The headline isn’t really a statement made from a superior position; today’s Americans, with our tolerance of morons who destroy historical landmarks and other signposts of our national heritage, are hardly any better.
But we haven’t had the ongoing, inexplicable idiocy of dead-eyed “climate activists” attempting to destroy priceless works of art like this – and it happens in Europe again and again and again.
Two women were detained in Stockholm after they threw “some kind of paint" at a painting by French artist Claude Monet and then glued themselves to the frame, Sweden's National Museum said on Wednesday.https://t.co/wsoMdHndq0 pic.twitter.com/TP54p60DrC
— The Associated Press (@AP) June 15, 2023
It’s hard to even understand the argument for this kind of thing, much less to justify it. Impressionist paintings by Claude Monet have absolutely zero to do with “peat mining,” which seems to be the bee in the bonnets of these two wannabe Greta Thunbergs.
And this idiocy happens again and again.
We make this #Monet the stage and the public the audience.
If it takes a painting – with #MashedPotatoes or #TomatoSoup thrown at it – to make society remember that the fossil fuel course is killing us all:
Then we'll give you #MashedPotatoes on a painting! pic.twitter.com/HBeZL69QTZ
— Letzte Generation (@AufstandLastGen) October 23, 2022
We guess the statement being made here is that if you support the burning of hydrocarbons to fuel a modern economy you don’t deserve to have nice things, or something. The truly amazing part of this is somebody dreamed it up and got other people to agree that it would actually persuade anybody of their point of view.
You’re entirely reasonable if your reaction to this is that it’s a waste of time trying to understand where these people are coming from. It is. They’ve convinced themselves that the apocalypse is coming because of slight increases in the amount of a trace gas in the atmosphere – carbon dioxide is well less than one percent of what makes up the air around us; the vast majority of it is nitrogen – and that mankind is responsible.
Anybody who believes that fervently enough to destroy artwork can’t be reasoned with. They’re nuts. They’re victims of a social contagion the people who control Europe’s cultural, political and intellectual institutions have been foisting on the young for a couple of decades now.
As atrocious as the defacement of a Monet might be, it really isn’t worse than slaughtering 200,000 cows in the name of saving the climate, and that’s not just an action by a couple of imbeciles in pigtails but an entire government made up supposedly of adults.
It’s hard to get your arms around how to fix the latter.
But as for the “activists” running around and trying to destroy priceless artwork, it’s a much simpler solution – but one today’s Europeans obviously lack the stomach for.
Because this will stop the minute the idiots doing it find themselves set upon by museum patrons who beat them within an inch of their lives.
Cover a painting with red paint and pretend that it’s blood? Then somebody beats you so badly that your face won’t look the same. And when their fellow idiots realize this is a real potential consequence of that action, their ardor to destroy their cultural patrimony will cool. Amazingly.
Yes, that’s harsh, and it’s distasteful. But if you can’t reason with these people, and it’s very obvious that the criminal justice system in Europe hasn’t acted sufficiently to punish and deter them, then we’re really down to the studs here.
And at the end of the day, when someone is stupid or crazy enough to do pointless and destructive things like this the only thing that gets their attention is physical force.
And a society that won’t fight for itself is a society deserving of oblivion. That’s where Europe is heading and nobody is bothering to stop it.
Again, we’re not much better here. But we haven’t seen these nuts so brazen that they’ll deface art in the Smithsonian or some of the high-end galleries in New York.
Yet.