>The canard about the Nazis being vegetarians and believers
>in animal rights was offered in a newsgroup a few months ago
>and thoroughly demolished, especially after the offerer
>failed to provide any evidence.
Well, given Alex Cockburn's rigorous fact-checking standards, I can't believe he'd just go off and say something without evidence!
Robert Proctor has a chapter in his fascinating book Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis about the German obsession with natural foods and such during the 1920s. The rhetoric around how modern industrial techniques spoil the purity of food sounds uncannily familiar - and the links to the neo-primitivism familiar to any reader of Adorno are pretty interesting. That's not to say that an obsession with organic food leads straight to the death camps, but there is something about concerns with purity, closeness to nature, authenticity, organicity, and strength that should provoke some serious scrutiny.
Doug