Sam Mitchell: It is an absolutely beautiful sunny winter day here in the great state of Texas, and the opening bell of the year 2020 and you have found your way to collapse chronicles.
My name is Sam Mitchell and what we do here obviously, as we chronicle the collapse of global industrial civilization and the planet. And guys, before I get into this I just want to give a little bit of a warning and a disclaimer. I have mentioned many times, because I bring a guest on to the show, it does not necessarily mean that I am advocating everything my guests are getting ready to say. I just want to make that clear to Homeland Security. Anyone else listening to this? I am not necessarily advocating what we’re getting ready to hear, but I do think it is a voice we need to hear. And who we’re going to be hearing is a recommendation I received from none other than Derrick Jensen. And this is this fellow named Max Wilbert, who is a buddy of Derrick’s.
And so for those of you not aware of Max, I have read out some of his stuff in the past here. From his Website:
Max Wilbert is a third-generation dissident who grew up in Seattle’s post-WTO anti-globalization and undoing racism movement. He has been an organizer for more than 15 years. Max is a longtime member of Deep Green Resistance and serves on the board of a small, grassroots non-profit. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Environmental Communication and Advocacy from Huxley College. His first book, a collection of pro-feminist and environmental essays written over a six-year period, was released in 2018. He is co-author of the forthcoming book “Bright Green Lies,” which looks at the problems with mainstream so-called “solutions” to the climate crisis.
And here on his Website, Max says of himself, “I am part of a revolutionary movement rooted in ecology, anti-racism, feminism and human and nonhuman rights that aims to dismantle the global culture of empire — read industrial civilization — by any means necessary.“
Max Wilbert, come on and say hi to the folks, and we’re going to dive right into this rollicking conversation.
Max Wilbert: All right, Sam, thanks for having me on the show. It’s good to be here. And thanks for that intro.
Sam Mitchell: OK. So, guys, anyway, my first thought was I was going to build up to this quote I’m getting ready to read from Max, but I’ve said, what the hell? Let’s just dive right into it. We’re not going to read this. It’s the laundry list of everything that is wrong with the global industrial civilization and the ongoing collapse of a planet. We’re going to dive right into what we need to do about it. And this is what Max Wilbert wrote a while back, and we’re just going to pick up from here. So to kick off this conversation, here’s what Max had to say:
“We need to build legitimate movements to dismantle global capitalism. All work is useful towards this end. However, I see no way this goal will be achieved without force. The best methods I have come across for achieving this rely on a dedicated cadre forming small, highly mobile and trained strike forces. These forces should target key nodes of global industrial infrastructure, such as shipping, communication, finance, energy, etc. and destroy them with the goal of inciting cascading systems failure. The interconnected global economy is vulnerable to this type of attack because of how interdependent it is. If the right targets are chosen and effectively attacked, the entire thing could come crashing down.”
Max Wilbert, that was a mouthful. Amplify and clarify, which you have defined as Decisive Ecological Warfare.
Max Wilbert: Absolutely. Thanks for reading that quote out. That was from an interview I did with a French friend of mine a while ago. I tried to lay it out as straightforwardly as I could in that article. And, you know, it sounds pretty extreme to a lot of people. And it sounds like, I think, what the government would call ecoterrorism, and a lot of people would be very terrified by hearing what you just read. And I’m sure a lot of listeners are sitting back in their seats and thinking, what is this all about? This guy’s a nut job, you know. I guess I want to push back on that a little bit. You know, I don’t feel like an extremist. I don’t think that I am somebody who’s crazy. I think that I’m somebody who’s looking at the political realities and the ecological realities of the situation we find ourselves in as a species, and trying to come up with a reasonable response to that. And to me, that reasonable response, it’s not going to rely on the government. I think a lot of your readers probably are on the same pages as me with this. And I think you probably are as well. But look at the incompetence of governments around the world to address the climate crisis and all kinds of different issues. The idea that they’re going to solve these converging problems that we’re facing in an ecological sense is a pipe dream. It’s just not happening. There’s no evidence that it’s happening.
Everything is getting worse day after day after day. And, you know, emissions continue to rise, year after year. So, if government isn’t going to solve it, then people will need to solve it, right? And what does that look like, given the constraints that we have on our time, given the situation that we find ourselves in? I’ve had sort of some revolutionary leanings in my politics for a long time. You talked in my intro about how I grew up in Seattle in the post WTO, and there was this understanding in the communities that I came of age, and politically looking at, for example, the Zapatistas and all kinds of different revolutionary and people’s movements around the world. Sometimes the movements have to be forceful, sometimes they have to use violence, or what people would term as violence. I don’t consider economic sabotage to necessarily be violence, although, of course, look at economic sanctions against Iraq, for example, which killed a million civilians, that’s more devastating than than any war can be. But I think that we need to be clear eyed about these things.
I say this as somebody whose grandfather was a conscientious objector who refused to fight in World War II. So many people look at World War II and talk about it as being that just war, and the Americans fighting the Nazis and the Italian fascists and the Japanese fascist state. The reality, I think as a lot of people know, anyone who’s read, for example, “A People’s History of the United States” knows that the US government didn’t go into the Second World War with altruistic motivations. The motivations were imperialist, they were economic. And many people in the government and prominent members of our society supported the Nazi regime from the very beginning. One of the biggest examples being Henry Ford. IBM, of course, worked closely with the Nazis. We all know that. This is sort of beside the point. But I say this as somebody, again, whose grandfather was a conscientious objector. I came of age politically in the anti-war movement, trying to stop the invasions of Afghanistan and then Iraq. So I’m not somebody who loves violence. I’m not somebody who wants to go out and cause destruction and impose my will on other people. That’s not my ideology. I’m somebody who values peace and basically wants to just have a good quiet life, live it in a good way and have good relationships with the people around me. And I would be very content if I could just go live in the woods for the rest of my life with my loved ones and not have very much happen. That sounds great to me. But unfortunately, we’re living in this global crisis and we need to come up with some sort of response to it. And all of the things that I look at, the government’s solutions, the corporate solutions, the greenwashing, all this stuff around alternative energy and green technology, the Green New Deal, all of these things. I look at them and they seem vastly disproportionate to the scale of the problems that we face. We need fundamental economic and political change across the whole planet. I don’t think that that is going to happen simply or easily. And frankly, I don’t think that’s going to happen willingly. I don’t think people are willingly going to give up this life.
You know, my nephew, who’s two and a half years old, and I’m hanging out with him recently and reading books and so on, and like most kids, he’s really into trucks, he’s really into the garbage trucks and the cranes and construction sites. It’s fascinating to him. It was fascinating to me when I was his age. And I was writing last night about the sadness, the tragedy that this kid, growing up in an urban area, is not going to be exposed to grizzly bears, to orca whales, to wolf packs. You know, the megafauna of the past have been replaced by what I’m calling in this article I’m working on a mechafauna. Large machines have replaced large animals. And instead of navigating through a landscape of raging rivers and towering mountains and glaciers, we’re navigating through a landscape of towering skyscrapers and freeways and businesses. So, most people are profoundly disconnected from the natural world. And I think because of that, we have all been inculcated into this ideology that looks at civilization and this way of life as… It’s even beyond a good thing, it’s something that’s so fundamental that it cannot be questioned.
Most people literally cannot imagine living a different way of life than the modern industrial, high energy way of life. Most people, at least in the United States where I live, can’t imagine that. Some can, some people obviously have more experience living off the land or living in communities and in more intentional ways and can really imagine a much lower energy, a smaller scale, more localized way of life, which is the only sustainable path for the future. But politically, if we think that that way of life, moving everyone on the planet away from high energy ways of life and dismantling those high energy systems, that’s the only path towards survival we have as a species. And that’s the only way to stop the mass destruction that the dominant culture is perpetuating. And I don’t see that happening willingly. There’s just no signs that that’s going to happen, at least on a large enough scale, on a fast enough timeline.
Sam Mitchell: What was your phrase you mentioned five minutes ago? The disproportionate scale of the response to the level of the crisis. The problem, the predicament. And again, I’m just going to play devil’s advocate here. So, assuming that I agree with everything you say, that what we need to do is target key nodes of global industrial infrastructure, such as shipping, communication, finance, energy, and destroy them with a goal of inciting cascading systems failure. The problem that I would have with that, on the assumption that I agree that was a noble goal, and I’m not saying whether I do or not, my problem, Max, would be the same problem I have with all of the other responses you mentioned, that there is no way in hell that we’re going to marshal the forces necessary. It’s not it’s not even David versus Goliath at this point. Rather, it’s a goldfish vs. a blue whale. What would you say to get me on your team? Assuming as that I agree I’m going to join your team, but this is the reason I’m reluctant to. What would be your response to me?
Max Wilbert: Well, the first thing I would say is if we don’t try, then we’ll never know whether it was possible. I mean, people have achieved plenty of incredible things throughout the history of the world, both for good and bad, that seemed incredibly unlikely in the beginning. And there’s one quote that I like to spread around, it was from Michael McFaul I believe, who is on the National Security Council. And he said “every revolution seems impossible beforehand and inevitable afterwards”. So I don’t think what you just said is a unique feeling. I think, millions of people have felt that way throughout history in all kinds of different difficult and dangerous political situations. And yet people still choose to fight. People still choose to organize. And of course, not everyone does. I don’t expect everyone to join a movement like what I’m talking about. But, we need to find those people who are willing to join, are willing to fight. And, that not only means people doing that work, fighting for that cascading system’s failure, going underground and taking serious action. I think it also means people who are just willing to speak up and talk about this openly, because I don’t think this is anything to be ashamed of, or anything that needs to be discussed in the shadows. You know, I’m willing to go on national television and talk about this. I don’t care because we’re in a desperate situation. And this to me is not any less mainstream. I mean, look at the politicians that you see on TV and these debates around the U.S. presidential election and so on. The stuff they’re talking about is completely out of touch, in most cases, with the realities of what we’re facing. And I look at those people as the extremists. I look at those people as the the people who are insane and out of touch with what’s actually happening in the world. So, I think we need people involved in all kinds of different levels.
And people hear what I’m saying and get scared. You know, this is serious stuff. Obviously I’m talking about revolutionary politics really in a sense, and that is a dangerous thing. It’s dangerous now and it has always been dangerous. And I think one thing that people neglect is the fact that revolutionary movements involve people at all kinds of different levels. I mean, there are people who are part of deep green resistance, the group that I’m in, who are parents of young children, who don’t have any time, who don’t have the ability to be a public face for the movement. People find ways to contribute. You know, people volunteer in all kinds of different ways. People translate articles. People donate. People do all kinds of different things to build a culture of resistance to support these ideas and build them up into a political force, a political movement that can actually influence the course of events. So that’s what we’re trying to do.
And I understand people’s feelings of disempowerment. You look at mass media, you look at the culture that we live in, and that’s one of the main goals of this system, to keep everyone in a position of feeling disempowered, of feeling a sense of total alienation, of feeling disconnection. And one of my experiences in political organizing and doing this work is that not only do I feel like I’m doing the right thing, but, I find this work to be incredibly fulfilling, personally. I find myself with a sense of purpose that didn’t exist before I found these ideas. When I was younger, I felt very swept along in global events. And now I feel like I’m part of an organized force that’s working to change things. And the fact that we are outnumbered and outgunned and have no money and so on, all of these things are realities that many other people throughout history have faced. So, I look at myself and other people in this movement as part of a multi generational struggle, that has frankly been going on for thousands of years against the culture of empire. We need to step up and step into that role. And I think it takes a lot of wisdom and it takes a lot of commitment and it takes a lot of self work to confront those fears, to have real conversations with yourself and your loved ones about what this could mean. And it takes courage. I would rather do this work than sit on a couch and watch Netflix for the rest of my life. So it does that make me crazy? Maybe in the minds of some people in this culture, but I would rather be crazy than working 40 hours a week, slaving away at some job I hate, getting ready to retire into a climate nightmare and leaving nothing, leaving nothing for future generations.
Sam Mitchell: OK, well, there are so many things I was trying to grab hold of out of that response. One word stands out to me and that response, it was outgunned. Max has a fine YouTube channel himself. You can find Max’s YouTube channel, and I’ve noticed that the other YouTube bots have not shut you down. I’m a little bit surprised that you are openly advocating on your YouTube channel to start picking up guns. Talk about that, where literally does arming ourselves fit into your program? I mean, guns have bullets. Where are you talking about those bullets ending up?
Max Wilbert: Well, to be clear: The strategy that you talked about, the Decisive Ecological Warfare strategy, is explicitly designed to minimize civilian casualties. That’s something that has been a part of our ethic from the beginning. We’re not talking about waging open warfare on governments or the industrial system. We’re talking about sabotage. We’re talking about coordinated economic sabotage. Now, I’m not naive enough to say that that may not involve some violence against people, but that’s not a call for me to make because I’m not directly involved in that process.
We talk very clearly about the need for a firewall between people who are above ground and advocating these things, like myself, and people who go underground to actually take those type of actions.
So I can’t actually tell those people what to do, and I don’t know what they will do or what they are doing if they exist. So, in some ways the point is moot. You talked about my YouTube channel and I’ve made some videos, like you said, talking about weapons. And I see two main reasons for this.
The first is self-defense. I think that we’re entering a world that’s getting increasingly chaotic. And people like myself, who advocate for what is seen as radical politics in this culture are at risk, compared to a lot of other people. I receive death threats regularly, I receive all kinds of hateful messages from all kinds of different people. I’ve been doing this for a while, and that has been happening consistently. And it’s only speeding up. We’re seeing increased polarization all around the world. We’re seeing the increased rise of of right wing, ultra nationalist and proto-fascist movement.
And that’s something to be concerned about. That’s a real concern. And I don’t think the police or the state are ever going to protect people like me, or even people who aren’t revolutionaries. Just look at the black community in the United States and all the violence that they have been facing for so long, at the hands of the police and racist vigilantes. I think we need to learn to defend ourselves, and that doesn’t mean we love guns or we build a stupid gun worshiping culture like the NRA.
I think that means that we be adults, and we make reasonable decisions to preserve the safety of ourselves and our communities. And I think as climate crisis intensifies, we’re going to see more and more instability and the potential for violence.
So I want to see communities of resistance, and especially communities that are engaging in on the ground work, defending the land, and building alternative communities, building alternative economies and ways to survive. I want to see those communities making serious decisions about what they’re gonna do, because if you have a great, wonderful, groovy eco village, and some sort of climate disaster knocks out the local government, then you may have to be prepared for a bad situation.
One of my friends is from Pakistan, and she talks about that we should look towards Pakistan as an example of what the U.S. and other more “wealthy” first world nations are moving towards in the future. You’re seeing a lot of conflict, you’re seeing a lot of sectarianism, violence, blackouts and rolling brownouts. Power is only available for certain periods of the day. A lot of desertification, a lot of extreme poverty contrasted with extreme wealth. And I think that’s the future we’re in for. Rebecca Solnit wrote a book about natural disasters, and about how people have this idea that when disaster strikes, everyone becomes rapists and looters and things get really nasty and really bad really quickly. And she writes that’s actually not what happens. That’s much more the exception than the rule. In general, when disaster strikes, people tend to come together and work together and cooperate and help one another. I’m not somebody who looks at human beings as inherently evil and nasty, and it’s gonna get really bad and brutish. But for political organizers, for people who are specifically resisting civilization, capitalism, white supremacy and so on, I think it makes sense to reasonably know how to use and own firearms legally.
The second reason that I talk about is almost, in a sense, more philosophical. In the Second Amendment of the US Constitution was written specifically: In a situation where people rose up to fight against a government, and they use the weapons that they own to do that. And then they wrote into the Constitution protections for people owning weapons. Obviously, the American Revolution was a bourgeois revolution. It was a high class revolution, a ruling class revolution. It was not a grassroots people’s movement, it was not a movement for freedom or progressive ideals. But nonetheless, I think it’s true that preserving independence from the state is incredibly important. And I find it very hypocritical that many people on the left, for example, will critique the administration for building concentration camps and for police brutality and violence, and then will turn around and the same time advocate for taking away people’s weapons, taking away weapons of the public. And of course, mass shootings and all these different issues, there are very serious issues and they are real issues. And at the same time, I think that preserving a population that is armed is a bulwark against tyranny in some ways.
The other part of it is, you look at the United States and there are a huge number of guns in private hands in this country, and the vast, vast majority of them are owned by conservative and far right people. Not many are owned by people with progressive values, who really value ecology and really value feminism and really value anti-racistm. I’m not saying that all conservatives are racist or whatever. That’s an oversimplification. But I think the fact is true, that all the weapons concentrated in the hands of the right is not good. And I think, as we see increasing instability, it makes sense to know how to use weapons. And again, that doesn’t mean you glamorize them. That doesn’t mean you worship them. And that doesn’t mean that you plan some sort of armed attack against whatever. That’s not what I’m talking about. But I do think that thinking about weapons and knowing how to use them can help move people on the left towards a greater sense of seriousness and a greater sense of power. I didn’t grow up in a gun culture at all, I didn’t shoot a gun until I was 21 years old, something like that. I wouldn’t consider myself a gun nut or anything along those lines. I don’t really enjoy shooting guns at all, although I do practice it occasionally and I do hunt, because I like to connect with the land and get my own food and get the best quality possible meat that’s local and organic and has no chemicals in it and was grown on the mountainside, not in some factory farm.
But I think when you critique the power of empire, when you critique U.S. imperialism, when you critique police brutality and you have never touched or fired a weapon, then I think that you perhaps have a skewed understanding or an incomplete understanding of what you’re talking about. And I think this can lead to some dangerous ideas. Many progressive people, leftists and people in the hippie community talk about things like violence doesn’t work, violence never works, which I think is just a stupid idea, frankly, I think the reality is that unfortunately, violence works really well. That’s why the US military uses it. That’s why the police use it. That’s why abusers and wife beaters use it, because it is very effective. And that’s not a good thing. But again, I think we need to be adults and face these realities.
Sam Mitchell: Yeah, well, I know that you of all people are keeping up with the trends, the skyrocketing number of environmental defenders being just flat out murdered by these guys. When I was reading something in the past few months, about one of these tribes in Brazil, these warriors, you know, and actually they need to be defending their land base. I am 100 percent in support of an Amazon indigenous person using violence to defend their land base and their culture. But at the same time, Max, I’m thinking in the back of my head, there is nothing that this Bozo Nero guy, as I call him, there is nothing that Bozo Nero would love more than an Amazon Indian to put an arrow through the throat of a soy farmer or a or a gold miner or someone building a hydro power dam. Are you following me? Then you would see what violence would look like. It would be a bloodbath. And they would say, well, they threw the first punch. That this guy with his bow and arrow killed some guy building a riot rod, driving a bulldozer or building a hydroelectric dam. Do you see where I’m going with this? And I would be cheering the guy with a bow and arrow, but I know what it would turn into, brother. What do you think about that?
Max Wilbert: Well, I think you’re absolutely right. And that’s why I think we can’t get caught up in dogma. I’m not a dogmatic pacifist. I’m also not a dogmatic advocate of violence. I think you need to be situational in the methods that you choose to use to achieve a certain goal. And if you are trying to defend your land, then in many contexts the best way to do that is going to be completely nonviolently. And that’s not a problem for me at all. I’ve participated in countless nonviolent actions and direct action blockades and protests and media events and all kinds of stuff on that spectrum. So, I don’t think that’s a contradiction at all. I think we need to be flexible in the way that we approach these things. But I also think that we need to avoid blaming the victim. And I think we need to recognize that of course what you’re saying is true, that the state will use violence as an excuse whenever it can. The reality is the states can be violent no matter what. The corporations are going to be violent no matter what. Their violence may take different forms depending on the situation, but their modus operandi is violent and whether they are sending in the military or whether they are using international trade agreements and unfair loaning practices. From organizations like the WTO and the World Bank, that force massive infrastructure projects on poor indigenous people and rural people all over the world, or whether we’re talking about banks here in this country and how they function and how they keep the poor poor and exploit people. They are using violence every single day. That is their main tool. And so our choice should not be some moral abstraction – not that morality is abstract – but I think that we need to be looking at what methods are going to be effective to stop them, and not artificially constraining ourselves based on morality. Morality that frankly I think we’ve been taught often. I think there’s a reality that we’re taught, Martin Luther King in schools and we’re not really taught about Malcolm X, and we’re not really taught about the Black Panthers, and we’re not really taught about revolutionary movements around the world, except for, again, the bourgeois American Revolution. And we have all internalized that training. Again, I think there’s a reason that we’re taught so heavily about figures like MLK and Gandhi, and even a figure like Nelson Mandela, who is lionized in the United States and looked at as this amazing figure. Well, very, very few people recognize that he was the leader of an underground military organization that was attacking and assassinating people in the apartheid government, in the apartheid state, and was coordinating sabotage, attacks against the electrical grid, against diamond mines, against power stations. And that side of the apartheid resistance has been completely whitewashed. And instead, we’re talking about Desmond Tutu and nonviolent protest and truth and reconciliation. The reality is that social change and revolutionary change throughout history has always been a messy process with a lot of different pieces and a lot of different people working in different ways. I don’t think that that means that you have to be opposed just because you’re using different tactics. And I think that ideally, the strongest movements do use all kinds of different methods and all kinds of different tactics across the spectrum, and they’re coordinated and they support one another. They’re not going to condemn one another for for using different methods. They’re going to just work in the most effective way that they can.
Sam Mitchell: I would add that they’re very savvy. We’re still on the first paragraph, and I made it exactly one paragraph into this whole list of quotes of yours. I wanted you to expand. So I’m just going to leave my notes behind then.
OK. You mentioned somewhere in the past 10 minutes and you’ve written about this, about whether humans are inherently … you know, I just interviewed this ecologist named William Reas. He should probably go listen to that interview, it was a last one of twenty nineteen. He is based from an ecological perspective, if not from a moral one, saying that humans are a plague on this planet.
I want to draw and find out where your line is. I don’t know whether you’re speaking for Deep Green Resistance, I just want to hear your own line.
I want to make clear that I understand that you draw a big line between global industrial capitalism, civilization, that whole messy thing, and humanity as a species. That you put those in kind of two separate camps. Well, I think a lot of people listening to this podcast probably agree with you 100 percent on that the global industrial civilization is the worst reflection of humanity, and we can all agree it needs to go, at least the people down in this rabbit hole.
But some people would say that even that’s not going far enough, that humans just need to go. What is your comment to the people saying that ending global capitalism still is not enough to save the planet, and we just need to have humans say bye bye and disappear?
Max Wilbert: Well, I think that’s a profoundly civilized thing to say. I think that’s only something that you can say if you grew up in a culture that is destroying the planet, which not every culture has done. You know, I grew up in a culture that’s destroying the planet. I grew up in a city, and grew up with cars and everything. So I can certainly understand the impulse and why people feel that way. But the thing is, people who are saying that are looking at history and interpreting it in a certain way. And the reality is, you can look at the same history and interpret it in a different way, or you can talk to people and look at situations where people are actually living in land based communities and see what’s happening ecologically, see what’s happening to the people. So, there are thousands of examples of cultures that have lived more or less in a balance, over the long term, with the natural world. And I think that this is actually an adaptive trait for human beings, to live in sustainable ways. And I think, for that reason, we are sort of born naturalists.
If humans are just given a little bit of training and a little bit of education and encouragement to learn about the local ecology, and immerse themselves, and exist within a living ecology, then I think that we can do it extremely well. That’s not to say that human beings don’t influence what’s happening around them in ways that could be called destructive. Quite obviously, humans are an apex predator. And apex predators always disrupt and change the world around them and always influence things, especially when they come into a new habitat for the first time. They’re going to upend things. They’re going to make a lot of changes. But that’s no different than if you don’t have wolves in an area, and then they’ll show up. They’re going to cause very similar changes to the ecology on a large scale. Nobody is saying that wolves are inherently destructive, right? I think humans are no different. For example, people look at the wave of extinctions that has followed with some species when indigenous peoples first showed up in certain areas, for example some of the Polynesian cultures, when people first showed up in North America… There is debate about these issues and they’re not well understood, because obviously we’re talking about ancient history. We’re talking about very limited records from archeology here. So we’re just interpreting the past, right? And that’s very limited. But what it appears like happened in these situations is that humans – again, an apex predator – showed up in an area, they caused a lot of change, they may have caused a few extinctions, and then things settled down. People figured out how to live in that area in a way that was balanced, and things more or less stayed the same for thousands of years after that. That is sustainability, and that’s an adaptive trait for human beings. And I think that, again, if you have not lived in that way, then it’s hard to perceive how that can happen. When you have grown up in a completely growth based culture, in a Judeo-Christian, Abrahamic religion, a world view of growth and patriarchy and as many children as possible and no relationship to the local ecology, then you’re going to look at that with skepticism. But the reality is that our natural state is an animistic state, where we are in real everyday relationship with the natural world around us, and we develop individual personalized relationships with certain places, a certain creek, a certain river, a certain forest, a certain herd of deer, a certain population of salmon, a certain family of grizzly bears, and we learned their habits and their ways, and we watched them not just for days or hours, but for years and generations. And we tell stories about them and we communicate about them with each other. We pass information down over time, and we develop ways to live, while not destroying these beings who are around us, who we love. That is so alien to most people in this culture today. Most people literally cannot comprehend that, because of the human supremacism that we’re inculcated with from birth. It seems completely unthinkable. So I would disagree that humans are inherently destructive. I think that is completely wrong. We can be incredibly destructive, but I think that essentially, when it comes to the nature versus nurture argument on this, it’s all about nurture. Humans are a very flexible species, and when we are raised in a destructive civilization that has no respect for the natural world and has this growth imperative, then things are going to go downhill fast. And that’s not just modern culture. That’s the story of the last 10,000 years, that’s civilization as a whole.
Going back to the Fertile Crescent, the so-called Fertile Crescent, that’s no longer fertile anymore because – I think Derrick said this on your show – the first written story of civilization is about Gilgamesh cutting down the forest, to build a city and to build an empire, an army and to become wealthy and powerful. That is the first written story of civilization. That’s the first written story. Civilization had existed for quite a while before this. This story was written from what we understand. And archeology tells us that indigenous peoples, people living outside of civilization, people living outside of mass mono crop agriculture, lived in balance for hundreds of thousands of years around the world, before civilization came. And when that transition to civilization happened, then you start seeing massive destruction. So, for example, global warming. A lot of people think it began with the industrial revolution and with the burning of coal and steam engines and so on.
That’s not actually true. Global warming actually began with civilization and the beginnings of widespread agriculture. For example, if you look in the ice core data, I think about thirty eight hundred years ago – something in that range, don’t quote me on that number –you see a big spike in methane emissions, and that corresponds with the beginning of rice paddy agriculture in Southeast Asia. There is a climate scientist named William Ruddiman, who argues and demonstrates from the data that the amount of greenhouse gases released by agriculture, and the destruction of habitat through the rise of civilization, the amount of carbon released is roughly equivalent to everything that has been released during the entire industrial period. It just happened over 10,000 years instead of over two hundred and fifty years. So these problems are not new. And for that reason, I think it’s easy for people to look back at ten thousand years of history and say, look at how destructive we’ve been. But the point is, you have to go outside history. You have to go into pre-history, because these indigenous communities, before civilization, did not have written records. And indigenous cultures, today and during the last 10,000 years, that have existed and have remained intact, have lived in profoundly different ways.
This isn’t to lionize or sort of falsely idolize indigenous peoples, because I think a lot of indigenous communities can be critiqued on all kinds of different issues. We all have disagreements about the best way to live, and not all communities that people call indigenous live sustainably or have lived sustainably at all times. I think that’s, of course, a vast oversimplification. We’re talking about thousands of cultures over thousands of years of history. We we can make some broad generalizations, but it’s dangerous to say that it’s always this way. You know what I mean?
Sam Mitchell: One of the things that I found missing in your work, you do not seem to talk about the issue of overpopulation very much. And I just want to say, sure, I know that you understand, if global industrial civilization comes down, that is going to mean the population of this planet is going to come down with it. Is that a good thing? A bad thing? Have you ever thought about what a sustainable human population living in balance with nature looks like on planet Earth?
Max Wilbert: Of course, that’s a huge issue, and I thought about it a lot. In terms of your last question, don’t have a number and I don’t think I could. That’s not something that I can dictate, it’s something that obviously will change, depending on the ecological circumstances that people find themselves in. I think the leading writer on this topic was William Catton, whose book “Overshoot” is one of the most important books that’s ever been written.
Sam Mitchell: Derrick Jensen’s “Endgame” and William Catton’s “Overshoot”, those are the ones I put at the top of my list.
This house of cards is coming down, you and I both know that, Max, whether we bring it down or it comes down itself. Do you believe that we’re going to be living on a planet of 10 billion people in 40, 50 years from now, or is that number going to be a whole hell of a lot less?
Max Wilbert: Well, that’s actually an interesting question. I think I may actually differ from a lot of the collapse people on this, because I don’t actually think that collapse of this culture is a given in the short term, and that sort of timeframe. I don’t think that’s a given. I think it could happen, but it does not seem faded at all to me. And I say that as somebody who traveled to the Arctic in a climate science expedition and has walked on thawing permafrost. I’m very familiar with all the feedback loops and the methane burp potential, and all these different issues. We don’t know what’s happening. We don’t know how fast these changes are gonna happen. But I think, this culture continuing to sail along and grow and grow and grow is the worst possible outcome.
And I think that even if nothing changes and nothing gets worse, we are already have enough reason to resist now. I don’t know what the future is going to look like. And I think that you are right, that the human population is not sustainable and it’s going to be lower at some point in the future. And there are a lot of ways that that could play out. It could be really bad, and just a ton of people all die very violent, horrible deaths. Or it could be achieved in a sort of more planned, humane way, by simply reducing the birth rate and letting natural deaths reduce population. Maybe the reality or how it will play out will be somewhere in the middle. I don’t know. But this issue is one of the reasons why I think feminism is such an important topic, because I think that the whole issue of overpopulation is incredibly tied up with agriculture and with patriarchy. And I would say the most important writer on this topic is Lierre Keith with her book “The Vegetarian Myth”. It’s sort of focused around the idea of diet, but it’s really about patriarchy and agriculture and civilization.
She points out rightly that within agriculture, within civilization, maximizing the number of births is the best way to increase growth. That’s the best way to make workers available for the workforce, to work in the fields, in the factories and to serve in the army. And the coordinated culture of control and domination, male domination, that is patriarchy, is something that has existed for a long time at this point.
All around the world, when you have examples of women actually gaining some level of political control and autonomy and pushing back the powers of the Abrahamic religions and pushing back the powers of patriarchal society, you see birthrates just plummet. The human population is unsustainable and it’s going to be lower, and I would prefer that to happen in a way as humane as possible.
Sam Mitchell: And I really hate to break in here, brother, but I am glad to say I’m going to be interviewing Lierre in a few weeks. I guess I’ll pick up with her on the book Bright Green Lies, since we did not have time to get to, we’re going to collapse here in a few minutes.
So Max Wilbert, if you’ve ever heard one of my interviews, you know how I always end them:
If you where not speaking with Sam Mitchell at Collapse Chronicles, where you had free reign for an hour, but you actually have the mainstream media with a microphone in your face saying “Max Wilbert, give us your 60 second sound bite to humanity and the opening bell of 2020”, what would those 60 seconds sound like?
Max Wilbert: Well, the problems that we’re facing are massive, and the political systems incapable of addressing them. So many of the solutions that we’re seeing, such as green energy, are turning out to be false solutions. We’re seeing a huge explosion in green technology and yet at the same time, emissions continue to climb and pollution continues to climb. So what do you do with that? I think we need fundamental change. We need broad economic change. And I think that looks like a complete restructuring of the global economy. How this could happen?
There are many different ways, and I want to support people who are working for these type of goals, working for deep growth, working for relocalization, working for permaculture. I want to support people who are working in all kinds of different ways. For myself, I have chosen a revolutionary path because I think that not only do we need to build up those alternatives, but I think we need to be prepared to dismantle the dominant systems of power that are destroying the planet. I don’t think they’re going to stop willingly. So, I would invite people who are interested in learning more about that or getting involved in that to reach out to me. Let’s get connected, so you can become part of this culture of resistance, because it’s our only chance. And I think that we are the inheritors of a beautiful tradition and we are living in perhaps the most important moment in the history of the human species. And what happens in the future is completely dependent on what we do now.
Sam Mitchell: Okay. And with that, Max Wilbert, we’re gonna have to wrap it up. Max Wilbert, thank you very much for taking an hour out of your schedule to come talk to us on collapsible chronicles, but more importantly, thank you for your work and keep up the good fight.
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
—Mary Oliver, poet
The culture of the left needs a serious overhaul. At our best and bravest moments, we are the people who believe in a just world; who fight the power with all the courage and commitment that women and men can possess; who refuse to be bought or beaten into submission, and refuse equally to sell each other out. The history of struggles for justice is inspiring, ennobling even, and it should encourage us to redouble our efforts now when the entire world is at stake. Instead, our leadership is leading us astray. There are historic reasons for the misdirection of many of our movements, and we would do well to understand those reasons before it’s too late.1
The history of misdirection starts in the Middle Ages when various alternative sects arose across Europe, some more strictly religious, some more politically utopian. The Adamites, for instance, originated in North Africa in the second century, and the last of the Neo-Adamites were forcibly suppressed in Bohemia in 1849.2 They wanted to achieve a state of primeval innocence from sin. They practiced nudism and ecstatic rituals of rebirth in caves, rejected marriage, and held property communally. Groups such as the Diggers (True Levelers) were more political. They argued for an egalitarian social structure based on small agrarian communities that embraced ecological principles. Writes one historian, “They contended that if only the common people of England would form themselves into self-supporting communes, there would be no place in such a society for the ruling classes.”3
Not all dissenting groups had a political agenda. Many alternative sects rejected material accumulation and social status but lacked any clear political analysis or egalitarian program. Such subcultures have repeatedly arisen across Europe, coalescing around a common constellation of themes:
■ A critique of the dogma, hierarchy, and corruption of organized religion;
■ A rejection of the moral decay of urban life and a belief in the superiority of rural life;
■ A romantic or even sentimental appeal to the past: Eden, the Golden Age, pre-Norman England;
■ A millenialist bent;
■ A spiritual practice based on mysticism; a direct rather than mediated experience of the sacred. Sometimes this is inside a Christian framework; other examples involve rejection of Christianity. Often the spiritual practices include ecstatic and altered states;
■ Pantheism and nature worship, often concurrent with ecological principles, and leading to the formation of agrarian communities;
■ Rejection of marriage. Sometimes sects practice celibacy; others embrace polygamy, free love, or group marriage.
Within these dissenting groups, there has long been a tension between identifying the larger society as corrupt and naming it unjust. This tension has been present for over 1,000 years. Groups that critique society as degenerate or immoral have mainly responded by withdrawing from society. They want to make heaven on Earth in the here and now, abandoning the outside world. “In the world but not of it,” the Shakers said. Many of these groups were and are deeply pacifistic, in part because the outside world and all things political are seen as corrupting, and in part for strongly held moral reasons. “Corruption groups” are not always leftist or progressive. Indeed, many right-wing and reactionary elements have formed sects and founded communities. In these groups, the sin in urban or modern life is hedonism, not hierarchy. In fact, these groups tend to enforce strict hierarchy: older men over younger men, men over women. Often they have a charismatic leader and the millenialist bent is quite marked.
“Justice groups,” on the other hand, name society as inequitable rather than corrupt, and usually see organized religion as one more hierarchy that needs to be dismantled. They express broad political goals such as land reform, pluralistic democracy, and equality between the sexes. These more politically oriented spiritual groups walk the tension between withdrawal and engagement. They attempt to create communities that support a daily spiritual practice, allow for the withdrawal of material participation in unjust systems of power, and encourage political activism to bring their New Jerusalem into being. Contemporary groups like the Catholic Workers are attempts at such a project.
This perennial trend of critique and utopian vision was bolstered by Romanticism, a cultural and artistic movement that began in the latter half of the eighteenth century in Western Europe. It was at least partly a reaction against the Age of Enlightenment, which valued rationality and science. The image of the Enlightenment was the machine, with the living cosmos reduced to clockwork. As the industrial revolution gained strength, rural lifeways were destroyed while urban areas swelled with suffering and squalor. Blake’s dark, Satanic mills destroyed rivers, the commons of wetlands and forests fell to the highest bidder, and coal dust was so thick in London that the era could easily be deemed the Age of Tuberculosis. In Germany, the Rhine and the Elbe were killed by dye works and other industrial processes. And along with natural communities, human communities were devastated as well.
Romanticism revolved around three main themes: longing for the past, upholding nature as pure and authentic, and idealizing the heroic and alienated individual. Germany, where elements of an older pagan folk culture still carried on, was in many ways the center of the Romantic movement.
How much of this Teutonic nature worship was really drawn from surviving pre-Christian elements, and how much was simply a Romantic recreation—the Renaissance Faire of the nineteenth century—is beyond the scope of this book. Suffice it to say, there were enough cultural elements for the Romantics to build on.
In 1774, German writer Goethe penned the novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, the story of a young man who visits an enchanting peasant village, falls in love with an unattainable young woman, and suffers to the point of committing suicide. The book struck an oversensitive nerve, and, overnight, young men across Europe began modeling themselves on the protagonist, a depressive and passionate artist. Add to this the supernatural and occult elements of Edgar Allan Poe’s work, and, by the nineteenth century, the Romantics of that day resembled modern Goths. A friend of mine likes to say that history is same characters, different costumes—and in this case the costumes haven’t even changed much.4
Another current of Romanticism that eventually influenced our current situation was bolstered by philosopher Jean Jacques Rosseau,5 who described a “state of nature” in which humans lived before society developed. He was not the creator of the image of the noble savage—that dubious honor falls to John Dryden, in his 1672 play The Conquest of Granada. Rousseau did, however, popularize one of the core components that would coalesce into the cliché, arguing that there was a fundamental rupture between human nature and human society. The concept of such a divide is deeply problematical, as by definition it leaves cultures that aren’t civilizations out of the circle of human society. Whether the argument is for the bloodthirsty savage or the noble savage, the underlying concept of a “state of nature” places hunter-gatherers, horticulturalists, nomadic pastoralists, and even some agriculturalists outside the most basic human activity of creating culture. All culture is a human undertaking: there are no humans living in a “state of nature.”6 With the idea of a state of nature, vastly different societies are collapsed into an image of the “primitive,” which exists unchanging outside of history and human endeavor.
Indeed, one offshoot of Romanticism was an artistic movement called Primitivism that inspired its own music, literature, and art. Romanticism in general and Primitivism in particular saw European culture as overly rational and repressive of natural impulses. So-called primitive cultures, in contrast, were cast as emotional, innocent and childlike, sexually uninhibited, and at one with the natural world. The Romantics embraced the belief that “primitives” were naturally peaceful; the Primitivists tended to believe in their proclivity to violence. Either cliché could be made to work because the entire image is a construct bearing no relation to the vast variety of forms that indigenous human cultures have taken. Culture is a series of choices—political choices made by a social animal with moral agency. Both the noble savage and the bloodthirsty savage are objectifying, condescending, and racist constructs.
Romanticism tapped into some very legitimate grievances. Urbanism is alienating and isolating. Industrialization destroys communities, both human and biotic. The conformist demands of hierarchical societies leave our emotional lives inauthentic and numb, and a culture that hates the animality of our bodies drives us into exile from our only homes. The realization that none of these conditions are inherent to human existence or to human society can be a profound relief. Further, the existence of cultures that respect the earth, that give children kindness instead of public school, that share food and joy in equal measure, that might even have mystical technologies of ecstasy, can serve as both an inspiration and as evidence of the crimes committed against our hearts, our culture, and our planet. But the places where Romanticism failed still haunt the culture of the left today and must serve as a warning if we are to build a culture of resistance that can support a true resistance movement.
In Germany, the combination of Romanticism and nationalism created an upswell of interest in myths. They spurred a widespread longing for an ancient or even primordial connection with the German landscape. Youth are the perennially disaffected and rebellious, and German youth in the late nineteenth century coalesced into their own counterculture. They were called Wandervogel or wandering spirits. They rejected the rigid moral code and work ethic of their bourgeois parents, romanticized the image of the peasant, and wandered the countryside with guitars and rough-spun tunics. The Wandervogel started with urban teachers taking their students for hikes in the country as part of the Lebensreform (life reform) movement. This social movement emphasized physical fitness and natural health, experimenting with a range of alternative modalities like homeopathy, natural food, herbalism, and meditation. The Lebensreform created its own clinics, schools, and intentional communities, all variations on a theme of reestablishing a connection with nature. The short hikes became weekends; the weekends became a lifestyle. The Wandervogel embraced the natural in opposition to the artificial: rural over urban, emotion over rationality, sunshine and diet over medicine, spontaneity over control. The youth set up “nests” and “antihomes” in their towns and occupied abandoned castles in the forests. The Wandervogel was the origin of the youth hostel movement. They sang folk songs; experimented with fasting, raw foods, and vegetarianism; and embraced ecological ideas—all before the year 1900. They were the anarchist vegan squatters of the age.
Environmental ideas were a fundamental part of these movements. Nature as a spiritual source was fundamental to the Romantics and a guiding principle of Lebensreform. Adolph Just and Benedict Lust were a pair of doctors who wrote a foundational Lebensreform text, Return to Nature, in 1896. In it, they decried,
Man in his misguidance has powerfully interfered with nature. He has devastated the forests, and thereby even changed the atmospheric conditions and the climate. Some species of plants and animals have become entirely extinct through man, although they were essential in the economy of Nature. Everywhere the purity of the air is affected by smoke and the like, and the rivers are defiled. These and other things are serious encroachments upon Nature, which men nowadays entirely overlook but which are of the greatest importance, and at once show their evil effect not only upon plants but upon animals as well, the latter not having the endurance and power of resistance of man.7
Alternative communities soon sprang up all over Europe. The small village of Ascona, Switzerland, became a countercultural center between 1900 and 1920. Experiments involved “surrealism, modern dance, dada, Paganism, feminism, pacifism, psychoanalysis and nature cure.”8 Some of the figures who passed through Ascona included Carl Jung, Isadora Duncan, Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and an alcoholic Herman Hesse seeking a cure. Clearly, social change—indeed, revolution—was one of the ideas on the table at Ascona. This chaos of alternative spiritual, cultural, and political trends began to make its way to the US. On August 20, 1903, for instance, an anarchist newspaper in San Francisco published a long article describing the experiments underway at Ascona.
As we will see, the connections between the Lebensreform, Wandervogel youth, and the 1960s counterculture in the US are startlingly direct. German Eduard Baltzer wrote a lengthy explication of naturliche lebensweise (natural lifestyle) and founded a vegetarian community. Baltzer-inspired painter Karl Wihelm Diefenbach, who also started a number of alternative communities and workshops dedicated to religion, art, and science, all based on Lebensreform ideas. Artists Gusto Graser and Fidus pretty well created the artistic style of the German counterculture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Viewers of their work would be forgiven for thinking that their paintings of psychedelic colors, swirling floraforms, and naked bodies embracing were album covers circa 1968. Fidus even used the iconic peace sign in his art.
Graser was a teacher and mentor to Herman Hesse, who was taken up by the Beatniks. Siddhartha and Steppenwolf were written in the 1920s but sold by the millions in the US in the 1960s. Declares one historian, “Legitimate history will always recount Hesse as the most important link between the European counter-culture of his [Hesse’s] youth and their latter-day descendants in America.”9
Along with a few million other Europeans, some of the proponents of the Wandervogel and Lebensreform movements immigrated to the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. The most famous of these Lebensreform immigrants was Dr. Benjamin Lust, deemed the Father of Naturopathy, quoted previously. Write Gordon Kennedy and Kody Ryan, “Everything from massage, herbology, raw foods, anti-vivisection and hydro-therapy to Eastern influences like Ayurveda and Yoga found their way to an American audience through Lust.”10 In Return To Nature, he railed against water and air pollution, vivisection, vaccination, meat, smoking, alcohol, coffee, and public schooling. Any of this sound a wee bit familiar? Gandhi, a fan, was inspired by Lust’s principles to open a Nature Cure clinic in India.
The emphasis on sunshine and naturism led many of these Lebensreform immigrants to move to warm, sunny California and Florida. Sun worship was embraced as equal parts ancient Teutonic religion, health-restoring palliative, and body acceptance. It was much easier to live outdoors and scrounge for food where the weather never dropped below freezing. Called Nature Boys, naturemensch, and modern primitives, they set up camp and began attracting followers and disciples. German immigrant Arnold Ehret, for instance, wrote a number of books on fasting, raw foods, and the health benefits of nude sunbathing, books that would become standard texts for the San Francisco hippies. Gypsy Boots was another direct link from the Lebensreform to the hippies. Born in San Francisco, he was a follower of German immigrant Maximillian Sikinger. After the usual fasting, hiking, yoga, and sleeping in caves, he opened his “Health Hut” in Los Angeles, which was surprisingly successful. He was also a paid performer at music festivals like Monterey and Newport in 1967 and 1968, appearing beside Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, and the Grateful Dead. Carolyn Garcia, Jerry’s wife, was apparently a big admirer. Boots was also in the cult film Mondo Hollywood with Frank Zappa.
The list of personal connections between the Wandervogel Nature Boys and the hippies is substantial, and makes for an unbroken line of cultural continuity. But before we turn to the 1960s, it’s important to examine what happened to the Lebensreform and Wandervogel in Germany with the rise of Nazism.
This is not easy to do. Fin de siècle Germany was a tumult of change and ideas, pulling in all directions. There was a huge and politically powerful socialist party, the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Party of Germany), or SPD, which one historian called “the pride of the Second International.”11 In 1880, it garnered more votes than any other party in Germany, and, in 1912, it had more seats in Parliament than any other party. It helped usher in the first parliamentary democracy, including universal suffrage, and brought a shorter workday, legal workers’ councils in industry, and a social safety net. To these serious activists, the Wandervogel and Lebensreform, especially “the more manifestly idiotic of these cults,”12 were fringe movements. To state the obvious, the constituents of SPD were working-class and poor people concerned with survival and justice, while the Lebensreform, with their yoga, spiritualism, and dietary silliness, were almost entirely middle class.
Here we begin to see these utopian ideas take a sinister turn. The seeds of contradiction are easy to spot in the völkisch movement entry on Wikipedia, which states, “The völkisch movement is the German interpretation of the populist movement, with a romantic focus on folklore and the ‘organic.’ . . . In a narrow definition it can be used to designate only groups that consider human beings essentially preformed by blood, i.e. inherited character.”
Immediately, there are problems. The völkisch is marked with a Nazi tag. One Wikipedian writes, “Personally I consider it offensive to claim that an ethnic definition of ‘Folk’ equals Nationalism and/or Racism.” Another Wikipedian points out that the founders of the völkisch concept were leftist thinkers. Another argues, “With regard to its origins . . . the völkisch idea is wholeheartedly non-racist, and people like Landauer and Mühsam (the leading German anarchists of their time) represented a continuing current of völkisch anti-racism. It’s understandable if the German page focuses on the racist version—a culture of guilt towards Romanticism seems to be one of Hitler’s legacies—but these other aspects need to be looked at too.”13
Who is correct? Culture, ethnicity, folklore, and nationalism are all strands that history has woven into the word. But völk does have a first philosopher, Johann Gottfried von Herder, who founded the whole idea of folklore, of a culture of the common people that should be valued, not despised. He urged Germans to take pride in their language, stories, art, and history. The populist appeal in his ideas—indeed, their necessity to any popular movement—may seem obvious to us 200 years later, but at the time this valuing of a people’s culture was new and radical. His personal collection of folk poetry inspired a national hunger for folklore; the brothers Grimm were one direct result of Herder’s work. He also argued that everyone from the king to the peasants belonged to the völk, a serious break with the ruling notion that only the nobility were the inheritors of culture and that that culture should emulate classical Greece. He believed that his conception of the völk would lead to democracy and was a supporter of the French Revolution.
Herder was very aware of where the extremes of nationalism could lead and argued for the full rights of Jews in Germany. He rejected racial concepts, saying that language and culture were the distinctions that mattered, not race, and asserted that humans were all one species. He wrote, “No nationality has been solely designated by God as the chosen people of the earth; above all we must seek the truth and cultivate the garden of the common good.”14
Another major proponent of leftist communitarianism was Gustav Landauer, a Jewish German. He was one of the leading anarchists through the Wilhelmine era until his death in 1919 when he was arrested by the Freikorps and stoned to death. He was a mystic as well as being a political writer and activist. His biographer, Eugene Lunn, describes Landauer’s ideas as a “synthesis of völkisch romanticism and libertarian socialism,” hence, “romantic socialism.”15 He was also a pacifist, rejecting violence as a means to revolution both individually and collectively. His belief was that the creation of libertarian communities would “gradually release men and women from their childlike dependence upon authority,” the state, organized religion, and other forms of hierarchy.16 His goal was to build “radically democratic, participatory communities.”17
Landauer spoke to the leftist writers, artists, intellectuals, and youths who felt alienated by modernity and urbanism and expressed a very real need—emotional, political, and spiritual—for community renewal. He had a full program for the revolutionary transformation of society. Rural communes were the first practical step toward the end of capitalism and exploitation. These communities would form federations and work together to create the infrastructure of a new society based on egalitarian principles. It was an A to B plan that never lost sight of the real conditions of oppression under which people were living. After World War I, roughly one hundred communes were formed in Germany, and, of those, thirty were politically leftist, formed by anarchists or communists. There was also a fledgling women’s commune movement whose goal was an autonomous feminist culture, similar to the contemporary lesbian land movement in the US.
Where did this utopian resistance movement go wrong? The problem was that it was, as historian Peter Weindling puts it, “politically ambivalent.”18 Writes Weindling, “The outburst of utopian social protest took contradictory artistic, Germanic volkish, or technocratic directions.”19 Some of these directions, unhitched from a framework of social justice, were harnessed by the right, and ultimately incorporated into Nazi ideology. Lebensreform activities like hiking and eating whole-grain bread were seen as strengthening the political body and were promoted by the Nazis. “A racial concept of health was central to National Socialism,” writes Weindling. Meanwhile, Jews, gays and lesbians, the mentally ill, and anarchists were seen as “diseases” that weakened the Germanic race as a whole.
Ecological ideas were likewise embraced by the Nazis. The health and fitness of the German people—a primary fixation of Nazi culture—depended on their connection to the health of the land, a connection that was both physical and spiritual. The Nazis were a peculiar combination of the Romantic and the Modern, and the backward-looking traditionalist and the futuristic technotopians were both attracted to their ideology. The Nazi program was as much science as it was emotionality. Writes historian David Blackborn,
National socialism managed to reconcile, at least theoretically, two powerful and conflicting impulses of the later nineteenth century, and to benefit from each. One was the infatuation with the modern and the technocratic, where there is evident continuity from Wilhelmine Germany to Nazi eugenicists and Autobahn builders; the other was the “cultural revolt” against modernity and machine-civilization, pressed into use by the Nazis as part of their appeal to educated élites and provincial philistines alike.20
Let’s look at another activist of the time, one who was political. Erich Mühsam, a German Jewish anarchist, was a writer, poet, dramatist, and cabaret performer. He was a leading radical thinker and agitator during the Weimar Republic, and won international acclaim for his dramatic work satirizing Hitler. He had a keen interest in combining anarchism with theology and communal living, and spent time in the alternative community of Ascona. Along with many leftists, he was arrested by the Nazis and sent to concentration camps in Sonnenburg, Brandenburg, and finally Oranienburg. Intellectuals around the world protested and demanded Mühsam’s release, to no avail. When his wife Zenzl was allowed to visit him, his face was so bruised she didn’t recognize him. The guards beat and tortured him for seventeen months. They made him dig his own grave. They broke his teeth and burned a swastika into his scalp. Yet when they tried to make him sing the Nazi anthem, he would sing the International instead. At his last torture session, they smashed in his skull and then killed him by lethal injection. They finished by hanging his body in a latrine.
The intransigent aimlessness and anemic narcissism of so much of the contemporary counterculture had no place beside the unassailable courage and sheer stamina of this man. Sifting through this material, I will admit to a certain amount of despair: between the feckless and the fascist, will there ever be any hope for this movement? The existence of Erich Mühsam is an answer to embrace. Likewise, reading history backwards, so that Nazis are preordained in the völkish idea, is insulting to the inheritors of this idea who resisted Fascism with Mühsam’s fortitude. There were German leftists who fought for radical democracy and justice, not despite their communitarianism, but with it.
Our contemporary environmental movement has much to learn from this history. Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier, in their book Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience,21 explore the idea that fascism or other reactionary politics are “perhaps the unavoidable trajectory of any movement which acknowledges and opposes social and ecological problems but does not recognize their systemic roots or actively resist the political and economic structures which generate them. Eschewing societal transformation in favor of personal change, an ostensibly apolitical disaffection can, in times of crisis, yield barbaric results.”22
The contemporary alterna-culture won’t result in anything more sinister than silliness; fascism in the US is most likely to come from actual right-wing ideologues mobilizing the resentments of the disaffected and economically stretched mainstream, not from New Age workshop hoppers. And friends of Mary Jane aren’t known for their virulence against anything besides regular bathing. German immigrants brought the Lebensreform and Wandervogel to the US, and it didn’t seed a fascist movement here. None of this leads inexorably to fascism. But we need to take seriously the history of how ideas which we think of as innately progressive, like ecology and animal rights, became intertwined with a fascist movement.
An alternative culture built around the project of an individualistic and interior experience, whether spiritual or psychological, cannot create a resistance movement, no matter how many societal conventions it trespasses. Indeed, the Wandervogel manifesto stated, “We regard with contempt all who call us political,”23 and their most repeated motto was “Our lack of purpose is our strength.” But as Laqueur points out,
Lack of interest in public affairs is not civic virtue, and . . . an inability to think in political categories does not prevent people from getting involved in political disaster . . . The Wandervogel . . . completely failed. They did not prepare their members for active citizenship. . . . Both the socialist youth and the Catholics had firmer ground under their feet; each had a set of values to which they adhered. But in the education of the free youth movement there was a dangerous vacuum all too ready to be filled by moral relativisim and nihilism.24
We are facing another disaster, and if we fail there will be no future to learn from our mistakes. That same “lack of interest”—often a stance of smug alienation—is killing our last chance of resistance. We are not preparing a movement for active citizenship and all that implies—the commitment, courage, and sacrifice that real resistance demands. There is no firm moral ground under the feet of those who can only counsel withdrawal and personal comfort in the face of atrocity. And the current Wandervogel end in nihilism as well, repeating that it’s over, we can do nothing, the human race has run its course and the bacteria will inherit the earth. The parallels are exact. And the outcome?
The Wandervogel marched off to World War I, where they “perished in Flanders and Verdun.”25 Of those who returned from the war, a small, vocal minority became communists. A larger group embraced right-wing protofascist groups. But the largest segment was apolitical and apathetic. “This was no accidental development,” writes Laqueur.26
The living world is now perishing in its own Flanders and Verdun, a bloody, senseless pile of daily species. Today there are still wood thrushes, small brown angels of the deep woods. Today there are northern leopard frogs, but only barely. There may not be Burmese star tortoises, with their shells like golden poinsettias; the last time anyone looked—for 400 hours with trained dogs—they only found five. If the largest segment of us remains apolitical and apathetic, they we’ll all surely die.
From a talk delivered November 1, 2019. Northern Michigan University Sonderegger Symposium: Anishinaabek: East, South, West, North. Marquette, MI. Featured image: American Progress by John Gast, ca. 1872.
Overview
I’m going to cut straight to the point: averting climate change is not going stop the global collapse of the planet as we know it.
Don’t get me wrong. Climate change is a global emergency and will cause tremendous damage, and, in fact, already has for many.
But the thing is, massive, global-scale destruction has been going on for a long time even before climate change. Although it has roots that go back further, 1492 marks the beginning of this global emergency.
So, first, averting climate change will not stop the global emergency because climate change is only one part of this global emergency.
Second, addressing climate change using the values and viewpoints of this Western culture will only exacerbate the problem. The disease powered by solar fields is still the same disease that is powered by coal.
Third, Western industrial civilization is the cause of the global collapse of the planet as we know it.
Thus, fourth, this Western culture must change if we want to save the planet as we know it.
Finally, fifth, we need to look to healthy cultures for answers about how to change this diseased culture so we can not just avert climate change but also end today’s global ecological collapse. One way to do this is to become acquainted with the resistance movements of healthy cultures. We have examples we can learn from right here in Anishinaabe territory.
Identifying the Problem
To begin at the beginning, what exactly is the problem?
In 1800, half the planet’s land was still in tribal hands.[1] Over the next 150 years, “virtually all indigenous territory” in the world was taken over “by colonizing industrial states” with around 50 million Indigenous people dying in those 150 years alone.[2] In the Americas, this genocide began in 1492 with some estimating as much as 90% of the Indigenous peoples here wiped out.
As this settler culture spread, it deliberately destroyed not only Indigenous human peoples and their ways of life but also the lives and cultures of the Indigenous non-human peoples. Untold numbers of plant and animal relations driven to extinction or near-extinction. Waterways choked with poison. 80% of the planet’s forests annihilated.[3] Grasslands destroyed. Children stolen. Cultures shredded. Or to quote one British author extolling the virtues of European colonization of Indigenous Africa: “This great work of progress will be accomplished through the religion of God. Africa shall be redeemed . . . Her morasses [swamps] will be drained; her deserts shall be watered by canals; her forests shall be reduced to firewood. Her [African] children shall do all this . . . In this amiable task, they may possibly become exterminated. We must learn to look upon this result with composure. It illustrates the beneficent law of Nature, that the weak must be devoured by the strong.”[4]
The majority of people in the settler culture not only stood by and watched this apocalypse but actively promoted it as Progress, although a few wept tears for the passing of the natives. Still, even for the sympathetic, it was assimilate or be annihilated – Progress is inevitable.
Then climate change came along. Suddenly the privileged elites felt threatened realizing this time they, too, will be feel the impacts of their own destructive culture. This time, they are concerned and want to take urgent action to stop the destruction.
The problem is their version of “urgent action” doesn’t call on sufficient change to address the problem because they don’t understand the cause of the problem. Most climate activists look at this industrial civilization and boldly claim the urgent action we must take is to stop powering this civilization with fossil fuels. We can do this, they say, with a carbon tax or a carbon dividend. We can do this with mega-wind and mega-solar. Their version of “urgent action” means getting off of fossil fuels as quickly as possible and replacing them with “green” energy sources. A technologically intensive civilization powered by wind, they argue, is the wave of the sustainable future. If we do this, as long as we haven’t yet passed the tipping point, we will stop global climate change and save the planet. Then we can get back to the business of Progress as usual.
The changes the elites want are only those changes that will allow them to continue their materialistic, colonizing way of life. Swept up in the urgency of things, everyone else gets swept up in their fervor, a fervor that feeds the disease and keeps it going. Haudenosaunee philosopher-activist John Mohawk compares it to being rabid.[5] Santee activist John Trudell calls it being “industrially insane.”[6] Aboriginal Australian singer/songwriter Bobbie McLeod sees it as a culture of Wayward Dreams. It is the culture that needs to change, this disease that needs to be cured. From there, all else will follow.
Artist: John Hunter (Gamilaraay)
Other Indigenous teachings from the Honorable Harvest to the Hopi Prophecies to the Anishinaabe Seventh Fire prophecy talk about what happens when a culture is out of balance with the Earth. The problem we need to address today, according to these teachings and prophecies, is not so much whether industrial civilization is powered by wind or coal but whether or not industrial civilization itself is sustainable. It also the raises the question: is the inherent parasitism of civilization even moral?
Industrialism has greatly exacerbated the disease of civilization. Yet Columbus landed in what we now call the Americas well before the Industrial Revolution. The Western cultural arena he came from was already grossly disconnected from the land, its burgeoning population well beyond the land’s carrying capacity[7], and thus most of Europe, even before the Industrial Revolution or before capitalism, was already wreaking havoc with its landbase.
Europe itself had undergone colonization by civilized cultures some centuries before Columbus. Prior to the civilizing of Europe, Europe was alive with tribal societies. The civilizing of those tribal societies by colonizers is likely where much of Europe’s disconnect from the land arose.
Yes, I just contrasted tribal societies with civilized cultures.
Um…what?
Trudell says, “The Great Lie is that it is ‘civilization.’ It’s not civilized, it has been literally the most bloodthirsty, brutalizing system ever imposed upon this planet. That is not civilization […] The great lie is that it represents ‘civilization.’ That’s the great lie. Or if it does represent civilization and it’s truly what civilization is . . . then the great lie is that civilization is good for us.”[8]
This is the conclusion many anthropologists, such as John Bodley, have come to.Civilization is not the human ideal we’ve been trained by this civilized culture to believe it is.
According to anthropologists (and as can be seen by the definition and origins of the word itself), a civilization is a society that is city-based. The city is the central point of power. Some of the traits that define a city-based society, as opposed to a tribal society, include the rise of economic, religious, and political power hierarchies and stratification within the urban society. The city needs these oppressive power structures for it cannot provide for itself from within its own borders. It needs the resources of the people who live on the land. This it most often obtains by force through such means as taxation, tribute, or outright military conquest. The primary target for an urban area to use for resources is the surrounding countryside, thus the rural area is made subject to the urban.
But the surrounding countryside is usually not sufficient to satisfy the urban appetite. Disconnected from the land and thus from understanding carrying capacity (or ignoring it), the urban world needs ever more land and resources for their ever-expanding populations. To get it, city-based societies or civilizations engage in what some anthropologists call “predatory expansion” against their neighbors.
For the last 6000 years, Indigenous people and their tribal societies have been targeted by civilizations by their predatory expansions. Europe itself was once a region of tribes who, if they followed the general pattern of tribal societies, would have lived in relative balance with their land and all their relations. Eventually, however, one by one the European tribes fell victim to the predatory expansion of their more civilized neighbors and became themselves one of history’s most destructive colonizers of tribal peoples.[9] As urbanite and historian Theodore Roszak writes, ““Whatever holds out against us[, the city] — [be it] the peasant, the nomad, the savage, we regard as so much cultural debris in our path.”[10]
But in the 6000 years of civilization and its predatory expansion, Indigenous peoples and other peoples of the land have resisted the incursions of civilization and its power inequalities, its colonization of rural/tribal areas, and its attempts to disconnect people from the land.
It was a mere two hundred years ago that, Indigenous peoples and their healthy lifeways protected half of the land on this planet. It is because of this that we have what little healthy land we have today. And it is this land today that is most targeted by resource corporations and their puppet governments in the Western world.
Despite the fact that some cultures got off track and became diseased with this cultural maladaptation of civilization, the Indigenous way of living with the land respectfully and in a good way is our heritage as human beings. All of us have a human heritage of more than 300,000 years of living well with our relations. It’s only in the last 6,000 that some of us have fallen ill and fallen out of balance. But it is human to live in harmony with the Earth. It is human to be at peace with the planet.
So, how do we cure this disease and move, once again, to a healthy way of living with Mother Earth?
Living the Circle: Learning from the Past
If we see the world through the lens of the Medicine Wheel, we will see our history is not a linear lockstep “progression” leading away from those good lifeways but rather a circle leading us back to them.
Our elders represent some of the greatest repositories of how to keep walking that circle. Climate activists of all ages can learn from them, and in fact many climate activists are those elders who have been on the front lines for decades. Without the work of these elders, we wouldn’t have the Endangered Species Act, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Water Act. Without them, we wouldn’t have the treaties and the struggles to protect those treaty rights. We wouldn’t have had Wisconsin’s mining moratorium. The older generations have worked hard, sacrificed much, thinking of us today and those who are yet to come.
This resistance movement to protect this planet and all our relations, is generations old and has very ancient roots. If we follow the teachings of the Medicine Wheel, we know we need the gifts of all ages, from the young to the elders, to realize our full power as a people.
Here in the northern Great Lakes area, the rural resistance movement to Western industrial civilization has been alive and well for some time. Most of the rural resistance I’ll discuss here comes from the Anishinaabe communites, but some also comes from the non-Native people of the northern Great Lakes area.
The two-plus centuries of rural resistance in our region emphasize how important it is to:
+ Resist civilization in its attempts to control
+ Resist removal from the land
+ Resist the predatory expansion efforts of urban areas/civilization
+ Resist the ideologies of human supremacy
As these rural resistance movements up here show, we can do this by:
+ Becoming a member of the community of a particular land or region by living on the land
+ Maintaining and reclaiming self-sufficiency and the necessary land skills for that self-sufficiency
+ Respecting the sovereignty of all our relations in accordance with the Honorable Harvest
This Land Is Our Home: Resisting Removal from the Land
From the beginning of the treaty era in the Anishinaabe homeland, people showed their reluctance to sign away their land or to leave the land they had belonged to for generations. Alfred Brunson, an outspoken Indian agent at LaPointe (whose criticism of the American government’s treatment of the Anishinaabe lost him his job within a year), wrote in January of 1843, “[S]o much dissatisfaction exists among the Indians and half breeds of the Chippewas of this agency” that there are “many omens of a Threatening Storm,” some of which included “a party of warriors & braves on the [1842] treaty ground.”[11]
During the discussions leading up to the 1842 treaty, Acting Superintendent of Indian Affairs Robert Stuart told the Anishinaabeg “it was no difference whether they signed or not” as the land would be taken anyway.[12] He also issued a veiled threat of outright removal from their lands. While uttering assurances that it was only minerals not the land that the U.S. wanted at the present time, he suggested that in the future they would be removed like so many other tribes “sent west of the Mississippi, to make room for the whites.”[13] After his words, as historian Ronald Satz writes, the representatives “of the Wisconsin bands from the Lake Superior region remained silent.”[14] They were “not . . . willing to sell or make any agreement.”[15]
Eventually and reluctantly, however, the Anishinaabe did sign. Brunson points out that “the Indians did not act free & voluntary, but felt themselves pressed into the measure,” largely by Stuart’s tactics. [16]
Photo: Great Lakes Indian Fish & Wildlife Commission
In 1850, Stuart’s threat of eventual removal became U.S. policy. An executive removal order was issued by President Zachary Taylor to remove the Anishinaabeg of northern Wisconsin and the western U.P. to Sandy Lake, MN by moving the location of the tribes’ annuity payments.. Closing the Indian agency at Fort LaPointe on what many know today as Madeleine Island, the Anishinaabeg of the 1842 ceded territory were told they’d have to travel to the Sandy Lake agency to receive their annuity payments of cash, implements and food. The idea was to use a velvet glove to force the Anishinaabeg to settle around Sandy Lake (and out of the 1842 territory). To the U.S., the Anishinaabe land in question was known as “the mineral district” and removing the Indigenous people from the area could prove beneficial to mining interests, particularly as the Anishinaabeg had already shown a resistance or dissatisfaction to mineral exploration on their homeland. Many refused to make the trip to Sandy Lake. Those that did arrived in October to find they had to wait weeks for what turned out to be only a very small part of the annuity payment in early December. Dysentery and malnutrition weakened and even killed some of those who waited at Sandy Lake. Understanding the intent of this maneuver, most made their way back home in early December. Over 250 more people died along the way. The entire incident is often referred to as the Sandy Lake Tragedy.
Once back home, the people refused to move and instead organized a petition drive, obtaining signatures from the Native and non-Native community. A delegation, headed by Chief Buffalo, then an elder in his nineties, traveled to Washington D.C. to present the petition to President Fillmore. The petition, the delegation, and the refusal to be moved from their homeland were all eventually successful as the executive removal order was rescinded.
Defending the Land: Resisting Civilization’s Predatory Expansion
Those who live on the land and call it home are more apt to defend that land from those who threaten it. As you see, we have a long history of such land defense in the rural resistance of the northern Great Lakes area.
Prior to Sandy Lake, back in 1820, the territory of Michigan organized the Cass Expedition whose purpose was to assess the natural resource wealth of the Anishinaabe homeland, land still legally Anishinaabe territory as the major land cession treaties were still over a decade away. The Cass Expedition was, pure and simple, a predatory expedition, surveying another’s homeland to assess its potential to benefit American civilization.
According to Henry Schoolcraft in his Narrative Journal of the Cass Expedition, the Anishinaabe people resisted giving him information that would lead the Expedition to the minerals they sought.[17] This was an early example of the Anishinaabeg resisting the mining that has plagued our region for the last century. In another instance of such mining resistance, a contemporary historian writes, “We know that the upper lake Indians traditionally opposed white mining exploration before and after the treaty [of 1842], and that Father Baraga had opposed mines in the Ontonagon and Keweenaw country.” [18]
Anecdotal evidence of resistance to industrial civilization on the part of the Anishinaabe in the Great Lakes area also comes from Broker’s account of her great-great-great-grandfather who worked in the settlers’ logging camps. “I do not like cutting the trees,” he says. “I think too often of the animal people. They will be few, and they will be gone from this land. When we have enough of the lumber, I shall no longer cut the trees or travel the rivers on them. My heart cries too often when I do this.”[19]
1910 Wisconsin Lumber Camp — Wisconsin Historical Society
In Anishinaabe country, there are and have been non-Native people who struggle to defend the land they’ve come to call home. One of the ironies of history in the United States is that this is a nation founded on freedom and overthrowing colonialism. Yet the the nation is also founded on that same colonialism and thus is founded on the destruction of the lives, freedom, and lifeways of the land’s Indigenous peoples. That is still an identity crisis most Americans have yet to deal with. It’s why you can have American historian Frederick Jackson Turner decrying, and accurately so, that the closing of the frontier sounded the death knell for American democracy, yet, with no sense of irony, also firmly believing that taking the land from its Native people was all a necessary part of creating that beloved frontier.
Here in the northern Great Lakes area we have that same irony.
In the nineteenth century, as the Anishinaabeg were dispossessed of their land, settlers, land speculators, and resource corporations came in. The trees were cut and almost all of Northwoods’ pre-colonial forests were annihilated.[20] Mining corporations formed and tore up the Earth for minerals, poisoned the waters with mine run-off, and kept their laborers as serfs. Settlers came in an attempt to farm the cutover areas, areas that once rang with the laughter of Anishinaabe families and once were rich with the wellspring of Anishinaabe culture: the verdant and generous woodlands of the north country.
Those settlers who arrived to make a living on the land were often in competition with corporations and land speculators seeking to get rich off the land. This produced some interesting scenarios. These days, mining corporations may have convinced many in the U.P. that mining is our heritage here, or, as one oil and gas representative told me, that “Yoopers like to be exploited.” But that prejudice ignores the rest of the U.P.’s heritage. In fact, one could argue environmental resistance is our true heritage here in the northern Great Lakes area, a heritage the corporations would prefer we forgot. Finnish immigrants who worked ardently to unionize miners and then sought refuge in the backwoods from corporate thugs, are yet another example of this. And there are more.
We’ve even had what one historian calls “guerrilla warfare” launched by non-Native homesteaders against logging corporations up on the Keweenaw in the 1890s. A lumber company named Metropolitan Lumber claimed to own land that the U.P. homesteaders saw as their own. To protect “their” land from corporate interests, these nineteenth century Yooper homesteaders engaged in what we would call eco-terrorism today. Draft horses pulling corporate sleds of logs were shot and killed. Steel spikes were driven into logs that were intended for the Metropolitan Lumber sawmill. Iced corporate roads, perfect for pulling out heavy loads of timber, were melted with hot ash. One woman lay down in the middle of an icy winter road to prevent a horse-drawn sleigh from taking away logs that Metropolitan Lumber had cut on her land.[21][22]
In the last several decades, the Anishinaabe also have risen in force to protect their land from mining interests. In Wisconsin, one of the most successful mining resistance movements around the world came out of the struggle to exercise the Ojibwe treaty rights to hunt and fish in the 1842 ceded territory, a fight for the right to maintain self-sufficiency. This fight for treaty rights took on racism in some of its ugliest forms. The struggle merged with the movement to protect the Northwoods from the opening of a metallic sulfide mining district. In doing this, the Native and non-Native people of Wisconsin foiled the multinational mining corporations. As Anishinaabe activist Walt Bresette often mentioned, the corporations seemed intent on dividing the people of the northern Great Lakes area by fanning the flames of white supremacy and racism. In this way, Bresette pointed out, they attempted to manipulate the people of the Northwoods into fighting each other while the true threats to the land moved in and tried to open up a metallic sulfide mining district in northern Wisconsin. The people of the land, Native and non-Native, however, united despite their differences, and fought off the multinational mining corporations with the passage of the mining moratorium, also known as the Prove It First Law. This hard won struggle marked Wisconsin, according to one mining industry representative, as the toughest place on the planet to put in a mine.
Then we have the Bolt Weevils of central Minnesota.
The Bolt Weevils were farmers who organized in the 1970s to protect their lands and scenic areas from high-voltage transmission lines. The lines were intended to bring power from a coal-fired power plant in North Dakota through Minnesota’s rural areas to the urban populations of the Twin Cities in Minnesota. From the beginning, the power companies told them the same thing the U.S. government told the Anishinaabe: you can resist us, but it won’t matter because we’ll get your land anyway.
Local public opinion strongly supported the farmers in their opposition. The farmers used every legal means possible: public hearings, planning commissions who denied the permits, lawsuits. Despite it all, it was determined that the greater number of people living in the city counted more than the smaller number of people living on the land in the rural areas of Minnesota. As one veteran powerline resistor, Verlyn Marth, who lived in the area said, rural people are seen as “just a colony to be used.” He told them, “You are being programmed to think you are helpless. But they are an evil cartel assaulting individual farmers…It is your responsibility to beat the line. You are the stewards of the land.”[23]
Despite the farmers’ objections, the power lines in rural Minnesota were approved and construction began. But the farmers didn’t stop. Their resistance to the lines turned to physical violence against the power lines. The state governor called in the state troopers to protect the powerline as it was built through the rural areas. The Twin Cities got their coal-fired electrical power.
But the farmers still didn’t stop. As singer/songwriter Dana Lyons so aptly describes in “Turn of the Wrench.”
Farmers opposing the powerline
The thing is, when a society is civilized, this type of thing is part of its predatory means of obtaining resources for its urban populations. Even if the power had been wind-derived, the powerlines would still present the exact same issue for the farmers: destruction of their lands in order to supply power to the city.
In fact, in the heart of Anishinaabe country at the turn of the twenty-first century, the Lac Courte Oreilles band of Lake Superior Chippewa and eleven rural Wisconsin counties also opposed a 400 kV transmission line. The line was to connect central Wisconsin to Minnesota’s energy grid, helping, in part, to increase Manitoba Hydro’s ability to bring more electrical power to urban areas in the U.S. The power would come from “green” energy which actually meant the expansion of mega-dams that threatened traditional Cree homelands. The Cree helped the people of Wisconsin resist the line. When all counties passed resolutions opposing it, however, American Transmission Company told them they’d take their land anyway, only for less compensation under eminent domain. The line was built. The mega-dams expanded. Wisconsin bragged about how wonderful it was they’d obtained more “green” energy. Ask the Pimicikamak Cree and the people of northwestern Wisconsin how “green” that energy truly is.
Likewise here in the U.P., several communities have opposed energy projects sold as “green” projects. Most climate activists hearing of wind projects will uncritically support such projects. Summit Lake Wind Project near the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community and the Heritage Wind Project on the Garden Peninsula are two such projects generating both rural resistance and knee-jerk climate activist reactions.
KBIC successfully opposed Summit Lake, not because they oppose wind in general, but because this “green” energy project would first clearcut an area that is 94% forested and full of all the gifts a forest offers. Further, in industrializing this wild area with the extensive road network needed for the turbine construction and to transport the heavy equipment for the project, KBIC feared it would open up the land to mining interests eager to get at the ore underneath the extensive forest, part of one of the largest wilderness areas left east of the Mississippi.[24]
The other example of this type of “green” energy project here in the U.P., Heritage Wind is built along a major bird migration route and, as such, is opposed by the USFWS among others. Although concerns are many, unique to the area are concerns over culturally significant sites, like the limestone caves containing pictographs of Anishinaabe constellations. To safely hold its 400+ foot wind towers, Heritage drills 200 foot deep foundations into the peninsula’s limestone. Some of the turbines will be built near the caves. Will the limestone be strong enough to resist collapse?[25]
None of the power from either of these wind projects would be generated for the rural communities they are placed in. Instead, for projects such as these the power they produce is loaded onto high-voltage transmission lines and made part of the national grid to be sold to urban areas. The rural area is the site for the energy generation. The urban areas are the sites for the energy use. This is energy colonization. The rural areas are being used as energy colonies for corporate “green” power production.[26]
Instead of colonizing rural areas with ever more electrical projects and ever more transmission lines, however, what if we as a society admit we have a problem – we are energy addicts. The biggest hurdle for any addict is first admitting there is a problem. Until then, the addict will do anything, no matter how destructive, to get what they crave. That’s happening right now. It’s time for it to change.
Resisting Control: The Right to Self-Sufficiency
The history of civilization’s attempts to colonize rural-wild areas to satisfy urban appetites clearly shows that destroying self-sufficiency to force people off the land into wage-dependency is an essential component of the colonizing process. Self-sufficiency makes people difficult to control.
more time spent in wage work, the less time there is available to engage in traditional land skills. This both makes peoples easier to control and weakens a people’s knowledge of the land and how to live with it. Colonial governments on Indigenous lands around the world have used Western-style education, wage-labor, and other civilizing methods to dispossess people from their homelands.
Robert Stuart, Acting Superintendent for Indian Affairs, was well aware of this colonial strategy. In 1843, he wrote about the Anishinaabeg, “There are those who think that all these Indians should be at once removed to the unceded district,” but this could not be “easily accomplished just now, as they have considerable game, fish, and other inducements to attach them to their present homes; but so soon as they realize the benefits of schools, and the other arts of civilization, which I trust we shall be able to cluster around them, there will be less difficulty in inducing them to renounce their present habits” and thus be able to remove them.[27] This approach was used around the world in colonization to varying degrees, including in Kenya where Indigenous workers were forced into wage labor by various taxation laws and then were forbidden from quitting their job, on pain of torture, without permission of their employer.[28]
Social engineers in the twentieth century employed a similar mindset with planning out what they saw as proper land use for the northern Great Lakes area. These social engineers came from urban universities. For example, P.S. Lovejoy (1918-1941), for example, was from the University of Michigan. George Wehrwein (1883-1945) from the University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point. Both were well respected men in the early twentieth century, and their ideas about how the northern Great Lakes area should be regulated to allow for a healthy regeneration of this cutover area were highly regarded. In their view, everyone in the Northwoods should be productive members of the national industrial economy. Farmers should not farm for subsistence but should be for-profit farmers. People who lived far back in the woods, should be induced by zoning laws to move closer to towns. After all, George Wehrwein argued, without neighbors to watch over them, “people in the forest might resort to a sort of savagery, bereft of any standard of morality or cleanliness.”[29] Without this type of social engineering, Lovejoy argued, the northern Great Lakes area would continue “breeding paupers and morons and fires.”[30][31]
Out of this mindset came elitist game laws, intended to preserve wildlife for future generations of sportsmen rather than for those who hunted for food. They completely ignored Anishinaabe treaty rights. Despite having their way of life outlawed unless they could afford to buy the proper permits, people resisted these laws and managed to provide for their families regardless. As Ignatia Broker writes, “Then came the laws to control the fishing, the hunting, the trapping, even on the reservation lands…The Ojibway, however, continued to net fish and hunt deer as they had always done . . . [They] still laid nets for the fish and pulled them in early in the morning. But they had to clean, salt, and dry their catch inside their house instead of in the outdoor ovens, so the man who enforced the laws against using nets would not know.”[32][33]
One of the major obstacles to controlling a people, as identified by colonial agents, is a peoples’ ability to provide for themselves from their own land. One of the key causes of our current environmental and climate crises is that people around the world have been thrown off the land by this civilizing process. As a result, like Europe in 1492, most people today are disconnected from the land and no longer possess an intergenerational knowledge and love of a specific land. As such, we are all subject to ever greater control by our governments,and we face global ecological crises of cataclysmic proportions. As Okanagan author Jeanette Armstrong says, the corporations know “how powerful the solidarity is of peoples bound together by land, blood, and love.
Resisting Human Supremacy: Respect the Sovereignty of All Our Relations
In traditional Anishinaabe teachings, living with the land involves an intricate system of values that is based on seeing all beings as relatives, respecting their right to self-determination. Respecting the sovereignty of all our relations.
In striking contrast, Western industrial civilization is based on a belief in the supremacy of human beings. This Western belief in human supremacy[34] is found in its religion. It’s found in its secular views on other species. It’s found in its science. It permeates Western culture, justifying its takeover of the planet through industry, science, consumerism, and even conservation-minded management.
The Indigenous concept of respecting the sovereignty of all our relations is complex yet straightforward. Potawatomi biologist and author, Robin Wall Kimmerer, describes it well when she refers to this relationship as “the democracy of species.” Being a part of this democracy means participating as a respectful member of a community, not as its tyrant or emperor. Part of it involves giving respect to other beings so that we can see them as fully functioning, sentient, intelligent beings. Not as our slaves. Or our wards.
From a traditional Anishinaabe perspective, all species are sentient whether they are plant or animal. Yet there is the recognition that life gives its life for other life to continue. Part of living in this democracy of species as human beings is to follow the guidelines of the Honorable Harvest. In fact, hunting, fishing and gathering in the respectful manner outlined by the Honorable Harvest connects us to the land in an intimate manner. This connection helps us understand the land.
The Honorable Harvest also recognizes the sentience of all relatives. When harvesting blueberries, for example, you first ask permission of the blueberries to harvest. If they don’t give you that permission, you listen and do not harvest them.
One recent example of respect for the sovereignty of all our relations comes from the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. Isle Royale is part of the traditional territory of the Grand Portage Band. As you know, there’s been an ecological conundrum of late as the predator/prey relationship of the moose and wolf is currently out of balance. The U.S. government determined relocation of wolves from other areas to the island was the best way to resolve the imbalance.
Grand Portage, however, initially opposed the relocation of wolves to Isle Royale. According to the band’s reply to the National Park Service Draft Environmental Impact Statement on the relocation plan, “The Grand Portage Band observes a cultural value that allows for natural cycles of predators and prey and the cultural philosophy of management only when necessary.” The band continues, “Thus, we urge non-interventionist policy for management of wildlife on Isle Royale National Park and feel that upholding the Park principle of maintaining unmanaged wilderness is most appropriate.” Wolves, they say, have only been on the island since 1949. Ice bridges often form between the island and the mainland. Wolves have used this ice bridge recently to cross to the island. But they choose not to stay. The band argued that for the next ten years at least, we should let nature take its course. [35]
The National Park Service eventually obtained the band’s cooperation when they agreed to first relocate Grand Portage wolves to Isle Royale. This, the band felt, would protect Grand Portage wolves from diseases and parasites that could be brought in if wolves from outside the area where relocated to the island.
However, of the four Grand Portage wolves relocated to Isle Royale, one died from the stress of captivity. A second died a month after being relocated to the island. Another wolf, a female who was radio-collared, left the island, crossing back to the mainland via an ice bridge – according to leading Western expert on wolf biology, David Mech, relocated (I’d say kidnapped) wolves released within eighty miles of their home will often return to their home.
The White Earth Land Recovery Project refers to Ma’iingan (the Wolf) as “[t]he one sent here by that all-loving spirit to show us the way.”[36] Ma’iingan, one of our very home-centered, family-oriented relatives, did once again shows us the way: our animal relatives are not there for us to control. A central tenet of traditional Indigenous philosophy that can be found around the world is the development of a relationship with all our relatives that respects the sovereignty and life force of those relatives as a whole and as individuals. The settler culture, however, being the civilized entity that it is, seeks to control that which is out of its control. This is central to the disease that so besets a civilized culture.
Yet there are non-Native people in the northern Great Lakes area who also demonstrate resistance to aspects of this diseased culture by protecting our non-human relatives. A retired teacher who has lived in my area since childhood is a recent example of this. A pillar of her Christian community, a well-respected member of various community organizations, this outspoken rural woman who usually votes Democrat, although she preferred to vote Green rather than vote for Hillary, lives at the end of a dirt road with her Republican husband. She loves and nurtures monarch butterflies. When the county Road Commission brushcutter headed down her way one summer, after having destroyed a milkweed patch along her road the previous year, she blockaded her end of the road with her car to protect the milkweed there, milkweed reserved for the monarchs. I call it, the Monarch Blockade, yet another great example of rural resistance. As the Earth-advocate Derrick Jensen often prescribes, find something you love, then stake yourself to it and protect it.
The Oshki-Anishinaabeg and the Green Path: On Being an Evangelical Heathen
I recently learned this summer that the word “heathen” comes from a time when England was converting to Christianity. People who lived in the city became Christian. These urban people looked down on the people who lived on the heath. The heath was a wild, “uncultivated” land. The people who lived there kept to the old tribal ways. The people of the city, like so many urban people of today, ridiculed the rural people as unenlightened and backward because it was those people, the people of the heath, the heathen, who kept to the old ways. [37]
Well, I have decided I am an unequivocal, evangelical heathen. I firmly believe returning to the wild, “uncultivated” lands and the old ways that belong to them is our way out of this mess. Our way out of climate change. Our way out of the larger global emergency that civilization has brought to this planet.
To quote a scientific report done in 1964, “It is realized that a whole system of culture and an age-old way of life cannot be changed overnight, but change it must, and quickly.”[38]
Like so much of civilization’s attempts to control and manipulate the people of the land, this report was directed at forcing the self-sufficient tribal peoples of India’s Chittagong Hills to become cash-croppers.
But this sentiment needs to be reversed.
Indigenous peoples around the planet were forced to change quickly from living in their well-adjusted tribal cultures to becoming part of the colonizers’ diseased, maladjusted one. The rapidity at which this happened shows how quickly cultures can change. But this time, it’s Western industrial civilization’s turn to change and change as quickly as possible. For those things that cannot humanely change rapidly (for example, in dealing with our overpopulated numbers), we need to start planning now on how to get to where we need to be. All of this needs to be part of a Seventh Generation Sustainability Plan wherein we work out where we need to be seven generations from now. Part of this involves long-range planning. Part of it involves urgent immediate changes.
As Trudell said, “Earth is a living entity. It is not in man’s destiny to destroy the Earth. That’s arrogance. What it is man’s destiny to do is destroy civilized man’s ability to live with the Earth… the antibiotic will come, in a planetary sense. If it means…letting it wipe out civilized man, then the Earth will do that. The Earth will continue on.”
The question is, will we?
The thing is, we have various Indigenous teachings and prophecies that are there to help. According to the Anishinaabe prophecy of the Seventh Fire, this is not only a time to be choosing the Green Path over the Burnt Path, but it is also a time when the oshki-anishinaabeg, the New People, will rise. Various culture bearers from Eddie Benton-Banai to Nick and Charlotte Hockings to Walt Bresette and others have felt this includes both Native and non-Native people. It refers to those people working to bring us back to the Green Path through finding that which was lost during the process of colonization.
The root causes of this global collapse are ignored, and in many cases, even exacerbated by the solutions proposed. Even if the ice caps stop melting and climate change is averted, as long as this industrial, technologically intensive, species-isolated culture continues as is, the apocalypse will continue until there is nothing left for us as human beings.
If, however, we recognize our potential in becoming the oshki-anishinaabeg we are prophesied to be, leading this society to the good path, we can enter a future where we don’t have to fear for our children and our children’s children.
I’d like to end with some words from Anishinaabe activist, Walt Bresette. As usual, in this excerpt of a speech he gave to a crowd at Northland College in Ashland, he offers us a way to build that bridge together and move into a world that, seven generations from now we can look back on and say, “We’re proud of what we’ve done.”
Miigwech. Mii i’iw.
Aimée Cree Dunn teaches at the Center for Native American Studies at Northern Michigan University.
[1] John Bodley. Victims of Progress. 6th edition. NY: Rowan & Littlefield, 2016. p7.
[2] John Bodley. Victims of Progress. 6th edition. NY: Rowan & Littlefield, 2016. p10.
[3] John Bodley. Victims of Progress. 6th edition. NY: Rowan & Littlefield, 2016. p184.
[5] John Mohawk. Thinking in Indian: The John Mohawk Reader. Ed. Josée Barreiro. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2010. p260.
[6]Trudell: A Film by Heather Rae. Passion River, 2007.
[7] Anyone who thinks overpopulation is not a problem, that overpopulation is not something that we should be concerned about, needs only to look at Europe in the fifteenth century. The overpopulation of Europe, like steam coming out of a boiling kettle, launched Columbus and the ensuing colonization of Indigenous lands around the world.
[8]Trudell: A Film by Heather Rae. Passion River, 2007.
[9] In fact, that is the danger in existing as an Indigenous person within a colonial society. The pull to assimilate is strong, to go with the crowd, even when it’s the liberal wing of the colonial society. Such assimilation, over generations, leads to becoming colonizers ourselves.
[10] Theodore Roszak. Person/Planet: The Creative Disintegration of Industrial Society. 1978. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1979. p243.
[11]U.P. Indian Treaties. Institute for the Development of Indian Law and Cook Christian Training School. “Treaty Rights Workshop: L’Anse Chippewa Treaty 1842.” Mimeographed copy at Northern Michigan University Olson Library. N.d. p36.
[16]U.P. Indian Treaties. Institute for the Development of Indian Law and Cook Christian Training School. “Treaty Rights Workshop: L’Anse Chippewa Treaty 1842.” Mimeographed copy at Northern Michigan University Olson Library. N.d. p36.
[17]U.P. Indian Treaties. Institute for the Development of Indian Law and Cook Christian Training School. “Treaty Rights Workshop: L’Anse Chippewa Treaty 1842.” Mimeographed copy at Northern Michigan University Olson Library. N.d. p8.
[18]U.P. Indian Treaties. Institute for the Development of Indian Law and Cook Christian Training School. “Treaty Rights Workshop: L’Anse Chippewa Treaty 1842.” Mimeographed copy at Northern Michigan University Olson Library. N.d. p8.
[19] Ignatia Broker. Night Flying Woman. St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1983. 72.
[20] Most estimates place the amount of pre-colonial forest remaining in Michigan and Wisconsin at around 1%. Dickmann and Leefers write that by 1926, after less than 100 years of colonization in Michigan, only 7% of the original forest was left, most of that in the Upper Peninsula. They add “most of that has since been cut.” Donald I. Dickmann and Larry A. Leefers. The Forests of Michigan. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2016. p173.
[21] Theodore J. Karamanski. Deep Woods Frontier: A History of Logging of Michigan. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University, 1989. 101.
[22] This is not intended as a promotion of violent protest but rather simply referencing histories that are all too often ignored.
[23] Barry M. Casper and Paul David Wellstone. Powerline: The First Battle of America’s Energy War. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981. p44.
[29] James Kates. Planning a Wilderness: Regenerating the Great Lakes Cutover Region. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. p158.
[30] Qtd. in James Kates. Planning a Wilderness: Regenerating the Great Lakes Cutover Region. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. p48.
[31] For a more thorough discussion of this issue, see my article “Listening to the Trees: Traditional Knowledge and Industrial Society in the American Northwoods” originally published in Honor the Earth: Indigenous Response to Environmental Degradation and Beyond. Ed. Phil Bellfy. Now available at https://voiceforthewild.wordpress.com/2019/10/28/listening-to-the-trees/
[32] Ignatia Broker. Night Flying Woman. St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1983. p117.
[33]For a more thorough discussion of this issue, see my article “Listening to the Trees: Traditional Knowledge and Industrial Society in the American Northwoods” originally published in Honor the Earth: Indigenous Response to Environmental Degradation and Beyond. Ed. Phil Bellfy. Now available at https://voiceforthewild.wordpress.com/2019/10/28/listening-to-the-trees/
[34] Derrick Jensen. The Myth of Human Supremacy. NY: Seven Stories Press, 2016.
Beginning tomorrow, Friday September 20, and going through September 27, there are a whole host of climate-related actions happening nationally (USA) and globally, including climate strikes and marches. These climate strikes are being heavily promoted by big green organizations on down to local communities, and the media plays along by making sure to note in coverage about the upcoming strikes that they are “youth-led”. Unfortunately nothing could be further from the truth. The youth themselves, of course, believe they are doing the right thing, and certainly their message that we need to do something about the climate catastrophe is true. But these youth are being supported and, one might even say, manipulated by a tangle of pro-business, pro-capitalism, pro-growth, anti-natureorganizations, corporations, and governments.
Bill McKibben writes about the climate strikes in The Guardian (“Why you should join the global climate strike” Wednesday, September 18, 2019). As in other recent articles he’s written, McKibben gives himself away as a front-man for big green organizations, including the one he started himself, 350.org, which have been co-opted by the solar, wind, and carbon capture industry.
He asks us to strike because…
“… sun and wind are now the cheapest way to generate power around the world”—if you ignore the impacts of land-grabbing, mining, manufacturing, transportation, maintenance, and disposal…
“… this could be the great opportunity…Green New Deals have been proposed around the world; they are a way forward”—the “great opportunity” he is speaking of is a way to keep our capital-demanding growth economy going so that the rich can continue to get richer at the expense of the natural world and the poor… Green New Deals are all growth plans, they all involve extracting more, building more, destroying more of the natural world…
“… batteries are ever cheaper – we can now store sunshine at night, and wind for a calm day”—again he is acting as front man for the solar and wind industries which are, as I write this, destroying forests, rivers, deserts, wildlife, habitat, and poor communities around the world, while the materials required for batteries and battery storage (lithium, iridium, copper, zinc, etc) are incredibly destructive to mine and manufacture…
“… indigenous people around the world are trying to protect their rightful land from the coal and oil companies”—and they are also trying to protect their rightful land from mines and dams and solar and wind factories and installations, because all those are harmful to land and communities just like oil is…
“… young people have asked us to. In a well-ordered society, when kids make a reasonable request their elders should say yes”—in fact it is the “elders” who are running the show, the elders who are running organizations like We Mean Business and GCCA who are working feverishly behind the scenes of the so-called youth-led movements to make sure that governments and corporations will make plenty of money on the fourth industrial revolution “demanded” by the people.
McKibben mixes his pro-business, pro-growth reasons for striking with just enough nice nature-sounding reasons to mask, for most people, that what he’s really doing is helping the corporations behind the fourth industrial revolution, by tricking “the people” into “demanding” action, believing they are part of a grass roots movement, when in fact those demands are being manufactured by the very organizations who will “respond” to those demands with more growth, more capitalism, and more extraction.
Don’t fall for it. True grass roots movements don’t have billionaires backing them. True grass roots movements don’t make vague demands of the very governments and organizations that have failed for 40 years to do anything at all. True grassroots activists take concrete actions that actually help: they sue the government and corporations when they break the law; they stand in front of bulldozers building pipelines and cutting down trees; they help inner city people learn how to build gardens in once empty parking lots to supply fresh vegetables; they change the zoning and planning laws in their own communities. Difficult and sometimes dangerous work that actually makes a difference.
Don’t waste your time on fake movements with vague asks that don’t actually take on the systems of power. The people behind these fake movements don’t give a damn about the planet, and they don’t give a damn about any of us. They care about money and power. That is it.
Do something real instead.
Image by Lunae Parracho for Reuters: Ka’apor Indian warriors tie up illegal loggers in the Amazon rainforest. Tired of the lack of government assistance in keeping loggers off their lands, they and four other tribes monitor their territory themselves.
“Before releasing them, one of the warriors told the loggers on the ground: “We’re doing this because you are stubborn. We told you not to come back, but you didn’t listen.”
They then set fire to five trucks and three tractors equipped to pull down trees and transport them from the jungle. They confiscated chainsaws and shotguns that they carried back to the village saying: “Jande pairata” or “We are strong.””
Editor’s Note: this piece comes from the Native Youth Movement, a cross-nation warrior society for indigenous youth on Turtle Island. We do not agree with every detail of this piece, but consider it a good primer on this topic and a look at how traditionally-minded indigenous people are approaching the internet, social media, pornography, and more. Featured image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
Facebook (Fed-book): the ultimate tool for intelligence and distraction.
Indigenous People
Who are We?
We are the original people of our Lands. Some of us were born into our culture, some of us were not, some of us got taught a little, some of us got none, some of us were born in our homelands to Indian hands and greeted by the Sun, some of us where born in far away industrial war zones, slapped on the ass by a white man & put under neon lights.
So who are we now?
Although we come from different realities & have been taught different world views, deep inside we share common pre-invasion bloodlines, pre-invasion realities and pre-invasion minds. At one time we all had the same world-view as humans–we are simply another animal species no more important than other Life forms. Life is a beautiful gift which we must not take for granted. Instead, we are to respect, care for and protect it. We are born with a basic task, the same as all Life: to continue it.
Today, we are those who have united and chosen Life over death, Land, Water and Air, over industrial waste. We have a Sacred Duty, to be Earths Army.
Our Vision?
Is to raise babies who are Independent of other humans and machines, knowing the land & water, how to sustain themselves with real skills, working with the Natural Law, Food Harvesting, Building, Healing, Protecting, Clothing, Making Fire, with good Leadership Qualities, Virtues and all the skills for living on the Land in various seasons and terrains.
Our Job. What do we want?
To Provide Life. Healthy Life! No More. No Less. We demand Healthy Life, not from other people, but from ourselves. It is our Duty as Indian Men and Women to look after ourselves and continue Life forever according to our Original Instructions.
How will we get what we want?
Building our skills, and living the Natural Law. Leaving the cities and reservations and building more villages in our Lands or join existing ones.
How did we arrive where we are?
Since the beginning, humans have had to fight off other humans attempting to invade lands and utilize the resources for their own human group.
Over 500 years ago a new kind of invasion took place in our Lands, one that had been existing over the seas for thousands of years–One that attempted to exterminate our people and way of life. These attempts continued to get advanced in their quest for resources and control. It was a War against Indigenous People. The War against the human proved unsuccessful. Many were exterminated, but many survived.
The industrial revolution changed the face of battle, from primary attacks on humans, to attacks focused on the earth that humans and all Life depend on for existence. War against humanity had expanded. Industry waged war against all Life forms.
To compliment industry, psychoanalysts used their study of human thinking to go deep into the thoughts and feelings of the survivors of Tribal people to empty the original thinking and replace it with a foreign way. Missions, Boarding & Residential schools would become the way for the white man to kill the thoughts, feeling and responsibilities of the Indigenous children by taking them away from their Lands and teachers and replacing their way of being with a white mind, and body that could now be used to contribute to the destruction of the earth. After generations, that form of forced brainwashing and fear through violence and sexual abuse was so successful they now use the public schools to continue to raise robots whose only purpose in life is to get a job contributing to the industrial machine and their own destruction in the process.
Resistance to pre-mature death is nothing new; it is a Natural Law of self-preservation. When something attacks you, you do all you can to make sure the attack is unsuccessful. Today is no different. World-wide attacks on humans and the Earth are resisted, so they must advance their methods of attack.
In comes the teck-no-logic ‘revolution’. Welcome the world of ‘social’ media, known better as advanced social monitoring.
This statement will focus on facebook, which we prefer to call by what it really is: fed-book– the world’s largest database of humans and their activities. For those who are completely part of the system the service provides insight even deeper into the colonized consumer human mind and how they can sell more products in order to expand control over them.
For those who know something is wrong and must change, fed-book serves to monitor their location, activities, friends, and psychology. From those reformist views of wanting a piece of the pie (money for our lands being exploited), and those revolutionaries who don’t want the money, but want to stop the exploitation and destruction of the land, fed-book is an intelligence tool. The greatest to date, with over 1.5 billion people (and growing) making their own profile to be monitored.
This writing will focus on why it is so great for intelligence and why we are so quick to fall for it. We will start by looking at why we might be susceptible to social media, then the problems created by it–Physical Health, Social, Mental & Body aspects–then Movement Health. Finally, we will discuss what we are going to do from here on out to improve our current state.
Teck-No-Logic World & the Internet: The quest for more control
The Internet was created by the military, for military purposes, and it continues to be used for such. Business, military and governments, which are all intertwined, have always sought more efficient ways to monitor people & control them. Psychoanalysts are the leadership in this constant improvement of how to control people better so we can live & die in their vision and not in our true way of life. They are highly skilled, with the majority of our people uploading photos of themselves, shooing off smiling, stoic, innocent, noble savage, hard or duck lips faces Billions are contributing to self-made intelligence profiles.
Let’s look at why humans are so eager to show themselves to anybody and everybody who cares to look, even after proven detrimental consequences.
How to get us to be distracted
Sex, Food and Violence
Internal Trickster, Tricking Our-selves
Needs are: Air, Water, Food, Protection, Fire and depending on your region the ability to stay warm or cool. This is what we need to complete our job while living on Earth.
We are born from a seed like all other life, then die, and our body goes back into the earth and essence back into the universe. Extremely simple. So if humans are so smart why do we complicate things so much?
The trickster. The trickster exists in all facets of our life, not really to trick us, but to test us, & like all tests, once completed & passed you have a stronger understanding and knowledge of the subject you were tested on making you a better human being. Within all of us are internal tricksters, and they exist within our mind. Our job is to not let ourselves, trick ourselves.
Reward System and Energy Balance
Our Real Elders have taught us that our Brain is truly a Seed. All Life comes from a Seed. We literally are the same as all Life, full of Water, Vitamins, Minerals & Energy, compiled into another shape.
In our Brain we have a part called the Reward System. The job of the Reward System is to identify things that are pleasurable and good for us. When identified, dopamine’s are released in this portion of the brain, giving a temporary feeling of satisfaction & euphoria.
We also have another part of the brain which combines many structures and makes the Energy Balance System. In a time before industrial production, refrigeration and internet systems worked hand in hand & they complimented each other. When we encountered fresh sweet berries, fatty meat, or salty food, our reward system was triggered because we knew that we needed it for proper energy balance in our bodies.
The Earth provides naturally, the perfect amount of energy, through a process of growth and death, giving and taking, to keep the planet in balance and therefore helping us to continue orbiting in the universe how we are supposed to. On a smaller scale the Earth always provided all its animals, including humans the proper amount of energy, through food and water to keep us alive and strong. No doubt if we looked into the minds of our ancestors they would not have found competing systems but one working unit. Some humans began to go through great efforts to change this naturally perfect system of internal cohesion and recognition between the Energy Balance and Reward System, and slowly began to only feed the Reward System.
Today we are still born hardwired to be healthy and strong life forms, but that is quickly disturbed and our brain separated by only getting offered physical and emotional things that benefit the Reward System and put us completely out of touch with Energy Balance. At the root of the Reward System is the thought that it needs certain things to continue healthy Energy Balance.
Now, when we see sweet, salty and fatty foods our Reward System finds them hard to resist because they used to benefit our Energy Balance system & when used in moderation were what we really needed to live. For example, when people see someone of the opposite sex they are attracted, not because they crave the feeling of orgasm, but because the feeling of orgasm signals to the reward system something good is happening for energy balance; a new life is being made, which is essentially why we are all here–to help Life continue.
Today, everything is superficial and instead of having just the right amount to live in energy balance, we are forced to have too much. Excess things trick our Reward System into thinking we are doing what is right, but really we are nowhere near proper Energy Balance. Realizing we are out of balance can explain why there is more obesity, drug addicts, sex addicts, technology addicts, gambling addicts, gaming addicts, chemicals, pollution, pre-mature deaths, physical & sexual abuse, overall sickness, and more war and destruction than any time before us on the planet. It can also help explain why, today, humans are the weakest in the story of humanity. Never before have we been so physically, mentally & spiritually weak.
How can we improve that? As Hidatsa-Arirkara Michael Yellowbird says, “In order to successfully de-colonize our harmful & obstructive emotions, thoughts & behaviors we must understand this imbalance & have the courage to confront it.”
So let’s confront it.
Mental & Physical Health
Social Health
The want for social attention and recognition
White man wants us to think there is a need for social recognition, not on the same level as basic needs, but a need none the less. However, we did not think like that, and shouldn’t today. There was not a need for social recognition. A need is necessary for existence. Some may have wanted it, but social recognition is not necessary to live.
If we are equal to all creation then to call it a need is as silly as a plant needing recognition to do its job. A plant that grows from a sprout into a beautiful flower, whose petals fall off, then withers and dries, drops its babies (new seeds) into the ground to continue life, then falls and feeds the earth, eventually becoming another layer of the dirt, does not need other plants to tell it what a good job it is doing to continue and complete its job. Some plants may want it (doubt it though), but a need? I don’t think so.
The want for social recognition can only happen if a person has their basic needs met. Today, although extremely poorly, the majority of Native people think they get their needs met through government programs put in place to maintain control. Although all Native communities have a shorter life expectancy than non-native communities, some as low as 42 years old, basic day-to-day needs appear to be met, but aren’t sufficient. If they were we wouldn’t die so young. But the appearance exists, giving our people the time to begin and worry about social recognition & status in a false reality, & today, a virtual one.
A long time ago your social status had to do with your deeds, your actions and how beneficial they were to the larger group. The society you lived in would determine what actions would help you achieve social recognition.
For the white-man, the deeds of george washington won him great social recognition. His society wanted all Indians dead, he was good at massacring them, therefore granting him the highest social status in white amerikkka.
For Native People fighting to continue our way of life, the actions of Crazy Horse to defend Indigenous people against destruction and defend the Land made him a person of high social standing. So much so that many Indigenous people, even outside of the Lakota Nation, know this name. To be high status in our society was different than the white-man, it did not mean you were better than others, it meant you did great deeds, knew the story of your people since creation and had a vision of what needed to be done for the future.
Skills & Self-esteem
Today our people seek social status and recognition not because they are deserving of it, but because they have an empty void they are trying to fill; a void caused by the invasion of our lands, the murder of our people, the destruction of our resources, the systematic erasing of our knowledge of how to provide for ourselves, the rape of our woman & men, the molestation of our children, machismo and feminism, & the continued poisoning of our bodies and minds with substances & colonial mentality.
In order to escape these realities, people turn the want for recognition into false need, just like the drug addict who now thinks they ‘need’ a substance. It develops an addiction that can enter for numerous reasons all having to do with voids caused by oppression. This void cannot be filled with lots of compliments and fed-book friends, although it may feel like it. To add to the dysfunction is the fact that social recognition in a virtual reality that isn’t real. Social media is not a real life community; it is a virtual one– fake.
People have developed a low self-esteem because of inter-generational trauma. Thinking attention and social recognition can help boost our self-esteem, is a false feeling. Only skills can improve self-esteem.
Compliments and attention are a quick release of dopamine in the reward system, just like substances (drugs), it is like a hot air balloon, a false heat that will come down when hot air is gone and needs more to get you feeling good again. This leads humans to become extremely narcissistic, in other words, have extremely inflated ego’s & think they are so beautiful & great & the whole world should know this. Greatness based on what deeds? Beauty, according to whose standard? Those who are truly beautiful & great, do not think so themselves, cause as soon as they do, their beauty and greatness are gone.
Narcissism is the medical term that can explain why humans love fed-book so much. We can recognize that this is just another form & layer of colonization. Let’s look at it so we may confront and improve it.
Narcissism
Narcissist was a greek youth who fell in love with his own image and spent hours of the day staring at himself, developing a huge ego & becoming extremely selfish. He eventually died from not taking care of daily needs & just staring at himself, but to make the story sound good, they say he turned into a flower which today bears his name.
Since 2000, psychological tests designed to detect narcissism have been done across the country, and the scores of residents of the united states have continually increased. Psychologists have linked the increase to social media. This is one of the reasons for creating social media: to get people consumed with themselves so they cannot function as normal human beings, let alone be a threat in an organized resistance to the industrial world.
Signs of narcissism are:
Problems in sustaining satisfying relationships
Lack of empathy: The capacity to recognize emotions that are being experienced by another.
Problems distinguishing them self from others: others either exist to meet their needs or may as well not exist at all.
Hyper-sensitivity to any insults or imagined insults.
Feeling Shameful instead of remorseful or guilty.
Haughty Body Language: a physical posture which implies & puts out an air of superiority, seniority, hidden powers, mysteriousness, amused indifference, etc. The narcissist usually maintains sustained and piercing eye contact, also keeping space & posturing up.
Flattery towards people who admire and affirm them.
Detesting those who do not admire them.
Using other people without considering the cost of doing so. Usually the other is in a subservient position where resistance would be difficult or even impossible.
Pretending to be more important than they really are.
Bragging (Subtly but persistently) and exaggerating their achievements.
Claiming to be an “expert” at many things.
Inability to view the world from the perspective of other people.
Pathological lying, making false promises.
Lacks values; easily bored; often changes course.
Entitlement: Narcissists hold unreasonable expectations of favorable treatment and automatic compliance because they consider themselves special. Failure to comply is considered an attack on their superiority, and the perpetrator is considered a “controlling” or “difficult” person. Defiance of their will can trigger Narcissistic Rage.
Inability to engage emotionally with their children’s needs, often choosing their own wants over time with children.
Failure to accept responsibility for own actions.
Narcissistic Abuse
“At the core of a narcissist is a combination of entitlement and low self-esteem. Feelings of inadequacy are projected onto the victim. If the narcissistic person is feeling unattractive they will belittle their romantic partner’s appearance. If the narcissist makes an error, this error becomes their partners. Narcissists also engage in insidious, manipulative abuse by giving subtle hints and comments that result in the victim questioning their own behavior and thoughts. Any slight criticism of the narcissistic, whether actual or perceived, often triggers narcissistic rage and full blown annihilation from the narcissistic person.
The discard phase can be swift and occurs once the narcissistic supply is obtained elsewhere.
In romantic relationships, the narcissistic supply can be acquired by having affairs. The new partner is in the idealization phase and only witnesses the ideal self; thus once again the cycle of narcissistic abuse begins. Narcissists do not take responsibility for relationship difficulties and exhibit no feeling of remorse. Instead they believe themselves to be the victim in the relationship.” Wikipedia
Fed-book & all social media is helping to increase this selfish and egotistical behavior in our people, hitting us in the deepest root of who we are…the inner self. Bringing two dysfunctional people together will contribute to dysfunctional Nations. To be Strong again, we must confront these dysfunctions & stop feeding into them. We must change them.
Trying to find yourself through Social media
Personal realization is crucial in the development of a human. But is Fed-book really helping with it, or creating an illusion about it?
Having lots of fed-book friends may help you temporarily feel good about yourself, but a study called, ‘Are Close Friends the Enemy? Online Social Networks, Self-Esteem, and Self-Control’, (by Keith Wilcox, a professor at Columbia University & Andrew Stephen, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh) shows that fed-book also makes you fat, broke, lazy and depressed. This ego boost has an ‘unintended psychological consequence.’ Fed-bookers relax their self-control making them more likely to make purchases and over eat junk food that they know is bad for them.
“Simply browsing Facebook makes people feel better about themselves and momentarily enhances their self-esteem,” Wilcox told Today.com. “It’s that enhanced self-esteem that ultimately lowers your self-control. The loss of self-control can result in self-indulgence. When you feel good, you can rationalize ordering dessert or buying something you don’t really need. ‘I feel good today,’ you tell yourself. ‘I deserve a treat.’ “
The results of the study found that Fed-book users had a higher body-mass index (BMI) (fat), were more prone to binge eating, carried more credit card debt and had lower credit scores. Fed-book use ‘is causing people to have reduced self-control in a variety of situations.’ They believe the ‘Facebook effect’ is subtle and develops over time and only gets worse the more a person is on it.No matter how many people like your self-moulding photos, or comment on your picture or post, it will not make you a better human being. You are not a good person because you appear to be attractive by cosmopolitan standards.
Social-Media has helped contribute to sexual dysfunction and is teaching another new generation that attraction is based on appearance.
Another recent study shows that social media makes the section of the brain connected with emotions grow, but not in healthy ways. It grows uncontrollable sensitivity, overly affected by what people think about, even if they do not even know the people and had no real life interactions with them.
Effects on marriages and romantic relationships
With the ability to be turned on at every corner of the web, social media is the leading cause of break-up and divorces today.
Emotional cheating is when you allow your thoughts (usually caused by viewing images), to drift from your real life partner and family, to somebody else you may or may not know as a real human being. Emotional cheating is still cheating, and often, more times than not leads to physical cheating, even if not with the person or people the emotional cheating started with.
It open’s a Pandora’s box into the human mind & the craving to satisfy the Reward System, not to create more life, but just to feel good, without any benefit on energy balance. The person online doesn’t contain any of the imperfections as your real life human partner. A person may feel completely attached to this idea of meeting someone perfect for them, & their real life partner is made into an evil enemy in the mind of the cheater to justify this new found ‘love’ & ‘freedom’.
When emotional cheating turns physical, most, if not all, will soon realize there is no such thing as a perfect person. They don’t exist, sorry, in case you didn’t know, you are not perfect either.
Over one third of divorce filings in 2011 contained the word “Facebook,” or “social media” according to a report from a legal services firm, Divorce Online.
Lookin’ for Love on fed-book
Divorce and break-up rates due to fed-book and other social media sites are extreme, but what about ‘meeting’ someone and creating a relationship that is based on something as shallow as appearance and not real human interaction?
When Fed-book was invented so was crush-stalking.
It’s a quiet and seemingly innocent art that everybody does, so it must be ok, right? The silent accumulation of massive amounts of information about a person whose appearance you like, quietly plotting how you will arrange to see them again, dropping-in on the events they announced they will be at, at the same time adding more mutual Fed-book friends, eventually sending them a friend request, then start liking what they like (even if you really don’t), start commenting how great & pretty they are, then ask for their phone number & eventually set up a face-to-face meeting. Before fed-book, you met someone who may interest you, maybe talk for a couple of minutes, not long enough to ask for a number, and it’s done. There is no ability to learn about their life, interests, hobbies, favorite music, who all their friends are, where they’ve travelled, & you damn sure wouldn’t be able to view their family photos. By looking at their pictures and videos you learn their different facial expressions, moods and share in their emotion at the time and place of the photo or video.
There would be no way that a person you just briefly met or just saw in the street would give you their personal journal & give you an open door into the inner most feelings of who they are. In so many ways it would be seen as high risk, for the heart & security, if a complete stranger had all that information. Now any & all who wish, can have access to all that information, without ever having to get to know the person in real life.
In Fed-book you can be whoever you want, only exposing the positive characteristics of yourself. As your virtual personality you don’t ever look tired with bags under your eyes, you don’t shit, you don’t fart, you don’t get sick, you don’t throw up or ever have diarrhea, your perfect, & your self-esteem is skyrocketing cause everyone ‘likes’ what you have to say & everybody ‘likes’ the photos of you. You are looking at that Photoshopped version of yourself — your favorite flattering photos, your witty comments, your epiphanies that came to you on your recent vacation — all reinforcing the version of who you want to be, having a positive but very temporary effect on your self-esteem.
You get that ego lift because you self-select the information that is included in our Fed-book profiles and posts on your wall . That skyrocketing self-esteem goes up fast and strong, but it always has to come down, and when it does the landing is never smooth. But with quick glance at the most beautiful photos of yourself, you can get that hot air balloon back up and running. But soon it will be deflated yet again, often leading to a new but real medical term, “Facebook-Depression.”
Those enormous egos may have already taken over your bodies and minds, a temporary escape from reality, & if you have access through your phone it is one you can visit all the time, even more than living in real reality.
The ability to be constantly connected means that those fragile relationship beginnings can be fast-tracked: You’ve only hung out once, but you Fed-book Chat throughout the day and like each-others uploads at a crazy pace. It’s too much, too soon, and can be addictive. Constantly chatting means that you can get to know someone seemingly faster and can quickly turn into a phase where you spend hours talking about your childhoods, families, and futures.
Then, you get stuck with a false intimacy.
Fed-book does not just confuse people about how ‘great’ they are, but looking at ‘friends’ pages, posts and updates also negatively affects the views of yourself, because like you they put only their best up & it can make people feel depressed & sad thinking others have a better life than theirs. So now to improve your feelings you gotta out do them to make yourself feel sufficient. Constantly self-modeling & announcing the newest cool things you’ve done.
In other words, the computer or cell phone it is not a healthy place to look for Love.
Sexting and Virtual Sex
Real Life Sex must happen to create more Natives. Sex is not an act for the release of dopamine’s and daily expulsion of sacred energy. When two humans, a man and woman exchange their energy it is a sacred union of these two energies: Water & Fire, Earth and Sky, Sun & Moon, pure balance that can potentially lead to a larger responsibility, a new Life.
In our pre-invasion world it was seen very different than today, very Sacred; the most Sacred of our ceremonies, the one that is universal. By exploiting sexuality, we exploit our Essence as Life forms. By colonizing & changing our sexuality they colonize our first & oldest ceremony, so sacred every man & woman had their own and it was only viewed, attended & participated in by them, an internal union of duality.
It is now controlled by the perverted minds of the colonizer. If they control what arouses people and when, through imagery, they can make a person think about sex and control the oldest part of us.
The Hind Brain is older and Stronger than any other portion of the brain. We share it with all other backboned animals. It is associated with the 5 F’s: Fighting, Feeding, Fearing, Fleeing & Fornicating; The Hind Brain Defends Territories & their husbands or wives from others who may want them. Being aggressive to protect is an important job of the Hind Brain.
“Sexual Behavior is instinctive, responses are automatic & our emotions are more stimulated, negativity & anxiety flow easily.” – Michael Yellow Bird, For Indigenous Minds Only.
When Hind brain is in charge, accessing neural networks that are responsible for compassion, self-awareness & emotional intelligence is harder. The place where our deepest Love comes from can be quickly overridden by the Hind Brain. Today most People in the industrial world function in this mental state of the five F’s. A continued state of Narcissism. Self-Modeling & sexting are perfect examples of this portion of the brain not just in charge but controlled through imagery and violent sexual trauma.
In other words, they have sexualized our world as a way to control the oldest thought process of survival.
Sexting and Pornography are eroding whole generations from birth. While sex is thought of as a curse word in public & our communities, dysfunctional sexuality is a behind closed doors addiction that is available for the whole virtual world to see. In 2012 the Internet Watch Foundation found that an “estimated 88% of self-made explicit images are stolen from their original upload location and made available on other websites, in particular porn sites collecting sexual imagery of children and young people”. When the person who originally sexted the photo finds out everyone has access to it they can go into depression & there have been many cases of suicide.
Young children are even sexting & very few adults want to talk about how wrong & against Natural Law it is because they are doing it or have done it too. We must question what is going on, not just follow the crowd because the cool kid or prettiest girl is leading the way.
Indigenous views of sexuality must be revived as a Sacred teaching to our Young ones.
We did not stare at asses, which is really the upper portion of the legs where you shit comes out of.
“Titties” are the physical tissues where food exits for the new life to eat.
Muscles are what give us form, the clay on sticks.
Sexual organs are for the exiting of turbid fluid (piss) & for exchanging seed to egg to make Life.
This shit is not funny or giggly, it is real. We all have the same bodies, with fluids, organs, tissues & energy. Smartin’ up, this is not a joke, the future of Indigenous People are at stake. Body parts were not objects, just as the human they are part of, are not objects, they are sacred Life forms that must be treated good & engaged respectfully. Physical appearance is shallow. A person’s mind must be in good health to be healthy. Looks are temporary. This did not drive the reason you are with somebody & choose to make a new Life.
Not only does the enemy control our feelings and emotions through screens they get us to attempt to satisfy them with material objects. No matter who we are, now they seek to make all consumers of our own colonization and destruction of the Land.
Study, Experiment & Execute- The creation of the Consumer
Today’s industrial world uses the old roman philosophy of bread & circus for control. Entertainment (Circus) & Welfare (food).
Now they’ve mashed them together making everything circus, flashy entertainment that tells us what to buy, whether it’s food, jewelry, shoes, clothes, toys, games, music devices, phones, computers, household items or whatever they can to get us to continue this perpetual cycle of buying things. Humans are now in a constant state of wanting something else, always getting the itch to buy something else. It is yet another product of low self-esteem, always trying to fill a void, one that can only be filled with Land and Water & living by Natural Law.
Turning humans into buyers of things is called Consumerism. It is another advanced form of colonization. Psychoanalysts have learned they can control people through the selling of stuff. They study the oldest desires in the Hind Brain of individuals then try to fulfill them with products. There are always new products to fulfill those desires in a better way.
Public relations are utilized to control Life in every aspect: the constant sight & sound of bright flashy things, then wanting them & getting them.
The core of white civilization is Individualism, so study groups were set up over generations to find what appeals to the individual human mind & how they can make people Narcissistic, so companies can appeal to that desire & control through products.
In the 1980’s business stopped dividing people by social class and started classifying them by what their inner psychological wants were.
Those who wanted Security & Belonging are Mainstreamers. If they sought Status & Esteem of Others they are Aspires.
If it is Control they seek they are Succeeders,
or if it is self-esteem they are Reformers.
They market products to fill the wants of these people.
Now through social media they mine all the information they can get about people & market to them directly for their individual wants and desires. It is called Data Mining, and is the newest tool used to help advance control through buying & debt.
Data Mining is used by corporations, police and intelligence.
Wikipedia says: “With this data, companies create customer profiles that contain customer demographics and online behavior. A recent strategy has been the purchase and production of ‘network analysis software’. This software is able to sort out through the influx of social networking data for any specific company.It is used to help companies improve their sales and profitability. Facebook has been especially important to marketing strategists. Facebook’s controversial ‘Social Ads’ program gives companies access to the millions of profiles in order to tailor their ads to a Facebook user’s own interests and hobbies. However, rather than sell actual user information, Facebook sells tracked ‘social actions’. That is, they track the websites a user uses outside of Facebook through a program called Facebook Beacon.”
That shit is crazy! Data mining is the next advancement of colonization
We were not born to be data mined consumers!
Are We Stronger Social Beings because of Fed-book?
Controlling our inner most feelings, when we are hungry, sexually aroused & scared due to violence, are at the root of control. At one time these feelings would come naturally, when needed. When our body needs more energy, it tells us, and we eat or drink, when we are alone with our partners we are in an intimate space we get sexually aroused, when some form of confrontation or violence occurs we make the decision to fight or get out of the situation somehow if we can. These are not feelings that should be turned on and off by movies, internet, images, billboards or games. By controlling our emotions & feelings, we are like a puppet or a toy that can be turned on & off at the will of the enemy.
“We strengthen our brains neural circuits of fear, anger and helplessness when we engage in negativity, faulty thinking, feeling and behavior…
Our brain changes depends on how we train our minds to engage the world…
A Healthy well balanced mind and brain are essential to engage in proactive, creative & successful decolonization activities” – Michael Yellow Bird
So are we stronger and better human beings because of fed-book. Are we socially advanced? Do we live the good stress free life of our ancestors?
When you log on you may feel like it, but that is all it is, a feeling, not real Life. Get real. Get a Real Life and Real friends who you know and trust and won’t be attracted to you because of physical appearances, what you type & false virtual status.
When phones first entered our communities, elders started to see the break down of personal interaction. People no longer talked to each other face-to-face, just over the phone. Visits and social gatherings became less frequent due to the ease of the phone. Now Internet has taken over, so instead of talking, people are typing and texting, another deeper level of social breakdown with absolutely no human interaction, just writing and reading through a screen.
We have been told we are more social than ever, learning how to speak a language of typed acronyms. Social implies interaction, not typed interaction, but physical interaction.
Children are the primary targets of it all. If children can be taught from a young age, you can control them as adults.
The majority of kids and teens spend about 75% of their awake time attached to some sort of screen.
What type of human is this going to be as an adult? What skill sets will that child learn? Will any of them be applicable if there was no electricity? Will any of these children be functional without electricity?
Addiction is the continued use of a substance or continuation of a behavior despite extremely negative consequences.
Not being able to function without electricity is an extremely negative consequence, a suicidal one. In the world of cyber war, whole Nations electrical systems can be turned over with the switch. On average approximately 7.5 hours per day are spent using some form of entertainment/electrical media. Most people think they need constant audio or visual stimulation.
Doctors have recently set general guidelines recommending that children under the age of two should not watch TV or any form of screen entertainment at all, because television “can negatively affect early brain development” & that children of all ages should not have a television in their bedroom. If it’s bad for child humans in cannot be good for adult ones either.
Where there are humans there are screens, screens have quickly replaced missionaries to colonize those who are uncivilized (not of the city). It is a world-wide disease, one that people slave in jobs to get and give to their children.
Bright flashy loud T.V. & games is how they get children’s attention; Using our instinctive sensitivity to movement and sudden changes in vision or sound. The human naturally orientates itself to screens, it is proven almost from birth: infants, when lying on their backs on the floor, will crane their necks around 180 degrees to watch TV.
Through stylistic techniques, they activate this orienting response by increasing the rate of cuts, edits, zooms, criticism, sudden noises & camera changes in the same visual scene to increase the persons physiological excitement along with attention to the screen. The content of the program is irrelevant. Screen based entertainment is the flavor enhancer of the audio-visual world, providing unnatural levels of sensory stimulation.
Research from China and Mexico identified television exposure as an independent factor in obesity. Mexico’s health ministry has reported that obesity has risen by 170 per cent in a single decade, 12 per cent higher for each hour of television watched per day. Eating when watching TV is a main factor, humans continue to salivate unnaturally in response to more and more food when normally they would not. 75 per cent of meals are eaten in front of the television.
Other studies have shown that for every hour of television watched there were an increase in attention problems. The younger and more TV watched the more serious the attention disorders become.
The latest research on communication disorders suggests that early childhood television viewing may be an important trigger for autism (communication disorder), which is steadily increasing.
Children get less sleep than previous generations had & have a harder time getting into a deep sleep. Passive exposure to TV creates sleeping difficulties in all age groups, from infants to adults.
A 25-year study, tracking children from birth has recently concluded that television viewing in childhood and adolescence is associated with poor educational achievement by 30 years of age. Early exposure to television has long-lasting bad consequences for educational achievement and later, the socio-economic status and well-being.
Not that we are promoting the white worlds view of educational and socio-economic status, but it goes to show that screens produce a dumbing effect on the population no matter what their goals are in Life.
Watching screens together, whether TV, Computers or cell phones, is a main pastime of families in the industrial world taking up more time than any other activity but sleep and even that is getting over powered by screen time.
Toys & Games
As Indigenous children we used to play with toys designed to help us learn coordination & the skill sets necessary in our world to Provide & Protect as adults. For example, little bows & arrows, hand-woven dolls to care for as if they were babies & many others that began to teach, from a young age, the jobs we would need to learn to be a beneficial member of our Community & Nation.
After colonization, we began playing with plastic & rubber toys which had very little significance to our way of Life & the Natural world. Now, kids are playing video games, learning how to be electrical killers & consumers, undoubtedly preparing them for a robotic world, whether in War or Purchase.
Recent estimates put the number of people playing video games worldwide at around 1.2 billion. This is mostly children & teens, not including the millions of adults sitting in front of slot machine screens, also known as adult gaming. These addictions are causing children & adults to ignore their own basic necessities of Life, such as Hygiene, Health & Humanity.
Dr. David Greenfield Director of the Center for internet and technology Addiction in Connecticut says people have died or killed others because their games were taken away.
“There are people who have died of deep vein thrombosis, starvation, repetitive motion injuries, heart attacks, malnourishment, and bowel restrictions because they refuse to go to the bathroom,” he said. At a Computer Addiction Services center in Richmond, bc, excessive gaming accounts for 80% of youth counsellor’s caseloads. Overuse of social networking and gaming also makes children more susceptible to depression and anxiety.
Globally, there have been deaths caused directly by exhaustion from playing games for excessive periods of time. Again it is the release of dopamine’s in the Reward System driving these cravings & addictions in Youth. Teck-no-logic addiction through screens is the most addictive thing on Earth and the materials used to make them are causing more diseases than any plague or pandemic know to Life.
Where do screen and computers come from & what are they made of?
Each screen and computer comes from somewhere. It is a compilation of materials that come from the Earth. These materials are acquired through mining.
Mining is when they blow holes into the Earth to access rocks below the surface that contain various metals they use for products. Mining has gone on for thousands of years. The industrial revolution enabled mining to reach a whole new level. Most products around the world are derived from mining, whether for metal or oil. In the process of separating the metal from rock they use toxic and hazardous chemicals, which leak into the ground & ground water. The metals that are mined are hazardous themselves, they are in the ground for a reason & when exposed to the surface have terrible effects on all Life.
There are over 40 individual materials that make up most electrical products, and are all toxic chemicals ranging from hazardous flame retardants such as PVC & brominated flame retardants (BFRs), including PBDEs (tri- to deca- brominated congeners), PBBs (tetra- to deca-brominated congeners), HBCD (hexabromocyclododecane) and TBBPA (tetrabromobisphenol A) to heavy metals like lead, tin, chromium, mercury, cadmium, tantalum, tin, tungsten, niobium, gold, copper, bauxite, steel, glass, crystalline silica, phosphorous & many more.
These chemicals are linked to birth defects, impaired learning and numerous other serious health problems.
After they stop working, and they all stop working at some point, they are discarded & become electronic waste, continuing poisoning & leeching poison into Life. Literally billions of electronic products are thrown away each year & billions more are produced to continue the never ending supply & demand. But the Earth only has a limited amount of these materials, leading to very serious discussions around mining other planets and even the Moon.
What do these hazardous & toxic materials do to our Bodies?
Physically, electricity is the greatest cause of sickness around the world and in the story of humanity. It is the greatest weapon for not only monitoring humans, it is the greatest weapon of sickness & disease ever known to the Earth. It is causing millions of pre-mature deaths and making whole generations dependent on a white medical system that has no concern with healing.
The use of electrical products by children is killing whole generations earlier than ever before, starting at the core of Life, the cellular structure.
“The body conducts electricity that enters it. When this happens, the body’s electrical processes are disturbed, & cell functioning is disrupted. The electricity in electrical wiring and appliances changes the atomic structure of the cell and breaks the bonds that exist in and between cells. This triggers changes in blood chemistry, induces free radicals, disrupts the cells ability to control PH levels, enzyme activity, cell reproduction, synthesis, functioning and energy transfer. A healthy and permeable cell membrane wall is needed for effective communication and coordination of activity between cells, tissues, organs and nerves. When exposed, to EMFS, the protein in the cell membrane wall is weakened and the cells react as though threatened by an invader and elicits a state of emergency (fight or flight response) in the body. In this state of emergency, non-vital processes are delayed, and blood pressure, heart rate and blood sugar levels increase. The cell enters into a state of emergency. Besides impaired communication and coordination, the reduced membrane permeability also makes it difficult for nutrients to enter and for toxins to exit. As a consequence, the body does not benefit from nutrients and healing therapies as it should, When the cell is in a state of emergency, instead of producing water and carbon dioxide, the cell produces hydrogen peroxide and carbon monoxide. In short, the cell begins to ferment. The state of emergency behavior is passed on to each subsequent generation of cells.”- National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences
VLF (Very Low Frequency) & ELF (Extremely Low Frequency) & EMF (Electric Magnetic Frequency) are emitted from all electronics. They cause what scientist call PEMR (Pulsed Electro Magnetic Radiation) which disturbs the balance of living cells. PEMR exist around all screens & continue shooting out of them even when turned off and unplugged. Magnetic Radiation travels through absolutely everything, walls, metals, flesh, screen filters…everything.
Magnetic Radiation creates electric smog which is everywhere, affecting all Life & doing irreversible harm to all, especially those who are around it all the time. Those who keep cellphones in their pockets, talk or text on them, watch TV or spend time on computers are the most affected.
Magnetic Radiation affects the whole body. The Pineal Gland is the organ most impaired by EMF exposure. This organ produces hormones and neurotransmitters that tune and regulate the hypothalamus, central nervous system, and immune system. EMF exposure suppresses the pineal gland activity leading to the reduction of two important chemical messengers: Melatonin and Serotonin. Both are involved in regulating numerous processes and functions in the body. Serotonin has enormous influence over many brain functions. Melatonin is a powerful antioxidant needed to keep the body healthy and strong.
Serotonin Deficiency can cause: insomnia; memory and learning disorders; mood disorders; eating disorders; depression; obesity; panic attacks; alcoholism; headaches; ADD; aggression; fibromyalgia; PMS; deficits schizophrenia and deficits in executive, fibromyalgia, schizophrenia, anxiety, memory and learning disorders, and impairments in functions that are collectively known as executive functions.
Our body has sixty trillion cells. Each cell is a tiny organism and can easily be damaged by the action of electromagnetic wave lengths which interfere with your body & reproductive abilities, menstrual cycles. For example, sperm & egg count are greatly affected by electrical products.
Obviously electrical products are not a good for health, but putting laptops, i-pads cellphones or any screen product on your lap is even worse. Some people do it daily, all day.
Watch out Narcissists, it’s not just what is inside that is affected, computers also cause wrinkles in the skin and premature aging. What about close to your head? It’s no coincidence cell phone are called cell phones, they affect the cells & when put close to the head all the time cause Cellular Death.
Cellular Death
Your cell phone emits and receives signals. There is an electromagnetic field around each cell phone, damaging memory, endocrine secretions, sexual abilities; gout & can cause dementia, depression, Parkinson’s disease & severe neurological diseases & tumors. Scientists admit there is a direct relationship between brain cancer and cell phone use. Brain cancer tumor risk has been steadily increasing over the last 10 years- particularly among the 20 -29 year olds.
What will it be like in the next 10 years with more & more children having i-pods & cell phones? Some scientists believe whole generation to come will be crazy in the head & brain tumors will be common in teenagers. Before you decide to allow your kids to have or even touch cell phones, look at the dangers involved.
Radiation in general & radiation from cell phones in particular penetrate much deeper into the tender skulls of kids than into adults. Tissues in their brains and limbs are still growing and their cells are rapidly dividing. Without a doubt it will decrease their life span. Once it penetrates your kids’ heads, it enters their brain and eyes at an absorption rate far greater than it does in adults. Up to 9 times higher. What does it mean for your kids? It means that their risks for cancer & mental sickness are far greater.
Cell phones for kids are death traps, ensuring them an unhealthy Life. They may seem normal only because we live in this time of worldwide radiation & really do not know what normal health is. Damage to the genetic material in kids’ growing cells can result in disruption of cellular functions, cell death, development of tumors, and damage to the immune functions and the nervous systems.
Many nations around the world have banned cell phone use to children. For Indigenous People, our children are everything & we should do the same. Also beware of all electronics near babies & children. Most baby monitors use digital wireless technology that produce more powerful EMF’s than living near a cell phone tower.
When EMF exposure is reduced, healing energies flow freely & the body begins to heal itself & get stronger. The nervous system & acupuncture meridians are unblocked. Our Natural flow begins again, the pineal gland increases production of hormones & chemicals that control & effect mental, emotional & physical functioning. Clarity, concentration, understanding and calmness set in. There is control of impulses & increased Energy.
Social Media: A scary place of Strangers, Predators & Perverts
Besides the effects on the body itself, children are at the greatest risk from social networking. Social Media is the perfect place for predators to hide.
Would you send your young children into the middle of a populated prison yard unattended? Or a busy city full of every kind of weirdo known to man-kind? Knowing full well that perverts & predators are lurking all around just waiting to find prey to abuse? Hell No. So why would you allow them to have any social media accounts? This is essentially what parents are allowing by allowing their children to make accounts online. Just because “everybody is doing it,” it has become normalized, much like the gas chambers & smallpox blankets humans are blindly following with no thought of what it is they are doing. It is absolutely crazy! Protect your babies by keeping them off social media & away from sickos.
Building a Society of Cyborgs
Many walk around constantly looking at a screen like zombies, having no situational awareness & knowledge of what is happening around them. Go anywhere with large human populations, whether on the street, a city bus or shopping mall & you will observe the majority of everyone constantly looking down at their cell phones, or as we prefer to call them, little poisonous electrical boxes. But why look down all the time? Why not just have it as a part of your body? That makes more sense, right?
Cyborgs may sound sci-fi, but they are actually real & gaining in popularity.
Cyborg, short for “cybernetic organism” is a being with both organic and artificial parts. They are currently making cyborgs for all sectors of industrial society, humans that are not full humans, full of electrical chips with the ability to stay constantly connected to the internet. Some cyborgs have their eyeglasses implanted into their head with screens on in their glasses so they can always see their social media sites. Even better, some have fake eyes with cameras & screens built into them.
Cyborgs are a part of the movement to replace humans with robots. Militaries are at the most advanced stages of robotics, some planning to have up to 1/3 of military vehicles unmanned within the next few years.
Constant cell phone & social media updating may seem innocent enough but it is normalizing the constant presence of technology which is leading to the normalcy of cyborgs & all robotics, or TI (Teck-No-Logic Intelligence).
Movement Health
“The most important thing was security. What you knew you held in your heart.” – Companaero Raul, EZLN Warrior
“Everything was for security.”
“Above all we had to be discreet about things.”- Commandante Abraham, EZLN Warrior
“In the first place, we learned Security measures without Security you can’t do anything”…
“As the work grew, we had even more security”
“…We always put security first” – Companero Gerardo, EZLN Warrior
“He was also very strict about security…” – Capitan Lucio, EZLN Warrior, speaking about subcommandante Pedro
“They were told how to be careful because everything was underground” – Major Moises, EZLN Warrior
Security Effects of fed-book
Making Gathering Intelligence Easy & More Efficient
Social media is an intelligence operation, which has completely changed the jobs of intelligence groups. Before social media, spies had to put much more effort into gathering information about those they want information from, and it would take an extensive amount of time to put complete profiles together on targets.
Today, everybody gives them all the personal and group information they need on their own, and all the intelligence community has to do is monitor and organize the information. Social Media use, combined with cell-phone conversations and text are enabling oppressive regimes around the world to monitor people more than ever, maintaining & gaining more control in every way.
Everything you do on social media stays on social media, regardless of your security settings, or if you can still see it or not. Whatever you post is somewhere, forever. There is no such thing as deleting your account– all info can be recovered at any time.
With over 2 billion people (and growing daily) on some sort of social media site it is the best known surveillance technology that has ever existed. For an intelligence organization, the most difficult & time consuming job is the collection and organization of data. With social media people make their own intelligence profile and update it constantly, sometimes multiple times a day.
Social media makes us think that record keeping and documentation of our lives & locations is normal. We have begun to normalize surveillance and even make excuses why it is ok.
People give government and business access to information that they would never have the time or resources to get on their own. There is no controversy about surveillance because the targets of it are not only the ones producing the information they are also distributing it.
Fed-books privacy policy states: “We may share your info in response to a legal request if we have a good faith belief that the law requires us to do so…we may also share information when we have a good faith belief it is necessary to: detect, prevent and address fraud and other illegal activity…” What the hell is a “good faith belief”?
Fed-book gives a trail of information on people from physiological wants and valuable information about the reading, listening, viewing & buying habits & attractions of its users.
In 2006, Newsweek reported that myspace had nearly 800 agencies and a 24-7 law enforcement team helping surf the site and monitor its users, their activities, and locations. In 2 years of launching the site it was contributing to 150 investigations a month. “Under Justice Department guidelines anything posted is fair game,” according to myspace vice president Jason Feffer. And that was years ago. myspace was shut down and made way for dozens of social media sites, and ever improving law enforcement monitoring and investigations.
The US Department of Justice uses social media to, “Reveal personal communications, establish motives & personal relationships, provide location information, prove & disprove alibis, and establish crime or criminal enterprises.” In the same Justice Department, documents say their purpose is to go undercover on fed-book and other social media sites to “communicate with suspects/targets, gain access to non-public info & map social relationships/networks.”
A department of Homeland Security memo states, “Narcissistic tendencies in many people fuels a need to have a large group of friends link to their page and many of these people accept ‘cyber friends’ that they do not even know… Once a user posts online they create a public record & timeline of their activities.”
Every year (since 2009) law enforcement has a gathering called SMILE-Social Media Internet & Law Enforcement. The gathering is held to “emphasize the relationship between Law enforcement, social activist and traditional media.” They also teach & share techniques regarding “maintaining public order & mass surveillance in an open source world”.
Infiltration into movements depends on believability of the informant. With social media you just have to type the right words your targets want to hear, post pics & videos they will like. They can just simply like the posts of their targets & gain enough trust to start engaging targets in typed conversations and if they really want to get close, soon enough they can get a phone number from target and start to have phone conversations, which can lead to face to face meetings. Profiles & posts offer law enforcement all the information they would ever need to pose a recruit or real member of the targeted organization.
The number of social media sites & users give the impression that there are too many people to keep track of. In reality, law enforcement is becoming better than ever at dealing with massive amounts of information. The NYPD (New York Pig Department) said they plan to “mine social media sites like facebook, twitter, myspace, linked in, in order to find criminals bragging about a crime they’ve committed or planning to commit.” Data mining is not just limited to policing. The CIA follows up to 5 million tweets a day. Analysts then cross-reference the data with other available intelligence and create reports for the white house.
Connecticut attorney general, Richard Blumenthal says, “The illusion of privacy is simply self-delusion on the part of young people.” Fed-book uses facial recognition software that automatically identifies people in photos. Opting out does not keep them from gathering data and recognizing your face- it just keeps people from tagging you. A person does not even need to be a Fed-book user to be identified.
There are over 90 billion (and counting) photos that fed-book hosts have access to, which they can then give to anybody they have “a good faith belief” should have it.
The US Army states that one of the ‘key tasks of counterinsurgency are to understand how members of a targeted population interact with each other’. The FBI can now instantly compile thorough dossiers/profiles (a collection of documents about a particular person, event, or subject.) on u.s. citizens tying together surveillance outside a drug store, credit card transactions, cell-phone call records, texts, emails, airplane travel info & web-search information.
Communications, along with public data like Facebook profiles, GPS location information, tax data, and other commercial data, were used to create “sophisticated graphs of some american’ social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions, and other personal information,” said The New York Times.
In addition to phone records and email logs, the National Security Agency (NSA) uses Facebook and other social media profiles to create maps of social connections. A policy change in November 2010 gave the NSA the ‘legal’ right to chain together info on targets, and discover & track connections from all other intelligence services. Julian Asange, founder of whistleblower wiki-leaks says, “Everyone should understand that when they add their friends to Facebook, they are doing free work for United States intelligence agencies, and building this database for them,”
Find ‘Em, Fix ‘Em, Flank ’em, Fuck ’em is a common military term used when engaging an enemy.
With social media we lead to our own demise.
We get found every time we log in, and you’re always found if you stay logged in. Your location is always picked up.
We are fixed, because they know our attention is on a screen in specific location.
We can get flanked at any time we are in a virtual world because we never see them coming.
We get fucked whenever they want, or better yet they let us fuck ourselves by giving us an open line to incriminate ourselves by thinking we have some form of freedom.
Building your house on the sand.
Organizing through fed-book-the illusion of being organized.
“People in the movement are falling for that shit?”
-Wolverine, Secwepemc Warrior, response when told about Fed-book.
Being involved in any Movement or Organization you must have strong ties. Connections & trust is of the utmost importance. Fed-book & social media in general promotes weak ties, the weakest possible, so weak that people accept support from anybody who types the right words; they could be cops, intelligence analysts, rapists, molesters, crazies or just everyday pieces of shit.
Some people promote that the social movement is more organized than ever before, but this couldn’t be farther from the truth.
There has never been a time in our story that we have been so un-organized.
Making connections around the world at the click of a friend confirmation is so fake it’s a bad joke. You do not know them, they are not your friend, ally or supporter, you cannot confirm or deny anything substantial about the people you connect with on social media, only thing that you know for sure is that you don’t really know them, or even really know if it is the person whose pictures you are looking at. Some think they can learn about the supposed person they are friending by checking out their photos, friends & posts, but learning about anybody through a screen is impossible.
Virtual reality is just that, it is virtually real, but it isn’t really real. Our Movement for the Liberation of our Lands and People is Real, not virtual, so we cannot claim to be part of this Movement through a virtual reality, it’s fake, a figment of imagination. Let’s get real.
Are you Fed-book Down or Really Down? The rise of the Internet Warrior
“There is no excuse for weakness.” – Sakej, Mik’Mak Warrior
Narcissism not only plagues the average fed-book user but it is what contributes to the continuing exposing & monitoring of so-called ‘movement’ members & organizers. Many think they are so beautiful, but the only real beauty is for Intelligence & police, through social media they make themselves a beautifully easy target for monitoring & surveillance.
Being a celebrity & well-known is promoted by society, even in Indigenous Movements that are supposed to be fighting for Land & Water. There are constantly people who are seeking to be fed-book famous, using the fight for the Land as a way to get attention to try to boost that low self-esteem. There is now an enormous amount of people, who are ‘down’ with the cause online, but they’re real Life actions & lifestyle is everything but down; just another unhealthy consumer contributing daily to the destruction of the Earth.
Celebrities are not Leaders. Leaders lead humans through example & influence. We must revive our real teachings & do away with pre-madonna celebrities craving attention who have no real life skills. Posting & posing are not skills, sorry.
A Lakota War Leader constantly reminds his Warriors that “the most important time to be a Warrior is when nobody is looking.” Fed-book is the opposite. People just play Warrior when they think people are looking. That’s all they are doing, playing. But this game is real Life & real Struggle involving real Life consequences too.
Educating people about current situations is great, but there are far better, more secure & less self-incriminating ways than social media to do it. In the current teck-no-logic world many may have forgotten how to really organize with humans, or for the younger ones they were most likely never taught.
Internet defenders often bring up the Zapatistas as a ‘great’ example of how effective the internet can be. To a certain extent, they are right. But, the Zapatistas spent 10 years organizing secretly, meeting with real humans, building a Movement from the ground up, and never informing intelligence services or the world about their organizing or their plans. They did not exist in the virtual world until they chose to & they did not choose to until they had a strong enough force to take over 7 cities & 650 ranches all while maintaining their home bases & villages. They did not organize their Movement through internet & damn sure not through social media (monitoring) if they did we would have never heard of them cause they wouldn’t exist anymore– they would have never even been able to get started.
“…The fact that people see social media as a tool for social change is more a triumph of marketing than the result of some digital revolution. Social media is a powerful tool for the very institutions that we are at war with, the people that seek to exploit & oppress us. Embracing it has resulted in our willing participation in a process of surveillance that we should be actively resisting”
-Evan Tucker, ‘Who needs the NSA when we have facebook’ Life During Wartime: Resisting Counter Insurgency
Reactionary Mentality vs. Pro-Active Thinking
We have been strategically raised to only address symptoms and not causes. To look at the pain & not the source of the pain. When we have a skin rash, we get a topical cream to put over it, never stopping to ask, what caused the rash, if we have a cough, we get something to sooth the cough, not addressing what caused the cough. When have no more food we go to a store. Before industrialization we were pro-active, we would go & harvest more food while we still had food, so we would never risk having none. They need our mind to react to situations & conditions they’ve created & not proactively work on fixing them.
Campaigning & protesting are reactionary actions. This is a mind-state promoted by the system, being a reactionary. We must get out of the campaign mentality. Protesting & freedom of speech are legal for a reason, because they produce no genuine change to the destruction of Mother Earth. While some campaigns may be successful in stalling some projects or achieving some legal legislation in colonial governments, no campaign has ever stopped this beast from swallowing the Earth, Water, Air & Universe. Even if they stop for a while, you can guarantee they will be back at some point to get the resources.
Social Media campaigns are a perfect way to keep those who could be potential in the building of a real Movement distracted with Narcissistic Celebrity views of getting known by ‘fighting’ the corporate world. They are in fact not really fighting but becoming another hindrance to real substantial Movement that led the Zapatistas to have a Land Base with clean Water to operate & Live from.
This industrial world does not limit their mind to single projects–industrial projects are a small part of how they keep this society functioning. The systems thinking & vision are very large; ours must be as well. The more we get caught into a campaign to campaign, or event to event mentality, the less we are thinking about the big picture, which may include stopping these projects, but cannot be limited to it. Projects and campaigns to stop them are the symptoms that arises out of industrialization. It’s not the cause. In an organized movement if we want real change we must address the root cause of the problem, a false man-made way of life based on mining, oil, electricity & greed.
Now people are virtually protesting, letting off steam through comments & posts, having even less effect than previous generations, thinking the Movement is in the latest image and movie. Instead of being on the Land protecting the Earth, many are concerned with getting the newest camera & computer to help get their word out. Everybody is a producer & photographer in the digital age. Technology has become a great excuse for in-action & building a real Movement with actual humans.
In order to fight industry, first we must not need industry, or else it’s called suicide. To fight mining we cannot live mining. To fight oil, we must not live oil. To fight industry, we must not need industry. How can we not need industry? By replacing it with Indigenous ways of living. They replaced our ways with white ones & they do not work. Now we will replace white ones with ours again.
Time & Energy is all we have while on Earth, we must spend it wisely, every breath that we spend on fedbook, twitter or linked-In, is one we cannot get back. It is wasted time. We must use our time being productive for the real world we live in & the one we want to create. Use your time to learn how to provide for yourself in every part of living, this is the biggest fight of all, this is the Movement, being a Real Indigenous Person.
Whatever english term you prefer, Indigenous, Indian, Native or Original these are just english words to describe those who still live on the Land without Industry. If you do not live this way, you are not really Indigenous. Right? All humans were people of the Land at one time, even in europe. Can europeans claim Indigenous Identity because they’re ancestors used to live with the Land? Is Indigenous just having ancestors that lived with the land? That would mean the world was Indigenous, right?
But the world is not. To use the term Indigenous you must recognize your Responsibilities to continue Life with Natural Law & Live by them. Does that mean a white hippy in north amerikkka can say they are Indigenous? We’re not saying that. But what we are saying is that we cannot just continue to be consumers & slave to the white-man’s possessions. We must recognize our Duties & work hard to fulfill them. Fed-book makes Life seem easier, less work. But is less work good? Does it make you Stronger? Does it make you a better Human?
As Bruce Lee says, “Do not pray for an easy Life, pray for the Strength to endure a difficult one”
Where do we go from here without Social Media?
“…if we’re going to be revolutionaries we have to be revolutionary to the last, because if one doesn’t accept the full consequences or abandons the people, it’s no good…
…If you say you have to Struggle, you have to go through till the end.” –Major Moises, Zapatista Warrior
So what can we learn from all of this? Well for one thing, social media is not advancing us in our daily lives to be better humans, it is not helping our families become better families, it is not helping our bodies become stronger & it is not helping our Movements for Land & Water. So what should we do about it? We can start by unplugging.
Deactivate your social media accounts. Take it as a loss while you still can.
Malcolm X says it best: “Once you change your philosophy you change your thought pattern, once you change your thought pattern you change your attitude, once you change your attitude it changes your behavior pattern & then you go into some action.”
Before neuroscience recognized the brains ability to change according to thoughts & experiences we have, Malcolm knew it through his own experience. Today they call it Neuro-plasticity. Knowing our brain has the ability to change its destructive thoughts, feelings, memories & narcissistic behaviors is the first step to getting strong real Life people. Only real Indigenous Men & Woman will make real change for the future. No change or strength lies in the virtual world, just confusion, weakness & disease.
We must not hold other humans up as the standard we strive to be like. Things are not ok because ‘respected’ people do them. We must think critically, examine what is going on around you, question it & if need be, change it. As long has we’re breathing it’s never too late.
Remember Tecumseh was just a Man & Lozen was just a Woman, with the same Organs & Bodily Fluids, Tissues & Energy as all of us. What made them different? First it was their Mind, how they thought & then their training. Because they thought different, they acted different, they trained hard to survive and Live in a Strong way. We too have the same potential to be like them, not just the same potential, but we have a Sacred Duty to be like them, they must be our standard, we must all be like Crazy Horse & Geronimo.
Next time you feel that temptation of weakness creeping in just ask yourself what would Tecumseh & Geronimo do? What would they think of social media & making our own intelligence profile for the enemies of the Earth?
A Movement is comprised of many individuals who in order to be successful must have a common vision and a plan on how to make that vision come to fruition. If our vision is re-building our Indigenous Nations, then we must have strong families to do this. When a man and a women make babies they have now knowingly or unknowingly engaged in a Sacred responsibility to care for these new lives, to guide them & protect them to the best of their ability regardless of the consequence. No matter what prior dreams and thoughts a person had as an individual with no children, the primary job now is to feed, cloth, protect and keep those new lives warm in cold and cool in hot. The child needs teaching & knowledge of the Land & Universe to be Strong, not screen time. We must Raise Warriors not addicts.
Get your mind out of screens. Come back to reality. If you were never in it, come & join us.
Real Warriors don’t sext, text, message, post, like, friend, comment, poke or any of the other slave talk in social media, they don’t were skinny jeans or self-model, they live and die according to Natural Law and walk the Lands in every part of the World.
Take Courage, be humble, this fight did not start with us & will not end with us, it is a Generational Struggle, our Duty is to continue Natural Law by Any Means Necessary. Love Life. It is Beautiful.
