I am just reading the controversial book that has been condemned by
Germany's Green Party, when the author made comments to Die Zeit. The
article I've seen in a Swiss magazine makes similar reading. When an
author gets himself kicked out of Germany Extinction Rebellion - some of
the loveliest people in the movement against dirty lignite brown coal -
It rings alarm bells.
Extinction Rebellion does have a conflict process but for some reason it doesn't have a way to re write the guy out of history.
What
role does someone play when on page 14 he uses the statistics of the
number of people murdered in the holocaust, as some kind of sick way to
visualise large numbers of deaths. (Basically most European Jews were
systematically and intentionally killed). As with the author, I am
absolutely no expert in History - the question of whether governments
are equally genocidal with regards to environmental violence against our
climate. They aren't. Genocide is a clearly defined international
crime and it's wrong to use that word to try and create through a media
storm, some higher awareness of the climate change situation. For one
thing climate change and the ecological breakdown has a basis in
international law - in the 1990's ecocide, a concept pushed by
extinction Rebellion co-founder Gail Bradbrooke, was proposed and not
adopted as a crime against humanity. It's been pushed heavily in Europe
as a citizens initiative. But it's a long jump between that and
petro-states coming to the International Criminal Court in the Hague and
being sentenced as the biggest criminals.
I am not a
fast reader but page 14 is crass. It's not inclusive and co-opts the
Jewish community and German community - with whom we've worked over the
actual rebellion last year. The outcome of the conflict process was
some quite good new governance structures, including an actual conflict
process made up on the hoof. He made quite a personal apology for what
he said and said he won't talk about it. So I'm not going to get into a
row with him, which is what he wants, to attract attention.
Sadly while words in newspapers and magazines quickly get buried in the news cycle, books continue to exist and be sold.
I'm not going to give this guy a public platform to sell his book.
