The New Communism

WASHINGTON - June 10, 2008 - Americans are searching for leadership in this election year and they have found it.

Unfortunately, he is not an American politician. Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic, who survived the communist system and now leads a country that emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet empire, is warning of a new form of communism threatening human freedom and progress.

Like former President Ronald Reagan, who developed his understanding of the communist menace by fighting the communists in Hollywood, Klaus suffered under them during the communist era in Czechoslovakia.

Because of this experience, however, he came to understand how Soviet-style communism, which collapsed as an empire and created the circumstances for the emergence of the Czech Republic as a free and independent nation, never really died as an ideology and that it has imitators in the West.

His book, Blue Planet in Green Shackles, published by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, charges that the movement to “save” the environment has been taken over by ideologues who favor total government control over our lives. He says it can be considered a form of communism, socialism or even fascism. Whatever you call it, the result will be the extinction of human freedom.

Indeed, Klaus’s book quotes the authoritative essay, “Fascist Ideology: The Green Wing of the Nazi Party and Its Historical Antecedents,” by Peter Staudenmaier, as providing the backdrop for understanding the mentality driving the media-led hysteria over “global warming” and the alleged necessity for immediate governmental action at the national and global levels.

Staudenmaier wrote that “the Nazi movement’s incorporation of environmentalist themes was a crucial factor in its rise to popularity and state power.” He explained, “Hitler and Himmler were both strict vegetarians and animal lovers, attracted to nature mysticism and homeopathic cures, and staunchly opposed to vivisection and cruelty to animals. Himmler even established experimental organic farms to grow herbs for SS medicinal purposes. And Hitler, at times, could sound like a veritable Green utopian, discussing authoritatively and in detail various renewable energy sources (including environmentally appropriate hydropower and producing natural gas from sludge) as alternatives to coal, and declaring ‘water, winds and tides’ as the energy path of the future.”

While the Nazi embrace of these alternative energy or health solutions does not discredit them, the historical facts should prompt us to consider the motivations of those promoting these causes in the current context. Are the attacks on “Big Oil” and the push for alternative energy technologies being used as a pretext for more government control over the economy? Are the demands for government action to curb global warming being used to undermine and subvert free enterprise capitalism and private property rights?

But while communism was an atheistic system, Klaus notes, modern environmentalism has assumed a religious dimension and has become a “green religion.”

At the end of Klaus’s remarks on this subject at a Washington, D.C. dinner hosted and sponsored by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), master of ceremonies Jonah Goldberg remarked that he wished that we had a U.S. President who would make such a speech. Tragically, Bush and Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, have fallen into the camp, which includes Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and most of the Democratic Party, which wants to further erode individual freedom in the name of saving the environment. It is the modern version of the Marxist, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” except that the needs of the environment are now being placed above those of people.