Policy advocates hurt their own cause when they easily pull out the Nazi analogy. Unless it is actually apt, calling your opponents “like the Nazis” is rightly seen by readers or listeners as a lazy slur. Alas, that’s what James Delingpole, the Telegraph’s warming skeptic (who I usually like) just did. Not good.
How does he get there? First, he quotes from a novel written by a former Nazi that contains a global warming plot. From there, he tries to erect a rickety bridge directly to Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, and the gang. From his column, Why Do I Call Them Eco-Nazis—Because The ARE Eco-Nazis:”
You’ll note from that “whoulda thunk?” that I am not altogether surprised by the Nazi connections with the green movement and AGW theory. That’s because, during my research for Watermelons, I discovered how intimately they were bound. The Nazi obsession with “Blut und Boden” (”Blood and Soil”) and the quest for Lebensraum did not die with Hitler in his bunker in 1945: in only slightly changed form they continue to permeate green ideology, in everything from the worship of all things “organic” and the rejection of GM, artificial fertilisers, chemicals (and all the other hideous methods by which we keep the Third World from starving) to the fixation held by so many environmentalists from the Prince of Wales to John Holdren that there simply isn’t enough space on the earth to house and feed us all and that something must be done about population. (The only real difference between the Thirties Nazis and their modern eco counterparts is that they were a bit more honest as to exactly HOW they were going to deal with this population “problem”).
No. No. No. No. Rejecting GM foods is not the moral equivalent of death camps. Hitler’s “living space” concept was merely a pretext for invasion and seizing control of other nations, not an environmental policy.
Today’s Greens are not Nazis. They have authoritarian impulses, to be sure. Some want massive human depopulation—but that is more anti human talk—which isn’t good—than ever being really ready to engage in actual mass genocide. They do want an international technocracy to control our economies—a bureaucratic world state—but that would be a soft tyranny smothering us in stifling regulations, not the utter lawless brutality of a Nazi Germany that stands people up against the wall. The Nazis would shoot you for looking cross-eyed, they engaged in torture, they were imperialist, they were racist, they conducted cruel medical experiments on Jews in concentration camps, in short, they perpetrated some of the worst evils against humanity in recorded history.
Policies and movements don’t have to be Nazis to be wrong. Calling Greens Nazis defames them, discredits global warming skepticism, and worst of all, makes the true evil of Nazism seem banal. Stop it.
