Energy Climate and Sustainability

11b: Ecofascism

work@mishavelthuis.nl

Thu 24 April 2025

Today

Backlash II

Possible futures I

The far-right meets the far-out

Eco-fascism

Planning

The far-out
meets the far-right

Regular right

Far right

The far-out

The Far-out during COVID-19

The context:

At the start of the pandemic there were some months in which science did not have the answers yet: wellness and fitness gurus stepped in: what to eat. How to stay healthy.

Professions that rely on physical presence/ contact were especially hard-hit: trainers, masseuses, fitness trainers.

MV: People not used to spend time with themselves inside: escapism in social media.

Lockdown required personal sacrifices, that many people - as it turned out - were unwilling to make:

The morality of discipline (ugly): I am strong because of my disciplined life-style. They are weak because they are lazy and undisciplined. Why should I sacrifice my freedom for their (self-inflicted) weakness.

Morality of eugenetics (uglier): I am stronger because of my genes. You are weak because of your genes. Why should I sacrifice my freedom for your weakness?

Klein: the historical alliance between wellness, fitness, new-age thinking and fascism reappeared:

"After the horrors of the Second World War, the fascist/fitness/New Age alliance broke apart. When the New Age experienced its next big wave of popularity, in the 1960s, it was firmly associated with hippies, environmentalism, and the Beatles studying transcendental meditation. Now, however, it seemed as if the movement’s older, supremacist roots were reasserting themselves.

Coopting legitimate concerns

Seeds of resistance are not just broken, they are used to fight the resistance.

Example 1:

Legitimate concern: big Pharma pursuing profit over the health of the common people.
Far-out, antivax Covid twist: "They want to vaccinate my children to make profit"

Example 2:

Legitimate concern: big tech accumulating unprecedented levels of control over what we read and see.
Far-out antivax covid twist: "They want to implant a computer chip so they can track my movement"

Example 3

Legitimate concern: (Sexist) blind spots of modern medicine (including premature recourse to medicalized solutions, too little recognition of more holistic, non-medicalized solutions).
Far-out antivax covid twist: "I don't need vaccines. My body/nature knows better.

Frustrations and fears over these problems - that could have been seeds of of a Degrowth resistance - were drawn in by right wing anti-vax movement.

Image:

Separation of state and science?

The great reset

Echoes of nitrogen

This dynamic looks like the dynamic we saw in the Dutch nitrogen crisis:

Nitrogen crisis

Big farmers are able to mobilize small farmers in the resistance against a political/scientific awareness that the scale of industrial farming in the Netherlands is unsustainable.

This awareness, if acted upon, would require the big farmers to radically change course, but it would not necessarily harm the small farmers.

But the big farmers coopt the small farmers by invoking a shared identity ("we are all farmers") and combine it with a caricature of the scientific/political push for sustainability (see van der Ploeg, 2020).

Great reset worries

Billionaires mobilizing the general public against "elites that want to destroy the US", while in a highly unequal country like the US, the systemic change required to address capitalism and colonialism (e.g. following the policy proposals of Degrowth) would likely leave the far majority better off.

Mirror world

A powerful tactic: know your own weak spots (things that would not go down well with public opinion), and accuse your opponents of exactly that, so that when they accuse you of those things, it will be less credible. (So that people will think: "these are just toddlers on a playground": "You are pedophile". "No you, are a pedophile!". (People will think: this is confusing, what is even true these days, let's continue with the day.)

Calling the lockdown fascist, while the defiance of the lock down (choosing your own freedom over the survival of the vulnerable) is actually something that would fit with a fascist value-system.

Calling people who take the vaccine selfish (while actually not taking the vaccine (because you are worried about your own health) is selfish).

Claiming to fight freedom of speech, while your movement is banning books, and having government agencies use list of forbidden words to redirect government funding to unversities.

Bannon: "It’s rule “by the wealthy, for the wealthy—against you,” he says." That is exactly what his political movement has been doing.

People protesting against the genocide in Gaza are claimed to be antisemites, while Trump has openly embraced and legitimized explicitly antisemitic neonazi groups like the "proud boys".

This article talks about the "populist camera obscura" that inverts the world:

"authoritarianism is seen as real democracy and people’s freedom"
"dismissing feminism as endorsing gender equality"
"and the systematic use of deception and falsehood as truth and courageous honesty"

The resistance 🙃

Possible futures

Planning

Eco-fascism

What is fascism?

Colonialism and fascism

Lindqvist in "Exterminate all the brutes": Fascism and the holocaust were "colonialism coming home".

The holocaust stands out because of its industrial nature, not necessarily because of its genocidal intent.

Klein in Doppelganger:

Quoting Julian Brave NoiseCat:

"It’s all so Freudian. The fear that it will happen to them stems from an implicit admission that they did it to others."

"As though the Black, Brown and Indigenous downtrodden are just as hateful as they are and are going to turn around and do to them what they did to us."

Herself:

"Is that part of what we are seeing? Are increasingly violent conspiracy theorists in the Mirror World afraid of being rounded up, treated as second- class, occupied, and culled because on some level they know that these are the genocidal behaviors that created and sustain their relative but increasingly precarious privileges? Are they terrified that if the truths of the Shadow Lands—past, present, and future—are ever fully revealed and reckoned with, then it can only result in a dramatic role reversal, with the victims becoming the victimizers?"

(A while ago I wrote a blog post about something similar: https://mishathings.org/posts/2024-08-02-quantum-coherence-and-zionism/ )

Contemporary fascism?

Why talk about eco-fascism?

Hardin's lifeboat

The right is right

Remember - the right is right

Densensitization

As Klein - being Jewish - writes:

"Israel also became a doppelganger of the colonial project, specifically settler colonialism. Many of Zionism’s basic rationales were thinly veiled Judaizations of core Christian colonial conceptions: Terra Nullius, the claim that continents like Australia were effectively empty because their Indigenous inhabitants were categorized as less than fully human, became “A land without a people for a people without a land”—a phrase adopted by many Zionists and that originated with nineteenth-century Christians. Manifest Destiny became “land bequeathed to the Jews by divine right.” “Taming the wild frontier” became “making the desert bloom.”

"The tacit argument many Zionists were making at the time was that Jews had earned the right to an exception from the decolonial consensus—an exception born of their very recent near extermination. The Zionist version of justice said to Western powers: If you could establish your empires and your settler colonial nations through ethnic cleansing, massacres, and land theft, then it is discrimination to say that we cannot. If you cleared your land of its Indigenous inhabitants, or did so in your colonies, then it is anti-Semitic to say that we cannot. It was as if the quest for equality were being reframed not as the right to be free from discrimination, but as the right to discriminate. Colonialism framed as reparations for genocide."