Anthropologist Stanley Diamond once wrote that “Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home.” Empires and the elites that control them have, as Diamond notes, been repressing their opposition for thousands of years. At this point, they have turned suppression and violence into an art form. From blacklisting to blackmail, from false lawsuits to frame-ups, from jail to torture and murder, their methods are sometimes subtle, sometimes direct, but almost always effective.
In his book on U.S. government repression of communist, black power, feminist, and indigenous movements during the 1960’s and 70’s, Nelson Blackstock writes that “The total picture [revealed by declassified COINTELPRO documents] is of cool, calculating technicians, not crazed paranoids, going about the business of secretly combating people who are challenging the rule of the rich.” He concludes: “That’s the FBI’s job.”
History is littered with the corpses of those who spoke truth to power, organized, and fought back, and who proved themselves too dangerous to be allowed to live. But as Steinbeck reminded us, there is a “little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.” The struggle for justice is bigger than can be covered up by one corpse, or a thousand, or a million.
When Che Guevara was on the firing line in Bolivia, his last words were: “Shoot, coward. You’re only going to kill a man.” Fred Hampton, murdered by the police as he lay drugged in his bed at age 21, once said “You can kill a revolutionary, but you can’t kill a revolution.” And the Burkinabé revolutionary Thomas Sankara, on the eve of his betrayal and murder, said “While revolutionaries as individuals can be murdered, you can’t kill an idea.”
Those in power—the overlords of our neo-colonial world order—use violence because it is dreadfully effective. Their drone strikes are effective. Their special operations raids are effective. Their hundreds of billions of dollars spent on weapons of war are well spent. That is why they do it.
Thomas Friedman, that prototypical liberal justifier of imperialism once wrote in a rare moment of clarity, “The hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist. McDonalds cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglass [an arms manufacturer that has now merged with Boeing]. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps.” He is right. Violence maintains modern industrial society.
Revolutionaries generally do not live long lives. Perhaps this is melodramatic to say. But then again, I have received death threats, and expect to receive more. The threats do not scare me. At least not yet. They will not silence me—but a bullet would. And that is well known to those behind the “hidden fist” of the market.
The real danger to revolutionaries is not simply repressive violence itself, but maybe even more so the fear that it creates.
In 1990, members of the Mohawk Nation began a protest camp among a pine forest at Kanesatake, west of Montreal, to oppose a “development” project that would have destroyed the forest. They began carrying weapons after racist vigilantes targeted them, and a standoff began when police were sent to evict them. After a firefight in which one policeman was killed, the Canadian military was called in, beginning a 78-day armed confrontation between 3700 professional soldiers and a small contingent of Mohawk warriors and families.
One Mohawk warrior explained the effect that their total commitment to land, nation, and mission had on the Canadian soldiers they faced. “They aren’t scared of us because we’re willing to take up arms,” he said, speaking to a journalist. “They’re scared of us because we’re willing to die.”
Courage is not the lack of fear, but the ability to continue despite fear. When we master our fears in this way, we have taken a vital first step towards defeating the repression. For every act of repression, our acts of defiance must be more fierce, more lasting, more total.
Violence is all around us. It is written on the tags of our clothing reading “Bangladesh” and “Vietnam.” It is engraved by child slaves and captured by “suicide nets” on the circuit boards of our cell phones and televisions. It is bone-deep in the stolen indigenous land we walk upon. It gushes forth into our gas tanks alongside ghosts of Ogoni and Falluja stillbirths.
Someday, that violence will catch up with all of us. The end may come fast or slow. A 9mm police bullet. The machete of an illegal logger. The slow death in a hospital bed. We are immersed in the violence every day, our lungs the shellfish of the atmospheric ocean, filtering out every carcinogen and toxin they can grasp and sequestering them deep in our soft bodies.
The question that faces each of us is “what will you do with your one wild and precious life?” Like Mary Oliver, I’ve spent my fair share of hours reclining in meadows, watching grasshoppers crawl up long stems of grass—and I plan to continue this pastime until I die. Living life, experiencing ecstasy and grief and the full range of human feelings, is our birthright as living beings. But an ethical life today requires more.
When I die, I do not intend to have lived for nothing. As Lierre Keith has written, life is a combat discipline. Every day on this planet could be my last, and in the event of my demise, there will be more work to be done. I hope those who survive will bury my body in a beautiful place, mourn, laugh and tell stories of me, and remember that I lived for a belief and died for a principle. Then, I hope they will straighten up, take a deep breath, and get back to work.
Max Wilbert is an organizer, writer, and wilderness guide who grew up in Seattle’s post-WTO anti-globalization and undoing racism movement. His essays have been published in Earth Island Journal, Counterpunch, and elsewhere. His first book, an essay collection called We Choose to Speak, was released in 2018.
From Zoos to Concentration Camps, A Culture of Cages
From chattel slavery to modern immigrant concentration camps to zoos and aquariums to private prisons, we live in a culture of cages. Understanding this system, and the ideology behind it, is essential to fighting it.
This statement on zoos and aquariums comes from the Deep Green Bush School. The Deep Green Bush School is a participatory, technology-free, evolutionary and revolutionary school in Aotearoa (New Zealand) designed to raise intelligent, healthy, mature, responsible young adults who can think for themselves, meet their needs, live a meaningful life and challenge the current system in order to bring about a healthy world.
Statement on Zoos and Aquariums
The Deep Green Bush-School curriculum is opposed to zoos and aquariums* and therefore the school will not take students to zoos or aquariums as a field trip. The DGBS recommends that parents also not to take children to the zoo. This document highlights how zoos and aquariums contradict and undermine efforts towards a healthy culture and a healthy world.
First of all, we can ask ourselves, would WE want to be kidnapped from our family, taken far away and locked up for our entire lives, to be stared at, photographed, harrassed and teased daily by thousands of people? Of course not. Yet that is what we subject animals to in a zoo or aquarium.
The fact is, a zoo is a miserable place for animals. They are not in their natural habitat, they are stressed by humans visitors and stressed by crowding. They never have enough of their own species to interact with – and more important, they do not have their families or herds or packs that they would normally be living with. All animals are social, even animals we normally don’t think of as social (Bradshaw 2017) – even trees and plants are social. (Fleming 2014, Simard 2016, Wohlleben 2015) Yet in zoos they are all locked up, often alone.
One of the most painful, abusive and torturous aspects of zoos is that the animals are ripped apart from their families and friends, or prevented from forming healthy social relations as they naturally would do. In Auckland, there are two completely unrelated Asian elephants, whereas elephants normally live in matriarchal herds based on family relations. Orcas and dolphins live in pods. Wolves live in packs. And so on. Denied these natural social arrangements, the animals are stressed, painfully alone and depressed. Many zoo animals are given anti-depressant medication. (Smith 2014) It’s like living in prison, or worse, in solitary confinement, or a concentration camp. It’s no wonder why captive animals regularly try to escape or fight back or kill their oppressors. (Hribal 2011)
On top of that, no zoo can possibly provide the natural amount of space an animal would have in thewild. Tigers and lions have around 18,000 times less space in zoos than they would in the wild. Polar bears have one million times less space. (CAPS 2006) Orcas and dolphins travel the ocean. Being in a zoo is torture for them.
The result of the torturous environment of a zoo is mental illness and trauma. Most animals in zoos suffer from anxiety and mental illness and show associated behavioural problems, such as pacing, rocking, circling, shuffling, self-mutilation, obsessive grooming, and hyper-aggression (Just like kids stuck in a classroom.)
One of the results of the torturous zoo environment is that animals don’t live as long in zoos. Just as human diseases increased once humans started living crowded together in cities, animals forced to live crowded with other animals in zoos are exposed to a wider range of diseases than in the wild. According to a report by the Captive Animal Protection Society (now called Freedom for Animals), African elephants in the wild live more than three times as long as those kept in zoos. 40% of lion cubs in zoos die before one month of age. (CAPS 2006)
Other highlights of the CAPS report include:
Zoos regularly kill “surplus” animals. Between 7,500 and 200,000 animals in European zoos are considered ‘surplus’ at any one time. The European Association of Zoos and Aquaria (EAZA) said in 2007 that zoos were encouraged to kill the animals they don’t want, including tigers.
Most zoo animals – 70-80% of them – are still taken from the wild. Often the mothers are killed first and then the young are taken.
The fact is, what you see in a zoo is not actually the animal. An animal can only be understood in the wild. An elephant in the zoo is not an elephant, unless it is surrounded by its matriarchal herd, and it is not an elephant unless it is living in the place it evolved to live, the place it is rooted to, with all the trees, other animals and climate that shape how they live and who they are. An orca is only an orca with its pod in the ocean, swimming with all the other creatures of the oceans. A wolf is only a wolf in the wild where it has always been, with all the other animals it would interact with,such as caribou and deer.
Furthermore, all the different aspects of an animal’s intellligence, including social and emotional intelligence, as well as their entire culture, only develops in the wild, surrounded by the other members of its familial group from which young animals learn how to live, to all the other animals, plants, trees, rocks, weather, and countless other stimuli, to which the animal is constantly responding to. Thus, defense of zoos reflects a total ignorance of and disregard for ecology – that everything is connected, and an animal in a zoo is not the animal.
Zoos objectify animals. Zoos make animals a thing to be used for our entertainment or for scientific research, not as equals, not recognising they have their own desires for how to live their lives. The only way to treat animals in such a way is to think of them as objects – unthinking, unfeeling, undeserving of respect.
Zoos reflect humanism and human superiority, which is a belief inherent in civilisations, when humans live disconnected from the wild. It is a source of all destruction of the wild. Humanism/human superiority refers to the common belief that humans are superior to all other life forms, and thus we are able to do whatever we wish, with any other creature. (Jensen 2016) In fact, zoos only arose with civilisation, the first zoos being created 5000 years ago. (Jensen 2007) It is this kind of thinking which is why most wildlife is now gone, and 96% of all mammals, by weight, are humans and their livestock. (Carrington 2018) Half of all wildlife has been wiped out in just the last 40 years. (WWF 2018) Zoos are a reflection of human idiocy and cruelty.
Zoos claim to aid the cause of conservation. This is part of their PR and greenwashing. Most zoos do not engage in conservation, many animals will not breed in captivity, genetic diversity is unnaturally low, and most animals that are bred in zoos are kept in zoos or other forms of captivity. (CAPS 2006, Jamieson 1985) Furthermore, the whole notion of “conservation” comes from the humanist/human superiority ideology, in which humans determine that some areas will be for humans only – i.e., cities, which are effectively death zones, from which all of nature has been eradicated – and some areas will be for wildlife and “wilderness”. Conservation is the belief that little pockets of wildlife can thrive while surrounded by ever-growing death zones of human cities, spewing toxic waste, radioactive waste and endless rubbish. The belief in conservation is well-meaning but ultimately a reflection of total ecological ignorance. (Livingston 1991)
Many zoos portray themselves as helping to “educate” youth and the public. It’s true, they do. Zoos do an excellent job teaching:
Zoos teach that humans are superior to the rest of nature.
Zoos teach that only humans do not like to be locked up (and even then, some humans still lock up millions of other humans – in prisons and classrooms, for example).
Zoos teach that animals have no thoughts or feelings.
Zoos teach that humans can do whatever they want to nature.
Zoos teach that nature exists for our entertainment.
Zoos teach that our current way of life is acceptable.
Zoos teach our children to be cruel.
Let us remember that for more than two million years, humans did not create zoos and did not view themselves as superior to other creatures. Humans evolved living among wild animals, treating them with respect and viewing them as kin. Humans regarded all of the natural world as sacred. As Luther Standing Bear of the Lakota explained,
Kinship with all the creatures of the earth, sky and water was a real and active principle. For the animal and bird world there existed a brotherly feeling that kept the Lakota safe among them and so close did some of the Lakotas come to their feathered and furred friends that in true brotherhood they spoke a common tongue.
The old Lakota was wise. He knew that man’s heart away from nature becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans too. So he kept his youth close to its softening influence. (McLuhan1971)
This reflects a fundamental element of the Deep Green Bush-School curriculum. In the end, the best way to help animals is to leave them alone and to make every effort to stop this civilisation from destroying all of life on the planet.
What to do instead of going to the zoo:
Allow your child freedom in any natural setting, to explore the trees, plants, bugs, birds and other animals
Take your child camping and hiking
Role model respect for the natural world. For example:
only taking dead wood
thanking trees, plants, and animals when you use or eat them
talking to the trees and animals
Give kids books about nature and that contain photos of animals
Read to them from books about wildlife and nature
Explain to them why you’re not going to the zoo
* The focus here is on zoos and aquariums. But the points made also apply to other forms of abusive animal captivity such as circuses, rodeos, factory farms and any form of animal experimentation and vivisection.
References
Bradshaw, G.A. (2017). Carnivore Minds: Who These Fearsome Animals Really Are. Yale University Press.
CAPS (Captive Animals’ Protection Society). (2006). “Sad Eyes and Empty Lives: The Reality of Zoos”. Retrieved from https://mafiadoc.com/sad-eyes-amp-empty-lives_59ae88d41723ddbec5e2c4a2.html
Carrington, Damian. (2018, May 21). “Humans just 0.01% of all life but have destroyed 83% of wild mammals – study”. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/21/human-race-just-001-of-all-life-but-has-destroyed-over-80-of-wild-mammals-study
Dasgupta, Shreya. (2015, September 9). “Many Animals Can Become Mentally Ill.” BBC Earth. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150909-many-animals-can-become-mentally-ill
Fleming, Nic. (2014, November 11). “Plants Talk to Each Other Using an Internet of Fungus”. BBC Earth. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141111-plants-have-a-hidden-internet
Hribal, Jason. (2011). Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden History of Animal Resistance. AK Press.
Jamieson, Dale. (1985). “Against Zoos”. Retrieved from http://www.animal-rights-library.com/texts-m/jamieson01.htm
Jensen, Derrick. (2016). The Myth of Human Supremacy. Seven Stories Press.
Jensen, Derrick. (2007). Thought to Exist in the Wild: Awakening from the Nightmare of Zoos. Novoice Unheard.
Livingston, John. (1991). The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation. McClelland and Stewart.
McLuhan, T.C., editor. (1971). Touch the Earth: A Self Portrait of Indian Existence. Simon and Schuster.
Sample, Ian. (2008, Dec 12). “Stress and Lack of Exercise are Killing Elephants, Zoos Warned”. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/science/2008/dec/12/elephants-animal-welfare
Simard, Suzanne. (2016, June). “How Trees Talk to Each Other”. Ted Talks. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/suzanne_simard_how_trees_talk_to_each_other
Smith, Laura. (2014, June 20). “Zoos Drive Animals Crazy”. Slate. Retrieved from https://slate.com/technology/2014/06/animal-madness-zoochosis-stereotypic-behavior-and-problems-with-zoos.html
Wohlleben, Peter. (2015). The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate. Greystone Books.
WWF. (2018). Living Planet Report – 2018: Aiming Higher. Grooten, M. and Almond, R.E.A.(Eds). Retrieved at http://wwf.panda.org/knowledge_hub/all_publications/living_planet_report_2018/
“Zoos Neither Educate Nor Empower Children”. Freedom for Animals. Retrieved from https://www.freedomforanimals.org.uk/news/zoos-neither-educate-nor-empower-children
February 7th updates from Unist’ot’enCamp and Gidimten:
The RCMP raid continues today as militarized, heavily-armed police backed up with K9 dogs, heavy equipment, and helicopters move further into Unist’ot’en territory. As we write this federal police are currently raiding the Gidimt’en checkpoint at 44km.
6:15pm: We are hearing that 30 RCMP are surrounding #Wetsuwetsuweten Hereditary Chiefs and supporters at 27KM who have blocked the road. Among them, Dini’ze Smogelgem, Dini’ze Dsta’hyl, and Tsake’ze Sleydo’.
Everything is quiet at @Gidimten checkpoint. Those in the cabin no longer see or hear police. It seems like the majority of the force has headed out and at least 15 RCMP have headed to 27km. The tower is still standing. The road is still blocked.
Denzel Sutherland-Wilson from the Gitxsan nation was arrested and removed from @Gidimten tower earlier today. Only those in Chief Woos’ cabin remain. The Gitxsan are the oldest allies of the #Wetsuweten.
3:45pm:#RCMP are now blocked in on the forest service road at the 27km mark after people parked several vehicles sideways — preventing vehicles from passing (this is the route out to Houston) #Wetsuweten. RCMP visibly frustrated at this additional barrier.
3:15pm:Anne Spice has been taken down from the tower. One person remains on top of the tower. Legal observers, @GitxsanJt, and a documentary filmmaker are still on site but far away.
2:30pm:RCMP are now using ladders to move up the wooden tower overlooking the territory.RCMP have said that the people on the tower are already under arrest and they are just trying to get them down.RCMP won’t specify what the charges are or why the people in the tower are under arrest.
2pm: The US-Canada border crossing in Mohawk territory was shut down by protests.
1:55pm: Eve Saint, the daughter of@Gidimten Chief Woos, has been arrested along with one other. They were removed from the bus blocking the road. They have been walked out by RCMP. They are not hurt.
12:55pm: The metal gate at @Gidimten is down. Legal observer is trying to get RCMP badge numbers and police names but RCMP won’t respond. Some RCMP are wearing masks to cover their faces.
12:45pm: RCMP are trying to limit the visibility of the tactical team to media by surrounding a bus containing media. RCMP “have one person stationed on the other side of the flipped van. They’re the one doing the lethal overwatch. They’ve got a gun pointed at us, underneath the warrior flag,” we’ve just heard.
12:30pm: Those at @Gidimten just said the teams dropped off by the helicopters included K9 units – so they are surrounded by snipers and police dogs.
6:30 am: RCMP militarized convoy engines are running and lining up in Houston now. Their extremist force is hardly a peaceful action against our unarmed, peaceful protestors. Shame!!! – Gidimt’en Checkpoint
February 6th updates:
6:45 pm: All six people who were arrested in Gidimt’en territories this morning are being released with no charges. Three are out already.
4:44pm: Chiefs & supporters blocked the road at 27km, forcing RCMP to let Wet’suwet’en chiefs in. Clearing work has stopped at 44km. Dsta’hyl (Likht’samisyu) said the #Wetsuweten will enforce the eviction of Coastal Gaslink, with any means at their disposal.
4pm: Solidarity actions are taking place across Canada. A blockade has shut down the Port of Vancouver. Various politicians offices have been occupied. Indigenous youth are locked down at the B.C. Legislature.
2:40pm Pacific Time: People at the Gidimt’en Access Point (44 km; the site of the armed police raid in January 2019) are now confirming that they see heavy machinery approaching.
Militarized, heavily armed police units known as “tactical enforcement teams,” supported by K9 dogs and infrared camera-equipped drones, have this morning raided the Wet’suwet’en First Nation territory in central British Columbia, Canada to remove indigenous occupation aimed at preventing construction of a fracked-gas pipeline.
Between four and six people have been arrested at the blockade setup at 39KM on the Morice River Road, 27 km from the main Unist’ot’en Camp. Journalists on-site were threatened with arrest, prevented from photographing the events (including police smashing the window on a truck), and forcefully removed from the area. This is the second militarized raid on the peaceful indigenous resistance camp. The previous raid, in January 2019, was later revealed to have included “lethal overwatch”—authorization to shoot to kill. In both raids, police carried sniper and assault rifles.
The police raid Wet’suwet’en checkpoint shows they are acting as private contractors for the gas company, facilitating the plunder of stolen indigenous land and destruction of the planet for private profit.
Coastal GasLink/TC Energy is pushing through a 670-kilometer fracked gas pipeline that would carry fracked gas from Dawson Creek, B.C. to the coastal town of Kitimat, where LNG Canada’s processing plant would be located. LNG Canada is the single largest private investment in Canadian history.
Each clan within the Wet’suwet’en Nation has full jurisdiction under their law to control access to their territory. Under ‘Anuc niwh’it’en (Wet’suwet’en law) all five clans of the Wet’suwet’en have unanimously opposed all pipeline proposals and have not provided free, prior, and informed consent to Coastal Gaslink/ TransCanada to do work on Wet’suwet’en lands.
This is a developing story and we will share more information as it comes.
Call to Action — Blockade the Colonial Institutions
Indigenous youth in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en Nation are calling for organized, rolling occupations of MLA and MP offices, and of financial institutions tied to Coastal Gaslink pipeline corporation.
7:48 am: RCMP are transporting the 4 arrested supporters to Houston. BC. Everyone at 39KM was arrested except media. Media that were at 39km are being driven out in a police van.
7:22am: 36 vehicles, 1 ambulance and heavy machinery went up from 4 KM. At least 2 bulldozers and excavator.
6:59 am: We have reports RCMP have headed up from town in an approximately 20+ vehicle convoy. #Wetsuweten#WetsuwetenStrong
6:43am: We have reports that RCMP are now blocking the forest service road at 4KM.
6:22am: We have lost all communication with the Gidimt’en watch post at 39KM after RCMP smashed the window of the radio vehicle. It’s still pitch black out.
6am: We have just heard that RCMP denied access to a reporter headed out to the camps this morning. Media exclusion zone is in full effect.
5:56am – The person on radio at 39km reports RCMP have broken in the windows of their vehicle.
5:43am – We estimate more than a dozen cops on site, with six cops surrounding the person communicating updates over radio.
5:30am – We’re hearing reports from the front line that some RCMP had their guns out – not pointed at people – but guns in hand.
We’re told that even with more than a dozen vehicles out on the territory, the Houston community hall is still full of cops waiting to invade our lands.
5:05am – We’ve heard 13 RCMP vehicles headed up the road earlier this morning. Up to 4 arrests have been made now, and RCMP are taking down tents. Our understanding is these tents were NOT blocking the road and are not part of the injunction area.
4:55am – It’s not yet 5am – still totally dark out – and we’ve just heard RCMP made their first arrest at the #Wetsuweten monitoring post at 39KM. Cops are surrounding people there and beginning to clear the road to the Gidimt’en checkpoint.
Deep Green Resistance delegation to Unist’ot’en Camp – 2012
This excerpt from Chapter 4 of the book Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet was written by Lierre Keith. Click the link above to purchase the book or read online for free.This is part 4 of this chapter.
While the alternative culture “celebrates political disengagement,” what it attacks are conventions, morals, and boundaries. It comes down to a simple question: Are we after shock value or justice? Is the problem a constraining set of values or an oppressive set of material conditions? Remember that one of the cardinal points of liberalism is that reality is made up of values and ideas, not relationships of power and oppression. So not only is shock value an adolescent goal, it’s also a liberal one.
This program of attacking boundaries rather than injustice has had serious consequences on the left, and to the extent that this attack has won, on popular culture as a whole. When men decide to be outlaw rebels, from Bohemians to Hell’s Angels, one primary “freedom” they appropriate is women. The Marquis de Sade, who tortured women, girls, and boys—some of whom he kidnapped, some of whom he bought—was declared “the freest spirit that has yet existed” by Guillaume Apollinaire, the founder of the surrealist movement.63 Women’s physical and sexual boundaries are seen as just one more middle-class convention that men have a right to overcome on their way to freedom. Nowhere is this more apparent—and appalling—than in the way so many on the left have embraced pornography.
The triumph of the pornographers is a victory of power over justice, cruelty over empathy, and profits over human rights. I could make that statement about Walmart or McDonalds and progressives would eagerly agree. We all understand that Walmart destroys local economies, a relentless impoverishing of communities across the US that is now almost complete. It also depends on near-slave conditions for workers in China to produce the mountains of cheap crap that Walmart sells. And ultimately the endless growth model of capitalism is destroying the world. Nobody on the left claims that the cheap crap that Walmart produces equals freedom. Nobody defends Walmart by saying that the workers, American or Chinese, want to work there. Leftists understand that people do what they have to for survival, that any job is better than no job, and that minimum wage and no benefits are cause for a revolution, not a defense of those very conditions. Likewise McDonalds. No one defends what McDonalds does to animals, to the earth, to workers, to human health and human community by pointing out that the people standing over the boiling grease consented to sweat all day or that hog farmers voluntarily signed contracts that barely return a living. The issue does not turn on consent, but on the social impacts of injustice and hierarchy, on how corporations are essentially weapons of mass destruction. Focusing on the moment of individual choice will get us nowhere.
The problem is the material conditions that make going blind in a silicon chip factory in Taiwan the best option for some people. Those people are living beings. Leftists lay claim to human rights as our bedrock and our north star: we know that that Taiwanese woman is not different from us in any way that matters, and if going blind for pennies and no bathroom breaks was our best option, we would be in grim circumstances.
And the woman enduring two penises shoved up her anus? This is not an exaggeration or “focusing on the worst,” as feminists are often accused of doing. “Double-anal” is now standard fare in gonzo porn, the porn made possible by the Internet, the porn with no pretense of a plot, the porn that men overwhelmingly prefer. That woman, just like the woman assembling computers, is likely to suffer permanent physical damage. In fact, the average woman in gonzo porn can only last three months before her body gives out, so punishing are the required sex acts. Anyone with a conscience instead of a hard-on would know that just by looking. If you spend a few minutes looking at it—not masturbating to it, but actually looking at it—you may have to agree with Robert Jensen that pornography is “what the end of the world looks like.”
“By that I don’t mean that pornography is going to bring about the end of the world; I don’t have apocalyptic delusions. Nor do I mean that of all the social problems we face, pornography is the most threatening. Instead, I want to suggest that if we have the courage to look honestly at contemporary pornography, we get a glimpse—in a very visceral, powerful fashion—of the consequences of the oppressive systems in which we live. Pornography is what the end will look like if we don’t reverse the pathological course that we are on in this patriarchal, white-supremacist, predatory corporate-capitalist society. . . . Imagine a world in which empathy, compassion, and solidarity—the things that make decent human society possible—are finally and completely overwhelmed by a self-centered, emotionally detached pleasure-seeking. Imagine those values playing out in a society structured by multiple hierarchies in which a domination/subordination dynamic shapes most relationships and interaction. . . . [E]very year my sense of despair deepens over the direction in which pornography and our pornographic culture is heading. That despair is rooted not in the reality that lots of people can be cruel, or that some number of them knowingly take pleasure in that cruelty. Humans have always had to deal with that aspect of our psychology. But what happens when people can no longer see the cruelty, when the pleasure in cruelty has been so normalized that it is rendered invisible to so many? And what happens when for some considerable part of the male population of our society, that cruelty becomes a routine part of sexuality, defining the most intimate parts of our lives?” 64
All leftists need to do is connect the dots, the same way we do in every other instance of oppression. The material conditions that men as a class create (the word is patriarchy) mean that in the US battering is the most commonly committed violent crime: that’s men beating up women. Men rape one in three women and sexually abuse one in four girls before the age of fourteen. The number one perpetrator of childhood sexual abuse is called “Dad.” Andrea Dworkin, one of the bravest women of all time, understood that this was systematic, not personal. She saw that rape, battering, incest, prostitution, and reproductive exploitation all worked together to create a “barricade of sexual terrorism”65 inside which all women are forced to live. Our job as feminists and members of a culture of resistance is not to learn to eroticize those acts; our task is to bring that wall down.
In fact, the right and left together make a cozy little world that entombs women in conditions of subservience and violence. Critiquing male supremacist sexuality will bring charges of being a censor and a right-wing antifun prude. But seen from the perspective of women, the right and the left create a seamless hegemony.
Gail Dines writes, “When I critique McDonalds, no one calls me anti-food.”66 People understand that what is being critiqued is a set of unjust social relations—with economic, political, and ideological components—that create more of the same. McDonalds does not produce generic food. It manufactures an industrial capitalist product for profit. The pornographers are no different. The pornographers have built a $100 billion a year industry, selling not just sex as a commodity, which would be horrible enough for our collective humanity, but sexual cruelty.67 This is the deep heart of patriarchy, the place where leftists fear to tread: male supremacy takes acts of oppression and turns them into sex. Could there be a more powerful reward than orgasm?
And since it feels so visceral, such practices are defended (in the rare instance that a feminist is able to demand a defense) as “natural.” Even when wrapped in racism, many on the left refuse to see the oppression in pornography. Little Latina Sluts or Pimp My Black Teen provoke not outrage, but sexual pleasure for the men consuming such material. A sexuality based on eroticizing dehumanization, domination, and hierarchy will gravitate to other hierarchies, and find a wealth of material in racism. What it will never do is build an egalitarian world of care and respect, the world that the left claims to want.
On a global scale, the naked female body—too thin to bear live young and often too young as well—is for sale everywhere, as the defining image of the age, and as a brutal reality: women and girls are now the number one product for sale on the global black market. Indeed, there are entire countries balancing their budgets on the sale of women.68 Is slavery a human rights abuse or a sexual thrill? Of what use is a social change movement that can’t decide?
We need to stake our claim as the people who care about freedom, not the freedom to abuse, exploit, and dehumanize, but freedom from being demeaned and violated, and from a cultural celebration of that violation.
This is the moral bankruptcy of a culture built on violation and its underlying entitlement. It’s a slight variation on the Romantics, substituting sexual desire for emotion as the unmediated, natural, and privileged state. The sexual version is a direct inheritance of the Bohemians, who reveled in public displays of “transgression, excess, sexual outrage.” Much of this ethic can be traced back to the Marquis de Sade, torturer of women and children. Yet he has been claimed as inspiration and foundation by writers such as “Baudelaire, Flaubert, Swinburne, Lautréamont, Dostoevski, Cocteau, and Apollinaire” as well as Camus and Barthes.69 Wrote Camus, “Two centuries ahead of time . . . Sade extolled totalitarian societies in the name of unbridled freedom.”70 Sade also presents an early formulation of Nietzsche’s will to power. His ethic ultimately provides “the erotic roots of fascism.”71
Once more, it is time to choose. The warnings are out there, and it’s time to listen. College students have 40 percent less empathy than they did twenty years ago.72 If the left wants to mount a true resistance, a resistance against the power that breaks hearts and bones, rivers and species, it will have to hear—and, finally, know—this one brave sentence from poet Adrienne Rich: “Without tenderness, we are in hell.”73
—
The alternative culture of the ’60s offered a generalized revolt against structure, responsibility, and morals. Being a youth culture, and following out of the Bohemian and the Beatniks, this was predictable. But a rejection of all structure and responsibility ends ultimately in atomized individuals motivated only by self interests, which looks rather exactly like capitalism’s fabled Economic Man. And a flat out refusal of the concept of morality is the province of sociopaths. This is not a plan with a future.
Take the pull of the alternative culture across the left. Now add the ugliness and the authoritarianism of the right’s “family values.” It’s no surprise that the left has ceded all claim to morality. But it’s also a mistake. We have values, too. War is a moral issue. Poverty is a moral issue. Two hundred species driven extinct every day is a moral issue. Underneath every instance of injustice is a violation of what we know is right. Unrestricted personal license in a context that abandons morals to celebrate outrage will not inspire a movement for justice, nor will it build a culture worth living in. It will grant the powerful more entitlements—for instance, the rich will get richer, and the poor will be conceptually nonexistent, except as a resource. “If it feels good, do it” isn’t even the province of adolescence; it’s the morality of a toddler. For the entitled individual, in whatever version—Homo economicus, Homo bohemicus, or Homo sadeus—pleasure is reduced to cheap thrills, while the deepest human joys—intimacy, belonging, participation from community to cosmos—are impossible. This is because those joys depend on a realization that we need other people and other beings, ultimately a whole web of existence, all of whom deserve our protection and respect. In return we get rewards, rewards that can accrue into profound satisfaction: from the contented joy of communal well-being to the animal ecstasy of sex to the grace of participation in the mystery.
Currently, the right places the blame for the destruction of both family and community at the feet of liberalism. The real culprit, of course, is capitalism, especially the corporate and mass media versions. But as long as the left refuses to fight for our values as values—and to enact those values in our lives and our movements—the right will be partially correct. They will also have recruitment potential that we’re squandering: people know that civic life and basic social norms have degenerated.
It is a triumph for capitalism that the right is winning the US culture war by pinning this decay of family and community on the left. But the right is willing to take a moral stance, even though the man behind the curtain isn’t Sodom or Gomorrah, it’s corporate capitalism. Meanwhile the left might identify capitalism as the problem, but by and large refuses a moral stance.
The US is dominated by corporate rule. The Democrats and Republicans are really the two wings of the Capitalist Party. Neither is going to critique the masters. It is up to us, the people who hold human rights and our living planet dear above all things, to speak the truth. We need to rise above individualism and live in the knowledge that we are the only people who are going to defend what is good in human possibility against the destructive overlapping power-grab of capitalism, patriarchy, and industrialization.
Cottonwood trees shaded the little river, while the rising sun brightened the blue sky and lit up the expansive slopes of the Sonoran Desert, dotted with prickly pear, saguaro, and cholla cactuses. I was in Aravaipa Canyon, a gorge in the Pinal Mountains of Southern Arizona, where I would prepare thirteen people to be in ceremonial conversation with the land for three days and nights. Aravaipa is an Apache name which means “laughing waters,” and the name fits. The river was brisk and clear as it churned its way around boulders and rippled over gravel bars in a playful, bubbling chorus.
On that first morning in the desert, I’d awakened with a dream.
I see a woman about to be raped. She’s yanked out of the driver’s seat of her car by a man who holds her captive while undoing his pants. A male friend turns to me and asks if he should try to stop it.
“Yes, absolutely!” I respond in haste.
My friend picks up a club that resembles a baseball bat and moves toward the rapist. My stomach knots; what if I’ve just sent my friend into a dangerous situation and he gets killed or hurt? I decide to join him and approach the rapist from behind, while my friend approaches him from the side. As we get closer, the rapist stops, and I feel surprised when he turns around with his hands held up in surrender.
Although our dominant culture marginalizes dreams, we must learn to pay attention to the wisdom and direction they offer. The Tz’utujil Mayan culture elected officials based on the number of villagers who dreamed of that person occupying the position.[1] The dreamwork of the Iroquois preceded the dreamwork of Freud and Jung. The Iroquois knew dreams were sacred and that to ignore them was to invite disaster;[2] they understood that the human soul makes its desires known through dreams.[3] Founder of Dream Tending, Stephen Aizenstat says dreams arise from the “World Dream;” they offer us a glimpse of the desires of the world so we may “act in the world, on behalf of the world…in Archetypal Activism.”[4] When the wisdom of our dreams guides our direct action, we’re able to bring together our visionary and revolutionary natures in a radical dreamwork. With the earth dreaming through us, we’re guided to take the actions that matter most.
Dreams hold a multiplicity of meaning and, like trees, rivers, and birds, each dream element has intelligence; it usually understands more than our waking ego. I guide others to recount their dreams in present tense, inviting them to be in the dream so its visceral impact has an opportunity to arise or burst forth.
On that morning in Aravaipa Canyon, I closed my eyes, returning to the dream about the rape. What was it asking me to experience and how could I steep myself in its mystery? The edgiest part of my dream was asking my friend to risk his life. I felt afraid that he could get hurt or die. I feel similarly when I send questers on a 3-day solo fast. Although I’ve taught them ways to be safe in the backcountry, anything could happen.
On a vision quest, each quester is invited to let go of their identity and listen for a deeper call—in this way, we discover who we really are and how we may serve the world. Questers are invited to undertake a psycho-spiritual death, an initiatory dismemberment, which can lead to a mature adulthood. Such a journey is inherently risky, even beyond the solo days.
Founder of Animas Valley Institute, Bill Plotkin writes that the great crises of our time stem from breakdowns in natural human development. He says that healthy, mature cultures have always emerged from nature: “from the depths of our individual and collective psyches, from the Earth’s imagination acting through us, from the mythic realm of dreams or the Dreamtime, from Soul, from the Soul of the world, from Mystery.” We can’t think our way into maturity; we cultivate our wholeness through allowing the natural world and our dreams to guide us.[5] Yet we can only become whole within a healthy Earth community. So what about the clear-cut forests, drained wetlands, and plowed prairies?
As mountains are mined, rivers are dammed and poisoned, and hundreds more species become extinct each day, my heart breaks at our human failure to protect our nonhuman relatives on whom we depend; they’re dying because they depend on us too. As the oceans fill with plastic, the ice melts, and greenhouse gas emissions grow higher each year, I feel the rape of the Earth alive in my body and psyche. Perhaps this dream invites me beyond myself. What if this dream is asking me to seek assistance in stopping the rape of Earth?
Rape is Acceptable
I had a lot of dreams about rape in my early thirties; it felt unstoppable. How surprising that this dream ends with my friend and I stopping the rape.
I remember guiding women survivors of violence on Women of Courage Outward Bound courses in my twenties. We’d listen to the women’s stories, the other two female guides and I, and then one night, to our surprise, we shared our stories in hushed voices, confessing that we too were survivors. The line between heroine and victim, wilderness guide and survivor, blurred.
It’s hard to perceive rape when you’re raised in a culture where rape is acceptable. As the most under-reported crime, rape[6] is notoriously under-investigated, largely unpunished, and rarely spoken about; less than one percent of rapes end in a felony conviction. Even then, a perpetrator does not often receive jail time, especially if they knew their victim; this sends a message that it’s acceptable to rape someone you know.[7] In eight out of ten cases of rape, the victim knew the person who sexually assaulted them,[8] and ninety-three percent of perpetrators of child sexual abuse are known to the victim.[9] Our culture barely acknowledges rape happens and nearly condones it. The rape of women, the abuse of children, and the destruction of land is our norm.[10]
Sister Carl, my junior high school teacher, repeated daily: “Silence gives consent, girls.” Perhaps she was trying to help us avoid some trauma she’d suffered. But what did the boys in the room hear? What if there wasn’t an opportunity to speak, or we were too young to understand? And what of the Earth? If we are deaf and dumb to her language, does our lack of hearing exempt us from the harm we cause? Perhaps the memory of Sister Carl’s words is echoed in the message of this dream: speak, act, stop the rape.
Rape is Legal
American law is orchestrated to protect abusers,[11] and it legalizes the right to exploit land and water, while simultaneously making it illegal to protect them. “Sustainability itself has been rendered illegal under our system of law,” said Thomas Linzey, Executive Director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.[12] Our dominant culture, global industrial empire, does not acknowledge the rape of the Earth. Instead, it talks about acquiring resources and the right to exploit. While the Earth suffers massive environmental devastation, many call it climate change and focus on human survival, but dealing with climate change within the values of our dominant culture will only allow the rape to continue.[13]
Our ecological crisis is sourced in a “collective perceptual disorder,”[14] a “collective myopia”[15] that misses our innate connection to Earth. Our culture is founded on the misperception that nonhumans aren’t alive and have no feelings or consciousness; this allows us to perpetuate the lie that no rape is happening at all. To stop a rape, we have to perceive that one is happening, and to do that, we must recognize that we live embedded in relationship with all of life on the planet.
How will I ask people to help me stop the rape if they don’t see it? Dissociation, denial, and silencing perpetuate trauma; to heal, the truth must be told. Although the “ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness,” remembering terrible events is part of restoring justice.[16]
How would you respond if someone you love was threatened? When we see our earthly relatives being harmed, aren’t we equally responsible to act fiercely and lovingly to protect them, like a mother grizzly looking out for her cubs? Fighting back isn’t wrong; it’s relative to the situation in which we find ourselves. It is just as wrong and harmful “to not fight back when one should as it is to fight when one should not.”[17]
The Love of Trees
I know how it feels when others don’t see the rape. My neighbor friend and I were four years old when we had our first sleepover. When I returned the next day, sick with a fever of 103, no one guessed that my neighbor’s father, Jack, might have hurt me, even though his wife sometimes came over to our home when he was drunk to avoid being hit. No one found it odd when I said my vagina hurt and suddenly refused to attend nursery school. I screamed and cried until I was allowed to stay home. No one wondered why my friend, Jack’s daughter, was so troubled. I still remember when she stabbed me in the belly button with a needle. After playing with her, I often returned home with bite marks and bruises up and down my arms.
When I kept insisting that my vagina hurt, my mom took me to the doctor. She stayed in the room while the white-haired man examined me. I asked her later what he had said, and she told me that he said I needed to use less soap.
Being told everything was fine was confusing when my body knew a different truth—one that my mind didn’t know how to hold, let alone put into words. Although in the dream my friend could see the rape, no one saw it when I was four.
But I wasn’t alone; I lived in trees. The thick, ancient trunk of a giant ash tree that rose well over 100 feet in my backyard was the center of my world. Down the hill in a grove of pines, I played in needles, sometimes climbing to the tippy top, arms and body wrapped around the thin tip, the weight of my body gently swaying from side to side. In summer, I crawled to the far reaches of the cherry tree’s branches, eating more berries than made it into my basket for mom’s cherry pie. The maple tree grew in the front yard; I went there to hide, high behind walls of green leaves, where I could see all and no one could find me.
I sensed the trees had feelings, lives; they were living beings with whom to be in relationship. Did the trees know my secret? Is that, in part, why it felt like they looked after me? All trees know rape; ninety-seven percent of North America’s native forests have been cut down.[18] I didn’t know why my young body returned again and again to be held in the branches of these elders who surrounded my suburban home. Or why I turned to the smell of pine and bark instead of human skin or voice when I hurt. Now, I imagine that something in my cells trusted their love and wisdom; they nurtured me.
The Rape of Earth
The Apache who named Aravaipa Canyon no longer live here. Sitting at the edge of the river, I marvel at the joyful laughter of its flowing waters. During the 19th century, the Aravaipa band of Apaches living here fought many battles with the U.S. Cavalry. Hispanic and Anglo settlers began grazing stock and developing copper mines in the watershed. In the infamous Camp Grant Massacre, a death squad of American pioneers—including Tohono O’odham Indians, as well as Mexican Americans and Anglo-Americans from Tucson—descended upon an Apache camp before dawn on April 28, 1871. Those sleeping were clubbed to death, while those awake were shot by men stationed in the bluffs above. [19]
Arvaipa Canyon wilderness
In less than an hour, the raiders had claimed the lives of nearly 150 Apaches, mostly women and children; the men were away hunting. With no casualties to themselves, they sold twenty-nine children into slavery in Mexico. This is neither the largest nor the most brutal of attacks on Native Americans, but it came at a time when a “peace policy” had been promised by the federal government. President Grant expressed outrage and sought to punish the attackers. Although a trial was held for 100 alleged participants, no justice was had; a jury of twelve Anglos and Mexican Americans from Tucson took only nineteen minutes to find the accused not guilty.[20] The remaining Apache were relocated to White Mountain Reservation to the northeast.[21]
Civilization is brutal and unsustainable; agriculture is dependent upon imperialism and genocide. As feminist and environmentalist Lierre Keith said, “You pull down the forest, you plow up the prairie, you drain the wetland. Especially, you destroy the soil.”[25] Shifting from fossil fuels to green energy is a false solution. Green technology markets solutions while denuding the planet; corporations and government profit.[26] Ecosystems are devastated by solar and wind projects, and the increased mining and consumption they entail. Our political system is bankrupt, and violence against women and the Earth are “legitimated and promoted by both patriarchal religion and science” and “rooted in the eroticization of domination.”[27]
The Earth Created Us This Way
Three saguaro cactuses surrounded us in Aravaipa Canyon; each one about thirty feet tall with barrel appendages on each side that look like arms. I shared my dream with the questers in our opening council. “Will you help me stop the rape?” I said. “Put your body between the rape and the rapist?” I raised my voice, uncomfortable with the ferocity of my words. The rim across from us was some distance away, but several moving dots caught my eye. I slowly deciphered them as five bighorn sheep moving causally along the mountainside.
Harrison[28], a young man in his late twenties in graduate school, later shared his view over dinner.
“There’s not a problem,” he said. “The Earth is dreaming us; she created us this way.”
“It’s not a problem that 200 species go extinct each day?” I responded, feeling stunned.
“Extinctions have happened throughout history,” he answered. “It’s all part of her plan.”
“Extinctions have never occurred at this level. This isn’t a passive geological event, it’s extermination by capitalism,”[29] I said. “Yes, the Earth is dreaming us, but we’re sick and disconnected. This isn’t her plan.”
“We shouldn’t treat the Earth like a victim,” he responded. “She’s whole. She doesn’t need us to rescue her. She can take care of herself. She’s more powerful than we know.”
“Isn’t it possible for someone to be both whole and harmed by another?” I asked. “Life is far more complex than a drama triangle—victim, rescuer, perpetrator. This is about honoring the Earth and all of life as Sacred, regardless how powerful she is.”
“Activists are too angry, and protesting doesn’t change anything,” Harrison stated. “Tapping into the imaginative powers of Earth and soul is more powerful—shifting our consciousness.”
“Listening to dreams and perceiving our larger mythic potentialities is imperative, but so is direct action; there are forests, prairies, and animals alive today because of activists and revolutionaries,” I responded. “Perhaps it’s not either-or, but both-and. Each perspective, dream, and revolution are relevant. The mythic is happening, and the rape is happening too. It seems necessary we attend to both. Why are you opposed to seeing the rape?”
A Morsel of Empathic Resonance
While apprenticing on a women’s quest in my early thirties, I asked the dream-maker to help me remember what happened when I was four. Sleeping on the edge of a red rock cliff, I awoke to roaring thunder and the grove of ponderosa pines lit up in the lightning’s glow. Jack was in my dream. “I’m the one who abused you,” he said.
In the months that followed, I remembered the grey streak that ran through his curly black hair, and the disturbing way he looked at me in later years when we both found ourselves at the curb taking out the trash. With the support of trees and humans, my body re-experienced and integrated the memories that arose. It took years to trust what came and even longer to speak about it; it’s not a story I often share.
Those victimized in our culture are invalidated and stigmatized, but my story is only a small thread in the tapestry of violence that pervades and envelopes our culture. My trauma has gifted me with a small morsel of empathic resonance for what most other living beings on this planet endure far more often than I.
By the age of five, I wasn’t allowed to play with my neighbor; my mother had grown concerned about the reoccurring bites and bruises. The giant ash, the grove of pines, and the cherry and maple trees with whom I grew up were far less fortunate; all have since been chopped down. Although my parents had moved, I returned to pay my respects for the lives and deaths of those loving trees who raised me and were my family. I remember them often in my imagination.
The Questions of Displaced Descendants of Slaves
I remember weeping in love and loss while huddled in the crowded adobe hall with over 100 people; Martin Prechtel was sharing the rare and forgotten history of indigenous peoples worldwide. We listened to their music and heard about their creation stories, animals, and daily life. We wept over the rape, the slavery, the injustice, and so much beauty already lost. We asked questions: How did we get here from there?What birthed the original destructive culture that grew to destroy all others? How can we, the displaced descendants of slaves, live and die in a way that feeds life?
Bolad’s Kitchen is a never-before-seen school which aimed to help us remember an intact human approach to living in sacred relationship with Earth. I returned there for seventy days over four years, in my mid-thirties. Martin had grown up on a Pueblo reservation and apprenticed to a Tz’utujil shaman. He taught us an ancient economics. Fellow participants and I made beads, and later repaid our debt to the Earth for the obsidian rocks and shells we borrowed. We made pottery, moccasins, and felt, always offering the best back to the Holy Earth. She is starving and grieving, because she has not been given the ritual food and gifts she needs to live.
Martin shared stories of indigenous cultures who responded to attack in two ways. Some acted directly, fighting to protect their land, animals, and people; they were often killed or enslaved. Others acted mythically, returning to the “origination” place of their creation stories; there they waited to die intact, so their death would send out an echo that feeds all of life. But what if it isn’t either-or but both-and? What if we could act both mythically and directly? What if our revolution to stop the rape was sourced in both our ability to attune to our dreams and our willingness to resist our dominant culture?
Stopping the Rape
My dream seems to imply that we can stop the rape. I write to weave the world of dreams with direct action, so that our dreams can guide us. The weaving of mythos with revolution can support us in stopping the rape. Dreams are “willful, living beings”[30] that can re-align us with earth’s wishes. Through dream incubation, artists ask for a dream to guide their creation, and the dream that comes is “for the work of art, which uses us to birth itself.”[31] Similarly, we can invite the Earth to dream through us, and guide us toward the actions that matter most. When we act on our dreams, more dreams come to guide us further. In this way, dreams can come to guide our life. Dreams have led me to heal and discover my soul; they direct me now to guide and write; they urged me to write this piece.
Dreams offer pivotal clues about our deepest purpose. Each soul’s story feeds and seeds the mythic sinew of our human potential while also empowering our creative service on behalf of Earth. Just as individual transformation requires a journey of dismemberment, so too must our patho-adolescent civilization dismember and dismantle. Civilization will fall no matter what we do, and it’s likely to be messy and dangerous. To stop the rape, we must stop industrial civilization from continuing to harm people and the planet.
Radical change is necessary rather than minor reforms; it doesn’t work to “ask for justice from a system which is deeply invested in injustice.”[32] We’ve been taught to solve problems by getting along, but this strategy isn’t effective with an abuser, and global industrial empire can be likened to an abuser. Abusers “feel entitled to exploit, will do anything in order to exploit, and will exploit precisely as much as they can get away with,” and as eco-philosopher Derrick Jensen says, the only way to stop an abuser is to place him “in a situation where he has no other choice.”[33]
How may we bring this radical change about? We need stealth, resistance, ferocity, and creativity. We need to cultivate a relationship with our dreams, the more-than-human world, and our deep imagination. We need humans willing to fight for what we love by all means necessary to dismantle industrial civilization. Judith Lewis Herman says it’s “morally impossible to remain neutral.” Bystanders are forced to take sides. It’s tempting to side with the abuser, because doing so risks nothing and requires nothing from us; it also appeals to “the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil.” Acknowledging rape asks bystanders “to share the burden of pain.” It demands “action, engagement, and remembering.”[34]
Global industrial empire and a living planet can’t exist at the same time. If you love the Earth, are you willing to stand with her? What happens to Earth happens to us; to side against her is to rape ourselves.
Primal Scream
The cottonwoods shaded us as we sat in final council. Harrison shared an encounter with a teddy bear cholla—a cactus so thick with spines, it almost seems covered in fur.
“It told me to slow down so I could listen better. I took off my shoes and walked barefoot,” he said. “I later touched a hurt place on a barrel cactus, and a surprising flood of painful memories returned of a time when I was abused.”
Harrison’s demeanor was soft and somber. I wondered if his experience would shift his perspective on the rape of Earth. Many women in the group had shared stories of rape earlier in the week. One woman had dreamed about a primal scream of pain for the feminine and the Earth. She carried it out on the land.
“I wanted to hold that scream forever,” she said. “Perhaps my writing can be a voice for it.”
As we paused to take in her words, a squadron of javelinas wandered into a neighboring field to eat some nuts from under the truffle trees. Javelinas are pig-like animals with tusks; they roam the gulches in family bands (like the Apache did).
I shared too. “You may see me as a strong guide, living her mythic purpose. Yet I’m also someone who has been harmed by the violence of our culture. The young girl inside me who carries this hurt also holds gifts. I love her. She lives within my mythos, her heart connected to the heart of the world in a cave underneath a world tree. That little girl who found comfort in the arms of the trees still speaks to me today—if I’m still enough to listen. She informs how I love, guide, and write. She chisels a sensitivity into my bones that attunes me to the rape of Earth and feeds my fervor to act.”
Author Bio
Rebecca Wildbear is a river and soul guide who helps people tune in to the mysteries that live within the Earth community, dreams, and their own wild Nature, so they may live a life of creative service. She has been a guide with Animas Valley Institute since 2006 and is author of the forthcoming book, Playing & Praying: Soul Stories to Inspire Personal & Planetary Transformation.
Rebecca & Doug will offer an Animas Valley Institute program to Deep Green Resistance members and allies, June 26 – 30, 2020, A Wild Mind Intensive for Activists & Revolutionaries: Partnering with Earth & Dreams. We’ll deepen our ecological perception and engage in radical dreamwork…and more!
[11] Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (Basic Books, 1997).
[12] Sean Butler and Will Falk, “Rights for Lake Erie? Why Corporate Rights and Preemption Must Go,” DGR News Service, December 2019.
[13] Aimee Cree Dunn, “An Open Letter to Climate Activists in the Northwoods…and Beyond,” DGR News Service, December 2019.
[14] David Abrams, Spell of the Sensuous (Vintage, 1997).
[15] Laura Sewall’s essay “The Skill of Ecological Perception” was published in Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind by Theodore Roszak, Mary Gomes, and Allen Kanner (New York: Random House, 1995).
[16] Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (Basic Books, 1997).
Belief in a Just World – And What it Means for Resistance
By Salonika
Many people hold a strong belief that justice is an inalienable right of every individual, and that the current social, economic and political systems ensure that justice is delivered. The belief that actions and conditions have predictable and just consequences is termed in psychology as the “just world hypothesis”.
Socialization of this belief in a just world begins during early childhood. A child is rewarded or punished based on whether his/her behavior fulfills the expectations of the elders (i.e. parents or caretakers). This consistent pattern rewards and punishment, which is, in many ways, necessary for a healthy development of the child, also initiates the inculcation of the idea that our behavior always determines our consequences, i.e. a belief in a just world.
Throughout our lives, social institutions like schools, law and religion continue the instillation of the belief.
Such a belief serves different functions. It helps makes the world predictable. It can be used to regulate one’s behavior. And it protects our psychological well-being. By believing in a just world, we reassure ourselves that only good things will happen to us in the future (based on the assumption that we have committed only “good” actions). For example, in the event of domestic violence, empathy towards the victim can cause psychological pain by making us vulnerable to the danger of becoming victim ourselves at some point of time. Instead, by engaging in victim blaming, we are able to psychologically ward off that danger. When we say, “she was abused by her husband because she is weak” what we really mean is that “I will not be abused by my husband because I am not weak.”
Another critical function of this belief is the suppression of resistance to systems of power. It does so in two ways: by denying that unjust systems of power exist at all, and by limiting resistance.
Denying systems of power
The belief in a just world justifies the existence of unjust systems of power. It frames systems of privilege and oppression not as injustices, but rather as “the natural order of things”. This legitimizes systemic both privileges and oppression. Both the privileged and the oppressed are believed to be “deserving” of their fate, based on their “superiority” and “inferiority” respectively.
Poverty is blamed on “laziness” of the poor. Rapes are blamed on lack of modesty of women. Colonization was necessary due to the “savage” nature of indigenous cultures. Ecocide is called “development”, and believed to be necessary for “progress”. In reality, these forms of injustices are necessary for the continuity of a capitalist, patriarchal, imperialist culture. But the critical role of the culture in producing the injustices go unnoticed.
Social institutions are designed to make these unfair systems of power invisible. For example, in many parts of South Asia, the caste system prevails. It is a hierarchical system that has historically oppressed (economically, politically and socially) certain groups of people by other groups of people. The karma system (the system believed to deliver justice) asserts that the birth of people into a particular caste is a direct consequence of their actions of previous incarnations. Thus, the domination of given caste groups becomes natural and fair.
Unfortunately, these values can be so deeply ingrained in members of a society that, in many cases, people of both groups, the oppressors and the oppressed, both are blind to the unjust systems of power. Oppressors feel entitled to the privileges they receive, and will go to lengths to preserve those privileges. On the other hand, the oppressed develop a feeling of inferiority, which suppresses their capacity to build a resistance movement.
Limitations to resistance
More significantly, the belief in a just world suppresses a radical resistance. It deters a radical understanding of the power differential in the culture. Incidences of injustice becomes a loophole in the system rather than the nature of the system Child abuse, domestic violence, sexual harassment, worker exploitation are interpreted as isolated events, rather than as part of a larger phenomena.
Isolated interpretations propose isolated solutions. After a workplace accident in a sweatshop in Bangladesh, the contractors are replaced, but the high pressure to lower cost and increase outputs remain. As a result, repeated accidents occur. These isolated solutions are only effective in rectifying individual events of injustice. They do not deal with the root cause of injustice: this culture.
Unless the problems are acknowledged as resulting due to a dysfunctional system, the proposed solutions would only be superficial. “Green capitalism” emerged as a response to the current ecological crisis, despite the fact that it is no better than “traditional” capitalism in destroying the planet. A radical analysis of the inherent ecocidal nature of capitalism is required to propose a radical solution to deal with the ongoing ecocide.
Overcoming the belief in just world
Although it serves some useful social and psychological functions, it is necessary to understand the shortcomings of our belief in a just world to build an effective resistance. It can be done through some of the following steps.
First and foremost, it is necessary to acknowledge the multiple systems of power in this culture. We may occupy different positions in these different systems of power, privileging by some, while being oppressed by others. Recognition of these privileges and oppression that we face may make us vulnerable to feelings of guilt and despair. But it is a fundamental step. In order to fight justice, it is necessary to understand the injustice first.
Next, it is important to understand that these inherently oppressive systems were created by a group of people in a particular time and culture. The industrial civilization is a few hundred years old. Civilization began some thousand years ago. But, human beings have existed for two million years. As much as civilization (particularly industrial civilization) seems like an absolute part of humanity, for majority of their existence, humans have lived in just and sustainable societies. As much as the oppressors would like to have us believe that civilization is infallible, it can be dismantled, and replaced with just and sustainable societies again.
Contrary to the just world belief, justice is not an inalienable right that is guaranteed to all on the virtue of their existence. The current structures of power make sure that the access to justice is distributed unevenly among different groups. It is only after we fully internalize these facts, that we could take effective actions to make this world more just. Organized resistance to oppressive systems of civilization, industrialization, capitalism, imperialism, patriarchy, racism, and casteism is required to dismantle them. Until then, justice will remain a scarce resource accessible only to the oppressors.
Salonika is a volunteer with Deep Green Resistance. She believes that the current culture is damaging to all, particularly to the oppressed, and that it is imperative for to dismantle the oppressive systems. Currently she is working with survivors of sex-trafficking, sexual abuse and gender-based violence.
