Re: Blood & Soil: Revolutionary Nationalism as the Vanguard of Ecological Sanity

[tedo...@hotmail.com]

NH wrote:
> BLOOD & SOIL: REVOLUTIONARY NATIONALISM AS THE VANGUARD OF ECOLOGICAL
> SANITY by Troy Southgate
>
> "One day the sewage of the cities will cease to be poured into the
> rivers, and will be returned to the land, to grow fine food for the
> people. One day salmon will leap again in the clear waters of a London
> river; and human work will be creative, and joyful. One day the soul of
> man, shut in upon itself during the long centuries of economic
> struggle, will arise in the light of the sun of truth." - Henry
> Williamson
>
> WHILST the modern world appears to be in a state of great disarray, the
> perpetual relevance of Nature both as a guide and a source of
> inspiration continues to invite our utmost respect and admiration.
> Sadly, however, the vast majority of people have become alienated from
> their origins, detached from their racial and cultural heritage, and
> cut off from their roots.
>
> Even as far back as 1833, Wiliam Cobbett had rightly announced to the
> world that English folk had become 'deserters from the plough'[1]. As
> if by magic, the smoking chimneys and windowless factories of the
> Industrial Revolution had arrived to force people away from the fields
> and into the expanding towns. Meanwhile, however, as Howard Newby
> suggests, even today the countryside offers its stubborn resistance to
> 'reassure us that everything these days is superficial and transitory;
> that some things remain stable, permanent and enduring'[2]. Indeed, the
> glory of rural life sanctions the status quo. Not the status quo of the
> Establishment or the bland sterility of modernism, on the contrary, the
> great tenacity our our forests, clifftops and dales are a lasting
> reminder that man can return to his ancestral sanctuary whenever the
> futile quest for scientific infallibility has run its inevitable course
> and he has finally begun to withdraw from the hedonistic negativity of
> the burgeoning metropolis. So what is meant by blood and soil, and why
> is it so vital in the shift towards a decentralised proliferation of
> small village communities?
>
> The term originated in Germany during the early-1920s and was first
> coined by August Winnig, an ex-Social Democrat who had resigned from
> the centre-left SPD due to its obsession with internationalism. In
> 1927, the Transylvanian exile, Georg Kenstler, launched his 'Blood and
> Soil' magazine as a means of safeguarding the 'integral link between
> the tribe and the land, to be defended by blood, if necessary.'[3] For
> rural Germans, therefore, blood and soil became 'a code word implying
> the protection of a real personality. It stressed the kinship element,
> and the peasant's demographic role. City-dwellers did not breed -
> peasants did. They were the life-blood of the nation in a literal sense
> as well as its spiritual and cultural basis.'[4] But the very notion
> that a race is somehow rooted to a territory which has been drenched in
> the pioneering blood of its ancestors, is something that goes far
> beyond the terminological inventiveness of Weimar Germany. In a similar
> vein, it would be extremely unwise to dismiss blood and soil as a
> phenomenon which simply accompanied the emergence of
> National-Socialism, or even to suggest that twentieth-century romantics
> like the German Youth Movement and various nudist colonies had merely
> revived the medieval spirit of Aryan yeomanry for their own amusement.
> Not so! In fact the image of the heroic farmer and his devoted spouse
> extends far beyond the trappings of Teutonic legend, and blood and soil
> each represent inextricable components of the natural order and should
> not be estimated in historical terms alone. To those who aspired to
> such an ideal, it became a living testimony to the Nordic soul, an
> 'unwritten history of Europe, a history unconnected with trade, the
> banditry of the aristocracy, and the infinite duplicity of church and
> monarchy.'[5] Indeed, throughout the centuries the growth of
> materialism has become enshrined within a capitalist-marxian axis,
> leading to an inexhaustible plethora of ideological variants which come
> and go like empires founded upon sand. Meanwhile, of course, the
> self-appointed lords of the manor have forcibly extracted their
> financial dues from the sweating brow of many a broken and bitter serf.
>
> Revolutionary Nationalism, on the other hand, or what in some circles
> is described as National-Anarchism, is more than a political ideology.
> It is able to recognise and understand that the relationship between a
> community and the land is something both immeasurable and spiritual.
> But, as Dr. Anna Bramwell has explained, blood and soil 'is implicit
> rather than explicit'[6] and, in practical terms, can often be seen
> today in 'European nations such as Greece and France, and several
> states in the United States of America, [where] farm purchase by
> non-nationals is either forbidden or tangled up with so many
> booby-traps as to be made extremely difficult. The position in the
> Third World is much more exclusivist and racialist.'[7] In short, to
> fully appreciate blood and soil one must come to terms with the fact
> that it is far more than just a political concept. As long as future
> attempts to initiate a blood and soil renaissance take this fact into
> account, however, the process will remain as natural and organic as
> possible.
>
> Few people would doubt that Hitler's Reichsbauernfuhrer, R. Walther
> Darre, was primarily a political animal, but he was also intelligent
> enough to realise that if Germany was to retain her fine rural
> tradition the incoming National-Socialist government had to ensure that
> the existence of the peasantry was not in any way undermined. Indeed,
> Darre did not wish to see the vocational heritage of the country's
> agricultural backbone reduced to a fleeting plaything of the urban
> escapist or become the profitable sideline of exploitative fatcats. But
> Darre was an idealist, and never likely to be taken seriously by an
> opportunist and a politician like Hitler.
>
> On March 6th, 1930, the National-Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP)
> published its 'Official Party Manifesto on the Position of the NSDAP
> with Regard to the Farming Population and Agriculture'. This document
> claimed that the 'Maintenance of an efficient agricultural class,
> increasing in numbers as the general population increases, is a central
> plank in the National-Socialist platform'[8]. Furthermore, the Partly
> rightly acknowledged that the German peasantry was under attack from
> several quarters, namely 'the Jewish world money market - which really
> controls parliamentary democracy in Germany . . . the competition of
> foreign agriculturalists, who work under more favourable conditions . .
> . the extravagant profits made by the large wholesale middlemen, who
> thrust themselves in between producer and consumer . . . [and] . . .
> the oppressive rates the farmer has to pay for electric power and
> artificial manures to concerns mainly run by Jews.'[9] In place of this
> exploitation the NSDAP proposed that, amongst other things, land
> ownership be exclusively available to German citizens, that such land
> be made inheritable property (enabling peasants to become rooted to the
> soil), and that large areas be set aside for colonisation by an
> expanding German population. But whilst such policies were
> understandably attractive to ordinary peasants and back-to-the-land
> enthusiasts alike, when the Hitler government finally came to power in
> 1933 they were never put into practice. In 1940 Otto Strasser attacked
> the regime's Patrimonial Farm Law for the simple reason that it
> extended only to a portion of the peasantry and 'created three kinds of
> agricultural entrepreneur: peasants whose holdings were so small as to
> be unviable; middle and great peasants who are tenant-farmers; and
> great landowners who run their estates on purely capitalist lines.'[10]
>
> Meanwhile, Walther Darre (who did not actually join the Party until
> 1930) had acquired a reputation as a man of great principle after
> resigning from his post in the East Prussian Trakhener Stud (Warm Blood
> Society), an animal breeding centre where he had come into direct
> conflict with his superiors. In 1926, Darre had writen an article
> condemning those who were seeking to revive plans for a colonial German
> empire, regarding the idea as 'inimical and destructive to the concept
> of a German homeland.'[11] Darre, therefore, seemed an unlikely figure
> for a Party which unashamedly advocated the forcible colonisation of
> occupied land for German settlement. Several years later, when Hitler
> ordered the seizure of Moravia and Bohemia from the Czechs, Darre
> recorded an entry in his diary claiming that, by creating an empire at
> the expense of her own national interests, Germany was repeating the
> errors made by England. Nevertheless, when Hitler had realised that
> Darre's immense popularity could provide him with the rural vote the
> NSDAP needed in order to obtain power, the latter rose to the challenge
> and vowed to use his new position in the government to defend the
> interests of his beloved peasants.
>
> Modern ecologists would do well to emulate the honesty and integrity of
> men like Walther Darre. Sadly, however, unlike their National-Socialist
> predecessor most of them are too frightened to accept that Race has a
> great part to play in the restoration of the natural order. As far as
> Darre was concerned, the peasantry constituted 'a homogenous racial
> group of Nordic antecedents, who formed the racial and cultural core of
> the German nation.'[12] In 1929 Darre published 'The Peasantry as the
> Key to Understanding the Nordic Race', in which he concluded that 'kind
> providence laid a gift in the cradle of the Nordic race out of which
> grew perhaps its most significant characteristic. It is to the
> innermost need of the Nordic to place his life at the service of a
> cause and to develop inner moral principles for himself out of the
> necessities which determine this work'.[13]
>
> Initially, Darre did little more tha reduce peasant interest rates to a
> maximum of 2% on farm loans and ensure that rural families retained
> their ancient right of hereditary ownership. However, once Hitler had
> made it perfectly clear that he had no real intention of honouring the
> original agricultural principles outlined in the 'Twenty-Five Points of
> the NSDAP', Darre realised that he had to use his time as
> constructively as possible in order to stave off the rising challenge
> of his closest rival, arch-technocrat and Hitlerian sycophant Herbert
> Backe. At Goslar, an ancient medieval town in the Harz Mountains, Darre
> established a 'peasants capital' and launched a series of measures
> designed to regenerate German agriculture by encouraging organic
> farming and replanting techniques. His 'dream was to make Goslar the
> centre of a new peasants' international; a green union of the northern
> European peoples. Here he made speeches condemning the fuhrer-princip
> and attacking imperial expansion. Visitors flocked to him. Organic
> farming enthusiasts from England welcomed Darre's plans and admired the
> hereditary tenure legislation. Representatives from Norwegian and
> Danish peasant movements joined the conferences on blood and soil.'[14]
> But Darre's overall strategy was even more radical, and he intended to
> abolish industrial society altogether and replace it with a series of
> purely peasant-based communities. In his view, '[c]apitalism and
> industry would soon wither away (a view held by many people in the
> Depression era) and with it the age of mass urbanisation and
> mechanisation. an urbanised society was incapable of survival. As it
> collapsed - helped by farmers blockading the cities - it would be
> replaced by a new society formed from a core of healthy, sound
> peasants'.[15] Darre realised, therefore, the extent to which cities
> have to rely upon extracting their sustenance from the rural periphery.
> He knew, in other words, that by encouraging German peasants to deprive
> the country's blood-sucking industrial regions of their agrarian
> lifesource, it was possible to hasten the self-destructive process of
> capitalism itself.
>
> Needless to say, the leaders of the NSDAP were eager to claim these
> magnificent achievements for themselves and, by August 1937, Darre
> became completely disgusted with a statement made by Hermann Goering at
> the International Dairy Conference, during which the overweight usurper
> had declared that '[n]o country can withdraw today from the world
> economic system. No country can ever say again, we decline the world
> economy and are going to live and produce for ourselves alone.'[16] By
> April 1939, Goering's Four-Year Plan for the industrialisation of
> Germany in accordance with a total war economy had taken young people
> away from the land and into cramped munitions factories in the cities.
> This led to Darre attacking the Nazi regime for its 'economic
> imperialism, which makes one anxious for blood and soil ideals'[17]. In
> 1942, Darre was demoted from his ministerial position and inevitably
> replaced by the odious and far less dangerous Herbert Backe. From that
> moment on he had no doubt whatsoever that Hitler had cruelly betrayed
> the German peasantry. In the words of the aforementioned Dr. Bramwell:
> 'Hitler found Darre a useful theorist and organiser for a period of
> crisis, but when he kept faith with his vision he was, like many other
> revolutionary ideologues, discarded.'[18] More importantly, however,
> whilst Darre was far too modest to concede the fact, the Fuhrer had
> deprived Germany of her finest ecological pioneer; a man who is truly
> the patriarch of the modern Greens.
>
> But Darre was not the only radical in the NSDAP. On the contrary, he
> was just one of many disaffected anti-capitalists who attempted to make
> the Party more radical by working from within. In this sense, at least,
> Darre surpassed most of them because the likes of 'Feder and Strasser
> did not see their ideas carried into effect.'[19] But, despite his
> agrarian radicalism, Darre never fully realised the futility of his
> association with the NSDAP until it was too late. On the other hand, if
> Darre had not been appointed Agricultural Minister in the first place
> he would not have been able to implement his blood and soil policies at
> all. This does not validate the gradualist strategy of those who
> continue to put their trust in the System, however, it merely
> demonstrates that - despite the legacy passed down to us by Darre and
> his closest followers - it is only possible to achieve a certain amount
> within the context of the existing governmental framework. Indeed, by
> 1942 Darre would have said the same thing himself, believing, as he
> did, that only a Green Revolution can sweep away the old Establishment
> and pave the way for a New Agrarian Order.
>
> Darre's concern for the environment was also shared by Corneliu
> Codreanu and the Romanian Legionary Movement (Iron Guard), mainly due
> to the fact that prior to the Second World War the Romanian peasantry
> made up some 90% of the total population. The defiant streak of
> anti-urbanism which characterised the green-shirted fighters of
> Europe's most spiritual bastion of National Revolutionary struggle to
> date, is epitomised by the slogan 'up above, we will defend the life of
> the trees and the mountains from further devastation. Down below [in
> the towns], we will spread death and mercy.'[20] This view obviously
> concords with those in contemporary National-Anarchist circles and
> their commitment to destroy capitalism from within whilst creating a
> brand new order from without. Codreanu was a man who often sought
> release from the tortures of self-doubt by wandering into the
> wilderness, eagerly savouring the comfort and solace offered by the
> beautiful Romanian mountains. In his moving and emotional
> autobiography, 'For My Legionaries', Codreanu describes his
> self-imposed experience of solitude thus: 'It was getting dark. Not one
> living soul around. Only trees with vultures shrieking around the
> barren cliffs. I only had with me my heavy coat and a loaf of bread. I
> ate some bread and drank some water springing from among the
> rocks.'[21] Codreanu undoubtedly appreciated the spiritual realities of
> his ancestral homeland. Another example of the vast importance the Iron
> Guard attributed to the notion of blood and soil can be found in the
> Legion's symbolic commitment to Romania in terms of the country's
> physical and spiritual immortality. In 1927, twenty-seven legionaries
> made a solemn vow to defend their fatherland by distributing between
> themselves small leather sacks conatining Romanian earth. But whilst
> some may view this ceremony as a purely theatrical affair, as Codreanu
> himself rightly notes, such earth was representative of the very soul
> of the nation, which, in turn, means 'not only all Romanians living in
> the same territory, sharing the same past and the same future, the same
> dress, but all Romanians, alive and dead who have lived on this land
> from the beginning of history and will live here in the future.'[22]
>
> In Spain, however, the concept of blood and soil was not at all shared
> by Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera's Falange. In fact the Nationalist
> leader 'stringently attacked the blood and soil gut patriotism typical
> of Romanian and German National-Socialism, together with Romantic
> Nationalism and its emphasis on the pull of the land'[23]. According to
> Hugh Thomas, '[p]atriotism had to be anchored, not in the heart, but in
> the mind'[24]. But despite the worthy idealism of the Falange prior to
> its involvement with self-important reactionaries like General Franco
> in the 1936 Civil War, the Movement's attitude towards agrarian issues
> was woefully inadequate. Jose Antonio wanted his country to dominate
> the world stage and, therefore, failed to appreciate the fact that a
> naturally-rooted peasantry is far from 'backward' or 'anachronistic'.
> Unfortunately, many of his 'economic and social policies followed the
> modernising path of Mussolini and the aims of Mosley.'[25] On the other
> hand, the Spanish leader was extremely critical of those who wallowed
> in the contaminating decadence of city life: 'Our place is in the fresh
> air, under the cloudless heavens, weapons in our hands, with the stars
> above us. Let the others go on with their merrymaking. We outside, in
> tense, fervent, and certain vigilance, already feel the dawn breaking
> in the joy of our hearts.'[26]
>
> But whilst capitalism is chiefly responsible for the destruction of the
> natural world, Marxism does not even take it into consideration. As one
> of the great modern pioneers of organic farming and self-sufficiency,
> John Seymour, has explained: 'Karl Marx, who spent most of his life in
> the reading room of the British Museum Library, probably came as little
> into contact with nature as it was possible to do and still stay alive.
> The result was that his philosophy ignored everything not human
> absolutely completely. He was aware (just) that food came from the
> country. He was aware that there must be some people out there
> somewhere who grew it. It was his object to rescue these imaginary
> people from what he called 'the idiocy of rural life'. What is that to
> the idiocy of spending all your life in the British Museum
> Library?'[27]. Since then, of course, the practical implementation of
> this individual's philosophy in Eastern Europe has proved beyond any
> doubt that Marxism is opposed to ecological order. One ridiculous
> consequence of Soviet agrarianism led to Russia - the greatest
> continuous wheat-growing area in the world - being forced to import its
> grain from abroad. If this is an example of Marxist state-planning in
> action, it is hardly surprising, therefore, to learn that Stalin
> eventually condemned millions of peasants to misery, squalor and mass
> starvation. The Red dictator's agricultural incompetence was soon
> hurriedly obscured by diverting the world's attention towards the
> steady industrialisation of Russia. Marxism, it seems, relies far more
> upon blood than soil.
>
> Returning to the present, until those involved in ecological struggle
> can learn to appreciate the spiritual reality which binds man to his
> environment, reactionaries, liberals and leftists alike will continue
> to delay the replenishment of the natural order. We revolutionaries can
> only revitalise and reclaim the natural world from the clutches of
> capitalism once we have discovered that which lies within ourselves. It
> is vital for us to come to terms with the fact that, by springing from
> the very soil of which we have always been a part, we are inevitably
> destined to return to it at the end of our brief sojourn upon this
> earth. This is summed up very beautifully by Knut Hamsun, the great
> Norwegian storyteller who, in a poem entitled 'My Grave', wrote the
> following emotive words:
>
> Oh Lord, I pray thee do not let me die
> In a bed with sheets and blankets piled upon
> And with dripping noses about me.
> Nay, smite me someday without warning,
> That headlong I fall into the forest some place
> Where no one will come around nosing.
> I well know the forest, I am its son,
> It will not deny my humble request
> To die on its cranberry bog.
> Thus will I give back without word of complaint
> My mighty cadaver to its creatures all,
> To the crows, the rats and the flies.[28]
>
> So without a recognition of our inherent racial qualities and the
> ancestral territory that determines our nationhood, we will remain as
> much a threatened species as the white rhino, the giant panda and the
> large blue butterfly. As Europe and North America struggles to cope
> with the catastrophic results of inner-city habitation and suicidal
> race-mixing, National Revolutionaries must never forget that we humans
> are the natural guardians of the soil and our extinction would be
> possibly the greatest ecological disaster of all. This is why we must
> seek to re-establish ourselves in the heart of the rural countryside,
> so that one day we can proudly declare that, in the words of Walther
> Darre: 'Here is anchored the eternalness of a racial stock of unique
> character.'[29]
>
>
>
> This article was originally published online by National Vanguard News.
>
> Notes:
> William Cobbett, quoted in Alun Hawkins' 'Deserters From The Plough' in
> 'History Today' magazine (1993), #February, Volume 43, p.32. [Back]
> Howard Newby, quoted in David Lowenthal's 'Heritage And The English
> Landscape' in 'History Today' magazine (1991), #September, Volume 41,
> p.10. [Back]
> Anna Bramwell, 'Blood And Soil: Walther Darre And Hitler's Green Party'
> (The Kensal Press, 1985), p.55. [Back]
> Anna Bramwell, 'Ecology In The 20th Century: A History' (Yale
> University Press, 1989), p.191. [Back]
> 'Blood And Soil', op. cit., p.54. [Back]
> Ibid., p.6. [Back]
> Ibid. [Back]
> Gottfried Feder, 'The Programme Of The NSDAP And Its General
> Conceptions' (BP Publications, 1980), p.10. [Back]
> Ibid., p.11. [Back]
> Otto Strasser, 'Germany Tomorrow' (Jonathan Cape, 1940), p.156. [Back]
> 'Blood And Soil', op. cit., p.24. [Back]
> Ibid., p.55. [Back]
> R.W. Darre, 'The Peasantry As The Key To Understanding The Nordic Race'
> in Barbara Miller Lane & Leila J. Rupp (Ed.) 'Nazi Ideology Before
> 1933: A Documentation' (Manchester University Press, 1978), p.105.
> [Back]
> 'Blood And Soil', op. cit., p.105. [Back]
> Anna Bramwell, 'Was This Man Father Of The Greens?' in 'History Today'
> magazine (1984), #September, Volume 34, p.8. [Back]
> 'Blood And Soil', op. cit., p.115. [Back]
> Ibid., p.119. [Back]
> Ibid. [Back]
> Ibid., p.5. [Back]
> Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, 'For My Legionaries' (Liberty Bell, 1990),
> p.225. [Back]
> Ibid., p. 146. [Back]
> Ibid., p.313. [Back]
> 'Ecology In The 20th Century: A History', op. cit., pp.163-4. [Back]
> Hugh Thomas (Ed.), 'Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera: Selected Writings'
> (London, 1972), p.30. [Back]
> 'Ecology In The 20th Century: A History', op. cit., pp.164. [Back]
> Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, in a speech to mark the foundation of his
> Movement on October 29th, 1933, quoted in 'Falange' by Stanley Payne
> (Stanford, 1961), p.41. [Back]
> John Seymour, 'The Ultimate Heresy' (Green Books, 1989), pp.87-8.
> [Back]
> Knut Hamsun, quoted in 'Voice From The Forests' by Padraig Cullen in
> 'The Scorpion' magazine, Issue #11, p.25. [Back]
> R.W. Darre, 'The German Peasant Formed German History' in George L.
> Mosse (Ed.) 'Nazi Culture' (Grosset & Dunlap, 1966), p.150. [Back]

The American Eagle, the only bird that craps in it's own nest.

ted