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Comrade Lysenko in Copenhagen: How Stalin’s favorite scientist paved the way for today’s global...
National Review Online ^ | December 08, 2009 | Alex Alexiev

Posted on 12/08/2009 9:59:42 AM PST by neverdem








Comrade Lysenko in Copenhagen
How Stalin’s favorite scientist paved the way for today’s global-warming enthusiasts.

By Alex Alexiev

As the illustrious conclave of global-warming true believers, led by Pres. Barack Obama, gathers in Copenhagen for yet another exercise in environmental doom and gloom, observing the proceedings with the sly smirk of somebody who’s “been there, done that” is likely to be the ghost of one Trofim Denisovich Lysenko. No ordinary ghost he: Comrade Lysenko was Stalin’s favorite scientist for decades and the driving force behind the greatest scientific fraud in history prior to anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Indeed, to fully understand the nature, magnitude, and implications of the AGW scam, it’s worthwhile to revisit Academician Lysenko’s exploits.

The 1950 edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, the arbiter and repository of all politically correct Communist knowledge, had the following entry under genetics: “Soviet scientists under the leadership of Academician Lysenko proved scientifically that genes do not exist in nature.” Having Mendelian genetics outlawed on the grounds that it was not a science was probably Lysenko’s crowning achievement.

A self-taught agronomist, Lysenko early on jumped aboard the Stalinist bandwagon and developed a number of agricultural ideas — ideas that rejected all established science as “bourgeois” and therefore “counter-revolutionary,” an approach similar to the Nazis’ assault on “Jewish mathematics.” Included were promises to dramatically raise grain yields through the practice of something called “vernalization,” change the climate of Siberia by planting trees, and make wheat plants produce rye, among others. To push these ideas, Lysenko called his opponents “wreckers” and the mere discussion of his theories “political sabotage.”

Invariably these “saboteurs” lost their jobs (if they were lucky) or landed in the Gulag. Today’s global-warming “deniers” would easily recognize all these tactics minus the Gulag. The U.K.’s energy and climate-change secretary, Ed Miliband, recently even referred to AGW skeptics as “saboteurs.” Some of our latter-day Lysenkos have called for legal prosecution of skeptics.

Despite a well-known record of bogus research, experiment falsification, and faked results, and with Stalin’s blessing, Lysenko and Lysenkoism ruled Soviet agricultural science for three decades with dismal consequences for agriculture and the country at large. While pre-Lysenko Russia was known as the granary of Europe, the Soviet Union was never able to feed its population and relied on huge grain imports until its demise.

Why was this charlatan tolerated for years even after Stalin’s death? The answer to that is simple. Lysenko may have been a fraud as a scientist, but he was a Communist scientist par excellence. Communist ideology, just like Nazi ideology, required strict obedience to partisanship in all realms, and science was not an exception.

And here Lysenko’s contribution was impressive. By denying genetics and propounding the idea that acquired characteristics are inheritable, he provided the “scientific” underpinning of Marx’s theory that after a few generations of Communist dictatorship, a new selfless and docile Communist man — a perfect ant in an anthill — would emerge.

It is here that Lysenkoism’s resemblance to AGW is most striking. Just as the former was only tangentially concerned with agriculture, the latter is only tangentially concerned with climate. Like many previous campaigns against imaginary evils (such as acid rain, overpopulation, urban sprawl, etc.), its real targets are capitalism and individual rights. Its solution is the unrestricted primacy of government over the citizen and of collectivism over individual rights.

The objective is the age-old socialist dream of the Left under a new and more benign guise. This new direction was best framed by the American academic socialist Robert Heilbroner after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Lamenting the fall of Communism and the socialist economic model, he urged his fellow leftists to use the ecological movement to impose socialism and central planning. This has proven to be sound advice, and today radical environmentalism has become the ramming rod of the anti-capitalist Left and a vastly more effective instrument for undermining markets and free societies than socialist ideology ever was.

Man-made climate change has become for its supporters what Lysenko’s theory of heredity was for the Stalinists. For the small international cabal of top AGW functionaries, it isn’t about climate — and it’s about more than money, power, and prestige (though, with the connivance of sycophantic Western governments and U.N. bureaucrats, there is plenty of that too). It is about ideology, in the name of which at least some of them were perfectly prepared to dissemble, falsify records, and destroy others’ careers. And their pseudo-scientific edifice, built with much underhanded effort over the years, will not go down without a fight, as Copenhagen’s confab will undoubtedly prove. For the AGW zealots in government and academia know well that the unraveling of the global-warming scam may well be the beginning of the end of radical environmentalism as the most promising means to destroy the hated free-enterprise system.

Consider, for a minute, how closely the various ongoing assaults on capitalism in the United States depend on AGW. The minute it is proven conclusively to be a fabrication, the rationale for government takeover of the energy sector via cap-and-trade disappears, as does the raison d’être for taxpayer-subsidized renewable-energy fantasies or the efforts to undermine Americans’ property rights through “smart growth” land-use restrictions. Or think of the likely impact of proven malfeasance by the AGW mandarins on their allies in U.S. government agencies, like EPA and NASA,
whose regulatory proposals and policy recommendations have relied so heavily on the IPCC’s forged consensus. They are already circling the wagons and, given the support of the Obama administration and the mainstream media, it is premature to write the mandarins off quite yet.

Nonetheless, what looked like an impregnable AGW fortress a while ago has been breached and appears shaken and vulnerable, and Copenhagen will not change that. With China and India not willing to join in the global-warming demagoguery of the West, no agreement worth the paper it’s written on is likely to come out of it. In the meantime, with new Climategate investigations, FOIA requests galore, and almost daily revelations of the disingenuous shenanigans of the environmental zealots and their government supporters, it no longer looks outlandish to imagine the AGW scam and Comrade Lysenko put to rest once and for all.

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- Alex Alexiev is a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C.



TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; Editorial; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: climategate; copenhagen; envirofascism; globalwarming; lysenko; stalin

1 posted on 12/08/2009 9:59:42 AM PST by neverdem
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To: neverdem

ping


2 posted on 12/08/2009 10:03:17 AM PST by truthguy (Good intentions are not enough!)
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To: neverdem

ping


3 posted on 12/08/2009 10:03:17 AM PST by truthguy (Good intentions are not enough!)
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To: neverdem; livius; DollyCali; According2RecentPollsAirIsGood; Thunder90; Little Bill; ...
 




Beam me to Planet Gore !

4 posted on 12/08/2009 10:06:26 AM PST by steelyourfaith (Time to prosecute Al Gore now that fellow scam artist Bernie Madoff is in stir.)
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To: neverdem
Lysenko was a piker compared to Lenin, whose twin plans, On Land and On Forests were to institute land use planning based upon "scientific" environmental metrics, nationwide. These two plans were so important to Lenin, that he halted his war planning against the White Russians to complete them first. Of course, the true objective was starving, killing, and relocating his political opponents (as the deaths of 22 million Kulaks attests), but then, never let the reality of a plan get in the way of a fable predicated upon "good intentions."
5 posted on 12/08/2009 10:07:26 AM PST by Carry_Okie (The environment is too complex and too important to manage by central planning.)
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To: All
Forget the acid rain comment. Otherwise, it's a good analogy about anthropogenic, aka man-made, global warming.
6 posted on 12/08/2009 10:10:07 AM PST by neverdem (Xin loi minh oi)
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To: Carry_Okie

Not to worry, if Lysenko’s approach doesn’t work, they’ll try Mao’s Great Leap Forward.


7 posted on 12/08/2009 10:10:37 AM PST by Tijeras_Slim (Live jubtabulously!)
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To: neverdem

Glas to see my posts in the past years of branding Gore as the American Lysenko2 has come to fruition.


8 posted on 12/08/2009 10:11:00 AM PST by Hostage
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To: neverdem
Forget the acid rain comment.

Too late for that; I'm afraid it is already raining acid humor.

9 posted on 12/08/2009 10:12:12 AM PST by Carry_Okie (The environment is too complex and too important to manage by central planning.)
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To: neverdem

Acid Rain, now comes from China since the US stopped producing it in the late 80’s early 90’s.


10 posted on 12/08/2009 10:18:11 AM PST by GraceG
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To: Tijeras_Slim

Ah! The man with the program. Al Lysenko Gore.


11 posted on 12/08/2009 10:23:34 AM PST by Mrs. Don-o ("If you can't be right then be wrong at the top of your lungs." Lucy van Pelt (in the Peanuts strip))
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To: neverdem

Last month, President Obama gave a somewhat chilling, if somewhat ignored, speech on climate change at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He stated that any scientific debate about the magnitude of global warming is unscrupulous, decrying “those who . . . make cynical claims that contradict the overwhelming scientific evidence when it comes to climate change, whose only purpose is to defeat or delay the change that we know is necessary.”

Then, the president talked tough, saying, - “We’ll just have to deal with those people,” - language familiar to anyone who knows the vagaries of Chicago politics.

This surely isn’t the first time in world history that some president, premier, or pope has attempted to define science and threaten those who disagree. But the truth of the matter is that disagreement, one way or another, is a given. One can selectively cite recent climate data in support of pretty much any point of view, from the rejection of any influence by humankind at all to the wild notion that the world is about to come to an end. If the Senate does not pass a climate bill that is acceptable to the president, Obama is almost certain to ask the Environmental Protection Agency to issue regulations on carbon-dioxide emissions that he can take to the Copenhagen climate conference next month as evidence of America’s efforts. These will then be used to extract some vague concessions on the part of the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, China, and the Copenhagen Protocol will be hailed as a major victory over global warming.

Of course, it will be no such thing. If the EPA does issue global-warming regulations, it will have to defend the science that it uses to raise the price of virtually everything. http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YmVjNDEyYWRlN2ZlMmY5Mzc2NjBlMGE5MzBlM2JlNDI=&w=MQ==


12 posted on 12/08/2009 10:39:02 AM PST by anglian
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To: neverdem

About forty years ago I read in a magazine about a 1930s soviet attempt to prove evolution by placing small turbans on the heads of turkeys.
The claim was that if the turbans were on long enough future genterations of these turbaned turkeys would evolve to have naural turbans on their heads.

Then there was the Soviet attempt to make a super soldier by inbreeding gorillas and humans...


13 posted on 12/08/2009 11:31:51 AM PST by Ruy Dias de Bivar (Are my guns loaded? Break in and find out.)
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To: neverdem

bttttt...
Commies love fake science


14 posted on 12/08/2009 11:37:13 AM PST by dennisw
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To: Hostage

Absolutely right; I also spotted the connection years ago. Al Gore and his cult are the new Lysenkos. Ask the average person who Trofim Lysenko was and you get a blank stare. Too bad too few people learn history, or learn from it.


15 posted on 12/08/2009 1:55:59 PM PST by henkster (0bamanomics: The "Final Solution" to America's "Prosperity Question.")
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To: neverdem
Outstanding post.

Gore is truly the new Lysenko. As before, the socialist totalitarians are again grossly manipulating science.


16 posted on 12/08/2009 3:42:41 PM PST by FormerACLUmember (The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule. - H. L. Menken.)
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To: neverdem

Man thinks a lot like me. The Lysenko affair was the first thing I thought of when the “emails” on global warming first came out. The problem is that leftists ideology and fundamentalism (both religious and ideiological) have infected all fields of science, especially in my field in the social sciences (political science). It will be very difficult to detatch ideology of one form or another from the necessary detachment that is necessaruy in the search for truth. We are setting opur science back decades unless we begin a concerted effort to clean our respective fields of this disease..


17 posted on 12/08/2009 3:44:34 PM PST by Cacique (quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat ( Islamia Delenda Est ))
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To: neverdem

99% of American’s don’t know a thing about Lysenko. Heck, most no nothing of the crimes of communism. Why wouldn’t watermelon politics look good?


18 posted on 12/08/2009 10:14:31 PM PST by rmlew (Democracy tends to ignore..., threats to its existence because it loathes doing what is needed)
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To: rmlew
Man, I would love to see one of the 31,000 scientists get a chance at the podium in Hackenhogen.

Unfortunately....

19 posted on 12/08/2009 10:19:06 PM PST by CaptRon
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