Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Anyone who thinks Extinction Rebellion is just about climate change should check out a banner they presented at a recent march.
The last government which flew the hammer and sickle banner presided over millions of premature deaths from preventable causes, and an infamous series of environmental and ecological catastrophes including the infamous Chernobyl reactor meltdown, which was largely caused by the Soviet government’s decision to conceal major reactor design flaws instead of addressing them.
Even hard left socialist groups like the Socialist Alliance admit the Soviet Union was an ecological disaster, with multiple radiological accidents, massive oil spills and large scale toxic heavy metal pollution.
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I lived for close to two years in the Soviet Union, and for a further seven in post-Soviet Russia. Reporting on the local environmental movement was part of my brief as a GLW correspondent, and also a personal enthusiasm. I got to know the Moscow environmental scene well, and interviewed activists from numerous republics and provinces. I also travelled, and saw some of it for myself. The Moscow sociologist who has made Russian environmentalism his specialty remains a close friend, and I’ve translated several of his books.
On this basis, let me agree with Adam that the damage done to the environment by the Soviet regime and its successor doesn’t remotely bear comparison with that in the West. It was, and remains, catastrophically worse. Particular countries elsewhere, especially in the developing world, have suffered one or another ecological disaster, sometimes of mind-bending dimensions. The USSR managed something in just about every sector of heavy industry to match the worst of them.
The Niger delta? The development of the oil industry of Western Siberia was carried out from the 1970s with great haste, using pipes and welding equipment that were often defective. By the 1990s the wells and pipelines were leaking like sieves, a Niger delta every few hundred kilometres. The Bhopal disaster in India? It’s only through enormous good luck that in Dzerzhinsk, the city east of Moscow that remains a key centre of the chemical industry, thousands of residents haven’t been killed by a similar leak of toxic gas. An activist from the place once argued to me that in any case, the levels of dioxins and other lethal chemicals to which the population was exposed ensured a cumulative “Bhopal” every few years. What were the local morbidity rates? Either the information was purposely never collected, or effectively suppressed.
Heavy metals pollution? In the ore-smelting centre of Nizhny Tagil in the Urals, another environmentalist surmised to me only half-jokingly, the sandpits in the child care centres could have passed assays as a minerals resource. The Siberian coal industry? This I did see for myself. I remember the black snow outside the municipal offices in the mining city of Anzhero-Sudzhensk. Who knows what the local incidence of birth defects was?
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Read more: https://socialist-alliance.org/alliance-voices/ecological-disaster-was-ussr-0
So it is not clear why the protestors believe that Soviet style socialism would somehow improve global environmental stewardship. At the very least the onus is on the protestors to explain why their hammer and sickle socialism would somehow be different from the previous attempt at hammer and sickle socialism.
If this is a big misunderstanding, and Extinction Rebellion are not actually advocating Soviet style socialism, or if the protest group is into extinction but not actually officially affiliated with XR, using the word “Extinction” and a hammer and sickle on their main protest banner is a very confusing attempt to communicate their ideals and goals.
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Blatantly obvious from the outset of XR’s creation, and indeed many ecological groups have a long historical link to Socialism/Marxism. Look up Eco-Socialism on wikipedia.
In France we call them “pastèque”(water melon), green on the outside, red on the inside.
Americans here may be aware of John Bellamy Foster, an American professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, who has written many books on the subject; Marx’s Ecology, The Ecological Revolution, Marx and the Earth, and surprise surprise he has a new one out…..The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology.
It’s socialism’s revenge on capitalism. Socialists never wanted to admit that their ideology was one of the worst that humans had ever thought of, there was no “mea culpa” from the left after the collapse of communism. No Nurenburg trials, no films of the Gulag, they just fell quietly into the shadows seething at the health, wealth and happiness that was being produced by capitalism…….. until now.
Now they see an opportunity to evangelise their catastrophic world view to a scared younger generation with little historic perspective, and for those that have already been to university, pre-programmed with level 1 indoctrination.
They have come to save us, rejoice.
Never let a crisis go to waste — AND — if there’s no crisis, let’s make one up — be it the climate, covid, BLM, orange man, etc., etc.
Perhaps their banners should be Civilisation Extinction.
Chinese Communism has also resulted in pretty poor environmental outcomes.
Socialists and Communists always bleat that failed Socialist states were not real Socialists or this time it will be better. This current crop of Socialists are so brain dead and contradictory they will have no hope in hell of “getting it right.” Their Third Way will almost immediately result in a total fascist state control over everything.
As most readers of WUWT would know, their Utopia is based on fantasy, not fact. Foundations not of bricks, but of BS.
Could the Pied Piper please take these terminally brainwashed youth and their equally brainwashed teachers off to some cave?
Or better still, to a cliff.
The reason why Marx is so attractive is because it promises justice to a large class that is marginalized. During Marx’s time, he espoused the injustice of “surplus value”: Bob makes a widget for Acme Corp and is paid $1 per widget manufactured, but David his boss sells each widget for $4 and keeps the remaining $3 per widget sold for himself or the enterprise. Replace “surplus value” with anything and Marxism fits the bill.
Ain’t nothing stopping dear Bob from building his own factory and selling those widgets for $3.50. Then Bob will discover that his profit is not what he thought it would be once he has paid for the raw materials required to make those widgets, the electricity to run his factory, interest on his loans, wages and benefits to his employees, taxes on his property, taxes on his profits, taxes on his net income,new equipment and machinery costs. But, knowing Bob, he’ll just complain he is a victim of some stripe and still not grow up.
The reason Marx is so attractive is that ignorant and envious people don’t want to feel bad about themselves. So Uncle Karl tells them a story about how it’s all the rich guy’s fault that they suck so hard at life. These people are not “marginalized;” like Marx, they’re just losers who are mad at God. And in Marx-speak “justice” means, “Stuff I want.”
If every penny of wealth were to be seized by some almighty power and distributed equally to every person on the planet. Within 10 years, those who are wealthy now, would be wealthy again. And those who are poor now would be poor again.
People who are wealthy, for the most part, are wealthy because they have made smart decisions.
People who are poor now, for the most part, because they have made poor decisions.
Before some wise acre starts going on about Kardashians or what not, note, I said FOR THE MOST PART. Obviously there are exceptions to every rule.
A lot of people who know nothing about economics whine about how that $3/widget has been stolen from Bob.
Of course David used his own money to build that factory and fill it with the tools that Bob is using.
In all probability, Bob was trained in how to make widgets, either by David or by someone hired by David.
David provided the raw materials, without which Bob would have nothing to make.
David is paying for the utilities needed to keep the plant operating so that Bod can make those widgets.
David is paying for the support staff who do all the other things needed so that Bob can concentrate on making that widget.
The know nothings actually believe that David shouldn’t be compensated for anything he has done, without which Bob wouldn’t be able to make anything and would be unemployed.
They don’t want to own the Capital (Marx), because they know they are useless, they just want to consume it.
Marx was a parasite who thought other people should pay his living simply because they had money – THAT’s the attraction.
Yep now in a communist system everyone gets paid $.50 an hour and it’s a fair.
Of course the people that run everything still get the easy life.
@Bob boder
That’s what happened in Lenin and Stalin’s USSR. The supervisors, bosses, and manager of factories received additional payment because of bribing or preferential treatment. It was rife with corruption.
That’s what happened in every instance of Marxist economies.
Thomas Sowell wrote an interesting paper in which he supported the notion that capitalism promotes cooperation between people, while socialism promotes competition and corruption.
I witnessed the collapse of Communism across Eastern Europe in 1989.
Having been brought up as an RAF child, I lived in what was then West Germany for half of my life until the age of 18. We lived not on RAF bases, but amongst the Germans that my father and his colleagues were defending against the Soviet threat. My father had been a forecaster for Bomber Command for most of the WW2, and in the early 1960’s was working on joint British/German station near Cologne.
His senior colleague was an elderly German with a doctorate in Meteorology.
Our neighbour was a heavily decorated former German fighter pilot, who had managed survive service on the Easter Front. His family was split across the Iron Curtain, a fact that caused much distress.
Despite former enmities, they were all united in efforts to counter the Soviet menace.
Seeing the collapse of the Berlin Wall on televison was a very emotional event for me, as it meant, quite simply, liberation for that family.
When I see young impressionable people like those from Extinction Rebellion or any of these other anarcho-lefty-socialist groups I despair. Their ignorance is troubling, and I wonder just how much history they have bothered to read.
I confess, I wasn’t a great student of history when I was 18, but having by then seen Dachau (my parents took me) , and read Orwell and Solzhenitsyn (school curriculum), I at least had a sense of what was simply terrible, and to be avoided at all costs.
Even when I was a student in the late 1970’s we could tell that the Socialist Workers Party activists were F.I.T.H. (you work it out). How is it that derangement like that hasn’t gone away?
It’s weird to me that now, approaching retirement, I’m more politcally angry and therefore likely to go out campaigning than I ever have been. Perhaps it’s because I have assets that I’ve spent 40 years working for and want to protect them, whereas young (or old) fools who have little or nothing think that destroying (other people’s) things doesn’t matter as they have naff-all anyway?
I do have a decent life here in the UK , but if things get worse , Idaho looks attractive.
Recently I read an interview with one young rioter. He proclaimed that the store owners weren’t really being hurt when their stuff was being stolen and their stores burned. According to the rioter, the insurance companies are going to pay for it anyway.
Even if the insurance covered 100% the cost of rebuilding and restocking (they don’t, there are deductibles and limits in every insurance policy), the insurance rates would go up from here on out.
And of course if the store owner manages to rebuild, when he has to increase the prices that he charges, the same young rioters will no doubt declare that these hire prices are proof of racism.
The following interview of Peter Hitchens – who once was a keen Bolshevik – is particularly revealing:
The authoritarian left never rests
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbfKBXpHNUU
Of course the leaders of Extinction Rebellion will not discuss “The Gulag Archipelago” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Abridged ed 2018 Vintage Classics) or engage in a conversation with people like Peter Hitchens.
The three failed social, economic, and political systems worldwide are feudalism, socialism, and communism. What is amazing is the number of people that still cling to these field systems.
Interestingly enough, those 3 systems are more similar than they are dissimilar.
Exactly. They all favor minority regimes, single/central solutions, expert rule. The worst of them combined authoritarian character with diversity dogma (i.e. color judgment), not limited to racism, sexism, ageism, and other class-based taxonomies. Also, wicked solutions (e.g. one-child, selective-child) to what they classified as hard problems (e.g. social progress, social justice, social excess).
You could include fascism in that list, though the argument can be made that fascism is just a variation on socialism.
This is well known and has been for quite some time, yet nothing happens; they get media attention and the ‘good guys’ get banned from the media; what do we do to make a change?
The existential threat is a fringe group becoming a majority without sufficient inspections. Climate is only a tool in that test of a generation.
XR began as “A campaign by RisingUP!” but has taken on an existence of it’s own. The RisingUp! website is here:
https://risingup.org.uk/
although they no longer acknowledge being the parent of XR. Warning: there are lots of trackers on this website – use TOR and NoScript to view.
The draft manifesto is worth a look:
https://risingup.org.uk/draft-manifesto
as is the “About us” page: ” We seek a better more beautiful world we recognise is both necessary and possible”
The whole thing is run by “Technically Compassionate Revolution Limited”, the directors of which are George William Blackmore Barda and Gail Marie Bradbrook. There’s lots of stuff about these two on line. Gail is or has been a director of 6 other companies.
Evidently a champagne socialist.
What’s disturbing about the Covid response – lockdowns and much free money – is that a large segment of the population is seeing how good free stuff is, and apparently without any downsides. It looks as if Trudeau is planning an election before the free stuff runs out. I am sincerely hoping that the bulk of the free money recipients are the sort that don’t come out to vote.
The solution is very simple. Send them all to Venezuela.
Even they don’t want more useless idiots.
We have lots of Venezuelan engineers in calgary who Nash their teeth are what is happening in North America and say that we are the stupidest people ever born.
We have so many real life examples to observe and still the crazies think they can make this work.
Assuming they think at all
Socialism and dodo dynasties. The disposition of minority regimes to run amuck, especially in a heterogenous society, is well established. That said, Extinction Rebellion has already been identified as a Pro-Choice, selective, opportunistic sect of what is ostensibly a “secular” church with mortal gods and goddesses directing their herd.
Individual dignity. Intrinsic value. Inordinate worth. Natural imperatives (e.g. reproductive rights, not rites). Go forth and reconcile.
What’s the difference between XR and Antifa?
XR Founder Calls for Government and Business Owners to be Shot
Yet he owns no guns. And is an avowed pacifist. Wonder how that will work out?
So, he is a gun owner, and is an avowed militant, or likes to keep his hands clean and shares responsibility.
Really? Where has he publicly admitted to owning guns, not being a pacifist and washing his hands regularly? All I see from him is death to humans(except for him, he is important).
Eric,
Please try to avoid the knee-jerk coupling of “toxic” with “heavy metals” and more broadly with chemicals in general.
AFAIK, heavy metals poison very few people each year. There are more pressing issues.
Be guided by the wisdom of Paracelsus who around 1540 wrote what is translated as “All things are poison, and nothing is without poison, the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison.” Geoff S
Correct
Water will kill you
Vitamin a
Zinc
Arsenic
Etc
All things essential to life
Food, just look at the people in walmart
It is the duty of every parent to punish their socialist snowflake offspring by spending their ‘inheritance’. Let them earn it for themselves !
So when they have taken the UK to a socialist state does it become SUK (Socialist UK) or USUK (Union of Socialist UK).
“What do we want?”
“A proletarian Marxist-socialist workers climate change revolution!!”
“When do we want it?”
“Now!!” /sarc
How are the Indian tigers going after being ”managed” by the Chinese?
What about Pangolins? Are they doing ok in China?
Some people wonder why Socialism and Marxism keeps coming back despite it being indisputably an utter failure.
Simple – Being a Socialist only asks OTHER people to change. If it goes wrong you are still an unemployable loser with a hobby degree* and a massive student loan, but if it goes right then you get to be the ruling class for a generation or so.
Remember the basic principle of Marxism is that the people who own the methods of production (the Old White Men) needs to be overthrown by those who actually do the production (the workers). Remember in the Marx world view the small business owners of the world no longer exist, having been consumed without replacement by the Old White Men… I mean production owners. So in the Marx Expanded Universe we have the Owners, The Workers and… Karl.
Karl was not an Owner or a Worker. He was effectively an unemployed loser standing on the outside trying to upset the structure of society so that people like him could be in change and wouldn’t have to live in share houses. His plan had very little actual risk for himself – remember, not a worker, not an owner – so if it went wrong it was simply back to sharing a room somewhere in Paris.
This is why Socialism is always popular. People with no actual risk in the game want other people to change so that society will be ‘fairer’ to THEM.
*Hobby Degree – One that will never help you make money. Also one that provides learning you could have gotten elsewhere for free.
Socialism is a good way of making people poor.
Poor people cant buy anything else than necessities.
Poor people has to work more and harder with less machines.
Piketty showed that equality is a goal , but failed to show examples like Cuba and Romania.
Keep on the future is grim!
Each of those people holding that “Socialism or Extinction” banner, and those following in support should be made to read a copy of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s book: The Gulag Archipelago to find out what Socialism was really like.
Socialism/communism is a mental disorder!