NEW YORK — After two days of toiling
through an ocean of charts, graphs and complicated mathematical
equations, attendees of the Heartland Institute’s 2008 International
Conference on Climate Change in Manhattan were provided a starker,
significantly less esoteric warning from the president of the Czech
Republic over breakfast Tuesday morning.
“It is not about climatology,” the recently re-elected, Mises
and Hayek-quoting Vaclav Klaus intoned darkly. “It is about
freedom.”
As the sole head of state willing to stand before the
self-congratulatory United Nations Climate Change Conference last
September and loudly register his dissent from the international
groupthink on anthropogenic (i.e. manmade) global warming, Klaus
was already a highly-regarded hero in these skeptic quarters. His
speech this week, however, went far beyond his UN confrontation in
terms of both its relentless defiance — try to imagine a more
scathing indictment of messianic environmentalists than Klaus’s
description of them as “imprisoned in the Malthusian tenets and in
their own megalomaniac ambitions” — and the Czech president’s
willingness to draw explicit comparisons between modern
environmentalism and communism:
If I am not wrong I am the only speaker from a former
communist country and I have to use this as a comparative —
paradoxically — advantage. Each one of us has his or her
experiences, prejudices and preferences. The ones that I have are,
quite inevitably, connected with the fact that I have spent most of
my life under the communist regime. A week ago I gave a speech at
an official gathering at the Prague Castle commemorating the 60th
anniversary of the 1948 communist putsch in the former
Czechoslovakia. One of the arguments of my speech there…went as
follows: “Future dangers will not come from the same source. The
ideology will be different. Its essence will, nevertheless, be
identical. The attractive, pathetic, at first noble idea that
transcends the individual in the name of the common good, and the
enormous self-confidence on the side of its proponents about their
right to sacrifice man and his freedom in order to make this idea a
reality.” What I had in mind was, of course, environmentalism and
its current strongest version, climate alarmism.
These are, as they say, fighting words.
AFTER I’D RUN A GAUNTLET of polite-yet-stoic Secret Service agents
and persevered through a scheduling snafu or four, Vaclav Klaus
kindly granted TAS a short interview (in English!) in a
suite at the Times Square Marriott. At turns animated and sternly
reserved, Klaus carries himself with remarkable poise and exudes a
passion for principled policy that is impressive when one considers
he’s been fighting political battles since 1989. It does not take long to get the impression
this is a man who does not suffer fools gladly.
“I was in Iceland a year or two ago and I enjoyed very much the
words of the Prime Minister who said, ‘Vaclav Klaus is very often
politically incorrect, but he’s usually correct politically,’”
Klaus chuckled. “I like this playing with words, which is for me
motivation to continue.”
What’s more, contrary to the blustery outrage in the
international press over his crashing of the United Nations
apocalypse party, the president’s views may not be quite so far out
as his colleagues would have their constituencies believe. Shades
of Obama’s NAFTA kerfuffle, Klaus insisted he was far from
shunned during the three days of General Assembly receptions,
meals, and cocktail parties following his speech.
“The funny [part of the] story is that many of them told me,
‘Thank you very much for what you were saying. My views are
similar,’” Klaus recalled. “So I say, ‘Then why don’t you say the
same?’” The president pushed his voice up a couple registers before
mimicking their response: “‘Oh, it is impossible and it needs
courage.’ And so on.”
Klaus shook his head, as if he were a competitive captain of a
football team spoiling for a fight on game day, only to be hindered
by the bunch of scared-of-their-own-shadow wimps the coach has
inexplicably recruited. I asked Klaus if it was frustrating for
him, as a trained economist — he’s held academic posts at the
Forecasting Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences and the
Prague School of Economics — to operate in a political world
populated with those who so frequently behave as if they are
allergic to facts and basic statistics?
“It’s not frustrating if you believe it is your task
to…fight all forms of irrationalities and to
fight the political correctness approach which is killing any
serious discussion,” Klaus shot back, not without some heat. Far
from being a detriment to political careers, this former Minister
of Finance said he believed the social and economic sciences had
more to offer realist politics than many currently concede and
frets global warming skeptics may be focusing too much on science
alone.
“Regulation, centralization versus decentralization — that for
me is something that is not just about freedom in a political
sense, but another layer, another dimension of the discussion,”
Klaus explained. This is a matter of philosophical consistency for
Klaus, who has expressed serious misgivings about centralized power of
the European Union as well.
“When I [talk about] the standard social science and the
standard economic approach, it’s not just saying you must be a
libertarian to stress and promote freedom,” he continued. “The
standard social science and economic approach will tell you
something about the irrationalities of centralization, the
irrationalities of over-regulation, the irrationality of the
bureaucratization of our lives. This is something I don’t hear
quite often enough.”
Is it any wonder the Competitive Enterprise Institute is
honoring Klaus at its upcoming annual
dinner? Our time was almost up, but in light of our discussion
of the “irrationalities of centralization,” I couldn’t help but ask
the president for his thoughts on the recent election in Russia —
a country he has maintained friendly ties with.
“I must say the Russian elections are not the same elections as
in the United States of America or in the Czech Republic,” Klaus
answered with slow and deliberate care. “So in this respect we both
wouldn’t be happy to have such elections. But on the other hand,
when I look at it in a historical perspective and compare it with
the past in Russia, when I compare it with much of Asia, in this
respect, these elections were relatively okay. I would not have a
highbrow negativistic approach which is quite popular in some
circles.”
Before I could follow up I noticed Klaus’s ceaselessly amiable
scheduler leaning into my line of vision across the room. When he
was certain I saw him he shot me a half plaintive, half apologetic
look. Time to wrap it up. Klaus gave a little single nod of the
head, a one-pump handshake, thanked me for the interview and then
was on to another. Queries about missile defense, Putin’s successor
and the U.S. presidential election would have to wait. It was a
shame, really: I’ve met state legislators less candid than this
head of state. This isn’t the kind of thing the EU exports, is
it?
American Spectator Contributing Editor Shawn Macomber is writing a book on the Global Class
War.
