Poor white one liberal. If you go into the water cannon for the climate in your swimming trunks, laughing, you will be told on the left that you are a spoiled brat who only thinks about his own children and not about the current climate emergency in the ‘Global South’.
That at least it was something the system-critical magazine OneWorld blamed the Extinction Rebellion citizens who allowed themselves to be arrested without checking their privilege, chatted leisurely in the police van and returned to work refreshed after the “school trip” (dixit convert Carice van Houten). Stop that “naive stupidity,” actor and writer Maryam Hassouni called on her colleague.
Ironic, because white liberals Until now, they have mainly been accused of another accusation, that of cowardly aloofness. They liked to be Martin Luther Kings letter from Birmingham printed under his nose, in which he (from the cell, written on scraps of paper) rails against progressives who agree with him ‘in principle’ but prefer order rather than action.
If you ever go out into the street, it’s still wrong.
In her Philippic, Hassouni made some striking points: the disaster is already happening southwards, and not only to ‘our children’. De Volkskrant did her bit thinly, Fidelity strike activists a heart under the belt with a former Theologian of the Fatherland who stood behind them but, of course, could not be there because she had “a party”.
XR also relies on King (and Gandhi) for the chosen means of action of civil disobedience. That is indeed ridiculous, if not presumptuous. Images of dancing demonstrators in bikinis are more reminiscent of the Yippies who tried to levitate the Pentagon with mental force in 1967, than of the mad dogs that were unleashed on King and his followers in Birmingham.
Yet. Does it mean that white affluent people are not allowed to demonstrate, at least not out of their own interest – or for their children? During the protests against nuclear weapons in the 1980s, punks and squatters, the hard-core system critics, also drown in a sea of ’ordinary’ people, with nice whistles and sandwich boxes. But they did make the difference back then. From a demonstration for the politically correct, against the neutron bomb in 1978, I especially remember the suspicious CPN police who ensured that the young comrades chanted the right slogans. Worked fine – albeit counterproductive.
Tasting each other’s moral kidneys is often a recipe for sectarianism. See the chaos at the Party for the Animals or the ‘intersectional’ drama of Bij1, where the poison tap in mutual relations proved impossible to turn off. I’d rather have those good citizens with their sandwich boxes.
Sjoerd de Jong writes a column here every Thursday.
A version of this article also appeared in the September 14, 2023 newspaper.