Perverse prescriptions: Andreas Malm

andreas2Yesterday we met Andreas Malm, an up-and-coming Swedish scholar who holds up sub-Saharan Africa as an economic model for the rest of the world.

Malm has a new book, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. In it, he pretty much slams every scientific, economic, and technological development that’s taken place since the industrial revolution. The devil lurking behind all this development, he makes clear, is the c-word: capitalism. As he puts it in his ringing Marxist-academic prose, “the fossil economy is coextensive with the capitalist mode of production.” For Malm, as the Manhattan Institute’s Robert Bryce wrote in a review of the book for City Journal, “the rise of the steam engine was little more than a ploy by evil capitalists to subjugate workers, and because of that, we are now all going to die from global warming.”

Malm’s prescription to avoid this dire fate? A “special ministry” in each of the four entities – the U.S., the E.U., China, and India – that produce the most greenhouse gases. These ministries would be empowered to cut emissions – and, in order to achieve their desired goals, would be obliged to cut them very, very drastically. Needless to say, this radical transformation of the present world order would involve an almost complete shutdown of industrial activity and, essentially, a replacement of democratic capitalism by an all-powerful international superstate intent on “simplifying” life in the developed world to a virtually unimaginable degree. 

malm1As is the case with many other climate alarmists, Malm’s purported analyses, forecasts, and proposed remedies raise the question of whether this fellow is prepared to sacrifice modern freedom, prosperity, and comfort because he’s genuinely that hysterical about the prospect of disastrous climate change, or whether, like the recently deceased Maurice Strong, he’s a man who, quite simply, despises capitalism for the usual Marxist reasons and has latched on to climate as a rallying cry because he recognizes it as an effective way to argue for the utter dismantling of the capitalist system.

Andreas-MalmWhat Malm’s prescriptions don’t take into account is this: that the deliberate undoing of modern civilization founded on democratic capitalism wouldn’t just impoverish people in the developed world and shorten their lifespans. It would also, among much else, render their lives dirt-cheap. Take a good look at sub-Saharan Africa: what you see there are see societies so backward that in Tanzania, for example, albino children are hunted down and macheted to death because their severed limbs are thought to have magical powers. Many a family in Angola, after the demise of a family member, will attribute the death to acts of witchcraft by a child in the family, who is thereupon beaten, subjected to brutal rituals, expelled from the home, shunned, starved, and/or murdered outright. Throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa, atrocities such as rape, forced child marriage, and human trafficking are rampant and go unpunished. Why? Because there’s little in the way of advanced social structure, little in the way of rule of law, little in the way of respect for the individual human life. All these good things that are missing in most of sub-Saharan Africa are part of the civilization that, over the centuries, has come to maturity in developed Western countries, thanks in large part to the kinds of advances that Malm has identified as enemies of humanity. 

The bottom line is clear. All too many people like Malm, sitting in their pleasant homes and their well-appointed offices in (for example) universities in Sweden, take a great deal for granted about the cozy lives they lead. When somebody in Malm’s position calls for an end to modern democratic capitalism, he is – whether he realizes it or not – a fool sitting in a tree and sawing off the very limb he’s sitting on.

Celebrating treason in the Big Apple

9/28/15 Robert Meeropol (pictured, pink shirt) and his brohter, Michael Meeropol, (pictured, blue shirt) received a proclamation from City Council member Daniel Dromm today. The proclamation recognized the contributions to the labor movement of Ethel Rosenberg, the mother of Robert and Michael. She was convicted of espionage along with her husband Julius in 1953 and was sentenced to death. Today would have marked her 100th birthday. Pictured, left to right: City Council member Mark Levine, City Council member Daniel Dromm, Robert Meeropol, Michael Meeropol and Gail Brewer. On the steps of City Hall, NY, NY . Please credit Gregory P. Mango.
Rosenberg sons Robert and Michael Meeropol, hold the proclamations, flanked by Daniel Dromm and Gale Brewer, outside City Hall

It’s only been a few days since we finished up our three-parter on the Rosenbergs, but we’ve got to return to them today because New York City’s City Council has done something truly remarkable. On Monday, September 29, which would have been Ethel Rosenberg’s 100th birthday, the City Council issued an official proclamation honoring her “life and memory,” praising her “bravery,” and describing her as having been “wrongfully” executed. The man behind this initiative was Daniel Dromm, a Democrat who represents the neighborhoods of Corona, East Elmhurst, Elmhurst, Jackson Heights, Rego Park, and Woodside in Queens. At the same time, Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, also a Democrat, issued a separate proclamation, declaring September 29 the “Ethel Rosenberg Day of Justice in the Borough of Manhattan.”

The putative reason for this official tribute to Ethel Rosenberg is that she was a pro-union activist who took part in a 1935 strike. But the real reason, which neither Dromm and Brewer sought to disguise in their remarks at a public ceremony outside City Hall, was to portray both Rosenbergs, in time-honored fashion, as innocent victims of American anti-communist hysteria.

When the Rosenbergs were executed, said Dromm, “it was a time of Jew-baiting, it was a time of McCarthyism, a time of anti-Communist hysteria.” These are familiar words. For certain people on the left, even all these decades later, it’s McCarthyism, not Stalinism, that was the real horror of the early postwar years. They still speak of anti-Communism almost as if there was no such thing as Communism itself. In their rhetoric, the terror of life under Stalin dissolves; the Gulag disappears; the Iron Curtain evaporates. And all that is left is Americans’ apparently baseless “hysteria.”

ethel rosenberg
Ethel Rosenberg

Then there’s Dromm’s reference to “Jew-baiting,” which is, of course, a total diversion. The Rosenbergs weren’t targeted because they were Jews; they were arrested, prosecuted, and executed because they were consciously betraying their country, and threatening its security, on behalf of a totalitarian enemy.

Fortunately, some savvy observers called Dromm and Brewer out on their reprehensible actions. “In these days of progressive ascendancy in New York,” wrote Seth Barron the other day in City Journal, “the Left is in charge, and thus responsible for the humdrum management of trash pickup and school curricula. But that stuff is boring when you’ve been raised on the mythos of class struggle and the glory of violent martyrdom. Today’s leftist leaders can’t help but be wistful for a time when their side was losing and their fight was noble. They cherish the ideals of their revolutionary forebears because it makes them feel like warriors for the oppressed.”

9/28/15 Robert Meeropol and his brohter, Michael Meeropol, received a proclamation (pictured) from City Council member Daniel Dromm today. The proclamation recognized the contributions to the labor movement of Ethel Rosenberg, the mother of Robert and Michael. She was convicted of espionage along with her husband Julius in 1953 and was sentenced to death. Today would have marked her 100th birthday. On the steps of City Hall, NY, NY . Please credit Gregory P. Mango.

The editors of the New York Post were disgusted, too.  The City Council, they charged, had “yet again proved itself one of New York’s biggest political embarrassments.” The City Hall ceremony, they aptly put it, was “the latest installment in the left’s decades-long drive to pretend Ethel and her husband Julius didn’t spy for Moscow.”

But Dromm and Brewer weren’t alone in celebrating the Rosenbergs – and condemning their executioners. At Raw Story, Katie Halper, a contributor to such outlets as The Nation, MSNBC, Jezebel, and Russia Today, rhapsodized over Julius and Ethel and confessed that Ethel’s farewell letter to her sons had made her “cry on live radio.” This is the famous letter in which Ethel lied to her kids, insisting that she and their father were innocent and perversely representing their devotion to Stalin as a commitment to “freedom.” The City Hall ceremony was attended by members of the Rosenberg family, including the traitors’ granddaughter Rachel and her seven-year-old daughter. “The execution left two children orphaned,” we were solemnly reminded at the ceremony. But it wasn’t the fault of America that those two boys grew up without parents; Julius and Ethel made the conscious choice to put their allegiance to a monstrous, bloodthirsty tyrant above their duty to their children.