Mankind's subservience to the commands of nature provides the connecting thread between Nazism and modern day environmentalism and represents a radical rejection of the Enlightenment's belief in progress. It is what separates the New Left and the modern Left's softer variants from their predecessors and leaves supporters of capitalism and markets as the last redoubt of belief in the potential of mankind's unfettered material progress.
‘This striving towards connectedness with the totality of life, with nature itself, a nature into which we are born, this is the deepest meaning and the essence of National Socialist thought,' wrote Ernst Lehmann, a professor of botany, in 1934, who characterized National Socialism as ‘politically-applied biology.' Sixty percent of all biologists joined the Nazis. As Proctor points out, ‘Nazism took root in the world's most powerful scientific culture, boasting half of the world's Nobel prizes.' The culture that gave rise to it existed before the rise of the Nazis and, as we shall see, though dormant in the three decades after 1945, would re-enter German politics in the late 1970s with environmentalism and anti-capitalism as two sides of the same coin.
Read Full Article »