Establishment &
media sympathize with Greta’s ‘Fridays for Future’ movement… So how is that a
‘protest’ exactly?
As hundreds of thousands of people – many of them
schoolchildren – take to the streets in another demonstration over climate
change, one must wonder: at what point does protest become the status quo?
Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg’s solo school walkout
last August was little more than a sideshow to newspaper editors and TV crews. But
the teenage crusader’s ‘school strike’ snowballed, and the ‘Fridays for Future’
movement grew.
Now, after an emotional speech by Thunberg at the UN Climate
Action Summit on Monday, hundreds of thousands of climate strikers worldwide
are packing the streets on Friday, demanding their governments declare a state
of emergency, slash carbon emissions, penalize meat-eating and kill the car, to
pick but a few of their proposals.
But these
radicals – as they would have been called not so long ago – aren’t being met by
the batons, tear gas and rubber bullets the state usually
deploys to quash dissent (not that any peaceful demonstrations should be). Media
outlets aren’t smearing those within their ranks as racists and downplaying
attendance numbers, and the crowds occupying city streets aren’t risking injury and mutilation to
do so.
The very idea of ‘protest’ implies some resistance, some
injustice of state to be overcome. Climate protesters would argue that not
enough is being done to heal our heating earth – and that’s a debate beyond the
scope of this article – but government, media, and the world’s power brokers
have aided Thunberg and co’s protest movement at every step of the way.
France’s ‘Yellow Vests’ protests began in opposition to a
fossil fuel tax hike, and were met with all of the violence described above on
a weekly basis. Thunberg, in contrast, was invited to address the French
parliament in July. Likewise with her appearances at the World Economic Forum
in Davos earlier this year, her speeches before British parliament and the US
Congress, and her most recent UN appearance. On every occasion, the world’s
political leaders rolled out the red carpet and held the door open for her to
lecture them.
Media coverage of Thunberg and the climate protests has been
overwhelmingly favorable - with The Guardian comparing her speech on
Monday to Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address for its historical significance,
and New York Magazine calling her “the Joan of Arc of climate change.” The
Yellow Vests, to continue the comparison, were described as a rabble
of anti-semites and “notorious Holocaust deniers,” based on the
actions of a tiny minority of protesters.
The school strikers and climate crusaders enjoy blanket
support. “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can
talk about is money, and fairy tales of eternal economic growth,” Thunberg
scolded leaders on Monday. However, even the world’s corporations have jumped
on board the eco bandwagon, ever keen to virtue-signal their way to a few more
dollars, even if their own green credentials are suspect at best.
If the protests are being framed as a David and Goliath
story of children speaking truth to power and taking on the elite, why do the
elite support them so wholeheartedly? An optimist would say that these leaders
finally see the need for urgent climate action. After all, public outcry over
the hole in the ozone layer in the 1980s led to the adoption of a landmark
chemicals ban in 1987, and three decades later, NASA revealed proof last
year that the ozone layer is recovering.
A cynic would argue that the upper echelons stand to benefit
in some way. And that’s true too. Several conglomerates of the world’s leading
financial institutions, backed by neoliberal think tanks like the Atlantic
Council, have already expressed interest in getting their hands on public funds
to finance green industry ventures, particularly in the developing world. What
some call a crisis, they call the “cñimate opportunity”
Addressing climate change too presents control-freak
politicians with boundless opportunity to push otherwise unpalatable
legislation. More than 100 US Lawmakers in Congress support the ‘Green New
Deal.’ Among them are a handful of presidential candidates and Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, the hotshot New York Congresswoman who welcomed Thunberg to the
city last month following her carbon-neutral Atlantic crossing.
Whether out of self-interest or benevolence, the climate
protest movement enjoys the support of the elite, and taking Friday off school
to demonstrate is about as safe as protest gets. Skipping school would normally
earn truants a clip about the ears or a stern talking-to, but more and more
teachers are getting on board with the strikes, and encouraging their
students to take part.
When I was a teenager, we weren’t given the day off to
protest the invasion of Iraq. Instead, we snuck off, changed into our baggy
jeans and hoodies, and hopped on a bus to government buildings. Protest felt
transgressive and anti-establishment.
Protest on a day off. Deny your parents and their generation
the only meaningful chance in a busy week to spend some time with you. After
all, as Thunberg said, adults have “stolen my dreams and my childhood with
your empty words.”
A protest stops being a protest when it’s pro-establishment.
Once it reaches that tipping point, people begin to probe deeper and doubt the
intentions of the protesters,and corporate support is a death knell for
authenticity.
Most people who complain about climate protesters don’t hate
Greta Thunberg for who she is. They just don’t like being browbeaten into
thinking a certain way by the combined forces of activists, corporations, the
media and the state, no matter how right or wrong that way is.
By Graham Dockery, RT
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