A recent article in Huffington Post detailed the strange bedfellows leading the Austrian government these days, viz., the conservative People’s Party and the Green Party. The contract (yes, they have to sign a contract) between the two parties obliges them to combat global warming and immigrants.
Indeed, far-right groupings across Europe are dumping climate skepticism and articulating the language of ecology to their authoritarian vision. Marine Le Pen in France invoked “blood-and-soil rhetoric, declaring that those ‘rooted in their home’ are ‘ecological’ while ‘nomadic’ people ‘do not care about the environment because they have no homeland.’” “Eco-fascism” is a term for “an ideology that defends its violent authoritarianism as necessary to protect the environment.” Or, as Naomi Klein put it in a recent interview, What actually happens is they apply that intensely hierarchical supremacist worldview to the reality that what climate change means is that the space for people to live well on this planet is contracting. More and more of us are going to have to live on less and less land, even if we do everything right. It’s already happening. So if you have that worldview, then you will apply it to people who are migrating to your country and to those who want to migrate to your country. Both the El Paso & Christchurch shooters cited this rhetoric in their pre-massacre screeds. Indeed, the more I look at what is transpiring in the human world, the more it seems like the current environmental disaster will be accompanied by increasing authoritarianism. And that authoritarianism will include racism as a prop. In the American context, creeping authoritarianism is bound up with religious intolerance, as it is in many places (which stands in for racial and gender intolerance, too). Maybe climate crisis isn’t the most immediate danger. Thinking about living under a fascist regime in the near future makes the “increasing number and intensity of storms” sound a little abstract. Some of us will be beheaded before we see life really disrupted by climate change. Authoritarians are pretty narrow-minded when it comes to writing that takes a critical view of their regime – or that they simply don’t understand (as with the Nazis’ denunciation of “degenerate art”). It’s hard to imagine very much writing of lasting interest being produced under such a regime. So . . . write what you can now? Stash it away and hope it all blows over? Or maybe doing everything we can to prevent such a regime from coming to power in the first place. And we must understand suppression of immigrants and immigration as a means to divert attention from the true causes of the climate crisis. Many courageous writers and artists have defied and worked against totalitarian regimes — not just as writers but as organizers, often clandestinely. The S may HTF politically before it does climatically. We need to take our noses out of our books.
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |