Churchill and Global Warming?
Steve Hayward of The Commons did a speech at the American Political Science Association recently, The Use and Abuse of Churchill in History. (Found it before Powerline linked it, but those guys are SCARY FAST.) Link to the whole speech here, but here is a quote:
It is worth remembering how long we waited before finally facing the challenge posed by Nazi totalitarianism and Hitler. Many were reluctant to acknowledge that an effort on the scale of what became World War II was actually necessary, and most wanted to believe that the threat could be wished away with trivial sacrifices. For several years before the awful truth was accepted, one Western leader spoke out forcefully and eloquently about the gathering storm. Winston Churchill was uncompromising in his insistence that every effort be immediately bent to the task of ensuring Hitler’s defeat. After Neville Chamberlain concluded the Munich Pact of 1938, which gave Czechoslovakia to Hitler in return for his pledge not to take over still more territory, most Britons were happy and supported the policy that later was condemned as appeasement. Churchill, however, grasped the essence of what had occurred and of the unavoidable conflict that lay ahead.
From here Gore goes to quote at length the ultimate paragraph of Churchill’s Munich speech in the House, though, like the BBC’s Wilderness Years adaptation of the speech done in the late 1970s, he omits the final phrase, "as in the olden time."
From here Gore continues his main theme: "Thus do we meekly acquiesce in the loss of the world’s rain forests and their living species, the loss of the Everglades, the Aral Sea, the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest, the topsoil of the Midwest. . ." etc. "Bitter cups all--but only ‘the beginning of the reckoning,’ only the first of a steady stream of progressively more serious ecological catastrophes that will be repeatedly proffered to us . . ."
In An Inconvenient Truth Gore ratchets up the comparison, making out skeptics of his eco-apocalypticism, or doubters of the proposed remedies such as the Kyoto Protocol, to be the moral equivalent of Nazi appeasers. Gore cites the conclusion of Churchill’s 1936 speech attacking appeasement: "The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences."
