Assumptions That Lead Us Astray (5)

Why? Why do we in the modern West protest against our societies and our ways of living to the point we enable our enemies to kill our own people? Why aren't we screaming mad and making changes in our favor? Why do thousands of protesters show up to riot in the streets of Seattle but only a dozen old people show up to condemn sharia laws in Ontario, Canada? Why do our movie stars and politicians and public intellectuals and our neighbours condemn our world and us for crimes against Humanity while killers threaten our friends with the possiblity of nuclear war? It's due to the way we view reality and from that how we assign priorities to our values. If, as an example, we value "The Land," then people are a lesser priority. If we value people who live in primitive cultures, then we devalue ourselves and condemn ourselves if we engage them in just war. We have to change our minds about how we view reality. Earth First! It leads down a road few of us would care to take if we knew where it leads.

The following installment of Staudenmaier's essay on ecofascism provides us with some further biographical detail and some insight into the nature of the anti-Human, pro-Nature thrust of ecofascism as practiced by the Nazis.

We are faced by ecoterrorism in the West. That, regardless of the terrorism itself against individuals, is not our deepest concern here. The importance is state ecologism and, worse, cultural ecofascism, the kind of mind-set that creeps in to societies and takes over under cover, as it were, that devalues people and promotes a mysticism and irrationality in people so they come to accept as right and natural the removal of people from areas to promote the good of birds, for example. all well and fine, we can say. But when protecting birds extends to protecting chickens, not from cramped cages, but to the extent of smashing windows and burning buildings and assaulting people, then it's more than a case of a few extremists going to far,it's a case of people who have lost sight of the worth of man in himself. Those are people who value the idea of ecology more than they value the idea of Humans. And once the idea of Humans is devalued, Humans themselves are just a detail. When nature is seen as "The Land" and is made into something more than the accumulation of dead decay that it is (mixed with rocks and stuff,) and when nature becomes Mother Nature! whom we are accused of raping, then all sense goes out the window, as well as those who do not belong on the land, the interlopers, the ones who came later, who aren't part of the natural environment. It soon enough degenerates into expelling or killing foreigners, burning homosexuals who are "unnatural" and unproductive of society's need to replenish the population, and to subjugating women and forcing them to become breeding machines. The move toward devaluing people as a universal whole in favour of them being unique groups of authentic beings in their own natural place and their own traditional cultures, that is the road to extermination of others.

We have to decide whether we are rational or irrational in our pursuit of knowledge and truth. Some, such as Herder, devalue reason in favor of feeling. Ecologists use reason to devalue Man by using reason irrationally. At heart they feel that Man is an interloper who must be made to return to a pre-lapsarian paradise, even if that means killing most people and forcing the rest to live in forests. Lest any one think this is some exercise in hyperbole, look please at the essay below, then examine the history of the Khmer Rouge, of the Cultural Revolution, of Soviet collectivization and the destruction of the kulaks and Ukrainian peasantry in the 1920s and 30s. Those campaigns of extermination are of a piece with the Nazi drive to create a utopian world of right Nature. If one starts to look at the world as invaluable, then one may very well start seeing people as of no value. And the first to be of no value are the ones who don't belong on the land in the first place. On that road there is only one end.

Every man, as Kant so nicely put it, is an end unto himself. No man, according to me and most, has any right to hasten another's leaving. Those who lose sight of the worth of Man are lost to Mankind. To look at Man as just another creature in a state of nature, and as one who is indeed a threat to nature that must be stopped before he does greater harm, that is a crime against Humanity. Firstly, it's a crime against the self. but even if there is no great Moral and man's life is simply an accident of biology and chemistry, Man is, and that is sufficient for Man.

Man-- not trees, not mountains, not cloud or the ozone layer can rise to heights nothing else can; we can know the future and our end:

Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Church-yard:

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Awaits alike th'inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Implementing the Ecofascist Program

It is frequently pointed out that the agrarian and romantic moments in Nazi ideology and policy were in constant tension with, if not in flat contradiction to, the technocratic-industrialist thrust of the Third Reich's rapid modernization. What is not often remarked is that even these modernizing tendencies had a significant ecological component. The two men principally responsible for sustaining this environmentalist commitment in the midst of intensive industrialization were Reichsminister Fritz Todt and his aide, the high-level planner and engineer Alwin Seifert.

Todt was "one of the most influential National Socialists," ⁴⁵ directly responsible for questions of technological and industrial policy. At his death in 1942 he headed three different cabinet-level ministries in addition to the enormous quasi-official Organisation Todt, and had "gathered the major technical tasks of the Reich into his own hands." ⁴⁶ According to his successor, Albert Speer, Todt "loved nature" and "repeatedly had serious run-ins with Bormann, protesting against his despoiling the landscape around Obersalzberg."⁴⁷ Another source calls him simply "an ecologist." ⁴⁸ This reputation is based chiefly on Todt's efforts to make Autobahn construction -- one of the largest building enterprises undertaken in this century -- as environmentally sensitive as possible.

The pre-eminent historian of German engineering describes this commitment thus: "Todt demanded of the completed work of technology a harmony with nature and with the landscape, thereby fulfilling modern ecological principles of engineering as well as the 'organological' principles of his own era along with their roots in völkisch ideology."⁴⁹ The ecological aspects of this approach to construction went well beyond an emphasis on harmonious adaptation to the natural surroundings for aesthetic reasons; Todt also established strict criteria for respecting wetlands, forests and ecologically sensitive areas. But just as with Arndt, Riehl and Darré, these environmentalist concerns were inseparably bound to a völkisch-nationalist outlook. Todt himself expressed this connection succinctly: "The fulfillment of mere transportation purposes is not the final aim of German highway construction. The German highway must be an expression of its surrounding landscape and an expression of the German essence." ⁵⁰

Todt's chief adviser and collaborator on environmental issues was his lieutenant Alwin Seifert, whom Todt reportedly once called a "fanatical ecologist." ⁵¹ Seifert bore the official title of Reich Advocate for the Landscape, but his nickname within the party was "Mr. Mother Earth." The appellation was deserved; Seifert dreamed of a "total conversion from technology to nature,"⁵² and would often wax lyrical about the wonders of German nature and the tragedy of "humankind's" carelessness. As early as 1934 he wrote to Hess demanding attention to water issues and invoking "work methods that are more attuned to nature."⁵³ In discharging his official duties Seifert stressed the importance of wilderness and energetically opposed monoculture, wetlands drainage and chemicalized agriculture. He criticized Darré as too moderate, and "called for an agricultural revolution towards 'a more peasant-like, natural, simple' method of farming, 'independent of capital'." ⁵⁴

With the Third Reich's technological policy entrusted to figures such as these, even the Nazis' massive industrial build-up took on a distinctively green hue. The prominence of nature in the party's philosophical background helped ensure that more radical initiatives often received a sympathetic hearing in the highest offices of the Nazi state. In the mid-thirties Todt and Seifert vigorously pushed for an all-encompassing Reich Law for the Protection of Mother Earth "in order to stem the steady loss of this irreplaceable basis of all life."⁵⁵ Seifert reports that all of the ministries were prepared to co-operate save one; only the minister of the economy opposed the bill because of its impact on mining.

But even near-misses such as these would have been unthinkable without the support of Reich Chancellor Rudolf Hess, who provided the "green wing" of the NSDAP a secure anchor at the very top of the party hierarchy. It would be difficult to overestimate Hess's power and centrality in the complex governmental machinery of the National Socialist regime. He joined the party in 1920 as member #16, and for two decades was Hitler's devoted personal deputy. He has been described as "Hitler's closest confidant," ⁵⁶ and the Führer himself referred to Hess as his "closest adviser." ⁵⁷ Hess was not only the highest party leader and second in line (after Göring) to succeed Hitler; in addition, all legislation and every decree had to pass through his office before becoming law.

An inveterate nature lover as well as a devout Steinerite, Hess insisted on a strictly biodynamic diet -- not even Hitler's rigorous vegetarian standards were good enough for him -- and accepted only homeopathic medicines. It was Hess who introduced Darré to Hitler, thus securing the "green wing" its first power base. He was an even more tenacious proponent of organic farming than Darré, and pushed the latter to take more demonstrative steps in support of the lebensgesetzliche Landbauweise. ⁵⁸ His office was also directly responsible for land use planning across the Reich, employing a number of specialists who shared Seifert's ecological approach.⁵⁹

With Hess's enthusiastic backing, the "green wing" was able to achieve its most notable successes. As early as March 1933, a wide array of environmentalist legislation was approved and implemented at national, regional and local levels. These measures, which included reforestation programs, bills protecting animal and plant species, and preservationist decrees blocking industrial development, undoubtedly "ranked among the most progressive in the world at that time."⁶⁰ Planning ordinances were designed for the protection of wildlife habitat and at the same time demanded respect for the sacred German forest. The Nazi state also created the first nature preserves in Europe.

Along with Darré's efforts toward re-agrarianization and support for organic agriculture, as well as Todt and Seifert's attempts to institutionalize an environmentally sensitive land use planning and industrial policy, the major accomplishment of the Nazi ecologists was the Reichsnaturschutzgesetz of 1935. This completely unprecedented "nature protection law" not only established guidelines for safeguarding flora, fauna, and "natural monuments" across the Reich; it also restricted commercial access to remaining tracts of wilderness. In addition, the comprehensive ordinance "required all national, state and local officials to consult with Naturschutz authorities in a timely manner before undertaking any measures that would produce fundamental alterations in the countryside." ⁶¹

Although the legislation's effectiveness was questionable, traditional German environmentalists were overjoyed at its passage. Walter Schoenichen declared it the "definitive fulfillment of the völkisch-romantic longings," ⁶² and Hans Klose, Schoenichen's successor as head of the Reich Agency for Nature Protection, described Nazi environmental policy as the "high point of nature protection" in Germany. Perhaps the greatest success of these measures was in facilitating the "intellectual realignment of German Naturschutz" and the integration of mainstream environmentalism into the Nazi enterprise.⁶³

While the achievements of the "green wing" were daunting, they should not be exaggerated. Ecological initiatives were, of course, hardly universally popular within the party. Goebbels, Bormann, and Heydrich, for example, were implacably opposed to them, and considered Darré, Hess and their fellows undependable dreamers, eccentrics, or simply security risks. This latter suspicion seemed to be confirmed by Hess's famed flight to Britain in 1941; after that point, the environmentalist tendency was for the most part suppressed. Todt was killed in a plane crash in February 1942, and shortly thereafter Darré was stripped of all his posts. For the final three years of the Nazi conflagration the "green wing" played no active role. Their work, however, had long since left an indelible stain.
http://www.spunk.org/library/places/germany/sp001630/peter.html
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The stain is visible and growing today. Most of us love our kittens and our puppies and we love gardening and hiking in the forests and across flower strewn meadows. We love, but nature is a thing without mind, without heart, without being other than that whcih we give to it from ourselves. Nature is only as beautiful as we are, and to project ourselves onto nature at the expense of our fellows makes us ugly beyond endurance. We must protect nature for our own sake, not for the sake of nature. When we over-value nature we under-value people. And then we start to over-value those who also seem to value nature highly, the primitives who live like animals, who are close to nature, who hate Modernity, who have a connection to The Land, whose people have lived on The Land from time immemorial, special people in special places, unlike those who have no place, and who should not be where they are.

And eventually we'd find ourselves wandering in circles going nowhere because there's no one left to kill anymore. Even then nature wouldn't be happy because nature is just a clump of dead stuff with living things on it for a time till they pass away. I'd rather we live while we're alive and love what we can and leave the rest alone if we don't need it. For the rest, I left my uniform and rule guide at the last hotel and filled my pack with poetry and things I need on the road.

Assuming We Know (4)

I confess: I have not a clue what blood purity and soil mysticism mean. I read this stuff and find that I'm baffled and confused. Maybe it's evidence of my mongrelism. Below we'll look more closely at Darre, a figure we've dealt with before here. He concerns us for two reasons: he is still a major figure in the ecology movement, whether most ecologists know of him or not; and he is also a key figure in how we view the Palestinians today.

People cannot be Human, according to the line of reasoning that follows from Herder, Fichte, Darre and others, unless they have a community to be one of, like images that cannot exist in a mirror without something to reflect. And to be legitimate and authentic as a group one must be in a place, legitimately rather than contingently. To be of a place means to be from the place of ones blood group wherefrom the soil emanates spirit or something. It's more or less beyond me. What I do know is that some people believe deeply in the idea that there is a special place for special people, and that if one removes them from that place they cannot live as authentic people any longer. Look for example at the Palestinians, exiled from the land they have lived in forever, now expelled by the Zionist (whatever the cliche of the day is today.) Whatever this crap is about, some of our own fellow Western and modernist citizens are right into it, so much so that they go nuts raging about Israelis, become cheerleaders for terrorists, and ht the West with more passion than they love their children, as one might gather from the story of the demise of Rachel Corrie.

When we look at our views from the distance of a hundred years ago we might get a sense of perspective that allows us to have an honest and conscious understanding of some of our assumptions today. That would preclude our Presbyterian synod readers, of course. For the rest of us we can see that Nietzsche's idiot sister and her great idea played out just about the way one would expect, and that what we see today in the Western Left dhimmi fascist's "discourse" is more of the same only different but not much.

Third World Peoples! Back to Nature! In Harmony with the Spirit of Life! The round-up of usual suspects will do. The more we see of the past fascists the more we see the same rehash today. What we see today is the same tired fascism of yesteryear. We assume it's all new and interesting but a look will show it's no different today. first some snippets of proto-Nazi wonderland followed by a look at ecofascism as it is now and then.

Ben MacIntyre writes about Nietzsche's sister and the colony of pure-breds she and her husband founded in Paraguay. Below are three excerpts from reviews that give the basics of what came of it.
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In 1886 Elisabeth Nietzsche, the bigoted, imperious sister of the famous philosopher, founded a "racially pure" colony in Paraguay together with her husband, anti-Semitic agitator Bernhard Forster, and a band of fair-skinned fellow Germans. In 1991 Macintyre, once a foreign-affairs reporter for Britain's Sunday Correspondent, tracked down the survivors of Nueva Germania, as the colony was called; he found a strange, tight-lipped people, still interbreeding to the point of genetic deterioration.

[T]he Paraguayan colony as `New Germany' (Nueva Germania); this colony was designed to appeal to `true' Germans who wanted to establish not only an ideological power base, but flee economic problems at home. The colony does not succeed, as Macintyre discovers when he journeys there in 1991: there are a few of the old families around, and the dangers of inbreeding, according to one recent German immigrant doctor, are becoming noticeable, heralding the inevitable decline of what Elisabeth envisioned as her own pure, private kingdom.

In 1886, Nietzsche's sister, Elisabeth, together with her husband, Bernhard Foerster, and 14 German families, founded a colony in Paraguay that they christened "Nueva Germania." Their purpose was to escape a fatherland they believed to be in serious decline and to live in a place where their beliefs--anti-Semitism, vegetarianism, nationalism, and Lutheranism--could flourish.... The pathetic group of descendants he finally found would hardly have delighted the founders.
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We might assume that something is good simply because it seems so right that it couldn't possibly be wrong. Of course we all want to protect the environment. We do not want to poison the Earth and kill off animals and lay waste to the world. And then we add on a few more details. We put in some other ideas that seem pretty good. Maybe we think we should have some pure water, some pure air, some pure land. And before we know what we've done we find ourselves in the wastes of Nazi Utopia so inbred we can't see straight, or, like the fascists of Elizabeth Nietzsche's commune, blind and idiotic. Nature has no sense of humor, no sense of irony, no sense of forgiveness. Nature, sad to say, has no sense whatsoever; and neither, obviously, do some people.

When our fellow citizens claim they have sympathy for the Palestinian! People! and that the Zionists are the cause of all the trouble in the Middle East, we must ask where their ideas come from. When completely ordinary middle class Americans in the suburbs, say, Protestants of the Presbyterian Church, claim they want to save the baby seals and stop Zionist aggression against the Palestinian! People! we have to ask ourselves just what is going on that these seemingly decent people would become enthusiastic cheerleaders for some of the world's most brutal and psychotic killers. Let's look further at Peter Staudenmaier's essay:
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Blood and Soil as Official Doctrine

"The unity of blood and soil must be restored," proclaimed Richard Walther Darré in 1930. 37 This infamous phrase denoted a quasi-mystical connection between 'blood' (the race or Volk) and 'soil' (the land and the natural environment) specific to Germanic peoples and absent, for example, among Celts and Slavs. For the enthusiasts of Blut und Boden, the Jews especially were a rootless, wandering people, incapable of any true relationship with the land. German blood, in other words, engendered an exclusive claim to the sacred German soil. While the term "blood and soil" had been circulating in völkisch circles since at least the Wilhelmine era, it was Darré who first popularized it as a slogan and then enshrined it as a guiding principle of Nazi thought. Harking back to Arndt and Riehl, he envisioned a thoroughgoing ruralization of Germany and Europe, predicated on a revitalized yeoman peasantry, in order to ensure racial health and ecological sustainability.

Darré was one of the party's chief "race theorists" and was also instrumental in galvanizing peasant support for the Nazis during the critical period of the early 1930s. From 1933 until 1942 he held the posts of Reich Peasant Leader and Minister of Agriculture. This was no minor fiefdom; the agriculture ministry had the fourth largest budget of all the myriad Nazi ministries even well into the war.38 From this position Darré was able to lend vital support to various ecologically oriented initiatives. He played an essential part in unifying the nebulous proto-environmentalist tendencies in National Socialism:

It was Darré who gave the ill-defined anti-civilization, anti-liberal, anti-modern and latent anti-urban sentiments of the Nazi elite a foundation in the agrarian mystique. And it seems as if Darré had an immense influence on the ideology of National Socialism, as if he was able to articulate significantly more clearly than before the values system of an agrarian society contained in Nazi ideology and -- above all -- to legitimate this agrarian model and give Nazi policy a goal that was clearly oriented toward a far-reaching re-agrarianization.39

This goal was not only quite consonant with imperialist expansion in the name of Lebensraum, it was in fact one of its primary justifications, even motivations. In language replete with the biologistic metaphors of organicism, Darré declared: "The concept of Blood and Soil gives us the moral right to take back as much land in the East as is necessary to establish a harmony between the body of our Volk and the geopolitical space." 40

Aside from providing green camouflage for the colonization of Eastern Europe, Darré worked to install environmentally sensitive principles as the very basis of the Third Reich's agricultural policy. Even in its most productivist phases, these precepts remained emblematic of Nazi doctrine. When the "Battle for Production" (a scheme to boost the productivity of the agricultural sector) was proclaimed at the second Reich Farmers Congress in 1934, the very first point in the program read "Keep the soil healthy!" But Darré's most important innovation was the introduction on a large scale of organic farming methods, significantly labeled "lebensgesetzliche Landbauweise," or farming according to the laws of life. The term points up yet again the natural order ideology which underlies so much reactionary ecological thought. The impetus for these unprecedented measures came from Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy and its techniques of biodynamic cultivation.41

The campaign to institutionalize organic farming encompassed tens of thousands of smallholdings and estates across Germany. It met with considerable resistance from other members of the Nazi hierarchy, above all Backe and Göring. But Darré, with the help of Hess and others, was able to sustain the policy until his forced resignation in 1942 (an event which had little to do with his environmentalist leanings). And these efforts in no sense represented merely Darré's personal predilections; as the standard history of German agricultural policy points out, Hitler and Himmler "were in complete sympathy with these ideas."42 Still, it was largely Darré's influence in the Nazi apparatus which yielded, in practice, a level of government support for ecologically sound farming methods and land use planning unmatched by any state before or since.

For these reasons Darré has sometimes been regarded as a forerunner of the contemporary Green movement. His biographer, in fact, once referred to him as the "father of the Greens."43 Her book Blood and Soil, undoubtedly the best single source on Darré in either German or English, consistently downplays the virulently fascist elements in his thinking, portraying him instead as a misguided agrarian radical. This grave error in judgement indicates the powerfully disorienting pull of an 'ecological' aura. Darré's published writings alone, dating back to the early twenties, are enough to indict him as a rabidly racist and jingoist ideologue particularly prone to a vulgar and hateful antisemitism (he spoke of Jews, revealingly, as "weeds"). His decade-long tenure as a loyal servant and, moreover, architect of the Nazi state demonstrates his dedication to Hitler's deranged cause. One account even claims that it was Darré who convinced Hitler and Himmler of the necessity of exterminating the Jews and Slavs.44 The ecological aspects of his thought cannot, in sum, be separated from their thoroughly Nazi framework. Far from embodying the 'redeeming' facets of National Socialism, Darré represents the baleful specter of ecofascism in power. http://www.spunk.org/library/places/germany/sp001630/peter.html
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We assume that ecology is a good thing because we don't want to wreck nature and kill chickens for no good reason. Some of us might go so far as to think we should become vegetarians to prove how decent we are as Human beings. We might protest the Chinese occupation of Tibet to show how dedicated we are to civil rights and national self-determination, not really considering the nature of dismissing people themselves as nothing more than the meaningless bits of the important whole. And from one stupid idea it's easy to go on to the next till we find ourselves falling right overboard in our support for any number of things that seem right, and things that are also highly popular among sophisticated people like movie stars and media personalities.

Once we open the door to ecology we let in all kinds of other ideas that come with it part and parcel. If anti-Humanism, which is what ecology is, becomes ones epistemological base, then anything irrational and anti-humanist is possible. We can easily go from food purity and concern for the sufferings of the Palestinian! Peoples! to thinking of ridding the Israelis from The Land of the Palestinian! Peoples! And once that starts we can move on to ridding the land of machines and technologies so as to restore Nature to its proper place, and to restore Man to his proper place within Nature, and so on.

We must look closely at how we see reality, how we decide what is true, how we know the world and its truths. Once we buy into the specialness of Nature we devalue Humans. Once we revalue the special people we assign them moral autonomy outside the Human race, and then truth and morals become exceptional, for them but not for others, and eventually for no one if they don't like it or for them if their group decides for them instead. We have to decide if people are important or if they are not. If people are individuals first or if they are Peoples. If land is a resource to use rationally or if it's something mystical that has spirits in it. We have to decide if people are all of the same and equal worth by virtue of their Humanness or if some are different, some better, some not. We have to decide how we decide.

We'll return next post to see more of ecology as epistemology. It's a frightening topic.

Assuming We've Won (3)

War broke out in Iraq 5,000 years ago. We're still fighting it today, having assumed ages ago that we'd won it. The war in Iraq continues to this day, and we will have to fight in our day like every generation has fought for millenia. This is our time. This is the war between Cain and Abel.A war broke out 5,000 years ago in the Fertile Cresent, Nomads against the Settled. That war continues today in our cities, in the West, across the Earth wherever Men live in struggle against the forces of Nature rather helpless than in its clutches.

We assume that the whole of Mankind is settled and happy in cities and on farms, that those who live in forests and jungles are the tiny minority of extreme primitives who have some special place in the scheme of things, that we must be their keepers, that we must protect them from us, for we would surely kill them otherwise.

5,000 years ago we ruined the Garden of Eden where we wandered around in ignorant bliss, knowing nothing, caring about nothing, provided for by Nature and the Spirit. And then we wrecked a very good deal by seeking knowledge of things we should have left alone. It's been misery and toil since. Now there is pain and death. It's our fault. We are the post-lapsarian killers driving off the few who have remained in a state of Nature, hapyh and free from our knowledge. They, not being part of the captialist revolution, not rampaging and destroying Nature, are pure and authentic. We are our brothers' killers.
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The West is divided against itself, one side favoring Abel, the other Cain. How do we live rightly? What is the Good?

Below we continue with a closer examination of our assumptions about what the Good is. Is Man meant to live cut off from Nature? Should Man be isolated from his brothers? Are cities good for people? Is Nature important to the point that Man must accomodate himself to it, or is Man supreme? Are we Abels, hunting and gathering and living rightly in touch with Nature? Or are we Men who make our way to the future? Let's question our assumptions about the world of people who live unlike our revolutionary selves. Maybe we are wrong in our approach to this garden that is the Earth.
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Nature in National Socialist Ideology

The reactionary ecological ideas whose outlines are sketched above exerted a powerful and lasting influence on many of the central figures in the NSDAP. Weimar culture, after all, was fairly awash in such theories, but the Nazis gave them a peculiar inflection. The National Socialist "religion of nature," as one historian has described it, was a volatile admixture of primeval teutonic nature mysticism, pseudo-scientific ecology, irrationalist anti-humanism, and a mythology of racial salvation through a return to the land. Its predominant themes were 'natural order,' organicist holism and denigration of humanity: "Throughout the writings, not only of Hitler, but of most Nazi ideologues, one can discern a fundamental deprecation of humans vis-à-vis nature, and, as a logical corollary to this, an attack upon human efforts to master nature." 25 Quoting a Nazi educator, the same source continues: "anthropocentric views in general had to be rejected. They would be valid only 'if it is assumed that nature has been created only for man. We decisively reject this attitude. According to our conception of nature, man is a link in the living chain of nature just as any other organism '." 26

Such arguments have a chilling currency within contemporary ecological discourse: the key to social-ecological harmony is ascertaining "the eternal laws of nature's processes" (Hitler) and organizing society to correspond to them. The Führer was particularly fond of stressing the "helplessness of humankind in the face of nature's everlasting law." 27 Echoing Haeckel and the Monists, Mein Kampf announces: "When people attempt to rebel against the iron logic of nature, they come into conflict with the very same principles to which they owe their existence as human beings. Their actions against nature must lead to their own downfall."28

The authoritarian implications of this view of humanity and nature become even clearer in the context of the Nazis' emphasis on holism and organicism. In 1934 the director of the Reich Agency for Nature Protection, Walter Schoenichen, established the following objectives for biology curricula: "Very early, the youth must develop an understanding of the civic importance of the 'organism', i.e. the co-ordination of all parts and organs for the benefit of the one and superior task of life." 29 This (by now familiar) unmediated adaptation of biological concepts to social phenomena served to justify not only the totalitarian social order of the Third Reich but also the expansionist politics of Lebensraum (the plan of conquering 'living space' in Eastern Europe for the German people). It also provided the link between environmental purity and racial purity:

Two central themes of biology education follow [according to the Nazis] from the holistic perspective: nature protection and eugenics. If one views nature as a unified whole, students will automatically develop a sense for ecology and environmental conservation. At the same time, the nature protection concept will direct attention to the urbanized and 'overcivilized' modern human race.30

In many varieties of the National Socialist world view ecological themes were linked with traditional agrarian romanticism and hostility to urban civilization, all revolving around the idea of rootedness in nature. This conceptual constellation, especially the search for a lost connection to nature, was most pronounced among the neo-pagan elements in the Nazi leadership, above all Heinrich Himmler, Alfred Rosenberg, and Walther Darré. Rosenberg wrote in his colossal The Myth of the 20th Century: "Today we see the steady stream from the countryside to the city, deadly for the Volk. The cities swell ever larger, unnerving the Volk and destroying the threads which bind humanity to nature; they attract adventurers and profiteers of all colors, thereby fostering racial chaos."31

Such musings, it must be stressed, were not mere rhetoric; they reflected firmly held beliefs and, indeed, practices at the very top of the Nazi hierarchy which are today conventionally associated with ecological attitudes. Hitler and Himmler were both strict vegetarians and animal lovers, attracted to nature mysticism and homeopathic cures, and staunchly opposed to vivisection and cruelty to animals. Himmler even established experimental organic farms to grow herbs for SS medicinal purposes. And Hitler, at times, could sound like a veritable Green utopian, discussing authoritatively and in detail various renewable energy sources (including environmentally appropriate hydropower and producing natural gas from sludge) as alternatives to coal, and declaring "water, winds and tides" as the energy path of the future.32

Even in the midst of war, Nazi leaders maintained their commitment to ecological ideals which were, for them, an essential element of racial rejuvenation. In December 1942, Himmler released a decree "On the Treatment of the Land in the Eastern Territories," referring to the newly annexed portions of Poland. It read in part:

The peasant of our racial stock has always carefully endeavored to increase the natural powers of the soil, plants, and animals, and to preserve the balance of the whole of nature. For him, respect for divine creation is the measure of all culture. If, therefore, the new Lebensräume (living spaces) are to become a homeland for our settlers, the planned arrangement of the landscape to keep it close to nature is a decisive prerequisite. It is one of the bases for fortifying the German Volk.33

This passage recapitulates almost all of the tropes comprised by classical ecofascist ideology: Lebensraum, Heimat, the agrarian mystique, the health of the Volk, closeness to and respect for nature (explicitly constructed as the standard against which society is to be judged), maintaining nature's precarious balance, and the earthy powers of the soil and its creatures. Such motifs were anything but personal idiosyncracies on the part of Hitler, Himmler, or Rosenberg; even Göring -- who was, along with Goebbels, the member of the Nazi inner circle least hospitable to ecological ideas -- appeared at times to be a committed conservationist. 34 These sympathies were also hardly restricted to the upper echelons of the party. A study of the membership rolls of several mainstream Weimar era Naturschutz (nature protection) organizations revealed that by 1939, fully 60 percent of these conservationists had joined the NSDAP (compared to about 10 percent of adult men and 25 percent of teachers and lawyers).35 Clearly the affinities between environmentalism and National Socialism ran deep.

At the level of ideology, then, ecological themes played a vital role in German fascism. It would be a grave mistake, however, to treat these elements as mere propaganda, cleverly deployed to mask Nazism's true character as a technocratic-industrialist juggernaut. The definitive history of German anti-urbanism and agrarian romanticism argues incisively against this view:
Nothing could be more wrong than to suppose that most of the leading National Socialist ideologues had cynically feigned an agrarian romanticism and hostility to urban culture, without any inner conviction and for merely electoral and propaganda purposes, in order to hoodwink the public [ . . . ] In reality, the majority of the leading National Socialist ideologists were without any doubt more or less inclined to agrarian romanticism and anti-urbanism and convinced of the need for a relative re-agrarianization.36

The question remains, however: To what extent did the Nazis actually implement environmental policies during the twelve-year Reich? There is strong evidence that the 'ecological' tendency in the party, though largely ignored today, had considerable success for most of the party's reign. This "green wing" of the NSDAP was represented above all by Walther Darré, Fritz Todt, Alwin Seifert and Rudolf Hess, the four figures who primarily shaped fascist ecology in practice.

***
http://www.spunk.org/library/places/germany/sp001630/peter.html

***

We'll look again next time at the urge to return to Nature, to the life of Abel. Maybe we'll find that our enemies are completely right in their return to the primitive, and we, our brothers' killers, have no right to be anywhere at all.

Assumptions of the Benign (1)

I think it is speciesist to think that the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center was a greater tragedy than what millions of chickens endured that day and what they endure every day... (Karen Davis, PhD (!) Vegan Voice)

http://www.whataretheysaying.org/index.html
***

Animal rights. Well, why not? Everything is one at some point, and we, living in nature and being but one small part of it should respect nature rather than treat it as something of our own for ourselves. What right do we have to kill living things and wreck the world as a united living organism? What, when it comes down to it and in the larger sense, makes a man's life worth more than that of a chicken?

Last time we asked that question we aroused some ire, not from animal rights activists or from religious adherents, but from a nutter who went on about my psychic pain! Spare me. We have to seriously question what makes Man's life worth more than a chicken's life, and we must be serious in asking because there are violent people among us who can't make that distinction, and some of them are us, perhaps not to such extreme degrees as others but to degrees we might not feel comfortable with if we were to closely examine just how close we do come to irrationality and ecofascism as it was practiced by our favorite bogeymen, the Nazis.

We have to question our assumptions about ecology and nature and man's place in it because some of us who practice the beliefs of ecology hold in common with others we might dislike some very unhappy opinions, and we, naively perhaps, might follow along into ways unknown and wrong, ways we would forego if only we knew. So let's know. Let's find out more about ecology and where it leads us, or where it might lead us, and see if it leads us into other dark areas that in turn lead us to conclude for exaple that Islam is a religion of peace, or some such silliness. Let's find out if ecology is part of a vast ideology of communitarianism that is also part of identity politics that groups people rather than one that allows for individuals.

Before we delve into our latest look at ecofascsim, I'd like to point out that "like" is not "same." Wiccans, for example,might have similar ideas to wandervogel kids of the 1920s in Germany, but Wiccans are not the same as the wandervogel kids. It's in the closeness that we must be careful to avoid confusions and at the same time to recognize similarities without fear of scorn. Wiccans and Nazis might be similar in beliefs without being the same, and we must also be able to find out the truth of the sameness if it exists without dismissing it out of hand because we're all rightly sick of the over-use of the pejorative sense of the word. Wiccans might well be fat suburbanite teenage girls who can't get laid and nothing more than that, but to dismiss any investigation into the fascist roots of that kind of nature fetishization on the grounds that it's extreme and shop-worn is to betray ourselves and lay ourselves open to not challenging our own Left dhimmi assumptions. Ecology in itself is neither here nor there to most people, and most feel that over-all it's benign and worthwhile for those who are interested and committed to it. It probably is, and probably too there are only a very few extremists who go so far as the idiot, Davis, above. But where do we draw the line? Is Wicca benign? Is ecology good? Do we really know what it means to support ecologism? As one will have seen many times by now, I feel that ecologism is not a good idea. It has far too much in common with Irrationalist fascism. Ecologists might not be the same as old line Nazis, but they are in many respects similar in beliefs. We can find out where they are similar, and from there we can examine the worth of it and some of the baggage that comes with it, not all of which is pretty or functional.

Below we'll look at how similar are old Nazis and New Age ecologists. Ecology fits in with identity politics, is inseperable from it, and together they create the ground of multiculturalism, which in turn allows for the ground of Left dhimmi fascism. Like but not same.
***

Fascist Ecology:
The "Green Wins" of the Nazi Party and its Historical Antecedents

by Peter Staudenmaier

"We recognize that separating humanity from nature, from the whole of life, leads to humankind's own destruction and to the death of nations. Only through a re-integration of humanity into the whole of nature can our people be made stronger. That is the fundamental point of the biological tasks of our age. Humankind alone is no longer the focus of thought, but rather life as a whole . . . This striving toward connectedness with the totality of life, with nature itself, a nature into which we are born, this is the deepest meaning and the true essence of National Socialist thought." 1

In our zeal to condemn the status quo, radicals often carelessly toss about epithets like "fascist" and "ecofascist," thus contributing to a sort of conceptual inflation that in no way furthers effective social critique. In such a situation, it is easy to overlook the fact that there are still virulent strains of fascism in our political culture which, however marginal, demand our attention. One of the least recognized or understood of these strains is the phenomenon one might call "actually existing ecofascism," that is, the preoccupation of authentically fascist movements with environmentalist concerns. In order to grasp the peculiar intensity and endurance of this affiliation, we would do well to examine more closely its most notorious historical incarnation, the so-called "green wing" of German National Socialism.

Despite an extensive documentary record, the subject remains an elusive one, underappreciated by professional historians and environmental activists alike. In English-speaking countries as well as in Germany itself, the very existence of a "green wing" in the Nazi movement, much less its inspiration, goals, and consequences, has yet to be adequately researched and analyzed. Most of the handful of available interpretations succumb to either an alarming intellectual affinity with their subject." 2 or a naive refusal to examine the full extent of the "ideological overlap between nature conservation and National Socialism ." 3 This article presents a brief and necessarily schematic overview of the ecological components of Nazism, emphasizing both their central role in Nazi ideology and their practical implementation during the Third Reich. A preliminary survey of nineteenth and twentieth century precursors to classical ecofascism should serve to illuminate the conceptual underpinnings common to all forms of reactionary ecology.

Two initial clarifications are in order. First, the terms "environmental" and "ecological" are here used more or less interchangeably to denote ideas, attitudes, and practices commonly associated with the contemporary environmental movement. This is not an anachronism; it simply indicates an interpretive approach which highlights connections to present-day concerns. Second, this approach is not meant to endorse the historiographically discredited notion that pre-1933 historical data can or should be read as "leading inexorably" to the Nazi calamity. Rather, our concern here is with discerning ideological continuities and tracing political genealogies, in an attempt to understand the past in light of our current situation -- to make history relevant to the present social and ecological crisis.
The Roots of the Blood and Soil Mystique

Germany is not only the birthplace of the science of ecology and the site of Green politics' rise to prominence; it has also been home to a peculiar synthesis of naturalism and nationalism forged under the influence of the Romantic tradition's anti-Enlightenment irrationalism. Two nineteenth century figures exemplify this ominous conjunction: Ernst Moritz Arndt and Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl.

[We'll hold off posting further biographical details until a later date.]

While best known in Germany for his fanatical nationalism, Arndt was also dedicated to the cause of the peasantry, which lead him to a concern for the welfare of the land itself. Historians of German environmentalism mention him as the earliest example of 'ecological' thinking in the modern sense. 4 His remarkable 1815 article On the Care and Conservation of Forests, written at the dawn of industrialization in Central Europe, rails against shortsighted exploitation of woodlands and soil, condemning deforestation and its economic causes. At times he wrote in terms strikingly similar to those of contemporary biocentrism: "When one sees nature in a necessary connectedness and interrelationship, then all things are equally important -- shrub, worm, plant, human, stone, nothing first or last, but all one single unity." 5

Arndt's environmentalism, however, was inextricably bound up with virulently xenophobic nationalism . His eloquent and prescient appeals for ecological sensitivity were couched always in terms of the well-being of the German soil and the German people, and his repeated lunatic polemics against miscegenation, demands for teutonic racial purity, and epithets against the French, Slavs, and Jews marked every aspect of his thought. At the very outset of the nineteenth century the deadly connection between love of land and militant racist nationalism was firmly set in place.

Riehl, a student of Arndt, further developed this sinister tradition. In some respects his 'green' streak went significantly deeper than Arndt's; presaging certain tendencies in recent environmental activism, his 1853 essay Field and Forest ended with a call to fight for "the rights of wilderness." But even here nationalist pathos set the tone: "We must save the forest, not only so that our ovens do not become cold in winter, but also so that the pulse of life of the people continues to beat warm and joyfully, so that Germany remains German." 6 Riehl was an implacable opponent of the rise of industrialism and urbanization; his overtly antisemitic glorification of rural peasant values and undifferentiated condemnation of modernity established him as the "founder of agrarian romanticism and anti-urbanism." 7

These latter two fixations matured in the second half of the nineteenth century in the context of the v?lkisch movement, a powerful cultural disposition and social tendency which united ethnocentric populism with nature mysticism. At the heart of the v?lkisch temptation was a pathological response to modernity. In the face of the very real dislocations brought on by the triumph of industrial capitalism and national unification, v?lkisch thinkers preached a return to the land, to the simplicity and wholeness of a life attuned to nature's purity. The mystical effusiveness of this perverted utopianism was matched by its political vulgarity. While "the Volkish movement aspired to reconstruct the society that was sanctioned by history, rooted in nature, and in communion with the cosmic life spirit," 8 it pointedly refused to locate the sources of alienation, rootlessness and environmental destruction in social structures, laying the blame instead to rationalism, cosmopolitanism, and urban civilization. The stand-in for all of these was the age-old object of peasant hatred and middle-class resentment: the Jews. "The Germans were in search of a mysterious wholeness that would restore them to primeval happiness, destroying the hostile milieu of urban industrial civilization that the Jewish conspiracy had foisted on them." 9

Reformulating traditional German antisemitism into nature-friendly terms, the v?lkisch movement carried a volatile amalgam of nineteenth century cultural prejudices, Romantic obsessions with purity, and anti-Enlightenment sentiment into twentieth century political discourse. The emergence of modern ecology forged the final link in the fateful chain which bound together aggressive nationalism, mystically charged racism, and environmentalist predilections . In 1867 the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel coined the term 'ecology' and began to establish it as a scientific discipline dedicated to studying the interactions between organism and environment. Haeckel was also the chief popularizer of Darwin and evolutionary theory for the German-speaking world, and developed a peculiar sort of social darwinist philosophy he called 'monism.' The German Monist League he founded combined scientifically based ecological holism with v?lkisch social views. Haeckel believed in nordic racial superiority, strenuously opposed race mixing and enthusiastically supported racial eugenics. His fervent nationalism became fanatical with the onset of World War I, and he fulminated in antisemitic tones against the post-war Council Republic in Bavaria.

In this way "Haeckel contributed to that special variety of German thought which served as the seed bed for National Socialism. He became one of Germany's major ideologists for racism, nationalism and imperialism." 10 Near the end of his life he joined the Thule Society, "a secret, radically right-wing organization which played a key role in the establishment of the Nazi movement." 11 But more than merely personal continuities are at stake here. The pioneer of scientific ecology, along with his disciples Willibald Hentschel, Wilhelm B?lsche and Bruno Wille, profoundly shaped the thinking of subsequent generations of environmentalists by embedding concern for the natural world in a tightly woven web of regressive social themes. From its very beginnings, then, ecology was bound up in an intensely reactionary political framework.

The specific contours of this early marriage of ecology and authoritarian social views are highly instructive. At the center of this ideological complex is the direct, unmediated application of biological categories to the social realm. Haeckel held that "civilization and the life of nations are governed by the same laws as prevail throughout nature and organic life." 12 This notion of 'natural laws' or 'natural order' has long been a mainstay of reactionary environmental thought. Its concomitant is anti-humanism:

Thus, for the Monists, perhaps the most pernicious feature of European bourgeois civilization was the inflated importance which it attached to the idea of man in general, to his existence and to his talents, and to the belief that through his unique rational faculties man could essentially recreate the world and bring about a universally more harmonious and ethically just social order. [Humankind was] an insignificant creature when viewed as part of and measured against the vastness of the cosmos and the overwhelming forces of nature. 13

Other Monists extended this anti-humanist emphasis and mixed it with the traditional v?lkisch motifs of indiscriminate anti-industrialism and anti-urbanism as well as the newly emerging pseudo-scientific racism. The linchpin, once again, was the conflation of biological and social categories. The biologist Raoul Franc?, founding member of the Monist League, elaborated so-called Lebensgesetze, 'laws of life' through which the natural order determines the social order. He opposed racial mixing, for example, as "unnatural." Franc? is acclaimed by contemporary ecofascists as a "pioneer of the ecology movement." 14

Franc?'s colleague Ludwig Woltmann, another student of Haeckel, insisted on a biological interpretation for all societal phenomena, from cultural attitudes to economic arrangements. He stressed the supposed connection between environmental purity and 'racial' purity: "Woltmann took a negative attitude toward modern industrialism. He claimed that the change from an agrarian to an industrial society had hastened the decline of the race. In contrast to nature, which engendered the harmonic forms of Germanism, there were the big cities, diabolical and inorganic, destroying the virtues of the race ." 15

Thus by the early years of the twentieth century a certain type of 'ecological' argumentation, saturated with right-wing political content, had attained a measure of respectability within the political culture of Germany. During the turbulent period surrounding World War I, the mixture of ethnocentric fanaticism, regressive rejection of modernity and genuine environmental concern proved to be a very potent potion indeed.
http://www.spunk.org/library/places/germany/sp001630/peter.html

Footnotes 1. Ernst Lehmann, Biologischer Wille. Wege und Ziele biologischer Arbeit im neuen Reich, M?nchen, 1934, pp. 10-11. Lehmann was a professor of botany who characterized National Socialism as "politically applied biology."
***

We see that some of our common assumptions about the benign can lead us to false paths, and once we see clearly where we're headed we can change direction and call to the attention of others that we are astray. Knowing what we do now about ecology we can see why Davis above would conclude that chickens are as important as is the life of man. In further posts we'll try to show that this line of feeling, this Irrationalist mode of epistemology leads us not only into fascist ecology but also into fascsit multiculturalism, into Left dhimmitude, into philobarbarism where we stand agape at Palestinian homicide bombers while some of our own say they are resistence fighters. It's all of a paackage, one part being next to the other. We'll continue next post with more of this essay, and we hope you'll join us.

--
Yalla, Dag

Cursed by Ecofascist Mystic Soil Worshippers

Modernity sucks sometimes. I'm filled with both angst and weltschmertz when I get computer daemons in the box that screw up things. We're going tosacrifice a chicken when the moon rises, I'll do a naked dance around the fire, and presto-pronto, things should be back to normal pretty soon. Sorry for the inconveniences.

Dag.

Questioning Authority of Assumptions (2)

A brief precis of part two of this look at ecology as an aspect of Left dhimmi fascism reveals that what we often assume -- as a general culture of the Modernist West -- is not the ecology of warm and fuzzy stuff, of cute animals and baby birds living in old growth forests while happy people wander naked in harmony with Nature. No, ecology is far more than that, something that is in truth a sinister and repulsive and violent, hate-fueled ideology that often very nice and decent people speak of without having any idea whereof they speak. Yes, it's off-putting to write like that, bordering at first glance on the conspiracy theory level. The historical record proves that assumption to be misinformed. It's still such an assault on our conventional assumptions that most people will not believe that ecology is a term coined by a violent anti-Semite and that ecology is a pseudo-science that promotes genocide.

Ecology, when it comes down to it, isn't important to us here in the heart of a large city. Ecology is only interesting in that it is part of a larger problem we face from our fellow citizens, those who think that Nature is something great and good. It makes us nervous simply because we have to share space in this city with people who assume that some things are right, others wrong, and that's how we'll conduct our public affairs; and the nervousness arises when the right and the wrong are based in the majority mind of the public, in public opinion, on some very wrong and frightening assumptions. The idea of ecology as good isn't one thing in the mind of the public, it's part of a greater opinion. There is a linkage between ecology and Muslims blowing up buses in the city centre and politicians saying its not a problem with Islam and protesters raging at America and the West. If we ask ourselves "Why is the West flooded with Islamic maniacs committing murder at random, and why aren't our politicians doing the right things about stopping it, and why are people protesting on the streets against the West itself?" then we will have to start looking in directions not clearly obvious. We might come across as kooks when we suggest ideas not commonly assumed. We'll risk it here and hope for the best.

Half the population of the West is in a state of pathological hatred regarding America. And half of American citizens are whipped into a frenzy of rage at the sound of the name "George Bush."

What's going on here? Why is this happening? Why aren't people in the West enraged instead by Islamic fascists, by men who bomb buses and schools, who gang rape teenagers, who sexually mutilate female children? Why aren't we going nuts over the antics of our enemies? Why are we so enraged at ourselves and our own cultures?

No, it's not ecology that makes this happen. Ecology is part of the problem. Ecology is a piece of the problem that makes us see the West as evil. The positions we take emotionally as ecology supporters also means we take emotional postions that conform to that mind-set. We take it all, the good with the bad, and the result is madness-- unknown to us, the bad hidden in the good.

Ecology started badly, and though none of us here will suggest that we believe in the things the early ecologists wrote and thought about racial questions that stem from it, that the soil is polluted by having Jews living on it, it is part of ecology's history. Ecology is about clean water and the ozone layer and real forests. It is also-- and we must understand this clearly-- about priorities.

We won't likely find many people who claim that chickens suffer more than did the people murdered by Muslims on 9-11. We look at such people who equate the lives of chickens with the life of Man as lunatics. But we find thousands of people protesting on the streets in the name of anti-globalism fighting with police, smashing, looting and burning, praising homicide bombers and rapists and child mutilators, people who protest against us because we are destroying the Earth, according to them. Why? And then, why do our poiticians lie to us about Islam being the religion of peace? Why do our leaders lie to us about Islam? Why all the lies, and why do so many average people go along with the lies? Why do so many average and decent people hate America to the point they would rather support Saddam than Americasn is Iraq? Why are normal and decent people insane and hate-filled?

Part of the answer is to do with our views on ecology. It might seem crazy today to say ecology is part of the reason peole are against the Modernist West, but in five years public opinion will catch up to this and you'll be thought mad to disagree with it.

Today, ecology is a mental position in the public opinion that threatens to destroy our world as we know it. This is the second part of why.
***

The Youth Movement and the Weimar Era

The chief vehicle for carrying this ideological constellation to prominence was the youth movement, an amorphous phenomenon which played a decisive but highly ambivalent role in shaping German popular culture during the first three tumultuous decades of this century. Also known as the Wandervögel (which translates roughly as 'wandering free spirits'), the youth movement was a hodge-podge of countercultural elements, blending neo-Romanticism, Eastern philosophies, nature mysticism, hostility to reason, and a strong communal impulse in a confused but no less ardent search for authentic, non-alienated social relations. Their back-to-the-land emphasis spurred a passionate sensitivity to the natural world and the damage it suffered. They have been aptly characterized as 'right-wing hippies,' for although some sectors of the movement gravitated toward various forms of emancipatory politics (though usually shedding their environmentalist trappings in the process), most of the Wandervöge were eventually absorbed by the Nazis. This shift from nature worship to Führer worship is worth examining.

The various strands of the youth movement shared a common self-conception: they were a purportedly 'non-political' response to a deep cultural crisis, stressing the primacy of direct emotional experience over social critique and action. They pushed the contradictions of their time to the breaking point, but were unable or unwilling to take the final step toward organized, focused social rebellion, "convinced that the changes they wanted to effect in society could not be brought about by political means, but only by the improvement of the individual." 16 This proved to be a fatal error. "Broadly speaking, two ways of revolt were open to them: they could have pursued their radical critique of society, which in due course would have brought them into the camp of social revolution. [But] the Wandervögel chose the other form of protest against society -- romanticism." 17

This posture lent itself all too readily to a very different kind of political mobilization: the 'unpolitical' zealotry of fascism. The youth movement did not simply fail in its chosen form of protest, it was actively realigned when its members went over to the Nazis by the thousands. Its countercultural energies and its dreams of harmony with nature bore the bitterest fruit. This is, perhaps, the unavoidable trajectory of any movement which acknowledges and opposes social and ecological problems but does not recognize their systemic roots or actively resist the political and economic structures which generate them. Eschewing societal transformation in favor of personal change, an ostensibly apolitical disaffection can, in times of crisis, yield barbaric results.

The attraction such perspectives exercised on idealistic youth is clear: the enormity of the crisis seemed to enjoin a total rejection of its apparent causes. It is in the specific form of this rejection that the danger lies. Here the work of several more theoretical minds from the period is instructive. The philosopher Ludwig Klages profoundly influenced the youth movement and particularly shaped their ecological consciousness. He authored a tremendously important essay titled "Man and Earth" for the legendary Meissner gathering of the Wandervögel in 1913. 18 An extraordinarily poignant text and the best known of all Klages' work, it is not only "one of the very greatest manifestoes of the radical ecopacifist movement in Germany," 19 but also a classic example of the seductive terminology of reactionary ecology.

"Man and Earth" anticipated just about all of the themes of the contemporary ecology movement. It decried the accelerating extinction of species, disturbance of global ecosystemic balance, deforestation, destruction of aboriginal peoples and of wild habitats, urban sprawl, and the increasing alienation of people from nature. In emphatic terms it disparaged Christianity, capitalism, economic utilitarianism, hyperconsumption and the ideology of 'progress.' It even condemned the environmental destructiveness of rampant tourism and the slaughter of whales, and displayed a clear recognition of the planet as an ecological totality. All of this in 1913 !

It may come as a surprise, then, to learn that Klages was throughout his life politically archconservative and a venomous antisemite. One historian labels him a "Volkish fanatic" and another considers him simply "an intellectual pacemaker for the Third Reich" who "paved the way for fascist philosophy in many important respects." 20 In "Man and Earth" a genuine outrage at the devastation of the natural environment is coupled with a political subtext of cultural despair. 21 Klages' diagnosis of the ills of modern society, for all its declamations about capitalism, returns always to a single culprit: "Geist." His idiosyncratic use of this term, which means mind or intellect, was meant to denounce not only hyperrationalism or instrumental reason, but rational thought itself. Such a wholesale indictment of reason cannot help but have savage political implications. It forecloses any chance of rationally reconstructing society's relationship with nature and justifies the most brutal authoritarianism. But the lessons of Klages' life and work have been hard for ecologists to learn. In 1980, "Man and Earth" was republished as an esteemed and seminal treatise to accompany the birth of the German Greens.

Another philosopher and stern critic of Enlightenment who helped bridge fascism and environmentalism was Martin Heidegger. A much more renowned thinker than Klages, Heidegger preached "authentic Being" and harshly criticized modern technology, and is therefore often celebrated as a precursor of ecological thinking. On the basis of his critique of technology and rejection of humanism, contemporary deep ecologists have elevated Heidegger to their pantheon of eco-heroes:

Heidegger's critique of anthropocentric humanism, his call for humanity to learn to "let things be," his notion that humanity is involved in a "play" or "dance" with earth, sky, and gods, his meditation on the possibility of an authentic mode of "dwelling" on the earth, his complaint that industrial technology is laying waste to the earth, his emphasis on the importance of local place and "homeland," his claim that humanity should guard and preserve things, instead of dominating them -- all these aspects of Heidegger's thought help to support the claim that he is a major deep ecological theorist. 22

Such effusions are, at best, dangerously naive. They suggest a style of thought utterly oblivious to the history of fascist appropriations of all the elements the quoted passage praises in Heidegger. (To his credit, the author of the above lines, a major deep ecological theorist in his own right, has since changed his position and eloquently urged his colleagues to do the same.) 23 As for the philosopher of Being himself, he was -- unlike Klages, who lived in Switzerland after 1915 -- an active member of the Nazi party and for a time enthusiastically, even adoringly supported the Führer. His mystical panegyrics to Heimat (homeland) were complemented by a deep antisemitism, and his metaphysically phrased broadsides against technology and modernity converged neatly with populist demagogy. Although he lived and taught for thirty years after the fall of the Third Reich, Heidegger never once publicly regretted, much less renounced, his involvement with National Socialism, nor even perfunctorily condemned its crimes. His work, whatever its philosophical merits, stands today as a signal admonition about the political uses of anti-humanism in ecological garb.

In addition to the youth movement and protofascist philosophies, there were, of course, practical efforts at protecting natural habitats during the Weimar period. Many of these projects were profoundly implicated in the ideology which culminated in the victory of 'Blood and Soil.' A 1923 recruitment pitch for a woodlands preservation outfit gives a sense of the environmental rhetoric of the time:

"In every German breast the German forest quivers with its caverns and ravines, crags and boulders, waters and winds, legends and fairy tales, with its songs and its melodies, and awakens a powerful yearning and a longing for home; in all German souls the German forest lives and weaves with its depth and breadth, its stillness and strength, its might and dignity, its riches and its beauty -- it is the source of German inwardness, of the German soul, of German freedom. Therefore protect and care for the German forest for the sake of the elders and the youth, and join the new German "League for the Protection and Consecration of the German Forest."24

The mantra-like repetition of the word "German" and the mystical depiction of the sacred forest fuse together, once again, nationalism and naturalism. This intertwinement took on a grisly significance with the collapse of the Weimar republic. For alongside such relatively innocuous conservation groups, another organization was growing which offered these ideas a hospitable home: the National Socialist German Workers Party, known by its acronym NSDAP. Drawing on the heritage of Arndt, Riehl, Haeckel, and others (all of whom were honored between 1933 and 1945 as forebears of triumphant National Socialism), the Nazi movement's incorporation of environmentalist themes was a crucial factor in its rise to popularity and state power.
http://www.spunk.org/library/places/germany/sp001630/peter.html
***

Path: A Reply to Rick Darby

The following post is in response to comments here last post from Rick at http://reflight.blogspot.com/.

Rick raised some worthwhile concerns, and I wrote back at such length that I felt I might as well post on the main page:

The essay below, Part 5 on Biehl's "ecofascism," is long and fairly detailed. It's of a piece with the seven or so essays on "Modern Agriculture" and pieces as well on Hiedegger and Darre, with more to come.

The reason for the emphasis here on ecology, something I honestly don't pay much attention to in my daily course of living, is bound also to the concept of "Identity Fascism," of which there is some here and more to come. Along with that is the third theme of "Gnostic Fascism," and then "Antiwar Fascism" and "Eschatology Fascism." Altogether the focus is on Left dhimmi fascism and it's reaction to Modernity and the triune revolutions of France, America, and Industry. There's not much chance of anyone following this blog's thesis as closely as I do, and therefore not much chance of the casual reader seeing the overall plan like I do. I'll try to summarise, if I can, to give a short version of what this is look at ecology is about:

Our epistemological view informs our life course. If we turn to Nature for our understanding of reality and our purpose in life, then we will have to limit ourselves to Irrationality as philosophy. That needn't be total. One may synthesize, as the Romantics do, Nature and Reason, giving privilege to Nature. That's the problem as I see it.

As Rick Darby points out rightly, one might try to associate ecological concerns with fascists rather than address the question of the validity of ecological concerns themselves.

The ecological "ground of existence" is German Romanticism, and within that the precepts of xenophobia, antisemitism, racism, sexism, and violent Irrationalsim. That's the historical record, and we can't legitimately ignore it. As Rick points out, to suggest that there is nothing else to ecology is ad hominem. Yes, Haekel and Arndt and Reihl are proto-Nazis; but no, it doesn't mean that ecologists today, all everywhere, are Nazis. Nor does it mean the Nazis who inform the ecological debate are wrong a postiori simply because they are Nazis. The historical record shows that those who created the modern sciences of ecology and environmentalism are proto-Nazi and later officials in the NSDAP rulership. Those who follow from then are also often neo-Nazis, and both Right and Left fascists in the classical sense. None of that invalidates valid ecological concerns. The source of truths doesn't invalidate those truths.

Rick points out the immigration and population problems that ecology addresses to some extent and in various ways.

When we look at the American scene today of unrestricted illegal immigration it pales in comparison to that in Europe, where Eurabia is a deepening daily waking nightmare. And even that is nothing compared to the realities of life in typical Third World megalopoli. We have seen here and elsewhere recently the swarmings at the border posts in Spanish Morocco of African migrants dying in the attempt to enter Europe illegally to escape from their home dysfunctions. That tells us graphically that there is a growing problem of immediate concern not only for Africans but for all of us. It is a problem of Human ecology. We are witnessing an out of control explosion of people akin to the rabbit plague in Australia that is creating before our eyes a Human wasteland, a desert of people, a clear-cut land of Human tree stumps. Our most urgent concern as residents of the West is of course to protect ourselves from irreparable resource depletion, and with the influx of destructive parasitic migrants such as Muslims our own consumption patterns become magnified and threatening to the existence of our world as it is now, and becomes increasing more desperate with each passing year. Really, we must do something, and soon. The question I wish to raise in this blog is what are we to do? And that will depend on how we organize our interpretations of knowledge itself. Our epistemological ground will divulge paths that direct us in many and varied directions from which we must choose the better.

Historically, the path of ecology is one of xenophobia, racism, violence against outsiders. That's history. We need not repeat the mistakes of the past, astoundingly evil ones at that, nor even lesser paths of bad epistemology. We have to be clear what our possible paths are in order to make a determined attempt to strike a right direction. Knowing the history of ecology might allow us to avoid past evils. The ecological problems Haekel and Arndt and Riehl and Darre faced are facing us today in ways more intense than they faced. We, if we are to be moral actors, cannot choose the past paths of the fascist ecologist, but we must also address the same problems they did. My focus here isn't on ecology itself but the epistemology of ecology, as it were. If we examine and define that ground of being in ourselves, therefrom we might move ahead rather than backward.

In numerous posts over these past years I've referred to the problem of Islam as one of the bifurcation of Humanity, the splitting in two of the paths of Humanity, the first remaining in the primitive world of tillers and toilers, the redundant people of the body politic of Modernity. There cannot be a compromise between the two paths: we cannot have a mass of subsistence farmers living side by side with people living in a rationalistic Space Age. One grouping must make way for the other, whichever that might be. The problem with that line of reasoning is that it seems to be a clear case of Social Darwinism, of cultures in a battle of the survival of the fittest. I beg to disagree. I do agree that Islam is a body of a billion people made psychotic death worshippers by an evil poligion, a political religion that informs the basest aspects of the Human experience. What, in the struggle for the course of history, is to be done about them if we Moderns prevail? Obviously if we lose the struggle against Islam we and the world will sink back to pre-feudal times and Man will again become a farm animal generally, which is the situation of the vast majority of Humans on Earth today, and which has been the lot of Man for the 5,000 years of the agricultural Revolution so far. But, if we win the struggle for the future as Modern, what will happen to the billion Muslims of now? As they are, they are psychotic. They are not simply violent, they are Irrational in the greater sense of having as a mental ground Irrationalism as epistemology. They simply cannot ever be rational in the Western sense and remain Muslim. At an intuitive level they understand that well. They also recognize that the Muslim world is being left further behind daily by the Modern Revolutions, which in turn drives them into further psychosis, further rages, further acts of "grand gesture fascism," such as suicide/homicide acts. Even further, these acts of Irrationalism as epistemology validate the death worship of Muslim culture, encouraging it more, and it will in turn provoke a response from the threatened West. In other words, a few more major attacks by parasitic psychopathic populations will goad the West into massive retaliation, eg. nuclear responses against Iran. I suggest that that is a bad thing. I see the clear possibility of a "sand diorama," a small museum construct of dress-up characters on display in a dusty museum of a lost race. What do we do to solve this problem of maddened and violent parasites swarming over our lands? It is a problem of Human ecology. Extermination is low on my personal list of options. I'm certain that's so even for the most bellicose ranters on the Internet, especially those who've never seen the results of massacres in person. I hope we can find a workable solution to this problem that includes the least necessary violence, though massive violence is definitely required even at this point.

This problem is not of ethnicity, race, not even of religion. It is a question of how we approach knowledge of the realities of life. We are Modern or we are primitive. That isn't to reduce us in the West to Mr. Spocks from Star Trek and to suggest that the primitives are cavemen. Our differences are vast, and I offer that our differences are unbridgeable. However, our differences are not insolvable. How we in the Modern West will approach the solution will come from how we understand the possibilities of knowing reality. Our Muslim cousins know reality from the Irrationalsit position of Islam. For them there is no other understanding of reality. I hope we can all forget about them as equations in this problem. Our task is to address the solution of Islam and its population of tillers and toilers, the parasitic swarms of violent psychopaths, and to see for ourselves how we might best deal with them in as humane a fashion as possible with the least amount of Human suffering on their side. We will not address this as Spockian logic fetishists. we must account for our own irrationalism conjoined with our Modernist epistemologies of universality and individualism and privacy. When struck, we must strike back, but within reason. Our debate is restricted to ourselves, excluding the object of our concern, given that they don't have anything positive to contribute. Muslims are irrelevant to the future course of what we do with and to them. They are a bloc of redundant, violent, suicidal parasites. Nothing they want makes any difference to us. Our questions will have to do with how we see reality and how we gain knowledge from it. That will determine how we act to solve this problem of Human ecology. We must do whatever we do in a Modernist and rationalist manner. Our 19th century and early 20th century forebearers acted in ways we cannot imitate. We have a problem like theirs, but our solutions must be completely different from theirs. We can be rational, reasonable, and restrained in our solutions, or we can nuke the bastards.

Our understanding of how we know what we know will decide the positions we take in our struggle to maintain the Modernity of the West. Faced with insane Islam as a poligion within and without, where do we find our solutions? First we must ask "Who are we." We will find that answer according to how we know reality. If our answers to that come to us from horoscopes, tarot cards, and runes, then we will follow a path very different from that leading from rational discourse. If our view is that knowledge is derived form the heavens, we will not be rational in our approach to solutions to the threats of Islam. We must, if we are to solve the problems of Islamic jihad and social ecology, identify who we are. Who are we protecting when we say "we?" And how do we prove that one is one of us? that will depend on our epistemology. Here we have spent some great amount of time, and will further in time, looking at the problems of identity from Herder, Fichte, and contemporary "Identity Fascism." When we know who we are, then we can determine who our enemies are. I suggest that we will know ourselves either by reason or by "Gnostic Fascism," a concept that needs wait for explication.

We, at this vague level of residents in the modern West, face a problem of Human ecology. It's pointless to ignore it, wrong to suggest that those who do are Nazis simply becasue ecology stems from evil originators. We, whoever we are, must decide how we wil solve the problem of Islam, of jihad, of swarms of violent parasites. Early ecologists opted for genocide based on psuedo-scientific clap-trap to justify their deeds. We, whether we like it or not, are faced with an intensified version fo the same ecological problems our Nazi ancestors faced. How we decide to solve our current problem will come from how we understand reality. If we allow ourselves to be guided by past ecological principles, we too will turn to racist genocide. I point out the history of ecology for the simple reason that if we do not know that history we might well blindly repeat it.

Our next post will continue this investigation of ecology. We hope you'll join us, and please feel free to write you comments on this topic or others as you see fit.