Octavian 🇪🇺@posta_octavian
Like it or not, Greta Thunberg represents the finest that Europe has to offer.
Perhaps she could only have been born a European.
Greta is someone who comes from a well-off middle class family in Sweden. From a very young age, she became concerned with one thing and one thing only:
The ENTIRE planet.
As soon as she learned that humanity is in the process of possibly destroying the planet and its ecosystem, she did what she could to stop it.
She organised Fridays for Future, became a global sensation, helped Green parties win elections in Europe and probably had a role in creating the Green New Deal and many more things.
Soon after she was done, she started travelling the world and getting involved with all kinds of problems and conflicts - without much discrimination. She visited Ukraine, West Sahara, spoke about Artsakh/Armenia -she is obviously very involved with the Gaza Flotillas - if her climate activism can be interpreted as an activity meant to save the world, then her current activity of raising awareness of conflicts around the world is a mere continuation of this policy.
What is unique about her is how utterly selfless she is. She is not at all concerned about her own interest, about the interest of Sweden or Europe. Instead, she is always taking the global perspective: Here I am speaking for all of humanity. Us, as humans, cannot continue polluting the planet. Us, as humans, cannot accept what is happening in Gaza. Us, as humans, cannot stay silent at oppression.
She is not scared to put herself in danger to speak up for humanity.
Her outlook on the world is uniquely and utterly universal.
There are activists, including environmental activists, from all over the world. But how many of them are truly taking the perspective of humanity, of the planet the way Greta is?
You have environmental activists from India who have seen what industrial farming does to the countryside, you have Gaza activists from the Middle East who have great empathy with the oppression of their brethren, but do they equally care about Ukraine, a conflict that is far away, the way Greta does? Did they speak about Azerbaijan ethnically cleansing a hundred thousand Armenians? Do they care as much about problems that do not affect them?
Where is the Chinese middle class girl that hops on the Gaza flotilla?
Where is the Saudi girl that speaks about West Sahara?
Where is the Indonesian activist visiting devastated suburbs of Kyiv?
Say what you want about Greta, about European liberalism. You can talk about how self-destructive and self-denying liberalism for Western countries. But what you cannot deny is that it is precisely that which differentiates Europe and the wider West from the rest of the world.
Europe has a drive to the universal. Europe will never be satisfied cultivating itself and being happy in isolation.
Europe will always try to save the world; whether it's through Christianity, the "white man's burden", or even communism: That's what Europe is. And that's what Greta represents.
