Contributed by Drieu Godefridi © 2019

I see three motives that make it necessary to classify environmentalism among totalitarian ideologies in the strict sense.

The first is that environmentalism does not make any secret of its will to control the entirety of human action. Indeed, the environmentalism claims to control each of the human activities emitting CO2. However, there is no human gesture, as tiny as it is – the simple act of breathing – which is not emitting CO2. Therefore, environmentalism claims to control the entirety of human action.

The academic literature leaves no more doubt on this subject than the innumerable media variations. So man must give up the plane because it emits CO2. The car is one of the misdeeds of the past, because the automobile emits CO2, directly in the case of “ICE -Internal Combustion Engine” vehicles, indirectly when it comes to electric vehicles. Man must give up tourism, pleasure travel, traveling without rhyme or motive – or even with just cause. We must of course give up meat consumption because cattle farming emits CO2. “Veganism”, formerly the privilege of a tiny minority, is now a “scientific” obligation. Even the fact of having children should be hindered: because a child is the worst source of CO2 that can be conceived.

Not only do environmentalists claim total control of human action, but they are proud of this claim.

By way of comparison, it is interesting to note that while the great totalitarian ideologies of the past – National Socialism, Communism – claimed to be involved in all aspects of individual life, none have ever claimed or even conceptualized control as complete as the one environmentalists claim. Traveling in the USSR was narrowly limited by the poor availability of transport, but it never occurred to any communist ideologue to make problematical the very fact of moving. Holidays were limited in the communist countries, because the material means were limited, but never were the leave, the beach, the meat, even less the fact of having children, considered as an anti-social act, crime or problem in itself .

From this point of view, the totalitarian purity of environmentalism is unprecedented.

Two, a totalitarian ideology is defined by the objectification of an enemy; an element within the social body that must be confined, or even eradicated, to allow the advent of the final stage of human society, when the class barriers that had stratified nations for thousands of years would dissolve, or the racially pure socialist society. As early as 1920 in his speech Warum sind wir Antisemiten, pronounced in Munich, Adolf Hitler theorized socialism as being able to triumph only within a nation, Germany, by the purification of its race – thus the expulsion of the element that he presents as his negation: the Jew. Marx, who was exonerated of the crimes of communism by generation of intellectuals, is their direct author in the realm of ideas, with for example the concept of Volksrache, ie the recommendation by Marx of the legal lynching of enemies of the regime – the bourgeois and other “revisionists” – after the revolution has prevailed.

Neither Jew nor bourgeois in ecological theology, and yet a properly “agonistic” logic, as it was said in ancient Athens. All contemporary ecological theory is defined by its rejection, its detestation, its execration of the human CO2, thus in the last analysis of man. The enemy of environmentalism is in all of us; it resides in this substance which transcends any consideration of class, race or culture: our very humanity. The enemy of the environmentalist is the man and the imagined “Garden of Eden-Earth” of the environmentalist would have been peeled of the human crust.

Having worked for a long time on the subject of socialism, in its German and communist nationalist slopes, I was struck by the great sincerity, the candor of their authors, who never made a mystery of the atrocities they intended to commit. In this almost naive contemplation of to the abomination, thrown to the cantonnade, trumpeted, announced with rage and eagerness to act, resides, in my opinion, the third characteristic of totalitarianism. All the debate on the theme “we did not know” the genocide of the Jews by the National Socialists takes a surrealist turn when we measure that it is the whole of the national-socialist theoretical corpus which, since the first writings, the first harangues, point jauntily towards the massacre of the Jew perceived as possessing, animated of a spirit of lucre which would be the antithesis of German socialism. Marx, as we have seen, theorised about violence and civil war as a means of gaining access to power, but especially as a technique of government. National Socialists and Marxists did what they had announced, and massacred millions as soon as they had the opportunity.

It would obviously be foolish to blame the environmentalists for the slightest crime; they have reached power nowhere. Green parties are around 10 per cent in the countries where they do best, and in the European Parliament.

But their project and objectives are undoubtedly clear: it is about reducing humanity to a tiny fraction of what it is. Such was the recommendation of Hans Jonas, probably the most influential ecologist theorist of the twentieth century, such is today the recommendation of most intellectuals and environmental activists, consistent with their theoretical axioms. Get rid of nine-tenths of humanity ... How? This is an aspect of the program on which the ideologues remain the most discreet. Not all. Paul Ehrlich, probably the most read American ecologist since the sixties, author of “The Population Bomb ”  – the environmentalists did not talk about CO2 then, only overpopulation – advocated the sterilisation of the people who reproduce “like rabbits” (sic), a racist and contemptuous expression that targeted Indians and Pakistanis. If massive vasectomy is not enough, Dr. Ehrlich continued, then sterilizing substances must be poured into the drinking water. That would be the “final solution” – the expression is Hans Jonas, in an interview with “Der Spiegel” in 1992 – to the “ecological problem”.

Environmentalism is a totalitarian ideology in the strict sense, more radical in its homicidal claims than any of its predecessors.

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