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Sunday, June 22, 2014

Ron Smith: On being 'fracked'




The London Times, quoting NATO Secretary-General, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, reports that, “Russian agents are secretly working with environmental groups campaigning against fracking to try to maintain Europe’s dependence on gas imports from Moscow.

It should be no surprise to us.  This sort of manipulation of left-leaning activists was a characteristic and quite successful ploy during the Cold War period, when, for example, western anti-nuclear groups were exploited to protest against the dispositions of NATO forces in Europe in the 1980s.  The successful resistance to these pressures by (in particular) President Reagan and Prime-Minister Thatcher, led to the ultimate collapse of the ‘evil empire’ that was holding a substantial part of Eastern Europe in what then seemed perpetual political subservience.
Now, as then, Greenpeace and ‘green’ parties must understand that they are being manipulated (politically ‘fracked’ even; by which I mean, ‘penetrated’ and roughly shaken about!).  The strategic value of keeping European countries dependent on Russian oil, and particularly, Russian gas, is obvious.  It has already contributed to the weak response to Russian annexation of the Crimea and the subsequent supplying of sophisticated weaponry to Ukrainian dissidents in the east.  And there is more to come.  I wrote about this in late March (‘The Munich Moment’, 24 March, 2014).

For New Zealand the opposition to fracking is not so much strategic failure as simple stupidity!  There is enormous potential for well-paying employment and national economic development from the further exploitation of this technology and, need I say, no shortage of deserving causes to which increased national wealth might be devoted.  We should really need compelling reasons not to go ahead.

The technology of fracking has been widely used and there is now a great deal of research on it. It has been carried out in New Zealand for more than twenty years.  In 2011, the Taranaki Regional Council, in whose district most of this has been done, reported that there was no evidence of any related environmental problems.  A similar conclusion has been published for the much more extensive American programme from its own Environmental Agency.  It should be added that the United States Environmental Protection Agency is not, particularly under the Obama administration, notably pro-business or lax in its enforcement of environmental standards! 

More recently, the New Zealand Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment (Jan Wright) has acknowledged that she could not find anything substantial to condemn it either, citing a report from the British Royal Society.  In the bizarre way of these things, she nonetheless called for ‘tighter regulations’.  It is hard to resist the conclusion that, for persons like Dr Wright and the various green activist groups, it is more a matter of ideology, than it is of science. 

Ultimately what we do about fracking should turn on a hard-headed cost benefit analysis and not on a sentimental attachment to a utopian ‘clean-green’ paradise.  In the real world, there are hard choices to be made.  There is a wide consensus that there is much to be done in the matter of health, education, housing and it all requires revenue.  We ought to think carefully before we cut-off, or even needlessly handicap, a potentially substantial source.  It is also worth noting that, if we fail to do ‘due diligence’ on the facts in these sort of cases, we make ourselves more vulnerable to those who mean us no good, just as Germany has by its closing down of nuclear power in favour of windmills and mirrors.

The ‘believe it or not’ section
Back in May of last year, I wrote about an emerging scandal in the United States which concerned accusations that, at the time of the 2012 presidential election, the United States Internal Revenue Service was administratively harassing President Obama’s political opposition (‘Cover-ups and scandals – another Watergate’, May 2013).  These accusations, which concerned a particular individual and her potential connection to the Whitehouse, have been the subject of Congressional inquiry right up to the present time.  After many requests for documents, and particularly emails sent and received by the person centrally concerned, it has now been announced by the IRS that unfortunately her computer crashed at the material time and that her hard-drive was subsequently ‘recycled’.  As a result of this, none of the emails sought are available.  Whether the Administration will get away with this astonishingly unbelievable claim remains to be seen.   The US media brought down President Nixon for his ‘losing’ twenty minutes of incriminating material in the Watergate affair.  To date they are still looking away.

5 comments:

Brian said...

On Being “Fracked”
There are many things one could label the “Greens” as, but stupid is not one of them, judging by the fact that they remain the third largest political party in the New Zealand Parliament. Outside these shores (Oh! Yes there are countries outside of “God’s Own” even if the media cannot grasp the fact) the Green movement is large and more to the point, they successfully offensive. Due in part to the “Goebbels” like adoption of appealing to emotion and avoiding facts (Nobody can love facts, ask any Politician).
The recent tirade in New Zealand against “Fracking” is another example of stirring the emotions of very good rather naive people whose idea of a New Zealand pristine environment rivals the very best that Heaven could ever provide. Naturally in their eyes “Fracking” as such, is against all our best interests in maintaining a pure undiluted New Zealand.
Human climate pollution of the world is another of their triumphs in misinformation, which has been swallowed hook, line and sinker; especially when backed up by those Scientists who are Government reliant for their salaries! A Tax is a Tax whatever it may be called.
True to form up spring the Greens again in the last week over the storm destroyed native forest in the South Island, when a mention that the Government should harvest these trees, Protection of our wilderness at any cost being their motto...provided it is not theirs.
No matter what the Commercial interest is for this country the Greens will stand forth, a Boudicca with her “The clean green Chariot defying pollution”. At the ready to protect all New Zealanders from the blight of industry, farming, ensuring earthquake building protection, D.I.Y dangers, and lastly but not least, from ourselves.
Excuse me but I have a copy of “Pooh Bear” just waiting to be read...oh sorry about the mention of pollution!
Brian


Anonymous said...

SOVIET MANUPULATION OF THE "PEACE" MOVEMENT I

The oft-asserted claim that anti-nuclear is “a cornerstone of our national identity” is one that deserves to be rigorously deconstructed. Far from being a statement of national identity, New Zealand's anti-nuclear stance of the 1980s was actually a triumph of Soviet foreign policy that served the Soviet Union’s strategic agenda of breaking apart the ANZUS pact providing for joint regional defence against Communist imperialism.

Observers of the "peace" movement since the 1950s often noted its ongoing failure to call upon the Soviet Bloc and its client states to disarm, its repeated attacks on the motives of America and its allies, and its continual blackening of America as the threat to world peace. There is a simple explanation. The "peace" movement in every Western country was without exception a slew of treasonous hate groups, founded, funded and directed from Moscow.

Understood in its proper context, it is soon apparent that New Zealand’s much-vaunted anti-nuclear stance is part of a much bigger picture. A permanent Communist objective has always been to tilt the balance of world military power in favour of Communist armed might. Communists in the democratic countries were instructed wherever possible to create a dialectical conflict between “warmongers” and “peaceniks” in the service of this objective.

Leftists claim to hate war, but their opposition to armed conflict is situational, and depends entirely on the political affiliation of who is fighting whom. For example, the Communist Party of the USA ("CPUSA") pressed for America to enter the Spanish Civil War in order to fight Franco and his Fascist allies, because the Soviet Union and Spain’s Communists were lined up on the other side.

When Hitler and Stalin later signed a mutual non-aggression pact, the CPUSA suddenly decided the USA should stay out of European affairs, even as the Nazis were gobbling up Austria, the Sudetenland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark and Norway. Of course that changed as soon as Germany invaded the Soviet Union.

During the Cold War, these same people, devoted as ever to advancing the interests of the Soviet Union, insisted America should unilaterally disarm and turn its atomic arsenal into plowshares.

The roots of the Soviet-inspired Western “peace” movement trace back more than 80 years. As Soviet strategist Dimitri Manuilski told the Lenin School of Political Warfare in 1931:

“War to the hilt between communism and capitalism is inevitable. Today, of course, we are not strong enough to attack. Our time will come in thirty to forty years. To win, we shall need the element of surprise. The bourgeoisie … will have to be put to sleep. So we shall begin by launching the most spectacular peace movement on record. There will be electrifying overtures and unheard of concessions. The capitalist countries, stupid and decadent, will rejoice to cooperate in their own destruction. They will leap at another chance to be friends. As soon as their guard is down, we will smash them with our clenched fist."

Anonymous said...

SOVIET MANIPULATION OF THE "PEACE" MOVEMENT II

This meant reframing the Communist agenda to attract broad support from respectable people. As Mikhail Suslov, the Politburo member in charge of the Soviet “peace” offensive from the Stalin era until into the 1980s, told the Cominform (Communist Information Bureau) in 1949:

“Particular attention should be devoted to drawing into the peace movement trade unions, women’s, youth, sport, cultural, education, religious, and other organisations, and also scientists, writers, journalists, cultural workers, parliamentary, and other political and public leaders.”

Nothing had changed in the philosophy and goals of the Communists, but by seemingly advocating "peace” and “disarmament” they were able to forge broad alliances with individuals and groups who had little or no inkling of their true agendas. Besides obscuring Communist leadership and direction, this “Popular Front” tactic also served to project the false impression of mass-scale public support for essentially Communist causes.

Communists are adept at creating “Popular Fronts” whose apparent purpose attracts the support of respectable people, while covertly advancing the Communist agenda. Only the Communist puppeteers know the true agenda, while those whom Lenin once referred to as “useful idiots” see only the smokescreen.

A relative handful of Communists are thus able to multiply their effectiveness many times over, sitting back and deriving a sense of superiority from knowing they are manipulating the situation, while a raft of useful idiots do their dirty work for them.

To proclaim the real objective of undermining the military preparedness of nations opposed to Communism would recruit few supporters in those countries. This meant a stated objective was required that would accomplish the same purpose, but could be presented as something totally different.

The goal of the “peace movement” as advanced to the Western public became the preservation of peace in the face of an imminent nuclear war. Its Communist directors laid out the calls for disarmament which were to be made to Communist and non-Communist leaders alike.

They failed to point out that these demands would have no effect in the Communist Bloc because there was no public opinion there that they could influence. The people of the Communist countries couldn’t even find out about these demands unless the Communist Party decided to tell them.

The underlying purpose of the “peace” movement was to remould public opinion in free countries with democratically elected governments. The useful idiots, satisfied that demands to disarm were nominally extended to all countries, were sold on this magnificent idea and enlisted in the cause.

Anonymous said...

SOVIET MANIPULATION OF THE "PEACE" MOVEMENT III

Communist front organisations and activists were thus able to manipulate a mass of well-meaning but gullible people into running interference for the Communist Vietcong during the Vietnam War, the Communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the African National Congress (a front organisation for the South African Communist Party) in South Africa, Hamas, Hezbollah, the PLO and every other terrorist “national liberation” movement on the planet. Communists spearheaded the nuclear disarmament movement and numerous other campaigns aimed at crippling Western defence capabilities.

Most people regard "peace" as the absence of armed conflict between nation states. When a Communist talks of "peace" he means something entirely different: a world in which all opposition to the imposition of global Communism has ceased. The ultimate agenda of the Communists behind the “peace” movement was to pressure the Western democracies to unilaterally disarm, leaving the Soviet Union as the world’s only nuclear power. The Soviets could then present the other side with a simple proposition: “Accept Communism or die!”

Our local “peace” movement loudly proclaimed the Pacific Ocean to be a “US Nuclear Lake” but somehow overlooked to point out that the Soviet Union maintained at Cam Ranh Bay, North Vietnam, a far larger flotilla of nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed ships than the US Sixth Fleet.

The Soviet Union’s agenda was to undermine regional defence and open up the Pacific Rim to Communist naval incursions and influence. Alienating New Zealanders from their traditional US ally and effectively taking us out of ANZUS was a master stroke of Soviet strategy in the service of this objective. Since the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union, the primary beneficiary of this has been the People’s Republic of China.

The claim that New Zealand's anti-nuclear stance demonstrates our “independent national identity" merely illustrates the extent to which local Communists and their dupes were able use the rest of us as glove puppets for International Socialism, as does the notion widely evident amongst our chattering classes that anti-Americanism is intellectually cute.

New Zealand’s disgraceful anti-nuclear grovel that removed NZ from ANZUS was a massive triumph for militant Marxist-Leninism, and for our local embedded Commies within the Labour Party.

Those on the Labour Party's National Executive who played a leading role in this matter were well aware that they were serving the strategic interests of a foreign power, yet remain to this day defiantly proud what they did.

Once upon a time the word “traitor” would have been applied to these people. But because our public discourse is today controlled by graduates of our Leftist-dominated university system, they’re instead depicted as praiseworthy.

Dave said...

Sorry the Greens are 'stupid' and the people who vote for them are naive, easily led, ill informed and manipulated and could easily also be classed as 'stupid'.
Fracking, deep sea oil, climate change, save the snails etc etc... it all adds up to misinformation spread by the left to try and destroy our industrial base, progress and create some sort of communist style 'everyones equal' (except the leaders) style of government Stalin called it communism, Norman and co call it Green.