I'm dead. Send flowers

By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

Recently my lovely wife and I visited a hotbed of British totalitarianism, Anglia Ruskin “University” at Cambridge, to gather evidence for the courts in connection with a death threat that the “University” and one of its students had made against me in the form of a widely-publicized tombstone with my name on it, under the hate-speech slogan “Lest We Forget Those Who Denied”. I should explain that there are two universities at Cambridge: the real one, my own alma mater, which tops the league-table of Britain’s 133 universities, and Anglia Ruskin, a jumped-up polytechnic which, from what we saw of it, ranks about 250^th out of 133.

Anglia Ruskin “University” suffers from an identity crisis. So its public relations people recently spent some taxpayers’ money buying advertising signs at Cambridge railway station, which, like the “University”, is 1½ miles from approaching a real University. These hilarious signs have done much to damage what little reputation the joke “University” may have had.

Sure enough, in a dusty corner of a grubby gallery on a tatty campus (why do grime and the hard Left have such an affinity for one another?) stood the tombstone on which the “artist”, a student to whom the “University” had awarded a prize for it, had engraved my name and those of five other British climate skeptics:

Ø Christopher Booker of the Sunday Telegraph, the world’s best regularly-published climate-skeptic columnist in any mainstream news medium;

Ø James Delingpole, who has transformed Breitbart London into the news website that everyone in Britain wants to read;

Ø Melanie Phillips, the redoubtable and always trenchant Daily Mail columnist, writing for the only daily paper that regularly reports how much nonsense global warming is;

Ø Lord Lawson of Blaby, Margaret Thatcher’s former Finance Minister, and founder of the authoritative Global Warming Policy Foundation; and

Ø Owen Paterson, the affable squire who, like most country folk, does not believe a word of the urban-myth cargo-cult doctrine of global warming, and is a former Secretary of State for the Environment.

Now, to put a victim’s name on a tombstone while the victim is still alive is to make a death threat, the nastiest and most repellent form of hate speech. If the tombstone had been erected anywhere in Scotland rather than on a manifestly dysfunctional campus in England, I could have had Professor Michael Thorne, the “University’s” Vice Chancellor, tried, fined, and bound over not to repeat that or any suchlike offense.

Professor Thorne had caused or permitted a press release to be issued, promoting this unspeakable death threat. The release explained that the tombstone bore the words “Lest we forget those who denied”. The implication was that, if we were not already dead, the “artist” and the “University” that promoted his “work” would very soon see to it that we were.

Indeed, the press release reinforced the threat in several unpleasant ways. Like the tombstone, it used the word “denier” or its derivatives – and did so five times in a single page. The intent of this hate-speech word, banned throughout Scotland by the law against threatening communications, is to compare climate change “deniers” with Holocaust deniers.

It mattered not to the Vice Chancellor, nor to the “artist”, that I do not deny the existence of climate change, which has, after all, been happening for 6000 or 4.5 billion years, depending on your point of view. I do not even deny that Man may have some as yet unquantified but probably insignificant and even net-beneficial influence on the climate.

Indeed, I have recently published with three distinguished colleagues – Dr Willie Soon, Professor David Legates and Dr Matt Briggs – a scientific paper making that fact quite plain. It’s well worth a read. Go to scibull.com, click on “Most Read Articles”, and ours is the all-time no. 1 in the 60-year archive of the Science Bulletin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Please download it now from scibull.com, and get all your friends to do the same. The more the Science Bulletin’s own ticker for our paper counts up, the more it will be realized that the scientific viewpoint we represent – the technical term for it is “the objective truth” – is widely supported.

The mere truth, however, did not stand in the way of the “University” or of the “artist”, who is recorded in the “University’s” press release as having said: “With this work [work?] I envisage a time when the deliberate denial of climate change will be seen as a crime because it hinders progress towards a low carbon future.” Kill them, kill them all!

To make the air of menace worse, “Dr” Aled Jones, the director of the “Global” “Sustainability” “Institute” at the “University”, said the “sculpture could be viewed in decades to come as a monument to a period of history that saw scientific knowledge battle to be heard above political ideologies.”

In the context, what this numpty meant was that climate “deniers” like me, even though our detailed and legitimate scientific objections to the climate scam have been reviewed and published in the Science Bulletin (have you and all your friends downloaded our paper from scibull.com yet?) and many learned journals, were mere political ideologues, while totalitarian true-believers like him, with little knowledge of and no interest in the scientific truth, were the sole repository of “scientific knowledge”.

In fact it is the other way about.

Every so often, I decide not to do what a couple of the other names on the tombstone did. I decided not to laugh it off. A death threat is a death threat. It is no laughing matter.

I have recently been reading Richards’ masterly three-volume history of the Third Reich. The first volume deals with the perplexing question how that monstrous regime came to be. And it is plain that the long, relentless campaign of intimidation by the Nazis of their opponents, with name-calling and death threats very similar to that perpetrated by the “University” and by all too many others over the past ten years, was an essential part of the process.

Most people laughed off the Nazi threats, at first. In Britain and in many other countries, full-on appeasement followed, in the hope that looking the other way would make the threats vanish.

It didn’t work. Tens of millions died because too few – the few including such honorable and courageous men as Popes Pius XI and XII and Cardinal Faulhaber of Munich – openly spoke out against the terror. Too many, including Britain and most European governments, went along with it and tried to appease it until it was suddenly too late.

The Nazis then, like their irrational, unlearned, hate-filled ideological successors at the “University” today, meant what they said. They killed those they had said they would kill.

So my clerk wrote to the Vice Chancellor, listing a couple of dozen previous instances, all of them in the past decade, where death threats and demands for trial, imprisonment and execution had been made, very publicly, against climate skeptics. This is by no means an isolated or exceptional incident. There is an increasingly dangerous pattern to it.

I also wrote to the police and the procurator fiscal in Edinburgh, warning them that if the “University” did not remove the press release from the web and the tombstone from the gallery I should expect them to prosecute the internet service providers who were carrying the threat into Scotland.

The “University’s” first instinct was to call in the shysters who are always willing, if paid enough, to come to the defense even of the nastiest totalitarian bullies. In this case, the shysters were Anderson Strathern LLP, of Glasgow. Don’t use them, ever, for any purpose. For they pretended there was no connection between the phrase “climate change denier” and “Holocaust denier” – though all they had to do was to Google the two terms together to see just how deliberate and how widespread that connection is. And they said the “University” had “no proposals to make”.

By then, however, the police and the Fiscal were in the picture, so the “University” found it expedient to ignore its shysters and to come to its senses. The press release has been removed from the web, both by the “University” and by another Cambridge website that had unwisely reproduced it. And the tombstone is now gone too.

The poisonous air of palpable menace remains. Dr Roger Pielke Jr., a scientist who has taken a gently sceptical view on some aspects of the climate question, has recently announced that he can no longer conduct climate research, because he fears for the safety of himself and his family.

No doubt many more scientists would have spoken out by now against the totalitarian profiteers of doom who are doing so much to destroy not only the economy but also the freedom of the West.

As the danger that an unelected world government will be inflicted upon us at the Paris climate summit this December draws ever closer, we are expecting more such malevolent attacks by the environmentalist Sturmabteilung. But we shall not be deterred by totalitarian thuggery. We shall continue to speak the truth as best we can discern it, whether today’s Nazis like it or not.

And if you are tempted to cite Godwin’s “Law” to the effect that he who calls his opponents Nazis has lost the argument, let me cite Monckton’s Law in return: those who cite Godwin’s Law confirm ipso facto that they are active supporters of today’s Fascists.

Whatever you do, don’t send your daughter to Anglia Ruskin “University”. And don’t ever send it so much as a dime. It is an unworthy institution. Send the money to Cambridge University (above) instead. We’re the real thing. We’ll put it to good and proper use: the advancement not of crude, Fascist propaganda but of learning.

I might have been tempted to leave the matter there, given that the “University” had had the sense to take down its press release and, eventually, the tombstone too. However, the shysters’ letter indicates a cast of mind I don’t like the smell of. I’m preparing a detailed report for the police in Cambridge, for under English law the tombstone and the press release together constitute – at minimum – conduct likely to cause a breach of the Queen’s peace, contrary to s.1, Justices of the Peace Act 1361, the most commonly-cited provision of English criminal law in the magistrates’ courts.

I’m going to have these wretches prosecuted: not the student, who is manifestly not adult enough to understand the seriousness of what he has done, nor even the dreadful “Dr” Aled Jones, who is arguably too blinded by Marxist prejudice and too ignorant of the true science behind the climate scam to think rationally at all.

But an outfit that describes itself, however implausibly, as a “University” ought at least to have made some attempt to behave like one, and not to have made death threats by way of press releases. It should have kept the peace. Now it will reap the whirlwind.

Ø This is an extended and illustrated version of my regular and unmissable Monday column at wnd.com. Click “Opinion”, then “Commentator line-up”.