Stalinism, climate change denial and totalitarian wanna be's

Tim Lambert at Deltoid points to the blather from a mob of denialists. Eli notes that one of them, a Scott Johnson, lead off with this beauty:

Today's award to Al Gore and the IPCC "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change" fits in with a subset of cosmopolitan frauds, fakers, murderers, thieves, and no-accounts going back about twenty years.

The interesting thing here is the use of the word cosmopolitan. While most bunnies are not old enough to remember, Eli was himself a young, though very aware, coney during Stalin's last years. Lest you are wondering who these cosmopolitans are, Eli, who remembers some of the code words, is quite unhappy to fill you in:

Rootless cosmopolitan (Russian language: безродный космополит, "bezrodniy kosmopolit") was a Soviet euphemism during Joseph Stalin's anti-Semitic campaign of 1949–1953, which culminated in the "exposure" of the alleged Doctors' plot. The term "rootless cosmopolitan" referred to Jews; however, since a state policy of anti-Semitism conflicted with official Marxist principles such as the fraternity of peoples and proletarian internationalism, the term "rootless cosmopolitanism" was used as a code phrase

The right wing in the United States today seeks to emulate Stalin, even to using the same imagery and tactics. Konstantin Azadovskii and Boris Egorov in an essay published in the Journal of Cold War Studies describe the tactics used by the Stalinist regime

Over the next few years almost every area of science and culture was embroiled in grandiose campaigns to do away with "groveling before the West," "anti-patriotism" (later "anticosmopolitanism"), and generally anything "non- Russian."

One simply has to exchange American for Russian in the article to understand the tactics of the extreme right in the US

The demarcation of Soviet society into "Russian" and "non-Russian" as well as "patriots" and "antipatriots" sparked tension, caused neighbors to be suspicious of one another, and evoked the specter of the "enemy." Newly available evidence confirms that this is precisely what Stalin sought. Public fear of an "enemy" suited his goals in the Cold War. Unlike in World War II, when the main enemy was unmistakably Germany, the anti-Western/anti- cosmopolitan campaigns were directed against abstract foreign foes on the one hand (e.g., global imperialism,) and against specific groups and nations within the USSR on the other.

Simply do a global replace of "the war on terror" for global imperialism. We know who today's specific groups and nations are too.

The campaign in the late 1940s against internal enemies was intended to place the blame for the continued enormous hardships of Soviet life on "fascists," "American imperialists," and other "alien elements" and to keep the populace in a constant state of tension.

But inevitably all minorities will be targetted

Increasingly, as discussed below, the anticosmopolitan campaigns took on an overtly anti-Semitic tone. There is no longer any doubt that Stalin himself was directly responsible for this policy. In private conversations he had openly expressed his desire to eliminate "Jewish influence" and to help a "native" (i.e., non-Jewish) intelligentsia gain sway in the Soviet Union. ⁶ Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Allilueva, later acknowledged that the murder of the eminent Jewish actor Solomon Mikhoels in Minsk in January 1948 was undoubtedly sparked by "[her] father's well-known tendency to see 'Zionism' and plots everywhere." ⁷ Konstantin Simonov, one of the writers who had met with Stalin in 1947, recalls that "in the very last years of his life Stalin held a position on the Jewish question diametrically opposed to the position he espoused in public." ⁸ At Stalin's behest, Jewish writers, artists, and academics came under attack in 1949. Everything possible was done to "expose" them, remove them, and ultimately replace them with "real" Russians of known loyalty to the regime.

Scott Johnson and Powerline are indeed Stalin's true heirs.