A new low for The Guardian: Climate Denial Linked to the Christchurch Mosque Massacre

Guest essay by Eric Worrall

Guardian author Rebecca Solnit wonders whether the white supremacist terrorists who massacred 50 unarmed Muslims in Christchurch chose last Friday to distract attention from the Climate Change Student Strike.

Why climate action is the antithesis of white supremacy

Rebecca Solnit

Tue 19 Mar 2019 22.58 AEDT

Behind the urgency of climate action is the understanding that everything is connected; behind white supremacy is an ideology of separation.

As the news of the Christchurch mosque massacre broke and I scoured the news, I came across a map showing that the Friday morning climate strike in Christchurch was close to the bloodbath. I felt terrible for the young people who showed up with hope and idealism, wondered whether the killer or killers chose this particular day to undermine the impact of this global climate action. It was a shocking pairing and also a perfectly coherent one, a clash of opposing ideologies. Behind the urgency of climate action is the understanding that everything is connected; behind white supremacy is an ideology of separation.

Of separation as the idea that human beings are divided into races, and those in one race have nothing in common with those in others. Of separation as the idea that though white people have overrun the globe, nonwhite people should stay out of Europe, North America, and now even New Zealand and Australia, two places where white settlers came relatively recently to already inhabited places – as a fantasy of resegregating the world. Of a lot of ideas and ideals of masculinity taken to a monstrous extreme – as ideas of disconnection, of taking matters into your own hands, of feeling no empathy and exhibiting no kindness, of asserting yourself as having the right to dominate others even unto death. And of course, of guns as the symbols and instruments of this self-definition.

Climate change is based on science. But if you delve into it deeply enough it is a kind of mysticism without mystification, a recognition of the beautiful interconnection of all life and the systems – weather, water, soil, seasons, ocean pH – on which that life depends. It acknowledges that everything is connected, that to dig up the carbon that plants so helpfully sequestered in the ground over eons and burn it so that returns to the sky as carbon dioxide changes the climate, and that this changed climate isn’t just warmer, it’s more chaotic, in ways that break these elegant patterns and relationships. That chaos is a kind of violence – the violence of hurricanes, wildfires, new temperature extremes, broken weather patterns, droughts, extinctions, famines. Which is why climate action has been and must be nonviolent. It is a movement to protect life.

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I asked Hoda Baraka, who is both Muslim and 350.org’s global communications director, how it all looked to her in the wake of the climate strike and the massacre, and she said “In a world being driven by fear, we are constantly being pitted against the very things that make this world livable. Whether it’s people being pitted against each other, even though there is no life without human connection, love and empathy. Or fear pitting us against the very planet that sustains us, even though there is no life on a dead planet. This is why fighting against climate change is the equivalent of fighting against hatred. A world that thrives is one where both people and planet are seen for their inextricable value and connectedness.”

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/19/why-youll-never-meet-a-white-supremacist-who-cares-about-climate-change

Rebecca, using the blood of murdered innocents to promote your climate ideology is nothing short of obscene, a new low even for the climate movement.