IN a recent issue of Oxford Magazine the theme was ‘Climate Change Special’. It was packed with the usual canards as might be expected. But one article in particular caught my eye. It was by Professor Bart van Es, entitled The Climate Crisis and World War 2 – a dangerous but necessary parallel.
His basic thesis was that most of the Dutch (he is himself Dutch) failed to resist the Nazis because most kept quiet. The exceptions were mostly students, many of whom lost their education by refusing to go along with the Nazis. So far, so unsurprising. But he then drew an analogy between that situation and the current ‘climate emergency’ where, he claims, most people just keep quiet and leave it to Extinction Rebellion(XR) to resist the wicked deniers who, like the Nazis did, control everything. I found this just a wee bit of a stretch so I wrote to the good Professor as follows:
Dear Prof van Es,
In your article you draw an analogy which intrigued me because the real analogy is the exact opposite.
During the 1920s and early 30s in Germany there were many attempts to thwart Hitler and the rising National Socialists. But these brave people found out rapidly that the influence of National Socialism was deeper than they realised. Attempts, for example, to bring the Brown Shirts (Sturmabteilung or SA) to justice frequently foundered through ‘lost’ evidence, or if they did reach court the defendants were acquitted or given lenient sentences.
Attempts to use the media to expose their lies also came to nothing. Papers were closed down, editors sacked and publicly ridiculed (or ‘exposed’ as being Jewish), and sometimes disappearing.
Before long, few dared question National Socialism in public. They had families, perhaps still viable careers, which they dared not risk. So the Nazis came to power. Once in power they had the children in schools opened to indoctrination and got children to spy and report on their parents. As Hitler himself stated: ‘When an opponent declares, “I will not come over to your side,” I calmly say, “Your child belongs to us already. What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community”.’ (A similar belief was held, incidentally, by many Remainers.)
Now today we have the Green dogma. Few dare criticise it. Those who do find themselves ridiculed, called ‘deniers’ (irony of ironies!) losing academic posts and careers (I know at least six people to whom this has happened), even spat upon in public. It becomes impossible to get research grants unless the topic goes along with the narrative of ‘climate change’. It becomes almost impossible to publish scientific papers questioning the dogma in mainstream scientific publications.
The semantic similarity to Holocaust deniers is often explicit and represents a strong symbolic undercurrent. One Australian columnist has proposed outlawing climate change denial: ‘David Irving is under arrest in Austria for Holocaust Denial. Perhaps there is a case for making climate change denial an offence —it is a crime against humanity after all.’ Likewise David Roberts from Grist (he did their long interview with Al Gore) talks about the ‘denial industry’ and states that we should have ‘war crimes trials for these bastards – some sort of climate Nuremberg.’
St Greta even said they should be put up against a wall (though she has apologised for that remark apparently).
As in Germany with ‘Jewish science’, so it is today with ‘Denier science’. (The irony was that ‘Jewish science’ enabled the British and Americans to construct the nuclear bomb, whereas arrogant but hamstrung German science got nowhere).
As in Germany with the Brown Shirts, so today we have XR, who are aggressive, cause immense public nuisance and rarely come before a court. (When some XR clown clambered on to the roof of a train and a brave citizen got him off, who was arrested? The citizen.)
Does ‘wicked’ industry try to break this embargo? No. Mostly they join it. XR has huge funding, as had the Nazis in Germany from German industry.
Do the official churches challenge it? No, they enthusiastically embrace the dogma. St Greta is acclaimed by a Swedish pastor as the ‘successor to Jesus Christ’. Again, just like in Nazi Germany, where the official churches often equated Hitler with Jesus; founding a Millennial kingdom – the ‘Thousand Year Reich’!
Pope Pius XII endorsed Hitler, co-operating in his anti-Semitism and passively assenting to the murder of Serbian Orthodox believers by Croatian death squads; so too the current Pope Francis endorses Greta and Green dogma.
The mainstream media? Not a hope – all would see it as the ‘kiss of death’ were they to espouse ‘climate denial’. So again, articles and letters are rarely published raising questions. Known ‘deniers’ are barred from the BBC. Ditto, no political party dare raise the issue. When President Trump does, he is vilified.
In schools it is one long indoctrination class: hardly a subject escapes being ‘greened’. Children are encouraged to report to their ‘teachers’ parents who don’t recycle properly or waste energy – of this I have specific evidence.
A further huge irony of your analogy is that the Nazis were very Green (which is partly why the Greens in Germany today are still strong politically). They inherited German Romanticism (nature worship, in essence an ultimately cruel and hopeless religion) of the previous two centuries. Hitler’s dream of Lebensraum where the ‘Übermenschen workers’ would, once the ‘Untermenschen’ had been exterminated, settle and grow their food on idyllic ‘organic’ farms, living lives of ‘unity with the earth’. ‘Blut und Boden’ – blood and soil – remember?
Oddly, that was Marx’s vision as well! In his workers’ Utopia he foresaw ‘hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, tending cattle in the evening and engaging in literary criticism after dinner’ (quoted in The Uses of Pessimism by the late Roger Scruton, p67).
The only bit that Hitler might not have approved of was the hunting, which he opposed as cruel!
So today we have ridiculous calls that food must be local, organic, even vegan. If that policy were pursued, 75 per cent of the world’s population would die of starvation. But we hear the likes of David Attenborough and his cronies complaining that we are overpopulated, so maybe that is the idea.
It is amazing just how lethal Green dogma has become. Third World countries are stopped from building fossil-fuelled power stations – the World Bank refuses them loans ‘because of environmental fears’, and as a result millions die. [Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death, Paul Dreissen, 2003]. Friends of the Earth want chlorine banned worldwide, a chemical which has saved billions of lives by making water safe for drinking – and, may I add, chickens safe to eat. I could go on.
Yours sincerely,
Philip Foster
And answer came there none!
This article first appeared in the February 2020 magazine of the Campaign for an Independent Britain (8 Carlton Rd, Worksop, Nottinghamshire S80 1PH, general enquiries 0845 5197 254) and is republished by kind permission.
