“Ecocide”: Joker in the Deck?

I remember seeing slaughterhouses described as “the new Treblinkas.” I am, of course, disgusted by the slaughtering conditions of cows, sheeps, pigs, etc. in these places , but comparing those practices to the genocide of six million people by the Nazis is, at best, horrifically tendentious—at worst, and I believe this is much closer to reality, indicative of a hideous contempt for humanity, a hatred of human beings, and reflective of genuinely genocidal aspirations. Did the geophysicist Bill McGuire not state that the only solution was the “culling of the human population”* before deleting his tweet in the face of the outcry it (fortunately) provoked? That people can entertain such thoughts does not surprise me, and in truth leaves me entirely indifferent. Thought policing is not my thing. That a mind might become tinged with every conceivable shade of despair or misanthropy does not strike me as abnormal. Nor is it surprising that certain activist organizations tend to attract such minds more readily than others. People can always find others who think as they do. What is frightening is the number of such individuals, and above all the ease with which they can gather openly and describe their aspirations. And what leaves me dumbfounded is that one can make such statements with complete nonchalance, as though they were an act of uncomfortable but necessary candor. The Final Solution is not far away—not the Holocaust itself, but all those unspeakable ends that tyrants and their followers have considered justifiable, brought about through monstrous means and a variety of methods, yet all culminating in mountains of piled-up corpses.

There are many examples: the genocide of Ukrainians through famine (the Holodomor), the massacre of Tutsis by Hutus, of Armenians by Turks, of Native Americans by the early settlers, and the atrocities committed by the Japanese army in Manchuria. (I am, however, infuriated by demands for repentance. It is inconceivable that I should apologize for being white because of French colonization in Algeria, just as a twenty-year-old Turk owes no apology to the Armenian people for the misdeeds of ancestors who may not even have been his own.)

The demands for repentance made by these eco-fanatics are of an entirely different order. Man himself is the problem. As though inventing rifles or vaccines stemmed from a hatred of nature or a desire to destroy it!

Epimetheus, whose very name reveals his thoughtless character (Epimetheus means “the one who thinks afterward”), managed to convince his brother Prometheus (whose name means “the one who thinks beforehand”) to let him distribute to every creature in Creation the attributes that would enable it to face the world.

The eagle received wings, talons, and keen eyesight; the bull was given horns; the lion, teeth and claws; the slow worm was thoroughly cheated (even more so than the Bipes, which is saying something); and as for man, Epimetheus left him naked, without fur, fangs, or claws. Prometheus therefore undertook to steal fire from the realm of the gods and bring it to mankind. The Titan was punished: each day an eagle devoured his liver, and had to endure the same meal endlessly until Hercules finally put an end to it during the course of those public-service labors whose exploits mythology has faithfully recorded.

Human intelligence is mankind’s only protection against the vicissitudes of the world. It is also a curse: in Genesis, Adam and Eve realized that they were naked, and were ashamed of it. In this way they distinguished themselves from the rest of the animal kingdom. The wolf sees in man only another animal, but human beings understand themselves and accept themselves as such. It follows naturally that they can harbor toward their fellow humans a hatred that is truly fundamental. The fanaticism illustrated by this article belongs to a higher order still.
Drieu Godefridi explains this admirably in a work entitled Environmentalism: A New Totalitarianism? (L’écologisme, nouveau totalitarisme ?), published by Texquis in 2019. If an English translation exists, or if you read French, I strongly recommend this book.

*https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/culling-for-climate?utm_source=publication-search