The Loft and the BNP

"Apparently the venue will serve "morally conscious" food, and "organic, fair trade and vegan wines" as well as "actively supporting and showcasing Nottingham's culture and arts scene"."

Apparently YOU imagine that there is some inconsistency here. Imagine that a person couldn't at the same time be FOR those things and also be a racist. WHY? Those are orthogonally independent concerns. There is absolutely nothing that prevents a racist or a non racist fascist for that matter (fascism isn't NECESSARILY about race) from being into "the arts" -- do I need list for you prominent figures from the arts who were fascists? Similarly not really a good reason to suppose you could expect a relationship with "food" (you certainly could not over HERE -- while by and large we lack European style fascism we have our own "extreme right" folks some of which are violently racist but some of these also into "organic food" etc.).

Is the problem you have with this that it represents a problem in organizing? Would imply that your allies in one campaign might be your enemies in another and that's messy, inconvenient. Well sorry, but that's the reality and pretending "can't be so" isn't going to make it go away. Need to come up with a way of dealing with the fact that we humans ARE "messy" in that way.

Unfortunately, ethically-motivated people in Nottingham seem reluctant to avoid places owned by morally dodgy people. Refer back to the discussion about Demo being hosted by Blueprint; there were loads of people saying that Demo should stay, because it as a night didn't directly fund the BNP. The argument about lining the pockets of a racist took some time for them to swallow.

There are also plenty of people will very short memories who continue to eat at the Alley Cafe.

Clearly, if a venue in Nottingham flashes some green and vegetarian credentials, it'll get support from Indymedia readers, who push the human rights arguments to the backs of their minds. A shame.

its psycle people who re-opened the loft (they did have a clubnight at blueprint)

theese guys are genuine hippys (sorry to steryotype but they are)

the chef used to work at the alley cafe and same with the infamous bar lady.



the blueprint re-opening story is true but it isn't the loft and i dont belive its going to be finbar.


in short nothing to do with blueprint, finbar, or the bnp

Psycle may be running some nights at the newly reopened Loft but they don't own the venue do they? Who actually owns, and therefore profits from the bar? Is it Finbar?

After it was revealed that Blueprint's owner was a member of the BNP, some promoters - the more ethical ones such as Demo and Futureproof - quit the club. Others such as Pure Filth and Psycle stayed.

Yes Psycle are genuine hippies - no-one who knows them would doubt that. But they didn't seem too bothered about helping to bring punters into a BNP-owned venue either, so maybe that's still the situation at the Loft.

Actually I'd like to retract part of my previous comment. It was unnecessarily divisive of me to make a distinction between more or less "ethical" promoters, when a lot of promoters and clubbers, myself included, found it difficult to decide whether to boycott Blueprint. And it was unfair of me to judge Psycle without knowing how much they knew about Finbar, what they thought about him, and why they stayed at Blueprint.

Nottingham has some good crews who put a lot of work into putting on positive club & party nights, so it would be a shame if the Finbar Bryson controversy gave rise to finger-pointing and recriminations within the scene. Of course, we need to make sure that everyone knows the truth about Mr Bryson's views and the venues that he profits from so that people can make informed decisions.

Does anyone have proof of who is the present owner of The Loft?

Sorry, I sometimes eat at the Alley Cafe. Nothing to do with short memory - I have that too - but it's something I don't know. What is it about Alley cafe? Would like to know.

What has the Alley Cafe done exactly?? I have jsut started going back in and love the place. What gives??

Finbar Bryson is on Facebook. His 176 Facebook friends include members of various Nottingham party crews including Pure Filth, Psycle, Muzika!, Percussion, Wibble and Demo, as well various well-known faces from the Nottingham party scene and even one or two Sumac Centre regulars.

His political views are tantalisingly listed as "Other" and interestingly enough, he is a supporter of the NGO Medical Aid for Palestinians. This is not necessarily at odds with his anti-Islamic views as MAP is a secular organisation, but neither is it what you might expect from a BNP supporter.

Perhaps Finbar's Facebook friends aren't aware of his BNP membership and anti-immigrant, anti-Islam views. Perhaps they are, and don't see them as a reason to stop being his friend.

Genuine hippies doesn't preclude friendliness with the bnp - just look at the northern green gathering shits. They used the same field the bnp used for their rwb festival and allowed bnp activists to stay behind and hand out literature. Some even showed the bnp how to make furniture out of stuff lying around.

The amount of hippies who spout right-wing gash is phenomenal.

Fascist Ecology: The "Green Wing" of the Nazi Party and its Historical Antecedents by Peter Staudenmaier


“We recognize that separating humanity from nature, from the whole of life, leads to humankind’s own destruction and to the death of nations. Only through a re-integration of humanity into the whole of nature can our people be made stronger. That is the fundamental point of the biological tasks of our age. Humankind alone is no longer the focus of thought, but rather life as a whole . . . This striving toward connectedness with the totality of life, with nature itself, a nature into which we are born, this is the deepest meaning and the true essence of National Socialist thought1.”

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

Despite an extensive documentary record, the subject remains an elusive one, underappreciated by professional historians and environmental activists alike. In English-speaking countries as well as in Germany itself, the very existence of a “green wing” in the Nazi movement, much less its inspiration, goals, and consequences, has yet to be adequately researched and analyzed. Most of the handful of available interpretations succumb to either an alarming intellectual affinity with their subject2.” or a naive refusal to examine the full extent of the “ideological overlap between nature conservation and National Socialism3.” This article presents a brief and necessarily schematic overview of the ecological components of Nazism, emphasizing both their central role in Nazi ideology and their practical implementation during the Third Reich. A preliminary survey of nineteenth and twentieth century precursors to classical ecofascism should serve to illuminate the conceptual underpinnings common to all forms of reactionary ecology.

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

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

While best known in Germany for his fanatical nationalism, Arndt was also dedicated to the cause of the peasantry, which lead him to a concern for the welfare of the land itself. Historians of German environmentalism mention him as the earliest example of ‘ecological’ thinking in the modern sense4. His remarkable 1815 article On the Care and Conservation of Forests, written at the dawn of industrialization in Central Europe, rails against shortsighted exploitation of woodlands and soil, condemning deforestation and its economic causes. At times he wrote in terms strikingly similar to those of contemporary biocentrism: “When one sees nature in a necessary connectedness and interrelationship, then all things are equally important—shrub, worm, plant, human, stone, nothing first or last, but all one single unity5.”

Arndt’s environmentalism, however, was inextricably bound up with virulently xenophobic nationalism. His eloquent and prescient appeals for ecological sensitivity were couched always in terms of the well-being of the German soil and the German people, and his repeated lunatic polemics against miscegenation, demands for teutonic racial purity, and epithets against the French, Slavs, and Jews marked every aspect of his thought. At the very outset of the nineteenth century the deadly connection between love of land and militant racist nationalism was firmly set in place.
Riehl, a student of Arndt, further developed this sinister tradition.

In some respects his ‘green’ streak went significantly deeper than Arndt’s; presaging certain tendencies in recent environmental activism, his 1853 essay Field and Forest ended with a call to fight for “the rights of wilderness.” But even here nationalist pathos set the tone: “We must save the forest, not only so that our ovens do not become cold in winter, but also so that the pulse of life of the people continues to beat warm and joyfully, so that Germany remains German6.” Riehl was an implacable opponent of the rise of industrialism and urbanization; his overtly antisemitic glorification of rural peasant values and undifferentiated condemnation of modernity established him as the “founder of agrarian romanticism and anti-urbanism7.”

These latter two fixations matured in the second half of the nineteenth century in the context of the völkisch movement, a powerful cultural disposition and social tendency which united ethnocentric populism with nature mysticism. At the heart of the völkisch temptation was a pathological response to modernity. In the face of the very real dislocations brought on by the triumph of industrial capitalism and national unification, völkisch thinkers preached a return to the land, to the simplicity and wholeness of a life attuned to nature’s purity. The mystical effusiveness of this perverted utopianism was matched by its political vulgarity.

While “the Volkish movement aspired to reconstruct the society that was sanctioned by history, rooted in nature, and in communion with the cosmic life spirit8,” it pointedly refused to locate the sources of alienation, rootlessness and environmental destruction in social structures, laying the blame instead to rationalism, cosmopolitanism, and urban civilization. The stand-in for all of these was the age-old object of peasant hatred and middle-class resentment: the Jews. “The Germans were in search of a mysterious wholeness that would restore them to primeval happiness, destroying the hostile milieu of urban industrial civilization that the Jewish conspiracy had foisted on them9.”

Reformulating traditional German antisemitism into nature-friendly terms, the völkisch movement carried a volatile amalgam of nineteenth century cultural prejudices, Romantic obsessions with purity, and anti-Enlightenment sentiment into twentieth century political discourse. The emergence of modern ecology forged the final link in the fateful chain which bound together aggressive nationalism, mystically charged racism, and environmentalist predilections. In 1867 the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel coined the term ‘ecology’ and began to establish it as a scientific discipline dedicated to studying the interactions between organism and environment. Haeckel was also the chief popularizer of Darwin and evolutionary theory for the German-speaking world, and developed a peculiar sort of social darwinist philosophy he called ‘monism.’ The German Monist League he founded combined scientifically based ecological holism with völkisch social views. Haeckel believed in nordic racial superiority, strenuously opposed race mixing and enthusiastically supported racial eugenics. His fervent nationalism became fanatical with the onset of World War I, and he fulminated in antisemitic tones against the post-war Council Republic in Bavaria.

In this way “Haeckel contributed to that special variety of German thought which served as the seed bed for National Socialism. He became one of Germany’s major ideologists for racism, nationalism and imperialism10.” Near the end of his life he joined the Thule Society, “a secret, radically right-wing organization which played a key role in the establishment of the Nazi movement11.” But more than merely personal continuities are at stake here. The pioneer of scientific ecology, along with his disciples Willibald Hentschel, Wilhelm Bölsche and Bruno Wille, profoundly shaped the thinking of subsequent generations of environmentalists by embedding concern for the natural world in a tightly woven web of regressive social themes. From its very beginnings, then, ecology was bound up in an intensely reactionary political framework.

The specific contours of this early marriage of ecology and authoritarian social views are highly instructive. At the center of this ideological complex is the direct, unmediated application of biological categories to the social realm. Haeckel held that “civilization and the life of nations are governed by the same laws as prevail throughout nature and organic life12.” This notion of ‘natural laws’ or ‘natural order’ has long been a mainstay of reactionary environmental thought. Its concomitant is anti-humanism:

Thus, for the Monists, perhaps the most pernicious feature of European bourgeois civilization was the inflated importance which it attached to the idea of man in general, to his existence and to his talents, and to the belief that through his unique rational faculties man could essentially recreate the world and bring about a universally more harmonious and ethically just social order. [Humankind was] an insignificant creature when viewed as part of and measured against the vastness of the cosmos and the overwhelming forces of nature13.

Other Monists extended this anti-humanist emphasis and mixed it with the traditional völkisch motifs of indiscriminate anti-industrialism and anti-urbanism as well as the newly emerging pseudo-scientific racism. The linchpin, once again, was the conflation of biological and social categories. The biologist Raoul Francé, founding member of the Monist League, elaborated so-called Lebensgesetze, ‘laws of life’ through which the natural order determines the social order. He opposed racial mixing, for example, as “unnatural.” Francé is acclaimed by contemporary ecofascists as a “pioneer of the ecology movement14.”

Francé’s colleague Ludwig Woltmann, another student of Haeckel, insisted on a biological interpretation for all societal phenomena, from cultural attitudes to economic arrangements. He stressed the supposed connection between environmental purity and ‘racial’ purity: “Woltmann took a negative attitude toward modern industrialism. He claimed that the change from an agrarian to an industrial society had hastened the decline of the race. In contrast to nature, which engendered the harmonic forms of Germanism, there were the big cities, diabolical and inorganic, destroying the virtues of the race15.”

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

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

The various strands of the youth movement shared a common self-conception: they were a purportedly ‘non-political’ response to a deep cultural crisis, stressing the primacy of direct emotional experience over social critique and action. They pushed the contradictions of their time to the breaking point, but were unable or unwilling to take the final step toward organized, focused social rebellion, “convinced that the changes they wanted to effect in society could not be brought about by political means, but only by the improvement of the individual16.” This proved to be a fatal error. “Broadly speaking, two ways of revolt were open to them: they could have pursued their radical critique of society, which in due course would have brought them into the camp of social revolution. [But] the Wandervögel chose the other form of protest against society—romanticism17.”

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

The attraction such perspectives exercised on idealistic youth is clear: the enormity of the crisis seemed to enjoin a total rejection of its apparent causes. It is in the specific form of this rejection that the danger lies. Here the work of several more theoretical minds from the period is instructive. The philosopher Ludwig Klages profoundly influenced the youth movement and particularly shaped their ecological consciousness. He authored a tremendously important essay titled “Man and Earth” for the legendary Meissner gathering of the Wandervögel in 191318. An extraordinarily poignant text and the best known of all Klages’ work, it is not only “one of the very greatest manifestoes of the radical ecopacifist movement in Germany19.” but also a classic example of the seductive terminology of reactionary ecology.

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

It may come as a surprise, then, to learn that Klages was throughout his life politically archconservative and a venomous antisemite. One historian labels him a “Volkish fanatic” and another considers him simply “an intellectual pacemaker for the Third Reich” who “paved the way for fascist philosophy in many important respects20.” In “Man and Earth” a genuine outrage at the devastation of the natural environment is coupled with a political subtext of cultural despair21. Klages’ diagnosis of the ills of modern society, for all its declamations about capitalism, returns always to a single culprit: “Geist.” His idiosyncratic use of this term, which means mind or intellect, was meant to denounce not only hyperrationalism or instrumental reason, but rational thought itself. Such a wholesale indictment of reason cannot help but have savage political implications. It forecloses any chance of rationally reconstructing society’s relationship with nature and justifies the most brutal authoritarianism. But the lessons of Klages’ life and work have been hard for ecologists to learn. In 1980, “Man and Earth” was republished as an esteemed and seminal treatise to accompany the birth of the German Greens.

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

Heidegger’s critique of anthropocentric humanism, his call for humanity to learn to “let things be,” his notion that humanity is involved in a “play” or “dance” with earth, sky, and gods, his meditation on the possibility of an authentic mode of “dwelling” on the earth, his complaint that industrial technology is laying waste to the earth, his emphasis on the importance of local place and “homeland,” his claim that humanity should guard and preserve things, instead of dominating them—all these aspects of Heidegger’s thought help to support the claim that he is a major deep ecological theorist22.

Such effusions are, at best, dangerously naive. They suggest a style of thought utterly oblivious to the history of fascist appropriations of all the elements the quoted passage praises in Heidegger. (To his credit, the author of the above lines, a major deep ecological theorist in his own right, has since changed his position and eloquently urged his colleagues to do the same23.)

As for the philosopher of Being himself, he was—unlike Klages, who lived in Switzerland after 1915—an active member of the Nazi party and for a time enthusiastically, even adoringly supported the Führer. His mystical panegyrics to Heimat (homeland) were complemented by a deep antisemitism, and his metaphysically phrased broadsides against technology and modernity converged neatly with populist demagogy. Although he lived and taught for thirty years after the fall of the Third Reich, Heidegger never once publicly regretted, much less renounced, his involvement with National Socialism, nor even perfunctorily condemned its crimes. His work, whatever its philosophical merits, stands today as a signal admonition about the political uses of anti-humanism in ecological garb.

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

“In every German breast the German forest quivers with its caverns and ravines, crags and boulders, waters and winds, legends and fairy tales, with its songs and its melodies, and awakens a powerful yearning and a longing for home; in all German souls the German forest lives and weaves with its depth and breadth, its stillness and strength, its might and dignity, its riches and its beauty—it is the source of German inwardness, of the German soul, of German freedom. Therefore protect and care for the German forest for the sake of the elders and the youth, and join the new German “League for the Protection and Consecration of the German Forest24.”

The mantra-like repetition of the word “German” and the mystical depiction of the sacred forest fuse together, once again, nationalism and naturalism. This intertwinement took on a grisly significance with the collapse of the Weimar republic. For alongside such relatively innocuous conservation groups, another organization was growing which offered these ideas a hospitable home: the National Socialist German Workers Party, known by its acronym NSDAP. Drawing on the heritage of Arndt, Riehl, Haeckel, and others (all of whom were honored between 1933 and 1945 as forebears of triumphant National Socialism), the Nazi movement’s incorporation of environmentalist themes was a crucial factor in its rise to popularity and state power.

Nature in National Socialist Ideology
The reactionary ecological ideas whose outlines are sketched above exerted a powerful and lasting influence on many of the central figures in the NSDAP. Weimar culture, after all, was fairly awash in such theories, but the Nazis gave them a peculiar inflection. The National Socialist “religion of nature,” as one historian has described it, was a volatile admixture of primeval teutonic nature mysticism, pseudo-scientific ecology, irrationalist anti-humanism, and a mythology of racial salvation through a return to the land. Its predominant themes were ‘natural order,’ organicist holism and denigration of humanity: “Throughout the writings, not only of Hitler, but of most Nazi ideologues, one can discern a fundamental deprecation of humans vis-à-vis nature, and, as a logical corollary to this, an attack upon human efforts to master nature25.” Quoting a Nazi educator, the same source continues: “anthropocentric views in general had to be rejected.

They would be valid only ‘if it is assumed that nature has been created only for man. We decisively reject this attitude. According to our conception of nature, man is a link in the living chain of nature just as any other organism26.’”

Such arguments have a chilling currency within contemporary ecological discourse: the key to social-ecological harmony is ascertaining “the eternal laws of nature’s processes” (Hitler) and organizing society to correspond to them. The Führer was particularly fond of stressing the “helplessness of humankind in the face of nature’s everlasting law27.” Echoing Haeckel and the Monists, Mein Kampf announces: “When people attempt to rebel against the iron logic of nature, they come into conflict with the very same principles to which they owe their existence as human beings. Their actions against nature must lead to their own downfall28.”

The authoritarian implications of this view of humanity and nature become even clearer in the context of the Nazis’ emphasis on holism and organicism. In 1934 the director of the Reich Agency for Nature Protection, Walter Schoenichen, established the following objectives for biology curricula: “Very early, the youth must develop an understanding of the civic importance of the ‘organism’, i.e. the co-ordination of all parts and organs for the benefit of the one and superior task of life29.” This (by now familiar) unmediated adaptation of biological concepts to social phenomena served to justify not only the totalitarian social order of the Third Reich but also the expansionist politics of Lebensraum (the plan of conquering ‘living space’ in Eastern Europe for the German people). It also provided the link between environmental purity and racial purity:

Two central themes of biology education follow [according to the Nazis] from the holistic perspective: nature protection and eugenics. If one views nature as a unified whole, students will automatically develop a sense for ecology and environmental conservation. At the same time, the nature protection concept will direct attention to the urbanized and ‘overcivilized’ modern human race30.

In many varieties of the National Socialist world view ecological themes were linked with traditional agrarian romanticism and hostility to urban civilization, all revolving around the idea of rootedness in nature. This conceptual constellation, especially the search for a lost connection to nature, was most pronounced among the neo-pagan elements in the Nazi leadership, above all Heinrich Himmler, Alfred Rosenberg, and Walther Darré. Rosenberg wrote in his colossal The Myth of the 20th Century: “Today we see the steady stream from the countryside to the city, deadly for the Volk. The cities swell ever larger, unnerving the Volk and destroying the threads which bind humanity to nature; they attract adventurers and profiteers of all colors, thereby fostering racial chaos31.”

Such musings, it must be stressed, were not mere rhetoric; they reflected firmly held beliefs and, indeed, practices at the very top of the Nazi hierarchy which are today conventionally associated with ecological attitudes. Hitler and Himmler were both strict vegetarians and animal lovers, attracted to nature mysticism and homeopathic cures, and staunchly opposed to vivisection and cruelty to animals. Himmler even established experimental organic farms to grow herbs for SS medicinal purposes. And Hitler, at times, could sound like a veritable Green utopian, discussing authoritatively and in detail various renewable energy sources (including environmentally appropriate hydropower and producing natural gas from sludge) as alternatives to coal, and declaring “water, winds and tides” as the energy path of the future32.

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

The peasant of our racial stock has always carefully endeavored to increase the natural powers of the soil, plants, and animals, and to preserve the balance of the whole of nature. For him, respect for divine creation is the measure of all culture. If, therefore, the new Lebensräume (living spaces) are to become a homeland for our settlers, the planned arrangement of the landscape to keep it close to nature is a decisive prerequisite. It is one of the bases for fortifying the German Volk33.

This passage recapitulates almost all of the tropes comprised by classical ecofascist ideology: Lebensraum, Heimat, the agrarian mystique, the health of the Volk, closeness to and respect for nature (explicitly constructed as the standard against which society is to be judged), maintaining nature’s precarious balance, and the earthy powers of the soil and its creatures. Such motifs were anything but personal idiosyncracies on the part of Hitler, Himmler, or Rosenberg; even Göring—who was, along with Goebbels, the member of the Nazi inner circle least hospitable to ecological ideas—appeared at times to be a committed conservationist34. These sympathies were also hardly restricted to the upper echelons of the party. A study of the membership rolls of several mainstream Weimar era Naturschutz (nature protection) organizations revealed that by 1939, fully 60 percent of these conservationists had joined the NSDAP (compared to about 10 percent of adult men and 25 percent of teachers and lawyers)[35]. Clearly the affinities between environmentalism and National Socialism ran deep.

At the level of ideology, then, ecological themes played a vital role in German fascism. It would be a grave mistake, however, to treat these elements as mere propaganda, cleverly deployed to mask Nazism’s true character as a technocratic-industrialist juggernaut. The definitive history of German anti-urbanism and agrarian romanticism argues incisively against this view:
Nothing could be more wrong than to suppose that most of the leading National Socialist ideologues had cynically feigned an agrarian romanticism and hostility to urban culture, without any inner conviction and for merely electoral and propaganda purposes, in order to hoodwink the public [ . . . ] In reality, the majority of the leading National Socialist ideologists were without any doubt more or less inclined to agrarian romanticism and anti-urbanism and convinced of the need for a relative re-agrarianization36.

The question remains, however: To what extent did the Nazis actually implement environmental policies during the twelve-year Reich? There is strong evidence that the ‘ecological’ tendency in the party, though largely ignored today, had considerable success for most of the party’s reign. This “green wing” of the NSDAP was represented above all by Walther Darré, Fritz Todt, Alwin Seifert and Rudolf Hess, the four figures who primarily shaped fascist ecology in practice.

Blood and Soil as Official Doctrine
“The unity of blood and soil must be restored,” proclaimed Richard Walther Darré in 193037. This infamous phrase denoted a quasi-mystical connection between ‘blood’ (the race or Volk) and ‘soil’ (the land and the natural environment) specific to Germanic peoples and absent, for example, among Celts and Slavs. For the enthusiasts of Blut und Boden, the Jews especially were a rootless, wandering people, incapable of any true relationship with the land. German blood, in other words, engendered an exclusive claim to the sacred German soil. While the term “blood and soil” had been circulating in völkisch circles since at least the Wilhelmine era, it was Darré who first popularized it as a slogan and then enshrined it as a guiding principle of Nazi thought. Harking back to Arndt and Riehl, he envisioned a thoroughgoing ruralization of Germany and Europe, predicated on a revitalized yeoman peasantry, in order to ensure racial health and ecological sustainability.

Darré was one of the party’s chief “race theorists” and was also instrumental in galvanizing peasant support for the Nazis during the critical period of the early 1930s. From 1933 until 1942 he held the posts of Reich Peasant Leader and Minister of Agriculture. This was no minor fiefdom; the agriculture ministry had the fourth largest budget of all the myriad Nazi ministries even well into the war38. From this position Darré was able to lend vital support to various ecologically oriented initiatives. He played an essential part in unifying the nebulous proto-environmentalist tendencies in National Socialism:

It was Darré who gave the ill-defined anti-civilization, anti-liberal, anti-modern and latent anti-urban sentiments of the Nazi elite a foundation in the agrarian mystique. And it seems as if Darré had an immense influence on the ideology of National Socialism, as if he was able to articulate significantly more clearly than before the values system of an agrarian society contained in Nazi ideology and—above all—to legitimate this agrarian model and give Nazi policy a goal that was clearly oriented toward a far-reaching re-agrarianization39.

This goal was not only quite consonant with imperialist expansion in the name of Lebensraum, it was in fact one of its primary justifications, even motivations. In language replete with the biologistic metaphors of organicism, Darré declared: “The concept of Blood and Soil gives us the moral right to take back as much land in the East as is necessary to establish a harmony between the body of our Volk and the geopolitical space40.”

Aside from providing green camouflage for the colonization of Eastern Europe, Darré worked to install environmentally sensitive principles as the very basis of the Third Reich’s agricultural policy. Even in its most productivist phases, these precepts remained emblematic of Nazi doctrine. When the “Battle for Production” (a scheme to boost the productivity of the agricultural sector) was proclaimed at the second Reich Farmers Congress in 1934, the very first point in the program read “Keep the soil healthy !” But Darré’s most important innovation was the introduction on a large scale of organic farming methods, significantly labeled “lebensgesetzliche Landbauweise,” or farming according to the laws of life. The term points up yet again the natural order ideology which underlies so much reactionary ecological thought. The impetus for these unprecedented measures came from Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy and its techniques of biodynamic cultivation41.

The campaign to institutionalize organic farming encompassed tens of thousands of smallholdings and estates across Germany. It met with considerable resistance from other members of the Nazi hierarchy, above all Backe and Göring. But Darré, with the help of Hess and others, was able to sustain the policy until his forced resignation in 1942 (an event which had little to do with his environmentalist leanings). And these efforts in no sense represented merely Darré’s personal predilections; as the standard history of German agricultural policy points out, Hitler and Himmler “were in complete sympathy with these ideas42.”

Still, it was largely Darré’s influence in the Nazi apparatus which yielded, in practice, a level of government support for ecologically sound farming methods and land use planning unmatched by any state before or since.

For these reasons Darré has sometimes been regarded as a forerunner of the contemporary Green movement. His biographer, in fact, once referred to him as the “father of the Greens43.” Her book Blood and Soil, undoubtedly the best single source on Darré in either German or English, consistently downplays the virulently fascist elements in his thinking, portraying him instead as a misguided agrarian radical. This grave error in judgement indicates the powerfully disorienting pull of an ‘ecological’ aura. Darré’s published writings alone, dating back to the early twenties, are enough to indict him as a rabidly racist and jingoist ideologue particularly prone to a vulgar and hateful antisemitism (he spoke of Jews, revealingly, as “weeds”). His decade-long tenure as a loyal servant and, moreover, architect of the Nazi state demonstrates his dedication to Hitler’s deranged cause. One account even claims that it was Darré who convinced Hitler and Himmler of the necessity of exterminating the Jews and Slavs44. The ecological aspects of his thought cannot, in sum, be separated from their thoroughly Nazi framework. Far from embodying the ‘redeeming’ facets of National Socialism, Darré represents the baleful specter of ecofascism in power.

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

Todt was “one of the most influential National Socialists45,” directly responsible for questions of technological and industrial policy. At his death in 1942 he headed three different cabinet-level ministries in addition to the enormous quasi-official Organisation Todt, and had “gathered the major technical tasks of the Reich into his own hands46.” According to his successor, Albert Speer, Todt “loved nature” and “repeatedly had serious run-ins with Bormann, protesting against his despoiling the landscape around Obersalzberg47.” Another source calls him simply “an ecologist48.” This reputation is based chiefly on Todt’s efforts to make Autobahn construction—one of the largest building enterprises undertaken in this century—as environmentally sensitive as possible.

The pre-eminent historian of German engineering describes this commitment thus: “Todt demanded of the completed work of technology a harmony with nature and with the landscape, thereby fulfilling modern ecological principles of engineering as well as the ‘organological’ principles of his own era along with their roots in völkisch ideology49.” The ecological aspects of this approach to construction went well beyond an emphasis on harmonious adaptation to the natural surroundings for aesthetic reasons; Todt also established strict criteria for respecting wetlands, forests and ecologically sensitive areas. But just as with Arndt, Riehl and Darré, these environmentalist concerns were inseparably bound to a völkisch-nationalist outlook. Todt himself expressed this connection succinctly: “The fulfillment of mere transportation purposes is not the final aim of German highway construction. The German highway must be an expression of its surrounding landscape and an expression of the German essence50.”

Todt’s chief advisor and collaborator on environmental issues was his lieutenant Alwin Seifert, whom Todt reportedly once called a “fanatical ecologist51.” Seifert bore the official title of Reich Advocate for the Landscape, but his nickname within the party was “Mr. Mother Earth.” The appellation was deserved; Seifert dreamed of a “total conversion from technology to nature52,” and would often wax lyrical about the wonders of German nature and the tragedy of “humankind’s” carelessness. As early as 1934 he wrote to Hess demanding attention to water issues and invoking “work methods that are more attuned to nature53.” In discharging his official duties Seifert stressed the importance of wilderness and energetically opposed monoculture, wetlands drainage and chemicalized agriculture. He criticized Darré as too moderate, and “called for an agricultural revolution towards ‘a more peasant-like, natural, simple’ method of farming, ‘independent of capital’[54].”

With the Third Reich’s technological policy entrusted to figures such as these, even the Nazis’ massive industrial build-up took on a distinctively green hue. The prominence of nature in the party’s philosophical background helped ensure that more radical initiatives often received a sympathetic hearing in the highest offices of the Nazi state. In the mid-thirties Todt and Seifert vigorously pushed for an all-encompassing Reich Law for the Protection of Mother Earth “in order to stem the steady loss of this irreplaceable basis of all life55.” Seifert reports that all of the ministries were prepared to co-operate save one; only the minister of the economy opposed the bill because of its impact on mining.

But even near-misses such as these would have been unthinkable without the support of Reich Chancellor Rudolf Hess, who provided the “green wing” of the NSDAP a secure anchor at the very top of the party hierarchy. It would be difficult to overestimate Hess’s power and centrality in the complex governmental machinery of the National Socialist regime. He joined the party in 1920 as member #16, and for two decades was Hitler’s devoted personal deputy. He has been described as “Hitler’s closest confidant56,” and the Führer himself referred to Hess as his “closest advisor57.” Hess was not only the highest party leader and second in line (after Göring) to succeed Hitler; in addition, all legislation and every decree had to pass through his office before becoming law.

An inveterate nature lover as well as a devout Steinerite, Hess insisted on a strictly biodynamic diet—not even Hitler’s rigorous vegetarian standards were good enough for him—and accepted only homeopathic medicines. It was Hess who introduced Darré to Hitler, thus securing the “green wing” its first power base. He was an even more tenacious proponent of organic farming than Darré, and pushed the latter to take more demonstrative steps in support of the lebensgesetzliche Landbauweise58. His office was also directly responsible for land use planning across the Reich, employing a number of specialists who shared Seifert’s ecological approach59.

With Hess’s enthusiastic backing, the “green wing” was able to achieve its most notable successes. As early as March 1933, a wide array of environmentalist legislation was approved and implemented at national, regional and local levels. These measures, which included reforestation programs, bills protecting animal and plant species, and preservationist decrees blocking industrial development, undoubtedly “ranked among the most progressive in the world at that time60.” Planning ordinances were designed for the protection of wildlife habitat and at the same time demanded respect for the sacred German forest. The Nazi state also created the first nature preserves in Europe.

Along with Darré’s efforts toward re-agrarianization and support for organic agriculture, as well as Todt and Seifert’s attempts to institutionalize an environmentally sensitive land use planning and industrial policy, the major accomplishment of the Nazi ecologists was the Reichsnaturschutzgesetz of 1935. This completely unprecedented “nature protection law” not only established guidelines for safeguarding flora, fauna, and “natural monuments” across the Reich; it also restricted commercial access to remaining tracts of wilderness. In addition, the comprehensive ordinance “required all national, state and local officials to consult with Naturschutz authorities in a timely manner before undertaking any measures that would produce fundamental alterations in the countryside61.”

Although the legislation’s effectiveness was questionable, traditional German environmentalists were overjoyed at its passage. Walter Schoenichen declared it the “definitive fulfillment of the völkisch-romantic longings62,” and Hans Klose, Schoenichen’s successor as head of the Reich Agency for Nature Protection, described Nazi environmental policy as the “high point of nature protection” in Germany. Perhaps the greatest success of these measures was in facilitating the “intellectual realignment of German Naturschutz” and the integration of mainstream environmentalism into the Nazi enterprise63.

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

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

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

To explain the destruction of the countryside and environmental damage, without questioning the German people’s bond to nature, could only be done by not analysing environmental damage in a societal context and by refusing to understand them as an expression of conflicting social interests. Had this been done, it would have led to criticism of National Socialism itself since that was not immune to such forces. One solution was to associate such environmental problems with the destructive influence of other races. National Socialism could then be seen to strive for the elimination of other races in order to allow the German people’s innate understanding and feeling of nature to assert itself, hence securing a harmonic life close to nature for the future64.

This is the true legacy of ecofascism in power: “genocide developed into a necessity under the cloak of environment protection65.”

* * *

The experience of the “green wing” of German fascism is a sobering reminder of the political volatility of ecology. It certainly does not indicate any inherent or inevitable connection between ecological issues and right-wing politics; alongside the reactionary tradition surveyed here, there has always been an equally vital heritage of left-libertarian ecology, in Germany as elsewhere66.

But certain patterns can be discerned: “While concerns about problems posed by humankind’s increasing mastery over nature have increasingly been shared by ever larger groups of people embracing a plethora of ideologies, the most consistent ‘pro-natural order’ response found political embodiment on the radical right67.” This is the common thread which unites merely conservative or even supposedly apolitical manifestations of environmentalism with the straightforwardly fascist variety.

The historical record does, to be sure, belie the vacuous claim that “those who want to reform society according to nature are neither left nor right but ecologically minded68.” Environmental themes can be mobilized from the left or from the right, indeed they require an explicit social context if they are to have any political valence whatsoever. “Ecology” alone does not prescribe a politics; it must be interpreted, mediated through some theory of society in order to acquire political meaning. Failure to heed this mediated interrelationship between the social and the ecological is the hallmark of reactionary ecology.

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

For all of these reasons, the slogan advanced by many contemporary Greens, “We are neither right nor left but up front,” is historically naive and politically fatal. The necessary project of creating an emancipatory ecological politics demands an acute awareness and understanding of the legacy of classical ecofascism and its conceptual continuities with present-day environmental discourse. An ‘ecological’ orientation alone, outside of a critical social framework, is dangerously unstable. The record of fascist ecology shows that under the right conditions such an orientation can quickly lead to barbarism.

Institute for Social Ecology

Footnotes

1 Ernst Lehmann, Biologischer Wille. Wege und Ziele biologischer Arbeit im neuen Reich, München, 1934, pp. 10-11. Lehmann was a professor of botany who characterized National Socialism as “politically applied biology.”

2 Anna Bramwell, author of the only book-length study on the subject, is exemplary in this respect. See her Blood and Soil: Walther Darré and Hitler’s ‘Green Party’, Bourne End, 1985, and Ecology in the 20th Century: A History, New Haven, 1989.

3 See Raymond H. Dominick, The Environmental Movement in Germany: Prophets and Pioneers, 1871-1971, Bloomington, 1992, especially part three, “The Völkisch Temptation.”

4 For example, Dominick, The Environmental Movement in Germany, , p. 22; and Jost Hermand, Grüne Utopien in Deutschland: Zur Geschichte des ökologischen Bewußtseins, Frankfurt, 1991, pp. 44-45.

5 Quoted in Rudolf Krügel, Der Begriff des Volksgeistes in Ernst Moritz Arndts Geschichtsanschauung, Langensalza, 1914, p. 18.

6 Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, Feld und Wald, Stuttgart, 1857, p. 52.

7 Klaus Bergmann, Agrarromantik und Großstadtfeindschaft, Meisenheim, 1970, p. 38. There is no satisfactory English counterpart to “Großstadtfeindschaft,” a term which signifies hostility to the cosmopolitanism, internationalism, and cultural tolerance of cities as such. This ‘anti-urbanism’ is the precise opposite of the careful critique of urbanization worked out by Murray Bookchin in Urbanization Without Cities, Montréal, 1992, and The Limits of the City, Montréal, 1986.

8 George Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich, New York, 1964, p. 29.

9 Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews 1933-1945, New York, 1975, pp. 61-62.

10 Daniel Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism: Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League, New York, 1971, p. xvii.

11 ibid., p. 30. Gasman’s thesis about the politics of Monism is hardly uncontroversial; the book’s central argument, however, is sound.

12 Quoted in Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism, p. 34.

13 ibid., p. 33.

14 See the foreword to the 1982 reprint of his 1923 book Die Entdeckung der Heimat, published by the far-right MUT Verlag.

15 Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, p. 101.

16 Walter Laqueur, Young Germany: A History of the German Youth Movement, New York, 1962, p.41.

17 ibid., p. 6. For a concise portrait of the youth movement which draws similiar conclusions, see John De Graaf, “The Wandervogel,” CoEvolution Quarterly, Fall 1977, pp. 14-21.

18 Reprinted in Ludwig Klages, Sämtliche Werke, Band 3, Bonn, 1974, pp. 614-630. No English translation is available.

19 Ulrich Linse, Ökopax und Anarchie. Eine Geschichte der ökologischen Bewegungen in Deutschland, München, 1986, p. 60.

20 Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, p. 211, and Laqueur, Young Germany, p. 34.

21 See Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, Berkeley, 1963.

22 Michael Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics and Art, Indianapolis, 1990, pp. 242-243.

23 See Michael Zimmerman, “Rethinking the Heidegger—Deep Ecology Relationship”, Environmental Ethics vol. 15, no. 3 (Fall 1993), pp. 195-224.

24 Reproduced in Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, Auf der Suche nach Arkadien, München, 1990, p. 147.

25 Robert Pois, National Socialism and the Religion of Nature, London, 1985, p. 40.

26 ibid., pp. 42-43. The internal quote is taken from George Mosse, Nazi Culture, New York, 1965, p. 87.

27 Hitler, in Henry Picker, Hitlers Tischgespräche im Führerhauptquartier 1941-1942, Stuttgart, 1963, p. 151.

28 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, München, 1935, p. 314.

29 Quoted in Gert Gröning and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, “Politics, planning and the protection of nature: political abuse of early ecological ideas in Germany, 1933-1945”, Planning Perspectives 2 (1987), p. 129.

30 Änne Bäumer, NS-Biologie, Stuttgart, 1990, p. 198.

31 Alfred Rosenberg, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts, München, 1938, p. 550. Rosenberg was, in the early years at least, the chief ideologist of the Nazi movement.

32 Picker, Hitlers Tischgespräche, pp. 139-140.

33 Quoted in Heinz Haushofer, Ideengeschichte der Agrarwirtschaft und Agrarpolitik im deutschen Sprachgebiet, Band II, München, 1958, p. 266.

34 See Dominick, The Environmental Movement in Germany, p. 107.

35 ibid., p. 113.

36 Bergmann, Agrarromantik und Großstadtfeindschaft, p. 334. Ernst Nolte makes a similar argument in Three Faces of Fascism, New York, 1966, pp. 407-408, though the point gets lost somewhat in the translation. See also Norbert Frei, National Socialist Rule in Germany, Oxford, 1993, p. 56: “The change in direction towards the ‘soil’ had not been an electoral tactic. It was one of the basic ideological elements of National Socialism . . . ”

37 R. Walther Darré, Um Blut und Boden: Reden und Aufsätze, München, 1939, p. 28. The quote is from a 1930 speech entitled “Blood and Soil as the Foundations of Life of the Nordic Race.”

38 Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century, p. 203. See also Frei, National Socialist Rule in Germany, p. 57, which stresses that Darré’s total control over agricultural policy constituted a uniquely powerful position within the Nazi system.

39 Bergmann, Agrarromantik und Großstadtfeindschaft, p. 312.

40 ibid., p. 308.

41 See Haushofer, Ideengeschichte der Agrarwirtschaft, pp. 269-271, and Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century, pp. 200-206, for the formative influence of Steinerite ideas on Darré.

42 Haushofer, Ideengeschichte der Agrarwirtschaft, p. 271.

43 Anna Bramwell, “Darré. Was This Man ‘Father of the Greens’?” History Today, September 1984, vol. 34, pp. 7-13. This repugnant article is one long series of distortions designed to paint Darré as an anti-Hitler hero—an effort as preposterous as it is loathsome.

44 Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel, Hess: A Biography, London, 1971, p. 34.

45 Franz Neumann, Behemoth. The Structure and Practice of National Socialism 1933-1944, New York, 1944, p. 378.

46 Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, New York, 1970, p. 263.

47 ibid., p. 261.

48 Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century, p. 197.

49 Karl-Heinz Ludwig, Technik und Ingenieure im Dritten Reich, Düsseldorf, 1974, p. 337.

50 Quoted in Rolf Peter Sieferle, Fortschrittsfeinde? Opposition gegen Technik und Industrie von der Romantik bis zur Gegenwart, München, 1984, p. 220. Todt was just as convinced a Nazi as Darré or Hess; on the extent (and pettiness) of his allegiance to antisemitic policies, see Alan Beyerchen, Scientists Under Hitler, New Haven, 1977, pages 66-68 and 289.

51 Bramwell, Blood and Soil, p. 173.

52 Alwin Seifert, Im Zeitalter des Lebendigen, Dresden, 1941, p. 13. The book’s title is grotesquely inapt considering the date of publication; it means “in the age of the living.”

53 Alwin Seifert, Ein Leben für die Landschaft, Düsseldorf, 1962, p. 100.

54 Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century, p. 198. Bramwell cites Darré’s papers as the source of the internal quote.

55 Seifert, Ein Leben für die Landschaft, p. 90.

56 William Shirer, Berlin Diary, New York, 1941, p. 19. Shirer also calls Hess Hitler’s “protégé” (588) and “the only man in the world he fully trusts” (587), and substantiates Darré’s and Todt’s standing as well (590).

57 Quoted in Manvell and Fraenkel, Hess, p. 80. In a further remarkable confirmation of the ‘green’ faction’s stature, Hitler once declared that Todt and Hess were “the only two human beings among all those around me to whom I have been truly and inwardly attached” (Hess, p. 132).

58 See Haushofer, Ideengeschichte der Agrarwirtschaft, p. 270, and Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century, p. 201.

59 ibid., pp. 197-200. Most of Todt’s work also ran through Hess’s office.

60 Raymond Dominick, “The Nazis and the Nature Conservationists”, The Historian vol. XLIX no. 4 (August 1987), p.
534.

61 ibid., p. 536.

62 Hermand, Grüne Utopien in Deutschland, p. 114.

63 Dominick, “The Nazis and the Nature Conservationists”, p. 529.

64 Gröning and Wolschke-Bulmahn, “Politics, planning and the protection of nature”, p. 137.

65 ibid., p. 138.

66 Linse’s Ökopax und Anarchie, among others, offers a detailed consideration of the history of eco-anarchism in Germany.

67 Pois, National Socialism and the Religion of Nature, p. 27.

68 Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century, p. 48.

Smurfz, for god's sake you don't have to post an entire f***ing essay to make your point! Now look what a mess you've made of this page. Just post a link and a couple of brief quotes in future.

political party, Finbar definetely doesnt like muslims or eastern europeans coming to the uk ask him. Even though he is scottish,its the lame argument about them taking our jobs apperently. A internationalist with these concerns would be more bothered about making sure ethical international fair trade & universal rights stopping mass immigration than joining a nazi party, why not UKIP?, its not as if Griffin isnt still a active toff, he certainly is.

Word from regular clubbers & club workers is that Loft is owned by finbars wife,
licencee details have to be available at the venue as far as Iam aware& are usually written near the door.
LOFT IS IN PROCESS OF APPLYING FOR A LATE LICENCE, I should know my uncle used to run it.

If it is owned by his wife you can go to council house in the new year from 4th or 11th January to licencing commitee A meetings for NG1 area every monday& complain or write in. Ring on fridays to confirm which establishments are going before the commitee the week before 9155555. The more who try this the better

Any reliable evidence of misconduct by Mr Bryson & his partner etc at the Loft would help, we have all heard & seen him or his staff in front of him do vdodgy sick stuff, evidence please.





Some people seem too trendy to be bothered about his nazi membership & are more bothered about ethical wine with a plastic hippy vibe, they should live in Greece for a fortnight or Saudi Arabia,Nick Griffins favourite country for its "ethical" rule of law, that is until it became fashionable to slaughter muslims instead of Jews.



IMC editors,why was my poem about the lovely Bryson deleted please???, come on I did it as nice as possible,really why??

Universal Brigade:
"Any reliable evidence of misconduct by Mr Bryson & his partner etc at the Loft would help, we have all heard & seen him or his staff in front of him do vdodgy sick stuff, evidence please."

I think you need to tell us what YOUR evidence is before making these allegations.

As to the Alley Cafe, there are a whole load of allegations out there about how badly the owner treats his staff. Ask an ex-worker if you want to get to the bottom of it.

people to come forward etc is another thing.
Your reacting abit trollishly, we need evidence to help stop the late licence as well as a boycott,if he or his partner are licensees, maybe whover wrote this should have gone there & made sure before doing the article, but at least they gor the ball rolling .
Allegations by one ex worker who was at alley cafe were that she was caught stealing, well Ive heard alleations about her stealing , lets not get distracted, allegations like that happen just about everywhere!
Being a BNP member& other activities
Ive 100%seen extreme violence randomly outside his club which he encouraged from the sidelines , police turned up & there were many witnesses.Other veteran trade unionists & antifascists say they have been threatened by his door staff in his presence with witnesses.Again many people often dont want to take this to police for political reasons, licencing committees are different

Maybe he is a clinical phycsopath? as well as a BNP dentist,he isnt a idiot, proof is needed to help stop his licence& hopefully he will get a dental job in Glasgow & stick to that so peopple can concentrate on stopping climate change& increaing democracy globally so people wont have to move around against their will.

Any snipping against other antifascists on this issue is s.n.a.f.u or subtle trolling & hopefully will be moderated.


Theres a 1% chance he is a misunderstood nightclub owner & he has felt threatened by the proof we have found of his fascist party membership. But he would have to disprove the evidence that he isnt in the BNP, if he can do this on IMC properly or somewhere public & nuetral soon that'd be great4all of us. There is still a vvsmall 1% chance this is a divide & rule tactic by the extreme right.
Issues like this are destroying much of his life & sucking life from almost everyone

May i correct you on your main point. Finbar Bryson does not own the LOFT or have anything to do with the running of the place. The Business is the sole property of his wife who is from SOuth Africa, and as the manager of the Loft i believe i can speak for us all when i say that vicous rumours without all the facts can be harmfull to a lot of peoples reputations.
Should anybody have any further issues regarding the venue then please do not hesitate to contact us.
Thank you to you all and we hope to see you down here at the LOFT soon...

Here we are again happy as can be.

This little issus seems to have raised its head again like the nasty little pimple on the back of a hobbit toe'd hippy.

I have chosen to use my usual pseudonym for the publication of this post so that those who know me, will know that i have posted this so if you have a problem with anything i say then you can say it to my face rather than hiding in the back bedroom of ya mam's house furiously typing away in between furiously chuffing the cheese fantastic.

Firstly i would like to piont out that as far as I'm aware. Psycle has no pollitiacal aganda other than to have a jolly good time, creating as little pollitics in the wake as possible. To be hitched onto this racist bandwagon i find offensive considering the amount of time and energy i have put into psycle, dragging speakers around in the mud, cleaning up all the rubbish, and the amount of complete twaddle i have heard from every walk of life at our parties, and all with a smile and a beer in hand. I do this because parties are a good idea, possibly one of the best ideas in my opinion. And all because of this little word "free." Its not that you dont have to put your hand in your pocket,(all though it would be nice guys next time the donation bucket comes round,) but because it is free from the normal constraints, the obvious ones of course, but also the fact that anyone can voice their opinions and if you think they are wrong then fair enough, present your rebuttal and it can be discussed. If you have a better piont then this can be taken on board, if not then i can happily think your a bit of a nob head and carry on with my day, as can anyone, in true South Park tradition that EVERYTHING is fair game within this situation. Yet is no reason for some on line underhand character assassination. So please, any more (i open up my ghetto hand book,) dissing of Psycle, then as alredy said... Say it to my face!

Secondly. How many on here who are rallying against the Loft has actually thought about the establishments they frequent? Because off the top of my head i can think of 3-4 that have masonic tie's (who also control the bar licences.) Let alone all the others that i have no knowlege of. What about where you work? Glass house's an all that. I have also seen some of the left lion boys playing and enjoying a drink at the loft so where they get off i have no idea, but i suspect a certain amount of artistic licence may have been used with this artice.

"The fallout for Blueprint, the club that Bryson ran at the time, was quite severe as a number of profitable nights pulled out. One of those was DEMO,"

That number was one and it was Demo, and fair enough, if that is where they stand, but lets not get out of hand here.

Thirdly. I have spoken to Finbar on many occasions, and i have always found him to be an intelligent (if not slightly Scottish,) man of his word, and i feel that he would be of my opinion. Say it to his face rather than on a sneaky website, then hear the arguments, and make up your own independent mind.

So for any discussion on the issue you can find me more than likely, at the next Notts free party. Making sure your numpty mate doesn't knock the decks over. Maybe filling the jenny with petrol, or at the loft. But then again, maybe not if my opinions arn't the same as yours!

P.S
Not All of Psycle are hippy's, some of us have jobs, and soap. You should try it sometime.

P.P.S
F.A.O Copy n paste boy.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.
There's no way you read all that!

Sodnpoo, you say Finbar is an intelligent man of his word. That may be the case but the question is, is he still a member of the BNP, and how have his views changed if he has given up membership.
The loft may be "owned" by his wife but that may be for business/tax reasons for all we know. Does she support his views?
Yes, there probably are lots of pubs etc owned by people with dubious morals, but the point seems to be that Finbar is/was a member of a party that up until recently would have denied membership to his own wife.
Additionaly if there are places that you think people should boycott then please list them here with the reasons.
I don't know Finbar but presumably a few of the commentators on this site do. Maybe they could ask him to reply to this thread? It seems that unless this happens the rumour mill will have plenty of fuel.

sodnpoo, thanks for showing us exactly what kind of right-wing fucknut you are - masonic ties? This is the real world, not right-wing hippy land where everything is controlled by jewish lizards from outer space who are all masons.

Happy to be a loon, happy to support the bnp - thanks for making it clear, I'll be avoiding your piss-poor excuse for parties in the future.

Sodnpoo says "Firstly i would like to piont out that as far as I'm aware. Psycle has no pollitiacal aganda other than to have a jolly good time, creating as little pollitics in the wake as possible."
and this is exactly why people are so thoroughly sick of Psycle. They'd probably put on parties for neo-Nazis if the drugs were good enough. Funny how sodnpoo is happy to support a member of a fascist party that is stirring up racial violence in this country but draws the line at Freemasons who are, at best, a fucking irrelevance.

A little hint, sodnpoo: You ARE taking a political stance by backing this guy up. It's not that you don't have politics but that you have SHIT politics.

labour, conservatives they all collaborate to maintain the corporate system, Atkins family joined the estabishment& so have many oher workng class families even in classridden UK. It suckz but its better than supporting nazi C18 & bizarelly the IRA as many,many people alledge Atkin Snr not jnr did. Seems Finbar isnt very different, except he is getting full support from some in the alternative scene.

All the evidence shows Finbar is in a fascist party with nazi roots, based fully on occult nazism.
There was once a time when freemasons supported the enlightenment & stood up against oppression by Royalty& the catholic church many of whom at the time made Al Queda look mild.Many were against divisions by race or religion, some some were racist& let down by having seperate orders for women though they generally suppported the universal sufferage, like masons in France
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Freemasons

Many famous scientist& musicians were freemasons, many of them supported the enlgightenment& were denounced or tortured by papal bull.
As a whole freemasons then became those who maintained the establishment which serve oligarchs like Bilderberger who are only human & a still almost fuedal class system which Nazis cosy up to then stab in the back for dictatorship.

Sodnopoo lets not divide ourselves into activists & party people, most people do both or switch between the 2& many Nottm Imcers+editors have organised parties from Stonehenge in the 60&70s to CJA stuff whilst some of us were in diapers. It would be lovely if we could all party & the whole world just joined. In fact really as Skunk anansie said everythings political!
At times if some of us want to at the very least boycott political parties& members who generally want to see people like you or your mates lined up & shot then you should support us & we would support you alot more in many ways & Nottinghams+ the global party scene would be much stronger for it without nazis, freemasons or oligarchs.

Couple of points concerning your abundantly misinformed 'article'

First off Futureproof didn't leave, they were kicked out for being shockingly bad promoters.
Yes Demo did leave.... then pretty much begged to come back!

Finbar didn't make any profit the last 3 years he was running the club (which had nothing to do with your petty little campaign) he funded it from his own pocket purely to support the creative music scene in Nottingham and for his love of the venue....kind of conflicts with your statement that spending money in the club would directly fund the BNP.

Finbar is currently funding an orphanage being built in South Africa...not exactly the actions of an evil nazi this website paints him out to be, not to mention couple of other bits of evidence such as his south african wife, his countless black and asian friends and his history of employing ethnic people from the area of radford at an above minimum wage rate.....might also point out how offended one of them was when you guys crudely tried to encourage him to say negative things about finbar when you were 'researching' your hateful article earlier in the year.


Now personally I detest the BNP for what it stands for as I do any type of fascist party...which includes deluded leftys I might add, however I do not for one minute think that every person who is a member of the BNP party is a racist/nazi/thug...some people are just misinformed and generally just disillusioned with the shocking state of British politics at the moment. Thats what you people just dont and probably will never understand. You can spout rhetoric all day long but it'll never achieve what you want (a non fascist society) because you'll never win those people across to your way or a more moderate way of thinking.
Though my suspicion with you folks is this whole witchhunt is a massive ego stroke to make you feel you've done your part in the fight against fascism....I hope you feel good about yourselves when you're stood in the queue for your next dole cheque.

"Finbar didn't make any profit the last 3 years he was running the club (which had nothing to do with your petty little campaign) he funded it from his own pocket purely to support the creative music scene in Nottingham and for his love of the venue....kind of conflicts with your statement that spending money in the club would directly fund the BNP."

I don't think that's the point that people have been making. They are making the point that Finbar has joined a fascist party and made some disgusting comments on the internet that mean that many people want to have nothing to do with him or his venues. I can't see where anyone has suggested that going to his venues is funding the BNP.

"Finbar is currently funding an orphanage being built in South Africa...not exactly the actions of an evil nazi this website paints him out to be, not to mention couple of other bits of evidence such as his south african wife, his countless black and asian friends and his history of employing ethnic people from the area of radford at an above minimum wage rate....."

That Finbar is a latter day philanthropist doesn't mean anything. Countless colonialists gave money to help 'poor darkies' whilst continuing to hold racist views. Many of them also married non-whites. Besides, some people are quite specific in who they are racist against. Does Finbar have any Muslim friends?

Btw - what are 'ethnic people'? I thought only fascists used language like that.

"might also point out how offended one of them was when you guys crudely tried to encourage him to say negative things about finbar when you were 'researching' your hateful article earlier in the year."

Who are these 'guys' who are conspiring to write 'hateful' articles, Ben?

"I do not for one minute think that every person who is a member of the BNP party is a racist/nazi/thug...some people are just misinformed and generally just disillusioned with the shocking state of British politics at the moment. Thats what you people just dont and probably will never understand."

I agree with you. But if that was the case with Finbar why did he never admit that he had joined the BNP? Why did he never disown the racist posts he had made on the internet? Why did he threaten people who had brought the evidence to light?

Could it be that he's more of a racist/nazi/thug than you would care to admit?

"Though my suspicion with you folks is this whole witchhunt is a massive ego stroke to make you feel you've done your part in the fight against fascism..."

Again, who are these 'folks'? Where is this conspiracy of withchhunters?

What I see is an attempt to boycott venues associated with an unrepentant reactionary by making information about his businesses public. You might not agree that this is the best way to conduct anti-fascism but then, seeing as you claim to be against the BNP, I ask you what you will be doing to change the views of bigoted people like Finbar Bryson?

Or do you agree with everything he's said?

"First off Futureproof didn't leave, they were kicked out for being shockingly bad promoters.
Yes Demo did leave.... then pretty much begged to come back! "

1. Futureproof did leave.
2. Demo fuckin well didn't beg to come back. Whats this bullshit?!

"First off Futureproof didn't leave, they were kicked out for being shockingly bad promoters.
Yes Demo did leave.... then pretty much begged to come back! "

Ben, neither of these assertions are true. I think you've been misinformed by somebody. Both promoters took a decision to leave the club and then stuck by that decision.

It's not very kind to spread gossip about other people's nights on the internet for the sake of making a political point.

Can you all please think about what kind of impact this has on others involved... There is a very wonderfull lady who, not only has had to put up and deal with ths kind of stuff all of her life in her home country but after trying to better her self and start her own business is still having to deal with idiotic comments like this... Cant you all just leave well alone and let the innocent parties carry on doing their jobs?
No i dont think you can as all you are hell bent on doing is achievng your own agenda... Bullies??!!??

when deciding where to go for a night I like to take into account the ethics behind the place Im going to. Trying to determine whether a venue is owned by a BNP member is therefore perfectly reasonable. The question is (and all the defenders of Finbar have still ignored this) is whether he is a) still a member of the BNP
b) whether his anti muslim views are still held
and c) whether his wife also holds those views.

These are not difficult questions to answer and until I hear an answer Im not going to drink in the loft.

I get the impression reading some of these comments that people are ignoring someones right wing extremely dangerous views because they put on good nights. Well you can dress up apathy in any way you like but at the end of the day its still apathy. Its a cliche but the only way evil will truimph is for good people to do nothing.