Millions die because left is wrong about everything

The political philosophers of early imperial China called them "legalists." The 20^th century called them fascists, socialists or communists. The 21st century calls them environmentalists.

The United States, more polite abut its extremists than most, calls them "radicals," "liberals" and even "Democrats." Their defining characteristic is a ruthless hatred of their fellow men, an eagerness to kill as many as possible, an incurable, totalitarian thirst to meddle moralistically in every last pernickety detail of the lives of those few whom they permit to live, and a wilful disregard for the disastrous and usually murderous failures of all of their favorite policies.

For brevity, we shall call them what the French originally called them: the left.

Consider the dismal record of these arrogant, know-it-all, hate-filled creatures. The National Socialist Workers' Party of Germany killed 6 million Jews and caused the deaths of perhaps 100 million more in the Second World War. Stalin killed 50 million with his purges. The mad scientist Lysenko killed 20 million more by starvation as his lunatic crop-germination theory destroyed Russia's harvests for two decades.

Then there was Mao's China, where not only did the communist regime murder millions directly, its crazily interventionist agricultural policies starved 33 million and prevented the births of 30 million more. Then there was the Cuban revolution, the Vietnam War, Pol Pot in Cambodia – wherever the left holds sway, tens of millions die.

The deaths caused by the left in the 20th century are nothing compared with the deaths it is causing in the 21st. The reason: ignorant, anti-scientific environmentalism.

On Monday, I shall be traveling to Sicily to attend the annual meeting of the World Federation of Scientists on planetary emergencies. This remarkable and wholly good organization was founded half a century ago by Italy's most eminent scientist, professor Antonino Zichichi, the particle physicist who is Italy's most eminent scientist.

Professor Zichichi established the federation in the medieval monastic village of Erice, high on a mountaintop overlooking the blue Mediterranean an hour west of Palermo. At last year's meeting, a scientist with the Bill Gates Foundation, which is aiming to eradicate malaria, told us that the decision – driven entirely by the political left – to ban DDT, the only effective agent against the anopheles mosquito that transmits malaria had needlessly killed at least a million people a year in Africa alone, most of them children under five.

This year, as I pack my bags for Sicily, professor Larry Gould of the University of Hartford has sent me a chilling documentary about the consequences of the ban on DDT. The title of the video says it all: "Three Billion and Counting." The estimate of the number of people killed by the environmentalist left's ban on DDT may be somewhat on the high side, but there is a statable case that the left's ban on DDT has killed more people than any war, any pogrom, any policy ever.

Some lessons must now be drawn from the left's poisonous, racialistic hatred of black children in Africa.

Lesson 1: The mass-murder-by-banning-DDT policy did not occur by accident. It was, and remains, the worst genocide the world has ever seen. The left's intention in banning DDT was to destroy Africa's population.

Lesson 2: The left always goes to elaborate lengths to conceal its true, murderous intent by finding and promulgating some half-baked, pietistic, pseudo-scientific justification. The left's pretext for banning DDT was that it was harming large birds by making their eggshells thinner, and that it caused cancer in humans. Subsequent studies showed that the "thinner-eggshells" story was fiction and that DDT, which humans can eat by the tablespoonful without coming to any harm, is about as carcinogenic as coffee.

Lesson 3: Even when science belatedly catches up with the left's lies and exposes the baselessness of its cruel policies, those policies remain in place. Just about everyone now knows perfectly well that the benefits of using DDT overwhelmingly outweigh its few and relentlessly overstated disadvantages, but no one dares to reverse the insane policy on which the left sourly continues to insist. At least half-a-million children a year continue to be killed quite unnecessarily by malaria as a direct result.

Lesson 4: The left gets away with maintaining its insane and vicious policies by mounting spiteful, lavishly funded and elaborately coordinated hate campaigns against the very few who have the courage to speak out against them. Most politicians are simply terrified of being subjected to a hate campaign by the left. They are cowed into fearful silence.

The cruel, environmentalist left is not only insisting that the scientifically baseless ban on DDT be maintained; it is insisting on the maintenance of many other death-dealing policies based on science that was not just wrong but deliberately false. Remember the acid-rain scare? That turned out to be nonsense. The ozone-hole scare? Nonsense again: It was based on a single paper that had overestimated the destructive effect of chlorofluorocarbons by a factor of 10.

It is not only humans that the left's policies have menaced. The left asserted, on no evidence, that elephants were trampling the grasslands of Africa and causing droughts that threatened the entire ecosystem. As a result, they succeeded in getting 40,000 elephants killed over several decades.

Fortunately, just this once, true scientists stood up to be counted notwithstanding the left's smear campaigns against them. For the elephants' trampling was and is, in fact, beneficial to the grasslands. The left's slaughter of the elephants – which has killed far more than the capitalist trophy-baggers and ivory-hunters ever killed – was brought to an end just in time to prevent the outright extinction of the African elephant.

A new anti-genocide law is urgently needed. In the future, anyone who uses bogus scientific arguments in support of a policy that can be proven to have caused widespread death should be put on trial for culpable manslaughter or, if the deaths are in the millions, genocide.

The environmentalist left is at it again, this time with the bogus, overstated "global-warming" scare. If the actually quite small number of bad scientists and profiteering national science academies promoting this cruel scare knew they would face prosecution if they persisted in their lies, they would be more careful and less murderous in future.

The world would be a better place without the left.

Media wishing to interview Christopher Monckton, please contact [email protected].