Greta Thunberg Is Finished as the Face of the Fight Against Global Warming

If you study history, you often come across something that makes you think: damn, humanity has already been through this once, twice, three times… and so on. And if we wonder how people could have been so naive back then and believe Hitler when he said that all he wanted was to remilitarize the Rhineland, then merely incorporate Austria into the Reich, then just the Czech borderlands… only for it all to end in a world war, what will future generations think when they see photographs from the ceremonial opening of the Nord Stream pipeline, with German Chancellor Merkel posing alongside her Russian friends, who by that time had already been occupying part of Georgia for more than three years and were preparing for “just” Crimea, just Donbas and Luhansk… only for it to end in an attempt to occupy all of Ukraine.

Other examples from history that make us tap our foreheads and wonder how people could have been so foolish go back much further. Specifically, to the year 1212. At that time, two religious movements emerged independently of each other in parts of Europe that were relatively far apart by the standards of the day. In France, there was an approximately twelve-year-old shepherd boy, Étienne of Cloyes, who claimed that Christ had appeared to him and entrusted him with a mission to travel to the Holy Land. In the German lands, a young man whose age is unknown to us today, Nicholas of Cologne, came up with the same idea. Tens of thousands of people believed them, and they were not merely naive children, as is sometimes claimed. They were people of all ages who believed they were carrying out God’s will. None of them concerned themselves with the fact that they had no transportation or logistics arranged for the journey to the Holy Land, had no military force, and, in short, had no realistic plan whatsoever. They simply believed the “chosen” child, and any critical thinking went out the window.

In France, they were fortunate that King Philip II was ruling at the time and did not succumb to the mass hysteria. The whole story struck him as strange, so he summoned prominent scholars representing different views and, based on their recommendation, ordered the deluded people to return home, bringing the whole farce to an end. In what would later become Germany, the story had a much more tragic ending. Nicholas and his followers set out on a long and difficult journey across the Alps, during which some of them died of hunger or exhaustion, while others simply gave up on continuing the journey. Thousands of them eventually reached Genoa and began to pray because, as Nicholas had prophesied, the sea was now supposed to part so that they could walk to the Holy Land. Well, nothing happened, apart from human lives being wasted.

I thought of these stories while watching footage from last week’s concert in Northern Ireland featuring primarily antisemitic musicians. There, largely ignored by the other Parteigenossen, a strange figure stumbled around wearing all the outward trappings of today’s neo-Nazis — but beneath the balaclava was Greta Thunberg, the former “star” of all those fighting for the climate.

There is no particular need to analyze her life story as a privileged child; it does not really depart from the familiar pattern of other spoiled children from the West. What was different was the moment when adult and powerful people in our world began listening to a child’s babbling with almost sacred reverence. Just like those mostly illiterate people eight hundred years ago. From this perspective, it is difficult to judge those who succumbed during the High Middle Ages when, in our own time, leading politicians, journalists, and opinion-makers succumbed as well. Just how calculated the whole operation was is demonstrated, among other things, by the speed with which those behind it managed to turn a fifteen-year-old child with Asperger’s syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and selective mutism (as she herself described it) into a global authority. The first traceable mention of her dates to August 20, 2018, when, with the support of her activist parents, she stopped going to school and instead began sitting outside the Swedish parliament. Just thirteen months later, on September 23, 2019, she was already shouting her psychological problems to the entire world at the United Nations headquarters in New York.

Her story demonstrates the power not only of PR agencies, which, when they realized that people were not particularly receptive to calls to tighten their belts when those sermons came from dollar millionaires whose own energy consumption was on the level of a small town, brought out a child instead. Incidentally, it was a brilliant move, because whenever someone dared to argue against Greta’s obvious nonsense, they were shouted down with, “You’re attacking a child,” and when even that was not enough, with, “You’re attacking a disabled child.” It marked the end of the kind of critical discussion from which our present-day “Western” civilization emerged. More than anything, her story is a symbol of how today’s politicians have degraded the exercise of their offices into little more than populist surfing on whatever issues the media and influencers serve up to them. The fact that Greta clearly could not care less today about the fate of the planet, because the money from modern-day indulgences keeps happily circulating and she herself quite obviously does not know what to do with herself, is merely a typical final chapter to her story. Just as Greta herself is now of no interest to her former “creators” and cheerleaders. She served her purpose. But we should put pressure on our politicians, and above all elect people who, like King Philip II of France once did, will be capable of evaluating problems and dealing only with those that are genuinely important to our survival.

And one final footnote. I do not in any way dispute that the climate on our planet is changing. I do not dispute that humanity is destroying valuable ecosystems and exploiting natural resources on an unprecedented scale, often with irreversible consequences for our lives. I am simply skeptical when I see such a narrow focus solely on carbon dioxide at a time when, for example, we are not addressing microplastics or the daily devastation of marine wildlife by the fishing industry. I am skeptical when I look at the actual results of our “fight against climate change,” which increasingly resembles the medieval belief that by paying indulgences to the Church, which will then “wisely” spend the money, we will achieve salvation.