Kyoto Protocol and Atlantic Charter : all smiles on outside , all self interest inside

As a moderately well known (and formerly very active) Green politician and activist , it must seem very odd that I have seemingly suddenly turned my back on the party and the movement.

All to devote myself instead to a book on some obscure events from seventy five years ago during WWII.

But I disagree.

I see lessons for us all today from those events so long ago, as the Anglo-American "special relationship" faces its toughest ever crisis : human climate change.

Kyoto and the Atlantic Charter

The Kyoto Protocol and The Atlantic Charter share this much in common : despite being full of popular sentiments and signed by almost all the nations in the world , almost no national leader expected or wanted those sentiments to ever have political and economic force.

It was all just dross , just bones thrown out of the back of the campaign bus , to calm restless international public opinion.

By contrast, most organized national opinions (national interest groups and their lobbyists) were semi-secretly opposed to some or most measures in both statements.

In both WWII and more recently, the battle over just how seriously to apply these statements to the real world was something conducted quite privately between supposedly allied nations - but also within every nation in a more semi-public manner

This verbal war may lack guns and body bags but it is just as serious and a lot more important than the military war that removed Hitler and Tojo.

Tiny Germany and tiny Japan were never going to be able to conquer and hold all of the world --- their limitless greedy ambitions, as much as anything else, sealed their fate.

Better or worse generalship could have seen this happen in 1940 or 1950, rather than in 1945 ; but that it was going to happen was a 'dead cert' .

But the Allied public war aims : were they to be taken seriously after 1945 ?

And if so, to what extent ?

This silent internal war was basically a debate over whether to move forward into a new (neo) plentitude in human and non-human relations or lapse backwards into the old modernist plenticidal values that had caused WWII and Auschwitz in the first place.

It was much more vital to our current troubles than any surprise panzer attack Hitler was going to pull off in late 1944.

But it has received surprisingly little press.

Pax Penicillia hopes to change all of that ...