Nina-Bytes: Fascism and Climate Imperialism
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There Is No Exit Strategy For Capitalist Extraction
Over the past eight years that I’ve been writing about fascism, capitalism, and climate catastrophe, I’ve worked pretty hard to focus attention on what I consider the most fundamentally important and horrifying reality of our time. It doesn’t matter how hard it may be for us to accept this fact; the billionaire ruling class in the Pig Empire, and the governments they own, fully intend to kill billions of people to keep extracting capital on a boiling planet, even in the face of a climate apocalypse. Furthermore, given that democratic societies full of people who probably don’t want to die just so billionaires can keep doing capitalism as the planet turns to ash are highly unlikely to continue facilitating that behavior, this same ruling class is busy transforming our nations into fascist police states to better crush dissent as swiftly as possible. Combining these two facts together, it becomes clear that the current Pig Empire-wide rise of well-funded, politically empowered fascist movements operating with the support of significant portions of the mainstream capitalist establishment is not an unfortunate accident, but rather an engineered evolution of capitalist society in response to the early stages of climate catastrophe.
Naturally, that sounds like a conspiracy theory to people who wouldn’t want to believe it anyway even if they knew it was true, so until folks watched Elon Musk literally buy Trump’s way to the White House this past fall, this idea was pretty hard to communicate to my readers, although I certainly kept trying. In my opinion, the evidence has been all around us for years now, from the funding behind fascist movements and political parties in the Pig empire, to the capitalist control of supposedly “liberal democratic” governments across the “West” that continue to facilitate the mass extraction of fossil fuels (that we cannot burn without murdering potentially billions of people) while professing to care about climate crisis. After years of study, I’ve concluded that the only plausible explanation for the ruling class and political actors consistently doing absolutely nothing about climate crisis and fossil fuel dependency while simultaneously hardening borders, curtailing civil rights, and building out massive police states hell bent on squashing protestors, is because they intend to take humanity – and the biosphere that supports more than eight billion of our lives – right off the ecological cliff, and they know the folks doing the dying are going to oppose that.
As we crash through climate objectives and rocket towards an environmental apocalypse in the middle of a mass extinction event however, it turns out that banks and government-aligned advisory bodies are more or less starting to admit this genocidal bullshit is the actual plan, out loud. As this April 8th article from Kate Aronoff writing for The New Republic demonstrates, portions of the banking sector and highly-respected government-aligned bipartisan think tanks are now openly arguing climate targets are a joke and it’s time for a new phase of aggressive climate imperialism as the planet descends into a warming-induced apocalypse; because nothing, not even the end of the world, can get in the way of churning profits to enrich a ruling class that already owns everything around us.
The Bleak, Defeatist Rise of “Climate Realism”
“The brand of climate cynicism being voiced by the Council on Foreign Relations is more novel. In an essay outlining the founding principles of the Climate Realism Initiative, Varun Sivarum—the program’s director and a former top aide to Biden-era U.S. climate envoy John Kerry—describes a zero-sum, catastrophically climate-changed world where “other countries will single-mindedly prioritize their own interests” and the United States should do the same. Facing climate-fueled mass migration “of at least hundreds of millions of climate refugees [that] could upend the international order, and increasingly grisly natural disasters,” the U.S. “should provide the support it can, cooperate with countries on building resilience capabilities, and protect its borders,” as well as “prepare for global competition for resources and military positioning that is intensifying in the melting Arctic.”
As emissions continue to rise from emerging economies, Sivarum calls on policymakers to treat climate change as a “top national security priority—on the level of averting nuclear war and engaging in great-power competition with China,” working with allies to penalize countries whose emissions continue to rise. Acknowledging that such an approach is “fundamentally unfair,” Sivarum makes the case for an America First climate policy. “Nevertheless, the fact is that foreign emissions are endangering the American homeland,” he argues. “Every tool of the U.S. and allies’ arsenals, spanning diplomatic and economic coercion to military might, should be on the table.”
Look folks, this isn’t a partisan political question of which party is better or worse on the issue of climate crisis; this is about a billionaire donor class that controls policy and politicians in both parties, and why that control means we were always speeding towards a hydra-headed crisis of capitalism, climate catastrophe, and fascist authoritarianism. Recognition of the awful reality that nobody “in charge” is going to stop this extinction-level crisis has been spreading slowly. Capitalist extraction, and the free market fundamentalist order is has created, are killing the planet and I’m sorry to say that ending that extractivism is simply not going to be on the ballot because this is a rigged oligarchy, not a democracy. I have never once argued that Republicans and other right wing parties in the Pig Empire are the same as “liberal” capitalist governments in terms of climate policy, merely that it’s their equally slavish devotion to capitalism that’s killing the planet we all live on, and an oligarchic donor class that dominates our politics regardless of how you vote has decided that ultimately both “sides” of the political divide are heading towards the same place – specifically, fascist police states on a boiling planet.
Of course, none of this changes the fact that electing an American government that’s openly working with fascist billionaires who seem intent on bringing about the climate apocalypse as soon as possible represents an existential crisis for the human species; an unholy alliance recently described by authors Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor as “End Times Fascism.” What’s important to understand here is that while the Trump regime certainly represents an acceleration of the process towards climate apocalypse, it is also the product of that very same process; we are here because rich people mean to kill us all to keep getting richer, and fascism is how you create societies where that is possible. This isn’t just because fascist ideology allows the construction of vast police states, but because the very same “us and them” hate-fueled logic that drives fascist movements to power is also an absolute necessity for implementing a climate imperialism political paradigm on a boiling planet with diminishing resources. There is no future on a boiling planet for both capitalism, and free societies; the rich have made their choice – perhaps it’s time for the rest of us to make our choice as well.
– Nina Illingworth
Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.
You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, and on Mastodon.
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