Draft:Eco-fascism

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Ecofascism is the hard green movement taken to its most extreme conclusion: the mixture of green politics with the far-right, often with a wholehearted embrace of the most totalitarian aspects of fascism. To ecofascists, the liberal ideals of individualism and human rights encourage overpopulation and wasteful consumption, and therefore, a heavy, authoritarian hand is necessary to bring society in line and "cull the excess population". The mainstream environmental movement is seen as having sold out to the left, refusing to confront the "real problem" of there being too many people and instead seeking to use the teeming masses as its power base. Much like regular fascism, ecofascism is often quite vigorously racist, with a love of the natural world tied to ethnic identity in a "blood and soil" fashion while non-white and Jewish people are seen as "parasites" who, lacking any attachment to the places in which they live, destroy the natural world out of selfishness.

Marine Le Pen

Marine Le Pen, head of the far-right National Rally party in France, is possibly the leading example of this mix of environmentalism, identitarianism, and localism, having stated that "borders are the environment's greatest ally", that she wants to make Europe the "world's leading ecological civilization", and that only a people rooted in the land can have a true ecological ethic while "nomadic" people (i.e. immigrants and jet-setting "(((globalists)))") inherently lack such, while also using animal rights as a cudgel against the halal food industry and fear of American agribusiness and GMOs as a nationalist talking point. This is a far cry from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who denied the existence of human-induced climate change and dismissed environmentalism as solely the domain of limousine liberals.

European Eco-fascist groups

Similar views can be found throughout Europe, where several political parties exist such as the Nouvelle Droite (or European New Right) of Alain de Benoist, the "Third Way" in the United Kingdom (a "green" splinter from the neo-fascist National Front), the Ökologisch-Demokratische Partei (Ecological Democratic Party, a right-wing splinter from the German Green Party), and groups espousing third positionism. The closest example of this from the U.S. is probably Virginia Abernethy, a Vanderbilt University professor who is both a widely cited expert on population and ecology and a self-avowed white separatist. Another American example would be the Wolves of Vinland, a group of Norse neopagans who have been described both as "eco-punks" and as white nationalists.

History

The mixture of ecological ideas and far-right nationalism has gone on more or less since the emergence of both. Ernst Haeckel, who coined the term "ecology" in 1867, was also an enthusiastic promoter of scientific racism and a firm believer in the superiority of the Nordic people who sought to apply contemporary biological ideas to humanity, which he viewed as just one component of a wider ecosystem with a clear place in its natural hierarchy The Völkisch movement in late 19th century Germany fused nature mysticism with ethnocentrism, seeking to bring Germans "back to nature" towards the ways of their ancestors and away from a modern urban industrial lifestyle that they perceived as decadent. The Völkisch movement was very influential on the National Socialist German Workers' Party, which (in propaganda, at least) placed a strong value on nature, the environment, and animals as part of the heritage of the Aryan race and felt that destroying the environment left a rootless people detached from their ravaged land, all while their policy of lebensraum emphasized creating a new rural frontier in Eastern Europe where, after it was cleared of its original inhabitants, German settlers could recultivate their ties to the soil. The propaganda slogan "blood and soil", in fact, was originally coined by the Völkisch movement before it was co-opted by the Nazis. However, this combination of vitalism and romantic traditionalism was in competition with a vision dominated by an emphasis on modern industrial manufacturing that would ultimately win out in Nazi Germany, due to the practical need to make lots of guns, tanks, and airplanes in preparation for war. So, rather than an Arcadian vision of some sort of rural and artisanal idyll with reinvented guilds and restored medieval hierarchies, Nazi Germany would double down on mass production in collaboration with the captains of industry. The hard green version did not entirely disappear from the broader ideological debate, however, and thus Savitri Devi, an avowed Nazi sympathizer before the war and a neo-Nazi afterward, espoused animal rights, argued that animal slaughterhouses were worse than Nazi war crimes, and claimed that the Jews had destroyed the harmony of nature by elevating humanity above all other species.

Alt-right

In August 2017, the drama miniseries Manhunt: Unabomber premiered on the Discovery Channel, causing a renewed interested in Theodore Kaczynski and his philosophy. As a result, a faction of the alt-right has now started embracing ecofascism, going by "pine tree gang" on Twitter and liking what Kaczynski has to say about leftists. Their beef with modernity has more to do with multiculturalism than anything else. They advocate that everyone should live on the land their ancestors gave them, a funny claim to make for a bunch of white people living in North America. Among the most prominent figures is Mike Ma, who embodies all the worst tropes of the alt-right millennial: after being a Vine celebrity, Mike became a Breitbart journalist, but now he is a self-described accelerationist and ecofascist. There also exists a subsection of neo-Nazis that follow ecofascism and use the Algiz rune (a Norse rune appropriated by the original Nazis) as their symbol alongside tree, earth, or mountain emojis.

Terrorism

Ecofascism has been especially influential on the more terroristic and "direct action" oriented strains of the far right. One now notorious example of an avowed ecofascist is Brenton Harrison Tarrant, the Australia-born shooter behind the mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand that killed 51 people and injured 50 more. In his manifesto The Great Replacement (named after the French far-right theory of the same name by writer Renaud Camus), he declared that he was "an Ethno-nationalist, Eco-fascist" in addition to being "a racist" and a "kebab removalist" (in reference to an Islamophobic meme featuring a Serbian Yugoslav Wars song). Patrick Crusius, the white supremacist who killed 23 people and injured 23 more in a shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, also titled his manifesto The Inconvenient Truth after Al Gore's documentary on climate change, and freely mixed anti-capitalist and environmentalist stances with rabidly anti-Latino xenophobia, ranting about hordes of Mexicans stripping America's natural environment bare. The aesthetic of "terrorwave", which glorifies terrorist violence, has also cropped up frequently in ecofascist circles.

References

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Categories:

• Alt-right
• Alt-lite
• Racism
• Pseudoscience
• Islamophobia
• Hard green
• Global warming