Time magazine's Person of the Year is starting to sound a little bloodthirsty:

Greta Thunberg told cheering protesters today 'we will make sure we put world leaders against the wall' if they fail to take urgent action on climate change. The Swedish teen activist was addressing the crowd at a Fridays for Future protest in Turin, Italy. She arrived there from Madrid where she had been attending the UN climate summit but said she feared the event would not lead to change.

Against the wall? It's kind of in line with Bernie Sanders's vow to put bankers in jail, except that it sounds more like something a totalitarian fanatic like Hitler or Lenin or Castro would say. Line 'em up and shoot 'em if they don't do what young Greta says? No disagreement, no civil discourse, no talking things out, no selling the idea? Just kill the dissenters, who, by the way, were democratically elected? Problem solved.

And you can bet the next thing that rolls out of her mouth will be even more bloodthirsty. Pol Pot, call your office.

This poor wretched person is getting worse and worse the more famous she gets. For a while there, she was adamantly calling for "action" as if no facts other than her own existed. Go green, or I will hold my breath and turn blue! She's since swung to Marxism, as we noted here, coming off as a new re-embodiment of "Children of the Corn." Now she's calling for the most logical and there-like-clockwork extension of Marxism, which is mass killings of democratically elected leaders. That's what Marxists do. That's what all totalitarians do. This suggests more than ever that she's one manipulated young person in the throes of some kind of totalitarian death cult.

Totalitarians have always found the bloodthirstiness of youth a useful thing, whether it was Che Guevara's killing minions, FARC's targeting of children as the best child narco-terrorist soldiers, MS-13's recruitment of 14-year-olds as gang members, or the Hitler Youth. Kids make the best fanatics, the best killers, the best hysterics, and in Greta's case, the shadowy green lobby financing her has hit pay dirt. But now it looks as though they've unleashed a Frankenstein's monster who will stop at nothing until destruction is achieved. Everyone knows that youths are easily manipulated into Lord of the Flies behavior if sufficiently deracinated of any values.

Here's how the Soviets did it:

Children in the Soviet Union held a special place in the hearts of citizens and the Party. They represented not only the innocence of youth, but also the promise of the socialist future; in order for the international Marxist Revolution to succeed, the youth had to be treated well and educated politically. Communist authorities took many routes to achieve this goal. Primarily, the Communist Party fostered a cult of childhood, much like Stalin’s cult of personality, which idealized Soviet childhood. The Communist Party formalized this cult through youth organizations such as the Komsomol, Young Pioneers, and Little Octobrists. Much as Lenin did in his 1920 speech to the Komsomol, this cult relied on a juxtaposition between “true” Communist children and everyone else. By institutionalizing this reverence for childhood, the Communist Party isolated those children who did not join such groups, and were in fact able to create a radical other, or class enemy, before citizens even entered the workforce. The force of this institutionalization was seen most strongly in the formative years of the Soviet Union, and was perfected under Stalin. The effect these groups had is undeniable; the Communists created secondary communities for children to align themselves with. Rather than attach themselves most strongly to their families, Soviet children were taught to prioritize Communism above all, and these youth organizations provided the very first encounters with socialism. This had the significant effect of diminishing the role of the family structure, and these groups became the primary outlet for self-expression among Soviet children. To carry the identity card of the Komsomol was to declare oneself a loyal Communist.

The left has attempted to compare her to Joan of Arc and the Virgin Mary, leading the charge for global warming and a full government takeover, but this sounds more like one of the crazy evil children of Soviet lore, an evil little Pavel Morozov lionized for snitching on his parents to the state, getting them (and himself) killed. In the end, he became a Soviet saint, a lesson on a statue pedestal to all other Soviet children to put nothing before the Communist Party, nothing, not even the lives of your parents.

As the late, great Eric Hoffer used to say:

Add a few drops of venom to a half truth and you have an absolute truth.

This Greta thing is starting to get creepy.

Image credit: Anders Hellberg via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.