Guest Post: Torquemada is back !
A guest post by Barry Brill:
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s address to the the UN General Assembly 24/09/2022:
“We will remain a strong and passionate advocate for efforts to address the weapons of old but, also, the weapons that are new. The face of war has changed. And with that, the weapons used … prolific disinformation and manipulation of whole communities and societies.
How do you tackle climate change if people do not believe it exists? How do you ensure the human rights of others are upheld, when they are subjected to hateful and dangerous rhetoric and ideology?
But there is cause for optimism. Because for every new weapon we face, there is a new tool to overcome it.
We have the means; we just need the collective will.”
With these stirring words – at the very centre of the international stage – New Zealand’s leader declared all-out war on those who do not believe that climate change[1] exists. All non-believers. Everywhere.
The NZ prime minister says “we” (by which word she presumably embraces all believers throughout the world) now need to muster the collective will to overcome the non-believers – by using the new tools that are now available. Non-believers must be made to recant their dangerous ideology. Their hateful rhetoric must be silenced.
It is no surprise at all that the Prime Minister employs the language of belief and ideology, rather than the language of science.
Beliefs
As “the greatest moral challenge of our times”, the dogmas of the climate change cult are no longer limited by any secular need for evidence or data
If climate change policy was ever based on “the science”, then that basis has long been overwhelmed by politics and tribal groupthink. It is now the very badge of a progressive left-wing worldview. In both USA and Australia, climate change alarm is the single greatest differentiator between the left and the right of politics. .
The “climate justice” narrative is a post-modern cultural phenomenon, intertwined in endless mysterious ways with race and gender and other categories of perceived Marx-like oppression. Belief in the climate change credo is a sine qua non for every left-leaning politician (or journalist) – in the English-speaking world and further afield.
While an ideology for some, it is a quasi-religion for others. As long ago as 2003, author Michael Crighton declared that mankind’s greatest challenge was to distinguish reality from fantasy, in the context of environmentalism becoming a religion. Regrettably, over the ensuing 20 years, faith in climate change has moved inexorably to fill the large vacuum left by the rapid decline of Christianity.
Intolerance
But religions can have their downsides. Over the centuries, there have been many instances of religious populations demanding total obeisance to the dominant dogma of that time and place. Some religions have even developed a fierce intolerance towards ‘infidels’ or ‘heretics’ who might tend to undermine the majority creed.
We have recently seen it in jihadist extremists, such as the efforts of ISIS to exterminate adherents of the Yazidi faith in Iraq Earlier, it manifested in ruthless pogroms against jews and other minorities – and, the most infamous of all, the Spanish Inquisition.
Just as Torquemada declared war in the 15th century on those who could not believe in the teachings of the Vatican’s Holy See, Prime Minister Ardern has declared war in the 21st century on those who can not believe in the teachings of the United Nations’ IPCC.
The Inquisition used the old weapons of the thumbscrew, the rack, and the burning of books. Ms Ardern is a proud cheer-leader for the use of the “new weapons” of hate-speech laws, de-platforming, and cancel culture.
Now she anticipates new and even better weapons, calling for –
“…research and understanding of how a person’s online experiences are curated by automated processes. This will also be important in understanding more about mis and disinformation online. A challenge that we must as leaders address.”
So, given the collective will, how will new automated processes on the web overcome those who do not believe that climate change exists?
Perhaps bots will detect such people and assign them demerit points, or impose instant fines? Or automatically erase their incorrect messaging; or bar them from access to the internet? While we don’t yet know the details, we do know that the NZ government is assiduously researching all possibilities (at taxpayer expense).
Orchestrated propaganda
And the dauntless Ms Ardern does not stand alone. By an extraordinary coincidence, the World Economic Forum (WEF) held a seminar on Davos Radio in the very same week: – “Tackling disinformation – how can we combat the lies that go viral?” – denouncing the “polluted information environment”.
Melissa Fleming, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications, said the UN puts out lots of messages to its millions of social media followers that “give people agency to take climate action”.
She described how the UN’s country offices all around the world “localise” the central messages sent from Geneva and New York. They deploy influencers who have huge followings, and work with TikTok in “a layered deployment of ideas and tactics”.
Ms Fleming said: “We own the science and we think the world should know it” – explaining how Google searches are now massaged to ensure that only UN-approved messages appear on the first page of results.
This is big
Roll over Josef Goebbels: your stunted canvas was but a single nation. Now we have the entire globalist population of the planet united behind the most ambitious propaganda campaign in history – with limitless funding and with no tether to any known system of ethics.
The propaganda has been the carrot. And now Ms Ardern introduces the stick. No doubt chosen for this role by the UN (or WEF), she proclaims herself to be a “passionate advocate”
Her conviction is absolute that dangerous heresies like climate denial must be banished from this earth…
“But while I cannot tell you today what the answer is to this challenge, I can say with complete certainty that we cannot ignore it. To do so poses an equal threat to the norms we all value.”
Watch this space.
[1] The term “climate change” is, as usual, employed as code for dangerous human-caused global warming