J SAKAI: THE GREEN NAZI

Did the fall of the Fuhrer Adolf Hitler and his Third Reich set back the cause of environmentalism by a hundred years? Does healing Mother Earth of man's crude ravages require the world rule of the white race? These sound like only the delusions of a few neo-fascist boneheads, but they are questions to take seriously. If only because this type of ecological politics is held not just by a few fanatics but very possibly by millions of people. Surprising though it may be, this represents one possible future for insurgent Green politics. Challenging usual assumptions that Green politics must be progressive, the nexus of the radical right and white environmentalism needs to be reexamined.

When we enter environmentalism from way on the other side, from the political far right, it gives us a view that is familiar but in a strange way. What comes into focus is just how blurred the line is between so-called Green fascism and mainstream Green politics and environmentalism.

Green is a New Fascist Color

Fascists are far from indifferent to environmentalism. In fact, they believe themselves to be the true forefathers of today's Green ecological concerns. For example, a letter to the editor published in the North Carolina Times in the year 2000:

Tom Metzger is, of course, the former national Ku Klux Klan leader who now leads WAR (White Aryan Resistance). So did the fall of the Fuhrer Adolf Hitler and his Third Reich set back the cause of environmentalism a hundred years? Does healing Mother Earth of man's crude ravages require the world rule of the white race?

With such vocal fans from the klan and neo-nazis, it's no surprise that the book Blood and Soil has been ignored by the left of center on the political spectrum. Equally forgotten is the book's subject, Nazi Minister of Agriculture R. Walther Darré. Actually, this book is an important intellectual work that is full of surprises. The usual historians of the Nazi era criticize and condemn their subjects, but defiantly punching out to a different drummer, Blood and Soil plunges us into the biography of Darré as a peasant leader, whom the author passionately defends as a decent man—and even as a pioneer of today's environmentalism.

Nor is the author, Dr. Anna Bramwell, some fringe neo-fascist writer as her type of fans might lead you to suspect. She is the most prominent Western historian of ecological politics, and her subsequent study, Ecology in the 20th Century. A History, was published by Yale University Press and is widely assigned in college classes. At times Bramwell may sound like some neo-fascist in Blood and Soil, but her own very conservative politics are different. Like her Nazi hero, Dr. Anna Bramwell is now deeply involved in remaking the Eastern European frontier: she is currently the administrator overseeing environmental programs in Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe for the European Economic Development Fund. Not a fringe nutcase at all, but a mainstream capitalist environmental official—yet one who traces her ecological politics back to the Third Reich!

Re-manufactured Aryan

R. Walther Darré got into environmentalism through his dual interest in both agriculture and ideology, since he was the most powerful peasant political leader in Germany in the 1930s. It really struck me that the persona reflects the ideology here. While Darré and other fascists were proclaiming how the tribal unity of the Aryan race was only “natural,” it was in fact so politically compelling in part because it was so completely artificial, manufactured to up-to-date specifications. Like offering teenage boys the chance to play roles in a real life “Star Wars.” That's what Darré did, in effect. He remade himself into a peasant leader although he came from a quite prosperous merchant family. He asserted his German nationalism although he was educated at an English prep school, and was Latin American.

Just like Adolf Hitler or Nazi propaganda head Goebbels, Darré was not a native German. He barely knew where Germany was until he was sent to Europe at age ten. Coming from a prosperous German immigrant merchant family in Argentina, Ricardo Walther Darré is pictured by Dr. Anna Bramwell in her biography as an “accidental” Nazi. He had decided to become an agriculturalist, even obtaining his PhD in farm management during long unemployment in the turbulent 1920s Depression years of the Weimar Republic. Gradually drawn into politics, Darré became known as an independent “Nordic” racial theorist trying to lead North German farmers. He first popularized the memorable slogan “Blood and Soil” in his writings, putting it on everyone's lips for use by future Nazi propaganda.

When Adolf Hitler made his stretch drive towards control of the government in 1930, the fascists were a South German urban party with insufficient support in the countryside. Hitler decided to offer the long-unemployed Darré an important salaried position as the Party leader for the Aryan peasant class, what became known as the Imperial Peasant Leader (“Reichsbaurernfuhrer”). So at that relatively late date Darré first joined the Nazis. After the Nazi Party won state power in 1933, Darré also became Hitler's first Minister of Agriculture for the Third Reich. It was only then that he opportunistically dropped his inconvenient Latin first name and finally gave up the security of his native Argentine citizenship.

Like many other Nazi leaders Darré was a self-manufactured German Aryan. He chose it.

Green & the National Socialist Drive to Power

Imperial Peasant Leader Darré may be completely unknown today except among loyal fascists, but he was a key player in the National Socialist drive to power. Like many other Nazis he was a hardened soldier of capitalist race war. Like his Fuhrer, Darré, too, was a proud nationalistic veteran of the German imperial army. Both men had survived intense combat in the trench warfare of World War I, been wounded, and had been awarded the Iron Cross. Like Hitler, Darré always spoke of his army service in World War I as the happiest time of his life, and after being discharged Darré eagerly joined the Steel Helmets (the Rightist veterans organization). He was to speak bitterly of how he and other right-wing veterans were afraid to wear their uniforms, as any who did were being physically attacked by gangs of “Reds” on the streets (even among military veterans the fascists were far outnumbered then by those in Left veterans' associations).

Darré was never just a thug. His value to the fascist movement was that he had racialist class politics in Green populist clothing. And strong class vision. It wasn't an accident that he was the one who popularized the racist slogan “Blood and Soil,” for Darré was a radical Right-Wing leader of the North German peasantry, those family farmers who worked their own small plots of land. As a middle property-owning class, these farmers can swing to either the right or left in times of economic crisis, often being successfully mobilized by the right as a mass force for rearranging capitalism. As happened in 1920s fascist Italy, in settler White America against the Indian nations, in Canadian support for the Social Credit movement, or in Japan during the u.s. occupation. Just as significantly, in the Vietnamese, Chinese, and many other anti-colonial movements the peasantry became the main force for revolution to the left.

“…the brilliant German Communist photomontage posters of Heartfield…”

An Austrian urbanite and bohemian like Hitler knew nothing about peasant organizing, but Darré knew enough to lead the entire Party in the countryside. For it was in the Northern countryside that the Nazi movement put on its most radical face—and became the strongest—as a revolutionary anti-bourgeois movement.

Conservative political parties, such as the Catholic German Center Party of the Weimar era or the Republican Party in today's u.s.a., are pro-bourgeois supporters of the existing capitalist order. Fascism is pro-capitalist but anti-bourgeois, and this is a critical difference. The Nazis called for violently purging Aryan society of everything they considered “bourgeois” (and Hitler explicitly used that word as identifying an enemy order). Bourgeois meant a culture preoccupied with the dirty quest for money; rule by decadent aristocrats and bankers; the swarms of “useless” intellectuals; the blurring of the primary biological differences and different missions of men & women; and, of course, the “unnatural” mixing of different races and peoples on sacred Aryan land. Keep in mind that fascism didn't promote capitalists as icons or role models, but called for society to be ruled by a hierarchical statist caste of male warriors.

What Darré's career exemplified was the Nazi populist backing of the Aryan peasantry—small farmers who owned their own little plots of land—against the big aristocratic landowners. Of all the old classes, the one that Hitler and his fellow National Socialists had the most contempt for was the landed gentry and aristocracy, most particularly the Prussian Junkers. Not only did that class personify the inherited privilege that Hitler so resented, but as a class they had staffed the old imperial state. Especially the failed military leadership. (Despite this most aristocrats went over to the Nazis once they saw where things were headed—eventually some 18% of the upper SS leadership were of the aristocracy.) We can see one side of fascism as a partial revolution within the body of capitalism. One that leaves the bourgeoisie in possession of production and distribution, but temporarily no longer in control of the state and nation.

“…we forget how much Nazism built its movement by campaigning against big capitalism…”

All during the rise of the euro-fascist movements in the 1920s and 1930s, the left dissed & dismissed them as pawns of the capitalist class. Whether in the brilliant German Communist photomontage posters of Heartfield or the pronouncement from Moscow that “fascism is the terroristic dictatorship of the big bourgeoisie,” there was a constant message that Italian fascism and German Nazism were only lifeless puppets for the big capitalist class. This was fatally off center and produced an actually disarming picture.

Today we think of fascism so much in terms of its repression, that we forget how much Nazism built its movement by campaigning against big capitalism. One famous National Socialist election poster shows a social-democratic winged “angel” walking hand in hand with a stereotyped banker, with the big slogan: “Marxism is the Guardian Angel of Capitalism.” Hitler promised to preserve the “good” productive capitalism of ordinary hard working Germans, while wiping out the “bad” parasitic big capitalism of the hidden finance capitalist Jewish bosses. In fact, tens of millions of Americans (and not just white folks) would support such a program right here & now. Fascism blended together a radical resentment against the big bourgeoisie and their State, together with racist nationalist ideology, into a political uprising of the local small bourgeoisie, the lower middle classes, and the declassed (the declassed, or lumpen, are those who have fallen out of the working class or the middle classes and no longer have a relationship to economic production and distribution).

New Nazi leader Darré threw himself and his party followers into the political war for the countryside. There the Brownshirt tide came to run so strongly that Darré once even offered to use his peasant Stormtroopers to just seize the government for Hitler. A measure of Darré's importance to fascism was that his new Agricultural Organization overrode all previously established Nazi Party structures and hierarchies in the rural areas, cutting across provincial and specialized party departments. He even took control of the Landpost, the party's rural journal, away from Goebbels' powerful propaganda department. In those years, as Imperial Peasant Leader, Darré reported only to the Fuhrer himself.

The North German countryside was already up in class war, and both Darré's military experience and his new “bio-dynamic” enthusiasm for organic farming served the fascists well. He had quickly built a farm network of party members and sympathizers, tied together by special rural organizers that he had trained in farm issues. Always Darré stressed both the ideological and the practical together. Improved yields through organic intensive farming, plus cooperative associations plus the vision of a neo-tribal Greater Germany, finally able to “reclaim” its supposed historic lands in Eastern Europe and Russia.

The 1930s class war in the countryside had already reached the point of dynamiting government offices and rifle fire breaking up bank auctions of bankrupt farmsteads. Farm activists were receiving prison sentences, while half the farms were losing money. Even “red” Communist organizing was winning supporters. Darré's crash party-building program trained angry farmers to become Nazi public speakers for farmers' unions & cooperatives—but at the same time also experts on land settlement, fertilizers, insurance, debt management, livestock raising, and so on. Not just talk alone, but practical help and sympathetic class organization built the Nazi machine in the countryside.

In December 1931, Darré's rural Nazis captured the elected presidency of the Landbund, the large farmers' union. This was just a taste of things to come. As Bramwell notes:

Reichsbaurernfuhrer Darré had, essentially, in only a few years led in swinging an entire class to join the Nazi movement. A stunning feat. Not just votes, remember, but whole villages as fascist eyes and ears, and new thousands of Stormtroopers who could be trucked into the cities at critical moments—no wonder a proud Darré could offer to seize state power for the Fuhrer. This wasn't just declassed fascists being thugs for the big capitalists, as the Communists endlessly shouted to no effect. It was a different dissenting class politics, and for awhile, until the long awaited War began, the Aryan peasantry was seemingly rewarded with new preferential policies and laws.

Dr. Anna Bramwell claims that what Darré argued for in writings and promised through his Nazi peasant movement, he actually did once installed as Reichsminister. He was already under the influence of the naturalist, “bio-dynamic” agricultural theories of the white supremacist nature-romantic Rudolph Steiner. Organic farming, Nazi-sponsored marketing cooperatives, new inheritance laws preserving small farms, as well as forested green belts and other soil conservation measures were at first promoted. With difficulty, Darré attempted to get measures adopted by the new regime favoring small peasant family farms over the large aristocratic estates.

When Ecology is Really Ideology

i think that the subject here—for Darré as well as for us—is really more fascist ideology than ecology. A confession: i really like Bramwell's book. Instead of bland academic abstraction, she really was unafraid to challenge the whole tilt of existing historical work on this subject. Her work doesn't allow us to just nod along, but presses us from out of ambush to reexamine and defend our own views. This is simply a book from hell. And not for the politically faint of heart. There are always books that slip through the cracks, go out of print, but still have a fevered cult following, and Blood and Soil is right up there as one of those cult books. The kicker here is that for good reasons this book's loyal fans tend to be of the neo-nazi persuasion, as we will discuss later.

So this is a political biography of a Nazi leader, but it is definitely not what we're used to. The author defiantly praises and identifies with her subject. Bramwell tells us:

“…guardian of a radical, centrist, republican critique which pre-dated National Socialism…”

Bramwell definitely uses every ideological trick her steely mind can think of to defend Reichsminister Darré's honor and politics. That is, she gives us a cram course in white racist and capitalist evasions, justifications, and half-truths (“Oh, please don't be so narrow-minded as to let the SS uniforms and swastikas influence your opinion!”). i mean, she's really “bombs away” on this, and her mad reactionary diva performance alone would be worth the price of admission. But there's much more, including serious political discussion of a reactionary class point of view.

Far from being deferential to her former Cambridge University colleagues, the author is open in her hatred of socialist intellectuals (on this point her opinion is much too timid and conformist for me). Bramwell, noting the death toll of Stalinist crimes, suggests that being a fascist while a mistake is not nearly as bad as being a socialist. So at the very least, Blood and Soil gives us a workout, exercising us against the skewed worldview of half-truths used to justify the Nazi experiment at ending humanity. And this book gives us much more than that, for it carries the understanding that fascism is not conservative but anti-bourgeois, violently radical. This is the radioactive element at the heart of fascism's continuing danger to us in the mutating world.

In author Anna Bramwell's eyes, Reichsminister Darré was no racist criminal but a true popular leader and ecological visionary. Bramwell convincingly details how awkward he was at inner party intrigue and politicking, how he never understood the power games of his Party rivals, refusing to make friends while indifferent to his growing intra-Party enemies. Of course, being a bad fit as a party animal didn't make Reichsminister Darré any less of a fascist, and this is typical of Bramwell's sly uses of half truths to advance bigger lies. Trying to reposition Darré as a “centrist” not a member of the far right, as a “republican” although he was a leader for ten years in a fascist movement that openly despised democracy and promised dictatorship, war, and terror.

Reichsminister Darré's Oxford biographer uses his agricultural career, his interest in defending German family farmers, even his non-conforming racial theories (some of Darré's early racist comrades ended up as Gestapo suspects for being enemies of Hitler to the ultraracist Right). All to push forward a picture of Darré as a peaceful radical idealist trying to help the poor and forgotten of the countryside. “Like a more nationalist Che Guevara, he opposed capitalism and the town,” is how she clumsily tries to reposition him. This is a bit over the top. Speaking for himself, Darré made it clear that his big problem with urbanism wasn't capitalism but Black people and Jews.

Darré's fascist idealization of pastoral living, small family farms, and rural life wasn't a plan for peace. Under his guidance the SS developed a concept of Master Race forward settlements, whereby German peasants would be soldier-farmers who would grow their own food, rule their own households of women and children, and band together in armed Aryan militias under the SS to gradually cleanse the frontier of the inferior natives. This was modeled on the experience of white American settlers on the Western frontier, only for him the white frontier was the East, and the natives useless to civilization weren't Indians but Poles, Latvians, Czechs, Romany, Ukrainians, and Russians. As Darré said:

As is so often the case in fascist politics, bloody plans for genocidal aggression are justified as only self-defense, as only restoring what is “natural,” and by the maudlin self-pity of oppressors. Invading and conquering other nations is justified as “taking back” land. Unlike Hitler, Darré's kind of expansionism would have been more gradual, incremental, always talking of the right of ethnic regroupment on the sacred tribal land—much like Sharon's genocidal policies in Israel. And like Israel's steady, violent squeezing of the Palestinians back further and further off of their lands, Darré for all his “natural” talk would have used the machine gun and the tank as his main agricultural tools.

The conquest and genocidal absorption of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Latvia, Estonia, and the rest of the East was a major tenet in Nazi doctrine. Reichsminister Darré was right on the same page as Adolf Hitler in depicting the other peoples of Eastern Europe as somehow “advancing” on poor innocent Germany, while demanding that cities like Warsaw be ethnically cleansed into German cities in the name of restoring what was natural. Darré also always insisted on Germans' “right” to seize as much territory as they wanted from other peoples.

So there was no real difference between Darré and other SS strategists such as SS Oberfuhrer Konrad Meyer, the author of the infamous “General Plan East” (which was approved by both Hitler and Himmler). Under “General Plan East” at least 31 million of the then 45 million inhabitants of Eastern Europe would have been eliminated—they used the word “deported.” Jews were not included in these numbers, of course, since it was assumed that they would already have been exterminated. Then the annexed lands would have been thoroughly “Germanized.” Bernt Englemann, in his account of being in the anti-fascist underground during WWII, quotes from a conversation then with his Nazi cousin Gudrun. She had married an SS Gruppenfuhrer and police lieutenant general serving in the fascist Government General of Poland:

Naturally, in this violent “solution” (a favorite word of Darré and his Nazi comrades, since it implies a prior problem where none existed) there was no “geo-political space” for the millions of Jews in the East. Darré the agriculturalist referred to Jews as “weeds” and “essentially parasitic.” We certainly don't have to guess what that meant. Yet his biographer claims that Darré was not a real anti-semite, and wasn't involved in the Holocaust. Of course, in researching her book she couldn't find one word or act by Darré opposing the attacks against the Jews of Europe. The very idea that someone who was a top Nazi leader wasn't for racist crimes and genocide stretches belief way beyond reason. That Darré may have been more wisely discreet on this subject doesn't mean that he had any significant differences with Hitler (about whom Darré wrote privately that he was in “awe” of) or with his party ally and one-time friend Heinrich Himmler of the SS.

If there was a foredoomed quality to Darré's white pastoral fantasies, it was not only because a resurgent fascist-capitalist Germany would demand air fleets, panzer divisions, and a heavy petro-chemical industrial base for oppressor civilization. Even Darré's simple frontier settlements would have required an ever-present modern military—since the conquest of other nations, the enslavement and elimination of tens of millions was not going to happen without heavy resistance (too heavy for our macho Nazis to handle, as it turned out).

Even beyond that, the very idea of Imperial Peasant Leader Darré as an “ecologist” strikes a false note. We're running into a good case of deceptive advertising for Aryan politics. It is telling that in this political biography—despite the subtitle—racism occupies a much larger place than ecology. For the simple reason that Reichsminister Darré's record on racist-nationalist ideology was far greater than his record on ecology. Even leaving aside the reality that someone who wanted the military invasion of all Eastern Europe and the wholesale ethnic cleansing of cities like Warsaw, has a strange relationship to the word “ecology.” Darré advocated smaller, more carefully farmed family agriculture, using organic methods not chemical fertilizers and pesticides, because it improved yields and peasant income, and decreased the relative power in the countryside of the “upper class” landed gentry. Needless to say, it was also a policy thrifty with expensive imported petro-chemical stocks (Germany had to import all of its oil). Hitler was delighted with this program—as he said, a good grain harvest was “worth twenty-two divisions” to him.

“…the same better living through more commercial management philosophy soaks through contemporary capitalist environmentalism…” (img from Kennecott Utah video discussing their new policy of using bigger trucks)

Ricardo Walther Darré's supposed “Green” politics were more in the category of husbandry, the careful & thrifty exploitation of Man's resources, rather than any true environmentalism. Which shouldn't be any big news, since the same better living through more commercial management philosophy soaks through contemporary capitalist environmentalism here … as species disappear and the earth is sterilized.

Not Going Down With Adolf

An important point in Bramwell's defense of Reichsminister Darré is his break with Hitler, which she uses to disassociate him from Nazism's moral trajectory. Again, this is an inspired use of a half-truth to promote a larger lie. While she tries to picture Darré as naively principled, he ends up coming across as narrow-minded but shrewdly opportunistic, self-centered beyond loyalties to any movement or party. A number of early fascist leaders fell out with Hitler, but unlike Darré most of them ended up being executed or else fleeing into exile. Reichsminister Darré ended up out-surviving not only many of them but the Fuhrer himself, deftly stepping out of the way as his Nazi movement and their tank divisions motored off into the abyss.

Reichsminister Darré quietly opposed Hitler's 1939 decision to go to war, making his views known within the top levels of the Party, but only there. He was even more opposed to Hitler's later decision to invade the USSR—though of course not on moral or humanitarian grounds. Darré judged that the earlier “Hitler-Stalin Pact” of 1937, trading Russian oil and minerals for German military technology while agreeing to divide Finland between them, had allowed the Red Army to grow too strong. This part of his opposition to the war was really just tactical, although his pessimistic judgement proved to be accurate.

Reichsminister Darré's broader objection was from the ideological imperative of racism. That such new conquests changed Germany from an ethnic empire into a colonial empire, diluting the foremost goal of a racially “pure” Germany. An immediately expanding empire and world war was forcing Germany to incorporate more and more non-Germans into its institutions. As an example of what he meant, by 1945 the majority of the elite SS soldiers were non-German, while 60–80% of the workers in various defense industries were non-German as well. Biographer Bramwell suggests that Darré was a reasonable racist-nationalist (which she implies was good) while “real” Nazis like SS chief Himmler were greater empire expansionists (which she implies was bad). i say, shoot them both and worry about the slight differences later!

Just before he joined the Nazi Party, Darré wrote a pamphlet “Why Colonies?” which positioned him as one of the Inner Colony nationalists. They advocated redeveloping Greater Germany (including the Eastern frontier, of course) racially as the alternative to unsuccessful Third World conquests. Even a large continental empire would inevitably mean that Germany's borders would include an “unhealthy” polyglot mix of different peoples (here in the u.s. Pat Buchanan has the same point of view). While to Darré, Germany's future strength as a nation depended upon the “purity” of the possession of her territory by only those of the Master Race. As Bramwell puts it:

It's hard not to laugh when reading about a “basic difference” like that. Bramwell breaks a sweat finding ways to describe Darré's fascist racism in a positive spin, with neutral-sounding labels. Just as she repeatedly interprets Darré's racism as “only defensive.” She writes: “Darré's position seems to have been that he was a political anti-semite, and felt no personal animus towards particular Jews … Many of Darré's attacks on Jews were because he associated them with democracy.” It's nice to know that he didn't mean anything “personal” in helping to create the Holocaust.

In the early 1930s, Darré was a powerful ideological force within the developing Party. Both in public writings & in inner party struggles, Darré fought for ever more racist thinking as the determinant of all policy. That he considered the 1930 Nazi Party as not dedicated enough to Master Race politics gives you an idea of exactly how racist Darré was. While Hitler was a fantasy Aryan, Darré was a hard-core “Nordicist,” a believer in an imaginary Nordic superior race of tall blond-haired men that inhabited Scandinavia and North Germany. In their view, the short dark-haired South Germans and Austrians (such as one Corporal Adolf Hitler) were at best of mixed blood and not true members of the Master Race. Darré never abandoned these views but did soft-pedal them once he joined the South German–based Nazis.

Reichsminister Darré dismissed his hated rival Goebbels, the party propaganda czar, as not being up to “scientific racial thinking.” Darré's main personal friend and ally in the party hierarchy was none other than SS chief Heinrich Himmler. In those early years the Brownshirts of the SA (Sturmabteilung or Stormtroopers) were the mass paramilitary arm of the Party, the street fighters, while the black-clad SS (Schutszstaffel or Security Squad) were growing from being Hitler's small elite bodyguard into a future ideological military caste, the very heart of the Nazi subculture.

Imperial Peasant Leader Darré was also simultaneously a top SS officer, the first chief of the SS Race and Settlement Office. He was one of the ideological godfathers of the SS, having helped mold the young organization. It was Darré who introduced the idea of regular SS classes on racist theory, and, in 1931, he convinced SS chief Himmler to make racial examination of all prospective brides of SS men a mandatory requirement. The idea of mass “racial examinations” of women is hard to explain as Green politics, but this fetish about women's biology was an obsession of Darré's (and many other Nazi pervs as well).

It was not as an environmentalist that Darré was best known then, but as one of the most extreme and controversial racial theorists. The 1920s & 1930s was a time when eugenics, that racist pseudo-science, was riding high in Western capitalism. Darré added his voice to those arguing that the white master race had to be “rescued” genetically by culling out not only the “contamination” of other races but inferior whites as well. Parents should leave defective children to die, as wild beasts do. Even his own children if necessary, Darré said. All German women should be subjected to racial heredity examinations, and graded into different categories regulating marriage and child-bearing. Men, he believed, could prove their racial soundness by their achievements, but since he believed that women could have no achievements to judge, their child-bearing value to the Master Race could only be determined by physical examination and tracing their family background. This, too, was preserving the natural environment according to Darré.

Privately, Darré had asserted that even his own children were not “100%” Master Race enough in their heredity. But, he added, if his wife (whom he had abandoned to marry someone younger and much wealthier) worked hard enough at their children's racist upbringing, they could at least grow up to be satisfactory German citizens. No wonder that some other Rightist nationalists sneered at what they called Darré's “chicken-breeding mentality,” while he was hated by more than a few nationalist women. Contrary to what his faithful biographer claims, there is a direct connection between the vanguard racist-sexist ideology spread by Darré and others, and the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

By 1939 Darré was only a figurehead minister in a tailored black SS uniform (Hitler hated to change his cabinet ministers in public, so let Darré stay on as a figurehead sitting in an isolated office, while his deputy became the real minister). Even the Allied War Crimes Tribunal after the war decided that he'd been out of the loop, and Darré ended up escaping the hangman's noose, serving only five years in prison (in his cell he still received mail from German farmers requesting advice or help addressed to “Minister Darré”). For his biographer this triumphantly confirms that he did nothing wrong. A more searching interpretation might be that the Allied Powers were indifferent to genocidal fascist politics per se. (Remember that British prime minister Winston Churchill had even publicly expressed his regret that Mussolini had sided with Germany instead of allying fascist Italy with Britain and the u.s.)

Charged initially with many crimes, Reichsminister Darré ended up being convicted on only one charge, that of expropriating “hundreds of thousands of Polish and Jewish farmers.” Kind of like being part of the group that attacked the World Trade Center but getting sentenced only for illegally double-parking at the airport. Turns out—not too surprisingly—that being a Nazi cabinet minister was less criminal to world capitalism than “Driving While Black” on highway I-95.

Survival of the fittest?

Paradoxically, the Nazi movement believed itself to be in harmony with Nature—even with all its intoxicating shouting clanking hierarchical-mechanical subculture and snappy film set costumes. Of course, by “Nature” fascists didn't recognize an ecology with complex interaction & interdependency of all the myriad life forms. Fascists tried to own nature as their own capitalist ideological property, and Nazism in particular projected its own ruthlessly mechanistic class agenda onto the “natural.” Ernest Lehmann, a Nazi professor of botany, declared that fascism was only “politically applied biology.” They saw a hierarchical food chain, a ceaseless conflict of stronger predators upon weaker prey, as the perfect metaphor for their own terroristic political economy.

It was only “Nature's law” to Hitler and Darré for one biological group—a species or a race—to totally unite under its strongest males to compete with other species or races for territory and resources. For crows to war with wrens, wolves to dominate elk, and master race civilization to rise up on the conquest and slave labor of the inferior races. Some Nazi leaders even mused about a fantastic science-fiction re-population of Afrika by millions of Aryans, supported by vast labor armies of slave Black workers. Peter Staudenmaier perceptively remarks:

In the Nazi worldview the superior being was a predator. This supposed recognition of “Nature's laws” is just capitalist culture with a biological wrapper. In life it isn't true. The lofty eagle isn't any more successful than mom sparrow. If anything, less so. If survival and dominance were everything, cockroaches might get olympic gold. Ecology is endless diversity, unending change, and development and interdependency of life forms that is complex beyond Man the Manager.

Again, there are class issues hidden in these man-made pronouncements about “Nature.” Although the Nazis always claimed to be a “Workers Party” (and at their electoral peak in 1932 received about 25% of their votes from workers, primarily the long-term unemployed), this ideology of “nature's iron laws” was profoundly anti–working class. The so-called German National Socialist Workers Party had intractable problems with the German proletariat. Which is why both Hitler and Darré wanted to do radical surgery and actually eliminate the German proletariat as a class. Which was done.

For even political conquest hadn't eliminated National Socialism's constant clashing with its own industrial working class. As the Party's German Labor Front reported in 1937 over mass resistance to speed-ups and Taylorism: “Workers, whether of National Socialist persuasion or not, still hold on to the Marxist and union position of rejecting critera of production … Controls over individual achievement are rejected. Therefore they resist all attempts to time them.” Remember that until well after 1933 the Nazis could venture into hard-core proletarian neighborhoods only in large groups.

As we've discussed, Imperial Peasant Leader Darré wanted to de-urbanize German society, limiting industrialization. Which would have automatically shrunk the proletariat. They would have become a useful niche class, in a society dominated by militias of racist militarized peasants, just like the mythic u.s. frontier that Darré admired so much. Instead, the Nazis pursued Adolf Hitler's evolving strategy, which was to simultaneously promote both techno-industrial development and the Aryan re-organization of classes spilling over frontiers. After all, if it is the superior race man's destiny to be both a fierce soldier and ruler over others—as the Nazis held as a core belief—then how can he at the same time be shelving groceries for women at the supermarket or bucking production on the assembly line?

Fascism de-proletarianized Aryan society. Or to put it more precisely: it created an Aryan society that had never existed before by de-proletarianizing the former German society. By the millions, Aryan men were shifted into military service and into being labor aristocrats, supervisors, straw bosses, and minor bureaucrats of every sort. In 1940 Nazi Labor Front leader Robert Ley said in a speech: “In ten years Germany will be transformed beyond recognition. A nation of proletarians will have become a nation of rulers. In ten years a German worker will look better than an English lord does today.” The new proletariat that started emerging was heavily made up of involuntary foreign & slave laborers, and—despite Nazi ideology about women's “natural” place in the kitchen and nursery—was largely becoming a proletariat of women.

Nazi slave labor is seldom dealt with in its class reality. Usually it is mentioned as a side-effect of the Holocaust, or as a short-lived desperate measure of a tottering regime facing military defeat on all fronts. The truth is that it was much more than that: slave and semi-slave labor was a necessary feature of mature Nazi society. If Hitler had been successful, slave labor would have gone on for his entire lifetime and beyond. Even conquered Eastern Europe and Russia, in official Nazi plans, would gradually have given way to the spread of vast Aryan-owned agricultural estates, whose rural proletariat would have been involuntarily furnished by the inferior races.

By 1941 there were three million foreign & slave proletarians at work in National Socialist factories, farms, and mines. Coincidentally, the SS—which had only 116 men at its first public display at the July 4, 1926, Party Rally at Weimar (the u.s.a. and the Nazis celebrate the same founding holiday)—had also grown to three million. Soon the overrun territories of Europe and the East provided over four million more slave laborers for Nazi industry & the war machine (the majority of whom were used up, consumed, that is to say killed, in accelerated capitalist production). The fascist class structure that had cloaked itself in Nature was revealed to be bizarrely artificial. Nazism's peculiar class structure was parasitic as a mode of life. One history sums this up:

Darré's early friend & collaborator, SS leader Heinrich Himmler, knowing the distance they were pushing their own cadre to mutate, urged them on in unmistakable terms:

This is like a criminal investigation, where digging up the basement of a suburban home suddenly unearths a jumble of bodies. We started with “Green Nazi” R. Walther Darré and the claims for his ecological pioneering. Yet, step by step, we've followed a corridor until finally we turn a corner … into the “ecology” of a slaughterhouse, and a capitalism temporarily given seeming paranormal strength by the radical resection and fusion of race, class, and gender.

Green Nazi Tip of the Capitalist Iceberg

R. Walther Darré and other Rightist Green politicians could be significant to new generations of neo-fascists, and not only because they give fascism a plausible claim to being the forefather of today's ecology movement. Far from being a political innocent, Darré was if anything even more developed about his racial supremacy than Hitler, and was certainly more practical and strategic. Who knows, if his views had prevailed maybe the Nazi Party might still be ruling Western Europe today? His rural settler strategy is in tune with much of the white racist Far Right in the u.s. (no small coincidence, since like Adolf Hitler himself Darré used the u.s. white settler Western frontier as his genocidal model). It all pushes us to check out what words like “Green,” “Nature,” “ecology,” and “peasant” mean in our politics.

First of all, capitalist culture has always exemplified Social Darwinism, using a manipulated model of nature to justify its hierarchical class civilization as merely “natural.” Hitler, Darré, and the other Nazi ideologists were just the most glaring tip of the iceberg. John D. Rockefeller built the Standard Oil petro-monopoly not only by business guile but by fraud, bombings, arson, and the violent repression of both Indian land rights and workers' unionism. Yet, he always justified his success as Hitler did his genocide, by stressing how it came about in accordance to “Nature's laws”: “The growth of a large business is merely survival of the fittest,” Rockefeller once said. “The American Beauty Rose can be produced in the splendor and fragrance which brings cheer to its beholder only by sacrificing the early buds which grow around it. This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working out of a law of nature and a law of God.”

Peter Staudenmaier and Janet Diehl, in their valuable study Ecofascism: Lessons From the German Experience, use phrases like “untrustworthy” and “grave error” on the rare occasions they discuss Bramwell's book. They gently say that her “grave error in judgement indicates the powerfully disorienting pull of an ‘ecological’ aura.”

This is an interesting kind of polite misstatement, this claim that Bramwell's defense of Darré's politics comes from her sympathy with his environmental vision. No, it's the attraction of his racist class politics that has so magnetized her to the big white supremacist refrigerator. People's moral disorientation doesn't come from anything ecological—how can it? that's just the cover story—but from the continuing attraction of capitalist racism. That's true whether we're talking about Reichsminister Darré or Ralph Nader.

As useful as it is to blow away illusions about Green Nazis, it is even more useful to understand how these lessons apply. It's not about the past, it's about the future. The Darré type of “Green” policy with its air-brushed romanticizing of nature and similar stage props is very popular right now. As we know, labels are so important in capitalist mass civilization. Every shoddy product seems to say “new” or “natural” on the box. Same with Green politics.

Trying to shrink down environmentalism so it could fit inside Reichsminister Darré's steel helmet, Dr. Anna Bramwell basically defines it as organic family farming, conservation, and better technology: “On the whole, ecologists do not call for a return to pre-industrial ways of life as such. They tend rather to stress research into new forms of technology which are more suitable to small communities, and which would avoid damaging the balance of nature to the extent observable today … It is not widely known that similar ecological ideas were being put forward by Darré in National Socialist Germany, often using the same phrases and arguments as are used today..”

There is no question that if anything she understates her case. Led by Darré and Hitler, the Third Reich was the first European nation to make cruelty to animals a crime, to set up forested green belts and other anti-erosion measures, to push organic small farming as the main form of agriculture. Side by side with a high-tech military of millions of soldiers. This is the pattern that u.s. Green politics are only following. The Nazi Party certainly had a much better record on ecology than u.s. president George W. Bush and his administration have. Certainly the Darré wing of the Nazi movement were pioneers. The question is … pioneers of what?

We're running head on into that popular illogical notion that being for something healthy somehow means that you are a good person. Adolf Hitler himself was a veritable Olympian of all the “healthy” and “natural,” not only a vegetarian but one who used alternative health care, who ordered cigarettes stripped from his soldiers' ration packs, and who passed the first laws banning experimentation on animals. (Kind of like, “Don't experiment on animals, use Jews and Romany. And don't smoke while you do it.”)

The Nazi policies were the very model for the modern capitalist industrial commercial “environmentalism” that's the mainstream of today's Green politics. Which is why Germany's Green Party voted for approval of the u.s. invasion of Afghanistan, and why America's Green Party has been working with far-right white supremacists. And their environmentalism isn't much better.

Theirs is the kind of boutique environmentalism that trims around the edges of the huge global capitalist machinery. Well intentioned though it might be for some, it is essentially a fraud. Small organic farming is good in itself but only a sand grain lost in the global landslide of ecological destruction that capitalism has unleashed. The mass dying of coral reefs and frogs and certain marine and bird species, the suburban cementing over of the landscape, disappearance of mature forests and marshlands to say nothing of wilderness, spreading desertification in Africa and Eurasia, new epidemics claiming millions of lives, bio-genetic industrial agriculture with compulsory ingestion of hormones and antibiotics, huge skyscraper cities being expanded without any natural water resources, global warming, loss of the ozone layer—these are capitalist ecological disasters on a scale difficult to grasp. But they are now just ordinary things we know and live with.

Today in America everyone is “for” the environment. It's just that no one wants to give up their white-collar job in some air-conditioned officeplex, their right to travel the concrete highways in their air-conditioned SUV on the way back to their air-conditioned suburban home, which is filled with “consumer electronics” and closets packed with clothing imported on container ships across oceans. Does everyone on planet Earth have the right to such a distorted lifestyle? What happens as the billions of Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East start to reach for this advanced capitalist life (they are being aimed there, that's for sure)? Now that researchers have discovered that jet airplane exhausts are the principal cause of the thinning of the ozone layer, what country will be the first to give up air travel? Would Americans vote for abandoning JFK and LAX? To realize that industrial capitalism is the deepening negation of all healthy ecology is not just to criticize corporations, but to see the real price of actual capitalist civilization as a whole.

Those who do see this great threat and act on it suddenly find themselves labeled as enemies of civilization. The late Judy Bari of Earth First!, who not only organized against destroying first growth forests but also defended timber workers and mountain communities, was car-bombed with obvious f.b.i. complicity and then was herself arrested as a “terrorist.”

Meanwhile some white defenders of the environment have decided that reducing the busload on planet Earth through genocide is both necessary and “natural” (another supposed eco-thought that the Nazis had anticipated). These are small but dangerous trends in a world where genocide has become an unspoken social tool. Because it represents a reflexive response within contemporary capitalism to crisis of the social environment, the publicized quest for “natural” purity is the visible symbol of a deeper hunger for a certain kind of repressive “social purity” (just as the German nationalists yearned for). Many people in Tokyo or Aspen or Vienna support these kinds of ideas, but they don't have anything to do with Nature. Just as some of the wealthy backers of today's Anti-Globalization movement want an advanced capitalist metropolis that is like a green parkland—with all the dirty basic industry and agro production pushed out to the slums of the Third World periphery. The Big House and the Field, only to global scale.

The eco-writer Edward Abbey, author of The Monkey Wrench Gang and the literary saint of the white radical ecology movement, was well known for his opposition to big corporations and their government. Less publicized was his dislike of Blacks, Latinos, and Indians (though he did put a Tonto figure or two in his stories), whom he thought had to be limited and controlled by whites in order to protect the holy wilderness. Like his fellow Aryan eco-writer, Reichsminister Darré, Edward Abbey wanted the militarization of the national borders to prevent the lesser races from immigrating. He was sincere in his subjective love of the wilderness, but politically it was a facet in his overall racist-nationalism. Just as those suburbanites worried about the fate of mountain gorillas in Africa push for Western-style military controls over the local populations there.

Fortress America's foremost Green politician is Ralph Nader, Washington “consumer advocate” and the Green Party's presidential candidate in the 2000 elections. Nader has for years been in a tight alliance with various white supremacist figures, notably far rightist Pat Buchanan (who like Darré and Abbey also calls for militarization of the border to keep out the inferior races) and racist textile billionaire Ralph Milliken. One fruit of that well-paid alliance was the election of George W. Bush, where Nader's 6% of the Florida vote skimmed off enough liberal votes to help hand the right wing of the Republican Party the presidential election. Because of his Green image, Nader could win support for a covert right-wing agenda of nationalism, economic protectionism, and white supremacy from environmentalists and even old left groups.

This is being written in part for generations that have no experience with fascism as a mass happening (or with violent government repression, for that matter). We should be thoughtful about who we work with, whose campaigns we are supporting. Whether it's the environment or Anti-Globalization or anti-racism, criticizing some obvious evil is easy for anyone to do. And sometimes masks disturbing agendas that orbit around the most reactionary aspects of capitalism.

When we remember that Dr. Bramwell, an admirer of “Hitler's Green Party,” is one of the foremost environmental administrators in Europe, we can see a trend. Supposed Green concerns that are really romanticized symbols growing out of a variety of regressive capitalist politics. The ongoing class struggles between oppressor and oppressed are the deep structures of politics, and even the ecological concerns which seem at first so simple can only be acted on in this context. Human self-liberation from oppression is the prerequisite for saving the Earth.

THE GREEN NAZI

An Investigation Into Fascist Ecology