devoid of morality
'Tis the season to be jolly so let's talk mass murder.
Here's the BBC reporting the chaotic finale of the Copenhagen climate summit a week ago:
Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping, the Sudanese negotiator, said the draft text asked "Africa to sign a suicide pact". Saying it was "devoid of any sense of responsibility and morality", he added: "The promise of $100bn will not bribe us to destroy the continent."
By the end of Saturday friend of the defenceless Lumumba had upped the rhetoric in a familiar direction:
Di-Aping ... said the accord spelled "incineration" for Africa and compared it to the Nazis sending "6 million people into furnaces" in the Holocaust.
Though the BBC was careful to call him negotiator for Sudan by this time, Di-Aping had throughout the conference been styled as the chief negotiator for the G77, the block of 130 developing countries led by China.
The catchy meme of likening those who see no hard evidence that global warming is a crisis to lunatic Holocaust deniers is clearly yesterday's trick. Now politicos who refuse to stump up more than $100 billion a year to feed into upstanding African leaders like the regime in Sudan, on the back of the 'settled science' of anthropogenic global warming, are just like the Nazis who planned and executed that 'gold standard' of genocide - like AGW, gold had everything to do with it, as we now know the Bank of International Settlements in Basel understood throughout the 40s, to its lasting shame.
Strangely, this month in Denmark, which alone with Bulgaria saved almost all its Jews from the gas chambers, sending them across the water to Sweden in 1943, there were very few eco-warriors and NGOs shedding tears for Darfur in the west of Mr Di-Aping's own nation. Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and Nobel prize-winner, considers the mass murder of Muslim by fellow-Muslim in Darfur the worst instance of genocide in the modern world. He's not the only one.
Devoid of morality? I couldn't think of a more pertinent phrase. The link with Christmas? As I heard read again in church this morning, in the temple in Jerusalem Simeon, on seeing the infant Jesus for the first time, prophesied:
This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many ... so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed.
It's time soft hearts turned from the shock of corruption revealed by the whistleblower at the University of East Anglia in November to a hard headed evaluation whether to trust leaders like those in Khartoum either to tell the truth or protect the defenceless of the earth in their care, if they receive billions of our money. 'We really want the best' isn't going to cut it for our own leaders very much longer. The grubby antics of Phil Jones at the Climatic Research Unit and the overblown rhetoric of Mr Di-Aping see to that.
It's a remarkable fact that of all sceptics of looming climate disaster the most distinguished, Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, lost almost all of his father's family and most of his mother's to the Holocaust. Even when gratuitously called a 'denier' by those who don't understand a fraction of the complex climate science he does, Professor Lindzen doesn't normally hit back by comparing the AGW movement to fascism. But here he does - because he's been asked to consider the impact of CO2 emissions control on the poor. It's the only time the dreadful analogy has rung true for me in around seventeen years of studying the issue.
There's no avoiding the hard choice: who to trust not to lead us into such terrible depths, as a world, once again. Happy Christmas.
