The Bloodless Revolution

by Tristram Stuart

  Kropotkin argued that Huxley’s portrayal of human social instincts was an ideologically motivated distortion of ecological facts ‘which has been too willingly repeated, without sufficient criticism, since the time of Hobbes’. Most organisms in the state of nature did not survive by fighting each other, Kropotkin insisted, but by clubbing together to overcome hardship and danger. Kropotkin did most of his zoological fieldwork in the harsh climate of the Siberian tundra where competition within sparse populations was not very obvious, which helps to explain the discrepancy between his viewpoint and that of Darwin, who regarded the superabundant tropics as the archetype of his ecological model. In a hostile environment, Kropotkin explained, those organisms that cooperated best were most likely to survive. Communitarian instincts brought important evolutionary benefits: ‘sociability is the greatest advantage in the struggle for life.’ Humans were the pre-eminent social species, always practising mutual aid, and that is why the species had been so successful. Kropotkin urged (in line with Rousseau, Thoreau and Gandhi) that this was the ‘pre-human origin of moral instincts’ and the basis of altruism.35 (Like Shelley, he did not have a problem with calling an evolutionarily determined trait ‘moral’, for, as his opponents abundantly demonstrated, it was still possible to choose to ignore the principle of mutual aid, even though it was a law of nature.) Kropotkin felt that his theory of mutual aid had obvious implications for the effective organisation of society: ‘ “Don’t compete! – competition is always injurious to the species, and you have plenty of resources to avoid it! … Therefore combine – practise mutual aid!”… That is what Nature teaches us,’ he thundered. The death and destruction resulting from Malthusian competitiveness – far from being ruthlessly efficient – was in fact a waste of resources.

  Most biologists today are still aligned in opposition to Kropotkin, pointing out that for an instinct such as altruism to be selected by the process of evolution it must increase the propagative success of the individual carrier of the relevant gene, not just the species. However, Kropotkin’s attack on the ideological hi-jacking of evolutionary theory was pertinent, and his zoological work has been continued by controversial naturalists such as Vero Wynne-Edwards.36 In a chapter titled ‘Kropotkin Was No Crackpot’, Stephen Jay Gould admiringly concedes that ‘Kropotkin therefore created a dichotomy within the general notion of struggle – two forms with opposite import: (1) organism against organism of the same species for limited resources leading to competition; and (2) organism against environment, leading to cooperation.’37

  Kropotkin felt that Darwin and his followers had unduly underestimated the importance of sociability. They had instead focused almost exclusively on the selfish struggle for survival which legitimised ugly political attitudes. It was true that Darwin and Huxley endorsed the view that inferior races would give way to European racial supremacy and that the evolutionary progress of the human species was being hindered, as Darwin put it, ‘by the preservation of a considerable number of individuals, weak in mind and body, who would have been promptly eliminated in the savage state’.38

  But Darwin had also drawn close attention to the principle of sociability in evolution, acknowledging that sympathy ‘will have been increased through natural selection; for those communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring.’ Alfred Wallace, the co-discoverer of evolution, and Ernst Haeckel likewise believed that human sympathy and morality were the result of ‘ethical instincts derived from our animal ancestors’. But like Adam Smith and indeed Hobbes before him, Darwin emphasised that the feeling of sympathy ultimately evolved from, or was at least strengthened by, the fundamental attribute of selfishness, for, as Smith had pointed out, we receive visceral pleasure from satisfying the sympathetic instinct, and Darwin elaborated that ‘we are led by the hope of receiving good in return to perform acts of sympathetic kindness to others.’ The instinct of sympathy and sociability in this case was not, as Rousseau proposed, the opposite of selfishness, but merely an adjunct to it.

  Kropotkin distanced himself from the naïvety of what he called ‘Rousseau’s optimism’, but his belief that humans could live harmoniously by the instinct of mutual aid without restraining laws or authoritative governments was in the tradition of Rousseauist-Godwinite idealism, and it was shared by the likes of Thoreau and Gandhi.39 Kropotkin, like his ideological forebear William Godwin, saw the inefficient use of agricultural land as a misuse of society’s shared resources. Grazing land, he said, was ‘much inferior in productivity to a cornfield; and the fine breeds of cattle appear to be poor creatures as long as each ox requires three acres of land to be fed upon.’ But Kropotkin did not call for the abolition of meat-eating for, he said, ‘the dearest of all varieties of our staple food is meat; and those who are not vegetarians, either by persuasion or by necessity, consume on the average 225 lb. of meat’.40 However, some of his followers found in Kropotkin’s theories an ecological rationale for vegetarianism. If harmonious cooperation within a species was so beneficial, why should not the same apply between different species? Élisée Reclus, a veteran of the Paris Commune of 1871 who indulged in more flagrant Rousseauist utopian dreams than his friend Kropotkin, argued that there was indeed a strong survival benefit to inter-specific harmony. Humans, he claimed, had evolved to live in ‘fraternal association’ with animals, and this natural relationship – still evident in remote parts of the world and inscribed in ancient Indian scriptures – was of mutual benefit to all members of the ecosystem: ‘The natural sympathy existing between all these creatures harmonised them in a broad atmosphere of peace and love,’ he claimed. ‘The bird would come and perch on the hand of man, as he does even today on the horns of the bull.’ This harmonious relationship, he said, would be far more beneficial to humans than their current ecological niche as predators.41

  Evolution had swiftly become the prism through which most social issues were discussed; accordingly, Kropotkin and Reclus’ theories took on special importance for vegetarians. (Indeed, Alfred Russel Wallace himself, though he ate meat, thought that humans ought to turn to vegetarianism for moral, medical and agronomic reasons and he corresponded with Henry Salt about the virtues of Percy Shelley.42) In 1938 the London delegate to the International Vegetarian Union, Dugald Semple, remarked that ‘We must not only study Darwin but also Kropotkin.’ Sociability was an evolutionary advantage, said Kropotkin: therefore, Semple deduced, the herds of sociable herbivorous animals were taking over the world while carnivores were ever dwindling.43 The prelapsarian dream of a bloodless ecology was still alive in the post-Darwinian era. Even Gandhi, who called lions ‘ferocious and practically useless’, seems to have been touched by its appeal.44

  In Russia after 1917 the radical Left emerged supreme – and after the deposition of the Tsar, Kropotkin returned from exile to establish his biomoral theories in the new revolutionary State. Simultaneously in Europe the far Right was rising towards a fearsome prominence, and its proponents also used ecology to defend their political vision: that it was natural for certain groups to exert ruthless supremacy over others. The Nazis (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or German National Socialist Workers’ Party) believed that their quest to purify the human race from evolutionary ‘runts’ was justified by the ecological force that Hitler in Mein Kampf called ‘the aristocratic principle, which is a fundamental law of nature’. Huxley and Haeckel can hardly be blamed for the Holocaust, but the Nazis’ willingness to use eugenics to direct human evolution drew on a long tradition, not least from Malthus and William Lawrence who came to understand evolution by studying farmers’ selective breeding programmes, and who saw nothing wrong in applying the concept of ‘selective breeding’ to ensure the ‘improvement’ of the human species. Nazis took theories like these to their apocalyptic extreme: arguing that Jews had to be extirpated from society because they had taken up a parasitic niche in the social ecology and were causing Germany’s
urban economic malaise.45

  It may come as a surprise that vegetarianism was in fact as prominent in the Fascist Right as it was on the Left (especially since the Malthusian view of ecology which they inherited had traditionally been used to critique vegetarianism). But Fascists intent on cleansing the human race were particularly attracted to the vegetarian rhetoric of purification. The Nazis aspired to lead humanity back to ‘nature’, and although their concept of ‘nature’ was abhorrent, it was one that was chillingly compatible with the language of vegetarianism. Their keenness for animal protection legislation also manifested their antipathy to Judaeo-Christian anthropocentrism, which they used as another front for persecuting the Jews. Their insistence that humans were just another animal in the ecosystem, meanwhile, no doubt rationalised their decision to treat some humans in ways which their own animal protection laws would have proscribed.

  To the great discomfort of many modern vegetarians, therefore – and despite the understandable attempts to highlight real discrepancies in the historical record – Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian. At the very least he espoused a vegetarian philosophy and practised it much of the time. Indeed, many Nazis were either vegetarian or interested in related issues. SS supremo Heinrich Himmler believed that vegetarianism was the key to health and long life. The deputy leader of the Nazi party Rudolf Hess was such a strict vegetarian that he even refused to eat meals specially prepared for him at the Chancellery by Hitler’s qualified diet-cook because he could only eat organically grown vegetables. (One-upmanship on Hitler was not advisable, and in the words of one onlooker Hitler ‘bluntly informed him that in that case he should take his meals at home’.) Hitler’s powerful spin-doctor Martin Bormann ate vegetarian food, if only to ingratiate himself while at table with the Fuührer. Even Joseph Goebbels, in an entry in his diary, seems to have agreed that on the issue of vegetarianism, Hitler’s ‘arguments cannot be refuted on any serious basis. They are totally unanswerable.’46

  The Nazi ideology is perhaps the most repellent product of European history, and it did not spring from nothing; it is sickening partly because one can trace distinct historical continuities both forwards and backwards. Apparently innocuous cultural trends were easily mutated into Fascism in the crucible of a national crisis.

  By the early twentieth century, the post-Rousseauist back-to-nature movement had sprouted into a thriving medley of naturopaths, nudists, mud-bathers, ecologists and vegetarians; this movement found its zenith in counter-culture nudist camps that promoted the idea that ‘men could live a paradisal life in nature’. In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany there was a focus on the reinvigoration of health and beauty in the face of the pathological effects of urbanisation; it drew inspiration from the Weimar period’s Lebensreform (life reform) and the vibrant Körperkultur (body culture). People from wildly different positions on the political spectrum selected aspects of these practices: Zionists and Fascists, Social Democrats and proto-hippies, all experimented with them. Even the Jewish novelist Franz Kafka became a nudist vegetarian raw-food enthusiast.

  In the 1860s Eduard Baltzer (1814–87) organised the vegetarian movement in Germany, using ideas from the earlier vegetarian tradition such as those of Goethe’s friend Wilhelm Hufeland. The German nationalist Richard Ungewitter (1868–1958) carried this tradition into the twentieth century by coaxing his followers into severe vegetarianism and harsh regimes of communal naked callisthenics, promising that this was the way to resurrect the German Volk as a world military power – a quest that took on special urgency after Germany’s humiliation in the First World War, which was believed to have reversed the process of natural selection by killing the nation’s fittest men.99 Ungewitter’s dietary allies, Gustav Selss (president of the German Vegetarian Union) and the feminist Klara Ebert, also advocated vegetarianism as a means of cleansing corruption from German society. They all believed that those ‘degenerates’ who could not be purified should be banned from breeding or even exterminated to prevent their deformities passing to the next generation. Ungewitter, meanwhile, forged an alliance with a neo-pagan cult whose membership consisted solely of an ‘Aryan aristocracy’ of blond males. In parallel developments in the United States, John Harvey Kellogg, who promoted breakfast cereals as a vegetarian alternative to bacon and eggs, was also a leader of the eugenics movement which endorsed the involuntary sterilization of African-American male convicts and aimed to sterilize 15 million men over 20 years.

  In early twentieth-century Germany the Fascists did not have to look far to find useful rhetoric among the vegetarians, and although the Nazis eventually suppressed nudist groups like Ungewitter’s, they readily adopted their language.47 Hitler himself believed that vegetarianism would help to purify his own ‘bad blood’ – an idea carrying implications for both physical health and breeding (he may have feared that he had a Jewish ancestor). He first gave up meat for a time in 1911 to treat a stomach complaint, and again to shed some weight in 1924, and, according to some unreliable reports, finally renounced meat in 1931 to purge himself of the psychological association that flesh had with the corpse of his niece Geli Raubal who shot herself with a gun Hitler had just given her.48 Throughout his life Hitler continued to believe that abstaining from meat alleviated his chronic flatulence, constipation, sweating, nervous tension, trembling of muscles, and the stomach cramps that convinced him he was dying of cancer.49 It was easy for such a man to insist that his personal experience must apply to the whole human race.

  ‘Waldesfrieden’ from Richard Ungewitter’s Nacktheit and Kultur (1913)

  Hitler, echoing the vegetarian tradition going back through Rousseau, Gassendi and Plutarch, became convinced that it was not natural for humans to eat meat. According to transcripts of Hitler’s conversations edited by Martin Bormann and published as Hitler’s Table Talk (tr. 1953), Hitler frequently insisted to top Nazi officials that ‘The monkeys, our ancestors of prehistoric times, are strictly vegetarian.’ ‘If I offer a child the choice between a pear and a piece of meat, he’ll quickly choose the pear. That’s his atavistic instinct speaking … Man, alone amongst the living creatures, tries to deny the laws of nature.’ ‘He believes more than ever that meat-eating is harmful to humanity,’ wrote Goebbels in his diary in 1942, corroborating the reliability of Bormann’s transcripts.50

  ‘Heil Go¨ ring!’ from Kladderadatsch, 3 September 1933

  As Robert Proctor showed in his ground-breaking book The Nazi War on Cancer, some medical professionals at the time claimed that eating meat, especially in excess, caused cancer, and that vegetable-eating peoples like the Indians were free from the disease. Accordingly, Nazis instructed Germans to adopt more natural diets based on wholesome roots, fruits and cereals, and legally obliged bakers to sell wholemeal bread – the patriotic food of the great German peasant. Failure to comply with the ordinances instructing the nation to clean up their diet and make themselves fit, slim and healthy resulted in persecution. Anyone who fattened themselves on excessive quantities of meat and fat, the Nazis insisted, ‘robs other racial comrades of these foods; he is a debauchee and a traitor to his land and his country’. These policies attracted some improbable support from German Theosophists, George Bernard Shaw and from the Seventh Day Adventists, who rejoiced in 1933 that the nation was now being run by Hitler ‘who has his office from the hand of God, and who knows himself to be responsible to Him. As an anti-alcoholic, non-smoker, and vegetarian, he is closer to our own view of health reform than anybody else.’51

  Hitler went still further and concluded (like Gandhi, Thoreau’s friends, the Danish hygienist Jens Peter Muüller,112 and vegetarians since Wilhelm Hufeland and William Lambe) that cooking itself was an unnatural health risk. ‘All sicknesses of civilisation are caused by man cooking food,’ said Hitler, according to Hitler’s Table Talk. ‘Those who adopt a vegetable diet must remember that it is in their raw state that vegetables have their greatest nutritive value.’52 Thus, while Gandhi and his followers experimented with s
prouted wheat diets inspired by German naturopaths, the German army was prescribed sprouted wheat alongside their rations of flour made from soya beans (nicknamed ‘Nazi Beans’). Ironically mirroring Gandhi’s own aspirations for dietary reform, Hitler claimed that if life expectancy was on the rise, ‘that’s because people are again finding room for a naturistic diet. The raw-food movement is a revolution.’53

  Within months of taking office as Chancellor, Hitler arranged a consultation with an eighty-year-old woman ‘known up and down the Rhine as the Seniorin of vegetarianism, cold-water cures, and herbal healing’. Later on the same day, when his staff tried to draw him back to the political tasks in hand, he answered that there were ‘far more important things than politics – reforming the human lifestyle, for example. What this old woman told me this morning is far more important than anything I can do in my life.’ He frequently startled his colleagues in the party by diverting political meetings into disquisitions on the benefits of the vegetable diet. Even in the height of the war, in April 1942, Hitler took up valuable strategy-building time ranting about his pet topic. ‘Of course he knows that during the war we cannot completely upset our food system,’ wrote Goebbels in his diary. ‘After the war, however, he intends to tackle this problem also.’ ‘Supposing the prohibition of meat had been an article of faith for National Socialism, it’s certain our movement wouldn’t have succeeded,’ Hitler mused; and he reassured Admiral Fricke that he would not issue a decree forbidding the navy to eat meat.

  Hitler wasn’t willing to institute it during a war, but he did believe that vegetarianism could be a key to Germany’s military success. Caesar’s soldiers had lived exclusively on vegetables, he claimed, and ‘The Vikings would not have undertaken their now legendary expeditions [if] they’d depended on a meat diet.’54 Himmler concurred, and called for the Waffen-SS to convert to a non-smoking, teetotal vegetarian regime. Indian vegetarians, Himmler observed, had longer lives and better health than Europeans, and he fantasised that Aryan Germans could take over the world if only they returned to their original vegetarian diet.55