by DGR News Service | Mar 6, 2020 | Movement Building & Support
Here are five upcoming Deep Green Resistance events around the world. Contact us to get involved, or donate to support our work.
1. Women and Wildness: Feminist Solidarity in Ecological Crisis (Dublin, Ireland — May 25, 2020)
We are living through times of immense violence, from the ongoing annihilation of the natural world to the unspoken epidemic of violence against women, female solidarity and radical analysis have never been more necessary. On May 25th join us in Dublin, Ireland for an evening in conversation with renowned feminist activists and thinkers:
- Lierre Kieth – American writer, radical feminist activist and revolutionary environmentalist. Some of Lierres notable works include “Deep Green Resistance – A strategy to save the planet”, “The Vegetarian Myth”, “Skyler Gabriel” and “Conditions of War”
- Rachel Moran – Founder of SPACE International(Survivors of Prostitution-Abuse Calling for Enlightenment) and author of “Paid For- My journey through prostitution”. Rachel speaks globally on prostitution and sex trafficking.
- Shahidah Janjua – Writer, poet and feminist activist. Shahidah has campigned for womens rights for over 30 years and was presented The Emma Humphries Memorial Prize for her work on issues of violence against women.
- Jennifer Murnan – US based feminist activist and environmental campaigner. Jennifer is involved in projects focused on growing and supporting gynocentric communities, and is co – host of The Green Flame podcast.
Tickets and more details: https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/women-and-wildness-feminist-solidarity-in-ecological-crisis-tickets-96064145445
2. SE Asia Solidarity Tour
This Spring, DGR is sending a delegation to SE Asia for a solidarity tour. This tour will include more than 20 events, trainings, and community visits. More details coming soon.
3. Wild Mind Intensive for Activists & Revolutionaries (Oregon, USA — June 26-30, 2020)
This program is in partnership with Deep Green Resistance and is for Deep Green Resistance members and allies.
Those who confront oppression and destruction often struggle with profound stress and disconnection. This intensive aims to help you access deeper wellsprings of strength through connection to wild mind. Imagine what it would be like if nature and dreams were your primary guides. Healthy, mature cultures emerge from the depths of our psyches and from the Earth’s imagination acting through us — through encounters on the land, dreams, and our visionary self.
In his book Dreams, the author Derrick Jensen wrote: “That we come to the earth to live is untrue: We come but to sleep, to dream…dreams are living, willful beings.”
The cultures of nature-based and indigenous peoples are rooted in their mythology and their relationship with Earth. Modern culture not only lacks these qualities, but actively mocks them. Yet, the revolutionary potential of our dreams, visions, and encounters in the other-than-human world await us nonetheless, for those who can break through these barriers. Through Bill Plotkin’s Nature-Based Map of the Human Psyche, a holistic model rooted in the four-directions, we can access our innate human potentials that we may not even have known existed, cultivate their powers, and integrate them into our everyday lives. We can also contact our fragmented and wounded subpersonalities which formed to protect us in childhood, but may now have become barriers to our authentic humanity.
More details and registration info: https://animas.org/event-registration/?ee=364
4. A Call To Action For The Earth (Virginia, USA — May 1-2, 2020)
This event will feature Derrick Jensen, Max Wilbert, and a range of other grassroots resistance activists. The event will be hosted by The Virginia Network for Democracy and Environmental Rights (VNDER) The Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights (CDER). Contact us for more details.
5. Deep Green Resistance International Conference (West Coast, USA — Midsummer)
Three days of revolutionary training, workshops, group discussion, strategy, and community. Presentations by core organizers and leaders, including Derrick Jensen and Lierre Keith. Opportunities for you to share your knowledge, learn, and build relationships. The most important event for DGR organizers.
This event is only open to DGR organizers and allies. Contact us if you wish to attend or get involved.
by DGR News Service | Aug 15, 2019 | Education, Strategy & Analysis
Editor’s note: DGR acknowledges that Extinction Rebellion and Extinction Rebellion Ireland are valuable and necessary contributors to a broader ecosystem of activism. The analysis in this article is relevant for many movements and it’s republished from Medium with permission from the author.
Image credit: Truthout.org on Flickr
by Roderick Campbell
Extinction Rebellion Ireland (XRI) is growing at a decent speed and has already hosted a number of public marches and street art performances. The movement currently follows the Extinction Rebellion International principles and policies, which make it a fully decentralised and non-hierarchical movement which is open to anyone who wants to participate. In Ireland they are currently opting for a consensus based approach to decisionmaking rather than a democratic process, and they are experimenting with using “circles” to organise around key issues like finance, tactics, and policies. The community is somewhat divided on the details, especially regarding the ambiguity of some of Extinction Rebellion’s principles and how they should be interpreted. There is also contention around the details of decisionmaking processes and key financial decisions.
This is very much a social experiment, and you can tell the movement is young and raw. Individual participants run the gamut from brand-new activists to seasoned community organisers, from upper class people to significantly underpriveleged people, and from those living in intensely rural settings to those living in the big cities. The diversity of participants is staggering. There seems to be a central division between those who espouse fundamentally capitalist beliefs and call for incremental progress through government lobbying and public relations stunts, to outright socialists who are calling for the abolition of capitalism and profound restructuring of government institions. Likewise, there is a division between those who believe that climate change is a serious concern but a vaguely distant threat, to those who believe climate collapse is actively occurring and poses a risk of near-term extinction. These divisions are obviously exploitable, and will inevitably identified by opposition forces (e.g. fossil fuel industry propaganda teams).
Below I outline some of my most immediate security concerns. Please note that I’m highlighting these concerns in order to help XRI identify and address them before they fall victim to malicious parties. I will approach these concerns from the perspective of an oppositional force in order to highlight the seriousness of these vulnerabilities.
Crippling Through Consensus
Perhaps the most easily exploitable aspect of Extinction Rebellion Ireland (XRI) is that they’re currently using consensus rather than democracy, which means that they only progress on a tactic or solution if everyone agrees. If one participant wishes to block the decision they can grind everything to a halt. There is no process for dealing with people who consistently obstruct decisions, so it would be easy for a member of the opposition to join XRI meetings and simply blockade all decisions while pretending to do so in good faith — though even if they blockaded XRI without pretending to be sincere, there are no existing procedures for dealing with them. A small handful of malicious individuals could easily cripple XRI and prevent most progress.
Scenario: I am the head of a PR (propaganda) agency for the fossil fuel industry and I’ve identified this weakness. I hire a small team of individuals to join XRI Facebook groups, join the XRI Slack, and participate in all key meetings both in person and via Zoom. These individuals do not need to be skilled at all, so I would select them based on their cover stories. I would give preference to older individuals, since they are perceived to be more trustworthy, and I would favour anyone who has a background in “feel good” activism so that they seem credible. Their entire job will be to bring up “legitimate” concerns about every issue and to trade off on blocking decisions, that way it’s not too obvious.
Outcome: XRI decisionmaking is ground to a halt, effectively the only actions which become possible are those which the fossil fuel industry has authorised because all others are blocked by the small team of paid trolls. These blockade participants may arouse some degree of suspicion, but it is impossible to definitively accuse them of maliciousness. This tactic will continue to work so long as consensus decisionmaking is in effect and/or so long as participation is open to the general public.
Consistent, Controlled Conflict
Groups like XRI are highly diverse, and they always include big personalities. There are a handful of especially divisive issues which are guaranteed to generate conflict and endless argument. Some of the prominent issues include:
- Urgently dismantling capitalist systems (“capitalism relies on infinite growth on a finite planet, which is irrational”).
- Emotional violence as violence (“if we hurt someone’s feelings it constitutes violence and is against the XRI policies”)
- Property destruction as nonviolence (“if we sabotage a pipeline it does not directly harm anyone and is therefore nonviolent”)
- Quantifiability of tactics (“we should not pursue tactics which have no quantifiable outcomes”)
- Naming and shaming (“we cannot mention any names” & “no naming and shaming only applies to XR participants and the general public”)
Leveraging these key issues to generate internal conflict would be effective because they all address valid, but generally unresolveable issues. They divide people along key lines: capitalism/socialism, idealist/pragmatist, and analytical/emotional. Each of these groups constitute a large ratio of XRI’s participants and can therefore generate substantial conflict with very little prompting. Most of these debates occur on Facebook and Slack, and can therefore be instigated and sustained by fake accounts.
Scenario: I am a member of a prominent opposition party and my objective is to cause enough sustained dissent within XRI to cripple an upcoming national strike. I coordinate a dozen party volunteers via Facebook. Each volunteer sets up 2–3 fake Facebook accounts and email addresses, primarily using images of attractive young women to ensure they are inundated with incoming friend requests, which significantly reduces the amount of work needed to create a realistic looking account. Once the accounts have several dozen friends the volunteers are prompted to add them to prominent XRI groups on Facebook, where each fake account regularly initiates arguments about one of the key issues outlined above. The volunteer trolls also engage with each others’ content in order to make the arguments appear authentic and lively. Once the accounts have become regonisable in the community they request to be added to the XRI Slack where they continue baiting arguments.
Outcome: XRI participants end up wasting time and energy on divisive arguments rather than working on actions or making progress toward resolving organisational gaps. Moreover, individuals who engage in arguments will be likely to form cliques and grudges until active members leave out of frustration and emotional exhaustion. XRI currently has no process for resolving these disputes or making critical interpretive decisions, so this tactic would work indefinitely.
Daylight Robbery
Extinction Rebellion and XRI have significant access to funding. The International account generally holds between €500,000 and €1,000,000 in cash and they are beginning to allocate relatively large amounts of funding to individual Extinction Rebellion groups. For example, XRI has been offered €10,000 without strings attached, and an additional €40,000 with minimal strings attached.
The biggest financial obstacle facing XRI and other regional XR groups is accessing funds, because they are often used for illegal activities. Under normal circumstances, XRI members would join forces and create a legal entity (e.g. limited company) to receive and process the funds; this approach requires individual XRI members to sign their name to the company and take on significant legal liabilities. Conversely, individual XR members could be directly paid out the funds as wages, which carries slightly less legal liability but lacks transparency, creates infighting, and makes resource purchases difficult. Another option is to set up an out-of-country legal entity, which provides significant legal protection but requires a trustworthy foreign national. The last option is to receive payment in bitcoin and withdraw cash from bitcoin ATMs, which provides the most legal protection but lacks transparency and requires several trustworthy individuals.
XRI is open to anyone and operates on a consensus model, which means that a dedicated group of thieves could potentially steal tens of thousands of euro by infiltrating the XRI community, driving financial decisions toward methods they can control, and working as a group to mask their actions and mitigate any risk of being caught.
Scenario: A group of 10 friends hear that XRI will soon receive €40,000 in funding. They join XRI groups, the Slack platform, and begin attending all meetings in order to build rapport. These individuals understand the logistical challenges facing XRI and they advise XRI to leverage bitcoin to receive the funds in order to take advantage of its many benefits, namely its anonymity and significantly reduced legal liability. XRI participants express concern about ensuring the funds are safely handled and can be transparently accounted. The group of thieves suggest a best practice: a “circle” of designated people should all have access to the bitcoin wallet in order to monitor the funds and keep each other honest. All 10 of the friends join the circle and insist that many people should have access in order to avoid centralisation and hierarchy. Once the funds are in the bitcoin wallet, they almost immediately disappear into another wallet and are then laundered through one of many services. The funds are eventually divided among the friends and nobody can identify who took the bitcoins.
Outcome: XRI loses €40,000 in funding and has a reduced likelihood of receiving additional funds. The Extinction Rebellion brand is tarnished and media coverage is diverted away from actions and toward the robbery. Extinction Rebellion funders are globally disenfranchised and become less likely to provide financial resources in the future.
Summary
By compiling this analysis I hope to highlight several significant security risks, which can be exploited by malicious third parties with minimal resources or expertise to cripple the Extinction Rebellion movement in Ireland. These approaches are not new, they have been used before to undermine movements, but they have not yet been used against Extinction Rebellion. My hope is that, by highlighting them, Extinction Rebellion can resolve the issues before oppositional parties exploit them or, at the very least, Extinction Rebellion participants will be more likely to identify them before they cause critical damage to the movement.
All of these weaknesses can be effectively counteracted, but only if we’re aware of them before we fall victim to them.
by DGR News Service | Jul 23, 2019 | Direct Action, Education, Strategy & Analysis
Editor’s note: this article contains extensive excerpts from the Irish Republican Army’s Green Book, one of their key training documents during their 20th-century struggle against British occupation.
Written by Liam Campbell
“Don’t be seen in public marches, demonstrations or protests. Don’t be seen in the company of known Republicans, don’t frequent known Republican houses. Your prime duty is to remain unknown to the enemy forces and the public at large.”
Like all successful underground organisations, the Irish Republican Army maintained a strict firewall between their aboveground and underground movements, this ensured that publicly identifiable individuals could not be pressured into revealing underground militants, providing a certain level of safety for both groups. The Irish Republican Army also emphasized the importance of abstaining from alcohol or other drugs, which they identified as the single greatest threat to any guerilla organisation.
“Many in the past have joined the Army out of romantic notions, or sheer adventure, but when captured and jailed they had after-thoughts about their allegiance to the Army. They realised at too late a stage that they had no real interest in being volunteers. This causes splits and dissension inside prisons and divided families and neighbours outside.”
When recruiting, the Irish Republican Army recognised that successful underground members had certain characteristics; they were intelligent, reliable, and they were capable of giving their total allegiance to the cause. These characteristics ensured that they would consistently obey often difficult orders from the chain of command, regardless of the personal cost, and despite any personal issues they may have with their superior officers. Certain qualities could disqualify a person as a candidate: emotionalism, sensationalism, and adventurism were among them.
“The enemy, generally speaking, are all those opposed to our short-term or long-term objectives. But having said that, we must realise that all our enemies are not the same and therefore there is no common cure for their enmity. The conclusion then is that we must categorise and then suggest cures for each category. Some examples: We have enemies through ignorance, through our own fault or default and of course the main enemy is the establishment.”
One of the most essential features of the Green Book was the precision with which it defined enemies. You cannot wage a successful war if your targets are poorly defined. The Irish Republican Army identified three categories of enemy:
Enemies through ignorance are those individuals who can be cured through education. Tactics included marches, demonstrations, wall slogans, press statements, publications, and person-to-person communication. The Green Book stressed that self education was essential, which included ideological understanding and also tactical knowledge about how to organise large groups of people and how to successfully execute different actions.
Enemies through our own fault are the ones created by the Irish Republican Army’s actions, which includes personal conduct and the collective conduct of the movement. These enemies vary greatly. The elderly woman whose door was pulled off its hinges by an IRA member evading capture who doesn’t receive an immediate apology and recompense, the family and friends of an informer who has been punished without their being notified of the reason, and also the collateral victims of violence.
Members of the establishment who consciously take actions to maintain the status quo in politics, media, policing, and business. Although some of these enemies are clearly identifiable, most of them operate with various degrees of anonymity as bureaucratic cogs in a vast machine of oppression; this means that one of the greatest challenges is accurately identifying establishment members. Surprisingly, execution is not always the best way to make a member of the establishment ineffective, often it is better to expose them as liars, hypocrites, collaborators, or subjects of public ridicule.
“Many figures of speech have been used to describe Guerrilla Warfare, one of the most apt being ‘The War of the Flea’ which conjured up the image of a flea harrying a creature of by comparison elephantine size into fleeing (forgive the pun). Thus it is with a Guerrilla Army such as the I.R.A. which employs hit and run tactics against the Brits while at the same time striking at the soft economic underbelly of the enemy, not with the hope of physically driving them into the sea but nevertheless expecting to effect their withdrawal by an effective campaign of continuing harassment contained in a fivefold guerrilla strategy.”
The Irish Republican Army’s strategy included a war of attrition, the destruction of high-value assets, to make large regions ungovernable, to sustain a propaganda campaign, and to protect the movement against criminals, collaborators, and informers. The Green Book emphasized that volunteers need to achieve more than just killing enemy personnel, they must also create and maintain support systems that would not only carry the movement through the war, but would also facilitate a smooth transition after military victory had been achieved.
“Most volunteers are arrested on or as a result of a military operation. This causes an initial shock resulting in tension and anxiety. All volunteers feel that they have failed, resulting in a deep sense of disappointment. The police are aware of this feeling of disappointment and act upon this weakness by insults such as “you did not do very well: you are only an amateur: you are only second-class or worse”. While being arrested the police use heavy-handed `shock` tactics in order to frighten the prisoner and break down his resistance. The prisoner is usually dragged along the road to the waiting police wagon, flung into it, followed by the arresting personnel, e.g., police or Army. On the journey to the detention centre the prisoner is kicked, punched and the insults start. On arrival he is dragged from the police wagon through a gauntlet of kicks, punches and insults and flung into a cell.”
Capture was one of the greatest fears that volunteers lived with on a daily basis, so the Green Book addressed these concerns in detail and prepared volunteers for that possibility. This section was broken down into the actual arrest, the interrogation, and the legal process. There were three categories of torture that volunteers could face: physical, subtle psychological, and humiliation. Physical torture often took the form of beatings, kicking, punching, and cigarette burns. Psychological torture could include threats to family, friends, and self, or threats of assassination and disfigurement. Humiliation included being stripped naked, remarks about the prisoner’s sexual organs, and removing symbolic defense mechanisms.
One of the ways the Green Book prepared volunteers was by reminding them that they could only be held and tortured for a maximum of 7 days. Although the experience would likely be horrific, it could only last for a relatively brief duration; if they confessed or capitulated during their interrogation they could easily face a lifetime in prison where they would experience much of the same torture. One of the coping strategies they employed was to form images in their minds or on the surrounding walls, directing their concentration away from the interrogators and diverting it toward positive or neutral ideas, even something as simple as a flickering candle or a leaf.
Overall, what the Green Book does is it clearly lays out the ideological foundations of the movement, the requirements of its volunteers, the methodology for identifying and categorising enemies, the tactics that should be employed, and it also addresses the greatest fears of volunteers and teaches them how to cope in the event that they must face them. These are the foundational psychological requirements that are needed to recruit and retain effective underground guerillas. They must know why they are taking action, what their actions will achieve, how to behave, who they are targeting, and they need to know that they will be able to overcome their fears should they need to face them.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jul 2, 2012 | Colonialism & Conquest, Defensive Violence
By Ben Barker / Deep Green Resistance
Based in 1920’s British-occupied Ireland, this film is the absolute best I’ve seen in terms of what a serious, militant resistance movement might look like.
It follows a chapter of the IRA (Irish Republican Army) as they recruit, build, and train an armed resistance movement to force the British–who had murdered and humiliated them for generations–from their homeland.
But, they didn’t stop with the British. A large faction of the Irish people signed a treaty with the crown to create a new “Irish Free State”, which meant their independence was meaningful only to the extent of the whims of the British. To fight for real justice and freedom for all people–not just the ruling class–the resistance movement had to battle amongst fellow Irish.
All people interested in a living planet–and the resistance movement it will take to make that a reality–should watch this film. The courage found within every one forming their amazing culture of resistance–militant and non; including those who set up alternative courts, sang traditional songs and speak the traditional Gaelic language, open their homes for members of the resistance–is more than i have ever experienced, yet exactly what is needed in our current crisis. Those who fought back endured torture, murder, and the destruction of their communities. Yet, they still fought because they were guided by love and by what is right.
It’s time we fight back. Watch this film and discuss it with those you love, with your comrades. The next question becomes: How?
From Kid Cutbank: http://kidcutbank.blogspot.com/2011/12/recommended-film-wind-that-shakes.html
