ESSAY: “Fascism’s problem is this: it despises the city, but is of the city”
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Blood and soil
10 min read
The article directly references 'blut und boden' - the Nazi ideology connecting ethnic identity to land ownership. Understanding this concept is essential for grasping the ideological roots of far-right environmentalism discussed throughout the piece.
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British Union of Fascists
12 min read
The article extensively discusses the BUF's relationship with rural England and agriculture, including Mosley's Blackshirts and their intervention in the East Anglian Tithe War. A deeper understanding of this organization provides crucial historical context.
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Tithe War
10 min read
The article mentions the 'East Anglian Tithe War' as a key moment when British fascists engaged with rural communities. Understanding the broader tithe resistance movements illuminates why farmers became a target for fascist recruitment.
Welcome to what will be a slightly truncated newsletter this week. We are thick into the final stages of Issue #2, which we’re sending to print tomorrow (!) so have been rather busy getting that all finished up. But, we can at last share some details about what will be in it.
Themed around the idea of the “frontier”, Issue #2 contains essays on the new scramble for Arctic shipping lanes; Brazilian ecological politics;, data centres in the Irish peat bogs; strategic openings in a time of fossil fuel industry consolidation; and a truly revelatory piece on solar geoengineering—alongside many others. Also making their debut are a number of dispatches from the frontlines of the climate struggle, with reports from Indonesia’s nickel mines, Canada’s Ring of Fire and the Lithium Triangle. Pre-orders for Issue #2 will go live shortly!
The news in the UK over the past month has been dominated by one issue: immigration. Fueled by a growing political right along with an increasingly supine and reactionary media, and kindled by protests in many instances organised by activists from extreme groups like the Homeland Party, the country seems to be in the midst of a bizarre moral panic. These protests, we often hear, represent the true concerns of “locals”, the presumption being that those who are against are rootless. There’s a distinct form of rhetorical doubling in this, one with a long history on the right: the true Englishman is rooted in the soil; the leftist is a vapid cosmopolitan, at home nowhere.
The spiritual home of this kind of rhetoric is, of course, the British countryside. In this week’s newsletter we have a superb essay by the novelist, essayist and nature writer, Richard Smyth, who has long been interested in the links between the British far right and the rural landscape. That history has, as Smyth makes clear, often been one of failure, peopled by “nonentities and cranks”. But it raises fascinating questions both about our relationship, on the left, to nature, as well as about how we counter this new reactionary upswell.
— John Merrick, (co-editor of the BREAK—DOWN)
Fascism and the countryside
The far right has long portrayed itself as the defender of a pristine nature against urban corruption, but
...This excerpt is provided for preview purposes. Full article content is available on the original publication.