by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 14, 2013 | Agriculture, Strategy & Analysis
By Max Wilbert / Deep Green Resistance Great Basin
I’m writing this at 68 miles per hour in the left lane of I-5. The freeway is 8 lanes wide here, a laceration running north and south for 1500 miles. It is a major corridor of human trafficking.
A river of oil, a friend calls it. A river of blood, too.
A checkerboard of clearcuts scars the face of the mountains to the east. Silt turns the river brown as it runs beneath the road. Agricultural land comes in waves, green or brown fields flashing past. I wonder how many see them for what they are: biotic cleansing.
But no, most people see a natural system.
Mt. Vernon passes in a blur. The town is home to a massive drug problem, a conservative electorate, and a large population of poor migrant farmworkers. Not so different from many of the other small towns on the route.
Then, suddenly, Seattle appears—a glittering inflammation on the land, arteries connecting the city to resources around the world, pipelines and trucks and barges and tankers bringing fuel and food and consumer goods.
The police department is—once again—under federal investigation for racial profiling. The poor (mostly brown) people of the city are withering under a devastating flurry of foreclosures, layoffs, and gentrification.
This city is home to a flourishing biotechnology industry, massive weapons manufacturers, an imperialistic coffee corporation, and an online bookstore that is destroying local businesses in an ever-accelerating downwards spiral.
Some of the richest people on the planet live here. Meanwhile, as I walk into the local grocery store, I pass a homeless indigenous man who went to war in Vietnam, was ordered to kill other poor brown people, and lost everything to the nightmares that now come every night. He says hello and smiles, just like always, and I walk on with a heavy heart, feeling I am not doing enough.
This culture is sick in brain and body. We all recognize this at some level. The reality of this civilization is red in tooth and claw—or perhaps more accurately, red in bulldozer and stock option.
The archaic notion of morality is long gone in today’s digital world. In fact, it’s not gone, it’s something much worse: ironic. Post modernism has spread insidiously to every nook and cranny of the culture, and in that twisted and depressed world view, oppression is inevitable and resistance is futile. The inevitable conclusion: “why don’t we just party?”
And people wonder why this ideology has risen to the fore! Hmm… let’s think. Maybe because it beautifully serves those in power?
Profit is the highest god of the land. Patriarchy, white supremacy, human supremacy, capitalism: these are a few of the overlapping systems of power in place across this planet that are impoverishing people, killing people, killing the land, and squeezing profits out of the last spindly forests, the last desiccated soils.
A few—a bare handful really—choose to fight back.
For me, the journey to revolution—to fighting back—began early. I read The Communist Manifesto in the 6th grade – those first lines were imprinted in my brain: “the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.” To my young mind, the teachers were the bourgeoisie – content in their comfortable salaried jobs, while we students slaved away under a system of forced industrial schooling. It was a joke, albeit a serious one, among my friends and I, but soon enough I would be able to apply the model to more brutal systems of power – white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, and civilization.
We all owe Marx a debt – he was the first to articulate the model of class struggle, and since then political classes have been and remain the basis of radical organizing. Don’t get me wrong: Marx had many failings, extreme racism not the least among them. I am not a communist. That has shown itself to be the path to another industrial nightmare.
I organize now with a movement called Deep Green Resistance, or DGR. Our movement is made up of an international network of activists and community organizers with a radical political vision. The DGR analysis is different from anything that I had heard previously.
We go deeper than I used to think possible – 10,000 years deep, to the end of that shadowed time called pre-history and the fragmentary beginnings of history. The end of the Paleolithic era; the beginnings of the Neolithic.
At this time, several communities around the world began to cultivate annual monocrops in a process known as agriculture.
Maybe you are thinking that agriculture has little to do with social and environmental issues. I would have thought the same, years ago. But now I know better.
10,000 years of evidence paints a bleak picture of agriculture. When they begin to cultivate fields, the archeological record shows that human skeletons shrink in stature and health. The pollen records, trapped in lakes and bogs, show that forests began to fall en masse around 8,000 years ago, as agriculture spread. Wetlands and grasslands show the same decline; they have never recovered.
Agriculture requires land clearance. Annual plants require bare soil, and that bare soil was created by unnatural disasters. Understand: agriculture is when you take a piece of land—a forest, wetland, or grassland—you clear every living thing off it, and you plant it to human use.
That energy is no longer being shared. Instead of sustaining biodiversity, you are now sustaining an artificially high human population.
When we say agriculture is theft, we are not joking.
Anthropologists and archeologists also explain to us that agriculture marked the beginning of dense population centers – cities – that became the first nation-states as these early cities devastated the lands and soils around them and began imperialist conquests further and further afield.
Make no mistake: civilization is not just characterized by aggressive resource wars, it is defined by them.
The history of civilization is the history of conquest. The first standing armies were created by the first civilizations; their progress around the world is written indelibly on the land, a patchwork of gullies and deserts, the ghosts of forests, and desertified soils.
Clearing forests, plowing fields, and harvesting grain is not easy work; thus, these early agricultural societies were characterized by slavery. Indeed, until the mid-1800’s (when fossil fuels burst onto the scene) fully 3/4ths of all the people on the planet lived in some form of slavery or indentured servitude: this is the future of agricultural societies, once the fossil fuels run out.
From the beginning, this social structure we call civilization has been defined by hierarchy, slavery, imperialism, and relentless destruction of the land. This cannot last. It is not sustainable nor is it just.
For these reasons, DGR advocates for the dismantling of industrialism and abandonment of civilization as a way of life.
The genesis of the DGR movement was a strategy based in this knowledge: that the culture of civilization is killing the planet, and that time is short. The system must be seriously challenged before it is too late. Part of the work we do in DGR involves preparing for the eventual collapse of civilization. The rest hinges on, to quote Andrea Dworkin, ‘organized political resistance.’
We recognize that mainstream politics is largely a distraction. The votes are tallied, the lobbyists scurry about their work, and Earth is consumed by global capitalism.
In the face of a global system such as this, we feel that many of our options for resistance have been foreclosed. But regardless of the ideological and political strength of industrial civilization, its physical infrastructure is fragile. This system (or global capitalism) rests on a brittle foundation of fossil fuel pipelines, refineries, mining sites, international trade, communications cables, and other similar infrastructure.
This centralization makes the system strong, but also vulnerable.
Let us not mince words: we call for militant, organized underground action to bring down the global industrial economy. Simply put, we need to stop this death economy before it completely destroys the planet. The pipelines need to be disabled, the power stations need to be dismantled, the mining sites need to be put out of commission. Global capitalism needs to be brought to a screeching halt.
The ticking of stocks is the death knell of planet Earth, and our response is that revolutionary refrain: by any means necessary.
As a group that operates within the boundaries of state repression, we do not engage in underground action ourselves. We limit our work to non-violent civil disobedience – an elegant political tactic that has been used for many decades with great success. If we had the numbers and the commitment, this system could be brought down through non-violence alone. But the numbers simply aren’t there. If anyone can make them appear, I will be forever grateful. But for now, I see no other option—we must fight back.
I ask myself all the time if these tactics are justified – after all, we are talking about the collapse of a global industrial system that supports billions of people. The end of this system won’t be pretty. Won’t the culture make a voluntary transformation towards justice and balance? Will people wake up? Isn’t it great hubris to claim to have some sort of answer?
But then I remember: like a good abuser, civilization systematically works to destroy alternative ways of thinking and being. Indigenous communities, which are living examples of ways to live in balance, have been the number one enemy of civilization. Against them, it is especially ruthless. We must always remember that members of settler culture (such as myself) are living on stolen land. Any plan for the future must take into account the needs and wishes of the original inhabitants.
With the same cold logic used by abusers of women and children, the system has made many of us dependent upon it for our survival. Our food, medicine, shelter, water, transportation, even our entertainment all comes from the system that is killing us and killing Earth.
When I walk down the street, I see people who are locked into a system that is killing the planet. Many of them—Democrat and Republican alike—have bought into this system. Will they demand change? Will they sacrifice for it?
Against all odds, and only for a few, the answer may be yes. But for the majority, the answer is a resounding no. Many are adopting a defensive posture, hunching around the elegancies and comforts of modern civilization and blocking out the cries of a bleeding world. Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.
But we hear the cries of people slaving away for a system that is killing them. We see more forests falling for shopping malls and strip mines. We choose to speak, and to not turn aside.
Max Wilbert was born and raised in Seattle and lives in Salt Lake City. He works with the activist group Deep Green Resistance. He can be contacted at max_DGR@riseup.net.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jul 11, 2012 | Agriculture, Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy
By Survival International
Survival has received disturbing reports from members of several tribes in Ethiopia’s Lower Omo Valley, which describe how the government is destroying their crops to force them to move off their land into designated resettlement areas.
Those most affected by the land grabs are Suri, Bodi and Mursi pastoralists, and the Kwegu hunter-gatherer people.
Many families are now desperate as they have no sorghum, and their cattle grazing land is also being rapidly destroyed as the government continues to lease out their land for sugar cane and oil palm plantations.
Some Bodi communities are already being moved in to camps against their will. A Bodi man said, ‘They are taking our land by force. The bulldozer even cleared the gardens where our crops were growing. They went right through where our sorghum was growing.’
The Mursi have been told they must sell their cattle, and will be moved to the resettlement camps by the end of this year. One Mursi woman said, ‘The other day I went to the Omo River. I went to my grain stores to get the grain and it was gone. My grain stores had been thrown away (by bulldozers). I don’t like what they are doing. When I went I just cried. Our grain stores were gone. Now we will have big problems. We don’t know what to do. Maybe we will die.’
Access to the Omo River is being blocked as the government continues to clear land and build roads to the sugar cane plantations, which are part of the state run Kuraz Sugar Project.
The government is also leasing large tracts of tribal land to national and foreign investors. To the west of the Omo National Park, the Suri are protesting against a Malaysian company which is planting oil palm on some of their best cattle grazing land.
According to one Suri man, ‘The government went with soldiers and for two weeks tried to prevent the Suri from planting crops. This was to force the people to be hungry and accept moving into the resettlement site. Most of the Suri are afraid to go to the place where they plant crops. Only a few went. In one village near the Malaysian plantation, three houses were burned down, with grain stores inside. This was done by the plantation workers.’
Human Rights Watch recently launched a damning new report ‘What Will Happen if Hunger Comes?’ which documents how government security forces are driving communities to relocate from their lands through violence and intimidation, threatening their entire way of life with no compensation or choice of alternative livelihoods.
From Survival International: http://www.survivalinternational.org/news/8467
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jul 5, 2012 | Colonialism & Conquest, Defensive Violence, Human Supremacy
By Chris Hedges, for TruthDig
Native Americans’ resistance to the westward expansion of Europeans took two forms. One was violence. The other was accommodation. Neither worked. Their land was stolen, their communities were decimated, their women and children were gunned down and the environment was ravaged. There was no legal recourse. There was no justice. There never is for the oppressed. And as we face similar forces of predatory, unchecked corporate power intent on ruthless exploitation and stripping us of legal and physical protection, we must confront how we will respond.
The ideologues of rapacious capitalism, like members of a primitive cult, chant the false mantra that natural resources and expansion are infinite. They dismiss calls for equitable distribution as unnecessary. They say that all will soon share in the “expanding” wealth, which in fact is swiftly diminishing. And as the whole demented project unravels, the elites flee like roaches to their sanctuaries. At the very end, it all will come down like a house of cards.
Civilizations in the final stages of decay are dominated by elites out of touch with reality. Societies strain harder and harder to sustain the decadent opulence of the ruling class, even as it destroys the foundations of productivity and wealth. Karl Marx was correct when he called unregulated capitalism “a machine for demolishing limits.” This failure to impose limits cannibalizes natural resources and human communities. This time, the difference is that when we go the whole planet will go with us. Catastrophic climate change is inevitable. Arctic ice is in terminal decline. There will soon be so much heat trapped in the atmosphere that any attempt to scale back carbon emissions will make no difference. Droughts. Floods. Heat waves. Killer hurricanes and tornados. Power outages. Freak weather. Rising sea levels. Crop destruction. Food shortages. Plagues.
ExxonMobil, BP and the coal and natural gas companies—like the colonial buffalo hunters who left thousands of carcasses rotting in the sun after stripping away the hides, and in some cases carrying away only the tongues—will never impose rational limits on themselves. They will exploit, like the hustlers before them who eliminated the animals that sustained the native peoples of the Great Plains, until there is nothing left to exploit. Collective suicide is never factored into quarterly profit reports. Forget all those virtuous words they taught you in school about our system of government. The real words to describe American power are “plunder,” “fraud,” “criminality,” “deceit,” “murder” and “repression.”
Those native communities that were most accommodating to the European colonists, such as the peaceful California tribes—the Chilulas, Chimarikos, Urebures, Nipewais and Alonas, along with a hundred other bands—were the first to be destroyed. And while I do not advocate violence, indeed will seek every way to avoid it, I have no intention of accommodating corporate power whether it hides behind the mask of Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. At the same time, I have to acknowledge that resistance may ultimately be in vain. Yet to resist is to say something about us as human beings. It keeps alive the possibility of hope, even as all empirical evidence points to inevitable destruction. It makes victory, however remote, possible. And it makes life a little more difficult for the ruling class, which satisfies the very human emotion of vengeance.
“Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power,” wrote the philosopher John Locke, “they put themselves into a state of war with the people who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience.”
The European colonists signed, and ignored, some 400 treaties with native tribes. They enticed the native leaders into accords, always to seize land, and then repeated the betrayal again and again and again until there was nothing left to steal. Chiefs such as Black Kettle who believed the white men did not fare much better than those who did not. Black Kettle, who outside his lodge often flew a huge American flag given to him in Washington as a sign of friendship, was shot dead by soldiers of George Armstrong Custer in November 1868 along with his wife and more than 100 other Cheyenne in his encampment on the Washita River.
The white men “made us many promises, more than I can remember,” Chief Red Cloud said in old age, “but they kept but one. They promised to take our land, and they took it.”
Native societies, in which people redistributed wealth to gain respect, and in which those who hoarded were detested, upheld a communal ethic that had to be obliterated and replaced with the greed, ceaseless exploitation and cult of the self that fuel capitalist expansion. Lewis Henry Morgan in his book “League of the Iroquois,” written in 1851 after he lived among them, noted that the Iroquois’ “whole civil policy was averse to the concentration of power in the hands of any single individual, but inclined to the opposite principle of division among a number of equals. …” This was a way of relating to each other, as well as to the natural world, that was an anathema to the European colonizers.
Those who exploit do so through layers of deceit. They hire charming and eloquent interlocutors. How many more times do you want to be lied to by Barack Obama? What is this penchant for self-delusion that makes us unable to see that we are being sold into bondage? Why do we trust those who do not deserve our trust? Why are we repeatedly seduced? The promised closure of Guantanamo. The public option in health care. Reforming the Patriot Act. Environmental protection. Restoring habeas corpus. Regulating Wall Street. Ending the wars. Jobs. Defending labor rights. I could go on.
There are few resistance figures in American history as noble as Crazy Horse. He led, long after he knew that ultimate defeat was inevitable, the most effective revolt on the plains, wiping out Custer and his men on the Little Big Horn. “Even the most basic outline of his life shows how great he was,” Ian Frazier writes in his book “Great Plains,” “because he remained himself from the moment of his birth to the moment he died; because he knew exactly where he wanted to live, and never left; because he may have surrendered, but he was never defeated in battle; because, although he was killed, even the Army admitted he was never captured; because he was so free that he didn’t know what a jail looked like.” His “dislike of the oncoming civilization was prophetic,” Frazier writes. “He never met the President” and “never rode on a train, slept in a boarding house, ate at a table.” And “unlike many people all over the world, when he met white men he was not diminished by the encounter.”
Crazy Horse was bayoneted to death on Sept. 5, 1877, after being tricked into walking toward the jail at Fort Robinson in Nebraska. The moment he understood the trap he pulled out a knife and fought back. Gen. Phil Sheridan had intended to ship Crazy Horse to the Dry Tortugas, a group of small islands in the Gulf of Mexico, where a U.S. Army garrison ran a prison with cells dug out of the coral. Crazy Horse, even when dying, refused to lie on the white man’s cot. He insisted on being placed on the floor. Armed soldiers stood by until he died. And when he breathed his last, Touch the Clouds, Crazy Horse’s seven-foot-tall Miniconjou friend, pointed to the blanket that covered the chief’s body and said, “This is the lodge of Crazy Horse.” His grieving parents buried Crazy Horse in an undisclosed location. Legend says that his bones turned to rocks and his joints to flint. His ferocity of spirit remains a guiding light for all who seek lives of defiance.
From TruthDig: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/time_to_get_crazy_20120702/
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jun 15, 2012 | Repression at Home
By Rights Action
On June 13, assassins on a motorcycle shot multiple times at Yolanda Oqueli Veliz, a community leader from the municipalities of San José el Golfo and San Pedro Ayampuc, just outside of Guatemala City.
Yolanda is in critical but stable condition in a Guatemala City Hospital, one bullet still lodged in her body.
Humanitarian-emergency relief funds are needed – see below, to make tax-deductible donations in the USA and Canada.
There is little doubt in people’s minds in San José el Golfo and San Pedro Ayampuc that the attempt on her life was carried out by assassins and that she was targeted due to the articulate and passionate community leadership role she has assumed in opposing the illegal and unwanted entry of Radius Gold into their community lands.
On Saturday, May 26, a Rights Action/University of Northern British Colombia delegation traveled to Yolanda’s home community and met with hundreds of community members peacefully resisting the entry of Radius Gold Inc.
Add Radius Gold Inc. now to the Canadian “Mining and Repression” Hall of Fame, to the growing list of Canadian mining companies directly and indirectly linked to extreme repression around the world. In the countries where Rights Action work (Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador), this list of repression, over the past few years alone, includes: Radius Gold, Goldcorp Inc (attempted assassination – shooting in the eye – of Diodora Hernandez / beatings and attacks on community leaders), Hudbay Minerals/Skye Resources (murder, shooting-wounding of numerous villagers, gang rapes of 11 women villagers), Pacific Rim (murder of 5 villagers). The lists goes on …
Read more from Rights Action: http://rightsaction.org/action-content/assassination-attempt-guatemala-linked-mining-interests-radius-gold-inc-canada
Rights Action has already been sending general support funds to the communities of San Jose del Golfo and San Pedro Ayumpac that are working for integral community development and the environment. Make check payable to “Rights Action” and mail to:
UNITED STATES: Box 50887, Washington DC, 20091-0887
CANADA: 552 – 351 Queen St. E, Toronto ON, M5A-1T8
CREDIT-CARD DONATIONS: http://rightsaction.org/tax-deductible-donations
DONATIONS OF STOCK: info@rightsaction.org
