James Delingpole "gets it":
“Environmentalism” is but one strategically significant theatre in a much greater ideological war being waged across the world. It’s the same one Toby Young is fighting over education; the same one the likes of Rod Liddle, Andrew Gilligan, Nick Cohen and Mark Steyn are fighting over political Islam; the same one Melanie Phillips is fighting over Israel; the same one Douglas Murray is fighting on pretty much everything. And its ultimate outcome is at least as important as those of the ones we fought in 1914-1918 and 1939-1945. At stake is exactly the same thing the Greek alliance fought for when Western Civilisation was born at Salamis in 480 BC; the same thing we citizens of the West have been fighting for ever since: the right to forge our own destinies as free men and women, rather than remain infantilised, oppressed and enslaved as vassals of a tyrant state.
Sure there’s no comparison (well not that much) between Obama’s US and Stalin’s Soviet Union; Coalition Britain and Mao’s China; Julia Gillard’s Australia and Queen Ranavalona’s Madagascar; sure the war we’re currently fighting doesn’t involve mass destruction like that of World Wars I and II. But it’s precisely because the ideological struggle we’re currently engaged in is so seemingly democratic and innocuous that it is in fact so dangerous. With Hitler and Stalin it was easy: the enemy was plain in view. Today’s encroaching tyranny is an of altogether more subtle, slippery variety. It takes the form of the steady “engrenage” – ratcheting – of EU legislation; of the stealthy removal of property rights and personal liberty under the UN’s Agenda 21; of the eco-legislation created by democratically unaccountable bodies like America’s Environmental Protection Agency; of the stealthy encroachment of the Big Government into the most intimate recesses of our daily lives – not just under barely disguised socialist administrations like Obama’s even under notionally “Centre right” ones such as Cameron’s or Sarkozy’s. When the Enemy is as sly and insidious as that, it’s much much harder for the increasingly oppressed populace to rouse itself to the appropriate state of alarm and rebellion.
Read the full article on telegraph.co.uk.
Re: Evil ideologies - Delingpole speaks out
I'm so pleased to have found this site again.
Delingpole is great at his best, and this piece is in the top ranks of his work.
The point about the property rights: It's somewhat dangerous to call them property rights, without qualification, because the statists ALWAYS attempt to seize the moral high ground.
They typically say there are human rights and then there are property rights, as if there is a neat division between the two. Then, they go on to (falsely) say that they support 100% all human rights, thereby implying a second-class status to "property rights."
The fact is, property, by definition, has no rights. The human owners of property DO have rights, the human rights to property.
It is, of course, our job to remind them that there is no real distinction, and constantly challenge them on every definition they post up, since so often, the party who defines the terms and sets out the alternatives gets to frame, and often win, sometimes undeservedly, the argument.
The statists have no moral or legal basis for their attempts to put us into captivity. This battle, particularly against the CAGW scam, is as big (in terms of payoff for the perpetrators, and misery for the victims) as either of the world wars. Saddest of all, if the statists win, many of their victims will have lost willingly, eagerly.
I loved the piece on Pascal's wager, also. What a pleasure to see great execution of solid concepts, with no hint of puffery! I shall recommend this site often.
Re: Evil ideologies - Delingpole speaks out
Thanks humanpersonjr, agree with your thoughts.
I wonder if we get confused about rights because the word is 'backwards'. What I mean is this: We have no right to not be hit by lightning, but we do have a right not to be murdered. Why? Because a 'right' is a shorthand way of talking about another moral agent's responsibilities. Other people have a responsibility not to murder us, but there is no free agent in the electrical forces of a thunderstorm that is under any obligation to not strike us with lightning.
Once we see that a right for one is a responsibility for another, then talk of property rights becomes a responsibility upon others of a particular kind, namely, to leave us in possession of our property. But it is basically similar to any other responsibility to respect another's welfare, whatever the form it may take.
The idea that property is somehow evil is thoroughly confused. I am privileged to have a close relationship with a family of Australian magpies, which we discuss on our wild bird website http://wingedhearts.org. And they have properties, inheritance, and property rights, despite being separated from us by about 150,000,000 years of evolutionary divergence. So property and rights are a thoroughly natural thing that clearly is to the evolutionary advantage of the species that develop it. Despite wanting to get back to nature, that crowd are profoundly out of sync. with the natural processes of our planet.