Fascists Among Us by Jeff Sparrow
Author:Jeff Sparrow [Sparrow, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: POL037000, POL042000, SOC031000, POL000000, POL042030
ISBN: 9781925849677
Publisher: Scribe Publications
Published: 2019-11-19T05:00:00+00:00
5
‘FORESTS, LAKES, MOUNTAINS, AND MEADOWS’
ECOFASCISM AND ACCELERATIONISM
Nothing in Person X’s document has spurred as much confusion as his references to the environment and environmentalism. ‘I … consider myself an Eco-fascist by nature,’ he wrote.1
Many conservatives used his self-description as an eco-fascist to cordon off Person X from the ideas of the right. He couldn’t be a right-winger, they said, because he’d identified himself as an environmentalist — and environmentalists belonged on the left.2
Others suggested that his comments about climate change revealed mental confusion, evidence that his manifesto should be taken less as a coherent ideological statement and more as a grab bag of pathologies. But in the context of the ongoing strategic debate among fascists, Person X’s professed ‘environmentalism’ made perfect sense, particularly given the affinity between the far right and a certain ecological tradition.
In many countries, environmentalism developed alongside the anti-immigration movement, with the same personnel sometimes involved in both. In the United States, for example, the lawyer Madison Grant founded the National Parks Association, the Save the Redwoods League, and the New York Zoological Society, helped establish the Denali National Park in Alaska and Everglades National Park in Florida — and wrote The Passing of the Great Race, a book that Hitler described as his bible. Grant’s interest in conservation and his interest in eugenics stemmed from a similar source: a belief that races were akin to natural species, and thus needed to be tended and preserved.3
In her bestselling book H is for Hawk, Helen MacDonald writes of seeing deer congregating on inhospitable land near where her mother lives. Another man joins her in watching the animals, and then says, ‘Doesn’t it give you hope?’
She asks what he means.
‘Isn’t it a relief that there’re still things like that, a real bit of Old England still left, despite all these immigrants coming in?’
Richard Smyth, who repeats that anecdote, argues that similar attitudes manifest themselves surprisingly often within nature writing. He points out that Tarka the Otter — recently voted ‘the UK’s favourite nature book’ — was written by Henry Williamson, a Hitler supporter and member of Mosley’s British Union, whose naturalism developed in parallel to his fascism.4
In Germany in particular, right-wing Romanticism gloried in the hierarchy of the wilderness, contrasting the natural struggle for survival with the egalitarian decadence of cities. The contemporary anti-fascist Alexander Reid Ross points out that the word ‘ecology’ was coined by Ernst Haeckel, an influential race theorist, while ‘biocentrism’ was associated with the philosopher Ludwig Klages, who blamed environmental destruction on modernity … and Jews.5
Such ideas found their way into National Socialism and its concept of ‘Blood and Soil’, the supposed biological basis of German nationalism. Nazi theorists such as Richard Walther Darré asserted a semi-mystical link between the German peasantry and the land on which they toiled. Deracinated cosmopolitans might thrive in the metropolis, but Aryans, the Nazis claimed, could only flourish with sufficient lebensraum (living space).
‘There is no nationalism without environmentalism,’ writes Person X, ‘the natural environment of our lands shaped us just as we shaped it.
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