“Eco-terrorist” SUVs and Saddam Hussein
May 9th, 2008 by Will Potter
Along the lines of the recent culture jamming post, I found this at UncivilSociety.
Despite writing, reading and reporting on this stuff every day, I still can’t really wrap my mind around how the word “eco-terrorism” works grammatically. (You shouldn’t be shocked, though. This is coming from someone who thinks “green is the new red,” when clearly environmentalists ARE communists!)
To me, the term “eco-terrorist” should logically mean someone who terrorizes the environment. WAIT. Before I get all kinds of hate mail about how that is liberal propaganda, I stole it from Charles Krauthammer, a conservative columnist at The Washington Post, who says:
“Saddam was unquestionably the greatest eco-terrorist in history. During the Gulf War, he produced the worst deliberate oil spill ever. He followed that with the worst oil-well fires ever. Then came perhaps the most astonishing ecological crime in history: deliberately draining the marshes of Southern Iraq…”
But if “radical environmentalists” like Charles Krauthammer (cough) are wrong, and the term means “instilling fear in the name of the environment,” I can think of a few terms that better meet these linguistic standards. Like, I dunno, oil-terrorism, national-security-terrorism, and just plain-old all-American $$$-terrorism.
Funny quote from Krauthammer. (He’s a columnist at the Washington Post, not the Times.)
I was about to ask if you knew who first coined the term “eco-terrorist,” but found this after some searching:
So some reporter, not the government or a corporation, came up with the word without thinking too much about it. Media framing in action.
Hi Ansel. Thanks, I just corrected the typo. Also, there’s a lot of dispute about the origins of the term. Ron Arnold of the Center for Defense of Free Enterprise wrote a response to the Indypendent article you reference, claiming that he coined the term long before the reporter. Will
That image is so true.
Regarding the name of your blog, when I first heard about it, I thought you were trying to say that being “green” was in fashion. And I was like, “Why didn’t he say ‘green is the new black’?” (as in black is always in fashion — little black dress, for example). And then, of course, I read your blog and realized why you call it “green is the new red.”
Tracy: I was at an event once and gave someone my card, and they said, “Oh, is that like PinkIsTheNewBlog.com?” Ha ha. Maybe I should turn this into a gossip/fashion blog! All the latest news about what “eco-terrorist” celebrities are wearing this season (probably black, black and more black).