The Green Socialists of Mars
By Daniel Greenfield
SutanKnish.Blogspot.com
We live in a strange world in which the weather is a subject of furious political debate. People have been arguing about the weather ever since the first rainstorm caught the first man without the umbrella that he did not yet know how to make, but they didn't hold political debates over it.
For the last fifty years, the anti-weather side
has been insisting that the world is headed toward a
Frostean apocalypse of ice or fire. The calm
biblical assertion that "Seedtime and harvest, and
cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and
night shall not cease" was replaced by the
terrifying certainty that the planet would soon turn
into Mars or Venus; either too hot or too cold.
The end of weather was here. Instead of stable
rhythms and cycles that might last for months or
centuries, there was a runaway weather apocalypse
that would culminate in unlivable conditions.
The doomsday predictions roll out daily without any
regard to scientific or experiential reality. The
more the predictions fail to match up, the more
urgently Warmists insist on immediate action. The
harder it snows, the more articles appear warning
that snow may soon be a thing of the past.
Never mind the weather; the end of weather is almost
here.
There is a fearful logic to the Warmist creed. Of
all the planets, minor planets, moons and assorted
rocks drifting through our solar system, only one is
inhabitable by man. It is very easy to assume that,
but for the grace of random chance, the Earth might
be just as uninhabitable as Mars or Venus and to
worry that one day it will be.
Mars and Venus inspired more than a series of
bestselling books about gender relations. They also
convinced the Warmists that Mars and Venus are what
the Earth would become.
"Venus is too hot. Mars is too cold. But the Earth
is just right a heaven for humans. After all, we
evolved here. But our congenial climate may be
unstable. We are perturbing our poor planet in
serious and contradictory ways. Is there any danger
of driving the environment of the Earth toward the
planetary Hell of Venus or the global ice age of
Mars? The simple answer is that nobody knows," Sagan
wrote in Cosmos.
The insistence that Mars and Venus were variations
of Earth, rather than entirely different planets,
was a false assumption that predated Sagan. This
geocentric fallacy insisted that Mars and Venus were
teaching us about our world, rather than about those
worlds. Their unlivable atmospheres reinforced the
neurotic obsession of doomsayers who treated them as
failed Earths.
The original error of climate researchers was their
assumption that planets were more fragile than they
truly are and could be undone by a nuclear exchange
or even by a few coal plants. Carl Sagan, who had
done much to popularize unscientific paranoia about
nuclear winter and global warming, warned that the
Gulf War's oil fires would lead to a miniature
nuclear winter.
They did not.
The mingling of philosophical paranoia over a
godless universe and political pacifism disguised as
science shaped not only Sagan's musings, but the
entire ideology of weather apocalypses which derived
from the conviction that ungoverned man was bound to
destroy his environment.
"The surface environment of Venus is a warning:
something disastrous can happen to a planet rather
like our own," Sagan wrote.
Sagan, who had predicted that Venus was a hot and
dry desert due to a runaway Greenhouse Effect, did
not have a very good track record on that planet...
or on this one.
Integral to the doomsday model was the belief that
Mars and Venus were planets that had once been very
much like our own. Sagan, who had spent so much time
decrying the primitivism of the medieval mindset,
had adopted its geocentric assumption that Earth was
the baseline and that if Mars and Venus differed
from earth, then they were failed earths.
It was not the first time that distorted geocentric
perceptions of Mars and Venus would influence Earth.
In the 19th century, Percival Lowell, a
popularizer of often bad science and an earlier
version of Sagan complete with anti-clerical and
pacifist views, became obsessed with the idea that
Mars was an inhabited world whose native race was
facing extinction because the planet was losing its
water. After the Martian canals had been completely
discredited, Lowell's obsessions were dismissed as
the error of a lone individual; but that was no
truer of Lowell than it was of Sagan.
Socialist science fiction had become a booming field
in the late 19th century. Edward Bellamy's Looking
Backward had envisioned time travel to a Socialist
American utopia in the year 2000. It was a bad book,
but a popular bestseller because it used the frame
of pseudoscience to depict Socialism as both a
practical model and inevitable. Likewise, Lowell's
Mars allowed Socialist theorists to depict the
Martian Socialist utopia that Earth could become.
Novels such as "Politics and Life in Mars",
"Unveiling a Parallel", "To Mars via the Moon", "A
Prophetic Romance" and "Red Star" envisioned
culturally superior Martians demonstrating their
advanced Socialist societies with income equality,
planetary labor unions and pacifism to the human
race.
In the Russian "Red Star", the Lowellian canals are
a Communist triumph over inhospitable nature
anticipating the USSR and Communist China's
disastrous dam projects. The German writer of "Two
Planets" envisioned the advanced Martians invading
Earth to impose their superior Socialist society on
human beings.
The Martians, like Global Warming, were a tool of
radical social change.
In "A Message from Mars", a turn of the century
novel, play and film, a Martian from an advanced
society visits the most selfish man on earth to
convert him to "Otherdom" teaching him to share what
he has with the less fortunate. In "Unveiling a
Parallel", a reactionary man visits Mars to discover
how well a progressive society can work.
In the Martian Socialist utopias, the aliens lecture
human beings on our selfishness, urging us to cast
aside nations, religions, private property and
monogamy and build our own Socialist utopia.
An inhabited Mars became a fictional conceit for
envisioning an ideal society. Global Warming serves
the same purpose, providing a fictional framework
that can be used to reconstruct human society along
more progressive lines. The only difference is that
Warmists have gotten further along in imposing their
delusion and their plans on the world than the
Lowellians ever did.
It does not matter to its proponents, inside or
outside the scientific community, whether the planet
is warming or cooling, any more than the existence
of Martian canals was pivotal to the Socialist
Martian utopias. The bad science is only a means of
advancing bad politics.
The Martian canals, like Global Warming, provided a
perspective shift to enable us to see our society as
changeable.
Or as Lowell wrote, "The fact gives us but a flat
image. It is our reflexions upon it that make it a
solid truth." Global Warming is another of those
"reflexions" that led Lowell to see a dying ancient
Martian civilization in the sky contrasted with a
modern dystopian Earth dying of its industry and its
wars.
Lowell's Mars was dying of "Global Cooling". Earth
is dying of "Global Warming". The crisis of the
Martians forces them to band together to manage the
water they have left and abandon selfish
preoccupations with capitalism and nationalism. The
Warmists warn that unless we embrace global
government, the excess water stored in icebergs will
flood the world.
Their Martian crisis has become our crisis.
In "To Mars Via the Moon", the human narrator
encounters a Martian Socialist utopia which accepts
the inevitable destruction of its planet by
practicing birth control.
"As the final period draws nearer, families will
become smaller and smaller, and in the last Martian
century no children will be born; so the diminishing
water supply will suffice for the needs of the
dwindling population," A Martian character explains,
forecasting the environmentalist Zero Population
Growth movement on our own planet. "Thus the race
will gradually die out naturally, and become
extinct."
Humanity, envisioned as the plague by
environmentalists, has only one final solution.
Extinction.
Though Sagan and the Warmists depict Venus and Mars
as failed earths, the threat to Earth that they
envision comes from man. Or as Sagan put it,
"Intelligent life, able to make major environmental
changes." The dream of finding Martians and
Venusians had died. It could no longer be argued
that these worlds had been rendered uninhabitable by
intelligent activity. But man was still on the hook.
Nuclear winter and Global Warming indicted war and
industry, the targets of those old utopias, for
making earth uninhabitable. The loudest advocates
for Global Warming within the scientific community
went on using Venus as a model for a failed Earth.
"The Venus syndrome is the greatest threat to the
planet, to humanity's continuing existence," James
Hansen declared. "If we burn all the coal, there is
a good chance we will initiate the runaway
greenhouse effect. If we also burn all the tar sands
and tar shale, I think it is a dead certainty."
Hansen's Venus syndrome is a modern echo of the old
Martian obsession. Earth will lose its oceans unless
it undergoes radical social and political changes.
It will become Lowell's Mars.
Lowell's Mars and Hansen's Venusian Earth are both
crisis societies with no room for individual
concerns. Survival demands the abandonment of
selfish desires such as heating your home or driving
to work. It mandates a progressive society where the
collective good reigns supreme and the leaders hold
unlimited power until the ordinary people become
progressive enough.
Global Warming is the culmination of the Martian
utopias. Either we become Socialist Martians or die
on Venus.
There is no more basis for Venus syndrome than there
was for the Martian canals. Both depend on wishful
thinking and misinterpreting data. The real threat
to humanity does not come from the climate, but from
the ambitions of other men. That was something that
the ancients knew long before they knew anything
about the worlds around us or the distant stars.
We do not face a crisis of climate, but a crisis of
ideology, not a crisis of rising oceans or
temperatures, but rising ambitions and egos. The
environmental crisis is a work of ideology, not
science, its goals are not planetary salvation, but
radical social change.
Our troubles do not come from Mars or Venus, from
the oceans or the volcanoes, but from the evil
dreams buried in the hearts of other me