Oh, Lord, climate agreement a Trojan Horse for Communist world government

Lord Christopher Walter Monckton, 3^rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, caused something of a stir 20 years ago when he wrote an article calling for universal AIDS testing, and for all those found with the virus to be quarantined immediately and forever. [Monckton later disavowed his proposal as impractical]. His Lordship's latest foray into the public arena is as a climate change denier and conspiracy theorist who sees Communists behind an international treaty to control greenhouse gases.

Communists, Monckton said in a speech last month in St. Paul, Minnesota, "piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement." That's quite an image, when you think about it: Scores, hundreds, perhaps thousands of dedicated Communists pouring out of East Germany after the Wall fell to take over the environmental movement. Now, "the apotheosis is at hand," Monckton said. "They are about to impose Communist world government on the world. You have a president who has very strong sympathies with that point of view."

Paranoia runs deep among fellow travelers on the political right and Monckton's smear is reminiscent of Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy's witch hunts of the 1950s, when he spoke of Communists in high places "concerting to deliver us to disaster."

In his 1964 essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," historian Richard Hofstadter, wrote, "American politics has often been an arena for angry minds." Hofstadter called it paranoid "simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy."

The political paranoid sees the world in "apocalyptic terms, traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values," Hofstadter wrote.

Cue Lord Monckton: "In the next few weeks unless you stop it, your president will sign [a climate agreement and] your freedom, your democracy, and your prosperity away forever," he said in St. Paul. "Neither you nor any subsequent government you may elect would have any power whatsoever to take it back again." [That's not just an over-the-top paranoid fantasy, but also plain wrong on the process. The US becomes party to a treaty not when the president signs it but when it is ratified by a super majority of the Senate - 67 votes].

Hofstadter wrote that the mantle of McCarthy had fallen to retired candy manufacturer Robert H. Welch Jr., founder of the John Birch Society. Welch charged that Communist influences "are now in almost complete control of our government."

Near, if not at the top of Welch's list of Communist infiltrators: President Eisenhower, "a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy." A conclusion, Welch said, based "on an accumulation of detailed evidence so extensive and so palpable that it seems to put this conviction beyond any reasonable doubt."

Hofstadter wrote: "We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well."