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“Historians rarely enjoy their fifteen minutes of fame, particularly when their work covers an obscure topic…my scholarship offers little support for the conclusions Senator Brandis reached.” Peter Staudenmaier
G�day. Here�s something special � a piece by historian Peter Staudenmaier, co-author of one of the books George Brandis used to claim the Greens were Nazis in disguise. Peter agreed to elaborate on the email he sent Webdiary which I published in Ashrawi and Brandis: the great debate. After Peter�s piece, the relevant extracts from George�s speech.
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Greens and Nazis
by Peter Staudenmaier
Historians rarely enjoy their fifteen minutes of fame, particularly when their work covers an obscure topic. Even if somebody out there ends up reading what we write, as likely as not we’ll complain that they’ve missed the point. When you’re thoroughly immersed in a subject, it can be hard to convey the nuances and complexities involved in a way that makes sense to a broad audience.
So it’s probably not too surprising that I was less than thrilled to find my work at the center of a political controversy in faraway Australia, a place I have never visited and know little about. When Senator Brandis took the floor of the parliament and quoted at length from a book that I co-authored, he used my writing for purposes that are quite at odds with my own.
There is nothing wrong with that in principle; it isn’t my job to tell others what lessons they ought to draw from the events and movements I study. In this case, however, I think it important to point out that my scholarship offers little support for the conclusions Senator Brandis reached.
He is not the only reader of my work to draw such conclusions. I have heard from a number of conservative political figures in the United States, where I live, who are eager to use my historical work as a weapon in the struggle against what they see as the Green menace. These people refer to my research on ecofascism as a cheap tactic to impugn virtually all varieties of political environmentalism. In my opinion, this is not a serious way to approach important historical questions.
The book that caught Senator Brandis’s attention is titled Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience. Along with my co-author Janet Biehl, I explore there the little-known legacy of right-wing ecology and its appropriation by one faction of the Nazi party in the 1930’s. Our book says quite explicitly that there is no inherent connection between classical fascism and contemporary Green politics. What gave rise to the convergence of ecology and fascism seventy years ago was a specific set of historical circumstances and a specific version of ecological thinking, which our book examines in detail.
The excerpts which Senator Brandis presented to his colleagues ignored this crucial context, and thus failed to do justice both to the very grave history that the book recounts, as well as to the current relevance of these issues in today’s world.
Moreover, the concrete parallels that Brandis emphasized � an ostensible excess of radical zeal on the part of some Australian Greens, as well as their supposedly cynical attitude toward democratic institutions � are at best tangentially related to the ideological commonalities between environmentalism and fascism that my research reveals.
The Nazis certainly did not come to power because the predecessors of the Greens in Germany were too vocal in their opposition to the militarist and authoritarian tendencies of their day.
It is possible that the Australian Greens are indeed awash in mystical and antihumanist ideas, as Senator Brandis’s portrait would have it; to comment on that question exceeds my competence. If such is the case, however, it scarcely means that fascism is on its way.
Perhaps Brandis’s ill-considered invocation of the rise of Nazism will have a salutary effect after all, if it spurs his intended targets among the Greens to study this background further. For the present, however, it would seem that vociferous disagreement with the status quo � even if its tenor is too strident for some � represents a significant bulwark against political demagoguery, not a step toward dictatorship.
That Senator Brandis apparently confused this sort of vigorous dissent with the lack of dissent that allowed fascism to flourish in the first place indicates that we still have a lot to learn from the history of political shortsightedness.
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Extract from the Brandis speech � full text at Nazi Greens an enemy of democracy, government decrees.
… even more illuminating is a work by a person who is known to be on the far left of green politics in Europe, Professor Peter Staudenmaier, who wrote a book four years ago called ‘Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience’. He, too, drew the comparison between the political technique of the Greens in contemporary Western societies and the political technique of the environmental movementor the naturalist movement, as it was then knownin Germany in the 1920s and the 1930s. The work of both of those scholars caused Patrick Moore, a former head of Greenpeace International, to say: “In the name of speaking for the trees and other species we are faced with a movement that would usher in an era of eco-fascism.”
The commonalities between contemporary green politics and old-fashioned fascism and Nazism are chilling.
First of all – and this is the most obvious point of the lot – is the embrace of fanaticism, the embrace of a set of political values which will not brook the expression of legitimate difference. So, as we saw from Senator Brown’s and Senator Nettle’s behaviour in the House of Representatives chamber last Thursday, they are unable to listen to somebody whose political colour they dislike, whose political views they disagree with, without screaming at them. They will not even brook the legitimacy of alternative points of view. The zealotry – the fundamentalism – we saw from Senator Brown and Senator Nettle last Thursday identified them as true fanatics.
The second feature that we see is so much a common feature –
Senator Brown: Mr Acting Deputy President, I raise a point of order. I thought that standing order 193 had been made apparent to you. I ask that that comment be withdrawn.
The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT (Senator Lightfoot): Senator Brandis, perhaps I should invite you to withdraw the term ‘fanatic’ or ‘true fanatic’.
Senator BRANDIS: Mr Acting Deputy President, I am unaware that the word ‘fanatic’ has been ever considered to be in breach of standing order 193 and I invite you to rule that an allegation of fanaticism, which is merely an allegation that somebody holds a political opinion with unreasoning zeal, is not a reflection upon the person but merely a comment on the intensity of their view.
The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT: Senator Brandis, that seems to be a discriminatory term and when applied to a senator it is unparliamentary. I would ask that you consider withdrawing it.
Senator BRANDIS: I abide by your ruling, Mr Acting Deputy President.
The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT :You should withdraw, Senator Brandis.
Senator BRANDIS: I withdraw.
The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT: Thank you.
The second feature of contemporary green politics which bears chilling and striking comparison with the political techniques of the Nazis and the fascists is not merely their contempt for democratic institutions but a very cynical willingness to use those democratic parliamentary institutions to achieve antidemocratic ends. Let it never be forgotten that the Nazis came to power in 1932 when they won a majority in the Reichstag in free elections.
Senator Robert Ray: They didn’t win a majority.
When they won control of the Reichstag – thank you, Senator Robert Ray – in free elections. The mechanistic use of democratic institutions – the invocation of the good repute of democratic institutions by those who wish to destroy those institutions – is a hallmark of contemporary green politics, just as it was a hallmark of those who were their antecedents.
The third feature which we see in common between the Greens and the Nazis is a kind of ignorant nationalism, as reflected most obviously in their hatred of globalisation. Professor Staudenmaier, in his book about ecofascism, tracing those values back to their philosophical antecedents, their philosophical roots, writes: “At the very outset of the nineteenth century the deadly connection between love of land and militant racist nationalism was firmly set in place.”
Yet again, another connection that we see between the values which Senator Brown represents and the values which were the antecedents of European fascism is commented on by Professor Staudenmaier and found in the writings of Ernst Arndt and Wilhelm Riehl. Wilhelm Riehl, in a 1853 essay ‘Field and Forest’, said –
Senator Brown: Mr Acting Deputy President, I rise on a point of order. The imputation that my values are the same as precursors to Nazism is abhorrent and should be withdrawn.
The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT (Senator Lightfoot): Senator Brown, as far as I was able to ascertain, and I listened intently, Senator Brandis did not refer to you. He did refer to the Greens, but I do not recall him referring to you since the other point of order.
Senator Brown: Mr Acting Deputy President, I invite you to look at the Hansard, because he referred to me by name. You were not listening carefully enough, if that is the case. No member of this parliament – whether it be Senator Brandis or I or anybody else – should have that sort of reflection on them in this place. It is against standing orders and he should withdraw.
Senator Robert Ray: I rise on a point of order. Every time that Senator Brown interrupts Senator Brandis, he gets his second wind and he can read his notes again. He is running out of puff. Can we just hear him finish his speech?
The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT: I would be delighted to so rule, Senator Ray, but I have a procedure to follow.
Senator BRANDIS: Mr Acting Deputy President, I was merely quoting from a learned text and I was making the point, which I would submit to you is not against standing orders, of identifying the common roots of different ideas.
The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT: I think the point is, Senator Brandis, that if you mentioned Senator Brown by name then you should withdraw. If you mentioned ‘the Greens’, I understand that term is not unparliamentary. It may be unsavoury to some people but it is not unparliamentary. I ask you to withdraw if you mentioned Senator Brown by name.
Senator BRANDIS: To that extent, Mr Acting Deputy President, I withdraw.
Senator Faulkner: Mr Acting Deputy President, I rise on a point of order. With your extensive knowledge of the standing orders, could you inform me if there is a standing order against pomposity?
The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT: There is no point of order, Senator Faulkner.
I want to quote to the Senate a fairly long extract from Professor Staudenmaier’s book Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience. He identifies the antecedents of those views in the writings of Arndt and Riehl. He says this:
“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 … Riehl was an implacable opponent of the rise of industrialism and urbanization; his overtly antisemitic glorification of rural peasant values and undifferentiated condemnation of modernity established him as the founder of agrarian romanticism and anti-urbanism.”
These latter two fixations matured in the second half of the nineteenth century in the context of the volkisch movement; a powerful cultural disposition and social tendency which united ethnocentric populism with nature mysticism. At the heart of the volkisch 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, volkisch 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 Volkisch movement aspired to reconstruct the society that was sanctioned by history, rooted in nature, and in communion with the cosmic life spirit, 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.
Reformulating traditional German antisemitism into nature-friendly terms, the volkisch 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.
That is the text to which the journalist Andrew Bolt referred in his article last weekend and in his earlier article in July. It is, as I said earlier in the speech, a chilling reminder of the common antecedents of late 20th/early 21st century Green politics and early 20th century German fascism. The antirationalism, the perverted mutated naturalism, the mysticism, the hostility to cosmopolitanism, capitalism, global structures and to the global economy are all there to see.
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Webdiary entries on the Brandis debate:
1.Teeth bared, Howard’s team mauls our latest outbreak of democracy, October 29
2. Howl of the despondent historian, October 30
3. The battle for minds, November 5
4. Expats talk back on the state of the nation, November 5 � a detailed rebuttal of the Brandis claim by Rod Sewell in Munich
5. Ashrawi and Brandis: the great debate, November 6