Environmentalism the new totalitarianism
by George Jonas
CanWest Publications
May 3, 2007
A recent news item featured radical environmentalists criticizing Environment Minister John Baird, whose program had just ushered in an economic ice-age, for -- yes, you guessed it -- for not being tough enough on global warming. The earnest chorus of true believers sounded like a Monty Python skit. It called to mind a suspicion I voiced 13 years ago, when the public mood was still celebratory following the implosion of the Soviet empire.
In 1994, during the euphoric days of "the end of history," I suggested it would be pleasant but unrealistic to imagine that the collapse of one particular form of tyranny had taught us once and for all that the only good society was a free society. On the contrary, all signs pointed to the probability that this was the very lesson we had failed to learn.
It was unlikely, I wrote, that the demise of the two great totalitarian systems of the 20th century, Nazism and communism, had also signaled the end of the totalitarian impulse in human beings. At best -- and even that wasn't certain -- we might have finally understood that the two forms of totalitarianism of which Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia had been the most prominent examples were blind alleys. There was a chance that we would not stumble into them again. However, we seemed quite ready to stumble into other blind alleys that could be equally bad or worse.
Tragic? Yes. Surprising? No.
Fascism and communism didn't come to us from Mars. Their systems weren't imposed on humanity by extraterrestrial forces. Fascist and communist states had been created by an impulse inherent in human beings. This being so, we couldn't expect the defeat of fascism or the collapse of communism to provide us with more than temporary relief.
Where were the next monster ideologies coming from? There were several lined up at the starting gate, beginning with the resurrection of communism masquerading as social democracy, or new strains of neo-fascist racisms, including anti-white racism. Embryonic forms of the latter had emerged both in the Third World and in the West by 1994, tolerated if not fostered by misguided reflex-liberals.
The rise of religious fundamentalism made it evident that some new totalitarian states would be theocratic in nature. Tribal nationalism had also been on the rise, usually in combination with religious and ethnic intolerance. In Africa, Mesopotamia, or the Balkans, tribalism's victims of ethno-relgious strife -- Bosnian, Croatian, Hutu, Iranian, Kosovar, Kurd, Serb, Shia, Tutsi, etc. -- threatened to rival the victims of Hitler, if not of Mao's or Stalin's.
Still, it seemed to me the forces of tribalism and nationalism weren't potent and universal enough to emerge as new systems of global totalitarianism along the fascist or communist model. They could wreak havoc, but their competing doctrines tended to cancel each other out. They might ignite entire regions in cruel little wars, but lacked the monolithic force of totalitarian ideologies.
In this respect, the European Union-type of techno-corporate state seemed a greater threat. This kind of social-bureaucracy would be less bloody and more sophisticated than a communist state, but equally coercive. Nor could one exclude theocratic, fundamentalist, militant Islam.
But the two forces that, to my mind, exhibited the greatest capacity for becoming all-embracing and thoroughly repressive ideologies in the 21st century were feminism and environmentalism. They both transcended borders and religions. More precisely, they could absorb other kinds of self-identifications and loyalties. They could even absorb each other, as demonstrated by the 1990s movement of "eco-feminism."
Even more dangerously, they were both millennial ideas. They held out the promise of a new beginning, a fundamental change in human society. Both matriarchy and environmentalism combined mysticism with a quasi-scientific stance, much like fascism and communism did. Like the older totalitarian ideologies, they were based on partial truths and appealed not only to the worst but also to the best side of our nature.
Environmentalism, especially, promised to unite us with the cosmos. It identified the enemy as the masculine-humanist tradition of "biocide" -- a crime of which we were all guilty by virtue of being human. It was a kind of religion, addressing itself to true believers, the very types who have a need to be ruled by something greater than themselves.
In 1994 I saw a bright and terrible future for both in the totalitarian horse race, with eco-fascism leading by a nose. In today's post-Kyoto world, it leads by a length.