The new socialism

Charles Krauthammer

In the 1970s and early '80s, having seized control of the U.N. apparatus (by power of numbers), Third World countries decided to cash in. OPEC was pulling off the greatest wealth transfer from rich to poor in history. Why not them? So in grand U.N. declarations and conferences, they began calling for a "New International Economic Order." The NIEO's essential demand was simple: to transfer fantastic chunks of wealth from the industrialized West to the Third World.

On what grounds? In the name of equality -- wealth redistribution via global socialism -- with a dose of post-colonial reparations thrown in.

The idea of essentially taxing hardworking citizens of the democracies to fill the treasuries of Third World kleptocracies went nowhere, thanks mainly to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (and the debt crisis of the early '80s). They put a stake through the enterprise.

But such dreams never die. The raid on the Western treasuries is on again, but today with a new rationale to fit current ideological fashion. With socialism dead, the gigantic heist is now proposed as a sacred service of the newest religion: environmentalism.

Socialism having failed so spectacularly, the left was adrift until it struck upon a brilliant gambit: metamorphosis from red to green. The cultural elites went straight from the memorial service for socialism to the altar of the environment. The objective is the same: highly centralized power given to the best and the brightest, the new class of experts, managers and technocrats. This time, however, the alleged justification is not abolishing oppression and inequality but saving the planet.

Blasphemy! Sacrilege! Call up the Inquisition

Jug Suraiya - Times of India

In response to those few who have contested the claims of global warming at the Copenhagen meet, R K Pachauri said that there was "overwhelming proof" that man-made climate change was an established scientific fact. An earth scientist like him should know that in science, 'overwhelming proof' is not the same as 'irrefutable proof', whose proper place is not science but religion.

Religion - or rather, religious dogma - is the age-old adversary of the spirit of enquiry. According to religious dogma the universe is a closed book which can never be reopened. In the 17th century, Galileo was threatened with torture by the Christian church because he proposed the 'heresy' that the Earth was not the centre of the universe, and that it revolved around the Sun. Forced to recant, Galileo is said to have murmured as he left the court, "Nevertheless, it does move".