KYOTO — Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, has published a book bitterly critical of environmentalists that has been translated into several languages. The original title of the book in Czech is "Modra, Nikoli Zelena Planeta," which literally translates as "blue planet, not green." Its English version has the title "Blue Planet in Green Shackles." The Japanese translation is titled "Kankyo-shugi wa Honto ni Tadashii no ka?" This literally means "Is environmentalism truly correct?"

The translator of the Japanese version called Klaus' book the equivalent of "The Road to Serfdom" for the age of environmentalism. Friedrich von Hayek, an Austrian economist, asserted in "The Road to Serfdom" (written during World War II) that fascism and communism shared the same fundamental roots in that they both suppress human freedom. The book became a classic of political economy as it proclaimed that freedom is of supreme value. The masterpiece directly challenged the then prevailing notion that communism liberates people suppressed by fascism.

In 1992, Francis Fukuyama, a third-generation Japanese-American political scientist, published a book titled "The End of History and the Last Man," in which he said that in the 20th century, freedom and democracy were threatened by two enemies, i.e. fascism and communism, that fascism disappeared at the end of World War II, that communism likewise ceased to exist with the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, and that, therefore, the whole world would be dominated by freedom and democracy.