Toward Ecosophy

American sentiment in favor of Germany goes back a good number of years before WW2, and was wide-spread during the 1930s even after the Nazis rose to power in Germany. German engineering and precision technology were widely thought to be the best in the world, and Germany clearly out-classed all other nations in academic and scientific work by the rigor of its methodologies, its mastery of all relevant sources and facts, and the general excellence of its voluminous academic publications. Together with this tradition of excellence there was also our ancient national antipathy toward Great Britain and all things British, going back as far as the War for Independence and the War of 1812.

In 1960, a few months before I started college, my father made a point of taking me aside to tell me some things that he was certain I would never hear in any of my college history courses. He had been a mechanical engineer working for the US Navy and the Norden Co. on the famous Norden Bombsight, and he had a very high level security clearance.

What he told me was this: In the years before the attack on Pearl Harbor, of all the very many engineers and military folk he knew, about one-third had passionately wanted the US to enter the coming war in alliance with Nazi Germany!

Another third of them wanted the US to stay out of the war altogether, and let the chips fall where they might, even oif i meant a Nzi victory. (Neutrality had been his position, too, back in the days before Pearl Harbor was bombed.)

No more than a third of the folk he knew really wanted the US to enter the coming war on the side of Great Britain, which was still widely viewed as the ancient enemy of all things American.

He went on to say that everything changed as soon as the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor: suddenly almost everyone wanted to enter the war, and to enter it against Japan--which regrettably also meant entering it against Germany, and for Great Britain.

After WW2 was over, and the horrors of the Nazi death-camps became widely known, almost everyone who had formerly wanted to enter the war on the Nazi side decided it would now be politic to let that past of theirs be forgotten. That part of their past had become profoundly embarrassing to them, and now seemed shameful.

Also, no one wanted to talk at all about how the Nazi program of genocide had been built on on American theories of eugenics and racial inferiority, and how it had employed technology originally developed by US engineers to run the machinery of their death-camps (including the use of hydrogen cyanide gas to kill people efficiently and in large numbers).

But my father did not want these things to be forgotten. He was Danish-American, and he was enormously proud of what the Danes had done to resist the Nazi occupation. Also, he was convinced that eugenics was junk science, and he despised every form of junk science. So it was very important to him that I learned what he had witnessed "on the spot," as it were.

What I feel certain of is that most of the Americans who has admired Germany and favored the Nazis did not actually change their opinion, but merely concealed it from public view, while quietly passing it on to their children and grandchildren.

So the current wide-spread nostalgia for the Nazis and their programs in the US is (IMHO) no new thing at all, but an old and hidden thing that people are beginning to feel safe in bringin gto the surface once again, now that few people are alive who had first-hand knowledge of the old Nazi horrors.

Most people find it very hard to learn from the past, even when it is about the Nazis.