An environmentalist condemns the US riots
July 6th, 2020A veteran sociologist who has led several campaigns in defence of the environment deplores the international left for supporting the destructive and often violent rioting across the United States and in some West European countries.
On Válasz, András Lányi laments the fact that the latest series of riots in the United States have pushed the environmentalist rebellion to the background. He finds it mendacious to attribute the death of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis policeman to racism. But the victims of a system, he writes, which is careless about the fate of the Earth and its inhabitants want tangible culprits, instead of the abstract ones, like networks, exchange rates, nanobytes and viruses. Lányi thus understands their destructive anger. On the other hand, he takes it as a sign that multiculturalism has failed. Samuel Huntington was right, he believes, when he predicted a clash of civilisations. And in that clash, Lányi thinks, European civilization is on the defensive. He flatly condemns the left-wing intellectuals who side with the rioters and asks why they still believe that extremism is helpful just because it is not right-wing but left-wing. Both equally jeopardize democracy and the rule of law, he warns.