One wonders what the reaction would be if somebody well known, or even somebody not that well known, appeared on national media and described a criminal act of vandalism – like maybe burning pallets or painting a slogan on the wall of a migrant accommodation centre for example – as “quite refreshing.”
Might they expect a visit from the peelers in the early hours of the morning to see if they might perhaps discover some more evidence of sympathy for the perpetrators of such an act?
Even if that was just on the level of incitement, having perhaps expressed sentiments which might be seen to be similar to those who carried out the criminal act? This is the very meat of our new ‘Hate Think’ culture surely? (If south Dublin SUV owners were a protected group of course.)
The deflation of tyres on vehicles in Churchtown in South County Dublin by a group styling itself (as Special Branch might put it if they were on their radar, which they most likely are not) The Tyre Extinguishers.
They were kind enough to place a leaflet on the targeted vehicles which is full of the sort of rhetoric that fills the speeches of many TDs and Senators from all of the Leinster House parties.
Of course, that is not to imply that any of them would support this sort of thing. Or at least would not have the gumption to voice their support publicly as opposed to sniggering about the “poshies” having their, like, Fooking SUVs done in by the fighters of TTE over a bottle of elderberry wine or whatever it is eco socialists get bevvied on.
However, this morning former Green Party Dublin City Councillor and a candidate in the Trinity College Senate bye-election, Sadhbh O’Neill, did appear on Newstalk and told a less than impressed Pat Kenny that, while of course she does not condone the incidents, that “it is very understandable,” and an expression of the fact that “young people are deeply frustrated” with the lack of progress in such matters.
O’Neill was elected to Dublin City Council in 1991 despite only getting 5.5% of the first preferences. The out-of-proportion and damaging influence of the Greens, currently languishing on 3 or 4% in the polls has continued since, due mostly to naïve voters bunging them preferences under the impression that they were sort of harmless. Hopefully that will end the next time out.
O’Neill later eschewed politics for the less uncertain world of NGOdom and academia. The two of these are now often indistinguishable and their personnel inter-changeable in the more faddish faculties of the “social sciences.” O’Neill happily manages to combine the two now as a campaign co-ordinator for Friends of the Earth and assistant professor in Dublin City University in something to do with, drum roll … “climate change.”
The response from the tweeting community was generally unsupportive although O’Neill herself responded with a defence of her position.
Such matters that are frustrating climate change worriers among the youth include, according to O’Neill, the “lack of political action” to impose the restrictions that the extremists are demanding.
Indeed, she not only expressed an understanding of the attacks on people’s personal property, but even appeared to have quite the insight into the motivations of the vandals in declaring that “the point of the action (which) is to raise awareness.”
For students of the American academic far left there are echoes of Berkeley professors “digging” the Weathermen and the Black Panthers. Criminality was also the rationale for what the old timey anarchists – before they became state NGO dependents and the pets of billionaire philanthropists – used to call the “propaganda of the deed.” You murdered someone or blew something up, not because you believed that in doing so you were going to achieve anything in particular. More an act of vengeance and petulant resentment.
Dostoyevsky wrote well about such bourgeois brats of whom he was one himself and who he got the measure of when sent to Siberia for his troubles. Their mentality has changed little. The joy of people who affect to be consumed by a love of humanity or animals in the abstract at the suffering of individual humans, and indeed animals as witnessed by the Grand National protest, has always been a distinguishing feature of leftist extremists.
And while causing someone the expense and inconvenience involved in the tyre incident – getting to work, exams maybe for children and so on – is not a par with murdering someone it emanates from the same mindset. Climate extremists just like every secret policeman and torturer and executioner believes that they are harming you for your own good.
Nor have I any desire to see O’Neill arrested nor have her home raided, and I would not even mention her at all other than like many of our bourgeois lefties who pose as some sort of rebels, she is an integral part of the establishment. I am no longer going to use the term “elite” even in parentheses as it still has connotations of some earned superiority.
None of these people possess any claim to being part of any higher social stratum other than silver spoons and the right connections. And none of their fellow travellers among the “refreshing” activist wing of climate extremism should be immune from having visited upon them the same state powers they demand be deployed against those who disagree with them.