BITTEN BY THE GREEN GORILLA

Conservatives and libertarians, you would think, are unlikely to fall for the Green propaganda, for they dislike big government, coercion, collectivism and violation of property rights; most will therefore take the doomsday propaganda with a grain of salt.

There are some surprising exceptions, however, and perhaps not so surprising after all. Chronicles was founded by Leopold Tyr-mand when John Howard directed the Rockford Institute in Illinois. Tyrmand died, Howard retired, and Chronicles became ever weirder, until one day they published an article glorifying a heroic dissident: none other than Gore Vidal, one of this country's most repugnant far-left stomach-turners who hide under the fraudulent label of "liberal." Their August 1990 issue brings an alarmist environmentalist article ("if we are to save a failing planet") by E.O. Wilson of Harvard, full of misstatements ("global warming by the greenhouse effect, undeniably coming . . . ozone depletion, severe and not in dispute . . . Our life is at risk") and recommending statist measures such as "zoning on a broad scale" and "population policy, [which] no less than economic policy, must come to occupy center stage in the years ahead."

Among libertarians, there are many whose love of liberty never went so far as wanting to defend it from its greatest enemy, Soviet totalitarianism in its heyday. There are also a few who revel in the destruction of private property, and even one or two who publicly applauded the executions, without trial, of hundreds of Iranian vic-tims each morning for weeks when the Ayatollah took power, con-doning them on the grounds that they were "scum." So it was not surprising to see, in Liberty (May 1990), Bill Kauffman lionizing the recently deceased Ed Abbey, who wrote the preface of their guide to ecotage, and a novel that became the bible of the Heil Erde! econazis. Kauffman quite correctly likens this (proudly self-proclaimed) Luddite to his other heroes such as Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky, and revels in the ecoteurs' "disabling bulldozers, blowing up bridges, dreaming and plotting that glorious day when the Glen Canyon Dam is blasted to smithereens."

In fairness I should add that this type of indecency is not repre-sentative of all the fare of Liberty, which offers a broad spectrum of opinion, and which is a stimulating magazine for people who do not mind reading what they may passionately disagree with (bimonthly, $19.50, Box 1167, Port Townsend, WA 98368).