Doug
----
>'The Right to be Different'
>The alarming interest of the "New Right" in indigenous peoples
>
>by Jan van Boeckel
>
>
>A well-known expression of indigenous peoples is: "The Earth does not belong
>to us, we belong to the Earth." Man is only a small part of Creation, and he
>should not be its ruler. This view communicates a respectful, humble
>attitude towards nature. But with some evil will, this expression of
>relatedness with all that lives can easily be associated with dangerous
>"Blut und Boden"-thinking. In this regard, it could be instructive to look
>back in history to see how feelings of connection to nature have been
>misused in pre-Second World War Germany. Today, again, radical-rightist
>groups are standing up which pride themselves in saying that their conduct
>is being guided by "the laws of nature". Next to that, they claim to be big
>proponents of cultural self-determination, even - or expressly - for
>indigenous peoples.
>
>Inspired by Romanticism, a broad interest in protecting nature developed in
>Germany at the end of the nineteenth century. Nature was regarded as
>something pure and transcendental, the antipole of the modern world which
>had broken adrift. Something in their traditional character as a people was
>to give Germans a special touch with that nature. The word "Volk" (people)
>was a concept infused by myth, with which a special bond was expressed with
>a transcendental "essence". Via the Volk, the individual knew he or she was
>related to the wider cosmos. This bond, or so people thought, was of real
>influence on their deepest inner being. Life was given meaning by being
>member of a large whole, the "Volks-gemeinschaft". The so-called
>Völkisch-movement of before and after the turn of the century was the most
>outspoken expression of this sentiment. To counter the very real uprooting
>that the triumph of industrial capitalism brought about, the Völkisch
>thinkers preached a return to the country side, to the simplicity and the
>wholeness of a life attuned to nature. Scapegoat for the environmental
>pollution and the feelings of alienation and uprootedness was the "homeless
>Jew". "The Germans", according to historian Ludy Dawidowicz, "were in search
>of a mysterious wholeness that would restore them to primeval happiness,
>destroying the hostile milieu of urban industrial civilization that the
>Jewish conspiracy had foisted on them." Within the Völkisch movement modern
>materialism, urbanisation, rationalism and science were regarded as the
>source of all evil, alien to the essence of the Volk.