Today we share an excerpt of the book Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet. This selection comes from Chapter 2: Civilization and other Hazards. In the preceding pages, various ecological crises were presented.
The media report on these crises as though they [ecological crises] are all separate issues. They are not. They are inextricably entangled with each other and with the culture that causes them. As such, all of these problems have important commonalities, with major implications for our strategy to resist them.
These problems are urgent, severe, and worsening, and the most worrisome hazards share certain characteristics:
1. They are progressive, not probabilistic.
These problems are getting worse. These problems are not hypothetical, projected, or “merely possible” like Y 2K, asteroid impacts, nuclear war, or super-volcanoes. These crises are not “possible” or “impending”-they are well underway and will continue to worsen. The only uncertainty is how fast, and thus how long our window of action is.
2. They are rapid, but not instant.
These crises arose rapidly, but often not so rapidly as to trigger a prompt response; people get used to them, a phenomenon called the “shifting baselines syndrome.” For example, wildlife populations are often compared to measures from fifty years ago, instead of measures from before civilization, which makes the damage seem much less severe than it actually is. Even trends which appear slow at first glance (like global warming) are extremely rapid when considered over longer timescales, such as the duration of the human race or even the duration of civilization.
3. They are nonlinear, and sometimes runaway or self-sustaining.
The hazards get worse over time, but often in unpredictable ways with sudden spikes or discontinuities. A 10 percent increase of greenhouse gases might produce 10 percent warming or it might cause far more. Also, the various crises interact to create cascading disasters far worse than any one alone.
Hurricanes (such as Katrina) may be worsened by global warming and by habitat destruction in their paths (Katrina’s impact was worsened by wetlands destruction). The human impact may then be worsened further by poverty and the use of the police, military, and hired mercenaries (like Blackwater) to impede the ability of those poor people to move freely or access basic and necessary supplies.
4. These crises have long lead or lag times.
The problems are often created long before they become a visible issue. They also grow or accelerate exponentially, such that action must be taken well in advance of the crisis to be effective. Although an alert minority is usually aware of the issue, the problem may have become very serious and entrenched before gaining the attention, let alone the action, of the majority.
Peak oil was predicted with a high degree of accuracy in 1956. The greenhouse effect was discovered in 1824, and industrially caused global warming was predicted by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius in 1867.
5. Hazards have deeply rooted momentum.
These crises are rooted in the most fundamental practices and infrastructure of civilization. Social convention, the concentration of power, and dominant economic systems all prevent the necessary changes. If I ran a corporation and tried to be genuinely sustainable, the company would soon be out-competed and go bankrupt.’ If I were a politician and I banned the majority of unsustainable practices, I would promptly be ejected from office (or more likely, assassinated).
6. They are industrially driven.
In virtually all cases, industry is the primary culprit, either because it consumes resources itself (e.g., oil and coal) or permits resource extraction and global trade that would otherwise be extremely difficult (e.g., bottom trawling) . Furthermore, industrial capitalism and industrial governments offer artificial subsidies for ecocidal practices that would not otherwise be economically tenable. Factors like overpopulation (as discussed shortly) are secondary or tertiary at best.
7. They provide benefits to the powerful and costs to the powerless.
The acts that cause these crises-all long-standing economic activities-offer short-term benefits to those who are already powerful. But these hazards are most dangerous and damaging to the people who are poorest and most powerless.
8. They facilitate temporary victories and permanent losses.
No successes we might have are guaranteed to last as long as industrial civilization stands. Conversely, most of our losses are effectively permanent. Extinct species cannot be resurrected. Overdrawn aquifers or clear-cut forests will not return to their original states on timescales meaningful to humans.
The destruction of land-based cultures, and the deliberate impoverishment of much of humanity, results in major loss and long-term social trauma. With sufficient action, it’s possible to solve many of the problems we face, but if that action doesn’t materialize in time, the effects are irreversible.
9. Proposed “solutions” often make things worse.
Because of all the qualities noted above, analysis of the hazards tends to be superficial and based on short-term thinking. Even though analysts who look at the big picture globally may use large amounts of data, they often refuse to ask deeper or more uncomfortable questions.
The hasty enthusiasm for industrial biofuels is one manifestation of this. Biofuels have been embraced by some as a perfect ecological replacement for petroleum. The problems with this are many, but chief among them is the simple fact that growing plants for vehicle fuel takes land the planet simply can’t spare. Soy, palm, and sugar cane plantations for oil and ethanol are now driving the destruction of tropical rainforest in the Amazon and Southeast Asia.
Critics like Jane Goodall and the Rainforest Action Network argue that the plantations on rainforest land destroy habitat and water cycles, worsen global warming, destroy and pollute the soil, and displace land-based peoples. This so-called solution to the catastrophe of petroleum ends up being just as bad-if not worse-than petroleum.
10. The hazards do not result from any single program.
They tend to result from the underlying structure and essential nature of civilization, not from any particular industry, technology, government, or social attitude. Even global warming, which is caused primarily by burning fossil fuels, is the result of many kinds of industries using many kinds of fossil fuels as well as deforestation and agriculture.
To learn more about the true environmental costs of renewable energy, read Bright Green Lies to be released in 2021.
Featured image depicts major floating garbage patches in the Pacific Ocean.
In this lecture, we will cover a wide range of 10,000 years of agricultural history. Starting with the initial question “how old is human culture” we argue that humans have been living in a wide range of different cultures, long before some of them started applying agriculture about 10,000 years ago. We distinguish 5 different human cultures, according to the way they get their food and basic resources: Hunter/gatherers, horticulturists, pastoralists, agricultural, and finally industrial culture.
Agriculture of different character developed in some places in the world, and some forms are more destructive than others. The form of grain monoculture that developed about 10,000 years ago in the fertile crescent has proven to be the most aggressive one, it is spreading very fast and with it the agricultural society, the people and their genes. It also causes the most devastating consequences for ecosystems. Europe was already ecologically badly damaged towards the end of the Middle Ages, by agriculture and the mining and extraction that was needed to fuel countless wars between European lords and kings.
The Issues with Agriculture
Environmental problems caused by agriculture are not a new phenomena. As a consequence, the European people had a large pressure to expand. The conquest of the Americas is the most recent disaster of this clash of cultures that has been going on for 10,000 years. The American Holocaust is the greatest mass murder in human history, the annihilation of at least 500 unique cultures, languages, peoples and world views that will never come back.
Since “unquestioned beliefs are the real authorities of any culture” (Robert Combs), and “Culture” means “enacting a story” (Daniel Quinn), we continue exploring some of the myths of agrarian culture. The question “why we are doing all of this” leads us back to biblical times and a spiral of violence that started with early agrarian empires and their efforts to conquer and colonize the middle east.
Following the development of apocalyptic thinking that originated in the ruined and deeply traumatized societies the empires and their wars left behind, we discover that “authoritarian religion and technocracy are not opposites, but part of a continuum” (Fabian Scheidler).
Transformation through Technology
Finally, we enter the 20th century. Central to apocalyptic thinking is the complete destruction of the old and the creation of a new, better state. To replace the heavenly state for the souls heard by the Last Judgment comes the belief in a transformation of the world through technology. Nature, which is perceived as brutal, raw, wild, imperfect is to be replaced by a better system, created by man.
This is what we are currently doing with our modern capitalist economy. In modern times, especially in the 20th century, the mega- machine, into which agricultural culture had evolved, once again gained enormous momentum through the input of the newly discovered energy sources fossil coal and oil. Also the destructiveness gained enormous momentum which we can see in climate change, ecocide, critical state of freshwater resources etc.
As we know, the 20th century brought new weapons and new wars. A particularly important man, who‘s inventions shaped our recent history, was Fritz Haber. He developed the process of ammonia synthesis in 1909. Ammonium nitrate is the basic material for explosives and also chemical fertilizers. The 20th century was marked by an explosion of human population that planet earth had never seen before. Fritz Haber inventions indeed broke the planetary boundaries by artificially producing more nitrogen than there would be naturally. This was the birth of modern industrial agriculture.
Ecological Restoration
After we have covered all these startling facts, we can finally start thinking about solutions. But we have to learn that “The political system cannot be counted on to reform agriculture because any political system is a creation of agriculture, a co-evolved entity. The major forces that shaped and shape our world –disease, imperialism, colonialism, slavery, trade, wealth– are all part of the culture agriculture evolved. (…) Just as surely, agriculture dug the tunnel of our vision.” (Richard Manning).
We‘ve probably understood during this lecture that the dominant culture, the civilization that is based on agriculture, inevitably leads to colonialism and conquest, and ultimately to the destruction of all life on this planet. That is the history, the present and that will be the future. But the future is ours, and we can change it. We can stop the destruction, and we can build alternative, life-centered cultures with structures and institutions that are based on cooperation, mutual understanding and respect. Whatever happens, the future must be an age of ecological restoration.
After millenia of agriculture, war, colonialism and suppression, all of us are, over generations, severely traumatized by all this violence. We went crazy and thought that we have to conquer and subdue nature and change the world fundamentally with our technology. All peoples who stood in the way of the expansion of agrarian culture were either destroyed or robbed of their land, their spirituality, their culture, and traumatized by violence and oppression, so that they became equally insane. (This is what Jack Forbes called Wétiko disease in his brilliant book Columbus and Other Cannibals.)
Why Permaculture?
I want permaculture to become a remedy that helps us to recover from this delusional state, so in the last part of this lecture we get to know permaculture, its founder Bill Mollison and its basic principles and ethics as a viable alternative. Coming to an end, I want to answer the initial question “Why do we need permaculture?”. Do we want an era of collapse, the apocalypse? Or do we want to take the chance and be protagonists of a new age of ecological restoration?
You may know the slogan swords to plowshares. It comes from the bible and has been used by movements for peace for a long time. But even they did obviously not understand that no lasting peace is possible within agricultural culture. Any peace movement that fails to recognize this must fail. Because whoever has plowshares will soon need swords. Actually, the plowshare itself is already a sword that injures the earth. It is the same analogy as explosives and chemical fertilizers, pesticides and chemical weapons. But we obviously had to break the planetary boundaries first to see these connections.
The more I think about it, the more permaculture becomes a new peace movement for me. So I would like to answer the question “Why do we need permaculture?” as follows: Agriculture is permanently at war (against nature and other people). Permaculture offers the chance for lasting peace.
Boris Forkel is a radical environmentalist, social rights activist and permaculturalist located in Germany. You can learn more about his work on his website BabylonApocalypse.org.
Vermont has a reputation for producing sturdy New England farm folk – hardscrabble people who lived full lives in challenging conditions. Our neighbors, Frank and Virginia, were prime examples. Living well into their eighties, they never owned a car or a phone, and never went on a vacation; they saved and reused everything, and grew their own food. Despite – or probably because of – the simplicity of their lives, they were happy.
Now there is a different kind of folk in the Green Mountain landscape. You’ll find them rushing to the airport in their hybrid car, smartphone glued to their hands, trying to catch a plane for their vacation abroad. Often well-meaning and ‘progressive’, they tend to look down on people like Frank and Virginia for not being ‘green’ enough. The reality, of course, is that these self-described environmentalists have a far greater impact on the Earth than those older Vermonters did.
Mainstream notions of monetary and career ‘success’ lead us to dismiss simpler ways of life. Unfortunately, this leaves us utterly wedded to the economic system that lies behind all our environmental problems, including climate change.
Crisis Logic
Bill McKibben‘s recent appearance in Hardwick to promote his new book, Falter, got me thinking about this. Back in 2008 McKibben correctly identified our growth-obsessed economy as the source of the ecological collapse we face today, explaining that when the economy grows larger than necessary to meet our basic needs, its social and environmental costs outweigh any benefits.
He pointed out that our consumerist way of life – in which we strive for more no matter how much we already have – is one of the ways corporations keep our bloated economy growing. The irony, he added, is that perennial accumulation does not even make us happy. But now, sadly, McKibben studiously avoids criticizing the very economy he once fingered as the source of our environmental crisis.
During his talk he referred to Exxon’s ‘big lie’: the company knew about climate change long ago but hid the truth. Ironically, McKibben’s presentation did something similar by hiding the fact that his only ‘solution’ to climate change – the rapid transition from fossil fuels to industrial renewables – actually causes astounding environmental damage.
Out of the Back Comes Modernity
Solar power, he said, is “just glass angled at the sun, and out the back comes ‘modernity’.” But solar is much more than just glass. One example? Like wind power, it requires the environmentally devastating – and fossil-fuel based – mining of rare earth metals. And that ‘modernity’ coming out the back? That is the lifestyle that is killing the planet.
McKibben extolled the virtues of Green Mountain Power’s industrial ‘renewable’ developments, failing to mention that GMP sells the Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) from those projects to out-of-state utilities, thereby subsidizing the production of dirty energy elsewhere. He also neglected to say that one of GMP’s parent companies is tar sands giant Enbridge, which owns a $1.5 billion stake in the Dakota Access Pipeline and is currently working to use Vermont as a corridor for future fracked-gas transport.
Therein Lies the Deception
McKibben once claimed that “every turn of the blade” of an industrial wind turbine “reduces fossil fuel consumption somewhere.” When the RECs are sold, however, this is simply untrue. And while the production and installation of every turbine has serious environmental costs, every reduction in consumption really does reduce fossil fuel use somewhere, while simultaneously reducing environmental impacts.
Renewables only make sense in tandem with drastic reductions in energy consumption, and are best implemented through small-scale, grid-free efforts. But what we have instead is corporations continuing to market the psychotic American dream – powered by ‘renewables’! This co-opted response to climate change is no longer about protecting nature from the ever expanding human nightmare, it is about sustaining the comforts and luxuries we feel entitled to. It is business-as-usual disguised as concern for the Earth. It is utterly empty, but it serves the destructive economy.
Though not Mckibben’s intent, this is what he implicitly supports.
Changing the Fuel Does Not Stop Ecocide
Climate change is a crisis, but it is only one of many ways the planet is being destroyed. Changing the fuel that runs the system that is killing the planet is not a solution. An effective response would resemble shifting towards the way Frank and Virginia lived. It won’t look ‘cool’, or stroke the attention-seeking narcissism of social media addicts, but it would have immediate benefits.
That shift will require a major rethinking of our lives and economy; it asks us to have the maturity, courage, humility and wisdom to put nature and her needs first. McKibben deserves credit for sounding the alarm about climate change early on, but now he should tell people the unvarnished truth: that if we cannot sacrifice our comforts, luxuries and rapid mobility because we love this Earth, then there really is no hope.
Suzanna Jones lives off grid on a small farm in Northern Vermont. She has been fighting injustice, destruction of the land, and industrial wind projects for decades and has been arrested several times.
Jack D. Forbes (Powhatan-Renapé and Lenape) was the author of Columbus and Other Cannibals, one of the most important books ever written. In this excerpt, edited slightly for publication, he offers the reader analysis of the nature and origins of evil in human beings. Image depicts former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin. <
The Origins of Evil in Human Beings.
For several thousands of years human beings have suffered from a plague, a disease worse than leprosy, a sickness worse than malaria, a malady much more terrible than smallpox.
The disease that is overrunning the world is the disease of aggression against other living things and, more precisely, the disease of the consuming of other creature’s lives and possessions. It is cannibalism, a cannibal psychosis, and it is the greatest epidemic sickness known to humans.
Cannibalism is the consuming of another’s life for one’s own private purpose or profit.
A cannibal is an evil person or spirit who terrorizes other creatures by means of terrible evil acts, including cannibalism. The slaver who forces blacks or Indians to lose their lives in the slave-trade or who drains away their lives in a slave system is a cannibal.
They may ‘eat’ other people immediately or they may ‘eat’ their flesh gradually over a period of years. The wealthy exploiter ‘eats’ the flesh of oppressed workers, the wealthy matron ‘eats’ the lives of her servants, the imperialist ‘eats’ the flesh of the conquered, and so on. The wealthy and exploitative literally consume the lives of those they exploit.
The overriding character of the cannibal is that it consumes other lives, that is, it is a predator. Somehow, cannibals believe that they have a right to use another’s life (or their property) in a manner which is decidedly one-sided and disadvantageous to the victim.
Predation can lurk under many guises, such as ‘patriotism,’ profit-seeking, ‘protecting our way of life,’ and ‘investment returns.’
Lying
Lying is almost always a factor in cannibal behavior. Lying and petty thievery, hustling, ‘wheeling and dealing,’ cheating, usury, and so on are all symptoms of a cannibal. In a cannibal society, the common training of large numbers of people is that of a hustler. The individual may learn to be a hustler in business, or in school, or in scientific research, or in politics, but their basic attitude is one of fierce competition to ‘get ahead’ of other people.
There are many psychological traits that help form the cannibal personality. Greed, lust, inordinate ambition, materialism, the lack of a true ‘face,’ a schizoid (split) personality, and so on, are all terms which can be used to describe most cannibals.
Arrogance
One of the major traits characterizing the truly evil and extreme form of cannibalism is arrogance.
Arrogance is a key trait of the cannibal or of a person liable to become a cannibal. Sadism and cruelty are closely related to cannibal behavior. The option of being sadistic and cruel is available to people in the cannibal world, and what is more, being sadistic and cruel can even be made to appear as being patriotic, good, or even pious. Thus the sane become insane, and the crazed become rulers!
‘Scientific’ experimenters on animals, social workers intimidating poor people, bureaucrats being rude to ‘common’ people who dare to approach their desks, teachers treating pupils with mental cruelty, and so on, are using disguised means of expressing the sadistic derangement fostered by the cannibal world.
Imperialism
Imperialism and exploitation are forms of cannibalism and are precisely those forms of cannibalism which are most diabolical or evil.
Imperialists, rapists, and exploiters are not just people who have strayed down a wrong path. They are insane (unclean) in the true sense of that word. They are mentally ill with the cannibal psychosis. The rape of a woman, the rape of a land, and the rape of a people, they are all the same. And they are the same as the rape of the earth, the rape of the rivers, the rape of the forest, the rape of the air, the rape of the animals. Brutality knows no boundaries, greed knows no limits, perversion knows no borders, arrogance knows no frontiers, deceit knows no edges. These characteristics all tend to push towards an extreme, always moving forward once the initial infection sets in.
The cannibal psychosis is a very contagious and rapidly spreading disease. It is spread by the cannibals themselves as they recruit or corrupt others. It is spread today by history books, television, military training programs, police training programs, comic books, pornographic magazines, films, right-wing movements, fanatics of various kinds, high-pressure missionary groups, and numerous governments.
Contagion
The cannibal disease, the sickness of exploitation, has been spreading as a contagion for the past several thousand years.
And as a contagion unchecked by most vaccines it tends to become worse rather than better with time. More and more people catch it, in more and more places, and they become the true teachers of the young. Exploitation is thriving. The exploitation of children, of love, of women, of old people, of the weak, of the poor, and, of course, the intentional commercial exploitation of every conceivable thing, from the hair around women’s vaginal areas, to worry over natural body odors, to adolescent insecurity, to the fear of growing old, to thirst (for example, persuading people to drink liquid chemicals and sugar in place of water or natural beverages).
The cannibal psychosis is a sickness of the spirit that takes people down an ugly path with no heart. They may kill, but they are not warriors. They may learn skills, but they acquire no wisdom. They may be surrounded by death but they do not, or cannot, learn its message. They chase after the riches or rewards of a transient world and delude themselves into believing that big tombs and monuments can make it permanent.
A pimp is someone who follows other people’s orders, follows someone else’s path, and who refuses to take responsibility for what they do. Such a person cannot be authentic. Such a person is not merely a pimp, they are also a ghost, a mere imitation of a person. Their life is an imitation of life, lacking solidity and realness. The cannibal world is full of such pimps and ghosts. The cannibal world believes in the use of tricks, constant opportunism, ‘situational ethics,’ life adjustment, personality adjustment, wheeling and dealing, double standards, and plain fakery. Such a life of deception and rootlessness leads easily into pimpery.
Civilization
To a considerable degree, the development of the cannibal disease corresponds to the rise of civilization.
Cannibal civilizations are (usually) societies with large slave populations, rigid social class systems, unethical or ruthless rulers, and aggressive, imperialistic foreign policies. Colonialist-imperialist systems seek to create cannibals. They recruit them because colonialism is maintained by means of properly controlled cannibal behavior. More especially, they need to recruit cannibals from within the native population in order to keep that group divided, exploited, and in a hopeless frame of mind.
Colonialists spread notions of racial and cultural superiority and transform hitherto free people into super-chickens (as it were) with an especially brutal pecking order. This pecking order (ranks, social classes, castes, and so on) is what maintains the system of exploitation and degrades the masses who become its victims. Such systems are a form of physical and psychological terrorism. When conquered people are reduced to a state of impotency, poverty, and despair, certain individuals will decide that survival depends upon cooperation with the exploiters. Slowly but surely, if they are especially aggressive or ambitions, they may come to see that there are ways to make money, get favored jobs, or obtain jobs for relatives, by becoming dishonest and corrupt. One of the tragic characteristics of the cannibal psychosis is that it spreads partly by resistance to it.
Assimilation
Those who try to fight cannibals sometimes, in order to survive, adopt cannibal values.
Imperialism creates the illusion of wealth as far as the masses are concerned. It usually serves to hide the fact that the ruling classes are gobbling up the natural resources of the home territory in an improvident manner and are otherwise utilizing the national wealth largely for their own purposes. Eventually the general public is called on to pay for all of this, frequently after the military machine can no longer maintain external aggression.
The material prosperity within successfully imperialistic societies, especially for middle-class and upper-class citizens, unfortunately serves to not only hide internal decay but also to blunt people’s desires for truth, justice, and personal authenticity. Even when obvious examples of wrong-doing appear, the bulk of the citizenry will refuse to take any action, in some cases because of a fear of reprisal, but more commonly because of a desire to continue to enjoy their prosperity without being disturbed.
Crime
Organized crime, in its many forms, is the most important manner in which the cannibal disease finds concrete expression.
It is true that individual cannibals, operating on their own, may cause great misery at times, but it is much more common for the most brutal aggression to take place as a part of an organized, systematic assault. Organized crime is indeed ugly, corrupting, and brutal. The terror and suffering lurking just beyond the curtain of wealth ultimately enters into even the gardens of the affluent; and, more importantly, that material wealth and power seldom seem to bring to their possessors the spiritual and psychological nourishment which human beings truly need.
True organized crime commences with the state or with state-approved aggression. The difficult and tragic thing about many systems of inhuman exploitation is that they usually are directed by innocent-looking, suave cannibals whose offices are never contaminated by the sweat, blood, and dying flesh of the oppressed.
The cannibal disease is not limited to the brutes and goons who handle the gun, the lash, or the instruments of torture. The nice people in the offices, the typists, the lab technicians, the clerks, and, of course, the owners, directors, stockholders, senators, generals, and presidents who use, profit from, and feed on human exploitation are also cannibals to one degree or another. The most guilty of the cannibals are those who mastermind, justify, and profit most from such systems. Such persons are the ‘master predators.’
Many people in the capitalist and communist worlds are not Real. Many are puppets or pimps, whose strings are pulled by others or who follow a life-path dictated by others. Thus they are ripe for the cannibal infection. Imperialism, predation, and cannibalism, as diseases of culture, seek to militarize societies.\
Degradation
Part of the process of creating a cannibal world is the sustained effort to brutalize the sensibilities of human beings.
In part, this has been (and is) accomplished by denying the spiritual character of humans and other living creatures and by treating them in a demeaning manner. An important aspect of the cannibal sickness is the apparent drive of some, especially scholars and university people, to de-sanctify that which has been regarded as holy and sacred, or beautiful and spiritual, especially for non-cannibals. The significance of de-sanctifying the earth, the animals, the plants, the trees, and even human beings is that the world is made a potentially ugly and very exploitable place.
A cannibal society seeks to prevent people (except for a select few) from pursuing their own spiritual fulfillment since the economy and the politics or such a society requires masses of laborers who live a regulated, predictable, conformist life.
Alcohol
‘Obedience’ is the objective, not true ‘salvation.’
Alcohol is a universal weapon of the cannibal. Exploitative and imperialistic programs may become very popular in countries where an improved material standard of living is believed to be dependent upon aggression. The systematic use of terror seems to have been developed as a control and domination strategy for many ancient empires, especially during their expansionistic phases or when faced by unhappy subject peoples.
Cannibals often leave a record of murder and terror that is shocking in the extreme. And the people who usually suffer the most are honest, simple, democratic people of the world, the non-materialistic, the freedom-loving, and the truly spiritual. These people are precisely lacking in the insane desires and delusions which motivate the cannibal. (Non-cannibals may, at times, be cruel, but their cruelty is individual and sporadic, not part of a system of cruelty). Folk peoples are the targets for intensive programs of social change engineered by cooperating teams of missionaries, armies, pacification squads, so-called ‘developers,’ and others.
Class Society
One of the essential characteristics of cannibalistic-imperialistic societies is that each social class seeks to exploit those below it.
In a cannibal society, all those who lack physical-material power will be exploited or abused. The cannibal world creates an intensive propaganda system designed to perpetuate the values of such a system. A facet of organized systems of aggression is that the governments, syndicates, corporations, or groups controlling or profiting from such behavior also control the greater part of the organs of public opinion modification. Patriotism, sectarian fervor, news, and propaganda are often used to justify aggression, genocide, slavery, and torture, and also to make the masses willing (or even anxious) participants.
The subjugation of women and their use as means instead of ends is part and parcel of the cannibal psychosis. There is a close correlation between the rise of patriarchal societies and the rise of imperialism and cannibal behavior. In systems that oppress women an element of the cannibal disease is certainly present. In many societies where exploitation reigns supreme, a hierarchical class system ordinarily exists and at every level, although in somewhat different ways, women are controlled and prevented from realizing their full potential. Occasionally, a queen or empress may be the titular or even active head of a male-dominated system.
Male Domination
Terrorism is a male disease.
The madness of violence, aggression, war, assault, rape, murder, conquest, dominance, and terrorism is, overwhelmingly, an insanity that strikes males primarily. Women can, of course, be vicious and mean, and they can goad men into violent action, but the kind of anger and sheer destructiveness that typifies the aggressive male rarely finds a female counterpart. Many of the cannibals are socialized by a society which has extremely negative attitudes towards sex (and which sees sex as a form of aggression, often against women), and which cultivates various forms of cruelty and sadism.
Male dominance typifies a number of major religions, including Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Orthodox Judaism, Islam, Southern Baptists in the U.S., Northern Ireland Presbyterians, and Sikhism, Hinduism, and Shinto. Only within indigenous religious traditions can one find major female leadership and participation accepted widely. The union of male religion with male military dominance has been an all too frequent problem among human beings. The result is the suppression of dissent and, perhaps, of the original core of the religion in question.
It is terribly dangerous when major societies and its movements are ruled by men only or primarily, because male behavior is, historically, all too predictable. From the raping of women, to the raping of countries, to the raping of the world. Acts of aggression, of hate, of conquest, of empire-building.
No discussion of terrorism, school violence, domestic abuse, war and peace, or crime should take place without confronting the world-wide phenomena of male dominance-seeking and violence.
Folk cultures have tended to be the most friendly to women, until very modern times. Perhaps this is because ‘empires’ and hegemonic systems (larger and larger organizations, states, churches, sects) are almost always the creation of men or cultures dominated by a male drive for power, expansion, dominance, and exclusivity. (And the ultimate exclusivity is the blasphemous claim of a group of males to possess the exclusive pathway to contact with the deity, for example, God, Allah, Jehovah, and so on).
Overpopulation appears to be a direct result of the creation of cannibal-dominated societies. Perhaps this results from the degradation of women in a cannibal system, or perhaps it correlates with the disintegration of traditional folk values, or perhaps it is stimulated by the need of industrialists, generals, and dictators for continual supplies of cannon-fodder and cheap labor. The cannibal disease seems to flourish in overpopulation. And in the slums, factory towns, and crowded countryside, babies, violence, hustling, prostitution, hunger, malnutrition, alcoholism, dope addiction, and fear often live side by side in a fertile culture of demoralization controlled only by prisons and monstrous armed forces. But of course the ‘big cannibals’ do not live in these slums, rural or urban. They live, as they always have, in fancy houses or apartments, guarded by the security forces whose salaries they pay.
The Cannibal’s Ten Commandments:
Thou shalt make a profit.
Thou shalt disown thy parents when they become old and send them away to perish alone; but thou shalt put on an expensive funeral for appearances sake.
Thou shalt deceive with false looks and flattering words, for appearances are everything.
Thou shalt gather to thyself alone as many material things as thou can obtain.
Thou shalt save and hoard, sharing not with others unless for thy own self-interest.
Thou shalt adulterate the foods which people eat, and deprive them of healthy sustenance.
Thou shalt take whatever thou can from the forest, from the earth, from the air, or from the defenseless and weak.
Thou shalt kill whenever it profits thee, and thou shalt exalt killing and violence since all progress results therefrom.
Thou shalt be arrogant, aggressive, and bold since such qualities insure success.
Thou shalt not worry about thy sins for the Almighty has arranged a means whereby thou can be forgiven, even at thy death bed.
You shall know a tree by its fruit and by its fruit the cannibal world stands condemned.
Jack D. Forbes (January 7, 1934 – February 23, 2011) was an Powhatan-Renapé and Lenape indigenous writer, scholar and political activist, who specialized in Native American issues. He is best known for his role in establishing one of the first Native American Studies programs (at University of California Davis). His book Columbus and Other Cannibals (1978) is foundational to the anti-civilization movement. Forbes analysis of civilization enabled readers, listeners and learners across decades to understand the systems that enable terrorism, genocide, and ecocide.
Rage and violence are exploding in the streets of the United States. Eleven people have been killed, hundreds injured, and thousands arrested over the last week.
Police are running wild, attacking and injuring non-violent protesters, journalists, and bystanders in their rush to protect private property. A revolt on this scale has not seen since the Holy Week Uprising of 1968 after the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr.
What recourse do people have when they are locked out of the mainstream political process, victimized economically, and abused and murdered on the streets?
In this article we offer a clear outline of the equipment needed to sustain direct action of different types and highlight the importance of training, discipline, preparation, and good quality gear.
Equipment for Scouting and Action
The effectiveness of any organized direct action is dependent on leadership, planning, skills, and coordination. Equipment can also play an important role.
Many activists, organizers, and everyday people who show up to conflict zones don’t pay attention to equipment or skills. Most people dress in cotton t-shirts, jeans, impractical shoes, and so on. They are not prepared to take serious action, or to be confronted with serious police and vigilante violence, and instead treat protesting and resistance as a social activity.
In some circumstances, this is ok. Many protests and actions are most effective as family-friendly activities that do not involve direct confrontation. But even activities like this increasingly need protection from violent police and vigilantes. And increasingly, more serious action is required to dismantle the power base of the ruling class.
Serious resisters and revolutionaries cannot afford to be lax.
Police, military, and private security forces tend to be highly prepared compared to resistance movements. They wear specialized boots and equipment belts with radios, handcuffs, pepper spray, flashlights, and handguns. They wear gloves, high-performance clothing, and body armor. Most have face protection or at least sunglasses, and sometimes they may have shields as well. They are coordinated and ready to move and react in any direction.
When an individual member of the resistance, or better yet, a trained and organized team, has skills and the equipment, a whole range of new possibilities opens up. We gain freedom of action.
Don’t underestimate the importance of good quality gear. It can allow you to function effectively in a range of situations. We recommend that individuals purchase and maintain their own equipment for a variety of different scenarios. Here are a number of considerations while considering gear.
General Gear
Any mission will require a general set of basic equipment, such as appropriate footwear, clothing, backpack, food and water for the day, etc. You will also need to ensure effective communication with your fellow activists.
Mission Specific Equipment
Specific missions will require specific gear. For example, you may need materials to build a blockade such as a shovel, saw, drill and screws, etc.. To drop a banner, you may need rope, carabiners and a harness; to breach a barrier—bolt cutters, hacksaw; observe or record from afar, binoculars, camera, etc. To protect an individual or a location you may need self-defense weapons. When facing police violence, you may need helmet, goggles, etc. You need to select your gear based on the situation.
How to Select Gear
Cost: Select gear based on a priority list of critical and mission essential gear first.
Availability: You may want it but it isn’t available, for whatever reason. Determine good substitutions.
Quality: Much of the gear should be excellent quality because your life or liberty may depend on it. Some gear isn’t as crucial. It depends on the specific situation. Set standards for what you need in your gear before buying.
Durability: The gear will be used under the worst conditions so don’t expect cheap dollar store gear to hold up under field conditions.
Multi-purpose: Finding gear that can be used for more than one task increases its value.
Size and Weight Consideration (SAWC): Sometimes good gear is large, bulky, and heavy and impedes mobility. Look for gear that is as compact, light but still functional for the tasks.
Camouflage pattern: Bright shiny items attract the eye and can give you away. Determine the best camouflage pattern for the area of operation. For urban operations choose dull colors instead of camo.
Waterproof: It will rain in the field so gear needs ideally to be water proof.
Shockproof: It will be dropped, kicked, sat on, thrown across the room in frustration or at a threat. It still needs to function after its abuse.
Simplicity: High-tech gear and moving parts will break. Select gear that is simple and robust.
Best achieves the mission: The main purpose of the gear is to assist in successful completion of missions (actions).
Ergonomic: the gear should be both efficient and comfortable. This extends the time frame for use in work. An uncomfortable or inefficient piece of gear will wear down the activist earlier making work harder.
It is important to note that the best gear isn’t always the most expensive, coolest looking, widest advertised or what some other person or group is using. Do buy/access equipment that suits you. So, for instance if you are susceptible to cold or dislike being too warm, figure that in. Do seek the advice of an experienced freedom fighter/activist that has a good level of experience and knowledge in the use and procurement of gear for specific kinds of operations and missions.
The Importance of Training
Once a training plan is developed and the gear is obtained the activist needs to train to standard on the skills and with the gear obtained in order to properly fit, modify, personalize and familiarize with that gear.
When all the gear procurement and initial training is complete a series of exercises, based on all the different operations and likely missions for each, should be conducted. This provides an opportunity for testing to ‘standard’ and evaluating all the common and mission essential tasks to determine if the activists are operationally ready.
Basic Gear List
This is a rough outline of the supplies you can consider carrying for a direct action. This list should be tailored to your specific location, mission, skills, team and environment.
Backpack: comfortable, includes a waist belt for distributing loads, carries weight well, allows you to stay balanced. It should be waterproof, or include a plastic bag to hold things that need to stay dry. Different packs will be needed for different missions. Some missions are best executed with no pack at all. Others will require a day pack with capacity for 20-40L of equipment. Longer missions may require larger packs.
Footwear: sturdy, comfortable shoes suitable for off-trail walking and jogging. Waterproof depending on season. You want sturdy shoes, but the heavier your shoes the faster you will fatigue.
More skill = less gear. This is a case where the stronger your ankles are, the lighter-weight shoes you can wear. However, the rougher the terrain, the more sturdy shoe will be required.
Clothing: must be durable, enable range of movement and be suitable for the climate/weather. Recommend long pants and long sleeves.
Consider everyone at an action wearing the same color of clothing to make it difficult for police to ID individuals.
Consider wearing waterproof layers, insulation layers and whether the clothing sufficient for the evening? What if you get wet? What if it gets windy? What if a storm blows in? Always pack extra socks.
Sunglasses: for eye protection, and to prevent ID via video or pictures. Full headmask/facemask to prevent ID via video or pictures.
A watch.
Bandana: good for multiple uses.
Pocketknife / Multitool / self-defense weapon / Cutting/digging tools: depending on the situation.
Food and water: bring extra, you never know how long an action will last. Will you be ok overnight if you have to miss dinner?
Notebook, pens, map and compass: small button compass for urban.
Binoculars, still and video camera.
Cell phone: leave your personal cell phone at home when scouting, or turn it off and remove battery or place inside a faraday bag before moving to the vicinity of your target location.
Small first aid kit: match to your training.
Flashlight or headlamp: take extra batteries
Cash: don’t use credit/debit cards or mobile payments when scouting or at an action.
Lighter: always good for cold emergencies to be able to start a fire.
Sleeping bag/pad/tent/tarp/bivy for wet weather and a survival kit.
A final word:
Sleep: daily training and specific actions will feel easier with a rested mind and body. Do not underestimate the importance of good quality sleep. Lack of or poor quality sleep impacts on your physical well being. Good quality sleep helps balance your emotional well being, sharpens your reactions and enables your problem solving skills to be at their best.
“Revolution is the sound of your heart still beating. And as long as it is, you have work to do. Do it. Without apology. Do it. Bravely and nobly. Do it. Exist, insist and by all means, resist.”
— Dominique Christina
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZrAYxWPN6c
Featured image: The Day Miami Burned, by Mike Shaheen. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic.
The United States is built on a foundation of slavery and indigenous land theft. Racism is deep in the bones of this country. Where there is oppression, there is resistance: the ongoing Minneapolis rebellion against the white supremacist state and police murder has spilled out across the U.S. Deep Green Resistance stands in solidarity with principled resistance by any means necessary.
George Floyd’s Murder: An Act Of White Supremacy
By Jocelyn Crawley
One of the first things that came to my mind when I learned of George Floyd’s ruthless murder was a social theory, typically used to analyze the ideology that undergirds patriarchy: the thought of domination.
According to radical feminists such as Monique Wittig, the thought of domination involves the idea that the ruling class produces the ruling ideas.
These ideas come to support the ruling class’s dominance over all of the other members of society. Within this schema, the thought of domination entails assent to the ruling class (men) imposing limiting ideas on the servant class (women). One of these ideas is the notion that there are two categorically different sexes and that these distinctions entail sociological consequences.
One of the sociological consequences is the naturalization of the division of labor in the family, with this belief functioning as a catalyst for the cult of domesticity and male dominance of the public sphere.
As made plain by this brief summary, the thought of domination ensures that those in power (men) keep those who lack it (women) in a position of subservience and slavishness. Within this type of societal schema, women are vulnerable to and subjected to diverse forms of dehumanization, some of which include rape, domestic violence, pornography, and prostitution.
Dominance and dehumanization:
In addition to functioning as an accurate analysis of how patriarchy works, I believe the thought of domination is directly pertinent to the white supremacist act we witnessed when white police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck for seven minutes while he was lying face down on the road. The video footage of the incident shows Floyd groaning and repeatedly saying “I can’t breathe.” After moaning while lying motionless near the foot of the squad car and being transported into an ambulatory vehicle, Floyd died. The only sense that I can make of this inhumane behavior is that the perpetrators have adopted the dominant society’s values of venerating domination as a desirable way to exist in the world because it enables one to become the abuser rather than the victim of abuse. Within a world predicated on a thought of domination in which whites are the ruling class and can therefore impose their rules on all other racial groups, the abuse they subject black people to frequently goes unquestioned and unpunished.
Lack of consequences:
In recognition of the fact that being a member of a ruling class oftentimes precludes one from experiencing repercussions under the law, the outcomes of George Floyd’s murder should be carefully considered if we are to truly understand how white supremacy works. All four officers involved in the event were terminated. Yet the question that persists in the minds of many protestors is: “Why wasn’t Chauvin arrested?” This was the same question that I came to ask myself after I learned that Gregory McMichael, his son Travis McMichael, and William Bryan pursued Ahmaud Arbery in a truck while he was running through the neighborhood. Many are familiar with the footage displaying Ahmaud Arbery stumbling to the ground after being shot while Travis McMichael stood by with a shotgun.
Many are familiar with the horror and fear this murder generated in the black community as we realized, once again, men of color are subject to being shot by the police and arrogant white men within local communities. Many are familiar with the stories of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice. What many of us are not necessarily familiar with is the logic that makes this heinous, inhumane behavior acceptable. This is why I propose that members of radical communities engage the thought of domination as the ideology that undergirds white supremacy.
It is clear that the primary system of thought that fuels and justifies the type of incomprehensible violence, we see as a product of white supremacy, is the thought of domination.
Domination is defined as the exercise of control or influence over someone or something, or the state of being so controlled. In a contemporary world whose zeitgeist is guided by white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy, domination is and must be an integral component of the cultures in which people are immersed.
Principles of mutuality, reciprocity, and cooperation may periodically flourish or temporarily gain traction in people’s minds and actions. However, making the regimes of white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy work requires that individuals recognize and respond to the realities created by those regimes. The reality that the regimes require is that an elite few exert extreme power over the masses, and that the masses respond to their own oppression by amassing as much agency and authority to themselves as possible while they grapple with the dehumanization and self-alienation engendered by the systems of oppression as distinct entities and a composite whole.
As one distinct component of the contemporary regime, white supremacy is predicated on the belief that white people are superior to those of all other races, especially blacks.
Based on this false notion of superiority, whites come to believe (whether consciously or unconsciously) that they have a right to dominate society. When I read about horrific stories such as those of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd, I am convinced that the thought of domination is operative. I have no other explanation that would help me understand why a man would place his knee on another living, breathing human until he was no longer living and breathing. I have no other explanation that would help me understand why one individual would continue holding his knee on another living, breathing human as he begs for his life. When I learn that one white man holds his knee on a black man’s neck and continues doing so despite the latter repeatedly saying “I can’t breathe,” I am convinced the former has unequivocally embraced the logic of domination. In a world marked by this perverse logic, the murder of a black man is acceptable because whites are superior and any threat to their own safety-whether real or imagined-is more important than black life.
In recognizing the reality of white supremacy and the logic of domination that suffuses and energizes it, individuals who find injustice intolerable must begin to revisit whether the strategies of resistance that have been conceptualized and implemented at this point are working.
If they aren’t, we need to refocus our energies. At this point, I am seeing a wide range of social media campaigns as a strategy of resistance. I have also seen footage of a street protest. Recently, I became aware that several demonstrators gained access to a police precinct in Minneapolis and set some sections of it on fire. There are also now reports of vandalism, arson, and looting. While I do not doubt the importance and efficacy of the levels and extent of resistance seen thus far, I also see that white supremacy-manifested through police brutality-remains resilient in the face of resistance. For these reasons, I have two suggestions for the resistance movements that are unfolding strategically or organically.
First, the agitation against the state must increase. I noted that a tent has been placed outside the home of the attorney handling George Floyd’s case (Mike Freeman) and several protestors claim that they aren’t going anywhere until Freeman prosecutes and charges the officers involved. I think more space needs to be occupied so that state representatives become aware that protestors are not retreating into their private worlds while the public realm remains a sphere dominated by white supremacist ideologies and praxis.
Second, individuals across the country and world who oppose this state violence should join forces and make the resistance movement a more tight-knit process. I am aware that NYC-based Black lives Matter activists are heading to Minneapolis to protest the murder. This is the type of solidarity that we need to see in order to ensure that the authority and agency that results from mass resistance engenders a profound shift in cultural consciousness and state activity.
As always, we who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.
Jocelyn Crawley is a radical feminist who resides in Atlanta, Georgia. Her intense antagonism towards all forms of social injustice-including white supremacy-grows with each passing day. Her primary goal for 2020 is to connect with other radicals for the purpose of building community and organizing against oppression.
