Eco-protestors

Ever since Monty Python created their internecine, bickering and ridiculous groups of freedom fighters – the People’s Front of Judea and the Judean People’s Front – for their 1979 film The Life of Brian, it’s always been easy and tempting to mock and deride the fissiparous nature of ideologues and tin-pot revolutionaries. Those who believe in the purity of a cause tend to have a semi-religious mindset – and consequently one semi-divorced from reality – which brooks no heresy from orthodoxy. Thus extreme, quasi-cult movements are always prone to split into factions. And so it goes with the radical green movement, which at its worst excesses does resemble a bizarre cult: witness

A pair of Just Stop Oil activists walked into the National Gallery this morning and threw tomato soup over Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. ‘What is worth more? Art or life?’, one of the demonstrators yelled as she glued herself to the wall. This isn’t the first time a work of art has been targeted by environmentalists. In July, eco-protesters glued themselves to the frame of Constable’s painting The Hay Wain and covered it with an altered version of their own, doing minor damage in the process. A few days before, eco-protesters rushed onto the track at Silverstone. Eco-protesters also glued themselves to a Turner painting in Manchester. In June, eco-protesters…  you get the idea. For all