Here’s a letter by Don Boudreaux regarding a review of environmental fearmonger Bill McKibben’s latest book.
Editor, The New York Times Book Review
620 Eighth Avenue
New York, NY 10018
To the Editor:
The virus of totalitarianism is seldom detected when it is attached to notions
dominant among ‘progressive’ intellectuals. Indeed, under such circumstances
this virus not only deludes its hosts’ mouthpieces into believing themselves to
be well-meaning and forward-thinking agents of beneficial social change, it also
protects even the most outrageous demands of these mouthpieces from serious
scrutiny by other intellectuals.
Think of the fawning admiration bestowed for many years by the likes of Ida
Tarbell, Lowell Thomas, and Sigmund Freud upon Mussolini. Or of Lincoln
Steffens’s and Dorothy Parker’s enthusiasm for Stalinism. Or of Joe Kennedy’s
present-day coziness with Senor Gen. El Presidente-for-Life Hugo Chavez.
Well-meaning intellectuals all, and nary a word of dissent from their
contemporary comrades-in-ink-and-paper-and-podium.
Your pages today offer yet another alarming example of how easily ‘progressive’
intellectuals regress into championing tyranny. Insisting that Bill McKibben’s
proposals for saving the planet are too modest (!), Paul Greenberg – reviewing
McKibben’s lastest use of trees to spread the Green gospel – endorses, as
allegedly being the only practical means of saving the earth, “some overarching
authority, a kind of ecologically minded Lenin” (“Hot Planet, Cold Facts,” May
9).
Read Greenberg’s words carefully. Read them again. Ponder them.
No degree of global warming poses to humanity anywhere near the danger that is
posed by intellectuals who are fascinated with the prospect of rule by strong
men.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
George Mason University
