'Environmentalism As Bad As Communism'

So says Czech President Vaclav Klaus, fan of Thatcher, admirer of Reagan, despiser of global warming rhetoric. Speaking to U.S. Congresspeople last week, he offered a few nuggets to chew on (but didn't mix metaphors like that). The Inter Press Service News Agency reports it here.*

A few snippets:

[The] Czech President asked the congressmen not to yield to pressure from environmentalists and abandon the principles of free society: "the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity at the beginning of the 21st century is not communism or its various softer variants. Communism was replaced by the threat of ambitious environmentalism."

"This ideology," Klaus said, "wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central, now global, planning of the whole world."

The Czech President is strongly opposed to environmentalism, which he calls a "religion based on political ambitions rather than science," and accuses environmentalists of using "sophisticated methods of media manipulation" to spread "fear and panic".

Here's a unique bit too -- turns out Klaus may simply be "ideological," and that his arguments are "lacking any evidence, examples or statistics." Luckily for us mighty Americans, we've never seen such baseless claims made by politicians. (Or wait, I missed April Fools Day, didn't I?)

The easily wielded anti-communist card, like our anti-terrorist card, doesn't sit well with other Czech's:

"He relies on the anti-communist card because anti-communist sentiments are very strong in the Czech Republic," Jan Drahokoupil [analyst at the Czech Economy and Society Trust] told IPS. "It's a very powerful tool in politics and media to compare something to communism; Klaus uses it against anything he doesn't like."

Ho hum.

(* And just how excited are World's Fair readers that we started doing the "open link in new window" thing? Eh? Eh?)

(Also: thanks TMN for the link.)