for everyone, it needs to be safe for the most marginalised” which is why XR activists “aim to live in a world where these hierarchies no longer exist.”

[5] The XR movement denounces – surprise, surprise! – “discriminatory behaviour, language or behaviour that exhibits racial domination, sexism, anti-semitism, islamophobia, homophobia, ableism, class discrimination, prejudice around age and all other forms of oppression.” They want to “ensure everyone has a voice and an influence” and they seek to “equalise power by disrupting the usual pillars of power that govern our lives.”

[6] XR’s world of dreams will be a “healthy, beautiful world, where individuality and creativity are supported, and where people work together, solving problems and finding meaning, with courage, power and love.”  

Places of the concentrations of the 3,5% that are about to derail the world

What do we make out of it?

[1] The XR movement makes out to be anti-government, but anti-government it is not. All the governments are obliging and obedient in their dealings with XR, and include most of the aforesaid demands in their political programmes. Ministers and Prime Ministers obediently and docilely listen to Greta Thunberg, who gives them a piece of her mind. Anti-government are patriotic or white identity organizations. If they begin action, governments step in with all harshness, clamp down on them and solve the problem once for all. By the way, patriotic or white identity movements are banned by Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Conversely, XR movements are tolerated and wanted, given good press and publicity. They are beyond a shade of doubt under someone’s control.

[2] The aims that XR proclaims are political through and through and resemble a communist manifesto: it is, to traverse Lothrop Stoddard, a rising tide of the underclass filled with envy and hatred, anger and confusion, in search of meaning in life, with little, no, or pseudo-education, people who desire to do away with their betters.

[3] The XR members and followers are feeble-minded individuals who dream about an ideal world with all the equality and safety and what not. History knows of hundreds of such ideal world projects and their disastrous implementations, but since XR activists are not versed in times gone by, they will rush in where angels fear to tread, especially when prodded by those who pull the strings.

[4] The XR movement is one of the three battering rams with which the Western civilization of the white man is being dismantled, blown to pieces. The other battering rams are gender mainstreaming (incessant multiplying of sexes renamed as genders and the propaganda of the changeability of the biological sex) and antiracism (the claim that there are no races and nonetheless that there is racism which is displayed by the white man exclusively).

Both the world’s right and left have found it convenient to advance such trends as XR in their attempt to build a global world of deracinated individuals living in constant search of pleasure and meaning, temporarily on the dope of the promise of a brilliant future. 

Young, impressionable female minds in search of meaning in their life