John McGuirk

Watch this video. It was played to the assembled delegates at the opening of the COP-15 conference in Copenhagen:

What’s the message behind this film? Obviously, on a literal level it clearly suggests that the failure of the gathering at Copenhagen would lead to – amongst other things – enormous tornados, tsunamis in the middle of deserts, and (in what is clearly a newly discovered side-effect of global warming) an epidemic of earth-splitting, cuddly-bear stealing earthquakes. The message is very clear: join us, or die.

On a more insidious level, it invokes the favourite canard of the modern, trendy, enviro-concerned amongst us – that failure to adopt their world view is fine, so long as you are willing to condemn little children to death, starvation, or torture. The fetishised use of children in political messages is perhaps the most disturbing symptom of a green political and social culture which has become increasingly sick.  Remember this party political broadcast by our own merry band of eco-warriors in 2007? And this one, which is my personal favourite:

Do you understand yet? By disagreeing with these people you are actively killing children.

There’s something very insidious about a movement and a culture which fetishises the death and suffering of children to promote its political message. The real issue here, however, is how accidentally revealing the first video is. Think about it – it goes a little like this:

“A child sees flooding or tornados or Tsunamis on television. A green analyst appears in the report to tell the impressionable child that this disaster – one of many such disasters that have happened since the beginning of time itself – is clear evidence that the world is being destroyed by this global warming. The people on television (and by the way, in classrooms) tell the child that unless something is done, the world will end. Child, predictably, has terrible (and terribly unrealistic) nightmares about this. Child then becomes devotee of the green movement.”

This is, in actuality, what happens in our schools and universities every day of the week. Children as young as four are taught about how man destroys the environment. Childrens books are produced specially to indoctrinate a whole new generation. Videos like the those above are shown to tell children that they face almost certain death unless they change their ways. Television stations run letters to children telling them that their fathers are killing other children.

There’s a pattern of propaganda at the heart of the green movement. It uses the fictional suffering of children to indoctrinate adults. It uses the fictional evil of adults to indoctrinate children.

Now, here’s the punchline. What’s the latest idea floated at Copenhagen to save the world? A global One-Child-Policy. This is of course a logical extension to the “Save the Planet, Have an Abortion” movement’s thinking,  which itself is not a radical new idea.

Of course, these are just the fringe lunatics. The more moderate members of the global green movement don’t want to kill, abort, or limit the numbers of children. They would just prefer – in good, upstanding, left-wing tradition – to tax the hell out of them. $5,000 to have a baby, and $800 a year to offset its carbon emissions, to be precise.

China, by the way, already touts the social niceties of its one-child policy as a major achievement in the battle against climate change.

So which is it? Are we making the world safe for our children by terrifying our children? Or are we making the world safe for our children by getting rid of our children? Because either way, the Green fringe looks more and more like a bunch of mind-addled lunatics every f**king day.

PS: I almost forgot. Remember, every time you fly, Polar Bears fall to their deaths: