In a speech presented on Sveriges Radio, in both Swedish and English versions, Greta Thunberg talks for over an hour (link to MP3) on her experiences over the last year, her travels in North America, and the world’s response to COVID-19. It is calm, eloquent, and devastating.
Like a modern de Tocqueville, she talks about the sailing trips, her reception in New York, speaking at the UN, meeting politicians in Washington, burned forests, oil refineries, the Paradise fire in California, Davos, and a planned trip to China.
Her disgust at modern North American society comes through loud and clear. A visit with Nancy Pelosi is particularly awkward. Greta and several young people, including many Native Americans, are ushered into the meeting. A large portrait of Abraham Lincoln hangs on the wall. Greta recounts what happened next:
“It is as if two entirely different worlds collide. Worlds separated by hundreds of years of injustices, structural and systematic racism, oppression, and genocide. At last a young activist asks to speak. Her name is Tokata Iron Eyes and she lives in Pine Ridge, an Indian reservation in South Dakota. It is one of the poorest and most socially vulnerable communities in the entire United States.
‘How do you think it feels for us to sit here in this room with that man looking down from that painting?’ Speaker Pelosi apologizes if anyone has been offended, but says that he was a great man who has meant so much for the country. ‘He wanted my people dead,’ Tokata says. ‘He was responsible for the biggest mass execution in US history. It was innocent people from the Lakota Nation. To sit here in this room, with that painting, is so difficult.’
Since the entire trip across North America was by car (a Tesla loaned by Arnold Schwartzenegger) , they got a good look at everyday life, including the endless shopping malls, the oil wells in California and Alberta, the difficulty of finding vegan food on the road, the empty factories, the poor living conditions in some areas, the dying forests, the receding glaciers.
“The emperors are naked. Every single one. It turns out our whole society is just one big nudist party.”