33 thoughts on “The New Holocaust Deniers”

  1. Outstanding Dr. Zubrin. I especially liked the shot at Rachel Carson, who deserves every bit of disdain that humanity can heap upon her.

    Taken together, these campaigns to deny billions of people the means to a decent existence have racked up a death toll exceeding that achieved by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or any of the other tyrants whose crimes fill the sordid pages of human history.

    Like his book, an excellent read.

      1. Look into the eyes of a Holocaust survivor, or look into eyes of a victim of the Khmer Rouge and say that the people who tortured them and tortured and killed their loved ones aren’t as bad as an author not only never hurt anyone, but didn’t want to hurt anyone.

        The science of DDT is irrelevant in this case — morality is necessarily connected to intentionality. When you make moral comparisons between Rachel Carson and Pol Pot or Hitler, you’re not only being deeply offensive, you’re also making yourself look like a complete nutcase.

        1. The trouble is you can’t look into Rachel Carson’s victims’ eyes. They’re dead. And unlike Pol Pot, who is universally recognized for the monster he was, Carson has been deified. And like Pot, her intentions are irrelevant.

        2. Bob, what if Hitler thought people were better off dead because then they shot straight to paradise? Would his pureness of heart matter to those whose deaths he caused?

          1. Your imaginary Hitler still intended to have people murdered. The rationale for a murderer (paradise vs genocide) does matter (see below), but it matters even more whether or not there was an intention for people to be murdered, and more generally, whether there was an intention for people to die at all (murder or otherwise). So: The real Hitler and your imaginary one wanted people to be murdered, while Carson didn’t want anyone to die at all, and she certainly didn’t want anyone to be murdered. I’m surprised you can’t tell the difference.

            I’m genuinely sorry that I don’t have time to write up a full treatment of this. But look, consider the following cases — I assert that intentions are what distinguish them:

            1) Suburban mom accidentally runs over her 2 year old neighbor while answering a cell phone call, child dies. Mom literally can’t apologize enough, is beside herself (and her neighbors) with devastating grief.
            2) 2 year old dies when US warplanes in Iraq bomb wrong compound. (Lets stipulate that the overall war was a very good idea.) Parents were pro-US invasion, minded their own business. US sincerely apologizes, but only pays $7,000 (or whatever) in compensation.
            3) Harry S. Truman orders bomb dropped on Hiroshima, sincerely regrets the deaths of innocents, but argues that it is for the greater good. Japanese put up museum blaming Japanese leaders for the war’s victims.
            4) Karl Marx writes some provocative stuff. Doesn’t literally kill anyone. Pun intended.
            5) Wright Brothers invent and eventually manufacture airplanes, Henry Ford and others mass produce autos. People die in vehicular crashes.
            6) The imaginary Schmuly company introduced lead into paint. Millions of children suffer from lead poisoning. Schmuly company owner genuinely shocked that this could happen, had no idea, and lets further imagine that he spends his retirement writing a book about the ethics of unintentional consequences.

            Gotta run.

          2. Bob, Hitler was murdering people for the greater good, just as Rachel Carlson and other environmentalists knew that their greater good would necessarily entail countless deaths (in the millions) from malaria, because prior to DDT, malaria’s death toll was in the millions.

            Making a change to an existing system by either adding or removing a product is the same act. For hundreds of millions in Africa and Asia, banning DDT was like banning medical care or antibiotics. You could compare Carlson’s actions with giving out free cigarettes to poor children, but malaria kills children directly, not only some of them and forty or fifty years later.

            Oh, and Hitler was an environmentalist.

          3. If you were around at the right time and place, and if you had an opportunity to kill Hitler, you’d do it, right? And you’d be willing to risk your life to stop him, right? On the other hand, being a patriotic American, presumably you’d defend Carson’s right to write what she wants. Doesn’t that tell you something? If not, then here’s the key question, the question which might indicate that you are a nutcase: if you saw Carson writing, would you try to kill her?

          4. Hitler and the Nazis used every tool of propaganda and warfare to motivate mass armies to kill people they considered undesirable. Stalin used the vast machinery of state terror to kill more millions. Even combined, they failed to cause nearly as much death and suffering as Rachel Carson. But of course her victims were just black and Asian kids, so nobody on the left cares.

            So that would be a yes. She caused the deaths of more people than Hitler and Stalin combined, and her victims were primarily poor minority children. Do you remember the Star Trek episode that got the best critical reviews? It was about a well-intentioned woman who had to die so that the Nazis didn’t win WW-II. Had someone stopped Carson in the 1950’s, tens of millions of black babies wouldn’t have suffered horrible, twitching, sweating deaths from malaria.

            So here is a closer hypothetical. Suppose some evil scientist (Adam) in a lab somewhere combined elements of the small pox virus with influenza and ebola, found a suitable insect vector, and unleashed it on the world, killing tens of millions of people. Would you have tried to stop him?

            Suppose after their virus got loose in the wild and killed tens of millions of people, a scientist named Betty developed an antidote that could bring it under control and whose continued use kept the plague from recurring.

            Now suppose that another scientist, Cal, said the anti-dote caused 5% increase in teenage acne cases (as African mother’s point out, we’re so self-absorbed, rich, and sanctimonious that we think a fish-eating bird is worth more than their baby’s life) and got the world to ban it, directly leading to the plague’s resurgence and the deaths of tens of millions of people.

            Betty is the hero of the story, and Adam and Cal’s actions are hard to distinguish, with the effects of their evil so overwhelming that we’re at a loss to describe it, so it feels like choosing between the Joker and the Riddler for which was more evil.

            I think you’re getting too confused about intentions when millions of lives are at stake. If millions of people are going to die (and these are mostly desperately poor children, mind you), intentions don’t matter. If an asteroid was heading toward Africa and was going to blow up a big hunk of the continent in a fireball, would you try to stop it or argue that the asteroid is completely innocent of bad intentions, and thus should be left alone to wipe out all the poor, minority people?

          6. In a moment of weakness, I posted a link to Silent Spring’s text, because I was going to make an argument about Carson herself. But I think the ethical argument is more interesting to me (see below). As for Carson herself, the web is full of refutations claim that she is some sort of murderer. You can easily find them by googling “Rachel Carson” and “Malaria”, or more provocatively, substitute “right wing” for “Malaria”. See what the Sierra Club has to say – maybe somewhere, someone goofy is putting birds above babies, but I see a lot of sensible and humanitarian defense of Carson, and they’ll argue their points better than I will.

        3. an author not only never hurt anyone, but didn’t want to hurt anyone

          Wow. Just wow.

          The first part: she did hurt people… including to death and in huge numbers.
          The second part: That’s always the liberal excuse isn’t it? Ya know, whenever, “I’m just a comedian” doesn’t work.

        4. …morality is necessarily connected to intentionality.

          Intentionality (mens rea), is a common, but not necessary component of unethical behavior. I assume you’re familiar with the concepts such as self-deception, negligence, dereliction and strict liability.

        5. Bob, I’ve met Holocaust survivors. I even spent a year helping one of them write his autobiography.

          While comparisons to the Holocaust are strained, the fact is that it is the results of actions that count more than intentions. Did Mao actually mean to cause a famine that killed some 50 million Chinese with his Great Leap Forward? Does it matter in the least to the dead or their survivors?

          I don’t give bonus credit for good intentions. If someone’s policies lead to mass suffering and death, it doesn’t matter in the least to me that they actually meant well deep in their hearts.

  2. “The science of DDT is irrelevant in this case — morality is necessarily connected to intentionality. ”

    It’s called hubris…or arrogance if you prefer. The sheer thrumming arrogance of Carson that she understood the ramifications of her actions; that she knew what was good for those people; that she could NOT be wrong; and that she was going to work to force decisions on other people because *she* knew better than they what was good for them.

    That’s also immoral.

    Klassik liberal thinking…………

    “Our intentions are good so results don’t really matter – even if we, too, slaughter millions. Our *hearts* were in the right place so you may lionize us”

  3. From the article, William Ruckelshaus is more to blame than Rachel Carson. She was a demagogue, but essentially powerless. People could have ignored her. Ruckelshaus was the one who implemented the ban despite the evidence.

    Hmm. EPA Delenda Est. It doesn’t quite have the right ring to it.

    http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/germany-s-environmental-protection-policies-fail-to-achieve-goals-a-821396.html (from a link from Instapundit) has stuff with similar chutzpah but milder effects.

    1. Adolph Hitler was a demagogue, but essentially powerless. People could have ignored him.

        1. Whose ideas remain to this day? Hitler’s power died with Hitler. Can the same be said of Carson?

          1. Hitler’s ideas didn’t die with him–there are plenty of neo-Nazis running around, and the anti-semites everywhere like to harken back to him.

            Carson wasn’t the founder of the eco-nuts, although she might have been the snowball that started the eco avalanche. She deserves to be reviled and mocked, but she’s not the main problem. The problem is with people in positions of power who abuse their power by following fads–eco fads, diet fads, drug fads, what have you. Big government.

            Maybe you could patch this problem with big government following fads by trying to eliminate fads–limit the press so that people like Rachel Carson or Erich von Daniken or Ralph Nader or Karl Marx or Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Adam Smith can’t publish their dangerous ideas. That doesn’t seem a reasonable solution to me. Punishing the people who coerce people into following those ideas seems much more likely to be an effective solution, but that would require enforcing responsibility for their actions or limits to their power on bureaucrats and politicians, which is pretty darn hard.

          3. Yeah, I know that was an easy take, but what other options are there? There’s nothing to do to Rachel Carson other than mock and deride her and her legacy. There’s nothing to do to the next Rachel Carson other than mock them. I don’t see how they could be sued or held in anyway liable for writing a book or making a movie or promoting it, unless they cross into slander. The problem is with the people with political power implementing ill-founded policies. There’s currently nothing we can do about many of them, either, but at least trying to do something about them doesn’t violate the constitution.

          4. If the price were anything less than eternal vigilance, there’d be a pithy saying about that, instead.

  4. Ruckelshaus is more directly responsible for the official decision, but the judges for cases will be essentially random, whereas the movement to ban DDT had one primary source that would’ve eventually found a bad judge.

    Going back to the Star Trek episode “The City on the Edge of Forever”, Edith Keeler worked in a soup kitchen but later founded a pacifist movement that delayed US entry into WW-II. Obviously the decision on whether or not to enter the war was being made far above her station, in the halls of government, so she wasn’t a direct decsion maker. Yet the movement she spawned would’ve swayed those decision makers, changing the environment in which they made their decisions.

    Ruckelshaus was the wink link in the chain, one that could’ve stopped the ban, but the movement would’ve tested other links as well, till it found the weakest, and the groundswell of anti-DDT hysteria spawned by the movement undoubtedly influenced the judge’s decision. Eliminate Rachel Carson and there is no case for Ruckelshaus to hear, no movement that would influence judges, no ban, and the African and Asian children who were sacrificied on the altar of indulgent, Western, utopian gaian environmentalism would now be bouncing their grandchildren on their laps.

    If a Southeast Asian or African went through the time portal instead of Captain Kirk, they’d have to restore the proper timeline and Rachel Carson would die, perhaps being buried next to Edith Keeler, unremembered and best forgotten as two women whose sincere actions resulted in tens of millions of brutal deaths.

    1. I think that Star Trek episode would be much less popular if Kirk, Spock, and/or McCoy had murdered Edith in cold blood, instead of trying to avoid interfering with what the viewers thought of as their own timeline. There is an alternative history version of the episode where two foreign timelines are being compared, and because the US delayed its entry into WWII for another year, many lives were saved globally (World War Three is only Niven’s “wet firecracker war” – we lose people in Miami and Havana, but the war doesn’t become an all-out global nuclear conflagration, you see) — good thing Kirk arrived to stop Edith from being murdered by George Turner the time bandit!

      I *completely* reject the narrative here on Rachel Carson, but I don’t want to argue about it — I’d rather stipulate that it is all true, and just think about the ethics of killing someone who didn’t use force, who merely wrote a book. As a knee-jerk reaction, I’d call you nuts and dangerous and want to have nothing more to do with you (since you appear to be entering Anders Breivik territory here), but on the other hand, to my knowledge, Hitler didn’t physically kill anyone, at least not after his WWI service was over. I’m quite sure this is an old conundrum about which much has been written, and I think I’d like to read it.

      Rand’s blog isn’t a discussion forum, and so it lacks a feature I like about them: the luxury to sit back and reflect for awhile before commenting (and thereby reattaining the attention of the participants.) Nevertheless, I’d like to mull this over. In the meantime, you might enjoy (re)reading Niven’s Death In A Cage – much better than Star Trek.

    2. I see your hangup. She just wrote a book (a nice environmental book warning of chemical dangers), and nobody should get killed for writing. But books have readers, and some books attract followers, and sometimes the followers spawn movements that cause very bad outcomes.

      Muhammed wrote a book that spawned conquest and 1400 years of murdering gay people and oppressing women (though in some areas the effects were probably positive). Marx wrote a book that spawned all kinds of mahem, directly leading to the deaths of an estimated 100 million people, and he wrote so incoherently that Engles had to edit his screed into something that sort of made sense. Someone out there wrote “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” which is still causing deaths. Hitler wrote a book and led the movement it fed, with obvious bad results. Mussolini’s only high-profile job prior to seizing power was a newspaper writer. He just wrote articles.

      In almost all of these cases, if you could go back an intervene, if you stopped the book’s author you ony have to kill one person, and actually you don’t even have to do that. You could just break their fingers, get them hooked on crack, or give them a cushy goverment job that seems really important and that would suck up all their free time. The target isn’t the author, it’s the particular combination of words that spreads to a mass audience that you’d want to stop, the combination that causes very large numbers of people to take actions and make decisions that result in mega deaths. If you try to break the chain of events after the book is widely circulated, you have to take out vastly more people, and those people are acting on words and ideas that are now in their heads, so there is no simple way to stop them all.

      Sometimes you could just do a wee bit of editing on one of the books and prevent the bad outcomes. For example, if instead of demanding an immediate ban, Silent Spring had said “carefully limit, cognizant of the importance of controlling certain insect vectors like malaria, carefully weighing the direct deaths from disease against the potential harm to the environment” then the overall outcome would’ve been more optimal than continuing the unlimited use of DDT or the near absolute ban on it. But it didn’t, and millions
      of people died in the aftermath.

      It’s a bit like stopping a viral outbreak. If you could stop the first case before the virus spreads anywhere, there is no outbreak. If the virus is a particularly bad one, like the 1917 influenza virus or perhaps the first case of smallpox, AIDS, or some hemoragic fever, you could face a similar moral dilemma. If you stepped out of your time machine and the first carrier was walking back toward their village, should you intervene? They’re completely innocent of anything. They didn’t even write a book. They’re just a carrier. But if you drop them dead in their tracks the disease dies with them, and all its future victims live normal lives.

      The moral question would be even murkier if we were weighing one real death against potential statistical deaths, where some NIH model says that X number of excess people might die from cancer. We actually know that milions of people were dying unnecessarily from malaria, since in many countries the death rate jumped from zero to hundreds of thousands a year, and unlike cancers that are potentially traceable to substance Y, the only thing that causes malaria is malaria.

      These are questions to ponder, but I could poke fun of the modern liberal’s moral dilemma. “Would you kill one white lady to save tens of millions of minority children, or let all the minority children die so the white lady can enjoy winning a book award?” Does their logic go, “Well, one white lady’s life is worth about a million black lives, so…. Hey, Mitt Romney put his dog in a carrier!”

      1. She just wrote a book (a nice environmental book warning of chemical dangers), and nobody should get killed for writing.

        The rub is that she did not “just write a book” that some other agent picked up and ran with — she was a vocal advocate who testified before Congress. She was as full an agent one can be for an idea and bears full moral responsibility for it, right, wrong or indifferent.

      3. She also had enough academic background (a master’s degree in zoology from Johns Hopkins) to severely limit her sycophant’s excuses that she was just a writer-advocate. She knew what she was writing was not scientifically sound. And she was fully capable of extrapolating its impact.

  5. We’re a little off course here. Zubrin isn’t talking about ancient history. People today advocate positions that will lead to death (including underworld paving material.)

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