Essay by Eric Worrall
According to British Academics, Eco-terrorism “… creates a contrast between a “reasonable” mainstream with a “radical” flank in a way that can be conducive to change.”.
Climate activism has so far been fairly peaceful: here’s why that might change
Rob Jubb, University of Reading
Alex McLaughlin, University of CambridgePublished: July 7, 2022 1.35pm BST
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In fact, the climate movement so far has been strikingly peaceful. The school climate strikes, for example, involved a series of peaceful mass demonstrations, with an estimated 1.7 million people taking part globally in 2019. XR also makes nonviolence central to its strategy, referring to influential research by political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan on the effectiveness of peaceful protest.
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A radical flank
Climate protest in the future, however, might not be so committed to nonviolence. In his provocatively titled book How to Blow Up a Pipeline, geographer Andreas Malm argues that the climate movement must diversify its tactics to encompass more confrontational forms of action, including sabotaging parts of the fossil fuel economy.
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A closer look shows that peaceful protests hailed as producing political change tend to coincide with more direct and sometimes violent tactics fighting for the same outcome. This creates a contrast between a “reasonable” mainstream with a “radical” flank in a way that can be conducive to change.
For example, the civil rights protests during the 1950s and 1960s in the US deep south were extremely controversial at the time, partly due to the public disorder they caused. However, Martin Luther King Jr, their most prominent leader, was able to contrast his demands with those made by more radical figures. In his famous letter from a Birmingham jail, King suggested that negotiating with him was necessary to avoid confrontation with them.
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Uncivil disobedience of the sort Malm suggests cannot be considered terrorism, or equivalent to it. Terrorism involves the threat of serious physical harm. Deflating the tyres of an SUV is not the same thing as setting it on fire.
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Read more: https://theconversation.com/amp/climate-activism-has-so-far-been-fairly-peaceful-heres-why-that-might-change-185625
Associate Professor Rob Jubb is Department Director of Teaching and Learning at the University of Reading Department of Politics and International Relations.
Alex McLaughlin is a research associate at the University of Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.
What are we supposed to conclude from this opinion piece? Are politics students at the University of Reading graded on how quickly they conclude that blowing up oil executives or pipelines is the only way to solve the climate crisis? Do students at Cambridge get into trouble if they suggest it is wrong to hurt people, to reduce the global carbon footprint?
In my opinion these university academics are sowing a lot of poisonous ideas into the minds of impressionable late teen to early 20 year old students who look to them for guidance. These academics appear to be teaching Martin Luther King Jr succeeded because violent radicals had his back. This twisted historical interpretation appears to be their rationale for violent eco-activism.
Their example of non-violent eco-terrorism, deflating the tyres on a SUV, is an act of reckless endangerment which could lead to loss of life. The SUV owner and other drivers or passengers could die if they don’t notice their tyres have been sabotaged.
In my opinion the actions of eco-terrorists like Tyre Extinguishers, deflating tyres and hoping nobody gets hurt, are no different to planting a bomb, then phoning a warning to police and hoping the police clear the area in time to prevent casualties. Both kinds of perpetrators could argue they didn’t actually want people to die – but their actions endanger multiple lives in the name of a political cause.
The truth is nobody needs to commit violence to reduce carbon emissions, all that is needed is for greens to support a few zero carbon nuclear power plants. France proved this in the 1970s, by converting most of their fossil fuel plants to nuclear. The excuses for rejecting nuclear don’t make sense, in the face of the French nuclear success, and the total failure of renewables to deliver value.
This reality won’t stop impressionable youths from being radicalised into perpetrating atrocities, because the likes of these academics incited them to murderous hatred in the name of saving the world. McLaughlin and Jubb might have personally stepped carefully around actually inciting their followers to commit murder, though their tyre deflation example comes close, but in my opinion murder is where such thinking will lead, once green radicals realise lesser tactics have failed to produce the outcomes they want.
It’s always communism first. Sadly most rationalists deny this fact.
Supporting someone who is clearly bug f**k crazy will lead the the assumption that you are, too.
Andreas doesn’t realize that the XR won’t stop until everyone’s like them & will destroy those who
won’t conform. At that point, they’ll cannibalize themselves, as they did in the French Revolution!
The founder comrades of the revolution are always first against the wall. Trotsky was too much of a threat to Stalin for Stalin to allow him to live.
It’s quite laughable that Trotsky’s version of communism is considered the kinder, gentler
version. He didn’t resign after the Romanovs were murdered in cold blood or when Vlad got
rid of ~2M people, many courtesy of Uncle Joe. That’s anything but kinder, gentler!
As for the founder comrades, Uncle Joe may have poisoned Vlad. Oh, the irony!
I missed the “kinder” and “gentler” communism of Trotsky. Sounds like something you “learned” in college. It’s in the vein of communism could work if only better people were in charge.
The new Prime of Australia was proudly a Trotsky fan, probably still is as he tries hard to appear to be more to the right now.
It was a fad in universities in the 1970s -80s (?) for the ‘humanities intellectuals’ to proclaim themselves Trotskyites. A more empty headed bunch would have been hard to find, at least before nowadays. When queried on why they believed any brand of communist despotism would work (given that this ideology may have killed a 100million of it’s own citizens in 3 or four countries), the reply was that it wasn’t done right.
As you can see the ideology has gone global today and they are already setting things up to arrange exit of a few billion from this mortal coil and to impoverish most of the rest of us. The Zealots don’t know they are toast after they are no longer needed.
The French will eat anything, I suppose.
Perhaps grooming is being used as evidenced by the use of youth to commit the acts.
How about these DHs provide a great example for us all and live the life of poverty and hunger they seek to impose on us peasants while of course being able to maintain their personal lifestyles. If they are not prepared to do that, they deserve no consideration other than to arrest and charge them for inciting violence.
UK is rapidly heading into poverty. Almost 1/5th of UK GDP in Q12022 was provided courtesy of foreigners. The only favoured investment is green gilts. They will rapidly lose their appeal as the charade falls apart.
So UK will not have much on offer once its green nirvana is seen for what it is – a massive waste of resources. All that debt and nothing useful from it. Boris will leave the PM role as UK flounders into deep recession.
Can you imagine UK going to the EU to get funding to start fracking? Maybe if they promise to send some gas to Germany.
“The sparrows are eating too much grain.”
Not too consequential an idea compared to promoting a brown-shirt division for the green hairs, but consider the disaster that led to. I guess the danger of spiked trees has already been forgotten – or too trivial compared having the vulnerable succumbing to winter weather while inside their homes.
Deflate which tires? Are those on passenger planes, ambulances, fire trucks, university profs vehicles exempt or not?
Driving spikes into trees to break sawchains and tear off the faces of loggers was too tame, so the eco-terrorists switched to throwing jugs of gasoline into schools, arson burning forests, and mailing letter bombs. Violence escalates into more violence. Once the line is crossed, terrorism explodes.
These thug punks are Unabombers in waiting, evil brainwashers of children, low life scum to whom violence is the goal, and “the ecology” is just an excuse to commit atrocities.
And we pay them to do it. These chumps are academics, living large on the dole. Our universities have become the enemies of decency and civil society, and everybody knows it.
The truth is no one needs to reduce carbon emissions.
Carbon has no direct involvement in Earth’s energy balance.
The temperature trends simply reflect the changing orbit causing changes in solar intensity and the fact that open oceans have an immutable temperature limit of 30C.
Why are both the Nino34 region and Southern Ocean negatively correlated with CO2? What causes CO2 to be selective in what regions of the Earth it warms and cools?
Open oceans cannot exceed 30C surface temperature without a dramatic increase in the atmospheric mass. It is that simple. CO2 does zip.
I think CO2 emissions reduction is a joke, I was just pointing out that greens are ignoring the obvious.
Eric
I think we need to make much more fun of these alarmists to show how ridiculous their assertions and solutions are. We need many more Joshes with tons of cartoons for the climate illiterates.
Sensible people understand the following: If the ideal temperatures and rainfall for each of the 30 climate zones and sub-zones cannot be quantified for each of 365 days, it is ludicrous to think we can even contemplate engineering a perfect climate for each zone. The more we learn about weather and climate, the more we should be marvelling at the complexity of the whole system. Adapting is reasonable but engineering climate is lunacy.
The problem is that young people are not taught to read, reason through and apply this kind of statement. We need to put it in pictures and cartoons and even use comedy. They need to see that the CO2 alarmism is both farcical and fraudulent – and will end up hurting them the most. One brilliant cartoon may achieve more than 100 angry diatribes. Sixty years ago Classics Illustrated introduced the classics to many young people in a comic format. We need a 21st century equivalent of this for today’s youth.
The Left has been taking over the educational system for a long time and they aren’t done yet. K-12 and then college can indoctrinate a large percentage of the kids going through.
http://invisibleserfscollar.com/
Great for trolling the woke profs on campus!
Brilliant. I wish I could give you +10.
love it
In the immortal words of Harry Callahan: “Go ahead Punk. Make my day.”
Terrorism is the left wing way. Always has been, always will be.
If you don’t give them what you want, they start throwing fits and breaking things.
The problem is that when adults start throwing a tantrum like spoilt brats, they do considerably more harm than children and cannot be given a good caning.
Throw the bastard in jail.
Actually about the only thing this addition of eco-terrorists would produce would be added violence – not only from said terrorists but from people fighting back.
Comparing it to civil rights protests and riots is totally apples and oranges. No one starved or froze to death once blacks achieved the same rights as whites. True, there were some who didn’t want to associate with blacks, especially in the south. But the worst that happened to those people was that they lost their exclusivity in public society.
However, just wait and see what happens when people sit in the dark for hours, go hungry, freeze, sweat bullets and otherwise suffer for lack of affordable, available energy. My guess is there will be a heck of a lot more resistance than blocking school doors….
The funny part is thinking that Martin Luther King Jr. was successful. Black Americans have it worse now than ever. Just ask them.
Most understand that things are immeasurably better than in MLK times, just have further to go
Back in the 50’s and 60’s for issues like teen pregnancy, single parent households, etc., the rates for blacks were pretty much the same as they were for whites and other races.
It was’t desegregation that decimated black families, it was welfare.
My new book could be titled “How to blow up an climate activists home and possessions”
Defeating them in the battle for minds and hearts will be enough.
Why not just let god sort them out, it’s what he’s there for
The problem with people like this is that the less support they have, the more violent they get.
People who are winning the battle for hearts and minds, don’t have to resort to terrorism.
That’s a threat:
‘So far we have been relatively benign but we can get violent if you don’t do what we demand’.
Looks like blackmail to me.
WE have enacted laws in the UK making hate speech a crime. Someone should ask the local police to make a house call on the two academics. Those ‘leaders’ who are inciting violence in the name of their chosen cause clearly need some education.
You know for a fact that if two sceptical academics suggested blowing up a meeting of XR protesters Plod would be knocking on their door straight away.
This is how punks and gangsters think. Give me what I want or you will get hurt.
Any violence against individuals will be absolutely counter productive. Just look at the example of animal rights activists. Most people probably are somewhat supportive of the general ideas of limiting cruelty, etc., but the animal rights nutters have completely poisoned the debate and most people leave it well alone.
In fact if you really wanted to disrupt the climate change bandwagon, you could blow up a few pipelines for them, in a false flag operation. This is the kind of morally disgusting activity we usually only attribute to our own governments, so considering their present green opinions it thankfully seems very unlikely to happen.
Paraphrasing Voltaire
“If they can persuade you to believe absurdities, they can make you to commit atrocities”….
And so it begins.
An activist terrorist wing normally should end up in jail .. But with a court system that is so indulgent to the left .. forget it. Maybe we should be smarter and try to get these groups to fight each other with appropriate propaganda ..
God cop bad cop?
Good cop bad cop
Bad cop, worse cop.
Associates nowadays ain’t the caliber they used to be.
“Uncivil disobedience of the sort Malm suggests cannot be considered terrorism, or equivalent to it. Terrorism involves the threat of serious physical harm. Deflating the tyres of an SUV is not the same thing as setting it on fire.”
The Terrorism Act 2000 defines terrorism, both in and outside of the UK, as the use or threat of one or more of the actions listed below, and where they are designed to influence the government, or an international governmental organisation or to intimidate the public. The use or threat must also be for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause.
The specific actions included are:
It is important to note that in order to be convicted of a terrorism offence a person doesn’t actually have to commit what could be considered a terrorist attack. Planning, assisting and even collecting information on how to commit terrorist acts are all crimes under British terrorism legislation.
Crown Prosecution Service.
Deflating tires can cause a car to crash which satisfies bullet points 2 and 3.
And probably swerve across traffic satisfying the next point down. It’s rarely going to be as simple as these idiots seem to think – there are real world consequences to their actions.
Richard, I left a reply to you on that NYC Tyre Extinguishers thread. It’s down near one of your last comments in our exchanges, I had one more thing to look at and I just did that today. Sorry I’m late, but life gets in the way sometimes.
But they put an informative pamphlet on under the windshield wiper blade, so the driver is alerted to the problem. Should he or she then operate the affected motor vehicle, she or he is assuming the risk, and the liability.
See how easy it is to provide a defense for the idiots?
To which the prosecution demands, provide evidence to prove you performed these actions.
Additionally, by admitting they put pamphlets under the wipers, they have admitted that they took part in the actions they are being charged with. I don’t know how many defense attorneys would be willing to take that risk.
Violence isn’t the preserve of climate loons or the left in general. Look what happened when they tried to mess with commuter on the London underground.
Cold and hungry people will go after the easy targets to survive and there’s none easier than middle-class, never been punched, climate academics and their brethren.
Climate activism has so far been fairly peaceful
My impression is that they have been disruptive, dirty and even destructive.
There is a simple solution. Make the protest organizers put down a deposit to cover the policing, cleaning up and repairs afterwards. If this does not cover the damages double the deposit and keep repeating this till they learn to behave or it becomes prohibitively expensive to protest.
Most of the people doing the damage and causing disruptions aren’t part of any official protest.
Demanding deposits won’t slow them down because they aren’t applying for permits in the first place. Only fines will work, and so far the courts have not been willing to do that.
It all depends on what “fairly” means. Here in the states, we had “mostly peaceful” demonstrations two summers ago. Mouthed by media types with fires raging in the background.
And by the way the greens keep on using fossil fuels every day, they see themselves as the elites who must defend the earth from the little peasants.
Already happening in canada
https://nationalpost.com/pmn/news-pmn/canada-news-pmn/politicians-condemn-violence-at-coastal-gaslink-construction-site-in-northern-b-c
David Suzuki should be sent to the gulag asap
Remember the propane tank bombs at the xl pipeline ‘peaceful protest?’
The UK in the 1990s had The Animal Liberation peeps who blew up at least one research worker’s car in Bristol – one member of the crew caught complained at first court hearing that he shouldn’t have been arrested as he worked for the “security services”.
I’d wager that there’s something similar going on here… iirc similar arguments were advanced at the time to the twattery espoused by the two credentialed berks who are the subject of this post.
I really hope they get reverse woked
“Avoid confrontation with MLK“? May as well say avoid confrontation with Gandhi.
Both advocated peaceful civil disobedience; and were willing to face the punishment (e.g. jail time) that went with their acts.
Today these extremists expect to be arrested and then let off gently because their cause was “just”
Gandhi was no angel and once said : ” if we had the atom bomb we would have used it against the British ” . He admitted Indian nationalists such as himself preferred satyagraha non violent resistance out of a sense of helplessness…Eco – terrorism , Green harassment , pressure tactics and thuggery are in fact a decades old phenomenon The campaign to ban DDT led to the needless malarial deaths of thousands and Greenpeace even sought to banish chlorine used to treat water supplies which would, if successfully implemented , have resulted in millions of fatalities. If these fanatics get their way energy poverty and civil strife [ look at the worrying situation in the Netherlands ] will lead to inestimably more misery , violence and deaths notwithstanding what many of them have planned if they prevail . Remember David Suzuki , Bill McKibben and others have openly proposed jailing climate skeptics . If that isn’t a warning sign what is ? The catch cry of one of Extinction Rebellions founders was ‘system change not climate change ‘ and the cults manifesto contains an article calling for the subversion of Westminster democracy and supplanting the ballot with a ” Citizens Assembly ” – a politburo in all but name
‘Gandhi was no angel and once said : ” if we had the atom bomb we would have used it against the British ” .’
Gandhi never claimed to be an angel. So, what are you suggesting about him? That he was a devil?
It is easy to smear the names of great men by alleging that they made statements which cannot be verified because the source from which they are being quoted is not supplied. What is the source of your assertion that Gandhi said this?
And if it is true that he said it, what was the context in which he said it? Who was the ‘we’ to which he was referring? His own group of avowedly non-violent resisters of servitude to the British Empire? If so, the words that you have attributed to him do not make sense, do they? So, let us dismiss that possible interpretation from the outset, as it is simply not credible on the face of it.
Could ‘we’ have referred to the government of the new nation of India that was formed after it had won its independence that Gandhi’s non-violent movement had been instrumental in obtaining? That interpretation could have more credibility, I think, because it doesn’t imply that Gandhi would have approved of the Indian government using the A-bomb against Britain. On the contrary, I think he would have disapproved of it strongly and vehemently because it would have contradicted the whole ethos of his life’s work and all that he professed to believe in.
Kind of like how the socialists need the communists in order to make them look respectable. Even though they are both different extensions of the same philosophy.