BRING ON THE APOCALYPSE: ESSAYS ON SELF-DESTRUCTION
JAY SMITH

jay@vueweekly.com
VUE Weekly, Canada
June 12 2008

The back jacket of George Monbiot’s latest book calls him "one of the
world’s most influential radical thinkers": there aren’t too many
people in the world for whom that would be a tame description. The
Guardian columnist, hardly a household name in North America, just
might become one after he attempted a very public citizen’s arrest of
John Bolton, former US representative to the UN last week. (Bolton,
Monbiot attests, has violated international law in his support of
the invasion of Iraq. Speaking at the Hay Festival in the UK, Bolton
escaped the arrest attempt easily thanks to his bodyguards.)

And, according to Monbiot’s website, he’s taken a metal spike in the
foot during a roads protest, been stung into a coma by hornets and
has been pronounced clinically dead in Kenya after having contracted
cerebral malaria. In every sense easily imaginable, he’s a statistical
outlier in the field of journalism. And this is even before you get
into the man’s politics.

Being the renegade that he is, Monbiot puts a tremendous amount of
his writing on his website (monbiot.com), including his columns for
The Guardian. Accordingly, the publication of Bring on the Apocalypse,
especially with its Canadian subtitle (the American edition seems to
be subtitled "collected writing"), is not exactly the delight that
it would be were his columns not so easily available.

These sorts of publications are always a bit awkward. The essays
in Bring on the Apocalypse are short, just as one would expect
from a collection of newspaper columns. This certainly doesn’t
mean that they don’t pack the proverbial punch–Monbiot is rightly
acclaimed for his ability to concentrate research, statistics and
insight into short pieces that transform how his readers look upon
whatever subject Monbiot has set out to illuminate. A book full of
five-minute reads has its place. It is, however, somewhat frustrating
that the eponymous apocalypse is never overtly deduced. In lieu of
an overarching argument, the book is divided into six "arguments"
which are, respectively, God, Nature, War, Power, Money and Culture.

Particularly in the first three arguments, Monbiot proves himself
one of the most engaging writers around. Although the essays about
the unbelievable deception involved in the Bush administration’s
"justification" of the invasion of Iraq have a decidedly weaker
effect almost six years following their original publication,
Monbiot nevertheless enflames. And his targets are broad: he attacks
(and tracks) the "science" behind the climate change deniers, argues
that the Americans are in grave violation of international law for
using chemical weapons in Iraq (specifically, white phosphorus,
considered a chemical weapon when used against humans) and calls
for better protection of sharks and marine wildlife. While some of
the issues that he takes up–think tax evasion and property rights
legislation in Britain–are largely irrelevant to Canadian readers,
Monbiot’s rendering highlights the philosophical, rather than specific,
injustice.

Part of Monbiot’s stylistic charm, if you can call it that, is his
refusal to tread lightly. In an essay unsubtly entitled, "How Britain
Denies Its Holocausts," Monbiot attacks the Briton’s superiority
attitude toward Turkey’s denial of the Armenian Holocaust. Swiftly,
Monbiot takes a tour through Britain’s colonial history to point out
the utter hypocrisy of such a stance. He points to a famine in India
in the years 1876 – 1878: millions died because the British insisted
that India’s rice and wheat exports continue unabated. Similarly,
in Kenya in the 1950s, after the Kikuyu started to organize against
the British, who had thrown them off their land, the British sent up
to 320 000 of them to concentration camps.

The caption on Monbiot’s website reads, "Tell people something they
know already and they will thank you for it. Tell them something new
and they will hate you for it." Let’s hope that Monbiot gains a few
more haters on this side of the pond with Bring on the Apocalypse. V

Bring on the Apocalypse: Essays on Self-Destruction By George Monbiot
Anchor Canada 242 PP, $22