Some 100 years before the Nazis rose to power, German philosopher Arthur
Schopenhauer (1788-1860) ominously wrote that
"we owe the animals not
mercy but justice, and the debt often remains unpaid in Europe, the
continent that is permeated with
Foeter Judaicus... it is
obviously high time in Europe that Jewish views on nature were brought
to an end...the unconscionable treatment of the animal world must, on
account of its immorality, be expelled from Europe."
That
such words became prophetic under the umbrella of a secular religion of
nature that was Nazi Germany, colored by an environmental totalitarian
view during the 1930's and 40's, is a historical truth that has been
underappreciated-and unreported-for too long.....
Thus while it may be true that from the perspective of modern environmental historians, the Nazis were not nearly as green as they said they were, there was one aspect of their nationalistic environmental campaign that was accomplished with brutal efficiency -- the elimination of the Jews
--which in the eyes of the Nazis was the first necessary step, if not the most important.
While Schopenhauer could not have anticipated the green sacrificial offering of the
Jews in the gas chambers of places like Dachau where organic farms were planted nearby to feed Himmler's SS troops, the Nazis never asked him "how" to expel the Jews from Europe.
Only the turning tide of the war prevented the Nazis from finishing the job that Schopenhauer prophetically announced 100 years earlier. While Schopenhauer would have undoubtedly been aghast at how literally the Nazis fulfilled such anti-Semitic ambitions, Hitler called Schopenhauer a genius.
Here begins the lesson of a nationalistic racism and environmentalism that got hotwired together into an explosive political ecology that eventually dug a biological-ecological hole as deep as Auschwitz.
....
In short, the Darwinian theory of the natural selection of the species mutated into eugenics where race became fused with species, so much so that the major concern was over preserving and protecting the original or indigenous German species from the disorderly mixing of the races. Haeckel was thus advocating a crackpot volkish romantic nationalism and
nature worship, all presented in contemporary scientific garb for modern intellectual consumption....
Borrowing from ancient Germanic mysticism that posited that German racial identity was essentially tied literally and metaphorically to the German landscape and then cleansed by Monist scientism, the slogan "blood and soil" had thus become a rallying cry for a dangerous
politicized ecology that would spell disaster for the Jewish people in particular, and millions of Slavs as well....
Here the thrust of environmental totalitarianism cannot be missed. As a necessary part of this environmental scheming, the RNG allowed the expropriation of land without compensation. The RNG is thus a footnote in environmental history, the first of its kind at the federal level, precisely because of its landscape planning provisions over already developed areas that went way beyond the typical conservationist and preservationist models of environmental thinking....
In the eyes of the Nazis, to Germanize the landscape was to properly take care of it by creating nature reserves, national parks and green landscape development plans for its inhabitants, all with the help of a depopulation program of Jews and Slavs to help really bring it along....
[Berit, the Nazis were environmentalists, and they passed the most progressive environmental laws found anywhere in the world at the time. Hitler, Himmler and Hess were all vegetarians. There has been a
long connection between being green and socialism. Hitler et al
were against the Jews for environmental reasons, among other things, because Jews believed that man has dominion over the earth
(including animals). (In Genesis, God tells Adam that he has dominion over the earth and the animals.)
Modern greenies could say the same thing about Bible-believing Christians. That could be another motivation for persecution. It reminds me of the bumper sticker that has a picture of a baby seal on it, saying "Save the baby humans." There are people who weep for baby seals, but murder human babies.
Obviously there was more to the anti-semitism than environmentalism. But that was a part of it. And if Hitler et al. were vegetarians, then their conviction about it was serious enough to affect their daily lives. Here is a link to an article about it.]
See
Saving the Earth
© 2006 Carolyn Dean - All Rights Reserved
Permission granted to post this excerpt.
You can read the whole article at
www.newswithviews.com/Dean/carolyn33.htm
Dr. Carolyn Dean's
book:
Death by Modern
Medicine
websites:
www.deathbymodernmedicine.com
and www.carolyndean.com
E-Mail:
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