Dear Fabian, thanks for this interesting article. On this subject, you may be interested in a little story of some years ago. In 1991, at the time of the first attack on Iraq, the Italian parliament voted in favor of joining the Western bombing campaign. One of the votes in favor came from a Green parliamentarian I knew, one the founders of the Green movement in Italy. At that time, I was a member of the Italian Green Party and I was incensed. I wrote to her criticizing her story. I didn't expect her to answer my letter, but she did. Clearly, she had received a lot of criticism additional to mine, and she was clearly under stress, but she defended her choice. She added that the voting in Parliament had been a thrilling experience for her, a sensation of collective excitation in which the MPs seemed to be proud to be able to order the bombers to scramble. She had been taken in by this wave of collective exaltation. I suppose it was the same thing that happened in 1915, when the Italian parliament had voted to send young italians to kill and be killed by young Austrians. Later on, she left the Greens (possibly because of the criticism she received) and joined the Socialist party. Today, she is still active in politics, a vocal supporter of nuclear energy. I suppose this story tells us about how easy it is to be caught by the mechanisms of power, even for people who start with the best of good intentions. About the decline of the Greens, you may be interested in this post of mine https://senecaeffect.substack.com/p/greenbashing-the-end-of-environmentalism
Dear Ugo, thanks for your thoughts. You have described very well how the dynamics of warmongering can unfold among our MPs. Ii 1914, as you know, the entire German Reichtstag, including the Social Democratic Party (SPD), voted for the war credits, which paved the way to the European apocalypse of the World War. What we have seen in the last years in Germany, reminds me in a very disturbing way of these dynamics. Thanks also for your interesting article. Greenbashing is very en vogue in Germany nowadays, and I think there is another reason for it apart from the bellicism of the Green party and the reasons you cited. The Greens here have turned out to be a rather anti-ecological party, when in government, they have dragged their feet on doing anything against glyphosat, against dangerous chemicals like PFAS, and they have built unnecessary LNG terminals for fracking gas in nature reserves. In my view, it is one of the most hypocritical parties around. After all, they have contributed a lot to discrediting environmentalism. Best wishes, Fabian
Really brilliant summation, but I wonder if a similar article could also have been written on how much appeasement of imperial Russian military fascism has come from the former German left.
Horrors abound, yet both sides seem to be yelling at the winds that blew over months and now years ago.
Dear Fabian, thanks for this interesting article. On this subject, you may be interested in a little story of some years ago. In 1991, at the time of the first attack on Iraq, the Italian parliament voted in favor of joining the Western bombing campaign. One of the votes in favor came from a Green parliamentarian I knew, one the founders of the Green movement in Italy. At that time, I was a member of the Italian Green Party and I was incensed. I wrote to her criticizing her story. I didn't expect her to answer my letter, but she did. Clearly, she had received a lot of criticism additional to mine, and she was clearly under stress, but she defended her choice. She added that the voting in Parliament had been a thrilling experience for her, a sensation of collective excitation in which the MPs seemed to be proud to be able to order the bombers to scramble. She had been taken in by this wave of collective exaltation. I suppose it was the same thing that happened in 1915, when the Italian parliament had voted to send young italians to kill and be killed by young Austrians. Later on, she left the Greens (possibly because of the criticism she received) and joined the Socialist party. Today, she is still active in politics, a vocal supporter of nuclear energy. I suppose this story tells us about how easy it is to be caught by the mechanisms of power, even for people who start with the best of good intentions. About the decline of the Greens, you may be interested in this post of mine https://senecaeffect.substack.com/p/greenbashing-the-end-of-environmentalism
Dear Ugo, thanks for your thoughts. You have described very well how the dynamics of warmongering can unfold among our MPs. Ii 1914, as you know, the entire German Reichtstag, including the Social Democratic Party (SPD), voted for the war credits, which paved the way to the European apocalypse of the World War. What we have seen in the last years in Germany, reminds me in a very disturbing way of these dynamics. Thanks also for your interesting article. Greenbashing is very en vogue in Germany nowadays, and I think there is another reason for it apart from the bellicism of the Green party and the reasons you cited. The Greens here have turned out to be a rather anti-ecological party, when in government, they have dragged their feet on doing anything against glyphosat, against dangerous chemicals like PFAS, and they have built unnecessary LNG terminals for fracking gas in nature reserves. In my view, it is one of the most hypocritical parties around. After all, they have contributed a lot to discrediting environmentalism. Best wishes, Fabian
Really brilliant summation, but I wonder if a similar article could also have been written on how much appeasement of imperial Russian military fascism has come from the former German left.
Horrors abound, yet both sides seem to be yelling at the winds that blew over months and now years ago.