Chapter IX
The reversal of anthropocentric values
Awaken, shake your chained forces
Let the sap flow in our dry furrows
Make sparkle, under the flowering myrtles
An unexpected sword, as in the Panathenaea—Leconte de Lisle (‘L’Anathème’, Poèmes Barbares)
Demographic growth is, as I have tried to show above, both a consequence and an ever-renewed cause of the development of techniques: a consequence of the preservation, thanks to the perfection of medicine and surgery, of an ever greater number of people who normally should not be living; and a cause of the efforts of inventive minds to create means of satisfying the needs, real or supposed, of a population that is multiplying, often dispite the absence of protective hygiene, and all the more so if such hygiene is widespread.
It is a vicious circle, and all the more tragic because it can probably only be broken on a global scale. It would be criminal to encourage, among the noblest and most gifted peoples, a decline in birth rate which would expose them, on equal terms (or simply in the fatal peace of a ‘consumer society’ indefinitely extended as technical progress) to give away to human varieties qualitatively inferior to them, but dangerously prolific, and whose demography is out of control.
No one was more aware of this fact than Adolf Hitler, and he gave it a place in his politics that it had never had under any regime, even a racist one, in the past. And it is perhaps in this more than in anything else that the blatant opposition of the Third German Reich to the leading trends of the modern world appears.
These tendencies are expressed in the hundred thousand times repeated precept ‘Live and let live’ applied (and this is to be emphasised) to men of all races as well as of all degrees of physical or mental health or illness, but to man alone. It is the contrary precept that our protectors of the sacrosanct two-legged mammal apply to quadrupeds, cetaceans, reptiles, etc., as well as to the winged gentry and the forest. Here, it is a question of ‘letting live’ at most what doesn’t hinder the indefinite expansion of any variety of man, and even, at the limit, only what favours this expansion. This seems to be the case in Communist China, where only ‘useful’, that is to say exploitable, animals have the ‘right to live’.
The eternal glory of Adolf Hitler—and perhaps the most striking sign that he was, par excellence, the man ‘against Time’: the man of the last chance for recovery, no longer partial but total—is that he transvalued this order of things. It is his glory forever to have, even in a country during the war, ‘let Nature live’: protect as far as possible the forests and their inhabitants; take a clear stand against vivisection; rejecting for himself all meat products and dreaming about gradually abolishing the slaughterhouses ‘after victory’, when he would have had his hands free. [1]
It is his glory that he has, in addition, mocked the misplaced zeal of lovers of ‘pedigree’ dogs, cats or horses, indifferent to the purity of their own offspring. He applied this time to man, in the name of the human elite, the very principle that had, for millennia, regulated man’s behaviour towards the beast and the tree: ‘Let live’ only that what didn’t hinder the flourishing of this elite; ultimately, only what favoured it—or at least he did all that was materially possible in this sense in a world where, despite his power, he still had to reckon with constant opposition.
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[1] Statement by Adolf Hitler to J. Goebbels, 26 April 1942.