Meet the new Soviet, same as the old Soviet:
Teenagers will learn about the threat to the environment from climate change and what they can do about it, under reforms to geography teaching.
They will be encouraged to recycle consumer goods and to question whether they really need another imported pair of trainers. Other topics to be studied include the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina.
Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, said: “With rising sea temperatures, melting ice-caps and frequent reminders about our carbon footprints, we should all be thinking about what we can do to preserve the planet. Children are the key to changing society’s attitudes to the environment. Not only are they passionate about saving the planet but children also have a big influence over their own families’ lifestyles.”
In due course, and perhaps even early course, children will be encouraged to rat their parents out to the authorities for ‘unGreen’ behaviour. Such is the pattern for the legitimisation of ruling class ideologies;indoctrinate the young and persuade them of the need to meekly accept poverty, austerity and political control for the sake of ‘saving the planet’.
‘Global warming’ does indeed present a grave threat; as a tool of political power it is a threat to freedom, prosperity, trade, progress and all the health, wealth and happiness that those things make possible and if anyone has been inclined to regard the whole ‘climate change’ nostrum as a joke, then I humbly suggest that this is a mistake. Our masters are clearly taking it very seriously indeed and we have a momentous battle on our hands if we intend to stop them from going down the path that they already begun to forge.
This is a battle we must win – for the sake of the children.
Update: the Libertarian Alliance is also calling foul on this exercise in political propaganda for children.
Thaddeus,
I made the same point on Perry’s GGPG thread earlier today.
How do we win?
I shouldn’t worry about this unduly if I were you. While the intent is deplorable, the same as the intent of the Scum of Labour always is, the actual practice is likely to be less so.
After all, the rubbish of the public sector cannot teach children to read, write or add up. So how on earth does anyone believe they are going to understand the party line on Glowball Warming?
And since all the effort expended by the Geheime Staats Polizei has falied to stop ‘Binge Drinking’, drug use, eating too much, burglary, robbery etc etc, why does anyone think it will fix any other ‘problem’ the state may have?
Perhaps because there’s something in it for them.
After all, the rubbish of the public sector cannot teach children to read, write or add up. So how on earth does anyone believe they are going to understand the party line on Glowball Warming?
I suspect that the Sociofascists want a population that is uneducated and lacking in critial reasoning, more interested in who said what to who in Eastenders than analysing if what is being fed their children is mind-altering Soylent Green.
Will they call for the biggest consumer — Big Government — to consume less?
Somehow I doubt it.
“How do we win?”
Same way we will win against Communism. Out-run them.
Their own incompetence will destroy them eventually. But it won’t be fast, or without cost. Don’t go thinking there are any quick and easy solutions, because there aren’t. It has too much momentum. But at the same time don’t give in or compromise your principles. Don’t put peace ahead of progress. Shine as much light on it as you can get away with. And don’t give up hope.
One thing you can do is to collect all the predictions they’re currently making as ammunition for the end-game. They got away with it when they predicted global famine by now back in the 60s and 70s, let’s not let them get away with it again.
Adolf Hitler would be so proud of Britain today…….
Shaun – sadly true, I’m afraid. FWIW, although I’m sure that this has been mentioned before, I’m given to understand that much of the resistance to a smoking ban on the part of various German governments is because Hitler banned smoking in “public” places.
Hitler was also a keen enviromentalist as well.
I think of that conference that just ended as the equivalent of the Council of Nicea when Constantine ordered the Christian Church to finally decide what they believed and what they didn’t.
The Green man is the political watermelon. It’s amazing what people will give up in the name of the big lie, when they’re kept dumb and docile. That’s the most infuriating thing about it, to me — that the people who are supposed to educate are mass-producing unthinking zombies. Education has become a serf production plant, which lowers the resistance to all freedom stealers.
…He also had a soft spot for naturism, I believe. Is that going to be the next big government push? Will we be seeing Patricia Hewitt au naturel explaining in her potty-time tones why it would be to our inestimable benefit to peel off and join her for a nice healthy game of volleyball?
Sorry, everyone — I didn’t… I didn’t mean to write that…
Ratting on your parents has been tried here in Portugal, though not for Green reasons. Any inquiry in school about drug consumption was asking kids if daddy forced mommy to have sex and other aspects of domestic violence. Very quaint.
All we can hope is that they overdo it so badly that the children smell a rat. Either that or that their predictions of global catastrophe diverge so far and so rapidly from what is actually happening that they are subjected to nationwide mockery.
At that, I’m minded to suggest a slogan:
Save water: take the piss out of an environmentalist.
“Will we be seeing Patricia Hewitt au naturel . . . ”
Paul, you fiend. That’s a mental image I did NOT need.
Wait, wait, wait… Even if we accept, for the sake of argument, the axistence of global warming and that it increases the occurence of hurricanes and typhoons, what does that have to do with the Asian Tsunami, which was caused by an earthquake?
Are they seriously arguing that global warming causes earthquakes?
I’m saddened…deeply saddened…to read this kind of anti-statist drivel from a people who already lead the world…the world…in consumption of toilet paper.
Every Briton flushes 17.6 kilos (39lb) of toilet paper down the lavatory every year, almost two and half times the European average, according to tissue industry figures. The Telegraph says so.
This is even a greater waste than we Americans…who only use 15.7 kilos…
How bad can you be? Worse than us, that bad. Sad. Makes me mad. Dad.
My experience of French motorway ‘aires’ and Italian municipal lavatories supports there being a general lack of toilet paper (though not of its potential use).
But I’m not quite sure of its relevance to the argument here on the cause of global warming. Perhaps it’s another somewhat spurious correlation.
Best regards
Interestingly the link in the first sentence does not now take one to the article. Mind you the timesonline website looks different so maybe the change accidentally broke it.
Some of this is still available here:
‘Every British teen to see Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth’
http://www.cbc.ca/arts/film/story/2007/02/02/gore-film.html?ref=rss