“The lowest strata are reproducing too fast. Therefore… they must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive; long unemployment should be a ground for sterilisation.”
Sir Julian Huxley (Co-founder of the WWF)
I will not be turning off my lights for Earth Hour this year. Instead, I will urge my kids to turn them all on as a gesture of resistance to a global corporate ritual I oppose. I believe Earth Hour has less to do with promoting environmental awareness and more to do with conditioning people to think and act in concert on a global scale. Though there’s nothing wrong with that in principle, I am, however, suspicious that Earth Hour is little more than a feel-good party set up as a front for more nefarious purposes. Here’s why.
Earth Hour is a project of the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF), a powerful NGO dedicated to environmental conservation. The WWF’s first president was Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands (consort to former Queen Juliana and father of the current monarch, Queen Beatrix). Born and raised in Germany, Bernhard was a notorious lover of fast planes, fast cars, fast women, and, of course, nature. Bernhard was also one of the co-founders, in 1954, of the Bilderberg Group, a secretive annual summit where the world’s money and power elites meet to decide upon political and economic global strategy.
Long considered a war hero in the Netherlands due to his public image as an anti-Nazi activist, the latest historical research (Annejet van der Zijl’s Bernhard: A Secret History) tells a different story. It appears that the prince’s anti-Nazi stance was a cleverly devised piece of theatre. Bernhard had in fact been a “brown shirt,” a volunteer in the Sturmabteilung, the dreaded Nazi paramilitary organization. That was before the Nazis had come to power and before the Nazification of Germany had begun. He was an “early adopter,” to use contemporary marketing speak, though he claimed to have signed up to save his skin.
Not known for honesty, Bernhard was disgraced later in life when he was caught taking bribes from the American aerospace giant Lockheed Corporation to influence the Dutch government’s military purchasing. Bernhard’s reputation was tarnished by other scandals, among them, the statement by Nelson Mandela’s government that Bernhard may have used the WWF as a vehicle to combat the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. Not a founding father to be proud of. Enough said about Bernhard.
Consider now another famous environmentalist and globalist, co-founder of the WWF, Sir Julian Huxley, like Bernhard, a scion of elite blood. Huxley was the grandson of the great nineteenth century biologist Sir Thomas Henry Huxley, “Darwin’s bulldog.” The first director of UNESCO, Julian Huxley was a principal architect of the “modern evolutionary synthesis,” the merger of Darwinian Theory with the science of genetics. Huxley’s credentials in this area are unimpeachable.
However, Huxley was also an avid eugenicist. He was president of the British Eugenics Society as recently as 1962, a fact downplayed in his autobiographical writings and by his contemporary defenders. Though ostensibly not a racist, Huxley was undoubtedly a major “classist,” advocating denial of medical services to the poor and sterilization of the chronically unemployed. The great scientist was thinking of the earth first, of course, and of the health of humanity as a whole!
For these celebrated fathers of the WWF and forerunners of radical environmentalism, the love of nature did not necessarily entail a love for humanity. Radical environmentalists often compare humans to maggots or parasites living in feces of their own making. To my mind this is wrong and should not be a message that is taught in schools, as it increasingly is nowadays. It fosters an unhealthy species self-loathing among impressionable youth.
Add to all of this the fact that Coca Cola (among other global companies) has been one of the major corporate sponsors of Earth Hour the past few years. Yes, that same company that phased out refillable bottles and replaced them with the globally ubiquitous disposable plastic bottle and tin can. Such huge corporate backing for Earth Hour renders laughable the simplistic notion that environmentalism is just another word for the political left, as many conservatives believe.
In fact, the leader of the Nazi S.S., Heinrich Himmler, loved animals so much so that he promoted anti-vivisection laws within the Reich because he could not understand how anybody could harm defenseless beasts. His colleague, Richard Walther Darré, Hitler’s minister of food and agriculture, was a neo-pagan naturalist and a fiercely anti-Christian, anti-Semitic eugenicist, and, champion of the organic farming movement. Hitler himself believed in and wrote about the moral superiority of vegetarianism.
This commentary should not be interpreted as hostility to environmental conservation, though it undoubtedly will be. My goal in disclosing these inconvenient truths about the dubious origins of Earth Hour is to urge people to research the subject before uncritically participating in this global rite – with candles and darkness – in 2012. School children do not need a nature ritual like Earth Hour to remind them of something that is practically rammed down their throats on a daily basis.