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Greenfield: Night Falls on Civilization
Sultan Knish blog ^ | Saturday, March 29, 2014 | Daniel Greenfield

Posted on 03/30/2014 3:40:12 AM PDT by Louis Foxwell

Saturday, March 29, 2014

Night Falls on Civilization

Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog

The World's Fair to Earth Hour marks the journey of a civilization across the sky from light into darkness. In our new post-civilizational time, we no longer celebrate human accomplishment by seeing a vision of the future, instead we turn off the bright lights of civilization and sit in the dark for an hour to atone for our electrical sins.

Earth Hour stigmatizes human accomplishment as the root of all evils and treats the lack of accomplishment as an accomplishment. For all the pretense of activism, environmentalism celebrates inaction.

Don't build, don't create and don't do-- are its mandates. Turn off the lights and feel good about how much you aren't doing right now.

Humanity is what is wrong with the world. It began with fire, then the wheelbarrow, the lever and the ax, the mason, the carpenter, the scientist, the visionary. It can end with you.

Just turn out the lights.

Environmentalism has degenerated from valuing how much the skies and the oceans, the butterfly and the beaver, the still lake and the blade of grass, enrich our humanity into a conviction that all human activity is destructive because the species of man is the greatest threat to the planet. Each death, each act of undoing and unmaking, each darkness that is brought about by the cessation of humanity becomes a profoundly environmentalist activity.

Kill yourself and save the planet. Put out the lights, tear down the city and let the earth revert to some imaginary primeval paradise free of all pollution; whether it is the carbon breath of men, dogs and cows or the light pollution of their cities.

Embrace the darkness.

While we take electric light for granted, being able to read and write after dark is a technological achievement that transformed our civilization. Animals are governed by day and night cycles. Artificial light made it possible for us to work independently of the day and night cycle. And that made our literature and our sciences, our civilization, possible.

Like all environmental gimmicks, Earth Hour is self-defeating as anything other than an assertion of identity and faith. Far more energy is consumed promoting it, than is saved by practicing it.

Websites switch to black, even though displaying black on television sets or monitors consumes more energy. Turning off electricity to entire buildings after working hours and then turning it on costs more than letting it run. And getting 90 million people across the country to turn their power on and off at a scheduled time is an energy savings disaster. And since power companies draw down on their more expensive 'green' generators first, Earth Hour actually shuts down 'green' power.

But its sponsors don't claim that Earth Hour saves energy or prevents us from polluting the globe. Like every environmentalist stunt from flying rock stars around the world on jet planes to carving thousands of statues made of ice and then leaving them to melt in a public square, Earth Hour is described as spreading "awareness".

Spreading awareness is the sole purpose of most environmental activism. Awareness spreading doesn't improve anything, but spreads the ideology that humanity is evil to make people feel guilty, outraged, hopeful or some combination of the appropriate political sentiments in the face of an imminent armageddon that can only be fought by convincing everyone to be deeply concerned by it and disdainful of everyone who stands outside their Chicken Little consensus.

It is a religious ritual for a secular religion that has no god, but whose devil is the gear and the microchip, the milk cow and the imported banana, the skyscraper and the lathe.

The WWF, Earth Hour's godmother, has learned that shrill attention seeking is a reliable fundraising method. One of the WWF's more memorable fundraising methods was an ad showing hundreds of planes headed toward the World Trade Center, to highlight just how much more important their work is than fighting terrorism. Franny Armstrong of Age of Stupid, which was promoted by the WWF, ran a 10:10 campaign in the UK, whose ads featured environmentalists murdering dissenters, including a group of schoolchildren. The ads are just ads, but London's leftist former mayor, Ken Livingstone had said of Age of Stupid, "Every single person in the country should be forcibly sat down on a chair and made to watch this film."

That is the dark side of environmentalism. The most active non-Muslim domestic terrorist group is environmental. The undercurrent of violence finds easy purchase in environmentalism's creed that the only real problem with the world is people.

No amount of turning off the lights is enough. Eventually you come around to having to turn off the people.

The Nazis were among the most enthusiastic environmentalists of their day, even the term 'Ecology' was coined by Ernst Haeckel, whose racial views served as precursors to Nazi eugenics. But while Nazi environmentalist believed that we were all animals, they insisted that some animals were better than others. Modern environmentalists believe that we are all worse than animals. In their view we are both natural and unnatural. Natural because we come from the ape and unnatural because we are intelligent. We live on the planet, but our intelligence excludes us from ever belonging to it.

Tools are our crime against nature. We make things. And we make things better. Earth Hour is our reminder to drop our tools and stop. Stop thinking. Stop doing. Just stop.

The incompatibility of productive man with the natural world is a fundamental tenet of the environmental movement. Everything we do is destructive because of what we are. We are tool builders, inventors and producers. And the environmentalist movement is aimed at convincing us to stop being these things. To turn off the lights, make do with less and march back to the caves with a few clever ad campaigns and a catchy tune.


Not only mankind must go, but all the animals that man has domesticated and bred-- cows, dogs and cats. That is why PETA kills thousands of dogs and cats a year, promotes the euthanasia of wild cats and pet spaying and its staffers have even been known to kidnap animals and then kill them. It is why the Global Warming crowd has made cow emissions into their whipping bovine.

It's not enough to kill man, tear down his cities and put out his lights. His cats and dogs and his cows and sheep must die along with him.

Environmentalism is not motivated by a love for all creatures, but by the fanatical belief in the purification of the earth from all traces of human civilization. The political leftist romanticizes the noble savage over the civilized man and its environmentalist arm romanticizes the jungle over the thousand acre farm. It prefers the the swamp to the garden, the wolf to the dog, and the tiger to the house cat.

This preference is not scientific, it is emotional, rooted in an antipathy to industrialization and human development. It wraps itself in the cloak of science, but it is a reactionary longing for a romanticized nomadic past that never existed. A way back to the lost eden of noble savages free from morality and guilt.

In the environmental bible-- man is the source of all evil. The transition from the nomadic to the domestic, the village to the city, and the craftsman to the factory, is its version of original sin.

The environmentalist began with a distaste for human civilization and the fetishization of the rural farm life of the peasant. The champions of this "naturalism" were invariably urban artists and writers from the upper classes who were enthusiastic about being in touch with nature. After them came the "Nature Fakers" crafting myths about the high moral standards of wild animals. Domestic animals in such stories were always wicked and dumb, while wild animals lived deep and spiritual lives out in the woods. And so the animal kingdom was subdivided into the noble savage and the uncle tom. 

The world was divided into two polar opposites, the green and the gray, in an apocalyptic struggle. Either man would drown the world in industry, or he would return to a natural way of life through a lethal virus (Mary Shelley, The Last Man, 1826), a devastating war (H.G. Wells), oppressive social policies (Edward Bellamy) or eco-terrorism (The Monkey Wrench Gang). The more civilization grew, the more apocalyptic the scenarios became culminating in the two great environmental myths; nuclear winter and global warming. These apocalyptic myths have served the same purpose for environmentalists as apocalypses do for all religions. They predict a time when the sinful order is overturned and the earth is renewed to make way for the faithful.

Man is the environmentalist's devil. He must be beaten, broken and subjugated. Even the animals he has bred, who are the spark of his genius, must be taken out and killed. Take away his food and his power. Blame him for the natural cycles of the planet and the inevitable extinction of species that goes on whether he is there or not. Take away his technology and his inventions. Tell him that the humblest bacteria is better than him for it is dumb and follows its natural instincts while he insists on using his mind. Take away his primacy and his learning. And then leave him in the dark.

The environmental movement is tenacious, fanatical and deceptive. Its creed is the undoing of all human progress.

There is money to be made from that, as there is in all revolutions, but beneath the inconveniences of living under an environmental regime, from dirty clothes to high taxes, while being forced to listen to the hypocrisies and false pieties of the Gorean clergy of environmentalist activists heating their mansions while the poor freeze in energy poverty, is the darker reality that environmentalism is an anti-human movement with a vicious hostility toward man and the civilization he has built.

Whatever he has built, it must destroy.

The gap between darkness and light is a profound symbol in every civilization. The light of knowledge pitted against the shadowy dark of ignorance. The light reveals, but the darkness hides.

Civilization and the moral code exist in the light of awareness, but the darkness is home to unthinking bestial things. To call for a return to the darkness is a profound act of symbolism. A civilization that celebrates a return to the darkness for even a single hour is longing for a return to a deeper state of darkness.

A darkness of the soul.


TOPICS: Government; History; Politics; Religion
KEYWORDS: deathofthewest; endtimes; greenfield; sultanknish
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Lou

1 posted on 03/30/2014 3:40:12 AM PDT by Louis Foxwell
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To: Louis Foxwell
(from the article):"The light of knowledge pitted against the shadowy dark of ignorance.
The light reveals, but the darkness hides.

This epitimizes today's media and press.

2 posted on 03/30/2014 3:59:44 AM PDT by Tilted Irish Kilt (Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm. -- James Madison)
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To: Louis Foxwell

Communists: For your own good, we will make you live like peasants (or even better, starve to death) while we live high on the hog.

Environmentalists: For your own good, we will make you live like peasants (or even better, starve to death) while we live high on the hog.

Tribal warlords: For your own good, we will make you live like peasants (or even better, starve to death) while we live high on the hog.

Yassir Arafat, Taliban, whatnot: For your own good, we will make you live like peasants (or even better, starve to death) while we live high on the hog.

etc. etc.


3 posted on 03/30/2014 4:08:08 AM PDT by P.O.E. (Pray for America)
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To: Louis Foxwell

bttt


4 posted on 03/30/2014 4:15:28 AM PDT by sphinx
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To: Louis Foxwell

Where’s the media when you need them?

Earth Hour was the ONE TIME per year that we tested all our outdoor and indoor lights to make sure they all could operate at the same time.

I missed it last night. Now what do I do?


5 posted on 03/30/2014 4:16:10 AM PDT by BobL
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To: Louis Foxwell

“Earth Hour stigmatizes human accomplishment as the root of all evils and treats the lack of accomplishment as an accomplishment. For all the pretense of activism, environmentalism celebrates inaction.”

Distilling down to the essence as only Mr.Greenfield can. He makes writing look easy.


6 posted on 03/30/2014 4:20:06 AM PDT by Artie (We are surrounded by MORONS)
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To: Louis Foxwell

The world just keeps getting crazier. There are now so many crazy people in the world with so many crazy causes that it will be a miracle if humanity and civilization can survive.


7 posted on 03/30/2014 4:25:22 AM PDT by iontheball
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To: Louis Foxwell

Yes, these noble (sarc) environmentalists are out to save the planet...for themselves. They demand we be vegans, ride bikes, abort our children, have no pets, but they live like kings and pretty much do as they please!


8 posted on 03/30/2014 4:28:14 AM PDT by Shery (in APO Land)
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To: Louis Foxwell

I can visualize an outline for a good short story or movie. An earth-shoe type family sits down to celebrate Earth Hour by turning out the lights; prattling on about how wonderful it is; saving energy, etc. After an hour, they go to turn on the lights... and nothing works. No lights. No heat. Stepping outside they find no lights on anywhere.


9 posted on 03/30/2014 4:35:00 AM PDT by Flick Lives ("I can't believe it's not Fascism!")
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To: Louis Foxwell
“It is a religious ritual for a secular religion that has no god,... “

Great rant. A minor correction: It HAS a god; the self. When God is rejected....well, nature (dictated by God) hates a vacuum

10 posted on 03/30/2014 4:44:10 AM PDT by TalBlack (Evil doesn't have a day job.)
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To: Louis Foxwell

The world just keeps getting crazier. There are now so many crazy people in the world with so many crazy causes that it will be a miracle if humanity and civilization can survive.

John 3:19 “And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.”


11 posted on 03/30/2014 4:58:12 AM PDT by iontheball
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To: P.O.E.
"Communists: For your own good, we will make you live like peasants (or even better, starve to death) while we live high on the hog."

Sounds like a description of Dear Reader.

12 posted on 03/30/2014 5:06:05 AM PDT by Truth29
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To: BobL
I missed it last night. Now what do I do?
Wait until Earth Day, then simultaneously test all your indoor/outdoor lights, all your appliances, lawn mowers, snow blowers, AC units, furnace and outdoor grill.
And, don't forget to test all your cars and trucks to the six hour idling in the driveway standard.
13 posted on 03/30/2014 5:09:23 AM PDT by oh8eleven (RVN '67-'68)
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To: Louis Foxwell

Bump....


14 posted on 03/30/2014 5:10:06 AM PDT by Popman ("Resistance to Tyrants is Obedience to God" - Thomas Jefferson)
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To: Louis Foxwell
And God blessed them. And God said to them, "be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth." ... Genesis 1:28
15 posted on 03/30/2014 5:12:11 AM PDT by Servant of the Cross (the Truth will set you free)
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To: oh8eleven
I enjoy burning a little Styrofoam on Earth Day!
16 posted on 03/30/2014 5:21:42 AM PDT by Wheelman81
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To: oh8eleven

Smart...thanks!


17 posted on 03/30/2014 5:47:20 AM PDT by BobL
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To: Louis Foxwell
Tools are our crime against nature. We make things. And we make things better. Earth Hour is our reminder to drop our tools and stop. Stop thinking. Stop doing. Just stop.

Does this statement explain our current economic policy?

Yes, it does.

18 posted on 03/30/2014 5:48:28 AM PDT by Aevery_Freeman (Historians will refer to this administration as "The Half-Black Plague.")
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To: Louis Foxwell

This is of his best pieces (from many good ones!) so far.

I think one of the reasons modern liberalism hates Judeo-Christian religion so much is that man is the center of it. That is, God is the center, but man, created in His image and likeness, is the center of the created world and has been given dominion over it.

This conflicts with the anti-mankind eco-religion of the liberal world.


19 posted on 03/30/2014 6:04:40 AM PDT by livius
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To: Louis Foxwell

Very well written. Great post!


20 posted on 03/30/2014 6:20:57 AM PDT by The_Media_never_lie (The media must be defeated any way it can be done.)
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