blackisthelight

There’s a meme format where the guy at a party is thinking about something and it often pops into my head when I find out something niche and nerdy about the far right. Like the folksy looking tea company from Yorkshire that’s run by neo-Nazis, which if you’re still used to thinking of boneheads in bomber jackets might be a bit surprising. Times are changing, and versions of the far-right mutate and coalesce rapidly in the online era. But that said, why not start with a quote from Adolf Hitler, a man who needs little introduction.

When people attempt to rebel against the iron logic of nature, they come into conflict with the very same principles to which they owe their existence as human beings. Their actions against nature must lead to their own downfall. (Mein Kampf)

Most people today will consider concerns with the environment to be the remit of liberal and left politics, and associate the right with indifference or callousness towards environmental degradation and climate change. Despite the dominant trends since the 1960s, environmental activism has long shown a distinct link to right wing politics and issues. This is not necessarily a bad thing. There will probably always be conservative people and using these connections to form cross-community alliances to adjust for climate change is going to be necessary. However, the further right on the political spectrum we go, the more likely attacks on minorities as scapegoats for social problems become a mainstay of the movement. While the right and far-right attachment to environmental politics has faded over the last number of decades it still holds its own logic that may become more relevant in the near future as the impact of climate collapse hits harder. One term for this is reactionary ecology, which can be seen as those movements which seek to produce and enforce racial and sexual hierarchies through invoking ‘natural’ systems. Before digging in it might be a good idea to define some of the terms used here. The term far-right will be used as a general term but it should be understood as several distinct and often competing elements.

Reactionary right groups advocate a form of ultra-conservatism, attempting to capture institutions and use them to impose their vision of society. Fascism should be seen as a revolutionary force willing to destroy institutions to get its way. Christian nationalist groups attempt to impose theocratic rule through the state. While fascist groups are always overtly violent, using threats, street gangs and paramilitaries to gain power, the others may hide their violence behind the forces of the state. In an Irish context, the gold-hoarding Hitler-quoting National Party might be considered fascist, the Irish Freedom Party might be considered reactionary right, and a group like the trad-catholic SSPX-Resistance sect could be thought of as Christian nationalist, although this term is more typically used in an American context.

Fascism itself is a notoriously tricky thing to define. Some of the best attempts have been offered by the Italian writer Umberto Eco, American historian Robert Paxton who wrote a lot about World War 2, and Yale professor of philosophy Jason Stanley. Eco wrote in 1995’s Ur-Fascism a list of 14 traits he considered to define the fascist movements that had blighted his early years. It’s a very lengthy definition but worth a read. Stanley offered ten traits for fascist politics in 2014’s How Fascism Works.

Paxton wrote in his 2004 work Anatomy of Fascism: “Fascism may be defined as a form of political behaviour marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

In terms of class composition, fascism can be seen as a cross-class collaboration led by the downwardly mobile middle classes, backed up by disenfranchised elements of the working class and financed by wealthy backers.

The phrase eco-fascism has a few different interpretations, sometimes used pejoratively to dismiss impassioned ecological movements. As used here it refers to a strand of fascism that sees nature as a source of power and inspiration, and uses the defence of nature to justify fascist outcomes such as genocide and ethnic cleansing.

Pre-1914

The history of modern western environmentalism might be said to have been formed in the American west, where the conservation movement became aware of the potential for rapacious economic expansion to destroy beautiful natural regions at the frontiers of the United States. The urge to save these areas from the mechanised advances of industrial civilization was justified, as settlers and their economy had ravaged the enormous primeval forests of the east and showed no sign of slowing down, but the urge to conserve spaces for the enjoyment of those that could afford it was based on the same logic of the frontier settlement itself. The remote areas were seen as pristine and untouched and the solution was to drive out the native population and install a guardianship of responsible settlers to oversee the preservation of the wilderness, thus disregarding the thousands of years of native land stewardship that existed in these areas. The logic persists to this day on Turtle Island, albeit with some improvements in relationship to the First Nations. The great National Park system of the US and Canada was founded on removing Indigenous people and their lifestyles and traditions from defined areas and replacing them with a carefully controlled and managed system, usually with an adjacent tourist economy to milk profits from the remaining pockets of so-called wilderness. This logic was akin to colonialism in other parts of the world where enlightened Europeans would attempt to save some places of natural beauty from destruction while blaming displaced and impoverished natives for trying to survive the brutal effects of colonial exploitation.

One of the main architects of the National Park system in the early twentieth century was Madison Grant, a colleague of Theodore Roosevelt, who is credited with developing modern wildlife management practices and helping to save several species from extinction. (As an aside, Roosevelt himself coined the phrase ‘race suicide’ as a precursor to the great replacement or white genocide conspiracy theories popular with today’s racists.) Madison Grant was also a prominent eugenicist (which at the time was popular across the political spectrum) and anti-immigration activist whose writings on the superiority of Nordic races were a significant influence on Hitler who described Grant’s book, The Passing of the Great Race as his bible. His work on racialised statistics and his legal advocacy led to legislation excluding Asians, Africans and Southern Europeans from immigrating to the US. Advocating extremist white supremacy was for Grant a logical development of his understanding of the natural environment. His conserving of endangered species such as the bison was also reflected in his attempts at preserving the Nordic or Aryan race from extinction, a fear that drives much of the latter day far right movement.

Predating the rise of late nineteenth century American movements, as a backlash to the industrial revolution and the age of enlightenment, the Romantic movement grew in popularity, emphasising an idealised connection with nature and glorifying a pre-industrial past. Some elements of the Romantic movement in Germany in the early 1800s contained many aspects of anti-rationalist thought, connecting the natural world with a xenophobic nationalist fervour that viewed their pristine homeland being degraded by the forces of technology and undesirable outsiders, such as the French from the west, the Slavs from the east and the Jews from inside. These ideas became an important part of German nationalist thought post-unification in 1870 and morphed into the völkish movement in the late nineteenth century, which again laid the blame for the ecological damage of industrial capitalism at outsiders corrupting a primeval utopia.

One of the adherents to völkism, Ernst Haeckel, coined the term ecology in 1867. Haeckel was a prominent zoologist and artist who popularised Darwin’s ideas on evolution. Haeckel also promoted scientific racism, believing in the racial superiority of northern Europeans. He supported ideas on racial purity, advocated for policies of executing disabled people, and was a fervent nationalist. The very concept of ecology was linked to reactionary authoritarian views from its conception, and Haeckel successfully introduced a scientific veneer of Social Darwinism to the essentially irrational mystical racism of the völkish movement. This is not to say that ecology itself is inextricably tarnished, but that it has a complicated history that deserves careful consideration as to how and why it has fostered or been adopted by reactionary movements.

Interwar

In the aftermath of the First World War, many German youth groups or Wandervögel were set up to promote healthy lifestyles. Many of the youth groups were influenced by the Romantics and became disinterested in the social causes of environmental destruction, preferring to focus on individual choices and eschewing radical critiques of the economics of the time. When the Nazis rose to power, many of the Wandervögel were swept along into the party. Fascist ideas of youthful virility and health in the name of securing a future for the master race led many into activities such as health foods, alternative medicines and environmental protection, and vice versa as the seductive power of authoritarianism led many to pin their hopes on fascist parties saving the environment.

Martin Heidegger, one of the most prominent of the Nazi philosophers, is often defended by people who find affinity with his ecological writings, his decentring of the human experience, advocacy of local power and defence of the natural world, without realising that all these elements are not incompatible with Nazism. This is of course, not to say that all or any of these ideas themselves constitute a far-right ideology, but merely to point out that they are not fundamentally left or right. The fusing of nationalism and nature was a key component of the Nazi program, the enduring slogan of Blut und Boden or Blood and Soil was popularised by Richard Walther Darré, the Nazi minister for Agriculture The slogan laid claim to the land and pledged to defend it from outsiders. Darré was also a leading race theorist of the party (who referred to Jews as weeds) and held a large influence over its ideology, solidifying its anti-urban and anti-modern outlook while also funding organic farming programs as part of the war effort. Another aspect of the reactionary ecology of the era was upholding a ‘natural order’ that included genocidal eugenics and Aryan supremacy. Blood and Soil implied that other races were not capable of such rootedness, and thus lesser. This in turn justified Lebensraum policies of invading territory in the east and murdering or otherwise ridding it of its inhabitants who would then be replaced by responsible German settlers. The traditional rural village was idealised as a contrast to the degenerate modernist multicultural cities. These were core beliefs of many of the party leadership.

The Nazi party was not a monolith and different tendencies and factions vied for power and influence. While some in the party rejected tendencies such as anthroposophy and biodynamics as quackery, Rudolph Steiner’s ideas of ‘root races’ blended easily with ideas of Aryan supremacy. The Anthroposophical Society itself was banned in 1935 as part of a wider crackdown on any competing social organisations not under Nazi control. Heinrich Himmler (head of the SS and the Gestapo and one of the lead architects of the Holocaust) was attracted to mysticism and established organic farms to produce herbal medicine for SS soldiers including one at Dachau concentration camp. Rudolph Hess (Deputy Führer until 1941) used homeopathic medicine and followed a strict biodynamic diet. Hitler promoted renewable energy as an alternative to coal and diesel power. Environmental considerations were adopted at a federal and state level for construction projects and strict rules protecting flora and fauna were introduced to combat rural degradation. All this environmentalism was a fundamental part of the Aryan racial rejuvenation that would see them attempt to conquer the world, and not some exercise in greenwashing to gain popularity.

The Nazi views on the environment, natural purity and the laws of nature perversely helped to lay the foundations for industrial mass murder. The logic of mystical ecology devoid of social analysis gave rise to genocide as a solution to environmental destruction.

Post-War

The connection between the far-right and environmentalism was proven time and again in post-war Germany where far-right groups continuously included environmental aspects to their programs and manifestos and made inroads into the German Green movement over the course of several decades. This took the form of both of far-right groups proclaiming their environmental credentials and of environmentalists attempting to reclaim what they thought of as the useful parts of Nazi history.

In Britain, The Soil Association, set up in 1946, was an early advocate of organic farming practices and counted several notable fascist and Nazi supporters among its leadership such as Jorian Jenks, the former BUF agricultural advisor. Jenks had advocated for small scale organic farming as a means to disengage from the world markets and become self-sufficient in food production. He maintained contact with Darré after the war, continued to work with Mosley and his Union Movement and edited the Soil Association journal, Mother Earth until his death in 1963. The British Nationalist Party have claimed to be Britain’s only true Green party because they are willing to blame immigration for environmental problems. Others even further to the right have adopted environmentalism and animal rights as more prominent aspects of their platforms. Animal rights is also an area of crossover between left and right. Concern for the welfare of animals has been used as a means to differentiate between superior and inferior races or cultures by the far-right for decades. In the 1930’s a prominent anti-vivisection group in London was considered a wing of the British Union of Fascists and animal welfare has not infrequently been an issue for various far right groups since. Criticisms of kosher and halal practices by these groups are often thinly veiled excuses for racism and anti-immigrant activity. The relationships between animal rights groups and the far right have not been one-way and have been a consistent element of far right platforms for a century. Notional appeals to ‘purity’, whether through a vegan diet, abstinence from alcohol and other substances, racial and ethnic homogeneity, sexual preferences and other areas of human activity can coalesce into a powerful sense of superiority and be used to justify harm to those considered less pure.

In France, parts of the Nouvelle Droit, spearheaded by Alain de Benoist and GRECE, have embraced ecology since the early 90’s and developed ways to use environmental concerns to attract followers and mainstream their far-right ideology. This has since been taken up by Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National touting borders as the best defence for the environment. Both RN and Golden Dawn in Greece have founded Green wings of their parties and the logic of ‘ecobordering’ is fast replacing denialism among many of the leading European far-right parties. The Swiss People’s Party conflates immigration with increased carbon emissions and water and air pollution. The fascist Italian Casa Pound group promotes itself as a defender of biodiversity and nativist ecology, organizing an annual tree-planting event aimed at protecting native plants from invasive and destructive alien plants. Jobbik in Hungary has campaigned against invasive flora. The neo-Nazi Nordic Resistance Movement in Norway and Sweden campaigns for animal and environmental rights while ranting against Jews and immigrants taking over Scandinavia.

In the US, a large and widely successful white supremacist network was set up and run by one of the worst Americans you may never have heard of – John Tanton. Tanton was an ophthalmologist from Michigan who started his activism with mainstream environmental groups such as the Sierra Club, Audubon Society and the Nature Conservancy. An obsession with population and birth rates led him into the world of white supremacy. Tanton was heavily influenced and worked with Paul Ehrlich, the Stanford professor and author who wrongly predicted massive famines due to population growth. Tanton also advocated for abortion rights and eugenics in the US in order to reduce undesirable populations and linked immigration to environmental destruction, advocating this position in both far-right and environmental circles at a high level. Both Tanton and his wife served as active members of Planned Parenthood, a prominent abortion and birth control advocacy group that had its roots in eugenics and race science. The founder, Margaret Sanger, was a family friend of the Mellons who would later finance Tanton’s groups. By the late 80s, Tanton was fully immersed in the besuited white supremacist movement, working with the likes of Jared Taylor and Peter Brimelow and publishing racist screeds like the novel Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail, which has become a keystone text of modern racist movements, all financed by the massive wealth of Cordelia Scaife May, heiress of the Mellon fortune, and supported by wealthy oil executives and prominent politicians. His anti-immigration groups had innocuous sounding names, such as Federation for American Immigration Reform and NumbersUSA, but with the help of Scaife Maye’s money (totalling hundreds of millions of dollars) and Tanton’s tireless organising, his network grew to exert a substantial influence over the right wing of the Republican party. The multiple organisations gave the appearance of a diverse network of groups who could cite each other’s work to provide evidence for their claims. Tanton and his associates, including Sea Shepherd founder Paul Watson, repeatedly tried to take over the Sierra Club in the early 2000s, attempting to turn America’s largest and best-known conservation group into an anti-immigration platform. After the election of Trump in 2016, Tanton associates such as Stephen Miller, Kellyanne Conway, Jeff Sessions and others, along with lesser-known activists filled the ranks of the Trump appointees to immigration related federal departments, and helped implement attempted bans on Muslim immigration and the building of a border wall with Mexico

Garret Hardin was another prominent American ecologist active from the 60s through to the 90s who worked with Tanton. Hardin was a professor of ecology at the University of California and his work focused on overpopulation as a cause of ecological collapse. His views on immigration can easily be categorized as white nationalist and he popularized the concept of lifeboat ethics, whereby helping others leads to disaster for all. His views on collective ownership leading to social collapse are consistent with American anti-left thought and gained him popularity among pro-private ownership ecologists. Hardin championed proposals for authoritarian solutions to environmental problems which are increasingly being taken up by tech elites, proposing to harness state surveillance to enforce environmental protection. The expansion of state powers cannot realistically be done in one direction without expanding power and coercion among all aspects of the state, leading to higher levels of repression and control. This is something that some environmentalists seem willing to take bets on as long as they think they are in control.

Another notable intellectual in this milieu was the recently deceased Richard Lynn, a professor at the University of Ulster and the ESRI in Dublin who published many works promoting eugenics, founded the Ulster Institute for Social Research and headed the Pioneer Fund, a US based group heavily linked to white supremacist groups. Lynn edited a white supremacist journal called Mankind Quarterly and heavily influenced and funded Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray who wrote The Bell Curve in 1994, a thinking man’s guide to being a racist arsehole. Part of his work with the ESRI, for which he was presumably handsomely rewarded, involved explaining how Ireland’s economy was bad because Irish people are genetically stupid with low IQs.

From the 1960’s on, the environmental movement, particularly in North America readily embraced the overpopulation thesis of environmental destruction, focussing heavily on the raw numbers of people, while not treating the levels of consumption among wealthier people as the main driver of extraction and pollution. This led inevitably to eugenicist policies to prevent people considered less worthy from breeding, ideas still being promoted by the likes of Al Gore and Bill Gates. The writing of Thomas Malthus in the late 18th century laid much of the groundwork for this approach. Malthus wrote about how savages were unable to control their own population through self-restraint which led to overpopulation, famine and death. His ideas were used to justify non-intervention during An Gorta Mór, with the benevolent ruling class at the time deciding that it might be for the best if there were simply less Irish people living in Ireland. These attitudes were widespread throughout the European colonies for centuries, as native populations were considered either incapable of living responsibly or treated as part of the local flora and fauna to be managed by the colonisers.

Terms such as ‘carrying capacity’ can be easily adopted for racist ends, being used as a justification for excluding immigrants. In 2019, two massacres, in Christchurch, New Zealand and El Paso, Texas, by far-right gunmen, resulted in the deaths of 51 and 23 people respectively, (mostly Muslims and Latinos). The gunmen were heavily influenced by ecofascist perspectives on immigration, population and environmental destruction. The Christchurch shooter self-described as an ecofascist and wrote ‘The invaders are the ones overpopulating the world. Kill the invaders, kill the overpopulation and in doing so save the environment.’ Part of the El Paso shooter’s manifesto stated that ‘if we can get rid of enough people then our way of life can become more sustainable.’ Implied in the statement is a value judgement on whose way of life should be preserved and which people must die. The manifesto also contained many references to industrial pollution and ecological destruction by corporations and consumerist society and laid the blame at overpopulation by immigrants. While frequently described as lone wolf attacks, the perpetrators of the mass killings should be seen as members of diffused online networks whose members urge and glorify these actions and venerate the killers as saints.

The fascist imaginary of a past, idealised harmonious nation is taken to mean that pollution was not an issue until ‘others’ started showing up. While focusing on immigration and population, these parties tend to not engage in basic critiques of consumption, industrialization and extraction as the main drivers of climate change and environmental collapse. The attempt is to make whole again what has been broken by modernity. The more esoteric elements of fascist thought, – such as Savitri Devi who developed a philosophy of worshipping Hitler as a god, and Julius Evola whose writings rejecting modernity have found plenty of adherents among modern fascists, including Steve Bannon– have frequently included concepts of nature and natural order, to justify their extreme racism and advocacy of mass violence.

Present Day

The alt-right movement which coalesced around the Trump election has since splintered into assorted component parts, some of which have taken on significant environmental aesthetics and ideas. Many of the rejections of modernity, to borrow a popular phrase from Evola, comprise an embrace of traditional hyper-masculine endeavours posed in contrast to what they see as a decadent liberal culture. Meat-based diets, tradwives and cottage-core, survivalist practices, paganism, mysticism, conspirituality, paranoia about state and corporate control, setting up rural communes and trying to breed a new generation of white children to save the master race all have direct links to right wing concepts of nature and the environment. Many of these subcultural spaces are in turn populated with people who may or may not agree with fascist thought but are exposed to it and the accompanying propaganda.

Coming from the other direction, some environmentalists, embracing anti-humanist and misanthropic positions have lurched rightwards. The overpopulation myth, racist ideas of culture and pollution devoid of social analysis, and a desire for an authoritarian government to fix environmental problems have led some to forge links with the right. Derrick Jensen, an American deep ecologist whose work was popular among eco-anarchist circles in the 2000s, is one notable example. Having embraced transphobia as a reaction against what he thought was unnatural, Jensen found himself unwelcome in radical left circles and kept moving rightward, having lately found himself producing work with outright fascists and genocidal antisemites such as CounterCurrents and Roscommon’s own Keith Woods. Conservative and reactionary thought is happy to use the binary of natural and unnatural to justify patriarchal and heteronormative positions and to attack feminist and queer movements for liberation. Some notable Green Party members in North America have become entangled with conspiracism and authoritarianism. A Canadian candidate named Monika Schaeffer produced Holocaust denial material and the Green Party candidate for Vice President in the 2016 election, Ajamu Baraka has embraced conspiracy theories in favour of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and spoken at a Duginist conference in Iran, showing a tendency for some greens to embrace the anti-imperialism of idiots and to move towards fascism instead of away from it. With the recent experiences of the pandemic and the associated paranoia and misinformation, anti-vaccine groups and macho fitness freaks have come to be seen as adjacent to right wing culture. They continue to make inroads into left and liberal spaces, attracting contrarians and providing seductively easy answers to difficult questions.

In the 1920s and 30s, fascism was a new idea, harnessing the potential of the state to promise benefits to its citizens, while simultaneously narrowing the definition of who deserved to be considered a citizen and inflicting horrific violence on those that failed to mount the ever-increasing hurdles to inclusion. A romantic attachment to the land and a belief in a mystical, rural past are often present in fascist ideologies and these are not incompatible with many environmental movements. What can set them apart from a more social and compassionate environmentalism, is the ability and desire to harness environmental protection as a weapon to inflict pain and hatred on perceived enemies – typically the migrant, the queer, the leftist, the feminist – and to blame them for the environmental degradation, and the perceived degeneration of traditional society, that has been carried out by capitalist economies. These fascist motivations are deeply irrational and driven by emotion, and they can find common cause with anti-science, anti-tech, mystical, and anti-humanist trends often present in the broader environmental movement. Conspiracy theories such as, ‘the government is spraying us all with mystery chemicals from aeroplanes’, ‘fluoride in the drinking water is used to keep people docile’ and ‘5G causes brain cancer’ might provide cheap laughs for most people but they provide strategic crossover points for left and right and spread conspiracist thought into environmental movements, which in turn debases critical thought and action from environmentalists.

While there is a much larger climate change denying cohort among the right that seeks to stymie any attempt at reducing carbon emissions or limiting damage from industrial or agricultural practices, parts of the right have accepted the reality of climate change, and this is only likely to increase in size and volume. As the predictions of climate collapse are becoming increasingly real, the far-right reaction is to blame and scapegoat a targeted minority as a solution to the problems. This may justify state or paramilitary violence against those being blamed for the consequences of carbon emissions from industrialised countries. Another aspect of right wing conspiracism is the personification of opaque economic systems onto identifiable social groups and this is a key aspect of fascist organising. It replaces ‘banking’ with ‘bankers, ‘globalization’ with ‘globalists’ and offers easy, and wrong, answers to social problems. A likely increase in aggression towards people seeking safety from war, famine and uninhabitable locations might manifest itself in increasing agitation for closed borders, deportations and worse. Immigration could be cast as a threat to local or national environments and strict border controls proposed as a solution. Immigrants can be cast as incapable of caring about their new environment, either due to ‘not belonging’ or being from an inferior culture. The scapegoating of immigrants from the global south as being guilty of environmental degradation deliberately confuses cause and effect. The centring of immigrants in discussions about the environment, shifts the focus from the centres of (over) consumption onto the areas where environmental harm has been greatest, obfuscating the history of European colonialism and entrenching racist border policies enforced by Frontex and other militarised agencies. This selective use of environmentalism can greenwash far right parties and serve as a justification for the cruelty and violence enacted by the state and others towards non-white and non-Christian people, which is the ultimate point of far-right politics.

Ireland

It's not hard to see how far right actors can make inroads into local environmental or single-issue campaigns. A small campaign struggling against the PR machine and governmental support of, let’s say a multinational mining corporation, might find itself approached by someone claiming to support the cause and offering to do some publicity work for free. A decent camera and a sizable social media following might kickstart the campaign into the national consciousness. If the offer comes from a ‘citizen journalist’ with extensive links to the far right and a history of promoting racism and other reactionary ideals, the tempting offer comes with a lot of baggage that could very quickly cause serious damage to a campaign that knowingly or unknowingly works with such a character. This is not a theoretical situation. For the last number of years this has happened repeatedly with various campaigns, to some extent. Farming, fishing, forestry, housing, healthcare and environmental campaigns have all been approached and targeted by far-right activists intent on growing their own audience and reach through association with groups outside their immediate orbit. Justifiable anger at government policy or economic hardship are used as starting points to offer support, with the aim being to proselytise to new recruits, grow far right presence and ideas, and channel energy into blaming and attacking minorities.

An online magazine called Meon appeared a few years ago. The journal bills itself as predominantly concerned with Irish environmental issues such as forestry, data centres and the like. It is almost solely promoted by fascist propagandists Keith Woods and The Burkean who seem likely to be connected to the publication. Ireland’s biggest online fascist and Nazi fan boy, Keith Woods (or O’Brien) has attracted a significant online following and is considered a protégé of Richard Spencer and moves in high profile far-right US circles alongside Nick Fuentes.

A social media channel set up to discuss sustainability, permaculture and low-tech solutions to rural living called Off Grid Ireland has become one of the main channels for fascist propaganda. The group now regularly hosts far-right content such as neo-Nazi activists from Patriotic Alternative advising on how best to drive refugees out of the community.

The use of outdoor activity to generate social bonding along with respect for Ireland’s environment and developing toughness for the race wars to come has been adopted by several far-right groups including the National Party and its Philip Dwyer led spin off Men’s Hikes. Small groups of fit young men might take the opportunity to fly a banner at the top of a mountain for propaganda purposes or pretend that they are in the army on a forced march in training for combat.

Rise Up Eireann is a group mostly run by a woman in Kerry which has managed to attract a sizable enough following among a more hippy oriented crowd. The group claimed responsibility for some large anti-covid protests including one that attracted several thousand and turned violent at St. Stephen’s Green. Confusion and resentment among anti-vaxxers during the pandemic was used to introduce reams of material on other contrarian talking points to followers, forming part of a firehose of online misinformation. The social media feed is a laundry list of conspiracies including more benign stuff like chemtrails and UFOs alongside a stream of homophobic, transphobic, anti-feminist, antisemitic and racist nonsense and shares more traditional far right content to followers. This is all adorned with flowery earth mama back to the land imagery and language. The woman behind the group has recently been active in queerphobic protests targeting libraries. Looking at an event put on in Galway is indicative of her politics, as anyone familiar with the far right in Ireland will recognise the list of speakers as being a who’s who of far right and fascist activists. The same group organises small underground music festivals. The politics are kept off the posters so as not to attract too much negative attention, and probably plenty of people might go looking for a fun weekend of music and camping, but the festivals are being promoted in the same Off-Grid channel that has put a lot of energy into introducing Irish anti-migrant protesters to British neo-Nazis.

Another example of reactionary ecology in Ireland was a recent attempt at a ‘festival of ideas’ in Westmeath. The event billed itself as a sustainability festival offering a family friendly atmosphere with music and talks. A blurb stated ‘We are bringing people together including small suppliers, producers and independent farmers… to build strong, resilient communities.’ The organisers have been at the centre of ongoing attacks on sex education and literature in the last few months targeting libraries, bookshops and schools. The social media channels are a mixture of organic food, transphobia, sustainability and paranoid conspiracies which are happily supported by many other far right channels.

There is a new group called the Farmer’s Alliance which has just proposed to set up a political party. While this group comes more into the science denial category of right wing activism, I think it’s worth mentioning as they will be trying to attract support in rural areas based on grievances, both legitimate and manufactured, with regards to governmental regulations and corporate exploitation. The group is directly inspired by the BBB farmer’s movement in the Netherlands, which has in a very short space of time managed to have a big impact on Dutch politics. BBB are probably more of a populist right than a far right party, and drew its base of support from opposition to farming regulations designed to reduce water pollution, which is very topical here. The founder of the BBB is half-Irish and has come over here to help assist the setting up of the Farmer’s Alliance. Farmer’s Alliance is already drawing support from established members of the Irish far-right and could easily gather a few independent TDs into their ranks.

Conclusion

The ever-increasing climate collapse will bring larger and larger social issues with it. The eroding of the networks that sustain modern western lifestyles will be seen by the far-right as an existential threat as will the likely mass migration. This will increasingly be met with extreme violence, cheered on and supported by the far right, which brings up the possibility of alliances with centrist and conservative governments desperate to cling on to power. The tendency of some in the environmental movement to embrace authoritarianism as a solution to social crises, married to attempts by existing powers to remain in control, all point towards an increasing relevance of ecofascism and reactionary ecology in the near future.

It would be very misleading to say that the far right are a significant presence in environmental campaigns but there are numerous examples of far-right tendencies appearing in Irish spaces, both online and in real life, adjacent to, interacting with or becoming part of environmental and community activism. While the scale or reach of such ideas should not be overblown, it forms part of an accelerating trend that seems likely to increase in the near future given the unresolvable problems of capitalism and the environment. The danger that these tendencies pose works in two distinct ways.

The first is the danger of further normalising hateful far-right rhetoric and actors. Allowing the far right to be a part of a community project grants them a seat at the table to present themselves as belonging to the community and deserving to have their views listened to, giving them a position to strengthen their groups and embolden action against minorities, which is almost entirely what the fascist project is ultimately about.

The second is that allowing far right actors into groups spreads hatred, division and paranoia among the community, damages relationships and leads to conflict and irreparable harm among members. Any activist or community organisation that allows openly far right members to participate in events will quickly become known as untrustworthy and support will likely dwindle. This is probably one of the key points I want to make. The inclusion of hateful members directly leads to the exclusion of others who are targeted by their behaviour. Inviting fascists, racists and queerphobes into the ranks of an organisation is not a winning formula to gain more support.

To reiterate an important point that may be taken up wrongly by some people. In terms of some of the ways that I have pointed out that fascists can gain entry into other spaces such as through emotional responses to environmental damage, spiritual connections to land etc., I don’t see any of these approaches as being essentially fascist, what I see them as is a common ground that can be used to build bridges, and people who engage in such practices need to be conscious of this and work to make sure those bridges don’t allow hate groups to spread their messages. Fascism relies on appeals to emotion. It doesn’t have any real solutions to social problems. There is no end to the hatred in people who have succumbed to the logic of fascism. Without a specific target to focus on, fascists need to invent one to fulfil the role of the traitor who must be driven out to purify the group. Fascism is a revolutionary ideology that purports to upend the status quo through any means necessary and has a core process of strategically appropriating various issues to further its goals. It is not merely enough to assume that one’s left wing or liberal credentials are sufficient to prevent a fascist creep in environmental circles nor entryism from the far-right, it must be actively resisted.

References

Bhatia Rajani (2004) ‘Green or Brown? White Nativist Environmental Movements’ in Ferber, Abby. L (ed.) Home Grown Hate – Gender and Organized Violence. London: Routledge pp 195-214

Biehl, Janet and Staudenmaier, Peter (2011) Ecofascism Revisited: Lessons from the German Experience Porsgrunn: New Compass Press (originally published by AK Press, 1995)

Campion, Kristy (2021) Defining Ecofascism: Historical Foundations and Contemporary Interpretations in the Extreme Right, Terrorism and Political Violence Vol. 33 No. 8

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