Del Boy And The Dodgy Citation

Mike Godwin, who devised the law known to countless participants of Usenet groups, might have wondered at the desperation of the climate change denial lobby, in which the N-word (as in Nazi) comes so readily to so many. And at the forefront of labelling his opponents as Nazis is the sneering and superior Maily Telegraph blogger James “saviour of Western civilisation” Delingpole.

In his latest blog post, “Why do I call them Eco Nazis? Because they ARE Eco Nazis”, Del Boy attempts to pin the N-word on those concerned about climate change. His key witness this time is a Stateside commentator called Mark Musser, who has contributed an article to American Thinker (a suitably right wing online publication) in which Musser links fascism to climate change science through an Austrian called Guenther Schwab.

Because Schwab was a Nazi, and wrote a fictional work about the consequences of runaway warming, Delingpole concludes that Nazis and anyone majoring in climate change are pretty much interchangeable. Sadly, however, Del Boy has once again failed to do his homework. Musser cannot even get Schwab’s year of birth right (it was 1904, not 1902), which might have made a more diligent reader wonder.

But Del would at least make sure his source was suitably qualified. After all, he rails against “non-subjects like ... media studies”, and tells of being at Oxford “in an era when they weren’t giving away degrees free with packets of cornflakes”. So Mark Musser’s first degree is a ... “Bachelor of Liberal Arts” from Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Not exactly Ivy League, is it, Del Boy?

And Musser’s back catalogue of articles doesn’t exactly exude moderation, with titles such as “The Green Nazi Hell”, “Hitler’s Green Killing Machine”, “An Ecofascist Crescent Moon near Ground Zero”, “Prince Charles and His Green Islamo-Fascist Paupers”, and the subtly named “The Original Green Nazis Were Nazis”. Oh, and, like Del’s pal Christopher Booker, Musser believes in so-called “Intelligent Design”.

In among all this ranting, Musser finds time to smear Susan Sotomayor as a racist (thus obediently following the deeply unsavoury Rush Limbaugh), tries to connect Barack Obama to some Marxists he invented along the way, and even gets the Weather Underground into his meanderings.

And this is James Delingpole’s sole source for his latest ham-fisted post. The same Del Boy who tells “I was taught to write with a certain rigour and to choose my words carefully”. It’s a pity for Del that the rigour and care seems not to have applied to doing his homework on the reliability of his sources.