Speaking Of Incomplete History Lessons

PAUL Norton, writing at the leftist Larvatus Prodeo, has taken issue with Vaclav Klaus over the Czech President's persuasively expressed concern about the millenarian global warming movement's potential to threaten liberty and democracy. He argues Klaus' Prague speech, commemorating the 60th anniversary of the 1948 communist putsch in the former Czechoslovakia, was an "incomplete history lesson." One strand of Norton's argument is that national leaders must accept The Consensus on AGW (which doesn't really exist) and promote market-based and liberty-affirming answers to the "crisis" before totalitarians make the topic their own, to everyone's detriment. As an example of how - ever attuned to a chance for self-promotion - communists stole a march on their philosophical opponents, Norton cites their prompt recognition of the "reality and urgency" of "the right of Vietnam to national independence and freedom from colonialism in the mid-20th century..." But this is an argument against a whimsical consensus.

After all, the North Vietnamese communists and the Viet Cong were themselves colonisers and didn't offer anything vaguely resembling freedom. They refused, brutally, to recognise the incontestable legal rights of the South and their deployment of "national independence" and "unification" propaganda constituted nothing more than textbook cover for the actual, overriding intention: totalitarian expansionism. At the time, the Western left's response to these axiomatic realities was - and so it largely remains - ahistorical, self-interestedly partisan, blindly doctrinal, as well as morally subjectivist. And it was the left that pushed hard for the holocaust-enabling US withdrawal - in terms comparably dubious to those heard now about AGW. The victory of communism over South Vietnam tells us more about the dangers of a politically motivated "consensus" than it does about the temperature of the planet. Economic libertarians, for their part, shouldn't let their excitement about "market solutions" turn them into useful idiots.