"I'm glad I don't live in James Delingpole's world."

 
james delingpole watermelons

That’s the first line to a truly excellent piece on New Statesman that I ran across last week. The piece is hilarious, insightful, and will hopefully help a bit to bring some sense to the countless individuals confused by Delingpole’s drivel. Here are the first two paragraphs of the piece:

I’m glad I don’t live in James Delingpole’s world. For this cut-price Telegraph blogger, everything exists in stark black and white, clearly delineated between good and evil – where “evil” is a sinister, UN-based, left-wing conspiracy to destroy industrialism, and “good” is represented by the efforts of a ragtag band of right-wing libertarians and climate-change deniers to beat the environmental communists/Nazis before they can take over the world. It is a schoolboy vision, deluded and naive, of a topsy-turvy world in which the Royal Society and other august scientific bodies are peopled by “liars, cheats and frauds”, while the little guy surfing the internet (Delingpole himself) who courageously disbelieves the white-coated “expert” elite is always right in the end.

Delingpole says he is a Second World War enthusiast and I can’t help wondering whether an early life spent poring over endless comics has somehow affected his brain. I lost count of the number of comparisons to Nazis: environmentalists are Nazis, scientists are Nazis, UN officials are Nazis, and we must fight them on the beaches and never surrender to their dastardly intellectualism and cunning, elitist plans. This is a strange and myopic Little Englandism of the internet age and I imagine reading Watermelons is akin to having dinner with Melanie Phillips – the reader is subjected to an endless barrage of unsubstantiated opinion; every case is overstated and everyone else is a Nazi.

Check out the full piece, a review of Delingpole’s book, Watermelons: How Environmentalists Are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing Your Children’s Future, for more.

Photo: Watermelon via Pink Sherbet Photography

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