A week ago, we warned against the sort of messaging that would portray the coronavirus pandemic as any sort of good news for the climate, and called out the ecofascist underpinnings of the idea that people are a plague upon the planet.
And despite the fact that a recent study found rich people are responsible for climate change, racist rhetoric’s stock and trade is that white purity and environmental harmony is under siege by the urban poor and dirty foreigners. The spread of disease in particular has long been a staple of racist scapegoating – for example antisemitism in the 14th century that blamed Jewish people for the plague, resulting in an estimated 100,000 Jews being burned alive in Germany and Austria alone.
So this edgy idea that coronavirus is Mother Nature’s revenge is literally indistinguishable from white supremacy propaganda and Dark Ages antisemitism.
And though that may sound hyperbolic, it is quite literal. Observe.
Last week, a now-suspended Twitter account claiming to represent a local Extinction Rebellion chapter in the UK posted pictures of a sticker with the words “Corona is the cure”, “Humans are the disease” above the Extinction Rebellion logo and name.
Despite a larger arm of XR UK disavowing it, tweeting that “far right groups have put out stickers with messaging that is not in line with what XR believes or stands for” and linking to their AloneTogether response to coronavirus, James Delingpole wrote it up for Breitbart, which got picked up by WUWT and shared around from there.
But when a real reporter, Ben Makuch at VICE, looked into it, he found that the white supremacist group Hundred-Handers have been impersonating XR. One of the requirements of membership, Makuch writes, is “to download racist sticker templates promoting white supremacism and nativist ideologies,” and spread them on places like school grounds.
Makuch found the group had provided the “elements and fonts required to create Extinction Rebellion stickers,” in a post viewed over 8,000 times. The group then called for “your best XR edits and we’ll post them and include them in our archive.”
While Makuch couldn’t confirm that Hundred Hands was behind this particular sticker promoting racist views in XR’s name, he did confirm a similar photo from March 7th. Posted on London’s metro were the words “White Brits a minority by 2066, preserve an endangered species,” accompanied by the XR symbol.
So we can’t say for sure that a hate group posed as environmentalists to create, apply, photograph and share this particular example of how green concerns can be exploited for white supremacy, but we can say that a hate group exists whose modus operandi is posting white supremacy stickers, and it provided members with the necessary fonts to create XR-looking stickers, and some of them placed similar stickers in other places in the UK around the same time.
But still, it is unfortunately all too possible that the account was legitimate and sincere, and the poster was either being tongue and cheek and edgy, or does truly believe that people are a virus on the planet.
And if that is the case, hopefully the fact that their own sticker could so easily be taken for hate speech will serve as a clear sign about the need to self-reflect.
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