Confronting the Rise of Eco-Fascism Means Grappling with Complex Systems
The Development of Deep Green “Neo-Fascism”
The Alt Right and Their Influences
Lone Atomwaffen member posing near an electrical plant with a rifle
Emmi Bevensee and Alexander Reid Ross
“If you don't believe climate change is caused by the Chinese and Indians and we should cull them to prevent further environmental damage you're a cuckold f----t.”
- Comment from a user in Iron March neo-nazi forum leaks
“My pledge @realDonaldTrump is that if you become a pit bull for planet Earth, you won't need Russia to hack my polling place. I will vote for you.”
- Bill Maher
When the El Paso shooter committed his personal ideology to a manifesto, he saw fit to include anti-imperialism and environmental politics, just like the shooter in Christchurch. Fundamentally subscribing to a biologically racist worldview that abhors inter-racial couples, his manifesto, if real, spoke of an overpopulated, polluted world in which corporations use racial underclasses to undermine workers and tip demographic scales in favor of liberalism. That conservatives largely reject environmental legislation did not phase the author of the manifesto, who concludes by insisting that corporations be brought to heel under a confederated system of ethno-states in what is now the United States. Importantly, the El Paso shooter confessed to being motivated, in part, by the manifesto of the Christchurch mass shooter, who also embraced green fascism.
Excepting the ultimatum of ethno-states, Western Kentucky University instructor William Black remarked, “The manifesto is not the ravings of a madman or a brainwashed kid. It's what millions of Americans believe.” In the U.S. alone, Donald Trump’s outbursts and Tucker Carlson’s program on FOX News promote a popular far-right image of immigrants and refugees as dirty, disease-bearing rapists and potential criminals. Indeed, the Trump administration figure most clearly connected to immigration policy, Stephen Miller, promoted propaganda by white nationalists producing a similar picture of an overpopulated world in which white men are under attack.
Shortly after the El Paso shooting, a man opened fire in a popular district of Dayton, Ohio, killing his sister and a number of bystanders. Investigations into his social media revealed left-wing, ecological, and antifascist commitments, but a deeper look turned up extreme misogyny, chauvinistic attitudes, and fascination with an ecoterrorist group and a death cult. A spate of articles came out at once cautioning against the rising tide of eco-fascism. Yahoo News ran a profile of eco-fascism in their lifestyle section, the Washington Post drew an eco-fascist connection between El Paso and Dayton, niche ecology-focused magazines like High Country News published in-depth articles about it, left-wing sites like Open Democracy and HuffingtonPost contextualized it within the rise of green thought across the board, and The Nation gave a choice: green socialism or eco-fascism. Articles have continued to flow, including most recently from Harpers Bazaar cautioning against the rise of eco-fascism and HuffingtonPost again regarding the Austrian coalition between Greens and Conservatives as “something that looks increasingly like ecofascism.” So how apt are these progressive warnings of the emergence of a far-right adaptation to the rising anxiety over climate change?
We returned to the history of ecological thought within fascism, and vice-versa, to tease out different tendencies within so-called “left-fascism” or the “Third Position” and identify strains as they have developed. We further searched through archived data from the leaked Iron March forum, comparing the sentiments and narratives expressed therein to the overall trends of green thoughts within fascism and fascist ideology within the green movement. Lastly, we analyzed the often-competing strategic approaches within fascism—vanguardism and populism—within this broader context to gain an understanding of the dynamics of fascist approaches to political parties and paramilitary movements as they pertain to green ideology.
We found, perhaps most importantly, that radical green and anti-imperialist politics exist in complex relation to other tendencies, including racism, misogyny, ableism, and a desire for extreme violence. We contend that ideology is no longer sufficient for the left to understand the rise of fascism and the Anthropocene. Like climate change, fascism manifests a complex problem and requires complex approaches to combat it. While environmentalism and anti-imperialism are rightly associated with the left, they can and have been wielded by anyone who seeks radical change, including fascists. Thus, leftist efforts to clearly differentiate their political agenda(s) from the far right in order to avoid fascist appropriation of left-wing movements and a "fascist creep" of leftists to the far-right often fall short of their lofty goals. Put simply, political affiliation is not enough.
This paper will describe the history of ecological tendencies within fascist ideology as they informed current networks of far-right groups that have influenced today’s mass shooters. It will ultimately argue that fascism exists not only with an ultranationalist core ideology but a limited adaptive capacity that enables it to absorb different political tendencies to take syncretic and oft-contradictory shapes. That means that issues like ecology, which the left believes itself to “own,” increasingly become sites of political contest over who can produce the most attractive political program.
Although fascist movements traditionally favored industrial futurism, their modernism typically involves a rejection of the modern world and a reactionary appeal to something greater. As climate change becomes more apparent, fascists adopt and foreground green politics to advance their goals. In our research of available historical and contemporary texts and data from the Iron March forum, as well as Telegram channels, we found three critical points that bear further elaboration:
• There is a long-standing environmentalist tendency within fascism that growing as hazards posed by climate change manifest an existential threat to the sustainability of structures undergirding a perceived white identity.
• As the need to confront the catastrophic consequences of climate change becomes more immediate, fascists have increasingly sent signals that they will shift further toward eco-fascist violence.
• Given that some leftists have proven susceptible to the false promises offered by green fascism, there is a chance that a significant authoritarian turn in the green movement could take place, with terrible consequences for poor and marginalized populations.
Put simply, the international far-right will not be able to ignore climate change forever. Should they actually abandon large-scale skepticism and accept the reality of climate change, fascists may actually draw in many who recognize climate change as a pressing crisis through the glossy appeals of green authoritarianism, only to purge true believers on the way to power. Strangely, with the impacts of climate change increasing ecological crises, the acceptance of anthropogenic climate change is not an absolutely necessary component to the kind of general shift toward ecological politics based on people’s lived experiences. Indeed, climate skepticism that rejects anthropogenic forcing but accepts climate change may be the ace up the fascists’ proverbial sleeve. At the same time, it is important to note that a turn of Conservatives toward ecology does not necessarily indicate a fascist turn, although it certainly reveals the flexibility of green politics and adaptive capacity of right-wing politics, which may eventually produce new strains of eco-fascism given extreme conditions.
This paper tracks the history of right-wing thought within the green movement, from the early days of ecology and the völkisch movement to the post-war Greens and parts of Earth First! to modern networks. We show how fascist networks extended into the left to develop a modern eco-fascist tendency seeking to infiltrate and gain hegemony within the modern green movement. We conclude that fascism, green or otherwise, can never present a viable alternative to the existential threat of climate change. Fascism is not only greening, it is also part of a larger transformation of the right-wing in general, which should be studied, understood, and confronted with clear strategies based on localized conditions in the context of a general movement toward climate justice.
It is often observed that the historical basis of Nazism lay in multiple hostile reactions to the Enlightenment, inclusive of both reactionary and Romantic tendencies. The formulation of ecology in the mid-19th Century centered around the notion of an Umwelt, a world unto each species produced by disinhibitions toward instinctive sources of reproduction, food, and shelter. Poorly translated through the fashionable sociological ideas of the day, ecology became a conduit for Social Darwinism under the guidance of its nationalist progenitor, Ernst Haeckel. Increasingly through the 19th Century, pseudo-scientific notions of race, ethnicity, and Volk proliferated in a manner that came to use Heimat (Homeland) as a kind of racial or ethnic Umwelt. This section outlines how völkisch ecology was combined with “geopolitics” by the Nazis toward perpetrating the unspeakable crimes of the Holocaust.
Following Germany’s sweeping military victories that culminated in the 1871 crowning of the Kaiser in the Palace of Versailles’s Hall of Mirrors, a rush of chauvinism swept over the newly unified German Empire, bringing with it novel geographic theories of people and place. Younger generations of Germans trekked the large spaces of the country searching for their identity as Germans among the spiritual ideas of the peasants and their connections to nature. This volkisch movement involved discrete flows of leftist ideas and far-right nativism that sometimes fused together in populist support for rural peasants in opposition to Jews viewed as alien to the German spirit that imbued Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil).
With his Politische Geographie, geographer Friedrich Ratzel produced a new understanding of the expansion of healthy civilizations, from a strong culture grounded in the soil outward into the borderlands, or Lebensraum (Living Space). Intimately linked to ecological thought, the concept of Lebensraum described a kind of evolutionary, biological space through which the human civilization could grow and evolve in new ecosystems. The school of thoughts that developed from Politische Geographie, later dubbed “geopolitics,” powerfully influenced German General Karl Haushofer, who later taught its conceptual framework to his students Rudolf Hess and Adolf Hitler in Landsberg prison after the failed Beerhall Putsch.
Fascism would prove adept at incorporating green tendencies along with syndicalist workerism because of its nature as a syncretic political movement of palingenetic ultranationalism, per Griffin’s minimal definition. The Nazis already maintained roots in the right-wing of the ecology movement, which remained powerful with Hitler in prison, as his second in command, Gregor Strasser, maintained control over the movement. Militants like nihilist Freikorps officer Ernst von Salomon, who participated in the assassination of Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau, viewed farmers and peasants as ideal national revolutionaries exercising their “right to revenge” with extreme racial prejudice. Other members of the party, such as Richard Walther Darré and Heinrich Himmler, promoted blood and soil ideas within the Party and in volkisch leagues like the Artamanen-Gesellschaft. In England, as well, the British Union of Fascists adopted a similar ecological geopolitic, with their leading agriculturalist Jorian Jenks linking race to a rural policy outlining a system of small, organic farms that would make England self-sufficient and independent from the global food market.
However, Hitler’s particularly vicious adaptation of geopolitical ideas like Lebensraum into the Nazi repertoire of chauvinist revanchism and virulent anti-Semitism would provide the clearest roadmap to the Holocaust. Believing the separation between races was tantamount to the separation between species (something rejected by Darwin), Hitler rejected as bourgeois the notion that people whose ancestors had not lived in Germany could be “Germanized.” He based his vision of eradicating the Jews, whom he called Weltvergifter (“World poisoners”), on the notion of states as ethnically homogenous by nature. With the 1939 Hitler-Stalin Pact, Hitler could enact his “Eroberung von Lebensraum im Osten" (conquest of living space in the East), involving the purge of non-German people from desired territories through mass murder and deportation.
Led by Julius Evola in Italy, a concomitant fascist movement “against the modern world” emerged steeped in the occult and arguing for a return to ethnic heritage in opposition to civilization, itself. A virulent anti-Semite, Evola’s esoteric hatred of civilization and liberalism helped deepen Fascist Italy’s race hatred, and he went on to exert a significant influence over the post-war fascist movement. Whereas those in power, especially Hitler, could be blamed for the downfall of the fascist movement, more marginal characters like Evola and Strasser’s brother Otto would put themselves forward as the redemption of the ultranationalist idea.
The modern ecological far-right carried on the work of the fascist movement in a far more surreptitious fashion. Relying on strategies of political terror and infiltration, fascists maneuvered to gain recognition as the “revolutionaries” of the right. Adopting what they called "Third Positionism" for the rejection of both Communism and liberal democracy, fascists worked to expand their movement by exploiting right-wing tendencies within mainstream political and cultural movements, inclusive of the green movement and an anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist resistance to industrial civilization. In this part, we track the trends of fascist engagement with left-wing movements and, particularly, the growth of the green movement during the Cold War.
Twenty years after the Holocaust, the hippie and back-to-the-land movements engaged with variants of folksy romanticism and a nostalgic politics of peace in opposition to modernity. These movements, coupled with the anti-war movement, contributed to the anti-nukes movement and, with the first Earth Day in 1970, articulated a new politics of environmentalism inclusive of bioregionalism, which called for a depoliticized ecological movement focused on restoring biodiversity within discrete territories. At the same time, mass political opposition to bureaucratic authoritarianism in the form of both Communist Parties and trade unions sparked wildcat strikes, factory occupations, rent strikes, and broad-based illegalism that eventually assembled under the term "Autonomism." Especially powerful in Italy, Greece, and Germany during the 1970s and '80s, Autonomism articulated a kind of anti-authoritarian politics that helped define the budding anti-nukes movement, green politics, and opposition to war with more punk-rock sensibilities and militant antifascism.
It should come as no surprise that, while green politics took these different forms in a complex system of overlapping and often contentious values and norms from the radical left to the center, the far-right also worked to appropriate and utilize its appeals for their own reasons. Most directly, fascists in groups like Italy’s Lotta di Popolo, inspired by Evola and Strasser who promoted "national revolution," took on the rhetoric of Autonomism, simply replacing class analysis with a vaguely populist patina and uprooting the egalitarian understory of anti-imperialism in favor of vulgar anti-Americanism. In France, Holocaust deniers made inroads on the left among anti-imperialists opposed to conventional Marxist-Leninist dialectics and industrial capitalism, as evidenced when notable ultraleft bookstore, La Vieille Taupe, threw its support behind negationist Robert Faurrison, whose book received an introduction by scholar Noam Chomsky describing the author as an “apolitical liberal.”
In Germany, as well, fascist and far-right activists attempted to infiltrate existing anti-nukes and green groups and even start up their own ostensibly progressive or revolutionary groups. The German Greens found themselves steeped in controversy when antifascists exposed the background of early leader of the Greens, August Haussleiter, who came from the far-right Action Community of Independent Germans. Haussleiter was ousted, and co-founder Herbert Gruhl left the party early on to found the right-wing Ecological Democratic Party. Gruhl was joined in creating the Ecological Democratic Party by another cofounder of the Greens (and the Independent Ecologists of Germany), Wolfram Bednarski, who has since joined the far-right Alternative for Germany and advocates the reintroduction of wolves for biodiversity purposes. Thus, the nascent post-war European green movement already proved an important political flashpoint between left and right, with the latter envisioning an invasion of immigrants from overpopulated countries in the Global South destroying the “human biodiversity” Europe like invasive species.
Amid these conflicts in Europe, books began to emerge cautioning against overpopulation in the Third World. In France, the book Camp of the Saints offered a paranoid vision of nonwhite people invading Europe from the overpopulated decolonized world. In his riff on the emergent theme of overpopulation, Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb warned against the growing population of Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia as the central crisis facing the global environment, while ignoring that the primary consumers of the world’s resources live in the developed world (his predictions have been proven wrong, regardless). These books formed the cornerstone of white nationalist efforts to draw environmentalists toward the far right, and have since been adopted by figures close to Trump-like Bannon and Miller.
A form of reactionary environmentalism influenced by the population trope emerged from the U.S.'s distinct "buckaroo" tradition, finding a base in the Earth First! movement in the 1980s. Rejecting social movements and urban issues as unimportant to the goals of attaining "big wilderness," EF! fought non-violent campaigns to protect vast areas of endangered species habitat, but also entertained racist and patriarchal leaders like Edward Abbey. Their chapters included a hodgepodge of far-left revolutionaries, hippies, and conservatives who loathed the former two, opposed immigration into the U.S., and inveighed against Third World overpopulation, calling for depopulation. EF! advocated “Deep Ecology” as advanced by Swedish ecophilosopher Arne Naess, a biocentric form of green theory that eco-nationalists like Pentti Linkola glommed onto in their rejection of industrial civilization.
While social justice organizers like Judi Bari opposed the right-wing of EF! from within the movement, the radical left-wing author and activist Murray Bookchin promoted social ecology, directly opposing EF!'s anti-humanist "Deep Ecology" philosophy and rebuking the conservative "buckaroos" of EF!. These fissures culminated in the conservatives' gradual abandonment of the movement in the early '90s. By the 2000s, EF! chapters were participating openly in anti-Klan organizing and immigrant solidarity.
Thus, in some cases, fascists infiltrated left-wing groups, while in others they organized separate but ostensibly parallel groups advocating similar things with a militant nationalist edge. With regard to the green movement, reactionary strains emerged from the beginning and contributed to the movement’s growth, giving rise to significant struggles for hegemony between factions. Now we will turn to the continued usage of “entryism” (infiltration) in pursuit of disseminating fascist ideology and right-wing ecology further through subcultural and political milieus.
The collapse of the Soviet Union led to a wave of right-wing triumphalism, as well as new efforts by the international left to combat capitalism in a “globalized” world. Fascists made renewed efforts to infiltrate ecological groups, while also developing increasingly powerful international networks. In particular, fascists seized on opportunities of chauvinism, antisemitism, and misogyny in social movements to make inroads and spread their ideology. This section will lay out the methods and strategies of networking and entryism that fascists deployed to encourage reactionary ecology through subcultures and fringe political tendencies after the Cold War.
Although EF! would go on to adopt clear anti-oppression guidelines, some continued to embrace the macho image of the environmentalist as a "rugged individualist" encapsulated in the writings of Ted Kaczynski. The Kaczynski manifesto, which repeatedly refers to modern environmentalists as "fags" too effeminate to take action, themselves, would be published and promoted by various factions of radical greens delinked from the left politics of equality and converging in many ways with ecofascists. While some in the U.S. green movement, such as Green Anarchist John Zerzan, tended to sympathize with Kaczynski, perhaps the clearest example of the far-right imaginary in the radical green movement took place in England with Richard Hunt's infamous journal Green Anarchist and, later, Alternative Green, which propagated ethnocentric tribalism against the modern world.
Among Hunt's proteges during the 1980s was Troy Southgate, who had produced a spin-off organization from the fascist National Front called the National Revolutionary Movement that used a strategy of "entryism," or infiltrating environmentalist, animal rights, and anarchist groups. Since social movements often inhabit parallel subcultures, fascists like Southgate also made concerted efforts to make inroads into music scenes. Although fascist skinheads mark the most infamous entryist effort into musical subcultures, the neo-folk scene became even more important in terms of advancing Traditionalist and völkisch ideas toward the promotion of green fascism.
Neo-folk and ideologically similar currents of “National Socialist Black Metal” proved to be a useful vector to inject esoteric fascist ideology into subcultures, vis-á-vis the cult, Order of Nine Angles. There has since been a concerted effort at creating an antifascist Black Metal movement. The convergence of völkisch green fascism and the occult in subcultures was further spread by “heathen anarcho-fascist” Michael Moynihan, who disseminated the writings of Evola and Satanist fascist James Mason. Among others, two members of the Earth Liberation Front, a network with roots in Earth First! that committed large-scale acts of arson, became devotees of the growing subcultural fascism.
Similar entryist efforts were also used in France by RNM-associated group called New Resistance and in Russia by the cofounders of the National Bolshevik Party, Eduard Limonov and Aleksandr Dugin. According to Dugin, a follower of syncretic “Chaos Magick,” fascists must pursue “conscious cooperation of the radical Left-wingers and the New Right, as well as with religious and other anti-modern movements, such as the ecologists and Green theorists, for example.” Through the aid of long-time fascist, Jean-François Thiriart, such groups federated with the American Front skinhead gang in the U.S., which later adopted Dugin’s ideology and produced a new group called New Resistance.
With a number of other organizations, these groups formed a decentralized network of "National Bolshevik"-associated groups in favor of an ultranationalist version of the Soviet Union's authoritarian, socialist state. With contributions from the stodgy fascist ideologues known as the "European New Right," this growing movement posited ecological Traditionalism as a way of overcoming multiculturalism and returning to ancestral roots by deporting immigrants and carving out ethno-states for white people. This tendency became involved in the anti-globalization movement, promoting localist ideas within a broader worldview that positioned authoritarian dictators as bastions of resistance to imperialist Western powers driven by secret Jewish conspirators.
Advocating “National Anarchism,” Southgate attempts to square the order-based tenets of fascism with a völkisch notion of anarchism by insisting upon a return to “natural” hierarchies based in traditional systems of ancestral precursors. Members of Southgate’s so-called "National Anarchist Movement” (NAM) practiced entryism both in real life and online anarchist organizing spaces despite their direct connections to the RNM and watered-down fascist ideology. Directly influenced by the “European New Right” and openly affiliated with NAM, "pansecessionism" emerged to assemble libertarians, leftists, and National Anarchists along a geopolitical axis dividing the U.S. into ethno-states and some smaller states dedicated to alternative political tendencies. Such groups often attempt to co-opt decolonization and Indigeneity toward including bioregionalism in a territorial plan to dismantle modern civilization.
With Moynihan publishing, a best-selling book on black metal and Limonov making inroads in Western media, fascism was developing a diffuse and networked, decentralized international movement capable of adapting to subcultural shifts and developing signals that could affect larger cultural changes. With the rise of the National Bolshevik network, the tendency of what some have called "left-fascism" gained critical hubs in post-Soviet Russia and throughout the world. Dugin’s “Eurasianist” approach wove together Haushofer’s geopolitics with disparate fascist and left-wing movements into a purportedly anti-imperialist "multipolar world" of Traditionalist, authoritarian ethno-states fusing left and right, grounded in the sacralization of patriarchal politics, and opposed most directly to liberalism and “globalism.” Through the efforts of such “left-fascists” and their collaborators, the fascist movement achieved limited mainstream success. However, they did produce an international network of young constituents eager to commit horrifying acts of violence.
Created around 2009 by fascist leader Richard Spencer, the Alt Right combined Third Positionism and National Bolshevism with a more Americanist form of white nationalism associated with Pat Buchanan’s “paleo-conservative” movement and adherents of biological racism coded as “human biodiversity.” Seizing on Web 2.0 and the popularity of podcasts, the Alt Right developed communications savvy that prior fascist groups lacked, while building on prior efforts to influence the counter-culture. In particular, Spencer cloaked his hate in euphemisms and a manner that convinced many in the public of a genteel alternative to the Republican-Democrat duality. The Alt Right’s marketing of fascism as young and edgy involved attempts at promoting ecological sustainability and even animal rights along völkisch lines, although some within the fascist movement criticized them as weak for it. At the same time, members of the Alt Right embraced a reactionary form of ecological insurgency in keeping with some of the more radical and reactionary elements within Earth First!. Here, we will describe some of these influences behind the green fascist tendency that emerged within the Alt Right, as well as the corresponding online cultures that help spread its message and gain recruits.
The Alt Right garnered many, if not most, of its constituents from within online gamer communities and the nebulous world of internet message boards and social media that has become the leading point of radicalization for young men seeking radical alternatives to contemporary conditions. 8chan and 4chan, in particular, grew to promote non-PC gamer culture in a way that increasingly moved toward misogyny, racism, and ableism. Young men whose lives become intensely intertwined with gaming platforms and cyber-technology created by misogynists appear attracted to fetishized understandings of nativist ecology as a paradoxically heroic escape from their own existence. On internet message boards, Alt Right followers argued over ideological tendencies, like whether the U.S. should move toward white supremacy or separatism, in which whites would move to a specific region to carve out an ethno-state. The latter idea was promoted in particular by Harold Covington, whose Northwest Front merged bioregional ideas of Cascadia with the Aryan Nations’s idea of a “Northwest Territorial Imperative” in the Northwest. Real-world networks have developed out of the online world to draw this angry following into actual, material activism, while mass shootings become suicidal apotheoses of their growing death cult.
The Christchurch shooter, with his self-described eco-fascist, anti-imperialist manifesto and 8chan livestream of the killings, presented the perfect example of this phenomenon in which the mass shooting becomes a media weapon designed to reproduce itself through its online presence. Describing himself as radicalized online, the Christchurch shooter says he traveled throughout the world, making connections to mass shooters like Anders Breivik and different far-right groups both above and below ground. According to his manifesto, the shooter had been a Communist and an anarchist before his travels to North Korea, among other places, changed his politics. He turned libertarian and ultimately fascist, internalizing along the way the major positions of anti-imperialism and green politics put forward by the "left-fascists." Like Duginists, he also celebrated Russia and historic military victories of Slavs over Turks as a model for ethnic war.
Some of the most violent tendencies within online message boards linked to the Alt Right found expression through neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin’s site Daily Stormer. Anglin’s enthusiastic support for deep green radical Derrick Jensen on his site evidences the method by which the far-right makes in-roads through reactionary entry-points in the far left:
“Turns out that all queer theorists are pedophiles. And Derrick doesn’t give a heck about these college students harassing him...Jensen is a cool guy. He’s an anarchoprimitivist, Uncle Ted [Kacyznski] style, who basically believes that the entire structure of civilization needs to be violently torn down. And he obviously views homosexualism as a part of this evil structure, though he’s usually low-key about that. But for some reason isn’t in the above clip….He was something of an influence on me before I was ever even into Neo-Nazism. He’s interesting.”
Anglin’s time as a green radical prior to fascism highlights the political vacillations that fascists tend to seize on in order to activate young and curious minds who reject their current surroundings. With its anti-establishment ethos and subcultural signaling, the green movement can offer members a feeling of belonging also sought by those attracted to the nationalist notion of homeland.
A leading figure in the line of deep green ecology, Jensen has become a model for the kind of authoritarian green leader that fascists would try to co-opt. He leads a radical green group called Deep Green Resistance (DGR), boasting an “accelerationist” agenda to take down industrial civilization by hightening internal contradictions and speeding up its presumed impending collapse. DGR attracted a significant number of environmental activists before the exposure of the Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist politics of its leadership. Advocating the rejection of trans people's very existence on the basis of a fanciful notion of "nature,” the supporters of this brand of reactionary politics unabashedly worked with far-right Christian groups to quash reforms that enhanced protections for trans people in everyday life. Earth First! denounced DGR because of such alignments, and much of its membership abandoned their leaders.
In October 2019, Jensen sat for an extensive interview with the Alt Right associated website Counter-Currents. “I have always thought it most likely that a new Rightist order will arise out of the chaos wrought by environmental change,” the Counter-Currents interviewer wrote. “My interview with Derrick Jensen buttresses this theory. He still has his liberal shibboleths, and surely hates everything about Counter-Currents, but given that protecting the Earth is his axiomatic base, he ends up holding not a few positions quite amenable to this Website and its supporters.” Even though Jensen later claimed not to know who Counter-Currents was, the overlap of their ideals remains.
The fusion of “deep green" philosophy and an insurgent orientation can thus align with an apparently paradoxical yearning for ethno-states—among the most fearsome manifestations of such an assemblage being the Wolves of Vinland. Embracing bioregional politics and the ultraviolence of a white gang, members of the Wolves of Vinland promote fraudulent "race science," advocate Evola’s esoteric teachings, and envision a tribal existence in tune with bioregional notions of the spiritual connection between place, ancestry, and the land. Like pan-secessionist Keith Preston, Wolves of Vinland member and “masculinist” Jack Donovan has contributed to the Alt Right through appearances at conferences and publishing houses. A gay vegan powerlifter, Donovan’s subcultural affinities with radical ecology facilitate a fascinating milieu of “fascist creep” through which Donovan’s friends contribute to his own writings while publishing other radical texts more associated with the (post-)left, such as egoist Max Stirner. Some radical nihilist insurrectionaries have become associated with Donovan’s gym, contributing to Donovan’s “anarcho-fascist” milieu. Others associated with esoteric spiritualities like the Asatru Folk Assembly and the defunct White Order of Thule have presented similar injunctions for ethnocentric tribalism in tune with völkisch ecology.
While the Wolves of Vinland and Daily Stormer advocate violence, the Alt Right’s tendency to connect white nationalist paleo-cons to fascism did not please some more ideologically-motivated fascists and Third Positionists. These vanguardists sought to differentiate themselves from the public-facing movement, which appeared watered down, and incite a national revolution against the state rather than insinuating themselves within its ranks. The story of the Atomwaffen Division is probably the most infamous example linking green fascism to modern terror; however, other reactionary green groups have emerged sui generis, bearing many similarities to Atomwaffen and other fascist terrorists. In this section, we will describe both Atomwaffen and Individuals Tending to the Wild/Savage (ITS) in terms of vanguardist efforts to destroy liberal democracy.
Amid the growth of the Alt Right, different fascist forums emerged online to link committed organizers within the global fascist movement from Moscow to Orange County, California, for the purposes of organizing direct action in the form of racist and homophobic terrorism. In 2011, the International Third Position Federation went online, hosting a number of fascists, including one who went on to form fascist terror group, National Action, with his online friend. National Action immediately showed the influence of both original fascism and rebranded versions like National Anarchism, particularly with reference to the neo-folk scene. Within a couple of years, the International Third Position Federation folded into Iron March, a new forum run by the same person, “Alexander Slavros” (Alisher Mukhitdinov), thus facilitating wider organizing potential and ultimately giving rise to another terrorist group, Atomwaffen Division, in 2013.
Iron March came to feature numerous posts describing ecological commitments largely in keeping with traditional völkisch tendencies and the broader National Bolshevik and Third Positionist proximity to the left. For instance, like the Christchurch murderer, Atomwaffen co-founder and convicted murderer Devin Arthurs spent time as a Communist before becoming fascist, as did another leader who called himself “Arathis.” One Iron March user posted about his experience as an EF!er involved in a tree-sit in the Northern California redwoods prior to his activity with Atomwaffen. Another promoted Derrick Jensen’s work. Atomwaffen members have also been recruited by eco-fascist groups propagandizing over Telegram messenger. These groups leverage a white “Indigenous” identity in allyship with neo-Nazi groups like the Azov Batallion, Misanthropic Division, and Right Sector fighting Russian separatists in Eastern Ukraine who are also often fascists. These groups often see white “Indigenous” identities and connections to nature as a volkisch take on anti-civilizationist rewilding.
The confluence of individualistic "Lone Wolf" style of terrorism with the ecological awareness and esoteric cults introduced through subcultures is obvious in Atomwaffen Division and associated terrorist network, The Base. Atomwaffen follows the esoteric fascist doctrine espoused by James Mason and disseminated by Moynihan, which promotes a bloody Aryan revolution using serial killer Charles Manson as a model. This doctrine is combined with an accelerationist critique of civilization often prompting members to allude towards possible large scale attacks on infrastructure as a means of killing all the weakest humans.
Adopting the kind of fascist syncretism that spread through subcultural entryism, Atomwaffen took up the creed of a U.S. offshoot of the Order of Nine Angles called Tempel ov Blood, which had been developed in association with New Resistance. With its associated cult New Bihar Mandir, Tempel ov Blood members deploy anti-imperialist rhetoric and support for North Korean "juche" alongside sacralized violence and a deep reverence for Hindu ultranationalism and Japanese death cult Aum Shinrikyo. The founder of Tempel ov Blood and nine other members are now leaders in Atomwaffen, according to journalist Nate Thayer. While it has tended to be involved in messy coalitions with the Alt Right, the Satanic creed of Atomwaffen and associated groups puts off hardened, Christian white nationalists, and they see themselves less as a front for spreading white nationalism through populist efforts than as a vanguard paramilitary movement set on national revolution anyway.
In the Pacific Northwest, members of the Atomwaffen Division joined an online chat room with other area fascists called "True Cascadia," taking a bioregional approach to organizing a potential far-right coalition before facing exposure by antifascist groups in the region. Despite their admiration for the “holy trinity” of terrorists (Kaczynski, Oklahoma City Bomber Timothy McVeigh, and Breivik), Atomwaffen members blend in with broader populist fronts like Patriot Prayer during street protests while gaining online tactical support from the chauvinist street gang, Proud Boys. These supposed “Lone Wolf” terrorists only exist in a larger, technologically-interconnected network of diffuse groups, tendencies, and campaigns. At least publicly, that network often maintains ambiguous and intentionally ill-defined political boundaries based on feelings of alienation and ressentiment, rather than specific ideological convictions, in order to maximize outreach.
Along with the bioregional mishmash of True Cascadia, Atomwaffen’s specific bioregional sensibilities become increasingly clear with a glimpse at associated reactionary reading lists. One list associated with Atomwaffen and associated group, The Base, reveals interest in Jorian Jenks, Richard Walther Darré, Ernst von Salomon, and Pentti Linkola, along with Herbert Gruhl and Ted Kaczynski. Ecofascist Telegram channels also expose widespread admiration for Edward Abbey and the Earth Liberation Front, viewing themselves as part of their legacy. With many of the same ideological points, The Base promotes the ideas of Covington’s Northwest Front with its white nationalist and bioregional overlap. One ecofascist cell in Sweden associated with The Base carried out an arson against a mink farm in January.
[Images.]
Posts from an ecofascist Telegram channel appropriating leftist/greenanarchist histories and aesthetics
Another thread named for Ted Kaczynski on 4chan’s Nazi-infested /pol/ board advanced a “recommended reading” that listed the works of Pentti Linkola and “conservative revolutionary” Oswald Spengler alongside a text by the group Atassa, publisher of the manifestos of the Individualists Tending toward the Wild/Savagery (ITS), also referred to as Wild Reaction.
Claiming responsibility for targeted assassinations and promoting indiscriminate murder as a way to attack civilization, ITS indulges in what they refer to as “eco-extremism” in opposition to “progress.” One Atassa book contains an image of an “Indigenized” swastika on its cover, and the group has drawn interest from the radical subcultures in which Jack Donovan and his ilk flow. Jake Hanrahan, an independent journalist and documentary filmmaker who has conducted deep dives into both Atomwaffen and ITS told us, “I definitely don’t think [ITS] have a Nazi ideology, but I do think what they're creating is beginning to resemble the new fascist-nihilist culture we're seeing that's now gaining momentum.” Importantly, many green activists agree with Hanrahan and repudiate ITS, for instance, Green Anarchist, John Zerzan, who made a formal split with Atassa and ITS, saying, “I don't think this is anarchism, I think this is fascism… this is a new low for these people.”
ITS sees themselves as a vanguard of individuals beyond the collective, untethering their associations from any ideology, per se. However, their opposition to the modern world and celebration of stochastic terrorism brings them into line with syncretic, fascist death cults like Tempel ov Blood, to which they are reportedly connected. Although they betray a fondness for Linkola, linking his thought to Tempel ov Blood, ITS argue that they cannot truly be eco-fascists, because they do not try to fight for a better world. However, as a defense mechanism to protect their subculture, Atassa, their supporters, and like-minded actors within the wider nihilist movement tend to use targeted harassment, threats of violence, and trolling tactics and memes that closely resemble the style of online fascists.
At the same time, ITS has expressed appreciation for fascist terror as part of a tendency toward wildness. Writing in response to the Christchurch killings, an ITS communique declared, “of course ITS celebrates all this, we don't care about the tears of the massacred Muslims, nor the tears of the future victims of the Islamic extremists, the Tarrant attack will bring chaos and destabilization and if it arrives, it will be welcome.” Thus, it came as no surprise that, while the El Paso shooter directly referenced the Christchurch shooter, the Dayton murderer's Twitter account revealed interest in ITS and Aum Shinrikyo, as well as misogyny, murder, and building pipe bombs.
The broader anti-civ and insurrectionary/nihilist political landscape may contain valid critiques and ideas that have developed within the left (and post-left) over the years. However, the way that eco-terrorist groups such as ITS utilize the edges of anti-civilization nihilist discourse to justify the abandonment of ethics undeniably approximates a shift toward fascist ideology. Many “anti-civ” egoists and nihilists are quick to point out the almost Puritanical panic amongst anarchists about ITS attacks that they claim are most likely an elaborate fairy tale. The communities of the people who they have supposedly killed or certainly threatened tend to disagree. However, those such as Atassa and their fellow travelers who have provided a platform for this form of fascist entryism into more ideologically cohesive Green Anarchist spaces are engaging in fascist entryism, either consciously or otherwise.
The anarchist website, It’s Going Down, stated that genocide is not and will never be an anarchist project in their response to ITS coddling on the left and post-left. If one believes the nihilist trope that humans have already condemned earth to ecocide, then it stands that humanity’s only hope is to forcibly wrest the direction of science and industry into scientifically grounded carbon-negative technologies. It is possible to blend the insights offered by anti-civ, Indigenous, and Green Anarchist movements with the advancements made possible by a science unencumbered by warfare and global imperialist capitalism. The more the need for a large-scale green movement intensifies, the more fascists might enter it and the more desperate and scared green activists may fall into their clutches.
In contradistinction to vanguardists, populists hope to expand their influence within more mainstream groups, thus furthering the fascist cause without necessarily bringing fascism to light. While populist radical right parties, which follow Cas Mudde in defining by way of authoritarianism and nativism, often deny anthropogenic forcing of climate change through greenhouse gas emissions, their associated groups and youth wings often paint a more complex picture. That those youth wings often maintain greater overlap with fascist organizations reveals the generational dynamics of populist movements, as well as the expanding import of ecology to them.
Dugin has become one of the global leaders of the populist tendency in fascism. In an effort to shed the identity of Third Positionism, he now promotes a "Fourth Political Theory," which claims to have overcome the fundamental contradictions of Communism, Fascism, and Liberalism in a new political approach that he aligns with "national-conservatism" and even more euphemistically, "populism." However, he maintains the same influence, ideological obligations, and personal associations as he did in the 1990s when writing essays heralding “Fascism – Borderless and Red.” Aside from European fascist networks, Dugin has met with Alt Right figures, appeared on Alex Jones’s conspiracy theory show, Infowars, appeared on Chinese state TV, and is admired by Trump strategist Steve Bannon, along with various conspiracy theorists and syncretic ideologues.
Some members of Green Parties persist in flirting with Dugin and the far right. Perhaps most notoriously, Canada’s Green Party has experienced run-ins with the far right, including Monika Schaeffer’s 2016 Holocaust denial video, along with an array of less salacious gaffes. The U.S. Green Party 2016 candidate for Vice Presidency, Ajamu Baraka, also has a running relationship with the far right. Protested by other leftists as a conspiracy theorist, Baraka has appeared on Holocaust denier Kevin Barrett’s radio show, Truth Jihad, and wrote a chapter featured in a book edited by Barrett, who himself ran a permaculture retreat called 3P Zawiya. While he disavowed Holocaust denial, Baraka called antifascist organizing a “distraction,” and received an award from a shadowy group that supports Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for his defense of the murderous regime. In 2019, Baraka also took part in a panel for the annual Iran-backed New Horizon conference which features keynote speaker Aleksandr Dugin, whom Barrett called “courageous and brilliant.” Baraka’s familiarity with Duginist networks, defense of authoritarian regimes, and conspiracy theories contribute to a tendency among green “anti-imperialists” to converge with fascism rather than oppose it.
Aside from drawing Greens to the far right, fascists work to bring together fascists and the radical right in a move that provides fascists ideological shelter and a base for dissemination and recruitment. One of Dugin's allies in Italy, the fascist network CasaPound, is connected to the populist radical right party Lega. Emerging from squatter networks in Italy to wield considerable street-level power through violent protests, CasaPound supports, among other things, a nativist version of green politics. CasaPound's Canadian allies in what they call "fascism for the third millennium," Atalante, have also adopted green rhetoric despite their roots in the Quebecois fascist skinhead scene. While the Conservative Party has done a reasonable job distancing itself from groups like Atalante, the new radical right People’s Party of Canada appears to maintain closer ties.
Another leading theorist for this new generation of fascists is “Identitarian” ideologue Guillaume Faye of the European New Right, who produced an ideological concept known as “Archeofuturism” articulating a Traditionalist synthesis of futurism and ecological primitivism. Substituting “national identity” as a euphemism for “Volk,” Identitarianism exploits anarchist and green aesthetics to cultivate constituents from the left and lure alienated young men disenfranchised with the status quo into desperate actions of extreme violence to further the "cause" of white nationalism. The younger, more-dynamic generation of Identitarians who lace their support of populism with “left-fascist” appeals is perhaps more closely networked than any before, and on some levels may share more in common with one another across continental boundaries than they share with older far-right activists in their own countries. As well, they are more effective than previous generations at eliding the difference between populist, fascist, and Identitarian in order to avoid stigma while advocating fascist ideology.
The Austrian Freedom Party’s youth wing, Ring Freiheitlicher Jugend, promote green positions through their online media presence while maintaining connections to fascist networks like the Identity Movement that tend to present themselves as the only vanguard that can put forward radical action in defense of biodiversity and homeland. After the Freedom Party fell from grace, the Austrian center-right party Peoples Party has entered into coalition with the Greens, leading some leftists to caution against a developing green fascism. While the convergence of ecology and anti-immigration policies do undermine the left tendencies within the Greens and open a gateway to a more consistent right-wing shift among the wider European green movement, they do not necessarily insinuate a fascist turn, however.
Also bearing disconcerting ties to the Identitarians, France’s National Rally now calls for Europe to become an “ecological civilization,” advancing the theory that “nomads” despoil France because, unlike the sedentary native population, they do not harbor ancestral concern for the welfare of their place. At the same time, the Alternative for Germany-linked extreme right publication, Umwelt & Aktiv, attack liberal “sustainable development” in favor of ecocentric nativism under the auspices of biodiversity. While there is little evidence of green parties openly entering into coalitions with these far-right parties, the Austrian example may indicate some potential shifts toward the hegemony of the right.
In other cases, groups perceived to be green have proven more syncretic. For example, Mike Adams “the Health Ranger” made his name as a promoter of organic foods through his website Natural News. However, his career took a turn toward conspiracy theories opposing vaccinations among other pseudoscientific tendencies. Known to co-host Infowars with Alex Jones, Adams now advocates Q-Anon and supports Trump. Strangely, Adams’s example shows how ostensibly-green tendencies like opposition to pollution and support for organic foods can be associated with climate denial and other reactionary politics.
Interestingly, some fascists have admitted climate change is occurring. In his usual call for a pan-European federation of homogeneous ethno-states, “European New Right” ideologue Alain de Benoist asked, “Which European country by itself, even if one of the big ones, can regulate the financial system… or confront the migratory wave? The challenges of a changing climate? Or the coming pandemics, and all sorts of trafficking that are expanding on a global scale?” While fascists have tended to support ecology for its own right and in opposition to immigration, Benoist’s acceptance of climate change is still relatively controversial and often mixed with the denial that humans are the main drivers. Where fascists do find humans accountable for ecological problems, blame almost always rests on Jews and non-whites.
A number of facts emerge from this overview of fascist populism. Green Parties engaging in conspiracy theories are susceptible to collaboration with fascists, and fascists have made discrete inroads to some left-wing parties that maintain some facets of a green agenda. Fascists have also made important connections to the radical right, and though they may not be driving an ecological turn among populist radical right parties by themselves, they are a part of the generational dynamics that have influenced the change. Although the radical right and fascist groups find each other useful, producing together a conflictive political space we have referred to as the “far-right,” ultimately fascist networks hope to overtake the less extreme radical right through infiltration or revolution (or both). And lastly, while völkisch ecology is often promoted for its own sake across the far-right, climate change is, at least for now, still looked upon with skepticism among far-right parties. However, this may be changing.
In this essay, we tracked how the fascist movement’s ecological tendency has developed and adapted over time, from the völikisch movement, through the Third Position, to an important part of an interconnected international movement with both vanguardist and populist strategies. We offered an analysis of the role of digital technology, including social media, forums, and message boards, in the proliferation of fascism and germination of a culture that supports mass shooters. We also showed how fascists work to advance authoritarian goals within populist parties by promoting conspiracy theories and disinformation alongside an ecologically nativist agenda. Lastly, we argued that just solutions to the hazards portended by anthropogenic climate change can only come about through complex, adaptive approaches far from the artificially simplistic answers provided by green fascists. In conclusion, we argue that the threat of fascism and increasingly intense hazards resulting from anthropogenic climate change are best addressed through non-authoritarian systems that can adapt scientifically and with agility to dynamic conditions.
Part of the reality of climate skepticism is due to the fact that climate change is a vastly complex and non-linear set of interconnected problem spaces, and authoritarianism can understand little else than centralized flows and directions of inquiry through a single channel, creating perverse incentives up and down the hierarchy. Distributed systems that value inquiry and non-zero sum cosmopolitan collaboration offer the networked agility necessary to solve complex problems that authoritarian parties and their fascist bedfellows lack the bandwidth to address. Instead of adapting to complexity, the far-right project problems onto the Other. In practical terms, the fascist movement's ecological rhetoric has drawn people toward the radical right and entropy over climate, transmitting the desire to do something into Islamophobic anti-immigrant fervor and ultraviolent pathology.
We found it interesting that eco-fascists frequently find themselves in self-perceived ideological affinity with the anarchist, post-leftist, and nihilist milieu as with the authoritarian left of Maoists and Stalinists (a la National Bolsheviks and National Anarchists). Marxist-Leninists tend to rely on the romanticization of industrial modernism that is difficult to graft onto the green tradition, but inroads have been made between the far right and the more ecologically-minded left in some cases as a result of foreign policy commitments in opposition to NATO. As well, the Tempel ov Blood support the authoritarian Communist regime in North Korea, suggesting that their affinity for anarchism lies more in decentralized frameworks of “leaderless resistance” and in cultural transgression than in ideology.
Both the right and left can work to prevent the spread of fascism within the green movement and, concomitantly, the germination of a green fascism within the public sphere through mainstream populist parties and subcultures. While the right can disassociate itself from fascist networks and join the antifascist movement, the left and post-left can continue the work to seal up some of the most visible entry-points that enable the spread of right-wing ideology and drift of young activists toward national socialism. The diffusion of antisemitism within the British Labour Party, and its subsequent denial by many of its members, has shown the discord that right-wing and authoritarian currents can sow within a left-wing movement. Antisemitism is part of a tendency to rely on conspiracy theories to explain away failure and unpopularity. Conspiracy theories associated with the Green movement like the notion that vaccinations cause autism or that the U.S. government is spreading “chem trails” in the air also offer crossover points for fascists.
Such conspiracy theories, afflicting both right and left, tend to fit the general authoritarian pattern of projecting complex problems onto an easy enemy rather than solving them through adaptive systems. The rise of an authoritarian populist mixture of nationalism, socialism, and ecology, supported through broader Russian media strategy, has contributed to a dangerous climate of disinformation that sidelines nuanced discussions on programmatic solutions to emerging crises. Disinformation causes power to flow to lackies who lie with the greatest facility, make the most powerful allies, and work around the limits of bureaucracy are able to survive. Such systems preclude climate justice.
There is more research that could be done to further analyze the cognitive dissonance between the climate denial and skepticism of the far-right, on one hand, and the growing ecological tendencies on the right, on the other. In particular, the growing right-wing disinformation systems around climate change echo similar patterns as geopolitical conspiracy theories surrounding the Syrian White Helmets and fearmongering about refugees. Correlation between climate denial and nativist ecology with support for Russia’s intervention in the war in Syria, which contribute to an influx of refugees, would indicate a kind of broken propaganda line that reflects broader issues pertaining to international relations.
Finally, we look with hope to combined and collaborative efforts in the future to understand the inherently complex root causes of both climate change and the rise of the global far-right as interconnected. Hence, both dilemmas can be confronted with carefully calibrated, systemic answers that come from situated knowledge connected to broader goals of equality and justice. While we name many of the problems in this essay and attempt to understand why they exist along with how they emerged, we accept that the solutions will entail rigorous but incredibly necessary work for the future of humanity, earth, and all other life found here.
Scott Campbell
“When horror knocks at your door, it’s difficult to hide from. All that can be done is to breathe, gather strength, and face it….I shared news of the woman found in University City. From the first moment, I was angered and protested the criminalization of the victim. The next morning I woke up to the horror and pain that she was my relative.”
– Statement from the family of Lesvy Rivera to Mexican society
“[W]e take responsibility for the homicide of another human in University City on May 3rd….Much has emerged about that damned thing leaning lifeless on a payphone… ‘that she suffered from alcoholism, that she wasn’t a student, this and that.’ But what does it matter? She’s just another mass, just another damned human who deserved death.”
– 29th Statement of Individualists Tending Toward the Wild (ITS)
Some things shouldn’t have to be said, but as is too often the case in this disaster of a world, that which should be most obvious often gets subsumed to the exigencies of politics, ideologies, money, emotion, or internet clicks. The purpose of this piece is to condemn the recent acts of eco-extremists in Mexico and those who cheer them on from abroad.
This critique does not aspire to alter the behavior of Individualists Tending Toward the Wild (ITS), Individualities Tending Toward the Wild (ITS), Wild Reaction (RS), Indiscriminate Group Tending Toward the Wild (GITS), Eco-extremist Mafia, or whatever they will change their name to tomorrow. Like any other deluded, sociopathic tyrant, these individuals have declared themselves above reproach, critique, reason, or accountability. They have appointed themselves judge, jury, and executioner; the guardians and enforcers of Truth using a romanticized past to justify their actions. As absolutist authoritarians, they have constructed a theoretical framework that, while ever-shifting and inconsistent, somehow always ends with a justification for why they get to hold a knife to the throats of all of humankind. In short, they think and act like the State.
There was a discussion about ITS on an IGD podcast from last December. For those unfamiliar, ITS and its spawn of affiliated acronyms publicly emerged in 2011 as an anti-civilization grouping that blew things up and tried to kill people they didn’t like, primarily university research scientists. In early statements, they spoke of favorably of anarchism and revolution. Over the course of just a few years and various groupings and splittings, they adopted a firm stance of rejection and reaction. They disavowed anarchism, revolution, leftism, or anything related to the social or human. They proudly adopted the mantle of ecoterrorism and proclaimed their disgust for the likes of John Zerzan or Ted Kaczynski, who they previously praised.
Unsurprisingly, through their increasing isolation and reactivity, ITS has turned into just plain murderers. (Or at least they’d like you to think so.) “The human being deserves extinction” and “We position ourselves against the human being, without caring about the use of civilization to carry out our acts” is now their creed. As such, in the State of Mexico, ITS claims it went out hunting for loggers to kill, but not finding any, they decided to ambush, shoot and murder a couple on a hike on April 30th, because, “We just want it to be clear that no human being will be safe in nature.” They suggest humans should instead stay in the cities, but then claim responsibility for the May 3rd femicide of Lesvy Rivera at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, stating, “Not even in your damned cities will you be safe.” The ITS phenomenon, while beginning in Mexico, has spread throughout much of Latin America, with groups using the ITS name claiming responsibility for attacks – including attempts at the mass murder of ordinary, working-class people – in multiple countries.
Understanding what led to the creation and evolution of groups such as ITS is a topic best addressed in a separate piece. As mentioned above and in the podcast, they find their roots in the insurrectionary and anti-civilization streams of anarchism. Mexico in particular has a vibrant clandestine, direct action insurrectionary movement. Mexico is also where 99 percent of all “crimes” go unpunished, where narcos, police, military and politicians either work hand in hand or kill one another and anyone else nearby in the tens of thousands. They also team up against aboveground social movements – repression being the only language the Mexican state speaks. It is not difficult to understand, in a country being gutted by neoliberalism, where appeals to the state are met with batons and bullets, where anarchists are already blowing things up, and where everyone else with an agenda seems to be killing people and getting away with it, why a group like ITS would emerge.
Yet at the same time in Mexico, aside from a few websites, ITS and its actions have not been praised or embraced by anarchists or anyone else. This likely also contributes to the escalating violence on ITS’s part – no one really pays attention to them except to dismiss or condemn. At least one anarchist group has publicly stated its belief that ITS is a state-run operation, designed to delegitimize the broader radical movement.
It seems more likely that ITS is a genuine group that believes what it says. Whether it has actually done what it says is another matter. Some attacks have certainly occurred, but a curiously large number of ITS attacks fail or go unmentioned anywhere except in their statements. They claim this is due to the police and media conspiring to not call attention to their acts. Yet the typical insurrectionary anarchist direct action is almost always reported with precise information, photos showing the damage caused, and can be verified in corporate media reports. How ITS is so much worse than other direct action groups at carrying out direct actions is an unanswered question. That ITS killed any of the three people they recently claimed to have killed is unlikely. The statement shares no details of the killings and only includes a photo taken from Facebook. Especially with regards to the femicide of Lesvy Rivera at UNAM, ITS is likely seeking to get a free ride on the coattails of a tragedy that has generated considerable action and coverage amongst the anarchists and radicals they hate so much yet whose attention they so desperately seek.
So do we anarchists give it to them? Admittedly, even the existence of this piece is a capitulation to their attention seeking. But worse are those that promote, even implicitly, the actions of ITS. Sites such as Anarchist News, Free Radical Radio, Atassa, and Little Black Cart. The “a retweet does not constitute endorsement” excuse doesn’t fly here. As ITS says, “We’ve been warning you since the beginning.” And now they are claiming to have killed three humans simply because they were human. Will ITS fans continue to distribute the propaganda of a group that by its own admission is not only not anarchist, but proudly terroristic, rejecting of all ethics, morals, or principles of liberation? They solely exist to kill people. It should not have to be explained why such a position does not merit support. Of a less pressing matter is the way in which ITS conceives of “nature” is itself a social and civilizational construct. Their (already constantly shifting) ideological basis for murder falls apart under any real scrutiny.
Some defend the publications and discussions (or trolling, as it were) they engender because while perhaps they don’t agree with killing people, the analysis ITS presents is intellectually stimulating and worthy of consideration. If ITS did kill her, Lesvy Rivera can surely appreciate that her brutal murder was found intellectually stimulating for some. It is the peak of colonial, racist arrogance that those from the safety of their U.S. or European homes feel comfortable debating the finer points of an ideology that amounts to brown people killing other brown people. We eagerly await the publishing on these sites of ISIS or al-Qaida communiques due to their intellectually stimulating critiques of
U.S. imperialism in the Middle East.
The only support ITS should be receiving from anarchists is encouragement that they practice their dedication to human extinction on themselves. Just as the fascists of ISIS are meeting a true anarchist response, the fascists of ITS should be called to task, rather than coddled.
William Gillis
Should publishing neonazi material be tolerated among anarchists?
To almost every anarchist the answer is and has always been no. This is not a matter of censoring or hiding from ideas, it’s a matter of not giving shitty people with shitty values and goals the legitimacy of a platform and connection with us. Social association matters, it maps networks of trust and collaboration, it declares degrees of affinity, and provides points of entry. When you hang with nazis, when you allow them into your spaces, or when you promote their propaganda you’re quite reasonably gonna get treated like a nazi collaborator.
The world is not a formless and consequenceless forum for the airing and interplay of ideas. It’s particularly sad that — in the drama surrounding Little Black Cart publishing the defacto English-language mouthpeice of a terrorist group targeting anarchists — anyone should have to point out to self-proclaimed “post-anarchists” the limits of the “marketplace of ideas” notion and the dangerousness of privileging the pretense of civil dialog.
Ideas rise to prominence for lots of reasons, their evolutionary fitness in a given context is not solely or often even chiefly determined by their epistemic value. When more rational or accurate ideas win out they often do so only very slowly, laboriously tearing down vast edifices of bullshit that can be raised quickly.
Nationalism is fucking stupid, but nationalist propaganda is particularly effective — its simplistic resonance persuades faster than critique can keep pace. It hooks into our shallow monkey brain instincts, feeding off our worst desires for status, power, belonging, and community, and providing an excuse to shrink the circle of our concern for others and avoid all the fatiguing intellectual responsibility such empathy brings. While we waste time critiquing its lies and misdirection nationalism happily continues building an army and preparing to crush us.
This doesn’t mean that we should expunge nationalist appeals from the historical record or make them totally inaccessible — epistemic closure is dangerous and it’s important to understand our enemies — but we shouldn’t make their dissemination easy, and we shouldn’t help in giving them slick packaging, prominence, and legitimacy. Since nationalism primarily recruits not through reason but through displays of social positioning and brute force — displays that promise power and demonstrate how much can be gotten away with — dialog is often a trap.
Almost everyone gets this.
An esoteric text dump online is different than something gilded in book form. The role of a publisher — even more so in the era of the internet — is to give social prominence to certain things. To leverage social and financial capital to disseminate something and lend legitimacy to it. Anarchists don’t publish flat earth nuts or climate change deniers because those perspectives have simply nothing in common with anarchism; they are not relevant or coherent with or even arguably reconcilable with anarchy. And while there is immense space for complexity, novelty, exploration, and contention within anarchism it is not yet so undermined as a concept as to be infinitely expansive. There are boundaries and a core locus of concern with the liberation of all.
We certainly don’t publish neonazis or tankies. It doesn’t matter that Mao was once an anarchist or that Mussolini ran in anarchist circles — they were clearly at fundamental odds with the anarchist project. But even those genocidal ideologies pale before the mass murderous ideology of ITS, who have even more stridently sought to embrace the opposite of anarchism. Rejecting the defining anarchist goal of liberation for all, ITS derides this as “humanist” and “moralist” — valorizing instead the murder of strangers for sport. Instead of freedom and the abolition of domination, they’ve devolved into worshiping a silly macho “wildness” that’s just decentralized domination with some residual environmentalist affectations and a laughable cloak of subalternity.
Once upon a time it was possible to quibble that their ideology shouldn’t be taken seriously as a declaration of intent. That the entire philosophy was self-evidently empty posturing by edgelords. And that when some brats declare that they want to kill all humans or that they’re “worse than Hitler” the extremity of such statements revealed their insincerity. But ITS’ attacks on anarchists, children’s hospitals, students, hikers, etc. long ago made such continued deflection impossible.
The Journal Atassa’s website is filled with translations of ITS communiques and interviews — Atassa has effectively operated as ITS’ press office in the anglosphere. That Little Black Cart would seek to publish Atassa as a journal and insert it in anarchist spaces follows the same trajectory of assisted entryism that has led to ITS communiques being repeatedly published on AnarchistNews.org,
hosted on TheAnarchistLibrary.org, read aloud enthusiastically on Free Radical Radio, laughed about approvingly on The Brilliant, etc. All from the influence of roughly the same circle of self declared nihilists.
Let’s be clear that Little Black Cart’s defense of their publication of Atassa in terms of whether “calls to action” are present in the print version of Atassa is as absolutely and transparently ridiculous a defense as could be imagined.
Whether a white nationalist journal makes “calls to action” is completely irrelevant. A neonazi text that speaks in airy abstract terms and avoids making a direct call to exterminate is in no real sense different than a neonazi text that lets slip such calls. This distinction is purely a legal artifice and one that should be largely irrelevant to anarchists. We all know this game intimately because we’ve played it continually over the last few decades when struggling with the liberal legal regime. The ELF had cells and the press office, legally distinct entities, but functioning as a single whole. Such positioning may save someone from prison but no anarchist actually buys that they’re ultimately distinct, they are but different organs within the same movement or project.
What’s intolerable about white nationalism isn’t merely its specific acts of violence, it’s the fucking white nationalism itself. Similarly what is intolerable about ITS isn’t merely their violent acts but their fucking values and goals. The violent acts are merely proof that they are actually serious about their vile ideology — even if they have not as of yet figured out how to for example sabotage nuclear plants and kill at a larger scale.
LBC contextualizes their publication of Atassa with, “The ideas we wish to publish are visionary, world-wrecking, ideas about a passionate, critical, fiery anarchy unleashed upon the world.” And similar statements have repeatedly been made across AnarchistNews.org and associated media projects — framing ITS as anarchist. But there is no sliver of anarchy to be found in ITS unless we are now — after years of attempted twisting and corruption — to accept a notion of anarchy as merely ANY fiery world-wrecking.
ITS does not seek to end domination and expand freedom, the wildness they worship might as well be called fractured fascism. Broadly contiguous with and reflective of the sort of “national anarchists” that have cropped up among modern fascists with a decentralization fetish. The same almost sociopathic myopia and localism of nationalism, except to an even greater extent.
That some of the folks slinging ITS have now also published “critiques” of ITS feels about as paper thin as it is when some white nationalist under immense social pressure says “hey now, I have a few disagreements with Hitler and the historical Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei.”
It’s true that now at long last a couple folks in this circle have voiced a critique of ITS. Yet in his essay in Black Seed inveighing against anyone loudly opposed to ITS, Bellamy’s “critique” of ITS functioned mostly as an attempt to distance them from anticiv nihilism, “Despite their many references to egoist and nihilist [sic] strands of anarchism, including quite recent ones concurrent with the above this is quite plainly a holy war, not a deconstruction of civilization through individual liberation. I see no room for a praxis of individual or small, intimate group liberation in conjunction with such an ascetic, semi-suicidal religious imperative“.
Notice how askew this analysis is. Bellamy casts the problem with ITS as that they’re not focusing myopically enough! In this picture what’s wrong with ITS is the intensity and scope of their values. God fucking forbid someone feel strongly committed to action or some large goal. Surely that’s what’s actually intolerable about ITS. And never mind the values of “individual or small intimate group liberation” that Bellamy casts as somehow both nihilist and desirable instead. The problem with ITS is apparently that they care about shit beyond their friend circle. Such critiques of “moralism” are hard not to read in vein of the “the problem with all these cucks is they get triggered about shit” nihilism at the bedrock of the alt-right.
Myself, being a “feverish” moralizing cuck, I diagnosed ITS as being too myopically focused in the immediate. The simple macho and subrational rush of brutal domination involved in murder, mixed with the visceral instinct of trees good concrete bad, both instincts fetishized by a all too nihilist failure to intellectually probe deeper or wider. Just as Richard Spencer admits that race or ethnicity is an arbitrary and contradictory construct, so too do they essentially admit that “the wild” is not ultimately an intellectually defensible category or concept, just as they’ve admitted they don’t get the science they castigate. They’re gonna go with the arbitrary value that psychologically resonates with them given their personal history, and fuck any sort of intellectual reflection that might undermine such or reorient them towards different values. Unlike certain fascists ITS is obviously not trying to convert large numbers of people to their cause, but they’re just as obviously leveraging the same sort of irrational psychological resonances that underpin fascism. A fetishization of violence and a return to mythologized lost tradition, a shrinking of one’s empathic circle to a closer relationships and othering of the rest, a ridicule for reason, truth, and intellectual diligence. It’s this latter trick that allows them to value their self-aware nonsensical construct of “the wild”.
Note how these few nihilists only now “critiquing” ITS can’t bring themselves to actually make an argument for some values and not others. They never address how murder for sport is wrong or why the lives of strangers should matter to us. They don’t want to get drawn into such an explicit metaethical conversation because it would bare just how arbitrary their values of “self” interest and privileging a few immediate relationships over others are. They want to duck such with trivializing moves like “of course we’re against bad things” when said bad things are overwhelming socially recognized (and only when those bad things are overwhelmingly socially recognized), but the entire project of anticiv nihilism has increasingly seemed to be about expanding the overton window of what’s socially allowable. If they’re trying to distinguish themselves from ITS it’s obviously incumbent upon them to explain the walls holding their myopic focus on immediacy from devolving into the even more extreme reductio of that demonstrated by ITS. After a decade of attempting to erode anarchism’s capacity to say anything, to uproot its ethical foundations, they’re now left grasping at the air trying to assert that there’s no slippery slope between them and ITS. Despite a number of individuals in the anticiv nihilist milieu long praising or expressing delight at ITS (see Free Radical Radio for some of the more public individuals).
When former anarchists reject not just the strawmen they set up with “moralism” but all ethics, declare that the abolition of oppression is impossible and undesirable, say “might makes right” and misanthropically fetishize mass die-off in a civilizational collapse, but then protest “sure, I don’t support killing random people” how honestly should we read such a deflection?
And does it really matter if they do happen to arbitrarily draw such a line? Richard Spencer can say he wants “peaceful” ethnic cleansing, but we all know the inevitable conclusion of his values. And what else could he really get away with saying in public? To many of us ITS has laid bare the inevitable and boring conclusion of most of this most recent misbegotten “nihilist” project in North America. A notion of anarchy increasingly stripped of all ethical content and rendered into a shallow aesthetic of revolt and attack. By now we should all realize that such an aesthetic is entirely swallowable by and deeply reconcilable with reactionary forces.
Let me clarify where I am personally coming from here, because I am certainly not suggesting that we banish everything remotely problematic or deviant. I am quite loudly reviled in a few of circles for taking iconoclastic stances in anarchism, as well as encouraging and facilitating critical dialog with ideas or circles deemed verboten. I have consistently been about challenging orthodoxies and expanding overton windows. I have built up and published writers that I have sharp and public disagreements with. While I have been vitriolic in my critiques of them I’ve nevertheless tabled and spoken at libertarian conventions, debated reactionary non-anarchist transhumanists, and even helped a bit in negotiating the original St Paul Principles — an influential treaty with maoists and liberals. I was once staunchly primitivist and have continued to engage at length with various branches of those ideas, even undertaking lengthy dialogs with some of today’s “eco-extremists” like John Jacobi (even despite Atassa’s inclusion of his writing). For a decade and a half since I worked up the backbone to stand up to the anarchist and leftist orthodoxy I’ve dealt with plenty of suspicious would-be scene police hoping to make a name for themselves by running me out of things for crimethink. Last year the LA Anarchist Bookfair side-eyed my application to table because they thought mutualism smelled like “propertarianism” — I would be certainly excluded by any ban on “individualists.” I’ve even hilariously been accused on Anews of trying to build a “red brown alliance” because a think tank I’m involved with engages in dialog with libertarians and the notoriously thirdpositiony Counterpunch has republished a few of our public domain essays (never mind that we’ve been the most consistent and outspoken critics of the fascist creep in libertarian circles, have converted thousands of libertarians, and are frequently targeted by actual fascists for our work). Syndicalists, Platformists, and “anarchists” in spitting distance of Maoism have said far worse about me, happily making up shit or conflating (“ancap” etc). I am well aware of how opportunistically “fascist” can be thrown by some and how hungry certain bureaucratic dinosaurs in the red branches of anarchism are for inane ideological purges and unfair litmus tests.
Anarchy is complex and varied in its application and we must embrace the often weird and unruly ideological mess that people make of it. We must continue to make sure there’s room for varying kinds of people with varying takes.
But there are nonetheless still some boundaries to the anarchist project.
There have to be or else anarchism would be absolutely indistinct from anything else and also immediately overrun.
We don’t let fascists in our spaces. We don’t let a very large array of fucked up shit in our spaces. We don’t think that our goals justify literally any means, nor do we believe that a number of means can feasibly lead to the ends we desire — or else we would have no problem with state communists and claim that mass slaughter and imprisonment are capable of building a world we could ever be interested in. Many of the exact same people now wailing about someone ripping up a copy of Atassa at the Seattle Bookfair I remember once laughing in approval at state communists getting water dumped on their books when they tried to table anarchist bookfairs. There are and have always been things rightfully considered utterly beyond the pale in anarchism. It is not remotely acceptable to distro fascist propaganda, and certainly not at an anarchist bookfair — even if the writers originally came from the anarchist movement (as again in the case of some “national anarchists”).
I know that my repeat comparison to nazis will be dismissed out of hand by a few — and shrieked about from the residual anews peanut gallery — as rank hyperbole, but when pressed no defender of ITS and Atassa has so far coughed up any attempt at meaningful distinction in why we should treat them differently. What’s so infuriating is that many of these people clearly perceive ITS as just some “misbehaving” comrades who are only a little bit lost. They know that they can’t just openly say that ITS’ values and analysis are close to their own because they know that anarchists at large would then revolt and kick them from the milieu like the “national anarchists” were once. Since Scott Campbell raised the profile of ITS’ targeting of anarchists and anarchist spaces, some folks involved with LBC have felt pressured into backpeddling a little. But these same cheerleaders knew damn well that ITS had tried to kill an anarchist years back and didn’t raise a peep then.
It behooves us to ask what other random idiotic monsters these “ITS isn’t that bad” folks would thus invite into our spaces and discourse. Are they going to start publishing shit like Keith Preston’s “national anarchist” propaganda? This isn’t rhetoric — Aragorn has already done this. In the late oughts Aragorn facilitated “national anarchist” entryism on anarchistnews.org, on antipolitics.net, and in the Berkeley study group. Defending the inclusion of BANA members and publishing national anarchist writing. It’s great that he stopped, but it’s concerning as hell that such retractions only happened after a loss of social capital. (Honest props to those nihilists who called him out and cut ties with him over it.)
What’s also flabbergasting is the audacity with which ITS apologists have instead tried to reframe the conflict around a motte and bailey of “indiscriminacy” in violence. As if the only thing objectionable is that some perfectly valid anarchist comrades are getting a little too sloppy when it comes to collateral damage in their actions. It’s insulting and disturbing that they think this reframing will work. ITS declares they want to kill everyone and proceed to target randos and anarchists — and their apologists try to turn the discussion into a re-litigation of the late 90s nonviolence debate.
No anarchist project nor any manner by which anyone might move through our world, occurs without some form of violence
— even the violence of nonviolence. But we can still recognize varying degrees of violence, and of domination, and subjugation. We can engage mindful of the context of our actions and the various feedback loops attendant to certain tactics or strategies. We can also — and this is the critical bit — seek to fucking minimize domination in the world, to expand things like agency and consent. The pretense that ITS’s murderfest and wish for mass death poses any serious or interesting questions for anarchists would be laughable if so many in LBC’s orbit haven’t somehow claimed such.
Of course Atassa — as ITS’ English language press office — doesn’t even bother with such deflections. The only pretense of defense it conjures is feigned outrage at gringos talking shit about something in a (not so) distant country. What a laughable pastiche of anticolonialism and white liberal insecurities! Are anarchists not to condemn the North Korean government or the Assad Regime? Must we refrain from critique of the Muslim Brotherhood or Daesh when communists laud them? Where does this “can’t critique distant things” nonsense end? Can’t develop an opinion on someone widely called out for rape in a slightly distant city? Someone in our scene snitches and we get to say “well I’m not super close with all the relevant individuals”? I mean I know that a number in these circles actually would like us to be so de-fanged, but I wish they would explicitly step to with that argument so it can be roundly rejected.
I mean is the level of bullshit used to equivocate and condemn condemnations of ITS really to be our future? Halfassed concern trolling and “whaddaboutism” where any restatement of what should be ethically obvious but somehow isn’t is in turn silenced as “virtue signaling?”
When the same folks who condemned those speaking out against the bombing of an anarchist infoshop then whined about civility, free speech and the disrespect of LBC’s property in Seattle, the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair organizers proclaimed that they wouldn’t exclude vendors based on their content. Immediately alt-right, anti-feminist, MRA, and pro-Israel material cropped up. Because. This. Is. What. Fucking. Happens.
There are so many more reactionaries than anarchists in this world that they could sneeze and flood us out of our spaces or drown out our voice. Some bare community norms or expectations are inherent and necessary. I’ve pushed for tolerance and ecumenicalism for years, but it’s hard to imagine what could even remain if we accept publishing the de facto press office of a group that opposes freedom and is out to kill all humans. The alt-right literature was promptly removed from the Bay Area Bookfair by spontaneously organizing attendees, but however horrible the alt-right is let’s remember they at least don’t champion the extermination of literally everyone.
Look, again, I get that there are dangers here. LA’s condemnation of “individualism” wholesale is obviously absolute trash. But just because something as central to anarchist practice as No Platform can be abused doesn’t mean anarchists can afford to suddenly discard it. Anarchism at core is an ethical stance against all domination, seeking the liberation of all — there should be room for vibrant intellectual diversity in discussing how this is applied, differences in strategy, prediction, and preferred implementation — but we cannot afford to erode the beautiful idea itself, to lend space and legitimacy to its avowed enemies. And we certainly shouldn’t be helping those actively trying to kill anarchists.
LBC’s decision to publish Atassa, Anews’ publication of ITS manifestos, their continued hosting on AnarchistLibrary.org and as audio recordings on Free Radical Radio are obviously beyond the pale in the same way that nazi or tankie texts would be. Not because anarchism cannot survive forbidden readings — although it is shameful we’ve done such a poor job enunciating and defending our values that somehow a small number found ITS’ inane perspective to have resonance — but because such publication legitimizes a profound watering down of anarchist values and basic norms.
Joint Statement of Insurrectional Groups in Mexican Territory
“The Tiger, in its unconquered gait, accumulates the memory and the traces of the road travelled, to stubbornly reaffirm it; unrestricted freedom that does not assure food but which a priori omits any possibility of degenerating into a herd or of assenting to grazing. Indomitable and irreducible, it confronts the most tenacious enemies. To do this it wields its instincts, taking advantage of its portentous night vision, its prodigious smell and its finely tuned ear. In its right attack: it disfigures, tears, kills and dies, to be reborn indomitable and fierce. Nothing escapes this becoming and it is exposed to the most daring hunters and the most tenacious tamers, veterinarians and circuses, taverns and altars, customs and laws, systems of thought and political institutions. Everything is shaken, torn or eliminated in this movement of which only the imagination can disern a principle but of which nothing and no one is able to decipher its objectives and its end. (…) Anarchism, conceived not as an inescapable realization but as a permanent tension embodied in an open configuration of thought and action, is also a tiger, indomitable and fierce, affected from end to end by this capricious walk into freedom.” – Gustavo Rodríguez
“Everything that we can identify as negative elements within our “space “, is also the responsibility of each of us to contribute to eliminate them. Bureaucracy, hegemony, informal hierarchies, intrigues, false friendships and false ‘comrades’ stabbing our backs have existed since the dawn of the so-called anarchist movement, because they are an intrinsic part of the human factor and our contradictions that constantly arise and are in conflict with each other. All these pathologies are due to attitudes that do not properly belong to a particular anarchist tendency but are present in all, and as long as they are not treated for what they really are, we will find them in front of us again and again.” – Conspiracy of Cells of Fire / Metropolitan Violence Cell
To the comrades in the Mexican region and the world, to the incendiaries and refractories of the planet, to the internationalists committed to a new coordination of anarchic informality:
Exactly 5 years and seven months ago we signed a “joint statement” at the request of a comrade for whom we feel great affection and respect. That text was entitled “2nd Joint Statement of the Anarchist Insurrectional and Eco-Anarchist Groups”. It was an unquestionably necessary writing given the context in which it was written and so we clarified it from the first lines:
“Coordination of the refractory struggle takes shape and spreads throughout the world. The fire and the anarchic explosion leave a mark and awaken the libertarian consciousness. From Santiago de Chile to Mexico DF, the night is lit up with gasoline and gunpowder in solidarity with our comrades held hostage. Montevideo, Lima and Portland, add to the anarchic fire. In Greece, Germany, Italy and Argentina, the loud roar of dynamite is heard. The fire spreads from Russia to Indonesia. The condemnation of the State is unanimous regardless of the ideological color of the governments on duty. The jails of the world hold hostage our fraternal brothers and sisters. With this panorama and before the extension of the anarchic struggle, attacks and slanders were to be expected from the opportunist left of Capital. Liberals, leftists and pestilent bolches, with their tongue kisses, shut up their filthy alliances in search of power, as the anarchists threatened to endanger them again; That’s why they point us out as the “public enemy number one” and hasten their onslaught. For these purposes they have no qualms about issuing orders to the State and volunteering as volunteer policemen. In the end, they do not fight to destroy the system of domination, but to transform it.”
On that occasion, we raised our voice in unison against the opportunist scum of “Saboteamos.Info”, “News of the Rebellion” and Carolina Saldaña, in defense of Individualists Tending toward the Wild (ITS). We went through the leftist verbiage that tried to present, through its communications and documentaries for the “journalistic investigation”, the drivers of the new anarchic insurrection and anti-civilization anarchism as “agents of government” and “distractor of the population to intimidate and characterize anti-systemic expressions” (sic.).
Back then, we let it be known publicly and energetically that:
“With these ITS partners, we can have theoretical differences and discuss them (always arguing fraternally in a constant attempt to update ideas and by building a unitary criticism attuned to the reality of the anarchist struggle), but we have never disagreed with the methods used, understanding anti-authoritarian violence and propaganda for the facts as they are : valid practices consistent with our ethical principles.”
Although ITS were one of the few clusters with which we did not directly coordinate when undertaking joint actions, we were in solidarity with them, in the same way that some of the comrades that made up our affinity groups obtained monetary resources for them to solve specific difficulties when requested. That has been (and is) the basis of practical co-ordination between the new anarchic insurrectionalism and eco-anarchism.
Understanding solidarity as an inseparable practice of our anarchic work. Direct solidarity cements affinities and consolidates ties, so it is a fundamental part of the offensive for total liberation.
However, while our opinion on all this leftist / populist shit (read “Saboteamos.Info”, “News of the Rebellion” and other shitty satellites) has not changed but, on the contrary, has reaffirmed and become aggravated with the passing of these years. Today it is indispensable to leave a written record of our positioning against the delirious decline of the Individualists Tending toward the Wild (Wild Reaction or Indiscriminate Group Tending toward the Wild or, Mafia Eco-Extremista or, whatever they call themselves now these eco-fascist brainworms thirsty for publicity in the means of mass alienation).
As our Greek-affiliated members of the Metropolitan Violence Cell of the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire point out: “Whatever we can do to identify negative elements within our “space”, it is also the responsibility of each of us to contribute to eliminating them.”
As our comrades in Greece point out in ‘Chaotic Variables’: point out: “Bureaucracy, hegemony, informal hierarchies, intrigues, false friendships and false ‘comrades’ stabbing our backs have existed since the dawn of the so-called anarchist movement, because they are an intrinsic part of the human factor and our contradictions that constantly arise and are in conflict with each other. All these pathologies are due to attitudes that do not properly belong to a particular anarchist tendency but are present in all, and as long as they are not treated for what they really are, we will find them in front of us again and again.”
That is the case of these disastrous ones. Axiomatic fruit of this pitiful civilization that they say they want to destroy. Only in the deepest entrails of this decay can such decaying behaviors manifest themselves. It is in the sewers of this society where these pathologies are nourished and the most delirious fascistoid rhetoric takes shape. That is where these deformations are formed and the irrepressible protagonistic anxieties throw them at the reflectors.
Its roots are none other than the nauseous dung of social dysfunction. After a sad childhood and a frustrated adolescence, harassed by bullying from the cradle and traumatised from their family, they begin to channel their frustrations and all the accumulated self-hatred and project it without ethical mediations. That is the Individualists Tending toward the Wild. His misogynist discourse and his authoritarian actions are the result.
To affirm that Individualists Tending toward the Wild embarked on “a particular own way away from the original eco-anarchist approaches and keeping distance of the labels without giving up altogether to a certain air of family” as comrade Gustavo Rodriguez stated in his book ‘What lights up the night!’ (2013), today, in retrospect, seems a monumental folly. Of course, any lack of divinatory qualities does not demerit the broad theoretical work or the consistent practice of the comrade, however, we consider that it is time to make certain points: ITS undertook a totally opposite route to the fundamental principles of Anarchy, moving away from the ethics of freedom and the radical critique of power; Renouncing not only the “air of family” but everything that exalts us as anarchists. ITS have assumed a convulsive authoritarianism that, beyond its congenital mythomania and its ridiculous and unintelligible communiqués assuming responsibility for murders and feminicides of others, reveals their proto-fascist decadence.
However, this certain conclusion is not the only one that circulates in our “space”. The cowardly rumors and scurrilous murmurings of anarco-legalists (anarco-federadxs, anarco-zapaterxs, anarchopacifists, and other tribes tending to pose, in immobility, in fictitious organizations, and the gradual evolution of the species) point in a choppy voice to assign all this folly to anarchist informality and hurry to sentence the end of this trend. They challenge the rise and development of the informal anarchist tendency by arguing for the supposed “disappearance of affinity groups” and their “decomposition” and “definitive disarticulation provoked by internal quarrels and interpersonal disputes”, which (according to their limited vision and lack of reflection) has inexorably motivated the evaporation of groups and the end of the anarchic war.
Their chronic myopia does not allow them to visualize beyond their noses. Many of the affinity groups involved in the anarchic action have self-dissolved and/or have re-started under another denomination or without reference to any appellation. Various of their former members have preferred to reaffirm their individualism and have assumed the cunning of the lobx solitarix. Other groupings have definitively abandoned the acronyms, useless claims and signed propaganda, without renouncing fire and dynamite, expropriation, sabotage, executions and punctual reprisals against personages of the system of domination.
After almost 5 years of permanence, in November 2013, the Autonomous Cells of the Immediate Revolution – Práxedes G. Guerrero (CARI-PGG) dissolved as a group; The Insurrectional Cell Mariano Sánchez Añón, after a long debate in December 2013, would decide to continue its action in total anonymity; In January of 2014 Anarchist Action Anonymous (AAA) also would dissolve itself in Mexicali. Similarly, in January of that year, CCF-Mexico would conclude as that group. Which in no way meant the permanent immobility of their ex-members, much less the end of the anarchic war against all authority.
Obfuscating in obsessive organization, the anarco-legalists do not understand (nor will they ever understand) the proposals and the methodology of anarchic informality. Discussions, “interpersonal disputes” and even “internal fights” are an intrinsic part of the natural development of informality and far from being a paralyzing incapacity, are an endless source of proliferation of affinity groups and a wonderful motivation for extension of the anarchic war.
Affinity groups are not clubs, they are not based on the affective relationship of their members, they are not established from romantic relationships. A group of affinity is based on mutual knowledge, on the deepening of theory and practice, on joint experimentation, on everyday coexistence. It consolidates between five or fifteen people maximum. Once it begins to grow, difficulties arise and it is time to create a new group.
On the other hand, the informal organization as well announces, that it is first INFORMAL. So it is necessarily ephemeral and never consolidated as an ORGANIZATION itself. It is only articulated with the intention of achieving specific objectives by concentrating different groups of affinity that alone could not have coordinated a blunt attack or a direct solidarity campaign. Once their objectives are achieved, the informal organization dissolves itself to rearticulate itself again when necessary.
In appearance, this methodology, which is certainly practical and consistent with our principles, is incomprehensible to lovers of fictional organization.
On the alleged decline of the informal anarchist tendency and the supposed “disappearance of the affinity groups” it is enough to take a look at the portals of anarchist diffusion to corroborate the emergence throughout the Mexican region of a new generation of informal groupings that have joined the anarchic action giving continuity and long life to the trend. Just to mention a couple of examples, it is worth highlighting the anti-systemic conflict of the comrades of the Informal Feminist Command of Anti-Authoritarian Action and the Autonomous Group of Sabotage Salvador Olmos García. Undoubtedly, we will have much to think about methodology and the aim of anarchic war. We will have to exchange ideas and practices and enrich the praxis by directing our steps towards the consolidation of a new anarchic paradigm that responds to the peculiarities of the war against domination in the 21st century. And, of course, we are likely to have new discussions, interpersonal disputes and even fights, but we are sure that these apparent “setbacks” will widen the path and strengthen the indomitable refractory struggle. As comrade Gustavo reminds us: “Anarchism, conceived not as an inescapable realization but as permanent tension embodied in an open configuration of thought and action, is also a tiger, indomitable and fierce, affected from end to end by its capricious walk into freedom”. Let nothing escape our sure claw.
Solidarity with the comrades imprisoned for expropriations in Germany!
Solidarity with the compañerxs Mónica Caballero and Francisco Solar!
Solidarity with the comrades of the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire abducted by the Greek State!
Solidarity with all our brothers and sisters imprisoned in Mexico, Chile and the world!
For the destruction of all that dominates us!
For the Black International!
For Anarchy!
Living on the war-footing!
Former members of Anonymous Action Anarchist (AAA)
Former members of the CCF [Mexico]
Former members of the Insurrectional Cell Mariano Sánchez Añón
Anarchic individualities and lobxs solitarixs