Wednesday, July 03, 2002

A Green wedge Send this entry to: Del.icio.us Spurl Ma.gnolia Digg Newsvine Reddit

A Green wedge This article over at Tech Central Station is a fascinating account of the ties between the Eco-Fascist movement and Fascist ecologists of the Nazi era. I've done a fair amount of research into the religious and mystical underpinnings of the Nazi "ideology." Himmler was something of an exemplar of the belief in the Natural Religion. Christian evangelicals are correct when they say that the Nazi regime was fundamentally anti-Christian. But, what they fail to often note is that it was not atheistic. Officers in the SS were often professors of "God belief," a generic theism suffused with nature worship. National Socialist religion had tendrils of Jungianism, Theosophy and Ariosophy. The Nazis-if they had won would have instituted the most brutal sort of ahistorical paganism of their own creation (this is not to say that Nazis were going to go about it as the Communists did-attacking the old religion head on-instead they would most likely have digested it piecemeal-see the case of the German Christians). Like the Deep Ecologists-they yearned for an era that never existed and looked forward to the day when the world was in "balance." The Nazis-unlike the Communists-did not look forward, but back toward an idyllic German peasantry that they wanted to somehow recreate in the industrial age. One important thing that the current Deep Ecologists and the Nazis share is that they were overwhelmingly white (OK-the Nazis were all white!). In my arguments with environmentalists with Deep Ecological tendencies (tip off-if they talk about human beings as a virus you know where they're coming from)-I always tried to play the race card to see how it would work. Sometimes they backed off while other times they would explode at me. The current radical Green movement considers itself Left-wing and racially progressive despite the overwhelming paleness of its complexion. When faced with the suffering of the people of color if organic farming was to replace industrial farming and animal protein was removed from the diets of those that didn't have access to protein via processed soy-they encountered an intellectual dissonance within themselves. It was all rather satisfying, seeing the Deep Ecologist tearing at the Ethno-politics sympathizer. Update: Ron Bailey of Reason on those wacky neo-Luddites.