Thanks to Orizzonti Geopolitici for the original article in italian language.
The use of captivating icons are a strategy that is not new to the dominant system and the new devotional figure that responds to the name of Greta Thunberg makes no exception. Regarding Greta, anything has been said. The Archbishop of Berlin Heiner Koch, referring to her charisma, compared Greta to Jesus “as both damned and adored” and, like Christ, she would be able to polarize the crowds. Strong of the clerical endorsement, Malena Ernman, mother of the young girl, said that she has an extraordinary photographic memory, she can tell all the capital cities of the world and the chemical elements of the periodic table in 60 seconds.
In addition to these gifts, her mother added a paranormal faculty: “Greta is able to see what other people cannot see. She can see the carbon dioxide with her naked eye, she sees how it comes out of the chimneys and turns the atmosphere into a landfill”. The young Greta tried at least two miracles, though with the one against Brexit – claiming the urgency to put global warming before it – the result went badly. The miracle of the distraction of the masses, instead, went fairly better, thanks to which the dying European ruling class was able to save itself.
In fact, thanks to the mass hysteria, Greta has been able to convince many Europeans not to vote for communists, sovereignists or populists, and they have rather conveyed their consent to the Greens. This vote has held back the advance of those anti-establishment forces and allowed socialists, popular, infiltrated by neoliberals and “rainbows”, to retain power, even for a deviation of just six votes.
Obviously, we are sure that Greta sincerely believes in her battle, but certainly the global Capitalism that monopolizes her believes in it less, or rather, believes in it to the extent that it will benefit from selling the solution to the problem. What we see till today in the girl is an increasing care in her clothing symbolism and her enfranchisement from school obligations.
The use of children is the unequivocal sign of Capitalism’s inability to govern a deranged world like ours. Hence the anxiety to find cynical politicians capable of doing low social butchery, without the people rebelling too much. Tsipras in Greece was an example, and the neoliberal and “rainbow” pseudo-leftists are the most significant example.
Before the creepy Greta, there was the solar Samantha
In addition to the enslaved and cynical politicians, capitalism has always used young idealists like Greta Thunberg, but the young girl has a precursor: Samantha Smith. In 1982, after Brezhnev’s death, while the so-called “free world” was playing its part in the nuclear war game, a young girl appeared in the western collective hysteria. Samantha Smith was an American student who sent a letter to Yuri Andropov, the new general secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR, these are her words:
Dear Mr. Andropov,
My name is Samantha Smith. I am ten years old. Congratulations on your new job. I have been worrying about Russia and the United States getting into a nuclear war. Are you going to vote to have a war or not? If you aren’t please tell me how you are going to help to not have a war. This question you do not have to answer, but I would like to know why you want to conquer the world or at least our country. God made the world for us to live together in peace and not to fight.
Sincerely,
Samantha Smith
The naive letter of the young girl reveals the fear of an invasion by a national entity that, if it does not have to fight invading Nazis around, always minds own business at home. Samantha’s words reveal the ingenuity of those Americans who do not see that they are the only imperial invaders. Andropov replied to the letter inviting her to the USSR, a journey she made in 1983.
At the time, the Soviet media gave wide coverage of the event, while the main American journalists seemed committed to countering the message of the young “ambassador for peace”, following her everywhere during her stay to find flaws. Just as Greta spoke to the Parliament of the European Union, Samantha took the floor before the members of the Supreme Soviet.
“The king is naked” is the famous phrase of the tale “The new clothes of the emperor” by Hans Christian Andersen.
It may be because they have the face of innocence, but more and more children are used in political and media operations. Western mainstream uses them because public opinion believes their words. In one case, however, things did not go as expected. You will remember the staging of the fake Duma chemical attack in Syria. The “Withe Helmts”, actors of Al-Qaeda at the payroll of the USA, were refuted by one of the children survived from the attack. When he was interviewed, the Western press was not interested in him… Returning to Samantha Smith, after the invitation to the USSR, she became “World Peace Ambassador”. She wrote a book about her Soviet experience and continued to travel the world talking about peace, until she died in a controversial and providential plane crash in 1985: Samantha lived a very short life.
Today Greta also travels around the world, spreading instead distressing, apocalyptic messages. Times have changed, at the beginning of the 80s the USSR was still a real superpower and a decade had to pass until its collapse. Today we live under the hood of “American Pax”, in which no one questions Washington and, for instance, its 113 unjustifiable military bases in Italy. Today the USA and their culture of death rule supreme.
In the West we live in a neoliberal stagnation, an inhuman social economic regime that has supplanted the left, replacing it. If in the 80s there was room for messages of hope, today under the dark Western regime there is only space for messages of fear.
Yesterday we had the smile full of life and hope of Samantha, today we have Greta with death in her eyes: an icon of a humanity that has lost itself..