UNSTABLE GREENS
Volkert van der Graf, plunged the Netherlands into a political crisis when he killed the Dutch right-wing populist Pim Fortuyn; just before the French elections Robert Durn provoked a nation-wide law-and-order debate by shooting dead eight town councillors. In the US 21-year old Lucas John Helder was arrested following a spree of postbox bombings that cost one man his arm. All were seemingly disturbed individuals, but they were also united by the ideology of environmentalism. Like Durn, van der Graf was active in the green movement, with the group Milieu Offensief. Helder, though not an activist was singing from the same song-sheet: 'I often wonder why so many people spend their entire lives consuming what is fed to them'.
Sadly, the green movement appears to have a record of instability, exhibited in the suicide/murder of German Green party founder Petra Kelly and her lover Gert Bastien, or the crank British sports commentator David Icke - a spokesman for the greens until he shifted his allegiance to little green men - or the hermit-like 'Unabomber' Ted Kaczynski, who bombed corporate America.
Environmentalism cannot explain individual psychological flaws, but the movement itself has proven to be ideologically unstable. Green activist George Monbiot - horrified to discover that his own book 'Captive State' was given a glowing book review by British National Party chairman Nick Griffin (see 'Blair's corporate Britain' www.bnp.org.uk/article49.html), urged greens to distance themselves from the far right, even naming reactionaries like Aidan Rankin, the former Ecology leader writer now writing for the neo-Fascist Third Way group (Stealing Our Clothes, Guardian 30 April).
But then Monbiot writes more column inches trying to dissuade environmentalists from reactionary ideas than he does arguing the cause. This week Monbiot was denouncing greens for lending support to the Not In My Back Yard opponents of new development to relieve the British housing shortage. Last May Monbiot was denouncing anti-capitalist agitators Reclaim the Streets as an 'association of incoherent vigilantes' (Streets of Shame 10 May 2000). And then he turned on his fellow greens - like the ex-Greenpeace chair Lord Melchett, who took a job with image consultants Burson Marsteller, promoters of Genetic Modification - for selling out to big business ('Business of Betrayal', Guardian 15 January 2002). Neo-nazi, corporate, little Englander vigilantes? Maybe Monbiot ought to ask what is wrong with the green ethos that it spins off in such exotic directions.
Part of the answer was given by the French gunman Robert Durn, who protested that nobody was paying attention to him, or US mail-bomber Helder who complained 'all of my family and friends were raised to believe . . . to be gullible'. A common element of the green philosophy is a contempt for humanity proportionate to the lionisation of nature. Coupled with the belief that conscience is a higher principle than democracy, that underpins the direct action movement, this contempt makes it easy for environmental cranks to short cut the process of public debate by turning to terror.
RED ARMY RAPISTS?
That was the charge laid by historian Anthony Beevor in the trails for his new account of the Soviet campaign in Berlin, in newspapers and on BBC2's TimeWatch series, aired this weekend. In the follow up to his acclaimed history of the siege of Stalingrad, Beevor acts as if he is breaking a taboo in 'revealing' the Soviet army's record of raping 'two million German women'. Actually Beevor is simply reviving an old piece of Nazi propaganda that predates the Soviet invasion of Berlin.
In 1944, the commander of the Nord Army Group issued the following Order of the Day: ' Ilya Ehrenburg [the Soviet propaganda officer for the Red Army] is urging the Asiatic peoples to drink the blood of German women. Ilya Ehrenburg insists that Asiatics should enjoy our women. "Take the flaxen-haired women they are your prey", he says.'
Not a word of it was true, but that did not prevent Jurgen Thorwald repeating in a history of the war published in 1950 that Ehrenburg 'told the Red Army that German women were their legitimate prey'. It turned out that Thorwald was actually a nazi Heinz Bongartz who had extolled Hitler in a book in 1941. In 1962 the libel was again made that Ehrenburg had urged the raping of German women in the Munich paper Soldatenzeitung.
Beevor managed to find one elderly German woman to support his claims. Embarrassingly, though, she adopted the same racial language of the original army propaganda, saying that she had been set upon by 'hordes of Mongols with slitty eyes'. Doubtless rapes did occur - Beevor found the evidence of that in the Soviet Union's own records. But to allege that they were policy is simply to revive the racial victim ideology of German fascism.
-- James Heartfield The 'Death of the Subject' Explained is available at GBP11.00, plus GBP1.00 p&p from Publications, audacity.org, 8 College Close, Hackney, London, E9 6ER. Make cheques payable to 'Audacity Ltd'