George Monbiot Profile picture
Sep 22, 2020 6 tweets 2 min read Read on X
While the right makes a clean sweep of the institutions, the left is splintering, divided by small differences and lethal culture wars.
The right preaches individualism, yet moves as a herd.
The left preaches solidarity, yet atomises.
Thread/
Most distressingly, I’m seeing friends on the left being sucked into far-right conspiracy theories: on Syria, Covid, George Soros and QAnon. Once they slip down these wormholes, they never seem to re-emerge. Conspiracism seems to be born out of frustration and despair.
Much of the creative energy of movement radicals is being sucked away. We are stressed, frayed, exhausted. Labour and the Democrats are deprived of new ideas, and appear to be solidifying around a bland, timid conformism, when we urgently need systemic change.
We've taken some hard knocks. But we must regroup, refresh our analysis of systemic failure and our proposals for systemic change. The alternative is to sit and watch while ecological collapse, social injustice, looting and corruption are locked in place.
Learn
Organise
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My political interest now focuses on a 21st Century democratic revolution: replacing a 19th C political model with one that gives us far more day to day control, tempering representative democracy with participatory, deliberative decision making. See next tweet for explanations.
Here are three articles laying out some of the arguments and challenges:
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

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More from @GeorgeMonbiot

Feb 21
1. There’s a telling sequence in the Netflix docuseries Raël. A completely mad cult claims, without a jot of evidence, to have cloned a human. And the world’s media fall for it, hook, line and sinker. All it took to fool them was 2 people in white coats and some lab equipment.🧵
2. What do we learn from this?
A. That the media is as susceptible to evident BS as the members of the crazy cult.
B. That it has a massive diversity problem – and not just the one(s) you are probably thinking of.
3. In any major newsroom, just about the only people with science degrees are specialist reporters. Almost without exception, the senior staff and main decision-makers have non-science degrees. Their knowledge of basic science is approximately zero.
Read 8 tweets
Feb 7
Nowadays, when you discuss the far right, people insist “That’s not far right!”.
Folk who have plainly shifted to the far right claim to have “transcended left and right”. Or state that the terms have no meaning.
What’s going on?
Hold onto your seats, it’s a wild ride. 🧵
For the past few years there has been a concerted effort on the far right to reposition Nazism and fascism as left/socialist movements.
I know, I know, but bear with me, because this is now a widespread thing, and unsuspecting people have been fooled by it.
As usual with these matters, it began - and continues - with utter blithering idiocy. “Nazism stands for National Socialism: ergo it’s socialism.” Hitler and Goebbels both mentioned socialism in public statements, therefore they were socialists.
Read 9 tweets
Feb 2
In the UK and around the world, environmental defenders are being attacked with ever more extreme laws. Who designs these laws? Corporate lobbyists. Who demands they are imposed? The billionaire media.
THIS IS NOT JUSTICE.
This week's column. 🧵
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
In the UK, you can now receive a longer sentence for “public nuisance” – meaning peaceful civil disobedience – than for rape or manslaughter.
Ordinary criminals are being released from prison early, and the spaces filled with environmental defenders.
Around the world, corporate lobbyists (often disguised as "thinktanks") have been drafting new laws against those who challenge destructive industries. The billionaire press then demands the introduction of these laws, while demonising peaceful campaigners. It's totally corrupt.
Read 6 tweets
Jan 31
This is a shocking exposure of how the BBC has been captured and disciplined by government minders. It might explain why, almost every day, the BBC still lets corporate lobbyists from Tufton Street junktanks pose as independent, objective commentators.🧵prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/media/64…
This is in direct contravention of the BBC’s own editorial guidelines. It breaches them day after day. Almost the only times when these corporate lobbyists are held to account is when guests challenge them about the way they hide their funding. Image
I don’t want to have to do this. I want to get on and argue about the issues. But transparency is essential to democracy, and when corporations and oligarchs can get what they want by hiding behind their secretly-funded lobbyists, we are all the poorer for it.
Read 7 tweets
Jan 30
The UK government's criminalisation of rough sleeping, now passing through Parliament in the Criminal Justice Bill, is overseen by a Prime Minister who owns four luxury homes for his own use. One of them, in Kensington, is reserved for accommodating family guests.🧵
"In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread." Anatole France
What we are seeing play out in the UK, in ever more extreme forms, is class war. The war being waged by the rich against the poor.
Read 5 tweets
Jan 23
I thought the flirtation with far right themes arose from naivity and audience capture. But now that Vandana Shiva, once a hero of the green left, is repeatedly reposting far right accounts, I wonder what the hell is going on. @drvandanashiva, please explain. 🧵 Image
Anyone can see how the far right is cynically homing in on the farmers' protests, exploiting them in exactly the same way as they did in the 1920s. Anyone with knowledge of history knows how staggeringly dangerous this is.
The historian Robert Paxton points out that “It was in the countryside that both Mussolini and Hitler won their first mass following, and it was angry farmers who provided their first mass constituency.”
Read 6 tweets

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