Review of Bramwell's Hidden History of Environmentalism:

By William Walter Kay

Intro

What follows is a critical and supplemented condensation of three books on the history of environmentalism written between 1985 and 1994 by Oxford History Professor Anna Bramwell. The latter two books were published by Yale University. The books make clear the Third Reich was a radical environmentalist regime. The Nazis promoted organic farming, reforestation, species preservation, naturalism, neo-paganism, holistic science, animal rights, sun-worship, herbalism, anti-capitalism, ecology, anti-urbanism, alternative energy, hysterical anti-pollutionism and apocalyptic anti-industrialism. At the same time the British ecology movement was stridently, treasonously fascist. While these aspects of Bramwell’s writings have been commented on, however inadequately, much less has been said about her treatment of post-WWII environmentalism. Here she provides useful insights into the wholesale corruption of the scientific community, the capturing of key organizations and the manipulation of the mass media by the environmental movement. Bramwell is not a passive observer of this process and conceals key players, interests and motives.

Table of Contents

Bramwell
Anna through the Platonist Glass
Peasantists outstanding in their Fields
Alchemy Astrology Augury Ecology
Soil with Soul
Darre the Enserfer
Die Klein Englische
How Green is your Nazi?
The Polish Holocaust
The Luciferian Rebellion – Environmentalism in the UK 1945-94
Goebbel Warming
Hiel Hippy!
Neo-fascism Eco-fascism
To the East
Deep Doo-doo
Tomorrow the World
Summary and Conclusion

Bramwell

Bramwell remembers the English countryside before the “ruination by roads” and “intensive farming” and before she: “began to think about ecological problems in the 1960s, [when] it was a rarefied interest. My friends, many of whom were attracted by Maoist or other revolutionary ideas, or were active in student politics, seemed to me to miss the crucial danger point of that time’s politics, which was the steamroller of Western – and American-dominated - culture ironing out all values, whether rural or spiritual, on a worldwide basis.” (1)

The first of twin revelations to hit Bramwell was a timely spark that Thatcher was right, “state planning was bound to fail” (2). The second occurred while she stayed on a small farm (a rite of passage for some) where Bramwell “learned of the unquantifiable pleasures, and through knowing the ex-farmers, something of the unique quality of faces untouched by television expressions, or modesty, unselfconsciousness and worth – virtu.” (3) This farm experience was a “constant inspiration”, regurgitated in each book. Had she not met the ex-farmers she “would not have recognized what it was that so many ecologists were trying to preserve.” (4) Because reviewers complained her treatment of the rural couple was condescendingly High Tory, she atoned in her next book acknowledging the lives of such people consisted of dirty low-paying toil. She then takes flight again over England’s verdant countryside naming several species of trees from the farm concluding she: “is not without sympathy for ecological values” having “retained a gut feeling about the value of the rural life and the countryside”. To this she later adds, “I live in the country still, because I am happier there.” (5)

Her books are polemical. The second volume begins: “Perhaps unusually for an academic book, I have tried, deliberately, to include my own views in the analysis.” And later:

“I refer in passing in this work to the harmony and beauty of nature. I have taken this as a given....I have not formally addressed or endorsed the reality of the claim that rural life is in some way morally superior. I have however felt it throughout as an underlying argument, hard to prove, not academically acceptable, yet presiding within the assumptions of our culture...Paeans of praise for the yeoman spirit fall easily into cliché, and while such people were in evidence, it is hardly necessary to delineate their virtues in detail; it was a common presumption of the culture at the time, and like all such presumptions, it was not – it did not have to be – articulated convincingly.” (6)

Bramwell never truly reveals her opinions. About her early intellectual development she provides:
“For me, as for many others relying on a small public library, the outstanding figures to write about the small-holding ideal were...Knut Hamsun and Henry Williamson....Again, like many others, I had no idea...that either author had been involved in politics.” (7)

Both were hard-core Nazis. The passage coming closest to spelling out her views is: “The habit of the English businessmen of returning to their rural homeland as soon as possible – so bewailed by critics for over two hundred years – shows that the first ‘good’ that is purchased after one’s sustenance is the quality of life we associate with the countryside. And the nurture of the countryside is the first long-term aim of those who live in it, belong to it, and wish to transfer it intact to their heirs.” (8)

So what is that capitalist doing in our Constable? Why, he’s obscuring the presence of another community of wealthy men who never left the “rural homeland”. Bramwell’s values are those of the aristocratic reformist environmentalist movement whose principal beefs are: “the domination of American culture in Europe – especially Britain – via the media, the slow but final removal of meaning from many of our institutions (church, family, law) which has already amounted to a revolution, the dissolution of language and meaning is another blow”. (9)Of this social movement’s four 20th century field marshals – Otto von Hapsburg, Prince Philip, Prince Bernhard, and Count Coudenhove-Kalergi – she mentions only the latter; then briefly and only to justify her own racism. (10) She makes one reference to the British Royals only to rush to Charles’ defence after he was knocked for decrying modern architecture and advancing rural values; or as the headline put it: “Prince Charles love of thatched cottages like Hitler”. (11) Bramwell dismisses critics who see “aristocratic malice” behind this social movement; who see men striving for “a world of impoverished serfs in which only the educated planner-king enjoys port and motor-rides to the rural hinterlands.” (12)

Bramwell’s Ph. D thesis (Oxford 1982) was: National Socialist Agrarian Theory and Practice with Special Reference to Darre and the Settlement Movement. In 1984-5 she published 3 essays on Nazi agricultural policy and her first book: Blood and Soil; Richard Walther Darre and Hitler’s ‘Green Party’. The book’s preface thanks Oxford History Professor John Clarke (Fellow of All Souls’ College): “for his long-term interest and encouragement of this project.” She researched Blood and Soil in Germany courtesy a British Academy grant. Writing Blood and Soil was, for Bramwell, “a voyage of discovery” into the question of why were the Nazis the first radical environmentalists in charge of a state. (13)

She was a Research Fellow at Trinity College, Oxford when she wrote Ecology in the 20th Century. Lord Quinton (Trinity’s President) along with Lord Beloff and Prof. John Farquharson read her drafts, made corrections and pointed out avenues of research. Additional assistance was provided by the Friends of the Earth (UK) energy expert.Ecology, being published by Yale, reached a wide audience of environmentalists from whom her treatment of the Nazi-Ecology connection elicited hostile reviews. The Guardian called the book “dangerous and perverse”. The British Green Party was upset because, as Bramwell saw it, she removed environmentalism’s history from their control. The Times Higher Education Supplement came to her defence saying she merely overturned a stone and dismayed liberals with what lay beneath. (14) Of this period Bramwell pines: “discussing the roots of ecology to an audience of pained undergraduate green sympathisers made me realize the impenetrability of the partisan mind.” (15) However, “once the fuss had died down”, Ecology became an influential text and her word “ecologism” (political ecology) gained currency among environmentalist professors. Ecology is on most environmentalist history and ethics reading lists. An American textbook was developed around the ecologism concept. (16)

Her work was part of a team effort to write biographies of Green Nazis within a larger academic project called the “historicisation of National Socialism” through which the Third Reich is deconstructed and its policies separated and re-categorized:
“This process has been continuing for some years, and is known as the ‘historicization’ of the Third Reich. National Socialist welfare policies, for example, have been compared to those proposed by Beveridge – a cross country comparison. Nazi war aims have been found comparable to those of Germany in the First World War – a comparison of a different kind.” (17)

Bramwell says there are many reasons for “re-categorising the past” but it is usually done for “polemical motives”, adding:
“Anything to do with National Socialism must carry overtones of a polemical interpretation, for the simple reason that National Socialism is the demonic figure of our time, and plays a vital role in the health of our society, quite apart from its role in legitimizing the post-war settlements and systems. We need a figure to represent evil.” (18)

Blood and Soil’s bibliography cites 2 books by leading holocaust denier, John Irving, whose Goring (1989) is an example of the Green Nazi biography genre. Yet, there is much to be done:
“There is a body of speeches, books and pronouncements which, in common sense terms, constitute Nazi ideology. It is not complete. Hitler’s speeches have never been collected and published in full, even in their original German.” (19)

Bramwell’s contribution required overcoming significant research obstacles. German Agriculture Ministry files, including personal letters of leading bureaucrats, were destroyed by Allied bombing. On the other hand, her contacts to German archivists gave her access to “restricted” files on leading Nazis. Her contacts included: a Nazi cabinet minister’s wife, the Nazi socialite Princess Marie Reuss zur Lippe, and most importantly Hans Merkl, a Nuremburg trials defence attorney. Bramwell’s Blood and Soil is a re-working of the defence Merkl gave on behalf of Nazi Agriculture Minister Walther Darre. Bramwell assures us: “wherever possible [she] avoided using defence documents presented at the Nuremberg Trial as a sole source”. She was given access to Darre’s “diary”. The original was purchased from a state archive and “burnt in the late 1960s”. Bramwell was allowed to read (but not photocopy) extracts from the original edited by two Darre associates who deleted anything of a “personal, prolix and libellous nature.”(20)

Her archival research was essential because: “there were two levels of ecological support in the Third Reich. The first was at the ministerial level, the second was at the planning and administrative level, in the new party organs.” (21)Her general research leaves no doubt: “German National Socialism had a strong ecological element”. (22) More specifically in relation to her archival research: “we do not have to strain at gnats to show there was a strain of ecological ideas among Nazis: the evidence is ample. It would be better known if it were found in the more well-known of the authorized texts referred to above, but it does exist in the ministerial, planning and personal archives of the Third Reich.” (23)

Bramwell’s voyage of discovery was not confined to 1933-45. Her analysis of environmentalism between 1945 and 1993 is a treasure but requires some decryption. For example, she repeatedly kicks around “left-wing” and “right-wing” in what are history of ecology texts wherein: “It is part of my argument that those who want to reform society according to nature are neither left nor right but ecologically minded.” (24)However she also informs us that those who claim to be “neither left nor right”, particularly Third Way promoters, are “the radical Right and revolutionary conservatives” for whom “the call for a third way is also seen as a means of avoiding the past”. (25)

Also confusing is her trisection of environmentalism into the sub-categories: Green, Environmentalist and Ecologist which she does not use consistently. Generally, Bramwell sees “environmentalists” as reformist, realistic, rural-orientated, low-key, Pan-Europeanists appearing as “single-issue and non-ideological activists, who are concerned with problems such as air and water pollution or protecting wildlife”. (26) The “Greens” are national Green Parties, especially the German Green Party, who opportunistically appropriated environmentalist ideas into a left-liberal grab-bag of election promises to appeal to the urban mob. The other bad guys are the “Ecologists” (particularly the Deep Ecologists) who are a philosophically-inclined radical flank of the movement distinguished by their extreme and sometimes violent opposition to urban-industrial society. Bramwell is on the former side of the following fault lines within environmentalism: rural versus urban, reformer versus radical, Pan-Europeanist versus nationalist, lobbyist versus electoralist and pro-nuke versus anti-nuke.

Bramwell’s polemics were part of a movement purge organized by the Pan-European reformist-environmentalists. During the 1950s and 1960s this elite core of the movement conducted a long-term, widespread campaign of lobbying, infiltrating, acquiring and building key political and cultural institutions. They undertook mass mobilizations starting in the late 1960s. Bramwell chronicles how: “environmentalism was the preserve of the few for so long and then became a mass movement” adding “the rise of environmentalism caught sociologists by surprise”. (27)Movement leaders were also taken by surprise by the rise of far right ecological extremists and by green left-nationalists. From the first tendency, they feared the rise of a German Pol Pot. (28) The reformists were also furious at left-lib urbanites for exploiting the green symbolic repatoire to further the precise welfare, wage and housing policies which the elite viewed as the problem. Reformist environmentalists backed the nuclear industry which the urban greens and deep ecologists opposed.

History, like uranium, is a dual-use technology; it can make tools or weapons. For Bramwell it is a weapon because she knows: “environmentalism is a radical belief with a hidden history”. (29) She knows environmentalism belongs nowhere along the socialist-to-libertarian continuum of utilitarian political thought. Part of her critique of the 1980s activist spouting green rhetoric was that: “it is not widely known that similar ecological ideas were being put forward by Darre in National Socialist Germany, often using the same phrases and arguments that are used today. (30)From this it followed that: “linking green ideas with Nazism is explosive particularly in Germany where the Greens have embraced soft leftist values of feminism, egalitarianism, and anti-nuclear activism.” Historian Bramwell had two targets to strike. Firstly, by unveiling the history of environmentalism, using the power vested in the swastika, she hits the left-lib urban greens. “Reds”, according to Bramwell, “will have nothing to do with the folkish”. (31) Her second targets, the ecologists, are made to look ridiculous by exposing the history of the myth-making process underlying the enviro-scares upon which ecologists predicate their draconian agenda. One minute the ecologist is on an Oslo street corner shouting “billions must die” and the next minute he learns he has been brainwashed by the people that gave us Beatle-mania.

Anna through the Platonist Glass

Bramwell can be frank about environmentalism’s pathological dishonesty because it is a quality she approves of. Buried throughout her writings is a fragmented chronology of environmentalism’s corruption of science. The untruthfulness of environmentalist propaganda is so obvious she conserves paper debunking it:
“There is no space in this book to discuss the likelihood or otherwise of the multitude of threatened ecological disasters, but it is not necessary to do so in order to suggest convincingly that ecologism and real disasters have little in common...The ecological package-deal is not a response to real problems...In short, the Green argument does not conform to the rationalist model of scientific thinking... (32)
To this she quickly adds: “Nevertheless, Green argument does depend to a surprising degree on ‘scientific’ facts. It depends on economist’s calculations and the climatologists assertions.” (33)
Understanding this manipulation of scientific symbols is a central aim:
“One of the themes of this study is the link between science and political ecology, and in particular the role played by science in lending conviction to what is at root a value-saturated creed.” (34)

The link is important because:
“The justification by science and scientist has to be incorporated into a history of ecological thinking if we are to understand the force, its convincing nature, and its rounded and comprehensively satisfying ideological completeness.” (35)

“Platonism”, or “Neo-Platonism”, is a 2400 year old writtentradition of arch-conservative analysis and advice. The tradition began and remains an expression of the nobility. Studying Neo-Platonism brings the jarring realization that our cherished religions are utterly deliberate concoctions of wise old men who hammer out mythological frames with the express intent of hoodwinking and controlling the masses. Writings about preserving social harmony through the “veiled nature truth” date back millennia. (36) Bramwell recounts the tradition’s honoured legacy: “The scientific efflorescence of the Renaissance was connected with the creative cosmologies of Neo-Platonism, not the rational discourse of Aristotle.” (37) Neo-Platonists formed one camp in the British culture wars of the early 20th century. In the rival camp was H. G. Wells who saw the struggle as between the believer in science and the “reactionary who is trying to restore a disorderly past”. Wells opposed “religion, monarchy, peasants, Greek Professors, poets and horses.” (38) In Bramwell’s Neo-Platonist camp were followers of Burke, Ruskin, and Oakeshott of whom she writes:

“Their main characteristic is that of myth-making. Myths are needed either to convey a non-earthly or spiritual concept, or to maintain social stability and to protect society from excessive and destructive rationalism (constructivist rationalism, as defined by Hayek, and exemplified by Bentham). This is a constant of Conservative thought.” (39)

For the Neo-Platonist “the truth is hardly bearable” and politics is a carnival of lies:
“There is one profound difference between politics and other disciplines. In politics you can create an idea out of nothing, persuade people to believe in institutions and principles. Belief confers reality: mutual belief confers legitimacy. Institutions feed back into society, and reinforce myth.” (40)

This attack on truth is a continuation of the Counter-Enlightenment attack on reason, science and the possibility of objectivity:
“The assumption that the world can be seen objectively is challenged by Hayek. He claims that scientific and technological education produced the scientistic heresy. Hayek shifts this belief that man can and should control the earth to the mid-19th century and he blames Jeremy Bentham...” (41)

Extreme subjectivism defined Platonism for centuries and has persisted in many forms: “Scientific relativism is to be found in Engels and in the New Left today.” (42) What seems ridiculous to one generation seems sound to the next. “Orthodoxy derives from heresy” declares Bramwell. (43)Predictably, she hits the obscurantist’s default button with: “It takes a creative mind to invent quantum physics or to believe in relativity, and it takes a certain kind of credulity to take these wonders on trust.” Then she gets dizzy, suggesting astrology and Steiner’s magical magnetism are taken seriously by science. (44)

To this mindset the “truth” consists of myths so widely accepted they have become “public opinion”. Myths are not lies but widely, or narrowly held, belief systems. A social movement’s struggle to popularize a mythical framework is a struggle to convert it into a truth. To achieve this, social movements convert and recruit opinion leaders such as teachers and preachers, but most importantly politicians and their handlers. (45) Conversion of statesmen to the Cause will inevitably turn movement myths into truths. Bramwell gives a relevant example of this perspective: “Some argue that as sustainable development is accepted by all world leaders and spokesmen as a goal, it must represent popular opinion.” (46)

The challenge for contemporary Neo-Platonists is to implant a mythology capable of solving “the knotty problem of the political acceptability of no-growth policies”. No-growth or slow-growth economies are perennial favourites of this movement. Environmentalist leaders “believe that ‘growth’ is a misconceived ideal, best abandoned as soon as possible.” Implementing this program is problematic but: “public opinion would be behind no-growth policies, providing they were explained clearly and a crisis atmosphere engendered (for example the greenhouse effect, the ozone layer)”. (47)Thus, during the 1960s enormous “efforts and resources [were] put into promulgating the doctrine of the Doomsday syndrome”. Because “the certificate of scientific origin is crucial to the effectiveness of the ecological argument” this initiative began “with dissident scientists as their main driving force.” (48) Environmentalists mobilized a cadre of converted scientists, connected them through journals and networks and subjected them to unique forms of peer pressure. (49)Thus arose: “scientists who saw the light and decided to save the human race...scientists who have turned their attention to managing the planet’s affairs”. (50) This mobilization resulted in “the conversion of a significant part of the intelligentsia.” (51)Bramwell describes the “Green Doomsday” choir, and ecologists in general, as “scientists against science”. (52) She continues:
“Many of the converts to ecologism since the mid-1970s are not themselves mystics, but began by deploring mysticism, occultism and the abandonment of a belief in science and were later converted to resource egalitarian, Doomsday ecologism...Peter Medawar, Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov all took up “Green Doomsday thinking” (53)

The UN publication Only One Earth (1972) helped scientists conceptualize “environmental problems in a worldwide context” and “won over many in the rationalist scientist camp who were unaffected by the scientific mysticism of Teilhard Chardin”. Another milestone was the giddy reception surrounding the release of Nobel Prize-winner Peter Medawar’s Pluto’s Republic (1982) which “marked the wholesale conversion of a scientific elite to Doomsday thinking.” Medawar argued the technosphere was out of balance with the biosphere. For evidence he reprinted disproven prophecies which he felt justified in reissuing because reputable scientists endorsed them. Medawar declared his new scientific mission was to: “develop for the earth as a whole the deep and passionate sense of allegiance, which youngsters are brought up to feel for their birthplace, school or nation.” Neo-Platonic corruption of science is doable because scientists “have non-rational parts of their psyches like the rest of us” and as such “their critical mechanism can be unhinged”. (54)The corruption occurred because: “Establishment people are as prone to unreality, to the dictates of fashion or politics as anyone else. To rise in the establishment you do not take an exam that guarantees you against ever having any dotty ideas; you simply take an exam that ensures you have the same dotty ideas as your peers.” (55)

Scientific corruption requires having well-known scientists make alarming pronouncements about matters outside their areas of expertise; a process facilitated by a “characteristic of the scientific mind...to believe that once successful in one field, you can solve problems in others”. These celebrity endorsements avoid critical attention because scientists within the relevant discipline treat the celebrity scientist’s remark as the statement of a lay person. Thus the names of famous scientists get attached to unscientific statements. In her words: “the history of political ecology has thrown up, and indeed depends on, many scientists who, outside their own disciplines, appeared to lack any saving element of reductionism, any critical analysis.” (56)

Scientific corruption involves herding lesser-known movement motivated scientists onto the relevant, controversial fields. (57) For decades: “the scientists and activists who campaigned on ecological issues arrived at their beliefs from a variety of disciplines, and experienced considerable cross-fertilisation of their ideas.” (58)Thus thetypical Green Doomsday scare is formulated by movement scientists making “extrapolation(s) of present trends, taking the worst possible estimate of such trends, and assume no technological or social change, no new resource discoveries”. (59)These predictions are stamped by celebrity scientists and then sent to the media who bomb the public until: “claims which, a few decades ago, would have demanded an analytical response now quickly become clichés, part of our mental furniture”. (60) Now it is only the “daring citizen who will doubt the scientific forecast.” (61) Bramwell dares to mock the “prophesies”. She points out that by 1982 the dire predictions of 1968-72 were completely discredited. She is amazed the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth (1972) was written by a team of prophets absent any social scientists, economic historians or development specialists yet became “accepted as a charter for global planning by global agencies”. (62)

The “oil crisis” of 1973-4 was “manna” for the movement. The media informed the public that the environmentalists were right – industry was physically exhausting the planet’s petroleum reserves. Bramwell knows: “the oil crisis of 1973-74 seemed to come as a vindication of the Doomsday scenario. In imitation of finitude but through the old fashioned mechanisms of the cartel, the oil price went up four times, and the energy crisis burst upon the world.” Oil crisis propaganda fused finite resource arguments with biological arguments and “seemed to prove the economic ecologist argument beyond doubt”. (63)However Bramwell, faithful Neo-Platonist, argues the myth of petroleum scarcity served Europa by kick-starting serious work on hydrocarbon conservation and energy alternatives. The oil crisis was a response to Europe’s victimization by the “energy imperialism” of the oil-rich states.(64)

Similarly, the official rationale behind the massively wasteful recycling industry is that recycling is necessary to cope with the scarcity of minerals and the shortage of land-fill sites – both myths. She realizes recycling glass “is illogical as sand is super-abundant and the recycling process is energy-intensive.” Recycling programs are uneconomical yet useful:
“...legislation in Germany makes car manufacturers responsible for the recycling of their own cars...German recycling policy is more of a trade war weapon than a serious contribution to recycling wastes. Most recycling programmes rapidly produce too much of the recyclable material (but) because packaging is something everyone perceives everyday...recycling is a popular policy.” (65) (Emph. added)

After the oil crisis the environmental movement launched a succession of aeromancy scares: acid rain, ozone-holes, global warming etc. About the latter she mentions: “fears of global climactic change began to be taken seriously (a process that owed more to the accidental conjunction of Sir Crispin Tickell and Mrs. Thatcher than to any new scientific evidence on the subject)”. (66) These mythic frames served the movement well: 
One might say the Ozone layer put the Greens on the map...the discovery of the holes in the ozone layer came just in time, and the greenhouse effect, while still in the realms of prediction, has galvanized governments into action. But that is the point: it has galvanized governments. (67)

Divining silver threads from these treasonous frauds Bramwell argues each scare is remotely possible hence research into them, and preparations for them, are beneficial to humanity. In her words: “The greenhouse effect still remains in the realms of hypothesis, but one should accept on methodological grounds that human behaviour could cause a climatic catastrophe, and any discussion of ecological apocalypse should be prepared to acknowledge that fact.” (68) Similarly, although she is aware new oil discoveries abound, she claims “logically” petroleum reserves are finite hence planning for oil’s exhaustion is prudent. (69)

One of the primary ways Neo-Platonists implant mythology is through fiction. Bramwell links English ecology, not to a scientist, but to literary critic John Ruskin. He asserted faith in science leads to error. (70) More than any other group, fictionists and lyricists have popularized environmentalist myths like the Noble Eco-Savage, the wonderful country life, and benevolent Mother Nature. Bramwell shares Oakeshott’s view that art by definition produces myths. Myths are the purest form of truth. Myths provide: “a dimension of escape...a transcendental other to comfort and to solace, to help maintain society.” (71)orget art-for-art’s-sake:

“No literature can be serious, just as no philosophy can be worthwhile, if it does not include the sense of wider interests known loosely as ‘politics’, based on an unreticent acceptance of one’s own values, and a care for the spiritual and moral life of the nation.” (72)

The promotion of environmentalist thought is ubiquitous in English fiction:
“Nature is embedded in our literature and it would be hard to find a conventional chronicle written in the last three decades that did not stress something of the beauty of the English countryside before the First World War.” (73)

Clergyman Gilbert White’s late 18th century nature-romanticizing was carried on in the 19th century by Richard Jeffries – a High Tory known for militant country-dwelling, pantheistic love of nature and hatred of London. 20th century reactionary writers Mary Mitford and Hugh Massingham romanticised simple village folk. For reasons not given, Bramwell dismisses “self-consciously ‘reactionary’ writers like Evelyn Waugh” (74) but she approves of E.M. Forster’s novels for protesting the hectic pace, “the telegrams and anger”, of urban living.Contempt for urban capitalists and their alleged greed is a standard literary theme. She notes: “G.K. Chesterton and the Oxford Inklings (the group led by Tolkien and C.S. Lewis) linked a dark destructive greed with evil.” (75)

Tolkien’s efforts in myth-making were the boldest. Like all “Inklings” he mourned an England severed from its myths, folk-memory, and Nordic roots. He was a North European nationalist inspired by paintings like the Berggeist.  The source of the famous Middle Earth scene of: “the shire despoiled, the poisoned water, the tainted loyalties, the good perverted and bought, lay in his experience of the industrialization of parts of the West Midlands countryside just after WWI.” (76) In the 1940s Tolkien created a complex, value-laden epic to guide and bind the English in the way the Kalevala had united Icelanders. His trilogy’s climax is “the cleansing of the shire” – the demolition of the mills and the replanting of the forest after the “bearers of exploitative capitalism have been chased out by the sword and the fist.” This irrationalist, rural fantasy appealed to more than just “nice conservatives who fell with relief upon Tolkien’s values”. The Lord of the Rings joined pirated translations of Rosenberg’s, Myth of the Twentieth Century, on Neo-Fascist must-read lists. Tolkien was a favourite of “deracinated hippies”. In Italy “far-right groups print Hobbit tee-shirts, and have Hobbit summer camps which teach bomb-making and runes.” (77)One Italian Neo-Fascist magazine had a feature issue entitled “Hobbit, Hobbit”. (78)

Bramwell’s treatment of Tolkien warrants supplementation in light of the increase in his popularity due to movie versions of his books and due to the many writers who have taken up his magical medievalist fantasy genre. (79) Tolkien’s books are full of animist scenes like mountains causing blizzards to thwart travellers and great rains weeping on battlefields.  Tolkien’s religion, Catholicism, is tolerant of animist intermediate spirits but his Middle Earth is clearly fashioned after the pagan world, Midgard. Tolkien wrote: “In all my works I take the part of the trees as against all their enemies.” His books refer to 64 real types of plants and 8 imaginary ones. His ‘Ents’ are sentient trees, led by chief Ent, Fanghorn, who war against Sauron, ruler of industrialized Mordor. (80) A 2002 movie version of The Two Towers has an amplified scene of Fanghorn passionately rallying trees and tree protectors. (81) Fanghorn is the symbol chosen by the anti-road construction crowd in Britain and by radical US environmentalists opposing forestry. The terrorist Earth Liberation Front (ELF) chose their name so they could refer to themselves as ‘Elves’; an idea one spokesperson, Tara the Sea Elf, says was inspired by Tolkien. English Wiccans also incorporate Tolkien into their lore. (82)

Neo-Platonists even develop myths about themselves as in the Holy Grail Theory of environmentalism’s origins. Bramwell begins her rendition of this theory with a “readers will remember” that King Arthur’s knights became bored with lives a-plenty in Camelot and craving adventure crusaded off to find the Holy Grail. In the 1960s, according to this theory, youth in the industrialized West became bored with affluence and: “their dissatisfaction led them to search for ideas embodying spiritual values, not only ecological or environmental values but also the ‘irrational’ and occultist mystical ideas mentioned above.” (83) The sheep lead the shepherd! The Holy Grail Theory is a myth veiling what was a top-down imposition of environmentalism/occultism onto the unsuspecting youth of the West by busy rich old men.

For icing on the cake Bramwell digresses to add the following anecdote:

“The speech of a Red Indian chief to an American President on the proposed purchase of Indian land has become a totem for fundamentalist ecologists like Rudolf Bahro (at a recent Schumacher Conference this speech was cited several times by different speakers.) (84)

She could only be speaking of the famous “Chief Seattle’s speech” which she no doubt knows is a complete fraud. The notorious bushwhacker, slave-monger and devout Roman Catholic, Chief Seith (a.k.a. Seattle) gave a speech to an assembly in 1854. He spoke in the rare, forgotten Lushootseed language. No one has a clue what he said. The flowery speech which became the environmentalist anthem is a rendition of a revision an article appearing in a Seattle newspaper in 1884 written by the physician-poet Dr. Henry Smith. (85) Bramwell does not appear to have made an effort to disillusion the conference attendees; nor does she disillusion her readers. (The English can be naughty that way.)

Peasantists Outstanding in their Fields

The definition of “peasant” in the Oxford Dictionary comes with a caveat:
“Although modern sociologists agree that a ‘peasant’ works the land, the more wealthy peasants may also be landowners, rentiers, hirers of labour, etc., and in these capacities share interests with completely different social groups. Hence in the analysis of many rural societies divisions within the class frequently have to be made.” (86)

The dictionary supplements this with a quote from a leading social science journal:
“A peasant may be at one and the same time owner, renter, sharecropper, labourer for his neighbours and seasonal hand on nearby plantation. Each different involvement aligns him differently with his fellows and with the outside world.” (87)

Because “peasant” means anyone active in agriculture, from wealthy businessmen to penniless hired-hands, the word is useless to both sociologists and the public. Bramwell uses “peasant” around 1,000 times! She sometimes narrows in on, actually pretends to promote, the small owner-operator yeoman-type of “peasant” but in the main she uses the term very loosely. Towards an operational definition of “peasant” she quotes Oswald Spengler:
“The peasant is eternal man, independent of every Culture that ensconces itself in the Cities. He precedes it, he outlives it, a dumb creature propagating himself from generation to generation, limited to soil-bound callings and aptitudes, a mystical soul, a dry, shrewd understanding...the origin, the ever-flowing source of the blood that makes world history in the cities.” (88)

To clarify this Bramwell adds: “The peasant, this undifferentiated blob, this crab-like plant person is the foundation, the soil for the mysterious spirit that produces a culture.” (89)One of her favourite novelists, Knut Hamsun, described his hero-peasant as: “a barge of man...a tiller of the ground, body and soul; a worker on the land without respite”. (90)So peasants are crab-like barges ferrying mystical blood-blobs. Peasants are mythical beings. They are the food fairies. They are soil elves. They’re lawn ornaments.

Eulogists of peasants, or “peasantists”, are known by different names. In revolutionary Russia peasantists were “Norodniks”. They hailed from the Russian gentry’s intelligentsia and they portrayed peasants as a mysterious caste in which the salvation of Russia was stored. Similar views were held by the anarchist disciples of Russian Prince Kropotkin. Peasantists are also known as “Catonists” meaning: “those who look to the peasant as saviour of the nation, and to peasant values as a corrective against urban corruption”. (91)For a Catonist example Bramwell picks the leader of Italian Fascism. “Mussolini fits the Catonist model in that he always referred to the peasant as the backbone of the nation”. Mussolini espoused national agricultural self-sufficiency, championed “peasant values” and channelled state resources into collecting and disseminating “peasant songs” and folklore. (92) Leading Asian peasantists were Mahatma Ghandi and Mao Tse Tung. In Northern European fascist propaganda the “peasant”: “was seen as a cure-all for various social, economic and moral evils.” (93) The Nazi-peasantist connection is widely accepted: “various observers have already pointed to the rural values lying, as a style or rhetorical tendency, behind much of Nazi ideology.” (94)

Not all Fascists embraced peasantism in the same way or with the same fervour. To the Parisian fascist:“nature was a bore, and peasants were something rather distasteful” because the “French fascist was locked in the very prison of urban individualism and irony he claimed to despise.” Fortunately for the movement: “After the defeat of France, the Vichy Government’s propaganda did stress the role of the sturdy peasant as well as rural life in general.” (95)Italian Fascists were peasantist but lacked the soil-worshipping ecologism found further north. To the East: “the peasant national socialism of the Green Shirts in Hungary and Rumania might seem to resemble those of the ecological intelligentsia discussed in earlier chapters. Peasant radical fascism in Hungary, Rumania and Bulgaria was strongly anti-Semitic and anti-capitalist, as well as being anti-communist.” The Rumanian Iron Guard consisted of “anti-liberal, anti-democratic, peasant terrorists.” The Iron Guard’s “fanatically Christian peasants” were “the closest approximation to early Nazism.” (96) They identified capitalism with Jews and held it: ‘responsible for the destruction of the very fabric of traditional peasant life be it the destruction of the ancient forests of Transylvania or the decline of the Orthodox church.” Their slogan was: “Up above, we will defend the life of the trees and the mountains from further devastation. Down below (in the towns) we will spread death and mercy.” German peasantists were the most ecologically minded. They envisioned a Germany at the centre of a Pan-European “Peasant’s International”. (97) Their slogan was “Blood and Soil” which Bramwell defines by relaying a Neo-Fascist definition: “What we mean by nation, everything we got from the magic fluid of our ancestors and from our sacred land...” (98)

Her personal definition reveals her bias:
“What [Blood and Soil] implied most strongly to its supporters at this time was the link between those who held and farmed the land and whose generations of blood, sweat and tears had made the soil part of their being, and their being integral to their soil.” (99)

Her books are sown with peasantist passages. She believes “critics of the rural ideal...ignore the mounting evidence that peasant farming was a practical approach to the problems of securing the national food supply.” (100) Blood and Soil racism is acceptable to her because:

In any case, intra-racialism is an intrinsic part of the peasant ideology, although it is unfashionable to stress this in the west today. The Third World and ethnic minorities in the west are more openly racialist. The idea of a network of kinship is intrinsic to a definition of a peasant, and must by definition exclude those alien to that network. The ideal peasant farm is orientated to the long term, the family and the future of the tribe. ‘Peasantness’ cannot absorb alien cultures, religions and races without the risk of self destruction.(101)

Northern European peasantist ideology was planted in the public mind via novels, poems, short stories, and lyrics. One trend-setter was the 19th century French ultra-conservative Barres who although “a fastidious, urban, sleek-haired dandy” wrote a novel that “tenderly portrayed a tragic peasant family.” (102)A.E. Houseman was an effeminate London bureaucrat unable to graduate from Oxford because of the emotional turmoil of having his homosexual advances rejected by a young athlete. He assumed the persona of a hearty farm-labourer for his popular peasantist poetry collection A Shropshire Lad (1896). (103)

Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun entered Berlin during its 1890s Scandinavian craze. He wrote love stories and semi-autobiographical tales extolling the “aristocratic values” of chivalry, honour and quixotery. After twice crossing the Atlantic he delivered a series of lectures in 1905 denouncing America’s business ethics and consumer culture. He hated things English. English-speaking people were “Protestant Jews”. Much is made of “Knut the Peasant” but by the time he purchased his first farm (1911) he was already a wealthy writer. “The farm was used for inspiration” for Knut who: “lived in luxury, feted by European society”. (104) His second wife was a famous actress. He used his Nobel Prize money to restore a mansion. 1911 marks Knut’s conversion to peasantism and soil worship. He set out to develop “the ideology of the peasant or small farmer...the crucial component of the nation, the man on the land.” (105) He promoted national agricultural self-sufficiency and the preservation of the pristine peasant community. Between 1913 and 1915 Hamsun wrote two novels about idyllic Norwegian villages ruined by industry; ruined by margarine and store-bought shoes. Bramwell describes Hamsun’s approach as a “total criticism” and this “absolutist quality is another hallmark of the ecological thinker.” (106) Hamsun had other hallmarks of the ecologist such as a relentless search for roots and a reflexive hostility to trade. His most successful novel The Growth of the Soil (1917) starts with illiterate “countryman” Isaac (“a ghost risen out of the past to point to the future, a man from the earliest days of cultivation”)heading out to homestead with an axe and a sack of seeds. (107) His next major novel, Wayfarers (1927), juxtaposes the rooted, honest peasants against the uprooted capitalist hucksters exemplified by the fraudulent Jewish watch-dealer. The novel concludes with a symbolic burning-down-of-modernity scene emblazoned with the message:
“There’s the point that we ought to cultivate our own soil; Norway’s soil; then we shouldn’t have to buy so much of our food from abroad and suffer for it later in taxes and duties. But that’s not all. The most important thing is that we avoid...being torn up by the roots from our own poor soil and set down in a richer one.” (108)

Hamsun praised “peasant virtues” and “peasant wisdom” and saw Nazism “as an attempt to take over the world in the name of thatched roofs, folk dances and solstice celebrations.” To Hamsun in “the fight between town and country, artificial and natural, which had been the main theme of his work, Hitler indisputably was on the side of nature.” Germany would rescue the European peasantry. In Hamsun’s mind there was a: “clear link between support for what he perceived as the rural values of German and Norwegian National Socialism and his ecological world-view.” Hamsun’s novels were widely translated but were exceptionally popular in Germany where they inspired top Nazis Rosenberg, Darre and Gunther. Hamsun endorsed the Norwegian Nazi party and both his wife and son were active members. Hamsun met privately with Hitler and Goring during the war. Thousands of German soldiers on the eastern front requested copies of his novels. The Nordic Society paid his wife to give readings of his work to troops on the eastern front whereat: “to a hushed room full of soldiers she would describe in precise but biblical language the peasant seeking for empty land to till, and the arrival of a woman”. SSers wept. Condemned Nazi war criminals ask to read Hamsun before their executions. (109) After WWII the Norwegian government declared Knut a traitor, seized his assets and threw him in the nuthouse.

According to Bramwell, Henry Williamson was “one of the greatest English novelists of the Twentieth Century”. (110) He was a pioneer of green rhetoric. His “nature books, his chronicle and the volumes of country tales all hammer out an environmental point of view”. He combined an apparent concern for water and air pollution with a campaign for “rural regeneration”. In what is standard testimony of “20th century country-lovers” Williamson was forced to watch “his childhood fields brutalized into garish shops and ugly suburbs.” Williamson’s spiritual rebirth is dated to a chance reading of Jeffries from whom he borrowed, among other things, the habit of using numerous metaphors built around the image of sunshine. (111) Williamson’s discovery of Jeffries coincided with his discovery of the aristocracy during WWI – “the war taught him to ‘fit in’ with the country gentry he had never encountered before. The old families became a touchstone of comparison, a glimpse of an old order and better world.” Thus hissympathiesafter the war “were with the Quixotic, chivalrous, natural men of the upper and lower classes.” (112) Walking the gentry walk, Williamson purchased a farm in Norfolk at “the height of the agricultural depression, with good farming land going for 10 pounds an acre”. He farmed it organically after agonizing over whether to let it revert to wilderness. (113)

His most popular writings were children’s nature fiction like Tarka the Otter (1927) and Salar the Salmon (1936). His adult writing aimed at the rural-urban divide. He opposed industrial agriculture in diatribes against processed foods. He held the bran of the “Wheat berry” (or “white berry”) to be sacred. “The white bread of the cities was not only a cause of war, but a symbol of the loss and destruction that deracinated men feel.” His novels describe London as “an emanation of solar death” over which “hundreds of tons of organic and inorganic matter were in suspension”. Hishero looks disdainfully at London’s Saturday afternoon cyclists: “all hurrying, staring ahead with tinkling bells, backs bent, faces set as though they were in a race, they crouched over handle-bars”. Williamson returned from a Nuremburg rally in 1935 pumped about the future and deriding London as a great sore “about to burst and pus to run throughout the body politic”. (114)He was infatuated with Wagner’s Gotterdammerung finale with the gods in flames and Europe drowning in a rising Rhine.

Williamson contributed to the Anglo-German Review and supported British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Mosley. In addition to calling for an English-German bund: “the Anglo-German sympathizers of the period were united by a common interest in nature and ecology.” (115) Williamson boasted a German grandparent. (116) In 1941 a stridently pro-Fascist novel of his was censored as treasonous. Williamson: “blamed capitalism, competition, the free market, and the lack of planning for pollution, white bread and stunted physiques.” (117)He believed: “People had to be taught the life on the farm while young enough, in farm labour camps if necessary, to retain this link to the land.” He combined Mosleyite political rhetoric with pantheistic longing: “One day our children...will see salmon jumping again in the Pool of London” (118)Williamson got locked up during WWII.

After 1945 Williamson retreated into “spiritual ecologism”. (Bramwell mentions other “defeated fascists” who changed from “politics to meta-politics”.) Williamson then penned the 15-novel, semi-autobiographical “Chronicles of Ancient Sunlight” series which was “permeated with ecological motifs. The clear water, the shadowless sun, the kind harmony of nature...” (119)He dedicated A Solitary War to the Mosleys. The next novel compared his struggle to restore a farm with Hitler’s struggle to restore rural values. In the second last of the series, Lucifer before Sunrise, (1967) Hitler is portrayed “as a flawed Christ, a saint killed by the lack of imagination of others” and Nazism is described as an altruistic effort to cure the division of mind and body through the cult of agricultural labour. To Williamson “Hitler was a chaste Saint, above earthly impulses.” The release of Lucifer “signalled the end to reviews and reprints” andbrought “serious embarrassment for many of his fans.” The final Ancient Sunlight novel, Gale of the World (1969), explored Gnostic and Jungian psycho-analytical cults and was named in honour of a martyred Yugoslavian Royalist. The hero, Philip, resolves to explain fascism to the next generation. The Ancient Sunlight series demonstrated Williamson’s “obsession with clear unpolluted water as a symbol of truth, reality and hope for the future”. Through Philip, Williamson synthesizes images of pollution with the corruption of aristocratic values: “Philip could not bear to look into the river; he felt its condition to be symbolic of the system, of the dark pollution of the spirit of Man, of the lack of honour in the body politic.” Philip ponders: “is it mere illusion to link the pollution of an English river with the general pollution of the European vision?” (120) (Answer, yes Philip it’s an illusion.)

Williamson’s anti-Americanism was his ticket into the late 1960s protest scene where: “Youth had begun to care about the environment. He was a sensitive friend to many such people”. To English youth Williamson preached Buddhism, deep breathing and ‘diatonics’. The BBC broadcast an interview with Williamson from his farm, deleting footage of the giant swastika on his barn. His writings were reprinted in The Rural Tradition, deleting explicitly fascist passages. Williamson retained “a cult following which is increasing as more people find their environmental and ecological interests reflected in his work.” The Poet Laureate spoke at his funeral. (121)

Alchemy Astrology Augury Ecology

Bramwell finds ecologists amusingly clueless about their own history. Most ecologists believe ecology sprang out “fully formed in the 1960s”. (122) Others, following Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger (ecology’s metaphysician), date the ecology to the Bronze Age. (123) Philosophical ecologist’s search for ecology’s origins in “what went wrong with humanity, what separated man from nature.” Ecology is the reaction to the Fall. (124) Thus, some ecologists believe their discipline emerged after “the growth of the natural sciences in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries produced a separation between ourselves and the world.” (125)Historian D. Pepper posits: “German ecologists point to the holism of Goethe, Paracelus, Nietzsche...Americans see Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman as the first, or at least most important, celebrators of man and nature.” (126)No scientists among the founders. Goethe and Paracelus were science saboteurs. Pepper isolates “two roots of environmentalism in Britain, a scientific root derived from Malthus and Darwin and an unscientific romantic concept stemming from Mathew Arnold.” (127) While he is right about Arnold, Darwin has little to do with this movement, and Malthus was not a scientist but an apocalypse-spreading reactionary preacher whose theories have been completely refuted. Historian, A. Mohler, argues the “ecological package deal” grew out romantic-reactionary ideologies in the 1920s. (128)

Bramwell also roots ecology into Romanticism. She channels to mid-19th century Germany with Republican riots raging outside Wagner’s window as he dreamed of pacifying the mob with the artistic-religious synthesis only Greek theatre could provide. To Bramwell, “the development of Green ideas was the revolt of science against science” beginning around 1860 and becoming identifiable in its modern form by 1890. On early ecology she writes:
...in the nineteenth century, ecological arguments similar to today’s were put forward. An anti-Western ethic identified civilization with exterminatory and evil impulses, preferred matriarchy over patriarchy, preached anti-anthropocentrism, thought an experience of the wilderness essential to a viable society, talked in organicist metaphors, and above all believed resources are finite and must be shared and rationed. (129)

In the 1860s J. Bachofen promulgated a myth about an idyllic Bronze Age matriarchy destroyed by the patriarchal Iron Age. (130) The 1860s also marks the beginning of the American national park systems and American academic biology. In the 1860s American George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature “pointed to deforestation and other destructive results of human action.” The English-speaking world soon imported from Germany: “the new science of forestry” which “was accompanied by a mystique of the forests” that “attributed almost everything bad in the past to deforestation.” Later English editions of German forestry texts were purged of mystical passages. (131)

Although Ernst Haeckel coined the word “oekologie” in 1866 he was never a practicing ecologist. Bramwell maintains: “he (Haeckel) does not display any notable insight into the dynamic principles of ecology”. (132) Nevertheless Haeckel was a believer in ecology because he saw the universe as a balanced organism and because he gave humans and animals similar moral status (“at least some humans”). He thought society should be organized along natural lines. These are not scientific beliefs. Haeckel is often grouped with Darwin even though Haeckel did not support the theory of natural selection but clung to the thoroughly discredited Lamarkian belief in “immortal germ-plasm”. (133) (Lamarckians believe if a woman works as an apple-picker while she’s pregnant her kid will have long arms.)

Haeckel popularized a scientific-sounding theocratic pantheism. His “new pantheism had a somewhat dominating nature at its centre, a Nature expected to educate and guide humanity.” (134)Haeckel’s religion was popular in Britain and Germany. By 1900 a German magazine, with a circulation of 5 million, regularly published his writings. Haeckel founded and chaired the Monist League whose goal was to merge “spirit and matter” and “truth and poetry” into “the perfect harmony of Monism”. Haeckel was active in “the expansionist, nationalist Pan German League”. He printed pro-German war poetry in the Monist’s journal. He called for a powerful German state to undertake a program of “radical social change” in advance of racial hygiene and in accordance with Natural Law. Haeckel was pro-Buddhist and anti-Christian. To Haeckel, Christianity “contributed not only to an extremely injurious isolation from our glorious mother ‘nature’, but also to a regrettable contempt of all other organisms’. (135)

Literary critic John Ruskin’s: “influence on the political ideals of British ecologism can scarcely be overestimated.” He is kept in the historical closet because: “Ruskin was too unscientific, too religiously moral in his political prescriptions to qualify as an ecologist” (136)Nevertheless, Ruskin best articulated the ecologists’ contempt for “uprooted money” and their disgust at the “ugliness” of industry. He promoted the Back-to-the-Land movement but more importantly, he commanded a legion of writers who constituted a vital flank in a social movement Bramwell defines as an alliance of “scientific-planners and atavistic poets”. (137)

In the 1890s ecology was almost synonymous with “ethology” – a “new” field wherein academics studied animals in their natural habitats. Charles Whitman and Julian Huxley “revolutionized zoology” with bird-watching. They declared their scientific revolution had implications for humanity and asserted their knowledge was superior to conventional science or economics because they observed the real world it its natural environment outside the confines of laboratories or offices. (138) Their man-as-part-of-biological-life-cycle rhetoric and Earth-as-organism metaphor levered readers toward the “holistic vision”. They believed: “untrammelled economic growth would use up natural resources and pollute the earth irrevocably”. (139) Ethologistsarguedtheirscienceenabledhumanityto control the “primate curiosity” (“the pseudo-scientific mentality that plays with a watch and breaks it”) which they reckoned caused humanity’s estrangement from nature. (140)They were not well received by the conventional scientific community rather: “Green biologists often had to work away from recognition, from outside the traditional system. They failed for decades to break into orthodox science”. (141)The “I’ve-gone-camping-hear-me-roar” line had limited resonance.

Haeckel’s final work, God-Nature, (1914) was a bible for disciples Bolsche, Driesch and Ostwald. Bolsche’s biography of Haeckel mythologized him as a great scientist. Bolsche also wrote romanticized biology books like Love-Life in Nature which helped assemble the conceptual scaffolding of socio-biology. Hans Driesch published The Philosophy of the Organic in 1909 and lectured at numerous British Universities about that mysterious vitality at work in the universe.  Driesch believed “the only way to explain the marvels of the human consciousness and animal life was that something or being had intended it to be.” (142)In 1911 Wilhelm Ostwald merged Vitalism with fudge about entropy to cook up “energy economics”. His entropy dread was “known to a wide circle of literate people since the 1880s.” He insisted that because matter tends to dissipate only a divine force could account for the increasing complexity of Life. (Bricks crumble yet are used for building complex and durable structures. And if all that is left to Vitalism is the statement that Life is a process of resisting death and decomposition...well, no shit Sherlock, we try.) Bramwell, unforgivably, cannot escape entropic sophistry, claiming it “has not been satisfactorily refuted.” (143)Entropy dreaders held that because energy stores (coal reserves) were finite the Industrial Revolution had a built in kill-switch.(144)This type of thinking passed as serious science but eventually: “Vitalism retreated into philosophy and lost its status in mainstream science. It remained as a vigorous sub-culture, finding expression in existentialism, as well as in popular science after WWII. The religious overtones of the life-force seemed to make it unacceptable for scientific discourse.” (145)

In 1921Count Coudenhove-Kalergi “prefaced his call for a new nobility with a ringing declaration that mere scientific veracity was irrelevant.” (146) The 1920s witnessed the “scientific aberration” of ecologism become a self-conscious crusading political discipline no longer “a preserve of a small section of the European and American intelligentsia”. (147) British ecology became a High Tory bullhorn blasting technophobic myths of soil erosion and famine prophecies. (148) Ecology’s self-conscious phase developed in the context of an academic infatuation with the romantic spiritualism of Bergson and Nietzsche and with the obscurantist new sciences of quantum physics and chaos theory. The artistic contribution to this zeitgeist was an “attack on consensus” througha “fragmentation of presentation”. (149)

Ecologists were natural supporters of fascist parties. Ecology and fascism were both pro-rural and anti-capitalist. They shared the core “anti-transcendental” principle believing that humanity cannot transcend nature; that nature imposed limits on industrial development. Both fascism and ecology had “a tradition, in practise as well as in theory, of looking to nature for philosophical guidance”. (150) Much of this movement described themselves as “naturalists” meaning men who: “go to nature to learn, and return with the recommendation that one clings to the wheel because it is the most sensible path of action. To do so requires sweeping away past identities, past traditions and past errors.”  The naturalist: “glances at earlier rural times to eliminate the misdirecting signposts previous generations obeyed.” As well, “The naturist is a natural protestor.” (151)

Entropy-dreading Vitalists morphed into energy economists motivated by perceived injustices in the distribution of the world’s energy resources and by a fear of civilization collapsing. They were haunted by Malthusian “fears of land shortage, of a failure to produce enough food to feed the population”. They believed coal reserves were near exhaustion. Their science fiction and fantasy novels expressed a pull-up-the-drawbridge mentality. Energy economists were trained natural scientists who “tended to switch disciplines and pursue reform in areas remote from their original field, but which seemed to present the same kind of problems.” (152)

Ecology’s two strands, holistic biology and energy economics, fused “when the oil crisis threatened the West in the early ‘70s, [and] the same arguments about finite resources reappeared, and the same plans to re-structure society so that the most economical use could be made of land and energy. (153) Thus “ecology” became a popular word in the English-speaking world rivalling “environmentalism” as a green label because: “ecology was the science which could interpret the fragments of evidence that told us something was wrong with the world – dead birds, oil in the sea, poisoned crops, the population explosion...What it meant was everything links up...Here was a new morality, and a strategy for human survival rolled into one.” (154) Bramwell repeatedly reminds us this: “‘package deal’ of ecological ideas that appeared in Europe in the nineteenth century mimics that of today in a surprisingly complete way.” (155)

Today ecologists are “a small section of the trained intelligentsia” incorporating biological-holism, entropy-dread, and Vitalist-pantheism into “diagnoses of large scale syndromes of global sickness”. (156) Ecologists are drawn from the “Northern White Empire” (a.k.a. the “protestant triangle”). Ecologists are from industrial cities. “We do not call peasants ecologists, nor Indian tribesmen.” Ecologists are “from the university intelligentsia, though sometimes dropouts from it”. (Generally, the “educated classes are the backbone of the environmentalist movement”.) (157) Ecologists prefer to live in the country and commute which explains why: “ecologists seem to need more of the earth’s resources than other people”, but does not explain why “ecologists absolutely have to travel everywhere by aeroplane”. (158)

Bramwell stresses - ecology is a pantheisticreligion not a scientific discipline. Paradoxes abound: “ecologists perceive science as bad, yet rely on it...it is a truism for Greens that ‘science’ equates with the mechanistic world-view they believe was created by Descartes, Newton, and Bacon.” (159)Ecologists appropriate the symbolic repatoire of scientific discourse to create scientistic defences of the Industry-Hurts-Earth movement framework. Ecologists share a uniform “scepticism of traditional science”. (160) They believe: “science is good when it claims to discover a greenhouse effect, and bad when it invents a chemical fertilizer.” (161)Ecologists superstitiously imbue “Life” into inanimate objects like the soil, the oceans, or the planet. (Animism is the root of religion; even a dog will bark at a flapping patio umbrella.) Like a religion, Ecology from its inception has been “interested in values and justifications of values”. (162) Ecologists believe “orthodox science” is lacking because “it does not allow for values, is purely positivist and ignores problems of relativity”. (163) Ecologists crusade to turn “ecological ideals” into widely accepted moral standards. Ecologists claim moral obligation and moral authority to impose drastic remedies on humanity. (164) Drawing on their ideological roots in “the proto-fascist and High Tory criticism of the mercantile world”, ecologists argue that the desecration of Nature results from a sinful craving for the “unnecessary consumerist fripperies in the West.” Ecologists demand sacrifice. They demand withdrawal from the exploitation of nature. (165) Ecologistsbelieveinamythical “essential harmony of nature...to which man may have to be sacrificed.” (166) Bramwell adds: “Despite its rejection of organized and traditional Christianity, the ecological movement still carries the burden of its heritage, the legacy of the crucifixion, symbol of death, suffering and surrender.” (167) Ecology: “is a total world-view which does not allow for piece-meal reform...it fears the dissipation of resources and it is not anthropocentric. Man’s existence should not be considered primary for a moral stance towards nature...ecologists want to reform man”. (168) To ecologists, Western ideologies pollute pristine primitive cultures and frustrate the “psychic needs” of European fanciers of those cultures. Ecology is a theocratic religion; a political religion holding that:
“humans should be rooted in one place, most trade is unnecessary and wastes resources, self-sufficiency and bio-regions are good, exploitation of nature is bad, civilization is seen in a negative way, they think globally but betray a Euro-centrism, they worry about the danger to primitive peoples from Western contact, they believe untouched tribesmen have a superior way of life than the West and are happier, they are concerned about environmental toxicities, especially those in the food chain, they are for forest preservation and the planting of trees, retaining ‘wild’ genes and are against monoculture and land clearances.” (169)

Political ecologists accept as a given: “there are too many people in the world, and those here are about to die in their billions due to famine. They call for a return to pre-scientific cultures and economies and for a permanent cabal of scientific planners to manage global industrial activity. Today’s political ecology is “a re-working of geo-politics, but without the sense of history, in a sense fascism without the nationalist dimension.” Ecologists believe the hunter-gathering economy is viable. Bramwell believes three quarters of humanity would not survive two weeks in the bush. Ecology has an anarchist-nihilist tilt towards: “the burning before the replanting, the cutting down of the dead tree. The father of the movement is an utter rejection of all that is, and for the last three millennia all that was.” (170)

Bramwell is impressed by ecology because “to have reversed the idea of acceptable and provided justification for so doing can only be the work of a vigorous ideology”. (171) This vigorous ideology should not be viewed in isolation. Ecology is Pantheism. Pantheism is Neo-paganism. Neo-paganism networks into Occultism, Astrology, and the New Age movement. This is a big part of this social movement:
“Green culture today ranges from CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) to the European New Right. It incorporates the new pagans, such as the nomadic bands of witches, who visit Stonehenge for the solstice and follow the astral plane across Britain’s sacred land, the matriarchal witches who worship at exactly the same standing stone in Germany as did the pagan Nazis. The pagan movement has grown in Britain and America...together with the astrological and nature-worshipping tendencies of the naturist movement of this century.” (172)

In a re-run of fascist occultism Neo-Paganists use “Atlantean theories of a lost Golden Age” which connect various ethnic groups to vanished super-races. By the late 1980s mysticalsymbolismwas popular among “minority European nationalisms” and “the CND made the death-rune famous.” Occultism’s new respectability is connected to changes in media policy such that: “the Druid cult, appear(s) to us now in the tamed form of bespectacled neatly collared men in flowing white gowns.”  Druids were showcased ina 1987 BBC pop-history series on wizardry, myth and ritual. British Druids are mostly Welsh exemplifying the role Neo-Paganism is playing in the minority-nationalist revival which has “an echo all over Europe”. (173)

Soil with Soul

Bramwell does a lame job of mapping rural Germany’s social structure and its relationship to the important issue of tenant-farmer mobility. She acknowledges that in the 19th century the “broad pattern of landholding was to hold from a landlord” meaning the ‘toiler on the soil’ worked someone else’s land. She is also aware restrictive land practices ensured “labourers could not reject low wages in favour of new uncultivated land”. (174) The little market power tenant-farmers had resulted from offers made to them by rival aristocratic syndicates. A diminishing rural labour force compelled Frederick the Great to offer relocation incentives to Dutch colonists in the mid-1700s. In the early 1800s Prussia sweetened the deal with reforms compelling estate owners to provide pensions for tenants. Throughout the 1800s Russian and Polish aristocrats poached German tenant-farmers. Rural emigration and shrinking tax revenues compelled German micro-states to form ‘land settlement commissions’ to entice tenant-farmers into their polities. However, by the late 1800s land offers in the Americas rang a death knell for German aristocrats.

German aristocrat, J. Von Thunen, examined the causes of rural emigration in The Isolated State (written and rewritten between 1820 and 1845). After reviewing the plight of the landless, over-taxed German agricultural labourer he concluded the solution was to open a “new frontier” for a new class of German owner-operator farmers. This point of view was similar to the utilitarianism dictating the English-speaking world’s agricultural policy. Other views prevailed on the Continent. One Frankfurt parliamentarian blamed land-flight on the rural poor’s inappropriate craving for land-ownership a syndrome he thought curable through indoctrination. More influential was Count Von Bernhardi who in 1849 began publishing studies alleging that in terms of “energy units” peasant productivity was superior to large capitalist farms. To the Count, Europe’s agricultural problems resulted not from technological backwardness but from flaws in capitalism. The Count, and other ‘peasant advocates’, argued the market incorrectly costed agricultural inputs. (175) They promoted distrust of middlemen and advocated economic self-sufficiency to rescue agriculture from the skewering affect of international swindlers. From 1880 on the “Jewish cattle dealer was a stock target for anti-Semitic attacks” by peasant advocates whose disinformation fused the concepts “Jew” and “capitalist”. (176) German environmentalist-geographer, Friedrich Ratzel, blamed “soil erosion and loss of mineral resources” on the Robber-economy. To Ratzel “nomadism” was a mindset introduced to Europe by Semites. Nomadism caused capitalism. (177) Consistent with this hostility to mobility, and to block the outflow of agricultural labour, Bismarck launched a Prussian Settlement Commission and summoned G. Ruhland to report on European agriculture. Northern European agriculture was growing in productivity particularly in Flanders and Denmark but more slowly in Germany where farming remained labour intensive and resistant to new machinery. Improvements in production and foreign trade were causing gluts and depressing prices. Ruhland, a raging anti-capitalist, led an Agrarian League protest that temporarily shut the Berlin Stock Exchange. In 1908 he published a 3 volume diatribe demanding the removal of agricultural from the capitalist market.

Bramwell claims there is a misperception about 1920s German rural society which is: “widely seen as split between two extremes” – Junker versus peasant. However she grudgingly admits “the typical Junker farm was about 1000 hectares in size” while many German farms were 2 to 5 hectares in size. (178) She does not discuss the landless rural labourer. She accepts the persistence of pre-WWI social structures well into the 1920s and is aware of the unusually large number of Germans living in rural areas. But she attempts to confine the aristocracy to “the large estates of the south-west, often the remnants of Holy Roman Empire holdings” thus ignoring the north-east a place famous for the persistence of the ancient regime. She concedes Prussia was a place where: “the Junkers had considerable political power”. (179) By attempting to deny the existence of a German aristocracy she is concealing the fact that German fascism was an extension of the old-school restorationist movement. Bramwell coils at this suggestion. In her view, among the German “radical nationalists” of the 1920s “the warlike Professors, conservative landowners, Catholic reactionaries, and others who receive a bad press in most history books, were in a minority.” (180) Generals are minorities within armies.)

Evidencing the extent to which Bramwell goes to paper over the aristocracy is her treatment of the 1926 Referendum on the Prince’s Property. After the 1918 Revolution removed princes from office many Germany statelets took possession of princely property usually through generous buy-outs. However the princes fought back in the courts, which were ruled by judges connected to the dynasties, and were winning even larger settlements. This prompted an urban-leftist coalition to launch a referendum on the following proposal:
“The entire fortunes of the princes who have ruled in any one of the German states until the revolution of 1918, as well as the entire fortune of the princely houses, their families and family members, are confiscated without compensation, in the interest of the general welfare.”

The Weimer constitution’s Article 73 required that before a proposal be put to a referendum a petition on the relevant question be signed by 10% of the electorate. For the referendum to succeed over half the entire eligible electorate had to endorse it. The electorate numbered 40 million. During intense campaigning over 12 million signatures were placed on the petition and over 15 million Germans voted in favour of the referendum which was far more than were opposed, and far more than voted for any party in the previous election; but it was still short of the required 20 million. The Nazis allied with the princes. The referendum process was the largest experiment in direct democracy in human history to date and it seared Germany. Bramwell devotes at least 100 pages on interwar German politics with a tunnel vision focus on land issues and conservatism yet spares not a word on this event. (181)

Between 1890 and 1914 a new social movement coalesced in Germany at the front of which was a massive Youth Movement championing a return to primitive farming methods and the creation of an agricultural frontier on the contested eastern borderlands. The Youth Movement hatched the radical Wandering Birds sub-movement. These roaming bands (similar to hippies) chirped an anti-urban, anti-industrial song as they flittered about German forests and valleys searching for alternative ways of life. In 1913 the Youth Movement assembled at an enormous hill-side rally organized and hosted by publisher and founding Nazi, Eugen Diederichs. The rally was the debut of Ludwig Kleges’ Man and Earth which protested “the rape of nature by humanity”. (The “neo-conservative philosopher” Kleges, although a trained natural scientist, wrote books like The Spirit as Adversary of the Soul damning technology and praising Vitalism.) The hill-side rally was attended by an organization of ultra-nationalist German teachers who: “wanted to replace Christian traditions and myths with Germanic ones. The Holy Land was Germany; the holy symbol the swastika; the holy river the Rhine; the holy mountain the Wartburg.” Youth Movement celebrity Thomas Mann wrote novels combining bizarre sex scenes with negative, orientalised images of Slavic people. Drawings of Neo-Feudalist artist Fidus were movement favourites as were sci-fi novels boosting rural decentralization and anything romanticizing American Indians. The movement’s artistic intelligentsia built on existing traditions within German poetry’s cryptic wilderness-based language – a blue flower symbolized the unknowable; the forest was a synonym for home etc. This literature contained: “one of the constant themes in German writing on nature...that it is seen as a pointer or a path. It goes somewhere. Nature is a teacher.” (182) Ecological-environmentalist thought was evident in the druidical, occultist, and neo-paganist groups popping up across turn-of-the-century Germany. The term “environment” (umwelt) was first used in the modern sense by physiologist J. Von Uckhill in 1909 and gained currency shortly thereafter. Ecology was a widely-used word in German academia and in a broader commercial-cultural field. “Ecology was formulated in Germany and many ‘alternative’ ideas, in the field of medicine, sun-worship, vitamins and homeopathy, came from German speaking countries.” (183)

The devastation of WWI vindicated and animated this social movement because: “the much mocked fear of steamroller pseudo-democracy, of anti-human technology expressed by the critics of ‘bigness’, or urbanism, was to be made manifest, embodied in the mindless mass slaughtering of the war.” (184) The movement’s solution was a return to the simple agricultural life. In keeping with this, and for other reasons, German governments promised small farms to demobilizing soldiers. Inter-war governments improved tenure-security for tenants and drafted plans to settle 250,000 families around the Baltic. (185)

In the 1920s two soil-oriented movement organizations, “Soil Guardians” and “Anthroposophists”, emerged while the overall movement embraced mystic racism. The vehemently anti-Polish and anti-Western Soil Guardians dreamed of settling the German East. Many Soil Guardians were status-less refugees from the eastern borderlands living on handouts or working without pay on estates in eastern Germany. Soil Guardians marched in the thousands chanting: To the Eastland Will We Go. They flew the swastika. (186) Another sub-movement was launched in 1924 when nationalist poet, Count Keyserling, organized a conference at which Rudolf Steiner lectured on self-sufficient farms, the spirit of the soil, and tilling along magnetic lines. (187) Steiner was an Austrian-born Catholic mystic who preached Anthroposophy - a mix of theosophy, Vitalism, astrology, magical magnetism and primitivism. Bramwell leaves out Steiner’s beliefs in reincarnation and in a complex hierarchy of angels and archangels. She mentions neither his extreme racism nor his extensive psychoanalytical research into myth acceptance. In Steiner’s mythology: “the earth was alive: the soil was like an eye or ear for the earth, it was ‘an actual organ’.” He convinced many that eating foods made with modern fertilizers damaged the nervous system. He named his main administrative building the Goethenaum and he chose the pagan fertility goddess Demeter as his symbol. Steiner named his pre-industrial farming method “Biodynamic Agriculture”. (188) At this time the entire reactionary social movement was embracing “Aryanism”. Bramwell attributes this to a “fundamentally sympathetic attitude to North Indian culture, of which Hinduism was seen as variant.” Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian poet, theosophist and nature-mystic “was received with rapture in Berlin in the 1920s.” Tagore was a Nobel Prize winning multi-millionaire whose philanthropy was directed at developing primitive villages in Bengal. (189)

Leading this culture war on the urban front was Nazi ideologue Hans Gunther who inveighed against modern architecture as “the work of nomads of the metropolis, who have entirely lost any concept of homeland”. This was the master frame of the German far right. The problem was “cosmopolitan, heartless, featureless, modernism.” (190) The villain was the capitalist Jew. Gunther’s Racial History of the European Peoples (1927) was widely-read and influenced Darre and other future Nazi leaders. (191) Bramwell summarises:
 “The National Socialists, consistent at least, were to attribute the spirit of mechanistic, exploitative technology, bad technology, to the Jews. Their dichotomy, their causation was clear. The great error, the wrongness, of the path Western civilization had taken, was caused by the cultural effects of Jewry.” (192)

Darre the Enserfer

Walther Darre’s father was a skirt-chasing, boozing Berlin businessman rescued from ruin by his buddy, the Berlin Stock Exchange President, who put him through a training course before dispatching him to Argentina to front an import-export business. Young Walther lived in a Buenos Aires mansion until aged 9 when he was sent to Germany. Aged 19 Darre enrolled in a training institute for plantation administrators and colonist-farmers but WWI interrupted his studies. He volunteered August 1914 and was twice wounded serving an artillery regiment decimated twice over the course of 30 battles. In 1918 Darre joined the violent arch-conservative veterans group, the Free Corps. He joined Steel Helmet in 1922 and the Freedom Party in 1923. (In the 1920s, with the Nazis surging in the south, Hitler ceded northern Germany to the Freedom Party.) During the turmoil following the 1925 death of German President Ebert, and the subsequent election victory of Hindenburg, Darre marched the streets with Steel Helmut chanting: we will hammer the French. Darre’s private letters from this period (but not his public statements) ranted against “Jewry and Parliamentarianism”. (193)

From 1922-6 Darre, his farming dreams thwarted by high land prices, studied animal breeding at university. Much was later made of Darre’s hands-on farming background but his farming experience consisted of getting hired and fired by three farms in 1921. In 1925 he was disqualified for a job with the Prussian Ministry of Agriculture because the position was reserved for people with farming experience. (194) This left Darre, aged 30, supporting wife and child on an allowance from his father. He turned to writing for a career, publishing 14 articles on animal breeding by 1927. His writing career was aided by his joining the “Nordic Ring” – a racist group centered around senior bureaucrat H. Konopacki-Konopath and the Princess Marie Adelheid whom Darre called “little sister and whose children he godfathered. Through the “Ring” Darre attracted financial support from Silesian aristocrat De la Vigne Eckmannsdorf, another champion of peasant culture. This affiliation introduced Darre to more sophisticated forms of peasantism and his writing soon blurred the distinction between peasant and aristocrat with gibberish like: “The lower German is a born aristocrat in character. No one is more recognizably aristocratic than the true peasant.” (195) His first popular article “Internal Colonization” (1926) attacked “dreams of empire” arguing Germany would not regain its colonies nor was this even desirable because foreign colonies undermined the Fatherland. In 1927 (while living with his parents) he wrote The Peasantry as Life Source of the Nordic Race castigating things mercantile, uprooted and urban. He “envisaged a Northern European ‘green’ union, spreading from Holland to Finland” (196) Darre promoted labour-intensive farming and local self-sufficiency as steps toward national agricultural self-sufficiency. As a disciple of Haeckel and Bosche, Darre’s peasantism blended Vitalism, Monism, and Lamarckianism. In the late 1920s Darre published another book and 40 articles including “Pig as Criterion regarding the Nordic and Semitic Peoples”.

In 1928 Darre, co-founded the “Union of Noble German Peasants” and hooked-up with Soil Guardian leader, Georg Kenstler, whose recently launched “Blood and Soil” magazine urged colonization of the eastern borderlands. To Kenstler “Blood and Soil” meant the “integral link between the tribe and the land, a link to be defended by blood if necessary”. Darre helped Kentsler organize a “nationwide network of cells among racially minded peasants”. Darre received financial assistance from Kenstler associate, Paul Schultze-Naumburg, whose estate was a centre for volkish activities and peasantist ideologues. He preached hereditary farms were an expression of divine law. With these people in mind Darre’s A New Nobility from Blood and Soil called for mandatory primogeniture, an end to the sale of land, and a prohibition on farm foreclosures. (197) The aim was a landowner’s state within the state. Younger, disinherited sons of rural landowners would form the militias, armies and city police forces of this future state. The landlord’s state would use food as a weapon against German cities to complete the conquest. (198) Darre thought “land reform” was a conspiracy started by economist Ricardo, an English-speaking Jew. Ricardo’s attack on high rent was interpreted an attack on the peasant. Darre blamed Jews for the Peasant War of 1525. He contended Jews damaged their nervous systems by incessant wandering and were genetically rootless and usurious. (199) Darre drew on the anti-market ruralism of Ruhland and organized study groups around his books which he tried to republish.

1930 began with Darre having sold a few thousand copies of his own books and working without pay for agricultural associations. Bramwell implies this work, which involved travelling the Baltic and Finland, had an intelligence gathering component however it could not have been significant as Darre complained in a letter: “I can’t even afford clothes.”  In May, Schultze-Naumburg’s wife arranged for Darre to meet Hitler. They spoke for a few hours. Hitler told Darre to prepare a report outlining “the possibility of a peasant coup, to be carried out by force against German cities.” In June, Darre joined the Nazi Party after accepting an offer to be Nazi agricultural organizer at 600 marks a month, paid by Darre’s publisher.

Because the Nazis did poorly in the previous election Darre’s job was to help build an electoral machine for the party’s rural wing. Towards this end, and to build his own power base, Darre organized the “Agricultural Organization” (AO) within the Nazi Party’s Labour Department. As AO executive, Darre reached out to former colleagues in Steel Helmet and the Freedom Party, and infiltrated farmer’s groups across Germany. All AO men joined Himmler’s Protection Squads (SS) and Himmler became Darre’s main ally within the party. For a deputy Darre recruited Herbert Backe; a ‘Skald Order’ activist since 1910. The Skalds shared the view that profits and peasants were incompatible. Skalds wanted to criminalize migrating to America. Skalds believed: “that soviet rule in Russia could not last, and that in the welter of successor states that would arise from a dismembered Russia, Germany could seize land in the east, and German farmers migrate there in force.” (200) In preparation for the eastern conquest Darre and Backe solicited party funds to establish a Race and Settlement Head Office in 1932.

Darre’s writings from 1930 to 1933 reflected the fact that his AO men were competing with agitators from the German Communist Party. These were hard times for the German rural poor. Half of farming operations were losing money. Darre had to be critical of the big landlords to preserve credibility among exasperated rural masses. He criticized the aristocrats as worn-out and gleefully showed articles written by out-of-the-loop conservatives calling him a Communist. He idealized the small farm and promised security of tenure to tenants and protection against foreclosure to small-holders. (201) In 1932 Hitler declared the Nazis were “the greatest peasant party” and a few months later he approved Darre’s statement calling for a “total change of the agricultural marketing and production structure.” (202)The Nazis called for greater subsidies for egg, grain, and dairy producers. On the other side, the Chamber of German Industry issued a report telling the government to end subsidies and allow market forces to reorganize farming. The Industry Chamber’s: “concept of the peasant as a profit-making businessman able to buy and sell his land at will, was opposed to all Darre and his staff stood for.” (203) The Nazis argued: “that foreign trade and industrialization had been designed by manipulative capitalists to force the rural population into towns”. (204) When the Nazis captured power, the Chamber report’s author fled to America where he “criticized the Junkers for their backwardness, obstinacy, and continued political power.” (205)

Chancellor Hitler appointed Darre: National Peasant Leader, Minister of Agriculture and Chairman of the Council of Agricultural Organizations. Backe became Darre’s deputy. Hitler immediately addressed the German aristocracy’s concern that Darre planned “to divide up the large estates” after the National Landowners Association complained to Hitler about Darre’s attacks on the “agricultural plutocracy”. Hitler ordered Darre to meet privately with President Hindenburg who came representing “conservatives” fearing Darre planned to “destroy the great estates”. (206) Hindenburg left laughing. Weeks later, in what set the pattern, Backe’s plan to level out the agricultural debt burden was decisively rejected by cabinet.

In September 1933 Darre created a new agricultural marketing board, the National Food Estate, which he headquartered in the original capital of the Holy Roman Empire, Goslar. His “dream was to make Goslar the centre of a new peasant’s international; a green union of northern European peoples.” He started a Peasant University in Goslar and held rallies on nearby hill-sides, addressed by Hitler, and attended by up to 500,000 supporters. His Agriculture Ministry received budget increases of 700% between 1934 and 1939 (average ministry increase - 170%). From 1933 to 1944 Agriculture went from being the 8th largest to the 4th largest ministry. Darre was “a prominent and popular figure” holding court in Goslar where “visitors flocked to him” including “organic farming enthusiasts from England.” (207) The court at Goslar listened as Darre “expounded his radical proposals to de-industrialize Germany, to leave the cities to decay, and to concentrate resources on the land.” (208) He championed a “new modernity” for agriculture as it was obvious “the day of mechanized cash crop farming was over.” (209) Darre published ecological articles and had a captive audience for impromptu science lectures. Here’s Darre on the stump in 1935: “our forefathers had always unconsciously venerated trees and other living plants. We now know that plants give out useful and desirable chemicals, so that old plant physiology was unconsciously very efficient”. (210) His books sold in the hundreds of thousands. Every town had a ‘Darre-House’.

Minister Darre was racist activist. He ordered signs placed in town centres proclaiming: “Race is the key to world history”. (Bramwell counter-balances this by alleging the sentence’s original author was a Jew.) (211) Agricultural Ministry publications contained articles on “positive racial education” accompanied with photos of athletic young Germans. He was scandalized by the revelation that a cover-girl on “New Folk” magazine was half-Jewish. Darre, along with Schultze-Naumburg and Princess Zur Lippe, established the eugenicist “Society of the Friends of the German Peasant”. He financed experiments on rats to better understand Jewish nomadism.

Darre kept several Anthroposophists on his staff. Anthroposophy had been boosted back in 1930 when former Chancellor Georg Michaelis assumed leadership of the Society for the Furtherance of Bio-dynamic Agricultural. (212) Bio-dynamic colonies sprang up across Germany including militantly anti-industrial varieties where field workers lived in huts. Darre firmly shared the belief that soil was alive and that industrial inputs eliminated valuable nutrients. Darre and the Anthroposophists viewed the peasant as the biological unit of the body politic. Their goal was “maintaining the Idea of Peasantness”. Darre believed only: “biological-dynamism was compatible with peasant farming. In its complete disavowal of industrial projects – artificial fertilisers, mass-produced grain, insecticides – it rejected industrial capitalism.” Darre: “claimed in public to support organic farming because it seemed the sensible sane way to farm, producing nutritious food without damaging the soil; privately, because it helped the peasant cause.” (213)Darre argued Bio-dynamic made superior food and: “if the scientists and past agricultural teaching cannot explain it that is their problem.” (214)He commissioned a top Anthroposophist to start a bio-dynamic farm at Marienhole. The farm’s journal, Demeter, had the motto: “Health through Natural Living – Harmony between Blood, Soil and Cosmos.”

In 1934, during a ritual at the February Stone, Darre received a memo from Thor. He then pressed to have the Nazi Party declare its opposition to Christianity. This was resoundingly rejected. Darre and Himmler pushed on; using state resources to promote Neo-Paganism. Rosenberg’s diary reads: “the SS, together with the peasant leader, Darre, is openly educating its men in the Germanic way, that is anti-Christian”. Darre sent pagan calendars to every farmhouse to “awaken an interest in the old German religion”. He declared naming house pets after Norse gods was a sacrilege. (215) He protested the closing of the German Order of Druids, arguing Druids were good Germans.

Once in power Darre dropped the talk of the new nobility and he never delivered on his promises to the peasantry. His ballyhooed Inheritance Law (1933) merely gave smaller farms the same protection against foreclosure as the large estates had and legalized pre-existing north German customs of primogeniture. Darre saved face by calling for a voluntary program whereby landowners would provide workers with garden plots to grow their own food. Darre’s Settlement Act (1935) was a further face saving exercise wherein the government gave itself powers to purchase land and create small farms but provided no funds. In 1938 Darre prepared his last reform, the Entailed Estates Law (‘entails’ were mortgage-like attachments on agricultural property to ensure payment of pensions). Bramwell notes this legislations’ importance to 1,400 large agricultural estates mostly “in noble hands”. The German aristocracy “flooded him with invitations”. Darre “was wined and dined by various members of the nobility.” Darre’s law “removed all restrictions on use, pension obligations, life interests, and other barriers to land alienability” thus allowing aristocrats to renege on pension obligations. The law created “more market-oriented behaviour than before” yet was advertized as a death blow to capitalism. He further bowed to aristocratic pressure adding “a protection clause for private forests, to prevent their division and sale.” The number of new small farms created per year inside Germany declined under Darre. (216)

Darre was buffeted as Nazi agricultural policy zigzagged from statist to liberal to statist. In January 1934 Goebbels attacked Darre for not using agricultural resources to help the Nazi winter charity campaign which Goebbels said “played an important role in maintaining the Party’s image as friend of the working class.” Darre’s 47-page rebuttal prompted a meeting where they squabbled briefly before Goebbels stomped out. A poor 1934 harvest left German livestock producers needing to import fodder which Economy Minister and Reichsbank President, Hjalmar Schacht, “the liberal”, did not want to pay for. Pro-production Goring joined the fray submitting a 30 page list of complaints about Agricultural Ministry policies. (217) Hitler stepped in and agreed to meet with Darre and Backe. During the meeting while the two peasantists delivered well-rehearsed pleas for more money for food producers, Hitler read a newspaper. Darre pontificated into the back of the newspaper until Hitler threw it down asking Darre what the “mystical romantic” price of bread should be. (218) Darre did an Olympic 180 degree twist telling the Fuhrer he wanted a low price for bread for the urban worker. Hitler agreed and ended the meeting. Hitler then appointed a price commissioner known for liberal leanings and a willingness to oversee: “the elimination of the inefficient farmer”. However, in 1935 Nazi war-planning led the inner circle to a re-think agricultural policy as they confronted the likelihood of a Germany besieged. Goring summoned 19 ministers for input on a new Four Year Plan. Darre left this meeting elated because Hitler “made a thorough going attack on ‘economic liberalism’” leavingSchacht “perplexed and helpless”. (219)

Goring picked Backe as the Four Year Plan Council Agricultural representative because he thought Darre was a flake as did Backe who further complained: “Darre could not control his staff, who were pretty useless anyway and that Darre had no understanding of economic questions.” Darre was stymied by the economic questions arising from the rearmament-caused labour shortages after 1937. Labour shortages caused acute problems in the agricultural sector and thwarted labour-intensive farming policies. (220) More generally, the surge in industrialization cut against the ideology permeating Darre’s staff. A Darre contemporary is quoted: “the static model of Darre’s peasant policy became deeply affected by industrial and economic growth. Only defensive answers were given to critical questions. A resigned attitude reigned.” (221)

The controversy over bio-dynamic flared at a Battle for Food Production cabinet meeting in 1937. Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess was the main bio-dynamic booster. Goring and Bormann were the most opposed. Bormann did not want Darre’s National Food Estate advisers promoting bio-dynamic. Undeterred, Darre redoubled promotion of bio-dynamic farming methods both within the National Food Estate and the Nazi leadership. Darre dropped Steiner’s mysticism, and changed bio-dynamic’s name to “organic” (organische). In 1940 Darre sent a questionnaire on organic farming to Third Reich Ministers – all but Hitler responded. 7 ministers were openly pro-organic, 3 were unsure, 3 were hostile because of the Steiner link, and 9 were opposed because they feared undermining the war effort.(222)

In May 1941 Rudolf Hess parachuted down ten miles from the Duchy of Hamilton. In Germany this prompted an attack on Hess and his circle. Leading Anthroposophists found their names added to the list of targets in a pre-existing campaign against “confessional and occult circles”. In October 1941 the murderous Heydrich weighed in on the debate writing: “bio-dynamic farming emerged from the spirit of Anthroposophy, and can only be understood in connection with it...Despite its temporary appearance of German Nationalism, Anthroposophy is essentially Oriental in its nature and origins.” (223)

While “oriental” was not a compliment, Nazis had worse insults. The Gestapo closed the Union of Anthroposophists but they allowed its most important arm, the National Union for Bio-dynamic Farming to carry on as the German Society for Life Reform. Regarding the victims of this purge Bramwell lowers a weighty but cryptic bob: “the brave handful of top Nazis, who resisted Heydrich in this matter had their children cared for by Anthroposophists after the Second World War”. (224) The role played by Anthroposophists during the Third Reich is controversial but clearly the purge did not suppress organic agriculture and Anthroposophists remained its principal proponents. Darre, again undeterred, appointed a special working committee on organic farming and continued to personally gather information on the topic. He devoted his last years as minister to organic farming declaring it one of the three areas where he was prepared to “go to Hitler” and fight (the other 2: peasant settlements and labour shortages). (225) Darre had to fight because to Goring “organic” meant production decline. Goring circulated a report from Baden showing the switch to organic caused a 20-25% output reduction. (226) Furthermore Goring and Backe “hated the mystical twilight” coming out of Darre and they further elbowed him out of the cabinet.

Backe wrote a report on Russia’s food producing capacity expressing confidence the invading German army could feed itself with locally-produced food. He overestimated Russian food production and underestimated how few calories a retreating army can leave behind. In 1942 Backe was crying “the entire eastern army must be fed from Germany at a time when the Ruhr potato crop had been ruined by frost.” (227) Nazi agricultural strategy warped under the deteriorating military situation. Policies were improvised, “plan succeeded plan”. (228) The more the war dictated policy, the more Goring, Bormann and Backe called for mechanized scientific farming. (229) As part of Darre’s opposition to this, he wove an elaborate conspiracy theory winding around an alleged secret letter written by an I.G. Farben executive outlining a plot against organic agriculture to protect the chemical industry.

Bramwell tries to distance Darre from activities in the east with a long, absurd argument that his contribution to eastern colonization was actually a preparatory step for settlements within Germany. This is complicated by “Germany” being an elastic concept to Darre for whom “within Germany” meant the Baltic area and beyond. Bramwell admits “it is fair to ask exactly where Darre thought the Baltic ended”. (230)Darre was active in several private-public partnerships dedicated to planting German farmers in the east including one he personally re-organized in conjunction with Duetche Bank. Settlement began in August 1938 with the establishment of the Sudetenland Protectorate. Darre’s staff scoured the area for “a supply of cheap, if not free, land for settlement.” German officials snapped up farmland at 20% market value. (In 1940 Jewish-owned farmland, within the grasp of the Third Reich, was seized at far below market value.) (231) Himmler’s settlement model, which Darre endorsed, called for fortified warrior-farmer villages consisting of 30 farming families governed by a few trained SS men. (232) Settlers were vetted through the Darre-founded racial screening bureaucracy and Darre’s peasantist cultural revival played a motivating role for the colonization project. His patronage of peasant art extended eastward: “The rural architecture of the settlement projects so dear to his heart had to reflect peasant building traditions...Buildings made of local timber and stone, with roofs steeply pitched against the wind and snow seemed more sensible.” (233)

Peasantist symbolism did not translate into support for small farms because the German Army High Command “supported the existence of large estates on the grounds that they were the only effective farms.” (234) The German aristocracy loved peasantist rhetoric but in practice had another agenda: “a different plan was to use the conquered acres of the east to establish large estates on the Prussian pattern, to produce grain and potatoes with hired Polish labourers.” Labour shortages stopped eastern agricultural colonization by December 1942.
Oblivious to the gathering storm Darre was busy sending enthusiastic birthday cards to Fidus and penning letters expressing his “great sense of liberation” over his new bride’s rejection of Christianity and embrace of Neo-Pagan