The Power of Eco-Nightmares
Posted: 06 Jun 2009 08:26 PM PDT
A massive wave sweeps across a major city turning
skyscrapers into splintered rubble, flooding streets and highways, and
sending cars flying through the air. The Statue of Liberty freezes, Los
Angeles burns, and everyone is forced to inexplicably commit
suicide.
The message of course is clear. Our inability to recycle
paper bags, swap out cars for public transportation and stop using air
conditioners has doomed the planet to utter destruction. Welcome to the
power of eco-nightmares.
The secular apocalypse of the
eco-nightmare, the environmentalist Armageddon doomed to strike at an
ever-changing date, is a green boschian vision of a sinful humanity being
punished for its sins against Mother Earth, that is as dogmatically
fanatical and practically unproven, as the rantings of any doomsday
prophet crying out, "The end is near."
Environmentalist
eschatology may be short on theology, but it's long on nightmarish
apocalyptic visions of eco-disasters with technology taking the place of
vice, industry replacing sodomy, and excessive use of water and power
taking the place of debauchery. After God had been replaced with the
one-two combination of the Big Bang and Evolution, environmentalism
developed a godless theology of sin and damnation, apocalypse and
salvation preached by eco-televangelists like Al Gore soliciting your
money to help stop the plastic devil and his CFC archdemons from
destroying the earth.
Of course a Marxist coined theology was bound
to focus on resource consumption and wealth, wealth and resources being
the sin and good works of Marxism. And like its Marxist godfather,
environmentalism is perpetually obsessed with what you have, how much of
it you have, how much of it you use, and what you can do to make up for it
all. Which most people would consider rude and annoying-- unless you
frighten them with visions of the environmental apocalypse devouring all
of mankind's works, because too many people flushed their toilets once too
often and used plastic instead of paper.
The power of
eco-nightmares is leveraged to frighten and intimidate people into
surrendering power over their lives and pumping untold billions into a
variety of schemes to stop a crisis that doesn't actually
exist.
Like Marxism, environmentalism views unregulated human
productivity as a venial sin. And is determined to place it under very
tight regulation. With Marxism's main thrust of worker rights losing steam
in the mid-20th century as Western workers became some of the most
prosperous people in the world, environmentalism slowly began to take its
place, adopting a new class of the oppressed, no longer workers, but
random people, animals and eventually the entire globe itself. All the
better to be able to speak on behalf of a demographic that will never
demand to speak for itself.
If Marxism viewed the capitalist
businessman as its enemy and profit as his crime, the environmentalist has
slightly modified that with the businessman still the enemy, but
technology as the crime. Technology after all is what makes human industry
possibly. Or rather efficient productive use of technology does. And the
goal of environmentalism is to reduce technology, make industry
inefficient and tax all products for their benefit. 
This global environmental shakedown requires a compelling
vision to enforce its diktat. And that is where the power of
eco-nightmares comes into the picture. While the left repeatedly refuses
to acknowledge the threat of Islamic terrorism, it has instead been busy
shoving the threat of environmental collapse at us. From polar bears doing
perfectly well on ice floes, set to the strains of mournful violin music,
to waves destroying entire cities, to Al Gore proclaiming that the pole
would be gone in five years-- the power of eco-nightmares continues to
haunt popular culture.
Like every other ideology, environmentalism
in the end is about power. Power over the lives of ordinary people. It is
driven by a twisted mixture of eco-fanaticism, ignorance, greed and
contempt for the ordinary man, for the suburb and the two car garage, for
the same bourgeois middle class that the Marxists so ardently
despised.
It is not after all the rich who will be made to suffer
by the environmentalists. There will always be indulgences that can be
bought, carbon credits, various offset schemes and donations that can be
made to the fund of your choice. Nor will it be the poor, who under
socialism, are meant to live heavily subsidized lives. They will of course
have more trouble than ever buying some basic products, but that will only
give socialism more power over them.
No it is the middle class, the
"damned bourgeois" who forms the backbone of a free country that as always
is the target of the far left. The small businessman, the middle class
whose increased productivity and spending has driven national wealth. Who
must be destroyed so that the age of the commissar and community organizer
can truly take hold, and free nations can become slave
nations.
That prosperity, that self-sufficiency and independence is
the biggest threat to those who want a totalitarian state.
Environmentalism is merely one more way to bring it about, to create
scarcity where there was prosperity, fear where there was
self-sufficiency, so that no man man live in peace in his own home ever
again.
The final outcome of environmentalism is a nightmare,
but not a nightmare of collapsing buildings, frozen cities, burning
deserts and giant waves, but an entirely human nightmare vision of a hive
warren of environmentalist bureaucracies, totalitarian decrees and
byzantine regulations. This is the promise and the threat behind the
illusory eco-nightmares fed to the public, exploiting the illusion of a
crisis to convince a billion people to don their own chains and give up
their own freedom.
Behind the imaginary nightmares of ecological
catastrophe, the true nightmare of lost freedom remains.
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