The Media is Whitewashing and Mainstreaming a Call to Terrorism
Excerpt:
Let’s get one thing out of the way: ecoterrorism kills.
Abstractions like blowing up “fossil fuel infrastructure” distracts from what really happens when people lose power to their homes. The elderly who are on oxygen machines can die, freeze to death in cold weather or die of heatstroke during heat waves like the one this summer.
Ecoterrorism is murder.
The media’s response to How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Swedish Marxist author Andreas Malm has been a master class in the use of vague evasive academic language to make it seem harmless and courageous, the destruction of a paradigm, rather than people’s lives.
Here’s how the New Yorker pitched a podcast featuring editor David Remnick and Malm, “Professor Andreas Malm, who studies the relationship between climate change and capitalism, insists that the environmental movement reconsider its roots in nonviolence.”
“Reconsider its roots in nonviolence” is quite a distance from the plain and simple, “embrace violence”.
Orwell made this same point a long time ago.
“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible...Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.”
Reconsider its roots in non-violence indeed.
The LA Review of Books is predictably even more deranged.
“Palestinian freedom fighters punctured or set fire to various pipelines throughout the 20th century, sometimes on a near-daily basis. Iraqis resisting American occupation executed nearly 200 attacks on pipelines; Kurdish and Egyptian and Houthi rebels, leftist guerillas in Colombia and Chechnya — all undertook similar tactics.”
Iraqis resisting American occupation? You mean ISIS?
The New York Times review mention that the author “notes that fetishizing nonviolence in past protest movements sanitizes history, removing agency from the people who fought, sometimes violently, for justice, freedom and equality.”
It’s another perfect mass of “euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness” to defend the indefensible.
Probably the best example though comes from this review which claims that “Malm avoids the grandiosity and testosterone that often saturate calls for violence, and instead offers a humble and nuanced case for how sabotaging fossil fuel infrastructure and machinery might be ‘synergetic and complementary’”.
Synergetic and complementary terrorism sounds like something a corporate report would propose.
Good thing there’s no testosterone to be found when Malm rants, “Damage and destroy new CO2-emitting devices. Put them out of commission, pick them apart, demolish them, burn them, blow them up. Let the capitalists who keep on investing in the fire know that their properties will be trashed.”
If you want to learn more about destroying the capitalists, check out the Marxist terror tract being distributed by Penguin Random House, a subsidiary of the German Bertelsmann empire which had Nazi ties during WW2.
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