Greta

In support of the Freedom Flotilla

Greta Thunberg has long solicited ridicule, anger, even hatred from some people. I remember trying to listen to her talk during one of the earliest Extinction Rebellion (XR) protests in London but my focus kept being pulled away by the righteous shouts of a small group of vegan adults who were furious that she did not speak more about the necessity of eliminating animal agriculture to fight climate change.

When my Year 9 secondary school class discovered that I had been arrested on a climate change protest – thankfully the charge of aggravated protest was thrown out of court else I wouldn’t have been able to teach – several of them were outraged due to the fact that I hadn’t been locked up and, more to the point, that I seemed to be taking a stand against petrol-powered cars (which a lot of the boys were adament fans of!) There was talk about how I should have been run over and how the kids themselves would have run me over if they had been able to! This inspired one of the boys to write a story in which he pointedly ran over and killed Greta Thunberg in his sports car.

While I have immediately seen a lot of support on Substack for what Thunberg is doing boarding the Freedom Flotilla, which is trying to bring aid to Gaza, I have also seen a lot of sentiments along the lines of “I don’t like her / She’s a neoliberal tool, though at least this is brave of her”. It’s fair to say that among the dedicated supporters of Palestine, there is a small-contingent of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists [correctly identifying the mass murder of Palestinian children by Israelis is not anti-Semitic; stating that all Jews are inherently demonic, is] who claim that Thunberg is related to the Rothschild banking dynasty, which is used in support of the belief that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by a shadowy Jewish elite.

While climate ≠ weather, the fact that ‘hottest day’, ‘hottest week’ and ‘hottest month’ records keep getting beaten year after year (cause all sorts of issues with flowers blooming out of season and crops rotting in the dry heat) is enough to convince me that the climate has changed since when I was young. Anecdotally, in terms of biodiversity, growing up in the countryside there were absolutely more flying insects in the air, more butterflies around buddleia bushes, more stag beetle sightings etc. Bird song was definitely ‘‘fuller’’ in my parents’ village when I was younger, I am utterly confident of that. Not being an ecologist or climate change expert, I am happy to defer to experts on this – especially when it seems far more likely that the vast majority of climate scientists who agree that human activity is the primary cause of global warming are correct and telling the truth, than the tiny percentage who are almost always shown to be in the pay of fossil fuel companies.

That said, I don’t think it is simply distrust in Thunberg’s scientific beliefs that motivates the hatred. Honestly, I think a lot of so-called neurotypical people still really don’t like so-called neurodiverse people. I know that having obvious OCD as a child* inspired a lot of the bullying I received, while my autistic best friend - now also schizophrenic, amongst other diagnoses - suffered some shocking levels of abuse. I’m sceptical that the attempts to remove stigma - or, indeed, the mass levels of diagnoses of autism and ADHD in recent years (though, not, notably OCD, diagnosis of which was a very ‘90s phemomenon) - have done much to lessen the bullying of those who are obviously marked out as ‘‘strange’’ or ‘‘different’’ but that is a subject for another blog post.

Needless to say, Greta Thunberg is very plain-spoken, has slightly blunted emotional affect in how she speaks and, most importantly, refuses to sit with obvious societal cognitive dissonance(s). Personally all these things means she ranks highly in my estimation, but most of my friends are, at the very least, on what used to be called “the spectrum”. While I have read fairly cogent critiques of her speeches in the past (or, at least, the symbolic role she played for liberals and the neoliberal establishment) her primary stance of “we need to stop burning fossil fuels to sustain a habitable planet” is patently, urgently correct, even if lots of climate activists may differ on the specifics of how this should be achieved.

I also think she has shown clear growth as an activist and, indeed, her progression into activism in protest of the genocide against Palestinians is a logical outgrowth of her concern for climate justice.

Make no mistake about it, Greta Thunberg is seriously heroic boarding the Freedom Flotilla - while I think she just has an astonishing level of integrity and refusal to sit with bullshit and hypocrisy, she must also be aware of her own symbolic status - if the Israel government/ IDF murder/ assassinate her it would put massive pressure on Europe to issue real sanctions; if they don’t (because of being aware of this) then she shames Europe into showing direct intervention is possible.

While I expect to see (perhaps rightly!) posts pointing out that she is no more heroic than all the Palestinians who have rushed into burning buildings to save children, volunteered as medics, kept writing truth to power with clarity and poetry at the same time as being starved, some critiques will be coming from attempts to distract from our own moral cowardice as Europeans / Westerners.

Greta knows what she is doing and the danger she is facing, with right-wing figures already calling for her murder. I have nothing but respect for her.

*Or demonstrating the symptoms which get somewhat arbitrarily grouped together as OCD. My brain definitely has tendencies which cause me suffering which the majority of people seem to experience to a much less severe degree.