As I wrote recently for Insight, there is an alarming sub-strata of the “deep-green” eco-activist movement which eagerly anticipates a mass genocide of the human species to “save the planet”.
This is not just a fringe element either: David Attenborough is a patron of the Population Matters group, which wants to urgently reduce the human population. Extinction Rebellion argue that not only must the population be reduced – urgently – but that industrial civilisation must be eradicated.
Fortunately, as I also wrote, so far only a handful of genuine lunatics on the fringes of the deep greens, like the Unabomber, El Paso shooter Patrick Crusius, and Christchurch terrorist Brenton Tarrant, have been motivated enough to put their beliefs into murderous action. To date, the mainstream deep greens have been content to merely talk.
But their talk is becoming more and more ominous.
One of the British eco-warriors who founded Extinction Rebellion has been disowned by his allies and rebuked by the German government after insisting there was nothing “unique” about the Holocaust.
Roger Hallam created a schism in the radical protest movement on Wednesday with an interview with the German newspaper Die Zeit in which he described the Third Reich’s systematic murder of six million Jews as “just another f..kery in human history” and said genocide was “almost a normal occurrence”.
This is part of another alarming pattern in left-wing politics: dehumanising Jews, minimising the Jewish experience (such as erasing any mention of Jews in Holocaust Memorial Day literature) and, at worse, mainstreaming outright anti-Semitism.
Thankfully, so far (at least) Hallam’s gauche explicit linkage of Holocaust dismissal with the deep green movement has alarmed his chums into doing the decent thing. For now.
The comments drew a swift rebuke from German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, who called the industrial-scale murder of Jews “uniquely inhuman”.
“We must always beware of this to ensure: never again!” Mr Maas wrote on Twitter.
German Greens co-leader Robert Habeck told the newspaper Bild “there must be no place for anti-Semitism or downplaying of the Holocaust”.
theaustralian.com.au/world/holocaust-not-unique-ecowarrior-roger-hallam-disowned
But, as Die Zeit writer Hannah Knut wrote, “it does not do Germans any good that they mistook him for being unique”. Because the truth is that Hallam is the very model of the modern climate protester.
Hallam actually studied a “PhD in civil disobedience” (yes, apparently there is such a thing) at King’s College London. An institution which he proceeded to harass into acquiescing to his extremist demands. This is a bullying radical incubated in the heart of an establishment white-anted by the left’s Long March through the institutions.
Hallam is not an outlier on the deep green movement. He is merely one willing to push the Overton Window furthest into the darkness inherent in deep green philosophy.