As for ‘eco-friendly’ measures such as government-mandated recycling initiatives and penalties for car use: what about those hard-working council taxpayers who have no objection to their money being spent on schools, street cleaning or regular bin collections but not unreasonably draw the line at having it spent on policing their levels of ecological correctness? And what about all those people who have considered the evidence and question the whole premise of global warming?
Sure, there’s a case to be made for some aspects of ‘sustainability’. But as free citizens, we surely ought to be able to vote for these things, rather than have them foisted on us by a handful of watermelons who know how to game the system.
Yet this is exactly how Agenda 21 operates. While paying lip-service to grassroots ‘people power’, it circumvents the democratic process entirely. You didn’t vote for all these stringent new rules and taxes; you don’t remember being consulted about them. Yet somehow, these values – which may be alien to everything you believe in – seem to have been absorbed by your local government, as if by osmosis, and now form the basis of policy decisions which will have a major impact on your life.
In an article for the website ‘Big Government’, James M. Simpson described it well:
In ‘Sustainable Development’ [Marxists] have found a magic mantra. It has allowed them to insinuate all their socialist fantasies into our legal code, under our noses, with little or no fanfare, scant public debate and graveyard noises from our treacherously AWOL mass media, right down to the local level – with our permission.
Let’s be absolutely clear: this ‘sustainable development’ is not the wholesome, cosily innocuous thing a succession of glossy magazine lifestyle articles have persuaded us it is. It is born of the pessimistic Weltanschauung (‘worldview’) we see in such pieces as Teddy Goldsmith’s first editorial in The Ecologist, where he variously describes the human race as ‘parasites’, a ‘disease’ and ‘swarming masses’; the Weltanschauung that led the Club of Rome to declare in a 1974 report – ‘Mankind at the Turning Point’ – that ‘the Earth has a cancer and the cancer is Man’; the worldview that enabled Strong to describe the prospect of billions of environmental deaths as ‘a glimmer of hope’.
And inextricably bound with this Weltanschauung is a very specific belief as to how Earth’s problems must be remedied. Might this involve trying to make everyone wealthier so they can afford to pollute less and are tempted to breed fewer children? Nope. Might it involve making energy cheaper, so that fewer of the world’s poor suffer from fuel poverty? Nope. Might it involve making governments more democratically accountable so that people are freer? Nope. For all those green doomsayers wedded to a belief in dangerous overpopulation and diminishing resources, the proposed solution is always the same: less freedom, less consumption, higher taxation, more regulation and bigger government.
Now at this point in the chapter, just when you think it can’t get any worse, I want to do the equivalent of the scene in the movie where the camera cuts away from the close-up – and you realise that the outcrop they’re standing on is but a tiny promontory of a mountain so high and vast, amid a range so enormous it truly beggars your feeble imagination, utterly transforms your perspective and makes you go: ‘Wow! The wonders of CGI!’
I’m going to do this by introducing you (just briefly, for we’re in danger of conspiracy-shock overload here) of just a few more of the big names and organisations involved in promoting exactly the same One-World Government agenda.
Let’s start with Mikhail Gorbachev. Yes, that’s right: dear Gorby, with the endearing birthmark on his bald pate and the habit of performing folk songs at private fundraising soirees (I’ve heard him). The same man who did so much to make the world a safer, better place when – in happy partnership with Ronnie Reagan and Margaret Thatcher – he helped bring about the end of the Cold War with Glasnost and Perestroika. Well, he’s now involved with this conspiracy. Big time.
In 1991, he established the Gorbachev Foundation (motto: ‘Toward A New Civilisation’) as ‘a think tank whose purpose is to explore the path that global governance should take as mankind progresses into an interdependent global society’. Most of his green activism, though, is conducted through another organisation which he founded – Green Cross International (GCI) – which has thirty-one national affiliates around the world and whose honorary board members include former UN head Javier Perez de Cuellar, actor Robert Redford and media mogul Ted Turner. The organisation’s stated mission is to ‘help ensure a just, sustainable and secure future for all’. (Hmm. Now where have we seen that ‘s’ word before?)
Gorby was also responsible, in collaboration with Strong, for the Earth Charter (2000). This is a collection of principles – described on Strong’s website as ‘a widely recognised, global consensus statement on ethics and values for a sustainable future’ and officially endorsed, natch, by the United Nations – which starts out like a fluffy, New Age wish-list (principle number one: ‘Respect Earth and life in all its diversity’) but which turns out on closer examination to be yet another master plan for global, socialist eco-tyranny.
Principle ten, for example, asks that we ‘ensure that economic activities and institutions at all levels promote human development in an equitable and sustainable manner’. Not just that, but also we must ‘promote the equitable distribution of wealth within nations and among nations’. And ‘ensure that all trade supports sustainable resource use, environmental protection and progressive labour standards’. And even ‘require multinational corporations and international financial organisations to act transparently in the public good, and hold them accountable for the consequences of their activities’.
And who will be defining and enforcing these progressive ideals? No one over whom you have any kind of democratic control. That’s because the aim of the Earth Charter is to eliminate national sovereignty and place us all under the control of a single ‘Earth Government’.
As Gorby himself said in a speech,
One of the worst of the new dangers is ecological… Today, global climatic shifts; the greenhouse effect; the ‘ozone hole’; acid rain; contamination of the atmosphere, soil and water by industrial and household waste; the destruction of the forest; etc. all threaten the stability of the planet… I believe that the new world order will not be fully realised unless the United Nations and its Security Council create structures… authorised to impose sanctions and make use of other measures of compulsion.
This is made explicit on the website of Dr Robert Muller, former UN Assistant Secretary-General, who declares, in the course of several long, imaginary dialogues between himself, God and Earth:
Please stand up, delegates of the world, hold each other’s hand and let us swear together that we will accomplish this historical miracle before it is too late: to save this Earth, to save humanity with a new world order. All the rest is secondary. Let us strengthen and reform the United Nations into a United States of the World or a World Union like the European Union.
All of which would be easier to dismiss as the kooky ramblings of an eco-nut of no consequence if Dr Muller hadn’t been responsible for drafting and overseeing vast swathes of UN environmental policy. He is founder of the United Nations University of Peace (which he sited on a mountain in Costa Rica in honour of an ancient prophecy) where the original Earth Charter document is kept in a specially constructed ‘Ark of Hope’, painted with panels representing the flora and fauna of the world ‘as seen through the images of the world’s traditional artists’.
Besides the Earth Charter, the Ark contains over 1,000 ‘Temenos Books’ – handcrafted books ‘made by artists, schoolchildren and citizens around the world, expressing their individual and collaborative prayers and affirmations for Earth’. These regularly tour the world’s schools and universities, spreading the message of a ‘just, sustainable and peaceful society’.
Not only does the New Age religion of the New World Order have its own Ark, but also its own
Tower of Babel. Or, if you prefer, its Rosetta Stone. It’s called the Georgia Guidestones, and comprises five mighty granite slabs, each nearly twenty feet tall, that were created in 1979 at the behest of an ‘elegant gray-haired gentleman’, Robert C. Christian (operating under a pseudonym). At first, Christian wasn’t taken seriously by the local contractor he commissioned for the job. But when he mentioned that money was no object and produced his first cheque for $10,000, all of this changed.
Since their erection on a hilltop in the US state of Georgia in 1980, the Georgia Guidestones have attracted a deal of controversy. Given the ‘ten commandments’ that are inscribed on the slabs, in eight different languages, this is not altogether surprising. The first, for example, gently hints that the majority of the human population should be culled:
MAINTAIN HUMANITY UNDER 500,000,000 IN PERPETUAL BALANCE WITH NATURE.
Even when the stones were erected in 1980, to fulfill this injunction would have entailed killing eight out of every nine humans. Today, it would involve executing thirteen out of fourteen. Not, of course, that the Guidestones put it quite so crudely. But you can guess their ideological bent from one of the other commandments: ‘BE NOT A CANCER ON THE EARTH’ says one. Hmm. Now where have we heard that phrase before?
Among those who have been fingered as the mysterious ‘elegant gray-haired gentleman’ is the media mogul Ted Turner. This seems unlikely. If he had grey hair in 1980, he’d surely be older than Turner is now. But the message of the Guidestones certainly chimes with Turner’s own deep-green ecological views, particularly regarding the human race. ‘A total world population of 250–300 million people, a 95 per cent decline from present levels, would be ideal,’ Turner once famously said, having apparently temporarily forgotten that with five children of his own, he has done more than most to contribute to the ‘problem’.
Presumably that means he’d get on like a house on fire with the Duke of Edinburgh, who – in a foreword to a book called If I Were an Animal – wrote: ‘In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation.’ Perhaps too, Turner would have found a kindred spirit in the late Alexander King (who besides co-founding the Club of Rome, you’ll recall, was the man who popularised the use of DDT as an insecticide during the war). In his memoirs, King confided somewhat chillingly: ‘My chief quarrel with DDT in hindsight is that it has greatly added to the population problem.’ Yeah, Alexander. You and Rachel Carson both.
You’ll find quotes like this repeated endlessly on the internet, as often as not on conspiracy sites warning of the coming New World Order. This, of course, makes it much, much easier for their significance to be downplayed by green opinion-formers in the mainstream media: ‘Oh you don’t take that kind of thing seriously, do you? It’s just a bunch of 9/11 Truthers and Alex Jones nuts and right-wing fruitcakes, indulging in their c-r-azee conspiracy theories.’
So before we close this chapter, I’d like to address this issue in more detail. Perhaps we should start by trying to decide what, exactly, is a conspiracy theory. I quite like the definition offered by (green MSM opinion former) David Aaronovitch in his conspiracy-theory-debunking book Voodoo Histories. Aaronovitch says that a conspiracy theory is ‘the attribution of deliberate agency to something that is much more likely to be accidental or unintended’.
What’s useful about this definition is that it expresses proper contempt for many of the more idiotic urban myths of our time such as the one – which prompted a time- and money-wasting official inquiry – that Diana, Princess of Wales, did not really die as a result of an unfortunate car accident in a Parisian tunnel, but was bumped off by MI5, perhaps on the orders of the Royal Family, because she knew too much or she was secretly pregnant with Dodi Fayed’s illegitimate Muslim love child or…
Well, it’s a nonsense and was obviously a nonsense from the start. Our Royal Family hasn’t been in the business of bumping off awkward members for at least four centuries. The intelligence services are so hamstrung by political correctness these days they’re not even allowed to do ‘wet jobs’ on evil, vicious enemies of the state, let alone well-loved and beautiful English princesses. And just suppose she had been pregnant with Dodi’s love child (which the inquest showed she wasn’t): what would it have mattered, when the succession to the throne had long since been decided with the births of Princes William and Harry?
Sure, a deeper investigation might have been merited had it emerged that the brakes of the Princess’s car had been tampered with, or that traces of ricin had been found in her body, or someone suddenly noticed on taking her to hospital that there was a huge stiletto between her shoulder-blades with Prince Philip’s crest on the haft. But none of this transpired. Instead what emerged fairly quickly was that the driver of her car was drunk, that the car was going very fast when it crashed, that Princess Diana had chosen not to wear her seat belt: all indications, any reasonable person might conclude, that this was very much a case of cock-up, not conspiracy.
But just because conspiracy theories tend by nature to be more convoluted and less immediately plausible than the alternative explanation doesn’t mean that they’re all untrue. This is where Aaronovitch’s definition – and his book too, for that matter – falls down. Built into it is a metropolitan liberal’s sneery assumption that conspiracy theorists are all deeply deluded, socially inadequate, mostly sinister right-wing whackos, and that conspiracy theories never turn out to be conspiracy fact because, well, they just don’t.
So where does that leave this chapter? Is it all just smears and innuendo? Did I pick as many big names as I could find on the internet – Mikhail Gorbachev! Robert Redford! The Dalai Lama! The ex-Prime-Minister of Belgium! – then trawl for a few scary quotes and loony-tune websites, and join the dots in a random way so as to concoct an entirely spurious web of intrigue?
I wish.
Look, when I began researching this book, I thought it was going to be about Climategate and global warming – not some massive international plot to destroy Western Civilisation and replace it with a grisly New World Order based on rationed resources, enforced equality and the return of the barter system. The last thing I’d choose would be for such a conspiracy to exist because a) the thought is so depressing, and b) it would run the risk of undermining the rest of my argument, by characterising me – at least in some readers’ eyes – as a paranoid nut job.
Unfortunately, though, the weight of evidence was against me. So brazenly open are the leading ideologues of the green movement about their plans for a New World Order, I’m not even sure that the word ‘conspiracy’ properly applies. When you think of a conspiracy, you think of something clandestine, underground, hidden. But these ‘conspirators’ are happy to shout their intentions from the rooftops. Whether it’s Maurice Strong on his road to Rio, John Holdren calling for the ‘de-development’ of the United States or Britain’s Tyndall Centre urging a ‘managed recession’; whether it’s a Friends of the Earth campaign leaflet, or a Club of Rome policy document, or a report published by the UN-sponsored Commission on Global Governance, the message that emerges is always the same. Economic growth must be reined in, resources rationed, personal liberties curtailed, wealth redistributed, private property abolished and a new era of – yes – ‘global governance’ by experts and other unelected bureaucrats be ushered in. You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to believe in the green movement’s master plan for a New World Order: only to possess the basic ability to read and listen.
This is why I find it hard to be sympathetic when, say, a figure of the stature of the Prince of Wales flies with his entourage to Rio to tell a conference of businessmen that ‘We have only 100 months left to save the world from climate change’. Or when, a few months later, he boards his biofuel-powered royal train to tour Britain, lecturing his future subjects on the need to live ‘sustainably’.
It was just this kind of well-meaning idiocy that prompted me to write a catty den
unciation of my future king in The Spectator. Like one of his predecessors, Æthelred the ‘Unready’, I argued, Prince Charles is ‘unraed’ – Anglo-Saxon for ‘ill-advised’. But more than that he is spoiled, petulant, irresponsible and thick.
Not all my readers agreed. Some of the criticisms I got were pure snobbery – on the lines of ‘Who are you, you disgusting little oik, to be calling our future King a prat?’ Others were on the similarly predictable grounds that Prince Charles is a nice, well-meaning chap, doing his best, and if he wants to talk about preserving scarce resources, and reducing carbon footprints and living more sustainably, well what’s wrong with that?
What’s wrong with it is that there are no-half measures in the modern green movement. To join it simply because you like trees, flowers and birdsong is the rough equivalent of joining the Nazi party in the mid-1930s just for the smart uniforms, restaurant discounts and more efficient train time tables. Which is to say that the eco-Fascistic elements are not optional extras. The anti-capitalism, the hatred of economic growth, the curtailment of personal liberty, the disdain for the human race, the yearning for a One-World Government of rule by ‘experts’ – these are all as integral to watermelons as Lebensraum and extermination camps were to Nazism.
I’m sure that the Prince of Wales, Ted Turner, Robert Redford, Leonardo DiCaprio, Deepak Chopra, Ed Begley Jr. and the rest of the green movement’s long, long list of celebrity useful idiots are awfully nice people once you get to know them. And I’m sure they have the very best of intentions. But I’m afraid the time has long since passed when ignorance or naïvety could in any way excuse their support for so thoroughly malignant a cause.
In their self-righteous eagerness to save the world, the watermelons are ideologically committed to the path most likely to destroy the world. That’s not nice. That’s not caring. That’s pure insanity.
Watermelons: How Environmentalists Are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing Your Children's Future Page 19