Were the Nazis radical environmentalists?

Louis Proyect lnp3 at panix.com
Mon May 11 07:04:00 PDT 1998


James Heartfield:
>Karl Marx also was well aware of the influence of nature worship in
>Germany. This is what he had to say about it:
>
>'We see that this cult of nature is limited to Sunday walks of an
>inhabitant of a small provincial town who childishly wonders at the
>cukoo laying its eggs in another bird's nest, at tears being designed to
>keep the surface of the eyes moist, and so on.

James misses my point, which was that nature-worship is not particularly a Nazi thing. We could start a separate thread on this topic, but it was hardly what interested me. I just wanted to show how foolish it is to make an amalgam of stormtroopers and reforestration. Speaking of nature-worship, I got this from my friend Paul Buhle this morning: "By the way, Naturism (i.e., nudism) ran alongside the love of nature; true, some Nazis were nudists, but it was stronger in the Left, and the rulers of East Germany were nudists--it was the most nudist society in the world. A strange thought."


>Only implies that they wanted to use natural resources consciously, and
>in a planned way, not that they wanted to hold back from the use of
>these resources.
>

Of course they wanted to hold back from the use of these resources in the manner you applaud, namely turning them into commodities. Why else would they establish that "natural monuments" were to be preserved? When you place this kind of esthetic value on nature, you are in a different world than "brown" Marxism. For example, bald eagles are as inspiring as a piano sonata. Rachel Carsons' "Silent Spring" attacked not only the damage DDT was doing to the economy on a long-term basis, but how it was making this country less beautiful. Beauty does not seem to play much of a role in "brown" Marxism.

Louis Proyect

(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)



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