The New Dark Age

We are entering an era in which catastrophe is no longer a historical accident but the very pattern of history. Permanent war, environmental collapse, forced migration, genocide, ecocide, and the destruction of human and nonhuman life are no longer breaks from the norm.

The multiplication of today’s climate, geopolitical, energy, and humanitarian crises is reshaping how Western states govern collective life. The environment is no longer merely an ecological issue. It has become a strategic one, embedded in national security. This shift can be described as ‘ecology of security’: a political order in which the material conditions of life, including water, energy, infrastructure, and mobility, are managed through the logic of national security rather than universal justice.

The Israeli occupation offers a striking example. Built on a doctrine centered on security, borders, and the management of resource scarcity within a landscape viewed as hostile, the environmental survival of Israeli society is coupled with a logic of ethnic cleansing against Palestinians that approaches an ecofascist fantasy. In this configuration, the environment ceases to be a universal common and instead becomes a national security calculous. Within this framework, the Israeli state, widely portrayed as a laboratory for green industries, manages the climate crisis not as a matter of global concern, but as a question of regional stability and control over vital resources such as water, energy and food.

A Marxist reading supports this analysis. It sees ecology of security as a reconfiguration of capitalism under environmental constraint. The climate crisis does not dissolve relations of domination, it rather intensifies them. In such a context, certain populations can be turned into sacrificial victims who bear the human and environmental costs of capitalist transformation.

In Marxist ecological theory, as developed by thinkers such as John Bellamy Foster, Andreas Malm, and Jason W. Moore, the climate crisis exposes a core contradiction of capitalism: the destruction of the material basis of life. Ecology of security represents the state’s response to this contradiction. Nature becomes a strategic object. Water, energy, and land are no longer merely economic resources. They are instruments of sovereignty. This logic transforms environmental policy into a differentiated management of vulnerability that protects some populations while shifting the burden onto others, or simply eliminating them.

Contemporary Western imperial policy does not promise a better future. It is concerned primarily with managing survival. What several thinkers today describe as the rise of fascism does not signal a mechanical return to the regimes of the 1930s. Rather, it points to the gradual consolidation of authoritarian politics within Western democracies, legitimized by fear and the anticipation of catastrophe. At the beginning of the millennium, Robert O. Paxton warned that fascism is not the product of a sudden rupture but of a process of incremental slippage: a democracy living in a permanent state of exception that ends up redefining its own limits without formally ceasing to be democratic and without any visible institutional collapse.

This slippage is what several authors mean when they speak of the rise of fascism. Ghassan Hage offers a clear framework for understanding this shift: the generalization of the siege condition as a political subjectivity. Societies come to see themselves as besieged. This perception becomes a technology of governance and, when it intersects with environmental crisis and permanent war, it produces what can be called a war ecology. The strategic management of territory, resources, and populations becomes central to sovereignty. The feeling of being under siege is not limited to an actual military situation. It becomes a durable emotional structure that shapes institutions.

Contemporary Western political discourse increasingly relies on the language of invasion. In 2015, Donald Trump declared: “We have an invasion of drugs, an invasion of gangs, an invasion of people.” Within this vocabulary, migration is framed as a form of warfare. The foreigner becomes a hostile force, and borders become psychological infrastructure. Benjamin Netanyahu employs similar rhetoric, stating: “We are fighting for our existence.” Meanwhile, in October 2022, Josep Borrell, the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, remarked that Europe is “a garden” while most of the rest of the world is “a jungle,” warning that the jungle could invade the garden. War thus ceases to be episodic, and national survival becomes the justification for a permanent state of exception.

This siege mentality, tied to a structural crisis in Western imperialism amid the rise of Chinese power, is redefining the thresholds of political legitimacy both within and beyond national borders. Catastrophe enables forms of violence that would have been unthinkable in ordinary times. When survival is invoked, the destruction of living and nonliving environments becomes integral to imperial state strategy.

Contemporary wars led by Western imperial powers in Palestine, Sudan, the Congo, and elsewhere no longer consist solely of military confrontation. They act directly on the environment itself: water systems, energy networks, vital infrastructure, and the habitability of land. War becomes an ecological transformation.

If capitalism rests on the capacity to sever the material exchanges between human societies and natural environments through extraction without return, today’s wars deepen that rupture. When water, agricultural, and energy infrastructures are systematically destroyed, the social metabolism with nature is disrupted on a massive scale. Accusations of ecocide in Palestine and Lebanon can thus be understood as extreme manifestations of this metabolic rift, environments in which the reproduction of the material conditions necessary for life becomes secondary to military and economic imperatives.

Environmental violence exposes the deep logic of crisis capitalism: the capacity to sacrifice specific regions of the world in order to preserve the global system. Accumulation no longer proceeds only through labor exploitation but through the violent reorganization of environments, where certain territories become sacrifice zones that absorb the catastrophe required to stabilize dominant centers.

From the perspective of “fossil fascism,” as described by Andreas Malm, Palestine and Lebanon can be seen as sites where contemporary war reveals a political ecology of survival structured along steep hierarchies. The massive destruction of energy, water, and urban infrastructure is not merely collateral military damage. It produces conditions of long-term uninhabitability that can be described as ecocide, the severe and lasting destruction of material conditions that endangers the reproduction of collective life. Even if the concept remains debated in international law, its analytical use highlights a central shift: war now acts directly on the environmental conditions of existence.

In a world organized around dependence on fossil energy and geopolitical competition over control of material flows, such catastrophes follow a logic in which certain populations become implicitly expendable. Palestine and Lebanon, in this context, have become laboratories for a politics in which environmental catastrophe is rendered manageable and integrated into the strategic governance of territory and into a global economy prepared to absorb ecological destruction in order to preserve its balances.

The rise of ecofascism does not necessarily signal the emergence of classical dictatorships. It points to a more subtle transformation in which democracy adapts to catastrophe through the logic of siege. Governance becomes the management of fear and differentiated survival. The open question extends beyond any single region: who retains the right to continue living in a contracting world? So long as this question is decided by force, catastrophe will remain a technology of rule in the service of a genocidal imperial order.