Greta Thunberg exposes the profound penchant for injustice in the social justice movement
But the rot goes even deeper and reveals the "banality of evil" within the newfound anti-semitism of our activist intellectuals
One of the more bizarre events in the grand pageant of the bizarre that has unfolded since October 7 took place in Amsterdam this past weekend.
Famed green activist Greta Thunberg, speaking at a large demonstration for climate action, brought a Palestinian and an Afghan woman to the stage, the latter of whom appealed for support for the Palestinian movement and in which the crowd chanted the familiar anti-Semitic rallying cry “from the river to the sea.”
Thunberg herself linked the two causes. “As a climate justice movement, we have to listen to the voices of those who are being oppressed and those who are fighting for freedom and for justice,” she proclaimed. Otherwise, there can be no climate justice without international solidarity.”
Another demonstrator upstaged her, however, by grabbing the microphone and complaining that he had “come for a climate demonstration, not a political view”. But Greta herself continued chanting “no climate justice on occupied land".
Many in the crowd were reportedly turned off by the episode and left.
One can draw all sorts of inferences from this episode. At a time when Europe, like the United States, has seen anti-semitic incidents skyrocket, Thunberg’s attempt to conflate climate change with support for Hamas seemingly exhibited either appalling naivete, or some spark of evil genius.
But most likely it simply served as an awkward reminder of how empty-headed and grotesquely out-of-touch the so-called “social justice” movement has become these days.
Despite the horrific acts of October 7 that have been described as the worst atrocities against Jews since the Holocaust, Hamas’ professed intentions in its charter to annihilate Israel and “the Jews”, and the recent discovery of an Arabic version of Hitler’s Mein Kampf found on a terrorist in a child’s bedroom, the call for a second Jewish genocide has now been added to the shopping basket of chic causes that young, privileged white Westerners draw upon whenever they need to virtue-signal their way to a more meaningful life, or a professional career.
Although it is not intuitively obvious what burning and beheading Jewish babies has to do with halting climate change, Thunberg obviously sees it as essential to some pliable pact of “international solidarity” in the name of fighting “oppression”.
The perversity of such discourse is outstripped only by its ubiquity among our current cogntive elites. How did we get here?
It’s been my job as an academic, who has been in the business now for over half a century, to track the vast topography of this sort of pseudo-cerebral trash talk. The entire idiom has its origin in the sloganeering of the political left during the Vietnam era, which took it upon itself to adapt the abstract Marxist principle of worker oppression to a sprawling miscellany of social problems and discontents.
It should be noted in passing that these problems were not illusory. America in the Sixties did not live up to its promise of human equality, let alone equal protection as guaranteed in the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Bias and discrimination was rampant in many areas of everyday life, prompting passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which defined the so-called “protected classes” that make up the majority of specific categories invoked into so-called “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives.
Various militant groups – some short-lived, others that eventually became establshment fixtures – sought to weaponize what were essentially legal distinctions and classifications by converting them into a social ontology that was more the product of polemics than any careful and sustained intellectual inquiry.
For example, women’s historic subordination in the workplace was construed not as the inevitable outcome of millennia of domestic dependency in light of high infant mortality rates and the preponderance of manual labor but as some gargantuan conspiracy by men that came to be known simply as “the patriarchy”.
Instead of a campaign for equal rights on behalf of previously excluded constituencies, as had been the case with liberal politics overall during the previous two centuries, the rhetoric of what in the late Sixties and early Seventies came to be almost mystically characterized as the Movement harped on a myth of complex and indelible forms of “structural” oppression that could never be sorted out in any other way than constantly naming and shaming the “oppressors”.
The protagonists themselves in the struggle, according to this world view, were not real, living, breathing individual miscreants but ghostly prototypes that could be easily manipulated as algebraic tokens in a ritually coded, binary logic of “oppressor” and “oppressed”.
The foregoing had nothing to do with the writings of Karl Marx in any meaningful sense, and the now familiar accusation of “cultural Marxism” ascribed to such a vague ideological globule by right-wing critics is an insult to Marx himself.
But it was the very vacuity of that formula that played very well with America’s half-educated managerial and bureaucratic elites, who had imbibed the rhetoric during their student days and quickly learned to leverage it for the sake of what the Dutch call de macht van het kleine – literally, “the power of the little people”, or a puffing up of the importance of those who really count for little.
The mantra-like repetition of such words without context over several generations now has had lasting, pestilential effects.
The popular phrasing used to convey these effects is “wokeness”, but its connotations belie the more insidious aspects of such a perceptual pathology, which for those accustomed to experiencing the world from this angle of vision amounts to an instinctive aversion to ethical nuance, an inability to distinguish between reasonable authority and “authoritarianism”, and a deranged sense of moral equivalence that obsesses with victimization while showing absolutely no concern for accountability.
The common canard among conservatives is that “woke” ideology has been a Trojan horse smuggled into our educational institutions by duplicitous educators with a stealth agenda. This “Manchurian candidate” model of how the “Great Awokening” took root throughout our schools and universities mollifies the conspiratorial mentality, but it misses the point.
Wokeness is simply the metastasis of the deep-reaching moral relativism and intellectual stupefaction that has pervaded the collective conscience of secular America since the Vietnam era. Just as cirrhosis of the liver is the invariable outgrowth of chronic alcoholism, so wokeness has been the inevitable result of a flabby-minded public discourse that is “inclusive” of both virtue and vice without qualification.
In 2005 a University of Notre Dame sociologist by the name of Christian Smith wrote a much-discussed book entitled Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, in which he described a streak of intense, but superficial moralism within the rising generation that, paradoxically, was not concerned with enforcing strict kinds of behavior, but mainly with being “good” or “nice”.
Smith referred to this insipid world view as “moral therapeutic deism”.
He was echoed by psychologists Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt who wrote a decade later about how “paranoid parenting” and the “bureaucracy of safetyism” had spawned a whole youth culture that “equates emotional discomfort with physical danger” and “encourages people to systematically protect one another from the very experiences embedded in daily life that they need in order to become strong and healthy.”
At the same time, such a sensitivity fosters its own kind of ethical narcosis and a lack of real empathy. If people are suffering, I cannot bring myself to try to fathom the ambiguity, let alone the genuine pain of their predicament.
The postmodern style of Gen Z moralist, according to media theorist Lilie Chouliaraki, is nothing more than an “ironic spectator” who processes all the perceived tragedies of the world as some sort of blasé video game, one which “explicitly situates the pleasures of self at the heart of moral action”, and refuses “reflexive engagement with the political conditions of human vulnerability.”
Thus the unspeakable barbarity deliberately perpetrated against Jewish civilians during Hamas’ “Al-Aqsa Flood” has no separate moral valency whatsoever when set over against the scenes of bombed buildings from Israeli air raids, or allows for any qualitative distinction between images of tortured Jewish corpses and aggregate statistics of dead Palestinians that cannot be verified by any independent source or conflates fighters with bystanders.
It is pure spectacle, and the point is not, as Chouliarki suggests, to induce feelings of compassion that might lead to sacrifice of self as well as effective gestures of solidarity, but to maximize affect – especially disgust and vitriol – regardless of its real world consequences.
What we get instead is the type of fulsome pseudo-solidarity with covert messages of violence that came out of the mouth of Thunberg on Saturday.
As Hardley Arkes notes in a recent op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal, the “moral” argument that Jews are the oppressors and Palestinians en bloc are the oppressed totally collapses when even an iota of critical scrutiny is applied to the circumstances surrounding the conflict. He opines:
The protesters inveigh against an Israeli “occupation” and the imposition of colonial “imperialism.” That has the moral resonance of charging that people are being ruled without their consent, without free elections. But Palestinians are governed by Hamas and the Palestinian Authority without free elections. Why aren’t they seeking to overthrow those regimes?
What do the protesters mean by “occupation”? There’s a confusion between the term’s military sense and the simple sense in which Jews “occupy,” or live in, Israel. Hamas’s objective evidently is to remove them from that land—or from the land of the living.
Is there a legal dispute over who has a right to govern this territory? That would bring accounts surprising to many people of who settled and developed the different parts of Palestine first. That is a dispute that lends itself to evidence presented in a forum that would be trusted to sift through the facts and form a judgment,
Even when it comes to the “moral clarity” of Israeli military reaction following October 7, Raphael Cohen in an essay in Foreign Policy makes the salient observation that “the reality of fighting Hamas in Gaza makes this war terrible one way or another.”
…once we unpack what Israel’s right to self-defense actually means in practical terms, the differences between so-called targeted operations and what Israeli operations have been to date begin to blur. At a minimum, a right to self-defense should allow Israel to rescue its hostages, prevent Hamas’s ability to launch another Oct. 7-style attack—which it has already promised to do—and kill or capture those responsible for Oct. 7.
There can be serious ethical critiques, even legitimate condemnations, of how the Israeli government over time has dealt with the Palestinian question, not to mention addressing the real question of how two historically antagonistic religious cultures such as Judaism and Islam can realistically coexist on an equal footing in a geopolitical setting where such co-existence has never been the case in even the remote past.
But for certain figures from within the crème de la crème of the Western intelligentsia to enable, even adopt, a position that differs little in substance from that of Goebbels and Himmler is an even greater outrage than what is happening on the ground in the Middle East.
Even the German population during the Third Reich had enough of a conscience that the Nazis were compelled to hide the killing of their victims as much as possible. Many of today’s college protesters openly exult in the murder of Jews and, despite the fierce blowback, continue to chant the genocidal “river to the sea” anthem of Hamas and its sympathizers.
The Israel-Hamas War has exposed what Hannah Arendt termed the “banality of evil” for the twenty-first century.
The fact that the social justice movement has become an incubator for the celebration of the most grotesque example of injustice in modern times – i.e., the Holocaust – speaks volumes not only about the failed mission of higher education but about our shattered moral compass.
After World War II it was a common refrain to ask how Germany which had birthed such artistic geniuses as Bach and Beethoven could ever give rise to Dachau and Auschwitz.
Currently we need to ask with uncompromising candor how institutions such as Harvard and Yale, which putatively serve as beacons of enlightenment as well as global paragons of advanced learning and research, can produce the most virulent kind of anti-semitism not seen the high tide of European fascism.
Or what it means that even in the teeth of a genuine climate crisis we are willing to trust the destiny of the human race to those with views similar to Greta Thunberg.