Bishop Hill Dennis Bray on global warming and Stalin
May 31, 2010 Climate: other Must-read post from Dennis Bray over at Klimazweibel, examining the similarities between Stalin's regime and the conduct of global warming science. He makes ten direct comparisons between the warmism and Stalinism. Here are the first couple to whet your appetite:
1. To begin, Koba’s reign of tyranny, was a reign that was indulged by Western intellectuals.
Climate change, particularly its remediation, is a point of contention. It is, however, indulged by Western intellectuals as if there only facts and no assumptions . (See statement by professional/scientific organization)
2. The Cheka - The Extraordinary Commission - (a soviet state security organization) operated by instilling fear in people. People needed to know they were never safe for the Cheka to operate successfully.
The IPCC and Co. tend to let people know they are never safe and people need to be kept this way if the IPCC and Co is to maintain its existence. (Although recently, the IPCC has been accused of understating the potential dangers of global warming and the public are beginning to have their doubts.)
Reader Comments (30)
I think we are at a fork in the road of possible futures. Either:
- CAGW is laughed out of existence, after another bitter winter..
or
- Economic chaos, resulting from collapse of the dollar, the pound and the euro (due to unsustainable levels of debt) result in the rejection of existing political parties. The eco-fascists take power.
Nulabor's Surveillance State becomes seen as just a warm-up for the real thing. Economic salvation is promised via carbon taxes on bigoil etc. Trials of denialists for their eco-crimes are the norm. Spot inspections, with automatic right of entryinto homes, with on-the-spot penalties for having your TV on standby, warm food placed in fridge etc are routine. Children denounce their parents as eco criminals and their evidence is automatically accepted - denial of the crime being taken as proof of guilt. And so on..
The pogroms are a-comin'
Time to consider buiding priest holes and organising clandestine resistance, and sharpening the pitchforks. Even now the gulags are being prepared. Uncle Rajendra will look after only GOOD citizens, and the others? Marshall Gore willl get us if we're not very careful.
We need to go underground, and communicate in code.
The teapot is on the wall, friends. Drive the car....
He missed out Lysenko. How could he miss Lysenko?!
He did miss out Lysenko, and I think the essay was weaker because of that. My favourite "Stalin/Lysenko and AGW parallel essay is this one by Cliff Ollier:
http://web.mac.com/sinfonia1/Global_Warming_Politics/A_Hot_Topic_Blog/Entries/2008/10/17_Guest_Essay:_Lysenkoism_and_GW_.html
And Bob Carter at the Quadrant Online... But there have been quite a few... googling Lysenko and climate change yeilds nearly 14,000 hits...
I thought history would see the twentieth century as one of big ideas, starting in optimism and ending in disaster. Communism, fascism, the EU and now global warming. It's always the big ideas that'll run roughshod over ordinary people.
I couldn't see the quote from Stalin about the omelettes. This quote seems very apt. The eco-fascists are using the same argument today. (I just read about a programme (?) on the BBC arguing for the suspension of democracy to save the planet.)
Speaking as a CAGW agnostic who visits blogs on both sides, I find this attempt at wit barely makes it half way, and only adds to "demonization fatigue." Bishop Hill is usually better than this.
Sorry. My link was poor.
http://web.mac.com/sinfonia1/Global_Warming_Politics/A_Hot_Topic_Blog/Entries/2008/10/17_Guest_Essay:_Lysenkoism_and_GW_.html
The underlying analogy is valid, but the exemplification of parallels is weak.
He missed out Lysenko. How could he miss Lysenko?!
Absolutely inexcusable. Both ScientistForTruth and justinert are totally correct. So much for Dennis Bray's "in-depth" comparison.
I wouldn't describe this one as a "must read" - I'm sure quite a few of us here could put together a more cogent analysis than Bray did. The parallels are certainly there, but if I had to choose a 1930's pathology as an analogy, National Socialism would win hands down. I'm just waiting for the 21st century equivalent to the Reichstag fire.
Stalin also said "if one climatologist lies, that's a tragedy. If a million climatologists lie, that's statistics". :)
sHx - nice one!
Let me explain why I think it the article is important. Firstly, Dennis Bray is not a nobody - he's an Emeritus professor at Cambridge. He also runs regular surveys of opinion among climate scientists and might therefore be expected to have some unique insights. If a blogger had written this article I might well not have linked to it, but the fact that Bray is speaking in these terms is significant.
The other point is that there are important concerns over what is happening on the AGW front. I have heard enough serious people talk about intimidation of scientists to believe that there is genuinely a problem. I have also heard enough serious people suggest that saving us from global warming will involve a suspension of democracy to believe that Bray's article might be less demonization than a genuine expression of concern.
Bit by bit all the pieces are falling into place - but are we too late. The one world government is not of the future but operating now through the UN auspices. Our 'leaders' are purposefully destroying our economies - look at K Rudd, Obama, Brown and others and the debt they are so eagerly plunging us into with nothing to show for it except burgeoning bureaucracy.
Comments along these lines are unsurprising given the scope of the issues involved but need to be read with detachment. For at least the last 250 years political thought has traversed a spectrum with violence at both ends. The Scottish Enlightment showed us a rational pathway through the centre where practical outcomes can be realised with common sense and goodwill. It has long worried me that a strong theme in left opinion places personal virtue above the wellbeing of the populace. This tendency is much in evidence in AGW behaviour. (The archetypical behaviour is that of Robespierre on 8 - 10 June 1794.) In a general way Dennis Bray is reminding us that detours from the centre ground are dangerous. For my part, though, I am more optimistic. I think that people in authority are absorbing the lessons of the past 6 months and while they do not want genuine public inquiries, they will shift their ground quietly. This will take pressure (real or imagined) off scientists who should feel freer to pursue their own lines of investigation. The really interesting area to watch is how the policy framework for funding public good science is adapted over the next year or so.
Has any climate scientist in receipt of a death threat ever reported it to the police so action could be taken? If not, they must be just bleating about nothing.
This was a completely idiotic piece. There are many fascinating social aspects of AGW mania, just as there are of other manias of credulity in human history. But comparisons to Stalinism are not helpful in any way. Stalinism was a completely different class of phenomenon.
If studying Stalinism, one needs to look at the general class of movements of mass murder. This would be valuable and important research topic, and one would have to include at least Pol Pot, the Nazis, the Chinese experience, Armenia, the extermination of indigenous peoples in Australia and the Americas. The Belgian program in the Congo would be included. Probably recent episodes there - Rwanda. The mass murder program in Russia by the way started before Stalin. And one should also include WWI, which was in its own way a program of mass murder. It is our delusion to think it does not count, because it was war.
Then there is a class of 'great popular delusions and the madness of crowds', which are mostly investment related, but include fantasies like Lysenkoism, medical hallucinations like the MMR mania, the diet-cholesterol mania, the various dietary manias of the 20C.
This is where AGW belongs, not in the first lot. The thing we have to get to grips with is why people run around when freezing cold, chanting that they are too hot, and that the thermometer records are in need of adjustment.
We are both a murderous and an irrational species. You may think that the two are related, that is, it is irrational to be murderous, and I agree. Nevertheless, if we are to understand and combat our irrationality in a particular case, we will not advance by comparing it to mass murder. It is a totally different phenomenon.
Contrary to one of the great intellectual hallucinations of the 20C, not everything is sexual. Well not everything irrational is murderous, either.
Caroline wrote,
I suggest it goes further back than that. All of those ideas are reactions against the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution & Capitalism. Anarchism (of the kind that murdered, among many others, President McKinley) and Communism were the first, 19th-century wave. Anarchism became sort of irrelevant after WWI and the Bolshevik victory in Russia. The second wave consisted of Fascism (in its Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, etc forms), and Nazism - also as a reaction against the Enlightenment but opposed to the particular "alternative" of Communism. WWII meant the defeat of most of Fascism but at the cost of the survival of Communism. During the whole Cold War period, those who hate the Enlightenment had their hopes on Communism or soft versions thereof (socialism etc - anything that could be understood as an "alternative to capitalism").
The economic and political bankruptcy of communism in 1989 meant that those with a visceral dislike of Enlightenment/Capitalism had to find something else to put their hopes on - it is therefore no coincidence that it was around that time that global warming alarmism started to take off. I think this is clear from the way the most stringent alarmists see global warming as a sort of existential crisis, gleefully demanding the revamping of the global economy, rather than approach it as a technical issue.
What it means is that even after global warming alarmism is fully discredited - I guess in 5 - 10 years - some other ideology will emerge to take its place. Or, maybe several ones. Hard-nosed, non-ideological defense of capitalism will probably migrate to countries such as China, India, Brazil and the like.
There is absolutely nothing left wing (red) about global warming politics. The phrase 'eco fascist' is meant to be taken literally, not as a metaphor for control. Many of the Nazi leadership were fanatical environmentalists.
"We recognize that separating humanity from nature, from the whole of life, leads to humankind’s own destruction and to the death of nations. Only through a re-integration of humanity into the whole of nature can our people be made stronger. That is the fundamental point of the biological tasks of our age. Humankind alone is no longer the focus of thought, but rather life as a whole . . . This striving toward connectedness with the totality of life, with nature itself, a nature into which we are born, this is the deepest meaning and the true essence of National Socialist thought."
Ernst Lehmann, Biologischer Wille. Wege und Ziele biologischer Arbeit im neuen Reich, München, 1934
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecofascism
There is absolutely nothing left wing (red) about global warming politics. The phrase 'eco fascist' is meant to be taken literally, not as a metaphor for control. Many of the Nazi leadership were fanatical environmentalists.
And Hitler's party was the German National SOCIALIST WORKER'S Party! So where's the difference between Communism and Fascism? Both derive from the illusion that the Great Unwashed can and should govern against those who have the intellectual capability of governing themselves and actually producing useful things and thoughts. The Greenies are nothing but a third strand of that same movement - hinder those that bring home the bacon in their industriousness (no matter if you call 'em "Captalists" from the Red viewpoint, "Jews" from the Fascist, or "Big Oil" from the Green one), without actually contributing to society themselves. In this way, all three are modern cancerous outgrowth from a ground formerly tilled by the Great Deluders Moses, Jesus Christ and Mohammed, the ancient Parasites of Mankind.
I see that John Delingpole has blogged on the recent BBC programme on the need to suspend democracy:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100041708/the-bbc-official-voice-of-ecofascism/
The AGW thesis is an excuse for control freakery. I trust that our host is keeping a very close eye on the preparations for the Cancun conference at the end of this year, and of the attitude and role of the Cameron government towards it. Clegg is on record as describing sceptics as "nutters"; Cameron sounds like an AGW believer; as for Huhne....
Chrisz. "So where's the difference between Communism and Fascism? "
Millions of people who could tell the difference died in WWII.
Bishop
Let me explain why I think it the article is important. Firstly, Dennis Bray is not a nobody - he's an Emeritus professor at Cambridge.
Then let him say something important. I was completely unimpressed. There were far more interesting and insightful comments from many of those posting above.
"The one world government is not of the future but operating now through the UN auspices.
If that is the case, the world is safe, for never has there been a more feckless debating society than the UN.
Bishop Hill said,
More people than we like to believe, even in countries of a seemingly deep tradition of democracy, lack a true "visceral" commitment to democracy and are ready to suspend democracy "temporarily" just enough to "solve the crisis". After the 1930s in Europe and Japan, that kind of thinking seemed to be reserved to so-called Third World countries, but it seems it was less a question of how developed the countries were, than a question of how serious a crisis there seemed to be, in order to justify the suspension of democracy. In Turkey, even now, or until recently, it was accepted by the mainstream politicians that the military would temporarily run things if there was a risk of Islamist takeover.
It seems that some people in the UK see global.warming as as serious a crisis as the Turkish establishment sees Islamist rule.
he's an Emeritus professor at Cambridge
Isn't that a different Dennis Bray? I think the Klimazwiebel DB is a sociologist.
[BH adds: Ah, I didn't know that. Thnx. Still not a nobody though.]
"Chrisz. "So where's the difference between Communism and Fascism? "
Millions of people who could tell the difference died in WWII."
And Stalin killed 30 million of his own people. Mao killed his millions.
DB has an update:
http://klimazwiebel.blogspot.com/2010/06/post-script-to-uncle-joe-and.html
P Gosselin
Thanks for the new link, but DB is still unimpressive.
Perhaps he should study some history.
"The IPCC and Co. tend to let people know they are never safe and people need to be kept this way if the IPCC and Co is to maintain its existence. (Although recently, the IPCC has been accused of understating the potential dangers of global warming and the public are beginning to have their doubts.)"
IPCC was partly established by the UNEP and is today politically and administrative uner the UNEP.
Sooo why not put the right name on IPCC?
UNEP/IPCC!!
?