The New Ecoterrorism

A note to environmental activists: When you have to resort to something outlandish to press your case, it often means you are losing the battle. If you need to hang a banner from the top of a bridge to convince Jasmine to be your girlfriend, chances are she kind of hopes you slip. The same principle holds for the Just Stop Oil protests.

The new, and patently ludicrous, strain of ecoterrorism is targeting the possessions of European museums. Young activists, who have learned to imitate Greta Thunberg’s pained facial expressions, typically make their stand by tossing foodstuffs onto some of the most valued works of art in the Western world, then spitting out an incomprehensible speech to onlookers.

I’m as confused as you are.

We might be tempted to think that this is just a juvenile prank, that the protesters are acting on their own, and that everyone has the right to be an idiot at that age. But these assumptions fly out the window when you open the Guardian and read an article by Aileen Getty titled: “I fund climate activism – and I applaud the Van Gogh protest.”

The truth is that there is nothing spontaneous about these protests. One need only go to the Climate Emergency Fund’s website to learn that the organization, whose main funder is Getty, is in the midst of a campaign called “Fall 2022. Sustained, Disruptive Protest. In 11 countries.” Among the eleven partner organizations perpetrating these actions are Declare Emergency (USA), Dernière Rénovation (France), Just Stop Oil (U.K.), Save Old Growth (Canada), and Ultima Generazione (Italy). Most of these groups have carried out protests in the past which, although they consider them peaceful, usually involve some form of physical confrontation.

As for Getty — whose grandfather, Jean Paul Getty, was an American oil tycoon — history is full of billionaires’ offspring who become rebels and give their lives to extreme left-wing causes; only the rich can afford communism, after all. Undoubtedly, her biography is as moving as it is horrifying, and the only happy thing we find in it is her having had the beautiful Elizabeth Taylor as a mother-in-law. Otherwise, her story is so harsh, so excessive, so insane and so lysergic that, even while celebrating that she has managed to overcome it, we cannot see her as the kind of individual any ordinary person would ask for life advice, let alone advice on what to do with the life of the entire planet.

These tactics are only the latest expression of a long-running activist campaign. Since 2000, most of the world’s police agencies have recorded acts of sabotage and other attacks carried out by extremists among animal-rights groups and environmentalists. The latest Europol reports on terrorist groups point to the danger posed by the radicalization of certain climate activists. However, they have not traditionally considered their actions ecoterrorism: A confidential document declassified in 2013 notes that Europol will not use “ecoterrorism” to refer to attacks by radical environmentalists, but will refer to them as “single issue terrorism.” They reserve “ecoterrorism” for attacks against the environment. The move is suspicious: It is the rare case in which the modifier or prefix before terrorism refers to the object of the attack and not to the identity or motivation of the terrorist. It would be like calling the Islamic State’s atrocities “normal people terrorism.”

Europol, of course, is involved in environmentalist policies, as are all the institutions under the EU, and does not seem very interested in anything that might tarnish the name of activists. In their 2017 report, they note that environmental activism took the form of peaceful actions. If violent incidents were recorded among them, it was due to the infiltration of anarchist and extreme left-wing groups. Meanwhile, in the 2022 report, the only allusion to environmental terrorism appears surprisingly in the section on extreme right-wing terrorist groups and bears the enigmatic label of “eco-fascism”; the report’s authors, however, do not specify concrete actions, pointing out that it is only a future danger.

But if you take a look at the emergence of the most important non-jihadist terrorist groups of the 20th century, you can see the progression from activism to violence over time, once ideological belief becomes a kind of religious dogma. In the aforementioned article, Aileen explains how she justifies the recent stunts at museums. She asserts that their activism is forced into these displays because what is at stake is life: hers, ours, and that of future generations. This rationale, in her mind, is a free pass for activists to do whatever they want, whenever and wherever they wish to do it. What’s to prevent them from trading their mashed potatoes for something more lethal? Perhaps only stiffer jail terms.

The truth is that climate-change activism has become a religious dogma. The way the presenter on the prime-time program of the Spanish Left’s radio network, Ser, began her editorial commentary this past week is paradigmatic: “Climate change is killing us. And if there is anyone who doesn’t want to see it and denies the evidence, they should be excluded from the conversation and public debate.” If you replace “climate change” with “vaccines” or “doing homework,” you realize that her reasoning needs improvement.

Just Stop Oil exists because leftist elites are interested in it and finance it. But beware: Even if these stunts seem trivial today, there are too many who no longer tolerate any kind of debate on climate — only blind faith and obedience — which could push our current discourse about the environment to the verge of actual violence someday.

For now, the primary victim of these non-spontaneous attacks is not Van Gogh, not the oil companies, not the politicians — but the cleaning staff.