Jack D. Forbes (Powhatan-Renapé and Lenape) was the author of Columbus and Other Cannibals, one of the most important books ever written. In this excerpt, edited slightly for publication, he offers the reader analysis of the nature and origins of evil in human beings. Image depicts former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin. <
The Origins of Evil in Human Beings.
For several thousands of years human beings have suffered from a plague, a disease worse than leprosy, a sickness worse than malaria, a malady much more terrible than smallpox.
The disease that is overrunning the world is the disease of aggression against other living things and, more precisely, the disease of the consuming of other creature’s lives and possessions. It is cannibalism, a cannibal psychosis, and it is the greatest epidemic sickness known to humans.
Cannibalism is the consuming of another’s life for one’s own private purpose or profit.
A cannibal is an evil person or spirit who terrorizes other creatures by means of terrible evil acts, including cannibalism. The slaver who forces blacks or Indians to lose their lives in the slave-trade or who drains away their lives in a slave system is a cannibal.
They may ‘eat’ other people immediately or they may ‘eat’ their flesh gradually over a period of years. The wealthy exploiter ‘eats’ the flesh of oppressed workers, the wealthy matron ‘eats’ the lives of her servants, the imperialist ‘eats’ the flesh of the conquered, and so on. The wealthy and exploitative literally consume the lives of those they exploit.
The overriding character of the cannibal is that it consumes other lives, that is, it is a predator. Somehow, cannibals believe that they have a right to use another’s life (or their property) in a manner which is decidedly one-sided and disadvantageous to the victim.
Predation can lurk under many guises, such as ‘patriotism,’ profit-seeking, ‘protecting our way of life,’ and ‘investment returns.’
Lying
Lying is almost always a factor in cannibal behavior. Lying and petty thievery, hustling, ‘wheeling and dealing,’ cheating, usury, and so on are all symptoms of a cannibal. In a cannibal society, the common training of large numbers of people is that of a hustler. The individual may learn to be a hustler in business, or in school, or in scientific research, or in politics, but their basic attitude is one of fierce competition to ‘get ahead’ of other people.
There are many psychological traits that help form the cannibal personality. Greed, lust, inordinate ambition, materialism, the lack of a true ‘face,’ a schizoid (split) personality, and so on, are all terms which can be used to describe most cannibals.
Arrogance
One of the major traits characterizing the truly evil and extreme form of cannibalism is arrogance.
Arrogance is a key trait of the cannibal or of a person liable to become a cannibal. Sadism and cruelty are closely related to cannibal behavior. The option of being sadistic and cruel is available to people in the cannibal world, and what is more, being sadistic and cruel can even be made to appear as being patriotic, good, or even pious. Thus the sane become insane, and the crazed become rulers!
‘Scientific’ experimenters on animals, social workers intimidating poor people, bureaucrats being rude to ‘common’ people who dare to approach their desks, teachers treating pupils with mental cruelty, and so on, are using disguised means of expressing the sadistic derangement fostered by the cannibal world.
Imperialism
Imperialism and exploitation are forms of cannibalism and are precisely those forms of cannibalism which are most diabolical or evil.
Imperialists, rapists, and exploiters are not just people who have strayed down a wrong path. They are insane (unclean) in the true sense of that word. They are mentally ill with the cannibal psychosis. The rape of a woman, the rape of a land, and the rape of a people, they are all the same. And they are the same as the rape of the earth, the rape of the rivers, the rape of the forest, the rape of the air, the rape of the animals. Brutality knows no boundaries, greed knows no limits, perversion knows no borders, arrogance knows no frontiers, deceit knows no edges. These characteristics all tend to push towards an extreme, always moving forward once the initial infection sets in.
The cannibal psychosis is a very contagious and rapidly spreading disease. It is spread by the cannibals themselves as they recruit or corrupt others. It is spread today by history books, television, military training programs, police training programs, comic books, pornographic magazines, films, right-wing movements, fanatics of various kinds, high-pressure missionary groups, and numerous governments.
Contagion
The cannibal disease, the sickness of exploitation, has been spreading as a contagion for the past several thousand years.
And as a contagion unchecked by most vaccines it tends to become worse rather than better with time. More and more people catch it, in more and more places, and they become the true teachers of the young. Exploitation is thriving. The exploitation of children, of love, of women, of old people, of the weak, of the poor, and, of course, the intentional commercial exploitation of every conceivable thing, from the hair around women’s vaginal areas, to worry over natural body odors, to adolescent insecurity, to the fear of growing old, to thirst (for example, persuading people to drink liquid chemicals and sugar in place of water or natural beverages).
The cannibal psychosis is a sickness of the spirit that takes people down an ugly path with no heart. They may kill, but they are not warriors. They may learn skills, but they acquire no wisdom. They may be surrounded by death but they do not, or cannot, learn its message. They chase after the riches or rewards of a transient world and delude themselves into believing that big tombs and monuments can make it permanent.
A pimp is someone who follows other people’s orders, follows someone else’s path, and who refuses to take responsibility for what they do. Such a person cannot be authentic. Such a person is not merely a pimp, they are also a ghost, a mere imitation of a person. Their life is an imitation of life, lacking solidity and realness. The cannibal world is full of such pimps and ghosts. The cannibal world believes in the use of tricks, constant opportunism, ‘situational ethics,’ life adjustment, personality adjustment, wheeling and dealing, double standards, and plain fakery. Such a life of deception and rootlessness leads easily into pimpery.
Civilization
To a considerable degree, the development of the cannibal disease corresponds to the rise of civilization.
Cannibal civilizations are (usually) societies with large slave populations, rigid social class systems, unethical or ruthless rulers, and aggressive, imperialistic foreign policies. Colonialist-imperialist systems seek to create cannibals. They recruit them because colonialism is maintained by means of properly controlled cannibal behavior. More especially, they need to recruit cannibals from within the native population in order to keep that group divided, exploited, and in a hopeless frame of mind.
Colonialists spread notions of racial and cultural superiority and transform hitherto free people into super-chickens (as it were) with an especially brutal pecking order. This pecking order (ranks, social classes, castes, and so on) is what maintains the system of exploitation and degrades the masses who become its victims. Such systems are a form of physical and psychological terrorism. When conquered people are reduced to a state of impotency, poverty, and despair, certain individuals will decide that survival depends upon cooperation with the exploiters. Slowly but surely, if they are especially aggressive or ambitions, they may come to see that there are ways to make money, get favored jobs, or obtain jobs for relatives, by becoming dishonest and corrupt. One of the tragic characteristics of the cannibal psychosis is that it spreads partly by resistance to it.
Assimilation
Those who try to fight cannibals sometimes, in order to survive, adopt cannibal values.
Imperialism creates the illusion of wealth as far as the masses are concerned. It usually serves to hide the fact that the ruling classes are gobbling up the natural resources of the home territory in an improvident manner and are otherwise utilizing the national wealth largely for their own purposes. Eventually the general public is called on to pay for all of this, frequently after the military machine can no longer maintain external aggression.
The material prosperity within successfully imperialistic societies, especially for middle-class and upper-class citizens, unfortunately serves to not only hide internal decay but also to blunt people’s desires for truth, justice, and personal authenticity. Even when obvious examples of wrong-doing appear, the bulk of the citizenry will refuse to take any action, in some cases because of a fear of reprisal, but more commonly because of a desire to continue to enjoy their prosperity without being disturbed.
Crime
Organized crime, in its many forms, is the most important manner in which the cannibal disease finds concrete expression.
It is true that individual cannibals, operating on their own, may cause great misery at times, but it is much more common for the most brutal aggression to take place as a part of an organized, systematic assault. Organized crime is indeed ugly, corrupting, and brutal. The terror and suffering lurking just beyond the curtain of wealth ultimately enters into even the gardens of the affluent; and, more importantly, that material wealth and power seldom seem to bring to their possessors the spiritual and psychological nourishment which human beings truly need.
True organized crime commences with the state or with state-approved aggression. The difficult and tragic thing about many systems of inhuman exploitation is that they usually are directed by innocent-looking, suave cannibals whose offices are never contaminated by the sweat, blood, and dying flesh of the oppressed.
The cannibal disease is not limited to the brutes and goons who handle the gun, the lash, or the instruments of torture. The nice people in the offices, the typists, the lab technicians, the clerks, and, of course, the owners, directors, stockholders, senators, generals, and presidents who use, profit from, and feed on human exploitation are also cannibals to one degree or another. The most guilty of the cannibals are those who mastermind, justify, and profit most from such systems. Such persons are the ‘master predators.’
Many people in the capitalist and communist worlds are not Real. Many are puppets or pimps, whose strings are pulled by others or who follow a life-path dictated by others. Thus they are ripe for the cannibal infection. Imperialism, predation, and cannibalism, as diseases of culture, seek to militarize societies.\
Degradation
Part of the process of creating a cannibal world is the sustained effort to brutalize the sensibilities of human beings.
In part, this has been (and is) accomplished by denying the spiritual character of humans and other living creatures and by treating them in a demeaning manner. An important aspect of the cannibal sickness is the apparent drive of some, especially scholars and university people, to de-sanctify that which has been regarded as holy and sacred, or beautiful and spiritual, especially for non-cannibals. The significance of de-sanctifying the earth, the animals, the plants, the trees, and even human beings is that the world is made a potentially ugly and very exploitable place.
A cannibal society seeks to prevent people (except for a select few) from pursuing their own spiritual fulfillment since the economy and the politics or such a society requires masses of laborers who live a regulated, predictable, conformist life.
Alcohol
‘Obedience’ is the objective, not true ‘salvation.’
Alcohol is a universal weapon of the cannibal. Exploitative and imperialistic programs may become very popular in countries where an improved material standard of living is believed to be dependent upon aggression. The systematic use of terror seems to have been developed as a control and domination strategy for many ancient empires, especially during their expansionistic phases or when faced by unhappy subject peoples.
Cannibals often leave a record of murder and terror that is shocking in the extreme. And the people who usually suffer the most are honest, simple, democratic people of the world, the non-materialistic, the freedom-loving, and the truly spiritual. These people are precisely lacking in the insane desires and delusions which motivate the cannibal. (Non-cannibals may, at times, be cruel, but their cruelty is individual and sporadic, not part of a system of cruelty). Folk peoples are the targets for intensive programs of social change engineered by cooperating teams of missionaries, armies, pacification squads, so-called ‘developers,’ and others.
Class Society
One of the essential characteristics of cannibalistic-imperialistic societies is that each social class seeks to exploit those below it.
In a cannibal society, all those who lack physical-material power will be exploited or abused. The cannibal world creates an intensive propaganda system designed to perpetuate the values of such a system. A facet of organized systems of aggression is that the governments, syndicates, corporations, or groups controlling or profiting from such behavior also control the greater part of the organs of public opinion modification. Patriotism, sectarian fervor, news, and propaganda are often used to justify aggression, genocide, slavery, and torture, and also to make the masses willing (or even anxious) participants.
The subjugation of women and their use as means instead of ends is part and parcel of the cannibal psychosis. There is a close correlation between the rise of patriarchal societies and the rise of imperialism and cannibal behavior. In systems that oppress women an element of the cannibal disease is certainly present. In many societies where exploitation reigns supreme, a hierarchical class system ordinarily exists and at every level, although in somewhat different ways, women are controlled and prevented from realizing their full potential. Occasionally, a queen or empress may be the titular or even active head of a male-dominated system.
Male Domination
Terrorism is a male disease.
The madness of violence, aggression, war, assault, rape, murder, conquest, dominance, and terrorism is, overwhelmingly, an insanity that strikes males primarily. Women can, of course, be vicious and mean, and they can goad men into violent action, but the kind of anger and sheer destructiveness that typifies the aggressive male rarely finds a female counterpart. Many of the cannibals are socialized by a society which has extremely negative attitudes towards sex (and which sees sex as a form of aggression, often against women), and which cultivates various forms of cruelty and sadism.
Male dominance typifies a number of major religions, including Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Orthodox Judaism, Islam, Southern Baptists in the U.S., Northern Ireland Presbyterians, and Sikhism, Hinduism, and Shinto. Only within indigenous religious traditions can one find major female leadership and participation accepted widely. The union of male religion with male military dominance has been an all too frequent problem among human beings. The result is the suppression of dissent and, perhaps, of the original core of the religion in question.
It is terribly dangerous when major societies and its movements are ruled by men only or primarily, because male behavior is, historically, all too predictable. From the raping of women, to the raping of countries, to the raping of the world. Acts of aggression, of hate, of conquest, of empire-building.
No discussion of terrorism, school violence, domestic abuse, war and peace, or crime should take place without confronting the world-wide phenomena of male dominance-seeking and violence.
Folk cultures have tended to be the most friendly to women, until very modern times. Perhaps this is because ‘empires’ and hegemonic systems (larger and larger organizations, states, churches, sects) are almost always the creation of men or cultures dominated by a male drive for power, expansion, dominance, and exclusivity. (And the ultimate exclusivity is the blasphemous claim of a group of males to possess the exclusive pathway to contact with the deity, for example, God, Allah, Jehovah, and so on).
Overpopulation appears to be a direct result of the creation of cannibal-dominated societies. Perhaps this results from the degradation of women in a cannibal system, or perhaps it correlates with the disintegration of traditional folk values, or perhaps it is stimulated by the need of industrialists, generals, and dictators for continual supplies of cannon-fodder and cheap labor. The cannibal disease seems to flourish in overpopulation. And in the slums, factory towns, and crowded countryside, babies, violence, hustling, prostitution, hunger, malnutrition, alcoholism, dope addiction, and fear often live side by side in a fertile culture of demoralization controlled only by prisons and monstrous armed forces. But of course the ‘big cannibals’ do not live in these slums, rural or urban. They live, as they always have, in fancy houses or apartments, guarded by the security forces whose salaries they pay.
The Cannibal’s Ten Commandments:
Thou shalt make a profit.
Thou shalt disown thy parents when they become old and send them away to perish alone; but thou shalt put on an expensive funeral for appearances sake.
Thou shalt deceive with false looks and flattering words, for appearances are everything.
Thou shalt gather to thyself alone as many material things as thou can obtain.
Thou shalt save and hoard, sharing not with others unless for thy own self-interest.
Thou shalt adulterate the foods which people eat, and deprive them of healthy sustenance.
Thou shalt take whatever thou can from the forest, from the earth, from the air, or from the defenseless and weak.
Thou shalt kill whenever it profits thee, and thou shalt exalt killing and violence since all progress results therefrom.
Thou shalt be arrogant, aggressive, and bold since such qualities insure success.
Thou shalt not worry about thy sins for the Almighty has arranged a means whereby thou can be forgiven, even at thy death bed.
You shall know a tree by its fruit and by its fruit the cannibal world stands condemned.
Jack D. Forbes (January 7, 1934 – February 23, 2011) was an Powhatan-Renapé and Lenape indigenous writer, scholar and political activist, who specialized in Native American issues. He is best known for his role in establishing one of the first Native American Studies programs (at University of California Davis). His book Columbus and Other Cannibals (1978) is foundational to the anti-civilization movement. Forbes analysis of civilization enabled readers, listeners and learners across decades to understand the systems that enable terrorism, genocide, and ecocide.
The United States is built on a foundation of slavery and indigenous land theft. Racism is deep in the bones of this country. Where there is oppression, there is resistance: the ongoing Minneapolis rebellion against the white supremacist state and police murder has spilled out across the U.S. Deep Green Resistance stands in solidarity with principled resistance by any means necessary.
George Floyd’s Murder: An Act Of White Supremacy
By Jocelyn Crawley
One of the first things that came to my mind when I learned of George Floyd’s ruthless murder was a social theory, typically used to analyze the ideology that undergirds patriarchy: the thought of domination.
According to radical feminists such as Monique Wittig, the thought of domination involves the idea that the ruling class produces the ruling ideas.
These ideas come to support the ruling class’s dominance over all of the other members of society. Within this schema, the thought of domination entails assent to the ruling class (men) imposing limiting ideas on the servant class (women). One of these ideas is the notion that there are two categorically different sexes and that these distinctions entail sociological consequences.
One of the sociological consequences is the naturalization of the division of labor in the family, with this belief functioning as a catalyst for the cult of domesticity and male dominance of the public sphere.
As made plain by this brief summary, the thought of domination ensures that those in power (men) keep those who lack it (women) in a position of subservience and slavishness. Within this type of societal schema, women are vulnerable to and subjected to diverse forms of dehumanization, some of which include rape, domestic violence, pornography, and prostitution.
Dominance and dehumanization:
In addition to functioning as an accurate analysis of how patriarchy works, I believe the thought of domination is directly pertinent to the white supremacist act we witnessed when white police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck for seven minutes while he was lying face down on the road. The video footage of the incident shows Floyd groaning and repeatedly saying “I can’t breathe.” After moaning while lying motionless near the foot of the squad car and being transported into an ambulatory vehicle, Floyd died. The only sense that I can make of this inhumane behavior is that the perpetrators have adopted the dominant society’s values of venerating domination as a desirable way to exist in the world because it enables one to become the abuser rather than the victim of abuse. Within a world predicated on a thought of domination in which whites are the ruling class and can therefore impose their rules on all other racial groups, the abuse they subject black people to frequently goes unquestioned and unpunished.
Lack of consequences:
In recognition of the fact that being a member of a ruling class oftentimes precludes one from experiencing repercussions under the law, the outcomes of George Floyd’s murder should be carefully considered if we are to truly understand how white supremacy works. All four officers involved in the event were terminated. Yet the question that persists in the minds of many protestors is: “Why wasn’t Chauvin arrested?” This was the same question that I came to ask myself after I learned that Gregory McMichael, his son Travis McMichael, and William Bryan pursued Ahmaud Arbery in a truck while he was running through the neighborhood. Many are familiar with the footage displaying Ahmaud Arbery stumbling to the ground after being shot while Travis McMichael stood by with a shotgun.
Many are familiar with the horror and fear this murder generated in the black community as we realized, once again, men of color are subject to being shot by the police and arrogant white men within local communities. Many are familiar with the stories of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice. What many of us are not necessarily familiar with is the logic that makes this heinous, inhumane behavior acceptable. This is why I propose that members of radical communities engage the thought of domination as the ideology that undergirds white supremacy.
It is clear that the primary system of thought that fuels and justifies the type of incomprehensible violence, we see as a product of white supremacy, is the thought of domination.
Domination is defined as the exercise of control or influence over someone or something, or the state of being so controlled. In a contemporary world whose zeitgeist is guided by white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy, domination is and must be an integral component of the cultures in which people are immersed.
Principles of mutuality, reciprocity, and cooperation may periodically flourish or temporarily gain traction in people’s minds and actions. However, making the regimes of white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy work requires that individuals recognize and respond to the realities created by those regimes. The reality that the regimes require is that an elite few exert extreme power over the masses, and that the masses respond to their own oppression by amassing as much agency and authority to themselves as possible while they grapple with the dehumanization and self-alienation engendered by the systems of oppression as distinct entities and a composite whole.
As one distinct component of the contemporary regime, white supremacy is predicated on the belief that white people are superior to those of all other races, especially blacks.
Based on this false notion of superiority, whites come to believe (whether consciously or unconsciously) that they have a right to dominate society. When I read about horrific stories such as those of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd, I am convinced that the thought of domination is operative. I have no other explanation that would help me understand why a man would place his knee on another living, breathing human until he was no longer living and breathing. I have no other explanation that would help me understand why one individual would continue holding his knee on another living, breathing human as he begs for his life. When I learn that one white man holds his knee on a black man’s neck and continues doing so despite the latter repeatedly saying “I can’t breathe,” I am convinced the former has unequivocally embraced the logic of domination. In a world marked by this perverse logic, the murder of a black man is acceptable because whites are superior and any threat to their own safety-whether real or imagined-is more important than black life.
In recognizing the reality of white supremacy and the logic of domination that suffuses and energizes it, individuals who find injustice intolerable must begin to revisit whether the strategies of resistance that have been conceptualized and implemented at this point are working.
If they aren’t, we need to refocus our energies. At this point, I am seeing a wide range of social media campaigns as a strategy of resistance. I have also seen footage of a street protest. Recently, I became aware that several demonstrators gained access to a police precinct in Minneapolis and set some sections of it on fire. There are also now reports of vandalism, arson, and looting. While I do not doubt the importance and efficacy of the levels and extent of resistance seen thus far, I also see that white supremacy-manifested through police brutality-remains resilient in the face of resistance. For these reasons, I have two suggestions for the resistance movements that are unfolding strategically or organically.
First, the agitation against the state must increase. I noted that a tent has been placed outside the home of the attorney handling George Floyd’s case (Mike Freeman) and several protestors claim that they aren’t going anywhere until Freeman prosecutes and charges the officers involved. I think more space needs to be occupied so that state representatives become aware that protestors are not retreating into their private worlds while the public realm remains a sphere dominated by white supremacist ideologies and praxis.
Second, individuals across the country and world who oppose this state violence should join forces and make the resistance movement a more tight-knit process. I am aware that NYC-based Black lives Matter activists are heading to Minneapolis to protest the murder. This is the type of solidarity that we need to see in order to ensure that the authority and agency that results from mass resistance engenders a profound shift in cultural consciousness and state activity.
As always, we who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.
Jocelyn Crawley is a radical feminist who resides in Atlanta, Georgia. Her intense antagonism towards all forms of social injustice-including white supremacy-grows with each passing day. Her primary goal for 2020 is to connect with other radicals for the purpose of building community and organizing against oppression.
Here are five upcoming Deep Green Resistance events around the world. Contact us to get involved, or donate to support our work.
1. Women and Wildness: Feminist Solidarity in Ecological Crisis (Dublin, Ireland — May 25, 2020)
We are living through times of immense violence, from the ongoing annihilation of the natural world to the unspoken epidemic of violence against women, female solidarity and radical analysis have never been more necessary. On May 25th join us in Dublin, Ireland for an evening in conversation with renowned feminist activists and thinkers:
Lierre Kieth – American writer, radical feminist activist and revolutionary environmentalist. Some of Lierres notable works include “Deep Green Resistance – A strategy to save the planet”, “The Vegetarian Myth”, “Skyler Gabriel” and “Conditions of War”
Rachel Moran – Founder of SPACE International(Survivors of Prostitution-Abuse Calling for Enlightenment) and author of “Paid For- My journey through prostitution”. Rachel speaks globally on prostitution and sex trafficking.
Shahidah Janjua – Writer, poet and feminist activist. Shahidah has campigned for womens rights for over 30 years and was presented The Emma Humphries Memorial Prize for her work on issues of violence against women.
Jennifer Murnan – US based feminist activist and environmental campaigner. Jennifer is involved in projects focused on growing and supporting gynocentric communities, and is co – host of The Green Flame podcast.
This Spring, DGR is sending a delegation to SE Asia for a solidarity tour. This tour will include more than 20 events, trainings, and community visits. More details coming soon.
3. Wild Mind Intensive for Activists & Revolutionaries (Oregon, USA — June 26-30, 2020)
This program is in partnership with Deep Green Resistance and is for Deep Green Resistance members and allies.
Those who confront oppression and destruction often struggle with profound stress and disconnection. This intensive aims to help you access deeper wellsprings of strength through connection to wild mind. Imagine what it would be like if nature and dreams were your primary guides. Healthy, mature cultures emerge from the depths of our psyches and from the Earth’s imagination acting through us — through encounters on the land, dreams, and our visionary self.
In his book Dreams, the author Derrick Jensen wrote: “That we come to the earth to live is untrue: We come but to sleep, to dream…dreams are living, willful beings.”
The cultures of nature-based and indigenous peoples are rooted in their mythology and their relationship with Earth. Modern culture not only lacks these qualities, but actively mocks them. Yet, the revolutionary potential of our dreams, visions, and encounters in the other-than-human world await us nonetheless, for those who can break through these barriers. Through Bill Plotkin’s Nature-Based Map of the Human Psyche, a holistic model rooted in the four-directions, we can access our innate human potentials that we may not even have known existed, cultivate their powers, and integrate them into our everyday lives. We can also contact our fragmented and wounded subpersonalities which formed to protect us in childhood, but may now have become barriers to our authentic humanity.
4. A Call To Action For The Earth (Virginia, USA — May 1-2, 2020)
This event will feature Derrick Jensen, Max Wilbert, and a range of other grassroots resistance activists. The event will be hosted by The Virginia Network for Democracy and Environmental Rights (VNDER) The Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights (CDER). Contact us for more details.
5. Deep Green Resistance International Conference (West Coast, USA — Midsummer)
Three days of revolutionary training, workshops, group discussion, strategy, and community. Presentations by core organizers and leaders, including Derrick Jensen and Lierre Keith. Opportunities for you to share your knowledge, learn, and build relationships. The most important event for DGR organizers.
This event is only open to DGR organizers and allies. Contact us if you wish to attend or get involved.
This excerpt from Chapter 4 of the book Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet was written by Lierre Keith. Click the link above to purchase the book or read online for free.This is part 4 of this chapter.
While the alternative culture “celebrates political disengagement,” what it attacks are conventions, morals, and boundaries. It comes down to a simple question: Are we after shock value or justice? Is the problem a constraining set of values or an oppressive set of material conditions? Remember that one of the cardinal points of liberalism is that reality is made up of values and ideas, not relationships of power and oppression. So not only is shock value an adolescent goal, it’s also a liberal one.
This program of attacking boundaries rather than injustice has had serious consequences on the left, and to the extent that this attack has won, on popular culture as a whole. When men decide to be outlaw rebels, from Bohemians to Hell’s Angels, one primary “freedom” they appropriate is women. The Marquis de Sade, who tortured women, girls, and boys—some of whom he kidnapped, some of whom he bought—was declared “the freest spirit that has yet existed” by Guillaume Apollinaire, the founder of the surrealist movement.63 Women’s physical and sexual boundaries are seen as just one more middle-class convention that men have a right to overcome on their way to freedom. Nowhere is this more apparent—and appalling—than in the way so many on the left have embraced pornography.
The triumph of the pornographers is a victory of power over justice, cruelty over empathy, and profits over human rights. I could make that statement about Walmart or McDonalds and progressives would eagerly agree. We all understand that Walmart destroys local economies, a relentless impoverishing of communities across the US that is now almost complete. It also depends on near-slave conditions for workers in China to produce the mountains of cheap crap that Walmart sells. And ultimately the endless growth model of capitalism is destroying the world. Nobody on the left claims that the cheap crap that Walmart produces equals freedom. Nobody defends Walmart by saying that the workers, American or Chinese, want to work there. Leftists understand that people do what they have to for survival, that any job is better than no job, and that minimum wage and no benefits are cause for a revolution, not a defense of those very conditions. Likewise McDonalds. No one defends what McDonalds does to animals, to the earth, to workers, to human health and human community by pointing out that the people standing over the boiling grease consented to sweat all day or that hog farmers voluntarily signed contracts that barely return a living. The issue does not turn on consent, but on the social impacts of injustice and hierarchy, on how corporations are essentially weapons of mass destruction. Focusing on the moment of individual choice will get us nowhere.
The problem is the material conditions that make going blind in a silicon chip factory in Taiwan the best option for some people. Those people are living beings. Leftists lay claim to human rights as our bedrock and our north star: we know that that Taiwanese woman is not different from us in any way that matters, and if going blind for pennies and no bathroom breaks was our best option, we would be in grim circumstances.
And the woman enduring two penises shoved up her anus? This is not an exaggeration or “focusing on the worst,” as feminists are often accused of doing. “Double-anal” is now standard fare in gonzo porn, the porn made possible by the Internet, the porn with no pretense of a plot, the porn that men overwhelmingly prefer. That woman, just like the woman assembling computers, is likely to suffer permanent physical damage. In fact, the average woman in gonzo porn can only last three months before her body gives out, so punishing are the required sex acts. Anyone with a conscience instead of a hard-on would know that just by looking. If you spend a few minutes looking at it—not masturbating to it, but actually looking at it—you may have to agree with Robert Jensen that pornography is “what the end of the world looks like.”
“By that I don’t mean that pornography is going to bring about the end of the world; I don’t have apocalyptic delusions. Nor do I mean that of all the social problems we face, pornography is the most threatening. Instead, I want to suggest that if we have the courage to look honestly at contemporary pornography, we get a glimpse—in a very visceral, powerful fashion—of the consequences of the oppressive systems in which we live. Pornography is what the end will look like if we don’t reverse the pathological course that we are on in this patriarchal, white-supremacist, predatory corporate-capitalist society. . . . Imagine a world in which empathy, compassion, and solidarity—the things that make decent human society possible—are finally and completely overwhelmed by a self-centered, emotionally detached pleasure-seeking. Imagine those values playing out in a society structured by multiple hierarchies in which a domination/subordination dynamic shapes most relationships and interaction. . . . [E]very year my sense of despair deepens over the direction in which pornography and our pornographic culture is heading. That despair is rooted not in the reality that lots of people can be cruel, or that some number of them knowingly take pleasure in that cruelty. Humans have always had to deal with that aspect of our psychology. But what happens when people can no longer see the cruelty, when the pleasure in cruelty has been so normalized that it is rendered invisible to so many? And what happens when for some considerable part of the male population of our society, that cruelty becomes a routine part of sexuality, defining the most intimate parts of our lives?” 64
All leftists need to do is connect the dots, the same way we do in every other instance of oppression. The material conditions that men as a class create (the word is patriarchy) mean that in the US battering is the most commonly committed violent crime: that’s men beating up women. Men rape one in three women and sexually abuse one in four girls before the age of fourteen. The number one perpetrator of childhood sexual abuse is called “Dad.” Andrea Dworkin, one of the bravest women of all time, understood that this was systematic, not personal. She saw that rape, battering, incest, prostitution, and reproductive exploitation all worked together to create a “barricade of sexual terrorism”65 inside which all women are forced to live. Our job as feminists and members of a culture of resistance is not to learn to eroticize those acts; our task is to bring that wall down.
In fact, the right and left together make a cozy little world that entombs women in conditions of subservience and violence. Critiquing male supremacist sexuality will bring charges of being a censor and a right-wing antifun prude. But seen from the perspective of women, the right and the left create a seamless hegemony.
Gail Dines writes, “When I critique McDonalds, no one calls me anti-food.”66 People understand that what is being critiqued is a set of unjust social relations—with economic, political, and ideological components—that create more of the same. McDonalds does not produce generic food. It manufactures an industrial capitalist product for profit. The pornographers are no different. The pornographers have built a $100 billion a year industry, selling not just sex as a commodity, which would be horrible enough for our collective humanity, but sexual cruelty.67 This is the deep heart of patriarchy, the place where leftists fear to tread: male supremacy takes acts of oppression and turns them into sex. Could there be a more powerful reward than orgasm?
And since it feels so visceral, such practices are defended (in the rare instance that a feminist is able to demand a defense) as “natural.” Even when wrapped in racism, many on the left refuse to see the oppression in pornography. Little Latina Sluts or Pimp My Black Teen provoke not outrage, but sexual pleasure for the men consuming such material. A sexuality based on eroticizing dehumanization, domination, and hierarchy will gravitate to other hierarchies, and find a wealth of material in racism. What it will never do is build an egalitarian world of care and respect, the world that the left claims to want.
On a global scale, the naked female body—too thin to bear live young and often too young as well—is for sale everywhere, as the defining image of the age, and as a brutal reality: women and girls are now the number one product for sale on the global black market. Indeed, there are entire countries balancing their budgets on the sale of women.68 Is slavery a human rights abuse or a sexual thrill? Of what use is a social change movement that can’t decide?
We need to stake our claim as the people who care about freedom, not the freedom to abuse, exploit, and dehumanize, but freedom from being demeaned and violated, and from a cultural celebration of that violation.
This is the moral bankruptcy of a culture built on violation and its underlying entitlement. It’s a slight variation on the Romantics, substituting sexual desire for emotion as the unmediated, natural, and privileged state. The sexual version is a direct inheritance of the Bohemians, who reveled in public displays of “transgression, excess, sexual outrage.” Much of this ethic can be traced back to the Marquis de Sade, torturer of women and children. Yet he has been claimed as inspiration and foundation by writers such as “Baudelaire, Flaubert, Swinburne, Lautréamont, Dostoevski, Cocteau, and Apollinaire” as well as Camus and Barthes.69 Wrote Camus, “Two centuries ahead of time . . . Sade extolled totalitarian societies in the name of unbridled freedom.”70 Sade also presents an early formulation of Nietzsche’s will to power. His ethic ultimately provides “the erotic roots of fascism.”71
Once more, it is time to choose. The warnings are out there, and it’s time to listen. College students have 40 percent less empathy than they did twenty years ago.72 If the left wants to mount a true resistance, a resistance against the power that breaks hearts and bones, rivers and species, it will have to hear—and, finally, know—this one brave sentence from poet Adrienne Rich: “Without tenderness, we are in hell.”73
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The alternative culture of the ’60s offered a generalized revolt against structure, responsibility, and morals. Being a youth culture, and following out of the Bohemian and the Beatniks, this was predictable. But a rejection of all structure and responsibility ends ultimately in atomized individuals motivated only by self interests, which looks rather exactly like capitalism’s fabled Economic Man. And a flat out refusal of the concept of morality is the province of sociopaths. This is not a plan with a future.
Take the pull of the alternative culture across the left. Now add the ugliness and the authoritarianism of the right’s “family values.” It’s no surprise that the left has ceded all claim to morality. But it’s also a mistake. We have values, too. War is a moral issue. Poverty is a moral issue. Two hundred species driven extinct every day is a moral issue. Underneath every instance of injustice is a violation of what we know is right. Unrestricted personal license in a context that abandons morals to celebrate outrage will not inspire a movement for justice, nor will it build a culture worth living in. It will grant the powerful more entitlements—for instance, the rich will get richer, and the poor will be conceptually nonexistent, except as a resource. “If it feels good, do it” isn’t even the province of adolescence; it’s the morality of a toddler. For the entitled individual, in whatever version—Homo economicus, Homo bohemicus, or Homo sadeus—pleasure is reduced to cheap thrills, while the deepest human joys—intimacy, belonging, participation from community to cosmos—are impossible. This is because those joys depend on a realization that we need other people and other beings, ultimately a whole web of existence, all of whom deserve our protection and respect. In return we get rewards, rewards that can accrue into profound satisfaction: from the contented joy of communal well-being to the animal ecstasy of sex to the grace of participation in the mystery.
Currently, the right places the blame for the destruction of both family and community at the feet of liberalism. The real culprit, of course, is capitalism, especially the corporate and mass media versions. But as long as the left refuses to fight for our values as values—and to enact those values in our lives and our movements—the right will be partially correct. They will also have recruitment potential that we’re squandering: people know that civic life and basic social norms have degenerated.
It is a triumph for capitalism that the right is winning the US culture war by pinning this decay of family and community on the left. But the right is willing to take a moral stance, even though the man behind the curtain isn’t Sodom or Gomorrah, it’s corporate capitalism. Meanwhile the left might identify capitalism as the problem, but by and large refuses a moral stance.
The US is dominated by corporate rule. The Democrats and Republicans are really the two wings of the Capitalist Party. Neither is going to critique the masters. It is up to us, the people who hold human rights and our living planet dear above all things, to speak the truth. We need to rise above individualism and live in the knowledge that we are the only people who are going to defend what is good in human possibility against the destructive overlapping power-grab of capitalism, patriarchy, and industrialization.
In November 2019, DGR UK hosted an event in London titled By Any Means Necessary? Diversity of Tactics in the Fight for Life on Earth. The event featured a panel discussion between four long-time environmental and social activists: Lierre Keith, radical feminist activist and writer, co-author of Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet; Simon Be, activist and co-founder of Extinction Rebellionl; Shahidah Janjua, feminist activist, writer and campaigner; and Nikki Clarke, anti-nuclear and anti-fracking activist, co-founder of South West Against Nuclear.
A video of the event is embedded here. Below the video, you can read the written text of the presentation by Shahidah Janjua:
by Shahidah Janjua
I see patriarchy as the overarching system of oppression over all sentient and non-sentient existence on the planet. In every instance any word you can come up with to describe the violence done to women, you can also apply to what is done to the environment, to the planet. The planet is a ‘she’, so you can do what you like to her. ‘Civilisation’ is the name given to a patriarchal, hierarchical and violent system of oppression. It rests on the idea of superiority. It also implies an opposite, ‘uncivilised’. Civilisation divides us on the basis of gender, sexuality, colour, ability, class. The most civilised are male, white, heterosexual, able bodied, and usually rich. The greatest challenge for us all is to become uncivilised. To become idigenised. To become one with our environment and with each other. By which I mean that our knowing, our being, our doing and relating is brought into every aspect of the communities we build. It means building harmonious, respectful, equal and just communities. It involves helping each other to undo the lies Patriarchy has told us. Our languages are filled with falsehoods and reversals.
I learned a great deal from Andrea Dworkin, radical Feminist activist and writer. She saved my life. She named the violence and oppression, male supremacy. She named my constant fear, my hyper vigilance. She broke down the barriers between women. She broke down barriers between women and men. Male violence is not genetic, inherent or inevitable, it is a product of a woman hating society. Misogyny is a blueprint for how power works.
We need a movement which honours everyone, every living entity, a movement which honours women, which acts upon violence done to all humans, to everything. We need a movement which doesn’t tell women to wait our turn, because there are other more pressing concerns. In that waiting too many of us are raped, murdered, disappeared, made slaves, prostituted and dehumanised. This is why women have not made alliances with men, because men have habitually put us last. For there to be a movement of all peoples, men need to look at what ‘civilisation’ has done to you. It has denied you your humanity in every conceivable way, got you to prop up its system of control, violence and oppression. It has terrorised women and made us complicit. We need to dig deep to unlearn these ideas and behaviours.
Mental health is a huge issue for people today. Here we are trying our best to live what are essentially a lot of lies. Is it any wonder we are driven to distraction. Relationships are atomised by patriarchy. The capitalist, patriarchal plan, promotes individualism, keeps us separate from each other, does away with community. Patriarchy makes it very hard for us to name our experiences and make connections with others. It fragments us down to a cellular level. Science, beaks us down, takes each piece of us and creates a specialism out of it. I take a drug to kill lung infection and it destroys my liver. One area of research is severed from another. Big pharma make money out of our illnesses, many of which are caused by them and by other corporations, who pollute and poison us, our environments, our planet.
There is nothing left untouched by patriarchal misnaming and patriarchal violence. Cruelty is manufactured and released into the unsuspecting minds of boys, the men of tomorrow, who have sensitivity, and curiosity. Boys go into porn sites for information on human bodies and sex. They are confronted with images of their future selves as torturers and murderers of women. The women in the pictures, in the videos are real women. Lately boys are shown that choking and strangling are the manly things to do to women, orgasm is their reward. Callous and careless about a being that closely resembles himself, how will a boy respond to any living creature that does not resemble him; the animals, the earth, the forests, the rivers? How will he care about the planet.
Robin Morgan says, and I paraphrase, ‘If I had to name one genius of patriarchy it would be compartmentalisation’. ‘Intellect severed from emotion…. The earth itself divided.
How did we get to this point? We have had little or no history of our own to refer to. We’ve dug out what we can, but we haven’t heard or read it in any systematic, ongoing way. The oppressor writes history. The message patriarchy gives us is that this system, of cruelty, violence, greed, war, money, has always existed, it is natural, it is unchangeable. This is precisely why it disappears or destroys our histories. They would expose the patriarchal lies
I thought democracy meant I had a say in the way society was run, that it was about people making decisions about how we live, that the people we vote for have our interests at heart, our need for shelter, warmth, food, medicine, education. Where everyone is a valued member of the community, cared for and respected. This too is a deeply ingrained patriarchal lie. Democracy was conceived in Greece by people who owned women and slaves. Historically numbers of people have been denied voting rights, because they were the wrong sex, the wrong colour, in prison, without property. Today there are millions of people who are disenfranchised. Voting is a way of co-opting us into an unjust, exploitative, oppressive system. It has harmed us, made us poor, jobless, homeless, cold, hungry and ill. Who has ever voted for that? The liars are powerful and the lie persists.
There had been many waves of women’s activism prior to the so-called first wave. There remain some egalitarian societies in existence today. We are not told about them. There was no mention of the Syrian Kurdish Rojava region, where women and men are striving together to create a just and equal society. This is the community that is being bombed out of existence. The so-called first wave women’s movement started when women protested sexual abuse, violence, rape, prostitution. Men divided that movement, some women were brought into the patriarchal fold and promised the vote, the ability to change laws, to bring women into equal power. Today we have no equal pay, rapists go unpunished, prostitution with all its violence, is seen as a job, women in the UK are murdered at the rate of 3 per week. I see no point in counting the numbers of women in governments, in corporations, in work-places, when these structures are patriarchal. That is not equality, it is co-option.
Some feminists have spent decades trying to change laws, work alongside governments, work in state institutions to bring about change from the inside. We have worked hard and tirelessly. None of it has worked. We have been doing the master’s work. Breaking our backs and our hearts to illustrate how we are hurt in these systems of oppression. We have done the research, named the violence. Created platforms for vulnerable and hurt women to speak out. We have begged and pleaded. We have given the master the language we use, and he has turned it against us. More recently we have witnessed how quickly the laws, the rights, the concessions we have fought so hard for, can be swept away at the stroke of a pen. At the same time there are movements across the world which are using laws to claim what is rightfully theirs. Some are winning. The lessons we have learnt would point to the transitory nature of these gains.
I believe it is absolutely necessary to draw lessons from our past struggles against patriarchy. It is necessary to develop new strategies; to unravel the influence patriarchy has had on our thinking. I believe we need to make connections. Pornography, prostitution, violence against women, rape, are part and parcel of the patriarchal means of control of not only women, but also everything else. Colonialism, capitalism, industrial civilisation are on the same continuum. The subjugation of women is the blueprint for oppression. We cannot continue to fudge this reality, if we are serious about the business of our survival as a species, and if we truly hold to the principles of valuing all life equally.
I believe we need to understand that we cannot ask for justice from a system which is deeply invested in injustice. Our strategies, including civil disobedience, have in time wrought the same long-term realities; that we have been assimilated into the power structures, or had the substance of our challenges subverted in some other way. To quote Audre Lorde, black lesbian, activist, writer, ‘We cannot use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house.’
I believe that we would need to have a multi-pronged strategy of resistance, one arm being the one that informs, educates, promotes understanding, that encourages involvement and activism; that is on the streets, consistently visible. Another arm engaged in developing alternative ways of living, according to local environments and local knowledge. This would mean existing villages, parts of towns, blocks of flats, housing estates, becoming self- managed, with non-hierarchical, non-patriarchal arrangements; working towards taking themselves off the grid. There is one example in the heart of New York. This will be how we build community.
In the process of indigenising, there is everything to be learned from indigenous peoples. From those who have hung on to their histories, language, knowledge, lived in deep connection with their local environments, honouring how it nourishes them and how they can nourish it in return. We need to learn how to live in harmony with our immediate environment, and with the planet.
I have for very many years believed in non-violent action. I have revisited the question from time to time, principally when I thought I could murder traffickers, rapists, pimps, pornographers…. the list goes on. However, I do believe that dismantling the infrastructure ‘industrial civilisation’, is another arm of a necessary strategy towards destroying it. There are many historic and current, mostly hidden, examples of this.
My fear is that unless men look with deep scrutiny at their place in the patriarchal construct of society, how it destroys their humanity, how it fragments them, how it buys them off with the promise of power and control …… these actions become what any other war instigated by the oppressors looks like, a struggle for power, not a struggle to destroy industrial civilisation and to restore balance to the planet.
We are here to find solutions together. There may be many different solutions, depending on where we live, how we live, who we are learning from, who we work with. I do believe that we cannot have a single centre, or centralised power, which tells us what to do and when to do it. At the same time we do all need a shared moral and ethical base, which upholds everything we are fighting for, a genuine deep respect for each other, for the environment, for the planet, a just and fair place, a place of safety.
