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George Monbiot Profile picture
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5 Oct, 5 tweets, 1 min read
One of the biggest mistakes on the left is the confusion between solidarity and conformity. Solidarity does not mean a ticklist of prescribed beliefs.
The demand for conformity destroys solidarity.
Without critical thinking and new ideas, the left is dead. But some people march about with virtual clipboards, insisting that if you don’t tick every box, you don’t belong. Almost every day, I’m denounced for believing something I shouldn’t, or not believing something I should.
There are two kinds of disagreement: disagreement motivated by an open-minded search for where the truth might lie, and disagreement motivated by the shrill demand that you fall into line. The first kind is a pleasure, the second kind is horrible.
We need to be vibrant, heterodox, welcoming, broad and challenging. We pull together by embracing our differences, not purging them.
And right on cue ...

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More from @GeorgeMonbiot

George Monbiot Profile picture
5 Oct
The permissions granted for intensive chicken sheds by @PowysCC, without consideration of the cumulative impact, are a disgrace. They are turning the lovely River Wye and its gorgeous tributaries into open sewers.
theguardian.com/environment/20…
We are well aware of the economic power of big business. But in Wales, the *cultural power* of farmers is one of the strongest forces of all. The government and local authorities appear to give them everything they ask for, regardless of the environmental and social cost.
We are rightly horrified by the Brazilian ranchers who are torching the Amazon. But similar (though smaller) disasters are happening in our nations, justified by similar arguments: guardians of tradition, stewards of the countryside, true patriots etc.
Read 4 tweets
George Monbiot Profile picture
2 Oct
At the risk of alienating yet another economic sector, I've just read a paper which suggests that keeping honeybees is even more harmful than I thought: massive suppression of wild pollinators, and much poorer reproduction of wild plants. nature.com/articles/s4159…
Bringing in beehives is like building an insect city in the countryside. Because their numbers are so great, honeybees mop up the nectar, outcompeting native bees, beetles and other pollinators. Good pollination depends on a high diversity of pollinators, so plants also suffer.
In other words, the impacts of keeping honeybees are similar to those of keeping other kinds of livestock: domestic grazers, as their numbers are so great, suppress wild herbivores and radically change plant communities.
Read 6 tweets
George Monbiot Profile picture
30 Sep
It's time to accept that international summits are a failed model.
They are where good intentions go to die.
They don't spur governments to act.
They relieve of them of the need for action.
30 years of broken promises should tell us: this isn't working.
Summits hoover up the time and energy of vast numbers of good people, pulling them away from workable solutions to our great predicaments.
Premiers love them, as they can bestride the world stage.
Journalists love them, because they are obsessed by power.
But ...
... when the party's over, the lights are off and the chairs are cleared away, the "achievements" applauded so loudly from the stage soon crumble to dust.
So the question is, what should we do instead?
Read 5 tweets
George Monbiot Profile picture
28 Sep
The photo used on the BBC's story about Boris Johnson's pledge to increase the area of the UK's "protected" land illustrates our bizarre notions of protection. Anywhere else on Earth, we would recognise this scene, in our temperate rainforest band, as an ecological disaster zone.
This is why I find it hard to get excited about government pledges to defend the living world. Meaning dissolves in a haze of undefined terms and unexamined baselines.
Our national parks are largely composed of sheep ranches, grouse shoots and deer stalking estates. Yet they form the core of the "protected" areas Johnson has promised to expand. They make a mockery of the government’s pledge, even before the ink is dry.
Read 12 tweets
George Monbiot Profile picture
25 Sep
Far-right politics has a standard script.
It goes like this:
A great evil stalks the land.
It’s a plot by a shadowy cabal.
Only a few of us have understood it.
A saviour is needed to rescue us from it.
He is justified in using any measure necessary to root it out.
Thread/
In other words, conspiracy theories are not an emergent or exotic property of far-right politics. They are a foundational principle. You cannot persuade people to endorse or commit atrocities unless they believe absurdities.
The QAnon conspiracy theory is a classic of the genre.
It claims that a cabal of Democrats, celebrities, the Rothschilds, Bill Gates etc etc are abducting children, abusing and torturing them and extracting their blood. Only Donald Trump can rescue the world from this horror.
As @MoiraDonegan points out:
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
Read 6 tweets
George Monbiot Profile picture
24 Sep
There is a real elite: the very rich and the politicians who support them. They have 2 tricks for diverting blame for the multiple disasters they cause.
1. Focus it on an entirely different group - public servants, academics and other experts - and call *them* the elite
Thread/
2. Channel the anger that would otherwise be turned on economic injustice, ecological destruction and misrule into culture wars, ensuring that BLM, feminists, LGBTQ+, refugees and Muslims get lashed, instead of billionaires and their poodles.
It works. So how do we fight back? How do we ensure that blame is not transferred from the perpetrators to innocent people? How do we make it clear that we are not attacking the victims of this hoax?
Read 4 tweets

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