Saturday, November 3, 2007

A short history of eco-fascism

A good piece from global warming 'denier' Philip Stott, explaining that the phenomenon of eco-fascism is not a new one, but is eerily reminiscent of Hitler's concept of 'blood and soil':

…(Hitler’s ‘green’ guru, Richard-Walther) DarrĂ© argued that it was the European farmer who had been the creator of European culture, and he proposed the formation of a Germanic ‘aristocracy of the soil’, rooted in the old agrarian community, which would be protected from, and be a bulwark against, the ‘capitalist’ (for which, read ‘wandering Jewish’) world, the “chaos of the market”, and industrialisation. The movement was to be ‘völkisch’ (nearly impossible to translate), with a romantic focus on folklore, the ‘organic’, and purity. Provocatively, he even placed the pig at the heart of this cult, a celebration of German peasant life, coupled with unsophisticated racism, and, above all, anti-Semitism.

Stott's piece was itself inspired by this article by James Delingpole of the UK's Spectator magazine, on the surprising amount of convergence between the views of conservatives and certain strains of modern Marxism, in particular with regard to their opposition to neo-fascist ideologies such as environmental extremism.

Any similarity between An Inconvenient Truth and Triumph of the Will is, of course, purely coincidental.

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