There exists an absolute truth – God – toward which every sacred and individual human soul is created to aspire, eternally. This notion of the transcendent nature of man is the marrow of Judeo-Christian consciousness and the fountainhead of Western Civilization.
Unlike any other, this notion – dare we say “revelation” - has fueled man’s quests for knowledge in the sciences and beauty in the arts. It has tempered his savage lusts so that he might live more harmoniously with his fellow man. It is the principle that provides the Declaration of Independence its irrefutable and universal authority.
History is replete with examples demonstrating that the extent to which societies have abided this notion they have thrived. The extent to which they have not, they have failed, often brutally.
Collectivist thinking is the antithesis of this notion, and its legacy is one of mass poverty, destruction, and death. Consider its most effective advocates and practitioners - Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Pol Pot. Under their rule there exists no God, society alone is sacred. The individual human beings comprising it are no more than cattle to be herded and disposed of as convenient to the objectives of the State.
When discussing the leaders of such regimes, the conclusion is often simply that they were madmen. True enough. But if we genuinely wish to prevent future such madmen from gaining power, we must make ourselves thoroughly aware of the means by which they did so in the past. The process often reveals hair-raising similarities to much of what today is politically fashionable.
Author Mark Musser has done invaluable work in re-constructing the rationale that drove the Nazi death campaign and enabled it to sell its message of murder to so many. In his latest essay, Hitler’s Green Killing Machine, Musser further explores what he calls the “eco-imperialism” that, in the minds of many, justified German expansionism and the attempted extermination of the Jews.
Musser points out that in Mein Kampf, Hitler contends, “the Jews try to pacify or tame Nature through international commerce and capitalism on the one hand, or by stressing universal political values like communistic equality on the other hand, both of which rebel against the stern rigid laws of Nature which cannot be overcome. German zoologist Ernst Haeckel, the racist Darwinist who coined the term 'ecology' in 1866, posited that the Jewish transcendent view of man over nature made them resistant to evolutionary biological change, and hence the Jews had become a lesser race. While Hitler eschewed some of Haeckel's political views, he heartily agreed with this particular belief.”
What made the “Jewish transcendent view of man over nature” so offensive to the Nazis was that it was in complete contradiction to their own.
“Many Nazis, including the Fuhrer himself, believed that the industrial age along with its emphasis upon commercialism, city life, international trade and finance were corrupting the biological substance of the German people. The Nazis thus had an extreme literal reading of Nature which would spell absolute disaster for the Jews in particular precisely because they allegedly lived by a false, ‘eternal,’ or transcendent ethos, far above the natural world and her ‘scientific’ evolutionary natural laws of racism.”
Musser notes that, once in power, Hitler quickly codified his green ideology into law.
“By the summer of 1935, right before the Nuremberg laws were set up, Nazi Germany was by far the greenest regime on the planet. The Animal Protection laws were followed up by a strong hunting law for Hermann Goering in 1934. In 1935, Hitler also signed the Reich Nature Protection Act, the high water mark for Nazi environmentalism. Here is seen the birth of environmental permits, environmental impact statements and environmental totalitarianism. The Reich Nature Protection Act even allowed the expropriation of private property without compensation for the sake of the environment. Sustainable forestry practices called Dauerwald, which ironically means ‘eternal’ forest, were also introduced at the federal level.”
These laws, and the thinking behind them, logically concluded in the attempt to rid the world of the Jews who, to the Nazis, “had become a wandering and threatening invasive species because of their steadfastness to universal transcendent values in opposition to the Social Darwinian evolutionary laws of Nature…The revenge of Nature against the Jews was to be carried out by the Nazis, who thought themselves to be the Master Race precisely because they deemed themselves the most 'natural' or 'authentic,' i.e., the most in tune with Nature's pantheistic ways.”
No one advocates totalitarianism, the abolishment of human rights, and genocide openly. They do so - innocently or deliberately – through the promotion of some interpretation of justice and the common good. Through the modern environmentalist movement and its claims to seek the salvation of the planet, the free world has come perilously close to abdicating what liberties it still enjoys, opening the door to whatever monster wishes to take the reins of government and economy and do as he pleases.
As neo-pantheism and agnostic materialism increasingly replace the Judeo-Christian understanding of the transcendent nature of man in the minds of Western man, so this risk will increase. For if each individual human being is not held to be created in the image and likeness of God, endowed with certain unalienable rights, he has no natural rights at all. As such he is wholly at the whim of circumstances, ambitious do-gooders, and madmen.
Cheers,
Charlie
