by DGR News Service | May 31, 2020 | Direct Action, People of Color & Anti-racism, White Supremacy
The United States is built on a foundation of slavery and indigenous land theft. Racism is deep in the bones of this country. Where there is oppression, there is resistance: the ongoing Minneapolis rebellion against the white supremacist state and police murder has spilled out across the U.S. Deep Green Resistance stands in solidarity with principled resistance by any means necessary.
George Floyd’s Murder: An Act Of White Supremacy
By Jocelyn Crawley
One of the first things that came to my mind when I learned of George Floyd’s ruthless murder was a social theory, typically used to analyze the ideology that undergirds patriarchy: the thought of domination.
According to radical feminists such as Monique Wittig, the thought of domination involves the idea that the ruling class produces the ruling ideas.
These ideas come to support the ruling class’s dominance over all of the other members of society. Within this schema, the thought of domination entails assent to the ruling class (men) imposing limiting ideas on the servant class (women). One of these ideas is the notion that there are two categorically different sexes and that these distinctions entail sociological consequences.
One of the sociological consequences is the naturalization of the division of labor in the family, with this belief functioning as a catalyst for the cult of domesticity and male dominance of the public sphere.
As made plain by this brief summary, the thought of domination ensures that those in power (men) keep those who lack it (women) in a position of subservience and slavishness. Within this type of societal schema, women are vulnerable to and subjected to diverse forms of dehumanization, some of which include rape, domestic violence, pornography, and prostitution.
Dominance and dehumanization:
In addition to functioning as an accurate analysis of how patriarchy works, I believe the thought of domination is directly pertinent to the white supremacist act we witnessed when white police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck for seven minutes while he was lying face down on the road. The video footage of the incident shows Floyd groaning and repeatedly saying “I can’t breathe.” After moaning while lying motionless near the foot of the squad car and being transported into an ambulatory vehicle, Floyd died. The only sense that I can make of this inhumane behavior is that the perpetrators have adopted the dominant society’s values of venerating domination as a desirable way to exist in the world because it enables one to become the abuser rather than the victim of abuse. Within a world predicated on a thought of domination in which whites are the ruling class and can therefore impose their rules on all other racial groups, the abuse they subject black people to frequently goes unquestioned and unpunished.
Lack of consequences:
In recognition of the fact that being a member of a ruling class oftentimes precludes one from experiencing repercussions under the law, the outcomes of George Floyd’s murder should be carefully considered if we are to truly understand how white supremacy works. All four officers involved in the event were terminated. Yet the question that persists in the minds of many protestors is: “Why wasn’t Chauvin arrested?” This was the same question that I came to ask myself after I learned that Gregory McMichael, his son Travis McMichael, and William Bryan pursued Ahmaud Arbery in a truck while he was running through the neighborhood. Many are familiar with the footage displaying Ahmaud Arbery stumbling to the ground after being shot while Travis McMichael stood by with a shotgun.
Many are familiar with the horror and fear this murder generated in the black community as we realized, once again, men of color are subject to being shot by the police and arrogant white men within local communities. Many are familiar with the stories of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice. What many of us are not necessarily familiar with is the logic that makes this heinous, inhumane behavior acceptable. This is why I propose that members of radical communities engage the thought of domination as the ideology that undergirds white supremacy.
It is clear that the primary system of thought that fuels and justifies the type of incomprehensible violence, we see as a product of white supremacy, is the thought of domination.
Domination is defined as the exercise of control or influence over someone or something, or the state of being so controlled. In a contemporary world whose zeitgeist is guided by white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy, domination is and must be an integral component of the cultures in which people are immersed.
Principles of mutuality, reciprocity, and cooperation may periodically flourish or temporarily gain traction in people’s minds and actions. However, making the regimes of white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy work requires that individuals recognize and respond to the realities created by those regimes. The reality that the regimes require is that an elite few exert extreme power over the masses, and that the masses respond to their own oppression by amassing as much agency and authority to themselves as possible while they grapple with the dehumanization and self-alienation engendered by the systems of oppression as distinct entities and a composite whole.
As one distinct component of the contemporary regime, white supremacy is predicated on the belief that white people are superior to those of all other races, especially blacks.
Based on this false notion of superiority, whites come to believe (whether consciously or unconsciously) that they have a right to dominate society. When I read about horrific stories such as those of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd, I am convinced that the thought of domination is operative. I have no other explanation that would help me understand why a man would place his knee on another living, breathing human until he was no longer living and breathing. I have no other explanation that would help me understand why one individual would continue holding his knee on another living, breathing human as he begs for his life. When I learn that one white man holds his knee on a black man’s neck and continues doing so despite the latter repeatedly saying “I can’t breathe,” I am convinced the former has unequivocally embraced the logic of domination. In a world marked by this perverse logic, the murder of a black man is acceptable because whites are superior and any threat to their own safety-whether real or imagined-is more important than black life.
In recognizing the reality of white supremacy and the logic of domination that suffuses and energizes it, individuals who find injustice intolerable must begin to revisit whether the strategies of resistance that have been conceptualized and implemented at this point are working.
If they aren’t, we need to refocus our energies. At this point, I am seeing a wide range of social media campaigns as a strategy of resistance. I have also seen footage of a street protest. Recently, I became aware that several demonstrators gained access to a police precinct in Minneapolis and set some sections of it on fire. There are also now reports of vandalism, arson, and looting. While I do not doubt the importance and efficacy of the levels and extent of resistance seen thus far, I also see that white supremacy-manifested through police brutality-remains resilient in the face of resistance. For these reasons, I have two suggestions for the resistance movements that are unfolding strategically or organically.
First, the agitation against the state must increase. I noted that a tent has been placed outside the home of the attorney handling George Floyd’s case (Mike Freeman) and several protestors claim that they aren’t going anywhere until Freeman prosecutes and charges the officers involved. I think more space needs to be occupied so that state representatives become aware that protestors are not retreating into their private worlds while the public realm remains a sphere dominated by white supremacist ideologies and praxis.
Second, individuals across the country and world who oppose this state violence should join forces and make the resistance movement a more tight-knit process. I am aware that NYC-based Black lives Matter activists are heading to Minneapolis to protest the murder. This is the type of solidarity that we need to see in order to ensure that the authority and agency that results from mass resistance engenders a profound shift in cultural consciousness and state activity.
As always, we who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.
Jocelyn Crawley is a radical feminist who resides in Atlanta, Georgia. Her intense antagonism towards all forms of social injustice-including white supremacy-grows with each passing day. Her primary goal for 2020 is to connect with other radicals for the purpose of building community and organizing against oppression.
by DGR News Service | May 30, 2020 | Direct Action, White Supremacy
Featured image: on the evening of May 28th, protesters stormed the 3rd Police Precinct Building in Minneapolis and set it aflame.
This week has seen a series of uprisings in major cities across the United States, touched off by yet another execution carried out in the streets by the racist police forces. This time, the victim was George Floyd in Minneapolis – but his murder comes only weeks after a SWAT team gunned down another black civilian, Breonna Taylor, in Louisville and vigilantes murdered Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Georgia.
Deep Green Resistance condemns these white supremacist killers, the cowards who enable them, and the entire structure of our settler-colonial law enforcement system. Further, we stand with the revolutionaries who are struggling against these oppressive forces in Minneapolis, Louisville, and beyond.
Police violence is one of the great injustices of our time. All told, police in the United States have killed at least two hundred citizens since the beginning of this year, and will likely kill more than five hundred by the year’s end. We often describe these killings as “senseless,” but in truth they hold a perfectly sensible function: Terrorizing and traumatizing oppressed communities.
These killings are not random, nor are they the result of individual bad actors. They disproportionately impact black and brown people – by some estimates, unarmed people of color are 60% more likely to be gunned down than unarmed whites – and they are encouraged by systematic racism at every level of the law enforcement system. Combining this atrocious violence with obvious and inexcusable racial disparities in stops, searches, and arrests, victims of colonialism in this settler nation have every right to see the police as an occupying force and resist them accordingly. The state has made its values clear.
Not every action undertaken during an uprising like this will be justifiable, either strategically or morally. But any supposedly “progressive” or “social justice” organization – let alone a revolutionary one – ought to save its condemnations for the white supremacists who have impoverished and abused these communities for generations, and we must offer our support and assistance to those activists and organizers on the ground who are working hard to struggle effectively against tyranny.
The mythology of white America has always centered on a supposed love for freedom and admiration of resistance. Yet the same white people who shout about “authoritarianism” when the state requires them to wear a face mask will demand black and brown people in this country submit to arbitrary humiliation, abuse, and even murder. As an organization, we reject this racist, cowardly nonsense, and we affirm the right of oppressed communities to defend themselves by any means necessary.
In the Deep Green Resistance book, Derrick Jensen asks, “What would you do if space aliens had invaded this planet, and they were vacuuming the oceans, and scalping native forests, and putting dams on every river, and changing the climate, and putting dioxin and dozens of other carcinogens into every mother’s breast milk, and into the flesh of your children, lover, mother, father, brother, sister, friends, into your own flesh? Would you resist?”
And we can ask the same question today of those who condemn these uprisings: What would you do if space aliens patrolled your community, killing innocents with impunity in the middle of the street? What if they promised every time to do better, while the bodies kept piling up? What if they stopped you on the way to work, or to school, or to the playground with your children? What if they harassed you and abused you and jailed you for petty crimes, or no crime at all? What if you weren’t safe, even in your own bedroom at night? Would you resist? Would you condemn those who did? If not, then you must not let the familiarity of this barbarous system pacify you.
Deep Green Resistance also condemns those who use uprisings like this as an opportunity to act out their macho fantasies. Already, we have seen reports of white “allies” engaging in pointless vandalism and deliberately provoking confrontations with police, or making increasingly reckless calls for escalation. There is no place in a serious revolutionary movement for the glorification of violence and disorder, especially by those who come from communities that will not bear the brunt of the consequences. A world of difference exists between strategic resistance, militant or otherwise, and random destruction; both dogmatic pacifism and reflexive violence can derail revolutionary movements.
The struggle for environmental justice is inseparable from the struggle against white supremacy, just as it is inseparable from the struggle for women’s liberation. And in turn, the abolition of patriarchy and settler-colonialism is necessary to save the land we live on. The dominant culture that is killing the planet cannot be stopped without sustained resistance against all forms of oppression, and we applaud those who are risking their lives to resist white power.
Should any revolutionaries in the area need of support, please reach out to us. We can provide platforms to amplify your voice, training, access to resources, allies, and more.
Deep Green Resistance shows its support and solidarity towards all oppressed groups. Read our People of Color Solidarity Guidelines for more information.
by DGR News Service | May 23, 2020 | Movement Building & Support
This excerpt is from Derrick Jensen’s unpublished book “The Politics of Violation.” It has been edited slightly for publication here. The book is in need of a publisher. Please contact us if you wish to speak with Derrick about this.
By Derrick Jensen
For more than two thousand years, a war has been waged over the soul and direction of anarchism.
On one hand, there are those who understand the straightforward and obvious premises that at least to me form the foundation of anarchism: that governments exist in great measure to serve the interests of the governors and others of their class; and that we in our communities are capable of governing ourselves.
And on the other hand, there are those who argue that all constraints on their own behavior are oppressive, and so for whom the point of anarchism is to remove all of these constraints.
I researched and wrote this book in an attempt to understand this war, in the hope that understanding this war can help us understand how and why anarchism has become a haven for so much behavior that is community- and movement-destroying; how and why a movement claiming to show that humans are capable of self-governance so often seems to do everything it can to show the opposite; how and why a movement that claims to be about ending all forms of oppression can be so full of bullying, abuse, and misogyny.
If we all understand this, might we as a society move both anarchism and the larger culture away from these behaviors and toward more sane and sustainable communities?
It became clear to me, however, that the book is about more than anarchism. In part it’s about differences between understanding and learning from a political philosophy—any political philosophy—and turning that philosophy into an identity; what happens when the former ossifies into the latter. This is a problem not just in anarchism but in more or less all philosophies.
When Harm is Left Unchecked
A strength of anarchism is that many anarchists are willing to struggle for their beliefs, and to fight power head on. A weakness is that too many anarchists are too often not strategic, tactical, or moral in choosing their fights, including how they will fight, and in choosing the targets of their attacks.
Severino di Giovanni provides a great example from the 1930s. He was an anarchist in Argentina who started a bombing campaign targeting fascists and also, because of the killings of Sacco and Vanzetti, bombing targets associated with the United States. We can argue over whether his actions were appropriate. And the anarchists in Argentina certainly did argue over it, which leads to why I bring him up: one of the anarchists who spoke against his bombing campaign (saying it would lead to a right wing coup, which in fact happened soon after) was murdered.
Guess who was the prime suspect in his murder?
…
I could provide hundreds of examples of atrocious behavior that have become normalized among too many anarchists. For that matter I could provide hundreds of examples that have happened to me, from threats of death and other physical violence to the posting to the internet of pictures of me Photoshopped to simulate bestiality. Probably the most telling action has been that anarchists arranged for my elderly, disabled, functionally-blind mother to receive harassing phone calls every fifteen minutes from 6:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. for weeks on end.
The point isn’t that they did this to me (and my mother): I’ve known too many people who’ve received their own version of this treatment.
Part of the point is that some people are terrible human beings. Change a few details, and anyone could tell similar stories from most other movements or organizations. And so this book becomes a case study of some of the harm terrible human beings can, if left unchecked, do to movements.
So, generically: What sorts of terrible people does your movement/organization support? And what harms do these people cause? Ecofeminist Charlene Spretnak has written extensively on social change movements, and has talked about how abusive behavior drives away people, especially women, in “huge numbers. That’s a brain- and talent-drain these movements cannot afford.”
What can we do about that?
An Insult to One is Injury To All
Here’s another example of the sort of community-destroying behavior that has come to characterize too much anarchism. A few years ago, I was discovered by the Glenn Beck arm of the right wing. Within two weeks I’d received literally hundreds of death threats from them, many of which were highly detailed in what was to be done to me (e.g., photos of castration) and in information about where I live, my schedule, and so on. In response to these threats I bought a gun and installed bars over my doors and windows. I also called the police and the FBI. I didn’t believe the police and FBI would be particularly helpful (they weren’t), but I wanted for there to be an official record of the threats for two reasons. The first is that on the remote chance someone did kill or injure me, people would at least have an idea where to start looking for the perpetrators. The second is that if someone attempted to harm me and I had to use lethal force to protect myself, it would already be a matter of public record that I had reason to fear for my life. I could imagine a court scene playing out after I was charged with murder for killing someone who had attempted to kill me.[1]
The prosecuting attorney asks, “Were you afraid for your life?”
“Yes.”
“Did you call the police?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
A long silence while I consider that it wouldn’t be particularly useful to say I didn’t call the police because to do so is evidently against anarchist ideology.
The prosecuting attorney continues, “Then I guess you weren’t very afraid, were you?”
Trial over. I lose.
The point is that when I told my neighbors I’d received death threats, they responded as you’d expect decent human beings to respond—with sympathy and expressions of concern for my safety. Some took tangible steps to help guarantee this safety. For crying out loud, a member of the local Tea Party helped me install the bars. This is what members of a community do. An insult to one is an injury to all, remember?
On the other hand, with few exceptions I received little positive support from anarchists, who instead accused me of making up the threats, called me a coward for paying attention to them (many of these particular comments were, ironically enough, anonymous), threatened to kill me themselves, or excoriated me for calling the police.[2] Anarchists quickly labeled me a “cop lover,” then “pig fucker,” then “snitch,” then “someone who rats out comrades.” Soon, anarchists were accusing me of “regularly working with the FBI and the police,” and of being a “paid police informer.” It wasn’t long before some were saying, “Word on the street is that he’s been a fed from the beginning. They wrote all his books.”
To Distort is To Control
How does a political philosophy that leads people to act as did those young men I described who became bodyguards for the victim of a sexual assault lead others to act so despicably? How can anarchism be so easily and forcefully used, as it has been, as an excuse for men to sexually or otherwise physically assault women? How can anarchism be so easily and forcefully used to support, as we’ll see, the sexual abuse of children? And how can we prevent all of this from happening in the future?
Can anarchism be fixed?
We should ask these questions of every social movement. This questioning is especially important for those who are inside these movements.
Change a few words, and this book could have been written about almost any social movement or group. I know female Christians (now former Christians) who’ve been sexually assaulted by male Christians, and then pressured by the Christian community not to go to the police because to do so would supposedly harm their community.
I know female soldiers (now ex-military) who’ve been sexually assaulted by male soldiers, and then pressured by the military community not to go to the police because to do so would supposedly harm their community.
I know female athletes (now former athletes) who’ve been sexually assaulted by male athletes, and then pressured by the local athletic community not to go to the police because to do so would supposedly harm their community.
I know female police officers (now former ones) who’ve been sexually assaulted by male police officers, and then pressured by the local police community not to go to the police (!!) because to do so would supposedly harm their community.
Substitute the words musicians, teachers, loggers, environmental activists, actors, writers, and the story is the same.
So this book provides an exploration of what rape culture does to movements, and how movements are deformed or destroyed by the imperative to violate that is central to patriarchy, central to the dominant culture.
I’ve long been a critic of Christianity, but I can’t tell you how many times, especially when I used to drive beaters (I bought four cars in a row for one dollar each, and considered these good deals since the cars must have been worth at least twice that much), that I’ve been stuck by a road, and the person who stops to help fix my car has been a Christian stranger, motivated by a calling to do good in the name of their belief system. Yet, Christianity has been and still is used to justify—and leads to—atrocious behavior such as gynocide, genocide, ecocide. When I think of Christians, I think of a wonderfully kind man and woman who invited me into their home when I was living in my truck in my twenties. And when I think of Christians I think of misogynistic, racist, pro-imperialist buffoons. I think of Christians rationalizing slavery, rationalizing capitalism. I think of Christians burning women they considered witches, burning Native Americans, burning the world. I think of Christians burning other Christians. How does a religion that leads to wonderful people like the couple who gave me a place to stay also lead to such routinely atrocious behavior?
Likewise, when I think of the American Indian Movement, I think of brave women and men standing up to the United States government and to corrupt tribal governments. And I think of misogynist murdering assholes raping and killing Anna Mae Aquash, among others.
When I think of the Black Panthers I think of free breakfast programs for children and black pride and protecting neighborhoods from police violence. And I think of systematic programs of rape by male Panthers against women both black and white.
I’m sure you can find your own examples.
What is wrong with these movements?
Justifying Oppression
Obviously, anarchism is not the only philosophy that has been used to rationalize or facilitate the sexual exploitation of women. We’d be hard-pressed to find philosophies within patriarchy that haven’t. And certainly, groups other than anarchists have facilitated this exploitation. Organizations from the police to the courts to the military to churches to universities to professional sports organizations to the NCAA to the music industry to the Boy Scouts to pretty much you-name-it have facilitated or covered up sexual assaults by men on women or children.
Those of us who care about stopping atrocities need to ask: How does any particular philosophy justify or otherwise facilitate atrocious behavior? And what are we going to do to stop these atrocities?
Panem et Circenses
I became interested in anarchism when I first became politicized—that is, when I began to understand that, as economists are so fond of saying and even more fond of then ignoring, there is no free lunch. In other words, all rhetoric and rationalization aside, the wealth of some comes at the expense of others.
In other words, empires require colonies.
It immediately became clear to me that while much of how a state disperses resources (e.g., time and money) could be perceived as citizen maintenance,[3]—or, with thanks to Juvenal, providing enough “bread and circuses” to keep the exploited from tearing out the throats of the rich—the state’s most important function by far, and the primary reason for its existence, is to take care of business; that is, to take care of the interests of those in power.
Burden of Proof
So there’s a sense in which the bad behavior of too many anarchists is not only appalling but tragic, Bad behavior among anarchists represents thousands of years of lost opportunity for meaningful social change, because while some anarchist analysis makes sense, the behavior of too many of those who call themselves anarchists can get in the way of people wanting to share a movement with them.
The sensible analysis begins with this: The state isn’t necessary for human survival, and in fact the state primarily serves the interests of the governors and others of their class.
If you don’t believe governments primarily serve the interests of the governing class, ask yourself if you believe governments take better care of human beings, or of corporations. If governments had as their primary function the protection of human and nonhuman communities, would they devise a tool—the corporation—that exists explicitly to privatize profits and externalize costs, that is, to funnel wealth to the already wealthy at the expense of others? I’ve asked tens of thousands of people all over the United States and Canada if they believe governments better serve humans or corporations, and no one ever says humans.
Let’s throw in a couple more common-sense comments about anarchism. The first is by the American linguist, philosopher, scientist and activist Noam Chomsky (who, by the way, is also hated by many of the anarchists on the wrong side of the war for the soul of anarchism, who call him “a pussy” and “the old turd”): “That is what I have always understood to be the essence of anarchism: the conviction that the burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met. Sometimes the burden can be met. If I’m taking a walk with my grandchildren and they dart out into a busy street, I will use not only authority but also physical coercion to stop them. The act should be challenged, but I think it can readily meet the challenge. And there are other cases; life is a complex affair, we understand very little about humans and society, and grand pronouncements are generally more a source of harm than of benefit. But the perspective is a valid one, I think, and can lead us quite a long way.”[4]
Makes sense, right?
Now let’s throw in another, by Edward Abbey: “Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.”[5]
This all seems pretty obvious, and leads to the question, why aren’t more people anarchists?
[1] And most of us have read accounts of this sort of thing, for example, so many of the women in prison for killing their abusive husbands. In the town where I live a woman is right now being charged with murder for shooting her husband in front of witnesses who all swear that he routinely beat her, that this night he was punching and kicking her, and just before she shot him he yanked her by her hair out of a car as she was attempting to escape. Even the dead man’s mother is begging prosecutors to drop the charges.
[2] This whole question of never speaking to the police cuts to the heart of one of the problems with too much anarchism. Just as with any rigidified ideology, the ideology itself comes to supplant circumstance and common sense. For example, when attorneys advise you never to talk to the police, they mean when you’re under suspicion, not under every circumstance. If anarchists saw Ted Bundy knock out a woman, load her into his car, then drive off, they wouldn’t call the cops? What are they going to do, hop on their bikes and pedal after him?
[3] Such as providing water and waste disposal for the people. But the fact is agriculture and industry account for more than 90 percent of human water usage and 97 percent of waste production. Governments “take care of” big business under the guise of “citizen maintenance.”
[4] Doyle, Kevin, “Noam Chomsky on Anarchism, Marxism, and Hope for the Future,” Red and Black Review, 1995, http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/rbr/noamrbr2.html – Site visited 6/20/2016.
[5] Abbey, Edward, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1990.
Featured image: 1873 painting of Diogenes, an ancient Greek Cynic and prominent figure in proto-anarchism. By Jules Bastien-Lepage.
About the Author
Derrick Jensen is a co-author of Deep Green Resistance, and the author of Endgame, The Culture of Make Believe, A Language Older than Words, and many other books. He was named one of Utne Reader’s “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World” and won the Eric Hoffer Award in 2008. He has written for Orion, Audubon, and The Sun Magazine, among many others.
by DGR News Service | May 21, 2020 | Male Supremacy, White Supremacy, Women & Radical Feminism
In this excerpt from Ain’t I Woman: Black Women and Feminism, author bell hooks describes the insidious nature of racism and sexism and the links between patriarchy and white supremacy. Understanding this type of analysis is critical to understanding how oppression functions within civilization as a tool of social control. While hooks uses the term “American,” the same analysis applies across much of the world.
Racism and Feminism: The Issue Of Accountability
By bell hooks
American women of all races are socialized to think of racism solely in the context of race hatred.
Specifically in the case of black and white people, the term racism is usually seen as synonymous with discrimination or prejudice against black people by white people.
For most women the first knowledge of racism as institutionalized oppression is engendered either by direct personal experience or through information gleaned from conversations, books, television, or movies. Consequently, the American woman’s understanding of racism as a political tool of colonialism and imperialism is severely limited.
To experience the pain of race hatred or to witness that pain is not to understand its origin, evolution, or impact on world history. The inability of American women to understand racism in the context of American politics is not due to any inherent deficiency in the woman’s psyche. It merely reflects the extent of our victimization.
No history books used in public schools informed us about racial imperialism.
Instead we were given romantic notions of the “new world“ the “American dream.” America as a great melting pot where all races come together as one. We were taught that Columbus discovered America; that “Indians“ was Scalphunters, killers of innocent women and children; that black people were enslaved because of the biblical curse of Ham, that God “himself” had decreed they would be hewers of wood, tillers of the field, and bringers of water.
No one talked of Africa as the cradle of civilization, of the African and Asian people who came to America before Columbus. No one mentioned mass murder of native Americans as genocide, or the rape of native American and African women as terrorism. No one discussed slavery as a foundation for the growth of capitalism. No one describe the forced breeding of white wives to increase the white population as sexist oppression.
I am a black woman. I attended all black public schools. I grew up in the south were all around me was the fact of racial discrimination, hatred, and for segregation. Yet my education to the politics of race in American society was not that different from that of white female students I met in integrated high schools, in college, or in various women’s groups.
The majority of us understood racism as a social evil perpetrated by prejudiced white people that could be overcome through bonding between blacks and liberal whites, through military protest, changing of laws or racial integration. Higher educational institutions did nothing to increase our limited understanding of racism as a political ideology. Instead professors systematically denied us truth, teaching us to accept racial polarity in the form of white supremacy and sexual polarity in the form of male dominance.
American women have been socialized, even brainwashed, to accept a version of American history that was created to uphold and maintain racial imperialism in the form of white supremacy and sexual imperialism in the form of patriarchy. One measure of the success of such indoctrinate indoctrination is that we perpetrate both consciously and unconsciously the very evils that oppress us.
Gloria Jean Watkins, better known by her pen name bell hooks, is an American author, professor, feminist, and social activist.
Featured image: Armenian Graffiti in the city of Yerevan. It is a translated quote of the author bell hooks which reads “To be oppressed means to be deprived of your ability to choose.” By RaffiKojian, CC BY SA 4.0.
by DGR News Service | May 14, 2020 | Colonialism & Conquest, Human Supremacy, Male Supremacy
Fear of death is a motivation that has driven man to attempt to control death by controlling the world. In this piece, Aurora Linnea explores the patriarchal root behind the unending drive to control and ward off death.
Patriarchal Terror in the Era of Covid-19
By Aurora Linnea
Man is afraid to die. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Denial of Death (1974), Ernest Becker proposed that, “of all things that move man, one of the principal ones is his terror of death.” Becker studied the oeuvres of Brilliant Men – Freud, Kierkegaard – and struck upon Man’s predicament: Man is conscious, he observes that what lives will one day die; Man is aware he is alive, hence he will die, and he is afraid. He fears his body, the “terrifying dilemma” of that “material fleshy casing” yoking him to the physical world of creatures, the mortal, earthly world with its cycles circling birth into death, its inherent limits and exigencies. Being a living body reminds Man he will die; he is afraid. Man is afraid, all the man-made world has been built around his fear. Man’s fear of death has been the ulterior force goading human history along its ill-starred trajectory. Becker’s thesis: The history of Man is the history of his fear, understanding Man means understanding Man’s fear, Man does what Man does, Man is what Man has become, because he is afraid.
To be human, according to Becker, is to be terrified of death and to pass one’s life laboring to allay terror’s torments through “a defiance of and a denial of the real nature of the world.” That Man is a mortal animal is the wellspring of his suffering, in retaliation Man pits himself against the “inadmissible reality” of…reality itself. It is this dedication to existing in pained permanent opposition to material reality that Becker defines as the project of “humanization.”
Clever creature that he is, Man has refined methods for channeling his horror of reality/mortality into the noble enterprise of “humanization.” He dreams up solacing fantasies of immortality, identifying himself with deathless disembodied gods of his own creation. If Man scorns death for depriving him his right to control his own destiny, he rebels by devoting his life to seizing control over as much of the living world as he can manage. He dominates inferior beings, beasts, lesser men, the wilds. He accumulates wealth, to stand as an undying monument to his reign. He extends his dominion through conquest, subjugates whole peoples, builds empires. His yearly more efficient exploitation of the underlings over whom he rules sings to him reassurances of his limitless power. He abstracts his way to intellectual transcendence, leaving his body below. He invents machines to act as barriers between himself and nature, so his hands don’t get dirty. He entombs the natural world choked-out unseen within an encrustation of man-made artifice to find himself surrounded by the products of his own mind, every disruptive reminder of terrorizing reality extirpated from his field of vision.
Thus, Becker concludes, Man triumphs over “mere physicalness,” salvages himself from the clutches of death. Becomes human.
Man makes himself the Master.
Except Man does all that and still he dies, and sometimes, when reality creeps in from its appointed place exiled to the periphery onto the mainstage of the man-made world and the Master’s delusion-complex of power-and-control defenses against death begins to unravel, Man must take emergency action. Here we have the psychoanalyst Gregory Zilboorg, writing during the Second World War, to help us understand what comes next: “Man then resorts to the mobilization of his aggression, his hatred.” Through the conversion of fear into hatred enacted as violence against some chosen enemy, Man can restore the necessary sense of control and avoid the humiliation of being caught frightened. “The murderous drives,” Zilboorg explains, “enable us to feel masters over life and death.” He terms this the process of “overcoming death by means of murder,” and discourages readers from feeling overly distressed by Man’s tendency to transmute fear into “murderous hatred.” It’s human nature, after all, to lash out in rage against mortality.
Becker and Zilboorg wrote “Man” to denote “Humanity”; both presumed they were analyzing “human nature,” the “human condition.” In actuality their sex-specific terminology was entirely appropriate, their exclusion of women apt. The condition these authors elucidate is not the “human condition,” but the patriarchal one, the psychic disposition of human cultures malformed by millennia of male rule. ‘Man’ is not ‘humanity,’ but men, as in males—and in fact, only a small subset of males can be correctly included here. ‘Humanization’ via the rejection of physical reality, through domination and exploitation, delusions of control, and antagonistic violence has been largely the undertaking of Western patriarchal civilization. Given that those of us without the luck to have been born ruling-class males of European descent have historically been fodder for, rather than the innovators of, these patriarchal procedures, a clarifying revision of Becker’s thesis feels warranted.
The history of patriarchy is the history of men’s fear.
To understand patriarchal civilization means understanding the fear that lurks at the core of patriarchal masculinity; engineered and administered by ruling-class men, human society has become what it is today because the men in power are afraid to die.
Fear of death and its various palliations are so thoroughly embedded in the social machinery of Western patriarchal civilization that under normal circumstances, they pass below notice. Granted, to do so has called for the institutionalization of brutal hierarchies, oppressive empires, genocide, gynocide, ecocide, the pervading malaise of mass alienation, but the Masters have been reasonably successful in convincing themselves they’re not going to die. Their fear has been repressed and managed, sublimated into everyday atrocity. It is only when the patriarchal mind is cornered by a surprise encounter with reality/mortality and its defense mechanisms go into overdrive that the underlying fear hurtles to the fore.
What could be a more paradigmatic “surprise encounter with reality/mortality” than an infectious-disease pandemic?
Covid-19 has the Masters running scared. Patriarchal death-terror is a naked thing shivering on the table now, men’s strategies of self-defense newly conspicuous as they scramble to safeguard themselves against the affront of the unacceptable, inescapable essence of our human condition: that we are animals, vulnerable bodies, born of women, destined to die.
As the current menace to male immortality is a disease, an obvious place to begin a study of men’s fear is the social institution known as medicine. Fear of death shines more glaringly here than elsewhere as a general rule. In medicine, men are dealing directly with bodies, bodily functions, physical sensation; patriarchal conquest commences with the conquering of the body; hence, patriarchal medicine is a logical site for intensive death-terror management. Itself a product of patriarchal imperialism, achieved through the (often femicidal) overthrow of female lay healers during Europe’s Early Modern Period, modern Western medicine is grounded on two key precepts:
1) the body is a machine, to be serviced and repaired by experts.
2) death is an aberration, which men should eliminate.
These principles reflect the mechanistic worldview preached by Enlightenment-era Fathers of Science, most notably Rene Descartes, a Brilliant Man who nonetheless struggled to discern any appreciable differences between a dog and a clock. Carolyn Merchant has described how, with the rise of the mechanistic worldview, bodies were recast as machines at the same time as the earth was ideologically demoted to dead inert matter. And, as may be expected, both bodies and earth existed to be used and manipulated by those blessed with the gift of reason, i.e., elite white males.
The reduction of bodies to machines allowed men to imagine that they’d transcended base physicality; men were not their bodies, but the overseers and technicians of those bodies. When the unreliable body-apparatus inevitably malfunctioned, the Father-Doctors would be there to force it back into working order. They could feel themselves heroes, rescuing patients from the sinking ships of their failing bodies. Medical practice thus evolved to give men a taste of victory in what Marti Kheel calls patriarchal medicine’s “war against nature.” Man vs. Body, Man vs. Death. A proliferation of ever-more invasive, elaborate techno-interventions has been the Father-Doctors’ weaponry in this endless conflict, the more aggressive the better. In the ICU combat zones of patriarchal medicine, men aspire to beat death into submission.
In our present-day plague year, ventilators are the medical technology du jour. Coronavirus infection causes the lungs to fill with fluid, the ailing can’t breathe, their blood oxygen levels plummet, they rush to the hospital where they are hooked up to machines, to breathe for them. This has been so-called Best Practice. Medicine’s passion for ventilators has been such that, in the early weeks of the pandemic, the specter of ventilator shortages was a favored mass-media bogeyman. More recently, evidence has been piling up to suggest that ventilators are not the omnipotent emancipators-from-death we were promised. The force entailed in threading an 10”-long plastic tube down a person’s throat and pumping highly saturated oxygen into her lungs has a funny way of inflicting injuries that compromise her body’s ability to recover, while the long-term sedation required can result in permanent brain damage. One doctor has called placing Covid-19 patients on ventilators “almost a death sentence.” Now, some renegade clinicians are starting to suspect that, just maybe, less invasive, less aggressively technological approaches might be more conducive to survival.
Holding hostility towards the body as its premise, patriarchal medicine allots scarce attention (or funds) to the prevention of illness through cultivating the necessary conditions for bodily health, with health here defined as something more than just the absence of acute disease. Where the dominant attitude is rancor for the body as a glitchy machine and/or blundering heap of stupid flesh, there’s not much room for protective succor or nurturance. Instead, the prescription is a series of reactive assaults, to punish the treacherous body when it errs. Today’s patriarchal medicine is also capitalist-industrial medicine, which introduces a new incentive for the heavy emphasis on crisis-stage interventions: medical procedures, drugs, devices are saleable to consumers as market commodities. The health of the populace therefore interferes with the medical industry’s maximization of profits, making it minimally desirable.
The slew of ‘social distancing‘ guidelines handed down by the CDC and states’ “shelter-in-place” mandates seem to indicate a focus on prevention in the Covid-19 response program. However, these measures are not preventative, but reactionary last-minute interventions aimed at controlling an already critical pathology. And lest we forget, humanity’s last great hope still lies with the biotech industry, as the scientist-saviors toil away to develop (and test on sacrificial animals, and patent, and sell) a vaccine. Once again, man-made technology shall deliver us from death! Shifting attention from heroic interventions to meaningful prevention would require addressing the overall abysmal state of human and planetary health that has rendered our situation so precarious, a task the Father-Doctors have zero inclination to undertake. Where’s the money in it? Where’s the glory? To quote Ivan Illich, “What need is there to worry about a murderous environment when doctors are industrially equipped to act as life-savers!”
From fear of death to domestic violence
Outside of the hospital wards, in homes worldwide, women, children, and domesticated animals are locked-down alongside men socialized within patriarchy to alleviate their fear of death through domination and violence.
A man in eastern China beats his wife with a high-chair as she holds their infant daughter in the family’s kitchen; the woman loses feeling in her legs, falls to the floor, still grasping the child, she cannot say how many times the husband hit her. Reports in the U.S. surface of men forbidding wives and girlfriends to wash their hands, reveling in the women’s terror of infection, in the life-or-death power they, as men, can wield. An international upsurge in domestic violence reports, calls to domestic violence helplines: France, 30% increase; Singapore, 33% increase; Brazil, 40-50% increase; Bogota, Columbia, 225% increase; United Kingdom, 700% increase. In the first four weeks of the U.K.’s lockdown, 13 women and children were murdered by men, twice the standard femicide tally of two women per week. Within the first days of lockdown in Columbia, a man shot and killed his wife, his wife’s sister, his wife’s mother. Men murdered at least 1000 women in Mexico in the first three months of 2020. Between March 27 and April 2, with “shelter-in-place” laws spreading across the U.S., as gun and ammunition sales soared, there were at least 19 murder-suicides, nearly all of which involved a man shooting his wife or child before killing himself.
In households where men beat women, there is an 89% likelihood that domesticated animals are also victims of male violence.
In Peru, at least one girl-child was reported raped each day for the first 17 days of quarantine. In Bolivia, police say they have been receiving more than four dozen reports of violence against children, including sexual violence, daily since the country’s lockdown began. By the close of March, the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) helpline had experienced a 22% increase in the number of minors calling in; 67% of minor callers identified their abusers as family members. Reports of online child sexual exploitation to cybertip hotlines are up by an average of 30% globally. Livestreaming the sexual abuse of children has spiked. Experts say: To meet the demand for new child pornography, more children are being abused on camera.
Male violence: common factor in every “disaster”
Intensifying male violence against women is recognized as a regular feature of cataclysms.
Noted in the aftermath of the eruption of Mount St. Helens, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the 2008 recession, Hurricane Sandy. The 2013-2017 Ebola outbreak in West Africa corresponded with an epidemic of violence against women and girls, which included increases in trafficking, child marriage, sexual exploitation, and rape. Public health experts cite “stress” as explanation for men’s brutality when catastrophe strikes. When men feel they have lost control, when they sense their mortality encroaching. When circumstances force men to confront reality.
It can be presumed that women are also “stressed” by volcanoes and hurricanes and bankruptcy and plagues, but women do not relieve the stress they feel by beating their partners, killing their partners, raping children. Women do not learn to restore their sense of control through violence against social subordinates when threatened, as men do, to mitigate their fear. That death-defying trick is reserved for patriarchy’s Master class, while women are its first-line victims.
In a patriarchal society, women are the primary underclass; wherever else a woman is slotted in the social hierarchy, she is below some man.
Every man is above some woman: women are easy targets, then, when men get that stressed-out urge to dominate. But violence against women as a male strategy of death-terror management has deeper roots; a woman is more than an easy target for men’s ‘murderous hatred,’ she is the perfect target. The female, by patriarchal construction, symbolizes bodily existence. As Elizabeth Spelman writes in “Woman as Body: Ancient and Contemporary Views” (1982), man-made culture split mind from body; men cast off the fleshliness they feared by claiming Mind for themselves, while portraying women as mindless Body. What is body-identified is also nature-identified, and both are inferior to Mind/Man, both are despised, for how they represent the origins of male mortality. In the Western patriarchal tradition, it is not only women debased to low status by identification with body/nature, but also nonhuman animals and nonwhite “savages.” We are the brute races, death’s emissaries, the Master’s enemies. And among these evils, a woman is often the most accessible. In the comfort of his own home a man can revenge himself by ravaging the concrete being of the woman he “loves,” or possesses: his own personal scapegoat.
He conquers, controls, degrades and destroys her, and in so doing, Man fantasizes he has defeated death. Yet still he will die; he is still afraid. So he sets his sights on larger prey. He has cut down the woman. Colonized the savage. Slaughtered the animal. Mutilated the body. But the natural world persists, uncontrollable reality/mortality mocking Man’s Master-Mind dominion. Earth: the matrix of our materiality, loathsome Mother of all Mothers, the ultimate body, bearer of the sum vulnerability of all mortal creatures. Women’s and nature’s victimization by patriarchal civilization emerge as parallel phenomena, as men strive to realize immortality through last-ditch rituals of violent domination. The ghastly irony is that in his denial of death, Man’s legacy is a human society condemned to self-obliterate. Fear of death becomes fear of life becomes the Masters’ murderous hatred for the living world. Breaking News: “A top nuclear security official says the U.S. must move ahead with plans to ramp up production of key components for the nation’s nuclear arsenal despite the challenges presented by the coronavirus.”
Life itself, in the terminal phase of patriarchy’s war against reality/mortality, is Man’s enemy, so life must be mastered, and when that fails, exterminated. And Man will fail. He is failing already. At the helm of his death-machine the Master is terrified, raging against reality, the natural world—and we cannot be afraid, neither to live nor to die, whatever it takes, in defense of life, we have to stop him.
Aurora Linnea is a librarian and ecofeminist pariah living near the Atlantic Ocean.
Featured image: anatomical sketch by Leonardo da Vinci.
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