BOOK REVIEW
From Middlebury College to Al Gore:
The Green and the Brown Nazis
by Paul Mourino, LaRouche Youth Movement
The Green and the Brown:
A History of Conservation in Nazi Germany
by Frank Uekötter
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006
246 pages, hardcover $65, paperbound $23.99
The title of this book is The Green and the Brown. Of course, this title is misleading in a way: the "green" and the "brown" were not two camps at a distance, like Stendhal's The Red and the Black, but two groups that shared many convictions and came to work together to a stunning extent. The green were brown to some extent—all too many of them. The story that emerges is a complicated one, with many facets that defy a simple narrative or a clear-cut explanation. It is a story of ideological convergence, of tactical alliances, of simple careerism, of implication in crimes against humanity, and of deceit and denial after 1945. It is a story that many environmentalists will find disturbing. That is what makes it important.
—Frank Uekoetter, from Chapter 1, "The Nazis and the Environment: A Relevant Topic?" in The Green and the Brown
Environmentalism and conservationism are both expressions of pre-pubescent fascism. Across the nation today, one sees strange creatures running wild, from former Vice President Al Gore to Middlebury College's social/political experimenters. What is our country turning into? Felix Rohatyn and Steven C. Rockefeller, Sr. and Jr. have transformed the college into an institution whose primary purpose appears to be to conduct social, economic, and political experiments aimed at recruiting young people, ages 18 to 35, to join a fascist movement. This echoes the Vermont of the 1920s and '30s, which prominently promoted eugenics and legislated sterilization of targeted segments of the population.
This social phenomenon is sick and treasonous, and at the same time the American people are being brainwashed, by these "change agents," to accept the biggest lie of the century: namely, that Global Climate Change/Global Warming is the threat to humanity! Coincidentally, Al Gore came out of, what most of us thought was retirement, to be the poster boy for this fascist movement, whose aim is to make this lie the political issue of the 2008 Presidential election. The propaganda machine is overwhelming, and spans from Hollywood, to the U.S. Congress, to the British Crown's Cayman Islands, and finally to the halls of our nation's universities.
The honest citizen would ask: Where does this stuff come from; who is pushing this garbage; and what is their motive? Uekötter's book provides a helpful historical lesson.
Although he has academic tendencies, the total picture Uekötter presents is quite damning to anyone who gives a little thought to the roots of the environmentalist movement.
Uekötter's book is the product of a lengthy investigation, which led him to discover that the major activists of the Green/Environmentalist movement of post-World War II were also active, conscious, and in some cases, high-ranking members of the Nazi Party. How did that happen? Why did the environmentalists in Germany support Nazism? A follow-up question would be: What is the significance of the fact that the Nazis were part of the environmentalist movement? A third question might be: What was the flaw in their view of man whereby the average Green could look the other way while the Nazis did their dirty work?
Confusion on the issue of the fundamental nature of man often leads to these types of problems. Namely, if one doesn't have a clear understanding of the creative spark of genius, then the door to fascism is left wide open. It's a fact that advanced civilizations care for people and animals alike, and when generations forget this, they tend to adopt the backwardness of peasants, or worse. Most Greenies would never say, let us go out and kill people, but fundamentally they believe that people are the problem, or that human beings are intrinsically worthless. Doubt on the fundamentals leaves one open for manipulation by larger, more powerful socio-economic and political forces. Undoubtedly these questions are very unnerving, yet the answers are absolutely necessary, especially for young people ages of 18 to 35.
The Historical Context
Conservationism/environmentalism began, just like today, as a British geopolitical operation to destroy the industrial cultures that were being developed in both the United States and Germany in the period following the U.S. Civil War. Charles Darwin's controller, Thomas Huxley, and others began the fight with their famous propaganda piece, The Origin of Species. To get the full meaning, consider that the full original title of Darwin's infamous work was: The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.
In Germany, Ernst Moritz and his students, one of whom was Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, added to the Darwin-Huxley following. Riehl, in his essay of 1853 on "Fields and Forests," says, "We must save the forests, not only so that our ovens do not become cold in Winter, but also so that the pulse of life of the people continue to beat warm and joyfully, so that Germany, remains German." The transition from an industrial culture to a new culture based on nature worship, nationalism, Romanticism, and peasant backwardness was well under way. The cat really came out of the bag with Ernst Haeckel in 1867, who became a big promoter of Darwin/Huxley and also organized various groups around the theme of volkisch traditions. This entails social views which focus on ecological holism. He created various societies called "German Monist Leagues," and later joined a secret society/cult named the Thule Society, among whose members would later be Adolf Hitler.[1]
The Thule Society promoted a strange mix of Romanticism, back-to-the-land, anti-industrial attitudes which carried over to the turn of the 20th Century, with the creation of a social phenomenon known as the Wandervögel (wandering free birds). Youth without jobs, lacking training, with a dearth of skills, and with no knowledge of physical science or Classical art, were easy prey for recruitment to a peasant movement. Uekötter doesn't discuss how the Wandervögel developed, but instead focuses on the build-up to the Nazi period.
The Nazis' 'Back to Nature' Movement
Ueokoetter takes up the story around 1933—the year of Hitler's rise to power—examining the vast political networks of Naturschutzen (nature protection organizations), Heimaten (homeland associations), and other civic groups that functioned both in and outside of the official Weimar Republic. Some states, e.g., Baden-Württemburg and Hesse, paid officials from the various Heimaten to be official government advisors, while in other cases, the Heimat groups enjoyed their influence by making use of government buildings for conferences and social gatherings. According to Uekötter, by 1933, between the Heimaten, the Naturschutzen, and similar groups, there existed 55 regional organizations and 880 county organizations. None of these organization did anything to stop the rise to power of the Nazi Party: What were they doing in 1933, through Hitler's takeover? They were organizing for the protection of nature, of course. They were complaining about how political campaign posters were destroying the natural environment!
The political power to "enforce" Green ideology nationwide, in fact, occurred first in 1933, with Hitler's installation as Chancellor. Upon Hitler's seizure of power, various Heimaten and Naturschutzen were organized into one large centralized bureaucracy, which Heinrich Himmler's Propaganda office controlled. The two groupings became so close, Uekeoetter reports, that during a celebration of the Day of Westphalia, members of the Nazi Party joined with members of the Conservation Civic Associations, 150,000 in all, to celebrate. It appears that the Greens and the Browns worked together and toasted from the same beer steins.
Göring's Green Hunting Parties
By 1935, the promise of this union was manifested with Hermann Göring's Reichsnaturschutzgesetz (Reich nature protection law). This required all projects presented before the Third Reich to be first authenticated by Göring's Forest Service Department. Any property could be confiscated by the Reich with the justification that the state wanted to use it to improve nature. Uekötter points out that Göring cared more about securing the Schorfheide National Nature Reserve as a place for private hunting parties, than for the preservation of nature. The Reich spent 225,000 marks in one year to fully fund Göring's hunting extravaganzas. Lastly, Göring's Reich Forest Service had the final word on any project or legislation which was to be made into law. Of course all such projects had to be environmentally friendly.[2] (Does this sound familiar? Is Al Gore not saying and doing the same thing in a modern context? Luckily, the combination to enforce his carbon emission cap tax has yet to be adopted in the U.S. Congress.)
Bill McKibben, Meet Ludwig Finckh
Uekötter offers further insight into various local operations which were run by agents provocateurs to arrest industrial expansion with the cry of protecting nature. One such example, is the Nazi/Conservationist radical Ludwig Finckh, who might remind you of Step It Up's Bill McKibben.[3] Ludwig Finckh was running around south Germany, appealing to the Romantic peasant impulse, demanding an end to quarrying in the Hohenstoffeln Mountains.
Finckh wrote his book, The Unknown Hegau, polemicizing that quarrying was destroying nature. Uekötter characterizes part of the beginning of his book, "The Hegau is sacred land. Every stone tells of the making of the Earth." Finckh's narrative spoke of the face of the land and the human history that it mirrored. But when he came to speak on the Hohenstoffeln Mountain, one of the former volcanoes, his elated style suddenly broke, and Finckh lapsed into a tragic mode: "It is painful to speak of this mountain." Finckh organized numerous civic associations around the project to protect the population from the "evils" of industry. He described his associates as "a small, impoverished, but undeterred group of Heimat friends, whose call was full of strength, and found resonance in the entire German Nation."
Is this true? Did the German nation respond to their appeal? The population moved as a product of police-state measures—that was "inspiration" enough. Finckh championed his cause by appealing to Himmler's volkish side, claiming that an old German fortress was located near the quarry site, and was threatened by the quarry's expansion. The polemic worked, and Himmler used the enforcement power of the 1935 Nature Law to outlaw further quarrying on the Hohenstoffeln Mountains. Upon his success, Finckh exclaimed, "We have reached a milestone in the protection of nature; excess quarrying has transformed peasants into industrial workers and now they are returning to their native soil."
'Greening of Auschwitz'
Another telling case from Uekötter's book is that of Heinrich Weipkin-Jurgesmann. The Nazis thought they had to purify Eastern European soil to make it habitable for Native Germans. Obviously, with all the new Lebensraum (living space), there was ample room for the Green Nazis to experiment. Heinrich Wiepking-Jurgensmann, a conservationist and chairman of the landscape design office under Himmler, took up the responsibility to prepare the new soil for German settlement. Wiepking-Jurgensmann describes the new land as bearing the marks of "murders, and cruelties of the native races, i.e., Eastern Races, and the land has been engraved with razor sharp grimaces of the native landscape." Wiepking-Jurgensmann assigned his top student to design a project for "greening the new town of Auschwitz." They sought to make the surroundings of the Nazi death camp ecologically appealing. (See previous article in this section.)
If you are wondering how they justified their actions, just ask Alwin Seifert, member of the Nazi Party and State Attorney for Landscape Design, who was a colleague and competitor of Wiepking-Jurgensmann. Seifert asserted, "Only our knowledge of the laws of Nature, of Blood and Soil, of ancestral manor ... enables and obliges us to the design the concept of Blood- and Soil-connected gardens." Seifert was a member of the Conservation Movement and was hired by the Reich as a private citizen to work as a state attorney for landscape under Fritz Todt (Reich road inspector). Seifert's lunacy went beyond just Blood and Soil. He attacked dam projects, claiming that "they were the cause for the American Dust Bowl." Siefert also insisted that it was absolutely necessary for German roads and rivers be full of curves, because roads and rivers with curves were more natural. He demanded that the German economy switch over its food production to organic farming.
Seifert, along with other Green Nazis, survived the Nazi period and the Nuremberg Trials, and went on to teach in Hanover to recruit another, younger generation of conservationists! Happily, several of Seifert's students realized that their professor was a Nazi, and have begun to speak out on the matter!
In the concluding chapters of the book, Uekötter poses the critical question. "Would I have enquired about the forces behind the National Conservation Law? Would I have wondered how it had been possible to designate dozens of nature reserves in 2 or 3 years? Would I have found out about paragraph 24 of the National Conservation Law, the option to confiscate property on environmental merit, and the blatant violation of property rights that it had led to in everyday conservation work? Chances are that a number of environmentalists and in any case too many of them would have behaved just as thoughtlessly as did so many German conservationists: that their guiding thought would have been that the protection of nature requires the use of every lever that one could seize and that one should take quick advantage of one's opportunities; learning from the Nazi experience may be more difficult and more painful than many conservationists have thought."
Conclusion
Uekötter's warning is well taken, and therefore it is up to the reader to take up the responsibility to save humanity. The LaRouche Youth Movement, in recent weeks, has answered Uekötter's question, distributing material en masse on the Global Warming fraud and exposing those authorities who are actively propagating Gore's fraud, or those who are conducting social/political experiments at Middlebury College in an attempt to coerce the current generation of college students to join a fascist movement (see article, this issue, in Youth section).
It is treason to allow Gore's operation, in an environment where the next Presidential cycle needs to be focussed on the policies of FDR and a rapid re-industrialization program, and ending Cheney's insane war. Instead, the pre-Presidential candidates are falling victim to Gore's hoax.
To quote Uekötter again: "Seeing a cause dear to one's heart aligned with such a regime is painful and many readers will have read this book with the sentiment of 'never again.' But understandable as this may be, it is also clear that it calls for specification: what precisely has to be done to prevent a repetition of this story? What are the lessons that the current environmental movement or other social movements for that matter, should learn from the Nazi experience?"
The answer is simple: Be human, think! Reflect on the implications of your actions. If you don't know what the effect of your actions are, perhaps it's time to ask Lyndon LaRouche about relative potential population density.
[1] Staudenmaier, Peter, Fascist Ecology: The 'Green Wing' of the Nazi Party and Its Historical Antecedents, www.spunk. org/texts/places/germany, 2007.
[2] Frederick Winston Furneaux Smith, Earl of Birkenhead, Halifax: The Life of Lord Halifax, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1966).
[3] David Dixon, "Middlebury College, Felix Rohatyn, and the Green-Brown Cult of Al Gore," EIR, April 6, 2007.
