''Right Wing" Energy

Anyone asking such questions today is hopelessly out of date, and probably "a right winger." Soft energy sources are progressive, appropriate and sensitive; nuclear energy is "right wing." What energy sources are soft? The ones that are progressive. Why are they progressive? Because they are soft.

The new approach to energy is to set up a hodgepodge of axiomatic dogmas, and then to search for evidence, genuine or falsified, to support them. Counter evidence is rarely disputed: It is ignored, and only the villain who brought it up is attacked as a public enemy. The very fact that he presented it makes him a right winger; presumably he is an arsonist and assassin of widows as well.

What is a right winger, anyway? The aware and sensitive have not the slightest idea, for they are as ignorant of history as they are of physics, or they would realize that it is they themselves whose bigotry and totalitarian manners (as well as their penchant for making themselves ridiculous) puts them uncomfortably close to the right totalitarian fringe of the ideological spectrum.

Here is an amusing case in point, a passage by one V.B. Price in the New Mexico Independent: "Not all pro nukers are right wing America Firsters by any means, but when people such as the widely quoted Czech expatriate Petr Beckmann write sentences like 'The rioting of anti nuclear fanatics has been particularly savage in West Germany, where the hysteria is actively fanned by Communist organizations, including the Moscow subservient ones...,' the credibility of their cause is severely damaged."

First, what has "Czech expatriate" to do with it?

A lot. Czech expatriates in the West, these days, are likely to be anti Soviet, and that makes them biased and highly suspect. In any case, ethnic background has always been important to progressives of a certain ilk; they used to burn crosses when the fashion and the time were different.

Next, what's so terrible about the statement? There are at least three Communist parties in West Germany: the Moscow subservient Kommunistische Parted Deutschlands, the Maoist KB W. and the party of the Fourth (Trotskyite) lnternational; in addition there are several splinter groups who believe in militant revolutionary Marxism. All of these groups are violently opposed to nuclear power in West Germany, and that includes the Moscow subservient KPD, notwithstanding the fact that the USSR and its East German colony are feverishly going nuclear. Does the great New Mexico opponent of right wingers dispute the truth of the assertion? Not in the least; the assertion "severely damages the credibility of the nuclear cause," and that's that.

And how did this upright journalist conjure up the impression that somebody accused the anti nukes of being Communists and used the accusation as an argument in favor of nuclear power? By rudely embezzling the gist of the quotation from his readers. Far be it from us to bat for Mr Price's professional competence; but if we do assume that he can read, he could not have overlooked what accompanied the text he quotes photographs, including a facsimile and translation from the German Communist press, an account of the training of anti nuclear paramilitary commandos in special training camps as reported in the respectable, middle of the road Die Welt, and a full reference to the source. Dishonesty is not peculiar only to the totalitarian right, but it is yet another characteristic Mr. Price shares with it.

Mr Price is, of course, quite unimportant as an individual writer. (We predict that when he starts penning heart rending sermons in favor of nuclear power as we believe he will just as soon as the fashion changes he will still be an unknown provincial assistant editor fervently hoping at least to be disputed.) But more important than the issue of yellow journalism, or even that of nuclear power is the issue of truth.

Not just truth about nuclear power or science or technology; but truth as that which agrees with demonstrable facts and observable reality, rather than a relative, personal preference that changes whenever expedient to the eye and stomach of the beholder.