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| Walther Darré National Ecosocialist |
Two disturbing stories recently on the greens. First Spiegel magazine runs an article on
the rise of extremist right-wing environmentalism in Germany. Then The Observer newspaper reveals that, in the name of preventing ‘climate change’, British aid money to India
is paying for the forced sterilisation of poor people. These are shocking
stories. But not so shocking to those familiar with story of Nazi
environmentalism. Time for a history lesson …
Picture the scene. At the edge of a
forest, German soldiers point their guns at rows of naked people who follow the
Jewish religion. Among them are young mothers clutching their babies.
The shots echo through the woods and the dead bodies fall into the
ground. Down the road, while this is happening, their German army
comrades are busy establishing nature walks and bird sanctuaries and planting trees.
The Nazis conducted horrific experiments on children (I have seen footage so
upsetting it can’t be shown on TV) but at the same time they banned medical
experiments on animals. The same Nazi monsters who committed crimes of
unimaginable barbarity also advocated vegetarianism, organic agriculture,
forest preservation and homeopathic healthcare. How can we possibly explain
this? What was the connection between the inhuman brutality
of the Nazis and their gushing idealization of ‘Nature’?
The purpose of exploring Nazi
environmentalism is not just to upset the greens. If environmentalism
were a curious but peripheral aspect of National Socialism, it would be of no
real historical interest. Environmentalists could be forgiven for
saying, Ah well, it just goes to show,
there’s a little bit of good in the worst of us. But
environmentalist ideology was not an accidental, optional-extra to National
Socialism. As we shall see, green ideas were at the core of
Nazi thinking. The German Volk and Nazi movements marched beneath the
banners of ‘Nature’ and the ‘organic’. However, what follows here is not
simply a potted history of Nazienvironmentalism.
It is, at the same time, a brief history of early environmentalism writ
large. As will become clear, it is not so easy to draw a line between two
types of green thinking.
To understand why green ideology emerged
at all, and why it happened in Germany, we need to go back in time, a few
centuries, to set the scene. We have described elsewhere on this blog (The Greens: A Warning from
History), the transition from feudal society to capitalism.
To the greens this great historical change it is more or less the source of all
evil. In Germany, it was a process which began, falteringly, in the 13th
Century.
Historically, a rise in commercial
activity is reflected in the growth of towns (towns are in essence markets).
During this century the number of them in Germany increased by about
ten-fold. But the towns in Germany were less of a liberating force than
they had been in England. German feudal society was especially
rigid. Professor of German history Mary Fulbrook describes how ‘Germany
had a much more immobile social hierarchy and was more ‘caste-ridden’ than
either England or France.’ The liberty of the towns was more bitterly
opposed by the German nobles, the increasing wealth of the new commercial
classes more keenly resented and the desperate attempts by the serfs to obtain
their freedom more fiercely resisted.
The German nobles despised the fledgling
class of ‘burghers’ (or ‘bourgeois’) in the towns, and the burghers hated them
right back. As Fulbrook says, ‘German burghers tended to be anti-noble in
outlook, and did not leave the towns to become country gentry as in
England.’ Nevertheless, the very existence of market towns in Germany –
little bastions of liberty – was enough to instil in the serfs the hope of
freedom.
In the 1520s the peasants rose up.
The great serf revolt became known as ‘The Peasants War’ and the ‘Revolution of
the Common Man.’ By 1525, 300,000 peasant serfs had armed
themselves. Well organised peasant armies of between 2,000 and 15,000
went into the field, demanding the abolition of feudal dues and an end to the
privileges of the nobles – in a word, freedom.
As with the famous Peasants Revolt in
England, the serfs enjoyed support from the towns, and like the Peasants Revolt
they met with stiff resistance from the feudal ruling class. But the
suppression of the serf uprising by the German nobles was especially ferocious.
Around 100,000 peasants were slaughtered and many more were blinded and maimed.
Larger economic forces also conspired
against the serfs winning their freedom. The opening up of the Americas drew
European trade towards the Atlantic seaboard. Overland trade routes
across Germany became less important, markets shrank and many German towns fell
into decline and even disappeared. As Professor Blanning says in his big
history of early modern Europe, a pattern was emerging, ‘It was in the
urbanized west that serfdom disappeared earliest, and it was in the rural east,
where one could travel for weeks without encountering anything resembling a
town, that it not only survived, but periodically enjoyed new leases of life.’
In Germany, the power of the nobles (as
against the towns and the serfs), was further enhanced by the devastating
Thirty Years War, which proved to be a key event in German history. The
war itself brought trade to a near stand-still, and to make matters worse, to
pay for the war, ruinous taxes were imposed on commercial activity. As
the historian Professor Gordon Craig describes, ‘the war greatly strengthened
the privileged position of the aristocracy at the expense of the educated and
prosperous burgher class and the peasantry. The decline of towns and the
consequent decrease in the demand for food caused so sharp a fall in grain
prices that small landowners were often forced to sacrifice their independence
in order to maintain themselves … the local nobility was able to take advantage
of this situation to impose new obligations in the form of rents and services
and restrictions upon movement.’
But of most significance was the political
settlement which followed the war. Professor Fulbrook points out, ‘the
settlement which finally emerged in 1648, set patterns with long-lasting
consequences for German history.’
In this settlement, the German ruler,
Friedrich Wilhelm (Elector of Brandenburg and Duke of Prussia) came to a deal
with the nobles which amounted to the creation of the first modern State.
Medieval warfare had involved great nobles – barons, earls and dukes – turning
up on the battle-field with their own feudal retinues to support the
king. War over, job done. There was no standing army. The
‘State’ amounted to a small royal court which followed the king around.
The nobles were powerful, the king was weak. But now, said Wilhelm, there
would be a huge standing army and a greatly enhanced State. The nobles
would lose their independence, but in return, their feudal privileges and an
income would be guaranteed by the State. In fact they would be
given enhanced feudal rights in their own localities and the servile status (leibeigen) of
peasants would be reaffirmed.
The standing Prussian army would be huge
(by the 1700s, it was 81,000 strong). The joke in England was that
Prussia was not a country with an army, but an army with a country. The army,
of course, was structured on feudal lines – the bluer the blood, the more
senior the rank.
It was as if feudalism had been
nationalised. The nobles rubbed their hands. Elsewhere in Europe,
the aristocracy was in decline, their feudal privileges and economic status
eaten away by the creeping success of capitalism. But in Germany, the
State had come to the rescue. It would be the guarantor of inequality.
In England, the success of the commercial
classes was leading to the first Parliamentary democracy. But in Germany,
there was to be a suppression of freedom. In its place would stand the
world’s first modern, bureaucratic State. As Professor Fulbrook
says, ‘In the course of the 1670s, the self-government of the towns was
destroyed and they were subordinated to a body of officials appointed by and
responsible to, the Elector. At the same time, with the foundation of the
Elite corps of the army, the elector created a prestigious status group which
would attract a previously rather independent set of nobles into central state
service.’
To get ahead in State-controlled Germany,
now meant becoming a bureaucrat, as Professor Craig observes, ‘in the upper
reaches of the civil service, in the fiscal administration, for example, there
were opportunities for educated members of the bourgeoisie, who now found such
careers more attractive than the commercial life that they might have followed
a century earlier … This socio-political hierarchy was in turn served by a host
of lesser officials – police, customs officials, tax collectors, teachers, even
clergymen … It is not too much to talk about the progressive
bureaucratisation of Germany in the 17th and 18th Centuries.’
Declining commercial centres, like
Nuremberg and Augsburg and Lübeck, were overtaken in size, importance and
grandeur by administrative centres like Würzburg. Karlsruhe and Mannheim.
A new class of high-status public sector officials had come into being.
They were, in the words of Professor Fulbrook, the new ‘state-dependent,
state-sustaining, professional classes.’ Professor Blanding says ‘It was
a process which reached its consummation with Hegel’s designation of the
bureaucracy as ‘the universal class’, freed from the pressures of the market
and self-interest’. This was also the first modern
publically-funded intelligentsia. As administrators they enjoyed authority
over others. They were not elected and they did not have to submit
themselves to the discipline of the market. They were paid to be in
charge. As the Weimer German satirist Kurt Tucholsky put it, ‘above, the
bureaus; below, the subjects.’ And, as the German sociologist Max Weber
observed, like the scribes of ancient Egypt and the Mandarins of ancient China
(and unlike the thrusting capitalists in England), these officials were not
about to demand political freedom. Why should they oppose State control?
They were the
State!
Over in England, through the 18th and
early 19th Centuries, capitalism was roaring ahead, liberating and transforming
British society. But in Germany, development had been arrested. As
Professor Fulbrook says, ‘many German towns were no longer the flourishing,
self-confident centres of trade and burgher life that they had been in the
early sixteenth century … towns were either transformed into, or newly founded
as, princely residences, centres of government and administration rather than
trade and industry … self-confident burghers became dependent bureaucrats;
habits of obedience and servility were stressed, for subjects rather than
citizens. Many observers have seen these developments as having long-term
political implications for German political culture.’
The creation of the Prussian State machine
was key to what happened next in Germany (and indeed for what has happened
subsequently in other countries too in the Western world). The creation
of a vast State bureaucracy had created an influential class of people who
were, in economic terms, parasitic on capitalism (they were paid for out of
taxes), but in social terms antagonistic to it; a class which was jealous of
its own power, disdainful of the activities of the commercial classes (and
later envious of their growing prosperity); a class of administrators and
planners whose entire reason for existence was predicated on limiting the
freedom which capitalism tends to encourage, and needs in order to flourish.
It was a bureaucratic, administrative
class which identified with its feudal masters and, as Weber describes
brilliantly, embraced the notion of a society based on status rather
than free market forces. A class, as we have seen from Hegel, which would
try to portray itself as selfless, and stuffed with higher purpose, but which
of course had (and has) a very clearly defined self-interest, and world-view to
match. And here, in passing, let us underline a point which should be
more than obvious. The
modern State did not arise in or order to ‘curb the cruelties’ of capitalism.
Far from it. It arose specifically to preserve the privileges of the
existing ruling classes against the democratic, liberating, enriching and
levelling forces of capitalism.
The creation of the German state, of
course, could not isolate its feudal ruling classes completely from the
historic changes happening beyond its borders. In England, serfdom
had effectively been abolished in the 16th Century. At the end of the
18th Century, the French Revolution swept aside feudal servitude there, and,
like a dam bursting, a wave of protest against feudalism swept across
Europe. When the German army was defeated by the French in the battle of
Jena in 1806, the German rulers feared that they would suffer the same grizzly
fate as the French nobles, and so in 1807 serfdom in Germany was formally
ended, though in effect, as Professor Fulbrook describes, the serfs would not
be actually free till the middle of the century. Feudal restrictions on
trade and the mobility of labour were lifted. Peasants and burghers could
now, in theory buy noble lands. The nobles, for the first time, were
asked to pay tax (though only temporarily, as their tax exemptions were
reinstated in 1919).
It took a few years but, by the middle of
the 19th Century the serfs in Germany were at last free to leave the
land. The serfs who for centuries had been forced to work without wages,
under legal compulsion, the serfs, whose lives had been, down to the smallest
detail and as long as anyone could imagine, controlled by their feudal masters,
the grovelling and obedient serfs … had finally won their freedom. They
now demanded wages, or else they would go elsewhere. They would go to the
towns and cities – and did, in huge numbers – to find paid employment as free
men, in any one of a thousand occupations. The transformation, not just
for the serfs, but for Germany as a whole was spectacular. Within 20
years Germany industry more than doubled in size, shops sprang into life, the
railway network trebled in size, the cities ballooned, new roads started
criss-crossing the land, advertising hoardings went up. The pace of change was
electrifying. The former humble obedient serfs were quickly becoming
assertive towns-folk with money in their pockets. They could move jobs to
find higher wages, they could gain promotion, they were courted as consumers,
they could save and they could borrow, they could start a business. Soon, like
the French masses, they’d be demanding political equality!
For the existing ruling classes – the
feudal elite and their legions of bureaucratic hangers-on – it was like the
world had been turned upside down. They were horrified by the newly
liberated capitalistic, commercial classes – proletarian and bourgeois alike.
This feudal anti-capitalist reaction,
this anti-capitalism of the upper
classes, this anti-capitalism from
above, was not a phenomenon limited to Germany. It happened
all over Europe and beyond. (We even see echoes of it in the American Civil
War, in the politics of the reactionary South.) Even England, the pioneer
of capitalism, produced reactionary anti-capitalists like Thomas More, Thomas
Malthus and others. But in England, such men were outsiders. In
thrusting capitalistic, liberal England, the embittered grumbling of men like
Malthus could not compete with the enlightened, thrilling, progressive ideas of
men like Adam Smith and David Ricardo.
In Germany, on the other hand, the
anti-democratic, backward-looking feudal elite had the support of a large State
bureaucracy, which shared its fears and prejudices, whose livelihood and status
depended on patronage from above rather than custom from below. Germany’s
intelligentsia wrote books lamenting the death of age-old German values, looking
back wistfully at the good old days, in the Middle Ages. Whole schools of
thought where developed which reflected this. In economics, the
democratic, freedom-loving English Classical Liberals were opposed by the
Statist, elitist German Historical School. In art, while the English were
enjoying the bright, funny, civilised novels of Jane Austen, the Germans were
producing the absurd, leaden, melancholic, crumbling castles and gargoyles
of Sturm und Drang and
gothic Romanticism, and the ridiculous pagan fantasies of Richard Wagner. In
philosophy the early enlightened rationalism of men like David Hume was later
countered by the dark German irrationalism of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.
The notion that the ‘common man’
(bourgeois and proletarian alike) should enjoy democratic rights Nietzsche
found positively obscene. He attacked the ‘the raving stupidity and the
noisy yapping of the democratic bourgeois.’ ‘Oh Voltaire! Oh
humanity! Oh imbecility!’ He spat at ‘the French Revolution, that
gruesome and, closely considered, superfluous farce.’ And also ‘the
levellers, these falsely named ‘free spirits’ – eloquent and tirelessly
scribbling slaves of the democratic taste and its ‘modern ideas’.’
Nietzsche poured scorn on the Enlightenment and humanism: ‘Man’, said
Nietzsche, ‘is something to be overcome.’ He says ‘The democratic
movement is a form assumed by man in decay’ … ‘that darkening and
uglification of Europe which has now been going on for a hundred years.’
For German reactionaries like Nietzsche,
the abolition of serfdom was a tragedy. He complains that ‘everything
base has become rebellious’. He is horrified by ‘the great evil,
protracted, slow rebellion of the mob and the slaves.’ He says, ‘Let us face
facts: the people have triumphed – or the slaves, the mob, the herd or whatever
you like to call them … Masters have been abolished; the morals of the common
man have triumphed … Mankind’s redemption (namely from its masters) is well
under way; everything is becoming visibly Judified or Christified or mobified
(what do words matter!). To arrest this poison’s progress throughout the
body of mankind seems impossible.’
Nietzsche’s whole work is defiant attack
on democratic, levelling effects of capitalism. He insists, ‘there exists
an order of rank between man and man.’ He speaks of ‘the incarnate
differences of classes.’ ‘The noble caste’, he says are ‘the more
complete human beings’. As for the newly liberated serfs, he calls them,
‘the grumbling, oppressed, rebellious slave classes who aspire after domination
– they call it “freedom”’. They are, ‘ponderous herd animals’ and
‘multifarious, garrulous, weak-willed and highly employable workers who need a
master … worthy clumsy mechanicals … with their plebeian ambition.’
He reviles the common masses: ‘Life is a fountain of delight; but where
the rabble also drinks, all wells are poisoned.’
Nietzsche belonged to a reactionary school
of German thought which became known as the ‘Volk’ movement. The
historian Professor George Mosse wrote a brilliant account of Volkish thought
in 1964 (The Crisis of German Ideology –
Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich). It acquired its
name because its adherents were constantly harking back to a more authentic
golden age when the German people were not just people who happened to live in
Germany and speak German, but were, in a deeper, mystical sense, a ‘Volk’ (or‘Folk’).
A famous (and typical) Volkish work
was Land und Leute (Places and People),
written in 1857 when the serfs had just won their freedom in Germany, and the
feudal reactionaries were reeling from the great change. Its author, Wilhelm
Heinrich Riehl (says Mosse), sought to turn back the clock and rebuild ‘the web
of ancient custom, which once had determined every man’s place in society – and
should do so again. The respective positions of lord and peasant had been
fixed by time-honoured customs as clearly as nature had divided field from
forest. Riehl viewed peasantry and nobility as the two estates which
still lived according to the prescribed customs and which were furthermore, an
integral part of the landscape out of whose soil they drew their living.’
From the start, Volkish ideology had what
we would recognise today as a Green tinge. The Volkish writer Friedrich
Ratzel, said, ‘As different from each other as plants, animals and human beings
may be, they all stand and move on the same soil. They came to life on
the same soil … Life is always bound to the earth … and cannot, partially or as
a whole, be separated from the earth and its soil.’
The ‘Volk’ (the people) had a deep,
mystical, essential bond with each other and the earth. The jargon of the
Volkist writers will be strikingly familiar to all those acquainted with modern
environmentalism. They said the true Volk society was connected with the
soil (volksboden), it was
organic and natural (organisirtes
naturproduct), determined by nature (naturbedingtheit), shaped by earthly forces and
conditions (bodenständigkeit),
inseparable from the earth itself (erdgebundenheit).
The landscape had formed the people, and their culture was part of the
landscape (kulturlandschaft).
The Volkists spoke of a healthy society’s ‘rootedness’ (verwurzelung).
In Nietzsche we find the usual Volkish
green simpering about Nature: ‘Remain faithful to the earth’ demands
Zarathustra, we must ‘re-animalise man’ and ‘return to nature’. As Professor
Mosse observes, ‘The word “rootedness” occurs constantly in their
vocabulary. They sought this in spiritual terms, through an inward
correspondence between the individual, the native soil, the Volk and the
universe … Rural rootedness served as a contrast to urban dislocation, or what
was termed “uprootedness”.’ Volkish thinkers like Riehl, Paul de
Lagarde, Heinrich von Treitschke and others, ‘looked back to the earlier Germans
with nostalgia for their ordered social and economic life. These olden
days had been times of rootedness, when the nation, composed of craftsmen and
nobles, warriors and tillers of the soil, enjoyed its labors and prospered
under the benefits of a settled hierarchy.’
Of course it is no accident that this
sudden enthusiasm for social ‘rootedness’ appears immediately after serfdom is
abolished. The yearning for ‘rootedness’ was nothing other than the
desire to keep the peasants tied to the land. ‘Rootedness’ was a perfect
description of feudal society. The nobles were rooted to the land … they
even derived their names from their feudal domains: the Baron or Earl of this, and
Duke or Count of that. And of course their serfs were legally
tied to them, and to the land. It was forbidden for serfs or their
children to leave their lord’s land (or indeed to marry without the lord’s
permission, and so on). They were ‘rooted’ in a very real, (very
unpleasant) way. The serfs stayed serfs
from generation to generation – it was in their ‘blood’ (keep your eye on that
word ‘blood’). Their status was inherited and legally enforced. And
the aristocrats stayed noble from one generation to the next, no matter how
inept or imbecilic. Their privileges were a blood-right. A
lord was as different to a peasant as a horse was to a dog. The age-old
social order seemed to them as natural as the trees.
The Volkist H. S. Chamberlain said that
society, and our respective class positions within it, had evolved and
were therefore natural: ‘nobody acquainted in detail with the results of animal
breeding can doubt that the history of mankind before us and around us obeys
the same law.’
Volkish anti-capitalism was not on the
side of the masses. Quite the opposite. The Volkists saw capitalism (rightly)
as the great liberator of the masses. It was this liberation which was
‘unnatural’ to them. As one of them put it, ‘Nature is a many-splendored
thing, but one aspect will not be found in nature: equality.’
In his great work, The Destruction of Reason,
written in 1952, the philosopher Georg Lukács pointed out that the idealisation
of ‘nature’ and the ‘organic’ was, from the very beginning,political. It
was, he pointed out, an attempt to defend ‘naturally grown’ feudal privileges,
‘Biologism in philosophy and sociology has always been a basis for reactionary
philosophical tendencies … it cannot permit of any essential change, let alone
progress …. Oppression, inequality, exploitation and so forth were presented as
“facts of nature” or “laws of nature” which, as such, could not be avoided or
revoked.’
Society was ‘naturally’
hierarchical. Nietzsche even insists, ‘In the last resort there exists an
order of rank of states of soul’ and there is no point of aspiring to achieve a
higher rank because, ‘one has to be born or, expressed more clearly, bred for
it.’ One is superior ‘by virtue of one’s origin; one’s ancestors, one’s
blood.’ People in different classes had different ‘blood’. They
were indeed a different race. For Volkish thinkers the terms ‘race’ and
‘class’ amount to the same thing. Nietzsche rails against, ‘Our Europe of
today, the scene of a senselessly sudden attempt at radical class – and
consequently race – mixture’. He talks of the ‘semi-barbarism into which
Europe has been plunged through the democratic mingling of classes and races.’
Professor Mosse says that for the
Volkists, ‘Even within the race, the most promising stock was to be encouraged
and the inferior left behind … Aryan nobles and warriors were to be formed, as
they had always been, by selection and selective propagation. Social
division, a special class, indeed a caste system, was thus essential.’
Hitler said he aimed for ‘a racial quality fashioned on truly noble lines.’
As Lukács observes, ‘The ancient racial
theory was extremely simple; indeed we can hardly call it a theory at
all. It proceeded from the thesis that anyone could tell an
aristocrat. For, as an aristocrat, he was of pure stock and descended
from the superior race.’ It was, says Lukács, ‘a pseudo-biological
defence of class privileges.’ The Volk movement turned the ‘class
struggle into a racial struggle “ordained by nature”’ … It was out of
these struggles that racial theory sprouted.’
The Volk movement viewed the advent of
capitalism with dismay. As serfs, the masses had been charming. As
‘proletarians’ they were threatening. The proletariat, says Mosse, was
‘the unfortunate product of modernisation, which itself entertained an
anti-Volkish malevolence.’ He says, ‘The big city and the proletariat
seemed to fuse into an ominous colossus which was endangering the realm of the
Volk: “dominance of the big city will be equivalent to the dominance of the
proletariat”.’
Because of capitalism, the serfs, instead
of being “rooted” to the land, were now physically ands ocially mobile.
The money economy – market capitalism – had shaken lose the old feudal bonds,
as it had done in England, and the great commercial centres – the cities – were
seen as driving this change. As one Volkish writer put it, ‘Cities are the
tombs of Germanism.’ Professor Mosse tells us, ‘the city came to symbolize the
industrial progress and modernity that all adherents to the Volkish ideology
rejected. It was the very opposite of rootedness in nature and, therefore,
antithetical to the spirit of the Volk. Worse still, it represented the
accomplishments of the proletariat; it was the concrete expression of
proletarian restlessness. The fear of urban centers became synonymous with
apprehension over the alarming rate at which the proletariat increased in
numbers and asserted itself.’
If the proletariat was to be feared, said
the Volkists, capitalism
and the bourgeoisie was to be blamed. ‘The bourgeoisie, by
raising the cry of liberty, equality, fraternity,’ says Mosse, ‘had ignored the
natural difference between the strong and weak, the clever and the stupid – in
short, the “natural” contrast between master and servant.’ For Riehl,
says Mosse, ‘the bourgeoisie was a disruptive element that had challenged the
“genuine” estates … this new element was composed mainly of merchants and
industrialists who had no close connection with nature.’
And the people singled out for special
culpability were the Jews. For, as Professor Mosse, says, ‘the Jews were
not a Volk, had no peasants, and owned no land, but were only traders and
parasites.’ ‘The Jews were identified with modern industrial
society’, they were ‘weaving a net of business and trade’ around innocent
Germans, and they were essentially un-green: ‘the rootlessness of the Jew was
contrasted with the rootedness of the Volk.’ So, ‘to oppose the Jews
meant to struggle against the champions of the materialistic world view as well
as the evils of modern society.’
We must make the point here that Volkish
and Nazi hatred of Jewish people was not religious. The Volkists and
Nazis hated Christianity, at times almost as much as they despised Judaism, and
they tried to establish a State pagan religion to replace it (see the laughable
librettos of Wagner’s turgid operas for a list of rehabilitated gods).
No, the Jews were hated because they were visibly non-rural and capitalistic,
and in particular they were pre-eminent in the world of finance (the greens
have always hated bankers). Of course the Jews had, historically, ended
up in those roles precisely because they had been expelled from the land in
much of Europe and had been forced to find occupations on the fringes of feudal
society. That abused group of people had been punished once, and now they
would be punished again.
(We might mention here that one of the
marked features of the declining feudal nobility in Europe was its tendency to
get into debt and thereby lose control of its land. Law after law was
passed to stop feudal domains from slipping into private hands and entering the
world of commodity exchange. But such was the desire of lavish but
useless aristocrats to have money, and such was their inability to make it,
that they were constantly borrowing, and then selling land to repay the
loans. They nobles were prepared to entertain Jewish bankers when they
needed the stuff, but loathed them with a passion when it came to paying it
back).
As Professor Mosse describes, ‘Economic
prejudices were always prevalent in anti-Semitism and they attained academic
respectability with Werner Sombart’s Die
Juden und des Wirtshaftsleben(Jews
and Capitalism, 1910). This eminent economic historian linked
the growth of capitalism to the role played by the Jews. As usurers in
the Middle Ages and entrepreneurs in modern times, the Jews had been a vital
force in building the capitalist system … The stock-exchange jobber, the
corpulent banker, these were the stereotypes of the Jew that were widely
accepted and disseminated through popular literature. The stock exchange
in particular became the symbol of the nightmarish capitalism that had been
fostered on the Germans by the Jews.’
For Adolf Hitler, in Mein Kampf, it was
the Jews who had dissolved the Volkish feudal bonds and brought capitalism to
Germany. It was ‘the Jew’ says Hitler, who ‘included landed property
among his commercial wares and degraded the soil to the level of a market
commodity. Since he himself never cultivated the soil but considered it
as an object to be exploited.’ It was the Jews, he said, who had brought
to Germany all those devilish democratic modern ideas, ‘bubbling over with
“enlightenment”, “progress”, “liberty”, “humanity”, etc.’
For the Volkish right-wing
anti-capitalists, the ‘bourgeoisie’ and ‘proletariat’ merged into one urban,
industrial, commercial enemy. Mosse says that Volkish thinkers ‘feared
that the “world bourgeoisie” and the “world proletariat” would recognize their
mutual compatibility and exercise a suzerainty over a world in which all that
was natural had been destroyed, especially the estates.’ The
proletariat and the bourgeoisie was a common enemy. They shared a
world-view which was commercial and extended beyond borders. (In this
respect, Volkish right-wing anti-capitalism was a more accurate portrayal of
reality than its Marxist offshoot).
Just as today’s greens idealise
pre-capitalist society, so did the Volkists and the Nazis. Their ‘blood
and soil’ racism was wholly the product of this backward fantasy.
It was nothing more than the desire to cling onto the world as it was
before. As with the Nazi’s demonization of Jewish people, it was an
expression of their fear and loathing of the physical and social mobility which
came with capitalism.
Like Nietzsche and the Volkists, Hitler
and the Nazis hated the Enlightenment. They rejected its humanism just as
they spurned the human-centered morality of the Judeo-Christian
tradition. They despised the moral restraints of civilisation, and
embraced the romance of pagan savagery as more ‘authentic’. They held
bourgeois liberal tolerance and internationalism (or globalisation) in
contempt. These were all features of the despised new capitalist order.
The Volkist deep hatred of capitalism
extended to all the trappings of industrial and urban development. As
Mosse says, ‘These sick individuals [the bourgeoisie and proletariat] had
subsequently stamped their surroundings with diseased characteristics.
The result was an unhealthy, “degenerate” landscape marked by smoking
factories, overcrowded cities and insatiable natural resource exploitation.’
The Volkists hated advertising billboards and hydro-electric dams
and railway lines. They hated modern farming techniques and the mass
production of food. They idealised peasant life.
In short, the Volkists and Nazis
were green. In
1934, a year after the Nazis took power, as Professor Thomas Lekan describes,
they ‘declared that the Third Reich had ushered in a new era of environmental
stewardship … They foresaw a new era of ‘organic’ land use planning that
stressed long-term sustainability over short-term profitability.’ The
leading Nazi Walther Schoenichen declared that the German countryside was to be
purified of the ‘un-German spirit of commerce.’ The same year they passed
a law ‘Concerning the Protection of the Racial purity of Forest Plants’, and
the following year the wide-ranging Reichsnaturschutzgesetz (Reich
Nature Protection Law).
Hitler appointed his most trusted general
Herman Göring supreme commissioner for nature conservancy, and made him Reichforstmeister (Reich
master of forestry) whose job it was to promote waldgesinnubg (forest-mindedness)
and the close-to-nature ideals of the dauerwald(eternal
forest). Göring’s Reichsforstamt (Reich
Forest Office) oversaw the Reichstelle
für Naturschutz (Reich Nature Protection Office). He declared
‘The people are a living community, a great organic, eternal body’, which was
echoed in the Nazi slogan, ‘Ask the trees, they will teach you how to become
National Socialists!’ As Mosse says, ‘In Volkish thought the image of the
tree was constantly used to symbolize the peasant strength of the Volk, with
roots anchored in the past while the crown aspired to the cosmos and its
spirit.’
Walter Darré, head of the SS Race and
Settlement Office was made Reichsbauerführer (Reich
peasant leader). He led the Nazi campaign described by one author as ‘the
Nazification of the countryside’. A new Nazi law attempted to re-impose
feudal relations on peasant land, forbidding inherited land from being bought,
sold or mortgaged. Needless to say, this met with resistance from the
peasants. The peasants also resented production quotas and other forms of state
interference. Nevertheless, hundreds of thousands of Polish peasants were
reduced to serfdom once more. The Nazis attempted (unsuccessfully) to
re-establish a Volkish peasantry by distributing free plots of land to workers,
and it was this that sent the German army into Poland, and beyond, in search
of lebensraum (living
space), made available by the mass slaughter of east Europeans. It was
Darré, who said he wanted to breed a new rural nobility, who coined the
chilling slogan ‘blood and soil’ (blud
und boden).
Of course the green policies of the Nazis,
like the policies of the greens today, were riddled with contradictions.
They wanted organic, peasant farming, but discovered very quickly that it would
not produce nearly enough food (though a special supply of organic food was
secured for the SS). Likewise, though they despised capitalism and
industry and commerce, they also needed it. The sprawling Nazi State bureaucracy
was a ravenous parasite that needed a host (we will deal with Nazi economics in
another article). But the fact that the absurd green fantasies of the
Nazis were impractical did not seem to disturb them, as indeed it seems not to
disturb greens today. Perhaps this was because every bit of green
legislation justified and involved a further extension of planning and state
intervention. As Professor Lekan politely puts it, ‘The discourse of
organic planning meshed well with Naziism’s corporatist approach to economic
intervention.’
But is important to note that
environmentalism and the appeal to Nature was at the heart of Nazi
belief. As Adolf Hitler insisted in Mein Kampf: ‘Man’s effort to build up something
that contradicts the iron logic of nature brings him into conflict with those
principles to which he himself exclusively owes his existence. By acting
against the laws of nature he prepares the way that leads to ruin … Our planet
has been moving through spaces of ether for millions and millions of years,
uninhabited by men, and at some future date may easily begin to do so again –
if men should forget that wherever they have reached a superior level of
existence, it was not the result of following the ideas of crazy visionaries
but by acknowledging and rigorously observing the iron laws of nature.’ As Dr.
Mark Bassin says (in the useful book How
Green Were the Nazis?), ‘The very appeal to the authority of
organicist-ecological principles for guidance in interpreting society and
political organization was seen as a fundamental aspect of what fascism was all
about.’
There are those greens who insist that the
environmental movement started in 1962 when Rachel Carson published her
misguided rant against DDT, Silent
Spring. But this is clearly nonsense. To emphasise our
point, let us look at the writings of Martin Heidegger, the famous Nazi
philosopher who still exerts a powerful influence on Western
intellectuals. Heidegger’s appointment to rector of his University of
Freiburg was celebrated with Nazi flags and songs, his lectures were
accompanied by Nazi salutes, he destroyed the careers of rival academics by
reporting them to the Gestapo and he remained a member of the Nazi party to the
end. (I will quote at length, lest I am accused of cherry-picking).
Heidegger contrasts wonderful peasant
life, which involved ‘dwelling’, with horrid footloose capitalism which
involves ‘homelessness’. He says, ‘The Old High German word for building,
buan, means to dwell. This means to remain, to stay in place … The old
word bauen, which however, also means at the same time to cherish and protect,
to preserve and care for. Specifically to till the soil and cultivate the
vine.’
His feudal Eden has been destroyed by
capitalism, ‘Bridges and hangars, stadiums and power stations are buildings but
not dwellings; railway stations and highways, dams and market halls are built,
but they are not dwelling places … The truck driver is at home on
the highway, but he does not have his lodgings there; the working woman is at home
in the spinning mill, but does not have her dwelling place there; the chief
engineer is at home in the power station, but he does not dwell there.
These buildings house man. He inhabits them but he does not dwell in
them.’
Heidegger contrasts the crass modern
machine-powered technology that disturbs nature with the healthy use of tools
by handicraftsmen, which involves a ‘revealing and unconcealment’ of nature.
Industrial capitalism, says Heidegger, ‘challenges’ nature in a way that
primitive peasant society does not, “The work of the peasant does not challenge
the soil of the field. In sowing grain it places seed in the keeping of
the forces of growth and watches over its increase. But even the cultivation of
the field has come under the grip of another kind of setting-in-order, which
sets upon nature … Agriculture is now the mechanized food industry.’ He says,
‘To save the earth is more than to exploit it or even wear it out. Saving
the earth does not master the earth and does not subjugate it, which is merely
one step from boundless spoliation.’
Into Heidegger’s imagined rural idyll, the
poison of market forces is seeping, ‘The forester who measures the felled
timber in the woods and who to all appearances walks the forest path in the
same way his grandfather did, is today ordered by the industry that produces
commercial woods.’
Heidegger argues against the ‘monstrous’
building of hydroelectric dams on the Rhine and sings the praises of wind
power: ‘modern technology is a challenging, which puts to nature the
unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as
such. But does not this hold true for the old windmill as well? No.
Its sails do indeed turn in the wind; they are left entirely to the wind’s
blowing. But the windmill does not unlock the energy from the air currents in
order to store it.’
Heidegger lambasts production of ‘the
maximum yield at minimum expense.’ He deplores the fact that “The coal
has been hauled out of some mining district … it is on call, ready to deliver
the sun’s warmth that is stored in it … to deliver steam whose pressure turns
the wheels that keep a factory running.’
How can anyone read the Nazi Heidegger, or
the writers of the Volk movement, or indeed Mein Kampf, and say, with a straight face, that
environmentalism started with Rachel Carson? The Nazi Martin Heidegger is to
the tips of his fingers, a romantic anti-capitalist. He is, to the toes
of his fascist jack-boots, an environmentalist.
Should we be at all worried about any of
this? After all, modern environmentalism, to many people, seems so
innocent. But in the words of Bruggemeier, Cioc and Zeller (editors
of How Green Were the Nazis?),
‘The green policies of the Nazis were more than a mere episode or aberration in
environmental history at large. They point to larger meanings and
demonstrate with brutal clarity that conservationism and environmentalism are
not and have never been value-free or inherently benign enterprises.’ We
should heed the warning of Lukács, that, ‘fascist demagogy and tyranny was only
the ultimate culmination of a long process which initially had an “innocent”
look’.
Green thinking was not a side-line for the
Nazis. The idealisation of nature and the organic, the nostalgia for the
Middle Ages, the anti-capitalism, the hatred of bankers, the hatred of cities
and industry, the idealisation of peasant life … all this defined their
poisonous ideology. It was the green attempt of the Nazis to recreate a
peasant society which led them to invade Poland in search of ‘living space’. It
was their green nostalgia for the Middle Ages which led to their ‘blood and
soil’ racist ideology. It was their green anti-capitalism and loathing of
bankers which led them to hate Jewish people. It was their green
rejection of the Judeo-Christian tradition and of the Enlightenment and its
humanist values, and their green return to pagan animal-worship – their
idealisation of pre-civilised barbarism as more ‘authentic’ – that led to them
to treat humans as worthless creatures with no more claim on our sympathies
than viruses and pests. Green ideology was at the core of National
Socialism. When we wonder what diseased thinking could motivate people to
turn on the gas taps at Auschwitz, this is where we must look.
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