Energy and Civilization

Would America have to put up with the Ayatollah's goons, would it let itself be pacified by its leaders' shadow boxing show if it had all the oil and other energy it needs? Energy truly feeds freedom, and in more senses than one.

The lesson has not been lost on the American people, and already a call for 90 more nuclear plants to go on line has rung out from the bosom depths of none other than Colorado's Sen. Hart, who formerly called nuclear power the Edsel of energy, and never missed a chance to malign it or to obstruct its development. Ayatollahs do work miracles, especially in election years.

But others persist in their contempt of American lives, whether threatened by thugs in Teheran or by energy shortages in New England. The antinuclear umbrella organization Mobilization for Survival has, in the same breath, called for more forceful obstruction of nuclear power plant construction, for "Public forums and tribunals to investigate the crimes of the Shah," and for "no US military intervention."

There is a name for riding roughshod over civilization's fundamental standards while promoting one's ideology by violence: fascism. It is not customary to call fascists by their proper name when they are fascists of the Left, but let us not be misled by fashionable taxonomy. That the fascists of the Left and Right are enemies is entirely due to their inability to brook any opposition; it does not make either of them less fascist, for a rat is a rat even if harassed by a snake.

The antinuclear activists mobilized by the MFS promote their ideology by criminal trespass, by extolling acts of vandalism, by street brawls, and by censoring or falsifying statistics on health hazards. They do not wield the unrestrained power of the Ayatollah's goons; but lack of success does not exculpate them from moral kinship. Promotion of ideology by violence remains fascism, whether it is so promoted by gauleiters, commissars, mullahs, or the American Friends' Service Committee.

The Iranian thugs, the Soviet imperialists, and the Western apologists for both may yet rescue another fundamental principle of civilization from oblivion: that there are evils greater than the evil of war.

If that unpleasant truth is not grasped in time, it will be brought home cruelly by the world's Bocassas, Brezhnevs, and Berrigans.