Beware of Ecofascism
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Throughout the 13th and 14th centuries, environmental activist Genghis Khan had a carbon footprint of ~700 million tonnes of carbon. Today, Khan would be regarded as the most “green” environmental activist alive by pure numbers. His carbon footprint was so negative solely because he slaughtered 40 million people during the Mongol invasions, scrubbing the atmosphere so clean that it caused some slight environmental cooling. However, Khan clearly deserves no applause, given how his Earth Day celebration was executed, right? Anybody with any sense of ethics or even the vaguest idea of what a moral compass is would agree, but there is a shockingly increasing population of people who might just give Khan a round of applause for his troubles.
The term for these individuals is “ecofascist,” and they are defined as radical environmentalists who blame climate change on underdeveloped industrializing countries, multiculturalism, and overpopulation, with their solutions to these problems often being blatantly genocidal.
Ecofascists are just as right-wing and authoritarian as normal fascists, though they uniquely weaponize climate change as a means to obtain power. Often times this front of environmentalism attracts well-meaning leftists and liberals who are desperate for any solution to fix the climate crisis, effectively brainwashing them into an ideology of racism, colonialism, and genocide. Ecofascism holds its roots in the original Nazi party, which cited population diversity as a corruption to the German’s rightful ecological space. Since then, Neo-Nazis have invaded environmentalist circles, accusing the Global South and its ethnic groups of the razing of various ecological spaces, often shifting the blame from the 100 companies who are actually responsible for 70% of global pollution. If you were surprised when you found that statistic out, it may be because ecofascist rhetoric has been climbing its way into mainstream discourse faster than many care to believe.
At their core, ecofascists claim that there are too many people and too few resources, and some “certain” populations are more at fault than others. For decades, governments around the world have been utilizing these values as a way to oppress certain minority groups. As early as the 1970s, well before the full extent of global warming was even known to man, the Indian Gandhi government forcefully sterilized 6.2 million “resource exhaustive” men as a response to the 1975 Emergency, claiming that they were draining and damaging India’s natural resources, though they were really just impoverished. In 1983, China coercively sterilized over 20 million women, as well as performing other birth control operations on millions more, once again in the name of resource control and overpopulation. These experiments were simply eugenics with a nature aesthetic - the government’s way of making the poor pay the price for their mistakes.
The West is also no stranger to ecofascist propaganda, specifically American tech and oil corporations. Take Elon Musk, who brags about how eco-friendly his new electric cars are and how the future is Tesla, while also bragging about funding a coup in Bolivia for cheaper lithium reserves. Elon Musk is a prime example of an ecofascist, openly exercising violence and authority over global minorities who get in the way of his “green” god complex. He’s not alone though, as the biggest tech companies in America (Apple, Microsoft, etc.) regularly flex their eco-friendly muscles while debilitating half the countries below the equator. These industry giants rape the Global South of their resources, often utilizing child labor and heavily pollutant factories, while simultaneously lobbying American media and politicians to tell the public that these very countries are to blame for climate change because of their growing populations and less “clean” technology. Multinationals often justify this environmental violence by stating that it's for the sake of a cleaner world back home, completely ignoring the ecological disasters they create abroad. Meanwhile, countries abroad hardly keep any of the resources they create, as colonial powers snatch them as soon as they are reaped. The constant narrative from American media is that the problem is overpopulation in poorer countries while completely ignoring the issue of overconsumption in the wealthiest nations.
As the climate crisis gets worse in the coming years, there will be more and more talk of overpopulation, personal responsibility, and other factors in climate change that have a minuscule effect when compared to the pollution spewed by giant oil and tech corporations. As the ship begins to sink, lifeboat ethics will continue to circulate the conversation. Wealthy nations will take the lifeboats while the poorest will be stranded in the water. They will continue to hoard resources and use authoritarian measures to redistribute them to a select few groups of people, allowing the rest of the world to fall into crisis. As this goes on, it is the responsibility of anybody who recognizes such rhetoric to speak against them and focus attention on the real polluters - the owning class and their puppets.