Review of "The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and The Far Right" by Sam Moore and Alex Roberts

The first thing to say is that this is a brilliant book...even better than their other book "The Post Internet Far Right", which was also great. It's not long, but it is very dense, with lots of links and footnotes, and lots of examples...many of which were derived from things that I had never heard of, even in the historical sections (and I'm quite well informed about the history of fascist and proto-fascist movements)...I'd never heard of Henry Dorgères or his French "Greenshirt" movement, to cite just one. The history section, which forms Chapter 1, is really good and would more or less work as a standalone piece; it's better than other things that I've seen before which more or less say there used to be environmentalists who were fascists, and the Green movement has skeletons in its cupboard and so on...this addresses the contradictions of fascist nature-loving, the Nazis's biodynamic farms alongside the massive program of autobahn-building and their need for cheap food.

Chapter 2 looks at the far right and nature now - how the climate crisis provides new opportunities for the far right. On the one hand climate breakdown, and its consequences, can be used by the far right to justify their programs and policies - a tighter grip on immigration and harsher policies against refugees. Conversely the far can also use opposition to climate mitigation methods as mobilising tool - either in terms of denialism ("climate change is a hoax being used to take away our freedoms") or a sort of Poujadist non-denial denialism ("all these green policies are too expensive and it's ordinary people who have to pay for them, not the liberal elite").

Chapter 3, which is slimmer, addresses the online far right ecologism, a peer into the cesspool of what they will say when they think they are anonymous or untraceable, with a much greater to misogyny, homophobia and murderous Social Darwinism.

Chapter 4 is about ecofascist terrorism, with a closer look at where the far right goes when it doesn't care how it looks to others - including the role of appeals to nature in the manifestos of fascist shooters and terrorists, the so-called "black-pilled".

And Chapter 5 looks forward into a future in which national and global politics will be dominated by climate chaos - in which science, and technology, and the political choices associated with them, will be ever more contested and fragmentary. They sketch out future responses, including: 

• "fossilized denialism", essentially the Trumpist postponement of effective mitigation measures while there's still money to be made from oil reserves; 
•  "batteries bombs and borders" - the search for technological and political fixes to address the climate while leaving the current distribution of wealth and power intact, including fighting multiple small wars for newly important resources alongside the militarisation of mitigation and adaption measures. Pretty much what we are being offered by Silicon Valley, Biden, and even the World Economic Forum.
• "climate collapse cults", a more thoroughly fascist response to the multiple crises, which will include, at least in rhetoric if not in practice, far right breakaway sub-states and communities, and more fantasies of violence.

The last of these offers the prospect for a return to actual fascism...most of the time the authors are careful to distinguish between that and other far right forms. Actual militarised fascist street movements and parties are for the most part pretty rare at the moment, but they might become a bigger part of a far right response as the climate crises worsen.