by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Aug 8, 2013 | Defensive Violence, Property & Material Destruction, Strategy & Analysis
By Lexy Garza and Rachel / Deep Green Resistance
Humans are storytelling creatures, and our current strategy as a movement is a story, with a beginning, middle, and end. We need to ask whether that story matches up with reality, and with the way social change has happened throughout history.
So here’s the story as it stands:
- By raising awareness about the issues, we will create a shift in consciousness.
- A shift in consciousness will spark a mass movement.
- A mass movement can successfully end the murder of the planet by using exclusively pacifist tactics.
We all know this narrative, we hear it referenced all the time, and it resonates with a lot of people, but we need to examine it with a critical eye along with the historical narratives that are used to back it up. There are truths behind these ideas, but there is also the omission of truth, and we can decipher the interests of the historian by reading between the lines. Let’s take each piece of this narrative in turn to try and find out what’s been omitted and those interests that omission may be concealing.
So let’s start with the idea of “a shift in consciousness.” The idea that we can educate society into a new and different state of consciousness has been popularized most recently by writers like David Korten, who bases his analysis on the idea:
“The term The Great Turning has come into widespread use to describe the awakening of a higher level of human consciousness and a human turn from an era of violence against people and nature to a new era of peace, justice and environmental restoration.”
Another way that this idea is often mentioned is in the form of the Hundredth Monkey myth. A primatologist named Lyall Watson wrote about a supposed phenomenon where monkeys on one island began teaching each other to wash sweet potatoes in the ocean before eating them. Myth has it that once the hundredth monkey learned to do it, monkeys on other islands who had no contact with the original potato washing monkeys spontaneously began washing potatoes, exhibiting a kind of tipping point or collective jump in consciousness. The existence of this phenomenon has been thoroughly debunked, and even Watson himself has admitted that he fabricated the myth using “very slim evidence and a great deal of hearsay.” This hasn’t stopped optimistic environmentalists from invoking the hundredth monkey phenomenon to defend the idea that through raising our collective consciousness, by getting through to that hundredth monkey, we’ll spark a great turning of humankind away from the behaviors that are killing the planet.
Unfortunately, this line of thinking doesn’t pan out historically. Let’s take the example of resistance against the Nazi regime and the genocide it committed. And let’s look at some omitted historical information. In 1952, after the Nuremberg Trials, after all of the information about the atrocities of the holocaust had become common knowledge, still only 20% of German citizens thought that resistance was justifiable during wartime which, under the Nazis or any other empire, is all the time. And mind you, the question was not whether they personally would participate in the resistance; it was whether they thought any resistance by anyone was justifiable.
At the time that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, 80% of Southern whites still disapproved of giving legal rights to black people. So, raised awareness of the atrocities of the holocaust and of American slavery did not translate into an increased willingness to support resistance. It was not a shift in consciousness that got the civil rights act passed – it was the hard and dangerous work of organizing, protesting, and putting pressure on the government not by changing its mind but by forcing its hand. [1]
This same unfortunate trend is true about current efforts to educate about climate change. A recent Yale study found that raised awareness about the facts of climate change is not the most powerful influence on someone’s attitude about the issue. Far more powerful on an individual’s attitude are the attitudes of their culture and their community. Right now, the culture we live in here in the US is dedicated to downplaying the risks and tamping down any kind of resistance. Our way of life depends on the very technologies that are causing climate change, and it’s difficult to make someone understand something if their salary, much less their entire way of life, depends on not understanding it. [2]
Pointing these things out is not intended to devalue education efforts. If we didn’t think education was important, we wouldn’t be writing this, and every social justice movement that’s had a serious impact has been very intentional about education. But it’s important to put education in perspective as just one tactic in our toolbox. If we’re looking to education and raising awareness as a strategy unto themselves as many seem to be, history tells us that we’re bound to be disappointed.
So who is served by the dominance of this narrative? Those who are profiting from the destruction of the planet are the ones whose interests are served by this because the longer we wait for the mythical great turning, or the hundredth monkey, or the next level of consciousness, the more time we give this system to poison the air and water, gut the land, and chew up what little biodiversity we have left.
Ideas can be powerful, but only if they get people to act. History tells us that more awareness often does not translate into more action. Let’s take the focus off trying to change people’s ideas about the world, and start focusing on changing material circumstances.
Mass Movement
Part and parcel with the idea of a consciousness shift is the hope that such a shift will lead to a mass movement, and this idea is extremely prevalent among many environmentalists.
We have Bill McKibben saying things like, “I can’t think of anything we can do except keep trying to build a big movement. There’s nothing else that’s ever going to do it.” – Bill McKibben
This is a very absolute statement, and it shows that folks like McKibben who have the most clout in the mainstream environmentalist crowd are telling us in no uncertain terms that building a mass movement is the only hope that we have to halt the destruction of the planet. I would hope that if he’s so sure about that, he has history and some evidence on his side to back it up.
And to be certain, there are examples throughout history of times when numbers mattered. Strikes, the Montgomery Bus Boycott – the key factor in some victories has been numbers. But the omitted history here is that a mass movement is not the only thing that has ever worked.
One of the most successful movements against oil extraction to date has been MEND, which stands for Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta. The area was being ravaged by Shell, and just a few hundred people took on both the Nigerian military and Shell’s private military. They’ve won popular support among the Niger Delta community, and more importantly, those few hundred people have managed to make significant reductions in the oil output from the region, which is something that mainstream environmental movement can’t boast by any stretch of the imagination.
The French Resistance to German occupation during WWII played a significant role in facilitating the Allies’ rapid advance through France, and active resisters to the Nazi occupation of France was composed of about one percent of the population. Supporters, judging by how many people were reading the underground newspaper, were as much as ten percent of the population, but the active resistance – those who were organizing strikes, gathering intelligence on the German military, sabotaging arms factories, attacks on the electrical grid, telecommunications, attacking German forces and also producing underground media about these activities – these folks were a very small segment of the population, about one percent, hardly a mass movement.
The Irish Republican Army, which fought the British occupation of Ireland, is a similar case with regard to the numbers. At the peak of the IRA’s resistance, when they were the most active, they had 100,000 members, which was just over 2% of the population, only 15,000 of which were guerilla fighters. And they had 700 years of resistance culture to draw on, while our modern environmental movement has been losing ground steadily in the fifty years since its birth.
This is not to say that broad popular support isn’t something we should hope for or something we should value, but we do need to call into question the idea, an idea that people like Bill McKibben seem to completely buy into, that a mass movement is the only scenario we can hope for. The history of resistance tells us otherwise, it tells us that small groups of committed people can be and have been successful in resisting empire.
Who is served by the dominant mass movement narrative? The people who are murdering the planet are served by this narrative. They are the victors, and they will continue to be the victors until we stop buying into their version of history and their vision of the future. While we wait for a mass movement, they are capitalizing on our paralysis and our inaction. And another 200 species went extinct today.
Dogmatic Pacifism
Recently we’ve seen the rise of the term eco-terrorist to define groups or individuals who use tactics involving force. We’ve even seen recent legislation, like House Bills 2595 and 96 in Oregon, used to redefine tree sits and other nonviolent forest defense tactics as terrorism. The FBI defines eco-terrorism as “”the use or threatened use of violence of a criminal nature against people or property by an environmentally oriented, subnational group for environmental-political reasons, or aimed at an audience beyond the target, often of a symbolic nature.”
When I hear the term eco-terrorism, I’m reminded of a bumper sticker that my friend has on her car, which says “they only call it class warfare when we fight back.” In this case, they only call it terrorism when people fight back. US imperialism, police violence, and the eradication of 200 entire species every single day – to the FBI, these things don’t count as terrorism. But the destruction of property, even if it harms no humans at all, gets condemned not only by the FBI, but by mainstream environmental organizations as well.
“The Sierra Club strongly condemns all acts of violence in the name of the environment,” said Bruce Hamilton, Sierra Club conservation director. “That type of criminal behavior does nothing to further the cause of promoting safe and livable communities.” I would like to hear Bruce Hamilton tell that to the living communities who are still alive today because of the use of forest defense tactics. I think they would disagree.
A side note on the Sierra Club: Between 2007 and 2010 the Sierra Club accepted over $25 MILLION in donations from Chesapeake Energy, one of the biggest gas drilling companies in the US and a firm heavily involved in fracking. Of course, the higher ups in the Club kept this from the members. At the time they ended their relationship with Chesapeake Energy in 2010, they turned their back on an additional $30 million in donations. We have to ask if a corporation, which like all corporations is singularly capable of focusing on profits, would donate any money much less that much money to a group using tactics they felt would be remotely likely to put a dent in their revenue.
So people like Hamilton are not only condemning acts they calls violent, but they’re condemning criminal behavior in the name of the environment. The problem with that is that the government, and the corporations that run it, THEY decide what is criminal and what isn’t, and they are increasingly criminalizing any action that has a chance of challenging their power or profits.
As activist Tim DeChristopher found out, something as nonviolent as bidding on land against oil companies is criminal. As occupy protesters found out, occupying public space is criminal.
If activists accept the line between legality and criminality as a line that cannot be crossed, they accept the idea that activists should only take actions sanctioned by the very people whose power we should be challenging. The state tends to criminalize, or classify as “violent,” any type of action that might work to challenge the status quo. Let’s keep that in mind as we look at the historical examples that are often used to back up this emphasis on the exclusive use of nonviolent tactics.
The fight against British occupation led by Gandhi is often the first and most prominent example used to promote exclusive nonviolence. Gandhi gained notoriety by leading large nonviolent protests like marches, pickets, strikes, and hunger strikes. He eventually was allowed to engage in negotiations with the occupying British who agreed to free imprisoned protesters from prison if Gandhi called off the protests. Gandhi is sometimes portrayed as single handedly leading a nonviolent uprising and forcing the British to make concessions, but we have to ask – what is the omitted history here?
The truth is that the success of the movement against the British occupation was not solely the result of pacifist tactics; it was the result of a diversity of tactics. While Gandhi was organizing, a socialist named Bhagat Singh became disillusioned with what he saw as the ineffectiveness and hypocrisy of Gandhi’s tactics. Singh went on to lead strikes and encourage militancy against the British occupation, and is considered one of the most influential revolutionary leaders in India, more revered by some in India than Gandhi. The combination of economic tactics, peaceful and symbolic actions, cultural revival, and yes, militancy, had an effect together. Most in the West, the activists that I’ve met that look to nonviolence as the primary guiding principle for their tactics have never heard of Bhagat Singh.
George Orwell had this to say on the topic of Gandhi: “Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If others imagine that one can somehow ‘overcome’ the German army by lying on one’s back, let them go on imagining it, but let them also wonder occasionally whether this is not an illusion due to security, too much money and a simple ignorance of the way in which things actually happen. As an ex-Indian civil servant, it always makes me shout with laughter to hear, for instance, Gandhi named as an example of the success of non-violence. As long as twenty years ago it was cynically admitted in Anglo-Indian circles that Gandhi was very useful to the British government. Despotic governments can stand ‘moral force’ till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force.”
Another prominent proponent of nonviolence was Martin Luther King Jr. For a people terrorized by the violence of poverty, police violence, white supremacist terrorism, and other horrors, the power of King’s words and the importance of his work, his significance to the civil rights movement, cannot be overstated. Other nonviolent groups and action like the freedom riders were very effective in demonstrating the reality of racist brutality. However, the gains made by the movement during that time were not solely the result of nonviolent tactics.
The Black Panther party and other groups were advocating for self-defense tactics and militancy, and they were widely censured for it by more mainstream elements within the movement, much like militant environmental defense is being censured by the mainstream today. A group called the Deacons for Defense and Justice was training black communities in armed self-defense tactics.
Again, in the case of the civil rights movement, it was not nonviolent tactics alone that produced the gains of that era; it was a diversity of tactics.
We already mentioned MEND, and MEND is not a nonviolent group. They are an armed militia, and they use tactics from sabotage to kidnapping oil executives in order to defend their land and their people. The land is being utterly decimated by oil extraction. The people live in poverty despite the Nigerian government making millions from the oil rich area. The tactics MEND uses are a last resort. Before MEND, the resistance in the Niger Delta was primarily nonviolent, and it was led by a man named Ken Saro-Wiwa. Ken Saro-Wiwa and his group, Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, never deviated from their commitment to nonviolence, even as Ogoni resistance leaders were being routinely murdered, both by oil company thugs and legally, through state execution. In 1995, despite a massive human rights outcry from around the world, Ken Saro-Wiwa was executed on false charges by the Nigerian government, along with eight other Ogoni resistance leaders. As Orwell pointed out, the Nigerian government and the oil companies it serves can stand “moral force” until the cows come home, it has no effect. But the physical force of MEND’s tactics was able to reduce oil output by one third between 2006 and 2008.
The movement for women’s suffrage is another movement often misremembered in the popular imagination as being won solely by nonviolent means. In Britain, women started out with pickets, and lobbying, and letters to the editor. But when these tactics failed, some suffragists moved on to direct action, such as chaining themselves to the railings outside the prime minister’s home, and to actually going and casting ballots illegally, which got them arrested. After a protest in 1910 turned into a near riot due to brutal police beatings of protesting women, the movement began to wage guerilla warfare, orchestrating systematic window smashing campaigns and arson attacks. The slogan of this movement was “deeds, not words.” They were imprisoned and tortured for their efforts, but in 1918, they won the right to vote. Again, this fight was won by a diversity of tactics.
So there’s a pattern here to which parts of history become mainstream, and which parts become marginalized and even forgotten.
Whose interests are served by omitting militancy from the historical record? It is in the interest of governments and corporations that we never seize the physical force to actually stop them.
However, plenty of people around the world ARE seizing that physical force, and they have been throughout history. Instead of haggling with Monsanto over ineffective regulations of GMO crops, and the labeling of GMO products, Hungary decided to burn all of Monsanto’s GMO corn fields within their borders to protect the integrity of their other crops. Another example of GMO resistance is that this past June in Southern Oregon, 40 Tons or 6,500 sugar beet GMO crops were destroyed by hand and the field burned over a three night period. There has been a complete media blackout of this in response, perhaps to avoid inspiring more folks to take this type of action.
Fracking equipment was set ablaze around so called New Brunswick in Canada two weeks later. This is coming at a time of increased indigenous resistance to hydraulic fracturing in the region, after numerous direct actions, midnight seizures of drilling equipment, and a local man being struck by a contractor’s vehicle.
Another example of resistance through physical force is that instead of accepting the Brazilian government ignoring their voices and sentencing their way of life to be destroyed, hundreds of indigenous demonstrators occupied and began to manually dismantle Belo Monte Dam construction.
So let’s look again at the narrative we began with:
- By raising awareness about the issues, we will create a shift in consciousness.
- A shift in consciousness will spark a mass movement.
- A mass movement can successfully end the murder of the planet by using exclusively pacifist tactics.
I hope that we’ve been able to demonstrate that while there are underlying truths here, this narrative leaves out a lot of important information, and as a result, a strategy based on this narrative is not working.
Here’s a version of those ideas that incorporates some of the omitted information that we talk about today.
- Education is vitally important, but we can’t expect raising awareness to galvanize most people into action, especially when action would threaten their privilege and entitlement.
- Popular support is valuable, but resistance has often been carried out by small groups of determined people, not by mass movements.
- Nonviolence can be a powerful tactic, but winning strategies are marked by a diversity of both peaceful and militant tactics.
What does this mean for our actions? How can we incorporate this information into our strategy?
- Vocally challenge these narratives
- Support extra-legal resistance
- Support political prisoners
- Adhere to security culture
We tried really hard as we were writing this to not sugarcoat any of this. When I’ve spoken frankly in the past about biodiversity collapse, catastrophic climate change, and the horror I feel in response to them, I’ve had some people say “tone it down. Don’t be so doom and gloom, you’ve got to give the people hope.” Let me say now for the record – fuck hope. We don’t need it. As one author put it, “hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency.” In other words, you only need hope in situations where you have no control, no power. Those who do have power, who are using that power to murder the planet, have written a narrative that masks the power we could wield, that lies in order to make sure we never claim the tools to challenge their profits.
Every day that we abide by their rules and accept the narrative that serves their power is a day we waste. But every day is also a new chance to rewrite that narrative, to change the story. With a truer understanding of the past we can form a more effective strategy for the present. With a more effective strategy in the present, we can reject a future on the dying planet they have us headed toward.
With everything, literally, at stake, it’s time to do what we can with what we have, and it’s time to claim the legacy of resistance that these and other examples of silenced history could teach us.
References
[1] http://books.google.com/books?id=kKv8PXwIiFkC&pg=PA237&lpg=PA237&dq=civil+rights+gallup+polling+1960&source=bl&ots=-TTg7n7EbO&sig=odTF9mCzMqJkuPH2xZoRYCDPYaI&hl=en&ei=HkLgS-WcFpKwNtWsmKsH&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CCAQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q&f=false
[2] http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1981907
This is the second part of a two piece series on strategic resistance by Lexy Garza and Rachel. The first piece is available here: http://dgrnewsservice.org/2013/07/24/time-is-short-resistance-rewritten/
Time is Short: Reports, Reflections & Analysis on Underground Resistance is a bulletin dedicated to promoting and normalizing underground resistance, as well as dissecting and studying its forms and implementation, including essays and articles about underground resistance, surveys of current and historical resistance movements, militant theory and praxis, strategic analysis, and more. We welcome you to contact us with comments, questions, or other ideas at undergroundpromotion@deepgreenresistance.org
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jul 24, 2013 | Human Supremacy
By Lexy Garza and Rachel
View video of the event at the Deep Green Resistance Youtube channel
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
This quote by Spanish writer and philosopher George Santayana was posted on the wall in my high school history classroom. The idea, as my history teacher explained, it is that learning about history is vitally important because by knowing and understanding past events, we can actively shape the future. According to my teacher’s view, at least the view he shared with his students, the history in our textbooks is objective, time-tested truth, and nothing more nor less.
Some time after that class ended, I read another George Santayana quote, which is somewhat less often quoted, “history is a pack of lies about things that never happened told by people who weren’t there.”
Taken at face value, this statement goes to the other extreme and completely writes off the history we’re taught as lies, as intentionally untrue. I think that both these views let us off too easy, because the stories we call history, and the process by which some stories become the dominant stories, the ones we teach to our children, is more complex than the dichotomy of truth vs. lie.
Another often repeated idea about history is that it’s “written by the victors.” This gets closer to a nuanced look at what history means and what it does.
For instance, in 1890 the US army massacred 300 Lakota men, women and children at Wounded Knee, burying them in a mass grave. Twenty US soldiers were awarded the Medal of Honor for this atrocity, just one of the many perpetrated by European colonizers who called genocide their manifest destiny. The vast majority of “historical” accounts throughout the decades don’t call Wounded Knee a massacre; they lend it a false legitimacy by calling it a battle. The same goes for the Washita massacre carried out by Custer in 1868. So-called historical accounts refer to this event as the Battle of the Washita. As it’s been said, “When a white army battles Indians and wins, it is called a great victory, but if they lose it is called a massacre.”
These and countless other examples show us that what we call history is certainly not objective truth. The voices of the colonized and the conquered do not get included in the version of the past we call history. That’s what it means to be colonized: genocide means the mass killing and eradication of entire peoples, but it also means the eradication of their culture, their stories, and the power to pass those stories on to future generations.
In his book A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn wrote, “I knew that a historian (or a journalist, or anyone telling a story) was forced to choose, out of an infinite number of facts, what to present, what to omit. And that decision inevitably would reflect, whether consciously or not, the interests of the historian.”
So this is the question we want to address– What interests are represented by the dominant story? Whose interests does the dominant story serve, and whose does it erase?
But before we get to that, there’s another question– Why does any of this matter? Why does it matter where our popular history comes from, and why does it matter what gets omitted?
It matters because our understanding of history informs our strategy in the present. Our ability to imagine what is possible is shaped by our understanding of the past. Therefore, our actions in the present are shaped by our understanding of the past. And right now, our actions in the present could not be more crucial.
200 species are pushed to extinction every single day. [1]
A Cornell research survey that found that water, air, and soil pollution account for 40% of human deaths worldwide [2]
The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change states unequivocally that for the climate to remain stable and in their words “manageable,” the average temperature rise cannot exceed 2 degrees Celsius. Yet virtually nothing decisive has been done to try and meet that 2 degrees Celsius limit. [3]
According to the International Energy Agency’s November 2010 assessment, which does not include the self-reinforcing feedback loops that many experts anticipate, the global average temperature rise of Earth will hit the 3.5 degrees Celsius mark in 2035, and some climate models have predicted a rise of 11 degrees by the end of the century. [4]
In the short term, we’re already seeing the beginnings of the floods, fires, droughts, and superstorms.
Plankton populations are collapsing, amphibian populations are collapsing, 90% of large fish in the ocean are gone [5].
The fabric of life on Earth is collapsing and humans are not exempt, though the effects aren’t obvious from here behind the military barricade of the US Empire.
The Global Humanitarian Forum recently put out a prediction that, by 2030, 100 million people could be dying annually as a direct result of climate change, based on how many are currently being killed due to climate change, which is around 300,000 per year [6].
We, not only the human we, but the global we of life on Earth are facing a crisis on a scale the planet has never seen, and the reality is that we are losing this fight right now.
With all the world at stake, we need to form and implement a strategy that can work. The latest Climate Commission report has warned that 80% of global fossil fuel reserves will have to stay in the ground if the planet is to avoid dangerous climate change. Our governments and the corporations that run them plan to burn every last drop of oil, every last speck of coal, and every last whiff of gas, and right now, the strategy of the mainstream environmental movement has no hope of stopping them, or even of substantially slowing them down.
If we are to avert the catastrophic dismemberment of our planet, we will need to see past the lies of the dominant culture and recognize its narratives—the mainstream narratives of social change—for the falsity that they are. Ultimately, we will need to move beyond legal & aboveground tactics as a whole movement, and make room for strategic sabotage and militant action in the tool chest of resistance.
References
[1] UN Environment Programme, Ahmed Djoghlaf, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/aug/16/nature-economic-security
[2][http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2007/08/pollution-causes-40-percent-deaths-worldwide-study-finds] (direct link to report: .
[3] UN Framework Convention on Climate Change**
[4] International Energy Agency’s November 2010 assessment**
[5] http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/science/05/14/coolsc.disappearingfish/
[6] http://www.ghf-ge.org/human-impact-report.pdf
This is the first part of a two piece series on strategic resistance by Lexy Garza and Rachel. Continue to Part II
Time is Short: Reports, Reflections & Analysis on Underground Resistance is a biweekly bulletin dedicated to promoting and normalizing underground resistance, as well as dissecting and studying its forms and implementation, including essays and articles about underground resistance, surveys of current and historical resistance movements, militant theory and praxis, strategic analysis, and more. We welcome you to contact us with comments, questions, or other ideas at undergroundpromotion@deepgreenresistance.org
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 4, 2013 | Direct Action, Strategy & Analysis
As radicals, we believe that another world—a world without patriarchy, white supremacism, capitalism, colonialism, or ecocide—is possible. But in the face of the reality in which we live our day to day lives, it can become difficult to remember not only the possibility of successful resistance to power, but also its rich and proud history, of which we are a part. This is all the more true when we recognize that a potent resistance movement will have to include militant, underground resistance. Being aware of our place within that legacy and re-telling the stories of past movements serves to fan the flames of our own will to resist, and are crucial pieces in building a culture of resistance.
But beyond simply reminding us of the potential for struggle against brutality, turning a sharp and studious eye towards that history can lend us invaluable strategic insights as well. Through a thorough examination of past movements, we can learn to recognize pitfalls and traps to be avoided, as well as strategies and tactics that can be applied to our own situation.
War of the Flea, written by Robert Taber is one such examination. Originally published in 1965, the book takes a detailed and critical look at the conditions and strategy of guerrilla war. Rather than focusing on the particulars of one specific conflict, Taber draws his conclusions from an analysis of the patterns that repeat across a variety of such struggles: Cuba, Greece, Cyprus, Israel & Palestine, Malaysia, both of the Vietnamese wars for independence, the Irish struggle for independence, and more. A closely interwoven narrative of specific real-world examples and abstract theory & strategy, War of the Flea presents an easily accessible yet very informative mapping of guerrilla anti-colonial and liberation wars.
Taber’s insights hold great value for resisters today, with much we can learn from past movements and their strategies, successes and failures. He outlines the guerrilla struggle as being primarily a political engagement, rather than one of military force. The goal of the guerrilla or insurgent group is not to militarily defeat those in power, but to create a ‘climate of collapse’ in which it becomes impossible to maintain the status quo, and that house of cards comes tumbling down around former rulers.
The resonance of this with the strategy of attacking infrastructure to aid in the collapse of civilization should be obvious. And that similarity between the core strategy behind the asymmetric guerrilla conflicts Taber studies and a resistance movement to bring down civilization extends further to the general strategy.
Perhaps the ultimate achievement of War of the Flea is the detailed grounding it brings to the strategy behind these struggles. As Taber notes, protracted popular warfare consistently follows a three-stage strategy. In the first stage—the strategic defensive—the guerrilla force focuses on building capacity while avoiding any sort of serious confrontation with the overwhelming force of the opponent. Then the struggle moves into a phase of strategic stalemate, wherein neither side has the force or resources necessary for a decisive victory. Finally, as the guerrilla group builds the necessary strength—and the opponent group suffers a slow eroding of its power base (thanks to the ‘climate of collapse’), the conflict moves in the strategic offensive stage, where the guerrilla force takes the initiative and brings down the government or opponent group.
That this can be applied to our own situation should be readily apparent, even if it is a more figurative than literal equivalent. The core of Taber’s analysis of a staged strategy, focusing first on survival and asymmetric action and scaling up to more coordinated and decisive action as resisters take the initiative, can and should be applied to our own radical movements today. While out-and-out armed battles of any sort are both unlikely and unwise, the principles that have made the ‘war of the flea’ successful over and over around the world hold much promise for us, if we’re ready to learn from them and develop our own strategy for waging—and winning—a decisive ecological war.
That said, the book is not without its shortcomings, the most obvious being that it was written almost fifty years ago, and much has changed since Taber’s time, and the time of the movements and struggles he cites. Those in power have found new ways to both divert or channel dissent back into supporting the status quo, and to disrupt or neutralize those who stand against them. While this is by no means Taber’s own fault, it should be taken into consideration when putting his work in context.
The more important limitation of applying Taber’s analysis to our own times stems from the fact that our struggles, for all they share in common with those Taber surveys, may have a fundamental difference.
A movement to dismantle civilization is unlikely to be waged as a guerrilla operation. Protracted popular war requires popular support—something a movement to dismantle civilization will likely never have, at least in the Global North. Without the sustained loyalty and material support of the general population, the guerrilla model of struggle will never be a realistic option. Additionally, while the guerrillas in all the conflicts Taber cites fought for greater self-determination, they were not fighting against the basis of their own society and subsistence, as a resistance movement against civilization within the privileged world would be.
Yet while War of the Flea may not be a straightforward blueprint for a resistance movement against civilization, there are still critical points we can take away from it.
Perhaps the most apparent of these is that our movement—a movement to dismantle civilization—will likely never be a guerrilla military struggle, so we shouldn’t act like it is one. There’s a tendency within radical circles to glorify or romanticize guerrilla conflicts (and militant resistance in general). Combined with the machismo that continues to characterize the culture of the Left, we’re left with much romantic masculine posturing about pitched battles with the police and those in power, which both destroys the movement and distracts us from more productive work.
One of the most valuable parts of the book comes as Taber posits several criteria necessary for successful insurgency; general pre-requisites to be met before people will take up arms. These include political, social and economic instability; a compelling moral and ideological political objective (or “cause”); the proven impossibility of acceptable compromise with the opponent; and finally, established revolutionary political organization(s) capable of providing leadership towards the accepted goal. While Taber draws these points from his study of guerrilla resistance movements, these “ingredients” stand on their own as shaping conditions for effective struggle through other means as well, and can doubtlessly be applied to our own situation.
Of additional note is the breadth of struggles cited and overviewed in the book. If nothing, this alone makes War of the Flea worth reading. Taber’s analysis goes well beyond the romantic and rhetorical, examining the strategies, successes and failures of an impressive variety of 20th Century insurgencies; from the IRA in Ireland to EOKA in Cyprus, the Viet Cong in Vietnam to the Communists in Greece, from Mao Tse-tung to Che Guevara. It is, without a doubt, a serious study of armed resistance movements and their dynamics.
While no study of past movements will do the work of the present, work such as War of the Flea provide us with important insights, allowing us to learn from the mistakes of those who’ve come before us, and lend us the strategic knowledge that is crucial to success. They also remind us of our place within a long and proud history of people who’ve fought against the odds and the numbers—and won. If we are to have any hope of dismantling civilization, we’ll need to learn everything we can from them.
Time is Short: Reports, Reflections & Analysis on Underground Resistance is a biweekly bulletin dedicated to promoting and normalizing underground resistance, as well as dissecting and studying its forms and implementation, including essays and articles about underground resistance, surveys of current and historical resistance movements, militant theory and praxis, strategic analysis, and more. We welcome you to contact us with comments, questions, or other ideas at undergroundpromotion@deepgreenresistance.org
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 20, 2013 | Lobbying, Movement Building & Support, Obstruction & Occupation, Property & Material Destruction, Strategy & Analysis
Resistance against exploitation is nothing new. History is full of examples of people—perfectly ordinary people—fighting back against injustice, exploitation, and the destruction of their lands and communities. They move through whatever channels for action are open to them, but often, left with no legal or political power, they turn to militant means to defend themselves.
It is hardly a simple decision, and rarely the first or preferred option, but when all other paths have been explored and found to lead nowhere, militant action becomes the only realistic route left. Movements and communities come to that truth in many different ways, but almost without fail, they come to it borne by a collective culture of resistance. One inspiring example is the Bolt Weevils.
The Bolt Weevils were a group of farmers in Minnesota who spent several years in the late 1970s perfecting the fine art of sabotaging interstate electrical transmission lines. Their efforts have been memorialized in numerous books and songs, and their story is a hopeful one we would do well to remember and re-tell.
The story of the Bolt Weevils begins in the mid-1970s, when the Cooperative Power Association (CPA) and United Power Association (UPA) proposed construction of a new interstate high-voltage transmission line. Taking its name from the two cooperatives, the CU Powerline would carry current from a generating station in North Dakota across west-central Minnesota to feed the urban centers of the Twin Cities.
In determining a route for the powerline, small farmers land was rated less important than large industrial farms, and as a result, the proposed route crossed the property of nearly 500 landowners. Outraged at being trodden over to for the benefit of industry and urbanism, resistance against the project began immediately in earnest.
Once residents found out about the project, they refused to sign land easements. Local towns passed resolutions opposing the project and reject construction permits. The powerline went to review before the State’s Environmental Quality Council, which went ahead and granted the necessary permits in the face of overwhelming public opposition.
When surveyors showed up out of the blue in one farmer’s fields, he smashed their equipment with his tractor and rammed their vehicle. The action of that one farmer helped catalyze popular sentiments into action. Farmers began using CB radios to notify one another about surveying activities, and would turn out in groups to stop the work. As resistance began to build, local radio stations would broadcast times and locations of protestor gatherings. Farmers and others who opposed the project began meeting every morning in the Lowry town hall, hosting others who’d come from neighboring counties, to make plans for each day.
As surveying and construction continued, the locals escalated their efforts. They would erect signs in their fields to block the sightlines of the surveyors, and stand next to survey crews running their chainsaws to disrupt their work. Survey stakes disappeared overnight. Farmers used their trucks to make roadblocks and their tractors to pile boulders in the construction sites. One group even gained permission from the county to improve a rural road—they dug a ditch across it to stop all traffic.
They filed more lawsuits, and the issue was eventually taken up by the Minnesota Supreme Court, which in the spirit of everything it represents, decided against the farmers and in favor of the powerline. Many of the citizens opposing the pipeline had earnestly believed in institutions like the Supreme Court and the structures of power. After their battles through the courts, many of them were disillusioned and had been radicalized.
Law enforcement began escorting construction and survey workers, and the situation came to a head on January 4th 1978, when 100 farmers chased powerline crews from three different sites, fought with police, and even tore down part of a tower. The next week, the Minnesota Governor ordered the largest mobilization of the State Troopers in Minnesota’s history, with 200 Troopers—fully half of the force—descended on the rural area to ensure construction continued.
Protests continued and grew, as the issue began to draw national and international media attention; hundreds turned out for rallies at survey sites, and some schools even let out so students and teachers could attend. In St. Paul, thousands of farmers rallied and demonstrated, and in March of 1978 more than 8,000 people marched almost ten miles through freezing temperatures from Lowry to Glenwood to protest the CU powerline.
It was in the heat of August that the kettle boiled over. Bolts on one of the transmission towers were loosened, and soon afterwards, it fell over, as the Bolt Weevils entered the scene. Then three more fell over. Guard poles and bolts were cut and loosened, insulators were shot out. Over the next few years, 14 towers were felled and nearly 10,000 insulators were shot out. Soon, helicopters patrolled the powerline, and it was made a federal offense to take down interstate transmission lines.
There were numerous arrests, some 120 in all, but only two individuals were ever convicted on felony charges, and even then they were only sentenced to community service. Opposition to the powerline was so common that in some instances, witnesses refused to testify against farmers.
In the end, unfortunately, the powerline was built and went into operation, despite the protests and the disruptions by the Bolt Weevils. While they were unsuccessful in ultimately stopping the project, there’s much from their efforts that we can learn and apply to our work today against exploitation and civilization.
As in most social struggles that turn to property destruction and militancy, that wasn’t the first choice of tactics for those on the ground. They fought for years through accepted legal and political avenues, turning to material attacks after all other courses of action had proven ineffective. But more than that, the popular agitation and organizing in the years leading up to the emergence of the Bolt Weevils didn’t merely precede militant direct action: it laid the groundwork for it.
The work of the local farmers—their protests, demonstrations, civil disobedience, and community organizing—paved the way (forgive the phrase) and set the conditions for the sabotage that would later occur. By mobilizing residents and community members against the project, building social networks, and agitating and raising opposition against CU powerline, a collective culture of resistance was created, planting and watering the seeds from which the Bolt Weevils were born.
With civilization churning onwards towards biotic collapse and underground resistance the only real hope left, caring for those seeds is our primary duty today. The story of the Bolt Weevils—like countless other stories of resistance—shows that militant resistance emerges from strong and supportive cultures of resistance. The time to start building such a culture was yesterday. For those of us who choose to organize and work in an aboveground and legal way, building such a culture that embraces and celebrates sabotage and the use of any means necessary to stop the omnicide of industrialism is our foremost task.
The story of the Bolt Weevils isn’t empowering and inspiring because they “fought off the bad guys and won.” They didn’t win. The power lines were built, forced down their throats in the face of their resistance. No, their story is inspiring because it so clearly and undeniably demonstrates how simply feasible sabotage and material attacks truly are. Often, we talk about militant resistance and direct action as mysterious and abstract things, things that wouldn’t ever happen in our lives or communities, things that no one as ordinary as any of us would ever do.
Whether we romanticize underground action or are intimidated by it, we generally talk about it as though it is something out of a movie or a novel. The truth is that such actions are simply tactics—just like petition-drives or street marches—that can be used to dismantle systems of power. The Bolt Weevils—a group of farmers with hunting rifles and hacksaws*—serve as a stark reminder that one doesn’t require military training and high-tech gadgets to act in direct and material ways against the infrastructure of destruction. We’re all capable of fighting back, and while sabotage against industrial infrastructure can be daunting for many valid reasons, technicality isn’t one of them.
We may have to fail working through other channels (as if we haven’t already) before collectively turning to sabotage and attacks on industrial infrastructure as a strategy, and we will certainly need to build a supportive and strong culture of resistance. But if we’re serious about stopping the destruction and exploitation of civilization, we will be left with no other choice.
*This is speculative. I don’t actually know how they shot out insulators or cut through guard poles, although there are plenty of accounts of hunting rifles and hacksaws being used in this fashion, and it’s from those stories that I hazard this guess.
Time is Short: Reports, Reflections & Analysis on Underground Resistance is a biweekly bulletin dedicated to promoting and normalizing underground resistance, as well as dissecting and studying its forms and implementation, including essays and articles about underground resistance, surveys of current and historical resistance movements, militant theory and praxis, strategic analysis, and more. We welcome you to contact us with comments, questions, or other ideas at undergroundpromotion@deepgreenresistance.org
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jan 2, 2013 | Strategy & Analysis
Within the radical environmental movement, it is widely acknowledged and rightly accepted that we have little time left before the earth is driven into catastrophic and runaway biotic collapse. We know that civilization is predicated on the slow dismemberment of the planet’s life support systems—a dismemberment that is increasing in speed as more efficient and devastating technologies are developed. We know that for a healthy, living world to survive, industrial civilization cannot.
It is also acknowledged (although perhaps less widely) that we are incredibly outnumbered and outgunned, so to speak. People aren’t exactly lining up around the block to join the movement, and when was the last time any of our campaigns weren’t starved for funds? We don’t have many people or resources at our disposal, and if we’re honest with ourselves, we know that isn’t changing anytime soon.
Due to these limitations, which should be glaringly (if dishearteningly) obvious to anyone involved with radical organizations or movements, we need to take extra care in devising how we chose to allocate the energy and resources we do have. With so much at stake and so little time to muster decisive action, we cannot afford to put time and effort into strategies and actions that are ineffective.
Additionally, in devising our strategies and tactics, we need to accommodate those personnel and resource limitations: a strategy that requires more people or more resources (or both) than are actually available to us is a recipe for quick failure. As obvious as this should be, these sorts of strategic considerations seem to be mysteriously absent from the radical movement*.
Of course, simply because these conversations aren’t happening doesn’t mean that there isn’t an unspoken strategy, a framework within which we operate by default. While this may not be articulated explicitly, our actions form a collective strategic template.
By and large, the strategy of the environmental movement is one of attrition, a slow battle with the goal of wearing down the institutions & forces of environmental degradation until they cease to function. Whether by default or perceived lack of alternatives, this has been accepted as an unquestioned strategy for the overwhelming majority of those of us in the environmental movement. This is a mistake which could cost us the planet if not revisited and corrected.
A strategy of attrition is one in which you wear down an opponent’s resources, personnel, and will to fight to the point of collapse. As a strategy, it intends one of two outcomes: through the continual depletion of the aforementioned resources, the enemy suffers unacceptable losses and surrenders or capitulates out of hopelessness; or, the enemy is worn down over time to the point that it is incapable of function and operation.
One classic example of attrition and exhaustion strategy being implemented is that of Ulysses Grant’s campaign against the Confederacy in the later part of the American Civil War. Grant attacked and pushed the Confederate army continuously, despite horrific losses, with the theory that the greater manpower and resources of the Union would overwhelm the Confederacy—which would prove correct.
In the context of the modern environmental movement, this strategy looks only slightly different.
Again, there is no articulated grand strategy within the environmental movement—whether we’re talking about the entire spectrum or just the radical side of things, there is no defined plan for success. However, our work, campaigns, initiatives and actions fit rather snugly into the box of attrition strategy: we focus on one atrocity at a time—one timber sale, one power plant, one pipeline, one copper mine—doing our best to eliminate one threat at a time. These targets aren’t selected based on their criticality or importance to the function of civilization or industrialism, but are selected by what might be best described as reactionary opportunism.
And that makes sense: remember we’re vastly outweighed in every way imaginable by those in power, and time is quickly running out. With 200 species going extinct every day, the sense of urgency that drives us to try and win any victory we can is understandable and compelling.
Unfortunately, this mix of passion and earnestness has led the environmental movement into a strategic netherworld. If our goal is to stop the destruction of the planet, we would do well to turn a critical eye toward the systems that are responsible for that destruction, identify the lynchpins within them, and organize to disable and destroy them.
Instead, we wander blindly in every which direction, striking out wildly, hoping that enough of our glancing blows find a target to wear the systems down to the point of collapse. But this strategy fails to account for the power & resource imbalance between “us” and “them”, as well as the time frame for action.
To address the first shortcoming: those in power—those who benefit from and drive industrial extraction & production—have near limitless resources at their disposal to pursue their sadistic goals, whereas things look decidedly different for those of us who fight for life. Every day, millions—billions—of humans go to work within the industrial economy, and in doing so, wage war against the planet. Those of us on the other side of the war don’t have—and can’t compete with—that kind of loyalty or support. China is still building one new coal-fired power plant every week, and worldwide, coal plants are being erected “left and right”1.
How many coal plants did we shut down this week? The week prior?
For a strategy of attrition to be viable or effective, we need to be disrupting, dismantling or retiring industrial infrastructure as quickly or quicker than it can be constructed and repaired. At this point, we’re lucky if we can stop new projects, new developments, new strip mines, timber-harvest-plans, oil & gas fields, etc., much less drawdown those already in operation.
This is true across the whole spectrum of activism and the environmental movement. On the more liberal side of things for example, take Bill McKibben and 350.org’s newest campaign, an initiative to get universities, cites, and churches/synagogues/mosques to divest from fossil fuel companies. The idea is essentially to slowly bleed money away from the fossil fuel industry, modeled after the divestment campaigns of the anti-apartheid movement. Unfortunately, the fossil fuel industry isn’t exactly hurting for investors, and it certainly isn’t reliant upon money from university endowment funds for its survival. Equally problematic, industrial civilization requires fossil fuels to function, and hence these companies already have the support and subsidies of governments around the world—do we think they’ll suddenly abandon their undying support for these companies? And besides, a slow drain on their stock prices must be balanced against the record profits being made in the industry: do we really think that this outweighs the capital available to the industry?
The same is true of many of the most radical actions taken in defense of earth, such as that of the Earth Liberation Front (ELF). Their first (and arguably primary) goal was/is “To cause maximum economic damage to a given entity that is profiting off the destruction of the natural environment.”2 That’s great, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with causing maximum economic damage to those that profit from the degradation of the earth, in and of itself. But what is the realistic extent of “maximum economic damage”, and what is the capacity of those entities to absorb it? For example, although the ELF claims to have caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage, every year companies lose more than that due to employees playing fantasy football at work. Absurdities of industrial capitalism aside, the point should be clear; the capacity of our movement to effect significant change through compounded economic damage is severely outweighed by the damage the system does to itself, and also by its ability to absorb that damage.
All of which is to say that 200 species went extinct today, and there hasn’t been a single peer-reviewed study put out in the last 30 years that showed a living system not in decline: for us to be satisfied with slightly diminished industry profits or anything less than a complete end to the death machine of industrial civilization is unconscionable.
None of this is to say that 350.org or the ELF aren’t worthwhile organizations who’ve done good things. This is not a critique of those groups in particular, because countless other organizations share the same strategic flaws; it’s a critique of the movement as a whole that continues to produces the same strategic inadequacies.
And then there’s the second problem presented by an attrition model: time. Attrition affects the greatest damage over a long period of time. Unfortunately, we don’t have much time. As previously mentioned, 200 species vanish into the endless night of extinction every day; 90 percent of large ocean fish are gone, the old growth forests are gone, the prairies and grasslands are gone, the wetlands and riparian areas are gone, the clean freshwater is gone. Every year, the predictions put out by climatologists and modelers are more severe, and every year they say the previous year’s predictions were underestimates. The Energy Information Administration says we have five years to stop the proliferation of fossil fuel infrastructure if we are to avoid runaway climate change (and some say this is overly optimistic)3. If we had decades or centuries in which to slowly erode and turn the tide against industrialism, then perhaps we could consider a strategy of attrition. But we don’t have that time.
To reiterate, this isn’t a strategic model that holds any real hope for the earth.
Smart strategic planning starts with an honest assessment of the time, people, and resources available to our cause, and moves forward within those constraints. We don’t have much time at all; the priority at this point is to bring down civilization as quickly as possible. We don’t have many people either, and can’t realistically expect many to join us; the rewards and distractions—the bread and roses—provided in exchange for loyalty to the established systems of power mean we will always be few and that we will never persuade the majority. Finally, our resources are also incredibly limited, and hence we need to focus on using them in ways that accrue the greatest lasting impact.
Given these limitations, it should be clear that a strategy of attrition is more than unwise; it’s fatal for both us and the rest of the planet. Working within the framework created by the available time, people and resources, and with the goal of physically dismantling the key infrastructure of civilization, the strategy with the greatest chance of success is one of targeted militant strikes against key industrial bottlenecks. As opposed to the slow grind of attrition, this would be a quick series of attacks at decisive locations; rather than waiting for the building to be eroded away by wind and rain, collapse the structural supports of the building itself; we would opt instead for a strategy of decisive ecological warefare.
Many of us put all the energy and passion we have into our work, and dedicate our lives to the struggle. But that won’t be enough. We’re up against a globalized death machine that is skinning the planet alive and cooking the remains; we will never be successful if we put our efforts into trying to dent their profit margins. Burning SUVs and vandalizing billboards have an important role to play in developing a serious culture of resistance (as does organizing students), but we can’t afford to pretend those sorts actions are meaningful or threatening blows to the industrial superstructure.
Time is short. If we’re to be effective, we need to move beyond half thought-out strategies of attrition that try to compete with the resources of those in power. We need to devise strategies that use the resources available to decisively disable and dismantle the infrastructures that enable their destruction and power.
*This isn’t to say that there is no strategic thinking, planning, or action at all; many organizations are very smart and savvy in undertaking specific actions and campaigns. The issue isn’t a lack of strategy in particular situations or campaigns, but comprehensively of the entire environmental movement as a whole.
1. “China & India Are Building 4 New Coal Power Plants—Every Week.
2. “Earth Liberation Front”. http://www.earthliberationfront.tk/
3. “World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, EIA warms”. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/nov/09/fossil-fuel-infrastructure-climate-change
Time is Short: Reports, Reflections & Analysis on Underground Resistance is a biweekly bulletin dedicated to promoting and normalizing underground resistance, as well as dissecting and studying its forms and implementation, including essays and articles about underground resistance, surveys of current and historical resistance movements, militant theory and praxis, strategic analysis, and more. We welcome you to contact us with comments, questions, or other ideas at undergroundpromotion@deepgreenresistance.org
