EIGHT
WELCOME TO THE NEW WORLD ORDER
It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
C. S. Lewis
Evil men don’t get up in the morning saying ‘I’m going to do evil’. They say: ‘I’m going to make the world a better place.’
Christopher Booker
No, it doesn’t involve sinister bald men with scars on their faces. Or white Persian cats. Or secret trap doors that drop you into the shark tank. Or deep, exultantly malevolent, echoing laughter that goes ‘Mwa ha ha ha ha ha haaa!’
On the contrary, the people who would like to deprive you of your democratic rights, wipe out a sizeable chunk of the global population, destroy Industrial Civilisation and rule the planet according to their own agenda could hardly be more considerate or nice. They’re doing it for all of us, you understand. Because they care. Because, unlike you or me, they have been granted the wisdom to realise that our ailing planet is on a fast track to hell and that only through radical intervention by an enlightened elite can it hope to survive the next millennium.
Or, as Aurelio Peccei once put it:
Phenomenal increases, rapidly approaching critical maxima, are happening in population, pollution, energy release, speed, automation and other areas revolutionised by technology. In the changed dynamics of these interacting factors lie the reasons why mankind is confronted with such an unprecedented complex of explosive problems. But we do not yet seem ready to realise that the time has come to plan and act on a scale and in ways capable of matching the new thrust and threat of events. Considering the situation in these broad and essential terms, we must recognise that very little is being done to redress it and set human fortunes on a sound and reasonable course. [Very] bleak situations will undoubtedly meet us during the next decades, unless a supreme effort is made now to get out of the present global impasse.
Peccei was the co-founder of an obscure organisation called the Club of Rome. If you want to understand how deep green ideology has managed to penetrate so far into modern Western culture, Peccei is your man. Peccei, and yet another man you might well not have heard of called Alexander King.
Peccei, a wealthy Italian industrialist, was an anti-Fascist resistance fighter during World War II, captured and nearly tortured to death by the Nazis. Afterwards he worked for Fiat, then Olivetti, where he rose to become president. King was a distinguished Glasgow-born research chemist, who during the war had recognised the insecticidal potential of the moth-balling agent dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, which he rechristened ‘DDT’ and which went on to be used against lice and mosquitoes. It was a discovery that, as we shall see, he would later regret.
King first contacted Peccei in the mid-1960s, impressed by a speech Peccei had given which oozed the kind of ecological catastrophism we saw in the previous chapter. On meeting, they hit it off instantly because they shared a belief system that would form the ideological basis for a shadowy new organisation they decided to call the Club of Rome. These beliefs were:
That the planet was getting dangerously overcrowded;
That resources were fast running out and must somehow be conserved;
That economic growth was the problem, not the solution; and
Urgent action needed to be taken, through the creation of some form of pan-global authority, to deal with 1, 2, and 3.
Now, it’s possible that many of you reading this will share King’s and Peccei’s belief in the first two propositions. (Though not, I hope, by the time you’ve finished the next chapter.) Some of you – perhaps in a nostalgic nod to the abundant 1990s when it was fashionable to think this way – might even agree with proposition 3. And yes, much though it pains me to imagine it, I expect there will even be one or two among you who aren’t totally, 100 per cent averse to the New World Order alluded to in 4.
But it’s OK, don’t worry, I’m not going to get cross and accuse you of being stupid, muddle-headed, naïve, closet Marxists, or anything like that. All I’m trying to do is show how two men you’ve probably never heard of – King and Peccei – turned out to be stunningly successful and influential propagandists. Add 1, 2, 3 and 4 together, after all, and what you have is the blueprint for an eco-Fascist tyranny so powerful and all-encompassing it makes Nazi Germany look like Mary Poppins’ nursery. Yet King and Peccei managed to persuade people like you – and if not you, then definitely many of the people you know, like and respect – all around the Western world that such a belief system is eminently reasonable, sensible and benign.
How? The catalyst was the Club of Rome’s first publication, a seminal 1972 book called The Limits to Growth, which was remarkable for at least three reasons. First, it had one of those snappy titles which made you understand the message even if you hadn’t read the book: that – duh! – maybe economic growth isn’t such a great thing, maybe there should be, like, limits to it. Second, it sold at least ten million copies, making it probably the most successful environmental bestseller ever. Third, it was the first book to make proper use of the eco-lobby’s deadliest and most effective terror weapon: the scary computer model.
From a propagandist’s perspective, the brilliant thing about computer models is that they can be made to ‘predict’ whatever fantastical scenario you want them to ‘predict’ while yet imbuing the exercise with a plausible but entirely spurious air of scientific authority. Not only are these models highly dependent on the quality of the information you choose to feed into them (‘Garbage In; Garbage Out’), but (even today, let alone back in 1972) they are not advanced enough to capture the almost infinitely-layered complexity of the real world.
None of which is likely to have troubled the audience for The Limits to Growth. Computers were, after all, the hot new thing. The spiffy flow charts in the book, based on modelling by Professor Jay Forrester of MIT, seemed more than adequate confirmation of the book’s thesis: that the planet was incapable of supporting economic and population growth on the scale it had experienced since the war; that therefore modern industrial society must come to an end. Some people knew right away that The Limits to Growth was a crock. Among these was John Maddox, editor of Nature, who in the same year (1972) published a counterblast called The Doomsday Syndrome, in which he weighed in against ‘irresponsible exaggerations which may cause unnecessary public alarm and divert attention from really important problems’.
But Maddox was swimming against the tide. The groundwork was done by Carson and Ehrlich; the late 1960s and early 1970s – with their oil crises, back-to-nature hippie values and drug-induced paranoia – were in any case fertile territory for grand universal theories of environmental apocalypse. With The Limits to Growth – perhaps the greatest piece of 1970s’ fiction this side of Jaws or Chariots of the Gods? – the Club of Rome established a vital bridgehead in its war on Western Industrial Civilisation.
One of the curious paradoxes about the Club of Rome is that it is at once highly secretive and brazenly transparent. On the one hand, its meetings are all held behind closed doors, with none of its minutes published; on the other, it has a friendly website – complete with remarkable list of distinguished members (see below) – and it regularly publishes books that quite unambiguously promote its doctrines.
Here is the most infamous Club of Rome statement:
The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome.The real enemy then, is humanity itself.
The bit that comes later is also pretty sinister:
Democracy is not a panacea. It cannot organise every
thing and it is unaware of its own limits. These facts must be faced squarely. Sacrilegious though this may sound, democracy is no longer well suited for the tasks ahead. The complexity and the technical nature of many of today’s problems do not always allow elected representatives to make competent decisions at the right time.
R-i-g-h-t. So what you’re telling us, Club of Rome, is that you loathe humankind, that you applaud lying, that you don’t believe in democracy and that you want to impose some kind of New World Order on us all, against our will?
What’s weird is that instead of keeping this information hidden in a steel-lined inner sanctum accessible only to acolytes at Operating Thetan level or above, the Club of Rome is happy to lay out its agenda for anyone who’s interested. Those quotes come from its 1993 publication The First Global Revolution, co-written by Alexander King and Bertrand Schneider – which was freely available in all good book stores and you can still buy online.
These people can’t be for real, surely? That was my first reaction when I read those quotes. I thought: ‘Probably just some obscure bunch of Situationist pranksters. Or one of those crackpot fringe eco-Fascist groups that says stupid things to grab everyone’s attention but makes no difference to anyone because they’ve only got about three-and-a-half members.’
But you only have to look at the membership list of the Club of Rome and its sister organisations – the Club of Budapest and the Club of Madrid – to appreciate otherwise. If these Clubs are a joke, they must be an extremely high-level and sophisticated one. Their membership (full, honorary, associate) includes senior diplomats, ex- and current world leaders, religious leaders, billionaire CEOs, scientists, pop stars, ex-wives of Rolling Stones and environmentalists including: Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, Václav Havel, Romano Prodi, Kofi Annan, the Dalai Lama, Jean Chretien, Mikhail Gorbachev, Bill Clinton, Peter Gabriel, Bianca Jagger, Paolo Coelho, Mary Robinson, Deepak Chopra, Daisaku Ikeda, Aung San Suu Kyi, Jacques Delors and not to forget, of course, Guy Verhofstadt, the former Prime Minister of Belgium…
It’s possible, of course, that being such busy people none of these luminaries had time to bone up on what the Clubs actually represent. No doubt there was some sort of cosy gang-joining, peer-group thing going on, too. You can imagine Vaclav Havel saying: ‘Gabriel’s a member, you say? The Peter Gabriel? Bloody hell. The Lamb Dies Down on Broadway is my all-time favourite album. Count me in!’ And the Dalai Lama saying: ‘The ex-Prime Minister of Belgium? You’re kidding? I’ve spent my whole life dreaming of meeting the ex-Prime Minister of Belgium.’
There’s also an argument to be made that for all their dubious pronouncements, these Clubs are only talking shop where the great and the good (and their entourages) gather to enjoy agreeable lunches in delightfully civilised old buildings in beautiful cities. They put the world to rights over a glass or two of fine claret, before heading off back to their day jobs – as innocuous as your local Lions or Rotary Club.
And indeed when you read inside accounts of the Club of Rome, that is pretty much the modus operandi. ‘That evening the group was invited to Gvishiani’s suite in the Imperial Hotel in Vienna. He served his favourite fruit vodka,’ runs an entirely characteristic sentence from Memoirs of a Boffin by J. Rennie Whitehead, who joined the Club in 1970 and attended many of its early meetings. Whitehead’s tone, throughout, is that of an agreeable, easy-going, gentle old cove who just happens to belong to a group of like-minded chums who possess bags of money, the highest level connections and the certain knowledge of exactly what needs to be done to save the world.
Only, the fact that ‘what needs to be done’ involves depriving people of their democratic rights, destroying their livelihoods, preventing them from reproducing and stealing their every liberty seems to bother Whitehead not one jot. There is no apparent malice in him. He simply believes – in the manner of EU fonctionnaires and UN bureaucrats and Whitehall mandarins throughout the ages – that ‘the gentleman from the Club of Rome knows best’.
Discretion bordering on invisibility, and power without responsibility were very much part of the original plan. As Whitehead has it:
[The Club of Rome] provided the climate in which new ideas were generated; it catalysed the meeting of researchers with common interests from different countries; it sought out interested funding agencies and helped negotiate funds for the newly conceived projects; and it provided a forum for discussion and reports on progress. It was by adherence to this brilliantly simple ‘non-organisation’ concept that Aurelio Peccei and Alexander King established and maintained the independence and the stature of the Club of Rome.
The Club of Rome is the Macavity the Mystery Cat of the global green movement. Its invisible paw-prints are all over everything, but by the time you get to the scene of the crime, the sinister feline has vanished.
Or has it? Probably the best analysis of the Club of Rome’s tangible effects on global environmental policy comes courtesy of a website called ‘The Green Agenda’:
While researching […] and during my academic studies, I have come across many references to the Club of Rome (CoR), and reports produced by them. Initially I assumed that they were just another high-level environmental think tank and dismissed the conspiracy theories found on many websites claiming that the CoR is a group of global elitists attempting to impose some kind of one world government.
I am not a conspiratorial person by nature and was faced with a dilemma when I first read their reports. But it’s all there – in black and white.
Indeed. Here, for example, is the Club of Rome’s Master Plan – and yes, amazingly, it really does call it a Master Plan – from its 1974 publication Mankind at the Turning Point:
In Nature organic growth proceeds according to a Master Plan, a Blueprint. According to this master plan diversification among cells is determined by the requirements of the various organs; the size and shape of the organs and, therefore, their growth processes are determined by their function, which in turn depends on the needs of the whole organism. Such a ‘master plan’ is missing from the process of growth and development of the world system. Now is the time to draw up a master plan for organic sustainable growth and world development based on global allocation of all finite resources and a new global economic system.
Note that use of the word ‘sustainable.’ By the mid-1990s it would become commonplace, ‘sustainability’ having entered the vernacular of every middle-class household as one of those unimpeachably desirable life-goals you could only possibly disagree with if you were the kind of Neanderthal who didn’t care whether your tuna fish was caught with skein nets or dolphin-friendly rod and line.
Few people who used the word had any idea of its origin or meaning. But it seemed to embody a multiplicity of equally wondrous concepts, including:
1. Our marvellous new compost heap which Charlie will insist on peeing on – jolly disgusting, if you ask me, but he read somewhere in some magazine that it speeds up the composting process.
2. Make do and mend – just like Grandma did in the War.
3. Fish, yes oh-my-God fish: aren’t you worried about them? I am. We won’t touch cod nowadays. And haddock’s even more of a no-no. Unless it’s Icelandic, of course, which is a blessed relief because I’ve tried Charlie out on mackerel and whiting and he’s not having it. He says that when he was a child, fish like that were only good for crab bait.
4. Chunky-knit, oiled woollen sweaters which will never go out of fashion and jolly good, too, because we’re so horribly wasteful as a society, don’t you think? Me, I’m seriously thinking of giving up fashion altogether. For Lent at least. Though I do rather have my eye on those marvellous new pony-skin numbers Emma Hope’s doing. And I haven’t yet told you about that new Marni coat… (Etc.)
Forgive me if I sound slightly cynical about the ‘s’ word. Problem is, I do know what it means and how it entered the language, and I’m afraid it embodies an ideological principle that is far from nice: Sustainable Development.
Y
es, Sustainable Development sounds like a good thing too – but that is only because we’ve been culturally programmed to think that way. We associate it with pleasant notions like wildflower meadows left to flourish and Icelandic waters teeming with cod (unlike the poor, overfished, never-to-be-restored Grand Banks), but in fact its underlying philosophy has much more to do with taxation, regulation and control.
As the Green Agenda website puts it:
It is an all-encompassing socialist scheme to combine social welfare programs with government control of private business, socialised medicine, national zoning controls of private property and restructuring of school curriculum which serves to indoctrinate children into politically correct group think.
This was certainly the context in which Maurice Strong used the ‘s’ word in his role as Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development when he wrote in a 1991 report:
Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class – involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, home and work-place air-conditioning and suburban housing – are not sustainable. A shift is necessary which will require a vast strengthening of the multilateral system, including the United Nations.
See how easy it is for an innocent word to mutate into something nasty? You thought ‘sustainability’ meant desirable, manageable life-goals like giving your favourite cardigan another year by patching the sleeves, or paying over the odds for misshapen organic vegetables. As Strong understands it, however, sustainability is a concept that gives unelected bureaucrats from the UN the right to decide how much meat you eat, how much fuel you use, even how habitable your office is in the sweltering heat of high summer.
Watermelons: How Environmentalists Are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing Your Children's Future Page 17