Climate cult on the road to hell
RNOW I don’t want to get your Saturday off to a bad start, but the quote that follows is not for those with a nervous disposition. This is what will happen if we don’t, er, Just Stop Oil, in the words of the movement’s “spiritual leader”.You’ll need a strong stomach for this (not least for the bad grammar) so be warned.
“What will happen,” says one Roger Hallam, “is episodes (sic) where a gang of young men come into your house, they take your girlfriend, they take your mother, they put her on to the table, and they gang-rape her in front of you. And then after that, they take a hot stick, and they poke out your eyes and blind you. That… is the reality.”
Hallam – currently in custody charged with conspiracy to cause a public nuisance – was speaking on a YouTube video about how he thinks the climate will change if we don’t “Just Stop Oil”.
Quite how explicit rape and torture fantasies fit into the physics involved in global warming (I thought we were rather more concerned about rising sea levels, melting glaciers and so on) is a matter for Hallam’s clearly very odd psychological profile – but I know a demented rant when I hear one.
While Hallam languished in his cell this week, his supporters were making videos of their own, usually from the top of a gantry above the M25.
I didn’t clock any weird stuff about sexual violence, blinding with hot sticks, etc, but there was plenty of near-hysteria (sorry, just make that hysteria) and unadorned self-righteousness.
“I’m 24!” one protester wept into her phone camera theatrically, as if this was in itself an incontrovertible argument for halting traffic across three counties.The Government’s approach to the environment was “an act of murder”. Shedding yet more tears, she informed us: “I don’t have a future!” Hmm.
A bit like someone seriously ill and trapped in an ambulance in the gridlock below.
Another eco-warrior (a 20-yearold man) predicted empty shelves in food shops and fighting in the streets in just a few years’ time, while Just Stop Oil emails to the media were not exactly models of measured, reasoned argument.
The UK’s “criminal” government is engaged in a “genocidal death project” hell-bent on causing “mass starvation and slaughter”. Global warming is real. The need to move away from fossil fuels and on to renewables as quickly as possible is real. Government foot-dragging (and not just our Government’s) is also real.
But Just Stop Oil has swiftly mutated from a fairly straightforward, if hugely simplistic, protest movement into something that looks very much like a cult.
It has a leader whose pronouncements sound, frankly, deranged, followers who sob and shake as they spout hysterical accusations and end-of-the-worldis-nigh prophesies, and actions that have moved from the straightforwardly silly (splashing soup on paintings, etc) to the downright dangerous.
Cults ALWAYS end badly. I fear this one is now irreversibly locked on a trajectory towards tragedy.