The ability of the Far Right to make common cause with people who drifted through enviromentalism or fascination with esotericism and "alternative" medicines is nothing new. Studies such as this one by Hurd and Werther have chronicled these interactions
http://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/31242/633779.pdf?sequence=1#page=152
The blending of such milieus with the Far Right in anti-health measures protest in Berlin builds on a long history of how obsessions with natural purity and hankering after a seemingly simpler historical time led some environmentalists and esoterics to embrace Nazis and Neo-Nazis
When they were founded in the late 1970s, the German Green Party found themselves expelling new members who through environmentalism also demanded a "purification" of society in ways that matched Far Right agendas. Many of these activists then drifted to Far Right movements
A hankering for some ostensibly purer social order before tech, industry, racial and ethnic minorities, gender debate, modern militaries, the Church, the Romans or other historical bogeymen is a established path that takes some from Left-Liberal Green politics to the Far Right
A pernicious pattern is how recurring anti-clericalism, often towards Christian churches, can among some who start with environmentalism drift into increasingly virulent hostility to the religious institutions of Islam and Judaism that ends with Islamophobia and anti-Semitism
I've been struck with how people I've known who drifted from Left environmentalism to reactionary traditionalism have viciously decried established religious hierarchies of various faiths and then without skipping a beat shown themselves suckers for a kind of comedy paganism
Because German and other European Greens have repeatedly had to battle with and expel reactionary traditionalists hostile to the social diversity that the German Green Party embodies, they are most aware of how the Far Right has also used environmentalism to gain recruits
The COVID19 crisis generated a lot of long term political shock effects. With a blend of hostility to the constitutional order of states, reactionary traditionalism and an emphasis on natural/social/physical purity it enables the Far Right to use old themes to get new recruits
You can follow @APHClarkson.
Tip: mention @twtextapp on a Twitter thread with the keyword “unroll” to get a link to it.

Latest Threads Unrolled: