Parts ... make for damn good reading. ... [b]ut the good bits are not enough to salvage This Changes Everything, a 560-page call-to-arms in which Ms. Klein proposes to overthrow four centuries of Enlightenment-driven human achievement.Klein's advocacy of "radical bottom-up popular revolution against governments and corporations, free markets and capitalism" is a recipe for the collapse of the system that made possible unprecedented human advances. Along with that collapse would surely come political and economic chaos and the death, by starvation and war, of billions. Klein, like most of the radical eco-left, is a foolish, dangerous demagogue.
... A major Klein target is Richard Branson, the media-darling head of Virgin Group ...
Other green billionaries skewered are Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg and T. Boone Pickens, each of whom has a history of cozying up to the climate issue while their feet remained firmly planted in the fossil fuel world.
... her best putdowns are directed at the “pro-business environmentalists,” a Who’s Who of green activists who parade through a chapter sub-titled “The Disastrous Merger of Big Business and Big Green.”
The book’s real objective is to blame the looming climate threat on the greatest intellectual, philosophical, scientific and economic transformation in history.
The logic behind the climate mass revolt advocated by Ms. Klein suffers from a rootless dislocation from history, philosophy and science. It may also be totally dislocated from the world’s human beings, who remain, after many millennia, ever keen to improve their lives on Earth through continued and increasing dominance of nature.
Friday, October 3, 2014
Naomi Klein's logic "suffers from a rootless dislocation from history, philosophy and science"
Terence Corcoran reviews Naomi Klein’s new climate-revolution/kill-capitalism manifesto:
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One of the best comments regarding Klein came from her behaviour at one of the Toronto G8/20 demonstrations. While careful not to directly encourage property damage, she appeared quite nonchalant at the evidence of destruction of business entities like McDonalds and Tim Hortons. One observer mused how she would feel about a brick through the window of her home shared with Avi Lewis in Totonto.
Be assured, that would be viewed differently.
True, Martin, though no doubt Naomi and Avi live in a nice high penthouse suite happily out of brick-throwing range. They're likely wealthy enough to be insulated from at least the early stages of the chaos that would follow if what Naomi is advocating came true.
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