Last night a Greenpeace protestor injured two people when he crash-landed a paraglider in the Munich stadium where the German football team were playing France. It could have been even worse, and it shows this giant of environmental lobbying will do anything in “the economy of attention” to get new members and donations, says Ulf Poschardt in Die Welt. As a result its members have turned into secular Calvinists, “a sin-free elite” who think they can do no wrong.
A few weeks ago climate activists stole hundreds of new VW car keys from the port of Emden and dumped them on Germany’s highest mountain, the Zugspitze, leaving a “mega CO2 footprint” for the company to retrieve them. VW bit its lip to avoid upsetting “the high priests of self-righteousness”. But this “appeasement” won’t work with Greenpeace and their media cheerleaders, who “see themselves as the saviours of the world” and above everyone else. In fact, protests such as the one last night are more about these activists forgetting “the tedium of their own bourgeois existence for a moment”. The hypocrisy is obvious. Greenpeace should be stripped of its not-for-profit status because, in the name of moral purity, it continues “to trash the symbols of democracy, endanger human life and despise the rule of law”.
Read the full article here (paywall).