ecofascism

By Steven R. D. Henderson - Institute for Social Ecology, March 2023

Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience was published when the American ecology movement debated social critique on one hand, or Malthusianism and anti-humanism on the other. Its authors Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier pointed to historic far-Right environmentalism as a warning.

The subject again gained attention in 2019 when a white supremacist gunned down 51 people at two New Zealand mosques. While he murdered friends and families in their places of worship, the attack was posted online for the world to see. “In his shoddy manifesto, the accused shooter in Christchurch identified as an ‘eco-fascist,’” reports Jason Wilson for the Guardian. A few months later another shooter in El Paso, Texas killed 23 people at a Walmart and cited the Christchurch perpetrator as inspiration.

“There have been significant links between environmentalism and Right-wing politics for more than a century,” Staudenmaier writes in his new book Ecology Contested: Environmental Politics Between Left and Right. “Knowingly or not, the perpetrators of the Christchurch and El Paso massacres continued that tradition. While they were unusual in putting their beliefs into violent action, many of the same basic ideas run through the contemporary far Right scene as well as substantial parts of the political mainstream.”

Staudenmaier’s concern is confronting these ideas. His new book hands readers the theoretical basis for a critical and historically-informed engagement with them. Earlier versions of some essays in the volume were published previously. “Disney Ecology” was first put out as a pamphlet, while “Ambiguities of Animal Rights” originally appeared in the journal Communalism. “The Politics of Nature from Left to Right” was written for the second issue of Harbinger. The remaining texts are new.

By Spencer Sunshine - It's Going Down, February 23, 2023

The increasing embrace by White Supremacists of environmentalism, which they use to justify their racist ideologies—dubbed “ecofascism”—is on the lips of many today. This has been driven by its mention in the manifestos connected to White Supremacist massacres in El Paso, Texas and Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019; between the two, 74 were murdered. Additionally, the new interest paid by fascists in Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, also shows rising interest in this trend.

Because of this, historian and anarchist Peter Staudenmaier’s book is a timely reminder that ecofascism is not just not a new problem, but also one that provides a bridge between the far-Right and the Left and anarchists. His book is a call, in the best radical environmental style, to blockade that bridge and stop fascists from entering radical circles.

Since the early 1990s Staudenmaier has been associated with the Institute for Social Ecology (ISE). The school was co-founded in 1974 by anarchist theoretician Murray Bookchin, and is best known for promoting what he dubbed social ecology—a fusion of Hegelianized Marxism, classical anarchism, and ecological thought. But ISE members have also been some of the earliest to warn anarchists about the danger of Red/Brown politics, especially in the radical environmental movement.

For example, Staudenmaier co-authored the 1995 book Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience with Janet Biehl. His half was one of the first treatments in English documenting the “green wing” of the original Nazi Party, clearly showing how the fascist embrace of environmentalism has a long history and impeccable pedigree. But—especially in the context of Bookchin’s occasionally injudicious, and sometimes downright vicious, attacks on rival radical environmental currents—Ecofascism was controversial when it was published. Today it stands as a prescient warning of what was to come.

(The term “ecofascism” itself is muddy because of the different ways it’s invoked. Staudenmaier, following the clear understanding of different far-Right factions which antifascist work requires, uses it to refer to genuine fascists who embrace environmentalism. Other leftists use it to refer to all right-wingers who oppose environmentalism. Meanwhile, many conservatives use it to smear environmentalists themselves!)

Ecology Contested is yet another warning about the thriving postwar ecofascist currents. In the increasingly crowded field of writings about this subject, Staudenmaier’s book stands out by its focus on the relationship between the Left and Right on environmentalism, but also anti-tech and animal rights politics. He does so by showing their overlapping theoretical, but also in some cases existing political, relationships. Like his 1995 book, Ecology Contested is sure to ruffle feathers. Some may even see it less as a warning of potential right-wing incursions and more as an attack on their own politics.

By Our Changing Climate - Our Changing Climate, February 10, 2023

By Nicholas Beuret - The Ecologist, August 11, 2021

A future of carbon neutral border industries criminalising climate migrants is already happening.

The number of people crossing the English Channel seeking refuge has risen in recent weeks.

This has been accompanied by the predictable right-wing decrying of the ‘invasion’, and populist politicians and commentators calling for the criminalisation of search and rescue services.

The context is a surging right-wing political activism. This is being led by the ruling Tory party, which is seeking to use its strong government majority to criminalise a range of dissenting, rebellious - or just-not-Tory - behaviours while they have the chance.

By Lise Benoist - Undisciplined Environments, May 4, 2021

In France, the far right’s acknowledgment of environmental threats serves a racist and nationalist agenda. This narrative is fed and spread by the far right metapolitical sphere, which revives a conservative and Malthusian conception of ecology along the nature-territory-identity trinity. This essay recounts one of their colloquiums on the topic, titled “Nature as a base”.

“The economy devours the society, the economy does not meet humans’ needs any longer, and humans now have to work to satisfy the needs of a growth that has gone mad. […] The means of life are destroying life itself, and the obsession for an infinite growth on a finite planet has become the first threat to humanity.”

This certainly sounds like a quote taken from the work of a degrowth scholar. Yet, these words were pronounced by Hervé Juvin, the head candidate of Rassemblement National (the main French far-right party), when invited to a public radio channel to present the ecological ambitions of the party in the weeks previous to the to the 2019 EU Elections. After being elected as an MP, he later defended “localism” as the only worthy solution to the climate crisis. As he put it, beyond the economic sovereignty concern, localism appears to be first and foremost about countering “the fall of the diversity of human societies” in front of “the uniformisation” caused by “naïve globalisation”.

Juvin’s words on public radio are representative of several dynamics at work. The first is the normalisation of the presence of the far right and its characteristic themes in the public debate. This contributes to the progressive conquest of the political and media spheres by the categories and obsessions of the far right. The second, which feeds the first, is the metapolitical enterprise initiated by the French far right in the late 1960s around the GRECE (Research and Study Group for the European Civilization), later referred to as the Nouvelle Droite (New Right) movement. This enterprise has been embodied by the thinker Alain de Benoist and his publications. The choice of metapolitics is the one of a cultural fight, outside of parliamentary politics. The underlying belief is that ideological transformation is a precondition to political change, a transformation that takes the shape of a battle of ideas waged today by and through numerous media outlets, organisations and key personalities.

In the wake of the counter-hegemonic thought of Antonio Gramsci, these metapolitical actors claim to be “Gramscians of the Right”, fiercely combatting a cultural hegemony perceived as neo-Marxist, in which a mishmash of feminist, anti-racist, LGBTQIA+, and anti-capitalist struggles go hand in hand with the defence of a “globalist ecology” and its climate justice demands. The third visible evolution is that the issue of ecology has be seemingly moved to the forefront of the preoccupations of parts of the French far right. On the parliamentarian side this is marked by the 2019 EU elections and the Rassemblement National ambitions to create an “ecological civilization in Europe”, whilst in the extra-parliamentarian sphere it reawakens a dormant theme.

In this context, in 2020 the Institut Iliade devoted its annual colloquium in central Paris to the topic, under the title “Nature as a base – for an ecology the right way up”, [La nature comme socle – pour une écologie à l’endroit] . This Institute “for the long European memory” is a sort of heir to the GRECE, a think tank that gathers numerous personalities of the Nouvelle Droite and works, by means of trainings, publications and conferences, for the “awakening of the European consciousness”, calling for “the defence of our civilization” in front of “the great replacement”. This trendy conspiracy expression refers to the alleged phenomenon of ethnic and cultural substitution, a “replacement” of the white European population by not only non-white people but, most dangerously, Muslims. This obsessive assumption is picked up and used today by the quasi-totality of the French far right, from the Rassemblement National to the Identitarians and the royalists of the Action Française. But it also spreads through public opinion. A survey proves that this belief, which can seem ludicrous at first glance, has managed to convince almost one in four French people. The influence of the metapolitical soft power of the far right should not be underestimated.

By Steve Ongerth - Institute for Social Ecology, November 2019

By various - Green Antifascist - Spring 2020

A compilation of writings against ecofascist infiltration of revolutionary ecology and green anarchist milieus, includes:

• Confronting the Rise of Eco-Fascism Means Grappling with Complex Systems - by Emmi Bevensee and Alexander Reid Ross
• There’s nothing anarchist about Eco-Fascism - by Scott Campbell
• On No Platform and ITS - by William Gillis
• ITS, or the rhetoric of decay - a Joint statement of insurrectional groups in Mexican territory

Web editor's note: we highly recommend the first three sections of this document. As for the last chapter, we vehemently disagree with their anti-organizational and anti-structural dogma as well as their sectarian denunciations of "the left", but welcome their distancing from ITS and similarly minded eco-fascists. In any case, the document is a package deal. Plus, note our standard disclaimer:

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author.

Download (PDF).

By Conor Arpwel - Protean Magazine, December 30, 2018

In his recent article for New York Magazine, Children of Ted, John H. Richardson ruminates on the recent rise of a fringe political movement centered on the writings of Ted Kaczynski, the ecoterrorist widely known as “the Unabomber.” On its face, Richardson’s article amounts to an eccentric human-interest story for a mainstream publication. Yet, in typical liberal fashion, Richardson approaches his subject with a dangerous combination of cynicism and naiveté. He frivolously mischaracterizes much of modern anarchist thought by describing the article’s main subject, John Jacobi, as an (idiosyncratic and largely mythical) type of leftist radical who is “sure that morality is just a social construct that keeps us docile in our shearing pens.” Richardson goes on to assert that “Kaczynski was Karl Marx in modern flesh, yearning for his Lenin”—a highly misleading and facile assertion. Due in part to this semi-implicit disregard for the potential for fundamental social change, Richardson does little to present alternatives to Kaczynski’s fascistic “solution” to our climate catastrophe that has already begun.

KACZYNSKI ADVOCATES A PRELAPSARIAN “RETURN TO NATURE” IN ORDER TO ALIGN OUR SOCIAL REALITIES TO GENETICALLY PRESCRIBED HUMAN BEHAVIOR. HOWEVER, IT IS CRUCIAL TO UNDERSTAND THAT THIS PERSPECTIVE IS FAR MORE INSIDIOUS THAN SOME ROMANTIC YEARNING FOR THOREAU’S WALDEN POND.

Although Richardson prefers to refer to this type of thought as “ecoextremism,” Kaczynski and his groupies are better understood as advocates for a callous strain of primitivism. This ideology is grounded in a belief that technological development must be stopped—even reversed. From Kaczynski’s perspective, industrialization and technological progress are responsible for societal instability and immense psychological suffering. To remedy this, Kaczynski advocates a prelapsarian “return to nature” in order to align our social realities to genetically prescribed human behavior. However, it is crucial to understand that this perspective is far more insidious than some romantic yearning for Thoreau’s Walden Pond. Kaczynski takes an artificially “constrained,” as Thomas Sowell describes it, view of humanity—namely, that we are defined by a “bedrock of selfishness,” over which altruism and cooperation manifest on occasion but remain mere exceptions to the cynical rule. This reflects the polemics of other reactionaries, such as white supremacist “race science” sophists and “intellectual dark web” charlatans like Jordan Peterson. Such ideologies all serve the same end: to foreclose the possibility of any systemic change to the status quo and dismiss any societal structure not predicated on hierarchy and subordination.

By the blogger - A Roaming Vagabond, January 15, 2018

This long post started as an investigation about the Left and Syria which I started after I read the Sol Process blog’s publication of three posts concerning shady pro-Assad sources used in leftist circles (which can be read here: part I, part II, part III), and which later expanded into a more extensive investigation. I also thank the acknowledgement of my blog post by Russia Without BS, whose blog was helpful in the initial stages of my research.

Note for safety purposes: this post will contain links to far-right pages for documentation and sourcing purposes, and any link to such a page will be in bold and italic, such as this.