Climate Zealots Want To Destroy All Of Western Civilization, Not Just Its Art

The news that two young female “climate activists” have been arrested for hurling a tin of Heinz tomato soup at Vincent van Gogh’s famous 1889 “Sunflowers” painting in London’s National Gallery should come as little surprise. For Just Stop Oil, the low-level green terror group apparently responsible, attempting to ruin an $85 million masterpiece is a blow against both Western capitalism and the wider cultural inheritance from which it sprang, both of which these people openly despise.

The philistines argued unconvincingly that today’s “cost of living crisis is driven by fossil fuels” and that, as a result, “millions of cold, hungry families” could not “even afford to heat a tin of soup.” They did not explain what, precisely, the starving millions would be easily able to afford to heat their gruel with should these very same fossil fuels be taken away from them. Blazing piles of degenerate art torn down from gallery walls for firewood, perhaps?

“Is art worth more than life? More than food? More than justice?” asked junior revolutionary Phoebe Plummer. But what, precisely, is justice for these people? It’s a euphemism for imposing a form of apocalypse communism upon humanity by making a spurious appeal to willfully misinterpreted “science” instead of actually persuading people to their cause by rational democratic means — a path they eschew largely because their cause is neither rational nor democratic.

Green or Red?

Just Stop Oil is an offshoot of another millenarian organization, Extinction Rebellion (XR). To many members, Extinction Rebellion isn’t about the climate at all. We know this as one of the group’s British founders, Stuart Basden, helpfully wrote a 2019 essay entitled “Extinction Rebellion Isn’t About the Climate.” So what is XR about, then? Destroying the West in its entirety, sunflowers and all. For Basden, the worst toxic environmental pollutant is not CO₂, but white people: 

The climate’s breakdown is a symptom of a toxic system [capitalism] that has infected the ways we relate to each other as humans and to all life. This was exacerbated when European ‘civilisation’ was spread around the globe through cruelty and violence. … Their cultural myths [Christianity and science] justified horrors…

Basden himself is white, by the way — unlike many nations that have become today’s worst environmental polluters, like China and India. But other races’ contemporary sins are the fault of white people too, as European empire-builders cunningly imposed a false consciousness upon other races during colonial times, making them psychologically conditioned to accept “dangerous delusions” such as the idea that the vastly higher living standards and life expectancies cruelly unleashed upon humanity by the Britain-born Industrial Revolution were in some sense desirable.

What has to be dismantled are thus not merely our power generators and factories but, more fundamentally, the moral obscenities which allowed Europe and America to develop these horrors in the first instance, namely white supremacy, patriarchy, Eurocentrism, class hierarchy, and hetero-sexism/heteronormativity (which “propagate the idea that heterosexuality is ‘normal,’” primarily because it is). Basden thinks these delusions produce