Today's edition of the New York Times contains an important and disquieting piece, "The Next Genocide", by Timothy Snyder, on the danger of science denial, particularly the denial of climate change. Many are unaware of the role of science denial in Nazi ideology. Snyder observes:
The war that brought Jews under German control was fought because Hitler believed that Germany needed more land and food to survive and maintain its standard of living — and that Jews, and their ideas, posed a threat to his violent expansionist program.
The pursuit of peace and plenty through science, he claimed in “Mein Kampf,” was a Jewish plot to distract Germans from the necessity of war.
Snyder warns us that today:
Climate change threatens to provoke a new ecological panic. So far, poor people in Africa and the Middle East have borne the brunt of the suffering.
For example:
China today, like Germany before the war, is an industrial power incapable of feeding its population from its own territory, and is thus dependent on unpredictable international
markets.
In summation:
The risk is that a developed country able to project military power could, like Hitler’s Germany, fall into ecological panic, and take drastic steps to protect its existing standard of living.
Denying science imperils the future by summoning the ghosts of the past.
An important piece, but it is regrettable that Snyder was too timid to go after the anti-"GMO" hysterics who want to hamstring modern agricultural science, or the anti-nuke crowd who have Germany and Japan burning millions of tons of coal.