Vice-Signalling and the Omnicause

Responses to the seizure of the Freedom Flotilla (Sailing Against the Tide) which included twelve volunteers (including Greta Thunberg) were predictable. From around the strange brew that is Britain’s right-wing media came a cacophony of derision from all the usual voices.

Leading the charge, of course, was Piers Morgan, who seems instantly and deeply triggered by Greta. Many used the phrase, copied from the Israeli authorities of the ‘Selfie Yacht’.

In the Telegraph Suzanne Moore thundered (‘Hypocritical Greta ignores the irony that she wouldn’t be tolerated by Hamas‘):

“Thunberg, like so many of her generation wrapped up in their made-in-China keffiyehs, are not interested in the specifics of this conflict.”

I wonder what specifics Moore means?

She continues with maximum derision:

“This is what happens when a young girl with a penchant for protest becomes too feted.”

I mean, to describe one of the most influential figures of a generation as having a ‘penchant for protest’ is just ridiculous, but Moore is just getting into her stride:

“Unsurprisingly, then, her symbolic power was soon commodified as she appeared at protest after protest, morphing effortlessly from climate change activism to Palestinian solidarity.”

This is one of the rights familiar tropes about Greta Thunberg, that she has ‘commodified’ protest and is getting rich.

Citing MAGA Senator Joni Ernst, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch and Tory MSP Murdo Fraser, Neil Mackay identifies the phenomenon we’re witnessing here as ‘vice-signalling’ whereby you display how bad and edgy you are by making awful statements about the world: “Think of virtue-signalling in reverse, whilst wearing Darth Vadar’s helmet.”

There’s a connection between what you call ‘vice-signalling’ and the sort of sneering contemptuous journalism that attacks anyone doing anything about anything, most of which is contempt for younger people.

It’s worth noticing that there are three primary triggers for the sort of rage expressed here by Moore, Daisley and Morgan but also routinely expressed by the likes of Stuart Campbell, Alex Massie, Iain Macwhirter (here’s a doozy), and others.

First is doing anything. Anything at all. Although they dress up their outrage as about tactics (‘throwing soup!’) they don’t really care about what tactics anyone uses. It is doing something they hate, either because it punctures the reality of their own culpability or it shatters their ignorant entitlement, or both.

Second is young people. Young people are stupid and naive and idealistic and to be derided at all times. Young women are, by definition, worse.

Third is the environment. There is nothing to sneer at more than young people caring about the environment. What fools.

The omnicause that these writers deride is actually an awakening that people are making as the crisis that converge manifest themselves in more and more awful forms and at greater and greater intensity.

What’s odd about these writers is their own lack of self-reflection about how the far-right operates. As the authors of the Post-Internet Far Right note: “We want to make clear that the far right is both a) massively diverse and b) almost completely contiguous (that is it’s possible to get from one part of it to another with relative ease). In this sense these writers are unable to reflect on what connects (for example) their various scribblings with expose their: racism, misogyny, Islamophobia, or their general inability to navigate the time we live in and their disastrous contribution to it.