PrintSeptember 14, 2009
Attack of The Green Meanies
Saving the planet has grabbed the imagination of the naïve in the same grip as the old worker's paradise promised by the Bolsheviks.
These two manifestoes share the common elements of absurdity, dogmatic conviction and the predictable dimension that the more their doctrines are proved false, the more their advocates defend them. In the case of Bolshevism, people's courts, midnight executions and propaganda were the instruments of coercion; in the case of man-made global warming, it's the Internet, politicized scientists and a mentally disabled mainstream media.
Disciples of world communism actually believed the workers of the world would unite and rule the planet with wisdom and generosity. Even in the wake of 100 million deaths in the name of communism, most left-leaning devotees supported the principles of the USSR until the regime fell in a rubble from within. The rise and fall of Bolshevism took just over seven deadly decades. If the man-made global warming movement takes that long, more than 100 million could die before it's over, mostly from starvation caused by the end of free market capitalism -- this time on the chopping block for raping Mother Earth and exploiting the proletariat.
While we wait for the end of times, look for other similarities. For example, the Communists were great liars. Forgery and treachery were woven into the fabric of their every act on earth, from informing their own people they lived in a worker's paradise, breaking treaties with abandon and concocting fake news stories about America and the West. The KGB's Department X-1 specialized in whoppers designed to undermine Western political stability, many of which have refused to die. Some have been elevated to gospel truth in the common culture. For example, the "fact" that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and his assistant Clyde Tolson dressed in women's clothing is a nefarious fabrication straight from Moscow Center.
The story was planted in an English-speaking news service in India controlled by the KGB. Compliant media and news services -- as usual -- picked it up and ran, never asking the source or verifying the facts.
This is just one of dozens of other examples of making up the big lie and using the media to disseminate fake news worldwide, including the 1990s concoction that the US created the AIDS virus and introduced it into the black and gay community to decimate their ranks. The CIA director at the time actually jumped up from pressing business and flew to Los Angeles to field questions ginned up by the media that the agency was responsible for alleged genocide.
The environmental loonies aren't as organized as the KGB -- yet. But their strategies are similar and the mass media, instead of becoming more diligent after the revelations of murder and mayhem beeping from the black box buried in the massive wreck of the Soviet Union, are right there to carry the message without checking the facts or questioning sources. The greenies have only to make up a huge lie and sit back as the useful idiots in the press pass it along faster than swine flu.
These fabrications usually concern another shocking result of the evil of mankind against Mother Earth and her animal inhabitants --- polar bears drifting off on icebergs detached by warming seas; dead fish washing up on sunny shores; predictions of the extinction of species after species; dire statements the ozone is poisoned; reports of the coming disappearance of entire nations from coastal flooding; estimates of drought and starvation just around the bend -- and on like that until people start to believe it, spawning outrageous expenditures to fund loony schemes such as wind farms, tidal power, chicken dropping plants and any scheme that promises an alternative to the use of fossil fuels and the curtailment of capitalist production.
There are so many nutty public and private initiatives based on false premises floating around that it's hard to keep count. One example ranks right up there with X-1 antics, reported as usual by the media as truth: the belief the earth is losing 40,000 species a year, to them a shocking result of mankind's predatory rape of the earth. A little research divulged this "fact" emanated from a British ecologist who "estimated" there are several hundred thousand species we have yet to discover. He figured we must be losing a percentage of these phantom species regularly -- and the scientific community and media actually fell for it.
The origins of the modern green movement can be dated to another loony scientist, Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb published in 1968 that predicted the world would collapse into starvation and poverty by the year 2000 due to overpopulation. Ehrlich was wrong about everything he predicted, yet he is canonized as the spiritual leader of the environmental religion and serves as a darling of the ever-enfeebled media. Worse, nations that fell for his theories and reduced their birth rates are on the edge of ethnic extinction, frantically seeking "guest workers" to immigrate to boost population levels to keep their economies going.
Not only are the green movement and its predictions grounded in sketchy science, their insistence on action now jeopardizes human safety and the world's economy. Already Americans are in danger of attacks by species rescued from alleged extinction. Reports arrive daily of fox, bear, moose, alligator, coyote and wild bird assaults crowded up against human habitats due to the insistence of environmentalists to save them for reasons that make no sense. Very soon energy police may monitor your use of gas and electricity and enforce a carbon tax, already floated in UK and France. And note that the hare-brained policies coming down on humans are couched in macro-speak, the refuge of unrepentant Marxists: "if only everyone in the world would take one less automobile or airplane trip; or eat meat once a week; not eat fresh fruit in winter to eliminate the danger to the atmosphere of delivery by jets and trucks and trains that expand the human-generated carbon footprint - then we would save the earth."
Like the Bolsheviks, they couch their inanities in global terms, and work to create world-wide decision-making entities to replace local government where sanity has a chance to breathe. As those who were herded into gulags or shot in the back of the neck under the communists would tell you, beware grandiose utopian schemes and international agencies that enforce impossible outcomes. If they decide you are in the way of the collective good, you are likely to be removed or eliminated.
Deep environmentalists, like the communists, brook no dissent. In the Soviet Union, truth-tellers were walked through show trials before being liquidated or pressed into gulags. In today's more civilized green tribunals, the accused is pilloried and stained in public and sent before a kangaroo court of his peers to be tried and punished by banishment and character assassination.
The case of Bjorn Lomborg is instructive. The Danish green scientist visited California in the 1990s to study the archival records of the heroes of modern environmentalism in situ where the movement began. Lomborg was startled to discover that what passed for science in the field of ecology was unscientific and often simply invented out of thin air for political purposes. He returned to Denmark and continued his study and published the Skeptical Environmentalist, the book that turned the movement on its ear -- but only briefly.
True to form, Lomborg's academic peers accused him of being a traitor to the green cause, forcing the installation of a tribunal to investigate his research -- and of course to ruin his reputation for daring to contradict the principles they held so dear. The inquisition went on for months, reported daily across Europe until finally the verdict was announced: Not guilty. In other words, Lomborg proved that the basic theses of environmentalism were suspect and unsupportable. Now he is a footnote, ignored by the greenies and the media, although he has written other books and added sanity to the insanity of the environmental manifestoes popping up like whack-a-moles across the globe.
The righteous green activists are dedicated to continuing the war against capitalism by other means by promoting one-world government; subsuming the self-esteem of human beings to the vague collective good; and calling on enforcement of their policies by international fiat that trumps national interests -- just like their Bolshevik forbears.
Bernie Reeves is editor & publisher, Raleigh Metro Magazine
