Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Green Nazis? Surely not
Der Spiegel is all of a dither. Apparently, Greenism and Environmentalism, those all-purpose left-wing ideologies are "being hijacked" by the Neo-Nazis, commonly referred to by the media as extreme right-wing. Well, I never. Anyone would think that this is unprecedented; that there was not extreme green environmentalism coupled with a romantic worship of the soil and an equally romantic opposition to industrialization and machinery among the Nazis of yore. In fact, it was the Communists who, in their worship of industrialization and hatred of the peasantry, despised pointless adoration of nature. What goes around, comes around.
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I once read a book by two extremely steaming (hat-tip Spike Milligan) Frenchmen who claimed that Hitler was literally preparing the surface of the Earth for the emergence of a super-race from within the Earth.
ReplyDeleteWorship of Gaia is nothing new, then ?
Alan Douglas
Can we please kick back against this re-invention of the word Nazi , much as the left have spent decades distancing themselves and using the educational, media and every available sympathetic establishment to revise history and paint the National Socialists as right wing, can we not surely keep pushing it back in their face, its yours and you the left own it. Nazism is a socialist invention and not a product of the right, and certainly not of any conservative thread of thought.
ReplyDeleteJust a thought, it really does need to be challenged in light of the dreadful re-invention of history by our educational establishment.
Do it for the Children.
DSV
OK, let's do it for the children. The truth is that the notion of Nazis being on the right was invented earlier than the modern left, notably by Soviet and Comintern propaganda. They had to distance themselves from the more popular national form of socialism and proclaimed that it was right wing while their own, international, form was left-wing. There are people out there who still believe it but we do need to fight it.
ReplyDeleteI am afraid to say, this is very much non-sense, so for the sake of the children, very nice populism by the way, let's examine: Yes, the Nazis had the word' socialist' in their title, as well as using the colour red which was tradionally associated with socialism, and it was a very deliberate attempt to confuse people, and surely worked on on the participants of this thread by the looks of it. The Nazis were in actual fact much more associated with, and helped by, monarchist elements of the early Weimar Republic which longed for a 'strong man' to take the reigns again. Also, by the way of the republic, let's keep in perspective that it was the (left-wing and formerly socialist) Social Democratic Party that actually proclaimed and fought for the first German republic with a democratic constitution. Democracy was loathed by the nazis, and they disabled all democratic institutions and levers as soon as they got into power. And of course then went on to the commit the most horrible atrocities....
ReplyDeleteThe strive for democracy was throughout the 20th anhd 19th century a movement by the left whereas pretty much by definition the convservative and the right were striving to keep (conserve) the status quo. It is true that some of the left who went into the disastrous 'dictatorship of the proletariat' line of thought totally overlooked that this would actually, surprisingly, imply a dictatorship..... They created states which were socialist and democratic by name only and then the powerful sought to 'conserve' their status quo again by repression of dissent. That, in my humble opinion, is not a left-wing thought, and certainly not a democracy.
From where I see it, you cannot be socialist without being democratic. And if the right would always have prevailed in the last 200 years, we probably would not be allowed to be having this discussion, still would have slavery and very few of us would have any kind of vote.
This is of course, only a (my) view, and for the sake of children, to keep turning populist again, I would let them read as many different trains of thought as possible, educate them to think freely and seek independent sources of information, and then discuss their findings with them. Because that is what democracy and the evolution of human thought live on, free discourse of ideas. And this is an idea that came from the left.