Greta is at it again. The pint-sized Swedish activist, best known for chastising world leaders for failing to act on her environmental wish list, has now popped up in France. Net Zero is très passé; on Tuesday, it’s all about revolting French pupils. And so our heroine has been spotted at the centre of the action, joining protesters at a school in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis.
She may be seven years older, and the issue may have changed, but Thunberg’s message is remarkably familiar. Back in 2019, she summoned righteous anger to tell participants in a United Nations Climate Action Summit: “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.” On Tuesday, outside the Lycée Paul Éluard, she told waiting journalists: “Young people are not being included in the conversation. Our future is being robbed away from us.”
Stolen, robbed, empty words, not included… A cynic might accuse Greta of recycling more than plastic bottles and tin cans. It’s almost as if a variation on the same speech can serve her purpose, whatever the cause. Greta’s repeated ideas, delivered seven years apart, expose the hollowness of her activism.
Greta may be physically present in Paris on Tuesday, standing shoulder to shoulder with pupils outside the lycée gates, but it is not at all clear why. What does she know about the French education system? Does she really think setting fire to a recently built school (as pupils did in Nantes), seriously injuring teachers and assaulting police officers, is an appropriate response to overcrowded classrooms and too much homework? Or are the French protests just the latest fashionable place for celebrity activists to hang out?
It’s not just Greta’s words that betray her willingness to jump on any activist bandwagon, details be damned. Draped around the 23-year-old’s neck is, of course, a keffiyeh scarf. This symbol of Palestinian solidarity is de rigueur among today’s young protesters, whether they’re in New York, London or Paris.
Indeed, before taking on board the concerns of French schoolchildren, Greta was spotted last year on a flotilla apparently attempting to breach an Israeli blockade and transport aid to people in Gaza. As it turns out, only Greta and her crew received food aid. The Israeli navy helpfully steered the activists out of a dangerous, militarised stretch of water and provided sandwiches for the 12-strong team.
The Global Sumud Flotilla – Nacho Doce/Reuters
Such nourishment did not stop Greta from passing judgment. Having been deported from Israel to Paris, she told waiting reporters the aim of her mission had been to expose the “systematic starvation of over 2 million people and the full-blown, livestream genocide”. Different year, same hyperbolic language, same disregard for facts.
The environment, Gaza, and now French pupils, interspersed with the obligatory nod to transgender rights. The past few years have shown that Greta Thunberg is not an environmentalist but a campaigner for the omnicause – the ever-changing, currently fashionable thing that motivates the perma-protesters. Activists bounce from one seemingly random grievance to the next. To outsiders, and perhaps even to Greta and her ilk, their chosen issues appear to have little in common.
But scratch beneath the surface and the connections are clear. Today’s omnicause campaigners care less about any one issue than they do about striking a blow against Western civilisation itself.
They oppose scientific progress, economic growth, and prosperity. Their pathetic protests stick two childish fingers up to the Enlightenment values that have shaped Western societies for centuries, whether that’s a belief in the importance of education or the biological fact of there being just two sexes. Israel, as the birthplace of Judeo-Christianity and a regional bulwark of democratic and liberal norms, is their primary target. Moving seamlessly from one issue to the next, Thunberg has become the personification of the omnicause.
But Greta backs another cause too. Herself. As she took her place outside the Lycée Paul Éluard in Saint-Denis on Tuesday, she must have known that all the cameras were on her, and she was once again the main story.
From a naïve 16-year-old sitting on the streets of Stockholm to protest climate change, Greta has grown into an attention-seeking opportunist. Wherever the omnicause goes next, one thing is certain: Greta is bound to have got there first.