The Strong Over the Weak

According to diplomatic legend, when the French diplomat Talleyrand heard that the Turkish ambassador to the Congress of Vienna had died, he asked, “I wonder what he meant by that?” Alternative versions attribute this to Metternich, with the slightly different rendering: “I wonder what his motive was?”

Strong copyWith the greatest climate conference peace conference since the Congress of Vienna getting under way in Paris tomorrow, it is worth noting the passing over the weekend of Maurice Strong, the Canadian multi-millionaire (who ironically made much of his fortune in the oil business he went on to try to suppress) and UN diplomat credited with starting this whole UN climate circus more than 25 years ago. He was the chief organizer of the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, from which flowed the entire architecture of the UN’s ongoing diplomatic climate circus. You can expect endless encomiums to Strong coming out of Paris this week, with lots of calls to craft a new climate treaty “for Maurice.” Maybe Strong decided to assume room temperature a gesture to raise the emotional temperature in Paris?

Normally I don’t speak ill of the recently departed, but Strong was the kind of loathsome authoritarian elitist whose departure is a net plus for humanity. Ron Bailey profiled Strong in National Review way back in 1997 (an archived version beyond NR’s paywall can be found here). Ron’s piece opened thus:

“The survival of civilization in something like its present form might depend significantly on the efforts of a single man,” declared The New Yorker. The New York Times hailed that man as the “Custodian of the Planet.”

That pretty much tells you all you need to know right there. But wait—there’s more!

He is perpetually on the short list of candidates for Secretary General of the United Nations. This lofty eminence? Maurice Strong, of course.

Never heard of him? Well, you should have. Militia members are famously worried that black helicopters are practicing maneuvers with blue-helmeted UN troops in a plot to take over America.

But the actual peril is more subtle. A small cadre of obscure international bureaucrats are hard at work devising a system of “global governance” that is slowly gaining control over ordinary Americans’ lives. Maurice Strong, a 68-year-old Canadian, is the “indispensable man” at the center of this creeping UN power grab.

Read the whole thing, which walks through Strong’s complete CV, and which will prompt the question: which Bond villains were modeled after this guy? One of his greatest hits, by the way, was the statement that “We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse.”

Meanwhile, here’s the climatista tweet of the day from Paris:

Klein Tweet copy

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