Excerpted from the book Deep Green Resistance — Chapter 15: Our Best Hope by Lierre Keith.
Fairy Tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.
—G. K. Chesterton
The IRA had Sinn Fein. The abolition movement had the Underground Railroad, Nat Turner and John Brown, and Bloody Kansas. The suffragists had organizations that lobbied and educated, and then the militant WSPU that burned down train stations and blew up golf courses. The original American patriots had printers and farmers and weavers of homespun domestic cloth, and also Sons of Liberty who were willing to bodily shut down the court system. The civil rights movement had the redefinition of blackness in the Harlem Renaissance and the stability, dignity, and community spirit of the Pullman porters, and then four college students willing to sit down at a lunch counter and face the angry mob. The examples are everywhere across history. A radical movement grows from a culture of resistance, like a seed from soil. And just like soils must have the cradling roots and protective cover of plants, without the actual resistance, no community will win justice or human rights against an oppressive system.
Our best hope will never lie in individual survivalism. Nor does it lie in small groups doing their best to prepare for the worst. Our best and only hope is a resistance movement that is willing to face the scale of the horrors, gather our forces, and fight like hell for all we hold dear. These, then, are the principles of a Deep Green Resistance movement.
1. Deep Green Resistance recognizes that this culture is insane.
A DGR movement understands that power is sociopathic and hence there will not be a voluntary transformation to a sustainable way of life. Providing “examples” of sustainability may be helpful for specific projects geared toward people who are anxious about their survival, but they are not a broad solution to a culture addicted to power and domination. Since this culture went viral out of the Tigris-Euphrates River Valley, it has encountered untold numbers of sustainable societies, some of them profoundly peaceful and egalitarian, and its response has been to wipe them out with a sadism that is incomprehensible. As one example among millions, Christopher Columbus’s officers preferred their rape victims between the ages of ten and twelve.
The pattern repeats itself across time and culture wherever civilization has risen. Civilization requires empire, colonies to dominate and gut. Domination requires a steady supply of hierarchy, objectification, and violence. As Ellen Gabriel, one of the participants in the Oka uprising, said, “We were fighting something without a spirit.… [t]hey were like robots.” The result is torture, rape, and genocide. And the deep heart of this hell is the authoritarian personality structured around masculinity with its entitlement and violation imperative.
Lundy Bancroft, writing about the mentality of abusive men, writes, “The roots [of abuse] are ownership, the trunk is entitlement, and the branches are control.” You could not find a clearer description of civilization’s 10,000 year reign of terror.
If Lierre were writing about something more popular than destroying industrial civilization, she’d be recognized as one of the great writers of our time. “Power is sociopathic.” Those three words are a thesis unto themselves.
I’m reminded of a line from the movie, “No Way Out,” where a junior officer at the Pentagon is warned, “You have no idea what men of power can do.”
The speaker was talking about the U.S. secretary of defense, and the power at issue was not the power to make war, but the power to destroy individuals who got in his way. He was expected to be admired for this — as if the admirable quality in him was not the power to do good or to defend his country, but the power to control and destroy.
That is the essence of modern civilization, which reached its zenith with the atomic bomb. And it is the core of American power and influence in the world today — not “democracy” and “opportunity,” but the ability to destroy the world if that power is threatened, and the will to do it.
Think about that. All of today’s nuclear powers — the U.S., Russia, China, France, the U.K., India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea — are identified by one quality: the will to destroy life on Earth, in order to maintain their control, wealth, and dominance over anyone and anything else.
Fundamentally, there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jung On. Every one of them is willing to initiate a process that could destroy every known life form in the Universe, rather than give up the power and control exercised by their own pathetic states — geopolitical entities that do not occupy an instant in a year of geological time.
Insane? Absolutely goddam right. And all that they stand for deserves to be eliminated, as quickly and as peacefully as possible. More to the point, every organization of human government above the village level is potentially an organization for power, wealth, and control.
I fully agree. And the cause of the cancer called civilization is agriculture and its resulting overpopulation. Everything else is just symptoms.
Omg please rethink this. An kind of violent residence will only add to the problem. We can win this by beating them at their own game. 2 strategies. individual opting out of the system and a network of co ops and grass roots organisation using the capitalist system to make a profit based on earth care people care and reinvesting the excess back into the first to. If set up properly this will draw the money away from the few who have all and redistribute it amoung everyone. When we reach the point where we own our own bank co op we can really start to make a difference. This will quicken the revolution without suffering and they won’t know it’s happening until it’s to late to stop it.
I have a pattern plan to start from nothing using demolition timber to make houses, moving up to eco subdivisions, bank, then buying unsustainable farms and converting them into co2 sequestration food production. (Also a land grab) All the elements of this plan work together to support the other elements. Help in any form would be appreciated. I’m in Australia but we need to take this world wide. Any business willing to make a profit out of a motivation to not from greed but to bring the change that’s needed could be part of this.
That’s why I vote Green.
Not that I really believe in either voting or the Green Party, but as a protest: “Give the underdog a chance to show that the entire system is dysfunctional or not.”
Boy, do I catch a lot of flak from Democrats who somehow feel entitled to the little-g “green” vote.
Although I could never bring myself to actually vote for him, if one believes that the collapse of industrial civilization in the solution, then gosh darn it, Trump is doing an outstanding job!
Yes Jan, I vote Green too and am so registered. But the Green Party lost its way 25-30 years ago, when they relegated peace and the environment to just two in a long list of issues instead of the priorities they were supposed to be in this party. The Green Party should be called the Red Party, it’s just another leftist party now.
Even more important, you’re also correct that voting isn’t going to solve anything. The problems are far deeper and bigger than anything that an electoral system can solve, especially a totally corrupt and rigged system like ours. Humans need to greatly lower both their population and individual consumption. Nothing less will solve these problems, and voting certainly won’t solve them.