When those Chan-board frequenters are driven to violence, their concerns aren't primarily tied to the most materially significant issues today, such as wealth inequality or environmental injustice. Their grievances are based within the mentality that they belong at the top of a hierarchy, and that certain groups--women, Jews, immigrants, nonwhites, and so on--threaten their status. In this worldview, the wars, climatic disruptions, disease-risk factors, and economic crises that are being created by capitalism and imperialism represent negative developments only insofar as they're making the things the deserving minority want scarcer. Therefore the undeserving groups need to be exterminated, or else they'll waste the dwindling supply of wealth and resources.
This is the philosophy of eco-fascism, an idea that's been promoted by the Christchurch and El Paso shooters and that will likely continue to come up in far-right terrorist manifestos. This is because it speaks to the anxiety that comes from living in the core of a declining empire, especially an empire whose internal dysfunction is compounding its suffering from a climatic crisis. That's the anxiety over the disappearance of the material benefits one gets from being a benefactor of imperialist extraction. The El Paso shooter's manifesto articulates this fear when it states: "The American lifestyle affords our citizens an incredible quality of life. However, our lifestyle is destroying the environment of our country... everything I have seen and heard in my short life has led me to believe that the average American isn't willing to change their lifestyle, even if the changes only cause a slight inconvenience. - So the next logical step is to decrease the number of people in America using resources."
This sentiment is consistent with Lenin's assessment that "fascism is capitalism in decay." The idea that the way to address global warming is by reducing the population, rather than changing the socioeconomic system that produces greenhouse gas emissions, is correct from a business perspective. The oil industry, and the capitalist states it has a grip over, will never let profits be sacrificed. The U.S. military, which is the largest institutional source of greenhouse emissions, can't be reduced either, as it's the instrument used to both generate and safeguard a crucial chunk of those profits. So the logical solution to the climate crisis is depopulation, namely of the classes and races that aren't favored by the existing social order.
There are other ways to accomplish this than the calculated genocide that white supremacists want, though as history shows, their ideas may in time become the "final solution" that the capitalist state embraces. A die-off of structurally disadvantaged groups is already happening, simply due to the way the system is designed to treat them during times of crisis. Black, native, and continentally indigenous communities are being damaged the most by the pandemic, by climate-exacerbated natural disasters, by droughts, by sea-level rise, by supply-chain breakdown, by unemployment, by the inflation crisis, and by the militarization of U.S. police. The equivalent discrepancies in where the harm is distributed apply to the billions who live in the countries that imperialism exploits. It's estimated that by the end of the century, 83 million lives could be lost due to the climate crisis, and if the current trends continue, the bulk of those deaths will be in the places that Michael Parenti clarified are "not underdeveloped" but "overexploited."
The view taken towards this situation by eco-fascism, and capital by extension, is that those lost lives will merely be the cost of humanity's survival. The ideology of capitalist realism will never entertain the idea that an equitable socioeconomic system can be implemented. And when a society takes steps to build an alternative system, like in socialist China, the figures in public discourse who are informed by capitalist realism frame this as disastrous for the environment. In the eco-fascist worldview, the peoples of the exploited countries must remain poor, because if they're allowed to lift themselves out of their enforced poverty, they'll attain living standards that increase their carbon footprints. Therefore when a formerly imperialized country like China develops independently, and lifts its population out of extreme poverty, capitalism's ideological partisans point to this country and say "it's to blame for more greenhouse emissions than anyone else!"
The context these statements leave out is that China's per-capita emissions are still far smaller than those in the imperialist countries, even after all of the development the country has undergone. They also don't talk about how China has already implemented a better version of the "green new deal" that the U.S. social democratic movement still hasn't been able to get passed under our capitalist state. But that's beside the point for the ideology of capital. In the world it wants, China would have stayed poor, because keeping the peripheral countries destitute and vulnerable to climatic disasters is supposedly the only way to alleviate the climate crisis. China's offense was to break from being a neo-colony, and come to economically stand on its own feet. Therefore by the reasoning of U.S. capital's defenders, the Chinese people who've suffered and died from China's recent unprecedented heat wave deserve their fate. They didn't stay in their subordinate role within the neo-colonial order, and they must be punished for this transgression.
That sentiment comes through in headlines like the ones from the anti-communist outlet The Epoch Times, which decries China for continuing to use fossil fuels amid the heat wave. This signals an incoherence within the ideas put forth by outlets like it, because the Epoch Times continues to also feature headlines that call manmade global warming a "big lie." But this inconsistency makes sense in that it shows a trend within reactionary discourse: as the climate crisis gets more severe, reactionary rhetoric selectively recognizes the existence of the crisis in order to shift blame for it onto scapegoats. Environmental writer Yair Oded refers to the analysis of journalist Natasha Lennard while pointing out this emerging direction in the way rightists talk about climate: "In her piece for The Intercept, Lennard points out that despite the fact that conservatives constitute the greatest force behind climate change denial today, they nonetheless make an increasing number of references to ideas of eco-fascism. As one example, Lennard cites Marine Le Pen's presidential campaign promise 'to make the 'first ecological civilization' of a 'Europe of nations,' claiming that 'nomadic' people with 'no homeland' do not care about the environment."
China is just one example of the places that are being subjected to U.S. propaganda for maneuvering to bring itself out of poverty. Ethiopia, Eritrea, and the other Belt and Road Initiative members are having their governments become negatively characterized for this reason, or are coming to be portrayed as victims of a supposed Chinese neo-colonial project. The goal of these narratives, as indicated by U.S. foreign policy statements that go as far back as the 1992 Wolfowitz doctrine, is to manufacture consent for a hybrid-warfare campaign against China's economic rise. In the context of climate collapse, this hybrid war is a resource war. One of the key regions it aims to bring out of China's orbit is central Asia, which the U.S. has been engaging in substantial military exercises within ever since its countries became post-Soviet. Washington's aim has been to ensure access to the region's enormous oil reserves, which U.S. strategists have long recognized will be important for the empire to control during the coming era of scarcity.
The more the world shifts into that scarcity paradigm, the more capital demands that war be intensified. The depletion of fossil fuels, and the broader shortages that the climate crisis is creating, have the potential to increase profits indefinitely. The rarer that oil, drinkable water, and other resources get, the more precious they are, and the more they can be used to generate profits. That's why as of two years ago, Wall Street has been treating water like another bettable commodity.
But this project to exploit the resource crisis requires that capitalism itself be maintained amid the ever-growing inequality that this crisis is exacerbating. The underclass must be suppressed, a task that the resource wars themselves are helping advance. The U.S. military is the world's largest institutional polluter (another piece of context that's omitted while blaming China for the climate crisis). This means those 83 million deaths, should we not manage to avoid them, will come as a consequence of these wars. In the age of climate disruption, militarism serves both to give the capitalist class control over the resources it needs in order to exploit the crisis, and to reduce the populations that capital decides must be expended.
To exact the environmental purge of "excess" human life that they want, the eco-fascists don't need to implement a new Holocaust. (Though again, such a Holocaust may yet come should the fascist movement not be sufficiently fought off.) A die-off of disadvantaged communities, both in the United States and worldwide, is happening simply through the innate mechanisms of capitalism during the climate crisis. As long as capitalism persists, the eco-fascists will increasingly get what they want. Yet even by their own argument's internal logic, this "solution" of a mass population sacrifice in order to avert human extinction doesn't work. The world's most exploited peoples produce a small amount of greenhouse gas emissions compared to the people who benefit from imperialism. And the world's richest people, as well as the war machine the rich depend on, pollute the most. So as long as capitalism remains, the crisis will keep worsening, regardless of how big or small the population is. Eco-fascism's real objective is not to save the planet, but to keep the machine of capital running as it consumes the planet.
Confronted with this reality that capitalism is incurably unsustainable, capital's partisans shift the blame onto China, and to the other historically imperialized societies that are building up their productive forces. If China's being able to pull itself out of poverty has led to its becoming the largest emissions source, goes this reasoning, China must be returned to neo-colonial status and no other countries must be allowed to become economically independent. But this idea is not only transparent in its moral bankruptcy, and dismissive of the increasingly likely possibility that China will solve its emissions problem. It's also unrealistic, because at this point there's no plausible scenario where China's development gets reversed. The growth that China is facilitating in Africa, Latin America, and the other parts of Asia can't be stopped either. The rise of the Global South is simply part of the next stage in history's development, not able to be undone by Washington's proxy wars, AFRICOM military occupation, color revolutions, propaganda efforts, drone strikes, and other attempts at holding back the inevitable.
The U.S. military's recruitment failures, which can only be solved by a new draft that would produce unmanageable blowback, are another indication that Washington won't win the new cold war. Its own people are increasingly apathetic towards the idea of fighting for its imperialist cause, as they're feeling the damage that the imperialist order causes to the empire's core. In every way, capital is experiencing contraction, and will continue to until its extinction. Its only recourse is to keep making war more prevalent by any means necessary, so that the system can be maintained for as long as possible.
War as a coping mechanism
Capitalist realism is a belief system of circular logic, where it's accepted as a given that capitalism will persist. That's why the prevailing sentiment among anti-Chinese liberals is that the Communist Party of China is not truly communist, but merely another entity that's been absorbed into the bourgeois superstructure. Because capitalist realism's reasoning is self-reinforcing, the material impacts that it has in relation to this reasoning resembles that of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Capitalist realism says that the profit incentive that drives climate disruption can't be taken out of the equation, so climate action has become less likely due to a cultural sense of climate futility. Therefore the scenario of omnicide that represents the logical conclusion of this thinking, where humanity ends up destroying itself out of some supposedly immutable competitive nature, gets far closer to being realized. The bad is coming precisely because we've expected it to come.
The notion that human beings won't overcome their demons in time to save themselves is one that feels fitting with the nihilistic, cynical philosophy that 4Chan cultivates. One popular Chan post articulates such a sentiment: "there's nothing any western leader can do to stop global warming--even if western Europe and the United States went back to a 1700s style economy with zero emissions the People's Republic of China would still pump out enough pollution to literally choke its people and block out the sun--the Republic of India is only two steps behind the People's Republic of China--there is no point in throwing yourself on this economic sword to try and 'save the planet' because you're not going to save the planet and nothing we can do will--Drill baby drill."
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