I recall vividly the day the horrific Christchurch mosque shootings occurred. At the time I had a makeshift rock-climbing wall in my garage, and as I sat flicking through news stories on my phone between climbs I came across accounts of the still-developing tragedy. In the days that followed, we learned more about the killer through his tedious but revealing manifesto. Parts of this were straight out of the extreme right-wing playbook – the belief in a taken-for-granted European culture threatened with extinction by non-white migration, or “replacement”; the need for violence to protect the future of white children; and the ethnopluralist stress on the link between land and race. Within this roll-call of right-wing tropes, however, there was embedded a stranger idea that stood out to me – “ecofascism”, an ideology the murderer explicitly identified with. For several years, I grappled with what ecofascism actually was: what is its logic, its particular ideological potency that has spurred more than one right-wing terrorist (the 2019 El Paso massacre was also framed in ecofascist language)? The key that unlocked it all for me came from a seemingly unlikely source – recently-departed Australian author David Ireland’s last novel, The World Repair Video Game. The text reads as a literary exploration of ecofascism, perhaps the most powerful we have in Australian (and world?) literature, as I argue in my most recent article published in Environment and Planning E. My outline here is that ecofascism, given its anti-rationalism and its inchoate political form, must be appreciated on the aesthetic level Ireland operates at, as it is precisely on this level that we can understand its deep affective power and the trajectories its material manifestations might take.
What do we mean by ecofascism? I agree with anti-fascist researchers Sam Moore and Alex Roberts that ecofascism is best seen as a still-inchoate ideology existing within a broader constellation of far-right forces and ideas, as opposed to a viable mainstream political movement. Nevertheless, and despite the fact that any definition of ecofascism must necessarily be somewhat pliable, we can pin down its essence at this ideological level. Moore and Roberts correctly identify the irreducible character of fascism: ‘[f]ascism is a political form that seeks to revolutionize and reharmonize the nation state through expelling a radically separate ‘Other’ by paramilitary means’ (p. 11). Under this aegis, ecofascism should not be understood as an equal admixture of fascism and ecologism. Rather, as Kristy Campion notes, it is a subform of fascism, a subform that ‘most emphatically tries to affirm its natural basis’ (as cited by Moore & Roberts, p. 12). Ecological concerns are intrinsically tied to the question of the Other, reflected in an intense fixation on the supposed deleterious environmental effects of immigration and vaguely-defined “globalism.” These ecological questions are also almost invariably pitched between the strictly local and national scales, a function of a posited link between a homogenous “people” and the landscape which creates it (a story particularly well-known in the Australian context). So, extreme violence against a radically different Other; a locally-based and exclusivist nature ethics (often manifested as nature worship); and a mass associational society that revolves around a distinct people – these are the essential planks of ecofascist ideology.
Ireland’s novel The World Repair Video Game is written as a diary of the protagonist/narrator Kennard Stirling, a scion of a large capitalist family that owns “Stirling Solutions.” Turning his back on the family business (although not its money), Kennard lives on “Big Hill”, a large, forested property close to the seaside village and tourist destination of Pacific Heights. There, he systematically rehabilitates and regenerates the bushland, creating something of an antipodean Arcadia regulated by the rhythms of flora, fauna and landscape. The jewel in this crown is his effort to construct a concrete path to the top of Big Hill, a natural lookout offering panoramic visions that stretch to the ocean. A laudable endeavour! The catch? The concrete is constituted in part out of the milled bones of Kennard’s murder victims. Kennard is in fact a serial killer who slays a motley collection of individuals who he identifies as unemployed welfare-cheats. Far from being justified in terms of individual sociopathy, Kennard defines these acts as part of his “project” of “repairing” the world:
My modest aim, while keeping mostly to myself, is to repair the world around me in small ways. Make it better. Adjust it, so it’s better to live in. Not perfection, but more tidy around the edges (p. 15).
It is the terms of this aim that convey the essence of the ecofascist project, and through Ireland we can elucidate several of its key planks.
First, and perhaps most significant, is the union between understandings of the natural world and social, political and economic objectives. This is a fusion which a host of scholars have identified as key to the ecofascist project. Kennard proceeds on the assumption that the objectives of human society can be derived from the tenets of nature, a derivation which is cast almost wholly in negative terms. What does Kennard see as the state of nature? A war of each against all, of innate inequality, of primordial violence and murder: ‘The world is a primal battlefield, the first murder is in all of us. From birth to death, it’s killing all the way…A vast slaughterhouse and all of us killers from birth, an unending line globally of living sacrifices’ (p. 55). In this conception, nature features as much more than a surrounding environment; rather, it is the source of eternal and inviolable lessons which we ignore and/or challenge (through measures to reduce inequality, for example) at our peril. The ecofascist moment of this understanding of nature comes when these natural laws are seen as the structuring condition of human laws. Kennard’s musings are replete with examples of this conceptual leap, whether it be justifying class inequality on the basis that bees and ants also have classes, or observing that as animals must kill to survive, so too must humans, in which case the very fabric of our morality needs reworking: ‘Our values must change. If children suffer, if cattle and sheep, fish and birds, trees and herbs must perish for our sake, what life is exempt when mankind’s survival is at stake, and why?’ (p. 262). That murder can be justified as a requirement of the natural law is a foundational element of ecofascism, a reality we saw all too dreadfully expressed in the manifestos of the Christchurch and El Paso terrorists.
The natural, and thus moral, predisposition to violence and murder grounds Kennard’s project, but doesn’t supply the entirety of its content. Rather, this demands that we look at the way in which Kennard identifies his victims and justifies their selection. As mentioned, he views his targets, with exotic names like Sliv Wisniewski, Ray Guzek and Mo Turpie, as unemployed welfare cheats. He opines of Mo Turpie, ‘[t]his fellow is alive because other life supports him, he gives nothing. I remember gran and her ‘no work no eat.’ Discipline and its harshness he has never known, hard work he has never experienced. There is no strong parent in this wrongster’s life’ (p. 111). In an understanding shared with the paganistic elements of the contemporary far right, Kennard notes the moral bankruptcy of Christianity and its notions of forgiveness and love in comparing Turpie to a ‘mendicant Jesus, without the doctrines…Like Jesus he had no property or possessions and no dwelling place. Is this social justice?…He’s coddled for doing nothing, he takes, never gives’ (p. 112).
Of course, these observations are not in themselves new or even fascist. Indeed, they essentially represent the ideological core of neoliberalism, which has always posited competition and individualism as the natural inheritance of humankind. What transforms this neoliberal vision into a fascist one is Kennard’s identification of his victims as radically different Others, Others posing a mortal threat to society that can only be remedied by physical liquidation. Kennard continually stresses how his victims, refusing the moral imperative of work, are rendered less than human as a result. As against his refrain that ‘[a] working life is a moral life. I say: Power to all who work and make an effort’ (p. 12), he contrasts Ray Guzek: ‘He’s part of that minority who refuse the human burden, laugh at the division of labour. It’s so much better for the whole if all contribute. Dodging the common effort is immoral. Those who do, have no meaning as humans’ (p. 143). The ability of Kennard to dehumanise, to “other” this section of the population, leads in his mind to the logical next step – their liquidation. In a truly sinister observation, Kennard opines of one of his victims: ‘I see beyond him where the anti-human waits, the one who will destroy humane society. Sliv Wisniewski is a mask covering a destroyer. All must look beyond this specimen and see the horror advancing behind him of more drones than workers and try to eliminate one concrete evil’ (p. 87). This is a deeply revealing aesthetic handling of one of the irreducible features of fascism; given the moral precondition of violence as natural, and the rendering of the Other (in this case the unemployed) as less than human, murder becomes a cleansing, palingenetic moral imperative.
How does the “eco” of ecofascism feature in all this, beside the intensity of Kennard’s efforts to root his project in the laws of nature? It is in the explicit link between murder and ecology crystallised in the project of “repair.” Kennard’s (successful) efforts at bush regeneration literally feed on the industrially-broken down constituents of the murdered: ‘I go to the shed and prepare sand, cement, gravel, oxide, milled bone and water in my mixer, making concrete for my path to the top…’ (p. 99, my emphasis). The remains of the victims enter the regeneration project simply as an input, the result of a process Kennard has seriously considered scaling for efficiency (and so replacing individual murders with mass killing, a reality we know brutally crystallised in the extermination camps of Nazi-occupied Europe).
In the same way that the stark material reality of historical fascism was occluded by intensely ideological layers of myth and mission, so too does this brute banality of Kennard’s process of repair blossom under a developed ideological superstructure. Rather than viewing his murderous acts as outbursts of anger or cruelty, he posits instead that, in death, he has given his victims a new, higher purpose as part of a restored environment. Baptised in the fascist language of rebirth through elimination, Kennard’s project takes form in his own mind as an act of charity and benevolence. After killing Mo Turpie, he deploys exactly this language: ‘There’s no more need for fear, for thieving, it’s all over now, time to sleep eternally after the stroke of kindness. No more loneliness, desolation, distress. No more uselessness and fooling others. He is dormant, subdued, switched off, all his settings recalibrated. His self is now a share in God, whatever God is…’ (pp. 114-115).
And what is this God/deity in which Mo finds rest? None other than Nature itself. One of the key structural features of The World Repair Video Game is the juxtaposition between Kennard’s fascistic political and social observations/acts with deep, rich and introspective acts of nature worship. This nature, is common with far right ecology more broadly, is conceived largely (although, in Ireland’s hands, not wholly) in local terms. The text is replete with moving observations of the spirit and language of trees, the intelligence and activity of birds, the history of landscape. Nature is direct, unmediated, felt as part of one’s inner essence, yet does not truly extend beyond the horizon. As I remarked to a fellow surfer-colleague of mine, it is language that reminds me very much of surfing localism – a deep and intrinsic connection to an immediately sensible place, existing alongside the understanding that this place is always-already under threat and must be defended.
Given the episodic, stream-of-consciousness style which has always been Ireland’s, the common structural pairing of these musings on nature with political, economic and social observations is telling. The two poles of this structural couplet reinforce the other, and I argue they reveal the intrinsic link between murder and environmentalism that must lie at the heart of ecofascism, seen in such passages as the following (immediately after the murder of yet another victim):
He’s been taken off the drip, one dependent fewer, and there’s one less untidiness in the world…
Tonight so much is mine. Sky and stars, sun and sea and mountains. How can I be so small and insignificant when in my head I contain the universe? Yet I am (p. 205).
Most significantly, this union of fascist murder and ecology is represented through the symbol of birds, who mark out Kennard’s victims, the “birdmen.” Kennard recognises his victims when he sees a solitary Australian native bird (including, amongst others, a kingfisher, a red wattle bird and a pallid cuckoo) sitting on their head as they first alight in Pacific Heights (it is not by accident that all of the targets are outsiders to the local community). A locally grounded, “native” Nature, symbolised in the birds, itself marks out the intruding misfits, the Others to be liquidated. It is Nature that exacts its vengeance through the vehicle of Kennard. And when he has disposed of the victims with his rapier (whom he lovingly calls “Ott”)? The birds fly away – a distinctly Australian Nature is freed of the burden of a superfluous population, a superfluity Kennard recycles into repairing that very Nature. Surely here lies a foundational moment of ecofascism, a foundational moment which I argue is more incisively handled (in aesthetic terms) by Ireland than any contemporary scholarly account could hope to achieve.
In this piece, I have concentrated on the specific handling of the question of nature in fascist thought. Due to the constraints of space, I can only mention in passing other elements of the text which speak to a fundamentally fascist politics: Kennard’s preference for the vigour and dynamism of war over peace and equality; repeated reference to the fecundity of immigrants and the resultant threat to the demographics of Western societies; the subservience of class identity to national identity; the conviction that a global conflagration is imminent; and a belief that democracy has outlived its usefulness. These strengthen my claim that The World Repair Video Game is the aesthetic unfolding of an ideology of ecofascism. There is, of course, the open question of whether or not this is an ideology that David Ireland is himself sympathetic to. It is impossible to know, particularly now he has passed away. Certainly his later works are very strongly inflected with the themes of anti-egalitarianism, anti-statism (specifically targeting the liberal welfare state) and a trenchant anti-Marxism that could easily cohere as an ecofascist mindset.
However, Ireland’s personal views are really beside the point. Literature as a fashioning of ideology always reveals more than it means to. This is particularly the case with fascist ideology. As a host of scholars have noted, fascism is fundamentally anti-rational. This does not mean that it cannot be conceptualised through rational means, but to be truly understood at the affective level where it is most potent, we must have recourse to the author, the poet and the propagandist. D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Yukio Mishima – in their work they capture the seductiveness of fascism. As I never tire of telling people, I did not truly understand fascism until I read Mishima’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. What can be said about fascism in the works of these authors applies doubly to the ecofascism of The World Repair Video Game. As mentioned previously, with ecofascism we are dealing with a movement that, barring the actions of a few right-wing terrorists, exists largely at the ideological level, and even there in an inchoate form. Aesthetic treatments of ecofascism, therefore, run ahead of its material reality, plotting in imaginative terms what an ecofascist future might look like and what it might entail. The World Repair Video Game is precisely such an ideological prefigurement. We ignore the warning bell it sounds at our peril.
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