Return with us now to a time when oil drilling was good; damming rivers a priority; racial stereotypes amusing; building smokestack industries a national goal; eliminating the countryside a utopian ideal and when burying protesting dirt farmers a la Rachel Corrie with earthmoving equipment was funny. Come back to an era when being conscripted was the highest ambition of any ‘peace loving’ person; cast your mind back to a day when people not only didn’t demand a minimum wage, they contributed free overtime. Lots of overtime.
So much overtime they gave it a name. Stakhanov overtime. Alexey Stakhanov was the ideal worker. “On 19 September, Stakhanov was reported to have set a new record by mining 227 tonnes of coal in a single shift. His example was held up in newspapers and posters as a model for others to follow, and he appeared on the cover of Time magazine in the United States”
Hearken to an era before Greens tried to stop polar activities; back to when activists vied with each other for exceeding whaling quotas.
It was revealed in 1994 that the Soviet Union had been systematically undercounting its catch. For example, from 1948 to 1973, the Soviet Union caught 48,477 humpback whales rather than the 2,710 it officially reported to the IWC. On the basis of this new information, the IWC stated that it would have to rewrite its catch figures for the last forty years. According to Ray Gambell, then Secretary of the IWC, the organization had raised its suspicions with the former Soviet Union, but it did not take further action because it could not interfere with national sovereignty.
How to square this with today’s leftist doctrine? The Daily Caller reports the conclusions of a Washington environmentalist think-tank. “Environmentalists are pushing a new way to deal with global warming and overpopulation: the U.S. needs to ‘de-grow’ its economy.”
“There’s no such thing as sustainable growth, not in a country like the U.S.,” Worldwatch senior fellow Erik Assadourian told Sierra Magazine.
“We have to de-grow our economy, which is obviously not a popular stance to take in a culture that celebrates growth in all forms,” he said. “But as the saying goes, if everyone consumed like Americans, we’d need four planets.”
De-growing the economy means working less and consuming fewer goods and electricity — the foundation of modern life. Most cheap, reliable electricity that businesses and homes rely on to power their everyday needs comes from sources like coal, natural gas and nuclear power — which environmentalists argue are killing the planet.
Well Crimea River. We’ve come a long way, baby.
If the reader is dizzied by this reversal of imagery, by this inversion of black into white or more precisely, Green into Red, which is the same as Red into Green, the point is not to criticize the Soviet Union, which has until recently been rumored to be dead but dreaming. The object of recollection is to look afresh at the faces of their successors in the West to ask ourselves: how much of their ideology is an act? The particulars of their religion may change, in fact it changes all the time. It is their worship of power that remains the same.
When Red was Green.
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Galloway on the future of the world.
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It is a mistake to imagine the Left is about making the future. It’s real business is continuously remaking the past. What makes the future are the billions of unplanned people; those who ignore Galloway or escape the clutches of Saddam and Assad. The past is what the Left is constantly trying to re-frame or tax. And our only escape from power is into tomorrow. Perhaps Sarah Connor said it best. The only victory we can claim is having made it this far.
August 29, 1997 came and went. Nothing much happened. Michael Jackson turned forty. There was no Judgment Day. People went to work as they always do, laughed, complained, watched TV, made love. I wanted to run down the street yelling… to grab them all and say “Every day from this day is a gift. Use it well!” Instead I got drunk. That was thirty years ago. But the dark future which never came still exists for me, and it always will, like the traces of a dream lingering in the morning light.
Did you know that you can purchase some of these books and pamphlets by Richard Fernandez and share them with you friends? They will receive a link in their email and it will automatically give them access to a Kindle reader on their smartphone, computer or even as a web-readable document.
The War of the Words for $3.99, Understanding the crisis of the early 21st century in terms of information corruption in the financial, security and political spheres
Rebranding Christianity for $3.99, or why the truth shall make you free
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Storming the Castle at Amazon Kindle for $3.99, why government should get small
No Way In at Amazon Kindle $8.95, print $9.99. Fiction. A flight into peril, flashbacks to underground action.
Storm Over the South China Sea $0.99, how China is restarting history in the Pacific
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