Senseless Acts Can Be Traced
To Philosophy Behind "Greens"

By William Perry Pendley

(Editor's note: William Perry Pendley is president and chief legal officer for Mountain States Legal Foundation, a public interest law firm specializing in issues of property rights and individual liberties.)

Throughout America, people are wondering how the killers at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, could do it. Days before their rampage, they had gone to the prom with their classmates, hours before they had gone bowling with some of them, and minutes before they saw one of them: "I like you man," said one killer. "Get out of here!"

Then they began killing students in cold blood — because they were jocks, because of their race, because of their faith in God, and for absolutely no reason at all. As they did so, they laughed.

Searching for answers, religious scholars like Reverend Kenneth Williams, Ph.D. of Golden, Colorado, says the process leading to such murderous sprees involves three steps: denial of the existence of God, abandonment of religious morality, and rejection of the sanctity of human life. (If God is dead, human beings were not created in His image.)

It was Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) who declared, "God is dead. God remains dead." While Nietzsche also rejected "conformist moralities," modern culture embraces a moral ambivalence and nonjudgmentalism of which Nietzsche only dreamed. Finally, it is a powerful part of our culture that asserts that it is not human life that has intrinsic value, but the environment and non-human life forms.

Nietzsche's philosophy was an important source for Hitler's fascist ideology. It was Nietzsche who said, "Without God, anything is permissible." It was Hitler who defined "anything." What is less well known, but hardly surprising, is that Hitler was a committed vegetarian. On one famous occasion Hitler told Herman Goering that eating meat was "like eating a corpse!" Hitler's compassion toward non-human species (he vigorously opposed animal research) contrasts starkly with his pitiless genocidal murder of millions.

Compassion for animals is not a failing. To the contrary, psychologists advise that one of the warning signs of a troubled youth is cruelty to animals. What is a character flaw is when, as in Hitler's case, animals have inherent value and worth, but not human beings.

Unfortunately, such a repudiation of the Judeo-Christian view of the sanctity of each human life did not die with Hitler. Today, radical animal rights and environmental advocates reject that view with as much vigor as did Hitler. Consider these statements: "There are no clear distinctions between [humans] and animals." "A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy." Or this book title: A Declaration of War: Killing People to Save Animals and the Environment.

Remarkably, one hears such things well short of the radical fringe. A Maine high school student, for example, responded to concern that the needs of mankind were being sacrificed by environmental laws to "trees, rocks and species of insects." He defended insects thusly: "Who are we to say [that insects must die for the needs of humans]?" Here is the marriage of today's cultural moral ambivalence with Hitler's rejection of the value of human life. Note, as well, the shift of emphasis, from protecting the environment to ensure human health, safety, and well being, to saving other life forms that have an intrinsic worth greater than humans!

While the Littleton teenage killers were devotees of Hitler, there was something else insidiously at work there, something that is all too common today. For they viewed their victims, not as human beings, but as mere members of one hated group or another: "jocks," "blacks" or "Christians." Regrettably, it is not unusual to hear such demonizing language from environmental extremists, who describe loggers as "tree killers," miners as "the rape, ruin, and run boys," and ranchers as "welfare cowboys." By this language, the speaker assures the audience that people in these groups are unworthy of concern, are without value.

Where does it all start? The day of the Littleton tragedy, less than 20 miles from Columbine High School, I saw a car with a bumper sticker that read, "Save an Elk. Hit a land developer."