Bielh: Ecofascism: (3)

Revelation, Reason, intuition: how we know the world and what is true decides for us what we will accept as Truth. If the Qur'an is the revealed truth, then we will be very different people from those who follow the scientific method of discovering truth; and in turn, if we follow our inner children to tell us what is true, we will be something altogether different again from others who do not follow that line of irrationalism. Our epistemological positions make our very lives with our neighbours a difficult thing to live with in light of the threat of world-wide jihad being waged against us and our triune revolutions of Modernity. That is so because if many or most believe that truth is something one finds in tarot cards or horoscopes or from the movies or out of the clear blue sky, then we will face our allies who are no help to us in our struggle to defeat the jihadis, and in fact, we might find that they are against us in that struggle, they feeling that Islam is the religion of peace and we are Right wing religious bigots who want to rule the world for some evil purpose.

Most people don't examine their deepest opinions very closely or carefully. We mostly know right from wrong, good from bad, quality from poverty simply on the face of it. We don't go into deep detailed examination because there's no obvious need to do so. And often the smarter we are the less we examine our opinions and attitudes, knowing that we're smart enough to know on the face of it this from that. That leaves those of us who aren't so smart to puzzle over the simplest thing. Ecology? I don't get it. So I look at it. This is what I find.
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Anthroposophy and the World League for the Protection of Life
Political parties like these have an assortment of 'Old' Right -- that is, Nazi -- connections upon which they may draw in their search for 'ecological' modernization. One such connection is the World League for the Protection of Life (Weltbund Schutz des Lebens, or WSL). This group is not without a certain general appeal in the Federal Republic, since its outlook is based on Anthroposophy, a body of occult ideas formulated earlier in this century by Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925). Steiner, the leading German figure in the nineteenth-century esoteric 'wisdom' cult Theosophy, founded the German Theosophical Society; he went on to found his own doctrine, Anthroposophy, and the Anthroposophical Society thereafter. He wrote many books on his occult spiritualistic philosophy.

Anthroposophy holds a particular attraction in the German counterculture today, as it did in the völkisch movement of the 1920s. The Waldorf Schools, for example, were founded on Steiner's educational principles and are respectable in many German and American countercultural circles. (There are more than sixty in the Federal Republic today.) Founded by Steiner in 1920, they provide children with an alternative, reformed education, one that is free from aggression and from pressures to achieve, one that places emphasis on the musical aspects of life and on feelings over understanding. Steiner is also the founder of biodynamic farming, a form of organic agriculture that does without pesticides and tries to foster a more organic relationship between cultivator and soil. Biodynamic agriculturists today produce a line of organic foods under the brand name Demeter and a line of cosmetics under the name Weleda. Many people have been and continue to be innocently attracted to these efforts and to Anthroposophy without any notion of the less savory aspects of Steiner's work.

Yet not all of Steiner's beliefs were benignly ecospiritual. For one thing, Anthroposophy classifies humanity into 'root races' in an esoteric evolutionary theory. 24 Building on a similar doctrine in Theosophy, the root-race theory is integral to Anthroposophy's cosmology. According to this doctrine, a series of root races of human beings evolved sequentially over the millennia, each superior to the ones that preceded it, each with a higher level of development of self-consciousness. The first two root races, the Polar and Hyperborean, were 'astral-etheric'; they are now extinct -- the evolutionary process superseded them. The next people to evolve were a bit higher, but they were still half animal, purely instinctive, lacking the capacity for conceptual thought and memory. The fourth root race finally began to be recognizably human; finally came the Atlantans, to which Europeans belong. The European whites, as the most highly developed so far, are at the summit of the hierarchical scale of humanity; they have brought everything that is good to humanity, since they "are the only ones who have developed humanity within themselves." 25 These various races have been mostly killed off in various catastrophes of one kind or another, after which only certain people -- presumably the fittest -- survived; "in the case of the inferior kinds of human beings," wrote Steiner, ". . . the life body was not sufficiently protected to enable it to withstand the Luciferic influence." 26 There are numerous subdivisions within these basic root races. Blacks, for example, must live in Africa, we learn, a land of much heat and light; blacks soak up this heat and light, and their brains are specially constructed to process it; their supposed highly instinctual nature results from all this processing.

And since the sun, light, and heat are retained in his epidermis, [the black's] whole metabolism proceeds as if he were being cooked inside himself by the sun. From this results his instinctive life. Within the black, he is continuously being cooked, and what stokes this fire is his posterior brain. 27

Once blacks emigrate out of Africa, the balance of light and heat is different, and therefore they will die out -- "they are in fact a declining race, they will die out of their own nature, since they are receiving too little light and heat." 28 Such a theory would justify accelerating the extinction of races since they are presumably going to die off anyway. In the future, wrote Steiner in 1909, certain people who have not reached a "high level of development" will incline toward evil: "The laggard souls will have accumulated in their karma so much error, ugliness, and evil that there will form, for the time being, a special union of evil and aberrant human beings who voluntarily oppose the community of good men." 29

Perhaps this root-race theory was what appealed to Rudolf Hess about Anthroposophy, for he became an Anthroposophist. As Ditfurth points out, "The root-race ideology of the Theosophists and the Anthroposophists melded seamlessly into the National Socialist idea of the purity of the 'Aryan race.'"30 Certainly Steiner's ideas on biodynamic farming influenced some National Socialists. Anthroposophical ideas are eminently usable by ecofascists today, and there is a strong right wing within the Anthroposophists that is closely connected with the ultra-right. Author Günther Bartsch is an Anthroposophist who is also a National Revolutionary of the Solidarist variety; the author of an adulatory 1989 biography of Otto Strasser, he attempts in his publications to synthesize ecological themes based on Steiner's ideas with Strasser's political ideas. 31 It should be noted that Anthroposophy is also well funded by huge multinational corporations like Siemens and Bertelsmann. 32

Among the ultra-right adherents of Anthroposophy today are officials of the World League for the Protection of Life (WSL), a small but influential and very wealthy environmental organization in the Federal Republic. The garden at its educational center is cultivated according to biodynamic methods, and visitors are served organic refreshments. Yet this organization was founded in 1958 by former members of the National Socialist party, and today it links protection of 'life' (that is, 'right-to-life') themes and the environment with racism and a revival of völkisch ideology. The 'life' it is most interested in protecting is of course German 'life'; thus the WSL is rabidly anti-abortion, believing that German women should be devoted to giving birth to 'Aryan' babies.

The spiritual leader of the WSL and its key figure for most of its history has been Werner Georg Haverbeck. Born in 1909, Haverbeck became an active Nazi at an early age; it should be recalled that Nazism was largely a youth movement, so that members like Haverbeck are still alive. 33 Haverbeck joined the SA in 1928 and from 1929 to 1932 was a member of the Reich Administration for the National Socialist Student League (Reichsleitung der NSDAP-Studentenschaft) and a leader of the Reich Youth Leadership of the Hitler Youth (Reichjugendführung der Hitlerjugend). He served as a leading official of the Strength Through Joy organization, which controlled recreational activities under the Third Reich; in 1933 Rudolf Hess saw to it that Haverbeck's passport was stamped "This man is not to be arrested." He survived the Röhm purge to help organize the Nuremberg Party Congress and join Hess's staff. It was Hess who converted him to Anthroposophy. During the war he conducted radio propaganda in Denmark and worked in South America; by the end of the war he was an officer. 34

After the Allies rudely aborted Haverbeck's many efforts on behalf of the Third Reich, he contented himself for a time working as a pastor for the Anthroposophical Christian community. He founded an educational center called the Collegium Humanum in 1963, where today ecofascist, esoteric, völkisch, Anthroposophist, neopagan, and primitivist groups meet and hold workshops. He co-founded the WSL and served as its president from 1974 to 1982. In 1981, he was a signatory of the notorious Heidelberg Manifesto, a document drawn up by a group of professors to warn the German people of the dangers that immigration posed to them. Its first draft began:

With great concern we observe the subversion of the German people through the influx of many millions of foreigners and their families, the foreignization of our language, our culture, and our nationhood. . . . Already many Germans have become foreigners in their living districts and workplaces, and thus in their own Heimat.35

Routine as this language may sound now, when opposition to immigration in the Federal Republic is much more tolerated and neofascists pander to it relentlessly, the Manifesto had to be toned down at the time (1981) because of the public outcry it raised.

In accordance with Anthroposophical root-race beliefs, Haverbeck is notable for propounding the thesis that the two world wars in this century in fact constituted a thirty years' war waged by foreign aggressors against the German people and their spiritual life. Apparently, German spiritual life stood in the way of "the strivings for world domination by the Anglo-Saxon race," behind which lay "the intensive image of a call to world dominance, like the old Jewish consciousness." Indeed, Haverbeck maintains, the two world wars amounted to a conspiracy against the German people and spiritual life. It is a "historical lie" that the Nazis ran "mass-murder camps," argues Haverbeck, and is actually "enemy propaganda." It was Russia that was the aggressor in the Second World War. 36

In his 1989 book Rudolf Steiner: Advocate for Germany, Haverbeck lauds Steiner (who died in 1925) for understanding the existence of this ongoing conspiracy early on.

During the first world war, Rudolf Steiner delivered a multitude of lectures about contemporary history, and he toiled inexhaustibly for the truth about the question of "war guilt." . . . Steiner presented his listeners with maps that showed that goals that had been proclaimed back in 1889 were being fulfilled [during World War I]. These maps anticipated the separation of Central Europe that would be ultimately achieved with the loss of East Germany. . . . What was not fully achieved through the Versailles treaty in 1919 was in fact completed in 1945: the demolition of Germany. . . . The leading forces of both parties to the cold war were united in this common struggle against spiritual Germany. "This war [World War I] was a conspiracy against German spiritual life," said Steiner. 37

When Haverbeck's book on Steiner's nationalism was published, it caused an outcry of protest among outraged countercultural Anthroposophists who send their children to Waldorf Schools, use Demeter products, and are in no way racists or fascists. Yet as researcher Wölk points out, their protests were unwarranted, since Haverbeck was only presenting Steiner as what he actually was -- "a crude nationalist whose demonizations were shared by the völkisch groups of his day" -- to show his usefulness for nationalist and neofascist groups today. 38

This alleged conspiracy against German spiritual life pervades much of the WSL's current thinking, notes Wölk. WSLers consider the "flood of asylum-seekers," the destruction of the environment, and the ongoing transformation of the Federal Republic into a multicultural society to be part of the spiritual war against the Germans. They regard the protection of the environment as part of the protection of a people, of its biological "substance" and its national identity. Indeed, WSLers see the battle for a healthy environment as part of the all-encompassing spiritual struggle against the homogenizing forces of modernity and "Western civilization." Haverbeck's wife, Ursula Haverbeck-Wetzel, another former WSL president who "for religious reasons refuses to dissociate herself from any human being, including Adolf Hitler," 39 observes:

Whenever a person comes to feel that he belongs to the cultural strain that is deeply rooted in his people which has not only a material existence but a spiritual reality that is superior to the material plane -- he has broken out from being a manipulated consumer. He has escaped the mass homogenization of completely manipulated people who are "amusing themselves to death" (as Neil Postman put it), which is the goal of "One World" advocates, intent on power and domination. The person who is faithful to his religious convictions and attentive and caring to his culture and customs, they consider dangerous. 40

Ernst Otto Cohrs, the WSL's president since 1989, is another devotee of Rudolf Steiner, having been an Anthroposophist since 1961. Today Cohrs's interests seem to lie in promulgating race theories, and publishing and distributing anti-Semitic literature. In 1982, an official of the WSL's Bavarian chapter made a public issue of Cohrs's activities inside the WSL. He wrote a letter to a WSL membership assembly saying that it should dissociate itself from Cohrs because, among other things, he was sending anti-Semitic literature to WSL members, running advertisements in ultra-right magazines like Bauernschaft (the journal of the notorious Holocaust-denier Thies Christophersen), permitting neofascist periodicals to reprint WSL leaflets, and himself distributing such writings as There Were No Gas Chambers and The Auschwitz Myth.41 Many members withdrew from the WSL as a result of this letter; those who remained were overwhelmingly those who shared Cohrs's anti-Semitic ideas and were not disposed to contradict him. Among them was Baldur Springmann, the 'ecofarmer' who was involved in the Greens in the early days, whose book Partner Erde (Partner Earth) was published by an ultra-right publisher (Arndt Verlag), and who writes for the 'New' Right publication Nation Europa; and Dr. Arnold Neugebohrn, a Republican candidate for the provincial legislature who takes pride in his NSDAP 'gold medal.' Concludes Wölk, "The internal crisis caused by Cohrs's activities in 1981-82 may have diminished the ranks of the WSL, but it also strengthened the WSL's neofascist orientation." Cohrs's current activities are still primarily the dissemination of Holocaust-denial literature. 42

One collective member of the WSL is a Hamburg-based organization known as the Society for Biological Anthropology, Eugenics, and Behavioral Research (Gesellschaft für biologische Anthropologie, Eugenik, und Verhaltensforschung, or GfbAEV), whose head is Jürgen Rieger, a "neo-Nazi in lawyer's robes" (as the newspaper Die Zeit called him) who is currently defending two fascist groups that the Federal Republic banned in 1992; one of the GfbAEV's fellows is the leading ideologue of the French Nouvelle Droite, Alain de Benoist. Its periodical is the notorious quarterly journal Neue Anthropologie, which maintains, among other things, that there has always been environmental destruction in the history of humanity, that in fact one could even say this was part of human nature were it not for one sole exception:

Only the Germans were different. In pagan times they worshipped groves and trees, and because of their closeness to nature, they had a caring orientation toward nature. Even the love of animals is much more pronounced among the Germanic peoples than it is, for example, among the Romance-language- speaking peoples. It is thus no coincidence that even today the most stalwart environmentalist efforts -- private as well as state -- are those conducted by peoples who have a larger proportion of the Nordic race. 43
http://www.spunk.org/library/places/germany/sp001630/janet.html
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Addendum on Steiner
We'll continue with one more piece from Biehl's excellent essay in a coming post. We'll see how our opinions are manipulated by fascists till we become sympathetic to fascism without realizing it. It doesn't mean we are bad people, and much of ecology and fascism is not as bad as the cliche would have it. But to know clearly what's good and what's bad about fascism we must know exactly what we're getting into when we accept ecology as a positive opinion we hold personally. Some of ecology leads us and our neighbours to mouth other unexamined opinions, such as "Islam is the religion of peace." Tat comes to us more easily, even naturally if we don't know why we say so and if it fits in comfortably with other dhimmi cliches such as those about ecology and multiculturalism.

Below we have parts of a longer essay on Rudoph Steiner, these dealing with anti-Semitism and racism.

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Peter Staudenmaier

Anthroposophy and its Defenders Reply to Peter Normann Waage, Humanism and Polemical Populism
Anthroposophy and Ecofascism has sparked a debate within Scandinavian humanist circles, with some humanists like Peter Normann Waage lining up to defend Anthroposophy as a harmless variant of humanism. ¹⁾ While we are encouraged by this long overdue debate, we are troubled by the degree of historical naiveté it has revealed. Waage's perspective seems to represent a view that is fairly widespread among educated and well-intentioned people. We hope that we can contribute to a more accurate view of the political implications of anthroposophy by correcting several of the misconceptions exemplified by Waage's reply. Although Waage has nothing to say about the article's main topic, the systematic collusion between organized anthroposophy and the so-called "green wing" of German fascism, he does raise several issues that lie at the core of that collusion. Waage would have us believe that Rudolf Steiner was a principled anti-racist, that he opposed private property, rejected militarism and nationalism, and was a staunch adversary of Nazism. These claims are not simply untrue; they betray a surprising unfamiliarity with Steiner's published work and a profound misunderstanding of anthroposophy's political history.

[....]

Antisemitism

Waage reminds readers of Humanist that Steiner "at the end of the century was involved in 'the Association Against Anti-Semitism'." Indeed, Steiner was a friend of Ludwig Jacobowski, an employee of the Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus (Society for Protection Against Antisemitism). The association with Jacobowski, however, does not speak well for Steiner's confused attitude toward anti-Semitism. In fact, a look at Jacobowski's writings on Jewish affairs shows that it was a familiar appeal to German nationalism which drew Steiner's attention. Jacobowski advocated the "complete assimilation" of Jews to what he called the "German spirit," and his best-known work, Werther der Jude, "can easily be read as . . . an antisemitic text." (Ritchie Robertson, The 'Jewish Question' in German Literature 1749-1939, Oxford 1999, p. 279) In a much-discussed pamphlet attacking a prominent antisemitic agitator, Hermann Ahlwardt, Jacobowski called Ahlwardt "un-German" (and also accused him of being a Social Democrat); the same pamphlet spoke of "an honorable anti-Semitism" in contrast to Ahlwardt's variety, and declared in assimilationist-patriotic style that "a young Jewish generation is being prepared which is German and feels German." (All quotes from Sanford Ragins, Jewish Responses to Anti-Semitism in Germany, 1870-1914, Cincinnati 1980, pp. 43-44) Jacobowski also referred to some of the anti-Jewish arguments put forth by pan-German antisemites as "important and correct" (Jacobowski quoted in Fred Stern, Ludwig Jacobowski, Darmstadt 1966, p. 159). One of the leading scholars on the topic, Ismar Schorsch, describes Jacobowski's position thus: "Anti-Semitism is indeed based upon fact and can only be overcome by a drastic ethical reformation of the entire Jewish community." Schorsch comments: "The response to anti-Semitism of this alienated Jew [Jacobowski] was thus marked by extreme vacillation between criticism of his coreligionists and defiant reaffirmation of Judaism." (Schorsch, Jewish Reactions to German Anti-Semitism, 1870-1914, New York 1972, pp. 47 and 95). Steiner himself emphasized Jacobowski's exclusive commitment to German culture and believed that his friend had "long since outgrown Jewishness" (Steiner quoted in Moses and Schöne, editors, Juden in der deutschen Literatur, Frankfurt 1986, p. 200). This is hardly a convincing testament to Steiner's pro-Jewish sympathies.

What Waage doesn't mention is that throughout his life Steiner consorted with notoriously bitter antisemites and was by his own account on entirely friendly terms with them. The passages in Mein Lebensgang on his relationship with Heinrich von Treitschke, for example, are straightforwardly admiring of this towering figure on the German right, who was the foremost intellectual ally of militant anti-Semitism (Treitschke coined the Nazi slogan "The Jews are our misfortune"). Steiner never so much as mentions Treitschke's infamous stance on the "Jewish question." The same is true of Steiner's appraisals of Haeckel and Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, among others. In fact it is abundantly clear from Steiner's own writings on the subject that he had an extremely rudimentary understanding of anti-Semitism and that he was himself beholden to a wide variety of antisemitic stereotypes, which he frequently broadcast to his followers.¹¹⁾ On more than one occasion he expressed the wish "that Jewry as a people would simply cease to exist" (Steiner, Geschichte der Menschheit, Dornach 1968, p. 189 and elsewhere). This wish was consistent with Steiner's categorical rejection of the Jewish people's right to existence: "Jewry as such has long since outlived its time; it has no more justification within the modern life of peoples, and the fact that it continues to exist is a mistake of world history whose consequences are unavoidable. We do not mean the forms of the Jewish religion alone, but above all the spirit of Jewry, the Jewish way of thinking." (Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Literatur, GA 32, p. 152) It would seem that Waage's portrait of Steiner as an opponent of nationalism and anti-Semitism is at odds with the facts.

Racism

Waage believes that Steiner "cannot justly be called a racist" and that anthroposophy's peculiar philosophy of root-races constitutes "a sound anti-racist view." To support these claims Waage tells us that "already in 1909" Steiner "stopped using" the terms "root race" and "Aryan." Waage seems to be rather confused about the chronology here. 1909 is the year that Steiner first published the collection Aus der Akasha-Chronik, his most thorough presentation of the root race doctrine in all its fantastic detail. This book remains to the present day the primary source for anthroposophy's worldview, with no distancing whatsoever toward its racist elements. The editor's foreword to the current edition, published in Dornach, doesn't so much as mention the book's racist content, much less try to explain or minimize it; and the Anthroposophical Society continues to officially designate the book one of the "fundamental anthroposophist texts" (Wolfram Groddeck, Eine Wegleitung durch die Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe, Dornach 1979, p. 16). Nor did Steiner himself ever renounce it; on the contrary, in 1925 he called Aus der Akasha-Chronik the "basis of anthroposophist cosmology" (Mein Lebensgang, original ed., p. 301). Today the book is still officially recommended for use by Waldorf teachers.

In 1910 - that is, after Waage claims Steiner had "stopped using" the terminology of root races and Aryans - Steiner gave the lectures in Oslo which served as the opening device for Anthroposophy and Ecofascism. The Norway lecture cycle on "national souls" was revised and edited by Steiner in 1918 and published in book form that same year. The term "root race" is used throughout this book. The fifth chapter, Steiner's lecture in Oslo from June 12, 1910, is titled "The Five Root Races of Mankind", and refers to the racial superiority of "the Aryans" (Steiner, The Mission of the Individual Folk Souls in Relation to Teutonic Mythology, London 1970, p. 106). ¹²⁾ But Waage would no doubt complain that we have taken Steiner's unequivocal words "out of context" if we did not go on to mention that the book also contains these curious sentences: "Since all men in their different incarnations pass through the various races the claim that the European is superior to the black and yellow races has no real validity. In such cases the truth is sometimes veiled, but you see that with the help of Spiritual Science we do after all light upon remarkable truths." (ibid. p. 76)

Aside from the vexing question of just what that ominous reference to "veiled truth" is supposed to mean - do black and yellow skins "veil" an inner truth? - this passage can only be interpreted as anti-racist if one accepts the anthroposophist version of "Spiritual Science," and the sentence makes no sense at all unless one believes in reincarnation. Moreover, any anti-racist interpretation of this passage is immediately contradicted by the context which Waage thinks Anthroposophy and Ecofascism systematically obscured. On the page directly before the above quote, Steiner prints a diagram showing Africa on the bottom, Asia in the middle, and Europe on top, and on the same page he explains that the "Negro race" is tied to humanity's childhood, "the yellow and brown races" to adolescence, and Europeans to adulthood and maturity. Steiner then insists that this racially stratified hierarchy "is simply a universal law" and indeed a product of inescapable destiny: "The forces which determine man's racial character follow this cosmic pattern. The American Indians died out, not because of European persecutions, but because they were destined to succumb to those forces which hastened their extinction." (ibid. p. 76 � the very same page as the quote which to Waage represents "a sound anti-racist view.")

Thus we can see that Waage's claim that Steiner rejected the ideology of root races and Aryan supremacy is flatly untrue, and that Steiner's occasional trite phrases about the spiritual insignificance of race are obviously disingenuous.¹³⁾ But have his anthroposophist followers managed to free themselves from their master's xenophobic prejudices? ¹⁴⁾ The article already offered numerous examples of the continuing virulence of racist thinking within contemporary anthroposophy, but let us examine one further instance which highlights Waage's indefensible claims. One of Steiner's early devout followers was Ernst Uehli, a teacher at the original Waldorf school and an officer of the Anthroposophical Society. In anthroposophist circles Uehli is regarded as an outstanding anti-fascist; Uwe Werner makes special mention of him as having been "extremely critical" of National Socialism (Werner, Anthroposophen in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus, Munich 1999, 97).

In reality Uehli was an ugly racist, an Aryan supremacist and antisemite with a marked penchant for blood-and-soil ideology. In 1926 he published a book on "Nordic-Germanic Mythology" and dedicated it to the recently deceased Steiner, who is quoted and referred to constantly throughout the book. Uehli uses the terms "root races" and "Aryan" repeatedly (Ernst Uehli, Nordisch-Germanische Mythologie als Mysteriengeschichte, Stuttgart 1965, 134-144). Why would a close follower of Steiner continue to promote ideas that the master had supposedly renounced? But Uehli doesn't content himself with simply repeating the anthroposophist orthodoxy on root races and Aryan superiority; he constructs a grand historical-evolutionary-racial narrative in which the two rival forces, separated throughout the millennia by their fundamentally different racial makeup, are "the Semitic and the Aryan peoples" (ibid. 144). But whereas "the early Germans were a people of nature" and thus pure and strong, "the Jews succumbed to Ahriman" (ibid. 147; "Ahriman" is the anthroposophist term for demonic forces that promote materialism). Alongside the world-historical struggle between the nature-loving Aryans and the materialistic and diabolical Jews, Uehli notes that there are still a few "primitive peoples that are dying out" as a result of cosmic necessity, since they are nothing more than the "decadent remnants" of an earlier root race (ibid. 135).

One might think that latter-day anthroposophists would be sensible enough to quietly ignore such repellent racist nonsense from their not so distant past. But in the year 2000 Uehli's works were still part of the officially recommended curriculum for Waldorf teachers in both Germany and the United States. This fact sparked yet another public scandal around anthroposophist racism when a book of Uehli's about Atlantis, evidently even more offensive than the one we've quoted, was brought to public attention earlier this year. The German youth ministry responded by putting the book on its index of racist literature. If even German government bureaucrats have no trouble recognizing anthroposophy's racist content, why does Waage stubbornly deny it? Anthroposophy's ongoing racist legacy has led to public investigations in the Netherlands, Switzerland, France and Belgium as well. Limits of space prevent us from elaborating on this crucial topic, but interested readers can consult the outstanding treatment of the German case by Peter Bierl in his Wurzelrassen, Erzengel und Volksgeister. Die Anthroposophie Rudolf Steiners und die Waldorfpädagogik (Konkret Literatur Verlag, Hamburg (1999).

http://www.waldorfcritics.org/active/articles/anthroposophy_criticism.htm

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Our next installment will be the last from this essay. We'll look at ecology in later posts, examining the early years from Haeckel to Darre and Hiedegger. Please join us.

Bielh: Ecofascism (2) NPD

How do we know anything? We rely on our senses for the most part, but once we find out that our senses deceive us at least sometimes we must rely on other ways of knowing; and then, what about things our senses cannot explain to us? What about death? How do we know about what happens to dead people? We rely on other ways of knowing to think about these kinds of questions, not on our senses at all. We rely, many of us, on revelation to explain these mysteries. How do we know the answers we receive are true? We don't. We rely on the signs from above, and when they don't make sense to us we rely on interpreters to explain the meaning of those mysterious signs, on priests and shamans and seers and such. It's revelation and authority that tell us things we cannot otherwise know but must have some answer to. And religion, throughout most of Human history, has, in its various manifestations, answered and explained, well or ill, who knows.

Some, looking at the same questions of mystery, looked at the way of things from a non-mysterious viewpoint, and they became philosophers some of them. In turn, some philosophers became scientists, relying not on revelation and authority but on observation, empiricism, informal logic, deduction, induction, evidence, testing for reproducibility and falsifiability: Reason, rationality. Religion they left behind.

And in leaving behind religion, what did this new and strange lot of thinkers leave the world's people? Not much, according to those who found themselves facing a world and life therein as a cold and empty experience of banality and cosmic worthlessness. Science did people no favours by making life materially more comfortable when with the other hand it took away the meaning of life itself.

Here are two words that mean binding: religion and fascis.

Without religion one is not bound to God. Without being bound to a group one is an individual, at best. When one is bound to neither God nor man one is an animal, perhaps. Or a scientist.

For those geniuses who reject revelation and reason there is Romance. For those who have no ties to Life and Man there is the unfettered phantasies of the mind to give meaning to existence, and the Romantic goes for it full tilt. Ecology is Romance gone crazy. Forget God, forget reason, and reify Mother Nature. Be one with the universe if you have no ties that bind. Those for whom there is no open electric paradise let them celebrate diversity and sustainability and the organic. Let them eat Romance.

Romance is a fascism for the atheist. The group is the tie, the volk, the land, the great leader who knows all, the genius who is in touch with his feelings, in harmony with the universe, our guru, the noble savage who lives in a state of nature, the Palestinians. Ecologists. Left dhimmi fascists who fight for the rights of the People and the Land. It's no mistake that Nazis are ecologists. It's mistaken ecologists who become Nazis. No hyperbole here.

Ecologists are not Nazis just because they're ecologists, and ecologists aren't bad just because they're ecologists. We have some deep concerns about the very concept of ecology, but not because we hate rabbits and chickens and like chopping down old trees for the sake of making a wasteland. Ecology makes some sense from a rational point of view. In many ways it's what we might term a good thing. But it's not the only thing, or even important over all. It's about dirt and water and air and material stuff that simply is. It's about animals and birds, none of whom are our friends, though some are pets. Ecology. It's about us.

There has to be some reasonableness in our approach to material conservation of nature and also to its aesthetic appeal. And reason means in this case attitude. We have to step back from ourselves momentarily to ask why we hold the ecological opinions we do, most being based on nothing more than attitude. Our attitude is that nature is a good thing. But what's objective about that? Nary a thing. We look at nature sentimentally, liking it from a distance so long as it doesn't mean cancer-- also a very natural thing. We sentimentalize nature because.... Who knows why? Why? Because everybody else does. Because it looks good depicted in oil paint on velvet. Who knows why? It's irrational and stupid. Loving nature is silly and reserved for pampered suburbanites in the West, and then again for fascists full-blown. Ecology is a German fascist invention, as we've shown here previously. But that doesn't mean that just because we enjoy hiking or camping in the wilderness or that we wish to preserve some old growth forests or what have you that we are Nazis. No, it doesn't mean that. But it means something to be an environmentalist, and ecologist, a nature lover. It doesn't mean necessarily what we might like to think it means. We, in our innocence, can have some very unhealthy ideas, not realizing that what we hold as attitudes are at base disturbing, violent, and hateful.

We begin this essay with a look at the man who coined the term "ecology." What we miss there is that he was an insane anti-Semite. We'll cover that later, this already being roughly eight typed pages.

Below also is the second installment of the Janet Biehl essay on ecofascism. We pay special attention to the slippery slope of irrationality and the manipulative side of ecologism to show that what we take as a pretty surface can lead to falling into a dark pit in the end.

We ended our look at ecofascism last post with Horst Mahler joining the NPD. Below we'll look closer at the party he's joined. We'll see that ecology is a fascist epistemology, though again we say that not all environmentalists are Nazis, though all Nazis are environmentalists.
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Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel ( February 16, 1834 — August 8, 1919), also written von Haeckel, was a German biologist and philosopher who popularized Charles Darwin's work in Germany. Haeckel was a physician, an accomplished artist and illustrator, and later a professor of comparative anatomy. He was one of the first to consider psychology as a branch of physiology. He also proposed many now ubiquitous terms including " phylum" and " ecology." His chief interests lay in evolution and life development processes in general, including development of nonrandom form, which culminated in the beautifully illustrated Kunstformen der Natur (Art forms of nature).

Haeckel advanced the "recapitulation theory" which proposed a link between ontogeny (development of form) and phylogeny (evolutionary descent), summed up in the phrase "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny". He supported the theory with embryo drawings that have been shown to be inaccurate and the theory has been largely discredited.

Haeckel was also known for his "biogenic theory", in which he suggested that the development of races paralleled the development of individuals. He advocated the idea that "primitive" races were in their infancies and needed the "supervision" and "protection" of more "mature" societies. He extrapolated a new religion or philosophy called Monism from evolutionary science. In Monism, all economics, politics, and ethics are reduced to "applied biology." His writings and lectures on Monism provided scientific (or quasi-scientific) justifications for racism, nationalism and social darwinism. It has even been argued that monism thus became the de facto religion of Nazi Germany. Some scholars disagree, arguing that Nazi ideology was not comfortable with evolutionary theory, which argues for a common descent of all human races.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Haeckel
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Neofascist 'Ecology'

Ecology is warped for mystical-nationalist ends by a whole series of neofascist groups and parties. Indeed, so multifarious are the ecofascist parties that have arisen, and so much do their memberships overlap, that they form what antifascist researcher Volkmar Wölk calls an "ecofascist network." 8 Their programmatic literature often combines ecology and nationalism in ways that are designed to appeal to people who do not consider themselves fascists, while at the same time they ideologically support neo-Nazi street-fighting skinheads who commit acts of violence against foreigners.

National Revolutionaries

The National Revolutionaries (NRs) manipulatively mix themes of left and right in their uses of nationalism and ecology, in an attempt to cross ideological lines. They draw on an old tenet of right-wing dissent in Germany -- the belief that a 'Third Way' between capitalism and socialism is necessary and that Germany is predestined to lead humankind toward it. 10 The NRs' 'Third Way' is based on nationalism, a socialism "of the specific national way" 11 -- in short, a 'national socialism.' A wing of the NRs today, called the Solidaristen, identifies itself with the Strasser brothers, two 1920s Nazi Party members who took the 'Socialism' in 'National Socialism' seriously and represented the 'left' anticapitalist wing of the Nazis. Today, the Solidaristen and other NRs regard Otto Strasser in particular as the 'Trotsky of National Socialism' because of his 1920s intraparty power struggle with Hitler; Hitler's ejection of this fascist in 1930 was, for them, a betrayal of National Socialism.

Today's leading NR ideologist, Henning Eichberg, calls for the assertion of "national identity" and a "liberation nationalism." Seeking to appeal to left and right, NR publications have supported national liberation movements from across the traditional political spectrum, including the Irish, Basques, Ukrainians, and Afghans, as well as Sandinistas. 12 They regarded divided Germany as an occupied country, "the result of the imperialist politics of the occupation forces," and they sought to "liberate" it -- including Austria. Now that Germany has been freed from this "occupation," the National Revolutionaries are free to concentrate on "reunifying" with Austria.

Eichberg regards Judeo-Christianity as the ultimate root of all present evils, since it is overly intellectual and alienates humanity both from itself and from the divine; it neglects the emotions and the body. Tied in as it is with the logic of productivism, Christianity, Eichberg writes, is the "religion of growth" that must be fought at all costs. To help cultivate 'national identity,' he proposes instead a new religion that mixes together neopagan Germanic, Celtic, and Indian religions with old völkisch-nationalistic ideas. It is to be based on "the sensuality-physicality of dance and ritual, ceremony and taboo, meditation, prayer, and ecstasy. In essence, [this religion] constitutes itself as a form of praxis" against the "religion of growth" since its "sensuous counter-experiences" can restore humanity to closer contact with nature. Sounding like many New Agers in the United States, Eichberg calls for a return to pristine nature, to the alleged primordial sources of people's lives, psyches, and authentic cultures, and for people to heal themselves within as part of healing the ecological crisis, overcoming their own alienation, and rediscovering themselves. 13

National Revolutionaries exploit ecological themes not only to construct primitivistic New Age religions but for political activity as well. During the 1970s they organized around opposition to nuclear energy at about the same time as the citizens' initiative movement did. "With their ecological and antinuclear enthusiasm," observes Walter Laqueur:

their cultural anti-Americanism and their support for movements of national liberation in many parts of the world, the "national revolutionaries" tried, in fact, to outflank their left-wing contemporaries. Some regarded Sinn Fein as a model for the German national revolutionaries, others suggested "political Balkanization" in Germany and Europe as a solution to all outstanding questions. 14

Other National Revolutionaries took a different political approach: at the end of the 1970s, they joined the newly emerging Greens, where some of their number succeeded in holding office for a time. In October 1980, the Alternative List of West Berlin, for one, decided they could not work with National Revolutionaries, whom they considered even more dangerous than overt neo-Nazis because they hid their true intentions behind a veil of grassroots democratic and ecological programs. They were mostly driven out of the Greens, at least as far as observers seem aware today. 15

The Freedom German Workers Party 16

Like the National Revolutionaries, the Freedom German Workers Party (Freiheitliche Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or FAP) calls for a 'national socialism,' albeit one based on "a sense of community instead of class struggle." The FAP seeks no rapprochement with leftists; it openly and militantly proclaims its support for Nazi ideas, celebrates race and nation, and is pro-Hitler rather than Strasserite. It praises German soldiers, whose "achievements" in two world wars will "still be admired in a thousand years." The FAP is largely controlled by The Movement (Die Bewegung), which seeks to reestablish the NSDAP (the Nazi Party) in the Federal Republic and unite all fascist groups under its aegis. 17

The FAP recruits from among skinheads and soccer fans, and its activities include acts of violence, arson, and racial attacks on foreigners. It advances the crudest 'Germany for Germans -- foreigners out' slogans. 18 When it engages in electoral activity, its programmatic demands have included "German jobs for German workers," "repatriation for foreigners," "no franchise for foreigners," and an end to the "crazy enthusiasm for integration." 19 Germans today must not ruin the "legacy of our fathers," the "cultural landscape"; Alsace-Lorraine, the South Tyrol, and Austria should all be returned to Germany.

FAP Nazis especially loathe "humanistically oriented cosmopolitanism." Marxism, liberalism, and Christianity "have torn humanity from its connectedness to the natural cycles of our earth." No "technical environmentalism" will succeed against the "increasingly obvious ecological catastrophe," they believe. Rather, the "disrupted relations between humanity and the rest of nature" require an "ecological revolution" and a "radical revolution in consciousness" that will "lead humanity to a reintegration with the structure of planetary life." We need a new ethics, they maintain, one in which "humanity, animals and nature are regarded as a unity. Animals are not things" but are "life-forms that feel joy and pain and need our protection." Not surprisingly, the FAP regards abortion as a "crime against the laws of a healthy nature and against God."

In a blatant self-contradiction, their concrete environmental demands are in fact friendly to capitalism: They want "continued economic growth," yet less profit-seeking. "Ecological necessities . . . must be brought into accordance with a functioning economy," they believe, while "the cyclical system of nature should . . . be incorporated into the economic realm."
The Republicans 20

The Republicans, a political party founded by former Waffen-SS member Franz Schönhuber in 1983, have made numerous disavowals of any association with the Nazis -- they present themselves as nothing more than a "community of German patriots." Yet this does not stop them from taking explicitly anti-immigrant stances, especially against Turks, or from exploiting discontents about the influx of foreigners generally, or from maintaining that Germany should be "for Germans." The presence of a "tidal wave" of asylum-seekers in the Federal Republic, they believe, causes "the importation of criminals," "social tensions," and "financial burdens."

The Republicans call for the "preservation of the existence of the German Volk, its health and its ecological living-space [Lebensraum] as a priority for domestic policy. This goal," they add, "will also foster environmental protection." Indeed, ecological dislocations are endangering Germans' "health" -- and by 'health' they mean the 'genetic health' of the German people. Such 'health' has "a higher value than short-term profits and striving for a standard of living." Protecting and maintaining a "healthy environment" not only assures the "security of the means of life of our people" but is "a patriotic duty." The Republicans are stringently antiabortion for German women, yet for the Third World, "meaningful family planning" is necessary to end the "population explosion" and its consequent threat to the environment; without it there will be "natural catastrophe and starvation."

The National Democratic Party 21

The National Democratic Party of Germany (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or NPD), founded in 1964 mainly by people who had been active Nazis before 1945, rose to prominence during the 1960s. This aggressively nationalist party long called for German reunification, while its programmatic literature complains that "two wars within one generation . . . have eaten away at the substantive health of the German people." (It does not mention what those wars did to the Jews, as Ditfurth dryly notes.) The NPD laments the destruction of the environment, which "has disadvantageous effects on the Volk-health." Germans should not be exposed to "chemical dyes" and should be protected from "congenital illness," while people with AIDS should be required to "register." The "preservation" of the "German people" requires that German women prolifically give birth, and therefore the NPD is against the "devaluation and destruction of the family." Since abortion threatens "the biological existence of our people," women who have abortions should be punished. The party calls for maternal and housekeeping training for "feminine youth."

In 1973, the NPD drew up an "Ecological Manifesto" that invoked "the laws of nature" to justify a hierarchically structured, "organic" order that would govern social relationships. 22 It inveighs against "the environment polluted and poisoned by a humanity that lives increasingly isolated in a degraded mass," which "is only the most noticeable symptom of the ruined equilibrium of humanity and nature." In the years since then, the NPD's rhetoric has become increasingly New Age oriented; it now calls for "reachieving . . . an environmental consciousness, so necessary for life." Achieving this consciousness, the 1988 NPD program states, "first requires an inner revolution in human thought. It is not the unlimited accumulation of material goods or boundless consumption that gives meaning to human life and happiness, but the experience of nature, concern for cultural values, and social security in the family and Volk." Indeed, "Volk-consciousness and environmental consciousness are inseparable," since "millions of strangers" threaten "our Volk in its existence."
http://www.spunk.org/library/places/germany/sp001630/janet.html
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Fascist didn't hijack ecologism. Fascists founded it and even coined the term. Ecology has been a central concern to German fascism in particular from the beginning of what we refer to as the counter-Enlightenment reactionary times. Thanks to German anti-Semite nature-worshipping mystical loonies we have ecology. No, it doesn't mean that those who donate money to Greenpeace are crypto-fascists. Not really. It does mean, though, that those who support ecology are caught more or less naively in a fascist web. It is this:

Nature is objective or it is not. If it is, then we use the Earth for our Human purposes to the benefit of Man. We do so rationally, not destructively and wantonly. If we take the approach, a matter of uncritical attitude, that Nature is our Mother, then we are irrational, and we are Irrationalist. Take you pick.

The prudent and sensitive person will not destroy the Earth simply to make a fast buck. Neither will he likely be found dancing naked in the moonlight celebrating the summer solstice. We take the attitude that nature is a large clump of stuff swirling around in the universe, and that that clump is for our use to do with the best we can for the sake of Humans and to the least detriment of that which we have no need to meddle with. We allow for aesthetics in nature, landscape appreciation being an essential part of our Human programming, according to, if memory serves, Steven Pinker, because it makes us wish to examine our spaces with an appreciative eye, and therefore to keep our places safe from destruction and invasion. But that is as far as nature goes if one is rational. Nature is an objective Human resource. Or it isn't.

Some, if not many of us are inclined to roll our eyes when another asks: "What is the meaning of life?" We take for granted that there is no meaning, or that whatever meaning there is is what we believe and that's an end of it as far as public dialogue is concerned. But that's most of us. What about those who ask the meaning of life, find that they know, and are determined to make you live according to the discoveries they have? We in the Modern West are immune for the most part from that kind of direct mental and emotional control of our personal opinions. Muslims, of course, are not. And according to the paranoid or obnoxious, Bush and his neo-con conspirators and their Right wing religious bigot allies are determined to force us all int a 1950s parody of their view of reality whether we like it or not, simply so they can continue to dupe us into making money for their international corporations, et cetera. Most of us are able to shrug off the stupidities of our fellows. What do we do though when we share some of those stupidities and don't clearly recognise them for what they are?

When we look at the ecofascist movement as above and see how fascists have created ecology from the ground up and have hooked so many well-meaning people into what on the surface seems to be a motherhood issue of protecting the Earth from wanton destruction for the sake of unrestrained protfit for the few at the expence not only of the many but of the future of the Human race, created ecology not simply for the sake of protecting nature as an invaluable resource but as a fascist and racist violent and genocidal mystical ideology, then we find that motherhood isn't as attractive as we might have originally thought. Our pandering to the sentimental cliches of the day lead us into the pristine valley of death. We find we've been lead astray. We find ourselves tricked into wandering into the bushes with someone who means us harm. We're not getting what we bargained for. All the smiling faces and promises of fun are turning out to be a Nazi-esque house of nightmares. Those people ask what is the meaning of life, and they conclude, seriously and fatally that the meaning of life is a revival of a primitive and violent life of Nature where the strong kill the weak, where the outsider is an enemy to be killed, where death is a good thing because it fits into the meaning of life as they see it, and it is ecologically sound to practice murder and rampage against others if one can.

Ecology is not a pretty day in the park: it is a hatred of Modernity, a hatred of cities and the people who live in them, a hatred of cosmopolitian people, those not mystically joined to the soild of the volk, the people of the wrong ethnicity or race. And they take this meaning of life so seriously that they will actually commit murder to make their visions come true. For the ecologist, murder is nature and nature is murder. That they consider to be a good thing.

We'll continue with part three of this essay from Biehl in a future post. Please return, and feel free to comment on anything you feel is unfair or uninformed. Unlike Muslims, we don't kill those who disagree with us.

Fascism's Conflation

A Leftist who becomes a Rightist is not a Leftist. It's a simple point but one that gets lost on some of our readers and commentators. Further, a Leftist who becomes a Right fascist in not proof that all Leftists are incipient Right fascists. And the Left, though often fascist, in not identically fascist in the way the Right can be. We do get some muddle-headed comments here from careless and silly people who can't read simple texts, so we'll make it clearer here, if possible: The Left is fascist in its abandonment of the working classes and in its communitarianism, corporatism, and philobarbarism, in its reactionary eschatologies, in its counter-Enlightenment Irrationalism. When the Left joins the reactionaries of the Right, which it has over-ll, many people are left standing in old party clothes that no longer are in fashion, though they don't know enough to realize the party's over and it's time long past to change the wardrobe. The Left has devolved into fascism, and the Leftists of yore are not the Leftists of today, though the labels remain. The Left of yesteryear is gone, though many still hold classical Left views. Folks, you've been left standing at the station at Vanity Fair, and the train has moved on without you. Today's altered Left is fascism conflated with Right fascism, and it is now a grey fascism, Left dhimmi fascism and worse. Some of the old ideas from the classical period remain, mostly embedded in the cliches of the times, but the values are gone. The Left is a monster of our time, a thing that bears no resemblance to the struggles for Modernity and universal Human rights that it was in the years past. And even then it wasn't what it was supposed to be-- even on paper. Today it's completely corrupt, and yet many still hold to classical Left views not realizing that along with those they also follow foolishly and naively the neo-Left fascism of the Greens, for example, a truly Right wing fascism, as we are seeing in the posts here on Ecofascism.
We spend a great deal of time and effort trying to clarify the difference between past Left labour rights and current Left dhimmi fascism. Look at the evolution, or the devolution of the Left today in Germany, not as proof of our thesis but as an example of our thesis. Ask yourself if this is the Left of classical times. Of course it isn't, and very likely you, dear reader, are not, regardless of your supposed liberalism, a fascist in any real sense. But! But is that true in practice? You readers from the so-called Left, ask yourselves if you do indeed follow much of today's Left dhimmi fascist agenda simply because you've neglected to understand the nature of the metamorphosis of the Left today? Are you conscious of the changes in Left into Right and dhimmi fascism? Or do you find yourself at the end of the following essay vaguely sympathetic to the subject below? Are your natural good intentions leading you unknowingly into a pit of fascism that you might find you actually prefer to the current state of fascist Leftism?

The following essay comes from a Trotskite website. We've deleted some of the more ridiculous and pointless chunks to keep this to a minimum while still giving the sense of the essay. The subject of the story is a co-founder of the Bader- Meinhof Gang, the Red Army Faction who committed acts of terrorism across Europe in the 1970 and 80s. Today that same man is a committed neo-fascist on the Right. But we argue that he is of a piece, no different today from then.

In a future post on Beihl and Ecofascism we will encounter the NPD. Below we meet one of our old friends, Horst Mahler:

Germany: Former left-wing radical Horst Mahler joins the neo-fascist NPD

By Max Rodenberg
1 September 2000

Berlin attorney Horst Mahler was a lawyer for the Extra-parliamentary Opposition (APO) at the end of the 1960s, joint founder of the Socialist German Student Federation (SDS) and a member of the terrorist Red Army Faction (RAF). Last weekend he applied to join the neo-fascist National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD).

Mahler's membership application to the NPD followed a weeks-long campaign for a prohibition of the party. At a press conference in Bruchsal near Karlsruhe last Saturday, Mahler—in his own words an "opponent of the party-state"—called on all those for whom "Germany was close to their hearts", to "strengthen the patriotic front, by publicly joining the NPD without consideration for the consequences for their personal fate". "We must all act at present as if we were at war, and the German Reich [empire] now demands our contribution to defend the German people and requires personal sacrifice.... Now it is a matter of Germany and the German Reich; reservations or animosities should be set aside."

[....]

He became joint founder of the first "socialist lawyers collective" and represented Rudi Dutschke, Rainer Langhans and others. In 1969, he defended Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, who went on to jointly form the RAF. ....

Following several criminal convictions in 1970—including a ten-month suspended sentence and a 75,000 mark fine—Mahler fled to Jordan with the recently released Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin and others, where they trained as armed guerrilla fighters with the Palestinians.

Mahler was arrested in Berlin two months later. In October 1972 ... he was finally condemned to 12 years imprisonment for "conspiracy to commit aggravated robbery in connection with the establishment of a criminal association and participation in the same". His exclusion from the bar followed in 1974. Mahler remained in detention until 1980.

With the help of Gerhard Schroeder—the former SPD-Young Socialists chairman, later prime minister of Lower Saxony, and today Germany's federal chancellor, who acted as Mahler's legal counsel in 1978—he gained readmission as a lawyer in 1988 and was able to re-start his business practice in Berlin.

The joint founder of the RAF had already become one of its critics during his detention. In 1977 he wrote that this had come from his "inner liberation from the dogmatic revolutionary theory of Marxism-Leninism". But his conversion went even further. In 1998, after 10 years of relative calm, Mahler surprised the public with a submission to the right-wing newspaper Junge Freiheit, in which he revealed his new beliefs. In this article he drew a connection between the radical 1968 movement and the development of a new völkisch (German-nationalist) ideology.

"The 1968 generation destroyed tradition and religion as world-shaping conceptions ... and brought our people a step nearer to maturity. The ground is only now ready for completing this enlightenment, which will simultaneously mean their surmounting. We experience this result of the cultural revolution of 1968 as Hell, since along with tradition and religion our moral substance has departed.... As a cultureless Volk [people] we live in a second Stone Age. It requires some effort of thought to really extinguish the mental vacuum—this condition of absolute negativity, which threatens to destroy us now as humans and as a Volk —and recognise as something positive, and in this sense as an historical service of the 1968 generation.... Let us be warriors of thought! Let us argue together—for God and our forefathers' country!"

In the meantime, Mahler has become an ideologue of the neo-fascist movement. The statement he issued to accompany his NPD membership application reads like a lightning course in neo-fascist ideology ....

On the basis of a conspiracy theory of "Jewish financial capital".... German politicians and media are all "well-intentioned puppets in this devilish play". What prevails is "opinion-terror against all, even so timid, stirrings of the German people's spirit. Against everyone, who ... opposes the enforced Überfremdung [swamping with foreigners]".

Mahler calls the murders and acts of violence carried out by neo-fascist young people "expressions of the natural—semi-instinctive—resistance of the German people against their Umvolkung [Grand Gesture Fascism. Dag,] [literally, un-peopling] into an Afro-Euro-Asiatic crossbreed". "In view of the population explosion in the coloured peoples' countries destroyed by Euro-American imperialism, the fear of foreigners is necessary in the coming decades [i.e., as a life-supporting defence reaction] to the extent that the pressure of migration from Asia and Africa places a question mark over the identity of Europe as the continent of the white man." For Mahler, "the taboo effect" must be removed from terms such as racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia, "with which the German people were held in servitude for over 50 years". The "genuine rage and outbreaks of hate" are nothing more than "symptoms of a spiritual illness, which arise from the suppression and proscription of healthy, vital drives".

Mahler also justifies the Holocaust with the explanation: "History represents the actions of God, not those of humans. The spirit of the time denies God and "persecutes the Germans for their faith, by placing the responsibility for history, thus for God's actions [meaning the Holocaust—MR], onto the Germans."

Mahler's transformation from a left-wing ideologue to a self-proclaimed fascist is unusual, but there are, however, historical precedents. In particular, a comparison can be drawn with the forerunners of Italian fascism, with the French theoretician Georges Sorel and with Mussolini, el Duce. Their original radicalism directed against bourgeois society—Sorel regarded himself as a Marxist, and Mussolini led the left wing of the Socialist Party—assumed an increasingly nationalist colouration and finally was directed against the workers' movement and its internationalism.

[....]

The course of Mahler's development—despite all his personal eccentricities—contains a rational core.

Despite their revolutionary rhetoric at the time, sections of the 1968 movement already regarded the working class as a mass that could be easily manipulated, dominated by "consumer terror", on which the fight against bourgeois society could not be based. As a substitute, they turned to various national liberation and guerrilla movements. The highest, and at the same time most demoralised expression of this conception was the establishment of the RAF, which wanted to conduct a guerrilla struggle in the German cities.

While most of the 1968 generation soon abandoned their socialist ambitions, and returned to the bosom of bourgeois society or even (like the former street fighter turned German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer) to its head, Mahler's rejection of the working class went to another extreme. Marxism, according to Mahler today, divides the people, and that is basically false. "Resistance should particularly be directed against American supremacy and come from the völkischen Einheit [unity of the people]".

Psychologically, Mahler's evolution reflects the pent-up fear and panic of social layers that are presently being hit by the effects of globalisation and welfare cuts. [?!]

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/sep2000/red-s01.shtml
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Next post we hope to continue with ecofascsim and to give further details on the NPD. Please join us.