SWAMP FEVER by David Watson FOOTNOTES

1 See my How Deep Is Deep Ecology? With an Essay-Review on Woman’s Freedom, written under the pseudonym George Bradford (Times Change Press, 1989).

2 See E. B. Maple, “Ideology as Material Force: Earth First! and the Problem of Language,” Spring 1988 FE; E.B. Maple, “Edward Abbey: We Rest Our Case,” Summer 1988 FE; and George Bradford, “Cheerleaders for the Plague,” Spring 1989 FE.

3 Goebbels cited in Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (1965; New York: Vintage Books, 1973), p. x.

4 See Industrial Society and Its Future: The Unabomber’s Manifesto (Camberly: Green Anarchist Books, no date). The unnamed editor of Green Anarchist distances the group from the Unabomber’s manifesto for “its reductionism and machismo,” but it would be hard to find a more reductionist and macho treatment of the issue. The editor applauds the bombings and jeers at people maimed and killed, comments that the Unabomber “made good with the deed sixteen times in as many years,” and congratulates the bomber “in his new career as ecoteur.” There is no reflection on the ramifications of FC’s agreement to stop killing people if the manifesto is published.

5 See in particular “Catching Fish in Chaotic Waters,” in the Winter 1995 FE; also “Return of the Son of Deep Ecology: The Ethics of Permanent Crisis and the Permanent Crisis in Ethics,” and “The Question of Agriculture (written under the pseudonym George Bradford), in the Spring 1989 FE.

6 Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive (1974; New Brunswick and London: Transaction Books, 1981), p. 207, quoted in “Renew the Earthly Paradise,” Winter/Spring 1986 Fifth Estate). Diamond’s book is one of the most important and far-reaching recent attempts to develop a comprehensive critique of civilization, a reasoned primitivism.

7 Fredy Perlman, Against His-story, Against Leviathan! (Detroit: Black & Red, 1983); The Strait: Book of Obenabi. His Songs (Detroit: Black & Red, 1988). For Fredy’s comment, “The only -ist name I respond to is ‘cellist,’” see Lorraine Perlman, Having Little, Being Much: A Chronicle of Fredy Perlman’s Fifty Years (Detroit: Black & Red, 1989), p. 96.

8 For some detailed discussion of the differences, see Langdon Winner’s Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1977), and Neil Postman’s Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Knopf, 1992). While not analyzing differences between tools and technology, Diamond still provides something like a neo-primitivist critique of technology in his observation that “science and technology, reified and divorced from the human context and from social application, are no more than mechanical fetishes. The belief in the progress of an abstract science or technology is a peculiarly Western fallacy [which] . . . is related to the irrational production of commodities, over which ordinary people have no control, but which they are conditioned to consume. In the joint perspective of the worker and the consumer, the machines take on a life of their own — after all, they have not invented them, and have no voice in their use or replication. The imperious ring of the telephone, for example, interrupts all other activities. Its trivial, dissociated and obsessive use reflects both the alienating character of the society that prizes it so highly, and the transnational corporations that profit from it. Thus the telephone as ordinarily used becomes a sign, not of communication, but of the lack of communication, and of the consequent compelling desire to relate to others, but to relate at a distance — and in the mode of a frustrated orality. The telephone is not an abstractly or inherently ‘rational’ instrument, but an integrated aspect of the repressive culture of monopoly capitalism. In our society, the machine becomes the mediator, and finally the locus of dissociated personal impulses.” He adds in a note, “Monopoly capitalism seeks to overcome its contradictions by producing goods and services that absorb and displace attention from the isolation and frustration that its form of society generates; these objects and services then become necessary, a sign of progress, a proof of prestige for those who ‘own’ them, a symptom of class collaboration, and a way of holding people at large, who have no other alternatives, to ransom. They are, in other words, addictions.” (Diamond, ibid., pp. 43-4)

9 John Zerzan, for example, who is listred as one of the primitivist luminaries by Moore and the GAs, thinks language and symbolization, which are rooted genetically and physiologically in the human species, reflect this repressive “totality.” See his Elements of Refusal (Seattle: Left Bank Books, 1988) and Future Primitive and Other Essays (New York: Autonomedia/Anarchy, 1994). Seeing culture itself as the enemy, such a view leaves little if any solid ground on which to resist repressive civilization, or to cultivate a liberatory society.

10 See Industrial Society and Its Future: The Unabomber’s Manifesto, paragraphs 166 and 182. The “two main tasks,” says the text in crudely instrumental language, “are to promote social stress and instability in industrial society and to develop and propagate an ideology that opposes technology and the industrial system.” (paragraph 181) One would think that radical green anarchists, fully aware of the social chaos caused by industrialism itself and a desire for a genuine social coherence, and wary as they must be of ideology itself, having learned its dangers from situationist and ultra-left theory, would have seen through such simplistic and manipulative notions. To each one his chimera, as Baudelaire once quipped.

11 Luther Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle (1933; Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), p. 248. On civilization, Luther Standing Bear had this to say: “True, the white man brought great change. But the varied fruits of his civilization, though highly colored and inviting, are sickening and deadening. And if it be the part of civilization to maim, rob and thwart, then what is progress?

“I am going to venture that the man who sat on the ground in his tipi meditating on life and its meaning, accepting the kinship of all creatures, and acknowledging unity with the universe of things was infusing into his being the true essence of civilization. And when native man left off this form of development, his humanization was retarded in growth . . . And true civilization lies in the dominance of self and not in the dominance of other men . . . Regarding the ‘civilization’ that has been thrust upon me since the days of reservation, it has not added one whit to my sense of justice; to my reverence for the rights of life; to my love for truth, honesty and generosity; nor to my faith in Wakan Tanka—God of the Lakotas. For after all the great religions have been preached and expounded, or have been revealed by brilliant scholars, or have been written in books and embellished in fine language with finer covers, man — all man — is still confronted with the Great Mystery.” (pp. 249-58) Standing Bear was clear-headed enough to protest civilization without tying himself up in knots the way some of our more literal-minded primitivists do today. This pragmatic attitude about language made him a distant ally of Mohandas Gandhi, who when asked his opinion of western civilization, had the presence of mind to choose his words carefully, replying, “It would be a good idea.”

For related reasons I find a recent article’s attitude about civilization or lack of it to be refreshing. Writes Peter Porcupine in a fascinating article on the brief relationship between plotholders in Leeds and a squatter who took over one person’s greenhouse, “Homage to Civility” (in Here & Now, issue 16/17): “It’s unfortunate that the bourgeois triumphalists of the eighteenth century cornered the word ‘civilization’ to define their singularly uncivilized and ruthless social arrangements. By rubbishing the society of Native Americans, Scottish Highlanders or English commoners the idea of civilization became synonymous with capitalist society with its strong state, hierarchical social relations and production for profit, consumption for emulation. Other social arrangements were simply designated as barbaric despite the civility with which these other arrangements conducted themselves. There is a temptation to use the word ‘community’ to provide a positive term for human relationships which operate without coercion or manipulation, but there is a danger that it be used as an exclusive term defined by who is in, and who is out . . . If community means just a democratic panopticon with everyone snooping on everyone else, then give me civility, an idea that respects the community without destroying the individual.” One might suggest that Porcupine is also quibbling a bit over words, but the difference is that he is engaging real practical problems in and beyond an actual community, and his essay raises a series of questions in an undogmatic way. He does not become enslaved to a jargon. (Here & Now is available c/o Transmission Gallery, 28 King Street, Glasgow G1 5QP, Scotland.)

12 It’s an error—or perhaps a tactic—made repeatedly by Murray Bookchin. He writes in a typically poisonous and self-serving essay attacking deep ecologists, neo-luddites and neo-primitivists in the ecology movement, “At the risk of being provocative, albeit not accusatory, I must point out that nature mysticism permeated the thinking and avowals of the most murderous of the Nazi leaders . . . Biocentrism appears in several pages of [Hitler’s] Mein Kampf . . . .” This passage, from Bookchin’s Which Way for the Ecology Movement? (Edinburgh and San Francisco: AK Press, 1994, p. 8), is cited approvingly by the Neoists in Green Apocalypse. Of course, saying you’re not being accusatory doesn’t necessarily mean you aren’t. At any rate, the result is the same, as when Bookchin publicly denounces deep ecology as an ecofascist “cesspool” and the Fifth Estate critical luddism as part of a sinister “neo-Heideggerian reaction” with eco-fascist implications. If Nazis stumbled on ideas resembling green and deep ecological insights in any way, that is supposedly enough to discredit these insights—a logic which does not serve social ecology well, either, as my essay demonstrates below.

13 For a list of such groups, see Carl Deal, The Greenpeace Guide to Anti-environmental Organizations (Berkeley: Odonian Press, 1993) $5 from Box 7776, Berkeley CA , 94707.

14 Mark Shapiro, “Browns and Greens: Europe’s New Eco-Fascists,” The Amicus Journal, Winter 1992.

15 In his A View to Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature through History (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1993), Matt Cartmill writes, “Under Stalinism, official art and propaganda painted wild nature as an enemy of the working class, calling on all Soviet citizens to help tame the wilderness and make it serve the needs of the proletariat. Novels, paintings, and posters showed heroic Soviet workers damming rivers, draining marshes, felling forests, and dotting the tundra with factories. Every good Marxist was expected to support the struggle of ‘collectively organized reason against the elemental forces of nature.’ ‘Praise of nature,’ declared Maxim Gorky, ‘is praise of a despot.’” (pp. 218-19)

16 See his Post-Scarcity Anarchism (San Francisco: Ramparts Press, 1971) pp. 117-19. Ironically, in her recent book Anarchism: Left, Right and Green (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1994), German anarcho-syndicalist Ulrike Heider points to what she considers potentially fascistic aspects of Bookchin’s work—for example, references to “the blood that flows between the community and nature” (in The Ecology of Freedom), and other passages that, according to Heider, “especially in their German translation, have a frighteningly familiar ring.” Bookchin’s “theoretical proximity to the ideology of the Volksgemeinschaft cannot be overlooked.” (pp. 79, 64) For more on Bookchin’s fascism-mongering, see my Beyond Bookchin: Preface to a Future Social Ecology (Detroit and New York: Black & Red/Autonomedia, 1996), pp. 220-1. Since fascism colonizes anxieties rooted in real concerns, and (as Bookchin rightfully argues in The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship [San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1987, pp. 244-5]), Nazism exploits only to abandon “the utopian content of . . . popular yearning for a sense of place and community,” anyone can be accused of fascism for voicing such anxieties, concerns and utopian yearnings.

17 Bahro’s books, despite irregularities, are still valuable. See Socialism and Survival (London: Heretic Books, 1982), From Red to Green (London: Verso, 1984) and Building the Green Movement (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1986). See also his essay, “Who Can Stop the Apocalypse?” in the Spring 1991 FE.

18 Janet Biehl and Murray Bookchin themselves have written that simply because fascists have exploited ecology and people’s genuine alienation “does not, of course, make attention to these issues fascist.” They rightly recommend that ecological theorists and activists should “exercise extreme wariness as to how they use these ideas and the context in which they are placed,” and they point to racist anti-immigration propaganda couched in ecological terms as an example of their misuse. The point, and the example, are well-taken. But one needn’t be too terribly wary to notice a discrepancy between, on the one hand, a crude, inhuman, racist anti-immigration politics masked by scientific-ecological rationalizations, that tempts people to surrender the minimum ethical integrity, and, on the other hand, profound and poetic sensibilities like eco-mysticism, a biocentric ethic, and deep ecological expressions of the unity of life. Unfortunately, Bookchin and some of his associates have repeatedly slammed any and all manifestations of the latter as automatically “misanthropic” and fascistic, thus undermining what good they might have done in raising the question of a political context. See “Ecofascism: Neither Left nor ‘Up Front’ but Far Right,” in Green Perspectives, Number 27, August 1992. Max Cafard’s “Bookchin Agonistes” (Summer 1997 FE) a review of Bookchin’s latest book (Re-enchanting Humanity: A defense of the human spirit against anti-humanism, misanthropy, mysticism and primitivism, 1995), gives a damning picture of the absurd excesses Bookchin commits in attacking and vilifying as proto-fascist anyone he disapproves of.

19 Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1970); Daniel Guerin, Fascism and Big Business (1939; New York: Monad Press, 1973). Guerin describes socialism as “manifestly inferior” to fascism in winning converts, mainly for being “less a religion than a scientific conception. Therefore it appeals more to intelligence and reason than to the senses and the imagination.” Given the irrational aspects of stalinism and other leftist movements, with their demonology of enemy factions, worship of leaders, historical messianism and technolatry,
Guerin’s distinction is less than entirely credible. Moreover, he can only produce a naively instrumental recommendation for future resistance to fascism: “Doubtless, [the left’s] propaganda methods need to be rejuvenated and modernized,” he says. “Socialism should place itself more within the reach of the masses, and speak to them in clear and direct language that they will understand.” (pp. 73-4) While Guerin’s lack of creative response to this question is understandable for his time, our failure to unite reason and spirit will be less excusable.

Both Guerin and Reich (whom Joel Kovel has called “the most spiritual of psychoanalysts”), refer to the “mystical contagion” of fascism, but they identify this with statism, traditional religion, patriarchal values and nationalist-racist ideology. “Every form of mysticism is reactionary,” writes Reich, “and the reactionary man is mystical.”(p. 24) Yet he argues for a kind of organicism, and attacks both the church and “reactionary science” (p. 128), arguing that “machine civilization” has turned humanity, “fundamentally an animal,” into a robot. “In the construction of the machine, man followed the laws of mechanics and lifeless energy,” he says, and adds emphatically, “The mechanistic view of life is a copy of mechanistic civilization.” Their animal nature suppressed, human beings experience it in a distorted, supernatural or otherworldly way. (pp. 334-5, 344) Of course, Reich’s work suffers from mechanistic reductionism and a lack of nuance concerning the spectrum of experiences and ideas he categorizes as mystical. Reich’s notion that “Consciousness is only a small part of the psychic life” (p. 26), like Freud’s, reflects a mixture of respect for the non-rational and a narrow rationalist approach to it. Whatever his failings, nevertheless, he attempted to explore the underlying characterological sources of fascist hysteria in order to understand “what prevents the economic situation from coinciding with the psychic structure of the masses” (p. 14), a problem which remains unresolved today, but which cannot be fully resolved by a narrow atheistic rationalism or Reichian therapeutic-medical ideology. For Kovel’s remark on Reich, see his History and Spirit: An Inquiry into the Philosophy of Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), p. 157.

20 As Alexander Cockburn observes in an essay discussing, among other related themes, the Nazis’ fascination with animal cruelty, vegetarianism, anti-vivisection, etc., “Animal-rights advocates and vegetarians often fidget under jeers that it was Nazis who banned vivisection. In fact vivisection continued during the Third Reich. The British journal The Lancet commented on the Nazis’ animal experimentation laws of 1933 that ‘it will be seen from the text of these regulations that those restrictions imposed [in Germany] follow rather closely those enforced in [England].’ The moral is not that there is something inherently Nazi-like in campaigning against vivisection or deploring the eating of animal meat or reviling the cruelties of the feedlot and the abbatoir. The moral is that ideologies of nature imbued with corrupt race theory and a degraded romanticism can lead people up the wrong path, one whose terminus was an abbatoir for ‘unhealthy’ humans, constructed as a reverse image of the death camp for (supposedly) healthy animals to be consumed by humans. For the Nazis their death camps were, in a way, romanticism’s revenge for the abbatoirs and the hogsqueal of the universe [an allusion to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle] echoing from the Union Stockyards in Chicago.” See “A Short, Meat-Oriented History of the World. From Eden to the Mattole,” in New Left Review, Number 215 (January-February 1996).

21 Jeffrey Herf, “Belated Pessimism: Technology and Twentieth Century German Conservative Intellectuals,” in Technology, Pessimism, and Modernism, edited by Yaron Ezrahi et al, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), pp. 115-36. See also Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 1984). I thank Allan Antliff for pointing out Herf’s work to me.

22 Guerin, ibid., pp. 79, 98, 53. Guerin speaks of other forms of fascist “mysticism,” including the cult of youth and the cult of the dead and fallen heroes. But these cults can also be found in working class leftist and anarchist movements, too, as anyone who sees the newsreel of Durruti’s funeral will notice. The cult of the dead probably goes back to the neanderthals, after all! Even the pseudo-classic and art deco aesthetic in fascist art can also be discerned in socialist and anarchist posters.

23 For example, the basic themes of the Italian Futurists, many of whom were won over to Mussolini, were established by the movement’s leader Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in The Futurist Manifesto. Jane Rye summarizes them as “the exaltation of speed, youth and action; of violence and conflict; rebellion against the past and disgust with the stagnation of Italian culture; a passionate enthusiasm for the beauties of the industrial age.” See Rye’s Futurism (New York and London: Dutton, 1972), p. 11.

24 Kovel, ibid., pp. 72-5, 83, 8, 69-70. He adds that a spirituality perspective “does not deny any of the findings of science . . . It simply says that these findings, the ‘nonspiritual spirit of things spiritual,’ if you will, are a backdrop to the encounter with nonbeing which is the ‘spirit of spirituality’ itself.”

25 Murray Bookchin, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm (Edinburgh and San Francisco: AK Press, 1995).

26 The undated fall double issue of the NCLC journal,The Campaigner, was probably published in 1972. On the U.S. Labor Party, see “Bozos on Parade: The Frenzied Case of Lyn Marcus,” by Robert Solomon, in Fli-Back: A Journal of Cheap Shots (Detroit, February 1976); NCLC: Brownshirts of the Seventies (Terrorist Information Project/Counterspy), and “The Strange Odyssey of Lyndon LaRouche,” by Frank Donner and Randall Rothenberg, in The Nation, August 16-23, 1980.

27 An early essay on such parallels, John de Graaf’s “The Dangers of Counterculture,” was published in the March-April 1976 North Country Anvil, and later revised and reprinted in the Fall 1977 CoEvolution Quarterly under the title, “The Wandervogel.” Later, De Graaf reviewed his discussion in an article for the Winter 1980 Chicago newspaper Heartland in an essay, “From Flower Power to Fascism.” De Graaf’s view, it should be noted, was not that the essentially pacifist and internationalist German counter-culture was fascist, but that the green counter-culture alone was incapable of stopping fascism. A left liberal himself, De Graaf argued that a “convergence of counterculture and left political tendencies” was necessary, and saw signs of hope in the ecology and anti-nuclear movements of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

28 Robert A. Pois, National Socialism and the Religion of Nature (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), pp. 34-63.

29 Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). p. 137.

30 See John Moore’s Anarchy & Ecstasy: Visions of Halcyon Days (London: Aporia Press, 1988), available from FE Books. For the Nietzsche citation, see The Portable Nietzsche, edited and translated by Walter Kaufman (1954; New York: Viking/Penguin, 1978), p. 92.27.

31 Diamond, ibid., pp. 203, 119, 356, 40, 48.

32 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (1955; New York: Atheneum, 1971), p. 392.

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