I was thinking to myself, “when will the effects of climate change get so bad that they provoke revolution” but then it occurred to me: they already did. Just in the wrong direction.
Syrians fled a civil war driven by the worst drought in a thousand years and Europe responded with a wave of reactionary fascism.
Central Americans fled rising temperatures that are killing agricultural workers and the U.S. responded with a wave of reactionary fascism.
Russia just happens to be in a war for control of some of the world’s best farmland.
Sudan is in the middle of a civil war and Niger just had its umpteenth coup.
Reactionaries are already at war with us over climate change. It’s only going to get worse as the world gets hotter.
That was meant as a sarcastic critique of the idea that Russia doesn’t have material motivations of its war of aggression. Sorry that didn’t come across.
@HeavenlyPossum What in the flying fuck happened in here? I'm just going to torch my History degree because, obviously, the whole 20th century in Europe is vastly different than anything I have read or studied. Sweet baby Jesus.
@HeavenlyPossum Ugh I replied to the wrong part of this conversation. This was in response to the Faye Loves Godzilla rant about the Nazis being environmentalists. I don't remember that being discussed at the Wannsee Conference or in Generalplan Ost.
@HeavenlyPossum I do feel like this has really ramped up lately. I guess it was just a matter of time for Mastodon to become like this. Especially with large unmoderated instances or openly reactionary ones.
@HeavenlyPossum Yeah, I'm always skeptical of people like that. Though I definitely run into self-described leftists that have some batshit ideas and knowledge of history. It does make me wonder what cesspits of the internet they are coming from where these ideas were fostered or encountered.
Though I'm skeptical of a lot of online "leftists" in general. Places like Reddit and Revleft really cemented that skepticism for me.
Ding ding ding! You discovered the secret that anyone with a basic grasp of history already knew.
Did you know the NAZIS and many extremely despotic people ran on platforms of aggressively tackling climate change? Including Hitler? The Nazis ran as conservationists who needed to invade the whole world in order to "save the environment".
There are people who are following this play book again. Talking heads that people currently love are going to try to sabotage elections.
The Nazis did not “run on a platform” of climate change, aggressively or otherwise. The Nazis did not justify their aggression via environmentalism. This is ahistorical nonsense.
They literally did!!! They literally used that as one of the many reasons to try to conquer the whole world!!
Did you know that Hans Asperger's signature was on at least 700 papers designating that Autistic children should be given lethal amounts of barbiturates???
because they were not the kind of Autistic who could serve Nazi Austria?
No! You didn't! Because you refuse to fucking LOOK
I’m not sure what Asperger has to do with an ahistorical claim that the Nazis used environmentalism to justify their conquests or that the Nazis “ran on an aggressive campaign” of climate change, a phenomenon that was not part of public discourse in the 1920s or 30s.
What is it that you think I should “fucking LOOK” at that would prove this weird and unnecessarily hostile point you’re trying to make?
Also Hans Asperger has everything to do with what I am saying when I have to constantly point out he killed children in the hopes to host another Nazi Gala at Am Spiegelgrund and people, today, still defend him.
One of my favorite things about the fediverse is discovering all the new and unexpected ways that total strangers will get mad and yell at my about their personal grievances that are, at best, tangentially related to anything I’ve said.
> Denies historical reality
>Tells the person they're denying it to they're a liar
>Pretends Nazis didn't do shit that they did and if they did, somehow it's irrelevant
>Asks why that would make someone mad
>Gets muted
It also reads like they were ascribing concern about climate change to fascists, as if concern about climate change is evidence of fascism. The whole thing is weird and has left me very confused.
@HeavenlyPossum@RD4Anarchy@Fayedray A quick glance at their timeline and there's a few articles about the "natural mysticism" that the Nazis used, in part, to justify securing Poland for food in service of creating the Ubermensch. It's pretty standard eco-facism vs environmentalism with a "this is the dangerous ways these ideas can be operationalized". This exchange reads like a 14yr old shouting about the very important thing that everyone must understand NOW! Anything but agreement is bad!
Nazi expansionism had a lot more to do with shitty geopolitical ideas about the World Island that were fashionable at the time than anything related to environmentalism as we use the term today.
I think some of it is how broken and defeated people feel, so being a shitty bully can be an appealing way of feeling in control of anything. Some of it is the structure of social media itself, which encourages adversarial confrontation (even here, though it’s dramatically better than twitter was).
I didn’t mean to imply that it’s inevitable; I’ve just observed that people denied control over virtually any aspect of their own lives will often seek control in pathological ways, like trying to start and “win” an internet fight.
There was once a library at my university who saw a student taking a book that had not been checked out. She tried jumping over a turnstile to catch him and broke her leg. I have thought often about the enormous risk she took and cost she bore just to try to assert the tiniest bit of control in her life by exercising the barest bit of authority that had been delegated to her.
It’s not an excuse for bad behavior, but I often noticed that I was the most combative on twitter, most deliberately sought to make someone else’s day shitty through pedantic argumentation, when I felt most powerless in the face of giant institutions.
At least with twitter it was predictable; ancaps and neolibs were always circling like vultures. Here, I’ll toot about climate change and suddenly someone is yelling at me about Hans Asperger.
Nazis literally campaigned on environmental justice and embraced the movement as a core principle for why they deserved to rule the world, because it literally lit a fire under Hitler Youths asses.
"Environmentalists and conservationists in Germany welcomed the rise of the Nazi regime with open arms and hoped that it would bring about legal and institutional changes"
@HeavenlyPossum i have had an unestablished thought that authorities and powers might be slacking in resisting global warming seriously because they find global warming a benefiting tool to be able to use the Arctic ocean..
It’s just a coincidence I guess that the Russian state is in the process of expending its military might in an attempt to capture a country that represents a tenth or more of global grain production.
@HeavenlyPossum
That kind if crystalized it for me. I'd wondered why after the Australiqn mega bushfures, all the experts were blaming drought and clinate change amplification after our mega floods, all the experts were blaming climate change amplified flooding (more moisture in the air in a warmer planet).
The conservatives blamed ... The Green polticans for not enough back burning and not enough dams, even though they are not in power in any state or nationally here in Australia and were themselves in power.
How to get them to not seize what's left over after civilisations collapse and make it even worse?
@HeavenlyPossum yes, fascism and rampant nationalism will take over as the southern hemisphere becomes unlivable and people move northward. The people left behind will turn to violent strongmen for supposed safety and survival.
@HeavenlyPossum I'm about 85% sure we're doomed as a species. We're not at the point of no return, that probably won't happen for another few decades, but we're definitely beyond the point that not making it worse anymore isn't enough, the positive feedback loops have already taken hold. Were we an intelligent species, we would shift a significant portion of our efforts into undoing the damage. We're not doomed because we're incapable of fixing it, we're doomed because we just don't care.
@StarkRG@HeavenlyPossum hence the Fermi Paradox. You only make it as an intelligent species not because you can make language and tools, but because you are capable of thinking ahead beyond your own lifetime.
That requires religious faith. Some of the cathedrals got built over multiple lifetimes. Rational people would not pay for something they don't get to enjoy.
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