Quite the wonderful rant from Daniel Hannan:
Greenland to Greenpeace: your hunger for publicity is putting our lives at riskCopied the whole thing as it is short and I could not excerpt it well. Hannan is a wonderful writer and speaker. Here are three clips: here, here and here
Those ingrate Inuit! They just don�t appreciate all the efforts that middle class Greenies are making on their behalf!
The prime minister of Greenland � a socialist, no less � has attacked Greenpeace for sabotaging an Arctic exploration rig. Kuupik Kleist is plainly not a politician given to circumlocution:My Leftie friends often take such rejection badly. Aboriginal peoples in poor countries are meant to be on their side. I remember how disconsolate Green and Socialist MEPs were when the main opposition to the EU�s ban on seal imports came, not from wicked multinational corporations, but from indigenous tribes in Canada.The cabinet regards Greenpeace�s action as very serious and an illegal attack on the country�s constitutional rights. It is worrying that Greenpeace, in their hunt for media exposure, violate security rules made to protect human lives and the environment.
Lefties have always liked the idea that they are speaking for those who would otherwise have no voice � which is, of course, a very creditable motive. The trouble is that, when the previously voiceless do find their tongues, they often say things that their erstwhile protectors find awkward. A hundred years ago, socialists presumed to speak for the proletariat. When the proletariat turned out to have some uncomfortably conservative views, they shifted their attention to the oppressed peasantry of the Third World. When these, too, turned out not to have the correct opinions, they moved on to more recherch� communities: hunter-gatherers in rainforests and the like.
Now even these groups have rejected the patronage of bien pensant whites. But there is one constituency left, one that can be guaranteed never to disown its self-appointed champions, namely dumb beasts. Hence the terrifying fervour of some animal rights activists: they have nowhere else to go.
One thing I never forget is a conversation I had with an ardent socialist back when I was 18 or 19.
"We are our brother's keepers!" the socialist told me, in a glowing, very warm and positive tone.
My reply was, "... But, what if your brother does not want to be kept?!".
And so it goes on today.
Socialists, Lefties, Greenies (whatever) all think they know better than you and I what is best for us because they assume that you and I are all either ignorant, bigoted, or otherwise marginalized to know what really is best for all of us. If the Lefties don't know directly what is best for all of us, then they defer to the elites and/or academics to tell us all what we really should be doing if we are morally just, and politically correct.
The funny thing is that reality is a square-peg for their round-hole, one-size-fits-all, view of the world.
Cheers!