COMRADE LYSENKO IN COPENHAGEN
To The Point News – COMRADE LYSENKO IN COPENHAGEN
COMRADE LYSENKO IN COPENHAGEN
Written by Alex Alexiev
Tuesday, 08 December 2009
As the illustrious conclave of global warming true believers, led by President Barack Hussein Obama, gathers in Copenhagen for yet another exercise in environmental doom and gloom, observing the proceedings with the sly smirk of somebody who’s “been there, done that” is likely to be the ghost of one Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (1898-1976).
No ordinary ghost that one either, for Comrade Lysenko was Stalin’s favorite scientist for decades and the driving force behind the greatest scientific fraud in history prior to “anthropogenic global warming.” Indeed, to fully understand the nature, magnitude and implications of the AGW scam, it’s worthwhile to revisit Academician Lysenko’s exploits, which just happen to bear an uncanny resemblance to the charlatanism currently on display in Climategate.
The 1950 edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, the arbiter and repository of all politically correct communist knowledge, had the following entry under genetics: “Soviet scientists under the leadership of Academician Lysenko proved scientifically that genes do not exist in nature.”
Denying that Mendelian genetics was a science and having it outlawed it in the Soviet Union was probably Lysenko’s crowning achievement, but it is instructive to see how and why he was able to do that.
A self-taught agronomist, Lysenko early on jumped on the Stalinist bandwagon and developed a number of dubious agricultural ideas that had one huge political advantage in that they rejected all established science as “bourgeois” and therefore “counter-revolutionary,” an approach similar to the Nazis” assault on “Jewish mathematics.”
Included were promises to dramatically raise grain yields through the practice of something called “vernalization”, to change the climate of Siberia by planting trees and make wheat plants produce rye among others. To push these fraudulent ideas, Lysenko resorted to politics by calling his opponents at the time “wreckers” and the mere discussion, let alone disagreement with his theories, “political sabotage.”
Invariably these ‘saboteurs” lost their jobs and livelihoods if they were lucky or landed in the Gulag and perished if they were not. Today’s global warming “deniers”, the modern equivalent to Lysenko’s ‘saboteurs”, would easily recognize all these tactics minus the Gulag, though some of our latter-day Lysenkos have called for legal prosecution of skeptics as well.
Thus, despite a well-known record of bogus research, experiment falsification and faked results, with Stalin’s blessing, Lysenko and Lysenkoism ruled Soviet agricultural science for three decades with dismal consequences for agriculture and the country at large. While pre-Lysenko Russia was once known as the granary of Europe, the Soviet Union was never able to feed its population and relied on huge grain imports until its demise.
Given this record of failure, why was this charlatan tolerated for years even after Stalin’s death? The answer to that is simple. Lysenko may have been a fraud as a scientist, but he was a communist scientist par excellence and that’s all that mattered. Communist ideology, just like Nazi ideology, required strict obedience to partisanship in all realms and science was not an exception.
And here Lysenko’s contribution was impressive. By denying genetics and propounding the idea that acquired characteristics are inheritable, he provided the ‘scientific” underpinning of Marx’s theory that after a few generations of communist dictatorship, a new selfless and docile communist man – a perfect ant in an anthill – would emerge from whom the state can take according to his abilities and give according to his needs.
It is here that Lysenkoism’s resemblance to AGW is most striking. Just as the former was only tangentially about agriculture, the latter is not really about climate. Like many other previous campaigns against imaginary evils like acid rain, overpopulation, urban sprawl etc., its real target is capitalism, the free enterprise system and individual rights. Its solution is the unrestricted primacy of government over the citizen and of collectivism over individual rights.
The objective is the same age-old socialist dream of the left under a new and more seemingly benign guise. This new direction was best framed by the American academic socialist, Robert Heilbronner, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when, while lamenting the fall of communism and the socialist economic model, he urged his fellow leftists to use the ecological movement to impose socialism and central planning through the back door.
This has indeed proven to be sound advice and today radical environmentalism has become the ramming rod of the anti-capitalist left and a vastly more effective instrument for undermining markets and free societies than socialist ideology was ever capable of being.
In this scheme of things, anthropogenic global warming has become for its supporters what Lysenko’s theory of heredity was for the Stalinists. For its small international cabal of top AGW functionaries, it was about more than money, power and prestige, though, with the connivance of sycophantic Western governments and U.N. bureaucrats, there was plenty of that too.
It was about ideology. In the name of which, they were perfectly prepared to dissemble, falsify records, destroy others’ careers and imperil their own. And their pseudo-scientific edifice, built with so much underhanded effort over the years will not go down without a fight as Copenhagen’s confab will undoubtedly prove.
For the leftist zealots who run AGW and their supporters in government and academia know well that the unraveling of the global warming scam may well be the beginning of the end of radical environmentalism as the most promising means yet to destroy the hated free enterprise system.
Consider, for a minute, how closely the various ongoing assaults on capitalism in the United States depend on AGW for their own viability. The minute it is proven conclusively to be a fabrication, the rationale for government takeover of the energy sector via cap & trade disappears, as does the raison d’etre for taxpayer-subsidized renewable energy fantasies or the efforts to undermine Americans’ property rights through ‘smart growth” land use restrictions.
Or think of the likely impact of proven malfeasance by the AGW mandarins on their allies in U.S. government agencies, like EPA and NASA, who have almost certainly engaged in similar dishonest practices. They are already circling the wagons and, given the support of the Obama Administration and the mainstream OPM media, it is premature to write the mandarins off quite yet.
Nonetheless, what looked as an impregnable AGW fortress a while ago has been breached and appears shaken and vulnerable and Copenhagen will not change that. With China and India not willing to join in the global warming demagoguery of the West, no agreement worth the paper it’s written on is likely to come out of it.
In the meantime, with new Climategate investigations, FOIA requests galore and almost daily revelations of the disingenuous shenanigans of the environmental zealots and their government supporters, it no longer looks outlandish to imagine the AGW scam put to rest once and for all, as Comrade Lysenko has been.
Alex Alexiev is a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington DC.
Comments are closed.
