Christopher Monckton, Black Helicopters, AIDS, global warming and the new Fascists

(Above: have I got a game for you. Just show me the money).

I love it when people wheel out the black helicopter theory of life. It simplifies things. And of course it's always all the fault of the United Nations.

Let's not forget Republican northern Idaho Rep Helen Chenoweth for helping popularize the concept of the fiendish choppers, when she complained that armed federal agents were landing black helicopters on Idaho ranchers' property to enforce the Endangered Species Act. Chenoweth hadn't actually seen any of the choppers, nor did she actually have any proof, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service didn't actually own any choppers, nor had ever used one in Idaho. 

The National Guard uses black choppers, and the Army uses dark colored ones, but since they seem to have already taken over America, there doesn't seem much point taking it over even more.

Still it makes a great story, and that's the great thing about conspiracy theories in general. I know for a fact that aliens have landed in my back yard. Now you might think they were just casual junkies out for a quick fix, but I have proof - I've seen strange flashing lights at 2 am, just after I watched Close Encounters for the fiftieth time. You might think it was the garbage truck, but show me a garbage man working at 2 a.m. Okay, I might have got the time wrong, but what makes you so sure you've got the time right?

Which brings me to Lord Christopher Monckton, Viscount of Brenchley, former adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and clearly one of those wondrous English titled loons who managed to gain, then lose the British Empire, and otherwise helped endless Monty Python skits when the writers were running dry on material.

The UN, Mikhail Gorbachev, Jacques Chirac, and other world-government wannabes are plotting to establish nothing less than a global, bureaucratic-centralist dictatorship under the pretext that it is necessary to ‘Save The Planet’. Ian Wishart's book demonstrates that there is not the slightest scientific reason for the new, quasi-religious belief that The Planet needs Saving. The new religion is merely an excuse for world government. World government will not, repeat not, be democratic government.

Now there's nothing you can constructively say about this kind of rant. You might point out that Gorbachev is now so far out of power, that he doesn't even have any clout in domestic Russian politics, and is forced to trot around the world acting as a keynote speaker to earn a quid (he even turned up recently at the alma mater of Ronnie Raygun to deliver a speech at their Reagan Day Dinner). 

You might say that Jacques Chirac is a dead duck, without even the clout when in power to get up a constitution for the European Union, and since leaving the presidency has mainly attracted attention for having a pacemaker fitted, and being hospitalized after being attacked by his pet Maltese poodle, who had been medicated with antidepressants.

But that would be like pissing into the wind when up against a good solid conspiracy theorist.

Sure, branding scientists and scientific research as a new religion, and as a way forward for world government, which repeat, will not be democratic government,  and firing off random shots at global bureaucratic centralist dictatorships is just one step short of la la land. However you construe it, you can't consider it scientific debate or a scientific argument. It's just black helicopter stuff. But that's what makes it fun.

Sadly, this sort of talk didn't seem to resonate within the UK - Monckton's listed in Wikipedia as standing for a Conservative seat in the House of Lords in a March 2007 by-election, and receiving no votes, promptly causing him to describe House of Lords' reform as a "bizarre constitutional abortion".

I'm also indebted to Wikipedia to learn Monckton's views on AIDS:

Monckton's views on how the AIDS epidemic should be tackled have been the subject of some controversy. In an article entitled "The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS", written for the January 1987 issue of The American Spectator, he argued that "there is only one way to stop AIDS. That is to screen the entire population regularly and to quarantine all carriers of the disease for life. Every member of the population should be blood-tested every month ... all those found to be infected with the virus, even if only as carriers, should be isolated compulsorily, immediately, and permanently." This would involve isolating between 1.5 and 3 million people in the United States ("not altogether impossible") and another 30,000 people in the UK ("not insuperably difficult").

Since that high water mark, Monckton has retreated, admitting that with the large number of people now infected, the possibility of quarantine is laughable and wouldn't work.

Still it's a nice little bit of coloring to understand Monckton's fierce desire for freedom and his fierce intolerance of bureaucratic centralist dictatorships. 

The ‘global warming’ debate is not really a debate about climatology - it is a debate about freedom. It is the aim of the growing world-government faction among the international classe politique to take away our hard-won freedom and democracy forever. I commend this timely book, which makes the scientific arguments comprehensible to the layman. Those who read it will help to forestall the new Fascists and so to keep us free.

Well yes of course, we need to forestall the new Fascists, except of course if you have AIDS or some other disease we don't like, or perhaps some kind of sexual or political orientation we find offensive, and then it's off to the gulags with you Jim lad, see how you like them bikkies.

You know you're far away from the realm of rational debate when people toss around phrases like new fascism, and suggest any debate about global warming is actually a debate about freedom. Well surely it could be about global warming, but no, it's about a growing world government faction among the international elite snatching away our freedom and democracy forever.

Try telling that to the hard hat nationalists in the USA, Russia, China, Japan, India and so on and on, yet funnily enough it's these hard hats who often fall hardest for this kind of jibber jabber about international conspiracies and black helicopters.

If you want to learn more about Christopher Monckton, go to the indefatigable Wikipedia here.

Long may he continue to entertain us.

Oh and a final warning:

Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!

(Below: a picture of the dangerous Jabberwock, reportedly working with the new Fascists to take away our precious freedoms and what's even worse, our precious bodily fluids).