Really. These guys are nuts. Totally fucking nuts. And any politician who curries their favor or seeks their endorsement should be asked to condemn them and return their dirty money.
Last month BIAW Stormwater Field Representative Mark Musser had the poor judgment to compare the state Department of Ecology to Nazi Germany, but if you thought he might follow up with an apology, think again, for in the latest issue of the BIAW’s newsletter Building Insight, Musser actually defends his comparison by offering readers a little history lesson: “Hitler’s Nazi party: They were eco extremists.” I kid you not.
Knowing my parallel would illicit screams of protest—how politically incorrect of me to mention Hitler and Nazis in the same breath as DOE or the environmental lobby—I explored the actual connection between environmental extremism and Hitler’s Nazi party.
You mean the modern environmental movement has its roots in Nazism? You know, the way the modern Northwest militia and Christian identity movements have their roots in the BIAW? Fill us in on the details, Mark.
The German Nazi party expressed many of the ecological refrains we hear today. Nazis were the vanguard of conservationism—they sought to remedy the increasing alienation of people from the natural world, deforestation, urban sprawl, the destruction of ecosystem balance, the extinction of species and the indiscriminate slaughter of animals.Hitler himself was a sometime vegetarian and an animal lover, and the Nazi government implemented some of the first laws protecting animal rights.
Hence, all vegetarians and animal lovers must be Nazis! (Well, maybe the folks at the Sierra Club.) Mark’s a logical guy.
The Nazis also blamed capitalism for destroying the European continent and believed environmental holism was the solution. They investigated sustainable forestry and institutionalized organic farming to advance experimental homeopathic cures and medicines.
I’m not sure if that stuff about sustainable forestry is true, or what the alleged connection is between organic farming and homeopathy, but I’m confused… is Musser trying to slander environmentalists or rehabilitate Hitler? (And, oh, by the way Mark, when he wasn’t weaving hemp or raising free-range chickens, I think Hitler also started a world war, firebombed London and exterminated six million Jews. I’m sure there’s a footnote in your history book about that stuff somewhere. Look it up.)
Nazi bioengineers were also very concerned about construction maintaining harmony with the natural landscape—the autobahn freeway in Germany was designed by Nazis with the utmost ecological care in mind and presented as a way to bring Germans closer to nature.
I hadn’t realized the autobahn was “bioengineered,” or that environmentalists were so into building freeways. Huh. I guess you learn something every day.
The Nazis also came up with far reaching land use restrictions and centralized environmental planning for the same purposes, and were very zealous about protecting wetlands and other ecological sensitive areas.
You know, just like Ron Sims. Ergo, Ron Sims must be a Nazi.
Thus green building and smart growth ideas are not something new.
Again, I’m not conceding anything to Musser on the facts, but is he implying that “smart” growth ideas are a bad thing?
Another familiar refrain—the Nazis complained the degradation of German soil was due to the landless, capitalistic, greedy Jews who pillaged and raped the European landscape for money and power. Today’s environmentalists still blame capitalism for the destruction of the natural world—greedy builders are routinely accused of pillaging and raping the landscape for money.
So, um, what you’re saying Mark, is that BIAW members today, under the regulatory regime of the Democrats in Olympia, have it as bad as my grandparents’ extended family did under the Nazi occupation in Poland and the Ukraine? Really? See, last time I checked, nobody was rounding up contractors into camps, starving them, gassing them, and shoving their bodies into ovens. But then, Europe’s Jewry didn’t have to contend with DOE’s stormwater regulations, so I guess they had it easy.
Of course, this Nazi environmental zealotry was insanely tied to German nationalism (racism), which relied heavily on the ideals of social Darwinism, a doctrine which some environmentalists have kept alive in spite of its evil reputation. When radical environmentalists oppose famine relief, medical aid and sanctuary for refugees because of overpopulation concerns, the whiff of Nazism is unmistakable.
Mark, are you sure you’re not getting environmentalists confused with your friends in the militia movement, you know, like all this local Minutemen with long ties to the BIAW?
Less vocally strident enviros are not quite sure what to do about overpopulation, aside from an insane obsession with anti-development, urban sprawl land use restrictions. Hitler, of course, had his own solution—wipe out the Slavs so the Germans could enjoy greater ecological health. Himmler had all kinds of grandiose ecological plans in mind for a depopulated Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus.
Again, no mention of Hitler wiping out six million Jews. Must not be in Musser’s history book.
What environmentalists offer today, instead of the racist German National Socialism that defined the Nazi party, is an international environmental socialism, an amalgam of Nazism and communism—an international environmental socialism with a centralized planning scheme. But this amalgam is increasingly at odds with itself, causing a rift within the environmental lobby, with builders caught in the middle.
I was at a Washington Conservation Voters workshop this summer at Islandwood, and the tension between the neo-Nazi wing of the movement and the neo-Stalinists was palpable.
Case in point: Builders in Washington State are being squeezed by an environmental movement which extols ecofascism on the one hand (where the most important thing on the construction jobsite is not a house but “Earth First”), while on the other hand they are micromanaged to death by an ecological bureaucracy that would make any Soviet commissar green with envy. This communistic ecological micromanagement is perfectly exemplified in DOE’s breathtakingly detailed, 976-page stormwater manual and BMPs.
It’s not so much a stormwater “manual” as it is a manifesto.
So, much like Stalin and Hitler were divided on how to best go about their socialistic schemes, environmentalists are also divided over how to best go about their socialistic scheme of controlling human development—either by burning houses down with Molotov cocktails, or slowly squeezing the life out of it through extensive, Sovietesque micromanagement. Homebuilders are thus caught between militant ecofascism (radical environmentalists like ELF) and communistic bureaucracy (DOE).
Yup, that pretty much sums up the entire environmental movement: we’re all either ecofascist terrorists, or Stalinist butchers. Some of us are even both.
For the time being, it is the suffocating Soviet version which is winning this war, but the recent arsons claimed by ELF, and the mainstream environmentalists’ refusal to denounce them, demonstrate the other side’s “ecological blitzkrieg” approach could be gaining traction.
I checked; it’s the March issue of Building Insight, not an April Fool’s edition. But either way, over-the-top, fantastical hatemongering like this, coming from one of the most powerful political organizations in the state, is no laughing matter. Musser’s BIAW sanctioned paranoid rants are not only batshit crazy, they are downright offensive.
As a Jew whose entire extended family in Eastern Europe was exterminated by the Nazis, along with most of the rest of European Jewry, I take personal offense at efforts to diminish Hitler’s historically unparalleled war crimes in the service of rank political partisanship. How dare the BIAW trivialize the deaths of tens of millions by comparing the DOE to a psychotic war machine that tossed babies into mass graves in the name of racial purity and lebensraum?
And how dare our elected officials — in both parties — grant credibility to the insane, hateful and extremist rhetoric of the lunatic fringe at the BIAW by appearing at their functions and pocketing their money.
If our political and media establishment continue to ignore the BIAW’s violent rhetoric, then eventually it will be deemed an acceptable part of our political discourse. And eventually, some crazed nutcase will act on it.