INTERVIEW: MARTIN DURKIN
The Greens Are a Sinister Movement
Martin Durkin of the United Kingdom, is the director of such widely viewed documentaries as "The Great Global Warming Swindle" and "Against Nature." He was interviewed by Stephan Ossenkopp of the LaRouche Youth Movement, in Berlin, Germany, on Dec. 11, 2009.
[PDF version of this interview]
EIR: The Sudanese chairman of the G-77 group of developing countries said at the Copenhagen Summit that the recently leaked draft treaty was a takeover by the few at the expense of all humanity, and that the proposed aid of $10 billion was not even enough to buy them coffins. What are your thoughts on that?
Durkin: I think I would agree with the Sudanese chap. Aid is a bad idea anyway. Giving aid to poor countries is what causes civil wars as far as I can see, causes corruption and civil war. Those poor countries need to develop. They need to grow themselves, they need to become economically successful themselves, not rely on handouts from the West, especially small handouts, but big ones, too. All handouts are bad.
But I think the green agenda, which supports global warming, has always been, that ordinary people in the West and in the poor countries are consuming too much. They always said—[former German Chancellor] Willy Brandt for example—for years and years, and lots of other Greens, too, that the Third World cannot expect a standard of living like the West, that the planet will not support it. As far as I can see, this is a kind of repulsive, reactionary neocolonialism, a horrible ugly argument, and they've been arguing it before global warming came along.
EIR: Have things changed with the so-called Climategate scandal? What are the implications and necessary consequences of this scandal?
Durkin: It has been very interesting. I have done a few interviews about this in the U.K., on radio programs where listeners call in, and the thing that amazes me is that so few people, as far as I can tell, really believe in man-made global warming; despite all the efforts of the BBC and the rest of the global warmers, ordinary people just don't buy it. I think ordinary people are much more sensible than they are often given credit for, and the Climategate stuff has just brought it to a head.
They have been putting out scare stories on all sorts of things for so many years, about GM [genetically modified]-food, about Mad Cow Disease, about DDT, about this, about that, and I don't think people believe it anymore. The Climategate stuff—people who have looked closely at this issue have known all along that there is funny business behind the science. The global warming scandal goes far beyond simply a scientific scandal. It is a scientific scandal, but it is also a political scandal. Global warming is about politics; it is not about science, and the politics that supports global warming is a profoundly reactionary, wicked, snobbish politics, I believe.
They Hate Ordinary People
EIR: Renowned scientist Zbigniew Jaworowski has recently said that UN representatives like Maurice Strong have expressed, at the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, that, in order to save the planet, modern industrialized civilization would need to be eliminated. What is your comment?
Durkin: You just have to read the works of the global warmers and the Greens. This is a form of anti-capitalism. And the strange thing is, I think, what we need to get used to is that there is a section of the middle classes, who are profoundly anti-capitalist, middle and upper classes who are anti-capitalist. We are used to thinking that—socialists taught us that it would be the workers who are anti-capitalist, but that's not true. The ordinary working people have benefited enormously from capitalism, and the people who hate capitalism now, it appears, are the intellectuals in the middle classes and the upper classes.
I believe they hate capitalism because they hate ordinary people, they hate this thought that mass production also goes with mass consumption. They hate supermarkets, they hate IKEA, they hate all the things that ordinary people rely on for a decent standard of living. When Prince Charles says, "Wouldn't it be nice if everyone were peasants again," it's because he wants to be an old-style king, where everyone is groveling beneath him. He doesn't like the idea that suddenly there are state agents and plumbers who have bigger houses than professors. This is a kind of class war, which is, I think, waged by upper-class people and impoverished upper-class people in the middle classes, against ordinary people.
EIR: It seems Prince Charles' chances of reigning are very slim, given the fact that the monarchy is losing so many followers, especially with what the Queen said in Trinidad recently. As a result of that, Lord Monckton said the Queen might lose the Lords' loyalty, and then the throne.
Durkin: I think there is a great possibility that the Queen will be the last full monarch of England. I believe that Charles is such a reactionary. And he is quite ignorant, and he doesn't even understand he is a reactionary. And he doesn't understand the full implications of what he says and what he believes. I believe that he will destroy the monarchy because people do still love the Queen, even though the monarchy is an anachronism. She has been so successful in being self-effacing and obviously good, obviously dutiful, and doing the right thing. The monarchy has survived thanks to Elizabeth, but I think Charles will kill it.
A Reactionary View of the World
EIR: What about Prince Philip, who has been on the forefront in financing this anthropogenic climate change theory? He has been on the record for saying that he would like to reduce the population more rapidly than wars and epidemics have been able to do, by reincarnating as a deadly virus. What is going on in his mind?
Durkin: If you look at the history of green thinking, it is both anti-capitalist, and it's anti-people. Population control has always been a major part of it. People think of the Nazis and eugenics, but in fact, the eugenics movement was very wide in Europe, and obviously came from Britain, but was also very big in the U.S., with sterilization programs and so on.
It is very interesting that the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], in their scenarios, have "good" and "bad" scenarios in their future trajectories of society—and their "good" scenario is "population control, limited migration, limited trade": It is a very reactionary, right-wing, backward-looking view of the world. The link with population control has obviously been there in the modern Green movement, like the Sierra Club and Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb, and in the earliest books of the "Climate Crisis." If you read Stephen Schneider, all those books go on about population. It is a very sinister movement.
Even people who disagree with the Greens often think that they are innocent and misguided, that their foolish attachment to paganism doesn't matter. I think it's deeply, deeply sinister. Anyone with a full understanding of the history of the Nazis should know how sinister this ideology is. I think they are absolutely wicked. When you read Rachel Carson's book [Silent Spring], about how awful DDT is, it goes on about owls and eggs and such things, it doesn't mention once in the book that thanks to DDT, literally hundreds of millions of lives had been saved at that point. Not one line does it express concern about this. And likewise, if you read Paul Ehrlich and other green writers they talk about triage where you just let people die because, you know, "The Earth cannot sustain them." I think they are nasty, nasty people.
