This piece from the Irish Times is good reading:
An Irishman's Diary
Friday, May 14, 1999
Opinion/Kevin Myers
Perhaps you read the imperturbable common sense from
Lt-Gen Gerry McMahon on our proposed membership of
Partnership for Peace and the comparable wisdom from Prof
Tom Raftery on genetically modified foods, both of which
appeared in this newspaper this week. You may be sure:
they're wasting their time. A huge new constituency of
know-nothing voodoo greenery has emerged in recent years,
which revels in cabals of wicked scientists out to poison us all,
and in secret NATO conspiracies to lure us out of our
internationally admired neutrality, and which most of all
triumphs in simple ignorance.
This voodoo greenery is as immune to logic, to science and to
fact as any of the unintellectual witch-burning hysterias which
regularly visit human societies. We can only hope it passes
before it does too much harm.
Inorganic methods
Food first. The world we live is fed not by natural green
methods but by the unnatural modifications of science. There
is, however, an enduring example of what happens when we
depend on solely "natural" methods of food production which
we should all remember; it is called The Famine. Potato blight
is not kept at bay by organic methods but by inorganic ones
devised by chemists. It is by the endeavours of such chemists
that the great centres of world famine, China and India, where
until 30 years ago starvation would roam in regular cycles,
predictably killing tens of millions of people, are now able to
export food around the world.
In his recent letter, Tom Raftery quoted from Norman Borlaug,
one of the greatest human beings of this century. He was the
architect of what is called the Green Revolution; but of course,
it was not green at all. It was proto-GM crop engineering. He
devised wholly unnatural genetic combinations to produce
higher and more disease resistant grains and rices, and it was
he who more than anyone else in the world has the moral and
scientific authority to pronounce on the green voodooists who
dominate debate on this topic.
"Current agricultural technology and advances in the pipeline
give the world the ability to feed 10 billion people. The
problems is whether producers are going to be permitted to
use this technology. Extreme environmental elitists seem to be
doing everything they can to stop scientific progress in its
tracks. While affluent nations can afford to pay more for food
produced by the so-called 'organic' methods, one billion
chronically undernourished people of the low-income,
fooddeficit nations cannot."
Bourgeois élite
Of course, the billion chronically under-nourished people in
what used to be the Third World do not matter a great deal to
the middle-class green voodooists in the West. This bourgeois
élite probably rather likes the thought that ten miles below the
wings of the jetliner taking them to a green conference in Rio or
wherever there is an ecologically friendly Eastern peasant
toiling in his ecologically friendly paddy field helped by his
ecologically friendly buffalo while his ecologically friendly wife
weaves ecologically friendly garments in their ecologically
friendly hut surrounded by their ecologically friendly children
with their ecologically friendly rickets.
The truth is that the greens are not so fond of people as they
are of their own doctrines of pious anti-scientism. Like their
ideological predecessors, the commissars who imposed
collective farming, and collective famine, on the peoples of the
Soviet Union and Communist China, the application of their
politically-pure know-nothing green theories is far more
important than the actual consequences of that application.
These greens can be really quite dangerous, nasty characters.
A virulent verdurousness has also been at work in discussions
about our membership of PfP, and poor Gerry McMahon will
try to explain the truths about this in vain; his words are unlikely
even to be heard in the deafening and sanctimonious roar about
our neutrality. They are nonetheless worth repeating: our
absence from PfP is further restricting what was already a
rather limited role in world peacekeeping. And limited that role
certainly has been. The smallness of our Army, its limited
equipment and the 21year UNIFIL commitment has meant our
capacities as peacekeepers comes nowhere near matching the
reputation our neutralists think we possess.
No colossus
We are not the Colossus of Neutrality Bestriding the Globe
that the green neutralists like to think we are. For most people
around the world, Ireland is as indistinguishable from Scotland
as Latvia is from Estonia or Ecuador is from Venezuela. They
do not, on hearing of this country, fall on their knees crying,
"Ireland! Internationally revered neutral country! Ireland, home
of internationally respected peacekeepers! Ireland, ex-colony,
uniquely placed to understand the concerns of other
non-imperial countries! Ireland, home of an independent and
non-aligned space where opposing sides in a conflict can feel
their case can be presented and heard!"
No. In reality, if they even admit to hearing of this tiny little
country - merely half the size of the ancient Finnish province of
Karelia - most foreigners are likely to say: "Ireland, ah yes,
home of the IRA, bang bang, Bobby Sands and
knee-capping." Or maybe: "Ireland, capital Edinborrow, and
just a few hours' train-ride from London, and I sure do love
those kilts and your Highland Flings." Or: "Ireland? Ireland?
You mean Holland, yes?" But: "Ireland, legendary home of
morally superior neutrality and of an army which is
internationally admired for its peacekeeping"? Hardly.
And as for membership of alliances: Ruairi Quinn is right.
NATO's days are over. We must look to a United European
Treaty Organisation; and in the meantime, we might learn a
little modesty. But most of all, we must learn not to pay any
attention to those who make a political virtue of their
ignorance.
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