Climate Hysteria: There's No Hustle Like An Old Hustle

In the Middle Ages, armies of religious zealots led by kings such as Richard The Lion Heart launched the Crusades. Travelling to the Holy Land to meet the threat of the Mohammedans, they brought slaughter, pillage and disease in a quest to make the region Christian again. There were nine separate Crusades over 300 years, many sanctioned by the Popes of the day.

The gore was justified by the purity of their hearts and the holiness of their mission. Plus the riches the survivors brought home with them. To paraphrase a modern line, the operation was a success but the patient died. Today’s domination of the Middle East by Islam speaks to their efficacy.

President Barack Obama even invoked the Crusades during his presidency to throw shade on the intolerance of American society in the face of radical Muslim attacks.

Which is a delicious irony. Obama was— and remains— the tip of a religious spear that seeks to replace capitalism with state-imposed socialism. Obama and his fellow travellers— Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg— represent the Fourth Crusade of the modern era seeking to replace capitalism with some Marxian construct based on total government control.

It is every bit as fanatical in its religious zeal as any of the original Crusades. The just-passed Children’s Climate March was a sample of how accepted their catechism has become (if you give kids a day off of school). Marx, scribbling away in the 1850s, would be proud.

The first major push for ditching capitalism came at the turn of the 20th century courtesy of socialists and anarchists— and was brutally repressed by the imperial powers of the time. The start of WW I effectively sidelined the movement. A second Crusade surged— after WW I destroyed the royal houses of the West and the Depression savaged the working classes. Again it was stopped by war— WW II— and the prosperity that flourished in its aftermath.

A Third Crusade emerged in the 1960s, sparked by the Viet Nam war and civic unrest in Europe. This time, thought radicals, they could not be stopped. The working classes would deliver them the keys to the throne. Sadly for the Red Brigades and their allies, the working class punted on their dream. Ronald Reagan emerged to put a sunny face on capitalism.

The subsequent failure of the Soviet Union and the brutality of Communist nations that murdered millions of their fellow citizens in China, Cambodia, Cuba and parts of Africa seemed to be the final nail in the coffin of Marxist momentum.

Faced with a desolate wasteland, radicals on the Left withdrew into their warrens in the universities and the culture industry to plan new strategies. As British author Douglas Murray has written in his new book The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, they declared the working class a failure and a disappointment. To make the final push they needed to create a new electorate with a new consciousness..

The device they chose to re-construct society was Identity politics. They would re-orient the public’s focus from religion/ prosperity to sexuality, gender, technology, climate and race. Preaching grievance, self-pity and reparations for sins past aging socialists like Sanders could finally create a new consciousness the masses would accept. 

Ignoring the inconvenient truth that this is the greatest time in human history to be alive, they blame every personal grievance or setback on capitalism’s ills, re-ordering the history taught in schools and re-writing laws to enforce their new fiats. Abetted by the meat puppets of Hollywood and the culture industry they are creating a new religion based on government control and their own dominance in such a system. 

Sanders rages like Martin Luther against capitalism’s failures. Where Luther said that sin would cast man into a fiery pit, Sanders & Co. use the fiery environmental apocalypse to whip the non-believers into line. The horrific pitfalls of cradle-to-grave state control mocked by George Orwell and Alexander Solzhenitsyn are labelled counter-revolutionary.

The emergence of Greta Thunberg, the child mystic of climate, is proof positive the the Left is attempting to render a spiritual conversion on the masses.

Anyone brought up Catholic in the 20th century will no doubt remember The Song of Bernadette. This Hollywood classic recalled how the Church beatified a peasant girl Bernadette (played by Jennifer Jones) from Lourdes, France, who claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary. There were similar Mary sightings in Fatima, Guadalupe La Salette and a host of other remote locales. 

The witness was invariably a young woman or a simple young shepherd tending his flock by night. Artifacts were collected, rosaries were sold and tourists flocked to the sites. By invoking the power of the innocent child the Church was able to temporarily divert the faithful from liberality (and communism). 

So Greta and her millions of fellow (climate) believers are likewise thrust forward to give the Climate Crusade a holy tincture. This human shield is declared a secular saint, beyond criticism. Declaring that only the deniers would question a 16 year old bulimic’s devotion, they celebrate a new generation’s energy— and the long delayed dream of collapsing capitalism. But behind Greta’s simple peasant skirt hides the devastations wrought by socialism’s past and present.

Hey, there’s no hustle like an old hustle in the religious-crusade game. Perhaps this time will be the charm for the Pol Pot Admiration Society. Richard the Lion Heart would approve.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the publisher of his website (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). He’s also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he is also a best-selling author whose new book Cap In Hand: How Salary Caps Are Killing Pro Sports And Why The Free Market Could Save Them is now available on brucedowbigginbooks.ca.