The left-wing Apocalypse
City Journal has a wonderful piece from Pascal Bruckner on “climate change” as the left-wing version of the Apocalypse: a dogma, anti-technology, impervious to reason, wherein Gaia (the new left-wing God) rains destruction upon humanity as punishment for its sin of not living by leftism.
Around the turn of the twenty-first century, a paradigm shift in our thinking took place: we decided that the era of revolutions was over and that the era of catastrophes had begun…How did this change happen? Over the last half-century, leftist intellectuals have identified two great scapegoats for the world’s woes. First, Marxism designated capitalism as responsible for human misery. Second, “Third World” ideology, disappointed by the bourgeois indulgences of the working class, targeted the West… The guilty party that environmentalism now accuses—mankind itself, in its will to dominate the planet—is essentially a composite of the previous two, a capitalism invented by a West that oppresses peoples and destroys the earth…“There are only two solutions,” Bolivian president Evo Morales declared in 2009. “Either capitalism dies, or Mother Earth dies.”
So the planet has become the new proletariat that must be saved from exploitation—if necessary, by reducing the number of human beings…
There’s more.
Via NRO (Stanley Kurtz), who delves into a different angle: how left-wing environmentalism lets rich, white college kids join the ranks of the oppressed. “Global warming allows the upper-middle-class to join the proletariat, cloaking erstwhile oppressors in the mantle of righteous victimhood.”
