The New York Times published a garbage essay by a radical environmentalist defending young climate fanatics for throwing “soup” on a world-famous Vincent van Gogh painting, calling it an example of “creative methods” to stop fossil fuel production.
Lund University Professor Andreas Malm emerged as a white knight for “Just Stop Oil” protestors who recently threw “soup” onto Vincent van Gogh’s world-famous 1889 painting, “Sunflowers.” But instead of defending van Gogh – a Dutch painter who died in 1890 and who probably contributed next to nothing to the so-called climate change crisis – Malm claimed that “History May Absolve the Soup Throwers” in an Oct. 20 guest essay for The Times.
As Malm conceded, “Vincent van Gogh is not responsible for our climate breakdown. He was not the C.E.O. of an oil and gas company or a coal merchant.” But that was the last reasonable argument that the professor made during his rambling, 1,121-word essay.
The professor even went so far as to justify “property destruction” to advance a climate revolution:
“As for the ethics of property destruction, it is not, in this case, very complicated. Fossil fuels kill people. If you disrupt the flow of such fuels and damage the machinery they impel, you prevent deaths. You stop the perpetration of harm. You may destroy an inanimate object — and no one in the climate movement is suggesting anything other than targeting dead things — so as to protect living beings. Or, put differently, if you are locked in a house on fire, you have a right to break some windows to get out.” [Emphasis added].
Malm justified his promotion of “sabotage” as long as it is “precise and gritty.” The Guardian reported in April that “Just Stop Oil” activists vandalized gas stations in England. Malm, of course, in The New York Times said “they hit the nail on the head” because gasoline “is a fuel of global warming.”
But if gas stations and van Gogh paintings aren’t worth protecting, what is?
Not much, according to Malm.
“There is a whole planetary layer of stations, pipelines, platforms, derricks, terminals, mines and shafts that must be shut down to save humanity and other life-forms,” he wrote. [Emphasis added].
But Malm didn’t stop there, riding the crazy, eco-extremist train right down to the finish. The professor gave a nod to “climate militancy,” which supposedly encompasses “civil disobedience” and even “guerilla warfare” to reduce global carbon emissions.
The “soup throwers” wore shirts emblazoned with the words “Just Stop Oil,” corresponding with a far-left group dedicated to eradicating fossil fuels. “Fossil fuels are killing us,” the group’s website proclaims. The video of the soup throwing has garnered thousands of views on YouTube and is prominent on the front page of Just Stop Oil’s website.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact The New York Times at 1-800-698-4637 and demand it stop pushing climate fanaticism and allowing radical environmentalists to justify criminal behavior as long as the criminals are flying the banner of climate change.
