Peaceful Islam?

DECEMBER 15, 2015

The Vast Majority Myth

WILLIAM KILPATRICK

We often hear it said that the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful and reject violence. That proposition is worth examining because if it’s not true there is cause to worry. Of course, you should be worried already. Even if only a small percentage of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims are prepared to use violence, that still works out to a large number. However, if the vast-majority thesis doesn’t hold up, you might want to order a Kevlar vest from Amazon, or, if you’re the accommodating type, you could start practicing the Shahada—the Islamic declaration of faith.

There is a good deal of polling data to suggest that the vast majority of Muslims are not just your standard-issue vast majority. For example, Pew polls of public opinion in Pakistan and Egypt show that the vast majority (about 82 percent) favor stoning for adultery, amputation for theft, and death for apostates. So, even if a majority in these countries are not personally inclined to violence, they have no problem with the violent application of sharia law.

But rather than rely on polling data, let’s look at some other ways of assessing the “vast majority” proposition. For some perspective, here are some other “vast majority” propositions that just popped into my head:

Proposition 1. The vast majority of people are peaceful until they’re not.

Proposition 2. The vast majority of people go with the flow.

Proposition 3. The majority of people in any society are women and children.

With the exception of the third proposition, there is no empirical evidence for these propositions, but they seem just as reasonable as the proposition that the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful—a supposition which also has no empirical support. However, Proposition 3 does lend credence to the “vast majority of Muslims” thesis since women and children are, for various reasons, less inclined to violence than adult males. It would therefore be reasonable to say of any society that at least a majority are peaceful.

But people who are peaceful today will not necessarily be peaceful tomorrow. It’s probably safe to say that the vast majority of Hutus were behaving peacefully before the Rwanda genocide of 1994 … and then they stopped behaving peacefully. Using clubs, machetes, and, occasionally, guns, the Hutu managed to kill about 800,000 Tutsi in the space of one hundred days. It’s likely that the vast majority did not take part in the killings, but, by all accounts, a sizeable number did, and an even greater number were complicit. According to reports, most of the Tutsi victims who lived in rural villages were murdered by their neighbors.

So, in line with Proposition 1, the majority of the Hutu were peaceful until they were not. And, in line with Proposition 2, the majority of the Hutu went with the flow—the flow, in this case, being in the direction of mayhem. It should be noted, however, that there were powerful incentives to go with the flow. Moderate Hutus who declined to join in the killing were often killed by their fellow Hutus as a warning to others.

Although women took part in the slaughter, Proposition 3 would suggest that the majority of them did not. And if you combine the women with the children, the elderly, and the moderates, it is reasonable to assume that the majority of Hutu did not participate in the carnage. That, however, would have been small comfort to the Tutsi. The more you think about it, the less comforting it is to know that the vast majority of any population won’t take up arms against you.

History is full of examples of peoples and nations who were peaceful and then were not. Prior to World War I, the vast majority of Europeans were behaving peacefully. Then came 1914, and the European nations went to war with each other. The majority, of course, remained at home and were never involved in battle, but it seems safe to say that most of them fully backed their own side in the conflict and welcomed news of enemy casualties.

Given the right circumstances, the majority of almost any population will willingly put itself on a war footing and turn their homeland into a home front. The questions is, is there something about Islamic cultures that make them more susceptible to warlike attitudes more of the time?

Before attempting an answer, let’s briefly consider another historical example—the Spartans. Were the vast majority of Spartans peaceful? In the sense that the great majority, including women, children, and the elderly were not at war all the time, yes. Still, we would be mistaken to call them a peaceful people. Sparta was a warrior culture, and it cultivated a warrior mentality in its citizens.

The Spartans were a unique case, but in so far as Islam has a tendency, it tends in the direction of Sparta rather than, say, in the direction of Sweden—a land which was once host to a warrior culture of its own. But the Vikings are long gone, and their peaceful descendants look like they will be the first European nation to fall to Islam—a culture which has been more or less at war with the rest of the world since its inception.

Why is the sharia penalty for apostasy death? Because Islam understands itself to be an army. And the penalty for deserting an army in wartime is death. But for Islam, all times are wartimes. The basic division in the Islamic faith is between the House of Islam and the House of War. The essential mission given to Muslims is to bring the House of War (all non-Islamic nations) under the control of the House of Islam.

Like the Spartans, the first Muslims were warriors. Their leader was both a prophet and a warlord. Since Muslims are still expected to model their behavior on Muhammad, it’s not surprising that Muslim cultures will be more prone to violence than, say, cultures that take Jesus or Buddha as their inspiration. Our own culture is completely sold on the importance of having role models to emulate, but hasn’t yet grasped the consequences that follow when 1.6 billion people take Muhammad as their primary role model. Indeed, one of the chief appeals of ISIS and company is their promise to return Islam to those glorious days when Muhammad spread the faith by force.

It may well be that a great many Muslims today just want to be left alone to go about their business. But one of the built-in features of Islam is that, if you’re a Muslim, it won’t leave you alone. It wants to force you to be good. However, the only way to know if you’re good is if you conform to sharia. Thus, where Islam is practiced in its purest form, the virtue police patrol the streets, and everyone understands that if they convert to another religion they can be executed for apostasy—that is to say, desertion.

This is where the second proposition comes in: the vast majority of people go with the flow. The flow of Islam today has returned to its historical channel. It flows in the direction of militancy. Many of the secular governments in the Muslim world have been overthrown, or are in danger of falling to militant theocrats. The caliphate has been re-established in the form of the Islamic State, and the combined might of Russia and the Western powers has been unable to defeat it. Moreover, the seeming impotence of the West is matched by its decadence, and, according to your local imam, the two go together. The current parlous state of the West is just the sort of punishment that Allah visits on those who ignore his laws.

Imagine that you’re one of those moderately disposed Muslims who just wants to go about his own business. You look around and see that all the predictions of the more militant mullahs and imams are coming true. You want to be left alone, but you also want to be a good Muslim. And more and more it seems that being a good Muslim is what the militants say it is. After all, they can buttress their case with dozens of passages from Islamic scripture. And even if you’re not inwardly persuaded, there are still those outside pressures to be considered. Just as the extremist Hutu killed off the moderate Hutu, so also, extremist Muslims have a habit of murdering moderate Muslims who won’t go along with the program. After a while, the radical position won’t seem so radical. In fact, it will start to make sense.

Such a change of heart is not purely a matter of cowardice. No one likes to think of himself as a coward, and so we have ways of convincing ourselves that we are acting out of good, even virtuous motives, rather than cowardly ones. Thus, a moderate Muslim who is moving in a radical direction may persuade himself that it is pleasing to Allah for him to discriminate against non-Muslims. Eventually, he may convince himself that he has a duty to Allah to kill infidels. This shouldn’t be too hard to understand, because we in the West have ways of persuading ourselves that our continual attempts to cater to Muslim sensibilities is due to our tolerance and open-mindedness, rather than to fear.

Now that the Islamic State has established a caliphate, all the arguments for the more militant form of Islam have been strengthened. Nothing succeeds like success, and the many successes of ISIS seem to prove that Allah’s power is behind them. Fr. James Schall, S.J., puts it this way:

Briefly, the assigned mission of Islam is to conquer the world for Allah. Submission to Allah is the highest human good. Any means to carry it out is good if it is successful. Carrying out this mission, in this view, is a Muslim’s vocation. With the re-establishment of the caliphate, this mission can now recommence.

In short, the rebirth of the caliphate may be the signal that obedient and orthodox Muslims have been waiting for.

The vast majority of people go with the flow. Or, to change the metaphor, they wait to see which way the wind is blowing. In Islam, the wind is blowing once again in a radical direction. As we know from history, a relatively small number of radicals can pull the majority along with them. The problem is compounded in Islam because, judging by the numerous terrorist attacks in every part of the globe, we may no longer be facing a relatively small number of radicals. It is also likely that the violent radicals now have the sympathy of far more Muslims than we in the West will admit. Fr. Schall again:

Many Muslim countries are “peaceful” only in the sense that their governments, usually military dictatorships, keep down that radicalism that would overthrow them and is overthrowing them in many places. Muslim masses wait to see who is winning. They know even within Islam that they cannot afford to be on the losing side.

It is often argued that if Western societies take a hard line toward Islamic aggression, both military and cultural, it will have the effect of driving the moderates into the radical camp. So we yield to demands for burqas in public, censor the “Islamophobes” in our midst, and avoid using “offensive” terms such as “radical Islam.” But the majority of Muslims aren’t waiting to see which side is the most tolerant or which side takes in the most refugees; they are waiting to see which side is winning. As long as the West continues on its current course of accommodation and appeasement, the moderates will continue by some strange alchemy to morph into radicals.

The other day, the Daily Mail carried a photo of a smiling young man in Muslim garb holding a large sign that read “I am Muslim … do you trust me enough for a hug?” If that were the end of the story, we could all reassure ourselves that he had thoroughly grasped the cherished Western concept “arms are for hugging.” But shortly afterward, Craig Wallace, aka Muhammad Mujahid Islam, sent an online death threat to a Tory MP who had voted to authorize military action in Syria. Wallace was peaceful … until he wasn’t.

Western Reality?

Western civilisation is under threat, but not just from terrorism

• THE AUSTRALIAN
• NOVEMBER 21, 2015 12:00AM
• SAVE
• PRINT

• Greg Sheridan

  Foreign Editor

  Melbourne

  https://plus.google.com/101372426793016687263

At the height of the Cold War, at the start of the fateful 1980s, Jean-Francois Revel wrote his classic How Democracies Perish, a bitter, bleak, trenchant book that saw the West losing the Cold War against Soviet communism.

Revel was wrong. Western democracy triumphed in the end. But for much of the Cold War it was a desperately close-run thing. Nation after nation in the Third World became communist. In the scathing assessment of Revel, democracies lacked the strength of will to prevail.

But then Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II emerged as the embodiment of Western will, leaders of moral authority and clarion conviction. But the West’s triumph grew out of much more than their leadership, indispensable though that was.

The West vanquished communism for two reasons. The economic and political model was so superior and this resulted in a massive disparity in economic growth and economic power between the West and the sclerotic communist bloc. Not unrelated to this, the communists themselves then suffered a system-wide crisis of conviction, made starkly evident when Polish soldiers refused to fire on Polish citizens to maintain a regime in power.

The Paris terror attacks indicate a new level of threat to Western democracies. Is it wrong to call this an existential threat, as Foreign Minister Julie Bishop and Attorney-General George Brandis have done?

There is a serious argument for seeing terrorism as just a kind of terrible criminality that can never prevail. The benefit of this analysis is that it is reassuring. And it doesn’t serve the terrorists’ propaganda by inflating their ­status.

But ultimately that analysis doesn’t hold water. It simply doesn’t correspond with reality.

The Paris attacks should be seen in the light of a multiplying and interlocking series of threats the West faces. At the same time, far from its model demonstrating superiority, the West is gripped by a double crisis of belief, and of governance.

The age of terror does, in fact, represent an existential threat to the West, but it does so in complex ways through its interaction with other threats.

Let’s enumerate them.

First, there is terrorism itself. This exists now in all Western societies and in all Muslim societies. This jihadist ideology is based on a coherent if extreme world view in which Islam is persecuted by the West and the drive is to achieve the implementation of a pure and fundamentalist Islam.

In Western societies, such as France or Britain or the US or Australia, most terrorists may represent pathology more than coherent belief, disturbed or alienated people preyed on by entrepreneurs of identity. But there is also a cohort of quite successful people who are drawn to the intensity of the Islamist ­belief.

In the Middle East and across North Africa there are tens of thousands of such people. This indicates the failure of the West since 9/11.

Western intelligence agencies have prevented terrorists from acquiring nuclear materials and have prevented a mass casualty attack in the West on the scale of 9/11. But the Islamists have been successful beyond their wildest dreams.

Like the communists before them, but more successfully than the communists, they have established a constituency for their basic paradigm amid a substantial number of people in Western societies and the Middle East.

More than that, they share in common with many non-violent Muslims a great deal of a common narrative that focuses on resentment and paranoia.

The Grand Mufti in Australia should not be demonised for his foolish comments in response to the Paris attacks. He is not remotely a supporter of justifier of terrorism. But when he nominates causes of the terror attacks as “racism, Islamophobia, curtailing freedoms through securitisation, duplicitous foreign policies and military intervention”, he validates the paranoid and exaggerated sense of Muslim grievance on which the extremists thrive.

Everybody has their griev­ances. There are 11 million illegal immigrants in the US. Most of them are Hispanic. Many are Mexican. Mexicans could have a quite serious historical grievance about territory lost to Texas. Hispanics, legal and illegal, can well feel alienated in the US and picked upon in public debate. Yet there is no Mexican or Hispanic terrorist threat in the US.

Western Muslim leaders sometimes take refuge in arguing that because terrorism does not represent real Islam, it has nothing to do with Islam. Yet this ignores the obvious reality that this terrorism emerges from Islamic communities and, at least, from an interpretation of Islam.

So the first big threat to the West is the growing domestic terrorism threat. In time, the terrorists will become more sophisticated.

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls has talked of information suggesting terrorists in France have planned terror attacks with chemical weapons. If the terrorist movement continues to spread, the chances are that eventually it will acquire some nuclear or radioactive material. That may not happen for a long time but the terrorist intent to do this is ­evident.

This threat is subject to a massive force multiplier in the Middle East. Islamic State controls a big chunk of territory in Syria and Iraq. Calls for more assertive Western military action against Islamic State are mistaken. The calibrated air attacks were necessary to preserve the Iraqi state. But what is clear from the unfolding of the Syrian civil war is that the defeat of Islamic State is not the top priority of the Middle East’s resident powers, who see Iraq and Syria much more through the prism of the Sunni-Shia conflict than through the Western terrorism prism.

At the same time, the appalling human suffering of the Syrian civil war has sent hundreds of thousands of people fleeing from Syria and heading ultimately towards Europe.

Two critical books, The French Intifada, by Andrew Hussey, and Reflections on the Revolutionin Europe, by Christopher Caldwell, detail the overwhelming failure of integration of North African and Middle Eastern Muslim populations in France and in ­Europe generally.

The picture is, of course, complex. Most European Muslims are law-abiding. But Europe, unlike the US, Canada and Australia, has never had a successful ethos for ­integrating large numbers of ­immigrants from foreign cultures.

However, there is a deeper structural problem for the West here. All Western societies have become substantially post-industrial and services-oriented. The parts of their economies that are industrial are very hi-tech. Up until at least the middle of the past century, Western societies could provide masses of jobs for unskilled migrants, even if they did not speak the language of the new society. In Australia, migrants could work in the car plants, and the Snowy Mountains Scheme, and in the white goods industries, and many other places without much formal education and, indeed, even without much English.

Now such jobs simply do not exist. Unskilled immigrants with language problems typically spend years and years without a job. They are humanely supported by the welfare system. But this is a toxic recipe long term.

Even though the European welfare system itself is a massive attraction, and one of the reasons almost no Middle East refugees seek asylum in the Arab Gulf countries, over time welfare dependency breeds alienation and resentment. It feeds perfectly into the Islamist narrative of Western oppression.

The West cannot leave the Middle East to its own devices. The political culture of the Middle East generates hatred of the West routinely and finances Islamist extremism around the world.

More than that, when terrorists control territory, as Islamic State does, and as the Taliban did in Afghanistan, and possess even rudimentary tools of statehood, their ability to threaten the West is amplified. The conflict in Syria magnifies the terrorist threat in the West in an obvious fashion. Perhaps 30,000 foreign fighters have flocked to Syria to join Islamic State and similar groups. Thousands of these people come from the West. They will return to the West and conduct acts of terrorism, as we saw in Paris.

However, it is wrong to think that Islamist terrorism is the only, or perhaps even the main, strategic threat the West faces. But by entangling the West, especially the US, in the Middle East, to some extent exhausting US strategic resolve in the Middle East, and by making Americans loath to engage in security actions around the world, the total security order of the West is gravely weakened.

Opportunist states use American weakness to test the limits. Russia invades Ukraine. China claims and occupies disputed territories in the South China Sea. Iran fools Washington with a fake nuclear deal and powers on towards nuclear weapons. The system is beset with entropy. The centre cannot hold. The interaction of the terror threat with traditional geo-strategic issues makes both much more difficult for the West to ­manage. At the same time, the West is undergoing a genuine civilisational crisis of belief and of governance. This is the first generation in Western history that, substantially, is not sustained by any transcendent beliefs. The death of God is also in the West the death of purpose and, for many, the death of meaning.

Can a civilisation really sustain itself on the basis of an ideology of self-realisation and entitlement liberalism? If so, it will be the first time in history. Not only that, even if the model was internally sustainable, can it really produce a society vigorous enough to defend itself against these multiplying ­security challenges.

George Orwell once remarked that the English sleep easy in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do rough things on their behalf. Every soldier, every police officer, is ultimately prepared to sacrifice their life for an idea, a set of principles, a set of values, that they believe transcends their own experience and even their own mortality.

Western society is moving ever further away from the idea that anything beyond the individual can demand such sacrifice. The internal liberalism has never been more oppressive, while the ability to stand seriously against enemies is very much in question.

Straws in the wind even in Australia demonstrate grotesque elements to our civilisation. The Catholic Archbishop of Hobart is to be hauled before a thought police tribunal for the crime of propounding traditional Catholic sexual morality. Meanwhile, we rejoice in televised cage fights between women, which even our parents, much less our grandparents, would have regarded as the essence of barbarism.

At the same time demonstrators can march through the streets calling death to Israel, or even denouncing the evil of the Jews, without attracting legal penalty.

If a society has lost strong beliefs, can it really excite the transcendent loyalty of its own citizens, or of people who join it through migration?

At the same time there is well-documented crisis of governance across the Western world. No Western nation can balance its expenditures with its revenues. All are caught up in an entitlements ­crisis. Health and welfare spending are ballooning, so are unsustainable deficits. The prestige of democracy is under severe attack. For most of the Cold War, millions of people in the Third World, and in communist societies, yearned to live in nations governed as well as those of the West. It is a hard argument to make to a young banker or IT worker in Shanghai now that they would be better off if their government had the resolve and technical skill of Greece or Spain.

Put this all together and it’s not quite yet a full-blown crisis of a civilisation. But there’s a great deal of trouble ahead.

Reality Of Family Violence

Silent victims: both mothers and fathers can be violent

• BETTINA ARNDT
• THE AUSTRALIAN
• NOVEMBER 14, 2015

There was a funny discussion recently on the new ABC television show How Not to Behave. One of the hosts, Gretel Killeen, started complaining about “manspreading” — men sitting with their legs apart. “Men sitting with their legs so wide apart you’d think they are about to give birth,” she quipped.

The male host, Matt Okine, suggested men sit that way simply because it is more comfortable. “For whom?” asked Killeen. “For my balls,” Okine responded, with a funny explanation involving a grape ending up in a wine-making process after being squashed at the apex of two adjoining rulers.

Manspreading has attracted attention on public transport in New York because of men’s spread legs sometimes taking up more than their allocated seat space. The city ran a campaign: “Dude, Stop the spread, please. It’s a space issue.” Fair enough. It makes sense to promote consideration for others in public spaces — but, as always, the public discussion descended into talk about male aggression. It’s all about patriarchal men claiming their territory, sneered the feminist commentators.

Hardly a day goes by without some new story appearing that rubbishes men.

After being criticised non-stop for about a half-century, it’s probably time men had a right of reply, British journalist Peter Lloyd writes in his recent book, Stand By Your Manhood. Arguing that men have spent decades as the target in a long line of public floggings, Lloyd comprehensively but with surprising good humour outlines the “dismissive, patronising and skewed” narrative about heterosexual men that has dominated mainstream media and public policy for so long.

“So why is it that, today, there has never been a worse time to be a man?” Lloyd writes. “Rubbishing the male of the species and everything he stands for is a disturbing — and growing — 21st-century phenomenon. It is the fashionable fascism of millions of women — and many, many men, too. Instead of feeling proud of our achievements, we men are forced to spend our time apologising for them. When people chide us for not being able to multi-task or use a washing machine we join in the mocking laughter — even though we invented the damned thing in the first place.”

Lloyd’s examples of this skewed public discussion include many that should make any ­rational woman squirm.

Like his comment on the front-running US Democrat candidate: “Hillary Clinton once said — ­remarkably, with a straight face — that women have ‘always been the primary victims of war’, not the men who get their legs blown off in the battlefield in Iraq. Or Libya. Or Sudan.”

He mentions that in Nigeria, Boko Haram set fire to a school dormitory killing 59 sleeping boys — the third tragedy of its kind in just eight months. There wasn’t a peep about this, yet two months later when the same terrorist organisation kidnapped a group of schoolgirls the world mounted a viral campaign in minutes. “What gives? Why is boy’s life worth less — or worthless?” questions Lloyd.

Isn’t it odd, he asks, that men’s health is not given any priority, given that men die five years ear­lier in a life expectancy gap that has ­increased 400 per cent since 1920? Lloyd’s book includes an Australian example of the disparity in health funding. Data from our National Health and Medical Research Council shows a “spectacular gender gap” with “men’s health problems being allocated a quarter of the funding women’s research gets”. Lloyd quotes a News Corp article showing funding specifically targeting men’s health ranks 36th in health research priorities, just behind sexually transmissible infections.

Yet where the anti-male bias reaches its zenith is in the witch-hunt over domestic violence. In their determination to promote what is a very serious social problem — the violence of some men towards their partners — the zealots controlling public debate on this issue are absolutely determined to allow no muddying of the waters. Violence by women is dismissed as irrelevant, violence against men is routinely ignored or seen as amusing.

A few months ago a promo for a “screwball” comedy, She’s Funny That Way, ran in all our major cinemas. It featured three successive scenes showing different women slugging men in the face, followed by a woman sniggering, “Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am.” Audiences found that hilarious and there has been not one word of protest about the promotion.

Anyone speaking out about the circumstances that drive men to violence is reined in. Look at what has happened to Rosie Batty. Who could forget this extraordinary woman speaking with such compassion about her mentally ill former partner, Greg Anderson, within days of him murdering their young son. “No one loved Luke more than Greg, his father,” she said, explaining Anderson’s mental health had deteriorated after a long period of unemployment and homelessness.

How disappointing, then, to hear her speech at Malcolm Turnbull’s first major policy announcement, the launch of a $100 million women’s safety package. “This is a gender issue,” she said firmly, mouthing the party line — not one word of compassion for men, noth­ing about men and children who are victims of female violence.

Open your eyes, Rosie. The epidemic of violence you are rightly so concerned about isn’t just about men. Didn’t you notice Melbourne mother Akon Guode, who has been charged with murder after driving her car with her four small children into a lake? Or Donna Vasyli, arrested after her Sydney podiatrist husband was found with seven stab wounds.

Why is it that when a woman was charged last month with murdering her partner in Broken Hill, the story sunk without a trace and domestic violence was never mentioned in the media reports?

Around the country there are government departments struggling to cope with daily reports of child abuse, most often by their mothers. Yes, it is appalling that so many children grow up in homes terrorised by violent fathers, but abuse by mothers is surely part of the story of violence in the home if we are really concerned about protection of children and breaking the cycle of violence.

Bill Shorten’s wife, Chloe, recently gave a speech boasting about her husband’s and her mother’s commitment to the eradication of violence against women. Funnily enough her talk mentioned a book, Scream Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear,written by the woman who set up the world’s first refuge, Erin Pizzey. Clearly Chloe Shorten’s speech writer isn’t up on the politics of domestic violence. Pizzey is now world famous for her strenuous campaign arguing that domestic violence is not a gender issue.

“I always knew women can be as vicious and irresponsible as men,” she wrote, describing her childhood experience with a mother who beat her with the cord from an iron. She points out that many of the women in her refuge were violent, dangerous to their children and others around them.

Pizzey’s honesty has attracted constant attacks — she was forced to flee her native England with her children after protests, threats and violence culminated in the shooting of her family dog.

The 76-year-old started her own “White Ribbon Campaign” to counter “40 years of lies”, the constant male-bashing misinformation that dominates the domestic violence debate. The feminist White Ribbon Campaign that operates here and overseas is a prime offender.

“We must stop demonising men and start healing the rift that feminism has created between men and women,” says Pizzey, arguing that the “insidious and manipulative philosophy that women are always victims and men always oppressors can only continue this unspeakable cycle of violence”.

This brave, outspoken woman is one of a growing number of domestic violence experts and scholars struggling to set the record straight about violence in the home. There’s Murray Straus, professor of sociology from the University of New Hampshire and editor of several peer-­reviewed soci­ology journals. Back in 1975 he first published research showing women were just as likely as men to report hitting a spouse. Subsequent surveys showed women often initiated the violence — it wasn’t simply self-­defence. These findings have been confirmed by more than 200 studies of intimate violence summed up in Straus’s recent paper, Thirty Years of Denying the Evidence on Gender Symmetry in Partner ­Violence.

It’s true that physical violence by women may cause fewer injuries on average because of differ­ences in size and strength, but it is by no means harmless. Women use weapons, from knives to household objects, to neutralise their disadvantage, and men may be held back by cultural prohibitions on using force towards a woman even in self-defence.

Straus’s review concludes that in the US men sustain about a third of the injuries from partner violence, including a third of the deaths from attacks by a partner. (In Australia, men made up a quarter of the 1645 partner deaths between 1989 and 2012.) And proportions of non-physical abuse (for example, emotional abuse) against men are even higher. Women are about as likely as men to kill their children and account for more than half of substantiated child maltreatment perpetrators.

(The world’s largest domestic violence research database published in the peer-reviewed journal Partner Abuse summarised 1700 peer-reviewed studies and found that in large population samples, 58 per cent of intimate partner ­violence reported involved both the female and male partner. See http://bit.ly/1GNOjoN.)

Strauss has spent much of his working life weathering attacks for publicising these unwelcome truths about violence, regularly being booed from the stage when he tried to present his findings. On two occasions the chairwoman of a Canadian commission into violence against women claimed publicly he was a wife-beater — after repeated requests she finally was forced to apologise to him.

Straus has received death threats, along with his co-­researchers, Richard Gelles and Suzanne Steinmetz, with the latter the subject of a campaign to deny her tenure and attempts made to rescind her grant funding.

“All three of us became ‘non persons’ among domestic violence advocates. Invitations to conferences dwindled and dried up. Librarians publicly stated they would not order or shelve our books,” Gelles says.

It would be nice to report more civilised debate over this issue in Australia but, sadly, here too lies and bullying are par for the course. Look at what happened to Tanveer Ahmed. This Sydney psychiatrist has long written about taboo topics, such as reverse racism or denial in the Muslim community, which got up the nose of the Fairfax Media audience. Two years ago he ended up losing his column over plagiarism charges.

Ahmed had spent six years as a White Ribbon ambassador but this all came unstuck this year when he wrote an article for The Australian that pointed to the pernicious influence of radical feminists on public debate over domestic violence and suggested the “growing social and economic disempowerment of men is increasingly the driver of family- based violence”. Boy, did that bring them out in force. Fairfax columnist Clementine Ford condemned his dangerous message, which “prioritises men’s power over women’s ­safety”, adding that she didn’t have time for “men’s woe-betide-me feelings”. After a tirade of attacks on social media, White Ribbon asked him to step down, informing him that to be reinstated he would need to undergo a recommitment program. Shades of Stasiland, eh? There’s a fascinating twist to this whole saga. Heading up White Ribbon Australia’s research and policy group is Michael Flood, who is on the technical advisory group for the UN’s Partners for Prevention, which has produced research papers supporting the essential points Ahmed makes about the links between men’s social disempowerment and violence towards their partners.

Flood has spent his ­career focusing on men’s violence, from his early years teaching boys in Canberra schools about date rape through to alarmist papers suggesting pornography promotes male aggression, to his latest role as pro-feminist sociologist at the University of Wollongong. ­Des­pite his years in academe he’s happy to play fast and loose with statistics when it comes to demonising men.

“Boys think it’s OK to hit girls.” Back in 2008 this shocking news about teenager attitudes to violence led to headlines across the country. The source was a press release by White Ribbon Australia reporting on a publication by ­Flood and Lara Fergus that made the extraordinary claim: “Close to one in three (31 per cent) boys believe ‘it’s not a big deal to hit a girl’ .” Politicians jumped on the bandwagon, and everywhere there were calls for the re-education of these horrible, violent young men.

Flood and his colleagues had it totally wrong. The research actually found males hitting females was seen by virtually all young people surveyed to be unacceptable. Yet it was quite OK for a girl to hit a boy — 25 per cent of young people agreed with the statement “When a girl hits a guy, it’s really not a big deal”. When the error was brought to their attention, White Ribbon finally issued a correction and sent letters to newspapers, but of course none of these had the impact of the incorrect, misleading media headlines splashed right across the country.

A simple mistake? Well, perhaps, but there actually has been a steady stream of misleading statistics about domestic violence and it’s a full-time job trying to get them corrected. The person who has taken on that daunting task is Greg Andresen, the key researcher for the One in Three Campaign, which seeks to present an accurate picture of violence in the home. The Sydney man somehow manages to challenge much of the deluge of misinformation about domestic violence while also working a day job and rearing a young family.

The campaign’s reference to “one in three” refers to the proportion of family violence victims who are male. Our best data on this comes from the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Personal Safety Survey in 2012 that found 33 per cent of people who had experienced violence by a current partner were male.

Confusingly, there’s another “one in three” figure constantly bandied about in domestic violence discussions, referring to the proportion of women who have experienced violence during their lifetime. This figure actually refers to all victims of incidents of physical violence, not just violence by partners, and about one in two men experience similar violence — as explained in an excellent report just released by Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety.

The One in Three website (oneinthree.com.au) opens with a startling image of a man with battered nose and a shocking shiner plus the slogan, “It’s amazing what my wife can do with a frypan.” That certainly makes the point but the strength of this site is the solid statistical analysis — more than 20 pages dissecting misleading statistics aired over Australia’s media.

Here’s one example from ABC’s Radio National: “A recent survey in Victoria found family violence is the leading cause of death and ill health in women of child-bearing age.” Andresen draws on Australian Institute of Health and Welfare data to show the top five causes of death, disability and illness combined for Australian women aged 15 to 44 are anxiety and depression, migraine, type 2 diabetes, asthma and schizophrenia. “Violence doesn’t make the list,” he concludes.

The same nonsense about domestic violence being the leading cause of death in young women also appeared on Sky News last year, spurring psychologist Claire Lehmann to do her own analysis, which she published in her blog (http://bit.ly/1Km1xEg) on White Ribbon Day. Lehmann made it clear she supports the important work of the campaign but, she writes, “what I do not support, however, are dodgy statistics and false claims which belittle this good cause”.

In great detail she demonstrates how the dodgy statistics stem from misleading analysis of a VicHealth report and presents all the Australian data from the ABS and AIHW showing the claim is totally absurd. Yet the ABC, presented with all the data, still concluded the claim was accurate.

One of the tactics used by domestic violence campaigners is to highlight only men’s violence and leave out any statistics relating to women. “A quarter of Australian children had witnessed violence against their mother,” South Australia’s Victims of Crime commissioner Michael O’Connell thundered in August 2010.

This statistic came from a Young People and Domestic Violence study that showed almost an identical proportion of young people was aware of domestic violence against their fathers or stepfathers. Yet this barely got any mention in the media coverage.

Whenever statistics are mentioned publicly that reveal the true picture of women’s participation in family violence, they are dismissed with the domestic violence lobby claiming they are based on flawed methodology or are taken out of context.

But as Andresen says: “We use the best available quantitative data — ABS surveys, AIC (Australian Institute of Criminology) homicide stats, police crime data, hospital injury databases — all of which show that a third of victims of family violence are male. The same data sources are cited by the main domestic violence organisations but they deliberately minimise any data relating to male victims.”

A recent episode of the ABC’s satirical comedy Utopia showed public servants who ran the Nation Building Authority all in a twit working out how to knock back a Freedom of Information request. It made for great comedy watching the twists and turns of the bureaucrats seeking to refuse the request, assuming it was better to block it “just to be on the safe side”. Pretty funny considering this fictional FoI request turned out to relate to a harmless, long-finished multi-storey carpark.

The bureaucrats must run around like headless chooks when they receive the regular FoI requests sent to all government bodies regarding the long-term cover-up of the gender of child abuse perpetrators.

Imagine the scene at the AIHW when they received FOI requests relating to a long-term cover up regarding the gender of child abuse perpetrators.

The one time this body published this data was in 1996 and showed 968 male perpetrators to 1138 women. Since then FoI requests have produced data only from Western Australia, namely state Department for Child Protection figures that showed the number of mothers responsible for “substantiated maltreatment’’ between 2007 and 2008 rose from 312 to 427. In the same period the number of fathers reported for child abuse dropped from 165 to 155. Easy to see why bureaucrats would be nervous of figures like that.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk recently made headlines by calling for campaigns against domestic violence to include male victims.

Her comment was met by a barrage of complaints from domestic violence services warning her not to recognise male victims at the expense of women.

According to Pizzey, that’s the real issue. It is all about funding. In a 2011 article forThe Daily Mail she argued domestic violence had become a huge feminist industry, “This is girls-only empire building, and it is highly lucrative at that.”

Pizzey has spent most of her life speaking out about the lies being promoted by this industry to protect their funding base and begging audiences not to create a domestic violence movement hostile to men and boys.

“I failed,” she concludes sadly, but she hasn’t given up. Her message is clear: “The roots of domestic violence lie in our parenting. Both mothers and fathers can be violent; we need to acknowledge this. If we educate parents about the dangers of behaving violently, to each other and to their children, we will change the course of those children’s lives.”

As Lloyd so eloquently points out, domestic violence is only one of many issues where men are being demonised, where the exclusive promotion of women’s priorities leaves men with a dud deal. His book explores issues such as paternity fraud, schools failing boys, circumcision, becoming a weekend dad, men’s sex drive, pornography and the early death rate.

Ironic, considering how often we are told men still hold all the power.

It’s about time those male newspaper editors, politicians, bureaucrats and other powerful men started asking hard questions about the one-sided conversation that leaves so many men missing out. And maybe women who care about their brothers, sons, fathers, partners and male friends may care to join in.

The Real Agenda?

MERV BENDLE

Green Salvation’s Hellfire Preachers

Apocalypticism used to be packaged as the forever-looming punishment for man's sins against God. These days it is Gaia who has been sinned against, according to her legion of environmental Jeremiahs. Unlike the Old Testament prophet, these retailers of the woe to come richly deserve to be scorned

Once again, the Australian people are about to be sold out, offered up as human sacrifices on the altar of the new religion of Gaia. Having successfully staged a coup to dislodge climate change moderate Tony Abbott as Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, along with Greg Hunt and Julie Bishop, can now make their pilgrimage to the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, the objective of which is to establish a legally binding and universal agreement on draconian climate change action from all the nations of the world.

In this fashion they will deliver us all into the gaping, insatiable maw of the global warming racket, with hundreds of billions of dollars to be expropriated annually from the middle-classes of the West and funneled into financial institutions, giant rent-seeking corporations, UN bureaucracies, and Third World kleptocracies.

The mendacity, gullibility, and self-interest of these politicians and their accomplices (especially in academia and the media) is breathtaking, but ultimately they are building upon a carefully choreographed campaign of eco-apocalyptic agitation and propaganda that has been underway for decades. While the machinations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and similar agencies are notorious, the longer-term history of the campaign to enchain the people of the world under the pretense of preventing a climate catastrophe is extremely illuminating as it discloses the true nature of the crusade presently being waged.

Central to this strategy is the mobilization of a new form of secular apocalypticism centred on the dogmatic assertion that the world is about to end as a result of human industry and technological ingenuity. The tremendous momentum of this otherwise unlikely global warming panic exists because it has been able to build upon and exploit the long history of apocalypticism.

Traditional apocalypticism is a major religious phenomenon based on the belief that the world and/or all human civilisation will shortly come to a catastrophic end through Divine intervention. It has had a firm grip on the Western culture for some 2500 years, and has reached fever-pitch on many occasions, frequently inspiring the widespread conviction that Armageddon was imminent and that humanity would shortly face Divine judgement.

The 20th century was one of the most apocalyptically obsessed periods in history, driven by world wars, revolutions on a continental scale, and the threat of nuclear annihilation. This has had a massive impact on popular consciousness, as I have previously discussed in an academic article. Above all, it made people extremely susceptible as traditional apocalypticism took on a secular guise, “evoking world destruction and transformation through ecological disaster … and technological breakdown”, with both religious and secular versions “converging upon the belief that the accepted texture of reality is about to undergo a staggering transformation, in which long-established institutions and ways of life will be destroyed”, as Paul Boyer explained in When Time Shall Be No More (1992).

Remarkably, the central role to be played by the global warming myth in this agit-prop campaign was spelt out by some of its ideological leaders 22 years ago:

“Humans need a common motivation … either a real one or else one invented for the purpose. … In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.”

So declared Alexander King and Bertrand Schneider in The First Global Revolution, A Report by the Council of the Club of Rome (1993). The book was a sequel to The Limits to Growth, the infamous 1972 jeremiad produced by the Club of Rome, an incredibly well-resourced NGO consumed by the belief that the world was about to end unless global political control was placed in the hands of a technocratic elite (i.e., themselves and their protégés). Despite none of its predictions coming true it was translated into 30 languages and sold over 30 million copies, becoming the best-selling environmental book in history.

It was able to exploit the popular hysteria and moral panics that surrounded such best-selling eco-apocalyptic polemics as Rachel Carson’s hysterical Silent Spring (1962), which led to a ban on DDT and other insecticides and resulted in the preventable deaths of between 60 and 80 million people (mainly in the Third World) who might otherwise have been protected from malaria and other diseases. Even more sensationalistic was Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968). This alleged that a global ‘population explosion’ would lead to hundreds of millions of people starving to death within 20 years. It intentions to terrify were emphasized by its cover, which depicted a black anarchist bomb with a lit fuse and the slogan: “The population bomb is ticking”.

Ehrlich was expanding on Paul and William Paddock’s eco-apocalyptic prophecy, Famine 1975! (1967) and this was followed by Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), which predicted that the Armageddon promised in the Bible would shortly bring global destruction; it consequently became one of the best-selling religious books in history. Barry Commoner’s The Closing Circle; Nature, Man, and Technology (1971) declared that the impending environmental catastrophe was caused by capitalism and insisted that only global eco-socialism could save the world. Similarly, the communist historian, Lefton Stavrianos, argued in The Promise of the Coming Dark Age (1976) that environmental equilibrium would only be re-established when the present Imperialist world-order collapsed as the Roman Empire had done previously and the world entered a new ‘Dark Age’. He insisted this would sweep away the destructive elements of modern industrial society and purify the world.

The 1970s also saw the first appearance of catastrophic climate change theory. Ironically, this new form of eco-apocalypticism focused on the insistence that the earth was confronting a new Ice Age caused by global cooling! A NASA scientist, Stephen Schneider argued in 1971 that industrialization was producing high levels of atmospheric dust and that this would prevent sunlight reaching the earth’s surface and cause a temperature drop of some 3.5 degrees Celsius. Science News concluded in its March 1975 cover story that such a percipient decline would trigger an Ice Age, and this assessment was confirmed by a 1975 report from the US National Academy of Sciences. Subsequently, Lowell Ponte publishedThe Cooling in 1976, carefully describing the global effects of such a catastrophe, while the BBC produced a documentary on the subject. Later, the resurgence of Cold War tensions later provoked Jonathan Schell to publish The Fate of the Earth (1982), a best-seller that depicted the annihilation of most life on earth in a nuclear war, with a ‘nuclear winter’ freezing the planet and leaving only “a republic of insects and grass”.

It was at this time also that Jack Sepkoski and David M. Raup published “Mass extinctions in the marine fossil record” in Science (March 1982), identifying five mass extinction events in the history of the world, headlined by the demise of the dinosaurs. This eventually overthrew the prevailing gradualist model of planetary history and established the theoretical foundations for the central eco-apocalypticist idea that the earth could undergo sudden, cataclysmic and irreversible physical and environmental change.

The apocalyptic mood intensified further in the 1980s with the appearance of AIDS, which brought the ‘Sexual Revolution’ of the Sixties to a screeching halt and led celebrity opinion-makers to proclaim the approach of a carnal Armageddon. This was exemplified by the 1987 on-air declaration of Oprah Winfrey that “research studies now project that one in five heterosexuals could be dead from AIDS at the end of the next three years – believe me!”, as Simon Pearson recalls in The End of the World: From Revelation to Eco-Disaster (2006). In Australia this moral panic was accompanied by the infamous ‘Grim-Reaper’ TV advertisements which depicted the average heterosexual family (including grandma and her grand-daughter) being bowled over by AIDS. Building on the pre-existing dread of nuclear annihilation, life increasingly was seen as vulnerable and contingent.

The 1980s also saw the emergence of the Gaia Hypothesis, which restored the religious dimension to eco-apocalypticism. It was first formulated by the biologist James Lovelock and popularized in Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979), followed by many other books by Lovelock, including such panic-inducing tomes as The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth Is Fighting Back – and How We Can Still Save Humanity (2006) and The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning: Enjoy It While You Can (2009).

According to this new form of pagan theology, the earth (‘Gaia’) is a transcendent superorganism, and is indeed the largest known living being, with its own super-complex nervous system (of which humanity is a small but significant part). As such, in a quasi-Divine fashion, Gaia deserves and demands reverence while severely punishing (indeed, making extinct) those species, e.g., humanity, that threaten its equilibrium or survival. Gaia theology quickly became a New Age cult and remains extremely influential throughout the environmental movement.

(To his credit, Lovelock has proven to be more of a genuine scientist than a theologian,recently conceding the rate of global warming has not been as predicted: “The climate is doing its usual tricks. There’s nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now,” he observed in a 2012 interview on MSNBC. He also criticized environmentalists for treating global warming like a religion, advocates fracking as a major source of energy, and dismisses the claims that modern economies could be powered by wind turbines as meaningless drivel.)

The 1980s also saw the rise to pre-eminence of the Deep Ecology movement and related eco-extremism.  Deep Ecology was invented by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess and is based on the premise that human life has no priority over non-human life, such as animals, plants, amoeba, or bacteria, or even over objects in the natural environment –mountains, wilderness and the like. Consequently, Deep Ecologists demand a 90% decrease in the human population if Gaia is to be saved. Naess visited Australia in the early 1980s and had a massive impact, inspiring the fledgling Greens and the floundering communist parties which went on to construct the watermelon form of leftism: green on the outside, red on the inside. These activists became and remain extremely influential in universities and schools, and some sit in our Parliament.

Other eco-apocalyptic extremists from this period that had significant influence on Australia include the Earth Liberation Front and Earth First! eco-terrorist organizations, which advocated economic sabotage and guerrilla warfare in what they saw as a fight to the death with modern industrial society for the honour of Gaia. Consequently, for many years they engaged in ‘eco-tage’, ‘monkey-wrenching’, and tree spiking, and also (for obscure reasons) waged a war on SUV dealerships in the United States. Prior to the 9/11 attacks they were on top of the FBI list of domestic terrorist threats.

The eco-apocalyptists found their most influential ally in Al Gore, who published in 1989 Al Gore published an opinion piece in the New York Times that likened industrial society to a drug addict continually in need of a fix to feed its self-destructive habit. He also compared the threat of global warming to the rise of Nazism. We face, he declared, an “ecologicalKristalnacht” and an “environmental holocaust”. Later, his eco-apocalypticism took full flight in Earth in the Balance (1992) which insisted that global warming was “the most serious threat we have ever faced”, discounting true catastrophes like the Black Death, which killed half the population of Europe in a matter of a few years, or the Mongol invasions, which nearly destroyed the European and Islamic civilizations. He even overlooked the scourge of 20^th century totalitarianism, which accounted for several hundred million lives.

In this Gore gave voice to one of the central conceits of eco-apocalyticism – its insistence that the most critical moment in history is right now and that the present time is always just one step away from Armageddon and the Final Judgement.

Meanwhile, the leading theorist of global cooling, Stephen Schneider, adroitly re-invented himself as a leading theorist of global warming as this was adopted as the preferred scenario by the Club of Rome and other NGOs and agencies. In Global Warming: Are We Entering the Greenhouse Century? (1989) he predicted a 5 degree Celsius rise in temperature by 2050, sufficient to severely degrade most societies on the planet. Predictably, the IPCC (which was constituted by the UN in 1988) declared such catastrophic global warming a reality in its first report in 1990 and this set the scene for the developments of the past quarter-century, including the Kevin Rudd-led hysteria leading up to the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference.

Schneider also made some revealing comments in 1989 about how he saw his role as a scientist committed to the ideology of global warming:

“As scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method [but] our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change [means that] we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.”

This signaled a paradigm shift in the role expected of scientists with a significant input into the policy process and the political sphere – it was henceforth seen as acceptable and even required that scientists deliberately mislead the public and obscure the implications of their research if it conflicted with pre-determined political outcomes.

(In 2006 Schneider served as an advisor to the South Australian Government on climate change and renewable energy policies. He was instrumental in increasing the state’s reliance on ‘renewables’ to over 30 %, with predictable effects on its economy.)

It was after these developments that The First Global Revolution with its similarly revealing confession appeared in 1993. This was in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. The Club and other NGOs saw this as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to seize control of the global political agenda, initiating what they saw literally as “the first global revolution”. With the defeat of communism it declared a new enemy was needed to mobilize the masses under elite control:

“The need for enemies seems to be a common historical factor … With the disappearance of the traditional enemy [communism] the sudden absence of traditional adversaries has left governments and public opinion with a great void to fill. New enemies have to be identified, new strategies imagined, and new weapons devised”.

Global warming was to be that contrived enemy.

The strategy therefore was to move eco-apocalypticism to the centre of global political concern. Freed from the spectre of communism the global masses could now be terrified into action in a new war, this time against carefully contrived threats of global environmental catastrophe. Nothing exemplifies this better than Gore’s Oscar-winning eco-apocalyptic documentary, An Inconvenient Truth (2006), with its images of the polar ice-caps and enormous glaciers expiring while hurricane victims scurry for shelter. America, he declared, must lead the fight against global warming, just as it allegedly did against slavery (?!).

This was accompanied by Alan Weisman’s non-fiction celebration of a post-human world inThe World Without Us (2007). This celebrates in excruciating detail what would happen to the natural and built environment once human beings are removed from the world. As The Guardian’s review (3/5/2008) exalted, people “learn during the course of this book, to feel good about the disappearance of humanity from the Earth”. It is a measure of the penetration of eco-apocalyptic ideas that Western intellectuals, enjoying the greatest freedoms and highest standards of living in history, nevertheless think that “there is something about a description of our own extinction that pulls at the heart”, and muse about “what is it that is so seductive about the idea of complete human extermination?”

Notoriously, Kevin Rudd became Prime Minister around this time and eagerly adopted the eco-apocalyptic perspective, casting himself as the global savior at the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference, maintaining the Prime Ministerial jet on stand-by at Canberra airport, ready for him to intervene at a moment’s notice in the conference negotiations, in order to save the world. Now, all too conveniently, Australia has another true believer as Prime Minister, eager to pay homage to Gaia at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in the City of Light.

While the alleged objective of this campaign is to prevent alleged catastrophic global warming its real aim is to enmesh countries like Australia in a legally binding framework that would require a vast re-distribution of wealth away from economically successful nations like Australia, while also establishing the basis for a form of global governance that would entail the surrender of national sovereignty.

Led by corrupt UN agencies, unaccountable NGOs, wealthy foundations, mendacious politicians, opportunistic academics, and Third World kleptocracies, the eco-apocalypticists are committed totally to re-shaping the world and its people into a Gaia-friendly and easily administered mass.

Indeed, despite the emphasis on environmental threats the real target of the campaign has always been human beings, as The First Global Revolution made clear:

“In their totality and their interactions these phenomena [global warming, pollution, famine, etc.] do constitute a common threat [but] all these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself.”

In this respect modern environmentalism is no different to the earlier forms of totalitarianism, with their fierce desire to re-make humanity according to their fanatical conceptions of race and class. Where its obsessions differ from those of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot is in its anti-humanism, as exemplified by Gaia theology, Deep Ecology, and the other misanthropic ideological tendencies present throughout the movement.

Ultimately, the role of apocalypticism as a major cultural and political force throughout history should make people pause and examine carefully all suggestions that the world is facing extinction or a cataclysmic global upheaval. At the very least people should be skeptical, and so should their representatives. However, such reflection and skepticism is difficult or even dangerous, because intolerance of all dissent and doubt is a core characteristic of apocalyptic systems of thought, and apocalypticists are always eager to punish those who question their prophesies.

The tragedy of the accelerating moral panic about alleged global warming is that we know a great deal about the history of traditional apocalypticism and the devastation it has wrought in the past, and yet we seem unable to place the contemporary eco-apocalyticism in that historical context and see it for what it really is: a fundamentally religious phenomenon being exploited by very powerful interests intent on enchaining the world under their control.