This episode of The Green Flame podcast looks at Decisive Ecological Warfare, the only revolutionary environmental strategy designed to dismantle the global industrial economy by any means necessary.
Our show features a conversation with movement lawyer and poet Will Falk, and Deep Green Resistance co-author and philosopher Derrick Jensen. The conversation covers ecological collapse, resistance, morality, immigration, permaculture, and more.
We also share poetry by the exiled black revolutionary Assata Shakur, and 9 Principles of War from the U.S. Military that can be adapted for use by activists. Our music track for this episode is “Crying Over You” by Christoper Morrow, used under CC BY 3.0.
The Green Flame is a Deep Green Resistance podcast offering revolutionary analysis, skill sharing, and inspiration for the movement to save the planet by any means necessary. Our hosts are Max Wilbert and Jennifer Murnan.
Decisive Ecological Warfare
Decisive Ecological Warfare (DEW) is the strategy of a movement that has too long been on the defensive. It is the war cry of a people who refuse to lose any more battles, the last resort of a movement isolated, co-opted, and weary from never-ending legal battles and blockades.
The information in the DEW strategy is derived from military strategy and tactics manuals, analysis of historic resistances, insurgencies, and national liberation movements. The principles laid out within these pages are accepted around the world as sound principles of asymmetric warfare, where one party is more powerful than the other. If any fight was ever asymmetric, this one is.
The strategies and tactics explained in DEW are taught to military officers at places like the Military Academy at West Point for a simple reason: they are extremely effective.
When he was on trial in South Africa in 1964 for his crimes against the apartheid regime, Nelson Mandela said: “I do not deny that I planned sabotage. I did not do this in a spirit of recklessness. I planned it as a result of a long and sober assessment of the political situation after many years of oppression of my people by the whites.”
We invite you to read this strategy, and to undertake that same long and sober assessment of the situation we face. Time is short.
GDPR is a European legal framework intended to protect personal data, provide greater data transparency, and give people greater control over their data. It requires any group that stores or processes data to follow strict policies to ensure security. It also entitles individuals to request personal data reports and deletion, both of which must be completed within 30 days by any group holding the data.
Who does GDPR apply to?
At minimum, GDPR applies to any group or company which stores the data of EU citizens or residents, in practice it applies primarily to data processing entities based in the EU. This can include corporations, political parties, activist groups, and even individuals.
What are the consequences of negligence?
Violation reports are investigated, a warning is usually issued, data may be deleted, data processing may be restricted, and continued violations can result in fines up to €20,000,000 or 4% of revenue, whichever is greater. The consequences are significant enough to even warrant serious concern among large corporations.
What is a personal data request?
Anyone can submit a request for a comprehensive report on any data which relates to them, and these reports must include all data and a list of systems which store or process that data. Requests must be fulfilled in under 30 days. This is relatively easy for big businesses who have invested in compliance software, but intermediate businesses have much more difficulty, and small groups or individuals struggle the most. Processing a data request manually can take 30+ minutes per request because all systems must be checked.
What is a deletion request?
Anyone in the EU can request that their data be deleted from some or all systems. The data must be permanently deleted and all systems must be checked for data. This can also take 30+ minutes to complete per request, depending on the systems.
How do you weaponise GDPR?
Opposition groups and companies which perpetuate ecocide can be easily flooded with GDPR requests. Each individual email address warrants a separate request. If someone has 3 email addresses and a request template, they can consume 1-3 hours of a company, group, or individual’s time and resources by investing a few minutes. If the request is not completed in 30 days, or if the report is incomplete, they can report the offense for investigation. Additionally, any company, group, or individual that does not have GDPR compliant opt-in features and privacy statements can also be reported, even without a 30 day waiting period.
Strategic mass reporting can consume significant resources among medium sized targets, and can be devastating for smaller targets. This is a tactic which requires minimal training, is highly asymmetric, and can be very disruptive when targets are selected intelligently. I recommend identifying candidates like: climate science denial groups, fossil fuel lobbyists, regional oil and gas distributors, politicians, logging companies, and opposition movements.
This summer, all too many rivers have turned into vast graveyards for the corpses of an unfathomable number of salmon; these critical life givers cannot survive the searing heat. In turn, they will not feed the bears, who will not feed the trees nitrogen with their leftovers, and this will accelerate the death and burning of forests in a vicious cycle of destruction. The fires have already started and we all watch with horror as the Amazon, Central Africa, and the Arctic ignite into tower plumes of greenhouse gases, which again perpetuates a vicious cycle of destruction. At some point, these feedback systems will reach a critical tipping point and they will become unstoppable. When we exceed the “point of no return” it will seem like any other day, no alarm bells will ring, no governments will declare the passing of hope, and no magical saviour will ride down from the sky to protect the world against this endless appetite for carnage.
You are our only hope. You and me. You and me, and other indivuduals who are intelligent enough to see what’s in front of us, compassionate enough to care, and courageous enough to take action. What needs to be done is relatively straightforward: we must stop industrial civilization from destroying life on Earth. In the spirit of cutesy, clickbaity articles here are 4 ways you can help stop global extinction.
1. Stop Electricity Consumption
Most articles will tell you to buy solar panels, which are manufactured using fossil fuels. Or they’ll tell you to install a gimmicky technology in your house to reduce electrical use. Pardon my language, but f-ck that consumer bullsh!t. Changing individual consumer decisions will not save us from annihilation, we need to abolish consumerism as a culture and turn it off at its sources. There are dozens of strategies for reducing electrical use; some groups call for shooting high-capacity power lines with rifles, which causes them to overload and results in widespread blackouts. Other groups call for using electromagnetic pulse (EMP) devices to shut down transformer stations and other critial utility nodes. Another approach is to shut down the raw energy sources: coal, gas, oil, etc. Some people choose to block coal trains, other people blockade essential fracking equipment, and others choose open military action (nod to the Niger Delta Avengers).
If those most effective tactics aren’t possible given your situation, you might consider blockading or sabotaging local oil and gas vehicles to disrupt their regional supply chains. Some people choose to do this by dropping caltrops to puncture their tires, others add sugar to their fuel tanks to cripple their engines, or others choose to burn them when they’re empty. The smallest scale efforts involve locking their gates at night to delay their departure.
2. Send Funds to Resistance Movements
If you’re too busy working a job, or too averse to personal risk due to personal constraints, you should donate a certain number of hours of work per month toward funding those courageous people who are willing to put their lives on the line. Donate one full day of work per month, or half a day if you’re in dire financial straits. That amount of effort and commitment per month is enough to support much, if not all, of the essential needs of a resistance member. It covers their food, water, shelter, equipment, medicine, and legal aid. It’s always disappointing when someone professes to care deeply about preventing global extinction while continuing to prioritise their own consumer activities over either taking action or meaningfully supporting action.
There are many worthwhile groups to donate to, and Deep Green Resistance is among them [donate here]. Some of these groups can be more difficult to donate to due to local government oppression and restrictions to banking, so you may need to use an intermediary to get funds to them safely and privately. If you have any questions about these processes please contact Deep Green Resistance and we’ll help you figure it out.
3. Cripple the Economy
Economic recessions result in reduced rates of consumption, and consumption is at the heart of this global crisis. The simplest possible way to anonymously and effectively make a difference is by inhibiting local, regional, and national commerce. You should obviously target large corporations and not local businesses. Possible tactics include locking front doors and parking gates, causing disruption to shopping activities, blockading stores, disabling shipping vehicles while they’re in docks, spraying fox urine, damaging goods, and a million other small and large tactics. When you start looking for opportunities to disrupt the economy you will begin to see endless approaches and you should take advantage of as many of them as possible. Build and foster cultures of economic sabotage, make it part of your daily life.
Another option, discovered in Washington State during a major snow storm, is to intentionally slow or stop major freeways and interstates. This can be especially effective in large cities during rush hour conditions. It may not seem like it, but the cumulative effect of delaying traffic, even relatively briefly, is immense. A small and coordinated group of people could easily have millions of dollars worth of economic impact by simply driving under the speed limit and blocking all lanes for an extended distance. Studies in Japan have demonstrated that these types of alterations in the speed of traffic can result in massive traffic jams.
4. Prepare Communities
Perhaps the biggest obstacle to widespread action is our dependency on ecocidal systems for our survival. People have been colonized, intentionally, by these systems and part of that process involved systematically stripping us of the ancestral skills and knowledge which allowed us to live independently. Our children have been processed by “education” systems which stripped them of the capacity to source their own food, build their own homes, and build independent communities. Young minds were filled with the birth dates of presidents instead of the names and uses of local plants. Young minds were saturated with abstract figures in place of local knowledge of soil and water. We were prepared for work and reliance on factories because industrial civilization knew that self sufficiency empowers people to resist.
One of the greatest acts of resistance is to recover that ancestral knowledge; with it comes the strength and resilience to fight back, to build alternatives, and to actively fight back. Our communities will turn against us if they believe that their survival is dependent on the continuation of industrial civilization; from that perspective the defenders of life are the harbingers of death. Therefore, we must recognize that radical self sufficiency is the first step toward radical acts of resistance. Teaching communities to grow their own food empowers them to shut down fossil fuel infrastructure. Teaching communities to respect and love nature, as the giver of life, empowers them to fight against the destruction of our shared natural world.
Editors note: this article contains material excerpted from an August 2019 Communique from the Indigenous Revolutionary Clandestine Committee—General Command of the Zapatista Army for National Liberation, Mexico. Image by Nick Rahaim, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
August 17, 2019
We bring you our word. The same word as yesterday, today, and tomorrow. It is the word of resistance and rebellion.
In October of 2016, almost three years ago, during the 20th anniversary of the National Indigenous Congress [CNI], the sister organizations of the National Indigenous Congress and the EZLN made a commitment to go on the offensive in our defense of our Territory and Mother Earth. Persecuted by the bad government, by caciques, by foreign corporations, by criminals, and by the law, and as we accumulated insults, derision, and dead, we the originary peoples (the guardians of the earth), decided to go on the offensive and circulate the words and actions of resistance and rebellion.
…
The appearance of this new [presidential] administration has not fooled us. We know that the real boss has no other homeland than money, and that this same boss rules in the immense majority of the world’s plantations that they call “countries.” We also know that rebellion, dignity, and rage are absolutely prohibited. Despite that, all over the world, in its most forgotten and despised corners, there are human beings who resist being devoured by this machine and who refuse to give in, give up, or sell out. These people have many colors, they carry many flags, they come dressed in many languages, and their resistance and rebellion is enormous.
The big boss and his overseers build walls, borders, and sieges to try to contain these people who they claim are bad examples. But they never achieve their goal because dignity, courage, rage, and rebellion can’t be held back or incarcerated. Even if they hide behind their walls, borders, sieges, armies, police forces, laws, and executive orders, sooner or later that rebellion will come asking for its due. On that day there will be neither forgetting nor forgiveness.
We know that our freedom will only come about through our own work as originary peoples. With the appointment of the new overseer to Mexico, the same persecution and death has continued. Within only a few months [of his administration], at least a dozen of our compañeros of the CNI-CIG who were in the struggle were murdered. Among the dead was a brother much admired by our Zapatista communities—Samir Flores Soberanes.
Samir was murdered after having been singled out by Mexico’s overseer who, despite Samir’s death, marches on with the neoliberal megaprojects that will disappear entire peoples, destroy nature, and convert the blood of our originary peoples into profits for powerful capitalists.
Because of this, in honor of our Brothers and Sisters who have died, been jailed, or are persecuted or disappeared, we decided to name the Zapatista campaign that ends today and that we are now making public: “SAMIR FLORES LIVES.” After years of silent work and despite the siege against our communities and the campaign of lies and defamation, despite military patrols, despite the presence of Mexico’s National Guard, despite the counterinsurgency campaigns that were dressed up as social programs, and despite having been despised and forgotten, we have grown and we have made ourselves stronger.
….
Today we present ourselves to you with new Caracoles and more autonomous Zapatista municipalities in new zones of the Mexican southeast. We will now also have Centers of Autonomous Resistance and Zapatista Rebellion. In the majority of cases, these centers will also house a caracol, a Good Government Council, and Autonomous Zapatista Municipalities in Rebellion (MAREZ). Though it took time, the five original Caracoles, as their name would imply, have reproduced themselves after 15 years of political and organizational work. Our Autonomous Municipalities and Good Government Councils also planted new seedlings and watched them grow. Now there will be 12 Caracoles, each with its Good Government Council.
This exponential growth that today allows us to move beyond the government’s attempt to encircle us is due to two things:
First and foremost, our growth is due to the political/organizational work and example set by the women, men, children and elders of the Zapatista bases of support. It is especially due to the women and youth of the EZLN. Compañeras of all ages mobilized so that they could speak with other sisters in other organizations and sisters that had no organization. Without ever abandoning their own tastes and desires, the Zapatista youth learned from the sciences and arts and through these activities transmitted their rebellion to more and more youth. The majority of these youths, especially the young women, have now taken up posts in our organization and they steep this work in their creativity, ingenuity, and intelligence. Today we can say without any shame and with much pride that the Zapatista women are out in front of us like the Pujuy bird to show us the way and keep us from losing our way, on our flanks to keep us on track, and behind us so that we will not fall behind.
The second thing that made this growth possible are government policies that destroy communities and nature, particularly those policies of the current administration which refers to itself as the “Fourth Transformation.” Communities that have traditionally supported the political parties have been hurt by the contempt, racism, and voracity of the current administration, and they have moved into either hidden or open rebellion. Those above who thought that their counter-insurgent strategy of giving out handouts would serve to divide Zapatista communities, buy off non-Zapatistas, and generate confrontations and demoralization actually provided us with the final arguments that we needed in order to convince those brothers and sisters that it is far more useful to dedicate our efforts to defending our land and nature.
The government thought, and still thinks, that what people need are cash handouts. Now, the Zapatista communities and many non-Zapatista communities, as well as our brothers and sisters in the CNI in the southeast and all over the country, have responded and are showing the government that they are wrong. We understand that the current overseer was brought up in the PRI and within its “indigenist” vision in which originary people’s deepest desire is to sell their dignity and cease to be what they are. In that vision, indigenous peoples are simply museum artifacts or colorful artisanal items through which the powerful attempt to adorn the grayness of their own hearts. That vision also explains why this administration is so set on making sure that its walls (across the Isthmus) and trains (the ones they maliciously call “Mayan”) include the ruins of a civilization as their landscape, with the added bonus that this way they can also please the tourists.
But we originary peoples are alive, rebellious, and in resistance. Meanwhile, the national overseer is trying to dress up one of his underlings, a lawyer who at one time was indigenous, so that he, as has happened throughout human history, can divide, persecute and manipulate those who were once his own people. This lawyer, who is now the head of the INPI [National Institute of Indigenous Peoples], must scrub his conscience every morning with pumice to carefully eliminate any traces of dignity. He hopes in this way to whiten his skin and take on the purpose and outlook of his real boss. His overseer congratulates him and congratulates himself because there is there nothing better for controlling a rebellious people than using one of them who has turned on his cause, who has converted himself into a puppet of the oppressor for money.
…
Here we are; we are Zapatistas. So that you could see us, we covered our face. So that we could have a name, we left our names behind. We risk our present so that we might have a future. So that we might live, we die. We are Zapatistas, the majority of us have indigenous Mayan roots, and we do not give up, we do not give in, and we will not sell out.
We are rebellion and resistance. We are only one of the many sledgehammers that will tear down their walls, one of the many winds that will sweep this earth, and one of the many seeds that will give birth to other worlds.
We are the Zapatista Army of National Liberation.
From the Mountains of Southeastern Mexico.
On Behalf of the Men, Women, Children and Elders of the Zapatistas Bases of Support
For the Clandestine Indigenous Revolutionary Committee—General Command of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation
I am one of the researchers on the Underground Action Calendar. I really love it. I can’t help but smile when I read of efforts to try to destroy parts of the infrastructure of civilization. Around the world individuals are burning, bombing, dismantling and sabotaging telephone towers, electrical stations, pipelines, mines, communication cables, cyber networks and more!
But there is a problem in my research efforts at this time and I need your help. Specifically, there seem to be fewer and fewer publications of the incidents (action items) that I need for the calendar. I think that this problem is so pronounced now due to the current political climate in the U.S. where I live.
We are looking for published write-ups of completed attacks on infrastructure. In the past I used a global database (of “terrorist” incidents), which includes items through 2017. I feel that I have largely picked over that database. I am currently using several other sources, but they mostly seem to be limiting themselves to acts of protest and/or civil disobedience. While we recognize that these actions are necessary, they are not what we’re looking to include in the calendar.
Please send me info on or links to sources that you know of in your country. Thank you. Together we can turn the lights off!
About the Underground Action Calendar
The Underground Action Calendar exists to publicize and normalize the use of militant and underground tactics in the fight for justice and sustainability. We include below a wide variety of actions from struggles around the world, especially those in which militants target infrastructure, because we believe this sort of action is necessary to dismantle civilization. Listing an action does not necessarily mean we support or stand behind the goals, strategies, or tactics of those actionists.
This page highlights specific actions. See also our Resistance Profiles for broader information on the strategies, tactics, goals, and effectiveness of various historic and contemporary resistance groups.
By Norris Thomlinson / Originally published on DGR Hawaii / Featured image by Angela Davis, CC BY 4.0
Once you understand something about the history of a people, their heroes, their hardships and their sacrifices, it’s easier to struggle with them, to support their struggle. For a lot of people in this country, people who live in other places have no faces.”
–Assata Shakur
A World Apart
I grew up in the same country as Assata Shakur, but as a poor black woman, her autobiography reveals an experience a world apart from my own middle class, white male upbringing. She ably captures these differences in a series of anecdotes revealing that she did in fact grow up in a different country: “amerika”, while I enjoyed the facades of democracy, peace, and justice in America. I’ve been aware of the shocking statistics of incarceration rates of people of color, disproportionate distribution of wealth, heartbreaking inequity in education systems, increased exposure to toxins, decreased lifespans, and on and on. But I haven’t read much by black authors about their personal experiences navigating these systems of oppression and injustice. Shakur’s autobiography is surprisingly easy to read and even enjoyable, despite and because of its humorous tragedy, and makes an excellent introduction to a different reality for those of us born into white and/or male privilege.
Beyond her personal insights into the impacts of class, race, and gender, Shakur shares her astute political analysis, and draws a logical line from her childhood acceptance of the systems of America to her adult revolutionary struggle against amerika. Based on voracious reading, observation of the world around her, and careful thinking, she developed a radical analysis of structures of power and how to fight them. She understands that “What we are taught in the public school system is usually inaccurate, disorted, and packed full of outright lies” and that “Belief in these myths can cause us to make serious mistakes in analyzing our current situation and in planning future action.” She links the “interventions” and invasions of the US abroad to its theft of indigenous land and oppression of people of color at home.
Shakur knows none of this is an accident, fixable by asking those in power to change their ways. The people need to fight back, using violence if necessary:
“…the police in the Black communities were nothing but a foreign, occupying army, beating, torturing, and murdering people at whim and without restraint. I despise violence, but i despise it even more when it’s one-sided and used to oppress and repress poor people.”
Horizontal Hostility
Shakur explains that while those in power use schooling, media, the police, and COINTELPRO to divide and conquer those who might oppose them, the solution is simple (though not necessarily easy):
“The first thing the enemy tries to do is isolate revolutionaries from the masses of people, making us horrible and hideous monsters so that our people will hate us.”
“It’s got to be one of the most basic principles of living: always decide who your enemies are for yourself, and never let your enemies choose your enemies for you.”
“Some of the laws of revolution are so simple they seem impossible. People think that in order for something to work, it has to be complicated, but a lot of times the opposite is true. We usually reach success by putting the simple truths that we know into practice. The basis of any struggle is people coming together to fight against a common enemy.”
“Arrogance was one of the key factors that kept the white left so factionalized. I felt that instead of fighting together against a common enemy, they wasted time quarreling with each other about who had the right line.”
Parallels with Deep Green Resistance
It seems many of Shakur’s insights directly informed the Deep Green Resistance book, or the authors came to the same conclusions after studying similar history. For example, Shakur clearly states the need for a firewall between an aboveground and a belowground:
“An aboveground political organization can’t wage guerrilla war anymore than an underground army can do aboveground political work. Although the two must work together, they must have completely separate structures, and any links between the two must remain secret.”
She sees one of the main flaws of the Black Panther Party as having mixed aboveground political work with a militancy more appropriate for a belowground, especially in attempting to defend their offices at all costs against police raids. While understandable as symbolic of their pride and a willingness to fight for what was theirs, the simple reality was that the Panthers weren’t ready to go up against the military might of the state, and it was suicide to attempt to hold this symbolic territory. In asymmetric warfare, you must give way where the enemy is strong, and strike where the enemy is weak.
Perhaps most importantly, Shakur emphasizes several times the necessity of discipline and of careful, logical, long-term planning. She recounts an embarassing situation where she and some friends smoke marijuana in a public park while carrying radical literature, risking beatings or arrest by relinquishing full control of their faculties. After another revolutionary group helps them out of their precarious situation, a dazed Shakur resolves to take the struggle more seriously. This contrasts sharply with the drug- and sex-fueled Weathermen and their contemporaneous white radicals, whose self-indulgence in machismo and rebelliousness resulted in a strategy of instigating fistfights and rioting in the streets.
It reassures me that so many of Shakur’s hard-won lessons are foundational to Deep Green Resistance, as it reinforces my confidence in DGR as a well-researched analysis of historical movements and a solid guide to proceeding from here:
“There were sisters and brothers who had been so victimized by amerika that they were willing to fight to the death against their oppressors. They were intelligient, courageous and dedicated, willing to make any sacrifice. But we were to find out quickly that courage and dedication were not enough. To win any struggle for liberation, you have to have the way as well as the will, an overall ideology and strategy that stem from a scientific analysis of history and present conditions.
[…]
Every group fighting for freedom is bound to make mistakes, but unless you study the common, fundamental laws of armed revolutionary struggle you are bound to make unnecessary mistakes. Revolutionary war is protracted warfare. It is impossible for us to win quickly. […] One of the hardest lessons we had to learn is that revolutionary struggle is scientific rather than emotional. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t feel anything, but decisions can’t be based on love or on anger. They have to be based on the objective conditions and on what is the rational, unemotional thing to do.”
Read This Book
If you want to better understand racism, read this book. If you enjoy a well-told story of a unique and fascinating life, read this book. If you’re interested in historical revolutionary movements, read this book. If you’re interested in a modern revolutionary movement, read this book, read Deep Green Resistance, and let’s start putting the theory into practice.
“It crosses my mind: i want to win. i don’t want to rebel, i want to win.”
