What drives someone to do something as morally depraved as throw human faeces on a monument to Captain Sir Tom Moore? The video allegedly showing a climate-change campaigner dousing a likeness of Sir Tom, in what was reportedly a mixture of urine and excrement, is deeply chilling.
The person in the video is part of a pressure group called End UK Private Jets. The woman allegedly executed the vile stunt in order to raise awareness about the polluting impact of private jets. Quite how defiling a monument to a national treasure in such an appalling way is going to raise the public’s eco-awareness is anyone’s guess. It’s far more likely to make people feel sick, and angry.
Call me an old-fashioned moralist, but my view is that you shouldn’t throw crap at any monument. Least of all Sir Tom’s. A British army officer who became globally famous in his 99th year of life for raising millions of pounds for the NHS – he’s hardly Edward Colston, is he?
Environmentalism is, at root, a campaign against people
Perhaps it should go without saying but pouring piss and poo on a public monument to a late, much-loved elderly man is not normal behaviour. So it seems to me there are two possible explanations for this wicked act. First, perhaps this protester has ‘issues’, to use modern parlance. Perhaps she’s a troubled individual. If so, let us hope she gets the help she needs.
Or perhaps this foul act is yet another expression of the misanthropy that lurks at the heart of so much modern green campaigning. Perhaps this speaks to radical greens’ lowly view of humankind in general.
There is unquestionably an arrogance and a dogmatism in a great deal of green agitation today. And it isn’t hard to see why. It’s because these people genuinely believe they are saving the planet from mankind’s monstrous and toxic impact. The more eco-activists convince themselves that the end of the world is nigh – and that only they, the enlightened ones, have the intellect and wherewithal to do something about it – the more they will believe that any kind of action is justified to achieve their urgent ends.
There’s a direct link between the End of Days mindset of modern greens and their increasingly haughty and irritating forms of protest.
Whether it’s Extinction Rebellion occupying central London for days on end, or Insulate Britain blocking motorways and preventing people from getting to work, going on holiday or visiting loved ones, eco-agitators clearly think little of disrupting daily life.
And that’s because they’ve convinced themselves that the apocalypse is just around the corner. And you can’t be doing with niceties, can you, when you have an extinction-level calamity to hold at bay?
There is a religious, cult-like feel to eco-activists’ conviction that they must do everything they can – including disrupting oil production, holding up ambulances and even throwing excrement around – to stave off the doomsday they’ve been having feverish nightmares about for yonks.
Some have said the horrible befoulment of Sir Tom’s likeness will not convince anyone of the need to take environmental action. That’s true, but it somewhat misses the point. It might have been the aim of traditional forms of political activism to persuade people, to try to bring us on board. But eco-protesting has an altogether different goal. Its object is to save us, not convince us; to hector us, not persuade us; to punish us, not help us.
As George Monbiot once said, climate-change activism is ‘a campaign not for abundance but for austerity. It is a campaign not for more freedom but for less. Strangest of all, it is a campaign not just against other people, but against ourselves.’
He’s right. Environmentalism is, at root, a campaign against people. That’s why it has an undeniable streak of contempt in it. Perhaps the alleged vandalism of Sir Tom’s likeness was that contempt taken to its most despicable level yet.
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