[flashvideo file=http://pjmedia.com/media/video/240p_no_pressure-10-1-10.flv width=329 height=266 image=http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/files/2010/10/10-10-video-title-card-10-1-10.jpg /]
Before clicking on the above video, take the warning of the Sad Hill blog to heart: “Do NOT watch this video if you wish to avoid portrayals of extreme violence, genocide, child murders, demonic practice and terrorism — all in the name of environmentalism.”
That disclaimer out of the way, we’ll get to the insane video at the top of the post in just a moment, but first, some background.
In a recent edition of City Journal, Fred Siegel explored how the radical environmentalism of the early 1970s created a new breed of “Progressives Against Progress,” as he put it:
In 1972, Sir John Maddox, editor of the British journal Nature, noted that though it had once been usual to see maniacs wearing sandwich boards that proclaimed the imminent end of the Earth, they had been replaced by a growing number of frenzied activists and politicized scientists making precisely the same claim. In the years since then, liberalism has seen recurring waves of such end-of-days hysteria. These waves have shared not only a common pattern but often the same cast of characters. Strangely, the promised despoliations are most likely to be presented as imminent when Republicans are in the White House. In each case, liberals have argued that the threat of catastrophe can be averted only through drastic actions in which the ordinary political mechanisms of democracy are suspended and power is turned over to a body of experts and supermen.
Paradoxically, today’s environmental fascists can use the power of the free market against itself, taking advantage of the freedom brought by powerful advances in computer video and computer illustration over the last decade to produce messages preaching the very opposite of freedom and individuality.
Last September, shortly before the “Hide the Decline” story broke, doing to the left’s global cooling/warming/climate change/global climate disruption fantasies what RatherGate did for Dan Rather’s reputation, we noted a series of ads designed to “raise awareness” of “global warming.” Instead they raised awareness of how desperate the eco-left have been to escalate their rhetoric.
First, there was MasterCard’s ad, originally spotted by James Lileks, in which a credit card company helps a thoughtless father see the error of his consumerist ways by buying doubleplusgood enviro-themed consumer goods, thanks to the prodding of his benighted young son:
[youtube f7slI8vQoW0]
Then there was this 9/11-themed ad:
Here we go again — the latest 9/11-mocking botched ad campaign, this time from the Brazilian division of DDB Worldwide (whose initials stand for the agency’s founders, Doyle, Dane, and Bernbach), the ad agency employed — possibly for the last time — by the World Wildlife Fund:
Click the image to enlarge to full size to see the ad’s “Fire make sea gods angry” caption, to borrow from an Iowahawk riff from a few years ago. It reads:
“The tsunami killed 100 times more people than 9/11. The planet is brutally powerful. Respect it. Preserve it.”
You can watch an accompanying video version of the ad here, which the WWF attempted to have squelched from YouTube. And we rounded-up several other 9/11-themed ads to promote anti-smoking, Starbucks, and even Spanish socialist politics around that time as well. And then in November of last year came this infamous YouTube clip:
[youtube fxis7Y1ikIQ]
Back then I wrote:
As I noted in last week’s “Hide The Decline” edition of my Silicon Graffiti video blog, in what turned out to be, in retrospect, the run-up to ClimateGate, the left seemed to be dramatically escalating the craziness of their global warming-themed PSAs and advertisements. By the fall of this year, it reached the point where the WWF was comparing global warming to a whole fleet of terrorist-controlled planes attacking the World Trade Center. Which was followed by this ad from Plane Stupid, the British anti-aviation group, which, in what was clearly another 9/11-inspired ad, featured photorealistic digital animation of polar bears falling from the sky, hitting skyscrapers, leaving blood trails on the sides of those buildings, and ultimately flattening parked cars.
Short of replacing the bears with humans falling from the sky for the complete 9/11 experience, once you’ve reached this level of hysteria, where else do you go to ramp up the hysteria?
Well, last Super Bowl had Audi’s Green Police ad, which was actually kind of fun for those of us who aren’t Gaia Worshipers, as it reminded people of the eco-left’s lust to control the lives of others:
….But England’s Green Police takes their capital punishment seriously. Unlike a recent American Express advertisement, they’re not content to merely demolish hydroelectric dams; they’ve blowing up, Scanners-style, people who’ve committed doubleplusungood oldenvirothink.
Which brings us to the video at the top of the post, which we’ll discuss right after the page break.
Found via Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, it’s the ad that really turns the reactionary enviro-rhetoric up to 11 — and way beyond. You can also find copies at EyeBlast, and at the moment, YouTube, although as Ed notes its makers keep trying to get it taken off there.
As with last year’s eco-horror-porn by the WWF, I can’t image why. Or as Ed writes:
If you want to see a demonstration of that, watch this appalling video that shows global-warming enforcers imagining the world they’d like to create, but beware that it includes some disturbing — and disturbed — images.
What makes this fascinating is that the people who produce this dreck have no clue as to just how far removed they have become from normal human sensibilities, or at least they didn’t until the video began provoking the fully-predictable reaction. They have become so wrapped up in Gaia that they seem to have little connection to humanity.
The other, mainly unrelated point that comes to mind is that this represents a reductio ad absurdum of the view from the hard Left about how dissent gets treated by the mainstream American populace, vis-a-vis the Iraq war especially. Can you imagine the reaction had an organization like Move America Forward produced a video like this, where those who didn’t support a robust strategy for the war on terror were blown up by a button-pushing advocate for the strategy? Especially children in a classroom being terrorized by their teacher into compliance with the groupthink?
Ed links to an article on the video by James Delingpole of the London Telegraph, who declares “Eco-fascism jumps the shark: massive, epic fail!”
I predicted this morning that No Pressure – Richard Curtis’s spectacularly ill-judged eco-propaganda movie for the 10:10 campaign – would prove a disastrous own goal for the green movement.
But what I could never have imagined was how quickly public disgust – even among greenies – would reach such a pitch that the campaigners would be compelled to withdraw it from the internet.
That, at any rate, is what they keep trying to do – cancelling it whenever it appears on You Tube, pulling it from their campaign website and so on.
Unfortunately their efforts are being frustrated by people on the sceptical side of the climate debate, who keep peskily insisting on reposting the video where everyone can view it. And rightly so. With No Pressure, the environmental movement has revealed the snarling, wicked, homicidal misanthropy beneath its cloak of gentle, bunny-hugging righteousness.
In his earlier article, Delingpole wrote:
Kyoto is dead. Copenhagen was a flop. Cancun is going to make a mockery of all those green dreams about global carbon emissions legislation. And how do the environmentalists respond?
By force of argument?
By presenting new evidence which supports their cause?
Nope.
By threatening to blow up anyone who disagrees with them.
To which Tim Blair responds, “It’s all they’ve got left:”
Interestingly, 10:10 – the organisation responsible – was founded by Franny Armstrong, director of enviro-panic film The Age of Stupid. How stupid is it to launch a campaign that has to be abandoned within 24 hours? The clip itself was directed by cloying Brit romance specialist Richard Curtis, who doesn’t exactly seem an obvious choice to advocate reduced consumption:
Curtis lives in Notting Hill and has a country house in Walberswick, Suffolk … with script editor and broadcaster Emma Freud. They have four children; daughter Scarlett Rachel Anne, and three sons, James, Charlie and Spike. They have another country retreat in Henley, Oxfordshire.
UPDATE III. Naturally, 10:10 is partially taxpayer-funded. And the Guardian – previous backers of another successful campaign – is their media partner. Beautifully, the Guardian‘s initial report now carries this update:
Please note that 10:10 took down the original video and the version above is a copy uploaded elsewhere on YouTube.
The Guardian is media partner to a group that is ashamed of its own work. They’re a nice fit.
Meanwhile, the Anchoress adds:
Remember that cocktail party game, Who Goes Nazi?
Well, after checking out these links at Instapundit, I think we can make some pretty good guesses.
Content warning on the videos. Both of them, the exploding people and the malevolent kid who seems close to murder.
What a repellent bunch of people, with sick, twisted minds.
Watch the videos–some joke, eh?–and then do what I’m going to do; take a long drive, burn some candles, cook dinner over some coals, and turn on all the lights. I’m sick to death of these liars and freaks.
I know they believe they’re smarter than the rest of us, but they (like some in our own government) are too stupid to realize that all they’re doing is destroying their own credibility and creating backlash.
Big, big, backlash.
One would hope; one would also hope that 10:10’s sponsors (and there’s a list of them here) will receive a backlash as well for funding this message.
On the other hand, as PJM’s own Zombie notes, the video has done the world a service. Zombie dubs 10/10’s efforts “The Most Honest Political Ad of All Time:”
Within minutes of its unveiling earlier today, “No Pressure” caused such an uproar that it was taken offline while the producers issued an apology.
Luckily, enterprising bloggers saved copies and have been frantically re-uploading them to YouTube, to prevent the video from disappearing down the memory hole.
Why? Because no video has ever provided such a revealing and shocking peek into the mindset of the Global Warming alarmists.
Exactly. Back in 2006, in the Christian Science Monitor, Julia Gorin explored the moral equivalent of war argument the far left had employed to equate radical environmentalism with terrorism; with the green movement’s biggest celebrity endorsement yet, that circle has really gotten squared!
Though it’s far from the first-time that radical environmentalism has linked itself (call it an “Eco–Anschluss,” as Condé Nast’s Traveler magazine approvingly did last month) to such eliminationist rhetoric. Or as Mark Steyn wrote a few years ago:
The ecochondriacs mean it: This’d be a pretty nice planet if we didn’t live here.
This video is the most graphic demonstration of that message yet. But as I said last year, once you’ve reached this level of hysteria, where else do you go to ramp up the hysteria?
Sooner or later, as I was certain when I wrote that, we’d see an answer. And this time around? C’mon boys, the bar has been set yet again: Let’s see what you can do to top this.
Update: Welcome to those clicking in from Glenn Beck’s The Blaze website.
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