Lebensraum
The quest for German domination was premised on the denial of science. Hitler’s alternative to science was the idea of Lebensraum. Germany needed an Eastern European empire because only conquest, and not agricultural technology, offered the hope of feeding the German people. In Hitler’s “Second Book,” which was composed in 1928 and not published until after his death, he insisted that hunger would outstrip crop improvements and that all “the scientific methods of land management” had already failed. No conceivable improvement would allow Germans to be fed “from their own land and territory,” he claimed. Hitler specifically — and wrongly — denied that irrigation, hybrids and fertilizers could change the relationship between people and land.
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As exotic as it sounds, the concept of Lebensraum is less distant from our own ways of thinking than we believe. Germany was blockaded during World War I, dependent on imports of agricultural commodities and faced real uncertainties about its food supply. Hitler transformed these fears into a vision of absolute conquest for total security. Lebensraum linked a war of extermination to the improvement of lifestyle. The chief Nazi propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, could therefore define the purpose of a war of extermination as “a big breakfast, a big lunch and a big dinner.” He conflated lifestyle with life.
Cet article met en rapport l’idéologie nazie et l’auto-suffisance avec un angle qui ne m’est pas familier. Je n’avais pas pris conscience de cette prépondérance dans la doctrine que je voyais bien davantage centrée sur la race que sur l’alimentation du peuple. La mise en lumière sur ce qui est en train de se passer dans le monde — aujourd’hui — à ce sujet est assez éloquente.
La guerre de l’agriculture, et donc de l’eau (aussi virtuelle soit-elle), ne fait que s’intensifier.