When the Australian foreign minister Kevin Rudd visited Israel recently, he brought a wrath of sunflowers to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in the country that had become a safe heaven for Jews. Of course this was the Australian ex-Prime Minister who was toppled at the face of it for his broken promise to tackle climate change. I will try to show here that he - for reasons I don't know yet - touched on an enigmatic issue that could have some important implications. For what might falter down under is still very much alive elsewhere. The German Greens, now the second largest party, will have a lot more clout soon to implement their target of running Europes biggest economy on 100% “clean” energy by 2050. They have already set the standards for the anti-Western renewable energy revolution by rejecting the most sensible nuclear power option at all costs. The sunflower has come to symbolize this irrational obsession in the West which is probably best explained as a remote echo of Hitlers engrained anti-nuclear bias.

Similar biased energy policies prevail in most of the West today with the notable exception of France. In California Arnold Schwarzenegger's disastrous turn to renewables just got recently buttressed by a referendum. In the UK between now an 2017 the renewable energy fraction on the whole will double while nuclear energies output will even shrink. The Scottish National Party seems keen to top the rest with a target of 80% of electricity from renewable energy as early as 2020. This has upset Rupert Soames, head of a big UK energy company and grandson of Winston Churchill. He has accused Scottish politicians of “holding hands and singing Kumbaya to the great green God”. The most likely candidate of this is the yellow flower that visualized the global ascent of the green movement and that happens to be the party logo of the German green party since the 1980s.

Historically, it was long known as a pagan or pseudo-religious cult flower of native American Indians, for whom it represented a solar deity. It serves a similar purpose today for the man-made global warming narrative that is for faithful green gnostics a non-disputable fact, rendering skeptics close to Holocaust deniers. In fact, much earlier in Germany, the anti-Christian policies had been taken up by the Nazis and continued even after their defeat with the evident role of former Nazis in the foundation of the German green party. This grass-roots project has meanwhile expanded greatly to what is now refered to as the European ecological-industrial complex. This is just another indication of the modernity of the Nazi cause. Aristotle already provided the answer to this conundrum with his observation that the default mode of progress always pertains to technology and not to morals or to laws.

However, Eric Voegelin was probably the first who reviewed these concepts in a way that appears absolutely convincing. The modernity of the Nazis is genuine, because science combined with pseudoreligious gnostic mass movement is at the very heart of modernity. The same is perfectly embodied today in the Global Warming movement. Francis Fukuyama in his End of History got it right: the Nazi regime lasted too short to be fully understood, or to put it more succinctly: the vanquished prevailed in the memory of their enemies. George Santayana taking on German subjectivism before WW I observed with the emerging politically blind giant:

“It is no paradox that idealists should be so much at home among material things. These material things, according to them, are the offspring of their spirit. Why should they not sink fondly into the manipulation of philological details or chemical elements, or over-ingenious commerce and intrigue? Why should they not dote on blood and iron? Why should these fruits of the spirit be uncongenial to it?”

Well, this spirit was probably visualised during WW II with the planting of sunflowers on many thousands graves of SS soldiers in the vicinity of concentration camps, as Simon Wiesenthal has reported. The big yellow bulbs stand for the continuation of the anticlerical passion of previous generations, taken up by the 1968 student revolt and the greens that gave birth to radical environmentalism. Incidentially the politicization of the sunflower remains so powerful as the brand for the anti-nuclear movement in Germany today that it can - unlike anywhere else - still mobilize millions of people. It was exactly for this reason that the Greens adopted the sunflower as their party icon decades ago. It somehow preserved the irrational anti-nuclear bias that was an ideosyncrasy of Hitler, and might turn out as his last triumph over the America of Hiroshima. At least this is what one of the leading green philosophers wants to make us believe. Carl Amery's book about the green credentials of Adolf Hitler, published in 1998, was never translated into English; however the title “Hitler as Predecessor” (of todays environmentalists) tells it all.

Amery used to be a key speaker at Green party conferences in the 1990s when I still attended them. He even argues in his book, a “new Auschwitz” might be inescapable in some of the poorest countries if global warming is not being addressed. The glaring antinuclear/anti-capitalist link between Greens and Nazis remains virulent to this day, with former SS trooper and influential Nobel Laureat Guenther Grass, who equals Ahmadinejad's threat to drop the atomic bomb on Israel with the US wartime decision of last resort to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Moreover, anyone to whom Amery's Auschwitz stance sounds pretty much over the top should think again. A recent video on YouTube showed a series of fun executions of carbon footprint dissidents in England. And just consider the “overpopulation” campaign in the worldwide green community which has gathered steam for more than a decade. The aim is penalizing every Western family with more than one offspring. However the most dramatic issue of course is the worldwide soaring numbers of famine casualties as a result of biodiesel production that abused millions of acres of farmland that previously had fed the developing world. Or look at Jonathan Franzen's new novel Freedom - which is actually a repudiation of that very American passion - setting low-birthrate Europe as the PC green paragon for the rest. In his misanthropic book, Franzen gives us a perfect portrait of present day green anti-humanism, born out of their obsession with carbon footprints.

It is no coincidence that green Europe has driven anti-Israel sentiments to a level not seen since pre-Holocaust times, with Israel today being treated as a pariah state. Among other things, the Greens are getting angry about Israel's carbon footprint resulting from the highest birth-rate of the West, much closer to African than to European figures. And what ought we to make of a new trend that has emerged in Germany these days of decorating graves of still born babies with a sunflower? Just google it to learn more.

Fittingly, this odd plant has made its appearance on the Apple iPhone at the very time when Steve Jobs went out of his way to castigate American businesses over anthropogenic global warming. Not only since then, though innovation in Silicon Valley has been smothered with political correctness, green and gender regulations. As a result, venture capitalists are said to have already succumbed to the sunflower mantra of renewable energy there. The latest outgrow of this worldwide gnostic movement is the international gardening guerrilla (IGG) which was founded of all places in the European capital Brussels in 2007. For the time being once a year on the day previously reserved for the international workers unions, the first of May, we now celebrate international sunflower guerrilla gardening.

On this behalf guerrilla gardeners, loath of property rights of course, plant these flowers in allegedly neglected public places around the world. This year more than 5000 people from North America, Europe and Asia signed up for the event. Little wonder that eastern socialist pink has also been replaced by the yellow bulbs. Funny enough, the sunflower conquered Europe in the 17^th century via Russia of all places thanks to the orthodox church. It served as a hidden source of fat during lent and for that reason alone became very popular in Russia, where until today sunflowers are grown commercially while the country remains the biggest producer of sunflower oil, but not diesel, in the world.

In the late 19^th century, accompanying the rise of socialism, the sunflower has been the symbol of the decadent aesthetic movement represented in several Van Gogh's still lives. For as an aesthetic item the sunflower excelled less through the beauty that freshly cut flowers exhibit, but more through its holistic-utilitarian properties. In fact it takes a year to grow a sunflower ready for decoration. Strictly speaking, it is not even a flower but actually a composite head with numerous florets. Those inside the circular head are called disc florets, which mature into seeds. The latter have historically been used for healing purposes, as nutrients and only recently for perverted agrarian purposes such as biodiesel.

All of this adds apt proof for Robert Kagan's thesis that the globally disintegrating West is giving way or in fact returns to persistent pre-WWI trends. These include the second wave of globalization we are witnessing, which takes on where the first wave was interrupted by WWI. Hence the return of the nation state in a multi-centred world, the paradigm shift to the Austrian School of economics conceptualized in the 1870s, and finally the return of the back-to-nature movement of fin-de-siècle. Even Van Gogh, taking his artistic inspiration from a pagan rather than a Christian symbol, is being emulated. At a Paris art exhibition David Hockney recently created a digital animated sunflower picture that could be sent to the handsets of tourists all over the metropolis to attract green spirited, environmentally “responsible” visitors. Thus perhaps for the first time art gallery visitors are exposed as involuntary heathens of the new earth cult.

As „a huge Gift of God“ hails Lufthansa flight attendant Hans-Peter Schiffer his carefully groomed 8.03 meter large sunflower. It took him seven years to grow the plant this high. He had to feed it regularly with compost and manure from cattle and horse on top of some 400 kilos of peeled potatoes. Strange enough, he planted the thing exactly at full moon on the 9^th of April 2009 and he keeps praying, or anyway that's what he calls it, because he considers the plant a product of an invisible hand. Fitting in is his confession that he never before had any interest in gardening, albeit his giant plant got him in the Guinness Book of Records.

This brings us to what is probably another record, recently presented at Tate Modern in London. Ai Weiwei from China covered the huge former turbine hall there with more than 100 million "sunflower seeds" - the latest commission in the gallery's popular Unilever Series. Visitors will be able to walk on and touch the seeds made of Chinese porcelain. It exposes an unsettling but clandestine admittance of the cheap labor which is in abundance in todays China. For each of the fake seed husks was handcrafted by skilled artisans. The ceramic seeds were molded, fired at soaring temperatures, hand-painted and then fired again over the course of two years. However no one understood why Wei was arrested by the Chinese authorities.

Now, the political message is not obvious here. However, “Sunflower for Suu” happens to be the name of the campaign to raise awareness of the Burmese human rights activist Aung San Suu Kyi, who was set free just after Weiwei's arrest by the Burmese government from her decades long house arrest. This followed pressure from her supporters in Burma who expressed their solidarity by growing sunflowers and spreading their seeds. That seems to have had a fairly good effect for Suu, but fell short of making any difference to the remaining thousands of prisoners. Weiwei was perhaps inspired bu Suu. This link between sunflowers and human rights issues in the Asian context is remarkabe, because human rights issues were in the past strongly attached to the Christian cross.

It seems something significant is going on here. At the very time of aggressive secular attempts to abolish the Cross from the public arena in the West, pagan symbols like tattoos, piercings and sunflowers are spreading all over the place. Fittingly - or take it as irony if you wish - under the threat of climate change, as of 2007, worldwide petrol production swallowed eight million tons of plant oil from sunflowers, which made up 10% of the production of biodiesel in Europe. This is apt proof of the political power of the gnostic cult that is about to eclipse real environmental concerns such as famine or infringements on freedom of speech and religious conscience in the West.

This raises concerns for the future of human rights in Europe, since the Judeo-Christian heritage used to be the genuine source of the notion of freedom. If we frame the question as one of the quest for truth and sticking to one's cultural heritage or identity, suddenly it might be an open question who will occupy the moral high ground  in the future, East or West. And it remains to be seen whether the green erosion of the classical values of individual freedom in the West will turn out as more detrimental to humanity than a different approach to human rights in the East. For example, the dismal collapse of the Copenhagen summit was merited because of the biased Western agenda as revealed through ClimateGate, the leaked e-mails from utterly close-minded climate scientists. This is an indication that the West is losing the monopoly on scientific truth. Climate sceptic and Czech president Vaclav Havel quotes a study published by two Chinese scientists, Guang Wu and Shaomin Yan. They employed the “random walk model” for ­analyzing the worlds temperature variations over the last 160 years and established — to the embarresment of the global-warming alarmists — that the random walk model perfectly matches with the temperature changes.

Coming back to Kevin Rudd at Yad Vashem, he may be forgiven for not being aware that in recent memory the sunflower in the context of the Holocaust stood for the inwardly hypocritical humanism of Western democracies or the evasion of guilt. It is for this reason that Simon Wiesenthal choose The Sunflower as the title for his account of a dozen of Eastern concentration camps. From there emerges his unique experience of being taken one day to the bedside of a dying German storm trooper called Karl in the Lemberg military hospital, who had participated in countless atrocities and was repentant only when he faced death. Karl was terrified of dying with a burden of guilt and asked Wiesenthal to grant him absolution. Wiesenthal, the man who, after he was liberated at Mauthausen camp by the Allied troops, spent the rest of his life hunting down hidden Nazi thugs, was unable to oblige and left the room in silence. However this encounter haunted him with feelings of guilt for many years and led him to present the issue to a symposium.

Wiesenthal asked several dozens of personalities of international renown, what they would have answered to Karl? In my opinion the best response came from Primo Levi, who himself went though the hell of a concentration camp. Levi regarded the request of the SS criminal for forgiveness as childish, irresponsible and egotistic. After all he had done, he still had the chutzpa to summon the one Jew he could get hold of, to his bedside asking for forgiveness.

Levi's answer was reminiscent of the '68 culture that shared with the elites of the Third Reich the same traits of selfish hysteria suggesting that it has come from the same Nietzschean source. It was Nietzsche's philosophy that declared God dead and fueled the back-to-nature movement in Europe at the end of the 19^th century abruptly blocked by WW I. This seems to be back with a vengeance, and again gnostic self-worship is on the rise - perfectly epitomized by Julia Roberts' secular creed of “God dwells in me, as me” in the movie Eat Pray Love.