1/12 Bryce Edwards & Liam Hehir argue many of the protesters at Wellington are 'old-school greenie activists', & therefore by definition can't be fascists. But there's a long history, in NZ, Australia, & Europe, of a convergence between fascism & certain types of environmentalism
https://twitter.com/bryce_edwards/status/1495228617961340929
2/12 Altho the vast majority of greenies past & present have obviously not been fascists, a minority played a role in the formation of the fascist movements of the '30s. & one of NZ's most famous & distinguished intellectuals was a green fascist. 
3/12 With its rhetoric of blood & soil & its presentation of cities as places of corruption & disease, fascism appealed to men like Jorian Jenks, who was a leading member of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists. At one point, Mosley named Jenks his deputy fuhrer.
4/12 Jenks believed in making the UK an agricultural autarky, where organically produced farms produced enough to feed the populace & reduce dependence on 'alien' nations. In Germany, many environmentalists joined Hitler's movement.
5/12 Scholar Paul Staudenmeier has written about the convergence between the Steiner movement & the Nazi regime. As well as creating his famous schools, Rudolf Steiner invented a style of 'occult' organic agriculture called biodynamics. Steinerites fused with the Nazi state.
6/12 If the UK had Jenks & Germany had Steiner, NZ had ARD Fairburn. Fairburn is remembered as a fine poet & as a critic of NZ society's reckless treatment of the environment. But he adhered to Clifford Douglas' Social Credit movement, & blamed NZ crises on Jewish usurers.
7/12 In recent years Fairburn has become something of a hero to a new generation of self-styled eco-fascists. The US neo-Nazi website Counter Currents has run long tributes to him, written by the well-known NZ neo-Nazi Kerry Bolton. counter-currents.com/2012/02/rex-fa…
8/12 In Australia, too, the extreme right & environmentalism have overlapped. Bartholomew Santamaria was an Italian migrant to Oz who dominated hard right-wing politics there for decades. He revered Franco & dreamed of turning Australian into a rural autarkic state.
9/12 Santamaria campaigned for much of his life for mass European migration to Australia's interior. He believed the Outback could be made to bloom by peasant farmers. He founded the National Catholic Rural Movement, which established several 'model' villages.
10/12 My father-in-law helped establish the Steiner movement in NZ, but long ago rebelled against Steiner's racist occultism. In recent years the mainstream media has run a number of articles exposing racism in our Steiner schools & Steiner opposition to 1080 spraying.
11/11 Many Steiner teachers oppose vaccines & mandates. Teachers & biodynamic 'environmentalists' have made pilgrimages to 'Camp Freedom'. These people may look to Hehir or Edwards like harmless old greenies. But they hold to an ideology that is far from harmless.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
