Jim Geraghty yesterday wrote about the recent nuclear sub sinking in China. It has not been big news here because we are too busy breathlessly covering two candidates sticking their tongues out at each other ad infinitum, but it actually is big news. Geraghty begins his piece with an examination of the large number of industrial/environmental disasters that have happened in China in recent years, and they are legion. It reminds me of the same scenario in the Soviet Union that culminated in Chernobyl. He moves on to draw parallels to Soviet naval disasters, which is a reasonable parallel. But then he makes an interesting turn that is worth examining in more detail.
Says Geraghty:
Autocracies are bored by safety regulations. Autocratic leaders just want what they want, often power and military force and grand demonstrations of their greatness, and they don’t care about what they have to sacrifice to get it, whether that’s the safety of the workers and sailors beneath them or the long-term environmental consequences.
This is one of the many reasons why red-green alliances make so little sense. How blind must you be, as an environmentalist, to look at the regimes in Beijing and Moscow and think, “Yes, these are the responsible stewards of the environment I want as my ally?”
He has a point there, but I think he is missing the bigger picture. There are two 40,000 feet takeaways from all that he describes so well. Takeaway One, failure is the endpoint of totalitarianism. Simply put, things are just too complicated for that level of tight control to ever work. Takeaway Two, the so-called green movement, in its highest levels of leadership, never has been about actual environmental stewardship – it is simply a means to totalitarian levels of control.
Ask yourself this – was the Russian Revolution ever really about creating a utopian socialist state? Oh sure, it was on the streets, but do you honestly think Lenin and his gang cared what form of government they ended up with or do you think they just cared that they were running it? And even if they were idealistic to some extent, the pretense ended in the Politburo with Stalin. The transition from Gorbachev to Yeltsin to Putin can be viewed as shucking altogether the trappings of utopian thought and settling into old fashioned dictatorship. Every utopian scheme in history has ended in failure and that failure has been rooted in the fact that enforcing the so-called utopian conditions requires totalitarianism. And totalitarianism fails because there are some things beyond our control.
In its current state environmentalism is a utopian scheme designed as a facade for a power grab. It is, if you think about it, audacious. They desire to dictate to every nation and place around the world how much power they can have and the source of that power. If they were to achieve that it would make the likes of Hitler or Stalin or Mao look like amateurs. And if they were to achieve it without resort to military force it would make the rest of us look like fools.
Is China at an endpoint? I don’t know – very different situation. It is possible that after Xi they will loosen the reins for the sake of maintaining control – there is historical precedent with them. Only time will tell.
In the end the lesson to be drawn from the failures that plague China is not that red-green alliances are senseless, but rather that they exist because they are close kin. Both are the sheepskin covering the wolf of totalitarianism – a wolf doomed to failure, taking all of us with it.
ADDENDUM: Every week I read and set aside things to talk about. But often I cannot get to them because there is more pressing news., just as the host leaves so much for the producer to cover in his podcast. I think that at least until we are past the election, I will add this “curated” (Hey! why not join the recent “word-of-the-day” trend?) addendum to Saturday posts and give some quick links to what’s in the pile before I just discard it altogether.
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