by DGR Editor | Sep 29, 2015 | Gender, Male Supremacy
by Jonah Mix, Deep Green Resistance
Earlier this month, transgender activist Trevor MacDonald published two opinion pieces on the Huffington Post, each to attack the feminist organization Woman-Centered Midwifery. Woman-Centered Midwifery has earned the ire of the transgender movement for their open letter to the Midwives Alliance of North America, protesting MANA’s decision to remove all mention of the word “mother” or “woman” from most of their literature. Woman-Centered Midwifery made a simple request, signed by over a hundred prominent birth experts, activists, and feminists – that an organization devoted to promoting and organizing midwives shouldn’t deny the link between womanhood and birth. This was, of course, enough to bring down a torrent of condemnation, harassment, and threats by transgender activists.
Woman-Centered Midwifery is led in part by Mary Lou Singleton, whose Facebook comment is also the subject of the second hit piece. Full disclosure: Mary Lou is a friend of mine, and someone I respect greatly. Her work with Stop Patriarchy’s Abortion Freedom Ride, Deep Green Resistance,the Women’s Liberation Front, and other radical feminist and environmentalist resistance efforts have inspired, encouraged, and even facilitated my own activism. But these ridiculous smears would be inappropriate when aimed at any woman, not just one who has so clearly demonstrated her commitment to women’s reproductive justice.
MANA and other groups that support the removal of “woman” from a discussion of midwifery believe that such language is offensive, due to the existence of a small minority of those who identify as men. As the logic goes, the obvious connection between pregnancy, birth, and womanhood must be excised so as to not invalidate their identities; instead of discussing mothers or women, the millions of adult human females who birth children across the globe will have their identities stripped and be relabeled “pregnant persons,” in deference to a handful of transgender activists.
As I attempted to follow this logic, I was brought back to 2013, after the acquittal of George Zimmerman for his lynching of Trayvon Martin. As black anti-violence activists began rallying around the cry of Black Lives Matter, the pushback from white supremacists was immediate – and their foremost response was the formation of their counter-slogan, All Lives Matter.
For those who are unclear, it must be said that All Lives Matter is a vicious expression of white supremacy hidden behind a façade of egalitarianism. Of course all lives do matter in a moral sense. But as many black activists have pointed out, we currently live in a system where the value of white life is affirmed in a way black life is not. To the police, courts, and prisons, white lives – especially rich, male white lives – have recognized importance. The growing piles of broken brown bodies across this nation make it clear that the same is clearly untrue for those who live outside whiteness– and that those inside it have shown little dedication to making their insistence on All Lives Matter a reality.
Luckily, it seems as if most liberals and leftists are on board with rejecting “All Lives Matter” as a slogan – yet they ape its logic when they berate activists who center midwifery, abortion rights, and other reproductive justice issues on women as a class. Some white people do suffer state violence, but we all see “Hey, not everyone killed by police is black!” as an insincere distraction. So why does the existence of a small minority of transgender parents turn “Hey, not everyone who has an abortion is a woman!” into a meaningful critique?
Black activists have repeatedly explained that saying Black Lives Matter doesn’t mean others don’t, and only the most disingenuous white folks disagree. But clearly MANA and others who want to remove any mention of womanhood from a discussion of birth believe the statement “Women give birth” does unjustly exclude anyone who might not identify as a woman. This double standard makes no sense; if the use of “mother” in a discussion of pregnancy is a violent act of erasure, then Black lives Matter is no more justifiable. Do we really want to travel down that road?
Police violence actually affects white people at a far greater rate than restrictions on abortion or access to childcare affect those who identify as transgender. But in both cases, that doesn’t change the obvious fact that these groups are not the intended victims. Cops are militarized into hypermasculine violence because a white supremacist state requires soldiers willing to do violence against black and brown citizens. White folks – especially poor white folks – are sometimes caught in the crossfire, but the bullets and batons are aimed directly at people of color.
In the exact same way, abortion restrictions are put in place specifically because women are seen as incubators. Their bodies are such that men can fuck them, wait nine months, and remove a (hopefully male) child. Female human beings who don’t want to identify as women still possess those bodies, and they inherit the violence that has been constructed to keep those bodies down – a violence that is specifically tied to misogyny. As Ophelia Benson writes on her blog:
It doesn’t help [pregnant people who don’t identify as women] to try to obscure the fact that attacks on abortion rights are highly political in a particular way – a sexist way, a misogynist way, an anti-women way. A trans man who needs an abortion is caught in a system that was organized to thwart women’s autonomy.
Gloria Steinem (or perhaps an elderly Irish cab driver!) famously said, “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.” The reason transgender folks are refused abortion services, as well as any other reproductive care, has everything to do with the fact that they are seen as woman, treated like women, and navigate a structure of policy and law imbued with intentional anti-woman violence. Sacrificing those obvious connections in the name of inclusion is a victory for right-wing fascists.
Inclusion has become the ultimate liberal fetish. Unfortunately, the uncritical expansion of categories to protect feelings is less inclusion than dilution. “All Lives Matter” is, after all, a demand for inclusion, specifically the inclusion of white trauma into the narrative of black resistance. The classic line used by men’s rights activists – “Sometimes men get beat up by women too!” – is a demand that efforts against domestic violence be “inclusive” as well. But none of these discussions are improved in the least solely by making language less precise.
The whole project of politics is placing the complex web of human interaction into a formula of power: Who does what to whom? And when we say white cops use violence against black civilians, the First World extracts resources from the Third World, or men restrict reproductive healthcare for women, we aren’t claiming that other individual experiences are impossible; we’re saying that, beyond those individual experiences an organizing structure exists that shapes how groups of people interact.
If your goal is to despecify language to the point where all possible experiences are represented equally, then yes, by all means replace woman with “pregnant person.” And while you’re at it, replace “Black Lives Matter” with “All Lives Matter.” Demand justice for “incarcerated persons,” not people of color. Set up shelters open to “the battered,” not abused women. Raise awareness for “colonized individuals,” not the Third World. Combat “discrimination based on orientation,” not homophobia. Then sit back, relax, and feel really, really great about just how inclusive you are.
But if your goal is a political analysis that actually confronts power, do just the opposite: Identify the white supremacy at the heart of police brutality, pinpoint the specific victims and perpetrators of domestic violence, name the agents of global empire, and, yes, be honest about who bears the brunt of reproductive oppression. At the heart of Black Lives Matter is the belief that oppressed populations have the right to narratives that center their experience of oppression, even if others who suffer from their peripheral effects may feel momentarily excluded. Reject this or accept it – but don’t apply it selectively. Victims of abortion restrictions and overmedicalized birth may indeed be “pregnant persons,” but only in the sense that those left bleeding, battered, and dead in our streets by psychopathic cops are “policed persons.”
Republished from Gender Detective, September 27, 2015
by DGR Colorado Plateau | Aug 21, 2015 | Colonialism & Conquest, Strategy & Analysis, White Supremacy
Editor’s Note: For further analysis of effective resistance movements, please visit the Deep Green Resistance Book, and read about our strategy: Decisive Ecological Warfare.
By Will Falk / Deep Green Resistance
When I am in Hawai’i, I ask everyone I meet if the United States will ever voluntarily de-occupy the Islands. No one ever says yes. Usually, before I can say anything else, people hurriedly start talking about the lack of a valid treaty or that the American occupation is illegal by their own laws or that the United States will pay for its human rights violations.
I am a haole in Hawai’i, a white settler in the United States. I acknowledge that every square inch of the United States of America exists on stolen native land. Leadership in land based struggles in the United States rests most properly in the hands of indigenous peoples. I will not undermine indigenous leadership, so I direct my thoughts to other settlers.
If no one believes that the United Sates will ever voluntarily de-occupy Hawai’i, why are so many of the movement’s settler supporters so focused on achieving this impossible voluntary withdrawal? Why, for example, do so many settlers spend so much energy supporting a parade in Oahu – a parade that is billed as a march for Hawaiian sovereignty while quietly being a voting drive to encourage participation in the occupying American government? Why do so many settlers hold up expensive court cases relying on American judges who are paid by the American government to make decisions leading to this mythical voluntary de-occupation as the only viable means for de-occupation?
The first answer is privilege. Settlers benefit from the current arrangement of power in Hawai’i. These Islands represent the tourist fantasy to many settlers despite the fact that Hawai’i’s life support systems are inches away from total collapse. The inability of settler support to recognize that Hawaiian de-occupation is our responsibility leads me to conclude that most settlers are not as concerned with Hawaiian liberation as they are concerned with maintaining a feel-good environment that balances settler crises of conscience while never threatening settler access to Hawai’i. Hawai’i does not have time to coax these settlers from their positions of privilege. So, I direct my thoughts to settlers of strong heart who simply suffer from a lack of analysis.
Apart from privilege, the second reason settlers have proven unable to mount a serious solidarity effort with the Hawaiian de-occupation movement is they see no alternative to a liberal mindset. “Wait a minute,” I hear a lot of confused readers saying, “Aren’t liberals good?” No, actually. It’s too late to rely exclusively on liberalism. Hawai’i has been cursed for 122 years of occupation with too much liberalism. Liberalism is the haoles’ game. Liberalism serves the United States of America. Liberalism renders resistance ineffective and must be forsaken if de-occupation is to be achieved.
The alternative is radicalism. An examination of the differences between the liberal and radical world views will demonstrate how radicalism arms settlers seeking to demonstrate true solidarity with a better analysis for forming an effective de-occupation strategy. This is not to say that a mixture of tactics cannot be effective. The Hawaiian de-occupation movement should not remove any tool from the table, but the longer Hawai’i remains occupied the clearer it becomes that decisive action is needed.
***
Before I begin, I would like to absolve the term “radical” of the bad reputation it has received in popular circles. Too many people confuse the word “radical” with the word “extreme.” But, as the great African-American activist Angela Davis has explained and as every major dictionary will tell you, the word radical simply means “getting to the root” and is most properly applied to political analyses that seek the origins of oppression.
The brilliant writer and activist Lierre Keith has pointed out two fundamental differences between liberals and radicals. The first difference revolves around individualism. Liberals believe that the basic social unit is the individual, while radicals believe the basic social unit is group or class. This reliance on individualism allows liberals to claim that every individual is entitled to their personal identity free from the realities accompanying social class. In fact, for many liberals, it is an insult to be identified with a certain group regardless of political reality.
For radicals, on the other hand, each individual is socially constructed by political reality. Radicals embrace their social group recognizing it as a source of strength. The first step to affecting change is making common cause with those who share your condition.
The other big difference between liberals and radicals is a disagreement on the nature of social reality. Liberals subscribe to a certain idealism while radicals root their analysis in materialism. For liberals, thoughts, mental states, and attitudes are the only sources and, therefore, solutions for oppression. Liberals locate reality in the human mind and tend to think that education is always the key to social change. For liberals, evil is a misunderstanding and if oppressors can just be shown the error of their ways, they will change.
How does this play out in Hawai’i? Take the role of white supremacism in the domination of Hawai’i, for example. Liberals, long ago, succumbed to the lie that racism and white supremacism are merely emotional states held in the hearts of individuals. They confine the definition of racism to hatred based on the color of one’s skin and confine the definition of white supremacism to hatred for everyone who is not white.
It is astronomers relying on a liberal definition of racism who can claim they are not racist because they hold no hatred in their hearts for the Hawaiian people while still insisting on destroying Mauna Kea’s summit to build telescopes. It is mining executives relying on a liberal definition of white supremacism who can claim no hatred in their hearts for native peoples while insisting that the guts be ripped from native land and poisons pumped into native waters to provide iron ore for the telescopes that destroy native peoples’ sacred sites.
Radicals see tangible systems of power maintained through force and working in the real, physical world as the sources and solutions of oppression. Education is an important first step to building radical consciousness, but they see organized political resistance and force as the means by which real change is achieved. Evil is not a misunderstanding. It is intentional and gives material benefits to oppressors. Oppression is always linked to resource extraction.
An emotional state – like hatred – might contribute to white supremacism, but radicals are less concerned with changing the hearts and minds of those murdering people of color and murdering the world, and more concerned with stopping the destruction. Hawaiian radicals, like Haunani-Kay Trask, for example, see racism as, “A historically created system of power in which one racial/ethnic group dominates another racial/ethnic group for the benefit of the dominating group.” White supremacism is the latest version of this system of power with white people dominating everyone else.
Racism and white supremacism establish, “Economic and cultural domination as well as political power…in the systemic dominance of the exploiting group.” Finally, radicals recognize, as Trask pointed out, that the dominating group holds a monopoly on the means on violence. It is this violence that must be confronted and dismantled if racism and white supremacism are ever truly going to be undermined.
To take this even further, consider what would happen if the liberal analysis was carried out to it’s logical conclusion. Imagine that liberals were actually successful at convincing those in power to treat every one in the world with love and kindness. Without a corresponding change in material reality, there would still be a huge problem. The dominant culture is built on the exploitation of natural resources. Resources are becoming scarcer and scarcer. Humans need to eat, for example, but topsoil is so depleted that major crops are all supported by oil. What will happen, despite the liberal conversion to loving kindness, when the dominant culture needs oil and indigenous peoples and others refuse to give up their lands to give them that oil?
***
A primary strength of the radical analysis is its ability to articulate the role power plays in oppression. Gene Sharp, the world’s foremost authority on civil disobedience and direct action tactics, has identified two manifestations of power – social and political. Social power, for Sharp, is “the totality of all influences and pressures which can be used and applied to groups of people, either to attempt to control the behavior of others directly or indirectly.” Political power is “the total authority, influence, pressure, and coercion which may be applied to achieve or prevent the implementation of the wishes of the power-holder.”
The powerful do everything they can to convince the oppressed that the current arrangement of power is inevitable. To believe power is inevitable is a mistake. Sharp says, “Power, in reality, is fragile, always dependent for its strength and existence upon a replenishment of its sources by the cooperation of a multitude of institutions and people – cooperation which may or may not continue.” The key to Hawaiian de-occupation, then, is dismantling American power. Power is dismantled most effectively by cutting it off at its sources.
Sharp lists six sources of power: authority, human resources, skills and knowledge, intangible factors, material resources, and sanctions. Jacques Maritain defines authority as “the right to command and direct, to be heard or obeyed by others” and Sharp notes that it is enough that those in power be perceived and accepted as superior. Human resources are simply defined as the number of people who obey those in power and will do their bidding. Those in power derive power from the skills, knowledge, and abilities of those who will do their bidding. Closely tied to skills and knowledge, intangible psychological and ideological factors like cultural history and spirituality can be leveraged by those in power to dominate others. Those in power need material resources like property, money, and sources of energy to maintain their power. Finally, those in power must have means to enforce obedience – punishment, in other words, for those who dissent.
The goal of any resistance movement aspiring to true success must engage in shrewd target selection to undermine these sources of power. Taking Sharp a step further, it is possible to prioritize which sources of power are more essential to the functioning of power than others. The most important sources of power are the material resources power depends upon and the brutality of the sanctions they can enact through their commitment to the exploitation of resources. All the other sources of power ultimately depend on the ability of those in power to enforce their power physically. This is a radical conclusion and can be easily demonstrated.
Consider the Overthrow. Did Queen Liliuokalani abdicate the throne because she believed in American authority or the inherent right of Americans to command Hawaiians? Did the Americans command more people to do their bidding in Hawai’i than the Queen? Was Queen Liliuokalani victim to some psychological failing that the Americans exploited?
The answer is obviously no. At the time, Kingdom of Hawai’i supporters outnumbered the Americans over 13 to 1 on the Islands and constituted 4/5 of the legally qualified voters in Hawai’i. Queen Liliuokalani abdicated the throne in order to avoid bloodshed and, according to her June 17, 1897 letter to President William McKinley, because she, “recognized the futility of a conflict with so formidable a power.”
Queen Liliuokalani abdicated the throne because there were 200 United States marines, holding rifles, standing outside her door. Again, it wasn’t the moral superiority of Americans that convinced the Queen. It was, quite clearly, the threat of violence. It is important to understand the physical processes that allowed the Americans to exert that kind of power in Hawai’i. Another way to understand this is to ask, How did a nation existing thousands of miles away on another continent succeed in pointing 200 rifles at Queen Liliuokalani? The answer is, superior material resources.
In order to occupy Hawai’i, Europeans had to get there first. The only way Europeans ever got to Hawai’i and then transported themselves in numbers great enough to gain power was through the use of large naval ships. In order to build these ships, those in power needed wood and lots of it. The U.S.S. Boston that provided the marines and firepower for the Overthrow was in fact one of the American navy’s first steel warships. In order to produce the steel needed to armor the U.S.S. Boston, iron ore must be harvested. To turn iron ore into steel, vast quantities of coal are needed. To mine sufficient quantities of coal, vast tracts of land housing this coal have to be ripped up. To gain access to these vast tracts of land to be ripped up, the indigenous peoples of that land have to be removed or destroyed.
It is true that the other sources of power support the exploitation of the natural world as we can see in the manufacturing of American naval ships. Coal mining, for example, requires human resources. Most humans will not voluntarily mine coal, so those in power have to employ a mixture of authority, psychological coercion, and pure violence to access the coal they need to exert more power. But, the whole system of violence requires material resources. No one is killed by authority alone. Mountain tops are not ripped off by simple knowledge. Belief systems, by themselves, do not colonize indigenous lands. Material action in the physical world produces power. Bullets, swords, or atomic bombs at various stages of human history kill people. Oil-powered excavators and dynamite blow the tops off mountains. Soldiers delivering blankets infected with small pox clear indigenous peoples off their land.
The good news is that the more destructive those in power become, the more complex their system of murder gets, the more opportunities they expose for dismantling their power. Each step in the manufacturing of the U.S.S Boston, for example, presents an opportunity for resisters to stop the replenishment of power at one of its sources. The method is simple. Restrict those in power access to the resources they require and their power weakens. Cut them completely off, and empire comes crashing down.
The physical processes that produce warships and put rifles and cannons in the hands of American troops in Hawai’i follow a similar pattern. These processes are ultimately what make civilization unsustainable. These processes demonstrate precisely how the civilized have come to dominate the world at the expense of the uncivilized and life on this planet. Again, this present state of the world is not inevitable. It is the result of power built through the exploitation of life on the planet. The problem for life right now is the American empire shows no signs of slowing. The bigger their weapons become the faster life is pushed to the brink of total extinction.
Radicalism, then – because it springs from material reality – gives the Hawaiian de-occupation movement an ecological imperative. European contact has resulted in half of Hawai’i’s endemic species being lost to extinction. How many more species must be lost before actions that truly reflect the seriousness of the situation are taken? The American empire is built on the use of fossil fuels and the American military is the single largest consumer of fossil fuels in the world. Burning fossil fuels must be stopped to avoid climate catastrophe. The American military presence is, perhaps, the most serious physical obstacle confronting the de-occupation movement. Blocking the military’s access to imported fossil fuels, then, could deal a decisive blow both to American power on the Islands and American environmental destruction.
***
This is the reality of the challenge confronting the Hawaiian de-occupation movement:The United States will never voluntarily leave Hawai’i and the survival of life on the Islands demands de-occupation. Too many settler liberals would have everyone believe that if Hawaiians just ask nicely enough, or cleverly enough, or with irrefutable American logic, the Americans will leave. Too many settler liberals hold up the American political and international legal systems as the only means for de-occupation. Too many settler liberals can be relied upon for sign-holding events, parades, and social media campaigns to achieve de-occupation, but when it comes down to being accomplices to Hawaiian liberation, we are failing.
Appealing to the American political system hasn’t worked in 122 years. Appealing to the international legal system misunderstands the material reality of power. These liberal tactics can be employed to erode American authority, to persuade humans not to support American power, but there are more decisive routes to undermining American power. It’s not that liberal tactics do not have their place. But, by themselves, they do not undermine power in any serious way.
Time is short in Hawai’i. Settlers wishing to demonstrate true solidarity need to embrace a radical analysis. It is time to get to work seriously dismantling the sources of American power.
Will Falk has been working and living with protesters on Mauna Kea who are attempting to block construction of an 18-story astronomical observatory.
Find an index of Will Falk’s “Protecting Mauna Kea” essays, plus other resources, at:
Deep Green Resistance Hawai’i: Protect Mauna Kea from the Thirty Meter Telescope
by DGR Colorado Plateau | Aug 11, 2015 | Gender, Repression at Home
By Derrick Jensen / Counterpunch
It’s easy enough, some sixty years after the fact, for us to cluck our tongues at the cowardice and stupidity of those who went along with McCarthyism. It’s especially easy for liberals and academics to say that had they been alive back then, they would certainly have had the courage to stand up for discourse and to stand up for those being blacklisted. That’s partly because universities like to present themselves as bastions of free thought and discourse, where students, faculty, and guests discuss the most important issues of the day. Liberal academics especially like to present themselves as encouraging of these discussions.
Bullshit.
A new McCarthyism—complete with blacklisting—has overtaken universities, and discourse in general, and far from opposing it, liberal academics are its most active and ardent perpetrators, demanding a hegemony of thought and discourse that rivals the original.
For the past decade or so, deplatforming—the disinvitation of a speaker at the insistence of a special interest group—and blacklisting have been, to use the word of an organization that tracks the erosion of academic freedom through the increased use of deplatforming, “exploding.” Between 2002 and 2013, disinvitations from universities went up six times. And no longer are the primary blacklisters the capitalists (as was the case in the 1950s) or the pro-Israel lobby (as it has been for the past few decades). The pro-Israel lobby is still blacklisting like mad, but it’s been overtaken these days in the anti-free-speech sweepstakes by those who often consider themselves the brave heirs of Mario Savio: the liberals and leftists. And the targets of the liberals and leftists are not confined to the right (although they do certainly target right-wingers as well). Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges was recently deplatformed because he speaks out against prostitution as exploitative of women. Only outcry by women forced the college to reinstate him. Writer and activist Gail Dines was recently deplatformed because she speaks out against pornography. Last year an anarchist organization called “Civil Liberties Defense Center” lent its efforts to attempts to deplatform writer and activist Lierre Keith from the University of Oregon because she’s a radical feminist. The irony of an organization with “civil liberties” in its title attempting to deplatform someone because her ideology doesn’t fit its own doesn’t escape me, and probably won’t escape anyone outside of anarchist/liberal/leftist circles. Last year, female genital mutilation survivor, child bride survivor, and feminist activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali was disinvited from receiving an honorary degree at Brandeis because she writes, from unspeakably painful experience, about how millions of women are treated under Islam.
Capitalists used the rhetoric of “communism” to blacklist. The pro-Israel lobby uses the rhetoric of “Anti-Semitism.” And the modern-day McCarthys use the rhetoric of “oppression” and “trauma.”
Things have gotten bad enough that comedians Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, and Larry the Cable Guy have all said they can’t or won’t play colleges any more. As fellow-comedian Bill Maher commented, “When Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld, and Larry the Cable Guy say you have a stick up your ass, you don’t have to wait for the X-rays to come back. That’s right, a black, a Jew and a redneck all walk onto a college campus and they all can’t wait to leave.”
Things have gotten bad enough that this spring The Onion put out a satirical piece titled, “College Encourages Lively Exchange of Idea: Students, Faculty, Invited to Freely Express Single Viewpoint.” The article concludes with fictitious college President Kevin Abrams stating, “‘Whether it’s a discussion of a national political issue or a concern here on campus, an open forum in which one argument is uniformly reinforced is crucial for maintaining the exceptional learning environment we have cultivated here.’ Abrams told reporters that counseling resources were available for any student made uncomfortable by the viewpoint.”
Things are much worse than I’ve so far made them seem. Brown University recently held a debate about sexual assault on campus. In response to the very existence of this debate—and this time it’s not The Onion reporting, but rather The New York Times—the college set up a “safe space” where those who might be made uncomfortable, or to use the politically correct parlance, “triggered,” by the debate could remove to relax with “cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma.” A student gave her reason for using the safe room: “I was feeling bombarded by a lot of viewpoints that really go against my dearly and closely held beliefs.”
Silly me. I thought being challenged was a primary point of college.
Over the past few years I’ve talked to several university instructors (especially adjuncts) who’ve told me they’re afraid of their students. Not physically, as in their students killing them, but rather they fear that uttering any opinion that any of their students—either
conservative or liberal: it swings both ways—find objectionable will lead to that student complaining to the administration, after which the instructor may lose her or his classes, in effect be fired. And I just read an essay by an instructor in which he mentions an adjunct whose contract was not “renewed after students complained that he exposed them to ‘offensive’ texts written by Edward Said and Mark Twain. His response, that the texts were meant to be a little upsetting, only fueled the students’ ire and sealed his fate.”
The political correctness posse has started coming after me. I’ve been deplatformed twice this year, by liberals at Appalachian State and Oregon State Universities. The logic behind the deplatformings makes an interesting case study in the McCarthyism and circular firing squad mentality of the liberal academic class.
Part of what’s interesting to me about these deplatformings is that given what I write about—my work more or less constantly calls for revolution—I always thought it was inevitable that I’d start getting deplatformed, just as I’m always detained when I cross international borders, but I thought this deplatforming would come from the right. Not so. It’s come from the left, and, well, to use a cliché, it’s come out of left field.
To be clear, I’ve never been deplatformed because I’ve written scores of lines like, “Every morning when I wake up I ask myself whether I should write or blow up a dam.” I’ve never been deplatformed because I’ve written about the necessity of using any means necessary to stop this culture from killing the planet. I’ve never been deplatformed because I’ve written about taking down capitalism. I’ve never been deplatformed for making the satirical modest proposal that a way to stop environmental destruction is to attach remote controlled cigar cutters to the genitals of CEOs, politicians, and land managers who claim their decisions won’t harm the land (let them put their genitals where their mouths are, I say (which is something they’ve probably already tried to do)) and when their decisions harm the land, well, bzzzt, and I guarantee the next CEO, politician, or land manager won’t be quite so quick to make false promises. I’ve never been deplatformed for calling in all seriousness for Tony Hayward, ex-CEO of BP, to be tried and if found guilty executed for murdering workers in the Gulf of Mexico, and for murdering the Gulf itself. I can say all of those things, and not have the slightest fear of deplatforming.
Why was I deplatformed? In both cases because I hold the evidently politically incorrect position that women, including those who have been sexually assaulted by males, should not be forced—as in, against their will—to share their most intimate spaces with men. I’ve been deplatformed because I believe that women have the right to bathe, sleep, gather, and organize free from the presence of men.
That’s it.
Yes, I think it’s ridiculous, too.
Even though I wasn’t going to talk about this right of women at all, but rather the murder of the planet, a small group of students—in this case those who identify as transgender—at Applachian State was given veto power over whether I would speak at the university. They said that my mere presence on campus would be “an offense” to their community. Bingo: disinvitation. I was likewise deplatformed from Oregon State because, in the words of the professors who deplatformed me, my presence would “hurt the feelings” of the students who identify as transgender. Never mind, once again, that I wasn’t going to talk about them at all.
Do we all see what’s wrong with deplatforming someone because he or she may hurt someone’s feelings? Once again, silly me: I thought I’d been invited to speak at a university, not a day care center.
My recollection of the universities I have attended or taught at is that a primary purpose was to foster critical thinking and the exploration of vital issues of the day, not to protect students from anything that might “hurt their feelings.” A purpose was to help them become functioning adults in a pluralistic society. Clearly, that’s gone by the boards. And I wasn’t even going to talk about transgender issues, which means it would be my mere presence that would hurt their feelings. Do we all see what is very wrong with basing campus and regional discourse on whether someone’s feelings will be hurt, and worse, on “hurt feelings” that won’t even be based on what the blacklisted speaker was actually going to talk about? What does it mean to our society and to discourse that one group of people—anygroup of people—is allowed to hold campus and regional discourse hostage by threatening that their feelings may be hurt? Should Christians be able to deplatform Richard Dawkins because he hurts their feelings? Should atheists be able to deplatform Christians because the Christians hurt their feelings? Capitalists are killing the planet. The murder of the planet certainly hurts my feelings. So let’s deplatform all the capitalists.
The kicker on me getting deplatformed because my presence would be an “offense” to, and “hurt the feelings” of, those students who identify as transgender, is that not only was I not going to talk about them, I barely even write about them. I’ve done the math, and out of the literally millions of words I’ve written for publication, only .14 percent (yes, that’s point 14 percent) of those words have to do with their issues: two short essays, only written after my female comrades began receiving a host of rape and death threats simply for wanting to sleep, bathe, gather, and organize free from the presence of males (and you’d think that rape and death threats by men who object to women wanting space away from men would be the end of the discussion: it is, but not in the way you think: it’s the end of the discussion because the men win and the women and their allies get deplatformed). .14 percent of my work is 1.4 words per every thousand. That’s the equivalent of five words in this entire essay. Even if it were worthwhile to deplatform me over the issue at all, they’re deplatforming me because they disagree with .14 percent of my work. Hell, I disagree with a lot more than that. The cult-like demand of loyalty on the part of the new McCarthyites is so rigid that 99.86 percent agreement does not suffice.
And the essays they object to weren’t even disrespectful (which is more than I can say for my treatment of, say, capitalists), just a political and philosophical disagreement.
Part of the problem is that a terrible (and manipulative) rhetorical coup has taken place in academia, where political and philosophical disagreement have been redefined as “disrespect” and “traumatizing” and “hurting their feelings,” such that the “victims” may have to dash off to a “safe space” to play with Play-Doh and watch videos of puppies. As the (highly problematical) professor and writer Laura Kipnis puts it, “Emotional discomfort is [now] regarded as equivalent to material injury, and all injuries have to be remediated.” A fearful college instructor observed, “Hurting a student’s feelings, even in the course of instruction that is absolutely appropriate and respectful, can now get a teacher into serious trouble.”
That is a rhetorical coup because it makes discourse impossible. Those who perpetuate or support this coup have made it impossible to talk about the subject (or, clearly, any subject, including the murder of the planet), because any disagreement on any “triggering” subject is immediately labeled as a lack of acceptance and as disrespect.
To be clear, if no one is allowed to disagree with any one particular group of people—whether they be Christians or Muslims or capitalists or those who support (or oppose) Israel or those who identify as transgender, or, for that matter, members of the chess club—for fear their feelings will be hurt, then there can be no reasonable discourse. And if the purpose of a college lecture series is to make sure that no one’s feelings will be hurt, there can be no speakers. Allowing any group to hold discourse hostage to their feelings is the death knell for pluralistic society. It leads to fundamentalism. It is a fundamentalism.
It’s a classic trick used by despots and pocket despots everywhere: to ensure agreement with your position, make certain that all other positions are literally unspeakable. For the religiously minded, the epithet of choice has often been blasphemy. For the patriot, it’s traitor. For the capitalist, it’s commie. And for the liberal/leftist/anarchist, it’s oppressor.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
When I was a sophomore in college, the Colorado School of Mines invited Edward Teller to speak. One of my classes required attendance. The lecture was precisely what one would expect from one of the worst human beings of the twentieth century. But some thirty-five years later, the only thing I remember of that year-long class consisted of the great classroom discussion the next day, with some students hating him and others defending him. The professors—no fans of Teller’s insanity—used this as an opportunity to teach their twenty-year-old charges to build and defend an argument. Why did you find his views so offensive? Defend your position. Convince us.
To my mind, that is the point of college.
I once asked my friend the Okanagan activist Jeannette Armstrong what she thought of an attack by another writer on Jerry Mander’s book In the Absence of the Sacred. Her answer has guided my life and career: if he didn’t like the book, he should have written his own damn book.
And that is the point of writing.
So, if you disagree with me, great! If you think women don’t have the right to gather free from the presence of males, then make your argument. If you feel Israel is not committing atrocities, then make your argument. If you feel capitalism is the most just and desirable social arrangement possible and that communism is the devil’s handiwork, then make your argument. In each case make the best argument you can. Show that your position is correct. Make your argument so sound that no sane person could disagree with you (and lots of people—sane or otherwise—will still disagree with you: that’s the fucking point of living in a pluralistic society). And when somebody doesn’t agree with you, don’t fucking whine that your feelings are hurt or that you’re offended by an opinion different than your own, but instead use that disagreement to hone your own arguments for future disagreement. Or change your perspective based on that disagreement.
That is the point of college.
We’re not all going to get along. But no one is saying you have to invite every speaker into your home. No one is saying you have to accept them into your internet- or face-to-face-discussion groups. No one is saying you have to like them. No one is saying you have to listen to them. Hell, no one is even saying you have to acknowledge their existence. But if you fear a certain discussion or lecture is going to traumatize you such that you need to go blow bubbles and watch videos of puppies, then maybe you should just not attend that discussion or lecture, and later on maybe you should discuss those feelings with a therapist. Don’t project your triggers onto your fellow students. Don’t deprive everyone else of something because you object or because it might trigger you. It is not everyone else’s—or the world’s—responsibility to never make you uncomfortable.
That’s the point of living in a pluralistic society.
I blame society for this mess. Every indicator is that people are becoming significantly more narcissistic and less empathetic: as Scientific American reported back in 2010, “A study of 14,000 college students found that today’s young people are 40 percent less empathetic than college kids from 30 years ago,” and noted that “the sharpest drop in empathy occurred in the last nine years.” The article reports that “today’s students are less likely to agree with statements like, ‘I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective’ and ‘I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me [sic].’” So it should not come as a surprise that these students demand and expect that public discourse be formed so as to not “hurt their feelings.” Pretty much everything in this society—from capitalism to consumerism to incessant advertising and corporate culture to the selfish gene theory to neoliberalism to postmodernism to the superficiality of Internet culture—reinforces this narcissism. How many decades ago was “The Me Decade”? And how much worse has it become since then? Well, about 40 percent.
I also blame liberals/leftists/anarchists, who are in some ways merely replicating the Stanford Prison Experiment, in that having gained some power in the Academy, they’re using that power the same way that capitalists or anybody else who gains power so often does, by denying voice to anyone who disagrees with them.
And I blame the groundlessness of postmodernism, with its assertion that meaning is not inherent in anything, that there are no truths, and that each person’s perception of reality is equally valid. As well as destroying class consciousness—which is one reason modern blacklisting is often based on claims of how some speaker will supposedly hurt or trigger the individual, rather than emphasizing harm or gain to society as a whole—postmodernism has led to much of the insanity we’re discussing. As philosopher Daniel Dennett commented, “Postmodernism, the school of ‘thought’ that proclaimed ‘There are no truths, only interpretations’ has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for ‘conversations’ in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster.” And if all you’ve got is rhetoric, that is, “interpretations” and “assertions,” as opposed to, say, factual evidence, then the only way, or at least the most tempting way, to conclusively win an argument is through rhetorical manipulations. If you can’t say, “Your opinion is wrong, and here are facts showing your opinion is wrong,” you’re pretty much stuck with, “Your opinion is oppressing me, triggering me, hurting my feelings.” And that’s precisely what we see. And of course we can’t argue back, in part because nobody can verify or falsify your feelings, and in part because by then we’ve already been deplatformed.
Among other problems, this is all very bad thinking.
And finally I blame the professors themselves. The word education comes from the root e-ducere, and means “to lead forth” or “draw out.” Originally it was a Greek midwife’s term meaning “to be present at the birth of.” The implication is that the educator is an adult, who is helping to give birth to the student’s capacity for critical thinking, and to the student’s adult form. This is not accomplished by making certain that no one be allowed to speak who might “hurt their feelings.” This is not accomplished by protecting students from “viewpoints that go against . . . dearly and closely held beliefs.” It’s accomplished by challenging students at every moment to be better thinkers, challenging them to question their own assumptions, challenging them to defend their positions with far more intellectual rigor than merely stating, “That hurt my feelings.”
I blame the professors also for not standing up for discourse itself. If you’re going to be a professor, if you’re going to be a midwife present at the birth of the critical minds of your students, then defending free and open discourse should be a calling and a duty. It should be a passion. It takes no courage whatsoever to fail to stand up to attempts to destroy discourse, whether the blacklisters are capitalists, the pro-Israel lobby, leftists, liberals, or students who perceive themselves (and who are evidently perceived by professors) as so fragile their feelings will be hurt by dissenting opinions, their feelings which must be protected no matter the cost to society and to discourse. This failure of courage does great injury to everyone, including the students perceived as needing protection from disagreement. I wish the professors understood that their job is to be educators, not baby-sitters (and codependent baby-sitters, at that). I wish the professors were defenders of discourse.
by DGR Colorado Plateau | Jul 9, 2015 | Colonialism & Conquest, White Supremacy
By Will Falk / Deep Green Resistance
I write these words from the floor of a warm corner of the men’s restroom at the Mauna Kea visitor center. The temperature outside is too cold for my laptop battery to take a charge and the restroom houses the only active plug, so I huddle in this corner to combat the words used by those who seek to destroy what I love.
I’ve been on Mauna Kea for the last 24 nights standing in solidarity with Kanaka Maoli as they protect their sacred mountain from the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) project that would dynamite an eight acre patch two stories deep at the pristine summit of Mauna Kea.
When I was asked to come to Mauna Kea, I was asked to write in a way that connects the complex forces informing a destructive project like the TMT to the systems currently murdering the beautiful islands of Hawai’i. More specifically, I was asked to write to America about the genocidal context the TMT springs from.
The occupation on Mauna Kea exists for two reasons. First, the Mauna Kea protectors will stop the TMT construction equipment when they finally seek to force their way to the summit again. As I write this, it has been 79 days since the TMT construction was stopped on the Mauna Kea access road the first time. Second, the Mauna Kea protectors serve as public education ambassadors. Each day hundreds of tourists come to Mauna Kea and each day dozens stop by our tent to ask us what we’re doing.
These conversations, reactions to some of my previous essays, and discussions with other protectors lead me to believe that a vocabulary lesson for haoles is due. As haoles who want to support Hawaiian sovereignty, we must learn to use the appropriate words.
The terms I define in this essay—haole, racism, white supremacy and genocide—are experienced in a very real way by oppressed peoples around the world. It is not my place to explain these terms to people experiencing genocide in the most vivid ways, so I write to those privileged enough to be free from these realities. The first step to acting in true solidarity is accepting the truth and to accept the truth we must communicate with the most honest words.
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Haole is the Hawaiian word for “white person.” The first time I used the term in my piece “Protecting Mauna Kea: History for Haoles,” I received a wide variety of comments and messages.
Some of the comments were from native Hawaiians thanking me for being a haole willing to describe the true Hawaiian history to other haoles. Some of the comments were from people offended by my use of the term. Some of the comments were from people telling me I was wrong, that haole has no racial connotation and means simply “without breath.” Finally, and most disturbingly, some haoles accused me of spreading division within the movement by using the term and demanded that the term never be used again.
Usually, disputes over definitions can be resolved simply turning to a dictionary. So, I’ll start there. Here is the definition of “haole” from the “Hawaiian Dictionary” compiled by the famous native Hawaiian language scholar Mary Kawena Pukui: “White person, American, Englishman, Caucasian; American, English; formerly, any foreigner; foreign, introduced, of foreign origin, as plants, pigs, chickens; entirely white, of pigs. To act like a white person, to ape the white people, or assume airs of superiority (often said disparagingly, especially of half-whites). Americanized, Europeanized; to have become like a white person or have adopted the ways of a white man.”
Now, I understand that haole can become a derogatory term if words like “fucking” or “stupid” precede it, but Pukui’s definition makes it clear that the most common use of the word haole is to describe a white person. And, I was careful in my essay to use haole only to refer to white people. So, why did some haoles object to being called haoles? Why did some white people get angry for being called white people?
One thing I’ve noticed in my attempts to work in solidarity with people of color is that many white people hate being reminded of their whiteness. When I was a public defender bemoaning statistical realities like the fact that there are more black men in prison today than were enslaved in 1850 to a roomful of white judges, prosecutors and cops, I was shouted down and told we live today in a colorblind society. When I was at the Unist’ot’en Camp pipeline blockade in so-called British Columbia and our Unist’ot’en hosts explained the need for separate indigenous and settler camps due to the reality that many indigenous peoples felt more safe expressing their opinions away from settlers, there was always a white person who tried to set up in the indigenous camp with the logic that we’re all one human family.
So, the question becomes: Why do white people hate being reminded of their whiteness?
The answer, I think, is white people know they benefit both from a brutal history and an on-going reality of genocide and imperialism.White people have visited unspeakable violence on ourselves and on peoples and lands around the world. This is uncomfortable for some white people. But, the truth is the truth however uncomfortable.
Haunani-Kay Trask
I am writing about Hawai’i so I turn to the brilliant Hawaiian thinker Haunani-Kay Trask. Trask also used the term haole to describe white people and Trask was also forced to defend herself from angry white people. She explains the uncomfortable history confronting haoles, “In Hawai’i, it is the haole who stole our land, took our government, destroyed our nationhood, and suppressed our culture. It is white people who created laws to divide Hawaiians by blood quantum; it is white people who brought capitalism to Hawai’i. In other words, it is white people who, for their own benefit, have exploited and oppressed Hawaiians.”
When Hawaiians use the term “haole” – a word that means simply “white person” – they use an original word from their original language. Haoles have taken too much from Hawai’i already. When white people demand that Hawaiians give up their original words those white people seek participation in an inexcusable dominance that extends to something as sacred as original language.
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What about claims that I (and by extension anyone else who uses the term) spread division in the movement when I write “haole”? What about claims that the term haole is an expression of reverse racism?
These claims are based on an ignorance of social reality. In a world free of racism and white supremacy, differences in skin color would not matter. Humans, indeed, would be one big family. This is not the world we live in, though.
At this point, I must define racism. Again, I’ll turn to Trask who defines racism as, “A historically created system of power in which one racial/ethnic group dominates another racial/ethnic group for the benefit of the dominating group.” In a racist system, “economic and cultural domination as well as political power are included in the systemic dominance of the exploiting group.” Finally, “a monopoly of the means of violence is also held by those in the dominating group.” Racism in Hawai’i has taken the form of white supremacy where white people form the the dominating group.
Notice that Trask’s definition opposes the typical, liberal notion that racism is an emotional state existing in the minds of individuals. By this definition, then, it should be clear that haole as a Hawaiian word cannot be racist because Hawaiians are presently incapable of holding the requisite power in Hawaii to engage in racism. As long as Hawaiians remain a dominated racial group, they cannot be racist. They can discriminate against haoles, perhaps, or express prejudice, but they cannot practice racism.
To say that I am, in fact, enforcing racism by pointing out that racism exists is to buy into the erroneous idea that racism is just a belief held in the mind and as such can be overcome merely by holding love for all people. White supremacy and racism, though, are enforced by physical power and violence. To truly undermine racism requires physically dismantling the means by which racism is perpetuated. If we cannot point out that haoles are white people directly benefitting from a specific arrangement of power, then we will never effectively dismantle white supremacy—and what’s left of Hawai’i will be annihilated.
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Another word many haoles roll their eyes at is “genocide.” The truth is Hawai’i has suffered from over two hundred years of on-going genocide and the TMT project, regardless of its stated goals, is another attempted act in a long list of genocide.
Too many limit their view of genocide to ditches full of corpses or black and white photographs of gas chambers. These are certainly images of genocide, but Article II of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide (the international authority) contemplates a much broader definition.
Article II says genocide is “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group as such: killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, or forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
Raphael Lemkin invented the term “genocide” and informed much of the 1948 Convention’s rationale with his masterpiece written in 1943 titled “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.” He wrote, “Genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation.” Genocide can also be “a coordinated plan of actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.”
Captain Cook on the coast of New South Wales (Joseph BACKLER/Wikimedia)
Viewed through this lens, we can see the countless, obvious acts of genocide that comprise recent Hawaiian history. First, there was Captain Cook landing on Hawai’i’s shores with sailors he knew full-well carried communicable and terminal diseases for native Hawaiians. The numbers are devastating. The population of Hawaii was estimated at well-over 1 million when Cook landed in the late 1770s. By 1898, at the time of the Ku’e Petitions, only 40,000 Kanaka Maoli existed in the whole world. This loss of human life in such a relatively short time reflects the “immediate destruction of a nation” Lemkin describes.
The illegal overthrow in 1893 involved all-white conspirators forcing Queen Liliuokalani to abdicate her throne as regent of the Kingdom of Hawai’i under threats of violence. The Kingdom of Hawai’i was formed to protect Hawai’i from European powers. So, the overthrow deliberately inflicted conditions calculated to bring about the physical destruction of the Hawaiian people. The objective of the overthrow was the disintegration of Hawaiian political and social institutions.
The banning of Hawaiian language in schools by the illegal Republic of Hawaii in 1896 was a move that was unquestionably designed to alienate Hawaiian children from their native culture, language, and religion.
And now we stand on Mauna Kea to stop genocide again. Make no mistake, the TMT project is classically genocidal aiming to desecrate the most sacred mountain in the traditional Hawaiian spirituality. Mauna Kea is the genesis site for Kanaka Maoli and is referred to as the piko, the navel of the world, connecting Sky Father to Earth Mother. The people are genealogically (read: literally) related to the Mountain making Mauna Kea an essential place of worship.
It is easy for many to see that blowing up places of worship like a synagogue or a mosque would be genocidal for causing serious mental harm to Jews or Muslims. It is easier still to see the way steamrolling places essential to world religions like Bethlehem or Mt. Sinai would be genocidal as well. Dynamiting Mauna Kea undermines Kanaka Maoli culture, spirituality, and society destroying a place of worship that is perhaps, the most symbolically significant place to the traditional Hawaiian spirituality.
Of course, the crime of genocide requires two elements – intent and action. A shrewd reader might object to accusations of genocide the same way the TMT organizers do, arguing that the TMT project does not intend to harm Hawaiians but instead is an effort to foster human understanding of astronomy. According to Gregory H. Stanton, President of Genocide Watch, “Intentional means purposeful. Intent can be proven directly from statements or orders. But more often, it must be inferred from a systematic pattern of coordinated acts.”
What happens when we view the TMT project through the totality of the haole presence in Hawai’i? Can we infer a systematic pattern of coordinated acts that would rise to the requisite level of intention needed to prove genocide?
As I demonstrated earlier, we see that the last two hundred years in Hawai’i—marked by the arrival of haoles—are dominated by genocide. Captain Cook came to the Pacific specifically to open the region to British colonization. Missionaries followed Cook to destroy Hawaiian spirituality and replace it with Christianity. Americans overthrew the Kingdom of Hawai’i to push the genocidal legacy of Manifest Destiny ever farther west. The Hawaiian language was suppressed in Hawaiian schools to program children in the Hawaiian version of “Kill the Indian, save the man.”
Now, the TMT project attempts to blow up the piko of the world, the heart of the Hawaiian people, in an act of desecration Cook, the Missionaries, and the haole plantation owners could only dream of. This is racism. This is genocide. The TMT must be stopped.
Find an index of Will Falk’s “Protecting Mauna Kea” essays, plus other resources, at:
Deep Green Resistance Hawai’i: Protect Mauna Kea from the Thirty Meter Telescope
From San Diego Free Press: http://sandiegofreepress.org/2015/06/protecting-mauna-kea-vocabulary-for-haoles/
by DGR Colorado Plateau | Apr 25, 2015 | Agriculture, Building Alternatives, Strategy & Analysis
In 1993 Michael Carter was arrested and indicted for underground environmental activism. Since then he’s worked aboveground, fighting timber sales and oil and gas leasing, protecting endangered species, and more. Today, he’s a member of Deep Green Resistance Colorado Plateau, and author of the memoir Kingfishers’ Song: Memories Against Civilization.
Time is Short spoke with him about his actions, underground resistance, and the prospects and problems facing the environmental movement. The first part of this interview is available here, and the third part here.
Time is Short: Your actions weren’t linked to other issues or framed in a greater perspective. How important do you think having well-framed analysis is in regards to sabotage and other such actions?
Michael Carter: It is the most important thing. Issue framing is one of the ways that dissent gets defeated, as with abortion rights, where the issue is framed as murder versus convenience. Hunger is framed as a technical difficulty—how to get food to poor people—not as an inevitable consequence of agriculture and capitalism. Media consumers want tight little packages like that.
In the early ‘90s, wilderness and biodiversity preservation were framed as aesthetic issues, or as user-group and special interests conflict; between fishermen and loggers, say, or backpackers and ORVers. That’s how policy decisions and compromises were justified, especially legislatively. My biggest aboveground campaign of that time was against a Montana wilderness bill, because of the “release language” that allowed industrial development of roadless federal lands. Yet most of the public debate revolved around an oversimplified comparison of protected versus non-protected acreage numbers. It appeared reasonable—moderate—because the issue was trivialized from the start.
That sort of situation persists to this day, where compromises between industry, government, and corporate environmentalists are based on political framing rather than biological or physical reality—an area that industry or motorized recreationists would agree to protect might have no capacity for sustaining a threatened species, however reasonable the acreage numbers might look. Activists feel obliged to argue in a human-centered context—that the natural world is our possession, whether for amusement or industry—which is a weak psychological and political position to be in, especially for underground fighters.
Artwork by Stephanie McMillan
When I was one of them, I never felt I had a clear stance to work from. Was I risking a decade in prison for a backpacking trail? No. Well then what was I risking it for? I chose not to think that deeply, just to rampage onward. That was my next worst mistake after bad security. Without clear intentions and a solid understanding of the situation, actions can become uncoordinated, and potentially meaningless. No conscientious aboveground movement will support them. You can get entangled in your own uncertainty.
If I were now considering underground action—and of course I’m not, you must choose to be aboveground or underground and stick with it, another mistake I made—I would view it as part of a struggle against a larger power structure, against civilization as a whole. It’s important to understand that this is not the same thing as humanity.
TS: You called civilization a plan based on agriculture. Could you expand on that?
MC: Nothing else that the dominant culture does, industrial forestry and fishing, generating electricity, extracting fossil fuels, is as destructive as agriculture. None of it’s possible without agriculture. There’s some forty years of topsoil left, and agriculture is burning through it as if it will last forever, and it can’t. Topsoil is the sand in civilization’s hourglass, the same as fossil fuels and mineral ores; there is only so much of it. When it comes to physical limits, civilization has no rationality, or even a sense of its own ultimate self-interest; only a hidden-in-plain-sight secret that it’s going to consume everything. In a finite world it can never function for long, and all it’s doing now is grinding through the last frontiers. If civilization is still continuing twenty years from now, it won’t matter how many wilderness areas are designated; civilization is going to consume those wilderness areas.
TS: How is that analysis helpful? If civilization can never be sustained, doesn’t that remove any hope of success?
MC: If we’re serious about protecting life and promoting justice, we have to acknowledge that civilized humanity will never voluntarily take the steps needed for a sustainable way of life, because its history is entirely about war and occupation. That’s what civilization does: wage war and occupy land. It appears as though this is progress, that it’s humanity itself, but it’s not. Civilization will always make power and dominance its priority, and will never allow its priority to be challenged.
Artwork by Stephanie McMillan
For example, production of food could be fairly easily converted from annual grains to perennial grasses, producing milk, eggs, and meat. Polyface Farms in Virginia has demonstrated how eminently possible this is; on a large scale that would do enormous good, sequestering carbon and lowering diabetes, obesity, and pesticide and fertilizer use. But grass can’t be turned into a commodity; it can’t be stored and traded, so it can never serve capitalism’s needs. So that debate will never come up on CNN, because it falls so far outside the issue framing. Hardly anyone is discussing what’s really wrong, only which capitalist or nation state will get to the last remaining resources first and how technology might cope with the resulting crises.
Another example is the proposed copper mine at Oak Flat, near Superior, Arizona. The Eisenhower administration made the land off-limits to mining in 1955, and in December 2014 the US Senate reversed that with a rider to a defense authorization bill, and Obama signed it. Arizona Senator John McCain said, “To maintain the strength of the most technologically-advanced military in the world, America’s armed forces need stable supplies of copper for their equipment, ammunition, and electronics.” See how he justifies mining copper with military need? He’s closed the discussion with an unassailable warrant, since no one in power—and hardly anyone in the public at large—is going to question the military’s needs.
TS: Are you saying there’s no chance of voluntary reform?
MC: I’m saying that it’s going to be a fight. Significant social change is usually involuntary, contrary to popular notions about “being the change you want to see in the world” and “majority rules.” Most southern whites didn’t want the US Civil Rights Movement to exist, much less succeed. In the United States democracy is mostly a fictional theory anyway, because a tiny financial and political elite run the show.
For example, in the somewhat progressive state of Oregon, the agriculture lobby successfully defeated a measure to label foods containing genetically modified organisms. A majority of voters agreed they shouldn’t know what’s in their food, their most intimate need, because those in power had enough money to convince them. There’s little hope in trying to reason with the people who run civilization, or who are otherwise trapped by it, politically or financially or however. So long as the ruling class is able to extract wealth from the land and our labor, they will. If they’ve got the machinery and fuel to run their economy, they will eventually find the political bypasses to make it happen. It will consume lives and land until there’s nothing left to consume. When the soil is gone, that’s essentially it for the human species.
Oak Flat, Arizona
What’s the point of compromising with a political system that’s patently insane? A more sensible way of approaching the planet’s predicament would be to base tactical decisions on a strategy to strip power from those who are destroying the planet. This is the root, what we have to mean when we call it a radical—root-focused—struggle.
Picture a world with no food, rising temperatures, disease epidemics, drought, war. We see it unfolding now. This is what we’re fighting against. Or rather we’re fighting for a world that can live, a world of forests and prairies and free flowing rivers that build and stabilize soil and sustain biological diversity and abundance. Our love of the world must be what guides us.
TS: You’re suggesting a struggle that completely changes how humans have arranged themselves, the end of the capitalist economy, the eventual collapse of the nation-state model of society. That sounds impossibly difficult. How might resisters approach that?
MC: We can begin by building a movement that functions as a cultural replacement for the culture we’re stuck in now. Since civilized culture isn’t going to support anyone trying to take it apart, we need other systems of material, psychological, and emotional support.
This would be particularly important for an underground movement. Ideally they would have a community that knows their secrets and works alongside them, just as militaries do. Building that network will be difficult to do in secret, because if they’re observing tight security, how do they even find others who agree with them? But because there’s little one or two people can do by themselves, they’ll have to find ways to do it. That’s a problem of logistics, however, and it’s important to separate it from personal issues.
When I was doing illegal actions, I wanted people to notice me as a hardcore environmentalist, which under the circumstances was foolish and narcissistic to the point of madness. If you have issues like that—and lots of people do, in our bizarre and hurtful culture—you need to resolve them with self-reflection and therapy, not activism. The most elegant solution would be for your secret community to support and acknowledge you, to help you find the strength and solidarity you need to do hard and necessary work, but there are substitutes available all the same.
TS: You’ve been involved with aboveground environmental work in the years since your underground actions. What have you worked on, and what are you doing now?
MC: I first got involved with forestry issues—writing timber sale appeals and that sort of thing. Later I helped write petitions to protect species under the Endangered Species Act. I burned out on that, though, and it took me a long time to get drawn back in. Aboveground people need the support of a community, too—more than ever. Derrick Jensen’s book A Language Older Than Words clarified the global situation for me, answered many questions I had about why things are so difficult right now. It taught me to be aware that as civilized culture approaches its end, people are getting ever more self-absorbed, apathetic, and cruel. Those who are still able to feel need to stand by each other as well as they can.
When Deep Green Resistance came into being, it was a perfect fit, and I’ve been focused on helping build that movement. Susan Hyatt and I are doing an essay series on the psychology of civilization, and how to cultivate the mental health needed for resistance. I’m also interested in positive underground propaganda. Having stories to support what people are doing and thinking is important. It helps cultivate the confidence and courage that activists need. That’s why governments publish propaganda in wartime; it works.
TS: So you think propaganda can be helpful?
MC: Yes, I do. The word has a negative connotation for some good reasons, but I don’t think that attempting to influence thoughts and actions with media is necessarily bad, so long as it’s honest. Nazi Germany used propaganda, but so did George Orwell and John Steinbeck. If civilization is brought down—that is, if the systems responsible for social injustice and planetary destruction are permanently disabled—it will require a sustained effort for many years by people who choose to act against most everything they’ve been taught to believe, and a willingness to risk their freedom and lives to bring it about. Entirely new resistance cultures will be needed. They will require a lot of new stories to sustain a vision of who humans really are, and what our lives are for, how they relate to other living things. So far as I know there’s little in the way of writing, movies, any sort of media that attempts to do that.
Edward Abbey wrote some fun books, and they were all we had; so we went along hoping we’d have some of that fun and that everything might come out all right in the end. We no longer have that luxury for self-indulgence. I’m not saying humor doesn’t have its place—quite the opposite—but the situation of the planet and social situation of civilization is now far more dire than it was during Abbey’s time. Effective propaganda should reflect that—it should honestly appraise the circumstances and realistically compose a response, so would-be resisters can choose what their role is going to be.
This is important for everyone, but especially important for an underground. In World War II, the Allies distributed Steinbeck’s propaganda novel The Moon is Down throughout occupied Europe. It was a short, simple book about how a small town in Norway fought against the Nazis. It was so mild in tone that Steinbeck was accused by some in the US government of sympathizing with the enemy for his realistic portrayal of German soldiers as mere people in an awful situation, and not superhuman monsters. Yet the occupying forces would shoot anyone on the spot if they caught them with a copy of the book. Compare that to Abbey’s books, and you see how far short The Monkey Wrench Gang falls of the necessary task.
TS: Can you suggest any contemporary propaganda?
Derrick Jensen’s Endgame books are the best I can think of, and the book Deep Green Resistance. There’s some negative-example propaganda worth mentioning, too. The book A Friend of the Earth, by T.C. Boyle. The movies “The East” and “Night Moves” are both about underground activists, and they’re terrible movies, at least as propaganda for effective resistance. “The East” is about a private security firm that infiltrates a cell whose only goals are theater and revenge, and “Night Moves” is even worse, about two swaggering men and one unprepared woman who blow up a hydroelectric dam.
The message is, “Don’t mess with this stuff, or you’ll end up dead.” But these films do point out some common problems of groups with an anarchistic mindset: they tend to belittle women and they operate without a coherent strategy. They’re in it for the identity, for the adrenaline, for the hook-up prospects—all terrible reasons to engage. So I suppose they’re worth a look for how not to behave. So is the documentary film “If a Tree Falls,” about the Earth Liberation Front.
Social change movements can suffer from problems of immaturity and self-infatuation just like individuals can. Radical environmentalism, like so many leftist causes, is rife with it. Most of the Earth First!ers I knew back in the ‘90s were so proud of their partying prowess, you couldn’t spend any time with them without their getting wasted and droning on about it all the next day. One of the reasons I drifted away from that movement was it was so full of arrogant and judgmental people, who seemed to spend most of their time criticizing their colleagues for impure living because they use paper towels or drive an old pickup instead of a bicycle.
This can lead to ridiculous guilt-tripping pissing matches. It’s no wonder environmentalists have such a bad reputation among the working class, when they’re indulging in self-righteous nitpicking that’s really just a reflection of their own circumstantial advantages and lack of focus on effectively defending the land. Tell a working mother to mothball her dishwasher because you heard it’s inefficient, see how far you get. It’s one of the worst things you can say to anyone, especially because it reinforces the collective-burden notion of responsibility for environmental destruction. This is what those in power want us to think. Developers build new golf courses in the desert, and we pretend we’re making a difference by dry-brushing our teeth. Who cares who’s greener than thou? The world is being gutted in front of our eyes.
Interview continues here.
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
