WHEN LEFT-WING GROWTHIST GATE KEEPERS WILL NO LONGER STIFLE OUR VOICE

So the editor of Canadian Dimension, Cy Gonick, will not publish the neo-Malthusian perspectives of Brishen Hoff, President of Biodiversity First, because they are too “simplistic”. http://biodiversityfirst.googlepages.com/index.htm

As a university student in the early seventies and late sixties, I subscribed to Cy Gonick’s Canadian Dimension, and read HIS simplistic socialist message until I could stand no more. Don’t you know? To him and his stable of contributors, the world’s problems are all down to “capitalism”. Not industrial civilization or civilization itself. But to this particular form of industrial civilization. There is enough to go around, you see. Just as Marx was trying to tell Malthus more than a century ago. All we have to do is to re-arrange industrial civilization so that the have-nots share the “bounty”. The earth is just bursting with treasures, but the corporate capitalists are holding the key to this Fort Knox of plenty. There is enough food to feed everyone-----but it just isn’t being distributed fairly or efficiently. There is enough room for everyone too. It just requires proper “planning” to protect designated areas of park, farmland, nature etc. Oh yes, in 2009, Marxists are on the green bandwagon too. So there is no space for Hoff’s kind of “simplistic” reasoning. That is, his reactionary idea that population growth is the multiplier of all evils, and that whether you have a socialist or a capitalist agenda, every problem from feeding, housing and educating the masses to defending agricultural and biodiverse lands and oceans is made so much harder to tackle in the context of too many people.

Yep, it is all the fault of “capitalism”. And when socialist regimes in the Soviet Bloc, China, North Korea or Zimbabwe make an even bigger mess of the environment than the capitalist ones, well, you see, it is because “they aren’t really socialist”, but examples of “state capitalism”. Or simply because one individual and the personality cult that develops around him, hijacks the revolution and governs as a dictator. Funny how that always seems to happen though, isn’t it? Funny because socialists, as we see in Canada, Britain, Australia etc. are such paragons and champions of free speech, always willing to let “a hundred flowers bloom and a thousand thoughts contend”. That is of course, if those thoughts aren’t “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic ad infinitum”. And what objective criteria exists for identifying whether opinions are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic ad infinitum”? Why, the objective criteria of the socialists’ subjectivity, naturally. It all depends on whether one of the identity groups that make up the socialist coalition chooses to be offended by your remark. Then the remark becomes the simplistic expression of bigotry or ignorance, and must be shut out to protect authentic democracy. Only “progressive”, “constructive” speech is to be permitted. This is known as “Repressive Tolerance”, the doctrine articulated by the father of contemporary Western left-wing totalitarianism, Herbert Marcuse. No free speech to “fascists”.

Getting a neo-Malthusian article printed in Canadian Dimension would be like the Catholic Weekly printing an article from Watchtower magazine. Far too disturbing to their comfort zone. Why, they might have start thinking and observing what is happening around them, and Good God, they might have to then go shopping for a new paradigm. Better to hold fast to the old one. After all, it has only been around since 1848 and the world hasn’t changed a bit since then, has it? Marx only died yesterday, in 1883. He had ALL the answers then so let’s just confine ourselves to repeating and fine-tuning them. As the leading monk in “The Name of the Rose” warned the protagonist, played by Sean Connery, knowledge must consist of merely repeating the revealed truth of the past, not trying to break new ground with fresh discoveries. That is vanity at its worst. For there is nothing new under the sun. And the villainous monk said something else too. To respect God we must fear Him, but laughter undermines that fear. This is something I have taken to heart. I never dare to tell politically incorrect jokes or write satire. Humour is a form of art, and art must serve the revolution, that is, the politically correct agenda of the month.

Who shall then judge art? Well those who KNOW BETTER of course. The gatekeepers of expression. The editors of left wing rags and the government bureaucrats who censor and threaten you on the one hand, and on the other hand use taxpayers money to subsidize bohemian dead beats so that we may have “art” as they define it. The concept of cutting arts funding so that you or I might benefit from lower taxes and therefore purchase OUR kind of “art” is something quite unacceptable to them. We have what Marx called “false consciousness” you see, that is a belief system not in harmony with “our” true interests as they see them. In other words not consistent with their world view. The view of those who KNOW BETTER. We are the rednecks, the great unwashed, the ignorant, and we are not to be trusted with our own judgment. Is it any wonder then, why they are not impressed with our demands for direct democracy? To them, direct democracy is just “mob” rule. And we can’t have that. Because we are inherently “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic etc etc.” And they are enlightened.

Pity then that their party will soon be over. For the mechanisms of censorship, thought persecutions and the manufactured consent of state broadcasting and public education all depend on the inflated tax revenues from a fossil fuel economy. “Progressive” McCarthyism has been living high on the hog for the last four decades because all the Human Rights Tribunals, the government anti-villification watchdogs, the Womens Studies (Fem-Nazi indoctrination) College courses, the “Hostile Work Environment Thought Police”, the Multicultural state-subsidizied propaganda to engineer our attitudes----all of this machinery of social sculpting and intimidation---requires generous taxpayer funding. When that collapses with Kunstlerian certainty, “soft” totalitarianism will collapse with it, like a House of Cards, like the regimes on the other side of the Berlin Wall suddenly did. Then Mr. Gonick and his ilk will have to find real work and become one of the working class in whose name he has written for so long. And then we will no longer approach them as supplicants, but instead look to our own devices to “educate” people on a more even playing field. As horrible as the Long Emergency may be, the pleasure of seeing those WHO KNOW BETTER knocked off their perch will be compensation enough for me.