Tuesday, November 26, 2019

November 26, 2019


MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

ENVIRONMENTAL MADNESS:
The Second Coming of Greta Thunberg

Friends,
I pass on to you an original essay which has not appeared previously or elsewhere. This one, titled “The Second Coming of Greta Thunberg,” was published today at the LewRockwell.com Web site, and it documents an over-the-top example of what I call “environmental madness,” the conversion of what was once a rational and legitimate concern for our environment, our natural resources, and the goodness granted to us by God, into a stridently fanatical, irrational, and hysterical semi-religion—which in a very real sense attempts to supplant the traditional faith that created the two millennia of our civilization. What it offers is a stark, verifiably mad counter-reality, a new Barbarism without Hope, without Faith, and without God.

Hilaire Belloc’s characterization of the Barbarians is quite apt:

“[T]he Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this that he cannot make; that he can befog or destroy, but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilisation exactly that has been true.  We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us: we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces there is no smile.


I pass on my essay at LewRockwell here:

LewRockwell.comanti-state•anti-war•pro-market

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By Boyd D. Cathey   November 26, 2019

Back on November 20, 2019, Tucker Carlson had a guest on his program, a self-denominated progressive—which he often does. But this time the guest was an environmentalist “with a difference,” as the saying goes. And this guest specifically reminded the television audience that formerly, not that long ago, environmentalists—conservation voters—supported strict immigration limits.
And the reason was simple enough: an overcrowded population within our borders increases dangers and threats to our environment, to our natural resources, and to our efforts to maintain those characteristics and that natural goodness and beauty which, I suspect, most of us appreciate and value highly.
The Leftist Web site Media Matters cited Carlson, speaking with his guest:
One of the greatest blessings we have as Americans is the amazing pristine beauty of our country. Ever been to the coast of Maine, or Big Sur, or the Tetons? It’s incredible. Now, why is that? Well, even with 320 million people living here, this country still is not particularly crowded. That’s the key, the old environmental movement understood that, and was why they campaigned for lower immigration levels — because crowded countries are never beautiful countries. But the modern left and modern environmentalists care much more about identity politics than the actual physical environment, so they’re pushing for open borders, because their donors want it.

Carlson’s point and the reason for having the guest on was to emphasize just how contradictory the modern progressivist environmentalist movement has become, how it had become captured by a zealous ideology.
And that point hit home the very next day. For then news leaked out and spread like wild-fire on social media. Indeed, dozens of mostly strident and frenzied Leftist Webzines featured the story:
“Greta Thunberg: Did She Time Travel from 120 Years Ago?”
The story was that someone had discovered an old, archived photograph taken 120 years ago, now housed at the University of Wisconsin Special Collections. In that photograph was the image of a young teen who could pass—the Twitter world speculated—as climate activist Greta Thunberg’s doppelganger, her exact twin.
Art News inquired breathlessly: “Is This Photo Proof That Greta Thunberg Is a Time Traveler From the California Gold Rush?” Aol.com exclaimed with scarcely concealed wonder: “120-year-old photo of Greta Thunberg lookalike is freaking the internet out.”  The Aol account continued, “The images show three young children working on a gold mine in Canada’s Yukon territory in 1898, with the eldest child bearing an uncanny resemblance to Thunberg, leading many to claim that the teen activist is a ‘time traveler’ sent to save the world.”
Although many posters admitted that the story appeared to partake of sheer fantasy, the Twitter Left remained abuzz. The image posted online caused many to speculate: “…Thunberg might be superhuman (well, more than she is already).”

Tweets posted by  Indy100 reveal the insanity of many on the environmental Left:

‘Greta Thunberg’ is in a photo from 120 years ago…. Greta’s a time traveller, from the future, and she’s here to save us.
*****
Maybe in the near future she will decide the only way to save us is by traveling to the past, so the pic is of a future her in the past.
*****
Wouldn’t this mean that she’s a time traveller from the past, or from now and went to back then? I guess she could be from the future but that would mean she time travelled twice for some reason. Maybe she realizes it’s too late here in our time and travels again soon?!
*****
Great now she will be getting re-attacked by @foxnews saying the “Dems sent her back from the future”
*****
Or…Greta Thurnburg went back to the past to try to stop progress there, and was so unsuccessful then as well, that she was able to come into existence in a country that benefits greatly from industrialization, without which her cell phone is not possible.

She even fulfills and complies faithfully with the precepts of her own warnings. Unlike Bernie Sanders, or Al Gore, or Leonardo di Caprio who love their private airplanes, she refuses to fly in those carbon-chewing jets—none of those polluting machines for her. The Aol story relates: “After three months in the United States, she’s currently sailing back across the Atlantic with Australian Youtubers, a journey that is being documented across social media. On Wednesday, she shared that the sailboat has encountered rough weather but the team will hopefully ‘arrive in Lisbon, Portugal, sometime in early December’.”
Indeed, this is fanaticism with logic and principle! Commented another Tweeter: Greta Thunberg is ‘The Doctor of Salvation’.”

Listen once again to Thunberg at the UN:
“This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean… People are suffering, people are dying, entire ecosystems are collapsing … and all you talk about is money and eternal fairy tales of economic growth. How dare you?” 
Was this indeed “the Second Coming of Greta Thunberg”?  Had that poor maid from circa 1899 all of a sudden miraculously returned to earth—time traveled as the Twitter Leftists speculated—to warn us of impending environmental doom (which will happen in just ten years according to Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes and now most Democrats)? Were we in the awing presence of a pure and innocent young girl, a secular prophetess, who had miraculously migrated through an entire century to warn usof the consequences of our environmental and social “sins”? Were we witnessing the 21st century’s paganized answer to the Holy Children of Fatima or to St. Bernadette of Lourdes, who had received direction from the Blessed Virgin to warn us of our apostasy from the faith of our Christian fathers?
Or was this, rather, a wallowing in the demonic dross that now overlays and dominates our culture, our politics, our entertainment, and environmentalism?  And from those who have turned real environmental concerns and questions into a veritable religion where there can be no dissent, no questioning—those who have created a counter-reality that seeks to replace the two millennia civilization created by our ancestors and their faith?

Of course, this speculation, this demented “miracle-ism” emits from those who, ironically, either openly deny or at a minimum pervert traditional doctrines of the Church and Christianity, who doubt those miracles recounted by Holy Scripture, and dismiss such accounts as myths and fables.
But when it comes to the meek and mild modest maid from modern Sweden, well, she can do no wrong. She is the Angelic Child, chosen to speak Truth to the Powerful, worshipped in thousands of school rooms across this nation—indeed across the entire world.
Certainly, as some commenters allow, Thunberg suffers from Aspergers Syndrome, she has a handicap, and criticism of her should bear that in mind. And, yes, her parents and/or probably some officiously ideological educators probably had much to do with the person she has become and the beliefs she now espouses and spouts in front of admiring and gullible minions across the globe.
But these factors do not lessen her personal responsibility nor her agreement to become a pagan icon—becoming, as it were, a modern Image of Baal for modern environmentalists and eyes-glazed-over progressivists. She fits neatly into their ideological passions and desires as a demi-goddess, a “Vox clamantis in Deserto”—a voice crying in the wilderness.
In this sense she incarnates both the fierceness and stridency of the unrelenting assault on our civilization and the perversion of genuine concern about our environment. And for that she must be held accountable and judged accordingly.
Reprinted with the author’s permission.

Copyright © 2019 Boyd D. Cathey

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