By Brian Sussman
In recent weeks while addressing Tea Party rallies here on the left coast, I ask the assembled patriots what appears to be an odd question: "Would all those from the former Soviet Union please raise your hands?"
A notable number of hands are always raised -- the San Francisco Bay Area is home to a diverse population.
I then ask another curious question: "What does April 22 signify to you?"
Without exception, someone will shout with great displeasure, "Lenin's birth date!"
The crowd clearly sees that I'm on to something. I next ask the former Soviets, "And as a young child in school, who were you told is your grandfather?"
At this point several painfully respond, "Vladimir Ilyich Lenin!"
"And in the United States, do you know what we celebrate on April 22?" I ask. "Earth Day. Grandfather Lenin has been conjoined with Mother Earth -- and it's no coincidence."
In my new book Climategate (released today), I detail the doings of Earth Day's devious founders. It seems that this crafty crew were cut from cloth that resembles Marx and Lenin, as opposed to Madison and Jefferson.
In 1970, Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-WS) was Congress's leading environmentalist activist. Nelson was the mastermind behind those ridiculous teach-ins, which were in vogue in the late sixties and early seventies. During the teach-ins, mutinous school instructors would scrap the day's assigned curriculum, pressure their students to sit cross-legged on the floor, "rap" about how America is an imperialist nation, and discuss why communism really isn't such a bad form of government -- it just needs to be implemented properly.
Nelson's teach-in efforts were aided by a young man named Denis Hayes. Hayes was student body president while an undergrad at Stanford, and well known for organizing anti-Vietnam war protests. Later, while pursuing a masters degree in public policy at Harvard, Hayes heard about Senator Nelson's teach-in concept and eventually helped Nelson institute the practice nationwide. Denis Hayes would also conspire with the senator to found Earth Day.
Rounding out the troika was Professor Paul Ehrlich of Stanford. In 1968 Ehrlich authored the Malthusian missive, The Population Bomb, in which he infamously spouted wild allegations which included equating the earth's supposed surplus of people with a cancer that needs to be eradicated: "A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. ... We must shift our efforts from treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions."
In 1969, following a much-hyped oil spill off the Santa Barbara coast, an overblown patch of fire on Cleveland's Cuyahoga River, and the pharmaceutically induced vibes cast across the nation via the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, Senator Nelson met with Ehrlich and reportedly said, "My God -- why not a national teach-in on the environment?" Hayes was brought in to play a pivotal role with organization and implementation. After careful consideration, a name and date for the event were chosen: The inaugural Earth Day would be celebrated April 22, 1970.
Skeptical historians immediately noted a bizarre coincidence. The date coincided with the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Lenin. Earth Day organizers have since tried to brush aside the odd synchronization of dates with lame retorts like "Lenin wasn't an environmentalist." But he didn't have to be. Lenin's core political philosophy was linked at the hip with these newfangled eco-zealots, who maintained that America's government must be altered, its economy planned and regulated, and its citizens better-controlled. The environment would be the perfect tool to force these changes, and the most efficient way to gain converts would be through the public school system -- the earlier, the better.
Nelson and Ehrlich were already known as non-traditional crackpots, but young Hayes was that and more. In a New York Times article published the morning after the first Earth Day entitled "Angry Coordinator of Earth Day," young Hayes bragged that five years earlier, he fled overseas because "I had to get away from America." Hayes was so committed to his anti-capitalist cause that he made sure that his organization did not even produce Earth Day bumper stickers. "You want to know why?" He explained to the Times: "Because they go on automobiles." Read more.
No comments:
Post a Comment