Steve recommends:
>
>Here is my favorite paragraph...
>
>"Furthermore, as Robert Proctor showed in "Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under
>the Nazis" (1988), the Nazis were health fanatics who banned cigarette
>smoking, promoted vegetarianism and organic gardening, engaged in abortion
>and euthanasia, frowned on all capitalist excess, and even promoted
>animal rights. They were environmentalists who locked up land from
>development to promote paganism."
>
>Not exactly something I'd expect from free market types who value
>individual rights.
>
>Steve

Again we have some more spurious or specious reasoning. The Seventh Day
Adventists are vegetarians, Rudolf Steiner was Jewish and a stauch biodyamic
and organic farming advocate, and the American Medical Association were the
first professional body to fight smoking. Since Hitler was himself a
vegetarian, but a heavy user of psychotropic forms of medication, does it
necessarily follow therefore that all vegetarians are Nazi's? and does it
necessarily follow that environmentalists who advocate organic foods and
vegetarianism Nazi's and fascists? 

Folks, I ask because, I beleive this is...

a classic example of 'post hoc' reasoning. Fitting isolated and unrelated
fixed variables to an agenda of statistical inference, abeit primitive, apon
the morality of the purist, kind hearted, and sensitive folks I know.

If any one is really interested, the Germans were very conscious of 'purity'
in their foods. For instance they have the Bavarian Purity laws regarding
beer (circa 14 AD). The Bavarian Forest Act (16 AD), which I have a copy of
- in it's original form, expressly forbids the introduction of 'unnatural
substances' in beer. Germans have been world leaders in the protection of
animal rights. They currently have strict standards for all domestic animals
in captivity. 

Then there is 'foul mouthed Luther'...

God Steve, you claim to be an expert in statistics. 

And moreover what is the meaning of this sentence?

Hitler and his ideologues were able to capture the 'blood and soil'
philosophy of the Germans. You have to remember that the "night of the
thousand" daggers was a pure blood bath in the Reichstag, all right wing
political parties leaders and supportes were killed, along with other strong
resistance. This act of terror was induced by an 'assination of a German
national  in Paris by a psychotic Jew. This was the moment of terror that
fueld Hitler to his dictatorship. After this there was no more democracy. If
Hitler had been found directly involved in the "Beer Hall Putsch" and
convicted of an attempt of a violent overthrow of the Austrian government,
Hitler would not have been leader of German. 

The implication for an environmental ethic here is obvious. We are now
reading 'post hoc' propaganda devised to instill fear in ignorant people
about the benefits of an environmentally oriented lifestyle, that is organic
foods, animal welfare, etc. The exact issues that threaten big corporations
that are making tropical rainforests 'hamburgerable'.

The seventh day adventists were the first to be executed in Nazi German for
being pacifists. Most people do not know this. The reason is obvious, the
Nazi's were afraid of the pacificism since it might teach other people to
behave the same way. Sheer terror of selfish interests were at work here. 

"Blood and Soil (Blut and Boden). Sometimes abbreviated to Blubo the phrase
expressed a primitive relationship of the earth and German peasant which
Nazi speakers dwelt on as part of the anti-urban, anti-industry,
anti-capitalist animus which is a constantly recurring theme in both the
Party and the SS." [A Dictionary of the Third Reich] 

And especially for you Steve - if you are still with me -  to contrast and
compare I would like to offer a quote by Wendell Berry:

"A potato is less complex than the topsoil, a steak than a steer, a cooked
meal than a farm. If, in the human economy, a squash on the table is worth
more than a squash in the field, a squash in the field is worth more than a
bushel of soil, that does not mean that food is more valuable than soil; it
means simply that we do not know how to value the soil. In its complexity
and its potential longevity, the soil exceeds our comprehension; we do not
know how to place a just market value on it, and we will never learn how.
Its value is inestimable; we must value it, beyond whatever price we put on
it, by respecting it." 
[Wendell Berry, Home economics]





>Not exactly something I'd expect from free market types who value
>individual rights.









>
>
>
>
>
>--- Volker Bahn <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> I'm glad you posted this, Jim, because I meant to reply to an older post
>> of yours in which you also made a connection between elevating the
>> common good over individual rights to fascism (sorry I don't have the
>> post handy but if you insist, I'll dig it out).
>> 
>> Oh here it is:
>>   Jim:
>>   It's a fine line--I'm not saying this distinction is always easily
>> made or
>>   clear cut by any means.  But the authoritarian tendencies in
>>   environmentalism are very real.  Environmentalism is perhaps the most
>>   conservative of political ideologies, make no mistake about that.  Any
>> time
>>   there is talk of elevating the needs of the community over the rights
>> of
>>   individual inhabitants, human or nonhuman, then there is a subsequent
>> risk
>>   of "fascism," broadly construed.  It is simply in the nature of the
>>   environmental beast.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>   Okay, to be more accurate, the term I should have chosen is
>> "collectivism" or possibly even "socialism." Remember, I'm still just
>> trying to understand Rand's views--not defend them. 
>> 
>> I will criticise the following statements, but because they are not your
>> opinions I guess the criticism goes to Rand. However, you were defending
>> her against attacks from left, right and center and I'm curious to see
>> whether you also conclude my criticism to be unsubstantiated or a
>> misinterpretation.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>   To her, socialism is what led (historically) to Nazism and to Soviet
>> communism. Socialist intellectuals, then, are the thinkers who let the
>> world down, so to speak. Rand:
>> 
>> This is wrong. Nazism and fascism were anti-communist and
>> anti-socialist. 
>> 
>>   the connection to Naziism and communism :
>>   --"It was not the businessmen or the industrialists or the workers or
>> the labor unions or the remnants of the feudal aristocracy that began
>> the revolt against freedom and the demand for the return of the absolute
>> state: it was the intellectuals. It was the alleged guardians of reason
>> who brought mankind back to the rule of brute force.
>> 
>> Wrong again. Fascism in Italy and later in many European countries was
>> initiated and supported by the middle-classes (craftsmen, merchants,
>> farmers, employees, officials), who felt threatened in their status and
>> wealth by progressing industrialisation and worker's organisation.
>> 
>>   --"Growing throughout the nineteenth century, originated in and
>> directed from intellectual salons, sidewalk cafés, basement beer joints
>> and university classrooms, the industrial counter-revolution united the
>> Witch Doctors and the Attila-ists. They demanded the right to enforce
>> ideas at the point of a gun, that is: through the power of government,
>> and compel the submission of others to the views and wishes of those who
>> would gain control of the government's machinery. 
>> 
>> That's partly right. However, the fascists never planned to violently
>> elevate society's rights over individual rights. They wanted to elevate
>> their own egoistical (and therefore Randian) rights over individual and
>> societal rights.
>> 
>>   They extolled the State as the 'Form of the Good,' with man as its
>> abject servant, and they proposed as many variants of the socialist
>> state as there had been of the altruist morality. But, in both cases,
>> the variations merely played with the surface, while the cannibal
>> essence remained the same: socialism is the doctrine that man has no
>> right to exist for his own sake, that his life and his work do not
>> belong to him, but belong to society, that the only justification of his
>> existence is his service to society, and that society may dispose of him
>> in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own
>> tribal, collective good.
>> 
>>   --"It is only the Attila-ist, pragmatist, positivist, anti-conceptual
>> mentality--which grants no validity to abstractions, no meaning to
>> principles and no power to ideas--that can still wonder why a
>> theoretical doctrine of that kind had to lead in practice to the torrent
>> of blood and brute, non-human horror of such socialist societies as Nazi
>> Germany and Soviet Russia. 
>> 
>>   Nazi Germany was NOT anywhere close to a socialist society. This is
>> historical ignorance.
>> 
>>   Only the Attila-ist mentality can still claim that nobody can prove
>> that these had to be the necessary results--or still try to blame it on
>> the 'imperfection' of human nature or on the evil of some specific gang
>> who 'betrayed and ideal,' and still promise that its own gang would do
>> it better and make it work--or still mumble in a quavering voice that
>> the motive was love of humanity.
>>   --"The pretenses have worn thin, the evasions do not work any longer;
>> the intellectuals are aware of their guilt, but are still struggling to
>> evade its cause and to pass it on to the universe at large, to man's
>> metaphysically predestined impotence" (The N.I., 48-9).
>> 
>> She seems to have fallen for the propaganda of the Nazis. Fascism and
>> Soviet communism were built on propaganda, which of course did not
>> represent reality. If her analysis doesn't go any deeper than taking the
>> propaganda of totalitarian systems for their real intentions and thus
>> tries to discredit social intentions I have to say that I'm starting to
>> GAG.
>> 
>> In the same line of logic one could claim that democracy equals
>> terrorism because the financing and military support of the Contras in
>> Nicaragua was big scale terrorism in the name of democracy.
>> 
>> Sorry, I'm drifting away from EE, but I didn't start it.
>> 
>> Cheers
>> 
>> Volker 
>> 
>
>
>__________________________________________________
>Do You Yahoo!?
>Send instant messages & get email alerts with Yahoo! Messenger.
>http://im.yahoo.com/
>



%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%