Report from Standing Rock

Report from Standing Rock

by Jennifer / Deep Green Resistance

I have traveled to Standing Rock twice now.  The first time was on September 16 – 20. On the first trip I went with my mother.  We camped at Rosebud and spent a great deal of time in the kitchen preparing food and talking with members of the camp, indigenous and non-indigenous allies.  We could hear prayers and drumming in the Oceti Sakown Camp well into the night. The atmosphere was of constant prayer and felt celebratory. There were fireworks on the first night of our stay. I visited Sacred Stone and the “Overflow,” Oceti Sakowan, camps. Between Rosebud and Sacred Stone a women’s lodge was being constructed, with the permission of the elders.

The second trip was on October 29 – November 2.  I went with acquaintances and we camped in the Oceti Sakowan. We fed ourselves, and provided our own shelter.  The only time I ate outside of our camp was when I went to do dishes at Rosebud.  Surveillance was present on the hill overlooking the camp: flood lights, drones, plane helicopter circling. I did not take pictures. The camp itself was much quieter. I attended non violent civil disobedience training, a requirement for all new arrivals.  I filled out forms with legal and prepared for the possibility of NVCD action.

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I also went to an orientation for the medics.  Currently a Medic tent, herbal/alternative remedy, and a body work tent have been established with a mental health group and center in formation. Meetings for the camp are held every morning and in a truly respectful and democratic manner.  All voices are heard.  From 2-3 hours of work a day are expected to be given to the collective. I participated in water ceremony by invitation.  I gave my drum when it was asked for, to be in sweat lodge.   I visited Sacred Stone, and spoke with a keeper of the sacred fire who had just returned to camp, having closed down her life a half a continent away to be at Standing Rock.

Building for the winter was well underway.  Between Sacred Stone and Rosebud on the Standing Rock Reservation side of the Cannonball, the women who were building the women’s lodge had returned and were well established; the lodge was complete. Rosebud looked the same physically, but many people who I remembered had left while some remained.  I had a brief conversation with a Episcopalian Minister letting me know that 300 faith leaders were answering the call to come to Standing Rock.  Over 500 arrived the day after our departure.

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I was physically cold, in pain, and sleep-deprived during the stay. Monday was particularly difficult and windy.  Recent tests indicate I most likely have a severe form of arthritis. Fortunately be were camped by some trees and able to create a bit of a wind break. If you are planning to go, be prepared for harsh conditions and be realistic about your limitations and how to deal with them.

I have attended multiple Wednesday evening updates at Four Winds in Denver. I have learned a great deal about the legal and on-the-ground struggles, not only at Standing Rock but historically, by attending updates. These meetings have also led to engagement  with an organizing group of women who coordinated Four Directions March and Prayer in solidarity with Standing Rock and on Indigenous Peoples Day (transforming Columbus Day), prayer and ceremony for Murdered and Missing Sisters, and on election day will be holding a Million Mothers March in Denver.  I have been  able to engage in support work by request and have been able to offer air time through WomynAir and the AM News Magazine on our local community radio station KGNU to increase awareness and notify the public when it is appropriate for them to attend.

In Conclusion: Standing Rock is a functional, resilient community of resistance.  Standing Rock is prayer and ceremony and community.  If there is anything that I have gathered from having been at Standing Rock it is this. Prayer and ceremony unite the people to the land, air, and water; to each other, to our ancestors, to community, to action.  It is my belief, after my experience of being at Standing Rock, that this foundation gives humans the strength and sanity to face ourselves, our communities, life, and to continue to take action in defense of life. Words fail.  I will continue to listen.

Should This Cruelty Be Normal?

Society must choose whether women count as human

Lierre Keith / Deep Green Resistance

Feminism has always been a contested area of politics. Fierce arguments centre on what it is, and why we need it. The best definition I know is from Andrea Dworkin: “Feminism is the political practice of fighting male supremacy on behalf of women as a class.” In one elegant sentence, she names both the problem ― male supremacy ― and the solution ― political action.

Implicit in those 16 words are also the two requirements of the human heart: love and hope. It is an act of love to notice women. Women are on display everywhere of course ― naked, for sale, the coin of the realm in a pornographic culture ― but being an object is the opposite of being human. Noticing the harm that is being done ― insisting that it is harm ― starts from love.

Such noticing tends to have an inverse relationship to hope. When harms against a people are both vicious and everyday, hope becomes a combat discipline. But, whether grim or glad, hope is possible only because change is possible. This is the promise of feminism: as endless as the horrors seem, they could end. We, as a society, could end them.

Armed with love and hope, I travelled to London recently for a conference on male violence and how we might end it. I left the US still braced against the details that had come out of Ohio: three women, one six-year-old girl, a basement strung with chains ten years long.

I arrived in London to news of Mark Bridger’s trial: his catalogue of images of murdered girls, his library of sadistic child-porn, the stalking that escalated from online to real life. This meant real death to a perfect promise of a girl named after spring. Her parents are now condemned to a deep winter of grief; how they will survive is anyone’s guess.

Then there was the long fall of Chevonea Kendall-Bryan, the 13-year-old who fell to her death from the window of her home, having suffered sexual bullying. Longer still was the fall from human to object, through rape, and more rape, landing finally on the unyielding surface of complete public violation. Does it matter whether she jumped or fell? Her life was shattered either way.

This is where we stand or fall as a society. We will have to choose. Right now, our society is choosing to make cruelty normal. We are choosing saturation in sadism. The choice turns on whether women count as human.

A few brute facts will answer. Globally, one in three women will be raped or beaten in her lifetime. Half of all sexual assaults are committed on girls under 16: might as well start the lesson early. In the UK, a woman is raped every nine minutes. There are plenty more numbers, and inside each and every one are the broken shards where body and soul, self and world, once met.

The numbers should speak for themselves, but numbers don’t actually speak, of course. They need human voices to carry them. The result of subordination, though, is always silence. Silence is what happens when people are turned into objects. Violence will do that. Sexual violence especially will do that. Sexual violence against children is a shroud of silence that can take a lifetime to unwind.

Amnesty International reports that rape is the most traumatic form of torture. In fact, women who have survived prostitution have higher rates of post-traumatic stress disorder than soldiers who have survived combat, which is to say that the war men are waging against women is in many ways worse than the wars they inflict on each other.

If you need convincing, type the word “rape” into Google images. Or, if you have the stomach and the spiritual stamina, try “torture porn”. What you will see is not entertainment, or sex, or freedom. What you will see is hell. What you will also see is that men by the million have been there before you.

We need feminism because, without it, the realities of women’s lives are unspeakable ― each woman cut adrift in a hostile, chaotic sea. Apply feminism, and that chaos snaps into a sharp pattern of subordination ― from the small, daily insults to body and soul, to the shattering traumas of incest and rape.

The crimes that men commit against women are not done to women as random individuals: they are done because women belong to a subordinate class, and they are done to keep women a subordinate class.

None of this will change unless we face the truth. I wrote above that every nine minutes a woman is raped. That is hard enough, but it is not the truth. This is: every nine minutes a man rapes a woman. And I am left with a human howl of “Why?” After 30 years spent fighting male violence and pornography, I still have no answer.

I am a feminist because I think women count as human. But feminism also insists on the humanity of men: we think that men can do better. The anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday studied 95 societies, and found that almost half were rape-free. It is not random. It is actually rather straightforward. Rape-free cultures value co-operation whereas rape-prone cultures reward competition. In the former, political and economic power are shared by the sexes; in the latter, women are dispossessed.

Whereas in the one, the sacred has both female and male aspects, in the other, God is only ever male. And now we come to it: in rape-free cultures, anyone can assume positions of ceremonial importance. In rape-prone cultures, men exclude women from roles of spiritual intercession.

Social subordination is like a set of concentric circles. The innermost is where the worst occurs: the cattle cars, the severed limbs, the missing girls found as bone fragments and blood stains. But every circle in the set helps to constrain the people trapped inside. The outer rings shore up the inner horrors, making them both normal and invisible.

How can such things happen, we ask in anguish? They can happen because each successive circle ― each institution and social practice ― creates the bull’s eye where Chevonea landed and April will never be found.

We have a choice, as individual men and women, and as a society. We can keep other humans barricaded inside such atrocities, or we can bring those barricades down. Either women will finally count as human, or the rancid pleasures of sadism will continue to rot our society and our souis. Choose now, before another girl falls, and another goes missing.

Originally published in the June 28, 2013 issue of Church Times

Time is Short: From Crisis to Resistance!

Time is Short: From Crisis to Resistance!

Featured image by Vanessa Vanderburgh

By Joanna Pinkiewicz / Deep Green Resistance Australia

Most people in the industrial civilized world will come to a point of crisis, loosely translated from its Greek origin as: “testing time” or “an emergency event.”

An ongoing feeling of pressure, instability or a threat can all bring on such crisis. These events shake our whole being, alarm our physical bodies and rupture our rational mind. The advice for dealing with a crisis that is perceived as “personal” or “individual” often follows a set of clear, practical steps:

  • Slow your breath to anchor yourself in the present
  • Take a note of your emotions or bodily sensations
  • Open up and express your thoughts
  • Pursue a valued course of action

The last step is particularly interesting, as it suggests questioning: What do I value the most? What do I stand for? How do I want to see myself respond?

As much as a crisis brings many negatives, such as anxiety and depression, it also brings an opportunity to re-examine our lives and expand our understanding of what is happening in the world or to the world around us. It forces us to examine and to make a choice: are we going to be a bystander or are we going to become courageous in the face of a looming threat?

Research on the psychology of resistance suggests, that access to support and the right type of information is crucial to help those wanting to understand what is really happening to us and the world, as well as, what can be done to address it.

The authors of Courageous Resistance, The Power of Ordinary People list certain factors that contribute to ordinary people becoming resisters in the face of injustice or impending threat. These include a combination of:

  • Preconditions: previous attitudes, experiences and internal resources
  • Networks: ongoing relationships with people that offered information, resources and assistance and
  • The Context itself: political climate, severity of the situation

 We understand courageous resistance to be a conscious process of decision making, which is affected not only by who the decision maker is, but where they are and who they know at the particular time they become aware of a grave injustice…

We define “courageous resisters” along three dimensions: First, they are those who voluntarily engage in other-oriented, largely selfless behaviour with significantly high risk or cost to themselves or their associates. Second, their actions are the result of a conscious decision. Third, their efforts are sustained over time. [i]

Humanity today faces ongoing stress from living in the civilized world. By and large, we have managed to adapt to changes that have been imposed on us, such as higher density living and working conditions. However the escalated threat of armed violence and impending effects of climate change bring on new types of crises, which needs not only immediate response, but creation of a completely new culture. The current culture likes us to believe that the crises we are experiencing are “individual,” due to a weakness or an illness. If we choose to believe this, we are more likely to suffer from helplessness and not participate in creating this new culture.

Aric McBay explains this in Deep Green Resistance, Strategy To Save The Planet:

 If someone is dissatisfied with the way society works, they say, then it is that individual’s personal emotional problem. Furthermore, the individual traumas perpetuated by those in power on individual people, on groups of people, and on the land, can seem random at first glance. But if we can trace them back to their common roots—in capitalism, in patriarchy, in civilization at large—then we can understand them as manifestations of power imbalance, and we can overcome the learned helplessness…[ii]

To begin to create a culture of resistance individuals must drop loyalty to the oppressive status quo and its systems. Two things may prevent us from fully committing to resistance: fear of punishment or separation from our kin (friends, family). While loss of “belief” in “redeeming” the existing culture is a first step towards resistance, separation from dependency on the existing systems is gradual.

As building an effective resistance culture is a long process involving generations, we must be wise at preserving our health and using our resources.

Listed below are steps that effective groups or communities follow in response to a crisis that is not personal, but wide spread and caused by either natural (earthquake, flood) or man-made circumstances (occupation, oppression, ecocide).

  • Prepare: clarify our values, recruit people, gather resources, and devise the strategy
  • Respond: assign roles and responsibilities, implement strategy
  • Recover: extend support networks, rebuild communities, and establish new organizations

Resilience building will come from commitment and co-operation in all of those stages. After the recovery from a crisis, a group gains valuable experience and is able to refine the “emergency” response plan and train newcomers.

Experience of past resisters demonstrates rise in organisational, strategic and physical skills among individuals as well and rise in strength and independence of a group.

I am thankful for my crisis. Like a loud warning siren it told me that things are not right in the world, that I must increase my awareness and prepare for the future.

My crisis led me to discover techniques and practices that reconnected me with my body. I discovered that reconstruction of mental and physical health goes hand in hand with protecting the environment. By recognising the physical and spiritual nourishment we receive from our forests, rivers, oceans, a commitment to environmental action is born.

Taking responsibility was the first step to my healing and the beginning of an authentic life. Such path does not require perfection, but courage and imagination to create new ways of living and existing. To work as a collective in the name of all nature’s communities is a revolutionary path of resistance we desperately need today.

Deep Green Resistance is a global radical environmental organization with a strategy to address our impending planetary crisis. We have recruited capable and experienced individuals to guide and work together in implementing our strategy and fulfill our vision to dismantle the industrial civilization, assist the planet’s recovery and build sustainable communities with decentralized governance.

Join the many existing chapters or start a new one! Become a conscious resister!

 

Notes:

[i] Thalhammer, Kristina E.; O’Loughlin, Paula L.; Glazer, Myron Peretz; Glazer, Penina Migdal; McFarland, Sam; Shepela, Sharon Toffey; Stoltzfus, Nathan. Courageous Resistance, The Power of Ordinary People.  New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

[ii] McBay, Aric; Keith, Lierre; and Jensen, Derrick.  Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet.  New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011.

News round-up: fossil fuel trains, Santa Barbara chapter, report from England, supporting underground resistance

News round-up: fossil fuel trains, Santa Barbara chapter, report from England, supporting underground resistance

Power and Direct Action: A Primer

Power and Direct Action: A Primer

By Will Falk / Deep Green Resistance

This year’s Fourth of July week grew in horror as it passed. Each day brought new nightmares that struck me at a dizzying pace. By the end of the week, after I decided I was sick of weeping, I turned off the television, shut my Facebook tab, and remembered that the best antidote for despair is action.

My week started hopefully enough in Eugene, Oregon where I participated in a training hosted by members of Deep Green Resistance called Extraction Resistance: A Three Day Training in Direct Action. One of the goals of the event was to normalize direct action tactics, and I was asked to write a primer on the topic. This is that primer.

When I got home from Eugene, I found a video news story from Karachi, Pakistan showing men digging mass graves in anticipation of the number of heat-related deaths caused by soaring summer temperatures. The ghosts of people not yet dead climbed from trenches dug in the dry Pakistani dust. I could almost see the bodies piling in the grave-diggers’ shadows.

The next day I watched as two white police officers pinned Alton Sterling, a black man, to the ground, put a pistol to his head, and shot him execution-style. I went to bed wondering how the cops were going to get out of this one only to wake to see Philando Castile slumped over in the seat of a car, blood seeping through his clothes, as his fiancé, Diamond Reynolds, explained in a video that Castile was just shot four times by a police officer in a routine traffic stop.

Then, during an otherwise peaceful rally protesting the murders of Sterling and Castile, twelve cops were shot, five of them fatally, and two civilians wounded by Micah Xavier Johnson, a military veteran who had served in Afghanistan. The Dallas Police Department then killed Johnson with a robot bomb.

Now, I am white, and I will not comment on the efficacy of Johnson’s actions. I will, however, direct a suggestion to white people who benefit from the white supremacism that the United States is founded upon and perpetuates. Let me suggest that the same culture producing climate change is the same culture producing the cops who murdered Sterling is the same culture producing the cops who murdered Castile is the same culture that trained Johnson “to shoot and move” is the same culture that employs police departments who possess robots with bombs that can be remotely controlled to kill citizens.

Let me suggest to those white people who are truly interested in undermining racism and stopping white supremacy that to do this we must dismantle the dominant culture. If we want to live in a world where Pakistanis are not digging mass graves for the victims of climate change, if we want to live in a world where people of color are not being murdered by cops, if we want to live in a world where veterans are not sniping from parking garages, if we want to live in a world where humans are not made into veterans in the first place, then we must look to the roots of the problem. Finding those roots, we must dig this poisoned tree out.

And, how do we dig these roots out? The answer begins with serious, militant resistance movements that correctly identify the dominant culture’s sources of power. Once those sources are identified, resistance movements must engage in direct action to undermine the dominant culture’s power.

***

First, we need to understand power. Quite simply, power is how the powerful do what they do. Power is how the cops murder and get away with it. Power is how corporations extract fossil fuels, burn fossil fuels, and drive the planet ever-closer to runaway climate change.

Power is best understood as a physical phenomenon. Power is not merely a mental event. Power is not simply an emotion. Cops may or may not personally hate the people of color they are murdering. Corporate decision makers may or may not personally despise the Earth that gives them life. What matters is that cops are armed with real batons, real pepper spray, real tasers, and real guns and they are supported by an entire governmental system that can protect them with even more batons, pepper spray, tasers, and guns. What matters is corporations are armed with real machines, real poisonous chemicals, real labor forces, and once their projects have been granted permits by the government, they can call on real cops with all the real weapons I’ve already described to protect their projects. What matters is physical power in the real world.

There is perhaps no person on Earth who has spent more time understanding the importance of power in contemporary politics than Gene Sharp. There is also perhaps no person in the world responsible for more successful revolutions than Sharp. This is no coincidence.

Sharp describes his theory of power in his brilliant book, How Non-Violent Struggle Works. His work helps us identify the dominant culture’s sources of power and provides insight into how those sources of power can be undermined.

Sharp begins by explaining the central importance of power, and writes: “Power is inherent in practically all social and political relationships. Its control is the basic problem in political theory and in political reality. It is necessary to wield power in order to control the power of threatening adversaries.” In short, the goal of any serious resistance movement should be to undermine the opposition’s power while enhancing the movement’s power.

Sharp defines political power as power “which is wielded for political objectives, especially by governmental institutions or by people in opposition to or in support of such institutions. Political power thus refers to the total authority, influence, pressure, and coercion which may be applied to achieve or prevent the implementation of the wishes of the power-holder.”

According to Sharp, the sources of political power are authority, human resources, skills and knowledge, intangible factors, material resources, and sanctions. These sources of power are interconnected and benefit and build off each other. Increasing power through one of these sources often enhances power in all the sources. This truth, while scary, also highlights weaknesses in the dominant culture’s power. If a resistance movement can undermine one source of power, it can deal a heavy blow to the others.

Sharp quotes Jacques Maritain to define authority as “the right to command and direct, to be heard or obeyed by others.” Taking this idea deeper than Sharp does, I want to point out that rights mean nothing if they are not enforceable. On the surface, it is easy to confuse the right to command and direct bestowed upon elected leaders, in the United States, as being derived from the results of an election. This is not completely true. Think, for example, what would happen if Barack Obama refused to yield the Oval Office to the winner of this year’s presidential election. Eventually, a governmental decision-maker would order police or soldiers to remove Obama at gunpoint.

Sharp describes how power is derived from human resources with, “The power of rulers is affected by the number of persons who obey them, cooperate with them, or provide them with special assistance.” These human resources come with the next source of power: skills and knowledge. Sharp writes, “The power of rulers is also affected by the skills, knowledge and abilities of such persons, and the relation of their skills, knowledge and abilities to the rulers’ needs.” Understanding this point, we see why the dominant culture is so obsessed with developing science and technology. It uses science and technology to enhance control. We see, too, why Western science has been a disaster for life.

Next, Sharp describes intangible factors as “Psychological and ideological factors, such as habits and attitudes toward obedience and submission, and the presence or absence of a common faith, ideology, or sense of mission.” To illustrate this point, imagine if rulers could convince people that this world isn’t real, that the sacred exists in an abstract sky God, and that the point of life is to suffer in this world to prove your devotion to this abstract sky God so you can join him, after death, in his abstract sky kingdom.

For material resources, Sharp writes, “The degree to which the rulers control property, natural resources, financial resources, the economic system, communication, and transportation helps to determine the limits of their power.”

To supplement Sharp’s analysis, here, we see one reason why the dominant culture is hell-bent on ecological destruction. Resource extraction yields power. Industrial agriculture – which requires the displacement of indigenous peoples, the extermination of animal populations, the theft of water from natural communities, deforestation, and the destruction of the world’s most important carbon sinks (grasslands) – yields a controllable food source. Mining – which also involves the displacement of indigenous peoples, the extermination of animal populations, the poisoning of groundwater, and mountain-top removal – yields energy sources for industrialization. And these are just two examples.

Sharp quotes John Austin to define sanctions as “an enforcement of obedience” and writes, “Sanctions are used by rulers to supplement voluntary acceptance of their authority and increase the degree of obedience to their commands…Violent domestic sanctions, such as imprisonment or execution, are commonly intended to punish disobedience, not to achieve the objective of the original command.”

We see, here, one of the primary roles of the police. Police exist to enforce obedience. Part of enforcing obedience is the performance of violent domestic sanctions like imprisonment and execution. To understand how this works think about a saying from the battered women’s movement: “One beating a year is enough to keep a woman down.” For a battered woman, it’s enough to keep her down that she merely be threatened with violence once she has experienced a man’s violence. The same is true for would-be resisters. After seeing videos of police murdering citizens, it only takes the threat of police violence to keep us in line.

***

Understanding that power is physical and identifying the material roots of the dominant culture’s power is only the first step. Now, we must act to physically dismantle those sources of power. Physically dismantling power requires direct action.

So, what is direct action?

The term “direct action” has been used so often within environmental and social movements in so many different contexts that it is in danger of losing its meaning. It is difficult to find a clear definition of direct action in activist literature rooted in a radical analysis, so I have formed my own. It has three parts: First, direct action involves a clearly defined and obtainable goal. Second, the success of that goal is demonstrable by a quantifiable reduction in the opposition’s physical power. Third, it is primarily the actions of those engaging in the direct action that produce the desired goal.

It is important that a proposed action begins with a clearly defined and obtainable goal because an action involving a poorly-defined goal makes it difficult to determine the scope of the action. And, proposed actions with unobtainable goals will be, by definition, ineffective. Planning to change the world through an educational program designed to illustrate the evils of the fossil fuel industry, for example, is neither clearly-defined nor obtainable. What does it mean “to change the world?” And, how will you possibly reach enough people to effect this change? Planning to delay the construction of a pipeline for a day, however, is both clearly-defined and obtainable. Resisters can, without too much imagination, envision a successful action.

Once a clearly-defined and obtainable goal is established, the direct action must reflect an understanding of power and be designed to materially affect the opposition’s physical power. Let’s say activists come up with a plan to drop a banner that says “Stop the Tarsands!” from the rafters of the Utah State Capitol. The plan is both clearly defined and, with some clever security dodging, obtainable. This action cannot be considered direct action, however, because there is no way to quantify how, or even if, the banner affects those in power’s ability to destroy.

Let’s look at another hypothetical plan: Activists plan to blockade, for 24 hours, trains carrying oil through the State of Washington where they will be loaded on to tankers to fuel the US Navy in Hawai’i. This plan has a clearly defined and obtainable goal. The goal also reflects an understanding of where the dominant culture gets its power. The US Navy, one of the weapons the United States uses to perpetuate imperialism, literally requires oil. Depriving the Navy of a little oil for one day may not be a big hit to its power, but it is quantifiable.

It is primarily the actions of those engaging in the direct action that produce the desired goal. Another way to say this is: There is a clear causal link between the direct action and the desired goal. If the goal is to block the construction of a pipeline, for example, then the planned action must literally stop the pipeline’s construction. If the goal is to liberate individual children from human trafficking networks, then the planned action must literally involve the means to escort children from human trafficking networks to safety. Yet another way to say this is: direct action does not leave it to external decision makers (governmental, corporate, or otherwise) to produce the desired goal. Direct action is not an appeal to those in power. It does not rely solely on moral persuasion, shame, or economic cost-benefit analyses.

A lawsuit, then, that is filed to gain protection for a species that lives on land where a mine is planned to be dug in order to stop the mine has a clearly defined and obtainable goal. If the lawsuit is won, then it will materially affect one of the dominant culture’s sources of power. But, this lawsuit is not direct action because it relies on a favorable ruling from a judge for its success. The actions of the lawsuit’s planners are necessary, but ultimately the planners themselves cannot produce the desired goal.

***

I’ve called this essay a “primer.” One definition of primer is “a short informative piece of writing.” Another is a “compound used to ignite an explosive charge.” I hope that this essay serves as both. We need to see the problems we face clearly and we need a spark to ignite the change that is so drastically needed.