Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to Guardian author, we need to re-awaken the spirit of social imperialism, like Bismark’s German social security programmes or Theodore Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism”, to create broad acceptance of big government green new deal style efforts to rescue Capitalism from itself.
Patriotism could be the unlikely answer to solving the climate crisis
Anatol Lieven
Sun 15 Mar 2020 06.00 AEDTLast week’s budget was a missed opportunity: we need to mobilise our attachment to country
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This need for social solidarity links the green new deal to the patriotic origins of the welfare state. Both conservatives and socialists have agreed in attributing the welfare state to socialism; conservatives because they have come to dislike it, the left because they want to claim all credit for it.
In fact, the origins of the British welfare state lie very largely in the social imperialism movement in the years before 1914. The supporters of this movement were an extraordinarily varied bunch: H G Wells, George Bernard Shaw and Sidney and Beatrice Webb on the left; liberal imperialists such as Winston Churchill and William Beveridge; patriotic writers including Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle; imperial bureaucrats such as Lord Milner and John Buchan; and soldiers including Field Marshal Lord Roberts. Their thinking echoed, in key respects, Bismarck’s social security programme in Germany and the reformist “new nationalism” of Theodore Roosevelt in the US.
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What all these figures had in common was a fear of social disintegration and revolution; a belief (right or wrong) in the British Empire as a force for progress; and a belief that social solidarity, “national efficiency”, and a degree of national self-sufficiency were essential to survive what they (correctly) saw would be the colossal social, economic and political strains of a new European war.
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The task then is to mobilise patriotism by convincing national populations that global heating is a threat, not just to humanity and the planet but to the interests and the future survival of their own countries; and that society, as a whole, will pull together, alleviate suffering and make sacrifices as part of a common effort.
If we can’t manage this I very much doubt that liberal democracy will survive what is coming at us down the line.
Anatol Lieven is the author of Climate Change and the Nation State: The Realist Case
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/14/the-climate-crisis-will-not-be-solved-until-we-believe-it-is-in-our-best-interests
Invoking patriotism and nationalism to unite Conservatives and Liberals into acceptance of big government socialism, to solve the climate crisis. What could possibly go wrong?
I think you will find that a huge majority of the world do NOT read the Guardian and many of us who read it in decades past stopped doing so when it became clear that it was the home of the woke, pseudo-leftie metrosexual self-righteous prats of the Western World.
I do not read a single Guardian article any more, so they cannot influence me in any way.
The easiest way to stop the Guardian having influence is to campaign to have people stop reading it.
No coercion, just convince them. A bit like giving up smoking.
Stop doing something that is bad for your emotional health……..
The great divide lies between those who value data and facts, thus using their brains to think individually in other words the non-zealots also known as deplorables and the zealots who use the slogan: the Party is always right therefore followers lack the urgency to think for themselves. The Party be it the Democratic Party, a Socialist Party, a Communist Party it is the “Group think” which will kill our Western Democracies.
The Guardian?
w.
The end of liberal democracy? Oh, good. Bring it on.
Something has gone very wrong when the Guardian says anything good about nationalism, imperialism or patriotism. Someone must have doctored the office water supply!
Like CO2, national patriotism can do anything. Even in my neck of the woods, teeny rural VT towns are now forming CUD’s (Communication Union District) with the idea of making a larger more attractive market for service providers. The funny thing is they claim that taxes won’t rise because of this and all funding comes from user fees and grants. Guess where the grants come from? Now we are busy building yet another bureaucracy which will live for-ever, with all it’s associated costs, because data.
I even got an email from CORI (Center for Rural Innovation, a 501c3 non-profit located in Heartland VT) which is “building rural innovation hubs in small towns” and is managing the implementation of these CUDs. They have staff titles which I cannot even decipher as to what exactly they get paid to do.
Of course they get State of VT grants too.
Nationalism is the last resort of Scoundrels.
Reminds me of the left wing definition of bi-partisanship:
Republicans and Democrats working together to pass the Democrats agenda.
Two points about European Universal Declaration of Human Rights can be seen as part of a wider response of the Allied Powers in delivering a human rights agenda through which it was believed that the most serious human rights violations which had occurred during the Second World War could be avoided in the future. Second, the Convention was a response to the growth of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe and designed to protect the member states of the Council of Europe from communist subversion.
Churchill was in favour and a supporter, but for several reasons the British public never liked it or the associated ECHR, and plan to withdraw. I hope no karma is involved, especially with suggestions like this
Currently the idiots are in control in Canada, we have drunk so much climate coolaid the federal cabinet should be rainbow colored
If you guys do not understand that the covid and climatism are working in lock-steps… hence all those articles using covid to suspend democracy, just as they wanted to do it for climate.
This is it.
The 1984 coup d’etat is unfolding under our eyes. 2020 is the year.
I recall how you all celebrated in 2009 after climategate.
You were wrong.
They have declared war on people. Curfew is coming and repression too.
The People will provide the nationalism. The Leftists will provide the socialism. In service of Profits and prophecy. Progress.
If the object is to destroy a country from within, then yes, this is one way to do it.
Truly Orwellian semantic manipulation. The left never have REAL evidence, so twisting around words to confuse us in to submission is how they get their insane way. Their way, being based on very rickety foundations eventually collapses in to a screaming and extremely painful heap.
This new call for left wing nationalism is obviously an admission from the progressive movement that their strategy of being anti-nationalistic, in order to destabilise society and seek change through that destabilisation, is not working. For many years now we have heard the same old lines that colonialism is bad, white people are bad, capitalism is bad, which are all part of a strategy to convince the people that their country’s culture is toxic and is the root cause of every conceivable problem facing the world today.
The problem for the progressives is that people know that western culture is in fact good and not only lifts people from poverty within their own country, but provides the capacity to support people in other countries in times of peril. The other problem with this strategy is that it it offensive to many people who understand the values of western culture and therefore acts to drive these people away from the progressive agenda, which tends to become a voice for minority groups that are seeking to find a cause in which to become a victim. So, whilst the progressive strategy has successfully divided society by race and gender, it has not succeeded to bring down western society and provide the reset mechanism for a socialist – totalitarian state.
It’s therefore no surprise that Trump based his electoral campaign on nationalism and capitalism. The MAGA slogan that was used so effectively by Trump to harness that lost sense of nationalism was the key to his victory. No doubt he will use this same approach in November, but it will be interesting to see how the new virus impacts the public mood and therefore the electoral outcome.
Why did my comment not get posted? That’s the second of two i’ve ever posted (the first was drawing attention to an error in your AGW guide). Please find the following:
>>This, in the Grauniad, is code for “we know hoi polloi is at least informed enough to know that UK action on CO2 emission reduction is utterly pointless in the face of the massive emissions in the East and Africa. So let’s at least try to leverage their Little Englander mindset. Come on – let’s stick it to Johnny Foreigner by making flights and heating our homes unaffordable. We can beat him in our race back to the pre-industrial age”<<
This will be my last attempt without success to post on this site
“…society, as a whole, will pull together, alleviate suffering and make sacrifices as part of a common effort.”
Now that gives us a clue as to what the real agenda is. Climate change for many of these people is simply the means to an end. The ultimate goal being the institution of global government. You can’t make sacrifices part of a common effort without a global governing authority to enforce compliance on all countries “fairly and equitably.” Never mind whether the sacrifices are actually required or not. The sacrifices will include the banning of fossil fuels to combat climate change. But the real goal will be to reduce the population (which will occur automatically if fossil fuels are banned) and to remove liberty and Democracy from those who survive. One thing’s for sure though. The governing elites will not have to make any sacrifices whatsoever. They are always exempt. And useful idiots like Anatol Lieven assume they will be part of the governing elite. That’s why they want to impose this all-powerful global authority on the rest of us. If they didn’t have climate change, they would invent another crisis as a means to their ends.
From the article: “If we can’t manage this [brainwashing of the citizens] I very much doubt that liberal democracy will survive what is coming at us down the line.”
There is nothing coming down the line at us that hasn’t happened before. We are still here.
The real threat to democracy is the Big Lie of CAGW (Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming).
How apropos that a national socialist context would elicit advertisements from Planned Parenthood corporation.
Look up famous people who were eugenicists then decide if you wish to tailor society on their ‘wisdom’.
You will find such illustrious names as:
H.G. Wells – “The way of nature has always been to slay the hindmost, and there is still no other way, unless we can prevent those who would become the hindmost being born. It is in the sterilization of failures, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies.”
Helen Keller – “It is the possibility of happiness, intelligence and power that give life its sanctity, and they are absent in the case of a poor, misshapen, paralyzed, unthinking creature,”
George Bernard Shaw – “The moment we face it frankly we are driven to the conclusion that the community has a right to put a price on the right to live in it … If people are fit to live, let them live under decent human conditions. If they are not fit to live, kill them in a decent human way.”
Winston Churchill – ‘The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded and insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate … I feel that the source from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed up before another year has passed.”
Theodore Roosevelt – “Some day we will realize that the prime duty – the inescapable duty – of the good citizen of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world; and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type. at all.”
Ref: https://flashbak.com/top-ten-unlikely-and-surprising-eugenicists-32300/
Hopefully, at least, they will have the trains running on time.
Many of the names in the Guardian article also supported eugenics.
How did that pan out?