10/31/22, 9:15 AM
Do we really care more about Van Gogh’s sunflowers than real ones? | George Monbiot | The Guardian
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Opinion
Do we really care more about Van Gogh’s
sunflowers than real ones?
George Monbiot
The Just Stop Oil activists are accused of using tactics that will
backfire. But ‘respectable’ protest is roundly ignored
Wed 19 Oct 2022 06.00 BST
W
hat does it take? How far must we go to alert other people to the scale
of the crisis we face? Only one answer is clear: further than we have
yet gone. We are hurtling towards planetary tipping points: the
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Do we really care more about Van Gogh’s sunflowers than real ones? | George Monbiot | The Guardian
critical thresholds beyond which Earth systems collapse. The
consequences are unimaginable. None of the horrors humanity has suffered, great
as they are, even hints at the scale of what we now face.
a state of
Everywhere I see claims that the “extreme” tactics of environmental campaigners
near-unconsci
will prompt people to “stop listening”. But how could we listen any less to the ousness or
insensibility:
"a drunken
warnings of scientists and campaigners and eminent committees? How could we
stupor
pay any less attention to polite objections by “respectable” protesters to the
destruction of the habitable planet? Something must shake us out of our stupor.
Braverman representative of the goverment
The response by the media and government to the two Just Stop Oil activists who
threw soup at Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers in the National Gallery in London
speaks volumes. Decorating the glass protecting the painting with tomato soup (the
painting itself was, as the protesters calculated, undamaged) appears to horrify
some people more than the collapse of our planet, which these campaigners are
seeking to prevent.
01:08
Activists throw tomato soup on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers at National Gallery – video
language is emotionally charged
Writing for the Mail on Sunday, the home secretary, Suella Braverman, claimed:
“There is widespread agreement that we need to protect our environment, but
democracies reach decisions in a civilised manner.” Oh yes? So what are the
democratic means of contesting the government’s decision to award more than 100
new licences to drill for oil and gas in the North Sea? Who gave the energy secretary,
Jacob Rees-Mogg, a democratic mandate to break the government’s legal
commitments under the Climate Change Act by instructing his officials to extract
“every cubic inch of gas”?
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Do we really care more about Van Gogh’s sunflowers than real ones? | George Monbiot | The Guardian
Who voted for the investment zones that the prime minister, Liz Truss, has decreed,
which will rip down planning laws and trash protected landscapes? Or any of the
major policies she has sought to impose on us, after being elected by 81,000
Conservative members – 0.12% of the UK population? By what means is the
“widespread agreement” about the need for environmental protection translated
into action? What is “civilised” about placing the profits of fossil fuel companies
above the survival of life on Earth?
counter arguments to Suella Braverman's statement
00:38
Suella Braverman blames ‘Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati’ for disruptive protests – video
millicent-s
uffragist
couraIn 2018, Theresa May’s government oversaw the erection of a statue of Millicent
protestor
ge is
performati
Fawcett
in
Parliament
Square,
which
holds
a
banner
saying
“Courage
calls
to
conta
ve action
gious courage everywhere”, because a century is a safe distance from which to celebrate
appreciate
radical action. Since then, the Conservatives have introduced viciously repressive s right to
vote
laws to stifle the voice of courage. Between the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts
Act that the former home secretary Priti Patel rushed through parliament, and the
public order bill over which Cruella Braverman presides, the government is carefully
criminalising every effective means of protest in England and Wales, leaving us with
nothing but authorised processions conducted in near silence and letters to our
MPs, which are universally ignored by both media and legislators.
The public order bill is the kind of legislation you might expect to see in Russia, Iran
or Egypt. Illegal protest is defined by the bill as acts causing “serious disruption to
two or more individuals, or to an organisation”. Given that the Police Act redefined
“serious disruption” to include noise, this means, in effect, all meaningful protest.
F l ki
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Do we really care more about Van Gogh’s sunflowers than real ones? | George Monbiot | The Guardian
For locking or glueing yourself to another protester, or to the railings or any other
object, you can be sentenced to 51 weeks in prison – in other words, twice the
maximum sentence for common assault. Sitting in the road, or obstructing fracking
pointing out
machinery, pipelines and other oil and gas infrastructure, airports or printing
double
presses (Rupert says thanks) can get you a year. For digging a tunnel as part of a standards
protest, you can be sent down for three years.
Even more sinister are the “serious disruption prevention orders” in the bill. bizarre
Anyone who has taken part in a protest in England or Wales in the previous five
years, whether or not they have been convicted of an offence, can be served with a
two-year order forbidding them from attending further protests. Like prisoners on
probation, they may be required to report to “a particular person at a particular
place at ... particular times on particular days”, “to remain at a particular place for
particular periods” and to submit to wearing an electronic tag. They may not
associate “with particular persons”, enter “particular areas” or use the internet to
encourage other people to protest. If you break these terms, you face up to 51 weeks
in prison. So much for “civilised” and “democratic”. protestor is treated similarly to a prisoner on
probation
Who are the criminals here? Those seeking to prevent the vandalism of the living
planet, or those facilitating it?
Whenever I visit the National Gallery, I can’t help but wonder how many of the
places in its treasured landscape paintings have been destroyed by development or
agriculture. Such destruction, which Truss, Braverman and the rest of the
government now plan to accelerate, even in our national parks, is commonly
justified as “the price of progress”. But if someone were to burn or slash the
paintings themselves, it would be an abhorrent act of brutality. How do we explain
these double standards? Why is life less valuable than the depiction of life?
Sometimes the tension is explicit. John Constable’s idylls of
rural peace were painted at a time of tremendous conflict and destruction, as
communities and landscapes were torn apart by landlords’ enclosures. He
bemoaned not the erasure of the “changeless” places he painted, but the reaction to
it, lamenting the riots and rick burning that ensured there was “never a night
without seeing fires near, or at a distance”. Constable’s response to the destruction,
in his later years, was to paint remembered landscapes: those, in other words, that
had already been obliterated. Like the current government, he celebrated past
glories while attacking measures, such as the Reform Act, to improve life in the
present.
In raising these issues, I don’t seek to deny the value of art or the necessity of
protecting it On the contrary: I want the same crucial protections extended to
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Do we really care more about Van Gogh’s sunflowers than real ones? | George Monbiot | The Guardian
protecting it. On the contrary: I want the same crucial protections extended to
planet Earth, without which there is no art, no culture and no life. Yet while cultural
philistinism is abhorred, ecological philistinism is defended with a forcefield of
oppressive law.
The soup-throwing and similar outrageous-but-harmless actions generate such fury
because they force us not to stop listening, but to start. Why, we can’t help asking
ourselves, would young people jeopardise their freedom and their future prospects
in this way. The answer, we can’t help hearing, is that they seek to avert a much
greater threat to both.
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
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