The Extinction Rebellion activist that staged a protest on the Cenotaph war memorial has further insulted the fallen by describing the annual Armistice Day service as a “little ritual”.
Donald Bell had desecrated the Cenotaph on Wednesday by planting a wreath of poppies on the memorial bearing the words, “Act Now”, and unfurled a banner saying, “Honour their sacrifice. Climate change means war.”
Remarking on this week’s political protest, Mr Bell told Good Morning Britain on Thursday that he was “trying to stop a war”, claiming that the government’s inaction on the so-called “climate emergency” was a “crime”.
“When they turn up there every year for their little ritual, that is a sign of disrespect as far as I am concerned,” the eco-activist said, according to the Evening Standard, confirming that he meant the November 11th ceremonies, when he referenced the “little ritual”.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson condemned the political action, with his spokesman saying: “The Cenotaph is a memorial to those who fought and died to preserve all our freedoms.
“On today, of all days, when we join together to pay tribute to our war dead, this action was profoundly disrespectful.”
Extinction Rebellion activists had disrespected another memorial, to former wartime prime minister Sir Winston Churchill, by graffitiing the word “racist” on the plinth in September, after the Marxist Black Lives Matter organisation had already twice defaced the monument, again claiming that the man who helped defeat the Third Reich was a “racist”. In June, a BLM activist even tried to set fire to the British flag on the Cenotaph.
This is not the first time that a member of the eco-extremist group has stirred controversy, however.
Last year, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion Roger Hallam called the Holocaust — during which the Nazis killed six million Jews, plus more than 11 million Slavs, Gypsies, homosexuals, disabled people, and others — “just another fuckery in human history”.
Mr Hallam had tried to minimise the systematic mass slaughter by claiming that “millions of people have been killed in vicious circumstances on a regular basis throughout history”, adding: “In fact, you might say it is like a regular event.”
Hallam was noted to have made further alarming comments at an Amnesty International event in February 2019, where he said that Extinction Rebellion would “force the governments to act, and if they don’t, we’ll bring them down and create a democracy fit for purpose. And yes — some may die in the process.”
In February 2020, fellow co-founder Simon Bramwell was revealed to have said months earlier that it was his and his group’s “duty” to “not only take down civilisation but shepherd ourselves and incoming generations back into a state of wilding as it were, into like a feral consciousness”.
Think tank Policy Exchange had labelled Extinction Rebellion “extremist”, saying said that the group’s “subversive agenda” is “intended to achieve mass protest accompanied by law-breaking — leading eventually to the breakdown of democracy and the state”.
“Obscured from public view, these objectives mark Extinction Rebellion’s campaign out as an extremist one that seeks to break down the established civil order and liberal democracy in the UK,” the think tank warned.