Mother Earth and the new
‘heralds of extermination’
Translated from
by Aldo Maria Valli
June 3, 2020
Dear Friends of Duc in altum [Valli's blog], I offer here my contribution this week for the feature La trave e la pagliuzza [The beam and the splinter] on Radio Roma Libera. [The title of Valli’s broadcast comes from Jesus’s well-known admonition that starts with “Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own?”]
During the days of the recent nationwide quarantine, I followed the advice of a friend and reread an old science-fiction novel entitled
L’araldo dello sterminio [published 1981 as
The Herald, by PulitzerPrize-winning author Michael Shaara, renamed
The Noah Conspiracy in its new edition], whose plot led me to reflect.
Published in Mondadori’s Urania line of mythical books, the novel, published in Italian in 1983,is the story of the moral dilemma in which a man finds himself after having been one of the very few survivors of a wave of murderous radiation deliberately caused by a group of scientists aiming for mass extermination of humankind, thereby giving rise to a new civilization, composed only of persons who survive the radiation because they are immune and therefore considered genetically superior.
The scientists’ plan is a sort of attempt to ‘re-boot’ mankind, eliminating through genetic selection everyone who is too coarse, stupid and/or driven by aggressiveness and hatred towards others. A salvific plan to eliminate the worst elements in mankind.
[Apparently, the plan is tried out on a small scale first, wiping out a town of 70,000 inhabitants.]
The protagonist, one of the few survivors, is charged by the government to go into the town to discover the source of the radiation and to destroy it. But during his mission, he realizes that maybe the tragedy could have consequences not altogether negative. Two out of every thousand inhabitants had survived, and to live where there had been too many people,could not be bad.
[Except does Shaara discount the lasting toxic effects of radiation that could make the immediate and surrounding environment unlivable for years, if not decades? Or maybe, the radiation unleashed by the plotters was something that was ‘self-eliminating’ or’ self-cleaning’ after it is emitted.] In such a situation, the state – with all that it means in terms of limiting personal liberties – would no longer exist, and interpersonal conflicts would be minimized. In short, a ‘perfect world’.
What then should he do? Block the source of radiation and put an end to further genocide, or allow the lethal radiation to spread all over the globe, enabling the scientists’ vision of a new civilization even at the cost of killing billions of innocent human beings?
I will not say how it ends. But I will observe that the Malthusian, ecological and environmental reality in a world where few human being survive, without social structures (no bureaucracy/taxes/police/army) and relational problems (traffic, the very burden of having to live so closely with other people in a crowded world) could be a seductive vision.
During the Covid-19 lockdown, some events and images, let us admit, tickled the Malthusian in each of us: the water in Venice’s infamously putrid canals said to have turned crystalline; mountain peaks visible from a distance of kilometers thanks to the absence of smog; historical centers restored to their beauty because free of noisy, maleducated crowds; wild animals emerging to be seen again because no longer terrorized by the presence of humans…
Yet, the disappearance of mankind cannot be a good solution. It would be the classic case of the remedy being worse than the evil purported to be corrected. Of course, not everyone thinks this way.
You may recall that last March 30, the Vatican news pages online, VaticanNews.va, published an article in English entitled ‘Coronavirus: Earth’s unlikely ally”, in which the writer, Jesuit priest Benedict Miyaki, commented with satisfaction that the Coronavirus quarantine, resulting in the mass lockdown at home of almost everybody, had brought “unforetold benefits to the planet”, such as the aforementioned clearing of the water and return of the fish to Venice’s canals, and the reduction in carbon emissions and therefore of air pollution.
In all this, the good Jesuit said, “there is a lesson for the future that shows us what we can do for the planet”. Ofccourse, Miyaki quoted the reigning pope’e ecological encyclical, noting that the document warned mankind of the noxious effects of human activity on the ecosystem.
But the article nowhere mentions the human suffering caused by the virus, and when authorities responsible for the Vatican news services realized this, they took the article offline. After enough people, including myself, had read it.
What to say?
When, in the grip of ecologist ideology, Mother Earth is held up as the new divinity, one can only arrive at such perverted thinking. The Jesuit was probably a bit too direct and cutting, but
what he did was to bring his kind of thinking – that for the planet, man is the evil - to extreme consequences. And that therefore, if we wish to save the earth, let us eliminate mankind, or at the very least, let us reduce his presence significantly. This is in line with the new prophets of Malthusianism like Jeffrey Sachs, people who are so often invited, and not incidentally, ‘revered’ at the Vatican.
In these terms, ecologism shows its close kinship to Marxism. For the ecologist ideology as for Marxism, man is not the end btu the means. In his case, a means in the service of ecology.
Ideology, when it chooses a supreme value, makes it absolute, with respect to which human life can be sacrificed. New ‘heralds of extermination’, prophets of radical ecologism, are in our midst. The fact that their preaching has been incorporated into the thinking of Catholics at the highest levels of authority, can only be disquieting.