COMMENTARY | Tyler Durden has discovered a Finnish writer and "deep environmentalist" Pentti Linkola, who has taken the environmentalist philosophy to its logical and extreme conclusion.
Essentially, Linkola wants to establish a worldwide dictatorship that would reduce the world population to 500 million people through the use of nuclear or biological weapons. That regime would use police state tactics to prevent economic and population growth, something he feels is harmful to the environment.
Linkola also calls for killing "defectives" via mass sterilization, greatly restricting electrical production, travel and technological innovation, forcing people to eat rats and confiscation of most private automobiles.
Godwin's Law, which states the first person in a political argument who brings up Hitler or Nazism to attack his or her opponent has therefore lost the argument, is a good general rule. But what Linkola is proposing goes beyond the mad dreams of the purveyors of World War II and the Holocaust. Linkola seems to celebrate mass genocide as a virtue, when he stated, "Who misses all those who died in the Second World War? Who misses the 20 million executed by Stalin? Who misses Hitler's 6 million Jews?"
Perhaps their friends and relatives, but that does not seem to enter into Linkola's calculations.
One suspects most people who call themselves environmentalists turn their eyes away from the rantings of such people like Linkola, but mainly because they don't want to look upon the implications of what they advocate. If one proposes to restrict technology, stop the production of energy, and control the human population, one cannot do so through benign or democratic means. Linkola is just being honest about it.
The thriller writer Tom Clancy, in his novel "Rainbow Six," postulated a group of environmental terrorists who wanted to achieve Linkola's dream of a smaller, less technologically oriented human society, by releasing a genetically modified virus to kill most of the human race. Naturally the heroes of the novel thwart the evil plan and exact a poetically just vengeance. One wonders, though, that along with crazy Islamists and insane Marxists we now have to worry about genocidal environmentalists. One hopes not. There are more than enough crazies with mad dreams without more of them cropping up.
