The Liberal Abandonment Of Greta Thunberg

The Swedish activist Greta Thunberg has been detained by Israel and reportedly maltreated by her Israeli captors after she was kidnapped, along with hundreds of other activists, from Gaza’s territorial waters on Friday.

World leaders who just a few years ago lauded Thunberg and rushed to share stages and photo-ops with her have said nothing. The climate scientists who hailed her moral clarity and feverishly retweeted her have ignored her. The prime minister of her own country has been silent.

Thunberg has been abandoned by a fake progressive liberal class that hailed her courage and valorised her strength just a few short years ago.

Obama and Thunberg meeting in 2022

Why? Because to confront Israel isn’t the sort of strength the liberal class lauds. To put your body on the line against a genocide backed by the west isn’t the sort of courage they applaud. By displaying a moral consistency that to her no doubt seemed obvious, but to the liberal class is a mortal sin, Thunberg exposes every professed liberal value as a lie. Because Thunberg has stepped outside of her lane and transgressed against the only true values the liberal elite class understand: imperial values. The values of war and conquest, colonialism and militarism, and the profits to be gleaned therein.

The rank stench of cowardice emanates from the rotting husk of the liberal body politic as it stumbles around, diseased and dying.

This liberal body politic was perfectly content for Thunberg to challenge an amorphous, eight-billion-person-strong industrial civilisation that fuels ecological disaster. But now she’s challenging something very concrete: the people and hardware of a genocidal occupation government and its army. And in doing so she’s defying the militarism practiced by the west’s colonial treasure and the billion dollar contracts that flow between the two.

For the liberal class, Greta doesn’t understand some fundamentals. She doesn’t understand that for all Israel’s genocide it is an essential bulwark against Iranian terror. She just doesn’t understand that Israel is the Only Democracy In The Middle East®™ and this is a de facto signature of superiority regardless of anything else it does. Doesn’t she understand it’s better to do a genocide as a democracy than not do one as a one-party state?

Naive child.

Of course I joke, but I imagine these lines of reasoning are not far from their thought processes.

Greta has transgressed by refusing to reproduce imperial narratives, and by refusing to be controlled.

She could have picked Aspen fireside chats with Hillary Clinton about the necessity of stepping up climate progress. She could have been contained by yearly Davos invitationals where she excoriates the liberal class for their lack of climate action. Restorative on-camera flagellation achieved, she then could have gone and enjoyed a Châteauneuf-du-Pape 2004 with Barack Obama. She could have picked non-confrontational NGO-style corporate-branded activism like her Gen Z golden child compatriot Malala. She could have had the lucrative career of performative activism she was being lined up for. But by shunning this path, she shows up so many liberals for the frauds they are. She also puts a spotlight on all the big climate scientists who’ve never once said genocide is bad for the environment.

These people are really shameful.

Israel’s extermination campaign has been devastating to human beings, but it has also been devastating for local ecosystems and the planet itself. By January this year, the war machinery used to murder hundreds of thousands and pummel Gaza to dust had released more carbon dioxide than Costa Rica or Estonia does in a year. The amount of carbon emitted to power the lives of millions was instead used by Israel to ruin the lives of two million people. On top of this, hundreds of olive groves have been torched, and the soil and groundwater have been poisoned for generations by bullets, bomb residue and the toxic stew from the tens of thousands of flattened buildings. Who knows how many animals and how much wildlife has died. Yet the big names of climate science, from Michael Mann to Katherine Hayhoe and many others, haven’t uttered a word between them.

A Palestinian woman hugs an olive tree in a grove destroyed by Israel

Thunberg shows them up, as she shows up all those who not so long ago rushed to proclaim her a planetary saviour.

Greta exposes a bankrupt centrism.

It seems likely that she understood these ideological lines fairly quickly. It seems likely that she understood it was euro-centred privilege to proclaim the impending end of the world without recognising the world has already ended for many peoples and is currently ending for others.

This isn’t at all to say her original stance was misguided. It is to say that she recognises genocide and ecocide come from the same root. Systems of power that destroy ecosystems also destroy people, also destroy planets, also destroy worlds. She is in many ways simply displaying a logical consistency, as much as a moral one, about the interconnected nature of the evils that plague our civilisation. And this is where she broke with a liberal class who see evils selectively and in terms framed and dictated by empire. A class who backed the evil doers while insisting they were backing the good guys.

And now the most grotesquely evil outgrowth of the colonial enterprise might be coming to an end, if you believe the reports about a ceasefire. But the occupation and the killing won’t end until Israel is brought to heel and Zionism dismantled.

We only to have to look at the West Bank to understand this.

From October 2023 to April this year, more than 900 Palestinians were murdered by Israel in the occupied West Bank, with scores kidnapped to be placed into Israeli torture prisons without charge or trial, according to a UN report from April. In the West Bank there’s no Hamas, no weapons, no ‘war,’ no inciting excuses. There’s just pure Israeli barbarism and impunity, sanctioned and backed by western governments.

As an afront to humanity, justice, human rights and international law, Israel must be dismantled. But even the dismantling of Israel won’t be good enough. Israel is merely a colonial output, the tip of the spear. True restorative justice requires the end of the throwing arm.

And given her transformation from liberal darling to prisoner of conscience in an Israeli dungeon, I expect Greta is on board with that idea too.

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