It’s easy enough to laugh at Extinction Rebellion oddbods dancing around peculiarly as if they are shaking off fleas (are they?) or singing jarringly in their pop-up choirs. It’s easy enough to get furious with them for their selfishness as they block the bridge you wish to cross on the way to hospital – with ridiculous meditation sessions and ritual bus-gluing. It’s easy enough to pin down their funders and to understand why someone as unappealing as Aileen Getty (pictured) – who pledged $600,000 (£487,000) to the Climate Emergency Fund which is funding Extinction Rebellion and other grass roots climate groups – feels she needs the acknowledgement. Because reasoned argument with them is virtually impossible above the sound of wailing and tambourines, it’s much more difficult to address the activists’ arguments head-on, and to prove that they are the wastrels they seem. Nonetheless, let’s have a go, shall we?
Helpfully, one of the founder members of the group, Stuart Basden, has let the cat out of the bag and told the world that, in his words:
“Extinction Rebellion isn’t about the Climate. You see, the climate’s breakdown is a symptom of a toxic system that has infected the ways we relate to each other as humans and to all life. Delusions (of white supremacy, patriarchy, Eurocentrism, hetero sexism/heteronormativity and class hierarchy) have become ingrained in all of us, taught to us from a very young age. The task of Extinction Rebellion is to dispel these delusions. We need to cure the causes of the infection, not just alleviate the symptoms. To focus on the climate’s breakdown (the symptom) without focusing attention on these toxic delusions (the causes) is a form a denialism. Worse, it’s a racist and sexist form of denialism, that takes away from the necessary focus of the need for all of us to de-colonise ourselves.”
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