[MAI-NOT] EcoFascism: Xenophobia and Hate in Green Clothing

[Antifascist Bloc]

http://www.spunk.org/library/places/germany/sp001630/ecofasc.html

'Ecology' and the Modernization of Fascism in the German Ultra-right

Janet Biehl

It is an incontestable fact that the ecology crisis today is real. In
a vast number of ways and places, the biosphere of this planet is undergoing
a great deal of damage. Parts of the environment have already been rendered
uninhabitable through toxic wastes and nuclear power plant disasters, while
systemic pollution, ozone holes, global warming, and other disasters are
increasingly tearing the fabric on which all life depends. That such damage
is wrought overwhelmingly by corporations in a competitive international
market economy has never been clearer, while the need to replace the
existing society with one such as social ecology advances has never been
more urgent. 1

At a time when worsening economic conditions and strong political
disaffection occur along with ecological dislocations, however, nationalist
and even fascist ideas are gaining an increasingly high profile in Europe,
particularly, but not only, in the Federal Republic of Germany. With social
tensions exacerbated, neofascist groups of various kinds are winning
electoral representation, even as their loosely linked cohorts commit acts
of violence against foreigners. Such groups, both skinhead and
'intellectual,' are part of a 'New' Right that explicitly draws its ideas
from classical fascism. They are updating the old nationalist, mystical, and
misanthropic themes of the 'Old' Right, writes Jutta Ditfurth, in a
"modernization of fascism." Among other things, they are using a right-wing
interpretation of ecology "as an ideological 'hinge' for organizing the
extreme-right and neofascist scene." 2

Today's fascists have a distinct ideological legacy from their fascist
forebears upon which to draw. Indeed, 'ecology' and a mystical reverence for
the natural world are hardly new to German nationalism. At the end of the
nineteenth century, a cultural revolt against positivism swept much of
Europe, as George L. Mosse writes, and in Germany it became infused with
both nature-mysticism and racial nationalism. This revolt

became intimately bound up with a belief in nature's cosmic life
force, a dark force whose mysteries could be understood, not through
science, but through the occult. An ideology based upon such premises was
fused with the glories of an Aryan past, and in turn, that past received a
thoroughly romantic and mystical interpretation. 3
Culminating in the 1920s, an assortment of occult and
pseudo-scientific ideas coalesced around the idea of a German Volk into a
romantic nationalism, romantic racism, and a mystical nature-worshipping
faith. Indeed, as Mosse observes, the German word Volk

is a much more comprehensive term than "people," for to German
thinkers ever since the birth of German romanticism in the late eighteenth
century "Volk" signified the union of a group of people with a
transcendental "essence." This "essence" might be called "nature" or
"cosmos" or "mythos," but in each instance it was fused to man's innermost
nature, and represented the source of his creativity, his depth of feeling,
his individuality, and his unity with other members of the Volk. 4
The völkisch movement of the 1920s regarded modern materialism,
urbanism, rationalism, and science as artificial and evil, alien to this
'essence.'5 In a time of bitter social dislocation, it saw Weimar democracy
as the product of Western democratic and liberal ideals and, further, as a
puppet regime controlled by people who did not represent German 'essence.'
Many alleged that a Jewish world conspiracy lay behind the discontents of
modernism, including materialistic consumerism, soulless industrialism, a
homogenized commercial culture, and excessive modern technology, all of
which were said to be systematically destroying traditional German values.
Only true patriots could save Germans from ruin, thought the extreme
right -- themselves.

This movement sought to assert a truly Germanic alternative -- one as
racialist as it was nationalist in nature. The popular writings of Paul
Lagarde and Julius Langbehn favored an aristocratic social order in which
Germans would rule the world. It invoked a nature-romanticism in which a
closeness to the natural landscape was to give people a heightened sense of
aliveness and 'authenticity.' It advanced a new cosmic faith, embodied in
'Aryan' blood, that was to be grasped through intuition rather than science
in a plethora of occult and esoteric spiritualistic faiths that abounded in
Germany in the 1920s. Mystical belief-systems like Theosophy, Anthroposophy,
and Ariosophy (a mystical Aryanism) abounded and were rife with
Germanicnationalist components, such that they could be used to mystify an
'ecological' nationalism.

However inadvertently, the romantic nationalists of the völkisch
movement became an important source for National Socialist ideology, which
ironically drew on its antimodern sentiments even as it built a
technologically modern and virulently nationalistic and genocidal
totalitarian state. Demagogically appealing to a very real sense of
alienation, the Nazis stage-managed indoctrination extravaganzas that
promised 'authenticity' in a mystical, romantic nationalism that was 'closer
to nature,' even as they engaged in mass murder. Stressing the need to
return to simpler, healthier, and more 'natural' lifeways, they advanced the
idea and practice of a 'Nordic peasantry' tied organically to the soil --
even as they constructed a society that was industrially more modernized and
rationalized than any German society had seen to that time.

The so-called 'New' Right today appeals to themes reminiscent of the
völkisch movement in pre-Nazi Germany. It, too, presents itself as offering
an 'ecological' alternative to modern society. In the view of the 'New'
Right today, the destruction of the environment and the repression of
nationalities have a common root in 'Semitic' monotheism and universalism.
In its later form, Christianity, and in its subsequent secularized forms,
liberalism and Marxism, this dualistic, homogenizing universalism is alleged
to have brought on both the ecological crisis and the suppression of
national identity. Just as Judeo-Christian universalism was destructive of
authentic cultures when Christian missionaries went out into the world, so
too is modernity eliminating ethnic and national cultures. Moreover, through
the unbridled technology to which it gave rise, this modern universalism is
said to have perpetrated not only the destruction of nature but an
annihilation of the spirit; the destruction of nature, it is said, is
life-threatening in the spiritual sense as well as the physical, since when
people deny pristine nature, their access to their 'authentic' self is
blocked.

The dualistic yet universalistic 'Semitic' legacy is borne today most
egregiously, in 'New' Right ideology, by the United States, in whose
'mongrel' culture -- egalitarian democracy -- all cultures and races are
mixed together, forming a crass, soulless society. American cultural
imperialism is genocidal of other cultures around the world, and its
technological imperialism is destroying the global environment. The fascist
quest for 'national identity' and ecological salvation seeks to counter
'Western civilization' -- that is, the United States, as opposed to
'European civilization' -- by advancing a notion of 'ethnopluralism' that
seeks for all cultures to have sovereignty over themselves and their
environment. Europe should become, instead of a modernized monoculture, a
'Europe of fatherlands,' with autonomy for all its peoples. Just as Turks
should live in Turkey and Senegalese in Senegal, Germans should have Germany
for themselves, 'New' Right ideologues argue.

Ecology can easily be perverted to justify this 'ethnopluralism' --
that is, nationalism. Conceptions of one's region as one's 'homeland,' or
Heimat, can be perverted into a nationalistic regionalism when a region's
traditions and language are mystically tied to an 'ancestral' landscape.
(The word Heimat connotes as well a turn toward the past, an anti-urban
mood, a familiar community, and proximity to nature. For several decades the
concept was looked upon with disfavor because the Nazis had used it, but
intellectuals rediscovered it in the 1970s, after further decades of
capitalist industrialization.) For a people seeking to assert themselves
against an outside intruder, an 'ecologized' Heimat in which they are
biologically embedded can become a useful tool not only against imperialism
but against immigration, foreigners, and 'overpopulation.' Elaborate
justifications for opposing Third World immigration are disguised as
diversity, drawing on 'ecological' arguments against 'overpopulation.' Today
it is not only fascists who invoke Heimat; in September 1989, for example,
the head of the respectable League for the Protection of the Environment and
Nature (Bund für Umwelt- und Naturschutz, or BUND), environmentalist Hubert
Weinzierl, remarked that

only when humanity's main concern, the diminution of the stream of
overpopulation, has been accomplished, will there be any meaning or any
prospect of building an environment that is capable of improvement, of
configuring the landscape of our civilization in such a way that it remains
worthy of being called Heimat. 6
An ecology that is mystical, in turn, may become a justification for a
nationalism that is mystical. In the New Age milieu of today, with its
affinities for ecology, the ultra-right may well find the mystical component
it needs to make a truly updated, modernized authoritarian nationalism. As
in Germany between the two world wars, antirational cults of the New Age --
primitivistic, esoteric -- abound in both the Federal Republic and the
Anglo-American world. Such antirationalism and mysticism are appealed to by
the 'New' Right; as anarchist publisher Wolfgang Haug observes, "The New
Right, in effect, wants above all to redefine social norms so that rational
doubt is regarded as decadent and eliminated, and new 'natural' norms are
established." 7

Neofascist 'Ecology'
Ecology is warped for mystical-nationalist ends by a whole series of
neofascist groups and parties. Indeed, so multifarious are the ecofascist
parties that have arisen, and so much do their memberships overlap, that
they form what antifascist researcher Volkmar Wölk calls an "ecofascist
network." 8 Their programmatic literature often combines ecology and
nationalism in ways that are designed to appeal to people who do not
consider themselves fascists, while at the same time they ideologically
support neo-Nazi street-fighting skinheads who commit acts of violence
against foreigners.

National Revolutionaries9
The National Revolutionaries (NRs) manipulatively mix themes of left
and right in their uses of nationalism and ecology, in an attempt to cross
ideological lines. They draw on an old tenet of right-wing dissent in
Germany -- the belief that a 'Third Way' between capitalism and socialism is
necessary and that Germany is predestined to lead humankind toward it. 10
The NRs' 'Third Way' is based on nationalism, a socialism "of the specific
national way" 11 -- in short, a 'national socialism.' A wing of the NRs
today, called the Solidaristen, identifies itself with the Strasser
brothers, two 1920s Nazi Party members who took the 'Socialism' in 'National
Socialism' seriously and represented the 'left' anticapitalist wing of the
Nazis. Today, the Solidaristen and other NRs regard Otto Strasser in
particular as the 'Trotsky of National Socialism' because of his 1920s
intraparty power struggle with Hitler; Hitler's ejection of this fascist in
1930 was, for them, a betrayal of National Socialism.

Today's leading NR ideologist, Henning Eichberg, calls for the
assertion of "national identity" and a "liberation nationalism." Seeking to
appeal to left and right, NR publications have supported national liberation
movements from across the traditional political spectrum, including the
Irish, Basques, Ukrainians, and Afghans, as well as Sandinistas. 12 They
regarded divided Germany as an occupied country, "the result of the
imperialist politics of the occupation forces," and they sought to
"liberate" it -- including Austria. Now that Germany has been freed from
this "occupation," the National Revolutionaries are free to concentrate on
"reunifying" with Austria.

Eichberg regards Judeo-Christianity as the ultimate root of all
present evils, since it is overly intellectual and alienates humanity both
from itself and from the divine; it neglects the emotions and the body. Tied
in as it is with the logic of productivism, Christianity, Eichberg writes,
is the "religion of growth" that must be fought at all costs. To help
cultivate 'national identity,' he proposes instead a new religion that mixes
together neopagan Germanic, Celtic, and Indian religions with old
völkisch-nationalistic ideas. It is to be based on "the
sensuality-physicality of dance and ritual, ceremony and taboo, meditation,
prayer, and ecstasy. In essence, [this religion] constitutes itself as a
form of praxis" against the "religion of growth" since its "sensuous
counter-experiences" can restore humanity to closer contact with nature.
Sounding like many New Agers in the United States, Eichberg calls for a
return to pristine nature, to the alleged primordial sources of people's
lives, psyches, and authentic cultures, and for people to heal themselves
within as part of healing the ecological crisis, overcoming their own
alienation, and rediscovering themselves. 13

National Revolutionaries exploit ecological themes not only to
construct primitivistic New Age religions but for political activity as
well. During the 1970s they organized around opposition to nuclear energy at
about the same time as the citizens' initiative movement did. "With their
ecological and antinuclear enthusiasm," observes Walter Laqueur,

their cultural anti-Americanism and their support for movements of
national liberation in many parts of the world, the "national
revolutionaries" tried, in fact, to outflank their left-wing contemporaries.
Some regarded Sinn Fein as a model for the German national revolutionaries,
others suggested "political Balkanization" in Germany and Europe as a
solution to all outstanding questions. 14
Other National Revolutionaries took a different political approach: at
the end of the 1970s, they joined the newly emerging Greens, where some of
their number succeeded in holding office for a time. In October 1980, the
Alternative List of West Berlin, for one, decided they could not work with
National Revolutionaries, whom they considered even more dangerous than
overt neo-Nazis because they hid their true intentions behind a veil of
grassroots democratic and ecological programs. They were mostly driven out
of the Greens, at least as far as observers seem aware today. 15

The Freedom German Workers Party 16
Like the National Revolutionaries, the Freedom German Workers Party
(Freiheitliche Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or FAP) calls for a 'national
socialism,' albeit one based on "a sense of community instead of class
struggle." The FAP seeks no rapprochement with leftists; it openly and
militantly proclaims its support for Nazi ideas, celebrates race and nation,
and is pro-Hitler rather than Strasserite. It praises German soldiers, whose
"achievements" in two world wars will "still be admired in a thousand
years." The FAP is largely controlled by The Movement (Die Bewegung), which
seeks to reestablish the NSDAP (the Nazi Party) in the Federal Republic and
unite all fascist groups under its aegis. 17

The FAP recruits from among skinheads and soccer fans, and its
activities include acts of violence, arson, and racial attacks on
foreigners. It advances the crudest 'Germany for Germans -- foreigners out'
slogans. 18 When it engages in electoral activity, its programmatic demands
have included "German jobs for German workers," "repatriation for
foreigners," "no franchise for foreigners," and an end to the "crazy
enthusiasm for integration." 19 Germans today must not ruin the "legacy of
our fathers," the "cultural landscape"; Alsace-Lorraine, the South Tyrol,
and Austria should all be returned to Germany.

FAP Nazis especially loathe "humanistically oriented cosmopolitanism."
Marxism, liberalism, and Christianity "have torn humanity from its
connectedness to the natural cycles of our earth." No "technical
environmentalism" will succeed against the "increasingly obvious ecological
catastrophe," they believe. Rather, the "disrupted relations between
humanity and the rest of nature" require an "ecological revolution" and a
"radical revolution in consciousness" that will "lead humanity to a
reintegration with the structure of planetary life." We need a new ethics,
they maintain, one in which "humanity, animals and nature are regarded as a
unity. Animals are not things" but are "life-forms that feel joy and pain
and need our protection." Not surprisingly, the FAP regards abortion as a
"crime against the laws of a healthy nature and against God."

In a blatant self-contradiction, their concrete environmental demands
are in fact friendly to capitalism: They want "continued economic growth,"
yet less profit-seeking. "Ecological necessities . . . must be brought into
accordance with a functioning economy," they believe, while "the cyclical
system of nature should . . . be incorporated into the economic realm."

The Republicans 20
The Republicans, a political party founded by former Waffen-SS member
Franz Schönhuber in 1983, have made numerous disavowals of any association
with the Nazis -- they present themselves as nothing more than a "community
of German patriots." Yet this does not stop them from taking explicitly
anti-immigrant stances, especially against Turks, or from exploiting
discontents about the influx of foreigners generally, or from maintaining
that Germany should be "for Germans." The presence of a "tidal wave" of
asylum-seekers in the Federal Republic, they believe, causes "the
importation of criminals," "social tensions," and "financial burdens."

The Republicans call for the "preservation of the existence of the
German Volk, its health and its ecological living-space [Lebensraum] as a
priority for domestic policy. This goal," they add, "will also foster
environmental protection." Indeed, ecological dislocations are endangering
Germans' "health" -- and by 'health' they mean the 'genetic health' of the
German people. Such 'health' has "a higher value than short-term profits and
striving for a standard of living." Protecting and maintaining a "healthy
environment" not only assures the "security of the means of life of our
people" but is "a patriotic duty." The Republicans are stringently
antiabortion for German women, yet for the Third World, "meaningful family
planning" is necessary to end the "population explosion" and its consequent
threat to the environment; without it there will be "natural catastrophe and
starvation."

The National Democratic Party 21
The National Democratic Party of Germany (Nationaldemokratische Partei
Deutschlands, or NPD), founded in 1964 mainly by people who had been active
Nazis before 1945, rose to prominence during the 1960s. This aggressively
nationalist party long called for German reunification, while its
programmatic literature complains that "two wars within one generation . . .
have eaten away at the substantive health of the German people." (It does
not mention what those wars did to the Jews, as Ditfurth dryly notes.) The
NPD laments the destruction of the environment, which "has disadvantageous
effects on the Volk-health." Germans should not be exposed to "chemical
dyes" and should be protected from "congenital illness," while people with
AIDS should be required to "register." The "preservation" of the "German
people" requires that German women prolifically give birth, and therefore
the NPD is against the "devaluation and destruction of the family." Since
abortion threatens "the biological existence of our people," women who have
abortions should be punished. The party calls for maternal and housekeeping
training for "feminine youth."

In 1973, the NPD drew up an "Ecological Manifesto" that invoked "the
laws of nature" to justify a hierarchically structured, "organic" order that
would govern social relationships. 22 It inveighs against "the environment
polluted and poisoned by a humanity that lives increasingly isolated in a
degraded mass," which "is only the most noticeable symptom of the ruined
equilibrium of humanity and nature." In the years since then, the NPD's
rhetoric has become increasingly New Age oriented; it now calls for
"reachieving . . . an environmental consciousness, so necessary for life."
Achieving this consciousness, the 1988 NPD program states, "first requires
an inner revolution in human thought. It is not the unlimited accumulation
of material goods or boundless consumption that gives meaning to human life
and happiness, but the experience of nature, concern for cultural values,
and social security in the family and Volk." Indeed, "Volk-consciousness and
environmental consciousness are inseparable," since "millions of strangers"
threaten "our Volk in its existence."

The German People's Union23
The German People's Union (Deutsche Volksunion, or DVU) was founded by
Dr. Gerhard Frey (born in 1933), a longtime ultra-right activist and
publisher. Still its leading figure, Frey has been fixated for decades on
the Second World War in DVU publications, casting doubts on the
concentration camps as they are normally depicted and generally denying
German guilt; his publications offer Nazi memorabilia for sale. The DVU
proclaims that "Germany should remain German" and calls for "priority in
German housing for Germans" and "national identity and self-determination."
For the DVU, environmental protection means passing "stringent laws against
polluters," "strict examination of imported foodstuffs," and imposing
restrictions on animal experimentation and on "the torture of animals."
Protecting life means "an end to abortion abuse."

Anthroposophy and the World League for the Protection of Life
Political parties like these have an assortment of 'Old' Right -- that
is, Nazi -- connections upon which they may draw in their search for
'ecological' modernization. One such connection is the World League for the
Protection of Life (Weltbund Schutz des Lebens, or WSL). This group is not
without a certain general appeal in the Federal Republic, since its outlook
is based on Anthroposophy, a body of occult ideas formulated earlier in this
century by Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925). Steiner, the leading German figure in
the nineteenth-century esoteric 'wisdom' cult Theosophy, founded the German
Theosophical Society; he went on to found his own doctrine, Anthroposophy,
and the Anthroposophical Society thereafter. He wrote many books on his
occult spiritualistic philosophy.

Anthroposophy holds a particular attraction in the German
counterculture today, as it did in the völkisch movement of the 1920s. The
Waldorf Schools, for example, were founded on Steiner's educational
principles and are respectable in many German and American countercultural
circles. (There are more than sixty in the Federal Republic today.) Founded
by Steiner in 1920, they provide children with an alternative, reformed
education, one that is free from aggression and from pressures to achieve,
one that places emphasis on the musical aspects of life and on feelings over
understanding. Steiner is also the founder of biodynamic farming, a form of
organic agriculture that does without pesticides and tries to foster a more
organic relationship between cultivator and soil. Biodynamic agriculturists
today produce a line of organic foods under the brand name Demeter and a
line of cosmetics under the name Weleda. Many people have been and continue
to be innocently attracted to these efforts and to Anthroposophy without any
notion of the less savory aspects of Steiner's work.

Yet not all of Steiner's beliefs were benignly ecospiritual. For one
thing, Anthroposophy classifies humanity into 'root races' in an esoteric
evolutionary theory. 24 Building on a similar doctrine in Theosophy, the
root-race theory is integral to Anthroposophy's cosmology. According to this
doctrine, a series of root races of human beings evolved sequentially over
the millennia, each superior to the ones that preceded it, each with a
higher level of development of self-consciousness. The first two root races,
the Polar and Hyperborean, were 'astral-etheric'; they are now extinct --
the evolutionary process superseded them. The next people to evolve were a
bit higher, but they were still half animal, purely instinctive, lacking the
capacity for conceptual thought and memory. The fourth root race finally
began to be recognizably human; finally came the Atlantans, to which
Europeans belong. The European whites, as the most highly developed so far,
are at the summit of the hierarchical scale of humanity; they have brought
everything that is good to humanity, since they "are the only ones who have
developed humanity within themselves." 25 These various races have been
mostly killed off in various catastrophes of one kind or another, after
which only certain people -- presumably the fittest -- survived; "in the
case of the inferior kinds of human beings," wrote Steiner, ". . . the life
body was not sufficiently protected to enable it to withstand the Luciferic
influence." 26 There are numerous subdivisions within these basic root
races. Blacks, for example, must live in Africa, we learn, a land of much
heat and light; blacks soak up this heat and light, and their brains are
specially constructed to process it; their supposed highly instinctual
nature results from all this processing.

And since the sun, light, and heat are retained in his epidermis,
[the black's] whole metabolism proceeds as if he were being cooked inside
himself by the sun. From this results his instinctive life. Within the
black, he is continuously being cooked, and what stokes this fire is his
posterior brain. 27
Once blacks emigrate out of Africa, the balance of light and heat is
different, and therefore they will die out -- "they are in fact a declining
race, they will die out of their own nature, since they are receiving too
little light and heat." 28 Such a theory would justify accelerating the
extinction of races since they are presumably going to die off anyway. In
the future, wrote Steiner in 1909, certain people who have not reached a
"high level of development" will incline toward evil: "The laggard souls
will have accumulated in their karma so much error, ugliness, and evil that
there will form, for the time being, a special union of evil and aberrant
human beings who voluntarily oppose the community of good men." 29

Perhaps this root-race theory was what appealed to Rudolf Hess about
Anthroposophy, for he became an Anthroposophist. As Ditfurth points out,
"The root-race ideology of the Theosophists and the Anthroposophists melded
seamlessly into the National Socialist idea of the purity of the 'Aryan
race.'"30 Certainly Steiner's ideas on biodynamic farming influenced some
National Socialists. Anthroposophical ideas are eminently usable by
ecofascists today, and there is a strong right wing within the
Anthroposophists that is closely connected with the ultra-right. Author
Günther Bartsch is an Anthroposophist who is also a National Revolutionary
of the Solidarist variety; the author of an adulatory 1989 biography of Otto
Strasser, he attempts in his publications to synthesize ecological themes
based on Steiner's ideas with Strasser's political ideas. 31 It should be
noted that Anthroposophy is also well funded by huge multinational
corporations like Siemens and Bertelsmann. 32

Among the ultra-right adherents of Anthroposophy today are officials
of the World League for the Protection of Life (WSL), a small but
influential and very wealthy environmental organization in the Federal
Republic. The garden at its educational center is cultivated according to
biodynamic methods, and visitors are served organic refreshments. Yet this
organization was founded in 1958 by former members of the National Socialist
party, and today it links protection of 'life' (that is, 'right-to-life')
themes and the environment with racism and a revival of völkisch ideology.
The 'life' it is most interested in protecting is of course German 'life';
thus the WSL is rabidly anti-abortion, believing that German women should be
devoted to giving birth to 'Aryan' babies.

The spiritual leader of the WSL and its key figure for most of its
history has been Werner Georg Haverbeck. Born in 1909, Haverbeck became an
active Nazi at an early age; it should be recalled that Nazism was largely a
youth movement, so that members like Haverbeck are still alive. 33 Haverbeck
joined the SA in 1928 and from 1929 to 1932 was a member of the Reich
Administration for the National Socialist Student League (Reichsleitung der
NSDAP-Studentenschaft) and a leader of the Reich Youth Leadership of the
Hitler Youth (Reichjugendführung der Hitlerjugend). He served as a leading
official of the Strength Through Joy organization, which controlled
recreational activities under the Third Reich; in 1933 Rudolf Hess saw to it
that Haverbeck's passport was stamped "This man is not to be arrested." He
survived the Röhm purge to help organize the Nuremberg Party Congress and
join Hess's staff. It was Hess who converted him to Anthroposophy. During
the war he conducted radio propaganda in Denmark and worked in South
America; by the end of the war he was an officer. 34

After the Allies rudely aborted Haverbeck's many efforts on behalf of
the Third Reich, he contented himself for a time working as a pastor for the
Anthroposophical Christian community. He founded an educational center
called the Collegium Humanum in 1963, where today ecofascist, esoteric,
völkisch, Anthroposophist, neopagan, and primitivist groups meet and hold
workshops. He co-founded the WSL and served as its president from 1974 to
1982. In 1981, he was a signatory of the notorious Heidelberg Manifesto, a
document drawn up by a group of professors to warn the German people of the
dangers that immigration posed to them. Its first draft began:

With great concern we observe the subversion of the German people
through the influx of many millions of foreigners and their families, the
foreignization of our language, our culture, and our nationhood. . . .
Already many Germans have become foreigners in their living districts and
workplaces, and thus in their own Heimat.35
Routine as this language may sound now, when opposition to immigration
in the Federal Republic is much more tolerated and neofascists pander to it
relentlessly, the Manifesto had to be toned down at the time (1981) because
of the public outcry it raised.

In accordance with Anthroposophical root-race beliefs, Haverbeck is
notable for propounding the thesis that the two world wars in this century
in fact constituted a thirty years' war waged by foreign aggressors against
the German people and their spiritual life. Apparently, German spiritual
life stood in the way of "the strivings for world domination by the
Anglo-Saxon race," behind which lay "the intensive image of a call to world
dominance, like the old Jewish consciousness." Indeed, Haverbeck maintains,
the two world wars amounted to a conspiracy against the German people and
spiritual life. It is a "historical lie" that the Nazis ran "mass-murder
camps," argues Haverbeck, and is actually "enemy propaganda." It was Russia
that was the aggressor in the Second World War. 36

In his 1989 book Rudolf Steiner: Advocate for Germany, Haverbeck lauds
Steiner (who died in 1925) for understanding the existence of this ongoing
conspiracy early on.

During the first world war, Rudolf Steiner delivered a multitude of
lectures about contemporary history, and he toiled inexhaustibly for the
truth about the question of "war guilt." . . . Steiner presented his
listeners with maps that showed that goals that had been proclaimed back in
1889 were being fulfilled [during World War I]. These maps anticipated the
separation of Central Europe that would be ultimately achieved with the loss
of East Germany. . . . What was not fully achieved through the Versailles
treaty in 1919 was in fact completed in 1945: the demolition of Germany. . .
. The leading forces of both parties to the cold war were united in this
common struggle against spiritual Germany. "This war [World War I] was a
conspiracy against German spiritual life," said Steiner. 37
When Haverbeck's book on Steiner's nationalism was published, it
caused an outcry of protest among outraged countercultural Anthroposophists
who send their children to Waldorf Schools, use Demeter products, and are in
no way racists or fascists. Yet as researcher Wölk points out, their
protests were unwarranted, since Haverbeck was only presenting Steiner as
what he actually was -- "a crude nationalist whose demonizations were shared
by the völkisch groups of his day" -- to show his usefulness for nationalist
and neofascist groups today. 38

This alleged conspiracy against German spiritual life pervades much of
the WSL's current thinking, notes Wölk. WSLers consider the "flood of
asylum-seekers," the destruction of the environment, and the ongoing
transformation of the Federal Republic into a multicultural society to be
part of the spiritual war against the Germans. They regard the protection of
the environment as part of the protection of a people, of its biological
"substance" and its national identity. Indeed, WSLers see the battle for a
healthy environment as part of the all-encompassing spiritual struggle
against the homogenizing forces of modernity and "Western civilization."
Haverbeck's wife, Ursula Haverbeck-Wetzel, another former WSL president who
"for religious reasons refuses to dissociate herself from any human being,
including Adolf Hitler," 39 observes:

Whenever a person comes to feel that he belongs to the cultural
strain that is deeply rooted in his people which has not only a material
existence but a spiritual reality that is superior to the material plane --
he has broken out from being a manipulated consumer. He has escaped the mass
homogenization of completely manipulated people who are "amusing themselves
to death" (as Neil Postman put it), which is the goal of "One World"
advocates, intent on power and domination. The person who is faithful to his
religious convictions and attentive and caring to his culture and customs,
they consider dangerous. 40
Ernst Otto Cohrs, the WSL's president since 1989, is another devotee
of Rudolf Steiner, having been an Anthroposophist since 1961. Today Cohrs's
interests seem to lie in promulgating race theories, and publishing and
distributing anti-Semitic literature. In 1982, an official of the WSL's
Bavarian chapter made a public issue of Cohrs's activities inside the WSL.
He wrote a letter to a WSL membership assembly saying that it should
dissociate itself from Cohrs because, among other things, he was sending
anti-Semitic literature to WSL members, running advertisements in
ultra-right magazines like Bauernschaft (the journal of the notorious
Holocaust-denier Thies Christophersen), permitting neofascist periodicals to
reprint WSL leaflets, and himself distributing such writings as There Were
No Gas Chambers and The Auschwitz Myth.41 Many members withdrew from the WSL
as a result of this letter; those who remained were overwhelmingly those who
shared Cohrs's anti-Semitic ideas and were not disposed to contradict him.
Among them was Baldur Springmann, the 'ecofarmer' who was involved in the
Greens in the early days, whose book Partner Erde (Partner Earth) was
published by an ultra-right publisher (Arndt Verlag), and who writes for the
'New' Right publication Nation Europa; and Dr. Arnold Neugebohrn, a
Republican candidate for the provincial legislature who takes pride in his
NSDAP 'gold medal.' Concludes Wölk, "The internal crisis caused by Cohrs's
activities in 1981-82 may have diminished the ranks of the WSL, but it also
strengthened the WSL's neofascist orientation." Cohrs's current activities
are still primarily the dissemination of Holocaust-denial literature. 42

One collective member of the WSL is a Hamburg-based organization known
as the Society for Biological Anthropology, Eugenics, and Behavioral
Research (Gesellschaft für biologische Anthropologie, Eugenik, und
Verhaltensforschung, or GfbAEV), whose head is Jürgen Rieger, a "neo-Nazi in
lawyer's robes" (as the newspaper Die Zeit called him) who is currently
defending two fascist groups that the Federal Republic banned in 1992; one
of the GfbAEV's fellows is the leading ideologue of the French Nouvelle
Droite, Alain de Benoist. Its periodical is the notorious quarterly journal
Neue Anthropologie, which maintains, among other things, that there has
always been environmental destruction in the history of humanity, that in
fact one could even say this was part of human nature were it not for one
sole exception:

Only the Germans were different. In pagan times they worshipped
groves and trees, and because of their closeness to nature, they had a
caring orientation toward nature. Even the love of animals is much more
pronounced among the Germanic peoples than it is, for example, among the
Romance-language-speaking peoples. It is thus no coincidence that even today
the most stalwart environmentalist efforts -- private as well as state --
are those conducted by peoples who have a larger proportion of the Nordic
race. 43
Rudolf Bahro:Völkisch Spirituality
If fascists are using ecological themes to update their racial and
nationalist aims, other thinkers are developing an ecological spiritualism
along New Age lines that bears no small resemblance to the völkisch Germanic
spirituality of the 1920s. Indeed, "a great part of the literature about
close-to-nature spirituality that the alternative scene is reading is
permeated with reactionary, völkisch, or even National Socialist content,"
writes Ditfurth. "We find neofascist and ultra-right positions not only in
the various political and even ecological groups, but also . . . in
neopagan, esoteric and occult circles." 44

Perhaps the most prominent figure in this connection is Rudolf Bahro.
Many German 'new social movement' circles previously accepted Bahro as a
social theorist contributing to a 'socialism with a human face' and continue
to regard him as part of the independent left; leftist periodicals publish
uncritical interviews with him. In the Anglo-American world, too, many
ecological radicals still consider Bahro as representing something
'leftist.' Yet Bahro no longer considers himself a leftist; indeed, he is a
vehement critic of the left45 and of "comrades without fatherland." 46 In
fact, as antifascist researcher Roger Niedenführ argues, since the mid-1980s
Bahro has been contributing to the development of a "spiritual fascism" that
has the effect of "rehabilitating National Socialism," openly calling for
reclaiming the "positive" side of the Nazi movement. Not only does Bahro
appeal to a mystical Germanist spirituality like the völkisch ideologues of
the 1920s, he even sees the need for a "Green Adolf" who will lead Germans
out of their own "folk-depths" and into ecological "salvation.

Bahro originally became well known as the author of The Alternative in
Eastern Europe, which he wrote during the 1970s while he was a dissident
Marxist and party member in the former East Germany. In 1977, the ruling
Communist government sentenced him to prison; in 1979, he was deported. Once
arrived in what was then West Germany, Bahro became involved with the
nascent German Greens, affirming that "red and green go well together." 48
In the early 1980s peace movement, he alarmed many by enunciating
nationalistic arguments against the deployment of Pershing missiles. 49 He
began to speak less in political terms and more in religious terms, asking
that "the emphasis [be] shifted from politics and the question of power
towards the cultural level . . . to the prophetic level. . . . Our aim has
to be the 'reconstruction of God.'"50 He became a vocal 'fundamentalist'
critic of the realo wing of the Greens (those who became generally committed
to exercising parliamentary power) and ultimately left the party in 1985. In
a parting speech in Hamburg, he said there were structural similarities
between the Greens and the Nazi movement that the Greens were not taking
advantage of but should; then he gave his 'fundamentalist' alternative: "the
other republic that we want will be an association of communities of
life-communities in which God and Goddess are at the center." 51

Bahro thereafter moved increasingly toward the New Age esoteric
milieu. His major concern remained "the ecological crisis," whose "deep
structures" must be investigated, but he now thinks ecology "has nothing to
do with left and right." 52 Today Bahro is one of the leading spokespeople
and theorists of New Age ideas in the Federal Republic. "The most important
thing," he rambles,

is that . . . [people] take the path "back" and align themselves
with the Great Equilibrium, in the harmony between the human order and the
Tao of life. I think the "esoteric"-political theme of "king and queen of
the world" is basically the question of how men and women are to comprehend
and interact with each other in a spiritually comprehensive way. Whoever
does not bring themselves to cooperate with the world government
[Weltregierung] will get their due. 53
In 1989, Bahro cofounded a combination educational center and commune
near Trier, the Lernwerkstatt (an "ecological academy for one world"), whose
purpose is to synthesize spirituality and politics, "to come to a new
personal and social orientation." It presents lectures, cultural events, and
weekend workshops on various New Age themes, including deep ecology,
ecofeminism, Zen Buddhism, holistic nutrition, Sufism, and the like -- as
well as German identity. 54 His 1987 book Logik der Rettung marked an overt
embrace of authoritarian theological concepts that shocked many former
admirers. 55

Bahro also holds a professorship at Humboldt University in Berlin,
where he conducts a seminar whose sessions are usually filled to
overflowing. At Humboldt, he holds a chair in 'social ecology,' and he
refers to his 'science' by this name, but Bahro's work is not to be confused
with the social ecology conceived and developed by Murray Bookchin. Although
the two theorists agree that class contradictions are not the exclusive
social contradiction, Bookchin regards hierarchy as basic, while emphasizing
the importance of class interests. Bahro, by contrast, points to "tribal
consciousness" as rooted "more deeply than class consciousness," even in the
spiritually "deepest layers" of a people. "The national question is an
objective reality," Bahro says, that is on a much "deeper basis than the
class question." 56

Moreover, whereas Bookchin's consistently internationalist social
ecology affirms reason and naturalism and repeatedly criticizes ecomysticism
and ecotheology, Bahro's version of 'social ecology' is overwhelmingly
spiritualistic. Indeed, in late 1990, when Bookchin spoke at the Humboldt
seminar at Bahro's invitation, Bahro told Bookchin that his (Bahro's) own
'social ecology' was actually an attempt to synthesize Bookchin's social
ecology with deep ecology. 57 Politics must be based on spiritualistic
values today, in Bahro's view, because "without a return to the spiritual
source," politics "will not be worthy of that name." 58 Not only are those
who see spirituality and politics as opposites fundamentally wrong, he
argues, but our global ecological problems are in fact a material reflection
of the inner spiritual "sickness" that separates them. It is a religious
"politics of consciousness" -- that is, the implanting of spiritualistic
ideas -- that can arrest the global ecological crisis and prepare people for
the new political order. 59

Bahro's spiritualistic approach has a distinctly ethno-cultural
dimension. He speaks of peoples as if they had unique spiritual 'essences'
that are indissoluble, that cannot be destroyed over time. 60 He is
particularly concerned with the 'German essence' (deutsche Wesenheit) and
its various manifestations on the material plane. 61 In approaching the
ecological crisis, the German 'essence' demands the incorporation of
spiritualism, particularly the mystical tradition initiated by Meister
Eckhart, whom "we Germans should read." 62 Bahro favorably contrasts this
"German legacy"63 with socialism and the Enlightenment.

It appears not to alarm Bahro, as antifascist researcher Peter Kratz
points out, that his mystical Germanism closely resembles the mystical
Germanism of the völkisch movement. 64 Bahro, in fact, consciously
associates himself with the völkisch movement -- he says he wants an
"awakening in the Volk"65 -- and with the 1920s Conservative Revolution
against the Enlightenment generally. 66 Indeed, Bahro is critical of the
Greens, among other things, because they did "not attend to this völkisch
moment." 67 Kratz warns that this gives Bahro's approach "the same potential
for political catastrophe that the völkisch movement had, even though this
would please Bahro as little as it would have pleased the originators of the
völkisch movement." 68

'Essences' like the 'German essence' cannot remain in the spiritual
plane; they must be manifested in concrete reality -- that is, in politics,
history, and society. In Bahro's prospectus (and in stark contrast to
Bookchin's anarchist libertarian municipalism), these manifestations will
not take the form of democratic institutions, since "to say that we will
create grassroots democracy now, among these wolves, is nonsense." 69 Bahro
criticizes the "bean-counting voting" process of democracy and prefers a
spiritual consensus process for decision making. 70 Although he is currently
receiving state support from Saxony for an eco-communal demonstration
project (thanks largely to his friend and visiting lecturer at Humboldt,
Saxon prime minister Kurt Biedenkopf), Bahro also rejects the state:
"Society's rule of law," he asserts, "may no longer be based on the state or
on any other existing forces that are even less legitimate." 71

Despite his antistatist assertions, which may make him appear
attractively anti-authoritarian, like many 'New' Rightists Bahro expressly
believes that the ecological crisis is resolvable only through authoritarian
means. He calls for a spiritually based and hierarchically elitist
"salvation government" (Rettungsregierung) or a "god-state" (Gottesstaat)72
that will be run by a "new political authority at the highest level": a
"prince of the ecological turn." 73 The "prince," which apparently may be a
collective entity, will constitute a spiritual elite, an oligarchy
responsible only to God. As a "voice of the divine," 74 this guru elite will
dictate the law of God and nature, in order to convert the present society
to the "order according to nature"75 that Bahro sees as desirable. People
should not "be afraid" of the advent of this "prince," says Bahro, since "a
bit of 'ecodictatorship' is needed" to handle our problems today. 76
Besides, "it is a matter of absolute indifference whether [this prince] is a
man or a woman," he assures us, "it is a question of structure. That is the
German moment in this Green movement." 77 But today it is important to
develop a broad spiritual consciousness in the general population, for
"without a spiritual determination, there will be no new redemptive
institutionalization" -- that is, no "prince." 78 It is presumably cheering
that "in spite of all bad experiences . . . the strongest
political-psychological dispositions of our people" make "the Germans more
responsive than other peoples to charismatic leadership." 79

Liberating the 'Brown Parts'
Since the mid-1980s, Bahro has been remarkably open about proclaiming
his embrace of the spiritual content of fascism for the 'salvation' of
nature and humanity. In The Logic of Salvation, he asks, "Is there really no
thought more reprehensible than a new 1933?" -- that is, Hitler's rise to
state power. "But that is precisely what can save us! The ecology and peace
movement is the first popular German movement since the Nazi movement. It
must co-redeem [miterlösen] Hitler." 80 Indeed, "the Nazi movement [was]
among other things an early reading of the ecology movement." 81 Germans are
to look for "the positive that may lie buried in the Nazi movement" and
reclaim it, he says, "because if we do not, we will remain cut off from our
roots, the roots from which will grow that which will save us." 82 Today one
must "liberate" the "brown parts" in the German character. 83 The fact is,
says Bahro, that today "there is a call in the depths of the Volk for a
Green Adolf." 84

When Bahro's critics reproach him for this assertion, Bahro responds
that no, he does not mean Adolf Hitler. That his leftist critics think he
means Adolf Hitler shows that the left "responds only with fear, instead of
comprehending that a Green Adolf would be an entirely different Adolf from
the one we know about." 85 Yet as Kratz points out, Bahro himself is evasive
about what this 'Green Adolf' actually would be: perhaps a personified
Führer, perhaps a spiritual elite, or perhaps some inner self-recognition
that within each of us there is supposedly a 'Green Adolf,' to whom we must
subordinate ourselves voluntarily through spiritual insight. This
evasiveness is itself a matter of concern. Kratz believes that Bahro really
means a personified Führer; for one thing, Bahro invokes the 'sleeping
emperor' myth, 86 the nationalistic notion that the Emperor Barbarossa is
sleeping in the Kyffhäuser Mountain and will one day come back as the Führer
and rescue Germany from dire straits87 -- an idea that is also one of the
foundations of the Nazi Führer principle.

For Bahro, this Führer will clearly be a spiritualistic leader. In a
foreword to a book by his colleague Jochen Kirchhoff, he argued that
National Socialism had had the right spiritual aims: it sought to manifest
the 'German essence' on the material plane. It went wrong in the
execution -- for one thing, it was very violent. But even this was
understandable since, arising as it did in the 1920s, it was the task of
National Socialism to make the first real spiritual revolt against the
overwhelming materialism of the age. Thus, the materialistic thinking of the
Weimar era, against which National Socialism rebelled, was the real cause of
the Nazis' material "vehemence"-- that is, mass murder. 88

The materialistic thinking of Weimar modernity that the Nazis were so
correct to oppose, says Bahro, is also today the immediate cause of the
ecological crisis. Only the spiritualization of consciousness, Bahro
believes, can prevail over biosphere-destroying materialism. Hence Germans
today have no alternative but to invoke the spiritually "deep forces" from
the Nazi movement -- in order to "be present with our whole potential." 89

But it must be a strictly spiritual endeavor: undertaking concrete
political resistance on the material plane is, for Bahro, itself an integral
component of materialistic secularism, an expression of negative
spirituality. Those who engage in politics on the material plane today, he
says, in fact politically resemble -- Nazis! True, the Nazis had to struggle
in the twenties, but at least they had the right spiritual ideas. But
"revolt (under the conditions of our imperial situation) is fascistic. That

is to say, it redeems [rettet] nothing." 90 Bahro's religious dispensation
thus does not synthesize spirituality and politics at all, as critic
Niedenführ points out; on the contrary, it simply eliminates political
action. 91

Repelled by these ideas, critics have denounced The Logic of Salvation
as fascistic or 'fascistoid' -- potentially fascist. Bahro responds that
such "faint-hearted antifascism" has "refused" to "look for the strength
that lay beneath the brown movement." 92 Precisely because the left rejects
the insights of spirituality, it can never see the necessity of
völkisch-authoritarian structures and therefore can never give material form
to the 'German essence,' he believes. Bahro replied further in his next
book, Rückkehr:

It can be instructive that there was a strong wing of the Nazis that
wanted to be socially and culturally revolutionary. This wing was not
consolidated, and the Hitler movement went on to serve a regenerated German
capitalism. . . . We can no longer allow fascism to be a taboo subject.
It should be noted that fascism has hardly been a 'taboo subject' in
the Federal Republic -- on the contrary, it has been much discussed. What
has been rightly rejected -- and hardly merely 'taboo,' since a taboo begs
to be broken -- is sympathy for the Nazis. Bahro continues:

I can't rule out the possibility that at the end of the 1920s I
wouldn't have gone with the Nazis. And it's very important that we be
prepared to ask such a question. As for what would have happened later, I
don't know. There were people in the Nazi movement who gave it up before
1933; there were people who saw the light with the Röhm affair; some went
into the resistance; others were executed. But we're not supposed to imagine
what we ourselves would have done. And I was ready and am ready to go into
such questions. I think that if we are serious about forming a popular
movement and overcoming the ecological crisis, and if we are really to
address what comes out of the depths, we will have to have a lot to do with
what it was that found expression then and that is seeking another, better
expression this time. That can go well only if there is a great deal of
consciousness about whatever unhappy mechanisms lie in all of us, the
resentment reactions, mere rebellion instead of revolution. 93
Posing as a courageous inquiry into the breaking of taboos, such
practices do nothing more than give people permission to envision themselves
as Nazis -- a horrifying dispensation in any era, but particularly in one
when present-day Nazis routinely attack foreigners in German towns and
cities and when fascist parties are having electoral victories.

Some of Bahro's associates add to the strong suspicion that his 'Green
Adolf' refers to a new Führer. One of his fellow teachers at the
Lernwerkstatt, for example, is Rainer Langhans, a former anarchistic 'wild
man' of the 1960s German student organization SDS who writes today that
"spirituality in Germany is named Hitler. And only when you have gone a
little bit further can you go beyond it. Until then, however, you must
reclaim the inheritance . . . not in the sense of this fine exclusionary
antifascism but in the sense of further developing what Hitler tried to do."
And: "This dumb Enlightenment, which builds up dams against so-called
'outbreaks of the irrational,' is actually merely laughable as an
antifascist syndrome." And: "We have to be, so to speak, the better
fascists." 94 Another of Bahro's fellow teachers at the Lernwerkstatt is
Jochen Kirchhoff, who writes that "National Socialism was a botched attempt
at healing the world . . . and to ground politics in the spiritual." 95

To speak at his seminar at Humboldt, Bahro also invited Wolfgang
Deppert, a onetime head of the völkisch-racist sect German Unitary Religion
Community (DUR), even though at the end of 1990 Deppert permitted the
publication in one of his periodicals of an article by Princess
Marie-Adelheld Reuss-zur-Lippe. Earlier in her life, in the 1920s, this
person was a founder of the 'Nordic Ring' and later a close political and
personal confidante of the Third Reich's Agriculture Minister, Walther
Darré, who called her "my little sister." In 1985, she was the
editor-in-chief of the journal Bauernschaft (Peasantry), whose publisher is
Thies Christophersen, the notorious author of the despicable 1973 pamphlet
Die Auschwitz Lüge (The Auschwitz Lie). 96 Deppert, apparently, spoke at the
Humboldt seminar on philosophy and science.

But whatever happened at that lecture, Murray Bookchin's appearance at
the seminar on November 21, 1990, did not go over well with the host. Bahro
had asked Bookchin to address such questions as "Is the alternative to
ecological destruction freedom from domination or an 'ecological'
dictatorship?" Bookchin replied that "an 'ecological' dictatorship would not
be ecological -- it would finally finish off the planet altogether. It would
be the glorification, the hypostasization, of social control, of
manipulation, the objectification of human beings, the denial of human
freedom and selfconsciousness, in the name of ecological problems. . . . An
'ecological' dictatorship is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron."

When Bookchin had finished his presentation, the following exchange
took place:

Bahro: You put such a spotlight on the positive side of human
nature -- cooperation and so on -- that if that were true, it's improbable
that again and again we would have fallen back into egotism and competition.
You see human nature predominantly as positive. But more often than not, it
has worked out for the worse rather than for the better. Most often the
institutions that the human species has created have had hierarchy and
domination. The fact that they did so must have a foundation in human
nature. . . .

When you talk about rationality, Geist, the fully developed capacity
of being human, you are confronting this side least -- the "dark side."
Because that is what gives us the capacity to dominate, this Geist, our
rationality. You don't want to confront that as fundamental. . . .

Bookchin: I don't ignore the "dark side" of humanity . . . But if
the "dark side" exists everywhere, then why has it been necessary for the
"dark side" to express itself in institutions of the most barbarous kind?
Why did there have to be coercion? Why does that "dark side" always have to
be institutionalized through force, through superstition, through fear,
through threat, and through ideologies of the most barbarous nature? . . .
There's no question that there is a"dark side" to human history. . . . But
it's very hard to find the biological reasons for that "dark side." Because
that "dark side" has always operated through the institutions of a minority
who relied on force and depended on propaganda and superstition, and on the
worst things that the human mind can develop, to suppress the millions and
millions.

Bahro: But does it have natural foundations?

Bookchin: It emerges from a social foundation. . . . If the "dark
side" is natural, why is it that in all the great revolutions that we know
of, people have broken out with a generosity of spirit that is incredible?
They have been willing to trust, to care, to feel the pain even of their
masters -- when their masters tried to oppress them, owing to their own
insecurities. . . . In warrior societies, to make the adolescent
transformation into a warrior, you have to inflict pain upon him. You have
to spoil him, to make him a sufferer in order to make him part of the
community of warriors. . . . I don't see the "dark side" of human nature,
but of social nature. 97

After Bookchin gave his lecture, Bahro told Bookchin that he would not
invite him to speak again.

Social Darwinist 'Ecology': Herbert Gruhl
Bahro, let it be said, claims to look for the roots of the ecological
crisis in the "sickness" in "white Nordic humanity." But the far right most
often locates these roots in non-Europeans and uses 'ecology' to marshal
classic racist arguments against Third World immigration. In the "Europe of
fatherlands" of the "ethnopluralism" concept, each Volk requires its own
specific, familiar home environment in order to thrive. Interference from
outside -- including immigration -- disturbs that natural environment, the
"natural ecology of the Volk." Most often, the far right claims to be
defending cultures rather than races; if the Nazis persecuted those who
practiced 'race mixing' and sought to preserve 'racial purity,' today's
fascists say they oppose cultural mixing and seek to preserve their culture.
Thus, the ecofascist and misleadingly named Ecological Democratic Party
(Ökologische Demokratische Partei, or ÖDP) calls for "asylum-seekers [to] be
accepted by countries that belong to the same cultural area as the asylum
seekers themselves," and they call for "Heimat instead of multiculture." 98

The hollowness of such claims becomes evident, however, when they are
clothed in terms of 'ecology.' For the far right's notion of ecology is in
fact nothing more than social Darwinism, the reactionary ideology that
biology dictates the form of society, that genes rather than environment
determine culture. Social Darwinist 'ecology' can then advance seemingly
'ecological' reasons for keeping out immigrants and for asserting ethnic or
national identity -- while avoiding the terminology of race.

Social Darwinism has deep roots in the German ultra-right. When it
first emerged as a doctrine in the nineteenth century, its German form was
very different from its Anglo-American form. Like Anglo-American social
Darwinism, German social Darwinism projected human social institutions onto
the nonhuman world as 'natural laws,' then invoked those 'laws' to justify
the human social arrangements as 'natural.' It also applied the maxim
'survival of the fittest' to society. But where Anglo-American social
Darwinism conceived the 'fittest' as the individual entrepreneur in a
'bloody tooth and claw' capitalist jungle, German social Darwinism
overwhelmingly conceived the 'fittest' in terms of race. Thus, the 'fittest'
race not only would but should survive, vanquishing all its competitors in
its 'struggle for existence.' As historian Daniel Gasman observes:

It may be said that if Darwinism in England was an extension of
laissez faire individualism projected from the social world to the natural
world, [in Germany it was] a projection of German romanticism and
philosophical idealism. . . . The form which social Darwinism took in
Germany was a pseudo-scientific religion of nature worship and
nature-mysticism combined with notions of racism. 99
Since this social Darwinism seemed to give a 'scientific' basis to
racism, National Socialism drew heavily on it to provide 'scientific'
grounds for its virulent racism. Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, for example,
that people "owe their higher existence, not to the ideas of a few crazy
ideologists, but to the knowledge and ruthless application of Nature's stern
and rigid laws." Among these 'laws': "Nature usually makes certain
corrective decisions with regard to the racial purity of earthly creatures.
She has little love for bastards." 100 To establish their totalitarian
regime and implement genocide, the Nazis easily drew on the common ideology
that the Volk mediates between individual and cosmos, rendering the
individual mainly a member of a larger whole, the 'Volk whole' or 'Volk
community.'

It is well known among ecological activists today that Ernst Haeckel
coined the term ecology in the 1860s; what is less known is that Haeckel was
the primary spokesperson for German social Darwinism in the latter half of
the nineteenth century, as Gasman shows. German social Darwinism was thus
almost immediately married to the concept of ecology. Haeckel was also a
believer in mystical racism and nationalism, so that German social Darwinism
was from the beginning a political concept that lent romantic racism and
nationalism a pseudo-biological basis. In fact, as Gasman argues,

racially inspired social Darwinism in Germany . . . was almost
completely indebted to Haeckel for its creation. . . . His ideas served to
unite into a full-bodied ideology the trends of racism, imperialism,
romanticism, anti-Semitism and nationalism. . . . It was Haeckel who brought
the full weight of science down hard on the side of what were Volkism's
essentially irrational and mystical ideas. 101
Haeckel himself was a proponent of carrying over concepts like
'selective breeding' and 'racial hygiene' from nonhuman nature into human
society.

Despite the widely different scientific concepts of ecology that have
emerged since Haeckel's day, the 'ecology' that today's ecofascists draw
upon is essentially the social Darwinism of Haeckel. Perhaps the most
prominent social Darwinist-'ecological' racist in Germany today is Herbert
Gruhl, 102 a former Christian Democrat parliamentarian whose best-selling
1975 book, A Planet Is Plundered: The Balance of Terror of Our Politics,
makes an explicit social Darwinist interpretation of ecology. 103 In the
late 1970s and early 1980s Gruhl participated in the formation of the German
Greens with a new political group he had founded, Green Action Future (GAZ).
It was Gruhl who created the slogan "We are neither left nor right; we are
in front," according to Charlene Spretnak and Fritjof Capra. 104 In the
early 1980s, ultrarightists, including Gruhl's GAZ, struggled with leftists
and centrists for the direction of the Green Party; the center-left
ultimately took control. "It is to the credit of the leftist tendencies in
the founding phases of the Greens," writes Ditfurth, "that the ultra-right
and neofascists were prevented from taking over ecological politics, as they
were threatening to do at the time." 105

Gruhl, on the losing end, concluded that the Greens had given up their
"concern for ecology in favor of a leftist ideology of emancipation" and
walked out of the party. He continued his fight for his conception of
ecology outside the Greens, however; with his fellow ultra-rightist Baldur
Springmann, he founded the Ecological Democratic Party (ÖDP) in 1982 and
wrote most of its programmatic literature, orienting ecology toward fascism
and endowing racism and population policy with an 'ecological' legitimation.
In 1989, when an ÖDP party congress dared to pass a resolution formally
distancing the party from the NPD and the Republicans, this 'leftist
victory' was too much for Gruhl, and he left to form yet another group.
Since the mid-1980s, Gruhl has appeared as a guest speaker at various
neo-Nazi and Holocaust-denial events and continues to publish books on
'ecology.'

Gruhl's social Darwinist 'ecology' reduces human beings to their
biological attributes and applies the 'laws' of nature to society: "All laws
that apply to living nature generally apply to people as well, since people
themselves are part of living nature," he maintains. 107 These 'natural
laws' dictate that people should accept the present social order as it is.
Domination, hierarchy, and exploitation should be accepted, since "the swan
is white, without anyone artificially cleaning it. The raven is black, and
everything is in its natural place of its own accord. This is good. All the
strivings of people . . . for organized justice are simply hopeless." 108
People should adapt to existing conditions instead of making futile attempts
to change them, since "every life-form accommodates itself to that which it
cannot change." 109

If society were set up according to nature, Gruhl believes, cultures
would institute prescriptions against those who deviate from their existing
norms, since "in the hunting grounds of the wilderness, if an animal breaks
the unwritten law of the herd and goes its own way, it generally pays for
this independence with its life." 110 Moreover, cultures should be kept
separate from one another: "When many cultures are all jumbled together in
the same area, the result will be that they live alongside each other, in
conflict with each other, or . . . they will undergo entropy, becoming a
mixture whose value lessens with every intermixing, until in the last
analysis it has no more worth." The reason for cultural separation too has
its basis in 'natural law,' "a law of entropy which we particularly have in
ecology, and this law also holds for human cultures." 111

In the coming years, Gruhl believes that cultures around the globe
will compete for survival over the means of life, in a social Darwinist
struggle for existence. "There is no doubt that the wars of the future will
be fought over shares in the basic foundations of life -- that is, over the
basis of nutrition and the increasingly precious fruits of the soil. Under
these circumstances, future wars will far surpass in frightfulness all
previous wars." 112 The peoples who have the best prospects for survival
will be those who are best armed and who best conserve their resources;
those who "succeed in bringing their military preparedness to the highest
level, while keeping their standard of living low, will have an enormous
advantage." 113

In the interests of this struggle, Germans must not only arm
themselves but preserve their environment by keeping the number of people
who inhabit it down: "Violations of ecological equilibrium and the
destruction of natural living spaces [Lebensäume] are directly related to
population density."

"Overpopulation" in the Third World, however, has produced "armies of
job-seekers" who are entering Germany with a "capacity for annihilation"
comparable to a "nuclear bomb," Gruhl writes. This "tidal wave of humanity"
is a primary menace that will cause "all order to break down" in Europe.
Third World immigrants are thus threatening European culture itself, which
will "perish not because of the degeneration of its own people, as previous
high civilizations have, but because of physical laws: the constantly
overflowing mass of humanity on an earth's surface that remains constant."
115 Therefore, there is no room for immigrants in the Federal Republic:
"Because of its high population density, the Federal Republic of Germany,
one of the most densely settled countries on earth, cannot be a destination
country for immigrants. We therefore reject the unlimited acceptance of
foreigners." 116 Accordingly, Gruhl demands "an end to immigration for
ecological reasons." 117

The 'laws of nature,' for Gruhl, offer a solution to Third World
immigration, especially the 'law' that "the only acceptable currency with
which violations of natural law can be paid for is death. Death brings the
equalization; it cuts back all life that has overgrown on this planet, so
that the planet can once again come into equilibrium." 118 Fortunately, in
his view, Third World people will accept this lethal solution since their
lives "rest on a completely different basic outlook on life from our own:
their own death, like that of their children, is accepted as fate." 119

Needless to say, Gruhl does not think democracy is the most efficient
way to address these problems. After all, this situation "will take on the
proportions of an emergency in coming years, and attempts that will be made
to prevail in it will produce a permanent state of emergency." 120 In an
interview with the editors of Junge Freiheit (Young Freedom), the flagship
publication of the National Revolutionaries, Gruhl was asked whether the
problems of protecting the environment and life can be solved within a
democracy. "Probably not," he replied, "because democracies follow the
Zeitgeist, and in all countries of the world today the Zeitgeist is to raise
the standard of living further. Parties that warn about this and advocate
renunciation of consumption seem to have little chance." Instead, Gruhl
demands a "strong state," strong both internationally and domestically -- if
possible, even a state with "dictatorial powers." 121

In the autumn of 1991, the environmental minister of Lower Saxony
shocked many observers by awarding Herbert Gruhl a highly prestigious state
honor. "With his international best-seller A Planet Is Plundered," minister
Monika Greifahn said, Gruhl has "placed ideas of environmental protection
and care at the forefront of public political consciousness." 122

A Social Ecology of Freedom
" A combination of nationalism, authoritarianism, and yearnings for
charismatic leaders that is legitimated by a mystical and biologistic
'ecology' is potentially socially catastrophic. Just as the völkisch
movement ultimately was channeled into the Nazi movement, so too new social
movements that appeal to these concepts must be mindful of their potential
for political and social catastrophe if they are channeled into a dangerous
political direction that draws on mysticism.

" A love of the natural world and alienation from modern society are
in themselves innocent and legitimate ideas, and it was by no means a
historical necessity that they be permutated into a justification for mass
murder. Nor is 'ecology' limited to an interpretation as a social Darwinist
racial jungle, or politicized along tribal, regional, and nationalist lines.
Nor is 'ecology' inherently an antirational, mystical concept. Finally, the
ecological crisis can hardly be dismissed; it is itself very real and is
worsening rapidly. Indeed, the politicization of ecology is not only
desirable but necessary.

" Although this article has focused on the 'ecological' right in the
Federal Republic, 'ecological' fascism is hardly limited to that country. In
Britain, a wing of the National Front issues the cry, "Racial preservation
is Green!" In the United States, the notorious white supremacist Tom Metzger
remarks:

I've noticed that there's an increased number of young people in the
white racialist movement who are also quite interested in ecology,
protecting the animals from cruelty and things like that, and it seems to me
that as we are becoming more aware of our precarious state, the white man,
the white woman's, state in the world, being only about 10 percent of the
population, we begin to sympathize, empathize more, with the wolves and
other animals." 123
" His colleague Monique Wolfing agrees: "Well, naturally. They're in
the same position we are. Why would we want something created for ourselves
and yet watch nature be destroyed? We work hand in hand with nature and we
should save nature along with trying to save our race." 124 The noted U.S.
deep ecologist Bill Devall, who is certainly not a fascist, has allowed
anti-immigration themes to enter his views: He notes with apparent relief
that while "population is beginning to stabilize in Western Europe and North
America," there is a caveat -- "in-migration." Devall chastises those who
would "justify large-scale in-migration to Western Europe and North America
from Latin America and Africa" as guilty of "misplaced humanism." 125

" What is clearly crucial is how an ecological politics is conceived.
If the Green slogan "we are neither left nor right but up front" was ever
meaningful, the emergence of an 'ecological right' defines the slogan's
bankruptcy conclusively. The need for an ecological left is urgent,
especially one that is firmly committed to a clear, coherent set of
anticapitalist, democratic, antihierarchical views. It must have firm roots
in the internationalism of the left and the rational, humanistic, and
genuinely egalitarian critique of social oppression that was part of the
Enlightenment, particularly its revolutionary libertarian offshoot.

" But an ecologically oriented politics must deal with biological
phenomena warily, since interpretations of them can serve sinister ends.
When 'respect for Nature' comes to mean 'reverence,' it can mutate
ecological politics into a religion that 'Green Adolfs' can effectively use
for authoritarian ends. When 'Nature,' in turn, becomes a metaphor
legitimating sociobiology's 'morality of the gene,' the glories of 'racial
purity,' 'love of Heimat,' 'woman equals nature,' or 'Pleistocene
consciousness,' the cultural setting is created for reaction. 'Ecological'
fascism is a cynical but potentially politically effective attempt to
mystically link genuine concern for present-day environmental problems with
time-honored fears of the 'outsider' or the 'new,' indeed the best elements
of the Enlightenment, through ecological verbiage. Authoritarian
mystifications need not be the fate of today's ecology movement, as social
ecology demonstrates. But they could become its fate if ecomystics,
ecoprimitivists, misanthropes, and antirationalists have their way."

Footnotes
1. On social ecology, see the many writings of Murray Bookchin,
particularly Remaking Society (Boston: South End Press, 1989) and
Urbanization Without Cities (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1992).
2. Jutta Ditfurth, Feuer in die Herzen: Plädoyer für eine Ökologische
Linke Opposition (Hamburg: Carlsen Verlag, 1992), part three, especially pp.
158, 172. Ditfurth was formerly a leading spokesperson for the leftists in
the German Greens. Now that the Greens have lost their radicalism, she is
currently involved in organizing the Ecological Left (Ökologische Linke) in
Frankfurt.
3. George L. Mosse, "The Mystical Origins of National Socialism,"
Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 22, no. 1 (Jan. 1961), p. 81. See also
Jeffrey A. Goldstein, "On Racism and Anti-Semitism in Occultism and Nazism,"
Yad Vashem Studies 13, Livia Rothkirchen, ed. (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1979),
pp. 53-72.
4. George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual
Origins of the Third Reich (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, Universal Library,
1964), p. 4.
5. On the völkisch movement, see Mosse, Crisis; Fritz Stern, The
Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1961); and Walter
Z. Laqueur, Young Germany: A History of the German Youth Movement (New York:
Basic Books, 1962).
6. Quoted in Ditfurth, Feuer, p. 170.
7. Wolfgang Haug, "'Pogromen beginnen im Kopf,'" Schwarzer Faden:
Vierteljahreschrift für Lust und Freiheit [Grafenau]; translated as
"'Pogroms Begin in the Mind'" in Green Perspectives, no. 26 (May 1992).
8. Volkmar Wölk, "Neue Trends im ökofaschistischen Netzwerk: Am
Beispiel der Anthroposophen, dem Weltbund zum Schutz des Lebens und der
ÖDP," in In bester Gesellschaft: Antifa-Recherche zwischen Konservatismus
und Neo-faschismus, Raimund Hethey and Peter Kratz, eds. (Göttingen: Verlag
die Werkstatt, 1991). Wölk is a spokesperson for the VVN/Bund of
Antifascists and has published widely on 'neofascism.'
9. Unless otherwise indicated, quotations in this section are from the
National Revolutionaries' documents Gegen Fremdherrschaft und Kapital and
Grundsätze unseres Wollens -- Die fünffache Revolution (n.d.), as cited in
Ditfurth, Feuer, pp. 228-30.
10. Walter Laqueur, Germany Today: A Personal Report (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1985), p. 152. Also on Strasserite ideology, see Mosse, Crisis, pp.
286-90.
11. See Hans-Georg Betz, "On the German Question: Left, Right, and the
Politics of National Identity," Radical America, vol. 20, no. 1 (1987), pp.
30-48.
12. See Betz, "On the German Question."
13. Henning Eichberg, "Produktivistische Mythen: Etwas über die
Religion in der Industriekultur," in Zurück zur Natur-Religion? Holger
Schleip, ed. (Freiburg: Hermann Bauer Verlag, 1986). Editor Schleip is,
ironically, a member both of the Greens and of the völkisch-racist sect
Deutsche Unitarier; the publisher, Hermann Bauer Verlag, is the largest New
Age publisher in Germany. The content of Eichberg's article is summarized in
Wölk, "Neue Trends," p. 126.
14. Laqueur, Germany Today, p. 153. Laqueur cites Henning Eichberg,
"Balkanisierung für jedermann," in the National Revolutionaries' periodical
Wir Selbst, "a journal for national identity and international solidarity"
(May-June 1983). The German right has been interested in the IRA since the
1920s; the title of this journal, Wir Selbst ("we ourselves"), is a
translation of Sinn Fein.
15. See Betz, "On the German Question," pp. 45-46; and Wölk, "Neue
Trends," p. 123.
16. Unless otherwise indicated, quotations in this section are from
the FAP's Action Program (15 Aug. 1990); the FAP charter (15 Aug. 1989);
"Basic Principles and Goals of the FAP -- Electoral Program for
Rhineland-Westphalia" (n.d.); and "Overview of Members of the Party
Executive Committee for the Provincial Associations" (15 Aug. 1990), all as
cited in Ditfurth, Feuer, p. 229ff. [Since early 1993, when this article was
originally written, the FAP has been banned in the Federal Republic.]
17. See Christopher T. Husbands, "Militant Neo-Nazism in the Federal
Republic of Germany in the 1960s," in Neo-Fascism in Europe, Luciano Cheles,
Ronnie Ferguson, and Michalina Vaughan, eds. (Essex: Longman Group, UK
Limited, 1991).
18. See Husbands, "Militant Neo-Nazism."
19. Husbands, "Militant Neo-Nazism," p. 96.
20. Quotations in this section are from the basic program of the
Republicans, adopted at their first federal congress (26 Nov. 1983) in
Munich; the 1987 program of the Republicans; "Ja zu Europa -- Nein zu dieser
EG -- Deutsche Interessen haben Vorrang," the Dinkelsbühl Declaration of the
Republicans for the European elections of 1979; and the 1990 party program
of the Republicans, all as cited in Ditfurth, Feuer, p. 228ff.
21. Unless otherwise indicated, quotations in this section are from
the NPD's 1973 Düsseldorf program; the 1988 Wurfsendung of the NPD; and the
NPD newspaper Deutsche Stimme 4-5 ( 1992), all as cited in Ditfurth, Feuer,
p. 228ff. On the NPD generally, see David Childs, "The Far Right in Germany
Since 1945," in Neo-Fascism in Europe, Cheles, Ferguson, and Vaughan, eds.
22. Betz, "On the German Question," p. 35.
23. Quotations in this section are from a DVU leaflet (c. 1990) and
"Overview of the Members of the Party Executive and the Provincial
Associations" (20 Nov. 1989), as cited in Ditfurth, Feuer, p. 228ff.
24. The following section on the root-race theory is based on Wölk,
"Neue Trends," pp. 120-21, and Ditfurth, Feuer, pp. 217-22. In English, a
mild 'revised' account appears in Rudolf Steiner, An Outline of Occult
Science (Spring Valley, N.Y.: Anthroposophical Press, 1972), especially
chap. 6.
25. Rudolf Steiner, lecture (3 March 1923), Gesamtausgabe, vol. 349,
pp. 52-67, cited in Ditfurth, Feuer, p. 221.
26. Steiner, Outline, p. 216.
27. Quoted in Ditfurth, Feuer, p. 216.
28. Quoted in Ditfurth, Feuer, p. 216.
29. Steiner, Outline, p. 361.
30. Ditfurth, Feuer, p. 200.
31. See Wölk, "Neue Trends," p. 123.
32. Ditfurth, Feuer, p. 222.
33. He is mentioned in passing in Laqueur, Young Germany, p. 194n.
34. Ditfurth, Feuer, p. 224.
35. Quoted in Betz, "On the German Question," p. 36.
36. Werner Georg Haverbeck, Rudolf Steiner: Anwalt für Deutschland
(Munich, 1989), pp. 143f, 242f, 324, cited in Ditfurth, Feuer, pp. 224-26.
37. Werner Georg Haverbeck, "Das Ringen um Völker- und
Geistesfreiheit," in Europa (Feb. 1990), p. 41f, cited in Wölk, "Neue
Trends," pp. 131-32.
38. Wölk, "Neue Trends," p. 132.
39. Letter from the WSL's provincial executive for Schleswig-Holstein
to the WSL presidium (28 July 1981), cited in Wölk, "Neue Trends," p. 133;
also in Vlothoer Tageblatt (19 Nov. 1982), cited in Ditfurth Feuer, p. 225.
40. Ursula Haverbeck-Wetzel, "Vom Wirtschaftskrieg zum Geisteskampf,"
in Europa (Mar. 1990), p. 28, cited in Wölk, "Neue Trends," p. 132.
41. Helmut Roehrig, letter (2 Apr. 1982), cited in Wölk, "Neue
Trends," p. 133.
42. Cited in Wölk, "Neue Trends," pp. 13-34. On Springmann in the
Greens, see, e.g., Werner Hülsberg, The German Greens: A Social and
Political Profile, trans. Gus Fagan (London and New York: Verso, 1988), pp.
94-95.
43. Neue Anthropologie 3-4 (1988), p. 91, cited in Wölk, "Neue
Trends," p. 131.
44. Ditfurth, Feuer, p. 190.
45. See conversation with Rudolf Bahro, "Die deutschen Linken und die
nationale Frage oder unsere Öinteressen am Golf," Streitschrift 3 (Nov.
1990), pp. 4-7, quoted in Ditfurth, Feuer, p. 210.
46. Conversation with Rudolf Bahro, Streitschrift, quoted in Roger
Niedenführ, "New Age: Die spirituelle Rehabilitierung der
Nationalsozialisten durch Rudolf Bahro, Rainer Langhans und J. Kirchoff," in
In bester Gesellschaft: Antifa-Recherche zwischen Konservatismus und
Neo-faschismus, Raimund Hethey and Peter Kratz, eds. (Göttingen: Verlag die
Werkstatt, 1991), pp. 141-54, at 149.
47. Niedenführ, "New Age," pp. 141-54, esp. 147-50.
48. Quoted in Hülsberg, German Greens, p. 93.
49. See the exchange between Bahro and André Gorz in Telos, no. 51
(Spring 1982). See also Rudolf Bahro's From Red to Green: Interviews with
New Left Review, trans. Gus Fagan and Richard Hurst (London: Verso, 1984),
especially part three, wherein Bahro says, "In practice, if we want to build
an ecological decentralized Germany, we have to first free German territory"
(p. 237).
50. Bahro, From Red to Green, pp. 220-21.
51. Rudolf Bahro, "Hinein oder hinaus? Wozu steigen wir auf? Rede auf
der Bundesdelegiertenkonferenz der Grünen" (Hamburg), Kommune 1 (1985), pp.
40-43.
52. Conversation with Rudolf Bahro, "Die deutschen," Streitschrift,
quoted in Ditfurth, Feuer, p. 210.
53. Rudolf Bahro, Connection (July-Aug. 1989), quoted in Ditfurth,
Feuer, pp. 207-08.
54. Lernwerkstatt, Rundbrief 13 (c. 1990); the Lernwerkstatt's 1991
program.
55. Rudolf Bahro, Logik der Rettung: Wer kann die Apokalypse
aufhalten? -- Ein Versuch über die Grundlagen ökologischer Politik
(Stuttgart and Vienna, 1987). I will refer to this book herein as The Logic
of Salvation.
56. Conversation with Rudolf Bahro, "Die deutschen," Streitschrift,
quoted in Ditfurth, Feuer, p. 210.
57. The author was present at this debate.
58. Rudolf Bahro, "Rette sich, wer kann," an interview with Rudolf
Bahro, Connection, vol. 5, no. 8 (1989), pp. 18-19, cited in Niedenführ,
"New Age," p. 148.
59. "Die Logik der Selbstausrottung," an interview with Rudolf Bahro,
Magazin 2000, vol. 22, nos. 81-82 (1989), p. 64, cited in Niedenführ, "New
Age," p. 148.
60. Niedenführ, "New Age," pp. 147-48.
61. Rudolf Bahro, "Lösung des Schattens und ökologische
Kulturentwurf," Connection, vol. 6, no. 2 (1990), p. 65, cited in
Niedenführ, "New Age," pp. 147-48.
62. Bahro, Logik, p. 153.
63. Bahro, Logik, p. 335; emphasis in the original.
64. Peter Kratz, "Bahros 'Grune Adolfs': Die 'Neue Rechte' an der
Berliner Humboldt-Universität," reprinted in A-Kurier [Berlin] 41 (1993),
pp. 6-15.
65. Bahro, Logik, p. 391.
66. Bahro, Logik, pp. 67-70. On the Conservative Revolution, see
Stern, Cultural Despair, passim.
67. Conversation with Rudolf Bahro, "Die deutschen," Streitschrift,
quoted in Ditfurth, Feuer, p. 210.
68. Kratz, "Bahros 'Grune Adolfs,'" p. 6.
69. Quoted in Dietmar Pieper, "Schickimicki unter Wolfen," Der Spiegel
26 (22 June 1992), pp. 62-63. See also Bahro, Logik, pp. 344, 481.v 70.
Rudolf Bahro, "Über kommunitäre Subsistenzwirtschaft und ihre
Startbedingungen in die neuen Bundesländer," working paper, p. 10, cited in
Kratz, "Bahros 'Grüne Adolfs,'" p. 9.
71. Bahro, Logik, p. 363.
72. "Salvation government" in Bahro, Logik; "god-state" in Pieper,
"Schickimicki."
73. Bahro, Logik, p. 325.
74. Bahro, Logik, p. 491ff.
75. Bahro, Logik, p. 59.
76. Quoted in Ditfurth, Feuer, p. 206.
77. Conversation with Rudolf Bahro, "Die deutschen," Streitschrift,
quoted in Kratz, "Bahros 'Grüne Adolfs,'" p. 8.
78. Bahro, Logik, p. 64.
79. Bahro, Logik, pp. 344-45.
80. Bahro, Logik, p. 346f. See also Robert Jungk, "Sein Kampf: Kritik
an Logik der Rettung," in tageszeitung (10 Oct. 1987).
81. Bahro, Logik, p. 350.
82. Bahro, Logik, p. 461.
83. Bahro, Logik, p. 399.
84. Conversation with Rudolf Bahro, "Die deutschen," Streitschrift, p.
6, quoted in Kratz, "Bahros 'Grüne Adolfs,'" p. 8.
85. Conversation with Rudolf Bahro, "Die deutschen," Streitschrift, p.
6, quoted in Kratz, "Bahros 'Grüne Adolfs,'" p. 8.
86. Bahro, Logik, p. 347.
87. On the 'sleeping emperor,' see Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the
Millennium: Revolutionary Millennarians and the Mystical Anarchists of the
Middle Ages, rev. ed. (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1970;
original, 1961), chaps. 6-7.
88. Summarized by Niedenführ, "New Age," p. 149ff.
89. Rudolf Bahro, foreword to Jochen Kirchhoff, Nietzsche, Hitler und
die Deutschen: Die Perversion des Neuen Zeitalters (Berlin, 1990), quoted in
Niedenführ, "New Age," p. 150.
90. Bahro, foreword to Kirchhoff, Nietzsche, Hitler, quoted in
Niedenführ, "New Age," p. 150.
91. Niedenführ, "New Age," p. 150.
92. Bahro, Logik, p. 346.
93. Rudolf Bahro, Rückkehr: Die In-Welt Krise als Ursprung der
Weltzerstörung (Frankfurt: Horizonte Verlag/Berlin: Altis Verlag, 1991), pp.
24-25.
94. All Langhans's quotes are from Niedenführ, "New Age," p. 146.
95. Bahro, foreword to Kirchhoff, Nietzsche, Hitler, p. 26, cited in
Niedenführ, "New Age,"p. 152.
96. On Christophersen and Holocaust denial, see, for example, Roger
Eatwell, "The Holocaust Denial: A Study in Propaganda Technique," in
Neo-Fascism in Europe, Cheles, Ferguson, and Vaughan, eds.
97. This exchange was transcribed from a tape recording of the
Bookchin-Bahro discussion, at which the author was present.
98. Quoted in Anti-EG Gruppe Köln, "Mit 'LebensschützerInnen' und
RassistInnen gegen EG und Kolonialismus? Anmerkungen zur ÖDP und anderen
'BundnispartnerInnen' in der Kampagne '92," ÖkoLinX: Zeitschrift der
ökologischen Linken 6 (July-Aug.-Sept. 1992), pp. 11 and 19, translated into
English as "Should We Work in Coalition with 'Right-to-Lifers' and Racists?"
Green Perspectives, no. 27 (Aug. 1992), pp. 2-6.
99. Daniel Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism:
Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League (New York:
American Elsevier; London: Macdonald & Co., 1971), pp. xxii-xxiii.
100. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Mannheim (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1943), pp. 288, 400.
101. Gasman, Scientific Origins, p. xxiii.
102. For critiques of Gruhl, see: Anti-EG-Gruppe Köln, "Mit
'LebensschützerInnen'"; Antifa-Gruppe Freiburg und Volksfront gegen
Reaktion, Faschismus und Krieg, eds., Beitrag zur Kritik des
Ökologismus and Beitrag zur Ideologie und Programmatik der ÖDP
(Cologne: GNN-Verlag, 1989); and Ditfurth, Feuer, pp. 151-69.
103. Herbert Gruhl, Ein Planet wird geplündert (reprint
Frankfurt/Main, 1987; original, 1975).
104. Charlene Spretnak and Fritjof Capra, Green Politics (New York: E.
P. Dutton, 1984), p. 15.
105. Ditfurth, Feuer, p. 152.
106. See, e.g., tageszeitung (7 Nov. 1991).
107. Quoted in Antifa-Gruppe Freiburg, Beitrag, p. 30.
108. Herbert Gruhl, Das irdische Gleichgewicht (Munich, 1985), p. 127;
Antifa-Gruppe Freiburg, Beitrag, p . 27; and Anti-EG Gruppe Köln, "Mit
'LebensschützerInnen,'" p. 10.
109. Quoted in Antifa-Gruppe Freiburg, Beitrag, p. 35.
110. Antifa-Gruppe Freiburg, Beitrag, p. 68.
111. Quoted in Ditfurth, Feuer, p. 159.
112. Gruhl, Ein Planet, p. 322f.
113. Quoted in Antifa-Gruppe Freiburg, Beitrag, p. 114f.
114. Quoted in Anti-EG Gruppe Köln, "Mit 'LebensschützerInnen,'" p.
11.
115. Herbert Gruhl, "Die Menschheit ist am Ende," Der Spiegel 13
(1992), pp. 57-58.
116. Quoted in Anti-EG Gruppe Köln, "Mit 'LebensschützerInnen,'" p.
11.
117. Quoted in Anti-EG Gruppe Köln, "Mit 'LebensschützerInnen,'" p.
10.
118. Gruhl, Ein Planet, p. 110.
119. Herbert Gruhl, Himmelfahrt ins Nichts (Munich: Verlag Langen
Müller, 1992), p. 242. See Thomas Ebermann's criticism, "Massakriert den
Armen!" Konkret ( June 1991), pp. 36-37, translated into English as
"Massacre the Poor!" Green Perspectives, no. 27 (Aug. 1992), pp. 6-7.
120. Quoted in Antifa-Gruppe Freiburg, Beitrag, p. 113.
121. Quoted in Reimar Paul, "EK III in Grün-Braun," Konkret [Hamburg]
(Dec. 1991), pp. 35-36.
122. Quoted in Paul, "EK III," pp. 35-36.
123. Tom Metzger, quoted in Elinor Langer, "The American Neo-Nazi
Movement Today," Nation (16-23 July 1990), pp. 82-107, at 86.
124. Quoted in Langer, "American Neo-Nazi Movement," p. 86.
125. Bill Devall, Simple in Means, Rich in Ends: Practicing Deep
Ecology (Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith, 1988), p. 189.

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The Green Wing of the Nazi Party and its Historical Antecedents by
Peter Staudenmaier
Table of Contents

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[Antifascist Bloc]

http://www.spunk.org/library/places/germany/sp001630/ecofasc.html

Janet Biehl

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[Dion Giles]

At 21:52 01/06/2004, "Antifascist bloc"wrote:
>http://www.spunk.org/library/places/germany/sp001630/ecofasc.html
>
> 'Ecology' and the Modernization of Fascism in the German Ultra-right
>
> Janet Biehl

etc

This latest from Antifascist Bloc makes good sense, now s/he's off his/her
Switzerland rave. Although the detailed examination is of the German
scene, the observations are well worth studying and applying to our own
settings. Is Janet Biehl the Breakaway Movement from the Antifascist Bloc?

[Christoph Reuss]

Dion Giles asked:

> Is Janet Biehl the Breakaway Movement from the Antifascist Bloc?

Janet Biehl is an ardent disciple (to the point of giving up own thinking)
of Murray Bookchin, the dogmatic guru of "Social Ecology" and former car
industry worker.

The book posted by the troll is 9 years old and made the rounds long ago.
The main purpose of the book was to discredit competing splinter groups by
attaching a brown label at them, rather than describing actual relations.
But hey, what else are we used to reading from the troll ?

The very label "EcoFascism" is a contradiction in terms. Fascism is a
corporate state form based on ruthless industrial destruction of nature.
The book's claims about Adolf "Autobahn" Hitler being green are as absurd
as about his strict vegetarianism (with stuffed squab, Bavarian sausages
and caviar as his favorite foods, and the German Vegetarian Society was
disbanded during the nazi era, so it had to be re-founded in 1946).
But urban legends die hard, especially if they can be used by certain
ideologists to smear green groups or vegetarians by alleged association.

"Xenophobia in Green Clothing" ? The green clothing, if any, of
right-wing parties (or even fascist ones) is so slim that only the most
superficial fools (such as the troll) will buy it. For example, the
troll's beloved SVP is about as anti-green as you can get, with a main
leader having been the general importer of Japanese cars for decades.
SD, the tiny party further to the right, while sometimes sporting sort of
a green clothing, combines voting lists with the Car Party, whose leader
is on record for suggesting to "put the Greens up against a wall and go
over them with a flame-thrower". So much for the "green clothing"...

Finally, over the many many words about "the historical roots of German
fascism", let's not forget nazism's twin, zionism, which shares common
roots (19th century German nationalism adapted by Theodor Herzl), the
basic concepts ("blood and soil", master race /subhumans, anti-Semitism)
and a long history of cooperation with nazism. And it has to do with
(anti-)ecology too, e.g. with zionist myths about "making the desert bloom"
while in fact stealing water from Arabs, torching their fields and cutting
their olive groves, thereby making their blooms desert: see
http://www.zmag.org/content/Mideast/McCallin_blooms.cfm

When will the so-called "Anti-Fascist Bloc" admit that zionism is fascism,
and act accordingly, instead of just diverting attention from the fact ?

Chris

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