Derrick Jensen: Not In My Name

Derrick Jensen: Not In My Name

Featured image: Sheyla Juruna/flickr

By Derrick Jensen / Deep Green Resistance

Let me say upfront: I like fun, and I like sex. But I’m sick to death of hearing that we need to make environmentalism fun and sexy. The notion is wrongheaded, disrespectful to the human and nonhuman victims of this culture, an enormous distraction that wastes time and energy we don’t have and undermines whatever slight chance we do have of developing the effective resistance required to stop this culture from killing the planet. The fact that so many people routinely call for environmentalism to be more fun and more sexy reveals not only the weakness of our movement but also the utter lack of seriousness with which even many activists approach the problems we face. When it comes to stopping the murder of the planet, too many environmentalists act more like they’re planning a party than building a movement.

For instance, there’s a video on YouTube of supermodels stripping, allegedly to warn us about global warming. How better to warn us than for a supermodel to shimmy out of her clothes to the accompaniment of a driving rock beat? The tagline beneath the video says, “No matter what your politics are, I think we can all get behind the notion of supermodels stripping.”

Well, not me. The video reinforces the values of a deeply misogynistic culture, where women’s bodies are routinely displayed for consumption by men, where pornography is a 90 billion dollar industry and the single largest commercial use of the internet. And in a movement that already loses women in droves because they’re objectified, harassed, raped, and silenced by men they’d considered comrades, do we really want to use recruiting tools that further this objectification?

Contrast the supermodel strippers with the Message from Sheyla Juruna, also on YouTube. A spokesperson for the indigenous Juruna peoples of the Xingu River in Brazil, Sheyla Juruna stares straight into the camera and says: “The Belo Monte dam is a project of death and destruction. It will decimate our populations and all of our biodiversity . . . We’ve already attempted various forms of dialogue with the government, doing everything we can to block this project, but we have not been heard. I think that it is now time for us to go to war against Belo Monte. No more dialogue. Now is the time to make more resolute and serious acts of resistance against this project.”

I guarantee that Sheyla Juruna did not become an activist for the fun and sex.

What’s more, the “fun and sexy” approach to environmentalism attempts to mobilize techniques that were developed for selling products toward building a movement. Showing a woman’s orgasmic face as she picks up a bottle of fabric softener may influence some people to purchase that brand. But becoming an activist is an entirely different process from buying fabric softener. The former requires fortitude, discipline, and dedication, while the latter requires four dollars to purchase the “natural brand that makes your laundry fluffy, cuddly, and static-free.”

In the arena of public relations, the U.S. military understands all too well something that environmentalists completely fail to grasp: How many recruiting ads have you seen selling the military as fun and sexy? None. An adventure, yes. Service to the community, yes. The few, the proud, yes. All of which, by the way, could and should be said about activism. Recruitment based on fun and sex will attract those who are in it for the fun and sex. Which means that either there will be a very high rate of attrition among such recruits or, far worse, the activism itself will become superficial enough to retain them. It ought to be obvious but in case it’s not: You can’t build a serious movement on superficiality.

The problems themselves are neither fun nor sexy, and the work of resolving these problems is anything but superficial. Organizing is hard work, sometimes tedious, often enraging, and, at this point in the ongoing murder of the planet, nearly always heartbreaking. Sheyla Juruna’s message isn’t about fun and games. Her message is about life and death — her own, that of her people, and that of the land without whom her people are no longer themselves.

Unfortunately, the notion that activism (they never dare call it resistance) has to be fun and sexy pervades the entire environmental movement, from the most self-styled radical to the most mainstream reformist. I have in my hands the most recent issue of the Earth First! Journal, which includes a photo from the most recent Earth First! Rendezvous (events that have a well-deserved reputation for drunken debauchery) depicting young men and women making a naked human pyramid. Remind me what this has to do with stopping this culture from killing the planet? Can you imagine Freedom Riders making coed naked human pyramids, painting their faces, or bringing papier-mâché puppets to sit-ins?

Or consider a recent campaign involving college students stripping to their underwear (do you see a theme?) and running around their campuses. A promotional article titled “Expose Coal Company Lies — With Your Underwear” begins, “Who doesn’t love a good cause that you can support by taking off your pants?” The “project” is a partnership between the Sierra Club and a “stylish underwear brand” called PACT. The Sierra Club, we are told, reports: “Over the past few weeks, students from coal-powered campuses have already used the underwear line in conjunction with organized events such as flash mobs, where students spontaneously [sic] strip down to their ‘Beyond Coal’ underwear, and a race to renewables, a cross-campus underwear run to advocate for the use of cleaner fuel sources.” An embedded video of the “underwear flash mob” is so thoroughly embarrassing (and depressing) that I truly hope you don’t look it up. Beneath the video, the text reads, “Hats Pants off to the Sierra Club and PACT!”

Do I really need to explore what’s wrong with (and creepy about) Sierra Club leaders and underwear makers encouraging young people to take off their clothes, much less pretending this is activism? I’m thinking about a recent global warming campaign where “3,000 people in New Delhi formed an enormous elephant threatened by rising seas — a plea to world leaders not to ignore the ‘elephant in the room.’” I’m thinking about face painting, and I’m thinking about puppets. And I’m thinking how spectacle supplants reality.

I’m also thinking about a conversation I had with some First Nations people in Vancouver, British Columbia, who described how, during the anti-Olympics protests, some Indian warriors were standing firm, alongside some of their nonindigenous allies, facing down police over the desecration of their lands. And they looked behind them and saw a physical separation between themselves on the one hand, and a big cohort of mostly white protesters on the other. But the separation was far more than physical, because the people in front were all dead serious, and behind them were any number of people wearing bunny costumes or running around in cardboard models of bobsleds.

When and why and how did partying and spectacle and debauchery become a substitute for serious political organizing and resistance? How did taking off one’s pants and running around become a political act? And where does dignity fit into any of this? There is, of course, a role for absurdity in political discourse. But the role of absurdity in political discourse is to ridicule and humiliate those in power, not ourselves.

The Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising took up arms in defense of their lives. The Shawnee war chief Tecumseh took up arms in defense of his people and his land. Harriet Tubman risked her own life to free her people. We, on the other hand, have a long way to go to form a serious resistance movement.

Originally published in the January/February 2012 issue of Orion.
First published online here.

Chiapas communities organize to protect sacred lagoon from tourist highway

Chiapas communities organize to protect sacred lagoon from tourist highway

Featured image: Candelaria residents erect a fence around the Suyul Lagoon to help protect it from intruders. (Waging Nonviolence/Sandra Cuffe)

By Sandra Cuffe / Waging Nonviolence

The reeds and grasses are as tall as Sebastián Pérez Méndez, if not taller. The vegetation is so thick it’s hard to see the water in the Suyul Lagoon that he and other local Maya Tzotzil residents are working hard to protect. Pérez Méndez crosses the road to point out where aquatic plants serve as a natural filter for the water as it flows out the lagoon, located in the highlands of Chiapas, in southern Mexico.

“The water is under threat,” he said. Pérez Méndez is the top authority of the Candelaria ejido, a tract of communally-held land in the municipality of San Cristóbal de las Casas. “We’re not going to allow it.”

Communities in Chiapas are organizing to protect the Suyul Lagoon and communal lands from a planned multi-lane highway between the city of San Cristóbal de las Casas and Palenque, where Mayan ruins are a popular tourist destination. Candelaria residents continue to take action locally to protect the lagoon. They also traveled from community to community along the proposed highway route, forming a united movement opposing the project.

It all started back in 2014 when government officials showed up in Candelaria looking for ejido authorities, including Pérez Méndez’ predecessor. It was the first residents had heard about plans for the highway. The indigenous inhabitants had not been consulted and were not shown detailed plans.

“They realized that [the government officials] were only seeking signatures,” Pérez Méndez said.

No one person or group is authorized to make a decision that would affect ejido lands, however, and there are strict conditions in place to ensure elected ejido leaders are accountable to members, he explained. An extraordinary assembly was held to discuss the highway project.

The Candelaria ejido was established in 1935, a year after a new agrarian law enacted during the Lázaro Cárdenas administration led to widespread land reform throughout Mexico. More than 2,000 people live in the 1,600-hectare ejido, and more than 800 of them are ejidatarios — legally recognized communal land holders whose rights have been passed down for generations. Only ejidatarios as a whole have the power to make decisions on issues like the highway project.

Candelaria residents paint over graffiti to fix up a roadside sign proclaiming their opposition to the highway project. (Waging Nonviolence/Sandra Cuffe)

Candelaria residents paint over graffiti to fix up a roadside sign proclaiming their opposition to the highway project. (Waging Nonviolence/Sandra Cuffe)

“The ejido said no,” said Guadalupe Moshan, who works for the Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas Human Rights Center, or FrayBa, supporting Candelaria and other communities in Chiapas. “They didn’t sign.”

Candelaria leaders sought assistance from FrayBa in 2014, after they were approached by government officials and pressured to sign a document indicating their consent to the highway project that would involve a 60-meter-wide easement through communally-held lands. Officials told community members that the highway was already approved and that they would be well compensated, but that there would consequences if they refused to sign, Moshan said.

“They told them they would suspend government programs and services,” she explained. In the days following the extraordinary ejido assembly rejecting the project, there was unusual activity in the area, according to Moshan. Helicopters flew over theejido, unknown individuals entered at night, and trees were marked, she said.

Protecting the Suyul Lagoon remains at the heart of Candelaria’s opposition to the planned highway. The lagoon provides potable water not only for Candelaria, but also for several nearby communities, said ejido council secretary Juan Octavio Gómez. Aside from the highway itself, project plans eventually shown to the community leaders include a proposed eco-tourism complex right next to the lagoon. That isn’t in the communities’ interest, Gómez explained.

“Water is life. We can’t live without it,” he said. “Without this lagoon, we don’t have another option for water.”

Fed by a natural spring, the Suyul Lagoon never runs dry. Local residents are careful to protect the water and lands in the ejido, where the majority of residents live from subsistence agriculture, sheep rearing and carpentry. They engage in community reforestation, but have plans to plant more trees, Gómez said.

The Suyul Lagoon is also sacred to local Maya Tzotzil. Ceremonies held every three years in its honor involve rituals, offerings, music and dance.

“It is said that it’s the navel of Mother Earth,” Pérez Méndez said.

Candelaria residents didn’t sit back and relax after rejecting the highway project in their extraordinary assembly. They have been organizing ever since. The Suyul Lagoon lies just outside the Candelaria ejido, but it belongs to ejidatarios by way of an agreement with the supportive land owner. Aside from the highway project and potential eco-tourism complex, the lagoon has caught the attention of companies, whose representatives have turned up in the area expressing interest in establishing a bottling plant.

It’s cold in February up in the highlands, but community members have been out all day, erecting a fence around the Suyul Lagoon to protect it from intruders. White fence posts are visible under the treeline across the sea of reeds. Like so many other local initiatives, fence materials are collectively financed by the ejido and the labor is all voluntary, communal work.

While residents continue stringing barbed wire from post to post, others take paintbrushes to one of their roadside signs. Locals have erected large signs next to roads in and around their ejido, announcing their opposition to the tourist highway.

A sign along the road leading to Candelaria informs passers-by of opposition to the planned super-highway. (Waging Nonviolence/Sandra Cuffe)

A sign along the road leading to Candelaria informs passers-by of opposition to the planned super-highway. (Waging Nonviolence/Sandra Cuffe)

“We’re also already organized with the other communities,” Pérez Méndez said. “All the communities reject the super-highway.”

After they were approached by government officials, Candelaria ejido residents traveled from community to community along the entire planned highway route. Some communities hadn’t heard of the project at all, while others said they were pressured into signing documents indicating their consent, Pérez Méndez said. As a result of Candelaria’s visits, community organizing along the highway route led to the formation of a united front of opposition, the Movement in Defense of Life and Territory.

Candelaria also recently got together with other indigenous communities in the highlands to issue a joint statement rejecting the tourist super-highway and a host of other government and corporate projects and policies.

“Our ancestors, our grandfathers and our grandmothers have always taken care of these blessed lands, and now it’s our turn to [not only take] care of the lands, but also to defend them,” reads the February 10 communiqué.

“The neoliberal capitalist system, in its ambition to exploit natural assets, invades our lands,” the statement continues. “The government and transnational companies are violently imposing their mega-projects.”

Back along the edge of the Suyul Lagoon, Candelaria residents continue to string barbed wire from post to post. They’ve been at it for a while now, according to Pérez Méndez, but they’ve now stepped up their efforts and hope to finish the fence by the end of the month.

Pérez Méndez surveys the progress, protected from the unrelenting sun and icy wind by his hat and white sheep’s wool tunic. He becomes pensive when asked if he thinks communities will be able to defeat the highway project.

“Yes,” the ejido leader said, after giving it some thought. “We can stop it.”

Maya Q’eqchi’ Women Survivors of Sexual Violence in Guatemala Demand Justice

Maya Q’eqchi’ Women Survivors of Sexual Violence in Guatemala Demand Justice

By Jhonathan F. Gómez / Upside Down World
All photos from Supreme Court trial by Jhonathan F. Gómez

Maya Q’eqchi’ women survivors recently entered the Supreme Court in Guatemala as part of the Sepur Zarco case to demand justice for sexual violence, sexual and domestic slavery, forced disappearances and murder, crimes committed during the internal armed conflict of 1960-1996. On February 1, 2016, Army Lieutenant Colonel Francisco Esteelmer Reyes Girón and military commissioner Heriberto Valdés Asij appeared before the court as another historic trial began.

The Sepur Zarco case is representative of the current state of justice for women in Guatemala. It serves as a reminder that the work towards bringing those responsible for genocide and crimes against humanity is an extensive and challenging process anywhere in the world.

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The case goes back to 1982, when the army built a military outpost between the departments of Alta Verapaz and Izabal. Built by forced labor from men of the communities of Panzós and El Estor, it was designated as a resting area for the troops. Late in 1982, the army captured and disappeared Maya Q’eqchi’ men who were fighting for their rights to the land in the area. Consequently, the army took advantage of the widowed women and declared them “alone and available,” forcing them into domestic and sexual slavery. The women were subjected to inhumane conditions, repeatedly raped, gang raped and forced to cook and clean for the army.

These crimes occurred when retired general José Efraín Ríos Mont Ríos Montt was president. Part of his government’s policy was to eliminate the Mayan people by way of displacement, disappearances, murder or forced exile. (Ríos Montt is currently waiting retrial to face justice for his crimes.)

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In 1993, the United Nation’s Historical Clarification Commission collected testimonies which allowed for an understanding of what happened. However, a broader understanding of what took place began to surface further in 2000 when the Community Research and Psychosocial Action Team (Equipo de Estudios Comunitarios y Acción Psicosocial, ECAP) conducted psychosocial work with women of the Sepur Zarco region.

The roots of this landmark case are part of a living history which Maya Q’eqchi’ women have been working for years at the community level in the pursuit of justice. In 2009, an independent psychosocial investigation, which led to the publication of a book called Tejidos Que Lleva el Alma (The Weavings that Our Soul Carry) was conducted by ECAP and the National Union of Guatemalan Women (Unión Nacional de Mujeres Guatemaltecas, UNAMG). The book’s aim was to bring the stories of Mayan women survivors into the public consciousness.

In 2010, a symbolic Court of Conscience (Tribunal de Conciencia) against sexual violence for crimes committed during the armed conflict was conducted as a public act by the women survivors. It signaled a breaking of the silence and promoted the sharing of stories with the clear objective that nothing of that nature should ever happen again. The event was organized by various community organizations and with the support of multiple embassies including those from Costa Rica, Spain, Germany Norway and Sweden. Following the symbolic act, the women took a step forward with strategic litigation within the Guatemala justice system.

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The Breaking the Silence and Impunity Alliance (Alianza Rompiendo el Silencio y la Impunidad), which consists of three grassroots organizations, came together the same year to accompany the legal proceedings of the women survivors. The women survivors have waited over 30 years to see any inclination of justice, and this case can therefore have a large impact in Guatemala and around the world.

The significance of the case cannot be overstated. It is the first time in the world where a national court, in the context of a criminal trial will hear charges against sexual violence during war, as well as the first time a national court will hear charges against sexual and domestic slavery, also in the context of war. The case can set precedents on how sexual violence is judged at a national and international level. Ada I. Valenzuela López from UNAMG states, “In our society, no one else will position sexual violence as an issue in this context. It is a violence which has been silenced for many years. It is almost never at the forefront of any debate in the courts or our society.”

The case stands to move public opinion forward in the struggle for gender justice. It can serve as a step to strengthen trust in a justice system that is capable of hearing the voices of women, and not shaming nor stigmatizing them for speaking out as survivors of sexual violence. It is particularly important for an indigenous population that has been historically discriminated and marginalized to trust in due process. Fifteen women have already testified during the intermediate phase of the case. Many of them have faced threats because of their testimony, yet all of them continue to stand strong because they share a collective understanding of the importance of the trial.

On September 2011, criminal charges were filed in Puerto Barrios, Izabal against military officials Reyes Girón and Valdés Asij. On December, 2011, exhumations were performed at the military outpost. In July of 2012, the prosecutor’s office requested before the Supreme Court that the case be transferred to the High Risk Court. In September of that year, survivors and witnesses presented testimonies before Judge Miguel Ángel Gálvez Aguilar who precedes High Risk Court B.

Arrests were made for Reyes Girón and Valdés Asij in June 14, 2014. On June 23, the first hearing was held and in October, the intermediate phase began which prompted the judge to request a trial date. Immediately after the defense filed a writ of amparo, a legal remedy for the protection of constitutional rights, which was rejected by the Constitutional Court in April of 2015.

In March, April and May of 2015, hearings were suspended because the defense attorneys were not present and because of health problems by Francisco Esteelmer Reyes Girón. Esteelmer Girón had been hospitalized and the defense stated that he was in “poor health.” On June 23, the judge restarted the public debate and the case was sent to the High Risk Court A, comprised by judges Yassmín Barrios, Patricia Bustamante and Gerbi Sical.

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On February 1 of this year, the trial began. It faces many challenges, both in the domain of public opinion, as well as in the trial itself. The defense continues to defame survivors’ organizations, witnesses and uses legal methods to delay the trial. Many organizations have denounced the defense’s methods as a way to evade justice and promote a culture of impunity. Jo-Marie Burt from the Washington Office on Latin America reiterates that “the challenge here is to prove that these types of crimes can be investigated, brought to trial and judged. And to seek to generate mechanism or protocols for the army understand that violence against women cannot be used as an instrument of war, and that women are not war trophies.”

On February 9, the plaintiffs presented over 30 boxes as evidence which contained the remains found in various exhumations which the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala (Fundacion de Antropologia Forense de Guatemala, FAFG) conducted. As the contents of the boxes were presented, many people who attended the trial as observers and supporters walked out of the courtroom because of their graphic nature. Evidence of this nature has not always been used at such trials, making it an even more important method of illustrating the magnitude of the crimes.

As a show of support for the Maya Q’eqchi’ women who will be testifying, women from various regions across the country have been present through the trial. As the country watches another historic trial unfold, the survivors are clear on their position. They seek justice and will not rest in peace until justice is served. They want to bring the issue of sexual violence into the public conversation and to show that it is hard for women to speak out against this type of violence. They want their voices to be heard, their truth to be known. They want society to understand that what happened to them was not their fault, and most importantly, that no other woman in Guatemala, or anywhere in the world, experiences what they lived through.

Jhonathan F. Gómez, is a documentary photographer currently living in Guatemala City. He is commitment to documenting the subaltern and diasporic realities of Guatemala as they relate to historic memory, race, class, gender, sexuality, identity and justice.

Survival International accuses WWF of involvement in violence and abuse

Survival International accuses WWF of involvement in violence and abuse

 

Featured image: The Baka have lived sustainably in the central African rainforest for generations as hunter-gatherers
© Selcen Kucukustel/Atlas

By Survival International

Survival International has launched a formal complaint about the activities of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in Cameroon.

This is the first time a conservation organization has been the subject of a complaint to the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), using a procedure more normally invoked against multinational corporations. Survival International has launched a formal complaint about the activities of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in Cameroon.

The complaint charges WWF with involvement in violent abuse and land theft against Baka “Pygmies” in Cameroon, carried out by anti-poaching squads which it in part funds and equips.

Before beginning its work in Cameroon, WWF failed to consider what impact it would have on the Baka. As a result, WWF has contributed to serious human rights violations and broken the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. It supports conservation zones on Baka land, to which the Baka are denied access, as well as the anti-poaching squads that have violently abused Baka men and women, and other rainforest tribes, for well over a decade.

Forced out of the forest, many Baka communities complain of a serious decline in their health. Living on the roadside, they are increasingly exposed to malaria and other diseases. © Survival International

Forced out of the forest, many Baka communities complain of a serious decline in their health. Living on the roadside, they are increasingly exposed to malaria and other diseases.
© Survival International

The international conservation organization has thereby violated both OECD human rights guidelines and its own policy on indigenous peoples, and Survival’s legal team has therefore submitted a formal complaint.

Baka have repeatedly testified to Survival about the activities of these anti-poaching squads in the region. In 2015 one Baka man said: “When they came to beat me here in my home, my wife and I were sleeping. They beat me with machetes. They beat my wife with machetes.”

Survival International is calling for a new approach to conservation that respects tribal peoples’ rights. Tribal peoples have been dependent on and managed their environments for millennia. Despite this, big conservation organizations are partnering with industry and tourism and destroying the best conservationists and guardians of the natural world – tribes. They are the environment’s best allies, and should be at the centre of conservation policy.“They are letting the elephants die out in the forest at the same time as they are stopping us from eating,” another Baka man told Survival. Today, the destruction of Baka land through logging, mining and the trafficking of wildlife continues, provoking concern among tribespeople that their land is being destroyed, even as they are denied access to large parts of it in the name of conservation.

Survival’s Director Stephen Corry said today: “WWF knows that the men its supporters fund for conservation work repeatedly abuse, and even torture, the Baka, whose land has been stolen for conservation zones. It hasn’t stopped them, and it treats criticism as something to be countered with yet more public relations. It calls on companies to stick to the same OECD guidelines it routinely violates itself. Both conservation and development have been allowed to trump human rights for decades and millions of people in Africa and Asia have suffered as a result. It’s time the big conservation organizations got their act together. If WWF really can’t stop the guards it funds in Cameroon from attacking Baka, then perhaps it should be asking itself if it has any right to be there at all.”

Survival International is the global movement for tribal peoples’ rights. We help tribal people defend their lives, protect their lands and determine their own futures. Founded in 1969.


Note: “Pygmy” is an umbrella term commonly used to refer to the hunter-gatherer peoples of the Congo Basin and elsewhere in Central Africa. The word is considered pejorative and avoided by some tribespeople, but used by others as a convenient and easily recognized way of describing themselves.

Sustaining a strategic feminist movement

Sustaining a strategic feminist movement

This is the second part of a series.  Read the first part at Toward Strategic Feminist Action.

By Tara Prema / Gender is War

Developing an effective response to the worldwide crisis of male violence

Strategic Feminism is a framework for collective action against patriarchal violence. The framework is based on acknowledging that the struggle for women’s liberation can – and must – adapt the lessons of asymmetric conflicts, such as guerrilla uprisings against  occupying armies. We can apply the lessons of successful insurgencies to our aboveground organizing. And we must do so. It is a matter of life and death: every minute, men rape, abuse, abduct, and murder girls and women. Time is short – we must prepare for worse still to come.

Strategic Feminism draws on the excellent analysis of asymmetric conflict in Deep Green Resistance: A Strategy to Save the Planet. In Part One, we discussed the crisis of male violence against women and sketched a solution based on organizing for action in our communities. Here in Part Two, we look at more ways to begin and sustain our work for radical social change.

We call this model Strategic Feminism because it’s outcome-oriented and focused on creating a movement that addresses the material conditions affecting women’s lives.

Sustaining a movement: Feminism in collapse

How can we create a movement in a time of collapse? How do we come together as a force for change when individuals burn out, groups fall apart, and coalitions fracture? When feminists are fighting each other on questions of gender, motherhood, sexuality, and privilege?

And how to do we take these steps now, when every day brings more signs of cultural, economic, and environmental collapse? How do we adapt our strategies to a world order that is reeling from one crisis to the next? This is our challenge.

As radical women, we must pledge to protect each other and the places we love, just as women have done since the time they burned us as witches.

change society mobilize womenKeeping the spirit

At the core of this movement, there is an intangible force with a measurable impact. It’s an attitude, a mindset, a determination that compels us to push back against oppression. It’s the warrior mindset, the stand-and-fight stance of someone defending her home and the ones she loves.

Many burn with righteous anger. This is important – anger lets us know when people are hurting us and the ones we love. It’s part of the process of healing from trauma. Anger can rouse us from depression and move us past denial and bargaining. It is a step toward acceptance and taking action.

Rewriting the trauma script includes asserting our truth and lived experiences, and naming abuses instead of glossing over them. It includes discovering (and rediscovering) that we can rely on each other instead of on men. It’s mustering the courage to confront male violence. But it’s not going to be easy.

Acknowledge and #NameTheProblem

We can’t fight a problem we can’t identify, especially when it is deliberately obscured. It’s not surprising that naming the problem has become a political act. And the problem is male violence against women. We shouldn’t have to say “she was raped” when we know that “men raped her.”

Reclaim what was taken from us

  • Learning (and re-learning and reminding each other) that our bodies and spirits belong to us, we deserve to be safe, and we have the capacity to defend ourselves
  • Fighting isolation and connecting with other women who have a similar fighting spirit
  • Creating a culture of resistance to male violence

Taking action

Strategies are the paths to the goal. Tactics are the means to implement strategies. Part of a strategy for sustaining a movement is networks of peer support, mutual aid, and solidarity. We start by coming together with our peers, women who share the same goals and principles.

Goal: Develop a thriving network capable of effective action

Strategy: Find women allies and start a group

Tactics:

  • knitting circle patchStart with a small circle: each one invite one.
  • When you get an invitation, go!
  • Use a petition or sign-on letter to gather potential recruits.
  • Screen and interview volunteers.
  • Discuss and write up a basis of unity
  • Hold meetings, discussions, films, work parties, and benefit shows.
  • Keep a signup sheet and a list of participants.
  • Retain volunteers through appreciation and peer support.
  • Raise money for projects and community campaigns.

Strategy: Start with an existing group

  • Entryism – add members until your crew has a majority
  • Headhunting – join in order to recruit members to your group
  • Affinity group – organize an action team within the group
  • Symbiosis – utilize the group’s resources and membership for your project

Strategy: Build a coalition

  • Circulate a sign-on letter
  • Organize against a common political enemy
  • Host an event: A symposium, press conference, rally, or direct action
  • Pledge to support and not publicly denounce each other
  • Collaborate together on an ongoing project

Strategy: Keep each other safe and supported

  • Have designated safe houses and emergency plans
  • Set up a legal defence fund and legal team before they’re needed
  • Create a mutual aid network so women activists can support each other
  • Make and distribute an activist safety/security plan to stop online hackers and physical attackers
  • Prioritize peer support and peer counseling, whether it’s formal or informal.
  • Keep a “not wanted” list to weed out known disruptors
  • Host group self-defense and security awareness trainings

Choosing our battles

How do we decide on a particular project, campaign, action or strategy? We can ask:

  • Is it effective? What will it achieve?
  • What are our goals (immediate and long-term )? How does this action lead there?
  • Who is working with us?
  • Do we have community support? From which communities?
  • What decision-makers are we targeting?
  • What are our strategies and tactics? (Legal, confrontational, revolutionary?)
  • Do we have the resources? (People power, funds, vehicle?)
  • How can we get the resources? (Recruiting, crowdfunding, direct appeals?)
  • What are the possible negative outcomes? How can we mitigate the negatives?

Some actions and projects aren’t intended to lead to concrete results – they are symbolic in nature but still useful for boosting morale, getting media attention, and recruiting volunteers.

Male allies

Male allies can – and should – make substantial contributions to the movement. Consider asking women what we need to sustain our work, and then providing that without judgment or trying to exercise veto power. Men who take on ally roles should turn to other men for peer support and take time to debrief with them regularly.

Remember to regroup

Every campaign, project, and group will stall eventually. We invariably reach the point when it seems our efforts are going nowhere and our adversaries are dragging us down. This is when we must re-group and re-commit ourselves or fail. Every goal worth fighting for is going to face a serious backlash from those in power.

In spite of all our planning, our groups and coalitions still fall apart due to lack of unity, loss of commitment, burnout, and the divisive pressures of racism, classism, misogyny, and disruption from outsiders. Overall, things are not going to get better on their own. In the endgame of capitalism, the situation for women as a class worldwide is deteriorating at a fearsome rate. It’s up to us to prepare for the worst.

In the short term, this anti-feminist backlash is intensifying. Planning now is crucial. Some readers may not see the immediate need for this laundry list of tactics and strategies. But the day is coming when the need for community networks of trust will be urgent, because so much of what we rely on now has collapsed.

These notes come from unceded indigenous territory on the frontier of resistance to the western patriarchal invasion.

Derrick Jensen interviewed about Deep Green Resistance, “transphobia,” and more

Derrick Jensen interviewed about Deep Green Resistance, “transphobia,” and more

Edited transcription of an interview by John Carico for The Fifth Column

How do you feel about Dr. Jill Stein and the Green Party of America?

I’m not a huge fan of the Green Party. I did a talk ten years ago at the Bioneers conference, which is about social change and environmentalism. One year their tagline was “the shift is hitting the fan,” about paradigm shifting. The thing that broke my heart was, so far as I know, I was the only person there who talked about power and psychopathology. I don’t think you can talk about social change without talking about power, and I don’t think you can talk about the destruction of the planet without talking about psychopathology. The Green Party has a lot of really good ideas, but how do you actually put them in place, given that those in power are sociopaths and the entire system rewards sociopathic behavior?

That doesn’t mean we need to give up or do nothing. A doctor friend of mine says the first step to a cure is proper diagnosis. If part of the disease that’s killing the planet is this sociopathological behavior, then fighting that sociopathological behavior needs to be part of our response.

I have voted Green in a couple of elections, and would vote again for a local Green. On the national level, the voting I’ve done was pretty much symbolic. I voted for Nader. I voted for a friend one time. The last time that I voted for any mainstream candidate was against Reagan in ‘84, and you pretty much had to vote against Reagan. But, interestingly, in 1980 I voted for Reagan and then realized I was an idiot, and voted Democrat in ’84. By ’88, I had an awakening and realized the whole system was just full of crap.

I do believe in voting on a local level. Voting on a national level may not change much, but locally, you can protect some things.

What warnings would you give young environmentalists as to how to differentiate green-washing from effective efforts?

The best way we learn is by making mistakes. The advice I give to young activists is to find what they love and defend it. Probably at some point, when they run up against the economic system, they’ll find themselves screwed over. That’s a lesson we all have to learn.

By the mid 1990s, I had already recognized that this culture is inherently destructive, but the “salvage rider” was still a big lesson for me. In ’95, activists all over the country had been able to shut down the Forest Service timber sales using the appeal process. Basically, if you could show the timber sales were breaking the law, you could appeal to have them stopped. Then they would have to produce a new document. Then you would stop them again by showing where they violated the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, etc. We were successful enough that Congress passed the salvage rider, wherein any timber sales that they wanted would be exempt from environmental regulations. The lesson was that any time you win using their rules to stop the injustice and stop the destruction, they will change the rules on you. There is really no substitute for learning this lesson yourself.

Artwork by Stephanie McMillan

Artwork by Stephanie McMillan

Recognizing Greenwashing comes down to what so many indigenous people have said to me: we have to decolonize our hearts and minds. We have to shift our loyalty away from the system and toward the landbase and the natural world. So the central question is: where is the primary loyalty of the people involved? Is it to the natural world, or to the system?

What do all the so-called solutions for global warming have in common? They take industrialization, the economic system, and colonialism as a given; and expect the natural world to conform to industrial capitalism. That’s literally insane, out of touch with physical reality. There has been this terrible coup where sustainability doesn’t mean sustaining the natural ecosystem, but instead means sustaining the economic system.

So when figuring out if something is greenwashing, ask, “Does this thing primarily help sustain the economic system or the natural world?”

That’s one of the problems I have with industrial solar and wind energy. They are primarily aimed at extending the party, not aimed at protecting salmon.

I would also ask young people to think about the linkages. A solar cell may be really groovy and you can power your pot grow but where did the solar cell come from? It required mining. It required global infrastructure. Even climate activists ignore these linkages. I heard one activist say, “Solar power has no costs, only benefits.” Tell that to the lake in Bhatu, China, who is now completely dead as a result of rare earth mining. Tell that to the people, human and nonhuman, who no longer can sustain themselves from the lake or from the land poisoned all around it.

A friend of mine says, “A lot of environmentalists start by wanting to protect one specific piece of land, and move on to questioning the entire culture of western civilization.” Once you start asking the questions, they don’t stop. “Why are they trying to destroy this piece of land?” leads to, “Why do they want to destroy other pieces of land?” Then you ask, “Why do we have an economic system based on destroying land? What is the history of this economic system? What happens when it runs out of frontiers? What happens when you have overshoot?” It’s important for young activists never to stop asking those questions.

Can you name successful revolutions of the past that you think we should look to when forming our own strategies? Where colonizing powers withdrew, and left the economy to its people?

Economy is a really hard word when you have a global economic system. We can talk about the Irish kicking the British out, or the Vietnamese kicking out the United States, but the real winner in Vietnam is Coca Cola, because Vietnam is still tied into the global economic system.

I think it’s great that the Indians and Irish kicked out the British and that the Vietnamese kicked out the U.S., so I’m not attacking revolution when I say this. But one of the problems is that when you defeat a certain mindset, it will often find expression in another way. When the United States illegalized chattel slavery, the underlying entitlement, where white people felt entitled to the lives and labor of the African Americans, was still there and found expression in a new way with the Jim Crow Laws. We see this all the way up to today with mass incarceration of African American males in such shameful ways. Like I said earlier, we need to keep looking at the linkages and, unfortunately, this makes one depressed. Because when you see a victory, oftentimes, you also see a backlash and a reconfiguration and reestablishment of the underlying bigotry.

We see this too with monotheism’s movement toward science, especially mechanistic science, where the world is not alive. The monotheism of the Christian sky-god did the initial heavy lifting by taking meaning out of the world and leaving it up there. Mechanistic science is really just an extension. We can say, “Wow, we really got rid of the superstition and the bigotry that has to do with Christianity,” but this belief in science is even scarier. At least with the Christian sky-god there was someone above humans. Now humans are making themselves into this new god and think they control the whole planet.

Having said that as a preamble, the film The Wind That Shakes the Barley highlights one of the smart things the Irish did. The film starts off with all these Irish guys playing hurling. When I saw this at first, I thought, “What the hell does this have to do with the Irish liberation struggle?” As I mentioned, one of the things we have to do is to decolonize ourselves. They did this in part by playing Irish sports, using Gaelic Language, and reading Gaelic Literature. A successful revolution begins with breaking identification with the dominat system. First comes the emotional part. After that, it’s all strategy and tactics; you look around and ask, “What do we want to do, blow something up, vote, peaceful strikes?”

This ties back into everything we’ve talked about so far. Are we identifying with a system or are we identifying with those we are trying to protect? We can say the civil rights movement was successful in the sense that African Americans now have a provisional right to vote. Of course mass incarceration targets black males and thus takes away their right to vote, but the movement was still successful in that it accomplished some aims. This was done by identifying as black voters. So, identifying is very important.

Several years out from the writing of Decisive Ecological Warfare, is there anything you would change in terms of strategy that you’ve learned since?

We don’t know because no one is doing it. All I know is that there are more than 450 dead zones in the world and only one of those has recovered — in the Black Sea. The Soviet Union collapsed, making agriculture no longer economically feasible there. They stopped agriculture and the dead zone has recovered enough that they now have a commercial fishery. That makes clear to me that the planet will bounce back when this culture stops killing it, presuming there’s anything left.

The image that keeps coming to mind is this body, which is the earth, and it keeps bleeding out because it’s been stabbed 300 times. All these people are trying to heal this body, and they are doing CPR and putting on bandages and everything else. But they’re not stopping the killer who’s still stabbing the person to death. We have to stop that primary damage. We have to recognize that we can’t have it all. We can’t have a way of life that relies on industrial capitalism and continue to have a planet.

Now, I haven’t really answered your question, mostly because of what I said at first: nobody’s doing it, so we don’t know what mistakes there are in the strategy. I’ve been saying for fifteen years that if space aliens came down to earth and were doing what industrial civilization is doing to the planet, we would put in place Decisive Ecological Warfare. We would destroy their infrastructure. This is an important point. We can make a very strong argument that World War II was won by the Allies, primarily in the killing fields of Russia. But I would argue that either first or second most important was the destruction of German industrial capacity. Similarly, the North won the Civil War not just because they had better generals, but because they destroyed the South’s capacity to wage war.

I don’t care how we do it; we can do it by voting, if that works. But we have to find a way to stop this culture from waging war on the planet.

Will Potter’s Green Is the New Red talks about the crackdown against Green movements. Do you have any advice for people who want to speak openly about resistance but are afraid of the repercussions? Where is the line between security culture and the need for movement building? The Invisible Committee says we need to tie the actions that have been done into a narrative. Is the problem that the media never covers the actions of those who, for instance, did direct action against fracking in New Jersey, and that any direct action the media does cover seems to follow the horrible lone wolf narratives? Do you think this stifles our movement?

What you say makes a lot of sense. Coverage of direct actions, and the true reasons behind those actions, can’t be left to mainstream media. The movement needs people aboveground who can publish the narrative, and another separate group which is underground, to actually do it. Both roles are critical, but we need a firewall. Many activists have been arrested partly because they tried to do both. We in Deep Green Resistance are trying to fill that aboveground role, as is the North American Animal Liberation Front Press Office.

As for security culture…I think, sometimes, about the whole marijuana legalization movement (I realize this isn’t so much a successful revolutionary movement as a successful social movement). They’ve done a good job pushing an agenda that would have been unthinkable thirty years ago. They’ve done this by using this model, by being below ground with the growers and above ground with NORML. We can say the same thing about the IRA.

You need that firewall when you live in a security state, but we shouldn’t feel unnecessarily paranoid. Although surveillance is everywhere and they pretend they are God, those sitting at the top are not actually omniscient. Living in northern California, where the pot economy basically runs the entire economy, has helped me to a healthy understanding that the Panopticon is not as all seeing as it wants to be. (Again, I know there is a difference between A) growing marijuana, which many cops probably smoke or view with sympathy, and B) ending capitalism, which would freak out all the cops.)

I’m very naive about many things, including drug culture. But I used to teach at Pelican Bay, a Supermax Prison, and students told me that if you dropped them into any city in the world, they could find drugs within 15 minutes. I couldn’t even find a bathroom in 15 minutes! That means the underground economy is surviving the Panopticon very well; it isn’t omniscient.

The Green Scare did not succeed because of the power of the Panopticon, or because of brilliant police work. The cases of sabotage were solved by good old-fashioned stoolie, because Jake Ferguson was an abuser, junkie and a snitch. Basic security culture probably would have defeated the investigations.

Can you give a critique of anarchists and why you see a lot of their work as ineffective?

I had a conversation a couple years ago with a very famous, dedicated anarchist who has some critiques of anarchism, but didn’t want me to use his name because he knows if he says anything critical about anarchism he will get death threats. One of the big problems is that anarchism is open membership, in that anyone can become an anarchist simply by identifying as an anarchist. He says many who call themselves anarchist, aren’t; they are just antisocial and have found an ideological excuse for their bad behavior. He says anarchists have a long tradition of fighting for the eight-hour work day, or fighting againt fascism as in Spain. He says there needs to be a way to kick out people who are simply sociopaths who call themselves anarchists. I mean, here’s a quote by an anarchist/queer theorist: “Smashing the institutions of patriarchal racist capitalism goes hand in hand with being a repulsive perverted freak.” Seriously? We’re supposed to put this person in the same category as Goldman or Kropotkin? Are we going to let that person in, even if they are just a prick? Any group will have nutjobs: Republicans, Democrats, stamp collectors. But anarchism is so small, so vocal, and so open that the nut jobs really stand out and can discredit the larger group.

I’m also concerned about effectiveness. The individualist anarchists (as opposed to collectivist anarchists) have an active hostility toward organization. DGR isn’t alone in getting attacked for this, for being perceived as hierarchical. I’ve seen writing on this going back 40 years, with anybody who believes you can have an organization with a stable schema immediately being attacked as Stalinist. They attack the organization simply because it’s an organization. There is a great line by Samuel Huntington that says “The west won the world, not by the strength of its ideals, but by its application of organized violence.” (He’s actually a supporter of the western empire; he says it’s a good thing.)
I talk about this in Endgame. I have become convinced that the single most important invention of the dominant culture, which has allowed it to destroy the planet, is the top-down bureaucratic military style organization. I’m not saying we need to model our organizations after this, but it is really effective. It is how this culture was able to murder the Native Americans. They had one big army. In my experience, people can generally be very contentious. It’s really hard to get together on the same page.

I had a friend who was trying to start an environmental organization years ago. An indigenous member warned that 95% of the time would be spent dealing with personality conflicts, and the other 5% actually doing the work. It’s an accomplishment, albeit a terrible one, that the U.S. Military gets 5 million people to act toward one aim: killing brown people, or whatever it is they are doing. They have propaganda on TV and in print, they have the capitalist system which rewards bad behavior, they have an organizational schema and, on the other side, we are supposed to defeat them without being organized?

Civil War General McClellan lost against Lee due to piecemeal efforts. McClellan attacked in one place and Lee moved his troops back. McClellan attacked another place, and Lee moved his troops back. The Turkish military had a strategy of attacking in piecemeal, and lost every battle for nearly two hundred years. The Russians would attack en masse and the Turkish army would send in one unit at a time and get slaughtered. Nathan Bedford Forrest, a terrible racist but brilliant Civil War strategist, said, “The way you win a battle is getting there first with the most.” In any conflict you want local superiority.

You asked why I see anarchist strategy as oftentimes ineffective: if you’re fighting an organized force, you should try to be organized as well.

Can you give a definition of Radical Feminism, and a response to some of your detractors who’ve accused DGR of transphobia?

The question I would ask is “Given that we live in a rape culture, do you believe women have the right to bathe, sleep, organize, and gather, free from the presence of males?” If you do believe that women have that right, you will be accused of transphobia; you will receive death threats. If you are a woman, you will receive rape threats. I’ve been de-platformed over this, some trans activists have threatened to kill the children of DGR activists over this. All because I believe that women have the right to gather free from the presence of males.

I want to make clear that no one in DGR is telling anyone how to live. I don’t give a shit! I’m not saying people who identify as trans should get paid less for their work, or that they shouldn’t have whatever sexual partner they want. I’m not suggesting they should be kicked out of their house, or should be de-platformed from a university, or that anything bad should happen to them.

Somebody wrote me and said, “I have a a little five-year-old boy who loves to wear frilly clothes, loves to dance ‘like a girl’, and sing ‘like a girl’; doesn’t this make him transgender?” I wrote back and asked, “Are you saying only little girls can wear frilly clothes? Why can’t we just say ‘this is a little boy who likes to play with dolls, and sing in a high voice?’ Why can’t we just love and accept this child for who he is? What does it even mean to dance ‘like a girl’? ”

Shoddy thinking makes me angry. I know the trans allies are going to get mad when I say, “Women should be able to gather alone” because they will then ask, “Who are women? Aren’t trans who identify as women, in fact women?” My definition of woman is human female, and my definition of female is based on biology. Some species are dimorphic. Just like there are male marijuana plants and female marijuana plants, and male hippopotami and female hippopotami, there are male humans and female humans.

I want to say two things before anyone offers a counter-definition of ‘woman’:

1. A definition cannot be tautological. You cannot use a word to define itself. You cannot say, “A woman is someone who identifies as a woman,” any more than you can say, “A square is something that sort of resembles a square.”

2. A definition must have a clearly defined metric. If I said, “Here is a three sided thing, it’s a square,” you would say, “No, it’s not a square because a square has 4 sides.” You have to be able to verify. I can say I’m a vegetarian but I had great ribs for dinner. This destroys not only the word ‘vegetarian’ but also the word ‘definition.’ I would ask those who disagree with my definition, “What is your better definition that is verifiable, for the word ‘woman’?” and second, “Is the fact that I have a different definition for the word ‘woman’, which is defensible linguistically, so important that you think it’s acceptable for men to threaten to rape women?”

I’ve never publically discussed this point before, but I think this is an important issue to discuss. It’s part of a larger post-modern social movement that values what we think and what we feel over what is real. This takes us right back to the greenwashing, with people saying, “We have to come up with the economy we want.” No, first we have to figure out what the Earth will allow!

This culture has a deep hate for the embodied and for what is natural. Here’s a great example: I have coronary artery disease, and I told my doctor I was feeling better since I had been diagnosed. This was right before Obamacare kicked in, so I didn’t have insurance yet. The pain got less in that time, and I asked why. The doctor said that when the arteries get clogged, the body sends out capillaries all around it to basically do its own version of bypass surgery. I had never heard that before. We all think it’s some miraculous thing when someone cuts open your chest and does bypass surgery, but we don’t even think about it when the body does it itself. There is tremendous wisdom of knowledge in the body, and we have to learn to respect it. This is important, both on a larger global scale and on the personal scale. I think it’s really important to recognize how this culture devalues the body. How I feel is way less important than what is.

Can you talk a bit about left sectarianism?

This goes back to the machine-like organizational structure of the dominant culture, which I am not valorizing, but do recognize as really fucking effective. It’s been able to get people past sectarianism.

Over the years, I’ve gotten thousands of pieces of hate mail, of which only a couple hundred were from right wingers. I’ve gotten hate mail from anti-car activists because I drive a car, vegans because I eat meat, and anarchists because I believe in laws against rape. I’ve never understood why animal rights activists and hunters don’t work together to protect the habitat. I wouldn’t have a problem with that. I do believe in temporary alliances. Once that’s done, animal rights activists can sabotage the hunts.

There’s a great example from 300 or 400 CE. These two sects of Christianity fought, same name but one had an umlaut, and one didn’t. They killed each other — hundreds of people! — over the question “Do you believe the fires of hell are literal or figurative?”

I was talking to a guy about the left always attacking each other. He mentioned that where he lived in West Virginia, there used to be a single KKK chapter consisting of three brothers. Now they have three chapters, because they can’t stand each other. So it’s not just a problem on the left.

Instead of getting mad at sectarianism, which I’ve been doing for the past fifteen years, we need to figure out what to do about it. It’s probably part of the human condition.

My friend Jeanette Armstrong, an indigenous activist and writer, told me once, “We, in our community, have just as many squabbles as white people do. The difference is I know my great-grandchild might marry your great-grandchild, so we figure out how to get along.” I really like that. I think we just have to ask “What are we really trying to do?”

What’s wrong with me having a really strong disagreement with a trans activist, for example, and them having a really strong disagreement with me? We can both continue doing our work and, at worst, ignore each other. There are plenty of people with whom I disagree. Families have different political views all the time and still love each other.

The question I’ve been asked over the years that cracks me up is what it’s like at my house on Thanksgiving. One of my sisters is a petroleum engineer, and she used to be married to a guy who did cyanide heat leaching and owned a gold mine. Now she’s married to a guy who used to work for the NSA and now works for the Israeli Military. What do we talk about? We talk about football. My brother is a huge Seattle Seahawks fan, so go, Hawks! I don’t talk about environmental stuff; it’d just start an argument. So I don’t understand why we activists can’t agree to disagree.

Noam Chomsky, who really disagrees with the anti-industrial perspective, is another great example. I was scheduled to give a talk in Scotland, and they wanted to ask me about Chomsky blasting anti-industrialism. I really disagree with him on this, but I really respect his work, so my agent, a really smart person and also Chomsky’s agent, said just to say “I’m not attacking Chomsky. We just have a disagreement on this.” I don’t understand why we can’t do this more often. There is a limit, of course. Roman Polanski is a rapist, so it makes sense to talk about his personal life.

I can’t stand Richard Dawkins, have critiqued his work a lot, and have heard, individually, that he’s pompous. But I’ve never heard that he’s a rapist or anything so I don’t know why I wouldn’t just keep my critiques focused on his work.

I think film is really detrimental to communication, because it’s so removed from real life and the way we communicate. In order to move a film story forward, you need dramatic tension. So a lot of times you have people fighting who wouldn’t fight in real life, and because we learn to communicate from the stories we take in, we learn to be even more contentious than we otherwise would be.

I know someone who was on Bill Maher and was relatively polite. They got mad and said, “If you are ever on the show again, you have to interrupt people and be contentious, because that’s what makes the show work. We want Jerry Springer, we want people to throw chairs.” We may not really want that, but that’s what works for the spectacle. And then we learn that’s acceptable behavior.

I’m writing a book right now with a coauthor. We had a significant conflict Saturday, but both parties handled it in a mature fashion. We still have a significant disagreement, but we strengthened our friendship because we handled it maturely.

What are your thoughts on Prison Abolition?

When talking about prison abolition, I get a little nervous because I can’t wrap my head around it. Obviously the prison system is horrendous. But I’m not a prison abolitionist, because when I taught at the Supermax, the students agreed that the only way for prison abolition to work is if you’re going to kill a bunch of people. I knew a kid who was put out for prostitution at age four, and really, what chance did this kid have? He was really fucked up by the time he was six. Another kid was living on the streets of Oklahoma at six with his little brother. This guy is now doing life for murder. Probably the first time he knew where his next meal was coming from was when he got to prison.

My creative writing students used to pass around jellybeans, but warned me never to take anything from one inmate. He had tortured a person to death, and since getting to prison, he’d poisoned three people. Something, obviously, had happened to this guy.

A friend had a student who said to her, “I am so broken, I need to be kept out of society.”

Another guy — not sure if he was executed or died on death row — killed his wife and kid and put each heart in a separate pocket because “the blood couldn’t mix.” When he was on trial, he pulled out one of his eyes because “that’s how the feds were putting stuff into his brain.” That didn’t work, so he pulled out his other eye and ate it. I’m not saying he needed to be in prison as it currently exists, but he definitely needed to be separated from society. Or removed. What do you do with Ted Bundy?

I’m not saying that Ted Bundy makes the case for locking up some fifteen year old, and I’m not saying we shouldn’t eliminate for-profit prisons and the prison industrial complex. And I’m mostly against the death penalty — though I think Tony Hayward of BP should be executed, it’s outrageous as it is because it’s racist and classist. But the whole culture is completely messed up, and we can’t simply abolish all prisons without addressing the rest of the problems.

I had a student who said if he could change one thing about society’s perception of drug dealers, he’d destroy the stereotype of the drug dealer in an Armani suit. He said, “You try living in Oakland with three children and working at McDonalds; you can’t do it. Drug dealing puts food on the table.” Now he’s in prison which doesn’t help anybody.

Before I went to work in the prison system, I was completely apolitical on the drug war, because I never thought about it. But I became highly politicized because a lot of my students would have been perfectly fine neighbors as long as you either A) kept them off drugs, or B) made the drug legal like cigarettes. Many of my stdents did terrible things to get money for drugs, but if it had just been like cigarettes, they never would have murdered people.

One student was in because he was a marijuana dealer in the 1970s, and shot dead someone who tried to rob him. If he had been a shoe salesman and shot someone who tried to rob him, he wouldn’t have gone to jail for even one night, much less for the rest of his life.

A friend who was a police abolitionist went into communities known for police brutality, and got push back because the police are only one threat. The communities also have armed drug gangs, sometimes just as organized and just as nasty as the cops. The local people had no interest in police abolition until there was a community defense that made it practical. Similarly, Craig O’Hara said that anarchism is not about the eradication of all laws, but about making society such that you don’t need them. That’s it, exactly. You can’t push theoretical ideals at the expense of what people need for safety right now. I’ve seen anarchists get mad at women for calling the cops for rape!

I talked to Christian Parenti years ago about police. He observed that police have two functions: to stop meth addicts from bashing in the head of Grandma, and to bash in the heads of strikers. Two roles: to protect and serve, and to protect and serve the capitalists. Police like to emphasize the prior, whereas anti-police activists like to emphasize the latter. Parenti said they spend most of their time making sure people don’t drive 80 mph through a school zone. I don’t have a problem with someone getting a ticket for driving 80 mph through a school zone. But their most important social role is to bash in the heads of strikers.

We need to realize that our broad cultural conditions are really really, really terrible, and that something needs to be done about Ted Bundy until we have a society where Ted Bundys aren’t made.