If our contemporary teenage Joan of Arc had her way our lives would once more be nasty, brutish and short
I met a well-known Swedish folk musician the other night, who said she had met Greta Thunberg, wan teenage messenger of the apocalypse, a few times. I asked what she was like and was surprised to hear that, according to the folk musician, Thunberg is “very nice”.
In a way, it was a sad bit of information, for it illuminated the fact that something has gone seriously awry with Thunberg, the better angels of her nature pulled in all the wrong directions by zealotry and paranoia.
Her environmental campaigning has always been imbued with an unsettling end-times quality mixed with a 17th-century-style Puritanism that suits the extreme derangement of our age. But last week Thunberg entered new, even more sinister terrain, in which her true political colours – and those of the movement for whom she is Joan of Arc – were made crystal clear.
Speaking in London at the launch of The Climate Book, her compilation of essays about the climate “disaster”, written by a variety of scientists, historians, philosophers and “indigenous leaders”, as well as celebrated anti-capitalist economist Thomas Piketty, Thunberg went full on anti-Western conspiracist. She is self-styled and hailed as a grand saviour of life, but her words were menacing and full of ill will for, well, everyone who lives in what she scathingly referred to as “the so-called global north”.