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DESCRIPTION
Unbeknownst to many, the highway to modern environmentalism passed through Nazi Germany. By 1935, the Third Reich was the greenest regime on the planet. Many scholars have rightly focused on Nazi racism over the years, but have often failed to notice that German Social Darwinism was rooted in ecology. What the Nazis derogatively labeled “the Eternal Jew,” the Jew who tried to overcome nature through international commercialism and cosmopolitanism, was specifically targeted. It is thus no coincidence that sweeping Nazi environmental legislation preceded the racially charged anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws. Furthermore, the quest for Lebensraum in the East, was far more than just another form of colonial expansionism. It was also a sinister eco-imperial plan designed to Germanize the landscape by removing populations of people who were unsuited to their environment, and by turning it into a beautiful natural park for the future health of the German race.
A LITTLE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
In 1989, Mark Musser graduated from the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, one of the premier environmental institutions in the country. In 1994, he received a Master of Divinity from Western Seminary in Portland, Oregon. Mark was a missionary to Belarus and Ukraine for seven years. He is now a pastor.
EXCERPT PREVIEW
“Mr. Musser exposes the powerful religious and philosophical undercurrents that are sweeping the “green” tsunami over our political landscape. In a day of sound-bite rhetoric and fund-raising memos obsessed with the latest scary story of alleged damage to Mother Nature, we often are too overwhelmed to see the flow from big ideas to big consequences. As one trained in modern environmental studies and experienced in actual environmental policy regulations, Musser ably deconstructs the Third Reich’s green connection--a sobering exhibit of what happens when ancient Baalist nature-worship coalesces with modern totalitarian bureaucracy. This is a lesson that biblically green “creation care” must learn or suffer the consequences of ignoring it.”
Charles Clough, BS MIT, MS in Atmospheric Science Texas Tech University, ThM Dallas Theological Seminary, Founder of Bible Framework
“Mark Musser's research into the Nazi elements in the environmental movement is unique and absolutely needed to understand current events. He demonstrates that radical environmentalism is an effort to control peoples' lives and that the Nazis used it for that purpose. Ominously, he also proves that the Nazis used environmentalism to target groups of people they wanted to eliminate from the face of the earth. We cannot allow government to acquire this kind of power again.”
Cliff Kincaid, Editor, Accuracy in Media
“Mark has written an invaluable book for anyone who wants to understand how a rejection of the God of Christians and Jews led the Nazis to worship other, grimmer, false gods. It is not a book that radical environmentalists will want you to read, which is precisely why it is indispensable reading for sane and decent people today.”
Bruce Walker writes many articles. He is also the author of Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the Lie and The Swastika Against the Cross: The Nazi War on Christianity.
The Jew … is a parasite in the body of other peoples. That he sometimes left his previous Lebensraum (Living Space) has nothing to do with his own purpose, but results from the fact that from time to time he was thrown out by the host nations he had misused. His spreading is a typical phenomenon for all parasites; he always seeks a new feeding ground for his race … The Jew’s life as a parasite in the body of other nations and states explains a characteristic which once caused Schopenhauer, as has already been mentioned, to call him the ‘great master in lying.’ Existence impels the Jew to lie, and to lie perpetually, just as it compels the inhabitants of the northern countries to wear warm clothing.
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
For the past 200 years in both North America and Europe, the Judeo-Christian worldview has been specifically targeted by modern environmental thinkers for being anti-natural. Much of this modern green opposition originally came forth from the dark and chilly northern forests of New England and Germany. The cool, remote and isolationist environmental mentality of the north has somehow captured the romantic imagination of modern environmentalism. Their worldview stands in direct opposition to the warmer and cultured Judeo-Christian civilization of southern Europe, born in the sunny Middle East. That this northern environmentalism would later become infatuated with the cult of global warming, dressed up in modern green science, is thus perhaps not so curious. Such a politicized ecology that has gone as far as politicizing the weather and the climate shows just how far this movement has come.
In fact, much like the ancient Canaanite nature religion eventually suffocated Israel and Judah in the Old Testament, modern environmentalism is well on its way to completely suffocating the modern western world as well, “there is hardly any area of your life that the greens consider off limits to intrusion. There is almost no personal behavior of yours that they consider too trivial or too sacrosanct to regulate.” The worship of nature and strict asceticism, with occasional bouts of human sacrifice, often went hand in hand in the ancient world. Similarly today, with all of the environmental land use regulations that are already on the table, not to mention another stampede which is poised to trample the modern western world even further with global warming/climate change mantra (or if this attempt ultimately fails another cause will most certainly be found), environmental asceticism may indeed become the moral ethic for both Europe and America where people will be not only expected, but also required to make substantial sacrifices for the sake of the environment. This ethic of environmental asceticism may also become the capstone of a final total replacement of the Judeo-Christian ethic in the western world. Even the recent publication of Green Bibles highlighting creation care found in a smattering of various Bible passages, is potentially just another nail driven into a sacrificial coffin built for both Jews and Christians and the autonomous western cultural superstructure built off its foundations. At root of this particular controversy is Genesis 1 where not only is man made in God’s image, and hence crowned as the king of creation, but he is also commanded by God to subdue and fill the earth (Genesis 1:24-31).
This ecological foundation laid in Genesis 1 is thus extremely controversial from an environmental point of view. In fact, the book of Genesis stands as the exact antithesis of what most environmentalists believe and promote these days. The biblical account presents to its readers that while the creation of the world was ultimately made for the glory of God, it was also made for man since he was made in God’s image. To add insult to injury, this biblical view of man and nature means that nature was specifically made for man to subdue and fill the earth under the divine blessing of marriage. Marriage thus has an overall divine purpose in the world – to subdue it and fill it with population. It thus becomes the basis for all subsequent human history in contrast to the natural world over which it has dominion. The dichotomy between nature and history was thus born in the opening chapter of Genesis, and matrimony is at the heart of the issue.
More striking is that this also implies that nature was considered un-kept and in need of human interference, even in its original fresh purity. While it is true that the subsequent fall of Adam and Eve into sin greatly complicated man’s dominion over nature, the Genesis mandate is still in effect today. It has never been rescinded. However, man’s dominion over nature is now saddled with much blood, sweat and tears (Genesis 3:16-21). Nature was cursed with thorns and thistles to discipline man’s rebellion (Genesis 3:18). It is no longer as benevolent as it was originally. It is also subject to corruption and pollution. Hence, both man and nature co-exist together in a fallen state. Because of Adam and Eve’s rebellion in the garden of Eden, God, man and nature are all alienated from each other as corruption, disease, mutation, increasing chaos, competition, and death rule as a way of life in the natural world.
As the creation story in Genesis has increasingly been treated as a myth in the modern western world, the notion that sin is the root cause for all the alienation that exists in nature (Hosea 4:1-6; Jeremiah 14:1-22) has increasingly fallen by the wayside. In its wake, environmentalists have found a different scapegoat to blame – the modern industrialized western world itself, improperly built off of the foundation of an alien, transcendental Judeo-Christian ethos that emphasizes man’s dominion over nature. This is the very doctrine which is allegedly most responsible for the degradation and exploitation of the environment. The great controversy here is that the biblical view of man and nature strongly implies an autonomous utilitarian ecology, the most hated ideological concept by Romantic environmental thinkers since the turn of the 19th century. It was especially the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment that emphasized this utilitarian view of nature that opened wide the door for the Industrial Revolution and free market capitalism, the two greatest forces of the modern world which was supposedly left the earth in ecological shambles.
Thus in opposition to this biblical-anthropocentric dominion view of nature, environmentalists have increasingly pushed for a nature based agenda that gives rights to ecosystems and animals on a par with basic human rights. This, of course, denies the fundamental distinction between man and nature. In fact modern environmentalists use ecological holism to subvert or trump man’s divine responsibility to subdue and fill the earth. Today, this is called ‘deep ecology,’ which “invites us to overturn the paradigms that dominate Western Society.” It is also more than ironic that the father of deep ecology, i.e., environmentalist Aldo Leopold, began strongly pushing for this nature based agenda upon returning home to America from his visit to Nazi Germany in 1935. In the mid 1930’s, Germany was the greenest regime on the planet. Leopold went there to observe the new environmental direction that the Third Reich was taking. Leopold was the Henry David Thoreau of the 20th century, and preceded Rachel Carson by several decades. The ‘deep’ ecological legacy he left America with in the late 1940’s was to “think like a mountain.”
Furthermore, as the Christian faith became increasingly more nominal and superficial in the modern western world, deep ecology has taken firm root. Thus the pantheistic nature worship of the ancients has come back out from the shadows of the green pagan forest in a powerful haunting way. Today, much like their ancient pagan forbearers, people increasingly fear the wrath of Mother Nature against them for daring to upset the natural balance of the delicate ecosystems on planet earth. Thus, the razor’s edge of life confirmed by the physical sciences, which should be a tremendous testimony to the existence of an Ultimate Designer that only the infinite personal God of the Bible can adequately satisfy, has instead left modern environmentalists in panic palace, “the naturalist atheistic world view sees earth and all its ecosystems as the result of chance processes and therefore inherently unstable and fragile, vulnerable to enormous harm from tiny causes.” Worse, is that all of their environmental worries, concerns, and general unbelief are now being foisted upon the modern world with unprecedented nature scaremongering tactics.
Still even more troublesome is that they are more than willing to sacrifice human culture and development for the sake of maintaining a holistic natural balance of things, which Genesis says has not existed since the Garden of Eden. Such a replacement of norms and standards has already led the contemporary west down a path where human concerns are increasingly taking a back seat to environmental anxieties with a green gone wild. More disconcerting than this is that a green gone wild could perhaps easily mutate into a much darker shade of green, perhaps even comparable to what happened in the ancient world when nature worshipers sacrificed human beings on occasion. Even the Aztecs sacrificed thousands of people for the sake of fair weather and the appeasement of the nature gods. Most disturbing of all is that one can also look to the historical experience of Nazi Germany in the 1930’s and 40’s to see how something like this may actually play itself out in the modern secular world with naturalism, holistic science, pantheism, nature mysticism and eco-fascism leading the way.
The word ‘holocaust’ itself is derived from the ancient Hebrew word that means ‘whole burnt offering.’ According to the Old Testament Levitical code, whole burnt offerings were animal sacrifices offered to Yahweh for religious purposes. Thus, the selection of this particular term to describe the Nazi crime strongly suggests both the sacrificial and religious nature of the most heinous act in human history. While the Jewish religious motivation for using this word to describe the unspeakable atrocity that was the holocaust is certainly warranted, the problem with using such a term is that it has often bordered on an ineffable holy word, “as the holocaust is sacralized, comparisons are perceived as blasphemy.” The unintended consequence of this is that it has tended to place a damper on getting to the roots of what the holocaust was all about. In other words, to describe the holocaust as a whole burnt offering brings up many interesting questions but fails to answer them all. Number one is that if the holocaust was a burnt offering, who were the priestly perpetrators of such a human sacrifice? Nor does it explain for what purpose the human sacrifice was offered in the first place. On the other hand, purely secular histories on the Third Reich have also downplayed or ignored the religious element of National Socialism. The overzealous leftist holy war against idealism that absurdly reduces all ideas to materialistic causes has clouded the fact that Nazi ideology did indeed have sinister religious consequences.
Nonetheless, the term holocaust is helpful in answering the question ‘what?’ It was a religious whole burnt offering. The question ‘how?’ of course has been answered as well – first by indiscriminate shooting and mass burial, and then later via cattle cars to the ghettos on the way to the gas chambers. The question ‘by whom?’ has almost been answered – by Hitler and the Nazis of course. The great problem here is that the reasoning behind the Nazi atrocities has not been well understood or appreciated, much less even promoted. Answers, of course, rightly dwelled upon the racial aspect of it all, but they somehow completely overlooked the ‘scientific’ evolutionary pantheism upon which Nazism was based on. As such, few have bothered to notice that Nazi racism was built on a ‘scientific’ ecological foundation.
This has led to great problems in answering the question ‘why?’ the holocaust. Even though the Nazis by and large hated both Christianity and Industry, both of them have often been routinely blamed for the holocaust. While both obviously played a dreadful role in the holocaust, they were not the primary players. Outside of the one great exception of Jesus Christ and the cross, Christians do not believe in human sacrifice. In fact, thanks to Christianity, the practice even of animal sacrifice, everywhere practiced in the ancient world at the time, eventually came to an end. Industrialists, on the other hand, would much rather employ people rather than sacrifice them. Industrialists are at least smart enough to realize that one cannot take advantage of a dead person. This was something that Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and armaments minister, complained about during the war. His complaints of course fell on deaf ears.
Hence, contrary to popular opinion, the primary player in the holocaust was the racial political ecology of the early German green movement. German Romanticism was largely born in the racist forests of Germany during the 1800’s. Over time, this eventually led to the destruction of millions of Jews and Slavs during the height of World War II. While it is true that from a logical point of view, the German racial ecology of the 19th century did not inevitably demand that there would be a Nazi holocaust in the 20th century – meaning that although it was a necessary condition for the holocaust it still was not a sufficient cause for the holocaust – history itself usually pays little attention to such abstract philosophical syllogisms. Certainly it must be allowed that the German Romantics of the 1800’s did not have the holocaust in mind when they spewed forth their anti-Semitic diatribes against the Jews for the sake of racial and environmental purity. Perhaps modern greens can take some solace in this fact? However, German racial political ecology was still the justification used for the holocaust, and Murphy’s Law has its own contradictory logic which very often overrides ‘rational’ discourse and decision making in the course of everyday life and history. In short, German Romanticism was converted into eco-imperialism by Nazi racism on the Eastern Front. The quest for Lebensraum in the East, i.e., the quest for empty environmental breathing room so that Germans would not biologically self destruct in increasingly overpopulated international cities at home, was a sinister eco-imperial plan that far surpassed the evils committed by the western powers in their drive for colonial expansionism.
