As the number and intensity of real environmental emergencies increases, a new global far-right has emerged that is enthralled by imaginary cataclysms.
We live in an era of catastrophes, to which we are increasingly inured.
Consider storms Hélene and Milton, which ravaged the continental United States in October. They killed a total of 260 people, damaging or destroying tens of thousands of homes, and causing a total of $100bn of damage. Storms bring supply shocks in their wake, while firms engage in price gouging.
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Such disasters are decades in the making. Storms have intensified since the Eighties thanks to global warming and sea level rises. The stripping away of natural defences by what disaster experts call ‘the Growth Machine’ compounds the crisis.
Disruptions
Fire weather seasons have also lengthened by 27 per cent since 1980. Forest fires now burn three million more hectares than they did in 2001.
In 2022, a UN report explained why: "The heating of the planet is turning landscapes into tinderboxes, while more extreme weather means stronger, hotter, drier winds to fan the flames."
Much of the land previously used for agricultural production is now neglected: the amount of land used for agriculture has been cut by half in the last forty years.
The Covid-19 pandemic is another example. About sixty percent of all human infectious diseases are zoonotic: they pass to humans from other animals. The threat of zoonotic outbreaks is growing and one of the main causes, as David Quammen puts it in Spillover, is "ecological disturbance".
The "ecological pressures and disruptions" caused by the growth machine bring "animal pathogens ever more into contact with human populations", while trade and transit links spread "those pathogens ever more widely and quickly".
As the number and intensity of real environmental emergencies increases, a new global far-right has emerged that is enthralled by imaginary cataclysms.
Lasers
Yet, even as the number and intensity of real emergencies increases, a new global far-right has emerged that is enthralled by imaginary cataclysms.
From Brazil to the United States, India to the Philippines, they envision apocalyptic plots ranging from ‘white genocide’ to ‘communist’ takeover.
They fabulate salacious scenarios of extreme sexual evil: elite child trafficking rings operated by Democrats and Hollywood celebrities or, in India, a ‘Romeo Jihad’ waged by Muslims seducing Hindu girls as an attack on the ethnic fabric of the nation.
Even faced with climate catastrophes, this neonate far-right responds by hallucinating. Consider the wildfires that struck Oregon in the summer of 2020, which some local residents spontaneously blamed on Antifa arsonists, leading to armed vigilantism.
Or, the 2018 wildfires in California which Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene famously blamed on Jewish space lasers. Again, as Hurricane Heléne flooded North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia, Greene was back to insist that ‘they’ can ‘control the weather’.
Wayward
We can call this disaster nationalism. It is a form of politics that thrives on the reservoir of dark emotions spawned by social disasters, chronic and acute, as well as the intensifying rhythms of climate emergencies on a dying planet. It offers, instead of systemic solutions to systemic problems, someone to take arms against.
Capitalism and climate change are big, unwieldly, abstract problems: disaster nationalism gives you enemies you can kill. Its disaster fiction is a kind of dreamwork enacted on the real crises of the age, conducting the molecular flow of economic, emotional and erotic miseries into a building tidal wave of vengeful violence.
The climate emergency works as a catalyst in this situation. The ecological despoliation of the planet does not, by itself, spawn ideologies of paligenenetic nationalism or the vengeful passions that accompany them.
Rather, the politics of ‘existential revenge’, as William Connolly has dubbed it, thrives on the negative emotions generated by pervasive social iniquity, by trajectories of personal and class decline, and by the toxic experience of failure.
Class societies breathe resentment and, with the etiolation of socialist and trade union organising, those resentments can either circulate broadly as a kind of wayward aggression, or be politicised against the folk enemies of the right: migrants, ‘cultural marxists’, Muslims, ‘bathroom predators’.
Righteousness
The climate crisis potentiates the emotional undercurrents produced by poverty, addiction, depression, recession and war, priming them to produce further explosions.
Consider a murder filmed on a bank of the Brahmaputra river in the Indian state of Assam, in 2021. The state was evicting Bengali Muslims from their homes, five thousand of which had already been destroyed, to give to “indigenous” Assamese Hindus.
A boy, Moinul Hoque, charged at armed police in blind fury at their destruction. They shot him at point blank range, and then proceeded to beat his dying body with batons.
Accompanying the police team was a Hindu photographer, Bijoy Baniya. As the batons fell, Baniya took a running victory leap and planted one foot on the dying boy’s chest.
In a report for Time, Debashish Roy Chowdhury commented: “Stomping on a Muslim corpse now has a gloss of patriotic righteousness to it … policemen are seen hugging him in the video after Hoque’s death.”
Risks
A dark subtext to this murder, aside from decades of incitement by Hindu supremacists, was the climate crisis. One of the main reasons for the migration of Bengali Muslims to Assam in recent years has been the wave of climate change-induced disasters, such as floods disrupting the ecology of the Ganges Delta.
This has, for decades, resulted in sustained conflict as Hindu Assamese attacked Bangladeshi Muslims, resulting in over thirty thousand deaths between 1991 and 2008. Murderous nationalism has been thriving on climate breakdown for at least that long. The danger is that this becomes the normal rightist response as climate change increases refugee flows.
According to the UNHCR, there have been 21 million people displaced by climate annually since 2008. By 2050, it is projected that there will be 1.2 billion people displaced by climate change and natural disasters.
Millions of these refugees already end up in debt bondage or forms of modern slavery simply because their position as refugees and the low status and protections they are given makes them more vulnerable to exploitation, so that an increase in their number due to climate crisis is likely to stretch further both the resources and negligible welcome available to them.
Climate change will also compound the existing risks associated with travelling to a safe country. For example, migrants and asylum seekers trying to reach the US border through Mexico must go through the Sonoran desert to avoid America’s mesh of border patrols and fortified crossings.
Undeserving
This already dangerous journey through an extremely hot environment is killing 350 people a year. As temperatures rise, the number dying from organ failure and dehydration is also likely to increase. An increasing number of climate refugees, it seems likely, will also intensify nationalist pressure for more violent border regimes, making the journey even more dangerous.
A flow of refugees does not by itself create a 'refugee crisis' or cause a violent backlash. As historian Dan Stone points out, the recent idea of a ‘refugee crisis’ in Europe appears to be a purely "rhetorical construct".
While "countries like Lebanon and Jordan have each taken in over one million Syrian refugees, European countries are apparently unable to cope with tens of thousands."
The flows only become ‘unmanageable’ from the point of view of states already committed to keeping refugees out, as in the efforts of ‘Fortress Europe’ to shut down every legal means of travel, causing refugees to undertake risky boat journeys in which hundreds die in the Mediterranean each year.
And while politicians euphemistically blame ‘traffickers’ for a situation they have created, in practice they affirm the predicate of disaster nationalism that refugees are undeserving human refuse.
Faltering
In Modi’s India, similarly, it is only because problems of distribution and entitlement have for decades been solved in an ethnic manner, to the benefit of Hindus, that the settlement of Bengali climate refugees in Assam is an occasion for murderous nationalism.
A disordered ecology would not transform itself into either ‘fossil fascism’ or ‘eco-fascism’ were such potentials not already circulating in parliamentary regimes.
Disaster nationalism is not yet fascist. It is, clearly, obsessed with fantasies of a military dictatorship against the Left: thus ‘Stop the Steal’ activists urging on military rule with Trump as president-for-life, or Brazilian protesters begging the military to ‘save’ Brazil from communism.
It indulges in trolling references to historical fascism, as when Brazilian secretary of culture Roberto Alvim delivered a speech on cultural policy that almost precisely mimicked lines from a Goebbels speech.
It has launched a series of fumbled, half-hearted, inept ‘insurrections’: the attempt to keep Trump in office in 2020, the Brazilian jacqueries in 2022, Yevgeny Prigozhin’s faltering march on Moscow in the same year, and the Reischbürger coup plot in Germany months later. In its ideology, it often resembles the ‘palingenetic ultranationalism’ that Roger Griffin describes as the ideational nucleus of fascism.
Anticapitalist
Fascism is more than ideology, however. It becomes an historical force only when it appears as a mass movement of the revolutionary right, using paramilitary violence to destroy its enemies and fight for the overthrow of democracy.
Disaster nationalists have used collective violence to circumvent legality, as with Rodrigo Duterte’s anti-drugs death squads in the Philippines, vigilantism against Black Lives Matter in the US, settler-soldier militias in the West Bank, pogroms in Delhi, and murders of Workers’ Party supporters in Brazil.
In power, as in Hungary, India and Israel, they have attempted a constitutional rupture, tilting the balance of forces toward authoritarianism. Yet they have made no effort to overthrow democracy per se. Nor, with the exception of the Hindu Right in India, are they organised around paramilitary force.
Disaster nationalists have a thin civic base, and typically operate through networks of dark money, online harassment campaigns and media strategies.
Above all, they do not even pretend to be revolutionary in the sense that interwar fascism did. While classical fascism presented itself as a plebeian, anticapitalist force, today’s disaster nationalists embrace muscular capitalism shorn of ‘woke’ constraints like environmental protections.
Snow-flakes
Disaster nationalism is not yet fascist, but it is accumulating the force through which a neonate fascism will emerge.
If interwar fascism thrived on a crisis of democracy exploding from the volcanic mouth of raging class civil wars and decadent imperialism, disaster nationalism is insinuating itself into a more intractable climate crisis threatening the energetic infrastructure of modern civilization.
For the present, its commitment to muscular national capitalism requires that it repudiate climate change as a ‘globalist’ lie victimising freedom-loving motorists.
It has taken over a denialist apparatus built and later abandoned by fossil capital, and to its traditionally pro-capitalist ideology added the animating idea of racial threat: climate change is a scam that transfers wealth to Chinese communism says Trump, or a plot to hand over the loot of the ‘producers’ to the ‘moochers’ says Pamela Geller. "Enviro-Communism", as Breivik’s manifesto put it, means a "transfer of resources … from the developed Western world to the third world".
In defiance of all the cry-babies and snow-flakes who are ‘ruining it’, they assert a hypertrophic capitalist paraphilia, technologizing omnipotence-wishes: ‘drill, baby, drill!’
Equality
This will become less persuasive as climate disasters mount. But already, there are green-nationalist and eco-fascist tendencies abroad, reflected in Marine Le Pen’s assertion that migrants are "nomads" who have no "homeland" and no care for the environment, in the alt-right contempt for profiteering "Jewish Unnatur".
These same tendencies appear in the ‘lone wolf’ manifestoes of Payton Gendron, Brenton Tarrant and Patrick Crusius connecting fears of overpopulation to ‘The Great Replacement’ and ‘white genocide’.
These claims rehearse the idea already present in nineteenth-century ecology, and reprised in the ecological thinking of Ernst Haeckel, Ludwig Klages, Savitri Devi, Jorian Jenks, Alain de Benoist, Renaud Camus, Garrett Hardin, Hervé Juvin, Björn Höcke and Dave Foreman, that environmentalism means a Social Darwinist war on out-of-place or superfluous biology.
As climate emergency stretches the ecological systems on which we all depend to breaking point, intensifies the rhythm of ecological shocks, and demands fundamental changes to how we live, our precarious democratic systems show little sign of resilience.
Capitalist democracy has always been unstable, since it is a combination of two very different principles: democracy promises equality, while capitalism delivers inequality.
Faith
The ideology of limitless ‘growth’ helped square that circle: as long as the system kept growing, living standards could rise just enough to ensure that democracy would not threaten the owners of property.
Now that ‘growth’ seems to be a problem, however, democracy looks weaker than ever. In a 2022 report by the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, it was found that half of the world’s democracies had seen an erosion of civil liberties, institutional paralysis, and dysfunction in the last five years.
For decades, the representative institutions have been "hollowing out" as Peter Mair puts it, while the state tilts in a more authoritarian and exclusionary direction. In this situation, the faith in democratic ideas has been receding, with the number of people in Europe and North America who think it ‘essential’ to live in a democracy falling well below fifty percent among younger generations.
The danger is that as faith in the possibility of democracy erodes from within and frays at the edges, a pessimistic fascist metaphysics will find its purchase, offering supremacy as a solution to the melancholia of loss and decline. To resist this, it won’t be enough to shore up faith in a failing system. Democracy, if it is to survive, will have to be radicalised: or succumb to the coming storm.
This Author
Richard Seymour is the commissioning editor of Salvage magazine and the author of The Twittering Machine. He tweets at @leninology. This article is an extract from his latest book, Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization, published by Verso.