Splattergate II: Green Graphic Novel Celebrates Eco-Terrorism Shopping Mall Killing Spree



by James Delingpole 21 Oct 2014 342 post a comment

When is it acceptable for a terrorist to go berserk in a shopping mall and machine gun innocent victims to death?

When it's all being done for the noble cause of environmentalism, of course!
Such is the take-home message of an award-winning graphic novel which has been praised by a top scientist at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as "a marvellous way to convey the knowledge accumulated by our scientific community." (H/T Marc Morano at Climate Depot)
It has also been recommended by a curriculum developer at the US National Council of Teachers of English as a "rigorous" and "highly expressive" work which will make an "optimal text for students at various levels". (Naturally, the novel has been deemed Common-Core-compliant too.)
Climate Changed by Philippe Squarzoni shows a beautiful woman called Camille in a supermarket staring down the sights of an automatic rifle at three men dressed in Santa costumes.
"In an energy model based on a vision of demand continually increasing we produce more so we can consume more," says the caption, disapprovingly.
Luckily, the author has found the perfect solution to this rampant and offensive consumerism, as he demonstrates in the next frames.
The woman opens up, shellcases tumbling, and the screaming Father Christmases are riddled with bullets.
In the last frame of the sequence Camille and her boyfriend Philippe Squarzoni (who besides being the book's author has made himself its hero) stand over one of the Santas, Camille's rifle trained on his corpse.
The caption reads:
"Making conservation a positive factor in the future would require a huge change in political direction."
Though it's quite possible the Santa massacre represents some kind of fantasy sequence it is not properly explained and there are no repercussions for it. In any case, it accords with the generally dyspeptic, eco-fascistic tone of the book in which, elsewhere, the Santas are shown as being in the pay of Big Tobacco, while "climate deniers" are represented as dung beetles pushing balls of excreta.
The book was published in France in 2012, where it won the Jury Prize at the Lyon Graphic Novel Festival.
Now it has been translated into English for a US edition published earlier this year by Abrams, New York, complete with plaudits from Dr Jean Jouzel, a vice-chair of the IPCC's Working Group 1 ("The Physical Science Basis") and an editor and author on the most recent four of the IPCC's five Assessment Reports.
Better still - if somewhat unfortunately, given Squarzoni's apparent distaste for Big Tobacco funding - Jouzel was the 1992 winner of a climatology prize from the Philip Morris tobacco corporation.
He writes:
"An extremely well-documented work - which is, of course, essential for the perception of the message it delivers. But its principal merit is, in fact, in the quality of the narrative and the art."
Jouzel may be right about the art work - but he's certainly not right about its scientific accuracy. Tony Thomas, in the Australian journal Quadrant has gone through it with a fine-tooth comb. He has found that though the graphic novel purports to take its climate science very seriously and is ponderously annotated and indexed with expert advice from supposedly impartial sources (eg one of Greenpeace France's leading activists) it is in fact riddled with basic errors and outright lies.
For example, the book claims that "Mike's nature trick" - a statistical fudge of Michael Mann's, made notorious by the Climategate email - was in fact just a method to "make the results more accurate". Climategate, meanwhile, is loftily dismissed as "just a series of trumped-up scandals, slander and false accusations."
Squarzoni also mocks the suggestion that global warming stopped in 1998. [Which it did.]
And he claims: "It is estimated that there are already 25 to 50 million eco-refugees fleeing from drought, hurricanes, floods...and their migration is accelerated." [So far the number of "refugees" attributable to climate change is as close as makes no difference to zero]
But none of these inaccuracies has prevented the book being recommended by one Peter Gutierrez, graphic novels expert for the US National Council of Teachers of English. He has written a Teacher's Guide to Climate Change (also published by Abrams), which appears to take at face value the book's environmental claims.
Here is a sample question:
“How might the lack of scientific understanding among the general public contribute to unfounded optimism (e.g., climate change will be far in the future—there will be tech solutions by then), often through the manipulation of data (p. 416)?”
But perhaps a better question to have asked about the book might be: how come neither its French publisher, nor its US publisher, nor the panel that gave it the award in Lyon, nor the representative of the US National Council of Teachers of English seems to have found anything slightly weird or unhealthy about celebrating the brutal killing of Santas in shopping malls for no better reason than that they embody consumerism.
The blindness of liberal-leaning arty types on this score is all too redolent of the Splattergate fiasco four years ago, when artistic luminaries including Radiohead's Thom Yorke, Richard "Four Weddings And A Funeral" Curtis, and Gillian Anderson out of the X-Files made an eco-film called No Pressure in which children who didn't believe in "climate change" were punished by being exploded at the push of a red button.
In the bubble occupied by the complacent arty intelligentsia, it would appear, lessons have still not been learned.

http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-L...-killing-spree