Redwashing Watermelons Earn Airmiles Marching For Transitional Demands At The People’s Climate March

New York City will be the host to the annual United Nations Climate Summit next week. As usual, whenever these meetings happen, Canada’s high-profile activists will contribute to the world’s carbon count by travelling to the host city, consuming more trees drawing-up their signs, and forcing the city’s drivers to idle their cars while protesters march through downtown streets. Some observers view this as hypocritical, the protesters contest that it’s necessary to make change.

As the poster at the top of this article shows, the protesters are against all four of the world’s sources of energy- coal, oil, nuclear and gas. Anyone with a reasonable understanding of alternative energy sources will probably get a good laugh out of this- though it would be nice if we could depend entirely on “renewable” energy sources, but it’s common knowledge that they’re not ready for prime time. Take for example solar and wind; neither works without sunlight or a good breeze, and neither solution has reached the stage where they’re economically viable.

At this point, if you’re not familiar with socialist theory, you’re probably wondering why the protesters would march for unobtainable demands…

Who’s Travelling To New York?” 

350.org put out a press release today outlining the “climate criminals” who will be burning-up diesel and jet fuel to march in New York. Unsurprisingly, the list includes the usual suspects covered on this site:

• Crystal Lameman comes from the Beaver Lake Cree First Nation, and is a professional protester working for the Sierra Club. Notice that guy she’s beside in the picture? It’s none other than anarcho-syndicalist “hero” Noam Chomsky, a man who once labelled con-artist Kevin Annett is a hero. She’lll be flying to NYC from Alberta.

•  Eriel Deranger is one of the elite group of Canadian professional protesters who wear the Love Is The Movement Tattoo. Deranger comes from a family of socialist professional protesters, and represents the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, a group who have made 10’s of millions of dollars in revenue providing services to oil sands companies. Deranger will also rack-up some quality airmiles.

•  Melina Laboucan-Massimo works for Greenpeace, an organization co-founder Patrick Moore left in dismay after realizing it had been taken over by Marxist revolutionaries. She comes from the Lubicon Cree Nation.

• Clayton Thomas-Muller is another “Love Is The Movement” professional protester, a hypocrite who professes how we should “respect the women” but told Idle No More Founder Nina Wilson to “check yourself” when she asked where all of the money went from the fundraising. Clayton has recently joined 350.org. In a further display of his hypocrisy Clayton warned fellow indigenous people at the Peoples Social Forum in August: “If you work for oil companies, native or not, expect resistance”- but, curiously, he continues to work closely with Eriel Deranger.

Redwashing Watermelons:

There are a couple of important trends to be observed here. First, the NGO industry has worked very hard to hire and promote indigenous protesters as a way of giving themselves more credibility. Thomas-Muller recently labelled this practice (when practised by corporations) as “redwashing”, a perfect description for how the NGOs work (they are, after all, corporations themselves).

The people on this list are less representative of indigenous communities than they are of Canada’s socialist revolutionary community…

Next, these professional protesters represent more than just the environment. Each of them is an active member of anti-capitalist movements, as are the vast majority of Canada’s environmental movement. Some refer to this kind of protesters as “watermelons”- green on the outside, red in the middle.

Transitional Demands:

Okay, so let’s get back to their unreasonable demands- just what the hell are these redwashing watermelons thinking?

The answer comes from understanding the Marxist theory of Transitional Demands. A transitional demand is something that’s intentionally unobtainable, banning all coal, oil, gas and nuclear energy is a great example. Other examples would include “jobs for all”, “disarm the police”, and “housing for all” – they seem reasonable on the surface, but aren’t likely to happen. The purpose of these demands is to disillusion people against capitalism- Leon Trotsky felt they were an essential part of socialist revolution.

As a friend of mine is famous for exclaiming, it’s all bullshit…