Viscount Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, a well-known sceptic of man made global warming theory, has made a complaint to the police over a prize-winning art work which he describes as a “death threat.” Lord Monckton intends to take the vice chancellor of the university which awarded the prize to court for hate speech.
Last month, Anglia Ruskin university awarded fine art student Ian Wolter the university’s 2015 Sustainability Art Prize for an installation featuring a faux-stone slab engraved with the names of six “deniers”, including James Delingpole of this parish, underneath the legend “Lest We Forget Those Who Denied.” Engine oil spills over the block in a continuous cascade.
On the unveiling of the piece, Wolter told the press: “With this work, I envisage a time when the deliberate denial of climate change will be seen as a crime because it hinders progress towards a low carbon future.”
Dr Aled Jones, the director of the university’s Global Sustainability Institute described the piece as “a very impressive installation, complex and very political.”
Commenting on the piece, Delingpole said “I quite agree [with Dr Jones] and am hugely proud to find myself in the distinguished company of some of Britain’s finest journalists and most brave and outspoken politicians, including a former Chancellor of the Exchequer and the former Secretary of State for the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.”
But Lord Monckton has seen it differently. Writing for WorldNetDaily, he explained his position:
“To put one’s name on a tombstone while one is still alive is to make a death threat, the nastiest and most repellent form of hate speech. If the tombstone had been erected anywhere in Scotland rather than on a manifestly dysfunctional campus in England, I could have had professor Michael Thorne, the ‘university’s’ vice chancellor, arrested, tried, fined and bound over not to repeat that or any suchlike offense.
“Professor Thorne had caused or permitted a press release to be issued, promoting this unspeakable death threat. The release explained that the tombstone bore the words, “Lest we forget those who denied.” The implication was that, if we were not already dead, the “artist” and the “university” that promoted his “work” would very soon see to it that we were.”
Rather than laughing off the piece, Lord Monckton has chosen to take a different approach. “I decided not to laugh it off. A death threat is a death threat. It is no laughing matter,” he said.
He has described an “air of palpable menace” which hangs over the whole climate change debate, comparing it to the atmosphere present in Germany during the days in which the Nazi party was on the rise.
“It is plain that the long, relentless campaign of intimidation by the Nazis of their opponents, with name-calling and death threats very similar to that perpetrated by the “university” and by all too many others over the past 10 years, was an essential part of [bringing the Nazis to power].
“Most people laughed off the Nazi threats, at first. In Britain and in many other countries, full-on appeasement followed, in the hope that looking the other way would make the threats vanish.
“It didn’t work. Tens of millions died because too few openly spoke out against the terror. The Nazis then, like their ideological successors at the “university” today, meant what they said.”
Similarly scientists interested in critiquing climate science, such as Dr Roger Pielke Jr, are now dropping out of the field as he fears for the safety of his family and himself.
Lord Monckton’s clerk has written to the vice chancellor of the university detailing “a couple of dozen” instances of sceptics being issued with death threats or threats of imprisonment and execution had been made “all in the past decade”.
Lord Monckton himself wrote to the police and prosecutor fiscal in Edinburgh advising them that if the university did not remove the press release from their website, and the installation from their gallery, he would move to prosecute the internet service providers who were allowing both to be accessed via the internet in Scotland.
He reports: “The ‘university’ found it expedient to come to its senses.
“The press release has been removed from the web, both by the ‘university’ and by another Cambridge website that had unwisely reproduced it. And the tombstone is now gone, too.”
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