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Title: Neoecofascism
Author: Daniel Rueda
Language: en
Source: Journal for the Study of Radicalism Volume 14, Number 2, Fall 2020 Michigan State University Press

Daniel Rueda

Neoecofascism

Humankind alone is no longer the focus of thought, but rather life as a

whole. This striving toward connectedness with the totality of life,

with nature itself, a nature into which we are born, this is the deepest

meaning and the true essence of National Socialist thought.1

—Ernst Lehmann, 1934

We are a special part of the natural order, being in it and above it. We

have the potential to become nature’s steward or its destroyer. European

countries should invest in national parks, wilderness preserves, and

wildlife refuges, as well as productive and sustainable farms and

ranches. The natural world—and our experience of it—is an end in

itself.2

—Richard Spencer, 2017

In a context of increasing concern regarding global warming and its

effects on human society and our planet’s biosphere, environmentalism is

expected to become one of the central political issues of the next

decades. The emergence and success of green movements and parties, a

logical consequence of such situation, is already a reality in several

Western countries. Although there are differences between those

movements, in [End Page 95] general they share values such as

progressivism, liberalism, equalitarianism, and respect for democracy.

Yet this hasn’t always been the case in the past, and it won’t

necessarily be the case in the future. History shows us that the

protection of the environment against human intervention and the idea

that the human being is part of the natural world are far from being a

monopoly of any single worldview. In fact, at the beginning of the

twentieth century it was difficult to associate such tendencies to a

particular ideology.3

Although today ecological radicalism is generally associated with

leftist worldviews, its radical right counterpart, ecofascism, remains a

reality in a series of contemporary political groups and it could be a

political force to be reckoned with in the near future in countries such

as the United States. This article starts from the assumption that

political demands (such as environmentalism) only express concrete

content after being located within a discursive system, a view

introduced by the poststructuralist theorist Ernesto Laclau.4 This means

that ecological radicalism cannot be a priori associated with any

particular ideological movement. Therefore, the fact that the radical

right “uses” it cannot logically be denounced as a deceitful

appropriation. A similar view is formulated by Janet Biehl and Peter

Stauden-maier (although on a different basis), the authors of what has

become the reference publication on ecofascism.5 Only this “relativist”

framework can guarantee a rigorous and objective examination of

ecofascism and prevent ideological biases.

This article is divided in two sections. The first is a brief history of

the genesis of ecofascism and an analysis of the core ideas of its

doctrine. It will trace the origins of this branch of fascism that began

to form in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century and that was

highly influential among certain sectors of the NSDAP

(Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei) until the fall of the

Nazi regime in 1945. This section will also focus on analyzing what kind

of ecological radicalism was formulated by the early ecofascists and

what were its connections with racist and authoritarian discourses.

The second section centers on an illustrative case study that can point

up some of the key characteristics of neoecofascism, the contemporary

version of ecofascism, and how they compare to the latter’s. It will

focus on the United States, a country that has witnessed a rise of

radical right groups and discourses in the last decade6 and in which

several terrorists have included [End Page 96] ecofascist remarks in

their manifestos, as we shall see further on. Finally, the differences

between the many right-wing environmentalist stances will be outlined in

order to avoid the semantic inflation of the term “ecofascism.”

The Origins of Ecofascism: The German National-Romantic Synthesis

Ecofascism was first and foremost an offshoot of Romanticism, an

intellectual movement whose impact on Germany during the nineteenth

century is impossible to exaggerate. In political terms, Romanticism was

primarily a reaction against the Enlightenment and its core assumptions.

To put it baldly, to reason, individualism, and civic communitarianism

the Romantics opposed a celebration of introspection and the emotional,

a nostalgia for a lost community (be that ethnic or religious) and an

emphasis on rootedness against cosmopolitanism and universalism.

That being said, it is important to note that Romanticism was and is a

complex and rich cultural movement that gave origin to several and often

contradictory tendencies on both ends of the political spectrum.7 In

fact, even critics of Romanticism, who tend to condemn it as part of the

so-called Counterenlightenment, such as Isaiah Berlin8 or Tim Blanning,9

admit that its alleged negative influence on modernity and liberalism

needs to be nuanced. Moreover, it is important not to lose sight of the

fact that, as authors like Zygmunt Bauman,10 Theodor Adorno, and Max

Horkheimer11 have noted, some of the key ideas that emanated from the

Enlightenment (such as instrumental reason) were also pivotal for the

fascist movement. Be that as it may, this work will focus on the

Romantic currents that paved the way for the advent of ecofascism,

therefore concentrating on some forms of Romanticism at the expense of

others. The connection between Romanticism and fascism has been pointed

out by the main authors of the fascism studies field, such as Roger

Griffin,12 Emilio Gentile,13 George L. Mosse,14 Zeev Sternhell,15

Stanley G. Payne16 and Robert Paxton.17

Germany was the nation in which, according to Biehl and Staudenmaier,

ecofascism was first articulated.18 The German Romantics played a key

role in shaping their country’s nation-building project (it is not by

coincidence that one of the first German intellectuals who promoted

nationalism was Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a philosopher highly influenced

by the Romantics)19 and they [End Page 97] did so by opposing the kind

of nationalism that was being formulated by the French revolutionaries

at the time. To civic and contractual nationalism, the German Romantic

nationalists of the nineteenth century opposed a union based on

ethnicity and a shared and unique culture,20 a solution related to the

fact that there was a high degree of political and territorial

fragmentation of the Germanic lands, a situation that made it difficult

to find common institutions and political authorities. Lacking the

political, these thinkers turned to the ethnic.

This led some nationalist thinkers to differentiate between German

nationalism (ethnic and Romantic) and French nationalism (civic and

liberal), a distinction that was advocated mainly by French scholars and

that has been partly contested since its formulation.21 The idea that

the German nation was being built with too much emphasis on irrational,

ethnic, and xenophobic elements is not a contemporary view, for it was

already pointed out by nineteenth-century thinkers. Such is the case of

Federico Chabod, an Italian historian who drew a distinction between the

German Volk based on spiritualism and racial identity) and the liberal

and contractualist idea of the nation that had emerged in France and

Italy.22 Ernest Renan, one of the most important theoreticians of

nationalism, shared this view and pointed to Romanticism as a dangerous

ingredient in nation-building processes.23

It is in this historical context that the two most important ideological

movements for the advent of ecofascism appeared: Blut und Boden (Blood

and Soil) philosophy and völkisch (which literally means “folkish,”

although the translation of the word Volk is hard to make outside the

German context)24 movement.

The notion of Blut und Boden emerged in the late nineteenth century and

initially referred to literary and cultural trends rather than to

political tendencies.25 The core idea behind this slogan is that the two

main components of a nation (here understood as an ethnos, not as a

demos) are a shared ascendancy (and thus a series of racial common

traits) and a shared territory. Those two components are only

distinguished for conceptual purposes, for they are actually two

inseparable and integral parts of the national soul or spirit

(Volksgeist) that permeates the totality of the territory of the nation

and its inhabitants. This nostalgic longing for transcendent unity is

one of the strong points of the Romantic anthropological project.26

This means that nature, which had been restored by the Romantics as an

active and mysterious force against rationalist and scientificist

postulates, is [End Page 98] presented as a part of the nation. The

Volk, its national community and its territory are one, bridged by a

metaphysic and nationalist understanding of the world. Men (here, German

men) are thus completely rooted in their fatherland, and their character

is supposed to mirror the landscape in which they were born. This

allowed some nationalist thinkers to posit that whereas the Germanic

peoples were inward-looking, mysterious, and spiritually rich (inasmuch

as they lived in a dark territory full of dense forests), the Jews were

a materialistic and mundane people because they came from the deserts

(and they also were uprooted and inevitably cosmopolitan insofar as they

had abandoned their original land).27

The key idea here is that according to the Blood and Soil creed, there

is a metaphysical symbiosis between the Volk, its culture, and nature.28

Inasmuch as nature is part of this Volksgeist it logically becomes

something that needs to be protected, not because it is a vulnerable

part of our biosphere or because exploiting it is dangerous in economic

terms, but because is part of the nation. This is the core belief behind

the ecofascist concerns towards nature, a belief related to identity

anxieties rather than to a progressive longing for environmental

justice. It is clearly connected to the Romantic critique of

industrialization and urbanization as well as to modern idealizations of

the natural world,29 although here an essential nationalist element is

added. Nature is portrayed as a source of mysticism that cannot be

understood rationally and that is closely connected to the national

ethos of a concrete territory. It is therefore “nationalized.” Thus,

defending nature is logically akin to defending the nation and the Volk.

This synthesis between naturalism and Counterenlightenment ideas was

formulated mainly by Ernst Moritz and Wilhelm Riehl.30 Moritz was a

German nationalist who advocated a homogeneous society based on medieval

values (which mainly are, according to him, authority, spiritualism, and

corporatism) and who fueled the growing xenophobia against the French in

the context of the Napoleonic Wars.31 In 1815 he wrote a diatribe

against industrialization in which he defended the interconnectedness of

nature, the human being and social community.32 Riehl for his part was a

folklorist who insisted on the romantic idea that nature is somehow more

genuine and real than society33 and on how the Volk is inevitably rooted

to a particular territory. He defended a return to traditional

hierarchies and to an organic political system,34 thereby anticipating

some of the core assumptions of National Socialism. [End Page 99]

This amalgamation of nature and society soon became instrumental for the

most reactionary among German nationalists. Raoul Heinrich Francé, a

German botanist and philosopher, formulated in 1920 the idea of

Lebensgesetze, positing that nature and social arrangements were

inevitably based on the same premises (inasmuch as, following again the

romantic Weltanschauung, the cosmos is an organic unity and thus every

part of it is connected to the others).35 This had the implication that

society would logically need to be based on hierarchy, racial division,

patriarchy, and the principle of survival of the fittest. Furthermore,

it implied that human beings were not necessarily special creatures, a

mindset that anticipated some of the most brutal expressions of Nazism

according to Robert Pois.36 The notion of Lebensgesetze also entailed

that nature needs to be saved from harm, for not doing so would mean not

recognizing it as part of the cosmic and mystic unity that was so

important for Francé and his disciples.37 As Franz-Josef Brüggemeier,

Mark Cioc, and Thomas Zeller note:

Homeland and nature protectionists saw it as their task not only to

protect rare plants, endangered animals, and natural monuments, but also

to preserve local customs and national traditions, following the dictum

“keep the German people [Volkstum] strong and wholesome.” What kept

Germans powerful and pure, in turn, was the strength Germans drew from

preserving their traditions, monuments, and land. Volk, homeland, and

nature were intertwined.38

The völkisch movement, the other main ideological precursor of

ecofascism, appeared during the late nineteenth century as well. This

was a period of nation-building (the country was finally unified in

1871) and rapid industrialization in Germany. The rivalry with France,

as mentioned, had prompted an intellectual response against the

philosophes and their rational and scientific worldviews. According to

George Mosse, the movement was apolitical when it emerged, not because

of a lack of political views, but in the sense that it didn’t have clear

political goals.39 Moreover, it is important to keep in mind that there

wasn’t a united völkisch movement, for “instead of a single, organized

political force, an uncoordinated collection of völkisch groups and

individuals emerged”40 and that the common ground of these groupuscules

“was limited to agreement that the German nation should be based on the

concept of the German Volk, defined in racial terms.”41

The völkisch movement embraced a worldview whereby nature was far from

being mechanic or dead (as some scientificist thinkers propounded) [End

Page 100] and claimed that it should instead be thought of as a living

and mystic entity (a view, as mentioned, defended by the German Romantic

philosophers) that could represent a spiritual antidote to

industrialization and modern life. To urban life and capitalist

modernity, some völkisch writers and poets opposed the idea of an

idyllic German nature by creating the Heimatkunstbewegung42 (Homeland

Art Movement), from which emerged the Wandervogel group (literally, bird

of passage), which was part of the important German Youth Movement, an

organization highly influenced by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.43

The Wandervogel organized group hikes for young people as a protest

against modern society and soon became a source of anti-Semitic and

ethnic nationalist ideas.44

Originally neither the Blut und Boden nor the völkisch worldviews

espoused a scientific form of racism. This is because they had as one of

their core assumptions a rejection of rationalism and science, which

they associated with modern decadence and materialistic disenchantment.

Their anti-Semitism was spiritual and metaphysical, and therefore more

related to thinkers such as Julius Evola45 than to Arthur de Gobineau or

Houston Chamberlain.46 Rather than pseudoscientific conferences, these

movements preferred to celebrate the summer solstice and other Nordic

pagan festivities.47 In a nutshell, they had more in common with Helena

Blavatsky’s esoteric Theosophy (who gave birth to the more overtly

racist Ariosophy a few decades later)48 than to scientificist

worldviews.

These romantic nationalists thought that the German race was unique

inasmuch as it was homogeneous and divine, and therefore not corrupted

by foreign elements. Wilhelm Riehl, whom we have identified as a

“protoecofascist,” compared the Germans to a tree, well-rooted in the

soil but pointing to the sky (i.e., to the spiritual).49 Yet when at the

beginning of the twentieth century (and especially after the First World

War) these ideas were politicized they inevitably lost some of their

mystic and spiritual traits and partly embraced the by then mainstream

scientific biological worldview. The fact that during the interwar

period so many of the young participants of the Wandervogel movement

fled to far-right and proto-Nazi parties such as the DNVP

(Deutschnationale Volkspartei), the German Socialist Party

(Deutschsozialistische Partei), or the Pan-German League (Alldeutscher

Verband) is symptomatic of a shift in the objectives of the Völkisch

movement. According to George Mosse, 1918 can be considered the year of

the political [End Page 101] systemization of the völkisch ideology,50

roughly coinciding with the first steps of the convulse Weimar Republic.

It is hardly surprising that these ideas ended up permeating some

sectors of the main German fascist party, the NSDAP. The man charged

with incorporating them into the Nazi rule context was Walther Darré, a

pioneer in environmentalism who might be the most famous among all the

ecofascist ideologues and politicians. He was politicized at an early

stage of his life when he joined the Artamanen Gesellschaft (a völkisch

group who propounded a return to nature in order to escape modern urban

society) and became an agrarianist.51 During the 1930s Darré turned into

the most prominent member of the Blood and Soil movement and claimed

that the German land needed to be protected both against the Jews and

against uncontrolled industrialization.52

Darré defended the need of restoring the connection between Blut and

Boden, i.e., between the German Völk and its territory, thereby

promoting imperialist goals related to the idea of Lebensraum (inasmuch

as after 1919 millions of Germans were living outside the frontiers of

their original country, mainly in Poland and Czechoslovakia),

anti-Semitic views (inasmuch as he posited that Jews, who weren’t part

of the Volk, needed to be expelled from German soil) and also

environmentalist and social policies (insofar as both the Volk and its

biosphere were deemed worthy of protection). In 1933, he became Reich

minister of food and agriculture, a prestigious position he held until

1942.

Darré was the most fervent intellectual of the so-called green wing of

the Nazi party, which counted among its members other important figures

such as Fritz Todt, Alwin Seifert, and Rudolf Hess.53 Darré, Todt, and

Seifert managed to implement some environmentalist policies, mainly

related to organic agriculture, reforestation, protection of endangered

plants and animals, and industrial and commercial restrictions. This led

inevitably to a series of confrontations with important Nazi politicians

who weren’t particularly enthusiastic about ecological measures, such as

Martin Bormann, Joseph Goebbels, and Reinhard Heydrich.54 After all, the

environmentalist tendencies within the National Socialist ideology were

only a part of a complex and often contradictory worldview, and issues

were continually aroused when it came to translating them into concrete

policies.55

This was the brief history of ecofascism, a doctrine inspired by

Romanticism, nationalism, and racism that appeared in Germany (although

it had followers in other countries, such as Italy)56 and managed to

have an important [End Page 102] impact on the Nazi regime. Far from

being a cynical manipulation of noble intentions, German ecofascism was

a genuine environmentalist ideology, although one deeply intertwined

with violent, imperialist, and racist views. There was a sincere will to

protect the German environment within the green wing of the NSDAP,

despite its rationale being totally at odds with today’s green parties’

political projects. That being said, Hitler wasn’t particularly

enthusiastic about his party’s green wing, and the importance of

ecofascism within the regime was limited, as Anna Bramwell has shown.57

After 1945 the fascist doctrine and its supporters were swept away by

the calamitous defeat of the Axis at the end of the Second World War and

became marginal throughout the West. Yet this didn’t imply the end of

ecofascist tendencies. As we shall see, today ecofascism is going

through a process of rearticulation, especially in the United States.

How does this new ideology, which will be called neoecofascism, differ

from the original doctrine? How has it adapted to the contemporary era?

Could it become a mass movement or a mainstream ideology in the future,

as was the case with the Blood and Soil ideal and the small völkisch

movements a century ago?

The Alt-Right, a Neofascist Movement

If today there is a country in which neofascism (which is the word

conventionally used to refer to fascist movements and ideologies after

1945)58 is a relatively flourishing ideology, it is the United States.

This article will employ the definition of “fascism” formulated by Roger

Griffin, who defined the so-called “fascist minimum” (i.e., the core

aspects of the fascist ideology that apply to every form of fascism) as

[A] genuinely revolutionary, trans-class form of anti-liberal, and in

the last analysis, anti-conservative nationalism. As such it is an

ideology deeply bound up with modernization and modernity, one which has

assumed a considerable variety of external forms to adapt itself to the

particular historical and national context in which it appears. . . .

[Fascism] seeks to end the degeneration affecting the nation under

liberalism, and to bring about a radical renewal of its social,

political and cultural life as part of what was widely imagined to be

the new era being inaugurated in Western civilization.59 [End Page 103]

Drawing from this definition, it is possible to identify several

American political organizations and intellectuals as neofascist. The

group that stands out in this respect is without question the Alt-Right

(an abbreviation of “alternative right”), a cluster of loosely connected

intellectuals, online groups, and activists who profess anti-democratic,

anti-liberal, anti-conservative (it is important to highlight that the

Alt-Right is genuinely different from the rest of the right, including

the so-called Alt-Lite),60 white nationalist, racialist, and patriarchal

views.61 This movement began to form at the beginning of this decade

when Richard Spencer (its most visible face) launched The Alternative

Right webzine. The Alt-Right shot to fame in 2016 when Donald Trump

chose Steve Bannon (the editor of Breibart News, which he described as

the platform for the Alt-Right) as his campaign director. At that moment

this radical movement “went from obscurity to infamy,” in the words of

Thomas Main.62

Despite the fact that some of its idiosyncratic features make the

Alt-Right a peculiar movement (e.g., its dispersed organization, the

continuous use of irony, its presence online, and the consequent use of

internet codes) that shouldn’t prevent us from seeing it as a political

group with a well-articulated ideology that can be systematically

analyzed.63 In fact, we have previously noted that both the völkisch

groups (who originally tended to be apolitical) and the Blood and Soil

ideology were initially a myriad of dispersed stances and organizations,

before they were articulated into more consistent worldviews. The type

of neofascism that we are witnessing today might be at the moment in a

“preparadigmatic state” similar to the one that existed in pre-1914

Europe, when despite the blossoming of radical right groups across the

European continent, there wasn’t a corpus of ideas capable of

homogenizing and structuring the groups.

Moreover, some of the Alt-Right’s extravagant elements might be in fact

more politically rational than they seem. For example, the continued use

of ironic detachment is probably due not only to the fact that the

Alt-Right’s online community is inhabited by young people for whom this

rhetorical device is essential, but also to a conscious will to engage

in radical positions without confronting the social consequences that

derive from doing so.64 The Daily Stormer, a website associated with the

Alt-Right, stated in its (leaked) guidelines for potential authors that

“the tone of the site should be light so that the unindoctrinated can’t

tell if we are joking or not.”65 As Jason Wilson points out, irony and

comic ambiguity are clearly “discursive weapons” in [End Page 104] the

hands of the Alt-Right.66 In fact the movement’s neo-ecofascist stance

(which is analyzed below) has also been filtered through irony and

internet codes, giving birth to mottos such as “save bees, not

refugees”67 and to groups such as The Pine Tree Gang,68 whose members

use the pine tree emoji as an identity marker.

In any case, the existence of outlandish and particular traits within

the Alt-Right’s discourse doesn’t imply that the movement shouldn’t be

associated with ideologies from the past, but that it is a new

manifestation of them. In fact, rather than it being a decentralized

fascist organization that uses memes and thrives online what should

shock us is a contemporary fascist organization that acts exactly as its

predecessors from the interwar period. The Alt-Right is just the

twenty-first–century expression of an old phenomenon. For example,

although some might point to the fact that today there’s not a fascist

mass party in order to justify their skepticism towards the existence of

contemporary fascism, Roger Griffin noted in 2008 (two years before the

emergence of the Alt-Right) that present-day fascist organizations are

“groupuscular” and rhizomatic and focus on spreading their ideas rather

than on creating competitive political parties.69

This fits with Thomas J. Main’s view of the Alt-Right as “not a

constituency with political goals but an intellectual movement that

shapes how people think about politics.”70 Such shift from mass

mobilizations to small-group influence is related to one of the most

important contemporary thinkers of the radical right: Alain De Benoist.

Partly drawing from Antonio Gramsci’s ideas on politics and culture, De

Benoist and other thinkers from the Nouvelle Droite developed the plan

of articulating a meta-political approach to politics, i.e., one based

on a will to carry a cultural struggle that affects the whole political

sphere instead of creating a political party that would stand in general

elections. This implies favoring small but influential organizations

over mass parties, although these are of course the main political

actors that need to be influenced.

Although neofascism had a relative success (given the adverse historical

context) in the United States during the 1950s and the 1960s, the

Alt-Right didn’t evolved from such ideology. Thomas J. Main, arguably

the author of the most important work on the Alt-Right’s ideology,

emphasizes that the Alt-Right is not the product of American neo-Nazism,

but of paleoconservatism. Paleoconservatism is a branch of conservatism

that, in opposition to neoconservatism, [End Page 105] took a drastic

turn in the mid-1980s and developed four major themes: a radical

rejection of liberal democracy, anti-Semitism, racialism, and

anti-Americanism.71

This means that the members of the Alt-Right derive their ideals from

thinkers such as Paul Gottfried rather than George Lincoln Rockwell (the

famous neofascist who founded the American Nazi Party in 1959), although

American neo-Nazism remains an important influence within the

movement.72 Despite being an offshoot of conservatism, paleoconservatism

is undoubtedly part of the radical right. Gottfried, for example, went

as far as to praise Mussolini as the founder of a more acceptable type

of fascism, allegedly significantly different from the German.73

The passage from paleoconservatism to the Alt-Right, headed by Richard

Spencer, is therefore not a passage from a moderate form of conservatism

to a radical one, but a significant qualitative change between two forms

of right-wing radicalism. A historical analogy might be pertinent to

clarify this. It could be said that the difference between the

paleoconservatives and the Alt-Right is parallel to the one between the

Konservative Revolution and the Nazis. Undoubtedly, thinkers such as

Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt, Moeller van der Bruck, Ernst Niekisch, or

Edgar Julius Jung were essential influences for the NSDAP, but they

certainly didn’t share all of its ideas, nor can all of them be

considered fascists.

The Alt-Right and Neoecofascism

The Alt-Right has its own “green wing,” although inasmuch as ecofascism

is today more marginal than it was a century ago (and fascism itself is

incomparably weaker), it is inevitably not as well-organized as its

German precursor. However, we should bear in mind that the formation of

the ecofascist ideology in Germany took decades to materialize. This

could also be the case of a new form of ecofascism (which has been

labeled in this article simply as “neoecofascism,” following the

diachronic distinction between fascism and neofascism), of which only

the first steps can be observed at the moment but that could flourish in

a context of global warming and environmental anxieties.

Such context is a truly transformative one, for climate change

represents a challenge for the whole political and economic system. The

unequivocal scientific evidence presents a world of rising global

temperatures, warming [End Page 106] oceans, glacial retreat, rising sea

levels, and extreme climate events. The global character of these

dangers and their capacity of quick disruption will defy not only our

sociopolitical systems, but also our worldviews and some of our most

basic assumptions. Capitalism will have to adapt to this bleak picture,

and if it fails to do so, it will be naturally challenged by both the

radical right and the radical left. In such circumstances it is

inevitable that the totality of the political spectrum becomes aware of

these challenges and modifies strategies accordingly, incorporating both

a cognitive map of the situation and a series of potential solutions to

it.

American neoecofascism is already adapting to this condition. Richard

Spencer himself pointed at the importance of the environment for the

Alt-Right in the 2017 manifesto What it Means to be Alt-Right.74 In that

brief proclamation, after outlining the centrality of race and

anti-Semitism within the Alt-Right’s ideological program, he refers to

man’s relationship with nature. Just like the Romantics and völkisch

thinkers, he states that a human being is part of the natural order,

although he considers it as “being in it and above it,”75 thereby

manifesting the tensions between right-wing hierarchism and naturalism,

two tendencies that were already in opposition in early German

ecofascism, as noted by Frank Uekötter.76 According to Spencer, “the

natural world—and our experience of it—is an end in itself,”77 which

means rejecting the conservative view of nature (based on aesthetic

contemplation and economic exploitation)78 and embracing ecofascist

postulates.

As Matthew Phelan notes, Spencer’s ecofascist proclamations are not only

the assertion of a series of ideas but also a stance against other views

within the American radical right, such as “the idea that climate change

is a hoax, that the environmental movement is a crypto-socialist bid for

state intervention (effectively, the Koch-funded Tea Party line).”79

This tension between those who spread conspiracy theories that point to

the left and to certain elites and neoecofascists will most likely be

the main cleavage within the contemporary radical right regarding

climate change and environmental protection. In any case, the popularity

of the environmentalist movement (Richard Spencer himself praised Greta

Thunberg recently)80 and the undeniable scientific evidence invite to

foresee a radical right that pays attention to such issues rather than a

“denialist” one.

The Alt-Right has also shown interest in other contemporary political

issues related to the environmentalist movement. One of them is food

[End Page 107] consumption. As Vasile Stănescu has shown, the Alt-Right

has engaged in several debates concerning diet and vegetarianism.81 One

of the positions that have resulted from such a rapprochement with

contemporary dietary concerns is a cult for milk consumption as a

synonym of masculinity and racial purity that reproduces some

nineteenth-century colonialist stances.82 Others have embraced

vegetarianism (as famously did both Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler)

or veganism, insisting on their online messages on how such dietary

option is a proof of Aryan strength and connectedness with all living

beings rather than something that belongs to “pacifistic hippy

caricatures.”83

Some of these positions are strongly influenced by neopagan and mystic

currents.84 This commitment with mythical discourses can be found in

prominent Alt-Right figures. Such is the case of Greg Johnson, the

editor-in-chief of Counter Currents Publishing, one of the pillars of

Alt-Right publishing.85 In 2011, while reviewing a book that fantasizes

about Hyperborea (the mythical polar land that is supposed to be the

original home of the Aryan race), Johnson stated that the movement

needed to focus on myths rather than in facts insofar as “myths, unlike

science and policy studies, resonate deeply in the soul and reach the

wellsprings of action. Myths can inspire collective action to change the

world.”86 This statement is as well a diatribe against “the

insufficiency of backwards-looking conservatism and data-driven

empiricism to preserve and elevate our race.”87

It is therefore hardly surprising that this neofascist revival has

developed links with American neopagan circles that engage in

environmentalist stances. Groups such as the Wolves of Vinland (a Norse

neopagan organization based in Virginia), who promote white nationalist

and male chauvinistic views, have been found to have links with the

National Policy Institute, headed by Richard Spencer.88 The Asatru Folk

Assembly, another neopagan group, has also prospered thanks to the

emergence of the Alt-Right.89 The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)

characterizes these groups as neo-völkisch and links their ideas to

“ideals and myths that are derived from the Völkisch movement of the

nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”90 These organizations share with

their ideological forebears a view of nature as a redeemer from the

evils of modernity and urban life, along with a patriarchal longing for

an uncivilized lifestyle that can liberate forces that are allegedly

repressed in modern society. [End Page 108]

It is also symptomatic that Richard Spencer has created special links

with movements such as the Nordic Resistance Movement (Nordiska

motståndsrörelsen),91 a Nordic supranational association (established in

Sweden, Norway, and Finland) that emphasizes the importance of

environmentalism and thereby continues the ecofascist enterprise.92 This

neoecofascist connection with the Nordic countries is far from trivial.

Finland is the home country of Pentti Linkola, an influential (and

openly ecofascist) thinker whose works advocate dictatorship and

downsizing population and who claims that “everything that we have

developed during the past one-hundred years needs to be destroyed.”93 An

unknown thinker outside Finland, Linkola’s renewal of ecofascist

postulates is becoming more and more popular in Alt-Right circles.94

This mystic and neopagan road to neoecofascism allows us to better

understand the growing cult of Savitri Devi (a central figure within

post-1945 ecofascism) among alt-righters.95 Savitri Devi (born Maximiani

Portas) was an important representative of postwar esoteric fascism96 as

well as a committed advocate of animal rights and “deep ecology,” a

philosophy that stresses nature’s inherent value. She claimed that

Hitler was a Hindu avatar (i.e., the incarnation of Vishnu and therefore

a kind of semi-god) and even disseminated Nazi propaganda in West

Germany in 1948, before engaging with the international neofascist

movement (meeting George Lincoln Rockwell on several occasions) and then

moving to India with her husband, a Bengal Brahmin who shared her

ideological convictions regarding the common Aryan ancestry of

Indo-European societies.

Savitri Devi could act as an intellectual bridge between ecofascism and

neoecofascism, for her ideas are capable of pursuing the ecofascist

enterprise that started at the end of the nineteenth century while at

the same time being appealing to today’s and tomorrow’s right-wing

radicals. Furthermore, her works on animal rights and environmentalism

(The Impeachment of Man,97 written in 1959, being the most important

among them) go beyond the nineteenth-century Romanticism professed by

the aforementioned German thinkers and can connect with contemporary New

Age and biocentrist ideas.

But the influence of Hindu mysticism (an important source of myths and

ideas for the German Blut und Boden movement)98 among alt-righters goes

beyond Savitri Devi’s peculiar amalgamation of deep ecology, Hinduism,

and Nazism. Julius Evola (born Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola), an important

intellectual of postwar fascism, is also popular among the American

radical [End Page 109] right. Evola held a kind of spiritual and

metaphysical racism more similar to the most mystic factions of the Blut

und Boden groups than to biological racism (which he criticized).99 He

posited that twentieth-century Europe was going through the Kali Yuga,

an era of chaos and decay according to the Hindu tradition, and that

Hitler and Mussolini represented a possibility to end it and restore the

rule of the Aryan race.100 Therefore, it was necessary to “ride the

tiger of modernity” to overcome this “age of dissolution.”101 Julius

Evola was surprisingly praised by Steve Bannon102 and his idea of the

Kali Yuga has become a meme among alt-righters (who created images of a

surfing skeleton with the message “Surf the Kali Yuga”).103

This Evolian understanding of the Kali Yuga, whose reception is, like

that of other radical ideas, both genuine and somewhat ironic, leads us

to a key component of neoecofascism that represents yet another

similarity with its ideological forebear, i.e., the idea of pessimism,

closely related to the notions of decadence and palingenesis. It was

probably introduced into the radical right by Oswald Spengler104 (under

the inspiration of Friedrich Nietzsche) at the beginning of the

twentieth century and became a commonplace for right-wing radicals ever

since. According to Roger Griffin, both the sensation of decadence and

pessimism (associated with modernity’s malaises) are central to fascist

ideology.105 In his analysis of George Sorel’s works as the intellectual

origins of fascism, Zeev Sternhell points at the importance of pessimism

as well.106 The idea of inevitable decay leads fascist thinkers to

imagine an apocalyptic rebirth generally associated with a national (or

ethnic) resurgence.107

The most prominent Alt-Right figures have expressed this sensation of

decay on several occasions. According to Richard Spencer the situation

of the United States can be compared to the decline of the Roman Empire,

and such decline is orchestrated by elites who “want a world without

roots . . . a world without meaning . . . a flat grey-on-grey world, one

economic market for them to manipulate.”108 He has also defined U.S.

society as being perverse and decadent and the United States as a

diseased country.109 Against this dramatic situation he propounds the

creation of a “white ethno-state on the North American continent . . . a

reconstitution of the Roman Empire.”110 Such new civilization “would be,

to borrow the title of a novel by Theodor Herzl (one of the founding

fathers of Zionism), an Altneuland—an old, new country.”111

Climate change, with its pessimistic prospect of natural disasters and

social chaos, is a great opportunity for this kind of discourse to

thrive. After all, [End Page 110] fascism grows from the seeds of fear

and turmoil, which is why Roger Griffin refers to it using the

theological concept of creatio ex profundis (an act of creativity

defying the unknown, or the chaotic).112 This sense of apocalyptic

decline was shared by völkisch thinkers at the end of the nineteenth

century who saw the natural world being threatened by the industrial

revolution and capitalism.113 It is not hard to imagine the return of

such discourses, which didn’t fade away after the Second World War but

were rearticulated by important radical right thinkers such as Ernst

Jünger114 and, as mentioned previously, by esoteric fascists such as

Julius Evola and Savitri Devi. The fascist tradition already harbors an

important focus on decline and pessimism but, more important, it has

produced an amalgamation of such mindsets with environmental anxiety.

Thus the radical right, as the Alt-Right is proof of, possesses a great

“ideological reserve” for the ongoing climate change distress, and it is

already making use of it in order to radicalize American right-wingers,

especially the youngsters. As Jeet Heer pointed out:

This combination of a white nationalism with angst about the prospects

for human survival is a perfect recipe for radicalizing young

right-wingers and taking Trumpian themes to a new level of extremism.

Instead of the merely restorationist day-dream of “making American great

again,” the extreme right is using social media agitprop and the

propaganda of the deed to harden young white Americans for a global race

war fought over diminishing resources. The very real dangers of climate

change provide race war fantasists the dystopian background they need to

give urgency to their violent agenda.115

That said, American neoecofascism faces at least two important

challenges in comparison with its ideological forebears. First, the

demographic structure of the United States has little to do with

nineteenth-century Germany. Ecofascism was professed mainly by members

of the urban middle class, who romanticized rural life and the figure of

the traditional peasant, but the challenge for contemporary

neoecofascists is that such world seems to have faded away in Western

societies. Agricultural mechanization and technological advances have

reduced agricultural workers to a minority, and one in which immigrants

play an important role. Yet it remains possible to appeal politically to

this social group, as Trump has done on several occasions.116 This is

because political imaginaries are de facto autonomous from social

reality, as the “imagined nature” created by the young völkisch

militants shows. [End Page 111]

The Alt-Right could focus on ideal representations of rural American

life, as opposed to the lifestyle of the “coastal elites,” a

well-established ideological trope in the United States,117 although

that would imply a heterogeneous implementation in geographic terms. Be

that as it may, it is clear that contemporary neoecofascists might have

to engage in New Age forms of Romanticism rather than in idealizations

of rural life, inasmuch as we now live in a “rurban world” (i.e., a

system in which rural and urban spaces are interpenetrated) in which it

is increasingly difficult to identify and romanticize the country life.

Second, contemporary notions of nature are different from the ones that

emerged in the wake of industrialization. German Romantics reacted to

both industrial capitalism and scientific rationalism by “reenchanting”

nature, thereby perceiving it as a source of mystic energies that

couldn’t be understood from a positivist point of view. It is evident

that this view of nature still operates today, but in a more marginal

way. Modernity meant the demystification of the world, but such a shift

was accompanied by the birth of new political metanarratives and

spiritualist (and often orientalist) reactions, whereas postmodernity

has made those difficult to develop. Among the three main

representations of nature according to Serge Moscovici (organic,

cybernetic, and mechanistic),118 the first (defended by the Romantics)

seems to be the least popular, which makes it difficult to spread the

idea that there’s a mystic unity among the nation, the ethnos, and the

“national” natural world. That said, the capability of nationalism to

bridge heterogeneous elements (e.g., nature and patriotism) shouldn’t be

underestimated, and neoecofascists might be able to do so in the future.

Right-Wing Environmentalism beyond Neoecofascism

Although this article focuses on the Alt-Right, there are other

movements that integrate environmentalist and radical-right or

right-wing stances in their discourses. For example, among conservative

environmentalists it is relatively easy to find the idea that

immigration and overpopulation are to blame for environmental collapse.

These ideas are sometimes disseminated by single intellectuals who,

despite having links with right-wing organizations, don’t offer such a

consistent worldview but instead will propound concrete ideas or policy

proposals for years to come. Rather than overtly neofascist [End Page

112] views (which tend to be revolutionary, idealistic, and

ultranationalist), these authors present their proposals as pragmatic

solutions to environmental and economic problems. Although they are

closer to conservatism than to fascism, their views can easily be

assimilated and appropriated by more radical groups and could become a

gateway to these.

The most famous among such thinkers is probably John Tanton, the

recently deceased founder of the Federation for American Immigration

Reform (FAIR). Although he has been included in the list of contemporary

ecofascist by several pundits,119,120 he should be seen instead as a

conservative environmentalist. Apart from advocating eugenics121 and

funding several anti-immigration organizations, Tanton is known for his

articulation of xenophobic and environmentalist stances. According to

him, in order to protect America’s biosphere it is imperative to stop

mass immigration, inasmuch as overpopulation is a threat to nature.122

This idea is shared by Jared Taylor (a white nationalist with links to

the Alt-Right), who wonders “how can we possibly claim to be fighting

environmental degradation or hope for energy independence when we import

a million or more people every year?”123 Tanton and his ecoconservative

supporters were influenced by the neo-Malthusian ideas that spread

throughout the United States during the 1960s,124 which are a good

example of a potential intellectual bridge between different forms of

right-wing environmentalism inasmuch as the control of population growth

can be used for multiple ideological purposes.

These views have partly infiltrated American environmental organizations

such as the Sierra Club.125 Tanton himself was part of the club and

actively tried to turn it into an anti-immigration political

organization.126 His efforts were not in vain, for until the 1980s the

Sierra Club was in fact a promoter of the idea that there is a

correlation between mass immigration and environmental damage.127 The

internal debate of 1997–98 was of major importance not only for the

Club, but also for the anti-immigration-environmentalist synthesis. In

it a group of members claimed that in order to protect the American

environment not only must there be a reduction of natural population

growth but an end of immigration would also be necessary. The focus was

not only on immigrants, but also on national minorities deemed to be

“poorly educated and highly fertile.”128

Among ecoconservatives contemporary demographic and social anxieties are

thereby linked to a concern for environmental well-being, a path that

some right-wing governments are starting to follow. This is already the

case [End Page 113] in Austria,129 Hungary,130 and Poland.131 It would

not be surprising if some of these turn into a form of

ecoauthoritarianism whereby some forms of illiberalism and social

control are justified in the name of preventing or fixing environmental

problems. Environmental authoritarianism is for now absent in the West,

but it is already a reality in China, where climate distress and a high

degree of air pollution have justified top–down solutions without any

mechanism for channeling public involvement within the process.132

However, the ecoconservative and the ecoauthoritarian intertwinements

between the ethnos and the environment, although part of the illiberal

tradition, seem to be somewhat “disenchanted” and rationalized, inasmuch

as they are presented with socioeconomic arguments rather than a

transformative point of view. This is a key difference between

neoecofascism and other right-wing ecologist tendencies. Whereas

neoecofascists yearn for a radical cultural change whereby our

conceptions about race, nature and the nation would be swept away,

right-wing environmentalists seem to merely address concrete

environmental issues from their ideological point of view. Yet as

mentioned (it is important to emphasize the dynamic and elastic

potential of environmentalism) these differences don’t prevent a

transfer of ideas between groups whose ideological frontiers have

historically been porous.

Indeed, political ideas are always open to resignification and

reappropriation (this is, as mentioned, the methodological premise of

this article), and environmentalism is becoming a great example of it.

For instance, some neofascists find inspiration in apocalyptic

perspectives described by authors that are far from being radical

rightists, such as Paul Ehrlich.133 Ehrlich (who was also influenced by

neo-Malthusianism) stated that overpopulation was leading the human race

to mass starvation and all kinds of social distresses and eventually put

the focus on mass immigration.134 As with some of Petti Linkola’s

eliminationist ideas, Ehrlich’s could influence ecofascism as a

pessimism booster, but he will fail to become part of the solutions this

ideology proposes. This is because, as we have already pointed, out

ecofascism (and more broadly fascism itself) is a utopian ideology that,

in the face of a terrible sense of decay and hopelessness, proposes a

nationalist palingenesis. Therefore it can feed on demographic anxieties

and environmental fears, but it won’t embrace any nihilistic “solution”

inasmuch as its pessimistic mindset is limited to criticizing the world

it seeks to overcome; it cannot (logically) permeate its transformative

political project. [End Page 114]

Environmentalism has also intersected with market-oriented ideologies

associated with laissez-faire economics that have little to do with

neoecofascism. Such is the case of what might be called

econeoliberalism, i.e., the branch of neoliberalism that sees

environmental problems as a product of state intervention. Their

solution is in the hands of consumers and entrepreneurs. Erik Swyngedouw

refers to econeoliberalism as “the privatization of climate” whereby

“the field of neoliberal economy is widened.”135 Economists such as

Robert Costanza and Monica Grasso, for example, refer to the environment

in utilitarian and economistic terms such as “eco-system services,”

“natural capital stocks,” or “the economic value of the planet,” and

advocate for market-oriented reforms of our relationship with nature.136

Such views can be found in important international organizations such as

the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the United Nations.

For example, in 2008 the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP)

launched its “Global Green New Deal,” a set of proposals that underlined

the importance of technological innovation, micro-credits,

liberalization, and economic growth.137

Right-wing environmentalist stances in the United States have found

another niche beyond political organizations and ecologist clubs:

terrorism. Right-wing terrorism accounts for the majority of attacks

that took place within the country in the last decade138 and an

important number of them were inspired by environmentalist positions.

This was the case of Patrick Cursius, the author of the El Paso shooting

of August 2019, who in his manifesto (posted on 8chan, a website

frequented by alt-righters and other supporters of the radical right)

showed concerns for the environment and blamed immigrants and “urban

sprawling”139 for climate change. The Christchurch shooter, who was an

inspiration for Cursius, went further and directly defined himself as an

ecofascist in his manifesto.140

Both were partly inspired by a book that has become a sort of Bible for

the contemporary Western radical right: The Great Replacement (Le grand

remplacement) by Renaud Camus. In this book Camus warns about the fact

that white European people are being consciously replaced by immigrants

in order to create a more compliant population consisting of replaceable

individuals lacking any national or ethnic identity.141 This conspiracy

theory (which is far from being groundbreaking as a radical right idea)

is based mainly on demographic anxieties, but it includes ecological

concerns as well,142 which has led Clément Gutern to speak of écologie

intégrale143 (integral ecology, [End Page 115] as in ‘integral

nationalism’, the ideology developed by Charles Maurras) inasmuch as

there is an integration of social, demographic, national, ethnic and

environmental concerns.

But the most notorious example of right-wing environmentalist

inspiration for terrorist attacks is undoubtedly Ted Kaczynski, better

known as Unabomber, the author of several attacks between 1978 and 1995.

Kaczynski’s manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, is a harsh

critique against industrialism and leftism that echoes several

environmentalist views and fears that were present in late

nineteenth-century Germany. In it Kaczynski also criticizes feminism and

technological progress.144 It is curious that he was influenced in part

by left-wing intellectuals such as Herbert Marcuse and Jacques Ellul.

Kaczynski’s work has become “one of the most well-known rhetorical

artifacts endorsing environmental extremism,”145 and he is today praised

in Alt-Right circles.146 His ideas are difficult to classify, for he

held an eclectic approach to environmental issues, but he remains part

of the radical right, an ideological family in which, as this article

has shown, different and often contradictory stances can coexist.

Conclusions

Although today it represents a marginal political current, neoecofascism

is likely to become increasingly important in the coming years or

decades, like other forms of right-wing environmentalism. This is

because environmentalism is already developing into a meta-ideology, at

least in Western countries. Here we use Andrew Heywood’s definition of

meta-ideology as “a body of ideas that lays down the grounds upon which

political and ideological debate can take place.”147 This implies that

environmental stances are likely to be part of practically every

ideological position in the near future in one way or another, to the

extent one can foresee. Therefore, rather than a confrontation between

environmentalists and antienvironmentalists, what may lie ahead is an

encounter between competing environmentalisms.

This polymorphous aspect of environmentalism is why it is important to

differentiate between the various forms of right-wing environmentalism

in order to avoid overusing neoecofascism, as has always been the case

with “fascism.” At the moment, the ecofascist revival cannot be

considered [End Page 116] a well-articulated ideology, but this doesn’t

imply that it doesn’t have the potential to become one. Let’s not forget

that German ecofascism only became a consistent worldview after the

First World War, following decades of ideology building and

contradictory moves.

The conditions in which ecofascism thrived at the beginning of the

twentieth century (e.g., the spread of romantic ideas, nationalism,

ecoanxiety, environmental distress, xenophobia) are alive and well

today, even if the romantic impulse has lost momentum. Moreover, the

West is witnessing a series of nationalist turns that can potentially

normalize or legitimize radical ideas that were taboo until recently,

and the economic and geopolitical prospects for the future do not invite

us to imagine a stable political landscape. Neoecofascists have to face

tremendous political and cultural obstacles, but they also have a

historic opportunity to reinvigorate a series of ideas that can connect

with highly contemporary issues. It is difficult to predict how things

will be in the future, but one thing is for certain: neoecofascism, in a

more or less residual way, will be part of it.

Notes

1. Ernst Lehmann, Biologischer Wille: Wege und Ziele biologischer Arbeit

im neuen Reich (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1934), 10–11.

2. Richard B. Spencer, “What It Means to Be Alt-Right. A meta-political

manifesto for the Alt-Right movement,” AltRight, 11 August 2017,

http://archive.fo/vuZGm (accessed 7 October 2019).

3. Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier, Ecofascismo: Lecciones sobre la

experiencia alemana (Barcelona: Virus Editorial, 2019), 48.

4. Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005), 86–87.

5. Biehl and Staudenmaier, Ecofascismo, 54.

6. Thomas J. Main, The Rise of the Alt-Right (Washington, DC: Brookings

Institution Press, 2018), 2.

7. Frederick C. Beiser, El imperativo romántico: El primer romanticismo

alemán (Madrid: Sequitur, 2018), 64.

8. Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press, 2013), 107.

9. Tim Blanning, The Romantic Revolution (London: Penguin Random House,

2010), 8.

10. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity

Press, 1991).

11. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of the Enlightenment:

Philosophical Fragments (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).

12. Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under

Mussolini and Hitler (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 52.

13. Emilio Gentile, “Fascism, Totalitarianism and Political Religion:

Definitions and Critical Reflections on Criticism of an Interpretation,”

Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 5, no. 3 (2004): 326–75.

14. George L. Mosse, The Fascist Revolution: Towards a General Theory of

Fascism (New York: Howard Fertig, 1999), 32.

15. Zeev Sternhell, El nacimiento de la ideología fascista (Madrid:

Siglo XXI, 1994), 6

16. Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914–1945 (Madison:

University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 35

17. Robert Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004),

17.

18. Biehl and Staudenmaier, Ecofascismo, 15.

19. Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, 95.

20. George L. Mosse, Les racines intellectuelles du Troisième Reich: La

crise de l’idéologie allemande (Paris: Seuil, 2008), 24.

21. Raphaël Cahen and Thomas Lanwehrlen, “De Johann Gottfried Herder a

Benedict Anderson: retour sur quelques conceptions savantes de la

nation,” Sens Public, 2010, www.sens-public.org/article794.html

(accessed 7 October 2019).

22. Federico Chabod, L’idea di nazione (Bari, Italy: Editori Laterza,

2008), 68–74.

23. Alessandro Campi, Nación. Historia de una idea y de un mito político

(Madrid: Sequitur, 2019), 183.

24. Mosse, Les racines intellectuelles du Troisième Reich, 42.

25. Robert Cecil, The Myth of the Master Race: Alfred Rosenberg and Nazi

Ideology (New York: Dodd, 1972), 165.

26. Beiser, El imperativo romántico, 65.

27. Mosse, Les racines intellectuelles du Troisième Reich, 198.

28. Ibid., 69.

29. Tim Cloudsley, “Romanticism and the Industrial Revolution in

Britain,” History of European Ideas 12, no. 5, (1990): 611–35.

30. Biehl and Staudenmaier, Ecofascismo, 16.

31. Klaus Vondung and Stephen D. Ricks, The Apocalypse in Germany

(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 112.

32. Amy Standen, “Meine Grune Nation,” Ecology Center, 15 July 2006,

https://ecologycenter.org/terrainmagazine/summer-2006/meine-grune-nation/

(accessed 8 October 2019).

33. Mosse, Les racines intellectuelles du Troisième Reich, 71.

34. Ibid., 20.

35. Beiser, El imperativo romántico, 127.

36. Robert A. Pois, National Socialism and the Religion of Nature

(London: Croom Helm, 1986), 25.

37. Biehl and Staudenmaier, Ecofascismo, 26.

38. Franz-Josef Brüggemeier, Mark Cioc, and Thomas Zeller, (Eds.), How

Green Were the Nazis? Nature, Environment and Nation in the Third Reich

(Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 7.

39. Mosse, Les racines intellectuelles du Troisième Reich, 55.

40. Ibid.

41. Guy Tourlamain, Völkisch Writers and National Socialism: A Study of

Right-Wing Political Culture in Germany, 1890–1960 (Bern, Switzerland:

Peter Lang, 2014), 4.

42. Ibid., 39.

43. Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany: 1890–1990

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 113–14

44. Mosse, Les racines intellectuelles du Troisième Reich, 45.

45. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism,

and the Politics of Identity (New York: New York University Press,

2003), 52

46. John P. Jackson, Jr., and Nadine M. Weidman, “The Origins of

Scientific Racism,” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, nº 50

(Winter, 2005/2006), Vol.8 : 66–79

47. Mosse, Les racines intellectuelles du Troisième Reich, 294.

48. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan

Cults and their Influence in Nazi Ideology (London: TPP, 2004), 33.

49. Mosse, Les racines intellectuelles du Troisième Reich, 75

50. Ibid., 385.

51. Heather Pringle, The Master Plan: Himmler’s Scholars and the

Holocaust (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 40.

52. David Patterson, Anti-Semitism and its Metaphysical Origins (New

York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 137–38.

53. Biehl and Staudenmaier, Ecofascismo, 43.

54. Ibid., 47.

55. Frank Uekötter, “Green Nazis? Reassessing the Environmental History

of Nazi Germany,” German Studies Review 30, no. 2 (2007): 267–87.

56. Rubén Domínguez Méndez, “La batalla del grano y los valores del

ruralismo,” La Razón Histórica: Revista hispanoamericana de Historia de

las Ideas 22 (2013): 36–47.

57. Anna Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century: A History (New Haven,

CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 51.

58. Walter Laqueur, Fascism, Past, Present and Future (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1997), 93.

59. Roger Griffin, “The Palingenetic Core of Generic Fascist Ideology,”

in Alessandro Campi (Ed.), Che cos’è il fascismo? Interpretazioni e

prospettive di ricerche (Rome: Ideazione Editrice, 2003), 97–122.

60. “From Alt Right to Alt Lite: Naming the Hate,” ADL, 16 June 2016,

https://www.adl.org/resources/backgrounders/from-alt-right-to-alt-lite-naming-the-hate

(accessed 8 October 2019).

61. Main, The Rise of the Alt-Right, 115.

62. Ibid., 3.

63. Ibid., 4.

64. Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis, Media Manipulation and

Disinformation Online (New York: Data & Society, 2018), 11.

65. Ashley Feinberg, “This is the Daily Stormer’s Playbook,” Huffington

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