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How China wrecked the Copenhagen deal; and the anti-climate change movement as the route to the global state
(Note: further down in this entry I argue with leftist Ken Hechtman that the anti-climate change movement is but the latest stage of the age-old effort by gnostic activists to form a world government under their control; and he agrees.)
This is not an easy article to understand in detail, but the main point is clear; China (surprise, surprise) did not want any kind of climate deal in Copenhagen, and it not only prevented any deal from being made, but made the failure look like that of the U.S. and other Western countries, thus angering the poor countries at the rich West from which they had expected mucho mullah to help them, you know, industrialize while not producing carbon emissions, . Also, the Chinese treated our college boy president with contempt, which he did nothing to mitigate.
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Mark P. writes:
Excellent link and excellent news regarding Copenhagen. I am glad to see this deal fail.
What is truly funny is this paragraph at the end of the article:
Copenhagen was much worse than just another bad deal, because it illustrated a profound shift in global geopolitics. This is fast becoming China’s century, yet its leadership has displayed that multilateral environmental governance is not only not a priority, but is viewed as a hindrance to the new superpower’s freedom of action. I left Copenhagen more despondent than I have felt in a long time. After all the hope and all the hype, the mobilisation of thousands, a wave of optimism crashed against the rock of global power politics, fell back, and drained away.
Take a look at the second sentence. This liberal really finds it surprising that the normal behavior of a superpower is not to put priority on multilateral environmental governance. Instead, that superpower puts its own freedom of action above all, like a normal nation. I guess this is one of those moments where a liberal is truly shocked.
It goes back to what you wrote before, about the script that liberals play in their heads. So busy are they fighting their little psy war against the Right, imagining that they have full control over all of the black, brown and yellow chess pieces, that they forget the chess pieces have their own agenda. At the right moment, those chess pieces will turn against them. This is one of those moments.
I remain hopeful that other global reality checks will vastly mitigate liberal expansionism.
LA replies:
Well said. It’s amazing that the anti-warming people could ever have imagined that China, a hard-boiled regime if ever there was one, would be in favor of some global anti-warming treaty which could only cripple its own expanding economy. It’s as though they went to a conference with Al Capone and they’re shocked and distressed to find out he’s not a humanitarian.
Your answer may very well explain the factors that drove this delusion.
Gintas writes:
The Mark Lynas article ends:
Copenhagen was much worse than just another bad deal, because it illustrated a profound shift in global geopolitics. This is fast becoming China’s century, yet its leadership has displayed that multilateral environmental governance is not only not a priority, but is viewed as a hindrance to the new superpower’s freedom of action. I left Copenhagen more despondent than I have felt in a long time. After all the hope and all the hype, the mobilisation of thousands, a wave of optimism crashed against the rock of global power politics, fell back, and drained away.
Is this article by a faithful Guardian Global Warming minion a call to reality, or a warning about China? His article history provides the context that answers my question.
No, this article is not a call to reality, it’s a Kunstlerite warning to the Ruling Liberal Order. China is the threat to the Liberal Order, and must be dealt with, because she is smashing our dreams and hopes. And more: China uses developing nations—our own rightful grateful, obedient clients—as its proxies! Curses!
LA replies:
What the heck is a Kunstlerite warning to the liberal order vis a vis China?
Gintas replies:
James Howard Kunstler issues warnings—like a drumbeat—about Peak Oil and financial disaster and what they will do to America; not that he cares about us in the middle class (he despises us), but about what a middle class uprising will do to him and his cronies in the ruling elite and to his beloved liberal order. He always sees before him the spectre of a middle class uprising.
Mark Lynas is worried about China blocking a Global Warming agreement. Lynas doesn’t really care about re-orienting his dreamy liberal constituency to hard reality and truth, but in preserving the march of his beloved liberal order to a totalitarian global system. China is a direct threat to that march, and Lynas’s article calls China out.
My prediction is that China will soon become a mortal enemy of the Liberal West.
Gintas continues:
A simpler way of saying what I said is:
This article is not by a weak liberal wringing his hands, confused, surprised, ready to be routed. He is part of the hard core; he knows that there are occasional, temporarily-deflating setbacks. This is one such setback, and now it’s time to rally the Guardianistas and the entire Liberal Order to a new fight: onward and upward against China! And don’t be deceived, the fight will be hard.
December 23
Ken Hechtman writes:
As you can imagine, most of the left is buzzing about Copenhagen this week. I had this same argument with one of my Trotskyite friends. On the one hand, in the grand scheme of things I’m happy enough to see the hard left ending its 40 year love affair with the Soulless Human Hive. But in this particular case, I don’t buy it. I don’t buy that Copenhagen was a disaster by any realistic expectations and I don’t buy that overall China is the climate villain here.
1. These UN conferences are defective by design. They’re always wrecked by one single country because their rules of procedure are designed to make them wreckable by one single country. I reported on the UN Biosafety Conference in Montreal in 2005:
After five years of debate, a decision was supposed to be reached last week. Working late into Thursday night, the working group produced a draft with the “May contain … ” language. At the closing plenary on Friday, Tewolde registered an objection, and under the Protocol’s rule requiring consensus, the conference couldn’t adopt the draft and will resume negotiations next year in Brazil.
In his closing address, Tewolde said, “Five years ago, in this very hall, we determined to usher in an era of transparency in the trade of LMOs (Living Modified Organisms—all genetically modified materials). In this hall, we have failed today. I believe we will fail in Brazil next year. Let us, the nations of the South, go back home and protect ourselves through national legislation, just as the industrialized nations have done.”
What I didn’t have the space to get into here was how every attempt to change the draft language to reflect the wishes of the vast majority of the assembly got derailed by the delegate from New Zealand. If nothing else, all this should give conservatives good reason to stop being afraid of the UN. Any governing body that allows any and all decisions to get derailed by one delegate out of 193 simply isn’t serious.
2. China is further along than the U.S. and most other Western countries in converting to renewable power from carbon-based power, 16 percent of their total compared to our 11 percent and their projected rate of conversion is faster still. I don’t enjoy saying anything good about China, but this happens to be true: they know they can’t burn coal forever and they’re transitioning away from it faster than we are. There are no climate deniers in the Chinese government.
3. Like the Guardian, much of the left is bemoaning the fact that Copenhagen ended without a “legally binding” agreement. At the superpower level, there’s no such thing. No global enforcement agency exists that can compel the U.S. or China to do anything it doesn’t want to do. Now, we can disagree on whether or not such an agency should exist, but for the moment, none does. If Copenhagen produced a gentlemen’s agreement, a handshake and a photo-op, then realistically, it did the best it could. [LA replies: But the entire liberal world of fantasists was acting as though Copenhagen was going to come up with some binding agreement.]
4. The left is ballistic that Obama short-circuited the UN process. Here’s Bill McKibben on the subject.
Again, I’m not convinced. If I had the choice of putting five people in a room to talk about 90 percent of a problem or 193 people in a room to talk about 100 percent of the problem, I’ll take option one.
Just as an aside, one first-hand account says that Obama barged uninvited into China’s private meeting with India and Brazil. I choose to believe this and I choose to take a small amount of vicarious pride in it too.
5. The left is also furious that the conference only set a temperature target, not a carbon emissions target. Carbon emission targets aren’t the meaning of life. Grant me the premise of the basic greenhouse effect so I can make this argument: Atmospheric chemical engineering can be understood as a control theory problem. Carbon emissions are our control variable. They’re the thing we can affect directly. But we don’t care about CO2 concentration in the atmosphere as such, not like we do with directly toxic pollutants. We care about the state variable, average global surface temperature. We know there’s a positive relationship between the control variable and the state variable. But we don’t yet have a model that specifies the relationship with the kind of precision we need. So it makes much more sense to agree on the state variable and adjust the control variable as and when required.
Ken Hechtman replies:
You wrote:
But the entire liberal world of fantasists was acting as though Copenhagen was going to come up with some binding agreement.
You say “fantasy.” I say “getting ahead of themselves.” Don’t get me wrong. Global warming is our best bet for global government. But we’re not there yet.
Again, let’s say the science is true. Let’s say the heat-trapping properties of CO2 are what Svante Arrhenius said they were a hundred years ago. It follows then that we have a world-wide problem. Some world-wide decisions need to be made, followed up by world-wide enforcement. But at best, world government will be the outcome of this problem, not the solution to it. I’m thinking of the UN as an example. The UN was the outcome of the Nazi threat and World War II. It wasn’t the solution to it.
LA replies:
I chuckle at this. You probably never read The Fate of the Earth, by Jonathan Schell, about what a nuclear war would do, which was a hugely influential book in the eighties when you were in your teens. It was a tremendously disturbing and compelling book. But when I got to the end, and realized that the real import of the book was that we had to have global government, I realized that Schell’s whole presentation was not about nuclear war, but a ploy to get us to embrace global government. I thought then, as bad as this problem of possible nuclear war may be, global government is NOT the answer, and I dismissed Schell.
And what happened? Reagan, far from following the teachings of Schell and constructing global government, stood against the Soviet Union, denounced it as evil, moralized the world against it, and spent it into bankruptcy, and the Soviet Union fell and the risk of nuclear war went away. So much for Jonathan Schell.
But the left always keeps looking for new pretexts for global government, problems so global that only global government can solve them, and this time it’s global warming. And to make people believe that a problem is so terrible that only global government can solve it, the left must convince mankind, especially the West, that it is hopelessly messed up, that societies can’t solve their own problems. A major part of the leftist project is to make Westerners hate themselves and hate their society so that they will turn willingly to the global government that the left seeks to impose on them. In the same way, the EU project has advanced itself by making Europeans believe that they and their nations are evil and that this evil can only be controlled if they let their nations be subsumed under the EU. Leftism, which is the political form of evil, advances itself by destroying the good, by destroying men’s hope of the good in the ordinary world they inhabit, and so making men believe that only some Tower of Babel-like cosmic technocratic regime can solve human problems.
Which, by the way, is the gnostic totalitarian project, as I discussed here. Gnosticism convinces men that the ordinary world is evil, so as to win them over to the construction of a gnostic dream world.
Ken Hechtman replies to LA:
You wrote:
I chuckle at this. You probably never read The Fate of the Earth, by Jonathan Schell, about what a nuclear war would do, which was a hugely influential book in the eighties when you were in your teens. It was a tremendously disturbing and compelling book. But when I got to the end, and realized that the real import of the book was that we had to have global government, I realized that Schell’s whole presentation was not about nuclear war, but a ploy to get us to embrace global government. I thought then, as bad as this problem of possible nuclear war may be, global government is NOT the answer, and I dismissed Schell.
Chuckle all you want. I never did read “Fate of the Earth.” But I’m not that young. I remember the Cold War. I read Helen Caldicott and “Friendly Fascism” and “America, God and The Bomb” and all the rest of that early eighties stuff.
But the left always keeps looking for new pretexts for global government, problems so global that only global government can solve them, and this time it’s global warming.
You’re not wrong about this. The left is always going to keep an eye open for problems that can’t be solved at the national level. But you know what? We only have to find one. [LA replies: Not for the first time, I thank you for your frankness in stating so clearly what the left ultimately wants and how it intends to get there.]
Look, if you got a way to fix the atmosphere with actions doable exclusively at the national level, you’ll never have to work another day in your life. In fact, let me know. While you’re putting it down on paper, I’ll give the Nobel Committee a heads-up. I’m told their standards are a bit lower than they used to be.
And to make people believe that a problem is so terrible that only global government can solve it, the left must convince mankind, especially the West, that it is hopelessly messed up, that societies can’t solve their own problems. A major part of the leftist project is to make Westerners hate themselves and hate their society so that they will turn willingly to the global government that the left seeks to impose on them.
You are wrong about this. Every year, the industrial West’s share of carbon emissions drops. This isn’t just about American SUVs. This is about Indian two-stroke rickshaws and African charcoal cooking fires and Chinese brown coal power plants. You could regress America all the way back to the Stone Age or advance it all the way to the Space Age and either way three-quarters of the problem is still there. [LA replies: Then why, as seems inevitable (though maybe I’m wrong about this) will the global carbon credit system give the extra credits to the developing countries which are producing most of the carbon and none to the advanced countries thus requiring the latter to buy the credits from the developing countries?]
Which, by the way, is the gnostic totalitarian project, as I discussed here. Gnosticism convinces men that the ordinary world is evil, so as to win them over to the construction of a gnostic dream world.
Again, you’re not wrong about this either. You can draw a straight line from the Roman gnostics to the medieval chiliast heretics to Marx to the modern-day left. If you claim continuity with the Roman church fathers, I claim continuity with the Roman gnostics. [LA replies: Wow. Again, I appreciate your frankness. You’re admitting that you and your fellow leftists are part of a millennia-old war against the Bible, Christendom, and Western civilization the aim of which is the seizure of all earthly power by gnostic leftists, and that the climate change scare is but the latest stage in this war for total power over the earth. Maybe you could be a consultant for the Left Behind series.]
Christopher L. writes:
In point #2 of his statement, Mr. Hechtman talks about the wonderful Chinese conversion to renewable energy. First, based on Wikipedia, they are fourth in wind power behind the U.S., Germany, and Spain. They generate a bit over 12GW. So, where does the great renewable energy come from for China, hydroelectric at 145GW. Basically, the Chinese are damming up every river they can to generate power. Meanwhile, we use about 40 percent of our potential hydroelectric sources. Now if Mr. Hechtman is willing to sacrifice a snail darting frog fish species or two, we might be able to up our renewable energy usage some in that area. Also, percentages are tricky things. I figure per capita energy usage in China is lower than in the U.S. which makes it easier to gain a higher percentage of renewable energy usage. Of course we can operate like the Chinese where you wear your winter coat at your office while you work (though I am sure the non-climate deniers in their government don’t and that it has improved for some workers from the late ’90s when I was talking with some Chinese immigrants).
Maybe he has not noticed, but the biggest deterrent to a lot of clean and renewable energy sources (nuclear, wind, solar, bio fuels) are environmentalists (i.e. leftists like himself).
I am glad there are no climate deniers in the Chinese government. How would you like to be governed by people who think the weather is the same all over the globe?
Finally, I do not accept his premises about CO2. I will not debate that here, but the entire scientific basis for it is flawed from temperature measurements to how CO2 acts in the upper atmosphere.
Mark P. writes:
1) Ken Hechtman wrote:
What I didn’t have the space to get into here was how every attempt to change the draft language to reflect the wishes of the vast majority of the assembly got derailed by the delegate from New Zealand. If nothing else, all this should give conservatives good reason to stop being afraid of the UN. Any governing body that allows any and all decisions to get derailed by one delegate out of 193 simply isn’t serious.
I don’t buy this. If the UN is so ineffective, then why have it in the first place? Why not just dismantle it completely? Because the UN serves other left-wing purposes beyond any governance issue.
Basically, the UN is an institution where left-wing conspirators get to work out their ideas. It is the perfect collaborative venue, located within the safety and technological advancement of New York City, where like-minded people meet to carve up the world.
The ideas that come out of the UN migrate to other forms of policy-making well beyond the purview of UN governing bodies. Destroying the UN destroys this collaborative effort, which is why the left will never dismantle the UN.
2) Ken Hechtman wrote:
China is further along than the U.S. and most other Western countries in converting to renewable power from carbon-based power, 16 percent of their total compared to our 11 percent and their projected rate of conversion is faster still. I don’t enjoy saying anything good about China, but this happens to be true: they know they can’t burn coal forever and they’re transitioning away from it faster than we are. There are no climate deniers in the Chinese government.
Meaning what? That China is running on wind farms and solar power? No, they are running on nuclear power, something leftists have opposed for decades.
The Chinese don’t give a rat’s a** about climate. Their focus on any renewable resources comes from the sensible policy of throwing their Howard Zinns and Noam Chomskys in prison or worse, instead of making them college professors.
Sorry Ken, there will never be any enforceable global mechanism for ensuring no one cheats on their emission targets. Copenhagen was nothing more than a photo op.
3) Lawrence, you wrote:
But the left always keeps looking for new pretexts for global government, problems so global that only global government can solve them, and this time it’s global warming. And to make people believe that a problem is so terrible that only global government can solve it, the left must convince mankind, especially the West, that it is hopelessly messed up, that societies can’t solve their own problems. A major part of the leftist project is to make Westerners hate themselves and hate their society so that they will turn willingly to the global government that the left seeks to impose on them.
As China shows, this “global government” project is dead on arrival. The basic problem is that no traditional power is going to give up control over its own territory to some ridiculous world government. It simply won’t happen.
Even worse for the liberals, the project of making Westerners hate themselves also leads non-Westerners to hate the West. This creates massive amounts of distrust toward any policy the leftists push. After all, if the West is so evil, then how could global warming be anything but a Western ploy against other nations. I would find it surprising if this is not exactly what the Chinese believe. After all, lots of their citizens attend Western universities and imbibe in Western culture. [LA replies: good point.]
Kristor writes:
Wow, stunning to hear Ken Hechtman verifying from the leftist perspective our conjectures about liberalism being a species of gnosticism. I would love to hear how he actually does draw the line from Roman gnostics to medieval chiliastic Cathars to Marx. Some flesh on that bone would be fascinating.
Alan M. writes:
Ken Hechtman (a fellow Canadian) said:
“As China shows, this “global government” project is dead on arrival. The basic problem is that no traditional power is going to give up control over its own territory to some ridiculous world government. It simply won’t happen.”
But it just did—with the EU. Ok, it isn’t a world government but many traditional powers have ceded control over their own territory to some ridiculous supranational government. It simply did just happen. France, Germany, Britain, Spain—all world powers at some point. All just gave up their sovereignty.
LA replies:
Absolutely right. Just a month ago the ancient states of Europe officially handed their sovereignty to a continent-wide, globalist-like superstate. So what happens to Mr. Hechtman’s concern (from his left point of view) that traditional nations will always stand in the way of the left’s globalist projects?
Paul Nachman writes:
On this China thing with Ken Hechtman, Christopher L. writes:
Maybe he has not noticed, but the biggest deterrent to a lot of clean and renewable energy sources (nuclear, wind, solar, bio fuels) are environmentalists (i.e. leftists like himself).
Nuclear fission isn’t renewable. He may be thinking of breeder reactors, that can greatly extend the life (factor of at least three, I’ll guess) of a given amount of fission fuel by extracting more of its available energy, but it still gets used up. (Nuclear fusion isn’t renewable either, but it would have a very long lifetime, if we ever get it to work as a usable, terrestrial power source.)
Christopher writes:
Finally, I do not accept his premises about CO2. I will not debate that here, but the entire scientific basis for it is flawed from temperature measurements to how CO2 acts in the upper atmosphere.
Christopher is just wrong about CO2. The CO2 (and it’s not in the upper atmosphere) part of the physics is the simple part. The complications are in the positive and negative feedback effects.
Mark P. wrote:
The basic problem is that no traditional power is going to give up control over its own territory to some ridiculous world government. It simply won’t happen.
Alan M., while mistakenly attributing this point to Ken Hechtman (so do you), gives the EU as a counterexample to what Mark P. wrote. Andy McCarthy provided another counterexample on Wednesday, in an entry on how Obama has placed Interpol above American law.
December 24
Ian B. writes:
Like you, I appreciate Ken’s frankness, though it might have gotten him in trouble this time.
He asserts that global warming is a global problem, only realistically solvable by a global government.
The problem is, due to his honesty, he has given away the store only a couple sentences previously, by admitting that global government is a solution in search of a problem.
Given this, isn’t the sensible conclusion to draw, by his own admission, that he is probably suffering from a false consciousness regarding the direness of global warming, exaggerating it in his mind and seeing a need for global government because it’s what he wants to see, just as he has admitted that leftists continually do in cases where there really is no such need (that is, all cases to date)?
Jack from Long Island writes:
I am always amazed at how much the left gets away with. Ken Hechtman writes about his “Trotskyite” friends without a hint of shame or embarrassment from associating with such creeps.
No man of the right could reference his “Himmlerite” friends without looking over his shoulder, or feeling a pang of guilt,unless he was just a lowlife rube.
Trotsky, after all, was the most violent demon, the Moloch, of the Bolshevik Hell, meditating war, urging a permanent state of murder/revolution, and destroying millions of European Christians.
I’m sure that’s why the Left is so enamoured of him.
V. writes:
You wrote:
“Absolutely right. Just a month ago the ancient states of Europe officially handed their sovereignty to a continent-wide, globalist-like superstate. So what happens to Mr. Hechtman’s concern (from his left point of view) that traditional nations will always stand in the way of the left’s globalist projects?”
France, Germany, Britain, Spain are no longer traditional nations. China is, thankfully for the Chinese, and will never cede their sovereignty to a Global Authority.
Or at least they won’t until they stop being a traditional nation, which would require the Chinese Race to lose its Ethnocentrism.
And that isn’t going to happen for the simple reason that there’s no force in China committed to doing such an evil thing as racially disarm the Chinese people.
Just think about it, the Chinese are even as I type this slow motion genociding the Tibetans as a government policy. They aren’t going to fall prey to the self-loathing that has destroyed the manfulness of white elites.
LA replies:
I’m not sure how China, still officially a Communist state, gets to be called a “tradiitional nation.” Do you mean that it’s “traditional,” or just that it’s out for its own interests and does not buy into liberal globaloney?
V. replies:
Yes, that is what I mean. The Chinese are currently traditional in that they follow the traditional human behavior pattern of putting loyalty to the racial group ahead of loyalty to abstract philosophical precepts. For that reason they wouldn’t sacrifice control of their Country to a World Government that would primarily consist of non-Chinese people.
This doesn’t mean that they are traditional in their attitudes toward religion, older forms of Chinese culture, etc.
December 25
Ken Hechtman writes:
Kristor wrote:
“Wow, stunning to hear Ken Hechtman verifying from the leftist perspective our conjectures about liberalism being a species of Gnosticism. I would love to hear how he actually does draw the line from Roman gnostics to medieval chiliastic Cathars to Marx. Some flesh on that bone would be fascinating.”
I’ve been reading through your explanation of how moderate-left/liberal ideology is similar to gnostic theology. You really captured it better than I ever could. Unsatisfying as it might be, I will have to answer Kristor with, “What he said … “
I can give you one personal theological story with a gnostic spin to it. I was 17 or 18 and in junior college in Montreal. I wasn’t a member of the campus Hillel but I had friends from high school who were so I’d have lunch in their office from time to time. Once a week they’d have a rabbi come by and they’d take turns preparing a Bible study which he would then critique and lead a discussion on. They asked me to do one once. They never asked me to do another one after that.
I took Genesis 11, the Tower of Babel story. I cheated a little bit, kitbashing together a text from the Revised American Version and the King James Version. For most of the story I wanted the clarity and simplicity of ordinary language. The anachronisms in King James are too distracting. But nothing beats the poetry and power of “Nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do” from King James.
Then I said: “OK, don’t look at the words on the page. Hear them in your head. What do you hear? What’s the tone of voice? What emotion is it carrying? Is it the same wrath and indignation as in the Noah’s Ark story or the Sodom and Gomorrah story? No, it’s not. This is fear. God is afraid. He never specifically says that this is wrong much less why it’s wrong. He just feels threatened. If Man has his s**t together, He doesn’t need God. Only a weak and divided and confused humanity needs God. How do we know that? God said so. But there is hope. Today Man is exploring the heavens, cracking the code of Life, wiring up the planet so everyone can talk to everyone else again—God just slowed us down, He didn’t stop us. The Tower of Babel is being built again and we will see it done in our lifetime.”
And on that note, Merry Christmas.
LA replies:
You had this in your head when you were 18?
Your analysis of God’s concerns was very insightful, but then you got it all wrong on the most important point. You’re looking at God as though he were a human leader or tyrant afraid of being dumped and losing his power. That’s wrong. He is God, looking out for what is best for man. He knows that if the human race becomes unified into a single global community with no restraints on its desires, it will become demonic and begin worshipping itself as God. It is from this terrible fate that God is saving humanity when he breaks up Babel and sends people in different directions to form different nations speaking different languages.
You fail to understand this. In classic gnostic/leftist fashion,—exactly like the ancient gnostics, and exactly like Marx—you see God in human terms, as some kind of sinister bully whose rule must be broken. Far from understanding that it’s bad for man to try to replace God, to become like a god, or to imagine himself to be a god, you believe in man’s self-divinization, and you make such self-divinization of mankind the ultimate goal of politics. Again, exactly like Marx.
You told me years ago that as a result of the fall of Soviet Communism you stopped believing in Marxism, stopped believing in all “big truths,” and changed to a liberal position where your main concern was to prevent other people (e.g. conservatives) from imposing their “big truths” on you. But evidently this is not the case. You have not given up Communist-style “big truths.” You’ve just changed their form. You still believe in the Brotherhood of Man, as you told me last year, and in a single global government, as you mentioned earlier in this current thread. Except that instead of seeking to bring about the Brotherhood of Man and global government by means of Communism, you seek to bring them about by means of global open borders, global anti-climate change, global Cap and Trade.
Ken Hechtman replies:
I had a lot of Aleister Crowley and Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson in my head in those days. Plus a lot of acid. It helped. Also, I’d just escaped (some people might say “graduated”) from 12 years of Jewish school. If I was given the chance to whup a rabbi upside the head, I was going to take it.
I guess what you’ve described above is the “straight line” I was talking about. You look at these ideas and say “These are fallacies Western Civilization considered and dismissed 2,000 years ago.” I look at them and say, “These are currents that have been part of Western Civilization as long as there’s been a Western Civilization.” [LA replies: yes, and as long as there’s been truth, there’s been falsity, and as long as there’s been good, there’s been evil. That doesn’t mean that falsity is true and that evil is good.]
When I wrote up the “family resemblances” between the medieval heretic cults and the modern hard left sectarians in my last post, I wasn’t listing off positive qualities. I guess you could tell. But the way you describe the Roman gnostics, I’ll accept them as the good guys. If they held knowledge of good and evil above blind obedience, if they held communication above confusion, and cooperation above tribal strife, they had it right.
LA replies:
It’s remarkable how you switch from talking about overthrowing and replacing God with a single unified humanity and a single global goverrnment, to talking about preferring “knowledge over blind obedience,” and “communication over confusion.” In a one-man good cop / bad cop routine, you alternate between the most radical, revolutionary language and harmless sounding sentiments that any liberal would go along with. And this indeed is the way the left advances itself and wins support, by making bland and humane appeals to “communication over confusion,” and “cooperation over tribal strife,” that no decent person could oppose. But you yourself have shown us how such harmless sounding liberal sentiments are in reality a cover for the aim of creating a godless, global, all-powerful state.
Ken Hechtman writes:
I sent you those two quotes 25 minutes apart, but I wrote them 25 years apart. For me, that’s more than half a lifetime. I’m not as angry or absolutist as I was in 1985. I’m still not religious, but I’m not nearly as anti-religious as I was when I was 17.
Something else: When I (or the rest of the left) talk about “overthrowing God,” it’s a metaphor. To mean it literally, I’d need to believe a God exists. I don’t. So even if I take the Serpent or the Angel of Light as exemplary characters, I take them as exemplary fictional characters. Back in 1985, I accepted the premise that the text of Genesis 11 was literally true so that I could get in under the rabbi’s defenses and surprise him. I didn’t believe it then and I don’t believe it now. I still think it was a good little sermon, that’s why I remember it 25 years later. But today, I wouldn’t pretend to believe something I didn’t simply to annoy a rabbi.
December 26
Richard O. writes:
What you refer to as Mr. Hechtman’s “bland and humane appeals to ‘communication over confusion,’ and ‘cooperation over tribal strife’” help implement the liberal/progressive agenda of acquiring political power. The main weapon in the liberal armamentarium is to show that all aspects of traditional society are merely manifestations of primitive custom based on patriarchy, superstition, and rapacious elites. Anything about tribal life is confused and the priests of liberalism exist but to clarify and redirect debate away from considerations of tribal survival. (E.g., Rush is just an “entertainer,” or a “racist.”)
As we know from liberals, anything tribal is ipso facto irrational and inevitably leads to “strife” or, more to the point, oppression (a/k/a “resistance”). The value of customary ways is zero; the pursuit of vague future social, political, economic, and scientific benefits, priceless. Traditional culture isn’t the accumulated result of countless successful experiments that have proved their worth over time; it’s the work of troglodytes.
In fact, mere resistance to out groups is irrational, since anything “out” is necessarily good. Differently stated, anything “tribal” is vile and must yield to anything not of the tribe, be it, I kid you not, polygamy, clitoridectomy, dependency, feral behavior, honor killings, hostility to free speech, pedophilia, sacramental sodomy, assassination of opponents, patriarchy, honor killing, primitive legal systems, illegitimacy, class warfare, theocracy, or filthy, violent, oppositional behavior.
LA replies:
Thanks to Richard for this perfect summing up of the real meaning of Ken Hechtman’s position. In the Hechtman/leftist view, everything that we are, everything that we have ever been, is tribalism, which means bigotry, violence, superstition, and oppression; and in order to cure ourselves of our disgusting tribalism, we must open our borders to and allow our society to be taken over by the most tribalist, bigoted, superstitious, oppressive people on earth.
This is the leftist impulse which, in the name of some imagined good that cannot be realized this world, destroys the actual goods that exist—goods that are the product of centuries and millennia of striving. This is the leftist evil which, wherever it rises to power, destroys civilization and ends up with piles of dead bodies.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 22, 2009 10:57 PM | Send
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