Target the premises that open the door to ecofascism, and target them while this movement is still small - before the entire right mobilises to win people’s hearts and minds on this issue. Our saving grace is that it’s still too early for the reactionaries to accept climate change, many people still can’t see the crisis in-front of their eyes, but that’ll change.
To weaken their cause in the future, these premises must be destroyed:
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The idea of individual responsibility. This leads people to blame the poor who don’t have any means to live sustainably, and to avoid looking at the systems that keep them poor. This also allows philanthropic billionaires to look like hero’s in the eyes of the public when their PR team plants a dozen trees, or something equally unhelpful.
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The myth that newly industrialized and developing countries are to blame for the climate crisis. This’ll be an easy scapegoat in the future, as westerners could then both be nationalistic, seeing their nations as having never contributed to the issue, and climate “solutions” would come to mean imperialism/colonialism. This could further radicalize people into seeing climate change as a result of race alone. Especially when climate refugees start to amp up, “first they ruined their own countries, now they’re coming here to ruin ours!” will be the rhetoric.
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The myth that overpopulation is the issue. As you said, the sympathy to Thanos is telling. If overpopulation is the problem, depopulation is the unspoken solution. Fascists, of course, will use the point above to further condition people into accepting the depopulation of “polluting” ethnic minorities.
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The benevolent billionaire myth. The cutesy sympathy to Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and others right now is just cringey, but will evolve into the acceptance and even championing of oligarchy or dictatorship if conditions continue to worsen. If billionaires love us and the Earth so much, and provide us with all these amazing technologies, we must give them more power to save us, right? Worker power must be suppressed for the billionaire class to be free, as they’ll say.
A lot of these premises are already lodged deep in the minds of many people, including liberals. It seems almost harmless now, but if those people see their lives start to collapse, if they fall into poverty and despair, if politics becomes more than just a civil discussion to them, an ecofascist movement will use these premises to their advantage.
And of course they won’t call themselves “ecofascist”.They may even want to distance themselves from the current alt-right, who people are becoming more skeptical of.
