This is the worst article I have ever read on this website. Stick to using citations from the occult sphere to advance your racialist dogshit coz the more tangible conclusions of science definately do not support it.

http://seer.cancer.gov/csr/1975_2005/results_merged/topic_race_ethnicity.pdf
^cancer incidence by ethnicity in the US.

but how did blonde hair, blue eyes, and white skin come to be? are these not genetic defects that came about as a result of the ice age/lack of adequate sunlight? what i have to say is more than reasonable. an increase in solar activity spells disaster for the white “race.” if the predictions of the maya and aztec shamans come to pass white people will not have what it takes to survive in the post-2012 world. so tell me, based on how things are starting to look on this planet, how is pasty white skin asset?

To your comment, engo:

”...blonde hair, blue eyes, and white skin…”

These are not genetic defects. They are genetic and phenotypic variations that so far have played a non-existent role in what has been a very successful adaptive strategy for the human species. There have been far more onerous selective pressures since the Ice Age and these genotypes have made it through fine. A substantial increase in solar activity coupled to a decline in ozone would have significant consequences for ALL races so don’t use it as an excuse to condemn Whitey.

Predicating the survivability of the “white race” (a term which itself is increasingly ludicrous in our globalized world) on the pigmentation of non-functional traits and the prognostications of tripping aboriginals is simply ludicrous. Next you’ll be saying black people have more fast-twitch muscle fiber and that’s why they’re better at sports.

You want to talk about global apocalyptic events and theories? Fine. But don’t use the occult and fringe science to try and justify what amounts to a thinly-veiled call to eugenics.

first of all, it is not just people of color that maintain that “racial whitness” is not the natural state of man in any part of the world. some of the greatest western thinkers have said the same thing. for example, in the philosophy of schopenhaur, metaphysics of love of sexes appear the following words: ”.....the white colour of skin is not natural to man, but that by nature he has a black or brown skin…..every white man is a faded or bleached one. tell me. when arthur schopenhaur made this statement was he “denouncing whitey” or was he just stating a fact? also, would you consider schopenhaur to exists on the fringe?

hmmmmm. blonde hair and blue eyes have nothing to do with recessive genetic traits. so what would happen if every white woman with blue eyes and blonde hair mated with a blue-black african? what are the chances their offspring would have blonde hair and white skin. come on guys, some things are well know facts, and all i have done is put a certain spin on them.

A few interesting odds and ends here but seriously taking no account of behavioral adaptations is ridiculous i.e. me being a white man who lives in the tropics, when i go outside on a hot day I simply use a hat and sunscreen to adequately protect myself from sunburns/cancer or I just go outside when its dark. The sun is obviously important to civilization, but it is our actions which ensure the continuation and manner of civilization, not whether people burn easily or not.

You need to realize that Engo isn’t being racist. Engo is presenting an idea meant to stir controversy… and he’s done just that. I was hesistant to publish this at first, but after I got through the whole thing – and shot a couple of emails back and forth with Engo – I realized what this article was meant to do. I knew it would stir up controversy… and I knew I would end up getting hate mail for it, but stirring up controversy is a good way to get a nice debate going.

Now, being the self-proclaimed “King of All White Boys”, I obviously don’t agree with Engo’s conclusion; but his work is well researched, and he has a great voice on black mysticism – something that is clearly lacking in the Western occult tradition.

Now Engo… time for me to play “white” devil’s advocate here, and I’d like to hear your response.

You mention Quetzalcoatl and how he equates to Horus, but in most of the South American Indian traditions, Quetzalcoatl (who also equates to Kulkulcan and Viracocha) is referred to as the “white bearded god.” In Pierre Honore’s In Search of Quetzalcoatl, in fact, we get to read first hand accounts from Cortes’ scribes about how the Spanish were thought to be the prophecized return of Quetzalcoatl because of their beards and white skin – a tale that is consistent throughout the Toltecs, Mayans, Aztecs and Incans. This hardly seems to equate with the Egyptian deity Horus.

Another counterpoint would be in terms of the white skin not being able to handle the sun’s rays and causing skin cancer. If 2012 is the year of transformation, and humanity is set to make some sort of evolutionary leap, couldn’t cancer be the catalyst for this leap? Cancer is a mutation on the cellular level, and as we know from biology, mutation is one of the things that can cause evolutionary leaps. It is obviously not without consequences (i.e. deaths before adaptation); but couldn’t it be that skin cancer is the mutation that will cause white people to be able to transcend through 2012? This wouldn’t be the end of the white race. It would be the transformation of the white race – the beginning of something new.

I’m interested to hear your thoughts.

Er, that should be ‘ethnocentric level’. Ahem.

szul you bring up something rather interesting points. perhaps whites could mutate, but i seriously doubt it. white skin is already a mutation and a product of a cycle or aeon that is coming to an end. so what happens after 2012? do we begin to return to that primeval point in time when the planet was much warmer and all humans had brown skin? it is also interesting to note that all the solar gods of the ancient world had black or brown skin. what is the reason behind this? why are all solar gods said to have had their faces burnt by the sun? why did the greeks call the aethiopians gods? could all of this have something to do with melanin and black genetic mutations? with the above in mind i will post later in regards to what i believe to be true about the feathered serpent and horus.

This is a loaded judgment call that has no basis in scientific fact whatsoever. By default, all genotypes are natural and only time, fecundity, and the selective pressures of the environment can determine the adaptive value of those traits.

White skin has yet to be proven as anything more than another phenotype. I have not seen any evidence that these traits confer maladaptive selection. The decline in western (ie white) populations is not because we’re dying off by absorbing too much UV. It’s a side effect of socioeconomics and better health care – we don’t need to maximize our chances of passing on our genes by having lot’s of children. Note also the steadily increasing longevity in the west which seems to run counter to the notion that that we’re under increasing selective pressures. These are elective trends.

Colonialism and slavery are unfortunate but common human expressions that are in no way unique to white skin. A casual glance across the globe will show that brown-skinned people are just as adept at grabbing land, killing, and enslaving the weak and peaceful as the fair-skinned. Europeans (and Asians) happened to develop better weapons earlier in history and happened to organize into city-states sooner, hence, they were the ones who had the jump on the land-resource domination game. The same game is still playing out all over the world across all racial lines. We’re still basically apes fighting for resources so we can protect our hides and get the best chance at immortality by sending our genotypes downstream. Anybody who thinks whites are inherently murderous and blacks are not needs to get a fucking grip, IMHO. The tribal wars currently ravaging the African continent do not convince me of “Black Greatness”. They’re just on a later track towards industrialism but they’re no better or worse than the post-industrial world. We’re all trying to evolve past the ape, and under our skin we’re all the same species.

And to be clear, while I acknowledge and am greatly thankful for my privileged position, I feel no need to apologize to the oppressed masses of the world because I have never oppressed them and seek regularly to dispel the vestigial instincts that perpetuate our warring inclinations.

The demon is human nature, not white skin. Get over it. In 500 years we’ll all be light brown anyways. Or extinct from relentless tribal warfare bred by ignorance and fear of The Other…

and chris if everybody is light-brown in 500 years that means there will be no whites on the planet! i see that deep down inside you agree with my theories. lol.

To Chris’ defense, I believe the “privileged position” he is referring to is his status as an American. I, myself feel “privileged” for being an American from a blue-collar working class family. Being in a “privileged” position doesn’t necessarily mean that you automatically perpetuate “racist white christian values” My father was too busy bleeding and burning next his fellow white, black and hispanic co-workers as a welder for 30+ years to perpetuate any “racist white christian values.” He was too busy trying to make ends meet for our family.

szul are you saying all blue-collar workers in america have the same civil rights? perhaps this is true in theory but not in practice. are all blue-collar workers regardless of their skin hue subject to racial profiling and police brutality? also, if a low-income white man gets into a fight with a black man anywhere in america who do you think the legal system will automatically favor?

In college, all English majors were required to take a course in Shakespeare. In my class we engaged in a rather lengthy discussion regarding the meaning of the term “Moor.” Moor could refer to sub-Saharan Africans, Turks, New World Indians, or even the Irish.

The Irish part interests me the most, particularly because it implies a connection with pre-Christian Islamic Ireland.

‘In short, if you’re offended by Padre Engo I suggest you take a good hard look at the world around you and get a fucking grip.’

I find the world around me offensive BECAUSE of beliefs such as these, regardless of who the racism is aimed at. Do I need to be black to find white-on-black racism offensive? Do you need to be white to find black-on-white racism offensive?

So the world is a shit hole – boo hoo. Don’t you think we should all ‘get a fucking grip’ and do something about it?

There was another man who based his approach to race on ‘occult’ ideas. He even set up a whole department to research ‘scientific facts’ to back up those ideas. He eventually gassed millions of jews. Szul – do you appreciate Hitler’s conclusions based on his research?

Engo – what are you going to do when (not if) the great white holocaust doesn’t occur after 2012?

And finally – what the hell does any of this have to do with mysticism, black or not?

Padre Engo and Ulysesses Lazarus: you both seem incapable of perceiving any critique of the above article as anything but a racist attack by Whites on Blacks. You seem unable or unwilling to consider any point raised without resorting to a ‘tit-for-tat’ reaction fundamentally based on a belief that we are engaged in some kind of race war.

For instance, Chris23 questioned the potential racial bias of a book entitled Melanin: The Chemical Key to Black Greatness. Engo, you reacted with an accusation of racism:

‘do you believe there are black scientists? or perhaps if its not white its not real science?’

Furthermore, Chris23 highlighted the racist conflicts ongoing in Africa, to which you replied:

‘what is the source of most of the problems in modern black africa?...im not saying black africans are angels, but there is no comparison to what the racist white christians have done on this planet and continue to do in the name of capitalism and “the war on terrorism.’

Engo, you clearly perceive Chris23’s comments as an attack by a white person on black people, and cannot approach the subject without automatically adopting an ‘Us vs Them’ attitude. The fact that white Christians have done awful things does not invalidate Chris23’s comments, nor does it make black racism excusable because ‘whites have done worse’.

Lazarus, you rather dramatically illustrate your belief that every detractor of Engo’s article is not only White but inherently racist here:

‘And forgive me if I’m fresh out of tears for white people horrified by other racial groups crafting their own myths.’

You seem unable to entertain the idea that perhaps the above comments are not a racist attack by white commentators on a black person, but on the offense caused by racism full stop.

I believe you both have a very low opinion of black people, in that black culture must inherently be based on race. Consider: the ‘greatness’ of black people is only found for you Engo in the colour of your skin, and can only be validated by the mass extinction of a whole race! Lazarus, you seem to think that we need to entertain the silly views of Engo because black culture has nothing to offer in terms of myth, despite the fact the African Diaspora has a multitude of myths on offer, and none of them based on race (fancy that?). Tell me – have there been absolutely no serious contributions by black historians, scientists, and researchers to our present culture? Do we really need to entertain Engo’s work because it’s the best black culture has to offer? What a joke.

While it is true that racism breeds racism, haven’t we had enough of grouping people by physical traits yet? Can’t we develop past ethnocentricity and adopt a worldcentric view?

Engo, if you seriously want to offer an alternative unbiased history as a counterpoint to the racist history of Europeans, is the best way of doing that by offering your own biased account?!

“quetzalcoatl has egyptian roots. he also has western african roots. are you aware of the fact that there are medieval texts in arabic and chinese that speak of moorish/arab voyages across the atlantic around the time quetzalcoatl appeared to the people before the coming of cortes.”

This still doesn’t explain Quetzalcoatl’s correlation as the “white bearded god” according to South American Indian tradition. Nor does it explain the artwork at Chichen Itza that seems to validate this description as actual characteristics rather than simple metaphor.

Glad to see we got to Godwin’s in record time.

I am certainly aware of different African Diasporic traditions, in fact we ran a very interesting piece on voodoo (sorry, this will always be my preferred spelling) by a (white) Englishman a few months ago. The author, Stephen Grasso, is also a bona fide initiate of a Haitian voodoo cult who seem to appreciate his cultural resonance with their religion more than the color of his skin. Without speaking for him, I would suggest that Engo’s rapport with me is based on similar principles, namely my interest in Moorish Science and its derivatives.

You don’t “need” to entertain Padre Engo’s ideas. I personally find them interesting, and believe there is a value in entertaining to the best of one’s ability all viewpoints available. It allows for a more complete picture of the world.

Finally, I would like to direct everyone to Padre Engo’s last feature at Key64, The African Origins of the Holy Grail and Witch’s Cauldron as well as his Interview with Edward O’Toole both of which I believe form a well needed backdrop to this article.

szul please provide a list of the major ethnic groups of northwest africa and tell me who for the last 900 years has looked like a white arab. also provide me with a history of the fulani, wolof, mandingo, and hausa, and prove that these are not moors in the true sense of the word and that there is no connection to medieval spanish, portuguese, and irish culture. prove that the almoravids did not call senegal, west africa their headquaters and the majority of them were not black africans. prove that west african muslims do not appear as black knights in medieval european literature. also, the jews are described in the old testament as blacks, and many of the traditional ways of sub-sahara africans are jewish. this is something that has also been commented on by highly respected jewish historians; not to mention the medieval commentators that mention a jewish kingdom in ghana, west africa. also, ask any arab scholar about the large black populations that have historically existed in many places in the so-called middle east. but of course, since both the egyptians, moors, and arabs contributed so much to western culture they cannot be blacks that have any relationship to the blacks that were enslaved in the americas. this is what the educational system in america teaches for the most part and this cannot be denied. and in regards to greece, herodotus and others state that the greeks obtained advanced knowledge from the aethopians. but of course, aethiopians are not “negroes” in the true sense of the world either. yeah right! lol.

I see little on libcom.org about Troy Southgate other than ad hominem attacks aka the first refuge of intellectual scoundrels. While not personally identifying as a “national anarchist” I think, as I do with Padre Engo, that there is certainly something his critiques.

But we’re really getting into thread rot here…

black resistance culture was not created by me. i am merely a spokeman, someone that is here to keep the real shit alive in these fake ass times. and i am sure skin color does not matter as long as whites are on top. also, racism guys is by definition an institutionized form of cultural prejudice. what padre engo institution is opressing your people on a daily basis? how am i “a racist?” im not a white man and i am not an american, which means i cannot be a racist! all i did was say the sun god (the true savior of the blacks!!!!) is gonna take care of an age old problem. how does that make me a “racist?” and do blacks have reason to to hate whites when the perspective of most whites (including the so-called liberals)not only travializes black people’s struggle but also black people’s history that continues to be well documented in spite of eurocentricism.

i find it very interesting that everytime i present historical facts about black people (moors)nobody but two people in this discussion intelligently comment. and now there is an idiot trying to say that i know nothing about black resitance culture when i have been trying to do my best in a white dominanted world since birth; not to mention all the blacks and latinos in new york city that support my revolutionary cause. okay now i see where most of you white boys are coming from. this does not surprise me on bit and the tone of my article is needed and i hope it inspires other people of color that have an interest in non-white “occultism” and non-white interpretations of the new world age of the mayas and aztecs. and thanks ulysses for trying to shed some light on that matter. im still working on the book which will present a new interpretation of noble drew ali, aleister crowley, palo mayombe, and obeah. i connect all these things together in a real interesting way and everything is well documented. the book is taking some time to finish so that all my points are made very clear.

Got it. Only white people can turn cultural ignorance into fear and hate of The Other, but it’s ok cause the Sun is going to kill them all anyway and we won’t have any more racism.

Thanks for clearing that up, buddy. :)

I’m not a spokesman for Padre Engo and my interest in Troy Southgate has little to nothing to do with my interest in Padre Engo. Upon further reflection, I’ve decided that I think he’s a bit more in line with the radical traditionalism of Michael Moynihan. Moynihan, by the way, has repeatedly denounced the extreme right, but of course he’s still a “fascist.” Whatever. It seems like this epithet gets applied to basically anyone in occult circles that doesn’t subscribe to sweetness and light annihilation of the self bullshit. In any event, I would ultimately argue that Engo is a man unto himself and comparisons with others are hard to draw.

It also occurs to me that many Thelemites interpret the Book of Revelations as detailing their triumph over and destruction of Christians. Where’s the outcry over that?

Right. Like homosexuals and women. Get real. Putting Jean Genet on display like a house pet and electing a woman as chairman to get the heat off of your organization seem like little more than tokenism.

While the Panthers are certainly not without their merits I find it all too typical of the Marxoid left to venerate without criticism butchers who torture their own comrades to death while throwing political swear words at people whose worst crime seems to be a poor choice of friends. A far better, but less historically glamorous, example of mass Black struggle would be the Detroit Revolutionary Union Movement and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.

when i speak of black resistance culture i am referring to shit way harder than the panthers. try the luciferian voodoo sects that inspired the hatian revolution or the maroon communities that existed in virginia’s dismal swamp around the time of the civil war. i am not the inventor of anything. only trying to keep a militant black animistic tradition alive in the 21st century by putting a new spin on it.

‘how am i “a racist?” im not a white man and i am not an american, which means i cannot be a racist! all i did was say the sun god (the true savior of the blacks!!!!) is gonna take care of an age old problem.’

Engo, by saying this you are claiming we cannot understand each other.

Tell me, what was the colour of the skin of the people who enslaved black people?

What was the colour of the skin of the people who abolished slavery for the first time in the history of the human race?

Let me break it down for your tiny mind:

Some white people were racist, and didn’t understand the injustice of slavery.

Some other white people were not racist, and finding slavery unjust, and seeing the suffering of black people, fought to abolish it.

Now I’m sure you will agree, everyone here (I hope) understands that the abolishment of slavery was a good thing, both black and white alike.

Engo, you are mired in false belief – we CAN understand each other, and we can also be friends.

Let’s all hold hands.:)

I don’t think that was ever my claim. I don’t recall accusing anyone here of being a racist, in fact I tried to avoid that. Further, I don’t see where I specifically assume that anyone here is white. Being “fresh out of tears” etc. etc. has really next to nothing to do with the race of the people involved in this discussion.

I’ll pre-empt your response of “but it was implied” by commending you on your outstanding ability to read my mind.

Right. Cuz a guy who gassed millions of Jews, Roma, homosexuals, Masons, and Jevovah’s Witnesses, and bombed half of Europe to shit is totally equivalent to a guy writing essays. Seriously, you British lefty types are really touchy.

Saw it.

Again, I think we’re comparing apples to wildebeast. I’ll direct readers the shitstorm in Louv Ron’s MegaCult here, here, and here. Readers can form their own opinion of how close Engo’s article is to Louv Ron’s lunatic rantings about ENTITY RAEPZ AND TEH VOODOO GANGS WHAT ARE OUT TO KILL ME AND STEAL ULTRACULTURE which clearly has more to do with sublimated sexual fantasies and an inflated sense of self-importance than anything grounded in, y’know, space-time.

skin cancer epidemic as Britons flock to the sun Britain’s love affair with the sun is taking a dramatic toll. As young people flock to the beach or the tanning salon, cancerous melanomas are reaching epidemic levels in some parts of the country. Mobile skin clinics are to tour the UK this summer and doctors are campaigning for paler skin to become as fashionable – and safe – as it was in Victorian times. Jo Revill reports
Jo Revill The Observer, Sunday April 27 2008 Article history
A sunbather on a beach. Applying sun cream is now essential, say scientists. Photograph: Sergio Moraes/Reuters/Corbis

When Amelia Webb walks down the aisle in 21 days’ time, her radiant appearance will be partly due to a healthy tan. But her glowing skin won’t be the result of a warm spring break in the sun: it will have come from a fake tan spraying session.

‘The idea of lying in the sun in order to go brown fills me with absolute horror,’ she said. ’ In fact, even the phrase “going brown” makes me feel queasy.’

These days the 29-year-old publishing executive is a little more careful of her skin. Webb is a survivor of melanoma, the most dangerous form of skin cancer and the disease which is now rising at a rapid rate across the UK. She is one of a growing number of young women and men who find themselves facing a disease that has a terrible prognosis

Yet she was not an avid sun-worshipper, nor is she particularly pale-skinned. ‘I would have my two weeks in the sun, like everyone else, and I would also have the occasional sunbed,’ said Webb. ‘But I wasn’t obsessive about it. I liked a healthy tan, but I tried not to burn.

Like so many young women, she put off going to the doctor for a while, although she thought the mole just below her collarbone, on her chest, looked a bit bigger. ‘It started to become a bit itchy, and that is when I worried,’ she said. ‘I finally dragged myself off to the doctor and they didn’t think there was anything wrong with it, but decided it should be excised [cut out] just for safety.’

To her distress it turned out to be malignant melanoma, and Webb was very lucky because it hadn’t spread. ‘But I keep thinking about what might have happened had I left it another few months, or gone on another Greek holiday. It was a very big shock for me and my family.’

Webb is one of the 9,000 people a year in the UK who end up with a diagnosis of melanoma, a form of skin cancer which was barely heard of 20 years ago. The disease now claims 1,800 lives a year, and is growing at a faster rate than breast or prostate cancer. Cases of what used to be called the ‘cancer noire’ have risen by almost half in a decade and quadrupled since the Seventies. Our love of the sun and a bronzed tan are creating a new epidemic of disease.

Around the world the situation is little better. Some 160,000 new cases of melanoma are diagnosed worldwide each year, and it is more frequent in men and in white-skinned people, particularly those in hot countries. Currently one in five North Americans and one in two Australians will develop some form of skin cancer in their lifetime.

It was the renowned British surgeon John Hunter who is reported to have been first to operate on a melanoma, in 1787. Unsure of precisely what he had found, the anatomist described the growth as a ‘cancerous fungous excrescence’. The excised tumour, still preserved in a cabinet in the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in London, was not identified until nearly 200 years later as an example of metastatic melanoma, a form of the cancer that had spread.

The disease is caused by the uncontrolled, sometimes frenzied, growth of pigment cells known as melanocytes which are found predominantly in skin. It is not the only form of skin cancer, nor the most common, but it is responsible for the most deaths. Those who survive the cancer have usually spotted it at a relatively early stage, and the crucial factor for doctors is the thickness of the mole, or tumour, itself. If the malignancy is diagnosed when it is still less than 1.5mm in thickness, then the chance of being alive five years after diagnosis is more than 90 per cent for both men and women, but for those whose tumours are thicker than 3.5mm, that chance falls to 52 per cent for women, and 42 per cent for men. This is because the thicker tumours have embedded themselves into the skin, and malignant cells have had a chance to spread.

Cancerous cells can break off from the tumour and move through the lymph nodes, or they can move into other organs such as the lungs or the brain, by which time it is impossible to treat. Someone such as Amelia Webb, whose tumour was just 0.4mm thick, had a good chance of recovery because the doctors were able to excise it, and then cut around some of the surviving tissue to make sure it hadn’t spread.

‘When they first removed it, they were not even sure it was a malignancy,’ she said. ‘But the tests showed it was, and then they had to take further tissue for safety.’

New research has also shown that an individual’s survival depends on where on the body the skin cancer first appears. A highly significant study of 51,704 previous melanoma cases in the US, published last week, found that melanomas occurring on the scalp or neck led to death at nearly twice the rate of melanomas on other parts of the body.

It had always been suspected that scalp and neck skin cancers had a worse prognosis because they are often diagnosed later than other forms of the disease. The new study took this delay in diagnosis into account and still showed a clear difference in survival rates.

Dr Nancy Thomas, associate professor of dermatology of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, has advised doctors to take extra care when examining patients for signs of skin cancer. ‘Only 6 per cent of melanoma patients present with the disease on the scalp or neck, but those patients account for 10 per cent of melanoma deaths. That’s why we need to take extra time to look at the scalp during full-skin examinations,’ she said.

For many years, doctors used to disregard the moles and bumps of patients that seemed to turn a strange shape. Now, the NHS has a two-week target for referring suspected skin cancers to hospital consultants. For Dr Tom Lucke, a consultant dermatologist working in Truro, Cornwall, his weekly clinic brings some sad cases, because the truth is that by the time the cancer has metastasised, or spread, there is very little anyone can do about it. Despite all the research, there is no really effective drug which can be given after surgery that would help to mop up the cancer cells.

‘We see three times the national rate of melanomas here in Cornwall, and it’s a major problem, almost an epidemic,’ said Lucke. ‘A lot of our cases are caused by the sun exposure people had in their twenties and thirties, which then turns up to give them problems later in life.’ But when Lucke goes down to his local beach, he watches young people surfing, sailing and fishing without seeing much evidence that they have understood the importance of covering up, or staying out of the midday sun.

‘I don’t know that the messages about safe sun levels are really getting through. The truth is that, if we pick it up early, then it is possible to make a complete recovery. But once it has spread and invaded other organs, then it isn’t treatable. The outlook is grim, and palliative care becomes the only option.’

As a member of the British Association of Dermatologists, Lucke would like to see some more sensible messages getting out to the public. ‘The group with the worst prognosis is middle-aged and older men, and their cancers are likely to be on their backs, which of course they don’t check. So we need to start asking women to check their husbands’ backs for suspicious moles. It’s simple and it works.’

Although more women than men get melanoma, more men die from it because they do not seek help quickly enough. Dr Ian Banks, president of the Men’s Health Forum, who is also a GP, said: ‘Men go to see a doctor later rather than sooner, and many men are dying unnecessarily because of that.’ He pointed out that men get burnt more often because they don’t wear sun cream. ‘They also get sunburnt through their shirts when they are at football matches because the replica shirts are so thin.’

According to official estimates, a 10 per cent decrease in the ozone layer would create an additional 300,000 non-melanoma, and 4,500 melanoma skin cancers could be expected worldwide each year.

In Britain the effects of climate change are also wide-ranging, and alarming. A report recently published by the Health Protection Agency warned of a ‘high’ risk by 2012 of a severe heatwave leading to 3,000 immediate deaths, followed by a further 6,350 fatalities from conditions such as heart failure and cancers. But it also pointed out that skin cancer rates could triple over the next 20 to 30 years, as the increased exposure to sunlight takes its toll and as we fail to adapt to a shifting world.

Much of the damage to our skin may be happening before we are even aware of it. It seems to be children who are the most vulnerable, as they are at a higher risk of suffering damage from exposure to ultra-violet radiation than adults. Their skin is thinner and more sensitive, and even a short time outdoors can result in a red and sore burn. Long-term population studies have shown that episodes of sunburn in childhood also set the stage for high rates of melanoma later in life. As about 80 per cent of a person’s lifetime exposure to UV is received before the age of 18, covering up children is crucially important for parents.

Should families and others not be aware now of the dangers of the sun, given that we have had more than a decade of campaigns warning about sunburn? Professor Lesley Rhodes, a photo-dermatologist who works at the University of Manchester hospital trust, said: ‘I don’t think it is ignorance. I think that there is still a large number of people who ignore the evidence. The information is out there, but perhaps it isn’t convincing enough to make them change their behaviour. Perhaps we have to get more sophisticated in our approach and use different images. We could explain, for example, that too much sun ages the skin even faster than smoking does.’

Rhodes, whose work is funded by Cancer Research UK, is also worried about sunbeds, which are also increasingly being targeted as dangerous. More than 100 deaths from skin cancer every year in Britain are thought to be linked to the use of the machines, which came into the high streets during the Eighties as a deep tan became extremely fashionable, like the mahogany hue of George Michael in his Wham! days.

The accepted health advice in Britain is that the under-16s and fair-skinned adults who burn easily should never use a sunbed. The proposals from the Health and Safety Executive, produced last week, came as experts estimated that 170,000 children in the UK have used a sunbed. In Scotland, which has high rates of melanoma, a new law to ban under-18s from using sunbeds is set to be passed by the Holyrood parliament.

‘Sunbeds need to be far better controlled, and run by people who know what they are doing,’ said Rhodes. ‘If we are going to start defeating this disease, it is really about altering our behaviour.’ If the first priority is to change our attitude to the sun, then the second surely has to be encouraging people to spot the first signs of the cancer.

This summer, the BBC Gardener’s World Live show in Birmingham will host an unusual kind of medical event. It will be the UK’s largest ever ‘free mole check’, with a team of consultant dermatologists offering visitors a quick examination of any suspicious moles, bumps or freckles.

The same kind of ‘radical action’ will take place at Glastonbury as well as at the music festival T4 on the Beach at Weston-super-Mare, and even the more upmarket Badminton horse trials.

The approach marks a radically different approach to diagnosing the condition. Today melanomas are diagnosed only after they become visible on the skin. In the future, however, physicians will hopefully be able detect melanomas based on a patient’s genotype, not just on his or her skin colour.

If doctors could identify people with high-risk genotypes, they might then also be able to determine which of a person’s moles have the greatest chance of becoming cancerous.

It was Coco Chanel who first started the fashion of being tanned. In the Twenties, she came back from a holiday on the Duke of Westminster’s yacht in the South of France with a deep tan, prompting the country’s fashionable women to throw away their parasols and do the same. A tan had always been a clear definer of class, but from that point on, it started to separate the paler servants from a healthier leisured class – an exact reversal of how a tan had been interpreted for hundreds of years previously. The question is now whether society can adapt again, to start to see the permatanned as undesirable, unhealthy, and most important of all, unhip.

Denise Van Outen, a role model for lots of girls, has been one of those who warned recently about the risks of sunbeds. Her face was blemished with brown spots as a result of using them as a teenager.

Van Outen, who started out on the Big Breakfast Show and won acclaim in the musical Chicago, said: ‘I used a sunbed when I was 18 because I did not know the risks, but I’m paying for it now. It’s my big regret.’ Her ‘tanorexia’, as the obsession has been nicknamed, left her with pigmentation scars on her face and marks on her cheeks and brow. She now wears heavy make-up to cover the damage done by the tanning-booth sessions.

‘Girls are still using sunbeds, they are still risking skin cancer for a tan. But they should know that tans fade and it’s not worth the risk.’