Blood and Soil (Blut und Boden)
The ‘noble lie’ - sometimes called the Myth of Blood and Soil - was introduced by Plato at Republic [III.412h-4l6d]. Loyalty to a particular city always seems somehow questionable: why affection for these men rather than any or all others? The only remedy that Socrates can find is a great lie — the noble lie. This famous lie consists of two very diverse parts. According to the first part, all the members of the city, and particularly the warriors, were born from the earth and educated and equipped prior to emerging from it. If the citizens believe the tale, they will have a blood tie to the country; their relationship to it will have the same immediacy as does their relationship to the family. The tale makes them brothers and relates them to this particular patch of land. It identifies city and regime with country,which is the object of the most primitive political loyalty.
The concept of the ‘noble’ or ‘lordly’ lie is introduced as an important propaganda device to mislead the people, to impress them with useful fabrications such as the Myth of the Blood and Soil. According to this story, the warriors who founded the city were suppose to be born of the earth instead of human mothers so they were completely dedicated to the defense of the city. Plato was an Athenian aristocrat whose sympathies lay with Sparta, the city-state by which Athens had recently been defeated in a long and bloody war.
The second part of the lie gives divine sanction to the natural hierarchy. "God .. has put gold into those who are capable of ruling, silver into the auxiliaries, and iron and copper into the peasants and the other producing classes." These metals are hereditary, they are racial characteristics.
Nobly born but degenerate children may be pushed down, and not that any of the base born may be lifted up. The way in which any mixing of metals must lead to destruction is described in the concluding passage of the story of the Fall of Man: "Iron will mingle with silver and bronze with gold, and from this mixture variation will be born and absurd irregularity; and whenever these are born they will beget struggle and hostility." Plato bluntly admitted that his Myth of Blood and Soil was a propaganda lie.
The philospher Kark Popper considered Plato a forerunner of Nazi Germany. He elaborated this thesis in "The Open Society and Its Enemies", An immediate sensation when it was first published in two volumes in 1945, Popper traced the roots of an opposite, authoritarian tendency to a tradition represented by Plato, Marx, and Hegel. Popper held that social affairs are unpredictable, and argued vehemently against social engineering. He also sought to shift the focus of political philosophy away from questions about who ought to rule toward questions about how to minimize the damage done by the powerful.
Popper wrote "Plato introduces his Myth of Blood and Soil with the blunt admission that it is a fraud. ‘Well then’, says the Socrates of the Republic, ‘could we perhaps fabricate one of those very handy lies which indeed we mentioned just recently? With the help of one single lordly lie we may, if we are lucky, persuade even the rulers themselves — but at any rate the rest of the city.’ It is interesting to note the use of the term ‘persuade’. To persuade somebody to believe a lie means, more precisely, to mislead or to hoax him; and it would be more in tune with the frank cynicism of the passage to translate ‘we may, if we are lucky, hoax even the rulers themselves’."
The modern myth of Blood and Soil has its exact counterpart in Plato’s Myth of the Earthborn. For the chosen people racialism substitutes the chosen race (of Gobineau’s choice), selected as the instrument of destiny, ultimately to inherit the earth. The concept of “blood and soil” was built on the notion of an organic, mystical relationship between man and nature, with an organically grown People's community [Volksgemeinschaft]. National Socialist leaders explicitly sought to supplant the Judeo-Christian tradition with a religion of nature — a religion rooted in the indigenous spirit of Germanic undefiled Aryan blood and German soil.
The Blood and Soil (Blut und Boden) issue divided the Nazi Party after 1925, and was resolved at the Bamberg Conference of 1926. Hitler believed that true Germans ‘came from the soil’ – that they had a family background based on farming and life in the countryside. Histler's fraction of the Nazi Party wanted to emphasise the relationship between true Aryans and a rural life. Others, such as the brothers Gregor and Otto Strasser wanted to move the party away from ‘Blut und Boden’ in order to attract support in urban areas. The Strasser brothers were defeated and Hitler rallied his supporters around ‘Blut und Boden’. Otto Strasser left the Nazis to form his own party based outside of Germany.
Robert G. Lee and Sabine Wilke wrote that the Nazis "... shared a vision of timeless reality, immune from the traumas of history, i.e., a non-transcendent Providence acting through nature. By conforming to the laws of nature, so the premise went, the German people would attain a strength and greatness enabling them to rise above their troubled history and dreary existence. This act of “collective regeneration,” to use Mircea Eliade’s term, would recover the Volksgemeinschaft that was felt to be the true spiritual home of the German people."
Fritz Lang’s (1927) film Metropolis ostensibly central contradiction — defined in terms of class conflict and its mediation — is taken as considering the role of the ‘heart’ in mediating between the ‘head’ and the ‘hands’ in terms of a gendered discourse centred on the opposition between nature (figured as feminine) and culture (masculine). The film’s problematization of the Oedipal narrative arising from the absent mother, highlights Metropolis’s unacknowledged debt to the Parsifal myth, characterized by Lévi-Strauss as an ‘inverse Oedipus’. The film’s double structure, superimposing elements of Oedipus and Parsifal, sheds light on its ambivalent reception, which — as the product of one of the most creative and convulsive periods of twentieth-century history — is framed in terms of the distinction between neurosis and psychosis.
In 1930 Richard Darré's ‘A New Nobility Based on Blood and Soil’ became a popular read among high ranking Nazis. Darré associated the ‘master race’ belief alongside ‘blood and soil’. Darré [later Minister of Agriculture from 1933 to 1942] argued that a master race created out of a eugenics program would lead to a race of people who would be free from illness and full of virtue and good thoughts. During the "Führer zeit", Darré hardly deviated from this ideological, “Blood and Soil” course.
In 1930 the NSDAP published “The Official Party Manifesto on the Position of the NSDAP with Regard to the Farming Population and Agriculture.” This document characterized the peasant as the guardian of the nation’s rural health, the source of its youth, and the “backbone of its military potential.”
By 1932 Gregor Strasser had emerged as one of the influential leaders whose ideas helped to pique farmers’ interest in Nazi politics. From the propaganda program of 1930 to the policies in the early years of the Third Reich, the Nazi regime revered the peasant and glorified his role in German society. The Nazis developed an agricultural policy based on the peasant as the core of their “worldview,” known as “Blood and Soil.” Strasser was a committed socialist and social radical as was Ernst Röhm. Strasser saw a need to redistribute wealth in Germany and like Röhm, opposed Hitler's policy of catering to the country's major industrialists.
Gregor was murdered on the Night of the Long Knives, 30 June 1934.
In the Voelkische Beobachter, a NSDAP newspaper, a writer claimed [January 9, 1932]: "On the one hand we have the strong, robust virile peasant, moulded by the eternal struggle with nature and the land. A product of the earth, a fighter, a born warrior. At his side is a German woman, a peasant woman, his faithful companion and proud mother of their children through whom the future will be made and history was made. On the other hand, the debased city-dweller, weak, effeminate and cowardly."
Perhaps the most peculiar products of Julius Streicher’s publishing house was a “medical journal” titled Deutsche Volksgesundheit aus Blut und Boden! (Geman People’s Health through Blood and Soil!). It was a combination of anti-Semitism, medical information, and natural healing. The periodical had a short life. It was published from 1933 to 1935. It went too far, even for the Nazis, since its claim that vaccination was part of the Jewish plot got in the way of public health, and it was forced to cease publication.
Ben Kiernan’s Blood and Soil: a World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007) makes manifest the claim of social theorist René Girard that collective violence such as genocide, far from being the exception to the rule, has been the norm throughout human history. Kiernan argues that “The main features of modern genocidal ideology emerged . . . from combinations of religious and racial hatred with territorial expansionism and cults of antiquity and agriculture” (p. 3). While others have noted the obvious implications of hatred combined with imperialism, Kiernan's focus on cults of antiquity and agriculture is fairly new.
Kiernan shows that an idealization of the two can “encourage a sense of victimization at perceived historical loss and even justify restitution by conquest of those perceived to be misusing lands to which they have inadequate claim” (p. 29). Genocidal initiatives are connected with the “attempt to silence domestic differences by focusing attention on an external, supposedly common threat” (p. 34). The Nazi genocide combined the cults of antiquity and agriculture to refine the nation through the extermination of internal enemies and through expansion and war against external threats.
Xenophobia had always been a part of European nation states. In the 21st Century, nationalist and reactionaries are acting on the basis of their traditional notions of “blood and soil”. The Daily Stormer, a digital publication takes its name from "Der Stürmer," a Nazi propaganda newspaper founded by Julius Streicher in 1923 that advocated for the extermination of the Jews.
Though the rise and fall of the Nazi party took place in Germany, Nazi ideology is alive and well in the United States. There are strong historical ties between German and American Nazism that pre-date the rise of the Nazi party. The Nazi party admired US racist and segregationist policy during the early 20th century, modeling its Nuremberg laws on Jim Crow legislation, which mandated public segregation.
A large group of torch-carrying white nationalists gathered on the night of 14 May 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia, ostensibly to protest against the removal of a statue of Confederate Civil War General Robert E. Lee. The crowd that surrounded the statue at Lee Park chanted "Jews will not replace us" and "Blood and soil," a phrase that was popularized in Nazi Germany. Supporters of Vanguard America, one neo-Nazi group present at the Charlottesville protest, bore shirts with the group's slogan "Blood and Soil".
In addition to plans to remove the statue, officials have renamed Lee Park where the statue stands, to Emancipation Park. A “Unite the Right” rally took place on 11-12 August 2017. The demonstration culminated in the death of a 32-year-old woman, Heather Heyer, when a car drove into a group of protesters. Several hundred counter-demonstrators were marching through the university town for a second day in opposition to a crowd of some 6,000 people attending a right-wing rally when the car struck. Donald Trump blamed “both sides” for deadly clashes between white supremacists and other protesters.
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