The Truth About Eco-Fascism

[Iconoclast]

The truth about eco-fascism

Environmentalism has been hijacked by the technocrats

unherd.com

Nearly a decade ago, I wrote an essay called “Dark Ecology”, about the state of environmentalism. In it, I wrote about the emergence of a tendency in green circles which I called “neo-environmentalism”. The neo-greens — who preferred to call themselves “ecomodernists” — emerged as a reaction to the traditional green movement, which in its infancy had been relatively conservative, low-tech and focused on the human scale. The neo-greens rejected all this as backward, impractical and even dangerous. They believed, as I wrote back then, that: “Civilisation, nature and people can be ‘saved’ only by enthusiastically embracing biotechnology, synthetic biology, nuclear power, geoengineering”. The “new environmentalism”, they declared, in manifestoes like this one, would be, as we might now say, “grown-up”.

Sucks to be right, as the kids say. Since I wrote that essay, the neo-greens have, as predicted, mounted an effective corporate takeover of most of the environmental movement. Examples of what we might call Machine Environmentalism have been embraced by the corporate sector, big NGOs, global institutions and most of the intellectual class, most obviously in the “Green New Deals” that are popping up like summer daisies in all corners of the globe. Meanwhile, the green movement is splintering into camps, determined by attitudes to the kind of intrusive and novel technologies that the Machine Greens are pushing.

A very insightful article by old-school green Paul Kingsnorth, who expertly articulates the real problem with the modern green movement; it's a hollowed out shell that acts as an excuse for more technocracy.

 

[Bassoe]

I disagree. Megaprojects to maintain the environment and acquire new sources of resources are necessary if we want to retain civilization as we know it. Yeah, they'll be expensive, but governmental financial responsibility has been a punchline for generations now, just take the endless hemorrhage of money straight from the taxpayer or printer (devaluing the taxpayers' savings with inflation) currently being wasted on endless pointless proxy wars and redirect it. The problem is, the ruling oligarchy isn't doing megaprojects, they're prefer to reduce our quality of life so we'll never compete with them.

Laroucheism​

What is it?

Once upon a time there was a leftist. Not a tankie that viewed America and by extension western civilization as the center of all human evil, but a Trotskyist. The ideology of Laroucheism goes back to the name of its' founder, Lyndon Larouche. Originally a businessman, LaRouche will join the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the Spartacist League. Fast forward to 1968, during the 1968 Convention of Students for a Democratic Society. The internal strife of the organization, manifested during the 1968 convention, provided LaRouche with an opportunity to gain influence with those dissatisfied with SDS through his own organization, the National Caucus of Labor Committees(NCLC). LaRouche presented himself as the only leader of the only movement with a direction and the correct application of Marxist theory: everyone else were either Stalinist racial nationalists or dopehead hippies with no political direction. He and his followers would paint themselves as the "professional, grown up" leftists dressing in suits and throwing out the Bob Dylan and Hunter S. Thompson for classical music and classical Enlightenment or Romanticist era philosophers.

Eventually, the NCLC was kicked out of SDS for taking the side of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville strike in 1969, where teachers struck against a community control program that was meant to empower black parents running schools where their children faced racial discrimination. This was LaRouche's first attempt at synthesizing Marxist theory with organizing the chauvinistic right into a political force. Following the expulsion, the NCLC would start to train paramilitaries and develop cells in Europe. Fermenting a conspiracy theory that the Tavistock Institute was brainwashing Americans, LaRouche will subject his followers to brainwashing in the name of "de-programming" them. Declaring tankies and Stalinists to be corrupting the American left, LaRouche would initiate Operation Mop-Up, where they inflicted mass violence against the rest of the American left(along with the United Auto Workers and the United Steelworkers of America for some reason) in an effort to "purge" them of their "impurities". This only unified Trotskyists and Marxist-Leninists(a rare sentence, I know!) against LaRouche's followers, and effectively led to his break from the left, but LaRouche will take increasingly twisted means to "purify" the left on his way out: supplying intel on political dissidents in the US and worldwide for the Iranian SAVAK, the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship, the Noriega dictatorship, the apartheid regime of South African , the Argentine Dirty War Junta, and the US Reagan administration .

The break of Laroucheism from the left would see LaRouche develop his ideology around what we commonly associate with LaRouche today. According to LaRouche, the history of all hitherto existing society is NOT the history of class struggles despite what Marx would believe, but humanity vs. a corrupt empire plotting perpetual human enslavement stretching back to Babylon, said conspiracy finding its' ideological basis in the ideas of Aristotle. LaRouche argues that the antithesis to "oligarchic" Aristotleism are the ideas of Plato. The "Platonists" are idealists and utopians who believe in absolute truth and an absolute good, while the Aristotelians use moral relativism to do absolute evil and keep the population brainwashed. According to LaRouche, every single empire in world history from Babylon to Sparta to Rome to Venice was driven to conquer and enslave populations by the Aristotelian "oligarchy" and the current manifestation of Aristotelian thinking lay in the British Empire, which it believes still controls the world through international banking, drug trafficking, and multiple puppet regimes, with the British having corrupted American society and the Queen as responsible for drug trafficking”. LaRouche mentions various "humanist" figures in American history--the Founding Fathers, Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley, Franklin Roosevelt, Henry Wallace, and John F.Kennedy(given that 3 of these individuals were assassinated, you can guess who LaRouche blames as the culprit), along as various "humanist" figures in world history--the Ancient Athenians during the Peloponnesian War, and both the Tsars of Russia and Otto Von Bismarck in the 19th century, as having unsuccessfully fought this conspiracy in favor of a world of perpertual peace and unlimited technocratic development.

Oh and, the British were behind the French Reign of Terror, and Napoleon, and WWI, and the Nazis too, and nuclear proliferation, and everything LaRouche dosen't like in society all for unifying the world into a horrific world empire. From what I can research about the man, I sure as hell can bet that he tripped because of a wet floor, he'll blame the janitor of being a British Deep State Agent out to kill him. On a more serious note, LaRouche pins blame for most of the 20th century's ills on, apart from the house of Windsor(with both Edward VII pre-WWI and Queen Elizabeth singled out as particuarly vile individuals by LaRouche), HG Wells and Bertrand Russell, the latter he declares "the most evil man of the 20th century".

But why stop at Anglophobia? LaRouche managed to sneak in some "good old" antisemitism into his conspiracies as well, often target Jewish people in positions of power, such as Henry Kissinger and the Rothschilds(which should sound eerily familiar) as members of the British led Aristotelian conspiracy. In fact, why stop at antisemitism either? Why not add in a good dose of homophobia and declare gay men suffering from AIDS as a threat must be shunned from society because they are a "British-Soviet plot" to destroy the US via the efforts of Soviet Agent Walter Mondale?

The deindustrialization of the United States in the 1980s would form a key cornerstone of his conspiracy. The Laroucheite ideology would frame the deindustralization of the United States as part of a massive conspiracy instigated by British puppets to commit mass genocide on the American population through driving it's population to starvation and unemployment and forcing the US to switch to more "primitive" forms of industrial production that will cause a mass population collapse. LaRouche's anwser to the problem of deindustrialization? A populist, technocratic dictatorship that will use crackpot science and untested technology like Fusion energy and excess nuclear energy to rebuild and reindustrialize the US and take us to the stars and beyond. Environmentalism? Nuclear energy falling under scrutiny after Chernobyl and Three Mile Island? No, no, no we can't have that here, because you see, environmentalism, global warming, the Ozone Layer depletion are all British Malthusian plots to manufacture consent to make people in the US and the third world accepting of the imminent population genocide on America and the third world through forcing "primitive" industrial production on most of the population that would cause the imminent population collapse to levels the oligarchs would like!

To spread his worldview further, LaRouche would set up multiple front organizations like the Schiller Institute, the LaRouche Political Action Committee, these organizations will inspire many smaller scale batshit organizations and political parties in Europe, two of these being Jacques Cheminade's Solidarité et Progrès in France and the European Worker's Party in Sweden. These front organizations publish various publications via their publication arm: the Executive Intelligence Review. EIR claims to have various international bureaus in Bogotá, Berlin, Copenhagen, Lima, Melbourne, Mexico City, New Delhi, Paris, and Wiesbaden, in addition to various cities in the U.S. It's headings are extremely sensational, conspiratorial, and fearmongering-oriented with the word "Nazi" thrown around to attack his enemies 24/7, and that's putting it lightly.

Suprising no one, LaRouche's ego remained as massive as ever. Building off his days opposing the Tavistock Institute, LaRouche would continue to annotate himself as the messiah to free everyone's minds from the Matrix. He and his cohorts methods of mass recruitment involve psychological manipulation by convincing its victims the whole world is a oligarch-controlled environment perpetually feeding them lies, the result of which being a global population collapse happening for which they are held responsible unless they bow fully to LaRouche and accept him as their lord and savior, as it is LaRouche who will teach them the right way to think about the world at large! And what say, if they don't and want to keep their sanity intact. Well, there are consequences for that. In 2003 a British student in Paris named Jeremiah Duggan found himself in an anti Iraq War demonstration organized by the Schiller Institute--in reality it was a cult recruiting session. Jeremiah stood up to the anti-Semitic rhetoric during the event and announced he was Jewish, and later on in the day...he was found dead hours later on the road.

I mentioned that LaRouche wasn't a tankie, and he himself hated tankies if his violent actions towards CPUSA are any indication. Yet you will often hear the LaRouche movement be associated with the tankie train of thought. Now on the surface there isn't much comparison outside of say a penchant for harmful ideas and simping for dictators they think fulfill their ideas--modern tankies at the very least in America and Canada tend to be mostly on the ultra-progressive side socially, and view Western civilization and especially "settler colonial" civilization(America, Canada, Israel, Australia, New Zealand) as irredeemably evil due to their more decolonial oriented focus of world history, Laroucheites on the other hand are socially reactionary to this day and view social progress as a tool of the oligarchy. Western civilization and especially American civilization by contrast are viewed as fundamentally good Platonic societies, but taken over and corrupted from within by the oligarchy and had its' positive mission of transforming the world into a technocratic paradise derailed into one of rampant imperialism by the oligarchy and the "deep state". Yet the reason this comparison of Laroucheism and Marxism-Leninism be made is moreso that politics makes for strange bedfellows.

Turns out there was a grain of truth in the international outreach LaRouche had and some of that international outreach included some figures associated with the anti-revisionist tankie left that have nationalistic and Euroskeptic views(and would be receptive to LaRouche viewing the EU as a Anglo-Nazi construct), and the national Bolshevik movement(which of course had a more positive view of Stalin) would associate themselves with LaRouche. Key figures of this trend include Annie Lacroix-Riz, the French Grover Furr, who on top of the Stalin whitewashing, has propogated the Synarchism conspiracy theory according to which France is ruled by a secret elite stemming from the Banque Worms grouping and strengthened by the joint ventures of 1st Baron Norman of Britain and Germany’s Hjalmar Schacht; said secret elite going on to form Vichy France, and later the EU. This theory has been accepted by LaRouche as a component of his ideology, as a "expanded universe" to his batshit acid trip cinematic universe to put it bluntly. Apart from Annie Lacroix-Riz, we also have the the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, a National Bolshevik Soviet Nostaligia party with xenophobic campaign ads and connections to Dugin that also support Laroucheite views. While not necessarily a Soviet Nostaligia party or a "tankie" party, Polish newspapers have reported that Andrzej Lepper, leader of the populist Samoobrona party, was trained at the Schiller Institute and has received funding from LaRouche, though both groups deny the connection. And of course there is also the fact that LaRouche, thanks to politics being strange bedfellows, view positively, the regimes of Putinist Russia and Dengist China--the latter before tankies decided it was cool(back then they viewed Deng as a sellout)

Of course LaRouche did end up influencing genuinely some tankies in the US that felt their comrades on the rest of the ML left were too overfocused on racial and identity politics and consequently did not see Western Civilization as a totally negative force unlike the rest of their kind, but felt it was corrupted from within, but that's a story better suited for chat.

LaRouche would die in February 12, 2019, with his movement splitting between the Schiller Institute(under the control of his wife) and the LaRouche Political Action Committee over differing views of his ideas. Where the movement goes from here, nobody knows, but it's clear that LaRouche played a huge role in inflaming the paranoid and conspiratorial style of American political society.

As Heroes, Villains, Neutrals, Individualist/Collectivist:

WIP, but surprisingly there are ways for the ideology to be "neutral", through the ideology would have to be much more saner evolution or offshoot of the insane original ideology due to a different LaRouche, different outcomes of the evolution of his ideas or faced with worse alternatives that could give it ideological ammo(ie: fascist or ML Britain, Anglo-American Cold War)

'Spend a few trillion dollars on building nuclear reactors everywhere for power and asteroid mines for rare earth ores so industrialism can continue and not autocannibalize into subscription service feudalism' is a solution. 'Oligarchs who have no intention of changing their own lifestyles saying we'll have to live in pods and eat bugs' isn't.

 

[DarthOne]