Alexander Solzhenitsyn feeds the darkest temptation
Andrew Bolt
ALEXANDER Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning writer who died this week, spotted the danger back when it was called communism.
Mind you, it took no great brains to see evil in an ideology that was trying to destroy him.
After all, this Russian war hero had been arrested on wild charges of slandering Stalin and sent to the Gulag, where millions had died.
But we should be warned. When Solzhenitsyn published The Gulag Archipelago in English from 1974, warning of the horrors of the Soviet system he'd somehow survived, his revelations struck many intellectuals in the West like a clap of thunder.
What? Nice communism, meant to help people, actually slaughtered them in their millions? Who'd have thought?
Well, not them. And which of our intellectuals can see now the newest form of the same totalitarian instinct?
What Solzhenitsyn described in his greatest work - a history rather than a novel - was how ideology licensed even intelligent people to be cruel.
What's more, this particular ideology taught that individuals could be sacrificed to the cause. To history.
It convinced its followers that the rest of us could be made to be happy, and anyone standing in the way of that moral plan must, of course, be evil. It was a duty to remove them.
So, said Solzhenitsyn, "it's thanks to ideology that it fell to the 20th century to experience villainy on a scale of millions."
Count its victims in Mao's China, Stalin's Russia and the Germany of the National Socialists. Count all those individuals sacrificed to save the State, Fatherland, or Party.
What Solzhenitsyn described was, of course, just the latest appeal to the totalitarian instinct that has tempted intellectuals from Plato to Marx. But with Marxism now dead, at least outside universities, what new ideology now tickles that temptation?
Just a bit more philosophy before we name some names . . . The great philosopher Karl Popper asked why so many clever people so often fell for ideologies that aimed to replace open societies with tyranny - some new cult of the tribe.
"Why do they attract and seduce so many intellectuals?" wrote the author of The Open Society and Its Enemies, who thought man's glory came from being free to reason and decide.
"I am inclined to think that the reason is that they give expression to a deep-felt dissatisfaction with a world which does not, and cannot, live up to our moral ideals and to our dreams of perfection . . .
"(T)he revolt against civilisation may be . . . a reaction against the strain of our civilisation and its demand for personal responsibility."
It was the strain of freedom that scared such intellectuals. And power that seduced them.
Which is why my hackles rise to read the latest from Clive Hamilton, former head of the Left-wing Australia Institute and now a Professor of Public Ethics.
The freedoms of capitalist society, he now claims, "makes us slaves of our passions" and he detects in us (how? where?) "a deep anxiety" over our "internal decay".
"There is a need - more pressing by the day - to question the value of the economic, political and personal liberty that has been won."
It's sinister that Hamilton assumes the cause of our "discontent" is our freedom. But what less-free society would make him happy?
Here's what I think is a clue. Why is Hamilton so strongly drawn to the global warming crusade? Why is it so many former Marxists and almost everyone of the Left is so attracted to the cult of man-made warming, with its call to force us into eco-virtuous lives?
Why is it, say, that the former editor of the Communist Party of Australia's newspaper, NSW University's Associate Professor David McKnight, not only now preaches global warming, but demonises sceptical scientists as enemies of the revolution, likening them this week to Holocaust deniers and tobacco lobby shills, and suggesting they were so corrupt they'd been bought off by Big Oil?
Again and again we now see the budding totalitarians of global warming demand individuals be sacrificed for this latest cause.
And so animal rights activist Toni Vernelli announced she'd aborted her child because "I felt strongly (it) would only be a burden to the world", and the ABC's Ockham's Razor gave neuroscientist John Reid a whole show to argue "the population of the world must be very quickly reduced" and the "humane way" to do it "might be to put something in the water".
True, few warming believers yet call for violence, and leading ideologue George Monbiot was likely joking when he said, "Every time someone dies as a result of floods in Bangladesh, an airline executive should be dragged out of his office and drowned."
Likewise, the ABC was just joking, I'm sure, when its website invited children to calculate their carbon emissions and "find out when you should die" to save the planet.
But what worse lies ahead, when a British energy company is now running a national campaign urging children to enlist as "climate cops" to spy on their family and root out "climate crimes" to "save the planet"?
How much further will this cult go when we've already named as Australian of the Year a man who
warns us to prepare for a dictator?
Read for yourself Tim Flannery's best-selling The Weather Makers, in which he says if the world warms much more, "humans would have no choice but to establish an Earth Commission for Thermostatic Control".
Says Flannery: "Inevitably, one day some commissioner will suggest that their work would be more effectively done were they to concentrate on the root cause of the issue - the total number of people on the planet.
"And with such a move the Earth Commission for Thermostatic Control will have transformed itself into an Orwellian-style world government with its own currency, army and control over every person and every inch of our planet.
"As horrific as such an outcome is, if we delay action to combat the climate crisis, the carbon dictatorship may become essential for our survival."
Solzhenitsyn would have recognised this longing for "order", this subjugation of individuals for a great cause, this fear of freedom. Can you?