Historical Lessons

Czech President and economist Vaclav Klaus is the keynote speaker at CEI’s annual dinner on Wednesday. Klaus riles the Left with is detailed analogy of modern environmentalists, and particularly global warming alarmists, to past utopians including those with whom he and his countrymen had a less than pleasant experience.

CEI is publishing his book in English, Blue Planet in Green Chains. Here Klaus makes the case starkly, as do Lubos Motl among others with more personal experience than we over here, and physicist Freeman Dyson in his current NY Review of Books piece.

Just last night I picked up Haynes and Klehr’s “In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage” for some bedtime reading. The experienced anti-alarmist will gasp at the parallels there, as well, between the behavior and dialectics of academic elites in the history field and those in the science/climate science arena. The party line was maintained through personal attacks on any who challenged it, the evidence against their dogma disputed at every turn including through mutually exclusive arguments.

Ultimately, the revisionists scrambled into justification mode. Most striking was Haynes and Klehr’s Chapter 5, “From Denial to Justification”, setting forth the fellow travelers’ arguments in the face of undeniable evidence of espionage and Soviet-run stoogery that, look, whatever, the point is that it was all in the name of creating a more just world.

For now, as the alarmist case continues to unravel pick up Klaus’s book, subscribe to Benny Peiser’s CCNet and decide for yourself.