COMMENT: Robert Wil­son spied this impor­tant story from the British Guardian. Reca­pit­u­lat­ing the “pro-Green” poli­cies of the Third Reich, Ger­man neo-Nazis, the NPD milieu in par­tic­u­lar, are adopt­ing an eco­log­i­cally and nutri­tion­ally con­struc­tive program.

This will make their move­ment more palat­able to young peo­ple, and may afford them gains with the Pirate Party in the Fed­eral Repub­lic. The lat­ter has emerged as some­thing of a protest party.

The national leader of the Ger­man Pirate Party dis­missed the notion (raised by the head of the Party’s Berlin chap­ter) that the “Pirates” had a Nazi prob­lem, say­ing that the party had only doc­u­mented a few neo-Nazis within its ranks.

In this cor­ner, we don’t doubt that the major­ity of the “Pirates” would be repulsed by Nazi ide­ol­ogy. Nonethe­less, they appear to have remained bliss­fully unaware of, or tol­er­ant of, Nazi sugar daddy Carl Lundstrom’s finan­cial spon­sor­ship of Pirate Bay, and they don’t seem to have fig­ured out Julian Assange/WikiLeaks’ Nazi/anti-Semitic orientation.

A num­ber of thoughts occur to us in this context:

• As is the case with the over­lap­ping “Anony­mous” milieu, the “Pirate folks” enjoy a degree of anonymity  due to the nature of the Inter­net free-downloading com­mu­nity. How can any­one say for sure who among the Pirate Party ranks are or are not Nazis?
• The Green Party in the past has cham­pi­oned some dubi­ous causes that ben­e­fit the Under­ground Reich. In addi­tion to sup­port­ing Ralph Nader against Al Gore in 2000, thereby ben­e­fit­ing George W. Bush, the Ger­man Greens have cham­pi­oned the rights of “Threat­ened Peo­ples,” thereby plac­ing them­selves in the same cor­ner as neo-fascist/Underground Reich ele­ments that have cham­pi­oned causes from the Tibetans to the ver­triebene milieu.
• The head of the Ger­man Green Party–Petra Kelly–was mur­dered by a Third Reich vet­eran, who allegedly com­mit­ted sui­cide after­ward. Might this have antic­i­pated co-opting the Greens to reac­tionary polit­i­cal causes?
• Note that the bru­tal absorp­tion of the still-depressed for­mer East Ger­many has facil­i­tated the Ger­man right’s acqui­si­tion of cheap farm land for “eco­fas­cist” activities.

“Ger­man Far-Right Extrem­ists Tap into Green Move­ment for Sup­port” by Kate Con­nolly; The Guardian [UK]; 4/28/2012. 

EXCERPT: Ger­man con­sumers are being warned that when they buy organic pro­duce they may be sup­port­ing the far-right move­ment, fol­low­ing the rev­e­la­tion that rightwing extrem­ists in Ger­many have embraced the eco­log­i­cal move­ment and are using it to tap into a new gen­er­a­tion of supporters.

Debunk­ing the pop­u­lar view that equates eco-friendliness with cud­dly, left-leaning greens, rightwing extrem­ists have even begun to pub­lish their own con­ser­va­tion mag­a­zine, which is believed to have the back­ing of the far-right National Demo­c­ra­tic party (NPD). Along­side gar­den­ing tips and reports on the dan­gers of genet­i­cally mod­i­fied milk are arti­cles rid­dled with rightwing ide­ol­ogy and racial slurs. Bavaria’s domes­tic intel­li­gence agency has described the mag­a­zine, Umwelt und Aktiv (Envi­ron­ment and Active), as a “cam­ou­flage pub­li­ca­tion” for the NPD.

“We have to get used to the fact that the term ‘bio’ [organic] does not auto­mat­i­cally mean equal­ity and human dig­nity,” said Gudrun Hein­rich of the Uni­ver­sity of Ros­tock, who has just pub­lished a study on the topic called Brown Ecol­o­gists, a ref­er­ence to the Nazi Brown­shirts and their modern-day admirers.

Hotbeds of far-right eco-warriors are to be found through­out Ger­many. In the Meck­len­burg region in the north, they have been qui­etly set­tling in com­mu­ni­ties since the 1990s in an effort to rein­vig­o­rate the tra­di­tions of the Arta­man League – a farm­ing move­ment whose roots lie in the 19th cen­tury roman­tic ideal of “blood and soil” rural­ism, which was adopted by the Nazis. Hein­rich Himm­ler, the SS leader, was a mem­ber. “They prop­a­gate a way of liv­ing which involves humane rais­ing of plants and ani­mals, is both nation­al­is­tic and author­i­tar­ian, and in which there’s no place for plu­ral­ism and democ­racy,” said Hein­rich, adding that the NPD is closely linked to the set­tlers, help­ing the party become “deeply rooted in these rural areas”.

The set­tlers pro­duce “Ger­man honey”, bake bread from home­grown wheat, pro­duce fruit and veg­eta­bles for sale, and knit their own woollen sweaters. Observers have noted that the far-right farm­ers have been able to profit from the cheap and spa­cious swaths of land left by a pop­u­la­tion exo­dus from impov­er­ished states in the for­mer East Ger­many, such as Mecklenburg. . . .