Mark Almond – Lecturer in Modern History,
Oriel College, Oxford Jan 1998
Supporters
of Mike Foster’s anti-hunting bill are bitterly disappointed that his attempt
to ban people from riding to hounds is likely to founder on parliamentary
technicalities. They get very indignant that an overwhelming parliamentary
majority cannot get its way at once.. They might however be surprised that it took
even Adolf Hitler three years before he succeeded in banning the pursuit of
quarry on horseback in July 1936.
Like the Drafters of Mr Foster’s Bill, the Nazis faced the problem of how to
define a hunt. In order to avoid ambiguity even following a pack on horseback
was made illegal. Hitler’s ban on hunting with dogs remains in force.
The teetotal and vegetarian Fuhrer was by nature against hunting on grounds of
cruelty, but riding to hounds roused the ire of the socialist in Hitler’s
National Socialism. German fox-hunters tended to be aristocratic, in his view
effete and probably Anglophile. Goebbels, too, on occasion dirided the social
world of riding. In the politics of resentment, few could beat the Nazis.
Hitler’s first dictatorial act, after the passing of the Enabling Act (1933)
was to regulate the cooking of lobsters (he was distressed by their screams
when tossed into boiling water). Only then did he abolish free trade unions.
Apart from their opposition to hunting, what Hitler and some of the most
extreme contemporary animal rights activists tend to share are an implacable
self-righteousness and misanthropy. Advocates of “good causes” all too often
confuse the justice of their cause with their own moral worth. Since they
support a holy cause they are sanctified by it and brook no criticism. When
that sort of self-righteousness peaks in
an extreme animus, other moral considerations go out of the window. Supporting
animal rights for instance can legitimise violence against human beings in such
people’s minds.
With some key Nazis this perversion of morality was central to their
psychology. But it also had ideological justifications. The Nazis associated a
raft of what they regarded as undesirable phenomena. They saw Jews as
anti-natural and promoters of the alienation of man from nature. Their
sentimentality about nature and their condemnation of millions of people as
“unnatural” went hand in hand.
Hitler’s chief mass murderer, Heinrich Himmler, regarded shooting birds or
animals as “pure murder” and waxed lyrical about the ancient Germanic peoples
had “respect for animals”. Like many modern animal rights advocates, Himmler
rejected the Judaeo-Christian tradition
and looked to Buddhism for inspiration about how man (or at least Aryan
man) should deal with nature. In his article ‘Animal Rights’ for the SS house
magazine in 1934 , Himmler recorded his admiration for medieval Germans who put
rats on trial for their depredations and gave them a chance to change their
ways!
Backed by Himmler, Hitler would have gone much further down the animal rights
agenda but important Nazis such as Goering, who gloried in the title ‘Reich
Master of the Hunt’ were not prepared to sacrifice shooting and fishing.
However, Goering was anxious to be seen as politically correct , 1930’s style.
He assured a radio audience in 1933 that whereas democracy had consumed years
of futile discussion about animal rights, he had moved decisively to stop
maltreatment of animals, including vivisection in his own domain of Prussia.
Warming to his subject, Hitler’s number two threatened that anyone who flouted
the Nazis concern for animal rights would be imprisoned.
Hitler’s vegetarianism led him to experiment with a meat-free diet for his
beloved German shepherd dogs – though before one could finish the course she
was poisoned by her master to test cyanide for his own use as the Red Army
arrived outside his bunker in April 1945.
Hitler’s politically correct dogmas would no doubt have earned him the
reputation of a prophet of modern attitudes if he had stuck to petty tyrannical
regulation rather than combining it with mass murder and militarism. Today’s
Nanny State could hardly disagree with his ferocious anti-smoking views for
instance. Towards the end of the war in March 1944 he found time to insist on
the necessity of banning smoking in trams, fearing the effect of passive
smoking on their conductors’ health. Naturally he had already banned smoking in
Nazi party offices years earlier. But even Hitler had to recognise that banning
smoking in the Wehrmacht might be bad for morale and decided to leave that
measure until after his final victory.
Nothing is more distressing than discovering uncomfortable ancestors in the
genealogy of one’s own beliefs. But it is certainly the case that a measure of
subterranean intellectual continuity does exist between some contemporary Green
movements and the Green/Brown world of ideas before 1945. It is also the case
that the Authoritarian personality-type that attributes absolute moral correctness
to its own views, and damnation to anyone who does not agree with them, is
something which fanatics share. Misanthropy cannot be justified by a cloak of
animal welfare.
So far the violence and intimidation exercised by hunt saboteurs may be only a
faint echo of Hitler’s combination of animal rights and inhumanity, but
reasonable opponents of fox hunting ought to ask themselves how far their
opposition is motivated by deep resentments which could turn ugly and how far
by a more benign concern for animal welfare. People asking those questions
should then ponder whether they want to be associated with the fanatics’ cause
Copyright –
Daily Telegraph.
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