Dear Editor,
Mr. Alexander G. Markovsky’s article “Climate Change – Who Stands to Gain?” in the American Thinker of January 2, 2019, is worthy of some echoing and commentary.
The writer is a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research at King’s College, New York City. The crux of his argument is that environmental concerns that had existed in the West for some time were crafted and used in the 1960s by President Charles de Gaulle as a “sinister plot to contain American expansionism.”
He writes: “From de Gaulle to Macron, while the political and economic landscape has changed, this strategy remains assertively consistent. He concludes (I believe correctly) that “fossil fuels (oil in particular) will maintain their economic and strategic importance in the US well into the 21st century.”
The French may have “assumed” the role of the world leaders of the environmental movement in 1968, as Mr. Markovsky informs us, but the beginnings of the movement were much earlier in the USA where the real leadership has remained to this very day. “climate change” and “open borders” are intrinsically linked and firmly rooted in the USA. They have been consistently and, until recently, stealthily financed by successive post-World War II US governments (Reagan’s excluded) via the UN, the EU and various US and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The “climate change” and “open borders” movements are the two giant Siamese squids that President Trump and his administration are now trying to wrestle. Quite a task!
I fault Mr. Markovsky for linking French legislation on nature during the 1960s with President de Gaulle’s so-called obsession with Napoleon; with a supposed “messianic vision of returning France to the status of a great power.” In 1964, as epigraph to the foreword of his landmark book Avant que nature meure (Before Nature Dies), published in 1965, ornithologist Jean Dorst placed a rather long (translated) excerpt of President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1908 Conference on the Conservation of Natural Resources. President de Gaulle enacting French laws to protect “nature” in France in the 1960s was a “sinister plot designed to contain American expansionism;” really?
Historians have seen the documents; today, they know that the French leftists of that era, Maurice Thorez and his Communists, particularly, were taking their marching orders from the Soviets. Informed readers everywhere are now well aware of the putrid political waters President de Gaulle was forced to sail through in post-World War II France – in spite of him being the French hero of the liberation of his country. That he was able to herd those cats, to keep those hyenas (the left and right) at bay while forging a sense of national unity and solidarity to the extent that he did, is testimony to the exceptional individual he was; to the genius of the man and to his love of country – the French nation.
Gratitude for this great patriot, for all he succeeded in doing for France and for the world is vital in the present debate wherein too many elites in the West are undermining so many of the values he championed. Instead of scapegoating him, Mr. Markovsky and others would benefit greatly from studying his relationship with both the “liberal” and the leftist press of that era. They can begin with Alain Peyrefitte’s C’était de Gaulle (That was de Gaulle), 1994-2000. They will discover how the French media of the 1960s were a preview to most of the US media today.
American conservatives – professed patriots – should be unmasking and naming the key authors of a number of nefarious political events in the 1960s and beyond; events such as the Revolution of May 1968 that drove the patriot-warrior-savior-hero of modern France – Father of the Fifth Republic – out of office. He died two years later in 1970. This great man, a French sovereignist before this expression came into being in Quebec; a nationalist and patriot before these words were soiled and tabooed, was a victim of the politics of the rabid extremists of that era and of so-called liberal journalists.
Like Democritus’ atom, utopianism/socialism/communism/leftism is an ideology that never dies, and no one should wish it to disappear completely. Yesterday’s utopists, communists, bolsheviks, Marxists, Leninists, fascists, socialists and other leftists are morphing into today’s “progressives-globalists-socialists”. Like in chemistry, “Nothing is lost, nothing is created: everything is transformed.” The more it changes, the more it is the same old story. “(…) and there is no new thing under the sun.” But we, my reader, my friend, have made it into 2019 and for that we must be grateful. Happy New Year to all!
Gérard M. Hunt
