As I mentioned in my last blog post, the authoritarian repression of climate protestors exercising their rights in so-called democratic nations isn't just an American phenomenon; this is a pattern of targeted, extraordinary legal and carceral suppression we're seeing grow across the entire Pig Empire under capitalism - as exemplified by the recent UK court decision to hand out longer prison sentences to Just Stop Oil protestors who planned to (but didn't actually) stop traffic, than those same courts gave violent fascist rioters trying to burn down migrant shelters across English cities. Furthermore, this isn't just *my* opinion; these facts are being borne out by investigate reports being conducted by both watchdog organizations and the UN itself:

theguardian.com/environment/ar…

Rich countries silencing climate protest while preaching about rights elsewhere, says study

"A Climate Rights International report exposes the increasingly heavy-handed treatment of climate activists in Australia, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, the UK and the US.

It found the crackdown in these countries – including lengthy prison sentences, preventive detention and harassment – was a violation of governments’ legal responsibility to protect basic rights to freedom of expression, assembly, and association."

Of course, this report also comes in the aftermath of a similar United Nations study from last year highlighting many of the same problems and noting that criminalization is increasingly being used in "developed nations" to silence peaceful climate protestors. As both reports indicate, this targeted repression includes record prison sentences for non-violent environmental protestors, preemptive arrests for folks merely *planning* to protest, laws that effectively eliminate the right to protest in countries that call themselves democracies, and alterations to the criminal justice system designed to stop juries from acquitting protestors based on their (extremely rational) motivations for climate protests. As I mentioned earlier, these measures effectively make peaceful climate protestors a class of unprotected super-criminal in a way that simply doesn't apply to say, violent fascists preaching eliminationism and rioting in support of white supremacy. None of which makes sense on a societal level until you realize that the capitalist order itself sees violent reactionaries who support colonialism, exploitation, and capitalist extraction as at least periodically useful, while climate protestors who are rallying to save a boiling planet are perceived as an existential threat to that same order because the only way to stop climate catastrophe is to stop burning fossil fuels, and that in turn will require the end of capitalism as we know it.

Look, I know this sounds like a conspiracy theory but at some point you have to face the facts when they're literally written into the criminal codes of nearly every Pig Empire nation. The purpose of a system is always what it actually does, rather than what it purports to do and right now the police states we live in are transforming climate protestors into criminal terrorists while ignoring rising fascist violence and organized eliminationism. If most rational adult observers can easily recognize that our societies are increasingly catering to, and controlled by rich capitalists regardless of the democratic norms that supposedly prevent that, it doesn't take much of a leap to extrapolate that to this situation and realize that this authoritarian repression targeting climate protestors above other, far more dangerous types of criminal activity, actually makes sense in the context of a Pig Empire that prioritizes extractivist capitalism and the profits from such above all other concerns. And given that we've known about impending climate catastrophe and its relationship to fossil fuel-based capitalism for decades now, this in turn suggests that the transformation of Pig Empire nations into increasingly authoritarian police states has a lot more to do with policing this type of democratically protected protest activity, than stopping violent crime; after all, only one of these things is actively being policed by extraordinary state repression in capitalist nations all across the so-called "West" and it's not violent criminals.

#Fascism #PoliceState #ClimateCrisis #JustStopOil #Protest #CivilRights