From pseudoscience to war

As ABC prepares to sap the nation's will to defend itself by airing a sick fantasy on nuclear war, the mass media are giving splashy coverage to the hunches and speculations of ex-scientists for pre-emptive surrender, represented by spokesmen such as Paul Ehrlich. A billion dead, extinction of the human species, end of the Northern Hemisphere, and other illiterate guesses are trumpeted by those who in 1970 predicted the end of the oceans and world famine by 1975.

That such a war would be horrible is self-evident without the sermons by pampered profs like Ehrlich and Sagan who have seen the horrors of war only in comic strips and on the boob tube. They are undercutting those who want to prevent war; and the only way of preventing it is to have the will to resist and the capacity to win.

But there is another issue here: the way the media create "scientists" from actors void of all qualifications in the field in which they are paraded as experts; and the way in which the media nurture their superstitious fables until they are mistaken for widely accepted "scientific," theories.

Paul Ehrlich is a typical case of such a media creation. Paraded as an expert in physics, demography, nuclear power, and just about every other hard science, you would never guess the real field of his expertise: butterflies. His ignorance of physics is shocking: "The Second Law [of thermodynamics]," he writes in a text intended for college students,(1) "tends to be inscrutable." His excursions into demography are close to fraudulent: More than a decade after the US birth rate started plunging to unprecedented depths, and while it was approaching the zero population growth value (it has now plunged below it), he beat the alarm about a population explosion in the US, using outdated statistics.(1) His demographic fables appear to be based on people hatred, possibly born "one stinking hot night in Delhi" when he saw "nothing but people everywhere...people thrusting their hands through the taxi window...people clinging to buses...people, people, people."(2) In matters of nuclear power, he claimed (in the serene scientific journal Playboy) that nuclear wastes were "dumped into one of our Southern rivers...until oysters growing in water near the river's mouth were found to glow in the dark."(3) The absurdity was accepted, for a Stanford Professor of Biology said so.

These types of media-made fabulists have now moved from pseudoscience to fomenting war; whether they do so intentionally is of secondary importance. For in ignorance they excel in one discipline above all others: history. It was Churchill, then branded a warmonger, who could have ensured peace; it was Chamberlain, the appeaser (and in his day appeasement was not yet a dirty word) who brought on the most horrible war known to mankind. Then, too, people were told that it was insane to oppose the Panzer divisions, the Stukas, and the other new weapons of mass destruction. Then, too, there were "scientists" preaching fables, and making statements like "Several coercive proposals deserve serious consideration, mainly because we will ultimately have to resort to them unless current trends in birth rates are reversed."

That statement, actually, was not made by a Nazi. It was made, once again, by the august scientist Paul Ehrlich.(1)

Is the fate of America and of Western civilization to be decided by men such as these?

As long as the mass media monopoly decides how the public is to be informed and what is to be censored, the answer is an unqualified yes.