The Four Horsemen - Part 4: Death

When we started writing on the theme of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, we intended to address only the first three: War, Pestilence, and Famine. What is to be said concerning the fourth: Death? But we've reconsidered, because there is a lot to be said about a perverse ideology that seems more widespread than any of us imagined when it first appeared.  

What is this ideology? Who in their right mind demonizes energy and food production? The answer, though obvious, is so hard to accept that our minds skitter around the edges of it.

There are those who fervently believe that Earth cannot support a human population of more than 500 million; some say even less, and some even graciously allow that a quarter of our current population might be sustainable. Mix in the apocalyptic, near-term fantasies of the global warming true believers (there's a broad overlap between these two groups) and you get a soulless conviction that human population, and with it, modern civilization, must crash fast and hard.

What is being cooked up now by deliberate policies is war, pestilence, famine, and death on a scale imaginable only by the "true believers" described above. Like all the worst "true believers" they do not see anything amoral or malevolent in their views or their actions. It's all for our own good, whether we are enlightened enough to see it or not.

We are not conspiracists; we lean toward the old saying, "do not ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence," but incompetence and stupidity do not explain this. We do have hopes for incompetence, though, as execution is more important than intent, and on the evidence, these people are not competent and disciplined enough to execute anything well. Especially when the adults in the room wake up, and resist.

We lean toward the point of view that "three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead," and that people who disagree vehemently with us are just as likely to disagree and fight among themselves, as they are to unite effectively and support one another. The ancient proverb, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" is seldom true – such folks may be allies of convenience, briefly – somewhat like China and Russia right now – but friendship and deep, consistent mutual interests have to be based on something more than mutual hatred of a third party.

What we're talking about here is more an inchoate, unorganized convergence of interests – or hatreds – than any sort of conformist ideology. It is not even a true alliance capable of order, discipline, and coordination. These disparate interests don't party together, and there is probably no central HQ issuing orders. Unfortunately, the sheer weight of this movement-that-is-not-a-movement is sufficient to threaten some very severe consequences, regardless of how little its "members" really have in common, and how incompetent they may be in action. Demolition and destruction are forces of entropy, and unfortunately do not always require coordination and competence.

First, who are the players?

• The Deep Ecology movement. Haven't heard of them? Read on.
• The globalists – the serious ones, like the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, George Soros and Bill Gates, and the faceless, unelected bureaucrats of the EU. They are, more than anything else, a self-interested elite who envision a world united, even against its will, under their "enlightened" leadership, asserted from the lofty heights of privilege, wealth, and security. Not that they are really united among themselves, except for temporary advantage.
• The committed socialists – the true believers in the Marxist ideal, which has in their view never had a real chance to prove itself, despite its unequalled toll of death and destruction everywhere it has been tried.
• The true believers of anthropogenic climate change – devotees of the angry weather goddess, wielding their false "science" like a scythe – and you are the grain under their swinging blades.
• Jihadists – the uncompromising true believers of Islam, who aspire to a perfect 7^th century society as avidly as they seek to emulate their prophet in every respect, from child rape to bloody-handed conquest to the abasement, slavery and abuse of nonbelievers.
• The "woke," self-hating, guilt-ridden post-modernists of Western societies, who despise their own history and culture and wish to punish all its descendants – except, of course, themselves – for historical transgressions. These are, in sum, the least competent but loudest and most annoying subset; but we should not ignore their potential for contributing to the emerging chaos and sabotaging efforts to control it.

It should be clear that there is considerable overlap among these categories; perhaps less obvious is that there is, across this spectrum, a great deal of energy, knowledge and expertise. To the extent that they can pull in one direction even temporarily, or complement and compound the efforts of others even without close coordination, they threaten the very fabric of our civilization.

Now you'll be asking, what is the common thread? It is this: a hatred of modern industrial civilization; of Western civilization, because the leaders of other "civilizations" in Samuel P. Huntington's construct (The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order) have largely adopted Western ways and ideas.

It is modern Western civilization that, in the view of these disparate affinity groups and ideologies, is polluting the planet, attacking biodiversity and the sanctity of Mother Earth, bringing on cataclysmic climate change, preserving the exploitative evils of capitalism, resisting the universal spread of the one true faith, and/or unfairly resisting the necessary transformation of our societies into a decadent, divergent and distrustful galaxy of genders, persuasions, and prejudices, divided against itself, dependent on and compliant to the ruling elite. With such a bill of charges, how can modern civilization deserve anything but collapse into the dustbin of history? This is the goal they share, for contradictory and opposing reasons.

The classical liberalism of post-Enlightenment Western civilization has given us, right up through the second half of the 20^th Century, representative governments, a rule of law that remembers and embodies the hard-earned lessons of thousands of years of human civilization, the concept (however frayed and tattered) of open markets and economic free choice, and a tolerance of differences so long as they don't interfere with the rights and opportunities of others.

If classical Western liberalism fails, then in short order the Jihadists will be throwing the gender-confused off the tops of tall buildings, socialists will be herding the noncompliant into gulags and mass graves, and the terrified worshippers of the weather goddess and the "deep ecologists" will be sanctioning the death of billions of humans (but not themselves) to bring the world back into "balance." So much for "friends." But their common enemy – modern Western civilization – is so huge, and so evil in their eyes, that some of them cannot look beyond the happy day when it falls. And some of them do look beyond, eyes wide open, and like what they see there.

We'll take a look into one aspect of this malevolent alliance – the intersection of climate (non)science and "deep ecology." First, from the world of academia, we find a representative Master's thesis from a Swedish graduate student, Stijn Koenraads, at Linköping University in 1916. His thesis is titled Reduction of the Global Human Population – A Rectificatory Argument based on Environmental Considerations. He's serious about this. Some representative quotes (in these and subsequent quotes, emphasis added):

"…I contend population reduction is justified … because humans have greatly harmed other living beings, species, ecosystems and themselves, and because humans can be held responsible for this…"

"Some forms of active population reduction are abortion, contraception, sexual abstinence, voluntary or compulsory sterilization, policies which restrict the number of children people are allowed to have, allowing/extending possibilities for euthanasia and/or assisted suicide, (large-scale) homicide, sex education, the use of small families as societal role models and measures leading to a decrease in poverty, which in turn leads people to have fewer children. Passive population reduction could, for instance, amount to refusing to perform life-supporting treatment on (terminally ill) patients, refraining from performing IVF [in vitro fertilization] and other ways in which humans can artificially create children, refraining from taking precautionary measures for natural disasters, refusing to hire new personnel in branches like the police force (which probably positively affects crime rates and crime-related deaths) and closing national borders in order to prevent foreigners from entering a country."

"Population reduction should therefore be considered as a way in which humans can take responsibility, in the form of rectification, for the harm they have caused..."

"So how should humans rectify, acknowledging the difficulties just mentioned? My idea is to rectify with human lives. To begin with, life is meaningful for humans as well as other entities. Global warming and related environmental problems are largely anthropogenic. Moreover, there is a possibility that anthropogenic environmental harm decreases on the whole if fewer people live on the Earth…"

"…population reduction might even be used as a global sanctioning device; countries which contribute unevenly much to environmental harm could be expected to reduce their populations to a higher extent than countries which contribute relatively little to the harm..."

"I must point out that I am aware it might be difficult to implement many of the methods I described above … in a democratic framework..."

"Let me discuss one general objection to the implementation of population reduction. It could be argued that population reduction would lead to negative birth rates, and that these would cause cities, provinces or nation-states to disappear or economically stagnate… Nevertheless, this can be regarded as an acceptable consequence. One could argue, for instance, that matters of life and death – our responsibility to rectify for harm to non-human life – are more important than the preservation of human culture. Moreover, intraspecies justice for humans (e.g. power distributions) can be seen as less important than interspecies justice, as the latter harm concerns many living entities and ecological wholes…"

"…even if we do not know exactly when we should stop, we know that we will have to reduce a lot in order to reach the end-point. Therefore, at least now, we do not need an exact end-point yet, because we will have to reduce the population drastically anyhow, whatever end-point we take. Starting with reduction without determining an exact end-point is also a safeguard against inaction because of calculation processes, political decision-making etc.: it is important to act now and not lose ourselves in the precise formulation of the (very) long-term end-point of reduction. If the above is correct, reduction should start as soon as possible..."

If the Normalcy Bias is strong in you, you will have read the above and said, "So? Another wacky graduate student in a woke university." And so he is, but since writing his thesis he has been broadly employed like many thousands of others like him, and his more recent writings do not indicate any shift in his views. He represents the views of many who are making and implementing policy, and advising leaders who may or may not understand the depths and depravity of the convictions of such people.

Some are more action-oriented than European thesis-writers. In America we have "deep ecology" movements epitomized by Deep Green Resistance. Derrick Jensen, in his online preface to The Deep Green Resistance Book (DGRB) says:

"The dominant culture—civilization—is killing the planet, and it is long past time for those of us who care about life on earth to begin taking the actions necessary to stop this culture from destroying every living being… The goal of DGR is to deprive the rich of their ability to steal from the poor and the powerful of their ability to destroy the planet…. Direct actions against strategic infrastructure is [sic] a basic tactic of both militaries and insurgents the world over for the simple reason that it works. But such actions alone are never a sufficient strategy for achieving a just outcome. The different branches of these resistance movements must work in tandem: the aboveground and belowground, the militants and the nonviolent, the frontline activists and the cultural workers."

Here you see how Jensen and his fellow "aboveground" leaders of DGR try to insulate themselves from the potential consequences of their ideology. They urge militant violence because of the perceived urgency of the threat, but they won't commit such acts. The "belowground" cadres will do the fighting while the "aboveground" will dodge responsibility the way Sinn Fein publicly disavowed the violence of the Irish Republican Army:

"…there must be an absolute firewall between aboveground and underground activities and organizations. This is basic security culture."

Lest you confuse DGR with more mainstream climate activists, in their chapter ALL-OUT ATTACKS ON INFRASTRUCTURE, the DGRB authors say:

"…militant resistance would have one primary goal: to reduce fossil fuel consumption (and hence, all ecological damage) as immediately and rapidly as possible. A 90 percent reduction would be the ballpark target."

Sound familiar? These folks are not listed as Biden Administration advisors, but they might as well be.

"…A drop in the human population is inevitable, and fewer people will die if collapse happens sooner…. Therefore, those of us who care about the future of the planet have to dismantle the industrial energy infrastructure as rapidly as possible. We'll all have to deal with the social consequences as best we can. Besides, rapid collapse is ultimately good for humans—even if there is a partial die-off—because at least some people survive."

Jensen and his co-authors and leaders of DGR are driven by a conviction that:

"The key issue—which we've come back to again and again—is time. We will soon reach (if we haven't already reached) the trigger point of irreversible runaway global warming."

In their minds, this justifies crashing civilization and killing billions of humans. Their denial of the scope of the dying they advocate is moral depravity akin to the perpetrators of the Holocaust or the politically-motivated famines of the 20^th Century. Jensen has a Q&A section in their book where he admits that:

"… some people will say that those who propose dismantling civilization are, in fact, suggesting genocide on a mass scale. Polar bears and coho salmon would disagree. Traditional indigenous peoples would disagree. The humans who inherit what is left of this world when the dominant culture finally comes down would disagree."

Note that he doesn't deny the scale of the dying, he just seeks to avoid the opprobrium of calling it "genocide." Such is "woke" culture. It would be funny if it were not genocidal. The depths of his self-deception – or is it just cynicism? – are apparent in his answer to a question as to whether "millions of people in cities will die as a result of this war on industrial civilization." Jensen replies that while it might seem as though "poor people in cities" would suffer (he only cares about poor people, it's 'good riddance' for the rest of us), an overnight collapse of the global economy would actually be positive for them, because they could return to the land "stolen" from them when they were driven into the cities, and would immediately take up a pastoral lifestyle and feed themselves.

One suspects the only thing he has ever grown is a pot plant in his mother's basement. The level of ignorance and failure of imagination here is appalling. Some human minds cannot stretch themselves around the concept of billions of human lives placed at risk by at "overnight collapse of the global economy." This is either a deadly failure of imagination, or rationalization and deception on an incredible scale.

Goal #1 of "Decisive Ecological Warfare Strategy" in the DGRB is "To disrupt and dismantle industrial civilization." From fires and explosions in food processing plants to the deliberate, rapid dismantling of the global fossil fuel economy, it seems that this goal already has many dedicated adherents, whether they know and admit it, or not.

In the United Kingdom, DGR has a counterpart movement that is to outward appearances a bit more tame. Extinction Rebellion does not speak of "ecological warfare" – it is devoted to non-violent activism. But it is still fixated on an apocalyptic vision of the future due to rapid and irreversible global warming. Their naivete is touching:

"Mahatma Gandhi, whose mass peaceful non-violent direct action movement was a major inspiration behind Extinction Rebellion…"

As though Gandhi's movement would have ended in anything other than bloody repression if the colonial power were any other nation than the UK, which was already committed to Indian independence, and had scruples entirely lacking in totalitarian states confronted with popular resistance. If you want to build a reputation and legacy for non-violent political activism, we recommend targeting Western democracies like Gandhi did. Try that in a totalitarian state, and you end up with tank tracks "all across your back," to paraphrase Jimi Hendrix.

And although ER disavows direct violence, its program would be no less responsible for mass death. "Life is sacred" to Extinction Rebellion – except the life of "excess" humans:

"Act Now: Every part of society must act now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025 and begin protecting and repairing nature immediately. The whole of society must move into a new precautionary paradigm, where life is sacred and all are in service to ensuring its future."

We've only taken a deep look at one set of players in the high-stakes game on which the survival of modern, Western, industrial civilization depends. The threats posed by violent, jihadist Islam, the deadly serious advocates of socialism, and the would-be globalist elite are even greater. If the synergy generated by all these disparate haters of our civilization is not recognized, opposed, and defeated, Death will indeed ride.