The Korean peninsula at night from space, showing the well-lit South Korea and the dark North Korea. Access to abundant, affordable, reliable energy, especially electricity, facilitates both the conquest of poverty and access to the information that is the lifeblood of freedom. Photo by NASA.
It’s long been clear that electricity, by putting enormous power at the fingertips of billions of ordinary people, has been crucial to their conquest of poverty. Just now, though, a short article by energy journalist Robert Bryce turned a new light on for me: Electricity is crucial to keeping people free, too.
Why?
Because information and its rapid, unrestricted sharing feed freedom. And electricity facilitates that rapid sharing of information—through telephones, radio, television, the Internet, and more.
What Bryce wrote that so caught my attention was a brief piece comparing the electricity consumption of North Korea with that of South Korea. For years I’ve used NASA’s stunning photo of the Korean peninsula at night, from space, to illustrate the importance of electricity to conquering poverty. South Korea’s all lit up, and North Korea is almost totally dark. South Korea’s people are many times richer than North Korea’s. Ergo, abundant, affordable, reliable energy, especially as electricity, facilitates wealth; lack of it means poverty.
But Bryce’s article focuses on electricity’s relationship not to poverty but to liberty. Kim Jong Un and his predecessor dictators have kept the North Korean people enslaved in large part by keeping them in the dark. They know little about the outside world, and their attempts to learn about it can lead to their public executions, used to instill craven fear in the whole population. Electricity would enable them to tune in to shortwave radio and television from South Korea and other free countries and to learn that life doesn’t have to be as it is for them.
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Mellany McKenzie says
Hello,
I sent the article to a local pastor who is a candidate for the Green Party in BC
I will also send him a link to the newsletter so he can be better informed.
Hopefully he will join the fight and be part of the opposition.
Anyhow…thank u for your articles. I post them and send them on.
Marantha!
In Christ
Mellany McKenzie
BC
Canada
Mark R. Musser who is also a pastor wrote a book called Nazi Oaks: The Green Sacrifice of the Judeo Christian Worldview in the Holocaust Paperback – Feb 4 2015
by Mr. R. Mark Musser
“Nazi Oaks” details the anti-Semitic historical background to the early German green movement of the 1800’s that was later absorbed by the Nazi Party in the 1930’s and 40’s. While many histories have decried the industrial nature of the holocaust, such views cannot explain the motive behind the greatest crime committed in the 20th century. The holocaust itself was carried out under a green cover because Nazi racism was largely rooted in the Social Darwinism of German Romanticism that laid the ecological foundations for what today is otherwise known as environmentalism. As an important ingredient of the argument, “Nazi Oaks” also demonstrates the anti-Christian bias of the environmental movement in America which paralleled the anti-Semitic bias in Germany during the 1800’s. “Nazi Oaks” describes why the holocaust is best understood as a modernized form of human sacrifice carried out under biological/ecological camouflage that is rooted in the sacrificial oak imagery of ancient paganism. The word “holocaust” itself means “whole burnt offering.”