The Nazi cult of the organic

by Ellis Washington
March 26, 2011

  Gemeinnutzgeht vor Eigennutz.

      (The common good supersedes the private good.)

                                                                                  Nazi slogan

Prologue

Fanatical environmentalism, vegetarianism, animal rights and public health are four progressive policy initiatives that most people would not readily associate with Hitler and the Nazis. "Unlike Marxism, which declared much of culture and humanity irrelevant to the revolution, National Socialism was holistic," wrote Jonah Goldberg. Indeed, "organic" and "holistic" were the Nazi terms of art for totalitarianism. The Mussolinian vision of everything inside the state, nothing outside the state, was organic-ized by the Nazis. In this sense, the Bavarian cabinet minister Hans Schemm was deadly serious when he said, "National Socialism is applied biology [Darwinism]."
Green fascism
Historically, German fascism was born out of a 19th century Romantic revolt against industrialization that philosophically mirrored aspects of Thoreau's transcendentalism. The distinction is that while Thoreau sought to separate himself from modernity, eco-fanatics like Al Gore and the Sierra Club seeks to translate their Romantic animosity against modernity into a totalizing government program that will control and dominate every aspect of our lives. Think: carbon credits, ethanol, micro cars and remote-controlled thermostats.

Liberal environmentalism is fascist to the core. The most tangible fascist aspects is that it is an invaluable "crisis mechanism." Recall the progressive motto, "Never allow a good crisis to go to waste." Al Gore constantly insists that global warming is the defining crisis of our time. Skeptics are called traitors, Holocaust deniers, tools of the "carbon interests."
Vegetarianism
German historicism had championed the organic conception of society and state bound together. Hitler often claimed his vegetarianism was inspired by Richard Wagner, his favorite composer and demigod to Nazi German nationalism and anti-Semitism, who argued in an 1891 essay that meat-eating and race-mixing were the twin causes of man's alienation from the natural world. Wagner demanded a "true and hearty fellowship with the vegetarians, the protectors of animals, and the friends of temperance."
Animal rights
Nazi leaders and today's progressives both share a fanatical obsession with animal rights as opposed to rational animal welfare. "How can you find pleasure in shooting from behind cover at poor creatures browsing on the edge of a wood, innocent, defenseless, and unsuspecting?" asked Heinrich Himmler. "It's really pure murder." In August 1933, Hermann Goring prohibited the "unbearable torture and suffering in animal experiments," threatening imprisonment in concentration camps to all "those who still think they can treat animals as inanimate property."
Radicalism has become mainstream – read Wesley Smith's "A Rat Is a Pig Is a Dog Is a Boy: The Human Cost of the Animal Rights Movement"
Princeton professor Peter Singer, in his 1975 book, "Animal Liberation," has been cited as the authoritative influence on PETA and today's animal-liberation movement. Professor Singer's thesis argues for an expansion of the utilitarian idea that "the greatest good of the greatest number" is the only measure of good or ethical behavior. Singer contends that animals should be given "equal consideration" to humans in all legislation.
"When it comes to feelings, a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy," said PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. "There is no rational basis for saying that a human being has special rights." First, there is the liberal fascist obsession on "feelings" – not morality, thought or reason – as the essence of life. Second is the supposition that the higher "feelings" (conscience) are irrelevant. Newkirk's rational basis test between rats, pigs and humans contends that there is no legal difference between them. PETA's "Holocaust on your plate" campaign is based on the barbaric cognitive dissonance of equating human lives to vermin, pigs and chickens.

Public health
Health fascism isn't new. Recall that Hitler loathed cigarettes and was fanatical about veganism and health. In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson appointed future President Herbert Hoover as his food administrator. Hoover mandated that all children sign a loyalty pledge to the state that they wouldn't eat between meals. Obamacare, New York outlawing transfats and salt, and Michelle Obama's "Get Moving" campaign are just the beginning.
Robert Proctor's magisterial work, "The Nazi War on Cancer" (1999), systematically cataloged the Nazis obsession with personal and public health, which was the core of the Nazi Weltanschauung (worldview). The Nazis, according to Proctor, were convinced that "aggressive measures in the field of public health would usher in a new era of healthy, happy Germans, united by race and common outlook, cleansed of alien environmental toxins, freed from the previous era's plague of cancers, both literal and figurative."
A popular Nazis slogan of the 1920s was "Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz" – The common good supersedes the private good – to justify policy sacrificing individual health for the sake of the body politic. In 2004, Hillary Clinton insisted that we look at children's entertainment "from a public-health perspective." According to the Hitler Youth health manual, "Food is not a private matter!" Or, "You have the duty to be healthy!" Or, "the government has a perfect right to influence personal behavior to the best of its ability if it is for the welfare of the individual and the community as a whole." Regrettably, that last statement was from President Reagan's surgeon general, C. Everett Koop.
Epilogue
The German needed to restore his organic purity by reconnecting with nature. Environmentalism, vegetarianism, animal rights and public health were merely different parts of the Nazi obsession with the organic order that dominated the German fascist mind then and the liberal fascist mind today. Hitler repeatedly asserted that there "is no gap between the organic and inorganic worlds." All of this is based on the "Wrong Turn" myth – that during the ancient past the German people took a wrong turn by accepting Christianity, bourgeois morality, logocentrism and forsaking occult paganism, the latter which Hitler and the Nazis viewed as being more organic, holistic and a more authentic way of life.
Tragically, this barbaric cognitive dissonance, this Nazi cult of the organic lives today in American society's obsession with all things organic, "saving the planet," overly protecting animals at human expense … and regulating our sacred constitutional rights into oblivion.
Heil Obama!

Ellis Washington is former editor of the Michigan Law Review and law clerk at The Rutherford Institute. He hosts a radio program Thursdays at 10 a.m. Eastern on 1620 AM in Atlanta. It can be heard online at the Radio Sandy Springs website. Washington is a regular co-host of the popular radio show, Joshua's Trial heard Saturdays on WDTKam.com. Visit his website, the Ellis Washington Report. Washington is a graduate of John Marshall Law School and a lecturer and freelance writer on constitutional law, legal history and critical race theory. His latest book is "The Nuremberg Trials: Last Tragedy of the Holocaust."

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