-Caveat Lector- The significance of eco-terrorism. by Stanley Kurtz Mr. Kurtz is also a fellow at the Hudson Institute The Holocaust has become our moral touchstone — the most important cultural symbol of our era. And that's a problem. The Jewish Holocaust of World War II was a human tragedy on a scale that beggars description. Serious study of the Holocaust, as well as meditation upon this terrible event by the general public, are most necessary and worthy endeavors. But can the Holocaust ever serve as the chief organizing principle of our moral universe? In an important sense, it already does. In a relativist age, the Holocaust is our moral anchor. Forty years ago, preoccupation with the Holocaust was still considered morbid, and the moral lesson it taught remained something of a debater's point. We knew, when pressed, that if nothing else was immoral the Holocaust was. But we did not yet know how to turn the Holocaust into an engine of meaning. We learned. Perhaps because we had to. Human beings crave moral certainty. If the Holocaust had waved us away from moral certainty for fear of committing horrors in the name of some higher cause, then the Holocaust would itself, of necessity, become our moral certainty. But how? How could a debater's point become a way of life? We would have to learn how to use the Holocaust to actually generate meaning. And having mastered this, we would learn how to recognize "little Holocausts" everywhere. All too frequently, the world would accommodate this need for little Holocausts. When it did not, we would have to use our imaginations. Weighed down by a sense of the banality of their existence, the baby boomers were given a life of material comfort but longed instead for a life of exertion in the service of some larger purpose, or at least for the appearance of such a life. The solution they hit upon was to identify with struggling groups — however temporarily, however superficially, however counterproductively. Student involvement in the early movement for civil rights was the entirely praiseworthy prototype of this moral pattern, but the many later attempts to copy that original crusade left much to be desired. The world was soon divided into torturers and victims, and a shallow but ostentatious appropriation of the victim's superior prestige created a new aristocracy of suffering. Heightened sensitivity to prejudice, or apparent prejudice, would become the keynote of the new identities since, over and above a few affected markers, no belief or way of life actually distinguished American blacks, women, Jews, or any given ethnic group, from anyone else. The new ethnicity seemed to operate as a way of associating individuals with some larger community. More deeply, however, the new ethnicity was a form of self-cultivation. Pasting together a series of identities, preferably rebellious and often fleeting, was more a way of distinguishing oneself from the mass than of forging stable connections to a given community. And yet, more paradoxically still, the gesture of suffering rebellion had itself become obligatory — a required ritual of admission to a society in which everyone became an individual in precisely the same way. The denial of freedom — or better, life — to an innocent multitude serves as the sacred icon of our time. The new goal is to identify oneself with mass-scale suffering and to strive to prevent it. On the face of it, of course, any such horror rightly calls forth our outrage. The fact that we are stirred to action by collective oppression or mass killing seems transparently to be our obligation, not some novel religion. Christ on the cross, after all, long the West's most potent icon, is the very image of blameless suffering. Yet the crucifixion is more than a picture of innocent agony. It is a paradigm of sacrifice — of a God who so loved the world that He gave to it, and willingly lost to it, His only begotten son. The displacement of the icon of Christ by the Holocaust metaphor marks a cultural shift of considerable significance. Many are now unable to work within the old paradigm of sacrifice, or even to recognize or comprehend it. This is reflected, for example, in the diminishing ability of young Catholics to find vocations as nuns or priests, and in the incomprehension of those who are disinclined to accept, say, marital advice, from a celibate priest. For many, the connection between Jesus's sacrifice of his life, the sacrifice entailed in celibacy, and the sacrifice at the heart of marriage, has been lost. For Jews, the struggle between the old sacrificial mode and the newer Holocaust metaphor is direct. To the distress of many traditionalists, the story of the Holocaust seems to have substituted itself for the story of the Exodus as the chief rationale for Jewish survival. For many, Judaism has become a sort of secular religion centered around ethnic identity, in which traditionally religious elements are considered private and strictly optional. Yet the focus on the Holocaust hasn't stemmed the tide of Jewish intermarriage. Paradoxically, the Holocaust cult's preoccupation with Jewish survival is actually undercut by the focus on mere survival implicit in commemorations of the Holocaust. Only the apprenticeship in sacrifice built into day-to-day religious practice — sacrifice on behalf of the opportunity to live amongst a people shaped by the purposes of God — has the power to compel and justify a refusal to marry outside. The hidden individualism of victim-centered forms of identity is evident here. In my earlier piece, " The Church of the Left," I showed how feminism constitutes a kind of modern religion built around Holocaust metaphors. But the purest example of the Holocaust metaphor's operation in contemporary leftist thinking is probably found in the eco-terrorism movement. Eco-terrorism, sponsored by loosely knit groups like the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front, began in earnest in 1998, with the burning down of a mountaintop ski resort in Vail Colorado, the release of 10,000 minks from an Oregon mink farm, and the burning of a slaughterhouse. Eco-terrorism has proliferated since then, although, until recently, fear of provoking further retaliation has prevented targeted businesses from publicizing the problem. Biotechnology projects are the latest targets, with a fire set to the offices of a global biotech project at Michigan State University in Lansing and various experimental crop sites destroyed. The attacks are sometimes mistaken (targeting scientists who are not in fact engaged in bioengineering) and often counterproductive (released minks only die in the wilderness, and the attacks themselves tend to backfire politically on the activists). But (as with much contemporary liberalism) it's the feeling of being a rescuer that counts, not the reality. The iconography of these activists is Holocaust iconography — photos of animals being experimented on, or locked away in small cages. The release of the minks and the burning of the slaughterhouse resemble nothing so much as our dream of preventing the Holocaust. In fact the Animal Liberation Front explicitly invokes the image of U.S. soldiers liberating Jews from Nazi death camps to justify its actions. Of course a great deal depends upon whether we accept the analogy between animals and people. But the question of the moral status of animals actually serves to disguise the underlying religious significance of eco-terrorism. The eco-terrorists have a very particular way of equating animals and humans. Many Hindus, for example, are vegetarians, but see animals in a completely different way than the eco-terrorists. Hindus worship the cow as the embodiment of motherly sacrifice, and the monkey as a symbol of manly self-control and power. Things are different in the church of the Left. Here animals embody no socially authorized pattern of sacrifice. They are, on the contrary, mute victims, whose relative incapacity only serves to ratify the purity of their victimhood. The credibility of any human claim of oppression can always be called into question, but a mass of mute animals is the perfect image of large-scale innocent suffering — a perfect little Holocaust just waiting to be prevented. Of course animals have an annoying tendency to consume one another. This muddying of the moral waters has been nicely circumvented, however, by the LLF, or the "Lawn Liberation Front," which recently distributed fliers to homeowners in a Pittsburgh suburb claiming that 12-inch spikes may have been driven into their lawn to stop them from cutting the grass. "Grass is a living entity that deserves as much respect as humans," said the fliers. So nostalgia for the heroism of World War II can now take the form of action to prevent the "herbicide" of millions of blades of innocent grass. In an ultimate bid to spread the new religion, every man is now "offered" the opportunity to prevent a Holocaust from taking place, quite literally, in his own backyard. Few eco-terrorists get caught. The risks are minimal, but the sense of moral superiority substantial. And such sacrifice as is entailed in the risk of criminal prosecution is dramatically different than the sacrifice embodied in the old religious mode. Eco-terrorists operate in isolated cells of individuals around the country, few of whom know each other's identity. This is not the sort of sacrifice that builds families and communities. It is a simulacrum of sacrifice, undertaken to rescue pampered middle-class children of affluence from the oppressive sense of being ordinary. The physical destruction of university research is perhaps the clearest example we have of the implications of "political correctness" for academic freedom. But the threat of eco-terrorism goes deeper. Intelligence analysts worry that the history of violence combined with the ideology of "deep ecology," which holds that human civilization has to be rolled back until the earth's natural environment is fully restored, may lead to the use of large-scale weapons of mass destruction (especially biological warfare) by eco-terrorists. Ironically, those who seek to prevent holocausts create a rationalization for perpetrating holocausts of their own. But the real significance of eco-terrorism is the clarity with which it reveals the larger tendencies of the contemporary religion of the Left. The religion of the Left works by seizing upon, exaggerating, distorting, or inventing images of mass-scale death and oppression. The point of this religion is not to gain salvation, power, or community through self-discipline and sacrifice, but to achieve a feeling of individual moral superiority through attempts to stave off potential Holocausts (every man a Schindler). (The movement for gun control is based on a close cousin of this ideology, as shown in the very interesting final chapter of Richard Poe's new book, "The Seven Myths of Gun Control.") The majority of environmental activists eschew violence, and the public at large favors well-lit houses and SUV's. But that doesn't mean that the Holocaust metaphor isn't alive and well in, say, the public battle over drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve. Agree or disagree with the president's plan, it ought to be possible to debate it as a complex effort to balance environmental sensitivity with the public's evident need and desire for energy. But the president's proposal can't seem to get around that "cringe factor" — the feeling that, whatever the safeguards, whatever the need for energy, drilling in ANWR is like a little Holocaust. The debate over ANWR may seem to be about public policy, but it's really a theological skirmish in the ongoing war between two American cultures and their respective religions. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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