i didn't know this, but it makes sense

that the animal rights (i.e. PETA) groups and the Green party all sprang out of the nazi mentality pervasive throughout germany. here's an exerpt from an excellent post over at one of my favorite weekly reads iberian notes.

Arts and Letters Daily links to a new very German website (in English) called Sight and Sign. Here's an excerpt from a piece by Gotz Aly on the Nazi origins of the German welfare state and why many Germans supported Hitler. My personal belief: The German Romantic movement, combined with virulent nationalism springing from the hundreds of years of German disunity and weakness, and combined with the German youth movement (Wandervogel) which fed on "blood and soil" ideology and the idea that pure, uncorrupted youth could and should overthrow the old ways, led to the cultural conditions that caused the First World War and then Naziism. I think it's fascinating that the radical Green environmental movement started in Germany; I honestly think the extreme Greens would fit very nicely into the naive wing of the Nazi Party. Just in case you were wondering, by the way, the Nazis were of all things animal-rights activists. One of the charges that '20s and '30s Nazi propaganda threw at the Jews was that kosher slaughtering was cruel and inhumane.