Venus and the Flu

Venus has the closest approach to us in 8 years, and as Hoyle predicted, 45 days later we have a heapload of flu bugs.

Now we have swine flu!

Each flu is slightly different as it percolates through our atmosphere and lands down to the ground, often skipping northern latitudes, even though it likely enters through the north polar magnetic hole, where the plasma is channeled into creating the northern lights.

If we begin to understand that flu life is the smallest most basic life, then we can say with some authority that perhaps most viruses are created in rarefied plasma environments.

In this case, I could imagine Venus as a literal sea of bugs, as its atmosphere is so hot as so thick.

Here is a link to a paper on the subject.

Thank you Fred Hoyle!

Questions for Baxter

QUESTION TO BAXTER EXECUTIVES

by Alexander S Jones
former employee of NIH
LSBR / NIAMS

You initially claimed “trade secrets” regarding the vaccine contamination. Could you explain why Baxter initially attempted to cover this up?

Despite popular media claims to the contrary, coinfection of H5N1 and H3N2 would not produce simple reassortment. It would produce complex in vivo recombination of many competing strains in the infected host. Does Baxter agree with this assessment?

Furthermore the complex coinfection of H5N1 and H3N2 in a human would produce natural selection pressure for maximum virulence. Does Baxter dispute this claim? If so, why? If not, please explain why on earth would Baxter attempt to cover up an incident which may well have been lethal to 99% of humanity?

The book “Evolutionary Dynamics” suggest that viral coinfection selects for both maximum virulence and infectivity. Does Baxter dispute these mathematics? Considering this danger is well known among virologists, can Baxter immediately explain the precise sequence of events, including dates, times, and people involved, which led to contamination in over 16 labs in three separate countries in Europe with coinfected H5N1 and H3N2 material?

Is Baxter prepared to cooperate with all relevant authorities in the multiple countries to publicly release the genetic sequences of the contaminated material? Furthermore, what Clade was Baxter’s H5N1 vaccine from? Clade 1? Clade 2? Clade 3? Other? Is part of the reason Baxter is so eager to destroy the existing vaccine material that executives are concerned the world will find out their ‘custom’ H5N1 does not resemble the strains circulating in waterfowl?

Can Baxter please disclose all financial and social connections it has with the incoming Obama administration (as Baxter and its executives are based near Chicago) and whether Baxter stood to benefit financially from the outbreak of a pandemic through a contaminated season influenza vaccine in late 2009? Does Treasury Sec Geithner hold shares in Baxter? If so, how many shares?

Baxter Director Gail Fosler has profoundly disturbing connections to powerful organizations including the Council on Foreign Relations, high-level Chinese CCP leadership, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The question is simple: Is Baxter involved in biological weapons programs? Are any of these programs ‘international’ in scope? If so , who is providing the funding? What is the nature and intent of these programs? Are any of these programs part of the so-called ‘black budget’? That is , is Baxter involved in any “Special Access Programs” , as defined by Congress? Are any of these ‘waived’ “Special Access Programs”? Are any of these ‘unacknowledged’ ‘waived’ Special Access Programs (also known as ‘black programs’)?

Can Baxter explain exactly how a Level 3 biological warfare pathogen found its way into H3N2 material, regardless whether or not this experimental vaccine material was ‘intended’ for eventual use in humans or not. Is the contaminated H5N1 strain genetically engineered? If so, by whom? Does the NS protein in Baxter’s H5N1 material contain polymorphisms which suppress human interferon production? Was Baxter’s H5N1a full set of influenza genes? Or was it just the hemaglutanin and neuraminidase? Did Baxter’s H5N1 contain a poly-basic cleavage site on the Hemaglutanin surface protein? Why were the samples of experimental vaccine material not irradiated?

Are Baxter executives prepared to testify before Congress , under oath, that their corporation is not involved in biological warfare programs?

Baxter’s explanation so far has been chilling to put it mildly. Furthermore, it would be in Baxter’s best interest, if it were not involved in criminal activities, to set the record straight? Does Baxter not agree its silence and weak explanations suggest possible criminal malfeasance? If not criminally involved, why will Baxter executives not provide a complete and full account of this supposed contamination, (if indeed it was contamination rather than intentional weaponization.)

Do Baxter executives have any financial and/or personal connections to Toyama Pharma and T-705, an influenza polymerase inhibitor? Has Baxter experimented with influenza polymerase inhibitors? Will Baxter disclose precisely what its financial positions are regarding H5N1 pandemic ‘therapy’ included its intended market timelines? The ‘contamination’ was an extremely serious breach of risk as Baxter could have easily exterminated most of the human race if this experimental material was made into vaccines.

Why does Baxter hold patents on avian influenza RNA polymerase promoters? What legitimate public health and/or scientific interest does Baxter have in this research? (see Application number: 10/547,155, Publication number: US 2007/0134270 A) Will all Baxter executives come forward and immediately renounce weaponization of biologics? Are Baxter executives concerned about possible civil and/or criminal actions brought against them? Why or why not?

What are the financial connections between the Federal Reserve System and Baxter? Does Baxter receive funding from JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs? Does Baxter receive any national security exemptions (waivers)?

What specific steps , including a precise timeline, does Baxter plan on doing to allay the concerns of both the public and the scientific community? Again, can Baxter please describe the precise nature of their H5N1 strain, including genetic sequences, from where it was obtained, and whether it was genetically engineered? If genetically engineered, what modifications were made? Single nucleotide polymorphisms? RNA Recombination? Reassortment? What exactly, was in this experimental vaccine material? We want scientific answers immediately.

Pirating - You are being lied to

Who imagined that in 2009, the world's governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy - backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China - is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labeling as "one of the great menace of our times" have an extraordinary story to tell -- and some justice on their side.

Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the "golden age of piracy" - from 1650 to 1730 - the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage thief that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda-heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: pirates were often rescued from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can't? In his book Villains of All nations, the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence to find out. If you became a merchant or navy sailor then - plucked from the docks of London's East End, young and hungry - you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off for a second, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the Cat O' Nine Tails. If you slacked consistently, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.

Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied against their tyrannical captains - and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls "one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the eighteenth century." They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed "quite clearly - and subversively - that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal navy." This is why they were popular, despite being unproductive thieves.

The words of one pirate from that lost age - a young British man called William Scott - should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: "What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirating to live." In 1991, the government of Somalia - in the Horn of Africa - collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since - and many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died. Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury - you name it." Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When I asked Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish-stocks by over-exploitation - and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m worth of tuna, shrimp, lobster and other sea-life is being stolen every year by vast trawlers illegally sailing into Somalia's unprotected seas. The local fishermen have suddenly lost their livelihoods, and they are starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters."

This is the context in which the men we are calling "pirates" have emerged. Everyone agrees they were ordinary Somalian fishermen who at first took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least wage a 'tax' on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia - and it's not hard to see why. In a surreal telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, said their motive was "to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters... We don't consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas." William Scott would understand those words.

No, this doesn't make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters - especially those who have held up World Food Programme supplies. But the "pirates" have the overwhelming support of the local population for a reason. The independent Somalian news-site WardherNews conducted the best research we have into what ordinary Somalis are thinking - and it found 70 percent "strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence of the country's territorial waters." During the revolutionary war in America, George Washington and America's founding fathers paid pirates to protect America's territorial waters, because they had no navy or coastguard of their own. Most Americans supported them. Is this so different?

Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our nuclear waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We didn't act on those crimes - but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 percent of the world's oil supply, we begin to shriek about "evil." If we really want to deal with piracy, we need to stop its root cause - our crimes - before we send in the gun-boats to root out Somalia's criminals.

The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarised by another pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know "what he meant by keeping possession of the sea." The pirate smiled, and responded: "What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor." Once again, our great imperial fleets sail in today - but who is the robber?

Johann Hari

Columnist, London Independent

Posted February 4, 2009 | 05:12 AM (EST)

www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/you-are-being-lied-to-abo_b_155147.html

Easter

Easter is upon us and I went through pages and pages looking for exactly what it means. Knowing that it came from the worship of the planet Venus by Babylonians was only so helpful. I knew that Ishtar was the phonetic equal of Easter and the rabbits and eggs were carryovers from the past gods.

I couldn't fathom why we miss this point. Why do we miss that these festivals were practically universal and adopted by Catholicism after it became apparent that the "pagans to be converted" were not changing as much as the church liked.

The worship of Ishtar is important as it is she who brings about Jesus (the sun) and birthed him from Ba'al or Zeus. This kinda makes Joseph, Zeus and Ishtar, Mary... This is the planet's tale told again and again throughout history and we walk over it without examining it. We bring these people to earth and 'historify' them. We so need to look at all these point of evidence we are ignoring.

I hope that you have a happy Ishtar, and I hope you see there is much more to this world than interpretations of bringing the planets back down to earth.

Remember that Catholic (from the Romans themselves) means "One World of thought". The first "World order" which attempted to adopt as much as it could to bring all members of the empire under one religion.

Unfortunately it came to late, and the empire fell. Looks like the same actions are afoot to create a new religion and it's very creepy how much effort is being poured in to making it happen.

Don't bow to any man. We are completely falliable and not as the gods were ;P

The Club of Rome

HTTP://GREEN-AGENDA.COM/

09.03.08, 5:52pm

Since publishing this website I have received a number of inquiries regarding my background and motivation. So I have decided to add this page to describe my personal 'path of discovery' and why I felt compelled to write these articles. So here goes...

During my youth I spent many hours in the 'great outdoors' hiking, climbing, fishing and sailing, and I came to the conclusion that protecting and managing the environment would be an interesting and useful career. So I headed off to university and completed a bachelors degree in Biology, and then earned a postgraduate diploma and a masters degree in Environmental Science. Since then I have worked for a number of government environmental agencies and am currently employed as an Environmental Analyst in an agency that is responsible for implementing sustainable development in accordance with the requirements of Agenda 21. Although I had studied various UN conventions, treaties and protocols at university I did not realise their true implications until I became involved in preparing policies and action plans to implement them 'on the ground'.

Over time I became more and more disconcerted with the intrusive regulations being introduced in the name of environmental protection. It seemed to me that almost every activity now required a government permit. I kept asking myself 'what has this got to do with environmental management?' Even more disturbing was the fact that all our policies and plans were required to begin with a description of how they met the objectives of Agenda 21 and various other UN agreements, and were audited too determine how they complied with UN requirements. So I started looking into who the primary architects were behind Agenda 21, the Earth Charter, the GBA, the Kyoto Protocol, and the various conventions on biodiversity and conservation.

I was amazed to find that the same names kept appearing. In fact the same person is listed as the chief author of all those documents I just listed. He also headed the UN Reform Committee, authored the UN report on Global Governance, was the Assistant Secretary-General of the UN (#2) in charge, president of the UN 'University of Peace' and the leader of the Baha'i movement in North America. His name is Maurice Strong.

So I read every book, speech and lecture I could find authored by Mr Strong. I was absolutely anstonished by his worldview. And this man was #2 in charge of the UN for 12 years!! I also researched the other leaders, and most vocal proponents, of the modern green movement. I was amazed that the same phrases and concepts were being used by all of them. I read all the UN environmental reports and policies, all Al Gore's books, all of James Lovelock's books, Robert Muller, Paul Erhlich, Tim Flannery, and many more. They are full of references to the earth as a sacred sentient super-organism which is being destroyed by humanity's untamed destructive behaviour.

Then I started researching the speeches given by political leaders who are the most vocal about green issues e.g. Tony Blair, Angela Merkel, Arnie, Gordon Brown, Gorbachev etc. It is as if they are all singing off the same songsheet. I also looked into the writings of the most vocal scientists such as James Hansen, Stephen Scheinder and Michael Mann. I was again amazed how many times they refer to the earth as a sentient super-organism called Gaia. Anyway ... I have been researching lots of people and documents. And then I wondered if there were any links between these people, since they had such similar ideologies.

Then I discovered that many of them belonged to a group known as the Club of Rome. Current members of this 'Club' include Al Gore, Javier Solana, Bill Clinton, Mikhail Gorbachev, Tony Blair, Jimmy Carter, Stephen Scheider, Bill Gates, David Rockefeller, George Soros, Ted Turner and many other influential leaders. Sometimes I think this must just be a bad dream, but when you read what they say, in their OWN words, and then you see it all unfolding...

And so I have become personally convinced that 'man-made' climate change is a deceitful and devious fraud being used to implement a much deeper agenda. In order to protect Gaia from the 'voracious beast of capitalism' they must strike at the beast's lifeblood - fossil fuels. And in order to transition to 'sustainable global earth community' they must implement a new form of governance which will allow them to control, and ultimately reduce, human activity on this planet. I was quite dismayed when I first discovered all this, especially since I am a Christian, and wondered 'why did I waste seven years training for a career in an area that is being used to deceive so many?' and I then felt strongly compelled to warn others as best I could. And so I decided to write this website. I have tried to keep it as clear and concise, except it seems for this page, and use as many quotes and excerpts from official documents as possible.

• Posted by: xraymike

Fascist Ecology

"The “green wing” of the NSDAP was not a group of innocents, confused and manipulated idealists, or reformers from within; they were conscious promoters and executors of a vile program explicitly dedicated to inhuman racist violence, massive political repression and worldwide military domination. Their ‘ecological’ involvements, far from offsetting these fundamental commitments, deepened and radicalized them. In the end, their configuration of environmental politics was directly and substantially responsible for organized mass murder."

The “Green Wing” of the Nazi Party and its Historical Antecedents
Peter Staudenmaier

“We recognize that separating humanity from nature, from the whole of life, leads to humankind’s own destruction and to the death of nations. Only through a re-integration of humanity into the whole of nature can our people be made stronger. That is the fundamental point of the biological tasks of our age. Humankind alone is no longer the focus of thought, but rather life as a whole . . . This striving toward connectedness with the totality of life, with nature itself, a nature into which we are born, this is the deepest meaning and the true essence of National Socialist thought.” 1

In our zeal to condemn the status quo, radicals often carelessly toss about epithets like “fascist” and “ecofascist,” thus contributing to a sort of conceptual inflation that in no way furthers effective social critique. In such a situation, it is easy to overlook the fact that there are still virulent strains of fascism in our political culture which, however marginal, demand our attention. One of the least recognized or understood of these strains is the phenomenon one might call “actually existing ecofascism,” that is, the preoccupation of authentically fascist movements with environmentalist concerns. In order to grasp the peculiar intensity and endurance of this affiliation, we would do well to examine more closely its most notorious historical incarnation, the so-called “green wing” of German National Socialism.

Despite an extensive documentary record, the subject remains an elusive one, underappreciated by professional historians and environmental activists alike. In English-speaking countries as well as in Germany itself, the very existence of a “green wing” in the Nazi movement, much less its inspiration, goals, and consequences, has yet to be adequately researched and analyzed. Most of the handful of available interpretations succumb to either an alarming intellectual affinity with their subject.” 2 or a naive refusal to examine the full extent of the “ideological overlap between nature conservation and National Socialism.” 3 This article presents a brief and necessarily schematic overview of the ecological components of Nazism, emphasizing both their central role in Nazi ideology and their practical implementation during the Third Reich. A preliminary survey of nineteenth and twentieth century precursors to classical ecofascism should serve to illuminate the conceptual underpinnings common to all forms of reactionary ecology.

Two initial clarifications are in order. First, the terms “environmental” and “ecological” are here used more or less interchangeably to denote ideas, attitudes, and practices commonly associated with the contemporary environmental movement. This is not an anachronism; it simply indicates an interpretive approach which highlights connections to present-day concerns. Second, this approach is not meant to endorse the historiographically discredited notion that pre-1933 historical data can or should be read as “leading inexorably” to the Nazi calamity. Rather, our concern here is with discerning ideological continuities and tracing political genealogies, in an attempt to understand the past in light of our current situation — to make history relevant to the present social and ecological crisis.

The Roots of the Blood and Soil Mystique
Germany is not only the birthplace of the science of ecology and the site of Green politics’ rise to prominence; it has also been home to a peculiar synthesis of naturalism and nationalism forged under the influence of the Romantic tradition’s anti-Enlightenment irrationalism. Two nineteenth century figures exemplify this ominous conjunction: Ernst Moritz Arndt and Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl.

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. 4 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.” 5

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.

Riehl, a student of Arndt, further developed this sinister tradition. In some respects his ‘green’ streak went significantly deeper than Arndt’s; presaging certain tendencies in recent environmental activism, his 1853 essay Field and Forest ended with a call to fight for “the rights of wilderness.” But even here nationalist pathos set the tone: “We must save the forest, not only so that our ovens do not become cold in winter, but also so that the pulse of life of the people continues to beat warm and joyfully, so that Germany remains German.” 6 Riehl was an implacable opponent of the rise of industrialism and urbanization; his overtly antisemitic glorification of rural peasant values and undifferentiated condemnation of modernity established him as the “founder of agrarian romanticism and anti-urbanism.” 7

These latter two fixations matured in the second half of the nineteenth century in the context of the völkisch movement, a powerful cultural disposition and social tendency which united ethnocentric populism with nature mysticism. At the heart of the völkisch temptation was a pathological response to modernity. In the face of the very real dislocations brought on by the triumph of industrial capitalism and national unification, völkisch thinkers preached a return to the land, to the simplicity and wholeness of a life attuned to nature’s purity. The mystical effusiveness of this perverted utopianism was matched by its political vulgarity. While “the Volkish movement aspired to reconstruct the society that was sanctioned by history, rooted in nature, and in communion with the cosmic life spirit,” 8 it pointedly refused to locate the sources of alienation, rootlessness and environmental destruction in social structures, laying the blame instead to rationalism, cosmopolitanism, and urban civilization. The stand-in for all of these was the age-old object of peasant hatred and middle-class resentment: the Jews. “The Germans were in search of a mysterious wholeness that would restore them to primeval happiness, destroying the hostile milieu of urban industrial civilization that the Jewish conspiracy had foisted on them.” 9

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.

In this way “Haeckel contributed to that special variety of German thought which served as the seed bed for National Socialism. He became one of Germany’s major ideologists for racism, nationalism and imperialism.” 10 Near the end of his life he joined the Thule Society, “a secret, radically right-wing organization which played a key role in the establishment of the Nazi movement.” 11 But more than merely personal continuities are at stake here. The pioneer of scientific ecology, along with his disciples Willibald Hentschel, Wilhelm Bölsche and Bruno Wille, profoundly shaped the thinking of subsequent generations of environmentalists by embedding concern for the natural world in a tightly woven web of regressive social themes. From its very beginnings, then, ecology was bound up in an intensely reactionary political framework.

The specific contours of this early marriage of ecology and authoritarian social views are highly instructive. At the center of this ideological complex is the direct, unmediated application of biological categories to the social realm. Haeckel held that “civilization and the life of nations are governed by the same laws as prevail throughout nature and organic life.” 12 This notion of ‘natural laws’ or ‘natural order’ has long been a mainstay of reactionary environmental thought. Its concomitant is anti-humanism:

Thus, for the Monists, perhaps the most pernicious feature of European bourgeois civilization was the inflated importance which it attached to the idea of man in general, to his existence and to his talents, and to the belief that through his unique rational faculties man could essentially recreate the world and bring about a universally more harmonious and ethically just social order. [Humankind was] an insignificant creature when viewed as part of and measured against the vastness of the cosmos and the overwhelming forces of nature. 13
Other Monists extended this anti-humanist emphasis and mixed it with the traditional völkisch motifs of indiscriminate anti-industrialism and anti-urbanism as well as the newly emerging pseudo-scientific racism. The linchpin, once again, was the conflation of biological and social categories. The biologist Raoul Francé, founding member of the Monist League, elaborated so-called Lebensgesetze, ‘laws of life’ through which the natural order determines the social order. He opposed racial mixing, for example, as “unnatural.” Francé is acclaimed by contemporary ecofascists as a “pioneer of the ecology movement.” 14

Francé‘s colleague Ludwig Woltmann, another student of Haeckel, insisted on a biological interpretation for all societal phenomena, from cultural attitudes to economic arrangements. He stressed the supposed connection between environmental purity and ‘racial’ purity: “Woltmann took a negative attitude toward modern industrialism. He claimed that the change from an agrarian to an industrial society had hastened the decline of the race. In contrast to nature, which engendered the harmonic forms of Germanism, there were the big cities, diabolical and inorganic, destroying the virtues of the race.” 15

Thus by the early years of the twentieth century a certain type of ‘ecological’ argumentation, saturated with right-wing political content, had attained a measure of respectability within the political culture of Germany. During the turbulent period surrounding World War I, the mixture of ethnocentric fanaticism, regressive rejection of modernity and genuine environmental concern proved to be a very potent potion indeed.

The Youth Movement and the Weimar Era
The chief vehicle for carrying this ideological constellation to prominence was the youth movement, an amorphous phenomenon which played a decisive but highly ambivalent role in shaping German popular culture during the first three tumultuous decades of this century. Also known as the Wandervögel (which translates roughly as ‘wandering free spirits’), the youth movement was a hodge-podge of countercultural elements, blending neo-Romanticism, Eastern philosophies, nature mysticism, hostility to reason, and a strong communal impulse in a confused but no less ardent search for authentic, non-alienated social relations. Their back-to-the-land emphasis spurred a passionate sensitivity to the natural world and the damage it suffered. They have been aptly characterized as ‘right-wing hippies,’ for although some sectors of the movement gravitated toward various forms of emancipatory politics (though usually shedding their environmentalist trappings in the process), most of the Wandervöge were eventually absorbed by the Nazis. This shift from nature worship to Führer worship is worth examining.

The various strands of the youth movement shared a common self-conception: they were a purportedly ‘non-political’ response to a deep cultural crisis, stressing the primacy of direct emotional experience over social critique and action. They pushed the contradictions of their time to the breaking point, but were unable or unwilling to take the final step toward organized, focused social rebellion, “convinced that the changes they wanted to effect in society could not be brought about by political means, but only by the improvement of the individual.” 16 This proved to be a fatal error. “Broadly speaking, two ways of revolt were open to them: they could have pursued their radical critique of society, which in due course would have brought them into the camp of social revolution. [But] the Wandervögel chose the other form of protest against society — romanticism.” 17

This posture lent itself all too readily to a very different kind of political mobilization: the ‘unpolitical’ zealotry of fascism. The youth movement did not simply fail in its chosen form of protest, it was actively realigned when its members went over to the Nazis by the thousands. Its countercultural energies and its dreams of harmony with nature bore the bitterest fruit. This is, perhaps, the unavoidable trajectory of any movement which acknowledges and opposes social and ecological problems but does not recognize their systemic roots or actively resist the political and economic structures which generate them. Eschewing societal transformation in favor of personal change, an ostensibly apolitical disaffection can, in times of crisis, yield barbaric results.

The attraction such perspectives exercised on idealistic youth is clear: the enormity of the crisis seemed to enjoin a total rejection of its apparent causes. It is in the specific form of this rejection that the danger lies. Here the work of several more theoretical minds from the period is instructive. The philosopher Ludwig Klages profoundly influenced the youth movement and particularly shaped their ecological consciousness. He authored a tremendously important essay titled “Man and Earth” for the legendary Meissner gathering of the Wandervögel in 1913. 18 An extraordinarily poignant text and the best known of all Klages’ work, it is not only “one of the very greatest manifestoes of the radical ecopacifist movement in Germany,” 19 but also a classic example of the seductive terminology of reactionary ecology.

“Man and Earth” anticipated just about all of the themes of the contemporary ecology movement. It decried the accelerating extinction of species, disturbance of global ecosystemic balance, deforestation, destruction of aboriginal peoples and of wild habitats, urban sprawl, and the increasing alienation of people from nature. In emphatic terms it disparaged Christianity, capitalism, economic utilitarianism, hyperconsumption and the ideology of ‘progress.’ It even condemned the environmental destructiveness of rampant tourism and the slaughter of whales, and displayed a clear recognition of the planet as an ecological totality. All of this in 1913 !

It may come as a surprise, then, to learn that Klages was throughout his life politically archconservative and a venomous antisemite. One historian labels him a “Volkish fanatic” and another considers him simply “an intellectual pacemaker for the Third Reich” who “paved the way for fascist philosophy in many important respects.” 20 In “Man and Earth” a genuine outrage at the devastation of the natural environment is coupled with a political subtext of cultural despair. 21 Klages’ diagnosis of the ills of modern society, for all its declamations about capitalism, returns always to a single culprit: “Geist.” His idiosyncratic use of this term, which means mind or intellect, was meant to denounce not only hyperrationalism or instrumental reason, but rational thought itself. Such a wholesale indictment of reason cannot help but have savage political implications. It forecloses any chance of rationally reconstructing society’s relationship with nature and justifies the most brutal authoritarianism. But the lessons of Klages’ life and work have been hard for ecologists to learn. In 1980, “Man and Earth” was republished as an esteemed and seminal treatise to accompany the birth of the German Greens.

Another philosopher and stern critic of Enlightenment who helped bridge fascism and environmentalism was Martin Heidegger. A much more renowned thinker than Klages, Heidegger preached “authentic Being” and harshly criticized modern technology, and is therefore often celebrated as a precursor of ecological thinking. On the basis of his critique of technology and rejection of humanism, contemporary deep ecologists have elevated Heidegger to their pantheon of eco-heroes:

Heidegger’s critique of anthropocentric humanism, his call for humanity to learn to “let things be,” his notion that humanity is involved in a “play” or “dance” with earth, sky, and gods, his meditation on the possibility of an authentic mode of “dwelling” on the earth, his complaint that industrial technology is laying waste to the earth, his emphasis on the importance of local place and “homeland,” his claim that humanity should guard and preserve things, instead of dominating them — all these aspects of Heidegger’s thought help to support the claim that he is a major deep ecological theorist. 22
Such effusions are, at best, dangerously naive. They suggest a style of thought utterly oblivious to the history of fascist appropriations of all the elements the quoted passage praises in Heidegger. (To his credit, the author of the above lines, a major deep ecological theorist in his own right, has since changed his position and eloquently urged his colleagues to do the same.) 23 As for the philosopher of Being himself, he was — unlike Klages, who lived in Switzerland after 1915 — an active member of the Nazi party and for a time enthusiastically, even adoringly supported the Führer. His mystical panegyrics to Heimat (homeland) were complemented by a deep antisemitism, and his metaphysically phrased broadsides against technology and modernity converged neatly with populist demagogy. Although he lived and taught for thirty years after the fall of the Third Reich, Heidegger never once publicly regretted, much less renounced, his involvement with National Socialism, nor even perfunctorily condemned its crimes. His work, whatever its philosophical merits, stands today as a signal admonition about the political uses of anti-humanism in ecological garb.

In addition to the youth movement and protofascist philosophies, there were, of course, practical efforts at protecting natural habitats during the Weimar period. Many of these projects were profoundly implicated in the ideology which culminated in the victory of ‘Blood and Soil.’ A 1923 recruitment pitch for a woodlands preservation outfit gives a sense of the environmental rhetoric of the time:

“In every German breast the German forest quivers with its caverns and ravines, crags and boulders, waters and winds, legends and fairy tales, with its songs and its melodies, and awakens a powerful yearning and a longing for home; in all German souls the German forest lives and weaves with its depth and breadth, its stillness and strength, its might and dignity, its riches and its beauty — it is the source of German inwardness, of the German soul, of German freedom. Therefore protect and care for the German forest for the sake of the elders and the youth, and join the new German “League for the Protection and Consecration of the German Forest.“24
The mantra-like repetition of the word “German” and the mystical depiction of the sacred forest fuse together, once again, nationalism and naturalism. This intertwinement took on a grisly significance with the collapse of the Weimar republic. For alongside such relatively innocuous conservation groups, another organization was growing which offered these ideas a hospitable home: the National Socialist German Workers Party, known by its acronym NSDAP. Drawing on the heritage of Arndt, Riehl, Haeckel, and others (all of whom were honored between 1933 and 1945 as forebears of triumphant National Socialism), the Nazi movement’s incorporation of environmentalist themes was a crucial factor in its rise to popularity and state power.

Nature in National Socialist Ideology
The reactionary ecological ideas whose outlines are sketched above exerted a powerful and lasting influence on many of the central figures in the NSDAP. Weimar culture, after all, was fairly awash in such theories, but the Nazis gave them a peculiar inflection. The National Socialist “religion of nature,” as one historian has described it, was a volatile admixture of primeval teutonic nature mysticism, pseudo-scientific ecology, irrationalist anti-humanism, and a mythology of racial salvation through a return to the land. Its predominant themes were ‘natural order,’ organicist holism and denigration of humanity: “Throughout the writings, not only of Hitler, but of most Nazi ideologues, one can discern a fundamental deprecation of humans vis-à-vis nature, and, as a logical corollary to this, an attack upon human efforts to master nature.“25 Quoting a Nazi educator, the same source continues: “anthropocentric views in general had to be rejected. They would be valid only ‘if it is assumed that nature has been created only for man. We decisively reject this attitude. According to our conception of nature, man is a link in the living chain of nature just as any other organism’.” 26

Such arguments have a chilling currency within contemporary ecological discourse: the key to social-ecological harmony is ascertaining “the eternal laws of nature’s processes” (Hitler) and organizing society to correspond to them. The Führer was particularly fond of stressing the “helplessness of humankind in the face of nature’s everlasting law.“27 Echoing Haeckel and the Monists, Mein Kampf announces: “When people attempt to rebel against the iron logic of nature, they come into conflict with the very same principles to which they owe their existence as human beings. Their actions against nature must lead to their own downfall.“28

The authoritarian implications of this view of humanity and nature become even clearer in the context of the Nazis’ emphasis on holism and organicism. In 1934 the director of the Reich Agency for Nature Protection, Walter Schoenichen, established the following objectives for biology curricula: “Very early, the youth must develop an understanding of the civic importance of the ‘organism’, i.e. the co-ordination of all parts and organs for the benefit of the one and superior task of life.“29 This (by now familiar) unmediated adaptation of biological concepts to social phenomena served to justify not only the totalitarian social order of the Third Reich but also the expansionist politics of Lebensraum (the plan of conquering ‘living space’ in Eastern Europe for the German people). It also provided the link between environmental purity and racial purity:

Two central themes of biology education follow [according to the Nazis] from the holistic perspective: nature protection and eugenics. If one views nature as a unified whole, students will automatically develop a sense for ecology and environmental conservation. At the same time, the nature protection concept will direct attention to the urbanized and ‘overcivilized’ modern human race.30
In many varieties of the National Socialist world view ecological themes were linked with traditional agrarian romanticism and hostility to urban civilization, all revolving around the idea of rootedness in nature. This conceptual constellation, especially the search for a lost connection to nature, was most pronounced among the neo-pagan elements in the Nazi leadership, above all Heinrich Himmler, Alfred Rosenberg, and Walther Darré. Rosenberg wrote in his colossal The Myth of the 20th Century: “Today we see the steady stream from the countryside to the city, deadly for the Volk. The cities swell ever larger, unnerving the Volk and destroying the threads which bind humanity to nature; they attract adventurers and profiteers of all colors, thereby fostering racial chaos.“31

Such musings, it must be stressed, were not mere rhetoric; they reflected firmly held beliefs and, indeed, practices at the very top of the Nazi hierarchy which are today conventionally associated with ecological attitudes. Hitler and Himmler were both strict vegetarians and animal lovers, attracted to nature mysticism and homeopathic cures, and staunchly opposed to vivisection and cruelty to animals. Himmler even established experimental organic farms to grow herbs for SS medicinal purposes. And Hitler, at times, could sound like a veritable Green utopian, discussing authoritatively and in detail various renewable energy sources (including environmentally appropriate hydropower and producing natural gas from sludge) as alternatives to coal, and declaring “water, winds and tides” as the energy path of the future.32

Even in the midst of war, Nazi leaders maintained their commitment to ecological ideals which were, for them, an essential element of racial rejuvenation. In December 1942, Himmler released a decree “On the Treatment of the Land in the Eastern Territories,” referring to the newly annexed portions of Poland. It read in part:

The peasant of our racial stock has always carefully endeavored to increase the natural powers of the soil, plants, and animals, and to preserve the balance of the whole of nature. For him, respect for divine creation is the measure of all culture. If, therefore, the new Lebensräume (living spaces) are to become a homeland for our settlers, the planned arrangement of the landscape to keep it close to nature is a decisive prerequisite. It is one of the bases for fortifying the German Volk.33
This passage recapitulates almost all of the tropes comprised by classical ecofascist ideology: Lebensraum, Heimat, the agrarian mystique, the health of the Volk, closeness to and respect for nature (explicitly constructed as the standard against which society is to be judged), maintaining nature’s precarious balance, and the earthy powers of the soil and its creatures. Such motifs were anything but personal idiosyncracies on the part of Hitler, Himmler, or Rosenberg; even Göring — who was, along with Goebbels, the member of the Nazi inner circle least hospitable to ecological ideas — appeared at times to be a committed conservationist.34 These sympathies were also hardly restricted to the upper echelons of the party. A study of the membership rolls of several mainstream Weimar era Naturschutz (nature protection) organizations revealed that by 1939, fully 60 percent of these conservationists had joined the NSDAP (compared to about 10 percent of adult men and 25 percent of teachers and lawyers).35 Clearly the affinities between environmentalism and National Socialism ran deep.

At the level of ideology, then, ecological themes played a vital role in German fascism. It would be a grave mistake, however, to treat these elements as mere propaganda, cleverly deployed to mask Nazism’s true character as a technocratic-industrialist juggernaut. The definitive history of German anti-urbanism and agrarian romanticism argues incisively against this view:

Nothing could be more wrong than to suppose that most of the leading National Socialist ideologues had cynically feigned an agrarian romanticism and hostility to urban culture, without any inner conviction and for merely electoral and propaganda purposes, in order to hoodwink the public [ . . . ] In reality, the majority of the leading National Socialist ideologists were without any doubt more or less inclined to agrarian romanticism and anti-urbanism and convinced of the need for a relative re-agrarianization.36
The question remains, however: To what extent did the Nazis actually implement environmental policies during the twelve-year Reich? There is strong evidence that the ‘ecological’ tendency in the party, though largely ignored today, had considerable success for most of the party’s reign. This “green wing” of the NSDAP was represented above all by Walther Darré, Fritz Todt, Alwin Seifert and Rudolf Hess, the four figures who primarily shaped fascist ecology in practice.

Blood and Soil as Official Doctrine
“The unity of blood and soil must be restored,” proclaimed Richard Walther Darré in 1930.37 This infamous phrase denoted a quasi-mystical connection between ‘blood’ (the race or Volk) and ‘soil’ (the land and the natural environment) specific to Germanic peoples and absent, for example, among Celts and Slavs. For the enthusiasts of Blut und Boden, the Jews especially were a rootless, wandering people, incapable of any true relationship with the land. German blood, in other words, engendered an exclusive claim to the sacred German soil. While the term “blood and soil” had been circulating in völkisch circles since at least the Wilhelmine era, it was Darré who first popularized it as a slogan and then enshrined it as a guiding principle of Nazi thought. Harking back to Arndt and Riehl, he envisioned a thoroughgoing ruralization of Germany and Europe, predicated on a revitalized yeoman peasantry, in order to ensure racial health and ecological sustainability.

Darré was one of the party’s chief “race theorists” and was also instrumental in galvanizing peasant support for the Nazis during the critical period of the early 1930s. From 1933 until 1942 he held the posts of Reich Peasant Leader and Minister of Agriculture. This was no minor fiefdom; the agriculture ministry had the fourth largest budget of all the myriad Nazi ministries even well into the war.38 From this position Darré was able to lend vital support to various ecologically oriented initiatives. He played an essential part in unifying the nebulous proto-environmentalist tendencies in National Socialism:

It was Darré who gave the ill-defined anti-civilization, anti-liberal, anti-modern and latent anti-urban sentiments of the Nazi elite a foundation in the agrarian mystique. And it seems as if Darré had an immense influence on the ideology of National Socialism, as if he was able to articulate significantly more clearly than before the values system of an agrarian society contained in Nazi ideology and — above all — to legitimate this agrarian model and give Nazi policy a goal that was clearly oriented toward a far-reaching re-agrarianization.39
This goal was not only quite consonant with imperialist expansion in the name of Lebensraum, it was in fact one of its primary justifications, even motivations. In language replete with the biologistic metaphors of organicism, Darré declared: “The concept of Blood and Soil gives us the moral right to take back as much land in the East as is necessary to establish a harmony between the body of our Volk and the geopolitical space.“40

Aside from providing green camouflage for the colonization of Eastern Europe, Darré worked to install environmentally sensitive principles as the very basis of the Third Reich’s agricultural policy. Even in its most productivist phases, these precepts remained emblematic of Nazi doctrine. When the “Battle for Production” (a scheme to boost the productivity of the agricultural sector) was proclaimed at the second Reich Farmers Congress in 1934, the very first point in the program read “Keep the soil healthy !” But Darré‘s most important innovation was the introduction on a large scale of organic farming methods, significantly labeled “lebensgesetzliche Landbauweise,” or farming according to the laws of life. The term points up yet again the natural order ideology which underlies so much reactionary ecological thought. The impetus for these unprecedented measures came from Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy and its techniques of biodynamic cultivation.41

The campaign to institutionalize organic farming encompassed tens of thousands of smallholdings and estates across Germany. It met with considerable resistance from other members of the Nazi hierarchy, above all Backe and Göring. But Darré, with the help of Hess and others, was able to sustain the policy until his forced resignation in 1942 (an event which had little to do with his environmentalist leanings). And these efforts in no sense represented merely Darré‘s personal predilections; as the standard history of German agricultural policy points out, Hitler and Himmler “were in complete sympathy with these ideas.“42 Still, it was largely Darré‘s influence in the Nazi apparatus which yielded, in practice, a level of government support for ecologically sound farming methods and land use planning unmatched by any state before or since.

For these reasons Darré has sometimes been regarded as a forerunner of the contemporary Green movement. His biographer, in fact, once referred to him as the “father of the Greens.“43 Her book Blood and Soil, undoubtedly the best single source on Darré in either German or English, consistently downplays the virulently fascist elements in his thinking, portraying him instead as a misguided agrarian radical. This grave error in judgement indicates the powerfully disorienting pull of an ‘ecological’ aura. Darré‘s published writings alone, dating back to the early twenties, are enough to indict him as a rabidly racist and jingoist ideologue particularly prone to a vulgar and hateful antisemitism (he spoke of Jews, revealingly, as “weeds”). His decade-long tenure as a loyal servant and, moreover, architect of the Nazi state demonstrates his dedication to Hitler’s deranged cause. One account even claims that it was Darré who convinced Hitler and Himmler of the necessity of exterminating the Jews and Slavs.44 The ecological aspects of his thought cannot, in sum, be separated from their thoroughly Nazi framework. Far from embodying the ‘redeeming’ facets of National Socialism, Darré represents the baleful specter of ecofascism in power.

Implementing the Ecofascist Program
It is frequently pointed out that the agrarian and romantic moments in Nazi ideology and policy were in constant tension with, if not in flat contradiction to, the technocratic-industrialist thrust of the Third Reich’s rapid modernization. What is not often remarked is that even these modernizing tendencies had a significant ecological component. The two men principally responsible for sustaining this environmentalist commitment in the midst of intensive industrialization were Reichsminister Fritz Todt and his aide, the high-level planner and engineer Alwin Seifert.

Todt was “one of the most influential National Socialists,“45 directly responsible for questions of technological and industrial policy. At his death in 1942 he headed three different cabinet-level ministries in addition to the enormous quasi-official Organisation Todt, and had “gathered the major technical tasks of the Reich into his own hands.“46 According to his successor, Albert Speer, Todt “loved nature” and “repeatedly had serious run-ins with Bormann, protesting against his despoiling the landscape around Obersalzberg.“47 Another source calls him simply “an ecologist.“48 This reputation is based chiefly on Todt’s efforts to make Autobahn construction — one of the largest building enterprises undertaken in this century — as environmentally sensitive as possible.

The pre-eminent historian of German engineering describes this commitment thus: “Todt demanded of the completed work of technology a harmony with nature and with the landscape, thereby fulfilling modern ecological principles of engineering as well as the ‘organological’ principles of his own era along with their roots in völkisch ideology.“49 The ecological aspects of this approach to construction went well beyond an emphasis on harmonious adaptation to the natural surroundings for aesthetic reasons; Todt also established strict criteria for respecting wetlands, forests and ecologically sensitive areas. But just as with Arndt, Riehl and Darré, these environmentalist concerns were inseparably bound to a völkisch-nationalist outlook. Todt himself expressed this connection succinctly: “The fulfillment of mere transportation purposes is not the final aim of German highway construction. The German highway must be an expression of its surrounding landscape and an expression of the German essence.“50

Todt’s chief advisor and collaborator on environmental issues was his lieutenant Alwin Seifert, whom Todt reportedly once called a “fanatical ecologist.“51 Seifert bore the official title of Reich Advocate for the Landscape, but his nickname within the party was “Mr. Mother Earth.” The appellation was deserved; Seifert dreamed of a “total conversion from technology to nature,“52 and would often wax lyrical about the wonders of German nature and the tragedy of “humankind’s” carelessness. As early as 1934 he wrote to Hess demanding attention to water issues and invoking “work methods that are more attuned to nature.“53 In discharging his official duties Seifert stressed the importance of wilderness and energetically opposed monoculture, wetlands drainage and chemicalized agriculture. He criticized Darré as too moderate, and “called for an agricultural revolution towards ‘a more peasant-like, natural, simple’ method of farming, ‘independent of capital’.“54

With the Third Reich’s technological policy entrusted to figures such as these, even the Nazis’ massive industrial build-up took on a distinctively green hue. The prominence of nature in the party’s philosophical background helped ensure that more radical initiatives often received a sympathetic hearing in the highest offices of the Nazi state. In the mid-thirties Todt and Seifert vigorously pushed for an all-encompassing Reich Law for the Protection of Mother Earth “in order to stem the steady loss of this irreplaceable basis of all life.“55 Seifert reports that all of the ministries were prepared to co-operate save one; only the minister of the economy opposed the bill because of its impact on mining.

But even near-misses such as these would have been unthinkable without the support of Reich Chancellor Rudolf Hess, who provided the “green wing” of the NSDAP a secure anchor at the very top of the party hierarchy. It would be difficult to overestimate Hess’s power and centrality in the complex governmental machinery of the National Socialist regime. He joined the party in 1920 as member #16, and for two decades was Hitler’s devoted personal deputy. He has been described as “Hitler’s closest confidant,“56 and the Führer himself referred to Hess as his “closest advisor.“57 Hess was not only the highest party leader and second in line (after Göring) to succeed Hitler; in addition, all legislation and every decree had to pass through his office before becoming law.

An inveterate nature lover as well as a devout Steinerite, Hess insisted on a strictly biodynamic diet — not even Hitler’s rigorous vegetarian standards were good enough for him — and accepted only homeopathic medicines. It was Hess who introduced Darré to Hitler, thus securing the “green wing” its first power base. He was an even more tenacious proponent of organic farming than Darré, and pushed the latter to take more demonstrative steps in support of the lebensgesetzliche Landbauweise.58 His office was also directly responsible for land use planning across the Reich, employing a number of specialists who shared Seifert’s ecological approach.59

With Hess’s enthusiastic backing, the “green wing” was able to achieve its most notable successes. As early as March 1933, a wide array of environmentalist legislation was approved and implemented at national, regional and local levels. These measures, which included reforestation programs, bills protecting animal and plant species, and preservationist decrees blocking industrial development, undoubtedly “ranked among the most progressive in the world at that time.“60 Planning ordinances were designed for the protection of wildlife habitat and at the same time demanded respect for the sacred German forest. The Nazi state also created the first nature preserves in Europe.

Along with Darré‘s efforts toward re-agrarianization and support for organic agriculture, as well as Todt and Seifert’s attempts to institutionalize an environmentally sensitive land use planning and industrial policy, the major accomplishment of the Nazi ecologists was the Reichsnaturschutzgesetz of 1935. This completely unprecedented “nature protection law” not only established guidelines for safeguarding flora, fauna, and “natural monuments” across the Reich; it also restricted commercial access to remaining tracts of wilderness. In addition, the comprehensive ordinance “required all national, state and local officials to consult with Naturschutz authorities in a timely manner before undertaking any measures that would produce fundamental alterations in the countryside.“61

Although the legislation’s effectiveness was questionable, traditional German environmentalists were overjoyed at its passage. Walter Schoenichen declared it the “definitive fulfillment of the völkisch-romantic longings,“62 and Hans Klose, Schoenichen’s successor as head of the Reich Agency for Nature Protection, described Nazi environmental policy as the “high point of nature protection” in Germany. Perhaps the greatest success of these measures was in facilitating the “intellectual realignment of German Naturschutz” and the integration of mainstream environmentalism into the Nazi enterprise.63

While the achievements of the “green wing” were daunting, they should not be exaggerated. Ecological initiatives were, of course, hardly universally popular within the party. Goebbels, Bormann, and Heydrich, for example, were implacably opposed to them, and considered Darré, Hess and their fellows undependable dreamers, eccentrics, or simply security risks. This latter suspicion seemed to be confirmed by Hess’s famed flight to Britain in 1941; after that point, the environmentalist tendency was for the most part suppressed. Todt was killed in a plane crash in February 1942, and shortly thereafter Darré was stripped of all his posts. For the final three years of the Nazi conflagration the “green wing” played no active role. Their work, however, had long since left an indelible stain.

Fascist Ecology in Context
To make this dismaying and discomforting analysis more palatable, it is tempting to draw precisely the wrong conclusion —namely, that even the most reprehensible political undertakings sometimes produce laudable results. But the real lesson here is just the opposite: Even the most laudable of causes can be perverted and instrumentalized in the service of criminal savagery. The “green wing” of the NSDAP was not a group of innocents, confused and manipulated idealists, or reformers from within; they were conscious promoters and executors of a vile program explicitly dedicated to inhuman racist violence, massive political repression and worldwide military domination. Their ‘ecological’ involvements, far from offsetting these fundamental commitments, deepened and radicalized them. In the end, their configuration of environmental politics was directly and substantially responsible for organized mass murder.

No aspect of the Nazi project can be properly understood without examining its implication in the holocaust. Here, too, ecological arguments played a crucially malevolent role. Not only did the “green wing” refurbish the sanguine antisemitism of traditional reactionary ecology; it catalyzed a whole new outburst of lurid racist fantasies of organic inviolability and political revenge. The confluence of anti-humanist dogma with a fetishization of natural ‘purity’ provided not merely a rationale but an incentive for the Third Reich’s most heinous crimes. Its insidious appeal unleashed murderous energies previously untapped. Finally, the displacement of any social analysis of environmental destruction in favor of mystical ecology served as an integral component in the preparation of the final solution:

To explain the destruction of the countryside and environmental damage, without questioning the German people’s bond to nature, could only be done by not analysing environmental damage in a societal context and by refusing to understand them as an expression of conflicting social interests. Had this been done, it would have led to criticism of National Socialism itself since that was not immune to such forces. One solution was to associate such environmental problems with the destructive influence of other races. National Socialism could then be seen to strive for the elimination of other races in order to allow the German people’s innate understanding and feeling of nature to assert itself, hence securing a harmonic life close to nature for the future.64
This is the true legacy of ecofascism in power: “genocide developed into a necessity under the cloak of environment protection.“65

• • *

The experience of the “green wing” of German fascism is a sobering reminder of the political volatility of ecology. 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.66 But certain patterns can be discerned: “While concerns about problems posed by humankind’s increasing mastery over nature have increasingly been shared by ever larger groups of people embracing a plethora of ideologies, the most consistent ‘pro-natural order’ response found political embodiment on the radical right.“67 This is the common thread which unites merely conservative or even supposedly apolitical manifestations of environmentalism with the straightforwardly fascist variety.

The historical record does, to be sure, belie the vacuous claim that “those who want to reform society according to nature are neither left nor right but ecologically minded.“68 Environmental themes can be mobilized from the left or from the right, indeed they require an explicit social context if they are to have any political valence whatsoever. “Ecology” alone does not prescribe a politics; it must be interpreted, mediated through some theory of society in order to acquire political meaning. Failure to heed this mediated interrelationship between the social and the ecological is the hallmark of reactionary ecology.

As noted above, this failure most commonly takes the form of a call to “reform society according to nature,” that is, to formulate some version of ‘natural order’ or ‘natural law’ and submit human needs and actions to it. As a consequence, the underlying social processes and societal structures which constitute and shape people’s relations with their environment are left unexamined. Such willful ignorance, in turn, obscures the ways in which all conceptions of nature are themselves socially produced, and leaves power structures unquestioned while simultaneously providing them with apparently ‘naturally ordained’ status. Thus the substitution of ecomysticism for clear-sighted social-ecological inquiry has catastrophic political repercussions, as the complexity of the society-nature dialectic is collapsed into a purified Oneness. An ideologically charged ‘natural order’ does not leave room for compromise; its claims are absolute.

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. An ‘ecological’ orientation alone, outside of a critical social framework, is dangerously unstable. The record of fascist ecology shows that under the right conditions such an orientation can quickly lead to barbarism.

Footnotes
1. Ernst Lehmann, Biologischer Wille. Wege und Ziele biologischer Arbeit im neuen Reich, München, 1934, pp. 10-11. Lehmann was a professor of botany who characterized National Socialism as “politically applied biology.”
2. Anna Bramwell, author of the only book-length study on the subject, is exemplary in this respect. See her Blood and Soil: Walther Darré and Hitler’s ‘Green Party’, Bourne End, 1985, and Ecology in the 20th Century: A History, New Haven, 1989.
3. See Raymond H. Dominick, The Environmental Movement in Germany: Prophets and Pioneers, 1871-1971, Bloomington, 1992, especially part three, “The Völkisch Temptation.”
4. For example, Dominick, The Environmental Movement in Germany, , p. 22; and Jost Hermand, Grüne Utopien in Deutschland: Zur Geschichte des ökologischen Bewußtseins, Frankfurt, 1991, pp. 44-45.
5. Quoted in Rudolf Krügel, Der Begriff des Volksgeistes in Ernst Moritz Arndts Geschichtsanschauung, Langensalza, 1914, p. 18.
6. Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, Feld und Wald, Stuttgart, 1857, p. 52.
7. Klaus Bergmann, Agrarromantik und Großstadtfeindschaft, Meisenheim, 1970, p. 38. There is no satisfactory English counterpart to “Großstadtfeindschaft,” a term which signifies hostility to the cosmopolitanism, internationalism, and cultural tolerance of cities as such. This ‘anti-urbanism’ is the precise opposite of the careful critique of urbanization worked out by Murray Bookchin in Urbanization Without Cities, Montréal, 1992, and The Limits of the City, Montréal, 1986.
8. George Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich, New York, 1964, p. 29.
9. Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews 1933-1945, New York, 1975, pp. 61-62.
10. Daniel Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism: Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League, New York, 1971, p. xvii.
11. ibid., p. 30. Gasman’s thesis about the politics of Monism is hardly uncontroversial; the book’s central argument, however, is sound.
12. Quoted in Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism, p. 34.
13. ibid., p. 33.
14. See the foreword to the 1982 reprint of his 1923 book Die Entdeckung der Heimat, published by the far-right MUT Verlag.
15. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, p. 101.
16. Walter Laqueur, Young Germany: A History of the German Youth Movement, New York, 1962, p.41.
17. ibid., p. 6. For a concise portrait of the youth movement which draws similiar conclusions, see John De Graaf, “The Wandervogel,” CoEvolution Quarterly, Fall 1977, pp. 14-21.
18. Reprinted in Ludwig Klages, Sämtliche Werke, Band 3, Bonn, 1974, pp. 614-630. No English translation is available.
19. Ulrich Linse, Ökopax und Anarchie. Eine Geschichte der ökologischen Bewegungen in Deutschland, München, 1986, p. 60.
20. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, p. 211, and Laqueur, Young Germany, p. 34.
21. See Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, Berkeley, 1963.
22. Michael Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics and Art, Indianapolis, 1990, pp. 242-243.
23. See Michael Zimmerman, “Rethinking the Heidegger — Deep Ecology Relationship”, Environmental Ethics vol. 15, no. 3 (Fall 1993), pp. 195-224.
24. Reproduced in Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, Auf der Suche nach Arkadien, München, 1990, p. 147.
25. Robert Pois, National Socialism and the Religion of Nature, London, 1985, p. 40.
26. ibid., pp. 42-43. The internal quote is taken from George Mosse, Nazi Culture, New York, 1965, p. 87.
27. Hitler, in Henry Picker, Hitlers Tischgespräche im Führerhauptquartier 1941-1942, Stuttgart, 1963, p. 151.
28. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, München, 1935, p. 314.
29. Quoted in Gert Gröning and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, “Politics, planning and the protection of nature: political abuse of early ecological ideas in Germany, 1933-1945”, Planning Perspectives 2 (1987), p. 129.
30. Änne Bäumer, NS-Biologie, Stuttgart, 1990, p. 198.
31. Alfred Rosenberg, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts, München, 1938, p. 550. Rosenberg was, in the early years at least, the chief ideologist of the Nazi movement.
32. Picker, Hitlers Tischgespräche, pp. 139-140.
33. Quoted in Heinz Haushofer, Ideengeschichte der Agrarwirtschaft und Agrarpolitik im deutschen Sprachgebiet, Band II, München, 1958, p. 266.
34. See Dominick, The Environmental Movement in Germany, p. 107.
35. ibid., p. 113.
36. Bergmann, Agrarromantik und Großstadtfeindschaft, p. 334. Ernst Nolte makes a similar argument in Three Faces of Fascism, New York, 1966, pp. 407-408, though the point gets lost somewhat in the translation. See also Norbert Frei, National Socialist Rule in Germany, Oxford, 1993, p. 56: “The change in direction towards the ‘soil’ had not been an electoral tactic. It was one of the basic ideological elements of National Socialism . . . “
37. R. Walther Darré, Um Blut und Boden: Reden und Aufsätze, München, 1939, p. 28. The quote is from a 1930 speech entitled “Blood and Soil as the Foundations of Life of the Nordic Race.”
38. Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century, p. 203. See also Frei, National Socialist Rule in Germany, p. 57, which stresses that Darré‘s total control over agricultural policy constituted a uniquely powerful position within the Nazi system.
39. Bergmann, Agrarromantik und Großstadtfeindschaft, p. 312.
40. ibid., p. 308.
41. See Haushofer, Ideengeschichte der Agrarwirtschaft, pp. 269-271, and Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century, pp. 200-206, for the formative influence of Steinerite ideas on Darré.
42. Haushofer, Ideengeschichte der Agrarwirtschaft, p. 271.
43. Anna Bramwell, “Darré. Was This Man ‘Father of the Greens’?” History Today, September 1984, vol. 34, pp. 7-13. This repugnant article is one long series of distortions designed to paint Darré as an anti-Hitler hero — an effort as preposterous as it is loathsome.
44. Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel, Hess: A Biography, London, 1971, p. 34.
45. Franz Neumann, Behemoth. The Structure and Practice of National Socialism 1933-1944, New York, 1944, p. 378.
46. Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, New York, 1970, p. 263.
47. ibid., p. 261.
48. Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century, p. 197.
49. Karl-Heinz Ludwig, Technik und Ingenieure im Dritten Reich, Düsseldorf, 1974, p. 337.
50. Quoted in Rolf Peter Sieferle, Fortschrittsfeinde? Opposition gegen Technik und Industrie von der Romantik bis zur Gegenwart, München, 1984, p. 220. Todt was just as convinced a Nazi as Darré or Hess; on the extent (and pettiness) of his allegiance to antisemitic policies, see Alan Beyerchen, Scientists Under Hitler, New Haven, 1977, pages 66-68 and 289.
51. Bramwell, Blood and Soil, p. 173.
52. Alwin Seifert, Im Zeitalter des Lebendigen, Dresden, 1941, p. 13. The book’s title is grotesquely inapt considering the date of publication; it means “in the age of the living.”
53. Alwin Seifert, Ein Leben für die Landschaft, Düsseldorf, 1962, p. 100.
54. Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century, p. 198. Bramwell cites Darré‘s papers as the source of the internal quote.
55. Seifert, Ein Leben für die Landschaft, p. 90.
56. William Shirer, Berlin Diary, New York, 1941, p. 19. Shirer also calls Hess Hitler’s “protégé” (588) and “the only man in the world he fully trusts” (587), and substantiates Darré‘s and Todt’s standing as well (590).
57. Quoted in Manvell and Fraenkel, Hess, p. 80. In a further remarkable confirmation of the ‘green’ faction’s stature, Hitler once declared that Todt and Hess were “the only two human beings among all those around me to whom I have been truly and inwardly attached” (Hess, p. 132).
58. See Haushofer, Ideengeschichte der Agrarwirtschaft, p. 270, and Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century, p. 201.
59. ibid., pp. 197-200. Most of Todt’s work also ran through Hess’s office.
60. Raymond Dominick, “The Nazis and the Nature Conservationists”, The Historian vol. XLIX no. 4 (August 1987), p. 534.
61. ibid., p. 536.
62. Hermand, Grüne Utopien in Deutschland, p. 114.
63. Dominick, “The Nazis and the Nature Conservationists”, p. 529.
64. Gröning and Wolschke-Bulmahn, “Politics, planning and the protection of nature”, p. 137.
65. ibid., p. 138.
66. Linse’s Ökopax und Anarchie, among others, offers a detailed consideration of the history of eco-anarchism in Germany.
67. Pois, National Socialism and the Religion of Nature, p. 27.
68. Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century, p. 48.

Script Bots in Propaganda

It's becoming clear that as the message gets out the more and more it is being scrubbed from the web. We have to dig for our information and sometimes it's been removed from the net altogether. There is a reason this is happening so frequently. The enemy of the people of the world, the Neo-Con fascists/zionists in our midst who wish to present a story of history that is different from what actually occured.

They are using computer scripts (bots) to downvote and remove things from sites automatically. trying to remove it from public view quickly, so people will not stumble upon it.

Here you can read an article on who and how.

"Propaganda agents obviously aren't going to publicly brag about what they are doing, and you can bet that their use of downvote bots is much greater. Moreover, they probably have more sophisticated software than Greasemonkey.

As one example of a publicly-available downvote bot, this script automatically downvotes any stories on 9/11, Gaza, torture, Guantanamo and a host of other topics, downvotes certain posters, and engages in other forms of cyber warfare.

I call on programmers to figure out a way to fight this cyberwarfare propaganda."

The Monsters want Control

From "Telling the History of the 21st Century as it Really is." blog.

ISRAEL FAILS AGAIN TO PROVOKE HEZBOLLAH AND WAR BETWEEN THE U.S. AND IRAN.

It is becoming apparent that the frenzied Israeli attack on the people of the Gaza Strip was designed specifically to inflame Hezbollah and provoke them into a war with Israel; a war that would quickly escalate to involve Iran and the US for the purpose of ultimately bringing about regime change in Iran. Furthermore, this was all supposed to happen before Bush left office when it was hoped that war with Iran would be unavoidable by the time Obama took office.

As well as mercilessly hammering the Palestinian people in the Gaza, which served the purpose of enraging Hezbollah – not to mention the entire Arab street and most of the rest of the world – the Israelis also massed troops on their northern borders with south Lebanon while their warplanes flew low-level missions into Lebanese airspace in a deliberate attempt to further provoke Hezbollah.

A few early model non-lethal Katyusha rockets were launched from just inside Lebanon which Hezbollah denied any knowledge of, and which no other group claimed responsibility for, making it likely to have been a false flag attempt by Israeli special forces to further provoke war. Fortunately, the Israeli special forces endeavours with these captured early model Katyusha rockets proved to be patently transparent even to the Israeli propaganda machine who were content in the end to point the finger at some Lebanese based Palestinian group rather than embarrass themselves by directly blaming Hezbollah, especially after having accused Hezbollah of having now accumulated tens of thousands of sophisticated rockets from Iran. The chances of any Palestinian group unilaterally launching anything from south Lebanon into Israel without Hezbollah’s knowledge is nigh on non-existent.

As the war against the Palestinians in the Gaza went on, Hezbollah refused to bite with any acts of war against Israel. Hezbollah gave moral support to the Gazans, as did the Iranians, but refused to be drawn in to any war. Israel tried to inflame and anger Hezbollah further by stepping up their atrocities in the Gaza striking at UN buildings and schools where civilians and children were known to be but still Hezbollah refused to bite. In the end the Israelis simply ran out of time as literally the last minutes of Bush’s presidency slipped away. And with went the chances of provoking the Final Confrontation they so desperately seek against Iran – at least until Netanyahu gets his shot at it after the Israeli elections next month.

by Damian Lataan

(Survival against the neo-nazi's is a call to all like breath to the lungs.)

List of Traitors/Enablers in our Midst

Interesting list: people with dual Israeli/US citizenship

Posted in Bush Administration, Government tagged Israel at 2:59 pm by LeisureGuy

UPDATE: After being challenged by RM Rich in the comments below, I’ve not been able to find an authoritative source for the authenticity of the list. I did check Snopes.com, of course, but the list is also not listed as an urban legend. Rich says he called two of the people on the list (which two he doesn’t say), and they denied holding dual citizenship at this time. So the accuracy of the list is questionable—as evidenced by the fact that it’s been questioned. So far as the possibility: it is indeed possible (legal, allowable) for people to hold dual citizenship in the US, not only with Israel but with other countries as well. (See this page, which requires IE Tab if you’re using Firefox.) As you will see, quite a few countries allow dual national/US citizenship, though the “official U.S. policy has been to discourage the incidence of dual nationality. The Government accepts but does not recognize or approve of dual nationality. The Government accepts it: “only as the result of separate conflicting laws of other countries.” ” So the list’s interest diminishes considerably.

UPDATE 2: Jacob points out a valuable post on the general question of dual citizenship. Note question 6:

I’ve heard that the US has a special agreement with Israel permitting people to be dual US/Israeli citizens. Is this true?

No. It just happens that Israeli citizenship law does not require renunciation of one’s old citizenship in order to become a citizen of Israel.

In this regard, Israel is really treated no differently than Canada, the UK, France, or other countries which permit people to become citizens without giving up their old status.

As best I have been able to determine, the US does not have any sort of treaty facilitating dual citizenship with any other country. Dual citizenship arises, not out of explicit bilateral agreements between nations, but because each country makes its own laws respecting who is or is not its citizen, often without regard for whether a given person is considered a citizen by more than one country at once.

It is interesting to note that Israel’s “Law of Return” (under which any Jew may immigrate to and become a citizen of Israel) confers Israeli citizenship automatically, without the immigrant having to apply for it, attend any ceremony, or swear any oath of allegiance. The Israeli law may originally have been written this way to encourage American Jews to move to Israel; they could, in theory, argue that they had not explicitly requested Israeli citizenship and were thus still entitled to keep their US citizenship. (Note that Mr. Afroyim, subject of Afroyim v. Rusk, was alleged to have lost his US citizenship, not because he had become an Israeli citizen, but because he had voted in an Israeli election.)

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the US ratified a series of citizenship treaties (the “Bancroft treaties”, named after American diplomat George Bancroft). The intent of these treaties was to prevent dual citizenship by providing for automatic loss of citizenship by foreigners who obtained US citizenship, or by Americans who obtained foreign citizenship. As a result of the various Supreme Court decisions on dual citizenship, however, the Bancroft treaties became legally unenforceable, and all of them have by now been formally abrogated by the US. One of these treaties (the one with Sweden) is mentioned in the Supreme Court’s decision in Perkins v. Elg.

UPDATE 3: Glenn Greenwald has a very interesting post on the issue of divided loyalties.

From Jacob via email. List is old, so some of the positions listed have changed hands:

American / Isreali Dual Citizens in the American Government

Attorney General - Michael Mukasey
Head of Homeland Security - Michael Chertoff
Chairman Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board - Richard Perle
Deputy Defense Secretary (Former) - Paul Wolfowitz
Under Secretary of Defense - Douglas Feith
National Security Council Advisor - Elliott Abrams
Vice President Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff (Former) - “Scooter” Libby
White House Deputy Chief of Staff - Joshua Bolten
Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs - Marc Grossman
Director of Policy Planning at the State Department - Richard Haass
U.S. Trade Representative (Cabinet-level Position) - Robert Zoellick
Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board - James Schlesinger
UN Representative (Former) - John Bolton
Under Secretary for Arms Control - David Wurmser
Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board - Eliot Cohen
Senior Advisor to the President - Steve Goldsmith
Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary - Christopher Gersten
Assistant Secretary of State - Lincoln Bloomfield
Deputy Assistant to the President - Jay Lefkowitz
White House Political Director - Ken Melman
National Security Study Group - Edward Luttwak
Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board - Kenneth Adelman
Defense Intelligence Agency Analyst (Former) - Lawrence (Larry) Franklin
National Security Council Advisor - Robert Satloff
President Export-Import Bank U.S. - Mel Sembler
Deputy Assistant Secretary, Administration for Children and Families - Christopher Gersten
Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development for Public Affairs
- Mark Weinberger
White House Speechwriter - David Frum
White House Spokesman (Former) - Ari Fleischer
Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board - Henry Kissinger
Deputy Secretary of Commerce - Samuel Bodman
Under Secretary of State for Management - Bonnie Cohen
Director of Foreign Service Institute - Ruth Davis

Who we help murder...

Israel is Immune From Criticism
By BRIAN CLOUGHLEY

The state of Israel has descended – plummeted – to one of the lowest levels of conscious barbarity that is currently evident in this horrible world.

Any nation that has behaved towards a subject people, as Israel has to Palestinians, is worthy only of utter contempt. On Sunday January 4 I heard a rabbi on the BBC's morning religious program saying that he supported Israel's air strikes on Gaza. A man of God actually endorsed the killing of hundreds of people. To say that I was – and am – aghast at the sentiment expressed is to put it very mildly. This religious leader, a person supposed to spread and preach tolerance, patience, charity and peace, was supporting war crimes of immense gravity. His approval of the killing of Arabs was blood-chilling.

And this rabbi was British. Here we have a British citizen supporting hatred and bigotry on a BBC religious program. But of course he isn't really British. He is an Israeli religious propagandist of British citizenship whose main allegiance is to Israel. There are thousands like him in the UK and the US. They unconditionally promote Tel Aviv's plans and policy and wield amazing influence over politicians and businesses. Killing Palestinians is Israeli policy, and these people spare no effort to justify it.

Here's a resident of Gaza talking to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz about the horrors experienced by Palestinians (and congratulations to Haaretz for having the courage to print it): "I keep the children away from the windows because the F-16s are in the air; I forbid them to play below because it's dangerous. They're bombing us from the sea and from the east, they're bombing us from the air. When the telephone works, people tell us about relatives or friends who were killed. My wife cries all the time. At night she hugs the children and cries. It's cold and the windows are open; there's fire and smoke in open areas; at home there's no water, no electricity, no heating gas. And you [the Israelis] say there's no humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Tell me, are you normal?"

No, they're not, is the short answer, and the ruthlessness is epitomised by the evil Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, who is using the Gaza war to establish her credentials as a reliably hard-nosed barbarian. She declares "there is no humanitarian crisis in the [Gaza] Strip and therefore there is no need for a humanitarian truce."

It was reported on January 5 that Israeli troops are using white phosphorus (WP) artillery shells in Gaza, supposedly to create smoke screens to conceal their advance.

American troops used WP – fondly known as Willy Pete – in their destruction of the Iraqi city of Fallujah, and the US tried to lie its way out of the war crime, but junior officers unintentionally blew the lies apart by writing in the magazine Field Artillery that "WP proved to be an effective and versatile munition. We used it for screening missions . . . and, later in the fight, as a potent psychological weapon against insurgents in trench lines and spider holes . . . We fired 'shake and bake' missions at the insurgents using WP to flush them out and high explosive shells (HE) to take them out." In fact WP is an effective killer, and anyone who inhales particles will suffer a particularly hideous and painful death. As recorded by The Independent newspaper in Britain "In the aftermath of the battle [at Fallujah], the State Department's Counter Misinformation Office issued a statement saying that WP was only "used very sparingly in Fallujah, for illumination purposes. They were fired into the air to illuminate enemy positions at night [which isn't the propose of a smoke-shell], not at enemy fighters." When The Independent confronted the State Department with the first-hand accounts of soldiers who participated, an official accepted the mistake and undertook to correct its website." Big deal. Lie, lie and lie again, until you're found out and it's impossible to deny the facts. And the Israelis seem to be taking the example, as usual, and are stoutly denying what has been seen by independent witnesses.

Article two, Protocol III of the 1980 UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons states: "It is prohibited in all circumstances to make the civilian population as such, individual civilians or civilian objects, the object of attack by incendiary weapons." But Israel is only following the US example. "Shake and bake" is such an attractive military option that it would be a shame to spoil their fun, especially when it has rabbinical approval.

Here is part of what is laid out in Protocol 1, Additional to the Geneva Conventions, 1977 . . . General Protection Against Effects of Hostilities: "Among others, the following types of attacks are to be considered as indiscriminate: An attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated."

Israel, supported energetically by Washington (and using US-supplied aircraft, bombs and rockets), has caused "incidental loss of life" and general civilian casualties on an enormous scale. The Israeli military and the Israeli people knew full well that their genocidal attack on Gaza would kill civilians. The use of white phosphorous in built-up areas is worthy of the Nazis at their most brutal. Stalin and Mao would nod approvingly. It wasn't considered important that there would be countless civilian deaths. Nobody cares, and least of all American politicians. The next secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, refuses to comment on the atrocities. The incoming vice-president has been silent. President-elect Obama? As Reuters reported : "Obama . . . has not commented on the Middle East crisis since Israel launched attacks on Gaza nine days ago. His advisers insist that only President George W Bush can speak for America until then." But it was noted that "The president-elect has commented on the global economic crisis and his plans to try to pull the US economy out of recession."

Of course he has. And were it not for the power of Israel in America he would no doubt comment adversely on the slaughter in Gaza, because he is a decent man.

But Mr Obama dare not criticize Israel, even for its use of chemical shells. Nor can any American who wishes to enter or remain engaged in politics. The kiss of political death in the United States of America is to censure Israel. It can't be done.

And that is why apartheid is permitted in Israel; it's why the mass-punishment blockade was enforced months before the attack went in; and it's why the near-genocide in Gaza is allowed to continue.

Does anyone remember the hearing on the so-called Israeli-Palestine peace process in the US House of Representatives in February 2007? Of course not. It was a farce. And why was it such a revolting and hideous charade? – Because it was a three card trick.

The main witness, of the three cards who were called, was one Martin Indyk, a former official of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee which is the richest and most powerful lobby group in the country (two of whose members are currently under a mysteriously delayed investigation for spying for Israel). From there, inevitably, he went to be US ambassador in Tel Aviv. (And, incidentally, whose book on the Middle East was the subject of a glowing review in last week's Economist.) Another witness was David Makovsky of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (founded by Indyk; it's all very chummy in pro-Israel sewers), which is funded extensively by American interests that support Zionism. (Among other connections, it is closely associated with the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University.) And was the third witness a counter-balance to two energetic supporters of Zion? Could he or she present a rather less biased view of the Middle East? Perhaps a person who would make the point that Israel has contemptuously ignored UN Security Council resolutions concerning illegal occupation of Palestinian lands?

Not a bit. The third member was a comic quasi-intellectual character called Daniel Pipes who once declared that Muslim immigrants to the US were "brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and not exactly maintaining Germanic standards of hygiene." (Germanic? – How quaint.) Pipes founded the Middle East Forum (MEF) which encourages university students in America to report lecturers and professors who they consider to be anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian. (In Hitler's Germany there were awards given to young people who identified and reported those they thought to be pro-Jewish; I know a very elderly German lady who did this when she was 15. She is now terribly ashamed at the memory, because she actually informed on her own father. How times change. Or don't, of course.)

In 2006 Pipes was given the 'Guardian of Zion' award, an annual prize to a prominent supporter of Israel, by the Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies at Bar-Ilan University in Israel.

With a galaxy of partisan propagandists like Indyk, Makovsky and Pipes being the only people selected to give evidence on Israel-Palestine to the nation's legislators in Washington, there was no chance whatever that the Congressional Sub-Committee would be presented with a balanced view of the Israel-Palestine problem. The deck was stacked, and the legislators listened. They had no choice, because of the power of the Israel lobby. They've been shaken and baked.

There is little doubt that the bias towards Israel will continue in the legislature and administration of the United States of America, no matter what Obama might really think, and no matter how many Palestinian children the Zionists have slaughtered. The Israelis are behaving like genocidal filth, but those who stay silent about their atrocities are not far behind in the gutter stakes.

Brian Cloughley's book about the Pakistan army, War, Coups and Terror, has just been published by Pen & Sword Books (UK)

Israeli Attack Footage

Here is a link to a YouTube of the boat Cynthia McKinney and others were on when attacked in international waters by Israel.

Just in case you were wondering the US bought and built the warship that attacked it's former congresswoman.

This Christmas

Let us remember that thousands of people are dying this holiday season for the crime of being brown. Being brown is the leading cause of death in Gaza. White people shoot at you and bomb your homes all day while you rummage through trash and eat grass growing in the mud to survive.

This is what Israel is. It doesn't matter what they wanted to do, or what their intentions are or were. This is what they did.

This is an example of their Propaganda that they feed to us as if we are to expect this is a reasonable response to a "domestic gang". Killing everyone near the gang and everyone around the gang or who might look like a gang member.

Children are killed regularly as terrorists. We must understand that there is no way that a child of 10 deserves 13 bullets to the head. No matter how criminal he may or may not have been.

"While the murderous assault on Gaza continues, I notice there's a briefing document on the website of the Israeli Embassy in London which has a lie in every line. The West's mainstream media repeat them, and even the most senior TV and radio interviewers don’t bother to challenge them.

The document is a transcript of Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni's statement to the Israeli press dated 27 December 2008 – a day that will live in infamy. It is a perfect example of the falsehoods used to dupe not only us westerners but Israel’s own people. The statement shows how the regime's view of itself is constructed on a web of dishonesty and self-delusion."

Here are some lies you will hear this Holiday season:

• "Israeli citizens have been under the threat of daily attack from Gaza for years."

Palestinians have been under harsh Israeli occupation for 60 years.

• "Only this week hundreds of missiles and mortars shells were fired at Israeli civilian communities."

Only one in 500 Qassam rockets causes a fatality. How many thousands of Israeli bombs, missiles, rockets, grenades and tank-shells have been blasted into the crowded city and towns of the Gaza Strip by Israel’s high-tech weaponry?

• "Until now we have shown restraint. But today there is no other option than a military operation."

The only legitimate option for Israel is to end the occupation and withdraw behind its 1967 border, as required under international law and UN resolution. Israel has been killing Palestinians at the rate of 8 to 1 since 2000, and children at the rate of nearly 12 to 1 (B’Tselem figures). This is somebody’s idea of restraint?

• "We need to protect our citizens from attack through a military response against the terror infrastructure in Gaza."

Self defence is not a right exclusive to Israel. Palestinians have an equal right to protect their citizens from the terror tactics of Israel.

• "Israel left Gaza in order to create an opportunity for peace."

Israel never left Gaza. It still occupies Gaza's airspace and coastal waters and controls all entrances and exits.

• "In return, the Hamas terror organization took control of Gaza and is using its citizens as cover while it deliberately targets Israeli communities and denies any chance for peace."

Hamas was voted into power as the legitimate government of Palestine. Israel chose not to accept the people's choice, which amounted to a denial of their human rights, and immediately set about obliterating it.

• "We have tried everything to reach calm without using force. We agreed to a truce through Egypt that was violated by Hamas, which continued to target Israel, hold Gilad Shalit and build up its arms."

Try talking. The Israelis' ongoing siege and economic blockade, begun shortly after Hamas was elected early in 2006, was never going to generate calm. And why is Shalit considered more important than the 9,000 Palestinians abducted and held prisoner by Israel? As soon as a Hamas government was formed Israeli troops arrested 8 Hamas ministers and 20 other parliamentarians, making the work of government impossible.

• "Israel continues to act to prevent humanitarian crisis and to minimize harm to Palestinian civilians."

Every agency operating in Gaza has warned of the deepening humanitarian crisis and protested about the starvation and suffering, especially of children many of whom show evidence of stunted growth.

• "The responsibility for harm to civilians lies with Hamas."

Not according to the Fourth Geneva Convention.

• "Hamas is a terrorist organization, supported by Iran, that does not represent the legitimate national interests of the Palestinian people but a radical Islamist agenda that seeks to deny peace for the peoples of this region."

Hamas was the popular choice of Palestinians at the last election. It is entitled under international law to take up arms against an illegal occupier and invader. If it is supported by Iran, so what? Israel receives mega-support from the US. When it comes to terror, it is Israel's conduct which fits the US definition of terrorism so perfectly - see Bush's Executive Order 13224, Section 3 - http://www.treas.gov/offices/enforcement/ofac/programs/terror/terror.pdf

• "While confronting Hamas, Israel continues to believe in the two State solution and remains committed to negotiations with the legitimate Palestinian Authority in the context of the peace process, launched at Annapolis."

Israel is busy establishing irreversible facts on the ground that make a viable Palestinian state impossible. As everyone knows, the regime has reneged on the peace process and carries on building illegal settlements and the illegal Wall, and demolishing Palestinian homes. Months ago Hamas accepted a Palestinian state based on internationally recognized (pre-1967) borders, in accordance with UN resolutions, with full sovereignty and its capital in Jerusalem, but this has been ignored. Hamas also offered a 10-year truce, also ignored. Earlier, Arafat and the PLO recognized the State of Israel in the Oslo agreement but what good did it do? Today’s US-backed, Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority is not representative of the Palestinian people.

• "Israel expects the support and understanding of the international community, as it confronts terror, and advances the interest of all those who wish the forces of peace and co existence to determine the agenda of this region."

Israel, next to the US, the biggest purveyor of terror in the region and only advances its own interests. It may get the support of Israel lobby stooges in other western governments but is rapidly earning the contempt of everybody else.

From a statement dated 22 December 2008:

• "Hamas, backed by Iran, has regularly stated its desire to see the complete destruction of Israel."

Israel is itself a leading destroyer and currently engaged in trying to wipe out Hamas and the Gazans. Iran’s Ahmadinajad quoted the late Ayatollah Khomeini as saying that "this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time" - fair comment considering Jerusalem, with Bethlehem, was designated an 'international city' under the UN Partition Plan. Israeli propaganda twisted the Iranian’s words to read “Israel must be wiped off the map”. Zionist sources and the manifestos of Israeli political parties have made it clear for a long time that Israel plans to wipe Palestine off the map, and every act and lie is directed towards that end.

• "Our fight is not with the people of Gaza; it is with the extremists of Hamas."

Then why does the Israeli navy harass and fire on peaceable Gazan fishermen who are well within their own territorial waters? Why does Israel prevent Palestinian students from taking up places at foreign universities and block hospital spares, medicines, foodstuffs and foreign medics from entering Gaza? Why has the Israeli navy just rammed a mercy vessel in international waters taking doctors and medicines to Gaza? Latest air-strikes have hit the Islamic University and the ministry of education. These are direct attacks on Gazan civil society and its infrastructure.

• "Hamas started this conflict, and it bears responsibility for any harm to civilians on either side."

The conflict, started by Jewish terrorists, has been going on for 60 years, decades before Hamas came into being.

• "Israel’s only responsibility is to protect Israeli citizens."

As the occupying power Israel has a duty to see that the people of the occupied territories come to no harm.

• "Just as Israel seeks to defend its civilian population, Hamas seeks to kill them."

This reads far better the other way round: “Just as Hamas seeks to defend its civilian population, Israel seeks to kill them.”

• "Rocket attacks have continued for years and are now a daily occurrence. How long does the international community expect Israel will wait before defending itself against them?"

The rocket attacks will end when Israel ends the occupation and stops terrorizing its neighbours.

• "In the south of Israel, Israeli citizens live with air raid sirens sounding every day - sometimes every hour. Their situation is intolerable."

Not half as intolerable as it is for the Gazans, who live in constant fear of air raids and re-invasion and are constantly under surveillance by armed drones which can fire missiles under computer control from an armchair in Israeli headquarters.

• "For years, the international community has turned a blind eye to this onslaught. Only when Israel seeks to stop the rockets do they take notice."

For years the international community has turned a blind eye to Israel's violations of international law and human rights, which is why the problem remains unsolved.

• "Hamas is not only the enemy of Israel - it is the enemy of every Palestinian who believes in peace."

Israelis just can’t come to terms with the Palestinians' democratic choice and are bent on obliterating it.

• "It is Hamas' attacks - not Israel's reactions - that destroy every opportunity we have for peace."

The world has managed to work out by now that Israel doesn't want peace until it has stolen all the land and water it needs to expand its racist state into a ‘Greater Israel’. It is well on the way to achieving this and won’t be thwarted.

• "Palestinian militants targeted by Israel are not just the enemies of the Israeli people; they are criminals under international law, and enemies of peace."

Israel is in no position to preach international law.

• "What is collective punishment? 'Collective punishment' is a city - schools, hospitals, homes - civilians being bombarded every single day by rockets and mortars."

Collective punishment is keeping a whole population bottled up under siege and blocking supplies and exports, smashing their infrastructure, wrecking their economy and starving their children. Trying to equate Sderot with what’s happening in the Gaza Strip is idiotic.

• "Today's Middle East is divided between extremists and pragmatists. Hamas, backed by Iran, belongs to the extremists, who must be defeated for the sake of the future of the Middle East.... Israel’s primary goal is peace."

Israel's primary goal is the expansion of Israel by making the occupation of the West Bank permanent and bringing the Gazans to their knees.

Stuart Littlewood brings these facts to our attention so that we will know that this is not a war, this is simple genocide.

Hamas is like the Green Party. If they got elected and the US came in and arrested our MP's and bottled up all Canadian Ports and shot down any outgoing planes,the continued to bomb us saying we elected terrorists and then, rolled tanks into Canada attempted to "purge the green party" from our midst based on "what they think a green party member looks like" what do you think would happen?

What do you think? Honestly? Would we just lie down and die until the 15 or so of us left that they are "sure" are not Green Party members are allowed to live in peace?

When we are all dead they just take our land and thats that.

This is what Fascism, Naziism, Zionism look like...

Self Evident

"It is indeed unfortunate that the general public is prey to these disturbing theories, which breed such a widespread distrust of the noble intentions and essential (if occasionally misguided or incompetently executed) goodness of our leading men and women. However, there is a very reasonable explanation for the credence given to these fringe beliefs:

They happen to be true."

Chris Floyd

Watch This!

How the Stock Market works.

This was posted as a comment by Viper on the Huffington Post. As it was so brilliant I stole it and put it here.

"Once upon a time a man appeared in a village and announced to the villagers that he would buy monkeys for $10 each.

The villagers, seeing that there were many monkeys around, went out to the forest and started catching them.

The man bought thousands at $10 and, as supply started to diminish, the villagers stopped their effort. He next announced that he would now buy monkeys at $20 each. This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching monkeys again.

Soon the supply diminished even further and people started going back to their farms. The offer increased to $25 each and the supply of monkeys became so scarce it was an effort to even find a monkey, let alone catch it!

The man now announced that he would buy monkeys at $50 each! However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would buy on his behalf.


In the absence of the man, the assistant told the villagers: "Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has already collected. I will sell them to you at $35 and when the man returns from the city, you can sell them to him for $50 each."

The villagers rounded up all their savings and bought all the monkeys.

They never saw the man or his assistant again, only lots and lots of monkeys!

Now you have a better understanding of how the stock market works."

World Despression

I am depressed about the fact the more people I tell the more weird it is we are being sprayed over 'Sackville'. A small butthole town. It seems no matter where you go you are being sprayed near daily with chemtrails floating down from the sky. Why are they making fake clouds?

Why? It just makes no sense. It makes even less sense to not tell us. Would we be mad at the illegal spraying currently going on in the NATO countries? Why do we not hear about this?

Then I hear the EU is calling for a overhaul of the financial system and to see up a better system. That system would be, in effect, the NWO. We cannot allow that to happen. Whether we must throw ourselves at the machines to stop them we must not allow the NWO to take hold. They are criminals and murderers who will enslave or kill us all if they had the chance.

I want to be joking, but I am not.

... And I am depressed.

Your Job

Citizens Responsibilities

1st Responsibility: A Citizen must educate oneself to be aware of their communities’ needs and problems so to keep from having their own ignorance from being exploited by some politicians who only want what’s best for them and their friends and not what’s best for everyone.

2nd Responsibility: A Citizen must get involved and be aware of what their political leaders are doing and know what decisions they are making and why they are making them. Everyone should at least know where this information is and personally know someone who can honestly explain what’s happening with an unbiased point of view in a way that is easily understood.

3rd Responsibility: Citizens must demand documentation and demand procedures at every political level so that when mistakes are made we have the ability to learn from the mistakes instead of never knowing the truth and never learning anything in order to correct mistakes.

4th Responsibility: Citizens must demand notification on town meetings using every form of communication available and not just the basic communications required by law. The Telephone alert system should be used and not wasted.

5th Responsibility: Vote, but vote based only on the facts and the needs of everyone. To many people vote based on personal beliefs or just on one single issue which is very selfish and disrespectful to the rest if the people who are voting to do what’s best for everyone. Besides the voter will always have their beliefs and lack of knowledge exploited by some politicians who know that a lot of voters are just thinking of their own best interest and are not totally informed about the truth.

Reflections on the Bailout

'In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act." .. G. Orwell

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities" Voltaire..

"It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government."-- Thomas Paine

"The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." --Edmund Burke

"No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices."
- Edward R. Murrow

"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored." ~ Aldous Huxley

"He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future." --- George Orwell, 1984

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs."

" Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin (1802)

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
-- John F. Kennedy

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." -Thomas Jefferson

'In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act." .. G. Orwell

"Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination." -- Oscar Wilde

AP News Pulled by Fox

Fox News Corp has this article on their website for about 1 hour yesterday, but it was pulled down by it's obvious implications. Truth, unfortunately does not serve the Republicans well. Nor does reality.


Conservatives Begin Questioning Palin’s Heft
by Associated Press
Sunday, September 28, 2008
http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/09/28/conservatives-begin-questioni...

A growing number of Republicans are expressing concern about Sarah
Palin’s uneven - and sometimes downright awkward - performances in her
limited media appearances.

Conservative columnist Kathleen Parker, a former Palin supporter, says
the vice presidential nominee should step aside. Kathryn Jean Lopez,
writing for the conservative National Review, says “that’s not a crazy
suggestion” and that “something’s gotta change.”

Tony Fabrizio, a GOP strategist, says Palin’s recent CBS appearance
isn’t disqualifying but is certainly alarming. “You can’t continue to
have interviews like that and not take on water.”

“I have not been blown away by the interviews from her, but at the
same time, I haven’t come away from them thinking she doesn’t know s-
t,” said Chris Lacivita, a GOP strategist. “But she ain’t Dick Cheney,
nor Joe Biden and definitely not Hillary Clinton.”

There is no doubt that Palin retains a tremendous amount of support
among rank-and-file Republicans. She draws huge crowds, continues to
raise a lot of money for the McCain campaign, and state parties report
she has sparked an uptick in the number of volunteers.

Asked about Palin’s performance in the CBS interview, a McCain
official briefing reporters on condition of anonymity said: “She did
fine. She’s a tremendous asset and a fantastic candidate.”

But there is also no doubt many Republican insiders are worried she
could blow next week’s debate, based on her unexpectedly weak and
unsteady media appearances, and hurt the Republican ticket if she
does.

What follows is a viewer’s guide to some of Palin’s toughest moments
on camera so far.

Speaking this week with CBS’s Katie Couric, Palin seemed caught off-
guard by a very predictable question about the status of McCain
adviser Rick Davis’ relationship with mortgage lender Freddie Mac.
Davis was accused by several news outlets of retaining ties - and
profiting from - the companies despite his denials.

Where a more experienced politician might have been able to brush off
Couric’s follow-up question, Palin seemed genuinely stumped, repeating
the same answer twice and resorting to boilerplate language about the
“undue influence of lobbyists.”

These missteps could be attributed to inadequate preparation and don’t
necessarily reflect more deeply on Palin’s ability to perform as vice
president. But when reporters have tried to probe Palin’s thinking on
subjects such as foreign policy, she’s been similarly opaque.

In an interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson, Palin gave a muddled answer
to a question about her opinion of the Bush Doctrine.

And given the chance to describe her foreign policy credentials more
fully, Palin recited familiar talking points, telling Gibson that her
experience with energy policy was sufficient preparation for dealing
with national security issues.

In the same interview, Palin let Gibson lead her into saying it might
be necessary to wage war on Russia - a suggestion that most candidates
would have avoided making explicitly and that signaled her discomfort
in discussing global affairs.

Then, asked this week by Couric to discuss her knowledge of foreign
relations - in particular, her assertion that Alaska’s proximity to
Russia gave her international experience - Palin tripped herself up
explaining her interactions with Alaska’s neighbor to the west.
Watch CBS Videos Online

On the economy, too, Palin has avoided taking clear stances. In a
largely friendly interview with Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity, Palin
spoke in tangled generalities in response to a question about a
possible Wall Street bailout - and even preempted her campaign by
coming out against it.

On Thursday, Palin finally took questions from her traveling press -
but shut things down quickly after Politico’s Kenneth P. Vogel asked
her whether she would support Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, who has been
indicted for corruption, and Rep. Don Young, who is under federal
investigation, for reelection.

Unlike her other interviews, at least this time Palin had the option
to walk away.

Is this the move?

Wall St is finally going down bank by bank, and with the governments new powers of Police State control, what will they do with 700 Billion obfuscated funds? They will have the money, the power and the control to make Republican Police State control of the US last a very very long time.

This is akin to Hitler asking the Germans to give him power and I will protect you. And look what he did with it. The motivations of the Fascists have not changed, nor their Jesuit and Jewish connections, whatever those ties mean I do not know, but they are there. Their motivations are much more sinister and cruel and in no uncertain terms must be halted.

With McCain unable to win the election, even while cheating, and Bush musing that he may not leave office, we have a sinister possibility he plans to keep his office through a declaration of martial law. All he would require would be another 'terrorist attack' to make the American public even more panicked.