Slippery Slope: Climate Alarmists Using COVID Policies To Justify Totalitarian Takeovers
When the coronavirus pandemic shut down economies around the world in March, millions of Americans worried about their livelihoods and the effects on their families and communities.
Not radical leftists, however. They were “cheering on the draconian lockdowns and dreaming ineffectually of a better world to come,” according to an article in the radical magazine Jacobin. Jacobin is a prominent leftist rag literally named after the genocidal maniacs of the French Revolution.
(Radical leftists like naming their media after genocidal monsters. The Young Turks named their media group after the Ottoman leaders who massacred hundreds of thousands of Armenian Christians.)
In a June 15 article titled “To Halt Climate Change, We Need an Ecological Leninism,” Jacobin interviewed a “world-leading scholar on human ecology” who argued that the drastic shutdown of world economies as a pandemic intervention should be applied to the “climate crisis.”
Andreas Malm, author of the forthcoming book “Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century,” told Jacobin:
“There was a moment in March 2020 when many of us in the climate justice movement felt a degree of surprise to find that governments in Europe and elsewhere were prepared to basically shut down their entire economies in an effort to contain the pandemic.”
Rather than causing consternation, Malm found it “striking, given that the same states had never contemplated undertaking any kind of intervention in the economy for the sake of the climate crisis.”
States never contemplated undertaking such an intervention for a left-wing pet cause because their citizens are not insane and would have never stood for it. As it is, COVID-19 is a real disease and citizens in the U.S. have heroically fought back against extended draconian lockdowns in Democratic states.
“The current juncture therefore provides us with an opportunity to oppose the return to business as usual, to push for the transformation of the global economy and the launch of something like a Green New Deal,” Malm said.
Asked to elaborate on “economic Leninism,” he said, “Given that capitalism will need to be challenged for any meaningful transition to occur, the socialist legacy offers a set of resources to draw upon. … It is incredibly difficult to see how anything other than state power could accomplish the transition required, given that it will be necessary to exert coercive authority against those who want to maintain the status quo.”
It is important to remember that when Jacobin interviewees use phrases such as “Ecological Leninism” and “War Communism,” they actually think “Leninism” and “Communism” are good things.
There is a whole generation in the West that never witnessed the peoples of Eastern Europe cheer their freedom as the Berlin Wall came down or Chinese students die in Tiananmen Square fighting for that same liberty.
Many of these younger Americans also were never taught the truth about communism in their schools. I suggest these young people pick up a copy of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s works to educate themselves.
If reading books is asking too much of them, then they can just watch the satirical movie “The Death of Stalin” or the German comedy “Good Bye Lenin!” to understand how communism works.
Conservatives have been warning that leftists would seize on Malm’s idea at some point.
Allowing the government to engage in drastic lockdowns is tacit approval of anything it does with that power, and now these climate extremists will have a precedent to lean on when it comes to their totalitarian requests.
Conservative commentator Dennis Prager sounded the alarm about this in March.
“If the government can order society to cease functioning, from restaurants and other businesses to schools, due to a possible health disaster, it is highly likely that a Democratic president and Congress will similarly declare emergency and assert authoritarian rule in order to prevent what they consider the even greater ‘existential threat’ to human life posed by global warming,” he wrote.
Conservatives rightly laughed when New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez presented her Green New Deal, which would have cost the average household $74,000 per year. But we must never forget that even when leftists suggest ideas that are insane, the leftists themselves are deadly serious.
This pandemic has exposed how much power world governments are willing to unleash and for how long.
It especially exposed the hypocrisy and double standards of Democratic Party officials in blue states who pushed the lockdowns far beyond “flatten the curve” and used them to punish unfavored constituencies.
Countless Americans have pushed back against these draconian measures. Just last week, Orthodox Jews cut the locks on a New York City playground that was welded shut by the dictatorial Mayor Bill DeBlasio.
These continued acts of resistance show that the American spirit is alive and well.
Freedom lovers will have to rally that spirit again if the climate alarmists ever get access to the full power they so desperately crave. The Jacobin interview is a warning.
If the Democratic Party, which grows more radical every year, wins greater legislative or executive power in November, that dystopian reality will not be far off.
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