The far right Green party?

[Steve Booth]

Authoritarianism and coercion

all green parties are far right

Years ago in the mid 1990s I wrote a story about a world where an authoritarian version of the Green Party got into power and was imposing its policies using totalitarian methods. I was basically asking the question how would it be possible for green ideas to prevail, given that the majority of people had contempt for this stuff and wouldn't voluntarily give up their 4x4s.

I suppose the dilemma is a version of the Rousseau thing about people being compelled to be free / good etc.

If you go down the electoral road, don't you always end up with this problem?

[supplementary hypothetical question added as afterthought to illustrate the point I am making - if as people like James Lovelock think, climate change has gone past the tipping point, and humanity is going to boil in its own juices, would an authoritarian style Green Party, imposing its policies, have been morally justified, say about 1975 or so, in order to save the human race?]

This said, my story was a work of fiction and the real Green Party, though it has / had people like David Icke in it, and other fringe elements, is in my experience a decent organisation. I don't think a totalitarian GP is likely. The people are too nice to go down that route.

 

[free spirit]

second the green movement itself is massivly influenced historically and politically by very right wing and dubious ideas - some of which are rather obvious ( nazism for example )

erm sorry, what?

have you any evidence of this whatsoever?

Not that I'm suggesting there are no people who're far right and also have green views, as there are*, but there's no way that that amounts to the green movement being influenced by the far right at least not meaningful way.

Unless you mean the odd twat like [SIZE=-1]Bjørn Lomborg, who's about as far out of the mainstream environmental thinking as it's possible to get, and even he's not really far right as such.[/SIZE]

*the bnp for instance is I think the only political party that states that if elected to control a council it will install renewable energy systems on all council buildings - maybe they share this policy with the green party?

 

[Monkeygrinder's Organ]

erm sorry, what?

have you any evidence of this whatsoever?

Hitler was a vegetarian. Case proved.

 

[free spirit]

Hitler was a vegetarian. Case proved.

ah yes, hitler was obviously a hippy

 

[Blagsta]

erm sorry, what?

have you any evidence of this whatsoever?

Not that I'm suggesting there are no people who're far right and also have green views, as there are*, but there's no way that that amounts to the green movement being influenced by the far right at least not meaningful way.

Unless you mean the odd twat like [SIZE=-1]Bjørn Lomborg, who's about as far out of the mainstream environmental thinking as it's possible to get, and even he's not really far right as such.[/SIZE]

*the bnp for instance is I think the only political party that states that if elected to control a council it will install renewable energy systems on all council buildings - maybe they share this policy with the green party?

He's right about this actually. There are links between Nazism and the concepts of lebensraum, fatherland, purity and health/ecology and pagan mystical reverence for the land stuff.

 

[Monkeygrinder's Organ]

He's right about this actually. There are links between Nazism and the concepts of lebensraum, fatherland, purity and health/ecology and pagan mystical reverence for the land stuff.

Certain similarities in some ideas doesn't demonstrate a 'massive influence' though.

 

[Blagsta]

I'm not an expert on this, but I think there was a big influence. Deep ecology for example has had some pretty dubious ideas around letting weak people die for example, not a million miles away from the social darwinism of national socialism.

 

[free spirit]

He's right about this actually. There are links between Nazism and the concepts of lebensraum, fatherland, purity and health/ecology and pagan mystical reverence for the land stuff.

erm...

Lebensraum (help·info) (German for "habitat" or literally "living space") was one of the major political ideas of Adolf Hitler, and an important component of Nazi ideology. It served as the motivation for the expansionist policies of Nazi Germany, aiming to provide extra space for the growth of the German population, for a Greater Germany. In Hitler's book Mein Kampf, he detailed his belief that the German people needed Lebensraum ("living space", i.e. land and raw materials), and that it should be found in the East. It was the stated policy of the Nazis to kill, deport, or enslave the Polish, Russian and other Slavic populations, whom they considered inferior, and to repopulate the land with Germanic peoples. The entire urban population was to be exterminated by starvation, thus creating an agricultural surplus to feed Germany and allowing their replacement by a German upper class.

The idea of a Germanic people without sufficient space dates back to long before Adolf Hitler brought it to prominence. The term Lebensraum in this sense was coined by Friedrich Ratzel in 1897, and was used as a slogan in Germany referring to the unification of the country and the acquisition of colonies, based on the English and French models. Ratzel believed that the development of a people was primarily influenced by their geographical situation and that a people that successfully adapted to one location would proceed naturally to another. This expansion to fill available space, he claimed, was a natural and necessary feature of any healthy species.[1]

(wiki)

while I can see that this is one potential extension of the malthusian thinking on environmental limits to population growth, it's an entirely different take on it to anything I've seen coming from a green perspective.

 

[FridgeMagnet]

He's right about this actually. There are links between Nazism and the concepts of lebensraum, fatherland, purity and health/ecology and pagan mystical reverence for the land stuff.

No, hold on, he says "second the green movement itself is massivly influenced historically and politically by very right wing and dubious ideas - some of which are rather obvious ( nazism for example )" which indicates that there is a direct link between the Nazis and the green movement, not that the Nazis coincidentally were known to talk about health and efficiency, as have many other groups. (I think it would be quite hard to claim that the Nazis were really "green" in any case, regardless of their iconography.)

 

[Monkeygrinder's Organ]

I'm not an expert on this, but I think there was a big influence. Deep ecology for example has had some pretty dubious ideas around letting weak people die for example, not a million miles away from the social darwinism of national socialism.

Again though that doesn't demonstrate influence in itself.

There absolutely have been some very dodgy ideas among deep ecologists. As far as I'm aware they didn't take them from Nazism though (although there may be exceptions.)

 

[Blagsta]

Free Spirit

Yes I know what lebensraum means thanks.






I think Dave Foreman (Earth First! US) had some fairly dubious things to say about letting people in the 3rd world die, for example.

 

[Blagsta]

I think you could also draw links between primitivism and nazi views on survival of the fittest.

 

[Blagsta]

Just found this btw
http://www.spunk.org/texts/places/germany/sp001630/peter.html
although I've yet to read the whole thing

 

[FridgeMagnet]

I think you could also draw links between primitivism and nazi views on survival of the fittest.

Yes I know what lebensraum means thanks.






I think Dave Foreman (Earth First! US) had some fairly dubious things to say about letting people in the 3rd world die, for example.

You can pick out things like this certainly, there are actually some real "eco-fascists" around rather than the Clarkson version, but they're not representative of "the green movement" are they?

 

[free spirit]

Yes I know what lebensraum means thanks.






I think Dave Foreman (Earth First! US) had some fairly dubious things to say about letting people in the 3rd world die, for example.

I didn't fully beyond a vague concept of 'living space', and thought it quite likely that others woudn't either.

anyway, what are these links you talk of?

 

[Blagsta]

Yes I know what lebensraum means thanks.

Sorry, I think I meant volks not lebensraum, although the two concepts are related.

 

[Blagsta]

You can pick out things like this certainly, there are actually some real "eco-fascists" around rather than the Clarkson version, but they're not representative of "the green movement" are they?

You might want to check that link I posted.

 

[Blagsta]

I didn't fully beyond a vague concept of 'living space', and thought it quite likely that others woudn't either.

anyway, what are these links you talk of?

You too.

While best known in Germany for his fanatical nationalism, Arndt was also dedicated to the cause of the peasantry, which lead him to a concern for the welfare of the land itself. Historians of German environmentalism mention him as the earliest example of 'ecological' thinking in the modern sense. His remarkable 1815 article On the Care and Conservation of Forests, written at the dawn of industrialization in Central Europe, rails against shortsighted exploitation of woodlands and soil, condemning deforestation and its economic causes. At times he wrote in terms strikingly similar to those of contemporary biocentrism: "When one sees nature in a necessary connectedness and interrelationship, then all things are equally important -- shrub, worm, plant, human, stone, nothing first or last, but all one single unity."

Arndt's environmentalism, however, was inextricably bound up with virulently xenophobic nationalism. His eloquent and prescient appeals for ecological sensitivity were couched always in terms of the well-being of the German soil and the German people, and his repeated lunatic polemics against miscegenation, demands for teutonic racial purity, and epithets against the French, Slavs, and Jews marked every aspect of his thought. At the very outset of the nineteenth century the deadly connection between love of land and militant racist nationalism was firmly set in place.

 

[Blagsta]

I think there are clear historical links between the development of ecology and National Socialism

Reformulating traditional German antisemitism into nature-friendly terms, the völkisch movement carried a volatile amalgam of nineteenth century cultural prejudices, Romantic obsessions with purity, and anti-Enlightenment sentiment into twentieth century political discourse. The emergence of modern ecology forged the final link in the fateful chain which bound together aggressive nationalism, mystically charged racism, and environmentalist predilections. In 1867 the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel coined the term 'ecology' and began to establish it as a scientific discipline dedicated to studying the interactions between organism and environment. Haeckel was also the chief popularizer of Darwin and evolutionary theory for the German-speaking world, and developed a peculiar sort of social darwinist philosophy he called 'monism.' The German Monist League he founded combined scientifically based ecological holism with völkisch social views. Haeckel believed in nordic racial superiority, strenuously opposed race mixing and enthusiastically supported racial eugenics. His fervent nationalism became fanatical with the onset of World War I, and he fulminated in antisemitic tones against the post-war Council Republic in Bavaria.

 

[Monkeygrinder's Organ]

You might want to check that link I posted.

As far as I can tell from a quick skim read it doesn't make any reference to Nazism being a direct influence on the modern green movement. It says that ecological concerns can lead to right wing ideology, or be part of it, but doesn't argue the case for a direct line.


ETA: Those quotes you've picked out don't do it IMO.

 

[Blagsta]

As far as I can tell from a quick skim read it doesn't make any reference to Nazism being a direct influence on the modern green movement. It says that ecological concerns can lead to right wing ideology, or be part of it, but doesn't argue the case for a direct line.

You might want to read it again then. It's fairly clear on the links between the development of ecological thinking and the volkish movement (a fairly major influence of National Socialism).

 

[FridgeMagnet]

You might want to check that link I posted.

The link you posted doesn't suggest that the green movement comes from the Nazis, or even was influenced by the Nazis. It does spend some time talking about Nazi blood and soil ideology - from a quick skim I'm not sure that it isn't taking it too much at face value, that's only a quick skim and isn't directly relevant here - but it doesn't attempt to say that modern ecological movements are derivative, just that ecological aims are not value-free e.g.

For all of these reasons, the slogan advanced by many contemporary Greens, "We are neither right nor left but up front," is historically naive and politically fatal. The necessary project of creating an emancipatory ecological politics demands an acute awareness and understanding of the legacy of classical ecofascism and its conceptual continuities with present-day environmental discourse.

and, well, nothing is value-free and everything benefits from awareness and understanding of history. I might say that it overstates the case. It certainly doesn't say "the green movement itself is massivly influenced historically and politically by very right wing and dubious ideas - some of which are rather obvious ( nazism for example )". In fact it says

It certainly does not indicate any inherent or inevitable connection between ecological issues and right-wing politics; alongside the reactionary tradition surveyed here, there has always been an equally vital heritage of left-libertarian ecology, in Germany as elsewhere.

 

[Blagsta]

ETA: Those quotes you've picked out don't do it IMO.

You don't think that Haeckel coining the term ecology demonstrates a historical link between the development of these ideas and nazism?

 

[Monkeygrinder's Organ]

You might want to read it again then. It's fairly clear on the links between the development of ecological thinking and the volkish movement (a fairly major influence of National Socialism).

Someone way back before Nazism was conceived of having some influence on both just doesn't begin to demonstrate Nazism as a massive influence on ecological thinking.

 

[Blagsta]

The link you posted doesn't suggest that the green movement comes from the Nazis, or even was influenced by the Nazis. It does spend some time talking about Nazi blood and soil ideology - from a quick skim I'm not sure that it isn't taking it too much at face value, that's only a quick skim and isn't directly relevant here - but it doesn't attempt to say that modern ecological movements are derivative, just that ecological aims are not value-free e.g.

and, well, nothing is value-free and everything benefits from awareness and understanding of history. I might say that it overstates the case. It certainly doesn't say "the green movement itself is massivly influenced historically and politically by very right wing and dubious ideas - some of which are rather obvious ( nazism for example )". In fact it says

The article shows a fairly direct link between the development of ecological ideas and concepts fairly central to Nazism. I don't get your denial of that tbh.

 

[Blagsta]

Someone way back before Nazism was conceived of having some influence on both just doesn't begin to demonstrate Nazism as a massive influence on ecological thinking.

Errrr...it shows a historical development of these ideas. I don't get your denial either.

Obviously claiming that the current green movement is fascist is stupid...but to deny the history of influences is weird IMO

 

[FridgeMagnet]

The article shows a fairly direct link between the development of ecological ideas and concepts fairly central to Nazism. I don't get your denial of that tbh.

I don't understand what you mean. We are talking about the "green movement" as it exists.

You're not surely claiming that all ecological ideas resulted from the Nazis?

 

[Monkeygrinder's Organ]

You don't think that Haeckel coining the term ecology demonstrates a historical link between the development of these ideas and nazism?

A quick wiki suggests that although Haeckel coined the term he didn't expand on it and this bloke: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenius_Warming#Warming.2C_religion_and_politics was the first to develop the idea.

 

[Monkeygrinder's Organ]

Errrr...it shows a historical development of these ideas. I don't get your denial either.

Obviously claiming that the current green movement is fascist is stupid...but to deny the history of influences is weird IMO

You're arguing a different point IMO. You supported the idea that there was a massive influence of Nazism on the modern green movement, and now you're trying to use common influences from decades earlier.

 

[Blagsta]

I don't understand what you mean. We are talking about the "green movement" as it exists, not "ecological ideas".

Errr...ideas develop historically. I don't get your denial of that.

You're not surely claiming that all ecological ideas resulted from the Nazis?

Of course I'm not, don't be silly. Nothing has singular roots. However your denial of any link at all is most puzzling.