The Holocaust and The Truth About Genocide

How could it happen in Europe?

If history was a panorama dome, it might be  possible to observe a vista of the  Holocaust’s  European antecedents.    We would then be witness to Islam’s armies sweeping across Middle Eastern deserts and North Africa, slaughtering Jews wherever they found them ; the Crusaders leaving behind them rivers of Jewish blood flowing in the gutters of villages in the  Rhineland and France;   the Jews of York  being  massacred  in Clifford’s Tower; the Inquisitors of  Spain and their auto de fé slashing a scar across the face of that country that has never truly healed;   Chmielnicki’s Cossacks of 17th Century Russia, galloping across the foothills of the Ukraine, raping, pillaging and murdering Jews  unchallenged; the pogroms of  Tsar Alexander III in the early 1880s , the first modern instances of  state sanctioned murder and despoliation of Jews;  the Kishniev massacre of 1905,  a final  stake into the heart of Old Russia.

Unabated and unabashed Jew killing became a European specialty and so it is often claimed by modern historians that Adolf Hitler’s campaign to destroy the Jews was  merely a culmination of centuries of such slaughter.  But that theory has always rankled with me.    The Holocaust stands alone in  history as a high water mark, not just of Jewish slaughter but also of human degradation.  The two had to combine to produce something as truly brutal and barbaric as the mechanized slaughter of Jews.  The unending question, the one that never truly ceases to pound  in my brain is  -  how was it possible for the German people to have perpetrated such a horrifying program of inhumanity with barely a ripple  of conscience?

The most immediate answer to that question is that for those who executed their orders, as well as those whose silence made them complicit in the Holocaust’s perpetration, it was not inhumanity at all.  Rather, it was a service to mankind.

The very idea that one could facilitate the creation of a better world by the elimination of the less worthy elements in it, was a function not simply of German antisemitism but of a modern nihilism and entropy that had been metastasizing in Western civilization for a century.  Darwin’s theory of natural selection and survival of the fittest (and the Social Darwinism which emerged from it); Einstein’s theory of relativity which suggested that there were other dimensions to the universe and that time and space were not a continuum ; Freud’s probing of the subconscious, exposing man’s basic impulses as fundamentally barbaric;  the rampant growth of  political ideologies which found the cause of man’s unhappiness rooted  in capitalism, wealth and greed;  Nietzsche’ s insistence that God was dead –  all nurtured  the growing acceptance that life had little purpose beyond immediate gratification of one’s senses.  It ultimately lead to an erosion of religious faith and the notion that moral strictures and codes were essentially human constructs designed as instruments of power rather than as  a path to purpose, meaning and civilized conduct.

The eugenics movement of the early 2oth Century became the most fitting scientific analog to this collapsing sense of humanity.   The notion that humans can and should be selectively bred to improve the species began in 1865 with Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, who believed that heredity governed  talent and character, just as it does eye color and facial features.  He coined the term  ” eugenics ” in 1883,  deriving it from the Greek “good in birth”    In  the early 20th Century eugenics was a serious intellectual and political movement with courses offered in 350 American universities and endorsed in over 90% of high school biology text books.   In 1920, two esteemed German academics Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche published Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life ( Die Freigabe der Vernichtung Lebensunwerten Lebens)  in which they argued that some humans had greater moral worth than others.  Here they suggested that physicians ought to be allowed to kill people deemed unworthy of life including the “terminally ill and mortally wounded; ” incurable idiots” and the”unconscious”   This was all  fifteen years before the Nazis instituted their own euthanasia programs.

And if you believe that eugenics was just a  European intellectual past time, think again.  In my June, 2009 piece California Roots of the Eugenics Movement, I describe how the Golden State became the leading sterilizer in the nation, putting to the knife to over 60,000 citizens deemed unworthy of reproduction, before a moratorium was called  on the practice in the early 1960s.  Eugenics enthusiasts were numbered among some of the West’s most  famous political and intellectual leaders on both sides of the Atlantic and these included  Sir Winston Churchill, H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Theodore Roosevelt.

It is any wonder then that the Germans felt at considerable ease committing (in 1904), the first genocide of the century in South West Africa – all but wiping out the Herero natives there?   Or that the Turks, eleven years later, could mercilessly drive one million  Armenians from their ancestral homes and force them on a death march which resulted in the disappearance of 90 per cent of the population?  Or that Josef Stalin in the 1930s could allow five million Ukrainians to slowly perish from starvation?   And that all these events occurred years before the advent of the Second World War?  These perpetrators had been schooled for years  in the idea of the Üntermensch – that there were lesser beings who populated the planet and whose existence stood in the way of human progress.

Perhaps this should give us pause then to remember that genocide never begins with guns, machetes and knives, but with ideas.  The Nazis only built on the concepts that, by the time they came to power, had been percolating through Western intellectual life for more than 60 years.

In our own day, we can’t forget that there are bio-ethicists and philosophers such as Princeton University’s Peter Singer who argue quite seriously that infants, as human beings absent cognition, have no right to life  at all – at least no more than baby chimpanzees.

Years ago I remember a celebrated Australian journalist writing that whenever he contemplated the Holocaust, his biggest nightmare was not that he could have been a concentration camp victim, but that he could have been one of the guards.

This is a reminder to those of us who are regularly exposed to the noxious arguments of supporters of assisted suicide, euthanasia, abortion and  mercy killing and who daily see the reality of animal life raised to the sanctity of human life, that there might indeed be modern day forms of  “permission to destroy life unworthy of life.”   Perhaps it can make us all realize that the horrors of the Holocaust began with the dehumanization of those incapable of either defending or speaking for themselves, decades  before the blueprint of the first gas chamber was set to paper.

How could it happen in Europe?  The real question – and an ongoing one – is how could it have happened in the human soul?

Ballad of a Thin Man

“You’ve been with the professors 
And they’ve all liked your looks
With great lawyers you have
Discussed lepers and crooks
You’ve been through all of
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books
You’re very well read
It’s well known. 

But something is happening here

But you don’t know what it is

Do you, Mr. Jones?”

                                 -  Bob Dylan

 Poor Philip Jones.   To think that only a few months ago he was riding the crest of the Climate Change wave, certain that the adulation would continue to sweep him to a plateau of  glory as one of the planet’s saviors.   Now his career and scientific reputation are in about as much of a mess as the office in which he lost the vital research data upon which the world has written its own doomsday scenario.  

Three admissions – that data for the vital “hockey stick” has gone missing in Jones’ mountain of disorganized office documents;   that there  has been no trackable global warming since 1995;  and that warming periods have happened before but not due to man-made changes  – constitute some of the most provocative developments in over thrity years of global warming advocacy. 

That is because Philip Jones is one of the world’s leading climatologists and his scientific studies regarded as so unimpeachbale  by the IPCC ( Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) – the U.N. body charged with determing whether man-made activity is causing global warming, that his work has rarely ever been challenged by his peers, and certainly not by acolytes such as Al Gore or many members of the media. 

Jones spilled forth all these revelations on Monday in an interview with the BBC.   Yet even more mind spinning was this astonishing admission: 

“Prof. Jones agreed that scientists on both sides of the debate could suffer sometimes from a “bunker mentality”.  He said “sceptics” who doubted his climate record should compile their own dataset from material publicly available in the US.”

Ahem…..debate?   Six months ago you could not get Mr. Jones, Mr. Gore or any member of the climate change chorus to admit that there was any debate at all.  In fact, most had gone on record declaring  that global warming science was settled and beyond dispute.

Yet “compiling their own dataset” was exactly what the most persistent climate skpetics, scientists such as Richard Lindzen, Edward Wegman, Fred Singer and Robert Carter, have been doing for decades.

For Jones, Gore and many of their supporters in the media however, these men were not skeptics at all but deniers, as pernicious and as notorious as other any deniers of historical fact, including the Holocaust:

Said Mr. Gore in 2006:

“Fifteen percent of the people believe the moon landing was staged on some movie lot and a somewhat smaller number believe the Earth is flat. They all get together on a Saturdy night and party with global warming deniers.

Scott Pelley, of CBS’ 60 Minutes, when asked by CBS reporter Brian Montopoli in March 2006, why he did not pause to acknowledge global warming skeptics, responded:

“ If I do an interview with Elie Wiesel am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?”

Newsweek joined that claque in August, 2007 with its famous cover story on global warming when Sharon Begley labelled these scientists:

   “ part of the denial machine, funded by the energy industry and organized by corrupt right wing lobbies.”

In the midst of the coldest winter in the northern hemisphere in in 130 years, with snow at one point blanketing 48 out of 50 states in the United States and rivers freezing in places they have not done so in 200 years, one would be hard put to understand any resistance to alternative ways of looking at global weather patterns.

For Philip Jones, that opportunity may have come a little too late.  But his acknowledgement that there might exist legitimate critiques of the science of global warming, is evidence that ‘something’ is certainly happening here, and that his chorus may soon be singing a very different tune.

Ballad of a thin man indeed.

More Evidence of Scientists Behaving Badly

Eric Felten, in the Weekend Wall Street Journal this week, adds to the list of malfeasants outlined in my piece Politics in Science. Besides pointing out some of the more egregious Climategate examples he adds:

• Dr. Scott S. Reuben of the  Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, MA  – a respected anesthesiologist and researcher in pain medications, who had fabricated results in up to 21 articles to  in order to secure grants from pharamaceutical companies.
• Cello Energy of Alabama, a company revealed to have dressed up plain old fossil fuels and biodiesel.  For their efforts, a federal jury in Alabama found that investors in Cello Energy had been defrauded of $10.4 m and awarded against the company.
• In England, Lancet, the country’s premiere medical journal ( and recently the purveyor of the nonsense that Palestinian wife beating was brought on by the indignities of the Israeli occupation), retracted its support for an article which, twelve years ago  had linked vaccines and the advent of autism in young children, resulting in thousands of deaths of young children from diseases such as whooping cough which had disappeared in the late 19th Century.
• Also  in England, two prominent stem cell researchers went public with their accusations against their discipline’s peer review process claiming that ” flawed and unoriginal work get published, while publication of truly original findings are either delayed or rejected.”

Eight weeks ago, in the Los Angeles Times, columnist Tim Rutten in the wake of the Climategate scandal,  asked the absurdly naive question,

“What are we to believe: that huge numbers of British and American scientists have entered into a conspiracy to dupe the world on climate change? Why? What would they stand to gain?”

Well, Tim, try money, power and fame.  They seem to be sufficient enough inducements for other human beings to commence a descent into corruption.  Or are scientists beyond the reach of human avarice?  A question to ponder as the veil is increasingly lifted on other scientists behaving badly.

A New Challenge to Climate Change

Is the climate change industry under seige? According to this latest piece from the Wall Street Journal  Climate Change Claim on Glaciers Under Fire that may be exactly the case.

In its 2007 report the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ( IPPC) claimed that the Himalayan Glaciers, which feed the rivers that in turn feed much of South Asia, were very likely to disappear by the year 2035.

” The receding and thinning of the Glaciers can be attributed to the (sic) global warming due to anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases.”     The report stated.

But that, apparently is not the case, as IPPC chief, Rajendra Pachuari stated this week when he acknowledged that the claim was ” pooorly substantiated”

“ The IPCC report stated that the total area of Himalayan glaciers would likely shrink from 500,000 square kilometers to 100,000 square kilometers by 2035. The report cited a 2005 study by the World Wildlife Fund, an environmental advocacy group. That study cited a 1999 article in New Scientist magazine that quoted Indian glacier expert Syed Hasnain as saying Himalayan glaciers could disappear “within forty years.”

The  funny thing is that this is a self-correction – coming as it does directly from the mouth of the very organization that has been the most forceful proponent of man made global warming.

So  lets get this straight:   The data that operated as the basis of the IPCC report was based on a quote from a 2005 report by another environmental group which had relied on a 1999 quote from an Indian glaciologist.   Does that sound like sound scientific inquiry to you?  It doesn’t  to me and nor does the rest of the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  The charter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is

“… to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation. IPCC reports should be neutral with respect to policy.”.

This makes it a high-profile single-focus organization whose existence depends on its own reports. In other words it has a vested interest in promoting claims that would guarantee its funding and justify its continued existence.

This alone would be reason enough to closely examine its procedures and claims but the situation is made worse by the involvement of governments. These governments not only fund the IPCC but apparently accept its claims without question and allocate funding for climate research on the basis of those findings, then repeat the process when the next IPCC Assessment Report draws on the findings of that government-sponsored research to support its hypothesis.

In case you have forgotten the IPCC shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore and is the organization most lauded as having provided the world with the certainty of anthropogenic global warming.

But from the very beginings of its creation in 1988, the IPCC has been a political body first and a scientific body only second.

The IPCC was established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Its mission, to assess the risk of human-induced climate change  has turned it into a single minded attack machine for anyone who dissents from the conventional view of anthropogenic global warming.

But from its earliest years inthe 1990s, this flagship of the global warming armada developed a distinctly political purpose.  One of the more alarming revelations is that of the controversy which surrounded the IPCC’s second report, The Science of Climate Change in 1995.  According to insiders, the report had originally concluded that there was no evidence that human beings have had any influence on the climate. Yet the original version of the report was substantially edited with 15 different sections of Chapter 8 ( the chapter dealing with the extent of human influence) being amended to reflect the opposite point of view. The Executive Summary to the report, the only part that in practise most politicians ever read, clearly hewed to the accepted fact of human interference, contrary to the conclusions of the original manuscript.

That editorial hit job was almost certainly the work of IPPC’s first chairman, the alarmist Swedish professor Bert Bolin. But he did not get away scot free. Professor Frederick Seitz, the former chairman of the American Science Academy, wrote in the Wall Street Journal on June 12th, 1996 that  ” I have never before witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer review process than the events that led to this IPCC report.”

He proceeded to demand that the IPCC process be abandoned. From then on,the IPPC’s serial campaign of disinformation only grew more robust and continues today as the flagship of the global warming armada.In discussions with the AGW proponents climate skeptics have often been often told that their views should first be published in peer-reviewed journals before they can be taken into consideration. At first sight this seems a reasonable requirement. But on closer scrutiny this argument is open to criticism. It is a good tradition in science that anybody may criticise any scientific statement with good arguments, irrespective of his or her position or background. However, often the climate establishment does not respect this tradition. On the contrary, as a rule only insiders are allowed to participate in the discussion. In this way an official though flawed idea can survive for a very long time. This has happened many times before in the history of science.

This perhaps explains how an  orphan idea central to the global warming community is coddled and nurtured within the  walls of fortress of climate change and any attack upon it viciously thwarted as an an attack upon reason itself.

The fact that the IPPC is beginning to eat its own young, is a sign that that the tables have turned.  Watch out in the next 12 months as the fortress walls begin to crumble under reaction to  such attacks as ‘Climate Gate’ and the work of other dissenters which will gain much greater public traction.

It is about time the IPCC is challenged in this way.  And it will be a blessing to the millions of people in the West whose lives have already been adversely affected by perverse and inimical legislation based on spurious science.

Google’s China Problem

Ten years ago, when I was working with Israeli internet  start ups, I brought a representative from an Israeli internet voice recognition company to Los Angeles.  In the course of his presentation to a group of investors, he described a meeting with Chinese officials in Beijing.   He said that for hours they peppered him with questions about security, questions he had never encountered  from  any government official before.    When he asked what was the source of fascination, it  was explained to him that his interlocutors were not as concerned with how to bring the new technology into the country, as with  how to keep it out.

Everyone has known for years that China is the fastest growing  market in the world for both the production and sale of goods.   But with its 1.3 billion person population, China also happens to be the world’s largest  potential market for information technology.

In recent years many of the landmark Internet operations of the United States, including Microsoft, Apple and Google have created beachheads in this market hoping to cash in on the likely explosive opening of this new frontier once Chinese state controls are loosened.

Last week Google became the first of the big three to finally accept that the Chinese fist is not going to be unclenched anytime soon.  Its threatened withdrawal from the Chinese market, after access to many of the major websites such as ebay, Youtube and Facebook had been blocked by the Chinese firewall known as Green Dam, was a last straw.  In recent weeks, at least 700 Web sites seem to have been shut down or blocked—on top of tens of thousands of foreign online services that were  already inaccessible. Individuals have been banned from registering new domain names in China, and authorities are turning the heat up on existing domains.

The lockdown has many companies worried because it is not simply access to information that is involved.   It is also access to proprietary technology that can apparently be scooped up by the Chinese firewall.  Cyberspying is a great threat to companies such as Google which rely on an interlinked network of proprietary technologies to engineer its formidable search engines.   Such piracy , is, of course, one of the known hazards of doing business in China.  But when you talk about theft of the very technology which makes a service such as Google unique, then there is cause for alarm.

For years, companies doing business in China recognized that they had to play by the Chinese rules if they wanted to succeed there.  Tough government regulations have always made it clear to companies from General Motors to  Motorola that they could reap the harvest of the Chinese market only if they were prepared to play by the rules.   For the past twenty years they have done just that.

But Google’s defiance at the latest outrage may be the first stone thrown in a battle with the Chinese which will involve not just companies but governments all over the world.   Already the White House has  come forcefully to the defense of Google demanding that China’s business practices conform with Western standards.  Other countries may soon follow suit.

What is clear is that the Chinese government is attempting to buy itself time.   It well knows that it was information that ultimately brought down Communism in Eastern Europe and the way to stem the ever present threat of a burgeoning counter-revolutionary force is to build barriers to that information.   But economic liberalization is meaningless without access to this information.  And prosperity, the one thing the Chinese leaders are certain is going to vouchsafe the longevity of their regime, will not continue to grow without it.

Unfortunately for the Chinese, growing prosperity also brings with it the demand for civil rights – as has been shown in almost every middle class -led revolution of the past 250 years.  The Chinese are fighting a battle they will not be able to win, and they know it.  One day the regime will topple, under the weight of a popular revolt from those who have access to information about the West and its many freedoms and will demand the same for themselves.

When it will happen , we do not know.   But as events in Berlin 20 years ago revealed to us,  a regime so seemingly certain of its longevity,  can be swept away in less time than it takes it punch a hole in a wall.

Or maybe in the time it takes to say ” Google.”

Identifying the True Idiots

Rolling Stone, that doyen of political correctness and bastion of hate for anything that is conservative, published this week its latest attack on the efforts to derail the global warming movement.    With an all black cover and absent any other graphics ( the funereal intent not going unobserved), the front cover screams its imprecations (in red) :  You Idiots:  Meet the Planet’s Worst Enemies.    The feature inside, The Climate Killers, proceeds to identify seventeen men whom it alleges are all facilitating the destruction of the planet.   They include investor Warren Buffett who, it claims,  invests billions in carbon-polluting industries; Rupert Murdoch, whose papers have become the leading source of disinformation about climate change; Fred Singer , author of Nature, Not Human Activity Rules the Climate and 85 -year -old professor emeritus in environmental science at the University of Virginia who is labeled a  ” hack scientist”; John McCain, who hasn’t done enough, apparently, to buttress his own beliefs in man-made global warming; Senator James Inhofe, who has led the republican charge in Congress against climate change legislation; George Will, the country’s leading commentator whom it regards as an anti-climate change ideologue masquerading as an intellectual, and several CEOs of leading coal and oil companies.

The article, in brash Rolling Stone style, does not make the case for global warming.  It clearly feels that it doesn’t have to. The preceding piece As the World Burns merely rattles off a list of catastrophes that every conscious human must already surely know.

For instance that:

” The Arctic is melting, wildfires are turning into infernos, warm-weather insects are devouring forests, droughts are getting longer and more lethal. And the more we learn about climate change, the more it becomes apparent how enormous the risks are. Just a few years ago, researchers estimated that sea levels would likely rise 17 inches by 2100. Now they believe it could be three feet or more — a cataclysmic shift that would doom many of the world’s cities, including London and New Orleans, and create tens of millions of climate refugees.”

There are no authorities cited for these views;  no reference to external data, field research or an offering of  independent studies.   There is no mention anywhere in the ten pages of the scandal, now  famously referred to as Climate Gate – which offers evidence of collusion and conspiracy on the part of leading global warming advocates to defraud the public. Nor is there any attempt to provide a level of balance to the discussion, preferring  to launch epithets and bromides against the ‘idiots’ who would deny the veracity of their claims.

In other words, there is no sense in which this piece can be regarded as journalism.  It is only an angry screed, unsubstantiated and full of deliberate obfuscations, such as the allegation that every one of the seventeen men on the list can be regarded as a stooge of the fossil fuel industry; that none of them could care less about the future of the planet or about the environment; that greed rules their world view.

Sophomoric, hyperbolic and poorly researched, the feature does little to hoist Rolling Stone much above the noisy yellow journalism of the tabloids.  It verifies what I have felt about the magazine for years – that rather than become a leading voice of the intellectual progressive left, as it might wish to characterize itself,  it has become an anti-intellectual repository of hate and anger poised against anyone who would challenge its ethos of political, sexual and economic liberation.

What a shame the progressive left allows itself to be under served by such a rank, also ran publication, steeped in oppositional politics yet nihilistically unsure of what it truly values.  How sad that any thinking person who reads this awful piece of writing, must come away with the opinion that  the crude  appellation of ” idiot” has somehow been slapped onto the wrong individuals.

WHAT IS ON YOUR AGENDA?

The word “agenda”  has left behind it something of a troubled etymological trail. Once defined as a list of things to be done or considered, ‘agenda’ today, has come to represent something more covert and sinister involving ulterior motives and driven by considerations hidden from the usual realm of common experience. The promulgation of the U.N’s Agenda 21 might have had something to do with that change in definition.  Agenda 21  was  a program first disseminated at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (Earth Summit), held in Rio de Janeiro on June 14, 1992, where 178 governments voted to adopt it.  The program laid out what the gathered representatives of the world governments agreed needed to be done to reduce wasteful and inefficient consumption patterns in some parts of the world while encouraging increased but sustainable development in others.  In a 40 chapter document, Agenda 21 outlined its plan for the control of the Earth and its resources, offering no less than the complete recalibration of human society and a re-structured approach to managing over-population, over-consumption and the Earth’s life-supporting capacity. This, in turn , was built on the premises of General Assembly Resolution 44/228 of 22 December 1989, which was adopted when the nations of the world called for the commission of  the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, and on the acceptance of the need to take a balanced and integrated approach to environmental and development questions. Yet over the past 17 years the implementation and the influence of the Agenda has been neither balanced nor integrated.  Rather it has been used as a tool of an elite multinational bureaucracy to undermine national sovereignty, suppress individual rights, increase restrictions on indivudal mobility , squlech opportunity and raise the needs of the environment above that of humanity. With the stamp of a supposedly multilateral consensus, the Agenda  is now spreading throughout the world under the mantle of the Education for Sustainability Movement.  This movement, through a variety of plans and designs,  calls for an end to the structure of western civilization as we know it.    The elimination of private property, the restructuring of the family unit, the negation of national sovereignty,  a proscription on growth, increasing restrictions on mobility and access to opportunity and the control of human procreation  - are all matters addressed by the sustainability movement. Moreover, it addresses a host of features of modern society which it deems unsustainable. What are they? According to the Global Biodiversity Assessment Report, a publication of the United Nations Environment Program ( UNEP) and as reported by Freedom Advocates,  they include golf courses, ski runs, scuba diving, synthetic drugs, railroads, paved roads, consumerism, fish ponds, modern hunting  and irrigation.  All are, in one way or another, prohibited by the sustainability agenda in the interests of an earth which will be protected from the hand of human degradation. There can be few doubts of the rapid spread of  this environmental dogma throughout educated elites of the Western world. In Britain this month, sustainability and environmentalism was ruled by a UK judge a “protected religious belief” Over 650 Presidents of Colleges in the United States have signed on  to the Education for Sustainability Movement, signing the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment created by the advocacy group Second Nature and supported by several other groups. Other college administrators are creating sustainability programs in the residence life, student activities, and buildings and grounds. UNESCO has called the decade of 2005-2015 The Decade of Sustainable Development. The United States itself bought into this when the Congress passed all provisions of the Higher Education Sustainability Act (HESA) as part of the new Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 (HR 4137) in July 2008  which has created pioneering “University Sustainability Grants”  offering competitive grants to institutions and associations of higher education to develop, implement and evaluate sustainability curricula, practices, and academic programs. California State University in Chico held its fifth annual  This Way to Sustainability Conference earlier this month, – the largest  international conference yet on sustainable development with over 100 speakers and 1,000 participants on subjects ranging from “ Tools for Leadership and Change” to “ Happiness.” (If anyone needs an idea of the extent to which the sustainability movement is seeking influence in education, go no further than viewing the 100 “ Green” courses” offered by the same university  at  (http://cypress.csuchico.edu/APO/Course_net1/GreenCourses.aspx) The sustainability movement is also inordinately pagan in its practices and outlook. In 1992, Maurice Strong, the Secretary-General of the Earth Conference, hinted at the overtly religious agenda proposed for a future Earth Charter, when in his opening address to the Rio delegates he said, “It is the responsibility of each human being today to choose between the force of darkness and the force of light…….We must therefore transform our attitudes and adopt a renewed respect for the superior laws of Divine Nature.”  Strong finished with unanimous applause from the crowd. In anticipation of the conference, his wife, Hanne Strong, held a three-week vigil with Wisdomkeepers, a group of “global transformationalists.” Through round-the-clock sacred fire, drumbeat, and meditation, the group helped hold the “energy pattern” for the duration of the summit. As if to prove the wild eyed ambition of  this New Age millenarianism, authors of the Earth Charter, an environmental manifesto promulgated at a UNESCO meeting held in Paris in March, 2000 commissioned the building of The Ark of Hope ,  a latter day replica of the Ark of the Covenant as a place of refuge for the Earth Charter document.The Ark was later brought on foot to New York City from Vermont (just as the Ancient Israelites had once carried their Ark) and exhibited at the United Nations. Is it any wonder that Strong would  commentafter the promulgation of the Earth Charter:  “The real goal of the Earth Charter is that it will in fact become like the Ten Commandments.”   Or that Mikhail Gorbachev, one of the  world’s leading proponents of sustainability  could state: “ Do not do unto the environment of others what you do not want done to your own environment….My hope is that this Charter will be a kind of Ten Commandments, a ‘Sermon on the Mount’, that provides a guide for human behavior toward the environment in the next century.” There is little doubt this drive towards sustainability is part and parcel of the general environmental movement – embraced by such seemingly benign NGOs as the Sierra Club, World Wildlife Fund, National Wildlife Federation and even  our own National Parks Service.  These institutions, over the past twenty years, have become wholly radicalized by environmental elites who view themselves as the guardians of  an earth pledged to protect us against human environmental degradation.  But because sustainability presents itself under the mask of environmentalism, few people question its underlying motives. They fail to understand that their “Green movement,” so apparently in keeping with responsible management of our planet and its resources, has morphed into a pseudo-religion, with its own definition of heretics and apostates and supported by communists, anarchists and New Age acolytes who, locked in an unholy alliance, want to change our lives. The movement, however, is not marching forward without its watchdogs and robust critics.  Holly Swanson, founding director of an Oregon-based organization called Operation Green Out that works “to get Green politics out in the open and out of the classroom,” and the author of Set Up and Sold Out:  What Green Really Means is a brilliant advocate within the anti-sustainability movement.  The National Association of Scholar’s Ashley Thorne reports regularly on the NAS’ website on developments in sustainability education. Today, environmentalists, academics, celebrities and even multi-national corporations are touting “going green” as synonymous with social responsibility. Yet as we enter the second decade of this century, we would be well advised to take a cynical view of this movement and understand that the “Green” they are endorsing, rarely represents the drive for environmental excellence.  Instead it is an attempt to impose a revolutionary social order upon humanity, inspiring a new form of religion observance and seeking to elevate the importance of environmental concerns well above humans needs. If you value the life you live today, then you better understand all of this – no matter what’s on your own agenda.

THE HEAVY TREAD OF INTOLERANCE

Leftist academics are quite fond of proclaiming that freedom of speech in America is an illusion.  Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Ward Churchill, Tariq Ali and many of their  acolytes have consistently argued that their views are not given sufficient coverage in the press and that the doors of many institutions remain closed to the expression of their views.

The charge itself is notoriously off  the mark.   For not only are these doyens of the far left free to catapult their poisonous cocktail of anti- Americanism, anti-Semitism and general contempt for American exceptionalism into our academic institutions, they have also become campus media darlings, their pronouncements taken with the utmost seriousness and afforded standing ovations for their most prolix and incendiary comments.

Rather, it would seem that those who stand for true Western values of openness and debate have a much better case for alleging creeping censorship in the United States.

Cases in point:

• On July 9, Robert Spencer was scheduled to speak at the American Library Association convention in Chicago but was canceled at the last minute after pressure from the Council on American-Islamic.  Spencer, the editor of JihadWatch.com and an associate fellow of the American Freedom Alliance, was invited to join a panel forum at the ALA’s annual General Meeting on the topic “Perspectives on Islam: Beyond the Stereotyping.” According to his attorney, William J. Becker Jr., as he was leaving to catch a plane for the event, Spencer learned that it had been cancelled. According to reports he later read on the Internet, Ahmed Rehab, Chicago executive director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), was responsible for bringing about the cancellation. In a letter to ALA, Rehab wrote: “I ask you to rescind the invitation to Mr. Spencer in order to maintain the integrity of the panel and the reputation of the ALA.” Mr. Spencer, he argued, offered “grotesque viewpoints that lie well outside the bounds of reason and civilized debate.”

• On September 20, an appearance the Norfolk Naval Base in Virginia by Brigitte Gabriel, a Christian Lebanese advocate for the rights of Muslim women and the President of Act for America! was cancelled.   It appears that the decision was made after  pressure was exerted by members of the Naval Academy amidst concerns about offending Muslims.  It was not the first time Ms. Gabriel has been confronted by hostility to  her appearances.  In April 2006  she was invited to give a lecture sponsored by Professor David Patterson of the Judaic Studies Program. When news about of her appearance spread, the Muslim community both on and off campus launched a full-scale campaign to stop her lecture. They demanded that Dr. Patterson cancel  her speech. E-mails flooded the University of Memphis administration and Dr. Patterson from Muslim students on campus and Muslims in the community and mosques.  

• On October 8,  the well known blogger Pamela Geller was scheduled to appear on The Eddie Burke Show on WBYR, “the best news and talk in Alaska,” to debate the “freelance journalist” and anti-Semite Alison Weir.  Because Weir made known her displeasure at the appearance of Geller known, Geller’s appearance was cancelled.  Weir appeared on the show alone.

• On October 12  David Horowitz,  President of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, was scheduled to speak at St. Louis University  but because of the title of his speech,  “Islamo-Fascism Awareness and Civil Rights., he too was cancelled.  Horowitz commented: “I have spoken at 400 universities. This is the first time my speech has been censored and stopped by an administration. And they are supposed to be the guardians of intellectual discourse.” Cary Nelson, the president of the American Association of University Professors, said that with this cancellation, St. Louis University “joins the small group of campuses that are universities in name only…. The free exchange of ideas is not just a comforting offshoot of higher education; it defines the fundamental nature of the enterprise.”

All of this follows hot on the heels of another outrage, this time perpetrated at Yale University.   Just two weeks ago, on October 1,  the University hosted both Kurt Westergaard, the cartoonist who had penned the notorious “Bomber turban cartoon,”  as well as Brandeis Prof. Jytte Klausen , author of  The Cartoons that Shook the World.   The latter had been subject in August to a last minute decision by Yale University Press to remove not only the reprinted 12 cartoons but also all representations of Muhammad.   What was the reaction of the Yale Faculty to the appearances?  As Peter Berkowitz recounts in Saturday’s weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal, while Westergaard’s appearance prompted a small faculty-led panel, the same faculty remained entirely silent and unmoved by Yale’s censorship of Ms. Klausen’s book.  Not one word of support was spoken on her behalf.

These acts of censorship, which smack of  the violation of free speech in its most egregious form, may be endemic to the kind of  intolerance we  now see metastizing  unchecked throughout our elite institutions.

This week the American Freedom Alliance learned of the spread of this disease through first hand experience.  A  premiere screening of the documentary  Darwin’s Dilemma,  at the Californa Science Center’s IMAX Theater, which was to be the kick off to our October Darwin Debates series, was cancelled by CSC on the claim that we had issued unapproved publicity for the event.   Nothing of the sort had occured.  The alleged publicity had been distributed by a third party, and, as we soon gleaned from emails and other sources, was a mere pretext for  the cancellation of a film whose message on intelligent design neither the California Science Center nor its national afilliate, the Smithsonian Institute, approves.  

The California Science Center,  I should remind my readers, is a public institution, paid by and for with tax payer dollars.  Its mission statement claims that the Center  “aspire(s) to ……inspire science learning in everyone….. because we value science as an indispensable tool for understanding our world, accessibility and inclusiveness….”

One would that such ‘inclusiveness’ would incorporate views it does not, as an institution, necessarily embrace.

Stated baldly, this public institution had a responsibility to  a California organization to allow free and open discussion of contoversial subjects of a scientifc nature, and no more so at an event that is actually labeled ‘a debate’, with both sides of the issue represented.

Needless to say, a law suit is pending.

AFA has found an alternative venue to replace the IMAX Theater, albeit at great expense and with a tinge of bitterness at being treated in such a reprehensible manner.

But the story is not over.

Those who live in the Los Angeles area now have an opportunity now to express their outrage, not just toward  the California Sceince Center, but to the entire throng of elite institutions who demonstrate consistent denial of First Amendment rights.   Join us in attending the new location for the screening on Sunday night, October 25 at the Davidson Conference Center at USC.   Make clear your disgust with the way an elite and high profile institution handled a freedom one might have thought it was pledged to protect.

Who knows,  if we cheer those films loudly enough maybe our voices will heard over the din of traffic at the California Science Center, just a quarter of a mile away.

CHARLES DARWIN’S UNHAPPY LEGACY

Many years ago I learned how thoroughly evolutionary theory had penetrated our culture. While watching the first installment of the Disney movie The Land Before Time with my sons I gazed with some amusement as colorful one celled organisms struggled through the soupy blue-green sludge to evolve, though several mutations and incarnations, into the adorable little dinos who would populate the movie and then, one day, the Earth.

Of course the nexus between that opaque little cell and the extraordinary creatures who would relentlessly pound the earth billions of years later is never clearly established. But then again, how the dinosaurs emerge speaking idiomatic English with outbursts of American slang is never made too clear either.   It all makes good television.

The question today is whether it all makes good science.

The 200^th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth will be celebrated this week, as will be his most famous work On The Origins of Species which was published in November, 1859 almost exactly 150 years ago. Back then the book hit Victorian England with the power of a full force gale, lifting the sheeting right off the rooftops of the Anglican Church and exposing the narrowness and impossibility of the Biblical narrative of Creation.

For the Church itself it was a call to arms since the evolutionary theory articulated by Darwin suggested that life could never have sprung into existence ab initio but required a slow process of mutation and transformation which probably took billions of years. In light of Darwin’s theory, it was then preposterous to declare the world only 5,000 years old and that man had entered it at more or less the same time as all other living creatures.

But the Darwinist revolution had an even more significant cosmological impact. If the Biblical narrative of Creation was demonstrably untrue, then perhaps the existence of a Deity, masterminding that Creation could also be dealt a death blow. Extrapolating further, order in the universe, and indeed its very purpose and meaning, could be questioned. Life, if one followed Darwin’s irreducible logic, actually had very little direction or purpose without the guiding hand of a Creator. Consistent Darwinism meant no life after death, no foundation for ethics, no free will, no ultimate meaning in life.

It is not an exaggeration then to state that the advent of Darwinism heralded the reign of secular humanism in British life and the eventual ennoblement of atheism throughout the western hemisphere. It was the midwife to Nietzcheian existentialism and the foster mother of 20^th Century nihilism. Today, evolutionary theory and the concept of scientific materialism that it enshrines has become an ideological fortress that one assaults at his own peril. You can barely whisper a word of doubt about evolutionary theory without being immediately shelled with lethal amounts of outrage and scorn by our intellectual elites. For them, evolutionary theory has not just become a building block of modern science, but an unassailable truth, as accurate as a mathematical formula and as empirically proven as the earth’s orbit of the sun.

That, of course, would be fine if evolutionary theory had been proven unassailable. But the fact is that the theory, over the past 150 years, has been repeatedly punctured, leaving gaping holes that have been extraordinary difficult to fill. Missing is the fossil evidence which would reveal how one species changed and adapted over several billion years to produce the final product. Or as physicist Gerald Schroeder puts it:

“ In the entire fossil record, with its millions of specimens, there has been found no midway transitional fossil at the basic levels of phylum….. no trace of an animal that was half the predecessor and half the successor of its parent group.”

In other words, no missing link.

On the contrary, the fossil record portrays the continuity of the same morphology of plant and animal forms for billions of years, only to be upset by a sudden transformation which began in the Cambrian period. Therefore evolutionary theory’s linear, gradual transformations of plant and animal life has not been proven, not enough at least to justify the Darwinists’ claim that the theory is incontrovertible. That proof may still be waiting, buried thousands of feet under the earth’s surface; or perhaps lying embedded on an ocean floor. But until it is revealed, the jury is still out on evolution.

I will leave to others, such as the molecular biologist Michael Behe in Darwin’s Black Box, the philosopher David Stove in Darwinian Fairy Tales ( an AFA recommended book of the month) or the mathematician William Dembski’s The Design of Life to amplify the claim that the proofs adduced by both Darwin and his successors have presented far more questions than they have ever answered. Suffice to say they show the Darwinian mechanism of chance variation and natural selection to be inadequate in accounting for the full diversity of life in the universe.

But I wouldn’t tell that to Richard Dawkins. The best selling author who has made millions debunking religious faith has declared that “ it is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane.” The naturalist Edmund O. Wilson has stated that “ evolutionary theory is so ingrained in our intellectual approach to the world that anyone who disavows it should be regarded as mentally incompetent.” The Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg has stated that from all his research into the substance and mechanics of the universe he finds the universe to be pointless and “only a little above the level of farce – and only a fool would think otherwise.” These guardians of evolutionary theory, together with the late professors Stephen J. Gould and Carl Sagan have become the celebrity high priests of a movement that they regard – and demand that society regard – as inviolable.

But be warned. The dogmatism that has attached to the defense of evolutionary theory since its beginnings, can also stand accused as the progenitor of some of the most malign practices and political movements of the 20th century. The pervasive Darwinian notion of the survival of the fittest (a term coined not by Darwin but by the 19^th Century philologist Herbert Spencer) gave Nazi propaganda regarding Jewish unfitness for life most of its intellectual heft. Marxism ( and Leninism for that matter) built on the notion of static inherent social conditions, a sociological variant of Darwinism and relied heavily on the necessity for violent confrontation rather than dialogue and cooperation in seeking to redress social wrongs. The eugenics movement of the 1930s, which sought to isolate, quarantine and ultimately eradicate defective human genes, led 30 U.S. states by 1935 to enact forced sterilization laws. At the legal level, the American eugenics crusade culminated in the infamous Supreme Court decision in Buck vs Bell, where Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. declared that compulsory sterilization for the mentally handicapped was constitutional because, afterall, “ three generations of imbeciles is enough.”

Extreme shades of multiculturalism, feminism and environmentalism today further represent forms of the same scientific materialism. Proponents of these ideologies often assert that human beings are so programmed by their race, gender or class that their political views, morality and religious beliefs are mere mechanical by-products of their social condition and that nothing can change them. This, of course, leads to the refusal to debate or discuss with seriousness the basis for their complaints against our society and often leads to violent confrontation.

And yet the wonder of how life began stubbornly persists. You don’t need to be a Nobel Prize winning scientist or a Sorbonne educated philosopher to understand the issue. One view of the night sky with the understanding that the light of any star you see may have been traveling towards you for a million years or the examination through a microscope of the infinite complexity of a cell – a galaxy unto itself - should be enough to make even a child ask powerful questions about ultimate cause. Science, of course, has helped us along in capturing this awe and wonder. We know, for instance, that almost four billion years ago, an exquisite, efficient system for encoding and transmitting the information necessary to guide an organism’s development from seed to adult, appeared. That same system, the double helix of our genetic DNA, guides the growth and characteristics of all living organisms. We also know that the development of a cell requires a perfect configuration of approximately 250 proteins and that the odds of this arrangement occurring by random chance from nothing, is several trillion to one.

The question then that any astronomer, molecular biologist and philosopher worth his salt must ask, is where did it all begin? Where did that first extraordinary cell which became the progenitor for all life derive its origins? Why did it develop and what, in the end, was its purpose?

Evolutionary biologists have no convincing answers for any of these questions.

Given this huge inadequacy, one is entitled to ask how is it possible to have such an intricately structured universe of such deep complexity, largely beyond human understanding or comprehension, and not be impressed by the hand of design? Curiously it is the scientific evidence – the significant discoveries of gravity, relativity, DNA, quantum mechanics and molecular biology and their irreducible complexity ( to borrow a term from Michael Behe) that points to the reality of intelligence in the origins and development of life.

The Intelligent Design theory, advanced by the authors I identify above, highlighted in Ben Stein’s excellent documentary Expelled and supported by hundreds of other scientists, philosophers and commentators throughout the world, does not demand to be the only theory advanced to explain the origins of life. But it demands and deserves to be heard.

But it is not heard, at least not audibly enough. Professors on our college campuses who even hint at the possibility of intelligent design suffer the threat of censure, research grant cuts and even termination. Books on intelligent design cannot be found in many college or community libraries or even in many book stores, as I found to my surprise in conducting research for this article. Scientists who espouse intelligent design are ridiculed on talk shows and news programs as simplistic born-again Christians, with a religious agenda, even if they practice no religion. A virtual witch hunt ensues in our society for those who wish to pursue alternative theories to evolutionary theory.

Oddly enough, it is science itself which has opened up the questions about intelligent design by leaving unanswered fundamental questions. Shouldn’t science then be the vehicle to examine it more fully? Do not the demands of free inquiry, one of the hallmarks of academic freedom and one of the absolute necessities for human progress, require our universities to take countervailing theories which seek to plug the gaping holes in old ideas with a level of seriousness?

Since the late 1850s we have seen where fanatical adherence to a philosophy and theory which brooks no opposition can lead. In the ontological approach it propounds, evolutionary theory has not led to the discovery of universal truths. On the contrary, the atheism of which evolutionary theory is a natural corollary has failed us, leading us to doubt, despair, ennui and societal breakdown. In its political incarnation it did not engender tolerance, cooperation and understanding as the scientific community might have once promised us, but instead led to competition, struggle and violence. The perniciousness of the theory as it has developed, unintended by its author, would probably shock him today.

What is at stake in all of this? Why should the debate over ultimate cause, evolution and intelligent design matter to any non-scientist? It is fairly simply stated. If life on earth is a product of blind, purposeless natural causes, brought into existence by random associations, then our lives are a mere cosmic accident. There is no source for overarching moral imperatives, no unique dignity for human life and no sense of purpose at all. Why should we fight to preserve human life or battle for a culture or a civilization when none of it has any transcendental meaning?

On the other hand, if life is the product of foresight and design, then human beings are not merely randomly associated chunks of matter, whose atoms will be spewed back into the ether to be reformed into space dust, but organisms whose existence have a direction and a purpose. With such assurance we can firmly fix our place in the universe and discern meaning in our daily lives. We have reason to defend our families, our values and our civilization.

At stake, ultimately, is which world view will shape our culture and our future.

At stake, may be our very survival.