Environmentalism's
Tainted Roots
from Fascism, Environmentalism, and
the Third Way
July 30, 2002
by
Bernard Switalski
Initial Publication Date: July 18, 2001
Editor's
Note: This article on environmentalism's roots, as well
as separate articles on global
warming and ozone depletion,
have been extracted from a very
comprehensive work by Bernard Switalski documenting misinformation
about global warming and ozone depletion as part of an overall
strategy by international socialists, fascists, and "third
way" proponents to seize power by creating public fear about
the environment.
From Dr. Melvyn Shapiro, Chief,
Meteorological Research, NOAA, Boulder, and a bitter critic
of the ozone hoax:
"What you have
to understand is that this is about money... If there were
no dollars attached to this game, you'd see it played on intellect
and integrity. When you say that the ozone threat is a scam,
you're not only attacking people's scientific integrity, you're
going after their pocketbooks as well. It's money, purely
money."
Dr. Fred Singer, a battle-scarred
vet of the war against eco-zealotry, takes a similar cynical
view:
"It's not difficult
to understand some of the motivations behind the drive to
regulate CFCs out of existence. For scientists: prestige,
more grants for research, press conferences, and newspaper
stories. Also the feeling that maybe they are saving the world
for future generations. For bureaucrats the rewards are obvious.
For diplomats there are negotiations, initializing of agreements
made, and - the ultimate - ratification of treaties. It doesn't
really matter what the treaty is about, but it helps if it
supports 'good things'. For all those involved there is, of
course, travel to pleasant places, good hotels, international
fellowship...."
Or there's Kary Mullis, Nobel,
Chemistry:
"The global
warmers ... predict that global warming is coming, and our
emissions are to blame. They do that to keep us worried about
our role in the whole thing. If we aren't worried and guilty,
we might not pay their salaries. It's that simple."
Shapiro, Singer, and Mullis
are partially correct; some do it for money and/or glory. But
others do it for other reasons. What might those other reasons
be?
Well...
Beginning in the late 1930s,
what passes for the global temperature record took a slight
(statistically insignificant) downward trend. Based on that
minute dip, in the early 1970s the prophets of doom rang the
alarm! A NEW ICE AGE IS COMING! A NEW ICE AGE IS COMING!
And the culprit? Industrialism!
and its noxious effluents, dust and smoke, blocking out the
sun, threatening to throw the planet into the deep freeze.
At the time, frights like these
appeared in print:
"The continued
rapid cooling if the earth since World War II is also in accord
with increased global air pollution associated with industrialism,
urbanization, and exploding population..."
-
- Reid Bryson, longtime
eco-deep-thinker, 1971.
"There are ominous
signs that the earth’s weather patterns have begun to change
dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic
decline in food production - with serious political implications
for just about ever nation on earth."
-
- Peter Gynne, Newsweek,
1975
"The facts have
emerged, in recent years and months, from research into past
ice ages. They imply that the threat of a new ice age must
now stand alongside nuclear war as the likely source of wholesale
death and misery for mankind"
-
- Nigel Calder, former
editor of the New Scientist, 1975.
But then, smack in the middle
of the campaign to stampede the proletariat into ice age hysteria,
the global temperature trend took a slight (statistically insignificant)
upward slope.
Uh-oh!
Problem?!
No problem.
On a dime, without so much as
an, "Excuse my elbow", the prophets of doom spun a one-eighty.
By George! it isn't global COOLING that threatens life as we
know it! By golly! it's global WARMING!
And the culprit?
What else?
Industrialism!
And its noxious effluent, CO2.
To illustrate how these characters
did the eco-flip.... Dr. Steven Schneider today speaks with
a stentorian voice among the global warming apocalyptics, and,
like Tertullian, Schneider threatens us with fiery annihilation,
unless we change our profligate ways.
However, twenty-five years ago,
Schneider was busy flogging the anthropogenic-aerosols/ice-age
line of doom. At the time, a few scientists speculated that
the theoretical warming caused by increasing CO2
levels might tend to offset the cooling effects of anthropogenic
aerosols. In furious defense of his ice age, in a published
paper, Schneider lashed back (note the categorical certainty
of his tone.):
"Temperatures
do not increase in proportion to an increase in atmospheric
CO2... Even an eight-fold increase over present
levels might warm the Earth’s surface less than 2 degrees
Centigrade, and this is unlikely in the next several thousand
years."
Point:
When global temperatures seemed
to be falling, Schneider blamed the fall on industrialism, and
he understood clearly that CO2 was an insignificant
greenhouse gas.
But when temps began to rise,
Schneider spun round and scrambled aboard the CO2/global-warming
bandwagon, this time blaming the rise on, what?
Right!
Industrialism!
So, you see, it ain't about
warming or cooling. It's about industrialism.
These guys don't like it. They
wanna kill it.
Which leads to a most interesting
question regarding eco-zealotry: why do environmentalists want
to kill industrialism?
They argue, typically, as does
Dr. Ted Kaczynski - in an opinion echoed almost verbatim by
Al Gore (See "A", below) - that, through
its noxious effluents, industrialism threatens the survival
of Planet Earth. But, they continue, industrialism is only a
symptom of a much more fundamental flaw in human affairs.
And that flaw is capitalism.
Capitalism promotes industrialism.
Thus, to save ourselves ...
CAPITALISM! ... THERE'S the demon we must exorcize!
And if you don't do what we
tell you, THE WORLD WILL END! Not my words. Theirs. A few examples
(of many out there):
"... the immediate
source of the ecological crisis is capitalism, a cancer on
the biosphere. I believe that the color of radicalism today
is not red but green."
-
- Murray Bookchin, founder
of the Institute of Social Ecology.
[The environmental
movement should regard attacks on pollution as] ... "different
ways for attacking concentrated corporate power, thereby opening
up the possibility of revolutionary change, and for reorganizing
society and communities on different principles..."
-
- James Ridgeway, long-time
fellow of The Institute of Public Policy.
"... environmental
pollution is a sign of major incompatibility between our system
of production and the environmental system that supports it.[The
socialist way is better because] ... the theory of socialist
economics does not appear to require that growth should continue
indefinitely."
-
- Barry Commoner, long-time
star and seminal thinker among the eco-elite.
"...if we don’t
overthrow capitalism, we don’t have a chance of saving the
world ecologically."
-
- Judi Bari, of Earth
First!.
Note:
-
The
real world has a nasty way of jumping up and slamming these
suckers in the face. If you think that only socialism can
save the planet, check out, "Tragic Nightmare: Ecocide in
the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe" (1993), and/or, "Ecocide
in the U.S.S.R." (1992).
At this point, one must lay
aside the scientific journals and pick up the history books,
because we're not talking about science anymore; we're talking
about political beliefs and their etiology. Specifically: socialism
and fascism.
Enter Socialism & Fascism
What follows are historical
accounts I've gleaned over the past several years from reading
a lot on the origins of fascism. Nothing I say is outlandish
or outside what has evolved into a legitimate interpretation
of the growth of fascist theology. In fact, at this moment,
I’ve just finished, "The Third Reich - A New History", by Michael
Burleigh, the William R. Keenan Visiting Professor at Washington
and Lee and Distinguished Research Professor in Modern History
at Cardiff University. Per the book's jacket, Burleigh is, "...
the author of six well-received books on modern European history."
One cannot classify Burleigh as a "questionable source".
In Burleigh's account - or any
other, for that matter - I’ve encountered nothing that contradicts
anything I say below. And Burleigh hits all the fundamentals.
For example, at the bottom of page 30, writing on the attitudes
gaining popular purchase in Germany during World War I, he writes:
"... enmities
gradually focused upon ... England as the home of rapacious
‘Manchester’ capitalism, or of France as the embodiment of
ideas represented by the date 1789. ... Among German intellectuals
of an already illiberal cast of mind, such writers as the
Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, who were rabidly anti-Western,
became modish."
Later, at the beginning of Chapter
3, he continues:
"[The Germans
hailed World War I] as a revolution and a liberation, a rebellion
against stultifying conditions and the domination of Western
culture by France and Britain, providing the chance for the
full affirmation of Germany and German culture for the first
time."
Burleigh nailed it. He uses
the terms "Manchester capitalism", "illiberal", "anti-Western",
and the date "1789" correctly, and there did exist in Germany
this long-standing anger and resentment at "Western culture"
and its supplanting of a superior German culture. And therein
lie the origins of modern socialism, fascism, and environmentalism.
Another not exactly "questionable
source," in Chapter 1 of his, "A History of Fascism, 1914- 1945"
(University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), Dr. Stanley Payne, Hilldale-Jaume
Vicens Vives Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison,
observes that, "... the first major expressions of modern environmentalism"
occurred in pre-WWI Germany around the turn of the last century
and "would later be adopted by the fascists".Bingo! Another
bull's-eye!
Environmentalism, as we know
it today, has its roots (for the most part) in 19th century
Prussia, where an assortment of deep-thinkers most influenced
the advance of both socialism and fascism. Among many other
persons, this group included fellows like Marx, Fichte, Sombart,
Lagarde, Hegel, Langbehn, List, Schmoller, Feuerbach, Nietzche,
and von Treitschke - the Dead White European Males who established
the intellectual foundations for every belief held so dear by
today's left. Whatever social injustice today's leftist detects,
these guys detected first. Whatever solutions to social injustice
today's leftist demands, these guys demanded first. And for
all their intellectual brilliance, the theories generated by
these 19th century geniuses in practice gave to us in the 20th
century: Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, and Mussolini.
Fascism as socialist heresy...
" ... better
go down with Bolshevism than live in eternal capitalist servitude."
-
- Joseph Goebbels, from
his, "Diaries".
Fascists are socialists.
First clue: the Nazis called
themselves, "The National Socialist German Workers Party", not,
"The National Capitalist German Plutocrats Party", and the Nazis
boasted that Hitler's Germany was, "the most modern socialist
state in the world."
In the late 1930s, during a
visit to Spain to witness the civil war, George Orwell - at
the time still a true-believing socialist - lamented at the
warfare between fascists and Marxists because, after all, "Aren’t
we all socialists?".
When reading fascist theologians,
one quickly realizes that fascists were as obsessively anti-capitalist
as any Bolshevik or Social Democrat, and, during the 1920s and
30s, everybody knew it.
Fascism is but a heretical sect
of socialism. In Mussolini's early days, before his rise to
power, many of his Marxist critics viewed his fascism as a curiosity
and recognized it as "more of a heresy from, rather than a mortal
challenge to revolutionary Marxism." (See Agursky's, "The Third
Rome", 1963.)
In the first few paragraphs
of "Capital", Marx decrees private property to be the root cause
of capitalism and, thereby, the root cause of evil, and no self-respecting
Marxist-socialist will ever let go that cardinal article of
faith. And therein resides the critical difference between fascism
and socialism. Socialism prohibits the private ownership of
property; fascism does not - which is the ultimate heresy to
socialists and thereby inspired the unbridgeable and often violent
schism between fascism and socialism which has lasted until
this day.
During the 1920s and 30s, because
such little practical difference existed between fascists and
socialists, critics of Hitler’s National Socialism routinely
called it, "National Bolshevism." And the Bolshevists, stung
by being throw on the same theological pile with fascists, decreed
through the Comintern that the international socialist propaganda
machine should immediately associate fascism with capitalism.
The machine swung into action with such vigor and lasting effect
that until today people wrongly perceive fascism as a necessary
characteristic of capitalism, and any critic of socialist (or,
lately, "progressive") dogma risks being tagged as a fascist.
Other sectarian differences
exist between fascists and socialists. For example, Marxist-socialist,
such as Lenin's Bolsheviks or the Social Democrats, were, "internationalist";
that is, they dismissed national frontiers as the obsolete vestiges
of capitalism, and, to destroy capitalism, all world's proletariat
must act as a single, unified entity without regard for geography
or nationality or ethnicity - as Marx proclaimed in his "Manifesto",
"The working men have no country." (A canon still fundamental
to today's left, latched on to especially hard by environmentalists.
See the first few citations in "C", below.)
On the other hand, fascists
tended to be "nationalist", that is, the socialism of most fascist
parties was specific to a specific nation, appealing to prejudices
and petty hatreds of a specific nationality. Or one might have
a variety such as Hitler's National Socialism, a flavor of socialism
meant specifically for the "Volk", which National Socialist
theology portrayed as a kind of mystical Germanic or Aryan "Nation",
bounded not by geography but by blood - and non-Aryans need
not apply.
Because so many variations existed,
scholars disagree over a precise definition of fascism. In the
"Enciclopedia Italiana" (1992), Emilio Gentile, in an article
on "fascismo", takes a shot at a comprehensive definition by
listing a series of ten generally-accepted sets of characteristics
common to all fascism's varieties.
A few excerpts from Gentile's
list.
From #2:
"[Fascism is]
anti-materialist, anti-individualist, anti-liberal, anti-democratic,
anti-Marxist, and anti-capitalist."
From #9:
"[Fascism is]
... an organization of the economy that ... broadens the sphere
of state intervention, and seeks, by principles of technocracy
and solidarity, the collaboration of the 'productive sectors'
under control of the regime, to achieve its goals of power,
yet preserving private property and class divisions." (More
on this, "organization of the economy", later, when we'll
talk about Mussolini. And if you think he's not important,
think again.)
Ernst Roehm, a dedicated socialist,
leader of the SA, second only to Hitler in power in the Nazi
Party, in a letter to a friend noted how often his SA street
thugs switched back and forth between Roehm’s gangs and the
communist gangs, uncertain on whose side they rightly belonged.
Note:
-
Roehm
lasted until Hitler began to suspect that he and others
planned to challenge Hitler for control of the Party, at
which time Hitler had all their throats cut in one fell
swoop during, "The Night of the Long Knives".)
In his "Road to Serfdom", Hayek
remarks on how, during the 1930s, university professors in the
U.S. and Britain noticed that students returning from study
in Germany could not decide whether they were socialists or
fascists, but were certain only that they hated "Western Civilization".
Down with Western Civilization!
"It is true that
the impertinence and the presumption of the French was and
is, in spite of all their misfortunes, unbearable; but after
all, France has given the modern world its freedom and its
civilization. ...
"Let our litterateurs
and our politicians vaunt the science and even, God forgive
them, the arts of these conquerors [the Prussians]; but if
they would only look a little below the surface they would
see that in their veins still runs the old blood of the Goths,
that their pride is beyond measure, they are hard, intolerant,
despisers of everything that is not German".
-
- Guiseppe Verdi, from
a letter to a friend on the eve of the Fanco-Prussian
War, 1870
To all those 19th century Prussian
daydreamers, the mortal threats to life as we know it were "modernity"
or "liberalism" or "Western Civilization" - the terms are almost
interchangeable - and were the fetid manifestations of the wicked
ideas spawned by the warped minds of such "liberal" thinkers
as: Adam Smith, John Locke, Jeremy Bentham, Jean Jacques Rousseau,
Edmund Burke, Thomas Jefferson, John Stewart Mill, Lord John
Acton, and Alexis de Tocqueville - the 18th and 19th century
liberals who held that: (1) individuals held rights superior
to the rights of the state, and (2) because any state by nature
will turn oppressive and tyrannical, its powers must be severely
restrained. (For more, see the original version of the U.S.
Constitution, a classic, 18th century liberal document.)
To the Prussians, "Western Civilization"
meant west of the Rhine; that is, French notions of democracy
carried into Prussia on the heels of Napoleon’s armies and British
capitalism and commercialism and urbanization and "Manchester"
industrialism and technology and individualism and rebellion
and parliaments and political bickering... all of which the
Prussians perceived as socially destructive and contrary to
the Prussian way of doing things... inimical to the Prussian
sense of order... all very, "un-German".
Note:
-
For
a good introduction to this topic, see "The Politics of
Cultural Despair - A Study in the Rise of German Ideology",
Fritz Stern, 1963.
So the Prussians set about concocting
forms of salvation, which split into two general categories
- "socialist" and "conservative".
The socialist utopia - in its
broadest sense - would be industrial, filled with great factories
and mills, owned in common by the proletariat who joyfully tended
their machines safe and content in the knowledge that the all-powerful
Party would see to all their needs.
The conservative utopia - in
its broadest sense - would be a return to Medieval times, bucolic,
few factories or towns, peopled by small land-holders, noble
yeomen tending their fields with crude tools, happy in the knowledge
that an all-powerful prince would protect them and see to all
their needs.
So they disagreed over how Utopia
should look.
The socialists would retain
the cities and the factories, but hold all property under communal
ownership.
The conservatives would retain
the notion of private property, but do away with the cities
and factories.
Despite their theological differences,
with crystal clarity all those early Prussian prophets understood
that they could not achieve, "the age-old dream of a world where
everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will
and faith, without secrets from one another", if, "the Western
malady, the revolt of the individual against the species", was
allowed to exist.
Therefore, to create Utopia
the utopians had to eradicate this individualism, this ugly
"Western malady."
No need for individual "rights"
in these utopias; the state has rights, citizens have duties.
None of this liberal British "individualism" crap allowed here;
we will not tolerate any revolt against the species. We are
all "one"; one proletariat, one Volk, and the Party will care
for us, the prince will care for us, and we shall never suffer
want or fear again. As Tom Joad said, "We are all part of one
big soul." That’s powerful stuff to the empty-headed.
Here's an interesting exchange
recorded in 1972 between Otto Friedrich (in his "Before the
Deluge, A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s") and Professor Richard
Lowenthal, a former leader in the communist youth movement in
Germany during the 1920s:
Friedrich: "How
is it that the Nazis could appeal so strongly to young students,
when one usually thinks of young people as idealistic?"
Lowenthal: "Because
the Nazis were idealists too. They promised national unity
and national resurrection. And there was that basic German
romanticism - you know - you know the difference between 'Gemeinschaft'
and 'Gasellschaft'? The first is a medieval concept, a society
in which everyone works for the common good; the other is
the modern, materialistic idea, a society in which everyone
competes against others for his own good. There was widespread
feeling that this was un-German, that it had been imposed
by foreigners. There was some truth to this too. Capitalism
did come from outside because Germany was so backward, and
democracy was brought in by the armies of Napoleon. The whole
of the German Romantic movement was a criticism of that, and
it is still true for young radicals today. So the Nazis promised
an alternative to what they called a corrupt plutocratic system.
And everyone wanted to believe."
All these early revolutionaries
venerated and appealed to youth in a kind of early 20th century
version of, "Don't trust anyone over thirty".
And they had lots of success
recruiting the young.
Hitler's bloodiest henchmen
- e.g., Himmler, Rhoem, Eichman, "Gestapo" Mueller - all joined
the Nazi party in their twenties, as had fellows like Lenin's
head executioner, Felix Dzerzhinski, organizer of the OGPU,
and later came Mao's Red Guards, most barely out of their teens.
No fascist or Marxist tyrant ever lacked for hot-eyed young
zealots all chomping at the bit for the chance to lop off the
head of anyone who dared challenge the revolution.
Friedrich records another conversation,
this one with Dr. Heinz Pachter, a professor of history then
teaching in New York, but who grew up in Germany during the
1920s and 30s:
Friedrich: "Was
the Youth Movement really serious? Was it comparable to the
radicalism of American students?"
Pachter: "Frighteningly
comparable."
Friedrich: "But
the students are mostly left-wing nowadays, whereas they seem
to have been right-wing in the twenties."
Pachter: "Right-wing,
left-wing, it doesn't make that much difference. The Nazi
youth talked of 'liberation.' They were also in rebellion
against their parents, and against 'the system.' The left
today - they just want power, and the worship of power is
Fascist."
The environmentalist sentiments
of the conservative movement manifested themselves most concretely
beginning around 1900 in the form of the charismatic Karl Fischer’s
"German Youth Movement" (the "Wandervoegel", roughly, 'birds
of passage'), where, at any one time, tens of thousands of young
German males trekked the forests arm in arm, singing songs of
praise to their oneness with Nature, vilifying cities and factories
and technology and liberalism, greeting each other with "Heil!",
and addressing Fischer as, "Fuehrer". Over the decades, the
German Youth Movement eventually splintered into competing factions,
flickered, then, with the coming of World War I, sputtered out.
But the ideas were there, firmly planted in millions of young
minds, primed and ready for action: down with capitalism! down
with the cities! down with technology! lacking only a new Fuehrer
to lead them, whom they found finally when Hitler emerged to
gather them all up into the National Socialist German Workers
Party.
Note:
-
In
1943, in response to a letter written by a Gauleiter anxious
to get on with the creation of the Germany Hitler had promised,
Martin Bormann counseled patience - as soon as Germany had
won the war, Hitler would smash the churches and "love of
Nature will be the sole guiding moral principle of the Third
Reich."
So the environmental sentiments
of the conservative utopians did pretty well. They survived
World War I in tact and found a home inside the Nazi Party.
But the socialist utopians hit
a snag. There was a flaw in the socialist promise. That "private
property" thing.
Except for the most rigidly
dogmatic cranks, people wanted to preserve the capitalist notion
of private property; that is, they wanted to keep their stuff.
On the other hand, people also
wanted all that free stuff the socialists promised.
What to do? What to do?
"The Kapp Putch
[1920] was not just against the government. It was against
capitalism. [General] Ludendorff was behind Kapp. He wanted
that the military and the workers to make a new government,
a worker government. That would have been the first uniting
of nationalism and socialism - and youth."
-
- Dr. Hans Staudinger,
an official in Germany's Economics Ministry in the late
Teens and early 20s.
"Fascism, which
is the very antithesis of Individualism, stands as the nemesis
of all economic doctrines and all economic practice of both
the capitalist and communistic systems."
-
- "The Philosophy of Fascism",
1936, by Mario Palmieri, Italy's foremost fascist theologian.
Round the turn of the century,
into the breech stepped a new form of Utopia - an idea that
had been forming up for a generation - a synthesis of socialism
and capitalism, a middle way, a third way.
George Sorel, circa 1900, an
advocate for violence to bring about socialism - but no Marxist
- distrusted the "decadence" inherent in the Marxist variety
of socialism and preached that socialism could work only by,
"incorporating into it free-market competition".
In 1913 Hilaire Belloc published,
"The Servile State", a criticism of this 'third way' idea, in
which Belloc argued, "the effect of Socialist doctrine on Capitalist
society is to produce a third thing different from either of
its two begetters - to wit, the Servile State",
Note:
-
Belloc
defined the Servile State as... "That arrangement of society
in which so considerable a number of families and individuals
are constrained by law to labor for the advantage of other
families and individuals as to stamp the whole community
with the mark of such labor we call the servile state."
But hardly anyone listened to
Belloc's alert to the dangers to freedom lurking in this "third
thing". Instead, they listened to fellows like Arthur Moeller
van den Bruck, who, in 1919, published "Das Dritte Reich" (The
Third Reich), an "enormously influential book among German intellectuals"
(and the generals), in which Moeller proclaimed that, to save
Germany, socialists and conservatives must join forces to combat
their common enemy, liberalism, and create a "new thing", a
"German socialism", where, "...we do not of course mean the
socialism of the social democrat ... neither do we mean the
logical Marxist socialism ... .We mean rather a corporative
conception of state and economics...", led by one strong man
on a horse, acting through a loyal and youthful elite - ruthless,
dedicated, unfettered by squabbling parliaments and laws.
But Moeller had competition
south of the Alps, because, about the same time in Italy, Benito
Mussolini, who, like the Prussians, perceived liberalism as
the mortal enemy of mankind, had broken with the Italian Socialist
Party.
As had almost every leading
fascists of the era, Mussolini started out as a virulent, true-believing
Marxist. In fact, Mussolini was your classic "red-diaper"; his
father was a fire-breathing Marxist activist who preached violent
revolution and who named his son after Benito Juarez, a hero
of Marxist revolutionaries. (See, "Mussolini in the Making",
by Gaudens Megaro, Houghton Mifflin, 1938, an excellent account
of Mussolini's pre-fascist years.)
By 1920, Il Duce had moved well
along toward forming his own version of Moeller's "corporative
conception of state and economics" - fleshing out an "Italian
model" of the synthesis of capitalism and socialism.
In Il Duce's utopia the capitalist
exploiters of the proletariat could retain ownership of their
dismal factories, but the state would dictate prices, wages,
working conditions, allocation of resources, profits, and disbursement
of class privileges according to social goals dreamt up by a
ruling priesthood who, through a system of state-run "Corporations",
would control the market, "in the interests of the people".
"Fascii di Combatimento", Mussolini
called it - Fascism. And Mussolini-style fascism proved enormously
popular round the world. Mussolini was a miracle worker, they
all said. Thomas Edison called him, "The greatest genius of
the modern age"; Gandhi rued his own limitations because he
was, "no superman like Mussolini"; in 1933 Winston Churchill
called him, "the greatest living legislator"; and, in 1934,
in the original version of, "You're the Top", Cole Porter wrote
(the words are still there in the original):
-
You're the top!
-
You're the great Houdini!
-
You're the top!
-
You are Mussolini!
(If you read enough - a bit
here, a bit there - you stumble across these gems.)
In the early 1930s, when Mussolini
predicted that, "In ten years all Europe will be fascist", no
one of importance thought to contradict him, and few bothered
to notice that Mussolini had turned Italy into a police state
in which you had better watch your mouth lest you lose your
job - or worse. Instead, they all marveled at how fascism solved
all social problems. It avoided the excesses of the Bolshevist
tyranny that had risen in Russia, it pulled the fangs of the
capitalist exploiters of the industrial proletariat, and it
promised a cradle to grave welfare state.
In short, fascism resolved all
conflict between - as Il Duce used the phrase - "the haves and
have nots". (For a bit more on Mussolini-style fascist theology,
and how well Mussolini predicted the future, see "B", below.)
Note:
-
There
are plenty of books out there recounting how fascist economics
had in fact wrecked Italy. Through a variety of accounting
tricks and outright lies, Mussolini made Italy appear solvent
and prosperous, which misled everyone to believe that his
"Corporative State" ran like a well-oiled economic machine.
But it was all bluff, bluster, and bull. After a decade
of fascist economics, Italians were paying the highest taxes
ever, and their standard of living had fallen below pre-WWI
levels. By the late 1930s, the chickens had roosted, and
no amount of cooking-the-books could hide the truth any
longer: Italy was bankrupt, on the verge of collapse, and
Mussolini welcomed war in desperate hope to pull his chestnuts
from the fire.
-
Not
to mention official corruption, which had risen to a scale
in Italy that would make your average Cook County Democrat
Party hack salivate with envy. The same sorts of economic
disintegration and corruption evolved in Hitler's Germany
and the Soviet Union too. In, "The Coming Soviet Crash"
(1989), Judy Shelton writes an excellent account of the
chaotic state of the Soviet economy just prior to the collapse
of the Soviet Union and Gorbachev's frenzied but futile
attempts to stop corruption and to inject capitalist market
forces into the Soviet system to save the day.
-
And
the bureaucracies... Many historians point to the explosive
growth of government planners and regulators in Germany
and Italy and the Soviet Union as a primary cause for the
apparent reduction of unemployment under socialist rule
in those countries. By sheer weight of numbers, armies of
bureaucrats inevitably become a formidable inertial force
in a society, obstructing change for fear of losing their
sinecures and privileges and pensions. Gorbachev viewed
the Soviet bureaucracy as an ravenous, insatiable maw which
the state could no longer afford to feed, and he openly
planned to clean house - until the roof fell on his head.
Not all fascists subscribed
to the "return to Nature", pre-industrial doctrines of the environmentalists.
Mussolini certainly did not.
But the Nazis did.
So the environmentalists stayed
tucked inside the Nazi Party, biding their time, and most socialists
- excepting die-hard Marxists - had moved in with the fascists,
and fascism by the late 1930s seemed to be doing well. (For
an account of how quickly most socialists accepted Hitler's
fascism, see, "Germany - 1866-1945", by Gordon A. Craig, Oxford
University Press, 1978, part XV, 'The End of Weimar'.)
But Bolshevist-style Marxist-socialism
in the Soviet Union had problems.
Inside the U.S.S.R., opposition
to Bolshevism wasso general and vehement and persistent that,
to hold power, Lenin and Stalin had had to resort to a more-or-less
permanent killing rampage in the People's’ Paradise.
On the topic of socialist killing
rampages: one must read, "The Black Book of Communism", by Stefane
Courtoise, a French historian - and one-time Maoist - who, in
the 1990s, with several collaborators, spent a few years researching
the number of killings it took to keep Marxism alive across
the planet. Courtoise came up with something between 85 and
110 million total dead. A quick - most conservative - tally:
-
The Soviet Union, nearly
10 million dead
-
China, 65 million
-
Vietnam, 1 million
-
North Korea, 2 million
-
Cambodia, 2 million
-
Eastern Europe, 1 million
-
Latin America, 150,000
-
Africa, 1.7 million
-
Afghanistan, 1.5 million.
. These folks did not die in
wars. They resisted their Party masters, and for it, died as
"enemies of the people".
Did you ever notice that the
people who promise social justice have no qualms using mass
murder to achieve social justice? Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao
... it is as if they used social justice as an excuse for killing
people.
In the first few months of the
Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin had more people executed than had
the Tsars in the previous hundred years of Russian history.
Here's a typical Lenin telegram
found by Courtoise in the Soviet archives:
"You must make
an example of these people. Hang (I mean hang publicly, so
that people see it) at least 100 kulaks, rich bastards, and
known bloodsuckers ... Yours, Lenin. P.S. Find tougher people."
Lenin's word was law. So if
Lenin ordered a hundred "bloodsuckers" hanged, a hundred "bloodsuckers"
got hanged. And if you had trouble getting people to do the
hanging, you just found, "tougher people".
Even during his last days before
his death - wasted to bones and half incoherent - he was still
firing out orders for the execution of recalcitrants. 'Arrest
three thousand in Minsk, and send a thousand of them to the
archives!' And his death squads dashed out and did it.
It is not a stretch to imagine
this sociopath's last breath ... "Kill 'em! Kill 'em all!"
Not to be outdone, Hitler had
his SS Einsatzgruppen, special "operations units" charged with
organizing the systematic murder of "untermenschen" in the conquered
territories on the eastern front.
Who were these Einsatzgruppen
fellows?
Burleigh gives a good description:
"Historians
have routinely made much of the fact that many of the Einsatzgruppen
were educated - two-thirds of whom held university degrees,
and a third doctorates. Predictably, less is made of the truth
that a doctorate merely betokens an assiduous mindlessness,
signifying nothing about the wider personality. For, ironically,
the universities were precisely the places in Germany which
fostered an elite for of antisemitism, whose radicality was
ill disguised with a carapace of 'scientific objectivity'
towards the 'Jewish Question'. Now these former student radicals
had the chance to implement what they so often talked of in
their exclusive circles."
No telling where it all might
have ended had not Hitler triggered World War II and thus tossed
a monkey wrench into the works.
The disaster of World War II
knocked the fascists - and, thereby, the environmentalists too
- off their feet.
Down. But not out.
Time to reorganize.
First order of business, change
the shingle on the front door; we can’t go round calling ourselves
fascist anymore.
The entire thrust of the post
World War II environmental movement revolves round reversing
the Industrial Revolution and destroying capitalism, notions
which come straight from the 19th century conservative element
of the Prussian anti-modernity movement and its version of reaction
against liberalism and Western Civilization.
However, because Marxist-socialism
welcomes industrialism, when today's environmentalist say only
socialism can save us, they cannot mean the Marxist variety
of socialism. Then what variety of socialism might they mean?
"If there is
to be revolution, there must be a revolutionary party."
-
- Mao Tse-Tung.
"We have moved
past the sterile debate between those who say Government is
the enemy and those who say Government is the answer. My fellow
Americans, we have found a Third Way."
-
- William Jefferson Clinton,
founder of "The New Democrat Party".
"Without a revolutionary
theory there can be no revolutionary movement."
-
- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"The Third Way
is a unified theory of life which will marry capitalism and
statism, and tie together practically everything: the way
we are, the way we were, the faults of man and the word of
God."
-
- Hillary Rodham Clinton
During the German election campaign
in 1932, the Nazi party ran against both Marxism and, "the American
system, or high capitalism", promising to take the best from
each and create, "a new socialist man".
"The Third Way
is an alternative to both Capitalism and State Socialism."
-
- Andrew Gamble and Gavin
Kelly, theologians for Tony Blair's "New Labor Party".
"Fascism can
be regarded as a compromise between pure individualistic Capitalism
and Socialism, but is decidedly nearer to the latter than
to the former."
-
- Paul Einzig, from his,
"The Economic Foundations of Fascism", 1933 - a British
apologist for Mussolini, just one of many many of the
era.
A couple of years ago, Tony
Blair visited Chicago to make a speech to some sort of international
business association. I caught Blair being interviewed on a
local TV show during which he mentioned "The Third Way" and
a few items from the Third Way's agenda. I'd never heard the
term "Third Way" before, but I did recognize the agenda. Tony
Blair's Third Way agenda comes directly from the "Declaration
of Principles", as published by the Socialist International
Party, the "SI". And it is no surprise that Blair's Third Way
agenda is the SI's agenda; the SI lists Tony Blair (and Ehud
Barak) among its current roster of vice presidents. Lots of
international heavy weights in this SI gang.
I’d already encountered the
SI when researching the "United Nations Conference on Environment
and Development", 1992, a.k.a., "UNCED"; a.k.a., the "Rio Conference";
a.k.a., the "Earth Summit" - the great environmental hootenanny
at which Mrs. Gro Brundtland, an organizer of the Summit, freely
acknowledged to reporters in Rio that the Earth Summit’s agenda
was based upon the Socialist International Party's "Declaration
of Principles".
Note:
-
Brundtland
is the current head the U.N.'s World Heath Organization,
former President of Norway, and a former vice president
of the Socialist International Party, whom Donna Shalala,
during her stint as Clinton's Secretary of Health, described
as possessing, "a large heart, a clear vision, and a strong
voice", and a "natural born leader", and "my distinguished
friend and colleague".
At the time I read Brundtland's
statement at the Earth Summit, curious as to who was this SI,
I found them on the Web and downloaded their Declaration. Based
on what their Declaration states, the SI seems to be a kind-of-sort-of-internationalist-environmentalist-neo-Social-Democrat-socialist-or-whatever-bunch;
they've crammed lots of stuff in their bag. However, sifting
through it all:
-
The SI allows for the private
ownership of the means of production.
-
The SI, per article #64
of their Declaration avers that, "... the State must regulate
the market in the interests of the people...", which is
the theological foundation of Mussolini-style fascism, so
the SI definitely falls among the fascist varieties of socialism.
Note:
-
When
reading "The Declaration", one enters a dreamland in which
the past never happened and history starts today, at this
very instant in time, and only a shiny-bright future lies
ahead - provided we follow the SI's agenda. In the real
world: the Declaration, point by point echoes all those
19th century Prussian utopians. They said it all before;
they tried it all before. Hitler tried it, Mussolini tried
it, Lenin tried it, Mao tried it, and here comes the SI,
hot to give it another shot.
These
guys never quit.
For
example, do these words sound familiar?
-
"We ask that the government undertake the obligation
of providing citizens with adequate opportunity for
employment... We demand a broad extension of care for
the aged... an all-around enlargement of our entire
system of public education ... education at government
expense of gifted children of poor parents ... the improvement
of public health..."
Of
course these words sound familiar. One hears them or variations
on them spoken during every election campaign in the United
States. And they've been around a long time. In 1920, these
specific words were written into the Nazi party platform.
But they might just as well have come from a speech by Lenin
or Mussolini or Dick Gephardt. And somewhere along the line
they always appeal to envy and contain elements of intimidation.
Note these comments written by an anti-Nazi German in 1937:
-
"Hitler's speeches are all demagogic and laced with
sharp attacks on the entire upper class. ... [With]
The mounting hatred against the upper class, at the
same time there is a growing aversion to all independent-minded
people. Whoever does not crawl in the dust is regarded
as treacherous."
There
it is. Down with the rich! And if you disagree, you are
treacherous - and it is a short step from "treacherous"
to "enemy of the people", to be dealt with accordingly.
The SI started out Marxist,
founded round 1900 as an umbrella organization under which the
world’s various Marxist-socialist parties could meet to match
notes and form a common international agenda to advance.
In the early days, the SI was
composed mostly of the "Social Democrat" variety of Marxist-socialists,
and Lenin perceived the Social Democrats as a greater threat
to his Bolshevism than were liberals or fascists. Liberalism
- pummeled unmercifully by all sides - was a severely crippled
creed clearly on the way out, and the fascists were a barely-organized
gang of head-busting thugs roaming Italy's streets, but the
Social Democrats were everywhere, organized and in force. (For
the Marxist roots of Social Democrats, see, "The German Social
Democrats and the First International, 1864-1872", R.F. Morgan,
1965.)
The fundamental theological
difference between the Bolsheviks and Social Democrats revolved
round by what means the Marxist utopia should come about. They
agreed that the dictatorship of the proletariat, as Marx decreed,
"cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the
rights of property". However - led by a priesthood composed
of the intellectual elite - Lenin advocated violent revolution,
convinced that the proletariat was by nature inert and stupid,
and, if push came to shove, would always side with the existing
regime. On the other hand - led by a priesthood composed of
the intellectual elite - Social Democrats preached evolution,
working within the existing system, but constantly pressuring
it for change, disrupting its institutions, undermining its
mores, battering its traditions, sowing doubt and confusion,
confident they could - bit by bit, slow but sure - persuade
the proletariat to legislate the Marxist state into existence.
(For the complete social democrat argument, see, "Evolutionary
Socialism", by, F. Bernstein, 1909.)
Lenin truly HATED! Social Democrats
- ostensibly for their imperfect grasp of Marxist theology,
but really because they challenged his global control of the
Marxist revolution by offering a potent alternative to his Bolshevism;
not all Marxists went for that "violent" bit. And there must
have been a personal element in Lenin's hatred. Friedrich Ebert,
a Social Democrat and the first President of the Weimar Republic,
leading a Reichstag dominated by Social Democrats and other
varieties of socialists, joined with Prussian generals to suppress
the Spartakist (Communist) Uprising (1919), thus foiling Lenin's
bid to take Germany by coup.
Outside the USSR, by 1919 the
SI had reached sufficient stature among international socialists
that Lenin founded the Comintern specifically to combat the
SI’s influence and to advance his own Bolshevist vision of Marxist
perfection. And Lenin’s tactic worked pretty well; many Marxist
parties jumped to the Comintern, while others split, some members
joining the Comintern and others remaining with the SI.
Inside the USSR, Lenin had little
problem with Social Democrats; he either had them shot or shipped
off to the gulag. Later, in Germany, Hitler dealt with them
similarly.
Despite the pounding they took
from the Bolsheviks and Nazis, both the SI and the Social Democrats
survived, and, sometime after World War II, for reasons not
clear - to me, at least - both the SI and the Social Democrats
abruptly deserted Marxist-socialism for fascist-socialism, now
accepting the notion of private property.
Later, with the collapse of
the Soviet Union, the SI has again emerged as the dominant voice
for the international socialist revolution. Among its member
parties, the SI lists the likes of the British Labor Party,
the Sandinistas, lots of "Social Democrat" parties, a smattering
of "Socialist" parties, and the odd "Revolutionary Front".
When I heard the Blair interview
(above), I searched the Web for the "Third Way". Found zip.
But today you find a lot. Some of it comes from the "New Democrats
Online", a propaganda organ for the Democratic Leadership Council
(founded by Bill Clinton), and "The Progressive Policy Institute",
a New Democrat Party think tank. Both these groups heap page
after page of breathless adulation upon Bill Clinton and Tony
Blair as champions of the Third Way. Here's a sample of what
they crank out. From the New Democrats Online:
"The Third Way,
Key Documents, Fact Sheet/DLC/PPI/June 01, 1998 ...
"Starting with
Bill Clinton's Presidential campaign in 1992, Third Way thinking
is reshaping progressive politics throughout the world. Inspired
by the example of Clinton and the New Democrats, Tony Blair
in Britain led a revitalized New Labour party back to power
in 1997. The victory of Gerhard Shroeder and the Social Democrats
in Germany the next year confirmed the revival of center-left
parties which either control or are part of the governing
coalition forming throughout the European Union. >From Latin
America to Australia and New Zealand, Third Way ideas also
are taking hold."
On the other hand, others see
the Third Way as nothing more than fascism with a paint job.
Which it is.
So, what's all this got to do
with environmentalism?
Well...
By making the SI's agenda the
environmentalist agenda, Brundtland herself has placed the world's
environmental priesthood inside the SI. And the SI is fascist.
Ergo, environmentalism has found its familiar old home, wed
to fascism. But there's a hitch in this marriage. These ain't
the same fascists from the old days. The SI is Mussolini-style
fascist, not Nazi-style. For example, Rudolf Bahro, a founder
of the German Green movement, viewed his Brave New Green World
as one where people shall live in socialist communities of no
more than 3,000, consuming only what they produce, and there
shall be banned: trade among communities, mechanized transportation,
computers, telephones, and all other modern technology. Bahro's
utopia resembles the Nazi's utopia, the utopia those 19th century
Prussian conservatives had in mind. Which is NOT Mussolini's
utopia, which does not oppose industrialism - provided the state
controls the market in the interests of the people.
So it is a marriage of convenience
only, one using the other, which will last only until both have
achieved their common dream: the destruction of the "Western
Malady". And after?... your guess is as good as mine. Perhaps,
to sort things out once and for all, after they've eradicated
the Western Malady, we'll see another, "Night of the Long Knives".
Why?...
What puzzles me most about these
people is not how they do what they do, but why?
The how is easy - the propaganda,
the half-truths, distortions, misrepresentation of facts, the
appeal to the greed and sloth and envy and gullibility of the
proletariat - Hitler and Lenin had it down pat; the techniques
have not changed since, and they work.
But we have now a grisly, meticulously
documented, 80-year record of where it all leads. So WHY do
they persist? In the face of the record, what motivates these
people to persist in believing the things they believe and in
doing the things they do?
Those much more knowledgeable
than I have suggested possibilities. For example, in his "1984",
Orwell, who understood them as well as anyone has ever understood
them, has O'Brien say to Winston Smith (who, in a major theme
of the book, also couldn't grasp the "why")...
"... It is this.
The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not
interested in the good of others; we are interested solely
in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness;
only power, pure power. ... One does not establish a dictatorship
in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution
in order to establish a dictatorship. The object of persecution
is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object
of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?"
For Orwell, then, the motive
lies in a blind lust after pure power, advanced and preserved
by terror. As O'Brien tells Winston, "If you want a picture
of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever."
But David Horowitz, who grew
up among and spent half a lifetime with these people, suggests
a different motive:
"The effort
to produce a super race of socialist men and women created
monstrosities instead ... . ... For behind the revolutionary
pursuit of the impossible ideal lies a deep hatred for the
human norm, an unquenchable desire for its annihilation. ...
Self-hatred is the dark side of the ambition to exceed all
previous human possibility, and the ultimate root of the revolutionary
ideal. ... Totalitarian terror is the necessary means for
an agenda whose aim is to erase the past and remake the human
soul. The totalitarian state is not an aberration of the progressive
spirit, but its consummation."
So, for Horowitz, the motive
lies somehow in self-hatred, but the results are the same as
for Orwell - totalitarian terror.
Perhaps they're both right,
or perhaps they're both wrong; I don't know. But whatever the
motive is, it is something sick, and, once set loose, the "progressive
spirit" feeds on its own momentum to a point of depravity where
it can survive only through the ruthless, bloody suppression
of dissent.
It always has. It always will.
A.
Here's an interesting exam for
those who consider themselves followers of eco-zealotry. Below,
in five-hundred words, compare and contrast Kaczynski's, Gore's,
and Hobsbawm's world-views:
"The Industrial
Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the
human race. ... We therefore advocate a revolution against
the industrial system. ... Its object will be to overthrow
... the economic and technological basis of the present society."
-
- Dr. Theodore Kaczynski,
from his manifesto, “Industrial Society And Its Future”.
"Modern industrial
civilization, as presently organized, is colliding violently
with our planet’s ecological system. The ferocity of its assault
on the earth is breathtaking, and the horrific consequences
are occurring so quickly as to defy our capacity to recognize
them. [Therefore] We must make rescue of the environment the
central organizing principle for civilization."
-
- Albert Gore, from his,
“Earth in the Balance”.
"The forces
generated by the techno-scientific economy are now great enough
to destroy the human environment, that is to say, the material
foundations of life. ...We have reached a point of historical
crisis. ...If we try to build the third millennium on that
basis we shall fail. And the price of failure, that is to
say the alternative to a changed society, is darkness."
-
- Eric Hobsbawm ... a
grizzled old British Marxist and defender of Stalin ...
now in his eighties, the dear and treasured elder statesman
of today’s revolutionary left - from his, "Age of Extremes
- A History of the World, 1914-1991", 1995.
Hobsbawm's book got sparkling
reviews, written, I'm certain, by people who never read it through.
This is an intolerably bad book, laced with flagrant errors
of fact and all muddled and confused - more stream of semi-consciousness
rather than concise argument.
And Hobsbawm sums up the 20th
Century not with a warning against the depredations of socialism,
the proven source of death and pain on a scale unprecedented
in history, but rather with a warning against allowing technology
to lead us into "darkness".
Hobsbawm's use of the word ‘darkness’
is a hallmark of socialist polemics. In leftist writings, starting
well back in the nineteenth century, one often encounters the
choice between socialism and capitalism presented as a choice
between good and evil, light and darkness.
Gore himself used it during
the election campaign when, before a group of black ministers,
he actually characterized the election as a choice between “light
and darkness”.
B.
From, "The Philosophy of Fascism",
1936, by Mario Palmieri, Italy's foremost fascist theologian.
Fascism, which
is the very antithesis of Individualism, stands as the nemesis
of all economic doctrines and all economic practice of both
the capitalist and communistic systems.
Fascism holds
that:
-
The economic
life of man cannot be abstracted and separated from the
whole of his spiritual life. In the words of Mussolini:
"The economic man does not exist. Man is integral; he
is political, economic, religious, saint and warrior at
the same time".
-
The economic
life of man is influenced, if not actually determined,
by idealistic factors.
-
True economic
progress can be derived only from the concerted effort
of individuals who know how to sacrifice their personal
egoism and ambitions for the good of the whole.
-
Economic
initiatives cannot be left to the arbitrary decisions
of private, individual interests.
-
Open competition,
if not wisely directed and restricted, actually destroys
wealth instead of creating it.
-
The wealth
of a community is something intangible which cannot be
identified with the sum of riches of single individuals.
-
The proper
function of the State in the Fascist system is that of
supervising, regulating and arbitrating the relationships
of capital and labor, employers and employees, individuals
and associations, private interests and national interests.
-
Class war
is avoidable and must be avoided. Class war is deleterious
to the orderly and fruitful life of the nation, therefore
it has no place in the Fascist State.
-
More important
than the production of wealth is its right distribution,
distribution which must benefit in the best possible way
all the classes of the nation, hence, the nation itself.
-
Private
wealth belongs not only to the individual, but, in a symbolic
sense, to the State as well.
Change the terminology round
a bit, and you could slip any or all these ten points into the
Democratic Party platform and no one would notice. (Supposing
they're not in there already.)
And, in one form or another,
you can find them all in the SI's, "Declaration".
C.
A few randomly selected remarks
made by environmentalists, and those who see things in a different
light:
Marx said it first....
"Our accepted
definition of the limits of national sovereignty as coinciding
with national borders is obsolete. ... "
-
- Jessica Tuchman Mathews,
of the World Resources Institute.
Marx said it first....
"It is simply
not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally
by individual nation-states, however powerful."
-
- Maurice Strong, currently,
Co-chairman, UN Commission on Global Governance Analysis,
and an organizer of the Earth Summit.
Marx said it first....
"Nationhood
as we know it will be obsolete, all states will recognize
a single, global authority… National sovereignty wasn't such
a great idea after all."
-
- Strobe Talbott, Clinton
administration's Deputy Secretary of State, comments made
to the U.N.'s "Millennium Peace Summit of Religious and
Spiritual Leaders" (WPS), August, 2000.
Prior to joining the Clinton
administration in February 1993, while still an editor for Time
Magazine, Mr. Talbot published in Time, "The Birth
of the Global Nation" (July 20, 1992), in which he espoused
this world view:
"...within the
next hundred years ... nationhood as we know it will be obsolete;
all states will recognize a single, global authority. ...
"All countries
are basically social arrangements, accommodations to changing
circumstances. No matter how permanent and even sacred they
may seem at any one time, in fact they are all artificial
and temporary....
"The internal
affairs of a nation used to be off limits to the world community.
Now the principal of "humanitarian intervention" is gaining
acceptance. ...
"However limited
its accomplishments, last month's Earth Summit in Rio signified
the participants' acceptance of what Maurice Strong, the main
impresario of the event, called "the transcending sovereignty
of nature": since the by-products of industrial civilization
cross boarders, so must the authority to deal with them. ...
"They are the
disputatious representatives of a larger, basically positive
phenomenon: a devolution of power not only upward toward supranational
bodies and outward toward common-wealths and common markets,
but also downward toward freer,more autonomous units of administration
that permit distinct societies to preserve their cultural
identities and govern themselves as much as possible.
If one takes Mr. Talbot at his
word, then his Brave New World will be composed not of nations
- which are, after all, "artificial and temporary" - but rather
of "autonomous units of administration", "distinct societies",
preserving their "cultural identities" and governing "themselves
as much as possible".
These "autonomous units of administration"
shall owe obedience to a global authority who decides what degree
of self-governance each "unit" shall enjoy.
And one might reasonably infer
that if a "unit" declines to obey the instructions passed down
by the global authority, then, according to Mr. Talbot's principle
of "humanitarian intervention", the global authority will exert
whatever means it sees fit to set the recalcitrants' minds right.
And, above it all, looms, "the
transcending sovereignty of nature".
Won't this be a fun world?
World Peace Summit (WPS)
Regarding this "Millennium Peace
Summit of Religious and Spiritual Leaders" (WPS):
First of all, they refused to
invite the Dalai Lama; the Chinese Communists - those most aggressive
defenders of religious liberty - objected to his presence; he
might have had the impertinence to demand his country back.
And, Maurice Strong, as he did
at the Earth Summit, loomed large here too, as the UN's Chairman
of the WPS's Advisory Board.
And such spiritual luminaries
as Ted Turner popped up as Honorary Chairman and Jesse Jackson
as a featured attendee.
They all signed off on something
called the, "Commitment to Global Peace", which addressed their
concern with, "problems of conflict, poverty and the environment"
(Environment!? These days, EVERYTHING coming out of the U.N.
contains a reference to the environment.), and was filled
with slogans, high-sounding phrases, and buzz-words, which are
what comprise reality for these folks.
They start out with: "[because]
Humanity stands at a critical juncture in history" ... the world's
spiritual leaders must help, "set a new direction for society";
which is your basic leftist fright: we face a crisis, and, if
we fail to head in a fundamentally new direction, we are done
for.
When reading this, "Committment
to Global Peace", you quickly realize that it mirrors the SI's
"Declaration", which seems to be the template for everything
"progressive" these days.
"Since environmental
destruction [caused by 'irresponsible industrialism'] extends
across national frontiers, environmental protection must be
international. ...
The best and
cheapest solutions to the crisis are those that change the
[world’s] basic framework of production and consumption..."
-
- From Principle #45 of
the Socialist International Party’s “Declaration of Principles”.
"The traditional
notion of ruthlessly exploiting and controlling nature in
the name of progress is being challenged by an environmental
creed that emphasizes a reintegration with the ecosystem.
... unbridled scientific and technological progress and creeping
corporate hegemony call for a new spiritual awakening which
would lead to a fundamental change in the values and institutional
relationships of American society."
-
- Jeremy Rifkin and Ted
Howard, eco-theologians.
"[To save the
planet from the horrors of Industrialism] We’ve got to reach
search back to our last know safe landmark. I can’t say where
it is, but I think it’s back there about a century, at the
start of the Industrial Revolution."
-
- David Brower, director
of the Sierra Club and the Friends of Earth.
"[Technology
is] taxation without representation imposed by an elitist
species upon the rest of the natural world... .
"The only good
technology is no technology at all."
-
- John Shuttlesworth, eco-theologian.
"... patterns
of production and consumption in the industrialized world
are undermining Earth’s life-support systems. To continue
along this pathway could lead to the end of our civilization...
. This conference [Earth Summit] must establish the foundations
for effecting the transition to sustainable development.
"This can only
be done through fundamental changes in our economic life and
international economic relations.... ."
-
- Maurice Strong, at the
time spoken, Secretary General of the Earth Summit.
The phrase, "sustainable development"
appears everywhere in eco-zealot literature. But damned if I
can figure out what "sustainable development" means - except
that, if, for whatever reason, the coercive power decrees a
thing NOT "sustainable", then the coercive power a priori
claims the right to use whatever means it deems fit to shut
that thing down.
For example...
Principle 27 of "The Rio Declaration"
- produced at the Earth Summit - announced the creation of a
United Nations, "Sustainable Development Commission", with powers
to:
"...receive
evidence about the behavior and policies of countries around
the world in order to assess whether and to what extent they
are consistent with [environmental] agreements reached."
Which leads one to wonder...
if the U.N.'s Sustainable Development Commission finds a country's
(or Unit's ?) "behavior" NOT "consistent with agreements reached",
then what are they gonna do about it?
Not to worry...
"We need a real
world authority, to which should be delegated the follow-up
of international decisions, the treaties signed ... This authority
must have the capacity to have its decisions obeyed.
... "What we
seek, to be frank, is the legitimacy of controlling [by force]
the application of international decisions."
-
- Michel Rocard, an organizer
of the Earth Summit, spoken at the Earth Summit.
Dr. Dixy Lee Ray's resume reads:
Governor of
Washington state, Assistant Secretary of State, Chairman of
the Atomic Energy Commission, recipient of many awards and
honors, including the United Nations Peace Prize, 21 honorary
doctorates, Woman of Achievement Award in Energy, and the
Susan B. Anthony Award.
Dr. Ray dedicated
the last few years of her life to battle against revolutionary
environmentalists, during which she attended the Earth Summit
and summed it up with...
-
"The objective,
clearly enunciated by the leaders of UNCED, [Earth Summit]
is to bring about a change in the present system of independent
nations. The future is to be world government, with central
planning by the UN. Fear of environmental crises, real
or not, is expected to lead to compliance. If force is
needed, it will be provided by a green-helmeted, UN police
force."
Let's allow Hayek the last word
here. >From his, "Road to Serfdom"...
THAT socialism
has displaced liberalism as the doctrine held by the great
majority of progressives does not simply mean that people
had forgotten the warnings of the great liberal thinkers of
the past about the consequences of collectivism. It has happened
because they were persuaded of the very opposite of what these
men had predicted.
The extraordinary
thing is that the same socialism that was not only early recognized
as the gravest threat to freedom, but quite openly began as
a reaction against the liberalism of the French Revolution,
gained general acceptance under the flag of liberty.
It is rarely
remembered now that socialism in its beginnings was frankly
authoritarian. The French writers who laid the foundations
of modern socialism had no doubt that their ideas could be
put into practice only by strong dictatorial government.
Where freedom
was concerned, the founders of socialism made no bones about
their intentions. ... the first of modern planners, Saint-Simon,
even predicted that those who did not obey his proposed planning
boards would be "treated as cattle."
Planning on
an international scale, even more than is true on a national
scale, cannot be anything but naked rule of force, an imposition
by a small group on the rest that sort of standard and employment
which the planners think suitable.
To undertake
the direction of economic life of people with widely different
ideals and values is to assume responsibilities which commit
one to the use of force... . [Planning on an international
scale] would make the very men who are most anxious to plan
society the most dangerous if they were allowed to do so.
... From the saintly and single-minded idealist to the fanatic
is often but a step.
And while the
planning authority will constantly have to decide issues on
merits about which there exist no definite moral rules, it
will have to justify its decisions to the people ... . The
need to rationalize the [arbitrary] likes and dislikes, which,
for lack of anything else, must guide the planner in many
of his decisions, and the necessity of stating his reasons
in a form in which they will appeal to as many people as possible,
will force him to construct theories, i.e., assertions about
the connections between facts, which then become an integral
part of the governing doctrine.
... The totalitarian
leader may be guided by [nothing more than] an instinctive
dislike of the state of things he has found and a desire to
create a new hierarchical order which conforms better to his
conception of' merit; he may merely know that he dislikes
the Jews ... [so] he will readily embrace theories which seem
to provide a rational justification for the prejudices which
he shares with many of his fellows.
Thus a pseudo-scientific
theory becomes part of the official creed which to a greater
or lesser degree directs everybody's action.
Or the widespread
dislike of the industrial civilization and a romantic yearning
for country life, ... provide the basis for another myth:
"Blut and Boden" ("blood and soil"), expressing not merely
ultimate values but a whole host of beliefs about cause and
effect which, once they have become ideals directing the activity
of the whole community, must not be questioned.
Perhaps the
most alarming fact is that contempt for intellectual liberty
is not a thing which arises only once the totalitarian system
is established, but one which can be found everywhere among
intellectuals who have embraced a collectivist faith and who
are acclaimed as intellectual leaders even in countries still
under a liberal regime.
Bernard Switalski
P.O. Box 486
Riverside, IL 60546
Voice: 708.442.7354
Email: switabern@juno.com
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