I have written extensively in recent years about the way in which accusations of “fascism” are used to smear radical opponents of a system that is, itself, a mutation of fascism.
One of the key figures in this ideological smear campaign, particularly in North America, has been Alexander Reid Ross (pictured).
As reported in Acorn 64, he is now working for a militaristic US “think tank” alongside many former “deep state” figures, including a former CIA chief.
Furthermore, the “think tank” in question is funded by Charles Koch, the 11th richest man in the world, renowned alongside his late brother for his opposition to the green movement.
As Rhyd Wildermuth asks in this excellent article: “Does it seem maybe a little weird that the man who helped create an atmosphere where far-left environmentalists are smeared as fascists is now working for an organization funded by one of the richest anti-environmentalists ever known?”
The only thing that surprises me about all this is that Reid Ross’s allegiances have been so openly confirmed.
It has long been obvious that the ideological war being waged against our political position was coming from the entity which we directly oppose – a big business mafia which hides its essential criminality behind an elaborate facade of “authority”, “law” and “democracy” and uses taxpayer-funded organizations like the CIA to defend its interests and power.
The trouble is, says Wildermuth, that the unmasking of Reid Ross does not seem to have fundamentally changed anything: “Though I imagine most people will now view anything Alexander Reid Ross writes about fascism with suspicion, the framework he created won’t go away so easily”.
I think it is important for those who seriously wish to bring down this death-cult industrial system to look closely what Reid Ross and others like him have been trying to do.
By a kind of reverse engineering, we can then identify the political ideas which are most feared by the system and which we might then conclude are the best weapons with which to attack it.
I.
As Wildermuth explains, the Reid Ross narrative accepts historical fascist propaganda at face value by assuming that its aesthetics of “anti-modernism and anti-capitalism” reflected its real position. The system regards modernism and capitalism as good things and thus anti-modernism and anti-capitalism as bad things. It therefore tries to discredit any opposition to modernism and capitalism (ie: opposition to its own domination) by declaring it “fascist” or on a slipperly slope towards fascism. Our response, as opponents of this modern capitalist system, should not be to run away from our core critique from fear of being branded “fascist” by paid agents of the system posing as holier-than-thou radical inquisitors. Instead we should explode the system’s narrative by pointing out that historical fascism was thoroughly modernist and capitalist, despite its PR spin, and by communicating the real anti-capitalist and anti-modernist thinking which inspires us (see, for instance, the organic radicals project).
II.
The term “eco-fascism” has also been misused by Reid Ross for his own insidious purposes. Wildermuth writes that this label has come to mean not just “fascists who are environmentalists” but also “anyone who rejects the idea that industrial civilization is the best way for humans to live”. He adds that Ross’s work has made many anti-industrial writers afraid to publish any longer. We see clearly here that the system, while busily promoting the fake-green climate capitalist movement and land-grabbing “conservationism” as part of its Great Reset, is afraid of real environmentalism, the kind which actually wants to abolish industrial degradation and pollution rather than just upgrade to a “bright green” and smart version. This realisation should remind us that industrialism is very much part and parcel of this system. We might also ask why it is that the system feels the need to smear anti-industrialists as “eco-fascists” rather than as “eco-extremists” or “Luddites”? Could it be that it knows such labels don’t really worry people? Does it know that the idea of abandoning industrial modernity and returning to a simple and healthy way of living will always appeal to large numbers of us? Is that why it has to attack the idea with the sledgehammer of a “fascist” accusation which is the one thing guaranteed to scare most people away? The system’s dislike of anti-industrialism should amount to a positive recommendation for those who dislike the system. We should, of course, remind people that historical fascism was very much built on industrialism. And we can hurt this current fascistic system most by defying its smears and ideological taboos and pushing more and more firmly an anti-industrial message.
III.
Reid Ross depicts any talk of “organic community” as necessarily tending towards fascism because fascists used the term, while deliberately ignoring the profound differences between their hierarchical, top-down statist understanding of the notion and the grassroots, decentralized co-operative version promoted by real radicals. We gather from this that the idea of organic community is seen as a threat by the system, as its control is based on a society of fragmented individuals cut off from all community and wholly dependent on top-down authority. It therefore tries to wipe all talk of organic community off the political map by labelling it “fascist” – a dirty trick which seems to work every time in certain gullible left-wing and anarchist circles. If the system does not want radicals to talk about organic communities, then that is exactly what we should do! If it wasn’t an idea capable of inciting rejection of the current status quo in favour of a radically different way of living, then the system would not need to employ professional propagandists to steer people away from it. The system always tries to pretend that no alternative way of living exists, that no future is possible other than the one it has lined up for us. Stating the obvious truth that this is not so, and proposing another vision of how we might live (such as in decentralized organic communities) is a powerful and necessary basis for meaningful resistance.
IV.
Wildermuth points out that the reach of the “fascist” smearing has been stretched further and further by Reid Ross in recent years “encompassing now not only those who hold ‘extreme’ views about the environment or modernity, but also those who question US foreign policy on Syria, Israeli state oppression of Palestinians, the death of Jeffrey Epstein, or even the narrative of Russian influence on leftist beliefs”. I would add that it has also been used against those of us who challenge the system’s Covid narrative – all across the world opponents of lockdowns, masks and vaccine passports have been branded “extreme right wing” in a very deliberate and obviously co-ordinated manner. What this tells us, of course, is that these positions are also seen as threats by the system and that the “fascist” smear has worked so wonderfully well so far that it has decided to wheel it out again and again in the face of every new heresy threatening its ideological control. But this magic smearing wand cannot work for ever. The more widely and inappropriately it is used, the more clearly it reveals itself for what it is. We can help that process along by ridiculising the smear, by openly laughing at it and by continuing to express whatever views and analysis seem correct and just to us, without once looking over our shoulders to see if Reid Ross and the fake-left Thought Police are about to pounce.
We might also use the many ideological warnings issued by Reid Ross and his kind in the opposite way to how they intended. Like the content warnings on social media, their red lights can often indicate to us a useful source of inspiration in our struggle to destroy the assumptions and illusions which they are trying to defend.
We can seize the momentum of their propaganda overreach and use it to inform and strengthen our opposition, while taking advantage of their identification of certain key ideas as particularly threatening in order to strengthen the impact of our resistance.
In this way we might rebuild a genuine, non-manipulated, radicalism capable of fighting back with courage and authenticity against the lies and deceptions of the system.
To discern ugliness requires a sense of beauty. To name darkness involves knowing light. And to correctly identify lies demands a grasp of truth.
It makes sense, therefore, that behind the title of the newly-published Bright Green Lies, by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith and Max Wilbert, (1) we find three important and sombre truths.
The first of these is that industrial society is killing the living planet.
Jensen’s magnificent 2006 work Endgame helped me enormously in finding the confidence to see and state this truth as an objective fact.
Previously, I had tended to regard it rather as a subjective opinion of mine, born of my personal aesthetic and moral distaste for the infrastructure and ideology of this ugly and empty modern world.
The same Endgame clarity shines through the almost-500 excellent pages of Bright Green Lies.
“The industrial economy is based on systematic theft from land bases, and the conversion of these living communities into dead products. That’s what an industrial economy is. The economy does not create value for the real world: It destroys the real world”, (2) insist the authors.
Development is “a euphemism for destruction”, (3) they point out. “There can be no such thing as a ‘green superpower’, a ‘green industrial system’, or a ‘nonextractive industrial system’. These are all oxymorons”. (4)
They set out to challenge “the unstated acceptance that industrial levels of consumption cannot be questioned, never mind curtailed”. (5)
“We need to stop being guided by the general story that we can have it all, that we can have our industrial culture and also have wild nature, that we can have an oil economy and still have polar bears”, (6) writes Jensen.
Wishful thinking lies at the heart of the general blindness regarding the severity of the problem. People simply don’t want to believe that things are really that bad, that they might really have to leave behind the plastic security of the industrial womb and face raw and natural reality.
As consumers we have been conditioned not to think too much about where anything comes from and how it is made. Guilt is not good for sales.
Bright Green Lies reminds us: “Things don’t magically appear because it’s convenient for you to think they do. Things come from somewhere. These things require materials. There are costs associated with extracting these materials. These costs are paid by someone. Even if you want a groovy, solar-powered mass transit system, the materials still have to come from somewhere someone else lived until their home was destroyed so you can have what you want”. (7)
They know that their message is not one that most people want to hear.
“We get it. We, too, like hot showers and freezing cold ice cream, and we like them 24/7. We like music at the touch of a button or, now, a verbal command. We like the conveniences this way of life brings us. And it’s more than conveniences. We know that. We three co-authors would be dead without modern medicine. But we all recognise that there is a terrible trade-off for all this: life on the planet. And no individual’s conveniences – or, indeed, life – is worth that price”. (8)
The picture could not be painted any clearer than in the statement made towards the end of the book: “Industrial civilization is incompatible with life on the planet”. (9)
The second truth exposed, one particularly hard for many contemporary environmentalists to face up to, is that “renewables” are a scam.
“We are being sold a story, and we are buying it because we like it,” say the authors. “We want it to be true. We want to believe that our lives can go on with all the ease and comfort we accept as our due. How painless to believe that a simple switch of wind for oil and solar for coal and we can go on with our air conditioning and cell phones and suburbs. Every time we hit a trip wire of unsettling facts or basic math, we soothe ourselves with our faith in technology”. (10)
They marshal a massively impressive, detailed and fully-referenced body of evidence to demonstrate, beyond the slightest doubt, that these bright green “solutions” are not only toxic and destructive to nature, but are not even capable of performing the role they are billed as performing.
“The brutal truth is that oil is fundamentally irreplaceable for an industrial economy”, (11) the authors note. “It is remarkably dishonest to pretend that ‘renewables’ meeting 74 or 78 percent of electricity on a sunny, windy, weekend afternoon even remotely implies that ‘renewable sources can power a large industrial nation’”. (12)
This means, they explain, that the idea of “green energy”, which social consensus tells us is a sound one, is not in fact sound at all – “neither in the broad strokes (continuing to fuel the destruction of the planet is in fact a bad idea) nor in the particulars (that nondestructive sources of industrial scale energy exist)”. (13) They add: “Again and again, the policies and technologies promoted by bright greens do the opposite of their purported goal”. (14)
Given all the long-available evidence supporting this analysis, it is strange that there is not more outrage about the deceit involved.
“Why aren’t more people screaming at the absurdity of these bright green fantasies?” (15) ask Jensen, Keith and Wilbert. “You have an entire culture killing the planet and calling this destruction ‘saving the earth’”. (16)
Their aim is to wake people up to the scam and to provide them with the analytic framework and “tools” to debunk such claims on their own. (17)
One of the main elephants in the renewables room is the fact that the materials for its infrastructure need to be extracted from the earth: “When bright greens tell you that it’s possible to have something resembling this way of life without mining, they’re not telling the truth”. (18)
Another is that the products of the new “green” economy are transported all around the world in ships and “the 16 largest ships create more pollution than all the cars in the world”. (19)
Further flies in the eco-ointment include:
SOLAR. “Industrial solar energy doesn’t help the world. It’s just another way to power industrial capitalism. At root, it’s an industrial product designed and built in the global capitalist marketplace to make a profit. Like other products, it leaves behind the wreckage of destroyed land, poisoned water, and devastated communities”. (20)
WIND TURBINES. “In December 2013, the federal [US] government exempted the wind industry from federal protections of bald and golden eagles. For the next 30 years, wind turbines can legally kill federally protected bald and golden eagles with no penalty. Remember, this is a technology promoted by the modern environmental movement”. (21)
BIOFUELS. “Just a fancy word that means burning living materials like wood – and what you and I might call ‘planting monocrops to use as fuel’ or ‘cutting down forests to burn’”. (22)
GREEN CARS. “Cars themselves harm the earth, whether they’re made of steel, carbon fiber, or ‘eco-plastics’; and whether they’re powered by gasoline, diesel, solar energy, or refined methane captured from unicorn farts”. (23)
WATER-POWERED FUEL CELLS. “One estimate looked at private passenger vehicles in the US and found that producing enough hydrogen for their operation would take 160 million gallons of purified water per day. Running all the private passenger vehicles in the US on water-powered fuel cells would be, in terms of water consumption, like adding four new cities the size of Los Angeles”. (24)
GREEN CITIES. “Green cities remain not just elusive but physically impossible. In fact, cities around the world function essentially the same as they have for thousands of years, as centers of consumption, control and power. Modern cities are not just linked to the destruction of the planet; they’re central to it”. (25) “Conserving nearby land doesn’t mean much when your economy is killing the planet elsewhere”. (26)
GREEN POWER GRID. “The new grid looks a lot like the old grid. It delivers electricity to factories and subdivisions (and now, cars). The power it delivers was generated in processes that are destroying the planet. The grid itself is destroying the planet, in its production, installation, operation, and maintenance. Instead of campaigning for more grids, we should be fighting them, indeed removing them”. (27)
GEOENGINEERING. “Spraying aerosols from planes is only one of the lunatic ideas put forward under the name of geoengineering. Also floated are ideas like putting mirrors in space to deflect sunlight, or somehow changing the earth’s orbit. Or dumping iron into the ocean to promote blooms of phytoplankton. What could go wrong?” (28)
REYCYLING. “The process of recycling materials itself requires an infrastructure that is harmful to both the environment and humanity. Not only does the recycling process very often cause more waste and pollution, but it frequently relies upon nearby populations living in unsafe conditions and workers being subjected to both toxins and slave labor”. (29)
E-WASTE. “Electric cars (along with nearly all the other green technologies, especially solar panels), also contain electronics, circuit boards, and other computer components. When this material is thrown away, it’s known as e-waste”. Recycling e-waste is “one of the most hazardous known industries”, the authors note, quoting an impact assessment report that describes e-waste as “a serious environmental and human health threat”. (30)
The authors describe their reference to bright green sell-out Naomi Klein’s infamous statement in the film This Changes Everything that polar bears “don’t do it for me” (31) as “the single most important passage in this book” (32) illustrating as it does so perfectly the degraded state of contemporary environmentalism, shorn of the deep and instinctive love of nature which once fed its soul.
Instead, this brave new pseudo-environmentalism appears to be all about money, in a general and more specific sense.
The book refers to researcher Cory Morningstar and her Wrong Kind of Green blog (33) and echoes her analysis that ultimately the bright green “climate” movement is not about saving the planet but about saving capitalism, that it is “a desperate attempt to stave off facing the consequences of our way of life, even though it will lead to an even more horrifying collapse at the end”. (34)
“Most environmentalists assume we must maintain the high-energy modern lifestyle; we must at all costs avoid disturbing the ‘prosperity’ so important to bright greens”, (35) they add.
For fake greens, “the ongoing destruction of the planet, and the continued dominance of coal, oil, and gas; seems to be less important than diverting people’s rage – which, if left unchecked, might actually explode into something that would stop capitalism and industrialism from murdering the planet – into corporate-friendly ends”. (36)
As well as wanting to prevent the collapse of the money system off which they feed, climate capitalists are out to make a considerable personal profit from the bright green technology bubble, at the expense of public funds mobilised to address the climate emergency.
The authors comment: “If you ask many of the people who march for the environment why they’re mobilizing, they’ll tell you they’re trying to save the planet; but if you ask for their demands, they often respond that they want additional subsidies for solar manufacturers… one could easily be forgiven for concluding that much environmentalism has become a de facto lobbying arm of the solar industry”. (37)
“And that, really, is what the bright green movement is about. Capturing subsidies for specific sectors of the industrial economy. To the dedicated young people marching to save the planet, we offer our solidarity. But the demands of this movement boil down to public money for sectors of the industrial economy”. (38)
“It’s pretty clear that the real goal of the bright greens isn’t defending the planet… The real goal is to get money into so-called green technology”. (39)
As Jensen notes in his Afterword, this is particularly true of the various “deals” for nature currently being touted by fake-green capitalists: “The Green New Deal, which is being pushed so hard by mainstream environmentalists, has far less to do with saving wild places and wild beings than it does with generating subsidies for favored sections of the industrial economy, with estimates of the giveaways running from hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars”. (40)
Genuine solutions to the environmental crisis, such as deconstructing the industrial economy, will never be considered, the book observes, because genuine environmentalism “doesn’t serve the industrial agenda (or the desires of the financial elites)”. (41)
Economic growth, the enemy of real natural growth, remains the holy cow of an ideology belonging entirely to the industrial capitalist system.
“Nearly all bright greens speak of economic growth as positive, or at the very least don’t speak against it”, remark Jensen et al. “Given that the global economy is killing the planet, ‘growing the economy’ will not help the planet”. (42)
The third sombre truth revealed by this book is that the “renewables” and “climate justice” bandwagon, for all its holier-than-thou posturing, is in fact carrying us faster towards the death of the planetary organism.
With their distraction of unworkable and unhelpful phoney “solutions”, they are preventing us from reacting as we should to this existential crisis.
The fossil fuels industry may have set our house on fire, as Greta Thunberg likes to suggest, but she and the climate capitalists who back her are trying to herd us towards a false escape route, through a door leading deeper into the deadly industrial inferno rather than away from it.
“Bright green environmentalism does great harm by wasting time we don’t have on ‘solutions’ that cannot work”, (43) say the authors.
It has also (temporarily) scuppered authentic resistance by taking over eco-activism, neutering its threat to the industrial and financial ruling clique and turning it into a tool for advancing their interests.
“Something has gone terribly wrong with the environmental movement”, writes Lierre Keith in her Prologue (44) and she and her colleagues repeat the message throughout the book.
“Mainstream environmentalists now overwhelmingly prioritize saving industrial civilization over saving life on the planet”. (45) “This has become a movement that does not help the earth, but rather helps its destroyers”. (46) “We are writing this book because we want our environmental movement back”. (47)
These three sombre truths – that industrial society is destroying all life, that renewables are a scam and that fake greens are in fact advancing the death of the planet – are difficult enough to come to terms with.
But no broader assessment of where we are today would be complete without reference to the techno-fascist New Normal being rolled out on the back of the “Covid crisis”.
So there is a fourth sombre truth on the table here, as set out in this brief article. The illusion of democracy has been abandoned and the ruling 0.1% are lining up a future of slavery for our children and grandchildren.
A fifth sombre truth is that the people and networks behind this tyranny are very much the same as those promoting the climate capitalist scam!
For the last few years there has been a page of links on the Winter Oak website called Climate Capitalists. In 2020, another page of links was created under the heading The Great Reset. It has subsequently become increasingly evident that these might as well be one and the same page.
They write: “The bright green future is a corporate future, a centralized future, a robotic, mechanized future emerging from factories like new LED bulbs in plastic blister cases. What appears to be a simple lightbulb – flick the switch and it turns on – is the result of a long chain of industrial technologies and processes involving mining, factories, complex chemistry, robotics, research laboratories at corporate and government facilities around the world, and billions of dollars of investment. It’s all tied together. LEDs would be impossible to create without globalization, imperialism, resource theft, and war”. (48)
And they clearly identify “Technocrats/Transhumanists” as being, of course, at the other end of the political spectrum to their own deep green position, explaining that, for these worshippers of artifice and technology, “humans should transcend biology by investing heavily in technology. We can also avoid the possibility of human extinction by leaving planet Earth behind, and we should ultimately move toward cybernetic enhancement and uploading human consciousness into machines in order to defeat death”. (49)
Transhumanists are vitaphobic. They hate life and want to replace everything alive with the dead matter that occupies the place where their own hearts should be.
So-called environmentalists who align themselves with transhumanist goals are doing the exact opposite of what they once did.
As Keith puts it: “Once we fought for the living. Now we are told to fight for their deaths, as the wind turbines come for the mountains and solar panels conquer the deserts”. (50)
The same could be said of anarchists and other leftists who once fought for the people and their freedom and now fight for their enslavement in a digital prison built from impact intersectionality and its dogma of conformity, separation and artifice.
Social movements, like the green movement, have been taken over by the technocrat system and pointed in directions which serve, rather than oppose, their insidious agendas.
These corporate-controlled pseudo-activists use the language of the system, endlessly regurgitating its duplicitous talk of “equity”, “social change”, “inclusivity” and, of course, “sustainability”.
They are also trapped within its syntax (as Guy Debord put it), being unwilling or unable to think beyond the assumptions on which the system is founded.
Anyone who dares to do so is immediately accused, and automatically found guilty, of heresy, of Orwellian thoughtcrime, today packaged as some variety of “denialism” or “hate speech”.
Their term “conspiracy theorist” is used to try to stop us identifying the existence of a very real system out there, with a life-hating and freedom-hating programme consisting of many different aspects and using all sorts of excuses (“terrorists!” “climate crisis!” “pandemic!”) to lure us ever deeper into its total control.
There is no point at all in seeing through the lies of the renewables scam if you are still going to be corralled into supporting a transhumanist totalitarian future by means of your gullibility with regard to the Covid manoeuvre.
There is no point at all in seeing through the lies of the Covid manoeuvre if you are still going to be corralled into supporting a transhumanist totalitarian future by means of your gullibility with regard to the renewables scam, or indeed by your refusal to face up to the fact that industrial society needs to be brought down if life is to go on living.
Jensen, Keith and Wilbert do not beat about the bush concerning the reality of what we are facing. They follow up their statement that “industrial civilization is incompatible with life on the planet”, which I quoted earlier, by remarking: “That makes the solution to our systematic planetary murder obvious, but let’s say it anyway: Stop industrial civilization”. (51)
“The most important, and simplest, solution to the destruction of the planet is to stop the destruction of the planet”, (52) they add. That sounds stupidly obvious, but so many people simply fail to get it.
Whenever real greens talk about ending industrial society, people always want to know what we imagine could replace it.
The answer is not difficult. We need to go back to living the way we did for hundreds of thousands of years before we started on the slippery slope to where we are now.
This is not turning the clock back, but moving forward in a direction inspired by what we know was previously possible. We need to reclaim the revolutionary wisdom of the past.
It is not so much about politics as values, as the Bright Green Lies authors rightly note. (53) Humankind needs to go back to knowing itself part of nature and living accordingly.
Long before “sustainability” was an empty WEF marketing slogan, it was a physical reality.
Write Jensen et al: “How’s this for a measure of sustainability: If your way of life can last at least 3,800 years without trashing a place, that’s sustainable. On the other hand, if your culture – largely driven by your dense cities – has managed to destroy 98 percent of a continent’s old-growth forests within a few centuries, then your way of living is not sustainable”. (54)
“Economic growth must stop” (55) they say, and instead we need to build communities “based on self-sufficiency, biological integrity, and human rights”. (56)
If we are going to move towards this new reality, we are first going to have to pull apart the lies of the current one, as the authors of this book, which does just that, are evidently very aware: “The first step is to stop believing in bright green fairy tales that technology will save the planet. Instead, put your belief in soils, grasses, forests, seaweeds, and the billions of living beings who every moment are working to regenerate the conditions that support life and beauty on this planet”. (57)
But, of course, the system won’t dismantle itself, nor sit idly by while we embark upon doing so, and we necessarily face a huge struggle ahead, a struggle for life itself.
“We need to return to the real world,” write the authors. “We need to return to being people who love the world – all its places and all its creatures – and who will fight to defend it”. (58)
“We need massive movements to relentlessly impede the functioning of industrial civilization, using every tactic: political pressure, legal challenges, economic boycotts, civil disobedience, and whatever else becomes necessary”. (59)
They warn: “We have written this book because life has been broken and is now fast draining away through the cracks. The cultures that have done that breaking need to be abandoned and their ruling sociopaths dethroned. Make no mistake, this will require a serious and dedicated resistance movement”. (60)
1. Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, Max Wilbert, Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It (New York: Monkfish, 2021). All subsequent page references are to this book. 2. p. 33. 3. p. 344. 4. p. 38. 5. p. 81. 6. p. xiv. 7. p. 313. 8. p. 27. 9. p. 433. 10. p. 177. 11. p. 158. 12. p. 71. 13. p. 151. 14. p. 205. 15. p. 192. 16. p. 187. 17. p. 402. 18. p. 275. 19. p. 316. See John Vidal, ‘Health risks of shipping pollution have been ‘underestimated‘, The Guardian, April 9, 2009. 20. p. 91. 21. pp. 137-38. 22. p. 45. 23. p. 342. 24. pp. 185-86. 25. p. 302. 26. p. 339. 27. p. 378. 28. p. 419. 29. p. xv. 30. p. 278. 31. p. 24. 32. p. 465. 33. p. 428. 34. p. 321. 35. p. 311. 36. p. 425. 37. p. 30. 38. p. 163. 39. pp. 428-29. 40. p. 469. 41. p. 72, footnote. 42. p. 236. 43. p. 256. 44. p. xvii. 45. p. 22. 46. p. 430. 47. p. 22. 48. p. 229. 49. p. xxii. 50. p. xix. 51. p. 433. 52. p. 440. 53. p. 465. 54. p. 310. 55. p. 446. 56. p. 459. 57. p.442. 58. p. 431. 59. p. 458. 60. p. 18.
Three years ago we published an article explaining how the idea of a nature-based philosophy had been smeared by its opponents.
Apologists for the industrial capitalist system, masquerading as “left-wing” and even “environmentalist”, constantly sought to suggest that there was something “fascist” about such an outlook.
We quoted “social ecologists” Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier in their attack on deep green thinking, in which they claimed that so-called Nazi themes such as organicist holism “have a chilling currency within contemporary ecological discourse”.
And we noted that Alexander Reid Ross, a one-time editor of Earth First! Journal, had identified parts of the EF! network, as well as anarchists and left-wingers generally, as being affected by what he termed ideological “fascist creep”.
We went into great detail in order to explain why this was not a true picture. A love of nature was merely window-dressing for the Nazis, a way of harnessing anti-industrialist sentiment (disastrously spurned by the left) in order to win public support.
As Hitler’s cabal strengthened their grip on power, the pseudo-holistic “nature” thinking was ditched in favour of the real Nazi agenda, namely to build up Germany’s industrial and military power, build motorways, develop scientific racial engineering to strengthen “The Master Race”, explore the potential of nuclear physics, and ruthlessly eliminate “alien” human elements from German society.
Numerous real nature-lovers and enemies of the industrial megamachine were duped by the Nazis into supporting a project which was meant to bolster and expand that same complex.
And those same kind of people were stabbed in the back a second time, later on, by fake-greens like Biehl, Staudenmaier and Ross, who used the false equation of nature philosophy and Nazism to discredit contemporary opponents of the megamachine.
This analysis has been confirmed by the fact that Ross, so keen to expose “fascist creep” in eco-anarchist circles, has recently been exposed as a fake, an infiltrator of radical politics pushing a state-corporate agenda.
If we are revisiting this issue again today, it is because the same duplicitous process – of co-opting and then smearing pro-nature thinking – looks like it is happening all over again, in a new toxic cycle.
It has now become very clear that this astroturf operation, using the Greta Thunberg brand and mobilising people under the Extinction Rebellion banner, is closely allied with the forces behind the Great Fascist Reset.
Like the original Nazis, these manipulators are cynically exploiting people’s very real concerns about environmental threats to our world, in order to sell their “solution” of a New Normal Order.
The brave new future they propose, despite its green window-dressing, in fact represents the intensification of the industrial project, which is why the likes of WEF chief Klaus Schwab refer to it as The Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Once again, then, we have the unedifying spectacle of people motivated by a love of nature being corralled into a totalitarian political project which aims at the expansion of the megamachine’s domination over human beings and our world.
Anyone who has been following our output on this site can hardly be unaware that we have stridently opposed the Great Reset which the ruling class are currently trying to impose on us under the false flag of “fighting Covid”.
Our Acorn bulletins have also been focusing heavily on Great Reset issues, starting with Acorn 56 in March 2020 (‘We don’t want your fascist future!’, ‘Fighting the coronazi clampdown’), continuing through 57 (‘Join the resistance!’, ‘The rebels will return’), 58 (‘Where do we go from here?’, ‘Exposing the lies’), 59 (‘Stand up to tyranny!), 60 (‘Resisting global fascism’, ‘We are not dupes!’), 61 (‘Libertà, libertà, libertà!’, ‘Us against them’), 62 (‘We will prevail!’, ‘Naming the enemy’), 63 (‘Breaking point draws near’, ‘Wanted: a new resistance movement’), 64 (‘The dictatorship will fall!’, ‘Shocktroops of the New Fascism’) right up to May 2021’s Acorn 65 (‘Humanity fights back!’, ‘Ten things we have learned during the Covid coup’).
In spreading a message of resistance to this new tyranny, we have not only lost a number of previous political allies, who have fallen for the scam, but also gained a lot of new freedom-loving political allies.
We have noticed that some of these are surprised by our rejection of the industrial world and our deep-green calls for a different way of living.
For them, this sounds suspiciously like the language used by collaborators and apologists for the Great Reset, who are increasingly using the “climate” weapon alongside the “virus” one to impose their new order.
This is very much a repeat run of what happened with the original Nazis’ co-option of the language of environmentalism.
Not only do these sly propagandists mislead people into going along with their project, but in doing so they also pollute the ideas they are abusing by means of their own association with them!
In view of all this confusion, we thought it could be useful to set out clearly why the green approach we have always promoted has nothing to do with the phoney version peddled by the climate capitalists, the WEF, Rob Hopkins, George Monbiot, Naomi Klein et al.
If you take Klaus Schwab at his word and believe his “nature-positive” hype, then you would place him close to us on a nature-loving scale.
If you then heard us insist that he doesn’t mean it, and that this is just greenwashing spin, then you might reply that we have no right to question the Supreme Ruler’s Sect of Sustainability and that we are obviously anti-environmentalists, probably funded by the oil industry.
If, however, you take our point, then you will have to consign Klaus (and Rob and George and Naomi) to the industry side of the scale where they belong.
We could then add another axis to this visual representation, namely that of freedom versus tyranny.
As we are proud to take a position of being entirely in favour of freedom, as well as being entirely in favour of nature, we find ourselves occupying an “extremist” spot at the top right corner of this diagram.
Since Schwab and his Great Reset are altogether opposed to freedom (for the greater good of us all, you understand) as well as to nature (despite their lies suggesting otherwise), they are consigned to the bottom left (authoritarian technocrat) corner.
Our position could therefore not be further from that of the Great Reset, which is presumably why, for our part, we spend so much time condemning and exposing it, and, for the WEF’s part, why they have blocked us on Twitter.
But what exactly does it imply, this belief in freedom and nature which places us on the other side of the barricades to Klaus Schwab and the technocrat-transhumanist project of which he is a figurehead?
Our commitment to freedom means, of course, that we totally reject the New Normal narrative that has seen the ramping up of authoritarian state powers to previously unimagined levels. Even the illusion of democracy and human rights has now been abandoned.
It means that, although we had many serious problems with the pre-Covid Old Normal, we know that we need to take a step back into that world so as to pull away from the cliff edge of outright fascism.
Our belief in freedom also informs the way in which we would like to see society evolve if we manage to see off this global tyranny and come together to think carefully about what we have learned about our society.
The Covid Coup nightmare has only been possible because of a global concentration of wealth and influence in the hands of one clique. Our future freedom, an authentic democracy, depends on the breaking down of the structures of this worldwide domination, not stopping short at national and regional levels but reaching right down into communities.
Power needs to emerge from below, from the people, rather than be imposed from above by a ruling class, in order to ensure that this kind of thing can never happen again.
As far as our love of nature is concerned, this does not express itself in the desire to exploit or monetise nature, or to use it as an excuse to destroy human cultures, as the ruling class plans to do with its New Deal for Nature.
Instead, we insist on the idea of nature as a living organism to which human beings inherently and unavoidably belong.
Human vanity in imagining that we are somehow not really part of nature, that we can simply consume it, destroy it and cast it aside in the pursuit of our own selfish material ends, has to end.
We will have to ditch the mechanistic industrial thinking that has narrowed and hollowed out our way of seeing the world for centuries now.
Instead, we need to rediscover the holistic wisdom of our ancestors, who well understood that our well-being and the well-being of the natural world are one and the same thing and that a human “progress” based on sawing off the very branch on which are sitting can only lead to a very uncomfortable coming to earth!
A love for nature means that we will need to bring down the all-devouring industrial machine that the Great Reset is intended to strengthen and expand.
There could never have been the threat of a Fourth Industrial Revolution without the prior existence of the First, Second and Third Industrial Revolutions (in fact Repressions) which paved the way by progressively conditioning us for lives of New Normal slavery.
We were born into the industrial prison, as were our parents and grandparents in most cases, and so it is not always easy to imagine another way of living.
Where will we sleep if we are no longer in our cells? How will we eat if there is no longer the prison canteen to feed us? What will we do when there is nobody in uniform on hand to bark out orders? Where will we go if there is no more razor-wire fence to stop us going there?
All of that is waiting for us to discover, together, when we finally escape.
Its rich and necessary diversity, we insist, is part of an overall coherence and commonality as a clearly-definable living organism.
This represents a threat to the dogma of the ruling clique, who claim that we would all constantly be at each other’s throats were it not for the firm hand of their top-down control.
While they themselves recognise no borders to their dominion, their divide-and-rule strategy has always involved classifying and separating the rest of us according to “race”, “nationality”, or, indeed, individual self-interest, in a bid to ensure that we remain isolated, divided and collectively powerless.
I have been shocked, therefore, in recent years to see so many anarchists embrace “intersectionality”, sometimes referred to more broadly as identity politics.
This way of seeing the world is, in my view, entirely incompatible with the anarchist vision, to the extent of representing its inversion.
It is founded on the definition of certain individuals as victims, the objects of various kinds of social oppression or domination.
This disempowered human-as-victim apparently only finds points of common interest with other individual members of the species in terms of an “intersection” of oppressions.
This is the opposite of the “big picture” approach at the heart of anarchism, which grasps the enormity of the domination, theft, imposition, duplicity and hypocrisy of the ruling system and hopes to inspire a radical and fundamental revolt which will set humanity free to live otherwise.
The “intersectional” approach instead effectively presents social injustice as a series of separate and very narrow “problems” for which “solutions” could be provided within the framework of the existing system.
If only it could provide “inclusivity” and “equality” for its favoured categories of oppressed victims, then all would be well, pending the discovery of further particular forms of oppression.
Far from being revolutionary, it hides the need for radical and fundamental change behind its limited shopping list of reforms.
My concerns about the intersectional approach have been deepened by the way in which it is so enthusiastically adopted by impact capitalists, who have been funding ostensibly “radical” groups pushing this ideology.
The founder of intersectionality is generally considered to be Kimberlé Crenshaw (pictured), a professor at Columbia Law School in New York, where she set up the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies.
She is also the co-founder and executive director of The African American Policy Forum, a New York think tank which works alongside the CISPS.
Crenshaw is, additionally, honorary president of the Center for Intersectional Justice in Berlin.
Set up in 2017, it describes its mission as being “to make anti-discrimination and equality policy more inclusive and effective in Europe”.
I have to admit that the word “inclusive” immediately rang alarm bells for me, as it is frequently used by the world of impact investment.
And when I found the CIJ’s list of funders on their website my suspicions were confirmed.
Top of the list of three is Guerrilla Foundation, an organisation thoroughly exposed in this November 2020 article as being engaged, along with Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum, in promoting impact capitalism under cover of funding “systemic change”.
Second is George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. Co-chair of the the Open Society Initiative for Europe in Berlin is none other than Rose Longhurst of the UK’s Edge Fund, whose close connection to impact capitalism I investigated earlier this year.
The third of the three funders is Gemeinnutzige Hertie Stiftung, a German foundation with the rather bizarre twin stated aims of “brain research and strengthening democracy”. More on this dubious organisation later.
The “partners & clients” listed on the Center for Intersectional Justice’s website are also far removed from the anti-establishment politics with which they (like Guerrilla Foundation and Edge Fund) want us to imagine they are aligned.
The CIJ’s founder and executive director Emilia Zenzile Roig (pictured) is in fact an Ashoka Fellow, which means that she (like Rob Hopkins of Transition Towns fame) is paid by them.
A key article on the Ashoka site makes it clear that the task given to Roig and the CIJ is to impose intersectional thinking on a European culture whose humanist values are deeply resistant to its agenda of classification and separation.
We learn that she “wants to change the way discrimination is understood and tackled in European societies”.
In the old world, “the mobilization of intersectionality remains challenging in a context that overemphasizes colorblindness and postracialism.
“The widespread reluctance to face the significance of race and the reality of racism is especially pronounced in Germany which rejects, for historical reasons of the Holocaust, collecting any demographic data on race and ethnicity in connection to crimes”.
Overemphasizing colorblindness and questioning “the reality of race” (ie: being anti-racist) does not sound like a problem to me.
And surely contemporary Germans are quite right to be concerned about attempts to collect data in order to link potential criminality to ethnic identity?
Roig thinks otherwise and her mission is “shifting the anti-discrimination framework towards one where intersectionality is eventually institutionalized”.
And on November 25 2020 Roig was interviewed in Forbes magazine as part of the Ashoka Contributors Group, under the informative heading of “Entrepreneurs. Insights, how-tos, and stories from the world of social impact”.
More insights into the “world of social impact” to which Roig belongs come from the ‘Clients and Collaborations’ section of her personal website.
There is a certain overlap with CIJ funders and partners. The Hertie empire and Open Society Foundations are listed, alongside Commerzbank and, of course, Ashoka.
Roig collaborates with an organisation called The Engine Room, whose slogan is “accelerating social change“.
The reference to the UN Sustainable Development Goals will come as no surprise to anyone who has dipped a wary investigative toe into the icy waters of impact capitalism and the Fourth Industrial Revolution to which it is allied.
Researcher Alison McDowell explains: “Powerful interests are using the Sustainable Development Goals to mask their plans to remake the world as a digital panopticon.
“Financiers are going to claim they’re doing positive things with their portfolios by configuring asset allocations to align with ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance), and that’s where the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals come in.
“It is the sustainability goals that will open the door to smart city infrastructure with facial recognition, cashless economies, big data analytics, and artificial intelligence used to implement broad threat assessments; the threat of natural disasters as well as threats posed by individual dissidents and groups”.
It is significant that Roig is a graduate of Berlin’s Hertie School, until recently known as the Hertie School of Governance, which was founded by the same Hertie Foundation which funds the CIJ.
The Hertie School is a partner in the Global Public Policy Network (GPPN) along with Columbia University in New York, the Business Administration School of São Paulo at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, the University of Tokyo, the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, the Institute of Public Affairs at LSE and Sciences Po, Paris.
It says: “As part of the United Nation’s 2030 Agenda, having specialized knowledge and hands-on experience on how to meet the SDGs is in high demand from government agencies, international organizations and private companies.
“The UN 2030 Agenda and SDG partnerships truly represent a global effort from the public and private sectors, at the international and local level, to respond to the most challenging questions of our time”.
Unfortunately, GPPN partner Hertie has lately been failing to respond to one particular challenging question of our time, namely its relationship to its own past.
Hertie Foundation received its substantial funds from the profits of the Hertie chain of department stores.
Georg Karg (pictured here in 1938), in whose memory the foundation was established by his heirs in 1974, got his hands on what was originally Herrmann Tietz & Co during the 1930s, when it was “aryanized” by the Nazis and the original Jewish owners pushed out with minimal compensation.
Explains this article: “The pro-Nazi Dresdner Bank and others simply refused to give the company new credit, claiming back a loan of 14 million Reichsmark. Facing bankruptcy, the Tietz brothers were forced to accept the bank’s condition: handing over the operations to an Aryan management”.
Hertie School was set up by the foundation with the goal of preparing selected students for “leadership” positions in government, business, and civil society.
In 2020, German media reported that almost 150 current and former students had come together to challenge the Hertie empire about its past.
Writes graduate Tobias Bünder: “Sadly, so far the history of the Hertie name has been shared with far too few of these future leaders.
“Many other corporations have done much worse and risen to new heights afterwards (Hugo Boss, for example, got big making SS uniforms). Nonetheless, Karg is definitely not without blame for capitalizing on the misfortune of his former employers during the time of a hateful, anti-Semitic political movement”.
There is a certain irony in the fact that Hertie is having to fend off criticism of its record in the Hitler years, while at the same time funding impact-intersectionality, a 21st century public-private partnership bid to control and exploit human beings by means of cold scientific classification along racial and other divisive lines…
