(Climate protesters vandalizing a Van Gogh painting in London on Oct. 14th, 2022).
We all stared at our screens, dumbstruck: had two people just hurled some sort of orange concoction at poor old Vincent Van?
Listen, I get it: that action was pretty foolish and the political messaging was terrible. Nobody understood what “Stop Oil” meant, or even wanted, and the irony of using oil-based super-glue to protest oil, is laughable. But society’s reaction when this kind of thing happens is always the same: poke holes in the spokesperson’s incoherence or make fun of their persona (“Greta Thunberg looks callous”), blurt out some obviousness about the problem being “complicated” and warranting “serious actions from everyone” before pronouncing yourself on the right side of history (“I don’t deny climate change”) and then move on.
The truth of the matter is, anyone with even a passing interest in global warming who looks at the data will end up more depressed than Kurt Cobain coming down from a weekend molly trip.
We’re at the doorstep of a new era: The birth of Eco-Terrorism, environmentally-fuelled guerrilla actions looking to disrupt the normal flow of forces in our post-capitalistic world. This isn’t to say the mujahideen will stop bombing Europe and join the green cause. They get 79 virgins for shooting civilians at the Bataclan, not for bombing Lockheed Martin, and nobody can compete with that...
However, I’ve often predicted (in my very exclusive Podcast spoken in Venezuelan Mumblecore) that we’re going to see the rise of Eco-terrorism in the upcoming years. The souping of Van Gogh is the first, timid iteration of this idea.
Now, I don’t want to discuss the ethics of guerrilla terrorism, which can be a prickly issue. We can state the obvious, though: in a world suffering from a crisis of meaning, where political representation is questioned or outright rejected, violent bursts of unconformity are to be expected. The reality is, democratic civil discourse, the rhetorical strategies championed by Jürgen Habermas, for example, are ill-suited to handle the environmental apocalypse. The process is too long, tiresome, and cruelly exposed to lying, cheating and lobbyist influence.
I’ve thought a lot about the justifications for terrorism/guerrilla activities, since I come from a country suffering a brutal dictatorship for decades. My position hasn’t changed: I stand with Albert Camus on this one. The French intellectual, as you may remember, had one of the biggest falling outs of the 20th century with his friend, Jean-Paul Sartre, over the war in Algeria. Sartre, a rich, armchair intellectual, advocated for violence and terrorism, whereas Camus answered with something like, “My Mom’s Algerian, and she might be on that train you want to bomb”.
(Jean-Paul Sartre, smoking a pipe and babbling about Existentialism in a swank left-bank café in Paris, while people in Algeria go fight the war he promoted).
Deciding how many people you want to kill in order to achieve “Freedom” (or whatever lofty goal), is sickening, an exercise I will not entertain. In the words of Dostoievsky’s Ivan Karamazov, if to reach heaven I have to kill an innocent baby, that’s not a heaven worth entering.
I also understand the cool comfort of my position, this moral grandstanding that proclaims, “one dead is a dead too many!” and refuses to budge. But I went down that road in Venezuela: the rage, the confrontation, they’re all souless bastards and I hope they die; and look where that took us…
This is what will happen: Eco-Terrorists will start by following the Tupamaros’ playbook in South America, i.e., stage acts without hurting anybody. The Tupamaros famously kidnapped a CIA agent sent to Uruguay to teach torture methods to the local police (this case is impeccably presented in Costa Gavra’s “State of Siege”) and they commandeered the radio station during a popular football match to spread propaganda, among other, brilliant and creative actions.
What happened to the Tupamaros? The public shrugged them off, too afraid to support their movement; one of the 7 leaders gave up the rest, they were all imprisoned and tortured and wound up dead or seriously impaired for the rest of their lives. I got to meet 2 survivors, most notably Atahualpa del Cioppo, and my own father wound up in prison and tortured just because he was friends with the guy.
So no, I’m not the person that’s going to tell you Guerrilla Activism is a good idea.
That’s because, after trying to play nice and doing clever actions like the Tupamaros, Eco-Terrorists will get frustrated at the lack of impact. They’ll then ramp up the attacks: it’ll probably start nicely, à la Tupamaros, with the bombing of a pipeline where nobody gets hurt. Then they’ll bomb an oil refinery on an off-day, hoping nobody is present. Then they’ll probably kidnap the board of Total. When all this fails, terrorism will reach the cities, where Camus’ Grandmother, my family and yours, will suffer directly.
I hope there were another way. But the political system is gridlocked, the media has been captured by rich moguls and lobbyists and the scorn and ridicule actions like the souping of Van Gogh have caused will just make Eco-activists more furious.
It seems obvious to me, we’re heading there. So laugh now, at these two not-very-bright dorks who attacked the Museum in London, because soon, we’ll all be crying.
I hope not. And neither do Vincent (& Theo).