Move over, Leni Riefenstahl, you now have serious competition indeed, courtesy of the smiling eugenicists at 1010 and their catechism of cataclysm, "No Pressure":The green thumb of the left hand of environmentalism is soaked with crimson this week, as a British taxpayer-supported group's attempt to bring attention to their upcoming advertising campaign got a little more attention than they bargained for. Against all reason, they packaged their appeal to conservation within a despicable gorefest launched with a preview in the UK-based Guardian newspaper, whose readers were given the first look at this "edgy" ecology lesson last Thursday, reminding us all that we can't expect to make omelettes without first breaking a few eggs:
[W]hy take such a risk of upsetting or alienating people, I ask [director Franny Armstrong]: "Because we have got about four years to stabilise global emissions and we are not anywhere near doing that. All our lives are at threat and if that's not worth jumping up and down about, I don't know what is."Two reactions. One, it's yet another example of how the well-intentioned animists who can successfully see the spark of the divine Creator in slugs and bugs, seem to have exhausted that insight by the time they get around to seeing their fellow human beings. No wonder we can be treated as just so much collateral damage, our tilling is merely part of the toil that goes into preparing the soil of any field for planting, a necessary evil familiar to every hopeful gardener.
"We 'killed' five people to make No Pressure – a mere blip compared to the 300,000 real people who now die each year from climate change," she adds.
Jamie Glover, the child-actor who plays the part of Philip and gets blown up, has similarly few qualms: "I was very happy to get blown up to save the world."
Two: is this film really aimed at the increasing number of blaspheming skeptics no longer holding their iron-clad faith in the man-made religion of man-made global warming? My sense is that it's real target audience are the fellow travelers who might be straying from the party line. Tithing must be in serious decline for No Pressure to warrant shot after shot of terrified blood-stained survivors of each explosive purge. Death comes quickly, after all, to the characters in the vignettes who disagree; the terror is reserved for those left behind, haunted by the shocking price to be paid for free will. Beyond the purported conservationist message of the film, isn't it also whispering:
"When you join this club, you never leave."
No pressure, because there's no real freedom to choose in the first place.
The artful photography, the studied realism of the special effects, the impressive acting (is there anything harder to pull off than acting natural..?), all this and more reveal how much thought, labor, and talent must have gone into the creation of this monstrosity. There was just one thing missing: moral judgment. An admission agreed to by the sponsors of the film, who upon seeing it were reported to be "absolutely appalled" at the result of their good faith. Thankfully, the backers have come to their senses, so that the film will no longer be distributed to UK theaters, as originally planned. (!)
"Many people found the resulting film extremely funny", the filmmakers contend in their eventual apology. This is absolutely true, as we may read, with mounting horror, as the initial article in the Guardian fills with reader comments rising to the defense of the indefensible, revealing all the more clearly how far Great Britain has fallen in our lifetime. Where once there were giants like William Wilberforce, capable of seeking justice for people and animals both, now there remains caricatures of his shadow, willing to see people as animals, ready for herding... and culling.
The sickest joke seems to have turned out to be in the apology:
At 10:10 we're all about trying new and creative ways of getting people to take action on climate change. Unfortunately in this instance we missed the mark. Oh well, we live and learn."Live and learn"... a priviledge not extended to the heretical characters of their macabre video.
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Many people make a naive mistake in thinking that ecology is a benign approach to conserving our natural environments for the good use of people and the rest of nature, i.e. something we might term "environmentalism."
Ecology is no such thing as a benign environmentalism. It is a fascistic misanthropy.
When ecology was first coined in the 1860s by the anti-Semite Ernst Haekel, and the so-called science was created, it was first and foremost a variant Darwinism, meant to support a scientific racism and Romantic/pagan love of Germanness. It was a proto-Blut und Boden, or blood and soil mystique, which is is to this day.
I not only could go on with this, I have, having written a few hundred pages that I hope will see the light of day soonish, when I type it all and present it properly. Ecology, from what I will present to the public, is not friendly. Ecology is a violent fascism. The video in question is just more of the same, probably unconsciously so. but it is of a piece from the beginning.
Well, Charles, thanks for showing us, more clearly than anything else I've seen, the logical outgrowth of the cult of White Guilt - those of us who don't recognize our guilt must die. But wait a minute...
Why are the "green" nihilists, the clear majority in this video, not happy just killing off themselves and fertilizing trees? Why must they first get everyone else to sign off on their nihilism? I guess what I'm saying is maybe they aren't really nihlists - to the extent they demand conformity around their "carbon" sign, they remember and salute a primitive religious impulse, and they give us a renewed sign of primitive faith. So they do believe in something human... On the other hand, it seems they can only remember this religious impulse in bad faith. They have to laugh at it, make a joke of it, because they can't even really believe in it even though it's clear that on some level they kind of do... They want to believe they only believe in "science", but that alone is nihilism and so they can't help, at the least, "joking" about being primitive sacrificers. So are they nihilists or not? Torn between the desire to sacrifice victims to the carbon gods, and to laugh at one's desire desperately hoping smug sarcasm will make one look smart and win one followers on smarts alone, I'd say they are somewhat more confirmed nihlists than religionists. Rather few of them, i'd guess, would get along in some new-age Aztec-land. And sarcasm can't win many followers apart from addled guilty-white 20-somethings.
This esthetic is really not what is required if they want to move mountains. One needs the guilty to confess, or even better yet: In Communist days - Chinese, Russian, etc., - those purged by the party often went to their deaths praising the party, professing that while the party was entirely on the right side of history, it must have made a most unusual mistake in this case because no one has ever been a more loyal party member, which was then proven by going happily to one's death, confessing whatever was required, that there be no scandal to question the greater glory of the party, the brotherhood and future of man .
That's the kind of spirit these carbon dinks are missing...
But even then, while many who were purged in the early days of Communism couldn't see that it wasn't because the party was unusually mistaken in their case that they were to die, but rather because "Communism" was a religion that required an endless stream of victims to fertilize the soil of the "golden future", to justify the dream, it was only a matter of decades before the bloody nature of the failed cult, which was a lie, became obvious to most. Seems like the AGW cult is desperately trying to avoid seeing that it too wants an endless stream of blood by making a "joke" about it as if to try to convince itself that it is much more sophisticated - they follow scientists - and doesn't really need or want the bodies disappearing... That's a pretty weak cult, and i feel a weak esthetic. Leni R. need not fear this competition. This is not a film clip that will live for centuries in infamy.
Dag says, but of course this new cult does want endless victims. Yes, one can always find examples of bloodthirsty types. But isn't what's at work here the desperate desire to deny this reality by making a "joke" of it, to try and convince oneself that one can have Green "Communism" without hundreds of millions of bodies if only we all laugh and go along with the smart people? Talk about raising the Utopian stakes, like a poker amateur.
Of course Dag is right that historically fascism and green thinking have often gone in hand. But as I keep trying to warn him - thinking he doesn't really want to come across to his readers as the Great Denouncer - there are many uses of the word ecology, born in different events/disciplines, and one should not try to control words as if one were the kind of would-be dictator one is denouncing. "Ecology" is just a sign, used for foul and fair. Some people gnostically worship signs as if they were knowledge and reality itself - which leads to shabby ethics - but we really should recognize that signs are just the means of accessing knowledge and reality, but not the thing itself. The sign itself is not the cause of the bloody sacrifices done in its name. The creation and sharing of a sign really is always to some degree an act of love; the resentment that leads to bloody sacrifice in the name of the sign is an immature understanding of one's inevitable alienation from the sacred centre that the sign merely represents.
But then I haven't yet read Dag's book; maybe he really is going to show how every ecologist studying, say, fluctuating salmon populations, is really just as morally foul as the people who made this video. Who will get the last laugh in the struggle for political and religious appeal?
Flatulating salmon populations! Damn. I knew I was forgetting something!
Salmon are good; cows are bad. It's all in the farts.
Oceans rising. I took a wild guess.
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