See French translation
Recent news that the German Green Party is willing to work with the extreme right “Alternative for Germany” (AfD) in order to secure a vote to ban glyphosate has shocked many political actors seeking a cordon sanitaire around the German fascist party. The Risk-Monger though is not surprised. He has often used words like “undemocratic”, “Machiavellian” and “fascist” to describe the self-righteous environmental activist campaign strategies.
Contradictions for the Cause
The Greens are a party of inherent contradictions. They talk of democracy and the voice of the common person yet the consequences of their food and energy policies favour the elite and the privileged (at the expense of the poor). Greens will lead transparency campaigns and moves to expose corporate lobbying, and yet they themselves, as transparocrites, often do not disclose from whom and how they use their (public) funds. They seek development and increased aid for emerging economies and yet they legislate to harm African agricultural and technological development. Environmentalists are quick to be righteous but unlike industry and government, do not adhere to ethical codes of conduct and even condone lying and breaking the law.
These contradictions are tolerated by the passion of the environmentalist ideology. Driven to change the world, the Greens have shown their Machiavellian stripes. The ends not only justify the means, it also allows these princes of purity to justify a whole heap of deception, intolerance and injustice (as the recent Portier Papers demonstrated). So if activists like Corporate Europe Observatory’s Martin Pigeon will knowingly get in bed with slime-ball American predatory lawyers; USRTK’s Carey Gillam will happily take money from anti-vaccine nut-jobs; NGOs like Greenpeace openly justify lying; should we be surprised that the German Green Party has stripped themselves naked for the puerile pleasure a rag-tag band of neo-Nazis (I hope they used a condom!)?
I can understand how some nature-loving kittens may be offended with my comparing them to a political ideology responsible for millions of deaths, so perhaps some qualifications are in order. Fascism arises when someone is willing to do anything to achieve a set of goals – principles of decency, tolerance and propriety are secondary and expendable. Motivated by higher goals (nationalism, racial supremacy, purity), fascists execute this strategy with righteous, Machiavellian precision. For environmentalists, if there is a means to succeed in saving the planet, that strategy is elevated above and beyond widely shared codes of conduct (sometimes crudely and condescendingly referred to as the values of the “sheeple”).
I have referred to this as zealot ethics but it is also a core fascist mindset: obsessive, blind righteousness! Green activists are essentially fascists who tolerate minorities! So for the German Green Party to work directly with a band of neo-Nazis is a no-brainer – they have so much in common. To achieve their goal, the German Greens merely will hold their nose and look the other way when their sister party, the AfD, starts attacking immigrants.
Ten Practices linking Environmentalism with Fascism
Not only do environmental activists, Green Party politicians and organic industry lobbyists engage in fascist practices, they also agree with many of the fascist ideologies. Here are ten practices that link environmentalism with fascism.
1. Denying Dialogue
I have often criticised how environmental activists in Brussels have worked to block dialogue. Not just how they have organised events in the European Parliament or the Hague where they deny others the right to participate and engage, but how they actively work to exclude others, like industry representatives, from participating in public debates. Denying the process of open dialogue is something only fascist-minded individuals would support. Pro-organic activists have even shut down Facebook pages and blog-sites.
2. Argumentum ad hominem
Whenever people who do not know me accuse me of being all sorts of evil (because they disagree with me), I get an image in my head of an angry, clean-cut Hitler’s Youth child chanting verbiage at me. Environmentalists do not argue on the basis of facts, science or evidence; rather they attack individuals personally, often quite viciously, via ad hominem attacks. These bully tactics are aimed to intimidate individuals in a ruthless ostracism resembling how opponents were treated in 1930s Germany.
3. Green Goebbelesque Gurus
Rhetorical jingoism repeatedly communicated works well when ubiquitous. In the 1930s, Joseph Goebbels utilised an emerging communications technology, cinema, to manipulate perception and enhance public fears and prejudices against certain races and ideologies. As the technology was new, few were able to discern reality from propaganda. Today we have the emerging social media communications technology, and there are dozens of Green Goebbelesque Gurus running around weaving green lies, repeated millions of times until their credibility is uncontested. I know it is a misquote, but “the bigger the lie, the more it will be believed” works perfectly on social media. If you share the views of Stephanie Seneff or Vandana Shiva five million times, they might just start to sound less ridiculous.
Just imagine if Goebbels had opened a Facebook page for Herr Hitler …
4. Victim Opportunism
Never waste a good crisis. When Herschel Grynszpan allegedly assassinated German diplomat, Ernst vom Rath, the Nazi pogrom strategy went into motion. If you can use a victim for your own gain, and exploit the reality to hype up fear, chances are, you would make a very good fascist! The greens have taken this victim abuse strategy to the next level – we are all victims of the evil chemical industry. When Carey Gillam scares you about trace levels of glyphosate in your blood, in your daughter’s blood, in everyone’s blood, she is strategically creating mobs of walking wounded to exploit. That twinkle in Carey’s eye is historically haunting.
5. Greenshirt Mob Mentality
It is no surprise to the Risk-Monger that discussions with activists usually turn quickly into verbally aggressive mob attacks that can become quite threatening. Scientists like Kevin Folta have received death threats by this band of organic storm-troopers. Now the German Agricultural Minister, Christian Schmidt, who voted in favour of glyphosate, is facing death threats, is under protection and has had to take down his social media pages. The mob wants his blood and it is likely Angela will comply. Vulnerable, frightened people can easily be made to act irrationally when their passions have been stoked by merciless opportunists. We are now in Donation December – there is no telling how far the NGOs will go to whip up some outrage.
6. A Relentless Desire to Win at any Cost
In their relentless drive to change the world, activists don’t lose campaigns, but merely suffer temporary setbacks from which they regroup and fight even more ruthlessly. The loss of the glyphosate vote is the equivalent of a Beer Hall Putsch. Seeing the rhetoric and venom coming out of Green Party corridors, the desire to drive forward and ban glyphosate has grown stronger with their saucy outrage. Only a fascist would not accept the decision of a legal, regulatory process. Will they set fire to the Berlaymont?
7. The Charade of Democracy
Branding themselves as representatives of the people, greens are very good at pretending to be democratic. Whenever an activist presents a policy statement, it is always cleverly voiced in the “we”, pretending their 5-7% of the electorate is actually representing the interests of the 99%. A small part of the population actually eats organic food, but they want all of us to (even if it means creating global food insecurity and environmental destruction).
When the glyphosate reauthorisation was passed, the activists screamed that it was undemocratic. First of all, facts and evidence don’t need to be democratic! If 95% of the population denies evolution, it does not mean creationism is correct. In any case, the 1.3 million signatories of the activists’ silly citizen’s initiative suggests they think their narrow-minded views take priority over the livelihoods of 12 million European farmers or hundreds of millions of European consumers. Why? Because they are the Übermensch. The Greens will fight on to ban glyphosate through other, non-democratic measures, accepting no compromise – this is “total war”.
8. Blut und Boden
The most frightening illustration of Green fascism has been this “blood and soil” approach to mobilise a form of puritan, organic Aryanism. Our food has been contaminated by the modern technologies of an externalised industrial exploiter and manipulator – the pesticides industry. The German Food and Agriculture minister from 1933, Walter Darré, proposed a back to basics, back to the land ideology, with a more traditionalist and conservationist (green) approach. This “new nobility” conserving soil has been seamlessly adopted by today’s agroecologists. When organic industry spokespeople start salivating about peasant farmers and smallholders in Cuba or Africa feeding hungry western elitist consumers, my mind wanders to Darré’s colonisation for his new nobility.
9. Heimat.org: Back to Green Righteous Roots
There have been many academics who have linked today’s Greens to 1930s Nazi Party ideology: Anna Bramwell’s autobiography on Darré or Rupert Darwall’s recent book, Green Tyranny, come to mind, showing how green Nazi policies have endured until today. Not only were Darré’s dabbling in organic food and free-range livestock rearing celebrated in 1930s Germany, but Nazi’s also were known to promote homeopathy and other alternative medicines. As today, being righteous and being fascist were synonymous. Hitler wanted to ban smoking but apparently relented, needing his soldiers to be “battle ready”.
There is even research linking the founding of the German Green Party directly to former Nazis. I have to admit I felt uncomfortable reading an NGO’s criticism of the Risk-Monger suggesting there was something prima facie wrong with my being involved as a speaker at an event partly organised by an Israeli group. It suggests that the Green’s attitudes here are more than simply pro-Palestinian sentiments.
10. Monsanto: The Final Solution?
To mobilise the masses and keep the mob enraged, any good fascist knows the value of a scapegoat. Years of propaganda and lies, repeated with Goebbelian precision, has built up an irrational rage against Monsanto: the “New Jew” – that filthy, vilified parasite that must be exterminated. When I tried to attend the Monsanto Tribunal show trial last year, I was alarmed at the blood-thirstiness of the angry strategists (definitely not the warm tree-huggers from the hippie commune I had expected). The green final solution entails destroying all industry so that the masses may prosper.
An Extreme on all your Houses
The last year has seen the disconcerting rise of the extreme right in election battles across Europe from France to the Netherlands, from Germany to Austria. After almost a decade of economic austerity and recessions, it should not be a surprise that the European electorate has radicalised to the extremes. But it is not just the far right that should concern us. As in the 1930s, the far left has also gained important ground, including being involved in governments in Austria, the Netherlands and perhaps Germany. With the ideological failure of Communism, the values of the extreme left today is more and more occupied by the Greens.
The distance on the political spectrum between the extreme left and the extreme right is not that far. Both sides are not very good democrats, deny open dialogue, are quite righteous and passionate in their ideologies, are Machiavellian in their political strategies and know how to mobilise their mobs via emerging communications tools. So it should surprise no one that the German Green Party is ready to get in bed with the neo-Nazis if it means allowing them to ban an efficient herbicide.
What surprises me is how so few people are outraged by the antics of these fascist environmentalists.
The Risk-Monger 
Reblogged this on Utopia – you are standing in it!.
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Coincidentally, I was just listening to Jordan Peterson interview Jonathan Haidt and discuss the psychology of disgust. Peterson suggests that Hitler’s most heinous acts were motivated by disgust and that there is a fundamental correlation between disgust sensitivity and attitudes about purity and cleanliness, among other things. I wonder if the observed similarities between Hitler and zealous Greens are just a few of what may be many shared, deeply embedded psychological traits. https://jordanbpeterson.com/2017/11/episode-34/
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Interesting. The difference of fear and disgust is interesting. I would say “outrage” has a role there – that which makes you want to destroy something rather than running away from it. Interesting to note Darré was against the Germans reclaiming the colonial territories in Africa. He felt the diseases were too great.
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Jordan Peterson: “If you are afraid of something then you run away from it or you freeze, but if something disgusts you, you try to burn it or kill it, right, you try to get rid of it or expel it, that’s right, you want to get it away and destroy it.”
Peterson observes that in the book, Hitler’s Table Talk, all the language is of disgust, that the core theme is that the Aryan race and country was a pure body assaulted by parasites.
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I love the part about Hitler being a clean freak and getting factories to clean up (by gassing the rats).
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Not really about you ecofascism article, but about recet problem of reality denial in glyphosate GM debate.
in India the nationalist outrage because of a pretended, propably non existent, muslim-hindu romance.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/11/17/bounty-placed-bollywood-actress-head-hindu-muslim-film-outrage/
in fact in both case I see a political group simply ignore facts, and sure doubts, just because they want to how their capacity to terrorize dissenters.
This is why they attacked you, why they fired dissenters in a French consumer journal
https://www.agriculture-environnement.fr/a-la-une/seznec-ecologie-radicale-le-lobby-bio-et-le-maccarthysme
why thei attack even non GM cropt tests…
It is the strategy of the cristal night, induce terror so the opponents get shocked.
in fact the watermelon intelectual are very good in explaining their own strategy, blaming others, like “merchant of doubt”
https://theierecosmique.com/2016/07/31/la-science-du-tabagisme-et-le-sophisme-de-big-tobacco-difficulte-facile-4000-mots-25-mins/
and the “strategy of the shock” that I explain above.
Herve This recently explained that many scientists stopped communicating by fear of being attacked.
On other non green domain I know the same tactic have been used, with dissidents, often old very respected experts nor far from Nobel,
Without evidences , and with the helps of frauds and non scientific arguments, they have been accused of frauds or errors, and any defense was ignored, while sequence of inquiry were launched destroying their career, finding nothing, but supporting doubt.
Tha paradox is that scientific method, morality , were used as arguments, while there was clear fraud on the opposing camp, with frauds proven by the editor, with errors in crictics conformed by known science, with claims of lack of publication and peer review, beaing factually wrong, with lack of replication, weakness of effects, being factually wrong… with errors with opponents experiments being spotted and detauled… no evidenc, even just listing in publication, can be accepted and on Wikipedia even facts cannot be entered becaue a handful of activists (not green here), block even what respect Wikipedia charts.
Personal attack, like student jokes (putting an experiment in a nuclear reactor to create fake positives) or home attack (horse manure in the mail box) have been used and also career have been destroyed (moving a respected expert to manage the stock in a national lab).
today in farming question, INRA is like like catholic church playing with the brown shirts, trying to save individual but playing it with coward diplomacy in public, with some of their members simply supporting the popular frauds, not being prevented by the hierarchy.
of course the industrials and commerce lords play it with the power, and the few who still opposed (eg Leclerc) have recently surrendered and paid their tax to the NGOs.
if people don’t understand that green want dictatorship, here is an article that not only was written, but published in a mainstream journal, in a democratic country
https://www.svd.se/demokratin-maste-pausas-for-att-losa-klimatkrisen
Time to panic, no more fun.
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Some excellent points here which makes me realise there are at least three more practices that show the fascist tendencies of environmentalism (I’ll have to write a volume two!)
1 -The activist reapers destroying field trials are essentially like those who came out on the night of the broken glass or the book burnings – denying the intellectuals or scientists any right to authority or expertise.
2 – How the academe was shamed or oppressed. Berkeley today seems like Freiburg in the 30s – for every Husserl who suffered there was a Heidegger who prospered.
3 – The Catholic church in the 30s (moreso in Italy) could be compared to many of the farming associations today – tolerating the rise of ignorance and prejudice (in this case I suspect they are anticipating more funding for farmers).
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We Love GMO and Vaccines was recently attacked with a FOIA as he is a teacher
View at Medium.com
fascism grows, and the problem is not that activist are evil, it is that we let them terrorizse those who oppose
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_…
time to panic or emigrate, but where ? not EU, not US…
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Another good analogy would be the 1950’s American far-right, as described in The Paranoid Style in American Politics I spoke earlier here.
As the Green movement of now, this movement innovated in communication, thereby enabling them to reach a greater number of persons, Advances in wireless communication and mass mailing enabled groups to send their propaganda and receive money from a larger public than before. Outfits such as the John Birch Society and Rev. Billy James Hargis became able to use these innovations.
They also used the fears then prevalent in the Fifties. Such groups professed opposition to Communism and support for MacCarthysm and “Americanism.”
All this, combined, helped the rise of these movements, making them gain more and more members and consequently more and more influence and money, both helping them to gain even more and more influence in a positive feedback. As our Greens, a great number of entangled organisations were born out of this, such as the well-known John Birch Society, the Minutemen, the National Indignation Congress and the Christian Crusade.
Their activities were the mass mailing of letters to politicians, dissemination of printed documents (at its heyday, H.L. Hunt’s “Facts Forum” had more prints than The New Republic!) and mass mobilisation in elections, whether local or Federal, which made these groups gain even more influence in politics, helping congressmen, senators and mayor to get elected. Plenty of major elected officials were members or at least sympathising with them.
These groups were able to mobilize a large group of persons against causes they deemed important but the rest didn’t think important enough: for exemple, they could mass-mail letters to a school board to remove books whose authors they thought were Communists or make one candidate elected. No one invested himself in the question of which books were present in a school library nor about which elected judge deserved to be removed. In the beginning, they managed to silence the opposition enough to enact such measures as mandating anti-Communist and anti-subversive oaths; in extreme cases, such as Allan Shiver in Texas, they managed to float death penalty for communists, which they actually got in Tennessee against subversives.
Their rhetoric eerily mirrored the one currently used by our activists: they often spoke, using a paranoid tone (cf. the title of the book I cited earlier) about a great conspiracy involving high-ranking civil servants and elected officials directed against America, which involved the UN, mental health system, water fluoridation and subversion by leftist intellectuals. Some, opposed to the FDR’s New Deal, described the 1932-1952 period as “20 years of treason.” Much like today’s activists use the term “shills” and “lobyists” against their adversaries, the Birchers used “communist” and “fellow-traveller” to describe their adversaries, even when they were merely centrists.
Another features we could find in today’s activists was the need to have a “totem,” or titular enemy symbolising what they opposed to, even if they are far weaker than imagined; Monsanto is this for the Greens and, for the then-far righters, it was Chief Justice Earl Warren, infamous for his decisions on civil liberties. Far-righters had boards reading “Impeach Earl Warren” along the roads, and especially in the South, which will bring us to the final point, that is, the ability to link with other movements. The CPUSA was also a possible target, although far weaker than the Communist parties of other Western countries. The UN and UNESCO were popular targets, being described as the way America would be enslaved by “world Communism.” Finally, the Kennedys joined the list in the 1960’s.
Much like today’s activists are able to link among themselves, although separated by specific goals, such as Michèle Rivasi, an anti-nuclear activist inviting Dr. Andrew Wakefield to speak about vaccination, far-righters had also the ability to cross-communicate: the John Birch Society could publish articles describing the civil right movement as being under communist control, a religious fundamentalist such as Rev. Hargis could dabble in anti-Communism and Gen. Edwin Walker, an hardliner who was dismissed for disseminating JBS documents to his troops, could participate, along segregationists, to the Ole Miss riots, and invite extremists from California to come fight against “Federal tyranny,” and later have his “Operation Midnight Ride” with Rev. Hargis helped by the KKK in the South. White Citizens’ Council members opposed to integration could join the “Impeach Earl Warren” campaign alongside the Birchers opposed to his decisions favorable to civil liberties. Arch-segregationist Senator James Eastland didn’t hesitate to describe the civil rights movement as Communists.
So how did their downfall begins? The end of MacCarthysm first, and them some more extremist declarations from them made them less and less acceptable, such as Robert Welsh describing Eisenhower as a Communist in an unpublished book or fluoride being described as a Red plot. While dismissing Walker on 62, Kennedy spoke against those spreading fear against mainstream churches, the SCOTUS, the institutions and even the drinking water.
Their opposition to the civil rights movement, based on their belief it was a communist conspiracy (one exemple of what could happen when paranoid thinking is put before the facts), with the participation of Walker to the Ole Miss riots.
On October 1963, Adlai Stevenson, ambassador to the UN, came to Dallas, a stronghold of these “hyperpatriots” and some members of the Minitemen and the National Indignation Congress “welcomed” him: one assaulted him with her placard and another sang “Kennedy will get his reward in hell.Stevenson is going to die.His heart will stop, stop, stop.And he will burn, burn, burn.” One month after was published a handbill accusing Kennedy of treason. On thys day, he was murdered, and the deed was originally blamed on the radical right.
The next year, radical right activists managed to make Goldwater nominated as GOP candidate; their superior organization made them victorious over the GOP leadership, who presented Cabot Lodge, Rockfeller and Scranton without success, even after Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act.
Each campaign day brought yet another thing the Johnson team could use against him: Strom Thurmong becoming a Republican, Alabama Alabama Grand Dragon Robert Creel endorsing him and all the crazies and segregationists rolling with him, such as the Birchers, the Minutemen; when it was finished, Goldwater got the worst Republican result, with Vermont voting for its first Democrat. This helped the Republican establishment to brush them aside, with Bill Buckley banning everyone of them from working in his journal.
Yes, the Green movement could be compared to the American far-right in the 1950’s and 1960’s.
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Fascinating really – but let’s not forget the lynchings.
My favourite line in this blog was to imagine if Goebbels had opened a Facebook page for Hitler. What would the extreme right in the 50s and 60s have been able to achieve if they had had the quick mobilisation tools of social media?
I once used an image of Senator McCarthy in my blog on Stéphane Horel – she basically asked me: Are you or have you ever been a Monsanto shill. Posing the question implies guilt.
If in-fighting tore the extreme right apart (plus, I believe McCarthy was torn apart by moral indignation) then, I wonder if the shame of how glyphosate pushed the greens into fascism might cause a schism with the moderates.
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frightening.
May be it would be efficient to send privately a good analysis about the danger of this evolution, making parallel with evil phase of history like here, toward usual politicians, toward some business personality, who follow the trend like everybody, finding it is “business as usual”.
I don’t expect any of those oppose The Trend publicly, but some may understand in private it is a societal danger for democracy and humanity. Many politician I respect are just naive on that subject, feeling it is good, and trying to serve the public good, beside their own interest, feeling it is aligned.
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Looking at some of the tweets that came out of DG Santé last Monday after the glyphosate vote, from the Commissioner and high levels in his cabinet, they know what is going on with the zealots and are rightly pissed off at them.
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Thanks to the Internet and social networks, entry costs to set up an operation are lower than in the Fifties, when it was necessary to spend a large amount of money in buying stamps and papers, along with the expenses of printing magazines, with the aggravating circumstance some of this money would be wasted since some of the receivers would not give any answer; now, all that is necessary is to have a mail server with a database to communicate with the adherents, along with the hosting costs of a website – if well managed, this web site could make its owners earn money!
Moreover, some “independents” could limit themselves to interventions in the comment sections and Twitter.
Here, the JBS would be an organization whose efforts would be supplemented by a larger body of activists able to coordinate on a larger scale, thereby enhancing the efficiency of their campaigns.
As for how it would work in the real world? Well, let’s just look at a real life instance of this in the Alt-Right.
For exemple, Dylann Roof confessed his entry into radical White nationalist began when he started to browse the Council of Conservative Citizens’ website; what if the White Citizens’ Councils, the CCC’s ancestors, could coordinate their attacks on “integrationists” on Twitter while using their website to recruit sympathisers?
A notorious exemple of 1950’s radicalisation was General Edwin Walker, who first started to be privately opposed to school integration until hearing the sermons on radio of Rev. Billy James Hargis while being posted in Little Rock on 1957, which turned him into a radical right activist and, ten years later, to get proposed by Robert Sheldon himself to become the Texas Grand Dragon.
Likewise, the JBS could have auxiliaries ready to harass the “Reds” on Twitter.
As for Goebbels, well, his “Cyber-Brownshirts” would try to use the same tactics than the “Stormer Troll Army” while himself trying to keep a clean image to not have the responsability of the eventual problems his “Cyber-SA” will cause.
Yeah, the radical right might have even more clout and influence with today’s techs.
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The list not only clearly links environmentalism with fascism but also with democracy – we do live in a coercive society after all.
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