The Green Genocide

The National Post today reprinted a terrific op-ed by Andrew Kenny originally from The Spectator.

Ideology comes in three colours: red, brown and green, representing Marxism, fascism and environmental extremism. Judged on sheer evil, the worst crime in history was brown, the Nazi genocide, although the reds slaughtered more people. The death toll (difficult to measure) is roughly, Hitler’s holocaust 6 million, Stalin’s famine and terror 8 million, and Mao’s famine 30 million. But the greens have topped them all. In a single crime they have killed about 50 million people. In purely numerical terms, it was the worst crime of the 20th century. It took place in the USA in 1972. It was the banning of DDT.

Malaria is one of the most terrible diseases mankind has ever faced. In the 16th and 17th centuries it decimated Europe (it is mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays as ‘ague’ and probably killed Cromwell). It brought death over the world on a gigantic scale. In 1939 Paul Muller, a Swiss chemist, discovered that a synthetic chemical, DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane), killed flies, mosquitoes and other invertebrates. It was used to stop a typhus epidemic in Italy in 1943. US troops in the second world war dusted themselves with it against lice. It proved spectacularly successful against malaria-bearing mosquitoes. In 1948 Muller won the Nobel Prize for his work on DDT. By 1967, thanks to DDT, malaria had been eradicated from all rich countries, and was being eradicated in Latin America, tropical Asia and three countries in Africa. In 1970 the US National Academy of Sciences stated: ‘To only a few chemicals does man owe so great a debt as to DDT.... In little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million human deaths, due to malaria, that otherwise would have been inevitable.’

Unfortunately, DDT was banned in 1972, and millions have lost their lives because of it. And, to this very day, the Greens are trying their hardest to block African countries from using DDT.