Posted on 04/12/2007 8:10:01 AM PDT by ZGuy
In anticipation of Earth Day, everyone wants to do his bit. Leonardo DiCaprio is vamping on an Icelandic glacier for the cover of Vanity Fair, alongside a Photoshopped polar bear.
I am reading the important book, "How Green Were the Nazis? Nature, Environment and Nation in the Third Reich."
I know you are thinking I have fallen for a hoax. No one in their right mind would publish a book stating, "The Nazis created nature preserves, championed sustainable forestry, curbed air pollution, and designed the autobahn highway network as a way of bringing Germans closer to nature." Or: "The Nazis did in fact impact the landscape in ways far out of proportion to the short twelve years they were in power."
But three professors -- Franz-Josef Bruggemeier of Freiburg University, Mark Cioc from the University of California/Santa Cruz, and the University of Maryland's Thomas Zeller -- have done just that.
It's incredible that anyone would actually publish sentences like: "The Nazis, however, were not interested in turning Germany into a tree farm"; "World War II was the opportunity that many modernist landscape architects had been waiting for"; or, "In the end, everyone . . . agreed that it was the wrong moment to embark on any projects with organic farming."
Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees.
I knew that Hitler was a vegetarian with a taste for nonalcoholic beer, but I didn't know that SS boss Heinrich Himmler also eschewed meat or that Hermann Goering had a "sincere interest in forest conservation." Nazi party secretary Rudolf Hess was a devotee of organic gardening. Did you know that there was an organic herb garden at Dachau? Marvelous! It's depressing how many historians insist on dwelling on the negatives.
How green was Caligula , anyway?
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
Grunewald........
No, they built them to move troops around.
Right. WWII did wonders for European forest growth.
The Nazis also had a crash program to develop synthetic fuels which naturally causes enviro hearts to flutter.
I think it’s commendable that historians are trying to actually examine the Nazis in a meaningful way, instead of simply taking the easy track of dismissing them as monsters devoid of humanity. I’m sure they also talk about Hitler and Dr. Porsche designing the VW air-cooled engine (I think it’s air-cooled, anyway).
Maybe their conclusions aren’t all correct, but at least they are trying to expand knowledge instead of rehashing the same ol’, same ol’.
Didn’t all those mass graves provide nutrition to the earth?
And don’t forget that Hitler was a non-smoker.
Interesting.... they also believed in gun control and abortion.
It’s almost like they were liberals, but that’s only because they really were liberals. The idea that the Nazi party was conservative is a myth perpetrated by liberal journalist.
And maybe they did. Hitler was a vegetarian and the Nazis tried to prohibit smoking in public. The authoritarian left does not like to look in the mirror and see what totalitarianism looks like.
If true, it just proves that Hitler thought he was God. Only though his manipulation could the world be made “right”.
Sounds, to me, EXACTLY like what some conservationists, global warming addicts, and bureaucrats believe.
And they murdered eight million people in concentration camps. Think about the environmental improvement that resulted from getting rid of all those polluting humans.
Some people are just nuts. Maybe dangerous nuts.
The Left also tries to sell the notion of “quality of life” when it comes to deciding who should live or die.
The Nazis began their extermination program with terminal and retarded patients in state hospitals.
They also had a gun buy-back program but without the cash benefit.
Perhaps the neo-Nazis can sell the carbon credits thus created.
If we put the insurance companies in charge of those decisions (and they are already very powerful in the gov), then those days might not be too far away for us.
And they were successful at it, although they were more intersted in using the product as feedstock for the synthetic rubber plants than they were as a fuel resource.
The Nazis competed for the same working class that Communists recruited. The Commies had to demonize them hence the “right-wing” label for the National Socialists-Fascists. Don’t forget Mussolini came from a socialist background writing for “Avanti” the socialist newspaper.
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