by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jun 16, 2012 | Colonialism & Conquest, Listening to the Land, Toxification
By Ben Barker / Deep Green Resistance Wisconsin
The Milwaukee River runs through the place where I live. Really, it is the place where I live, or at least part of it. This place would not be what it is without the river.
On a warm, sunny day the river will call to me in a bodily way to come into the water, or at least to feel it with my hands or feet. I’m sure this relationship between river and human, river and bird, river and insect, is older and more sacred than I can imagine.
When the river calls to me in this way, I want so badly to get in. I want to spend all of the warm and sunny days heeding this call, and the other days watching from the river’s side, listening and learning.
What breaks my heart is that I will not enter this river and let its waters caress my body, at least not today or any time soon, because its waters are full of poison.
Less than ten years ago, my friends and I would swim in the river on every warm and sunny day. Then, a number of them started experiencing rashes on their skin or felt sick from accidentally letting some of the river water into their mouth. We stopped swimming in the river. The poison dumped or seeped into the river continues to build, and the river continues to be killed, while we essentially stand aside and mourn.
I’m tired of mourning and I’m tired of hearing that this destruction is natural, inevitable, “just the way things are.”
What made clear in my own life that this river was changing for the worse, that it was being killed, was when I no longer wanted to let its waters touch my body. While obviously bad in itself, there’s a larger picture here that must be looked at.
There are living beings—including the river itself—whose lives depend on this river. When the river dies, so to do the fish, bugs, birds, and other animals who drink and eat from the river, who call the river home. Thus, each year that there are more and more pollutants from agricultural run-off in the river, there are less and less songbirds and frogs.
Prior to the arrival of Europeans on this continent, human beings lived here who loved the Milwaukee River. They were indigenous peoples called the Menominee, Potawatomi, and Fox, among other tribes. The lives of these human beings were firmly intertwined with the life of the river. These human beings ate and drank from the river, prayed to the river, and listened to the river’s wisdom.
Those sustainable human cultures were victims—and continue to be victims—of large-scale murder—genocide—at the hands of white settlers. The same people who committed these atrocities against the indigenous humans are now killing the river. Both the river and the human beings who love it—and know how to live sustainability with it—are targets of the dominant culture, industrial civilization. In order to control, exploit, and pollute the river, the humans who depend on it for sustenance must also be displaced or eradicated. We can see how this happened here at home in the case of the Milwaukee River, but we must see further that this has happened everywhere and is the story of civilization.
Currently, every stream in the United States is contaminated with carcinogens. 99% of native prairies have been destroyed. 99% of old growth forests are gone. 90% of the large fish in the oceans are gone. It’s estimated that unless there is a dramatic shift in course, global warming will become irreversible in around 5 years, eventually rendering all life on this planet doomed.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The destruction can be stopped and we must stop it. Clearly, the river, the land, indigenous humans, and so much more life, are the victims of an abusive system. Like all perpetrators, the way to stop them is to aim at the root of the problem and remove or block their ability to abuse. Basically, the goal is to return the circumstances to the way they were before the abuse started, with the victims free and safe. The abuse of civilization has been a campaign of 10,000 years, so obviously there is much to be done to stop it. But, what choice do we have other than to start now and try?
Who or what do you love? Surely you love something or you wouldn’t be here. What would you do to defend your beloved?
I love the Milwaukee River. I want to see this river come back to life, year after year regaining health. I want to see no more poison seeping into the river, no more dams suffocating it, no more destruction of any kind. I want to see all of that destruction reversed and those who would commit abuse stopped and held accountable for their crimes against life.
I love the Milwaukee River and I love life. I will do whatever is necessary to defend the living, before the planet is killed entirely. Will you join me?
From Kid Cutbank: http://kidcutbank.blogspot.com/2012/05/story-of-river.html
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jan 1, 2014 | Pornography
By Ben Barker / Deep Green Resistance Wisconsin
This essay was originally published in the Fall 2013 edition of Voice Male.
If the fight against pornography is a radical one, where are the radicals fighting against pornography?
Earlier this year, the 18th annual Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair, an event that brings together radical activists from around the world, was held at the headquarters and production facility of so-called “alternative” porn company, Kink.com.
Kink.com is known for its unique brand of torture porn. As Gail Dines reports, women are “stretched out on racks, hogtied, urine squirting in their mouths, and suspended from the ceiling while attached to electrodes, including ones inserted in their vaginas.” But to grasp the agenda of Kink.com, we can just go to the source: founder Peter Acworth started the company after devoting his life to “subjecting beautiful, willing women to strict bondage.”
When the Anarchist Bookfair announced its choice of venue, feminists were outraged. The few who were billed to speak during the event dropped out. But ultimately, the decision was defended, the outcry lashed back against, and the show went on.
Anarchists are my kind of people—or so I thought. When I first discovered the radical Left some eight years ago, I thought I’d stumbled on the revolution. The rhetoric seemed as much: brave, refreshing demands for human rights, equality, and liberation; a steadfast commitment to struggle against unjust power, however daunting the fight.
It wasn’t long, though, before my balloon of hope burst. To the detriment of my idealism and trust, the true colors of my radical heroes began to show.
Pornography was then and is now one such let down. Over the years, I’ve bounced between a diversity of groups on the radical Left: punks, Queers, anarchists, and many in between. But wherever I went, porn was the norm.
Here’s the latest in radical theory: “We’re seventeen and fucking in the public museum. I’m on my knees with your cock in my mouth, surrounded by Mayan art and tiger statues. Our hushed whispers and frenzied breathing becomes a secret language of power. And us, becoming monstrous, eating-whole restraint and apology. The world ruptures as we come, but it isn’t enough. We want it all, of course—to expropriate the public as a wild zone of becoming-orgy, and to destroy what stands in our way.” I’m sad to report that this quote, and the book it comes from, reflects one of the most increasingly popular of the radical subcultures.
Conflating perversion and revolution is nothing new. We can trace the trend all the way back to the 1700s in the time of the Marquis de Sade, one of the earliest creators and ideologues of pornography (not to mention pedophilia and sadomasochism).
Sade was famous for his graphic writings featuring rape, bestiality, and necrophilia. Andrea Dworkin has called his work “nearly indescribable.” She writes, “In sheer quantity of horror, it is unparalleled in the history of writing. In its fanatical and fully realized commitment to depicting and reveling in torture and murder to gratify lust, it raises the question so central to pornography as a genre: why? why did someone do . . . this? In Sade’s case, the motive most often named is revenge against a society that persecuted him. This explanation does not take into account the fact that Sade was a sexual predator and that the pornography he created was part of that predation.” Dworkin also notes that “Sade’s violation of sexual and social boundaries, in his writings and in his life, is seen as inherently revolutionary.”
Despite all they seem to share in common, most of today’s radicals actually don’t revere the Marquis de Sade. Rather, they look to his followers; namely, one postmodern philosopher by the name of Michel Foucault, no small fan of Sade, whom he famously dubbed a “dead God.”
Foucault’s ideas remain some of the most influential within the radical Left. He has catalyzed more than one generation with his critiques of capitalism, his rallying cries for what he calls “social war,” and his apparently subversive sexuality. Foucault, who in fact lamented that the Marquis de Sade had “not gone far enough,” was determined to push the limits of sexual transgression, using both philosophy and his own body. His legacy of eroticizing pain and domination has unfortunately endured.
So where are the radicals in this fight against pornography? The answer depends on who we call radical. The word radical means “to the root.” Radicals dig to the roots of oppression and start taking action there—except, apparently, when it comes to the oppression of women. How radical is it to stop digging half way for the sake of getting off?
What is called the radical Left today isn’t really that. It’s radical in name only and looks more like an obscure collection of failing subcultures than any kind of oppositional movement. But this is the radical Left we have, and this one, far from fighting it, revels in porn.
Just as we need to wrest our culture from the hands of the pornographers, we need to wrest our political movements from the hands of the sexists. Until we do that, so-called “radical” men will continue to prop up sexual exploitation under the excusing banner of freedom and subversion.
This male-dominated radical Left is expressly anti-feminist. In a popular and obscene anarchist essay, “Feminism as Fascism,” the author—who is male, need I mention—ridicules feminists for drawing any connection whatsoever between porn and violence against women. He concludes that feminism—rather than, say, the multi-billion dollar porn industry—is a “ludicrous, hate-filled, authoritarian, sexist, dogmatic construct which revolutionaries accord an unmerited legitimacy by taking it seriously at all.”
I’ve ceased to be surprised at the virulent use and defense of porn by supposedly radical—and even “anti-sexist”—men. The two have always seemed to me to go hand-in-hand.
My first encounter with radicals was at a punk rock music show in the basement of a stinky party house. I stood awkwardly upstairs, excited but shy. Amidst the raucous crowd, a word caught my ear: “porn.” Then, another word: “scat.” Next, the guys were huddling around a computer. And I was confused . . . until I saw.
More sophisticated than the punks, the anarchist friends I made a few years later used big words to justify their own porn lust. Railing against what they deem censorship, anarchists channel Foucault in imagining themselves a vanguard for free sexual expression, by which they really mean, men’s unbridled entitlement to the use and abuse of women’s bodies. And any who take issue with this must be, as one anarchist put it, “uncomfortable with sex” or—and I’m not making this up—“enemies of freedom.”
The Queer subculture puts the politics of sexual libertarianism into practice. Anything “at odds with the ‘normal’ or legitimate” becomes fair game. One Queer theorist explained in specifics: “Sleaze, perversion, deviance, eccentricity, weirdness, kinkiness, BDSM and smut . . . are central to sex-positive queer anarchist lives,” she wrote. As the lives of the radicals I once counted as comrades began to confirm and give testament to this centrality, I abandoned ship.
Pornography is a significant part of radical subcultures, whether quietly consumed or brazenly paraded. That it made me uncomfortable from the beginning did not, unfortunately, deter me from trying it myself. It seems significant though, that, despite growing up as a boy in a porn culture, my first and last time using porn was while immersed in this particular social scene. Who was there to stop me? With all semblances of feminist principles tossed to the wind, who was there to steer me from the hazards of pornography and towards a path of justice?
The answer is no one. Why? Because the pornographers control the men who control the radical Left. Women may be kept around in the boy’s club—or boy’s cult—but only to be used in one way or another; never as full human beings. How is it a male radical can look honestly in the face of a female comrade and believe her liberation will come through being filmed or photographed nude?
I have a dear neighbor who says, “There’s nothing progressive about treating women like dirt; that’s just what happens already.” My neighbor has little experience in the radical Left, but apparently bounds more common sense than most individuals therein. She, along with many ordinary people I’ve chatted with, have a hard time believing—let alone understanding—that people who think of themselves as radical could actually embrace and defend something as despicable as pornography. If the basic moral conscience of average people allows them to grasp the violence and degradation inherent in porn, we have to ask: what’s wrong with the radical Left?
In a way, this let down is predictable. From ideologues like Sade and Foucault, to the macho rebellion of punk bands like the Sex Pistols, to the anarchist-endorsed Kink.com, justice—for women and for all—has been a periphery goal at best for countercultural revolutionaries. Of vastly greater priority is this notion of transgression, an attempt at “sexual dissidence and subversion which challenges the symbolic order,” the devout belief that anything not considered “normal” is radical by default.
I can’t speak for you, but there are plenty of things that I think deserve not to be seen as normal. Take Kink.com, for example. Despite the cheerleading of shock value crusaders, I don’t really care how many cultural boundaries the company believes itself to be transgressing; tying up and peeing on another human being is simply wrong. If this sentiment gets me kicked out of some sort of radical consensus, so be it.
What is transgressive for some is business-as-usual oppression for others. As Sheila Jeffreys explains, “Transgression is a pleasure of the powerful, who can imagine themselves deliciously naughty. It depends on the maintenance of conventional morality. There would be nothing to outrage, and the delicious naughtiness would vanish, if serious social change took place. The transgressors and the moralists depend mutually upon each other, locked in a binary relationship which defeats rather than enables change.” Transgression, she contests, “is not a strategy available to the housewife, the prostituted woman, or the abused child. They are the objects of transgression, rather than its subjects.”
Being radical is a process, not an outcome. To be radical means keeping our eyes on justice at every instance, in every circumstance. It means maintaining the agenda of justice when picking our issues and the strategy and tactics we use to take them on. Within a patriarchy, men cannot be radical without fighting sexism. This is to say that radical activism and pornography are fundamentally at odds. Where are the radicals fighting porn? The ones worth the name are already in the heat of battle, and on the side of justice, whether or not it gets us off.
As for the rest, we’re going to have to make them. As the current radical Left self-destructs under the crushing grip of misogyny—as it already is and inevitably will—it is up to us to gather from the rubble whatever fragmented pieces of good there are left. And it is up to us to forge those pieces into a genuinely radical alternative.
Women have been doing this work for a long time. But it is by and for men that women’s lives are stolen and degraded through pornography. And it is by and for men that the radical Left colludes with this injustice. So it must now be men—the ones with any sense of empathy or moral obligation left—who take final responsibility for stopping it. Women have already mapped out the road from here to justice. Men simply need to get on board.
It’s no easy task taking on the cult of masculinity from the inside, but it’s a privileged position in comparison to being on the outside and, thus, its target. And this cult needs to be dismantled. Men need to take it down inside and out, from the most personal sense to the most global.
Men can start small by boycotting porn in our own lives, both for the sake of our individual sexualities and for the sake of the many women undoubtedly suffering for its production. Through images of dehumanized women, pornography dehumanizes also the men who consume them.
Individual rejection of pornography is necessary, but social change has always been a group project. Men must put pressure on other men to stop supporting, and at the very least stop participating in, sexual exploitation. We can demand our movements and organizations outspokenly oppose it. We can disavow them if they refuse.
As it stands, it’s hard to tell apart the radical Left and porn culture at large. Both are based on the same rotten lie: women are objects to be publicly used.
As it falls, the male-dominated radical Left can be replaced by something new and so desperately needed: a feminist, anti-pornography radical Left. Its goal: not the transgression of basic human rights, but the uncompromising defense of them.
Beautiful Justice is a monthly column by Ben Barker, a writer and community organizer from West Bend, Wisconsin. Ben is a member of Deep Green Resistance and is currently writing a book about toxic qualities of radical subcultures and the need to build a vibrant culture of resistance. He can be contacted at benbarker@riseup.net.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Dec 1, 2013 | Movement Building & Support
By Ben Barker / Deep Green Resistance Wisconsin
If the political Left was what I thought it was growing up, I would want nothing to do with it. It’s not what I thought it was, however; at least not in its true form. A Left worth the name is less a sold-out party line and more a grassroots revolutionary force of the kind we’ve not seen for far too long. No matter what we want to call that force, now is the time to build it again.
It starts with political. I know the connotations: we think charades of Presidential elections and we think the textbook spectrum to which we’ve never been able to relate. We all know that the political system is boring, pointless, and corrupt (and did I mention boring?). Politics, however, is not the political system.
That which shapes the world we live in, from the most global to the most intimate sense; that which determines who has power and who doesn’t, who has wealth and who doesn’t, who eats and who doesn’t; this is the real meaning of the political. The term comes from the Latin politicus, meaning “of, for, or relating to citizens.” Need I say that this concerns and should be important to us?
To ignore politics or revile it is to do nothing more than sit on the sidelines as society unfolds. Decisions will be made, whether or not we participate. Thus, we have two choices: concede power over our own lives to the powerful or take that power back for our communities and landbases.
I have, at different times, been both apolitical and anti-political. Like so many who dream of a saner way to live, I placed no more faith in the Left than I did the Right to take us there. It’s all the same, I convicted; sad but true.
But there’s something deeper in that word: the Left. What if, instead of being one end of a spectrum, one pillar of the status quo, it could sink that spectrum and topple those pillars? What if the real meaning of the Left is a culture of resistance: a fiery populist radicalism potent enough to shake the power elite with even the smallest dose?
“Left” has become a dirty word even amongst those ostensibly most aligned with its values. For some it comes on too strong; it’s too political, too confining. For others, it’s too weak; it reflects but one arm of a wholly corrupt machine. In either case, when we wash our hands of the political Left, we wash our hands of the potential for a better world. Neither best wishes nor fierce posturing will cut it.
There is no American Left. Once upon a time there was, but it died long ago: stamped down by force, kept there by fear.
Its remnants are pitiful: one part those who act nothing like a Left, but call themselves such, and one part those who have the potential to build a Left, but can’t get over the name to get together; the essence of modern liberals and radicals.
I’m not sure Leftists know our own history. It starts with revolution in France. Within the Estates General, a political assembly, those opposed to the monarchy and in favor of revolution sat on the left side of the room. Old Regime heads occupied the right.
Since that time, “Left” has been applied to a vast array of worthy movements: anti-colonialism, anarchism, socialism, lesbian and gay liberation, environmentalism, anti-racism, feminism, anti-imperialism, and so on. What bound them together—and should still bind them together—was one simple thing: opposition to the ruling class.
Read that again. The Left, in its original and most honest meaning, is an opposition to the ruling class. Not a loyalty to it. Not an indifference to it. Not even a hatred of it. But an opposition. And in our case, it means an opposition to capitalism. This is why there is no Left in America. This is why we so desperately need one.
Devoid of any meaningful political opposition to join, potential activists are diverted instead into the benign, the fringe, and the bizarre. Each one heads in a unique direction, but in any case it’s never one that leads to the transformation of society.
Some want to remain in the center. They want to take from both the established Left and the established Right to find bipartisan solutions. But the problem is bipartisanism itself: Democrats and Republicans are for more alike than they are different. The only real political party in this country is the capitalist one. How can any well-meaning person want to be in the center of that?
Some imagine themselves radical beyond the Left. It’s called post-Leftism, pitting itself against traditional Leftist values like organization, political struggle, and morality. At its core, this is merely a cult of the individual. No matter how righteous those individuals imagine themselves to be, social change is a group project.
Some wander into conspiracy theory. Obscure schools of thought masquerading as movements appeal to those privileged enough to imagine that social control happens largely in the head rather than through grinding poverty and oppression. Yes, there exists those who are conspiring against us, but they’re called multi-national corporations, not “the new world order.”
The task before us now is to rebuild a home for these would-be Leftists. We must make it the common-sense avenue for resistance. Moreover, we must be a reminder that the political is important. We must be a reminder that the world can be changed, that there is an organized opposition capable of making that happen.
Until then, we have the indifferent and the disillusioned to work with.
I have friends who are silent revolutionaries. Their bones shake enough at every injustice to make even Che Guevara proud. They don no labels or political affiliations, but passionately desire a better way of life; one without systemic atrocity; one worth living in. These friends know things are bad and are just continuing to get worse. They know we need some force of nature to change that. But they don’t imagine that they, themselves, would make up such a force. They simply don’t know it’s possible.
Similarly, I have friends who are outspoken militants. But they, too, don’t see themselves as part of the Left. Why? Two words: Red Scare. It was but fifty years ago that the most passive and compromised of the Left stabbed in the back their active and steadfast counterparts. “[W]riters, actors, directors, journalists, union leaders, government employees, teachers, activists, and producers,” were fired, deported, or otherwise crushed by those in power, writes Chris Hedges in Death of the Liberal Class. “The purge,” he writes, “was done with the collaboration of the liberal class.” Indeed, it was a gleeful bloodlust. So much for solidarity.
Our energy is diffuse, but vast amongst these pools of the disenfranchised. It’s up to us to give common people, in the words of Hedges, “the words and ideas with which to battle back against the corporate state.” And it’s up to us to rescue our opposition from the status quo of the ruling class, where it became “fearful, timid, and ineffectual,” says Hedges. He continues, “It created an ideological vacuum on the left and ceded the language of rebellion to the far right.”
It’s impossible to say exactly what an actual Left would look like in today’s America. Certainly, the project won’t be easy. We won’t always agree. But our debates could be held behind that shared banner, our unwavering Leftist vision of opposition to the ruling class. There’s a chance it won’t work. But right now that ruling class is driving our world to ruin. A Left that means it could put a stop to it once and for all. That chance is worth it.
Beautiful Justice is a monthly column by Ben Barker, a writer and community organizer from West Bend, Wisconsin. Ben is a member of Deep Green Resistance and is currently writing a book about toxic qualities of radical subcultures and the need to build a vibrant culture of resistance. He can be contacted at benbarker@riseup.net.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Sep 1, 2013 | Male Violence
By Ben Barker / Deep Green Resistance Wisconsin
I wish this was just a nightmare. My friend is gone and I want her back. She was killed several weeks ago—violently, sadistically, suddenly—and for several weeks I’ve been crying. My head keeps shaking. I whisper to myself: “No. No. No.” Over and over. More than anything else right now, I want this to not be real. But it is the victim herself who would have been the first to remind me: men’s violence against women, the cruelty of this culture, is all too real.
The pain of the world has come home. What words could do it justice? I dredged some up to speak at her funeral, but even then this tragedy felt like a bad dream. It still does.
Just one night before her death, we were making dinner plans for the coming week. Just a few days before that, we were on the phone expressing how much we’ve missed one another. “I’m listening to Regina Spektor and thinking of you,” I said. “Aw, thank you for thinking of me,” she said. “I’d love to see you soon.”
After one unfathomable instance, after one piece of the most horrible of news, our plans are shattered, our relationship gone, my heart broken.
Jessie and I met because we both wanted to change the world; because we both believed that, in the words of a feminist writer we mutually admired, “there are certain kinds of pain that people should not have to endure.”
With her easy smile, a lot of laughter, and a propensity to start so many deeply profound conversations in one sitting, Jessie was a gust of wonder, passion, and beauty. She asked the big questions and, as best she could, tried to live out the answers every day. Her wish was only for others to try, too.
The personal and political were inseparable for Jessie. She was at once a musician, an activist, a daughter, and a friend. She was so much more than any one title could describe. And every aspect of who she was depended on the other; their coming together is what made her life as rich as it was, what made her as dynamic a person as she was, what moved her to change her corner of the world, as she did.
Together, we cooked, we walked in the woods, we talked politics, we talked relationships, we made music, we did activism. We were sternly serious and blissfully silly.
Jessie would sit at the piano and let the music of her life release. She asked me to sing along, which I feebly did. Meanwhile, not so feebly, I stood back and witnessed in awe the undeterred passion flowing out of my friend’s throat and fingertips. It gave me shivers and put tears in my eyes.
Her voice still thunders in my mind. Her songs still have me mesmerized. Her honest longing for justice still humbles me. Her courage in fighting for it still shows me a way to live my life.
Like so much that is alive and beautiful in this world, Jessie was stolen from us. She was a flame snuffed out by the very violence she strived to stop. She was vanished by hands of destruction: a fate Jessie firmly stood against when faced by vulnerable people and a vulnerable planet; a fate that came, in its unspeakable horror, to take her from her safest place, on some random morning.
It’s hard—near impossible—to piece together letters that come close to spelling the magnitude of how wrong this all is. The contrast of her life—which, in her last days, she said explicitly she was loving—and her death—which was cruel beyond sane human comprehension—is staggering. It is heart-breaking.
What can I do with this broken heart? Try as I may, wish as I might, nothing—not the recounting of memories, not the consoling conversations, not the longest of cries, not the steadfast declarations of activism, not the time spent with those who have loved her most and remind me of her most—will bring her back. So, what to do?
If Jessie’s life was made of music, she’d tell me to just keep singing along. She’d tell me, in the simple, honest terms she was so fond of, to simply keep trying; to try at life. As long as I’ve known her, I’ve been better for it. I’ve been encouraged to ask more questions, to be more loving, to sing more and worry less. Why stop now?
Little is as sobering as death. Its lesson is basic: take nothing for granted.
What good is this lesson without my friend? There’s no solace here, just truth in the most truthful sense; the truth that breaks hearts and buoys them.
The truth is I miss Jessie; I want her to be here. The truth is I’m still alive and I have to go on. The truth is I have, at every moment, the choice to embody the wonder and beauty and passion that she embodied.
What I can’t do—and will not do—is forget. Jessie, in life or death, cannot be distilled to a thirty-second news story. She is not just some girl from some small town whom some tragic thing happened to; the once living, now deceased, occasionally remembered. She is not just another victim with a fate too sad to mention.
This dissociating, this forgetting, is what allows us to carry on, quiet and complacent, in the face of glaring and devastating injustice. It is what allows the perpetrators to carry on, too.
The casualties of this culture far outnumber those who survive it. Each one has a story; friends and family in mourning; dreams and passions forever lost.
I want to tell Jessie’s story forever. I want to tell every story of every stolen life as much as I possibly can. I can’t forget Jessie—her laugh, her music, her political vigor, her sitting across the table from me on that night of the full moon—even if I wanted to. I can’t forget the hollow her death has created within me and within this world.
So, what do we do? What do we who love life and love justice and love Jessie do now? First we mourn; then we fight. And all the while, we keep the flames of our love alive: for each other, for this planet, for you, Jessie.
It is utterly stunning how, within the subtleties of a single relationship, we can find something so blazingly true and real and beautiful as to see in it the love that is the fabric of our world; a love worth living and dying for. When those subtleties, and the relationship itself, are stolen from us, it is the meaning of the whole world that shakes beneath us and, eventually, guides us forward. Such is precisely how precious life is.
As her father said, “Jessie’s death crystallizes things. There is a war between forces of life and death. We can either let a small group of people fight it out while the rest of us sit by, or we can get in there.”
Jessie’s kindness radiates still. Jessie’s fight is unfinished. To honor our dear friend, let us now love deeply, defend fiercely, and put an end to violence against women and the culture which fosters it.
I love you, Jessie, and I miss you more than words can explain. I had more to learn from you, more to experience alongside you, more love to give you.
First I’ll mourn. Then I’ll fight. All the while, I’ll love you.
Beautiful Justice is a monthly column by Ben Barker, a writer and community organizer from West Bend, Wisconsin. Ben is a member of Deep Green Resistance and is currently writing a book about toxic qualities of radical subcultures and the need to build a vibrant culture of resistance. He can be contacted at benbarker@riseup.net.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jul 1, 2013 | Alienation & Mental Health, Male Supremacy, Noncooperation, White Supremacy
By Ben Barker / Deep Green Resistance Wisconsin
People laugh at anything and everything these days, and they expect you to laugh along. In this age of utter cynicism, little is sacred, little is off-limits from humor, little is safe from the cultural tide of callous abuse. What’s worse: you laugh along. You may not want to, but you do.
Laughter is a beautiful thing—until it meets abuse. Like a spoonful of sugar with a stab in the back, it attempts to cover for abuse. Or like pouring salt in the wound, it can be the abuse itself. “Come on, it’s just a joke,” say abusers, as they mock you to the core, as they target any trace of sensitivity—read: humanity—for utter ridicule.
As a friend says, “cruel humor is the humor of sociopaths.” Any boundary set by another, any boundary placed on humor, will be broken. And to them, that’s what makes it funny.
Far from “just jokes,” this is a serious social problem. As psychologist Lundy Bancroft writes, “[H]umor is . . . . one of the powerful ways a culture passes on its values.” What does this say about a culture in which, from the most personal level to the mass one, abuse is merited funny; in which there exists so-called “gay jokes” and “rape jokes” and “race jokes”; in which humor is rated congruently with the scale of oppression or atrocity it invokes?
Not laughing is an act of protest. Some things are funny, of course, and some things are absolutely not. Boundaries do exist and they must be respected. Abusers live to breach them, using humor as one vehicle, one excuse. They want us to laugh along. With most everyone else joining in, it can be hard not to. But we mustn’t; we can’t give in. We may feel alone as the tide washes over us, but we’re not: we share the turbulence with all those whom the jokes are made at the expense of, the ones whose boundaries are under siege.
I can hear the chorus of apologists now, red-faced and shouting their mantra: “politically correct, politically correct, politically correct.”
This sentiment is not new to me. For my first group of so-called radical friends, “P.C.” was enemy number one. They were against the state, the authorities, and, above all, anyone who put a damper on their fun.
These friends just wanted a laugh. So they called African-Americans “niggers” and tattooed swastikas on their arms. So they called women “sluts” and watched torture porn. So they called lesbians and gays “faggots” and formed a punk band specifically to mock the suicide of a local 15-year-old gay boy.
All this was done in the name of irony and shock value, which is, as one of these friends put it, the point of being radical.
If it makes me politically correct to say out loud that this is just wrong, that this is in fact fucking sick, so be it. But I’m not concerned with being “correct.” I care about stopping injustice, whatever form it comes in. I am politically opposed, never mind correct, to these heartless attacks on the physical and emotional boundaries of others.
Those so quick to make accusations of “P.C.” rarely bother to learn what it is they’re saying. It has a history, notes Sheila Jeffreys: In the 1980s and ‘90s, “the feminist and anti-racist policies that had been adopted by education authorities and universities in the UK and the USA were being denounced as ‘political correctness’. The term ‘politically correct’ was a term of abuse used automatically and unthinkingly by many, whenever challenges were raised to practices which entrenched the rights and interests of rich white men.”
That’s the point, isn’t it? All pretenses of joke aside, abusers have one basic aim: to preserve the existing hierarchy which allows them to abuse in the first place. With iron boots already pressing down on the necks of the oppressed, humor serves as but one tool to that end.
The pursuit of irony makes for sad, miserable, ugly lives. Those who grasp for it do so in the absence of any real human emotion and human relationship. This is the ultimate irony: their hearts and minds are too dull to participate in the world without pretending it is one long joke.
“Lighten up,” they say. We all want to think of ourselves as good people, even if we have to convince ourselves that being abusive is not a disqualifier. As social beings, it hurts to be told we’ve done wrong, that we’ve acted unacceptably, even though we may know deep in our bones that it is true: the joke went too far.
In his book, The Heart of Whiteness, Robert Jensen recounts the story of a friend looking for some sympathy after being called out for a racist joke. The friend is wary to accept responsibility and seems to ask for advice only in the hope of strokes to his bruised ego. Writes Jensen: “Before he even tells me the joke, the answer is obvious: of course the joke is racist. He understands that because he knows enough to form the question. Though he is struggling to understand why, his gut tells him it is a racist joke. At some level he knows that he told a racist joke to a group of white people. Why is he asking me? Is it the hope that I’ll tell him it wasn’t so bad after all? Or does he need someone to confirm what he knows in his gut and tell him that he is still a good person?”
Humor is worthless without an audience. Like children testing their parents, one person can crack jokes all day long, but unless there others around, and unless these others are willing to laugh, he’ll soon bore of talking to himself.
There would be no audience to abusive humor if our culture as a whole wasn’t based on abuse. But it is; it manufactures and encourages sociopathy. To protect the boundaries of individuals, we need to dismantle the dominant culture. We need to dismantle the oppressions that become the fare of laughter.
Let us now deprive the cruel of an audience and deprive the culture that supports them of its capacity to exist. Let us insist that, yes, it is so bad after all and, no, they are not good people. Let us laugh when it is right to do so and stand firmly when it is wrong.
When abuse is eradicated, when the sacred is defended, when boundaries are protected absolutely, when justice is wrought, we can look to the abusers writhing in their lack of joke material and ask: Who’s laughing now?
Beautiful Justice is a monthly column by Ben Barker, a writer and community organizer from West Bend, Wisconsin. Ben is a member of Deep Green Resistance and is currently writing a book about toxic qualities of radical subcultures and the need to build a vibrant culture of resistance. He can be contacted at benbarker@riseup.net.
