Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor confront the politics of collapse in End Times Fascism

Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s new book argues that some of the people with the greatest power to prevent ecological and social breakdown appear instead to be prepping for it and profiting from it.

End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World, out now, describes “end-times fascism” as an ideology that makes the world less livable while offering a select few escape routes. From private islands and bunkers to off-Earth plans, the authors discuss how fear of the future is being weaponized to justify inequality, exclusion and authoritarianism.

Klein, co-director of the Centre for Climate Justice and professor of climate justice at the University of B.C., says this is traitorous behaviour not toward nations but toward “creation.”

Klein and Taylor will be bringing this discussion to UBC’s Chan Centre for the Performing Arts (Chan Shun Concert Hall) on Oct. 8 at 7 p.m. You can get tickets at the chancentre.com.

Both authors have a history of confronting power. Klein, the Vancouver-based author of No Logo, The Shock Doctrine and Doppelganger, has spent decades examining how political and economic power exploits emergencies. New Yorker Taylor, an author, filmmaker, activist and co-founder of the Debt Collective, has written extensively about democracy, insecurity and solidarity.

The book proposes there’s a loose coalition of three camps: apocalyptic religious fundamentalists; tech oligarchs convinced that artificial intelligence will either save humanity or radically reorder it; and ethno-nationalists who turn fear of scarcity and displacement into support for hardened borders and exclusionary policies.

“Our point is that the kind of apocalyptic aspect of their narrative is there’s a 25 per cent chance this will destroy humanity, or 20 per cent chance, or 10 per cent whatever they’re saying, cannot be separated from the positive vision that they are trying to sell. We’ll all be able to have every wish granted,” said Taylor. “We’ll be able to understand the cosmos, and we will have superabundance. And money won’t matter. Just let me be a trillionaire until that moment magically comes.”

The pair state in the book that “fascism is capitalism’s most ferocious threat response,” and that it has a way of ensuring that public anger during times of crisis gets directed toward “the vulnerable rather than upward at the system itself and its most privileged stewards and beneficiaries.”

“Fascism is capitalism with bared teeth,” they write in the book.

“I think that line actually speaks to the base that we’re talking about,” said Taylor. “The problem is not immigrants. The problem is not trans kids. The problem is an economic paradigm that steals from you and concentrates wealth at the top.”