by DGR News Service | Mar 16, 2020 | Building Alternatives, Culture of Resistance, Defensive Violence, Movement Building & Support, The Problem: Civilization, The Solution: Resistance
This is an edited transcript of the interview Sam Mitchell from Collapse Chronicles conducted with DGR Member Max Wilbert.
Sam Mitchell: It is an absolutely beautiful sunny winter day here in the great state of Texas, and the opening bell of the year 2020 and you have found your way to collapse chronicles.
My name is Sam Mitchell and what we do here obviously, as we chronicle the collapse of global industrial civilization and the planet. And guys, before I get into this I just want to give a little bit of a warning and a disclaimer. I have mentioned many times, because I bring a guest on to the show, it does not necessarily mean that I am advocating everything my guests are getting ready to say. I just want to make that clear to Homeland Security. Anyone else listening to this? I am not necessarily advocating what we’re getting ready to hear, but I do think it is a voice we need to hear. And who we’re going to be hearing is a recommendation I received from none other than Derrick Jensen. And this is this fellow named Max Wilbert, who is a buddy of Derrick’s.
And so for those of you not aware of Max, I have read out some of his stuff in the past here. From his Website:
Max Wilbert is a third-generation dissident who grew up in Seattle’s post-WTO anti-globalization and undoing racism movement. He has been an organizer for more than 15 years. Max is a longtime member of Deep Green Resistance and serves on the board of a small, grassroots non-profit. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Environmental Communication and Advocacy from Huxley College. His first book, a collection of pro-feminist and environmental essays written over a six-year period, was released in 2018. He is co-author of the forthcoming book “Bright Green Lies,” which looks at the problems with mainstream so-called “solutions” to the climate crisis.
And here on his Website, Max says of himself, “I am part of a revolutionary movement rooted in ecology, anti-racism, feminism and human and nonhuman rights that aims to dismantle the global culture of empire — read industrial civilization — by any means necessary.“
Max Wilbert, come on and say hi to the folks, and we’re going to dive right into this rollicking conversation.
Max Wilbert: All right, Sam, thanks for having me on the show. It’s good to be here. And thanks for that intro.
Sam Mitchell: OK. So, guys, anyway, my first thought was I was going to build up to this quote I’m getting ready to read from Max, but I’ve said, what the hell? Let’s just dive right into it. We’re not going to read this. It’s the laundry list of everything that is wrong with the global industrial civilization and the ongoing collapse of a planet. We’re going to dive right into what we need to do about it. And this is what Max Wilbert wrote a while back, and we’re just going to pick up from here. So to kick off this conversation, here’s what Max had to say:
“We need to build legitimate movements to dismantle global capitalism. All work is useful towards this end. However, I see no way this goal will be achieved without force. The best methods I have come across for achieving this rely on a dedicated cadre forming small, highly mobile and trained strike forces. These forces should target key nodes of global industrial infrastructure, such as shipping, communication, finance, energy, etc. and destroy them with the goal of inciting cascading systems failure. The interconnected global economy is vulnerable to this type of attack because of how interdependent it is. If the right targets are chosen and effectively attacked, the entire thing could come crashing down.”
Max Wilbert, that was a mouthful. Amplify and clarify, which you have defined as Decisive Ecological Warfare.
Max Wilbert: Absolutely. Thanks for reading that quote out. That was from an interview I did with a French friend of mine a while ago. I tried to lay it out as straightforwardly as I could in that article. And, you know, it sounds pretty extreme to a lot of people. And it sounds like, I think, what the government would call ecoterrorism, and a lot of people would be very terrified by hearing what you just read. And I’m sure a lot of listeners are sitting back in their seats and thinking, what is this all about? This guy’s a nut job, you know. I guess I want to push back on that a little bit. You know, I don’t feel like an extremist. I don’t think that I am somebody who’s crazy. I think that I’m somebody who’s looking at the political realities and the ecological realities of the situation we find ourselves in as a species, and trying to come up with a reasonable response to that. And to me, that reasonable response, it’s not going to rely on the government. I think a lot of your readers probably are on the same pages as me with this. And I think you probably are as well. But look at the incompetence of governments around the world to address the climate crisis and all kinds of different issues. The idea that they’re going to solve these converging problems that we’re facing in an ecological sense is a pipe dream. It’s just not happening. There’s no evidence that it’s happening.
Everything is getting worse day after day after day. And, you know, emissions continue to rise, year after year. So, if government isn’t going to solve it, then people will need to solve it, right? And what does that look like, given the constraints that we have on our time, given the situation that we find ourselves in? I’ve had sort of some revolutionary leanings in my politics for a long time. You talked in my intro about how I grew up in Seattle in the post WTO, and there was this understanding in the communities that I came of age, and politically looking at, for example, the Zapatistas and all kinds of different revolutionary and people’s movements around the world. Sometimes the movements have to be forceful, sometimes they have to use violence, or what people would term as violence. I don’t consider economic sabotage to necessarily be violence, although, of course, look at economic sanctions against Iraq, for example, which killed a million civilians, that’s more devastating than than any war can be. But I think that we need to be clear eyed about these things.
I say this as somebody whose grandfather was a conscientious objector who refused to fight in World War II. So many people look at World War II and talk about it as being that just war, and the Americans fighting the Nazis and the Italian fascists and the Japanese fascist state. The reality, I think as a lot of people know, anyone who’s read, for example, “A People’s History of the United States” knows that the US government didn’t go into the Second World War with altruistic motivations. The motivations were imperialist, they were economic. And many people in the government and prominent members of our society supported the Nazi regime from the very beginning. One of the biggest examples being Henry Ford. IBM, of course, worked closely with the Nazis. We all know that. This is sort of beside the point. But I say this as somebody, again, whose grandfather was a conscientious objector. I came of age politically in the anti-war movement, trying to stop the invasions of Afghanistan and then Iraq. So I’m not somebody who loves violence. I’m not somebody who wants to go out and cause destruction and impose my will on other people. That’s not my ideology. I’m somebody who values peace and basically wants to just have a good quiet life, live it in a good way and have good relationships with the people around me. And I would be very content if I could just go live in the woods for the rest of my life with my loved ones and not have very much happen. That sounds great to me. But unfortunately, we’re living in this global crisis and we need to come up with some sort of response to it. And all of the things that I look at, the government’s solutions, the corporate solutions, the greenwashing, all this stuff around alternative energy and green technology, the Green New Deal, all of these things. I look at them and they seem vastly disproportionate to the scale of the problems that we face. We need fundamental economic and political change across the whole planet. I don’t think that that is going to happen simply or easily. And frankly, I don’t think that’s going to happen willingly. I don’t think people are willingly going to give up this life.
You know, my nephew, who’s two and a half years old, and I’m hanging out with him recently and reading books and so on, and like most kids, he’s really into trucks, he’s really into the garbage trucks and the cranes and construction sites. It’s fascinating to him. It was fascinating to me when I was his age. And I was writing last night about the sadness, the tragedy that this kid, growing up in an urban area, is not going to be exposed to grizzly bears, to orca whales, to wolf packs. You know, the megafauna of the past have been replaced by what I’m calling in this article I’m working on a mechafauna. Large machines have replaced large animals. And instead of navigating through a landscape of raging rivers and towering mountains and glaciers, we’re navigating through a landscape of towering skyscrapers and freeways and businesses. So, most people are profoundly disconnected from the natural world. And I think because of that, we have all been inculcated into this ideology that looks at civilization and this way of life as… It’s even beyond a good thing, it’s something that’s so fundamental that it cannot be questioned.
Most people literally cannot imagine living a different way of life than the modern industrial, high energy way of life. Most people, at least in the United States where I live, can’t imagine that. Some can, some people obviously have more experience living off the land or living in communities and in more intentional ways and can really imagine a much lower energy, a smaller scale, more localized way of life, which is the only sustainable path for the future. But politically, if we think that that way of life, moving everyone on the planet away from high energy ways of life and dismantling those high energy systems, that’s the only path towards survival we have as a species. And that’s the only way to stop the mass destruction that the dominant culture is perpetuating. And I don’t see that happening willingly. There’s just no signs that that’s going to happen, at least on a large enough scale, on a fast enough timeline.
Sam Mitchell: What was your phrase you mentioned five minutes ago? The disproportionate scale of the response to the level of the crisis. The problem, the predicament. And again, I’m just going to play devil’s advocate here. So, assuming that I agree with everything you say, that what we need to do is target key nodes of global industrial infrastructure, such as shipping, communication, finance, energy, and destroy them with a goal of inciting cascading systems failure. The problem that I would have with that, on the assumption that I agree that was a noble goal, and I’m not saying whether I do or not, my problem, Max, would be the same problem I have with all of the other responses you mentioned, that there is no way in hell that we’re going to marshal the forces necessary. It’s not it’s not even David versus Goliath at this point. Rather, it’s a goldfish vs. a blue whale. What would you say to get me on your team? Assuming as that I agree I’m going to join your team, but this is the reason I’m reluctant to. What would be your response to me?
Max Wilbert: Well, the first thing I would say is if we don’t try, then we’ll never know whether it was possible. I mean, people have achieved plenty of incredible things throughout the history of the world, both for good and bad, that seemed incredibly unlikely in the beginning. And there’s one quote that I like to spread around, it was from Michael McFaul I believe, who is on the National Security Council. And he said “every revolution seems impossible beforehand and inevitable afterwards”. So I don’t think what you just said is a unique feeling. I think, millions of people have felt that way throughout history in all kinds of different difficult and dangerous political situations. And yet people still choose to fight. People still choose to organize. And of course, not everyone does. I don’t expect everyone to join a movement like what I’m talking about. But, we need to find those people who are willing to join, are willing to fight. And, that not only means people doing that work, fighting for that cascading system’s failure, going underground and taking serious action. I think it also means people who are just willing to speak up and talk about this openly, because I don’t think this is anything to be ashamed of, or anything that needs to be discussed in the shadows. You know, I’m willing to go on national television and talk about this. I don’t care because we’re in a desperate situation. And this to me is not any less mainstream. I mean, look at the politicians that you see on TV and these debates around the U.S. presidential election and so on. The stuff they’re talking about is completely out of touch, in most cases, with the realities of what we’re facing. And I look at those people as the extremists. I look at those people as the the people who are insane and out of touch with what’s actually happening in the world. So, I think we need people involved in all kinds of different levels.
And people hear what I’m saying and get scared. You know, this is serious stuff. Obviously I’m talking about revolutionary politics really in a sense, and that is a dangerous thing. It’s dangerous now and it has always been dangerous. And I think one thing that people neglect is the fact that revolutionary movements involve people at all kinds of different levels. I mean, there are people who are part of deep green resistance, the group that I’m in, who are parents of young children, who don’t have any time, who don’t have the ability to be a public face for the movement. People find ways to contribute. You know, people volunteer in all kinds of different ways. People translate articles. People donate. People do all kinds of different things to build a culture of resistance to support these ideas and build them up into a political force, a political movement that can actually influence the course of events. So that’s what we’re trying to do.
And I understand people’s feelings of disempowerment. You look at mass media, you look at the culture that we live in, and that’s one of the main goals of this system, to keep everyone in a position of feeling disempowered, of feeling a sense of total alienation, of feeling disconnection. And one of my experiences in political organizing and doing this work is that not only do I feel like I’m doing the right thing, but, I find this work to be incredibly fulfilling, personally. I find myself with a sense of purpose that didn’t exist before I found these ideas. When I was younger, I felt very swept along in global events. And now I feel like I’m part of an organized force that’s working to change things. And the fact that we are outnumbered and outgunned and have no money and so on, all of these things are realities that many other people throughout history have faced. So, I look at myself and other people in this movement as part of a multi generational struggle, that has frankly been going on for thousands of years against the culture of empire. We need to step up and step into that role. And I think it takes a lot of wisdom and it takes a lot of commitment and it takes a lot of self work to confront those fears, to have real conversations with yourself and your loved ones about what this could mean. And it takes courage. I would rather do this work than sit on a couch and watch Netflix for the rest of my life. So it does that make me crazy? Maybe in the minds of some people in this culture, but I would rather be crazy than working 40 hours a week, slaving away at some job I hate, getting ready to retire into a climate nightmare and leaving nothing, leaving nothing for future generations.
Sam Mitchell: OK, well, there are so many things I was trying to grab hold of out of that response. One word stands out to me and that response, it was outgunned. Max has a fine YouTube channel himself. You can find Max’s YouTube channel, and I’ve noticed that the other YouTube bots have not shut you down. I’m a little bit surprised that you are openly advocating on your YouTube channel to start picking up guns. Talk about that, where literally does arming ourselves fit into your program? I mean, guns have bullets. Where are you talking about those bullets ending up?
Max Wilbert: Well, to be clear: The strategy that you talked about, the Decisive Ecological Warfare strategy, is explicitly designed to minimize civilian casualties. That’s something that has been a part of our ethic from the beginning. We’re not talking about waging open warfare on governments or the industrial system. We’re talking about sabotage. We’re talking about coordinated economic sabotage. Now, I’m not naive enough to say that that may not involve some violence against people, but that’s not a call for me to make because I’m not directly involved in that process.
We talk very clearly about the need for a firewall between people who are above ground and advocating these things, like myself, and people who go underground to actually take those type of actions.
So I can’t actually tell those people what to do, and I don’t know what they will do or what they are doing if they exist. So, in some ways the point is moot. You talked about my YouTube channel and I’ve made some videos, like you said, talking about weapons. And I see two main reasons for this.
The first is self-defense. I think that we’re entering a world that’s getting increasingly chaotic. And people like myself, who advocate for what is seen as radical politics in this culture are at risk, compared to a lot of other people. I receive death threats regularly, I receive all kinds of hateful messages from all kinds of different people. I’ve been doing this for a while, and that has been happening consistently. And it’s only speeding up. We’re seeing increased polarization all around the world. We’re seeing the increased rise of of right wing, ultra nationalist and proto-fascist movement.
And that’s something to be concerned about. That’s a real concern. And I don’t think the police or the state are ever going to protect people like me, or even people who aren’t revolutionaries. Just look at the black community in the United States and all the violence that they have been facing for so long, at the hands of the police and racist vigilantes. I think we need to learn to defend ourselves, and that doesn’t mean we love guns or we build a stupid gun worshiping culture like the NRA.
I think that means that we be adults, and we make reasonable decisions to preserve the safety of ourselves and our communities. And I think as climate crisis intensifies, we’re going to see more and more instability and the potential for violence.
So I want to see communities of resistance, and especially communities that are engaging in on the ground work, defending the land, and building alternative communities, building alternative economies and ways to survive. I want to see those communities making serious decisions about what they’re gonna do, because if you have a great, wonderful, groovy eco village, and some sort of climate disaster knocks out the local government, then you may have to be prepared for a bad situation.
One of my friends is from Pakistan, and she talks about that we should look towards Pakistan as an example of what the U.S. and other more “wealthy” first world nations are moving towards in the future. You’re seeing a lot of conflict, you’re seeing a lot of sectarianism, violence, blackouts and rolling brownouts. Power is only available for certain periods of the day. A lot of desertification, a lot of extreme poverty contrasted with extreme wealth. And I think that’s the future we’re in for. Rebecca Solnit wrote a book about natural disasters, and about how people have this idea that when disaster strikes, everyone becomes rapists and looters and things get really nasty and really bad really quickly. And she writes that’s actually not what happens. That’s much more the exception than the rule. In general, when disaster strikes, people tend to come together and work together and cooperate and help one another. I’m not somebody who looks at human beings as inherently evil and nasty, and it’s gonna get really bad and brutish. But for political organizers, for people who are specifically resisting civilization, capitalism, white supremacy and so on, I think it makes sense to reasonably know how to use and own firearms legally.
The second reason that I talk about is almost, in a sense, more philosophical. In the Second Amendment of the US Constitution was written specifically: In a situation where people rose up to fight against a government, and they use the weapons that they own to do that. And then they wrote into the Constitution protections for people owning weapons. Obviously, the American Revolution was a bourgeois revolution. It was a high class revolution, a ruling class revolution. It was not a grassroots people’s movement, it was not a movement for freedom or progressive ideals. But nonetheless, I think it’s true that preserving independence from the state is incredibly important. And I find it very hypocritical that many people on the left, for example, will critique the administration for building concentration camps and for police brutality and violence, and then will turn around and the same time advocate for taking away people’s weapons, taking away weapons of the public. And of course, mass shootings and all these different issues, there are very serious issues and they are real issues. And at the same time, I think that preserving a population that is armed is a bulwark against tyranny in some ways.
The other part of it is, you look at the United States and there are a huge number of guns in private hands in this country, and the vast, vast majority of them are owned by conservative and far right people. Not many are owned by people with progressive values, who really value ecology and really value feminism and really value anti-racistm. I’m not saying that all conservatives are racist or whatever. That’s an oversimplification. But I think the fact is true, that all the weapons concentrated in the hands of the right is not good. And I think, as we see increasing instability, it makes sense to know how to use weapons. And again, that doesn’t mean you glamorize them. That doesn’t mean you worship them. And that doesn’t mean that you plan some sort of armed attack against whatever. That’s not what I’m talking about. But I do think that thinking about weapons and knowing how to use them can help move people on the left towards a greater sense of seriousness and a greater sense of power. I didn’t grow up in a gun culture at all, I didn’t shoot a gun until I was 21 years old, something like that. I wouldn’t consider myself a gun nut or anything along those lines. I don’t really enjoy shooting guns at all, although I do practice it occasionally and I do hunt, because I like to connect with the land and get my own food and get the best quality possible meat that’s local and organic and has no chemicals in it and was grown on the mountainside, not in some factory farm.
But I think when you critique the power of empire, when you critique U.S. imperialism, when you critique police brutality and you have never touched or fired a weapon, then I think that you perhaps have a skewed understanding or an incomplete understanding of what you’re talking about. And I think this can lead to some dangerous ideas. Many progressive people, leftists and people in the hippie community talk about things like violence doesn’t work, violence never works, which I think is just a stupid idea, frankly, I think the reality is that unfortunately, violence works really well. That’s why the US military uses it. That’s why the police use it. That’s why abusers and wife beaters use it, because it is very effective. And that’s not a good thing. But again, I think we need to be adults and face these realities.
Sam Mitchell: Yeah, well, I know that you of all people are keeping up with the trends, the skyrocketing number of environmental defenders being just flat out murdered by these guys. When I was reading something in the past few months, about one of these tribes in Brazil, these warriors, you know, and actually they need to be defending their land base. I am 100 percent in support of an Amazon indigenous person using violence to defend their land base and their culture. But at the same time, Max, I’m thinking in the back of my head, there is nothing that this Bozo Nero guy, as I call him, there is nothing that Bozo Nero would love more than an Amazon Indian to put an arrow through the throat of a soy farmer or a or a gold miner or someone building a hydro power dam. Are you following me? Then you would see what violence would look like. It would be a bloodbath. And they would say, well, they threw the first punch. That this guy with his bow and arrow killed some guy building a riot rod, driving a bulldozer or building a hydroelectric dam. Do you see where I’m going with this? And I would be cheering the guy with a bow and arrow, but I know what it would turn into, brother. What do you think about that?
Max Wilbert: Well, I think you’re absolutely right. And that’s why I think we can’t get caught up in dogma. I’m not a dogmatic pacifist. I’m also not a dogmatic advocate of violence. I think you need to be situational in the methods that you choose to use to achieve a certain goal. And if you are trying to defend your land, then in many contexts the best way to do that is going to be completely nonviolently. And that’s not a problem for me at all. I’ve participated in countless nonviolent actions and direct action blockades and protests and media events and all kinds of stuff on that spectrum. So, I don’t think that’s a contradiction at all. I think we need to be flexible in the way that we approach these things. But I also think that we need to avoid blaming the victim. And I think we need to recognize that of course what you’re saying is true, that the state will use violence as an excuse whenever it can. The reality is the states can be violent no matter what. The corporations are going to be violent no matter what. Their violence may take different forms depending on the situation, but their modus operandi is violent and whether they are sending in the military or whether they are using international trade agreements and unfair loaning practices. From organizations like the WTO and the World Bank, that force massive infrastructure projects on poor indigenous people and rural people all over the world, or whether we’re talking about banks here in this country and how they function and how they keep the poor poor and exploit people. They are using violence every single day. That is their main tool. And so our choice should not be some moral abstraction – not that morality is abstract – but I think that we need to be looking at what methods are going to be effective to stop them, and not artificially constraining ourselves based on morality. Morality that frankly I think we’ve been taught often. I think there’s a reality that we’re taught, Martin Luther King in schools and we’re not really taught about Malcolm X, and we’re not really taught about the Black Panthers, and we’re not really taught about revolutionary movements around the world, except for, again, the bourgeois American Revolution. And we have all internalized that training. Again, I think there’s a reason that we’re taught so heavily about figures like MLK and Gandhi, and even a figure like Nelson Mandela, who is lionized in the United States and looked at as this amazing figure. Well, very, very few people recognize that he was the leader of an underground military organization that was attacking and assassinating people in the apartheid government, in the apartheid state, and was coordinating sabotage, attacks against the electrical grid, against diamond mines, against power stations. And that side of the apartheid resistance has been completely whitewashed. And instead, we’re talking about Desmond Tutu and nonviolent protest and truth and reconciliation. The reality is that social change and revolutionary change throughout history has always been a messy process with a lot of different pieces and a lot of different people working in different ways. I don’t think that that means that you have to be opposed just because you’re using different tactics. And I think that ideally, the strongest movements do use all kinds of different methods and all kinds of different tactics across the spectrum, and they’re coordinated and they support one another. They’re not going to condemn one another for for using different methods. They’re going to just work in the most effective way that they can.
Sam Mitchell: I would add that they’re very savvy. We’re still on the first paragraph, and I made it exactly one paragraph into this whole list of quotes of yours. I wanted you to expand. So I’m just going to leave my notes behind then.
OK. You mentioned somewhere in the past 10 minutes and you’ve written about this, about whether humans are inherently … you know, I just interviewed this ecologist named William Reas. He should probably go listen to that interview, it was a last one of twenty nineteen. He is based from an ecological perspective, if not from a moral one, saying that humans are a plague on this planet.
I want to draw and find out where your line is. I don’t know whether you’re speaking for Deep Green Resistance, I just want to hear your own line.
I want to make clear that I understand that you draw a big line between global industrial capitalism, civilization, that whole messy thing, and humanity as a species. That you put those in kind of two separate camps. Well, I think a lot of people listening to this podcast probably agree with you 100 percent on that the global industrial civilization is the worst reflection of humanity, and we can all agree it needs to go, at least the people down in this rabbit hole.
But some people would say that even that’s not going far enough, that humans just need to go. What is your comment to the people saying that ending global capitalism still is not enough to save the planet, and we just need to have humans say bye bye and disappear?
Max Wilbert: Well, I think that’s a profoundly civilized thing to say. I think that’s only something that you can say if you grew up in a culture that is destroying the planet, which not every culture has done. You know, I grew up in a culture that’s destroying the planet. I grew up in a city, and grew up with cars and everything. So I can certainly understand the impulse and why people feel that way. But the thing is, people who are saying that are looking at history and interpreting it in a certain way. And the reality is, you can look at the same history and interpret it in a different way, or you can talk to people and look at situations where people are actually living in land based communities and see what’s happening ecologically, see what’s happening to the people. So, there are thousands of examples of cultures that have lived more or less in a balance, over the long term, with the natural world. And I think that this is actually an adaptive trait for human beings, to live in sustainable ways. And I think, for that reason, we are sort of born naturalists.
If humans are just given a little bit of training and a little bit of education and encouragement to learn about the local ecology, and immerse themselves, and exist within a living ecology, then I think that we can do it extremely well. That’s not to say that human beings don’t influence what’s happening around them in ways that could be called destructive. Quite obviously, humans are an apex predator. And apex predators always disrupt and change the world around them and always influence things, especially when they come into a new habitat for the first time. They’re going to upend things. They’re going to make a lot of changes. But that’s no different than if you don’t have wolves in an area, and then they’ll show up. They’re going to cause very similar changes to the ecology on a large scale. Nobody is saying that wolves are inherently destructive, right? I think humans are no different. For example, people look at the wave of extinctions that has followed with some species when indigenous peoples first showed up in certain areas, for example some of the Polynesian cultures, when people first showed up in North America… There is debate about these issues and they’re not well understood, because obviously we’re talking about ancient history. We’re talking about very limited records from archeology here. So we’re just interpreting the past, right? And that’s very limited. But what it appears like happened in these situations is that humans – again, an apex predator – showed up in an area, they caused a lot of change, they may have caused a few extinctions, and then things settled down. People figured out how to live in that area in a way that was balanced, and things more or less stayed the same for thousands of years after that. That is sustainability, and that’s an adaptive trait for human beings. And I think that, again, if you have not lived in that way, then it’s hard to perceive how that can happen. When you have grown up in a completely growth based culture, in a Judeo-Christian, Abrahamic religion, a world view of growth and patriarchy and as many children as possible and no relationship to the local ecology, then you’re going to look at that with skepticism. But the reality is that our natural state is an animistic state, where we are in real everyday relationship with the natural world around us, and we develop individual personalized relationships with certain places, a certain creek, a certain river, a certain forest, a certain herd of deer, a certain population of salmon, a certain family of grizzly bears, and we learned their habits and their ways, and we watched them not just for days or hours, but for years and generations. And we tell stories about them and we communicate about them with each other. We pass information down over time, and we develop ways to live, while not destroying these beings who are around us, who we love. That is so alien to most people in this culture today. Most people literally cannot comprehend that, because of the human supremacism that we’re inculcated with from birth. It seems completely unthinkable. So I would disagree that humans are inherently destructive. I think that is completely wrong. We can be incredibly destructive, but I think that essentially, when it comes to the nature versus nurture argument on this, it’s all about nurture. Humans are a very flexible species, and when we are raised in a destructive civilization that has no respect for the natural world and has this growth imperative, then things are going to go downhill fast. And that’s not just modern culture. That’s the story of the last 10,000 years, that’s civilization as a whole.
Going back to the Fertile Crescent, the so-called Fertile Crescent, that’s no longer fertile anymore because – I think Derrick said this on your show – the first written story of civilization is about Gilgamesh cutting down the forest, to build a city and to build an empire, an army and to become wealthy and powerful. That is the first written story of civilization. That’s the first written story. Civilization had existed for quite a while before this. This story was written from what we understand. And archeology tells us that indigenous peoples, people living outside of civilization, people living outside of mass mono crop agriculture, lived in balance for hundreds of thousands of years around the world, before civilization came. And when that transition to civilization happened, then you start seeing massive destruction. So, for example, global warming. A lot of people think it began with the industrial revolution and with the burning of coal and steam engines and so on.
That’s not actually true. Global warming actually began with civilization and the beginnings of widespread agriculture. For example, if you look in the ice core data, I think about thirty eight hundred years ago – something in that range, don’t quote me on that number – you see a big spike in methane emissions, and that corresponds with the beginning of rice paddy agriculture in Southeast Asia. There is a climate scientist named William Ruddiman, who argues and demonstrates from the data that the amount of greenhouse gases released by agriculture, and the destruction of habitat through the rise of civilization, the amount of carbon released is roughly equivalent to everything that has been released during the entire industrial period. It just happened over 10,000 years instead of over two hundred and fifty years. So these problems are not new. And for that reason, I think it’s easy for people to look back at ten thousand years of history and say, look at how destructive we’ve been. But the point is, you have to go outside history. You have to go into pre-history, because these indigenous communities, before civilization, did not have written records. And indigenous cultures, today and during the last 10,000 years, that have existed and have remained intact, have lived in profoundly different ways.
This isn’t to lionize or sort of falsely idolize indigenous peoples, because I think a lot of indigenous communities can be critiqued on all kinds of different issues. We all have disagreements about the best way to live, and not all communities that people call indigenous live sustainably or have lived sustainably at all times. I think that’s, of course, a vast oversimplification. We’re talking about thousands of cultures over thousands of years of history. We we can make some broad generalizations, but it’s dangerous to say that it’s always this way. You know what I mean?
Sam Mitchell: One of the things that I found missing in your work, you do not seem to talk about the issue of overpopulation very much. And I just want to say, sure, I know that you understand, if global industrial civilization comes down, that is going to mean the population of this planet is going to come down with it. Is that a good thing? A bad thing? Have you ever thought about what a sustainable human population living in balance with nature looks like on planet Earth?
Max Wilbert: Of course, that’s a huge issue, and I thought about it a lot. In terms of your last question, don’t have a number and I don’t think I could. That’s not something that I can dictate, it’s something that obviously will change, depending on the ecological circumstances that people find themselves in. I think the leading writer on this topic was William Catton, whose book “Overshoot” is one of the most important books that’s ever been written.
Sam Mitchell: Derrick Jensen’s “Endgame” and William Catton’s “Overshoot”, those are the ones I put at the top of my list.
This house of cards is coming down, you and I both know that, Max, whether we bring it down or it comes down itself. Do you believe that we’re going to be living on a planet of 10 billion people in 40, 50 years from now, or is that number going to be a whole hell of a lot less?
Max Wilbert: Well, that’s actually an interesting question. I think I may actually differ from a lot of the collapse people on this, because I don’t actually think that collapse of this culture is a given in the short term, and that sort of timeframe. I don’t think that’s a given. I think it could happen, but it does not seem faded at all to me. And I say that as somebody who traveled to the Arctic in a climate science expedition and has walked on thawing permafrost. I’m very familiar with all the feedback loops and the methane burp potential, and all these different issues. We don’t know what’s happening. We don’t know how fast these changes are gonna happen. But I think, this culture continuing to sail along and grow and grow and grow is the worst possible outcome.
And I think that even if nothing changes and nothing gets worse, we are already have enough reason to resist now. I don’t know what the future is going to look like. And I think that you are right, that the human population is not sustainable and it’s going to be lower at some point in the future. And there are a lot of ways that that could play out. It could be really bad, and just a ton of people all die very violent, horrible deaths. Or it could be achieved in a sort of more planned, humane way, by simply reducing the birth rate and letting natural deaths reduce population. Maybe the reality or how it will play out will be somewhere in the middle. I don’t know. But this issue is one of the reasons why I think feminism is such an important topic, because I think that the whole issue of overpopulation is incredibly tied up with agriculture and with patriarchy. And I would say the most important writer on this topic is Lierre Keith with her book “The Vegetarian Myth”. It’s sort of focused around the idea of diet, but it’s really about patriarchy and agriculture and civilization.
She points out rightly that within agriculture, within civilization, maximizing the number of births is the best way to increase growth. That’s the best way to make workers available for the workforce, to work in the fields, in the factories and to serve in the army. And the coordinated culture of control and domination, male domination, that is patriarchy, is something that has existed for a long time at this point.
All around the world, when you have examples of women actually gaining some level of political control and autonomy and pushing back the powers of the Abrahamic religions and pushing back the powers of patriarchal society, you see birthrates just plummet. The human population is unsustainable and it’s going to be lower, and I would prefer that to happen in a way as humane as possible.
Sam Mitchell: And I really hate to break in here, brother, but I am glad to say I’m going to be interviewing Lierre in a few weeks. I guess I’ll pick up with her on the book Bright Green Lies, since we did not have time to get to, we’re going to collapse here in a few minutes.
So Max Wilbert, if you’ve ever heard one of my interviews, you know how I always end them:
If you where not speaking with Sam Mitchell at Collapse Chronicles, where you had free reign for an hour, but you actually have the mainstream media with a microphone in your face saying “Max Wilbert, give us your 60 second sound bite to humanity and the opening bell of 2020”, what would those 60 seconds sound like?
Max Wilbert: Well, the problems that we’re facing are massive, and the political systems incapable of addressing them. So many of the solutions that we’re seeing, such as green energy, are turning out to be false solutions. We’re seeing a huge explosion in green technology and yet at the same time, emissions continue to climb and pollution continues to climb. So what do you do with that? I think we need fundamental change. We need broad economic change. And I think that looks like a complete restructuring of the global economy. How this could happen?
There are many different ways, and I want to support people who are working for these type of goals, working for deep growth, working for relocalization, working for permaculture. I want to support people who are working in all kinds of different ways. For myself, I have chosen a revolutionary path because I think that not only do we need to build up those alternatives, but I think we need to be prepared to dismantle the dominant systems of power that are destroying the planet. I don’t think they’re going to stop willingly. So, I would invite people who are interested in learning more about that or getting involved in that to reach out to me. Let’s get connected, so you can become part of this culture of resistance, because it’s our only chance. And I think that we are the inheritors of a beautiful tradition and we are living in perhaps the most important moment in the history of the human species. And what happens in the future is completely dependent on what we do now.
Sam Mitchell: Okay. And with that, Max Wilbert, we’re gonna have to wrap it up. Max Wilbert, thank you very much for taking an hour out of your schedule to come talk to us on collapsible chronicles, but more importantly, thank you for your work and keep up the good fight.
by DGR News Service | Feb 10, 2020 | Repression at Home
By Max Wilbert
Anthropologist Stanley Diamond once wrote that “Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home.” Empires and the elites that control them have, as Diamond notes, been repressing their opposition for thousands of years. At this point, they have turned suppression and violence into an art form. From blacklisting to blackmail, from false lawsuits to frame-ups, from jail to torture and murder, their methods are sometimes subtle, sometimes direct, but almost always effective.
In his book on U.S. government repression of communist, black power, feminist, and indigenous movements during the 1960’s and 70’s, Nelson Blackstock writes that “The total picture [revealed by declassified COINTELPRO documents] is of cool, calculating technicians, not crazed paranoids, going about the business of secretly combating people who are challenging the rule of the rich.” He concludes: “That’s the FBI’s job.”
History is littered with the corpses of those who spoke truth to power, organized, and fought back, and who proved themselves too dangerous to be allowed to live. But as Steinbeck reminded us, there is a “little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.” The struggle for justice is bigger than can be covered up by one corpse, or a thousand, or a million.
When Che Guevara was on the firing line in Bolivia, his last words were: “Shoot, coward. You’re only going to kill a man.” Fred Hampton, murdered by the police as he lay drugged in his bed at age 21, once said “You can kill a revolutionary, but you can’t kill a revolution.” And the Burkinabé revolutionary Thomas Sankara, on the eve of his betrayal and murder, said “While revolutionaries as individuals can be murdered, you can’t kill an idea.”
We are surrounded by ghosts. The ghosts of ancient forests, long ago cut down. The ghosts of verdant meadows plowed for fields and cities. The ghosts of bison, slain for their skins turned to leather belts and sent east to drive gears in factories. The ghosts of indigenous people. The ghosts of extinct species. And the ghosts of those who have fought back.
Those in power—the overlords of our neo-colonial world order—use violence because it is dreadfully effective. Their drone strikes are effective. Their special operations raids are effective. Their hundreds of billions of dollars spent on weapons of war are well spent. That is why they do it.
Thomas Friedman, that prototypical liberal justifier of imperialism once wrote in a rare moment of clarity, “The hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist. McDonalds cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglass [an arms manufacturer that has now merged with Boeing]. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps.” He is right. Violence maintains modern industrial society.
Revolutionaries generally do not live long lives. Perhaps this is melodramatic to say. But then again, I have received death threats, and expect to receive more. The threats do not scare me. At least not yet. They will not silence me—but a bullet would. And that is well known to those behind the “hidden fist” of the market.
The real danger to revolutionaries is not simply repressive violence itself, but maybe even more so the fear that it creates.
In 1990, members of the Mohawk Nation began a protest camp among a pine forest at Kanesatake, west of Montreal, to oppose a “development” project that would have destroyed the forest. They began carrying weapons after racist vigilantes targeted them, and a standoff began when police were sent to evict them. After a firefight in which one policeman was killed, the Canadian military was called in, beginning a 78-day armed confrontation between 3700 professional soldiers and a small contingent of Mohawk warriors and families.
One Mohawk warrior explained the effect that their total commitment to land, nation, and mission had on the Canadian soldiers they faced. “They aren’t scared of us because we’re willing to take up arms,” he said, speaking to a journalist. “They’re scared of us because we’re willing to die.”
Courage is not the lack of fear, but the ability to continue despite fear. When we master our fears in this way, we have taken a vital first step towards defeating the repression. For every act of repression, our acts of defiance must be more fierce, more lasting, more total.
Violence is all around us. It is written on the tags of our clothing reading “Bangladesh” and “Vietnam.” It is engraved by child slaves and captured by “suicide nets” on the circuit boards of our cell phones and televisions. It is bone-deep in the stolen indigenous land we walk upon. It gushes forth into our gas tanks alongside ghosts of Ogoni and Falluja stillbirths.
Someday, that violence will catch up with all of us. The end may come fast or slow. A 9mm police bullet. The machete of an illegal logger. The slow death in a hospital bed. We are immersed in the violence every day, our lungs the shellfish of the atmospheric ocean, filtering out every carcinogen and toxin they can grasp and sequestering them deep in our soft bodies.
The question that faces each of us is “what will you do with your one wild and precious life?” Like Mary Oliver, I’ve spent my fair share of hours reclining in meadows, watching grasshoppers crawl up long stems of grass—and I plan to continue this pastime until I die. Living life, experiencing ecstasy and grief and the full range of human feelings, is our birthright as living beings. But an ethical life today requires more.
When I die, I do not intend to have lived for nothing. As Lierre Keith has written, life is a combat discipline. Every day on this planet could be my last, and in the event of my demise, there will be more work to be done. I hope those who survive will bury my body in a beautiful place, mourn, laugh and tell stories of me, and remember that I lived for a belief and died for a principle. Then, I hope they will straighten up, take a deep breath, and get back to work.
Max Wilbert is an organizer, writer, and wilderness guide who grew up in Seattle’s post-WTO anti-globalization and undoing racism movement. His essays have been published in Earth Island Journal, Counterpunch, and elsewhere. His first book, an essay collection called We Choose to Speak, was released in 2018.
Featured image by Max Wilbert
by DGR News Service | Dec 13, 2019 | Direct Action
This post is excerpted from the book, Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet. Click here to buy a copy of the book or read it online. The book includes a detailed exploration of the morality of different forms of resistance, and is highly recommended reading. This is part 3 in a series. Part 1 is here, and part 2 is here.
Ultimately, success requires direct confrontation and conflict with power; you can’t win on the defensive. But direct confrontation doesn’t always mean overt confrontation. Disrupting and dismantling systems of power doesn’t require advertising who you are, when and where you are planning to act, or what means you will use.
Back in the heyday of the summit-hopping “anti-globalization” movement, I enjoyed seeing the Black Bloc in action. But I was discomfited when I saw them smash the windows of a Gap storefront, a Starbucks, or even a military recruiting office during a protest. I was not opposed to seeing those windows smashed, just surprised that those in the Black Bloc had deliberately waited until the one day their targets were surrounded by thousands of heavily armed riot police, with countless additional cameras recording their every move and dozens of police buses idling on the corner waiting to take them to jail. It seemed to be the worst possible time and place to act if their objective was to smash windows and escape to smash another day.
Of course, their real aim wasn’t to smash windows—if you wanted to destroy corporate property there are much more effective ways of doing it—but to fight. If they wanted to smash windows, they could have gone out in the middle of the night a few days before the protest and smashed every corporate franchise on the block without anyone stopping them. They wanted to fight power, and they wanted people to see them doing it. But we need to fight to win, and that means fighting smart. Sometimes that means being more covert or oblique, especially if effective resistance is going to trigger a punitive response.
That said, actions can be both effective and draw attention. Anarchist theorist and Russian revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin argued that “we must spread our principles, not with words but with deeds, for this is the most popular, the most potent, and the most irresistible form of propaganda.” The intent of the deed is not to commit a symbolic act to get attention, but to carry out a genuinely meaningful action that will serve as an example to others.
Four Methods of Direct Confrontation
There are four basic ways to directly confront those in power. Three deal with land, property, or infrastructure, and one deals specifically with human beings. They include:
- Obstruction and occupation;
- Reclamation and expropriation;
- Property and material destruction (threats or acts); and
- Violence against humans (threats or acts)
In other words, in a physical confrontation, the resistance has three main options for any (nonhuman) target: block it, take it, or break it.
Nondestructive Obstruction or Occupation
Let’s start with nondestructive obstruction or occupation—block it. This includes the blockade of a highway, a tree sit, a lockdown, or the occupation of a building. These acts prevent those in power from using or physically destroying the places in question. Provided you have enough dedicated people, these actions can be very effective.
But there are challenges. Any prolonged obstruction or occupation requires the same larger support structure as any direct action. If the target is important to those in power, they will retaliate. The more important the site, the stronger the response. In order to maintain the occupation, activists must be willing to fight off that response or suffer the consequences.
An example worth studying for many reasons is the Oka crisis of 1990. Mohawk land, including a burial ground, was taken by the town of Oka, Quebec, for—get ready—a golf course. The only deeper insult would have been a garbage dump. After months of legal protests and negotiations, the Mohawk barricaded the roads to keep the land from being destroyed. This defense of their land (“We are the pines,” one defender said) triggered a full-scale military response by the Canadian government. It also inspired acts of solidarity by other First Nations people, including a blockade of the Mercier Bridge. The bridge connects the Island of Montreal with the southern suburbs of the city—and it also runs through the Mohawk territory of Kahnawake. This was a fantastic use of a strategic resource. Enormous lines of traffic backed up, affecting the entire area for days.
At Kanehsatake, the Mohawk town near Oka, the standoff lasted a total of seventy-eight days. The police gave way to RCMP, who were then replaced by the army, complete with tanks, aircraft, and serious weapons. Every road into Oka was turned into a checkpoint. Within two weeks, there were food shortages.
Until your resistance group has participated in a siege or occupation, you may not appreciate that on top of strategy, training, and stalwart courage—a courage that the Mohawk have displayed for hundreds of years—you need basic supplies and a plan for getting more. If an army marches on its stomach, an occupation lasts as long as its stores. Getting food and supplies into Kanehsatake and then to the people behind the barricades was a constant struggle for the support workers, and gave the police and army plenty of opportunity to harass and humiliate resisters. With the whole world watching, the government couldn’t starve the Mohawk outright, but few indigenous groups engaged in land struggles are lucky enough to garner that level of media interest. Food wasn’t hard to collect: the Quebec Native Women’s Association started a food depot and donations poured in. But the supplies had to be arduously hauled through the woods to circumvent the checkpoints. Trucks of food were kept waiting for hours only to be turned away.31 Women were subjected to strip searches by male soldiers. At least one Mohawk man had a burning cigarette put out on his stomach, then dropped down the front of his pants.32 Human rights observers were harassed by both the police and by angry white mobs.33
The overwhelming threat of force eventually got the blockade on the bridge removed. At Kanehsatake, the army pushed the defenders to one building. Inside, thirteen men, sixteen women, and six children tried to withstand the weight of the Canadian military. No amount of spiritual strength or committed courage could have prevailed.
The siege ended when the defenders decided to disengage. In their history of the crisis, People of the Pines, Geoffrey York and Loreen Pindera write, “Their negotiating prospects were bleak, they were isolated and powerless, and their living conditions were increasingly stressful . . . tempers were flaring and arguments were breaking out. The psychological warfare and the constant noise of military helicopters had worn down their resistance.”34 Without the presence of the media, they could have been raped, hacked to pieces, gunned down, or incinerated to ash, things that routinely happen to indigenous people who fight back. The film Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance documents how viciously they were treated when the military found the retreating group on the road.
One reason small guerilla groups are so effective against larger and better-equipped armies is because they can use their secrecy and mobility to choose when, where, and under what circumstances they fight their enemy. They only engage in it when they reasonably expect to win, and avoid combat the rest of the time. But by engaging in the tactic of obstruction or occupation a resistance group gives up mobility, allowing the enemy to attack when it is favorable to them and giving up the very thing that makes small guerilla groups so effective.
The people at Kanehsatake had no choice but to give up that mobility. They had to defend their land which was under imminent threat. The end was written into the beginning; even 1,000 well-armed warriors could not have held off the Canadian armed forces. The Mohawk should not have been in a position where they had no choice, and the blame here belongs to the white people who claim to be their allies. Why does the defense of the land always fall to the indigenous people? Why do we, with our privileges and resources, leave the dirty and dangerous work of real resistance to the poor and embattled? Some white people did step up, from international observers to local church folks. But the support needs to be overwhelming and it needs to come before a doomed battle is the only option. A Mohawk burial ground should never have been threatened with a golf course. Enough white people standing behind the legal efforts would have stopped this before it escalated into razor wire and strip searches. Oka was ultimately a failure of systematic solidarity.
Reclamation and Expropriation
The second means of direct conflict is reclamation and expropriation—take it. Instead of blocking the use of land or property, the resistance takes it for their own use. For example, the Landless Workers Movement—centered in Brazil, a country renowned for unjust land distribution—occupies “underused” rural farmland (typically owned by wealthy absentee landlords) and sets up farming villages for landless or displaced people. Thanks to a land reform clause in the Brazilian constitution, the occupiers have been able to compel the government to expropriate the land and give them title. The movement has also engaged in direct action like blockades, and has set up its own education and literacy programs, as well as sustainable agriculture initiatives. The Landless Workers Movement is considered the largest social movement in Latin America, with an estimated 1.5 million members.
Expropriation has been a common tactic in various stages of revolution. “Loot the looters!” proclaimed the Bolsheviks during Russia’s October Revolution. Early on, the Bolsheviks staged bank robberies to acquire funds for their cause. Successful revolutionaries, as well as mainstream leftists, have also engaged in more “legitimate” activities, but these are no less likely to trigger reprisals. When the democratically elected government of Iran nationalized an oil company in 1953, the CIA responded by staging a coup. And, of course, guerilla movements commonly “liberate” equipment from occupiers in order to carry out their own activities.
Property and Material Destruction
The third means of direct conflict is property and material destruction—break it. This category includes sabotage. Some say the word sabotage comes from early Luddites tossing wooden shoes (sabots) into machinery, stopping the gears. But the term probably comes from a 1910 French railway strike, when workers destroyed the wooden shoes holding the rails—a good example of moving up the infrastructure. And sabotage can be more than just physical damage to machines; labor activism has long included work slowdowns and deliberate bungling.
Sabotage is an essential part of war and resistance to occupation. This is widely recognized by armed forces, and the US military has published a number of manuals and pamphlets on sabotage for use by occupied people. The Simple Sabotage Field Manual published by the Office of Strategic Services during World War II offers suggestions on how to deploy and motivate saboteurs, and specific means that can be used. “Simple sabotage is more than malicious mischief,” it warns, “and it should always consist of acts whose results will be detrimental to the materials and manpower of the enemy.” It warns that a saboteur should never attack targets beyond his or her capacity, and should try to damage materials in use, or destined for use, by the enemy. “It will be safe for him to assume that almost any product of heavy industry is destined for enemy use, and that the most efficient fuels and lubricants also are destined for enemy use.” It encourages the saboteur to target transportation and communications systems and devices in particular, as well as other critical materials for the functioning of those systems and of the broader occupational apparatus. Its particular instructions range from burning enemy infrastructure to blocking toilets and jamming locks, from working slowly or inefficiently in factories to damaging work tools through deliberate negligence, from spreading false rumors or misleading information to the occupiers to engaging in long and inefficient workplace meetings.
Ever since the industrial revolution, targeting infrastructure has been a highly effective means of engaging in conflict. It may be surprising to some that the end of the American Civil War was brought about in large part by attacks on infrastructure. From its onset in 1861, the Civil War was extremely bloody, killing more American combatants than all other wars before or since, combined. After several years of this, President Lincoln and his chief generals agreed to move from a “limited war” to a “total war” in an attempt to decisively end the war and bring about victory.
Historian Bruce Catton described the 1864 shift, when Union general “[William Tecumseh] Sherman led his army deep into the Confederate heartland of Georgia and South Carolina, destroying their economic infrastructures.” Catton writes that “it was also the nineteenth-century equivalent of the modern bombing raid, a blow at the civilian underpinning of the military machine. Bridges, railroads, machine shops, warehouses—anything of this nature that lay in Sherman’s path was burned or dismantled.” Telegraph lines were targeted as well, but so was the agricultural base. The Union Army selectively burned barns, mills, and cotton gins, and occasionally burned crops or captured livestock. This was partly an attack on agriculture-based slavery, and partly a way of provisioning the Union Army while undermining the Confederates. These attacks did take place with a specific code of conduct, and General Sherman ordered his men to distinguish “between the rich, who are usually hostile, and the poor or industrious, usually neutral or friendly.”
Catton argues that military engagements were “incidental” to the overall goal of striking the infrastructure, a goal which was successfully carried out. As historian David J. Eicher wrote, “Sherman had accomplished an amazing task. He had defied military principles by operating deep within enemy territory and without lines of supply or communication. He destroyed much of the South’s potential and psychology to wage war.” The strategy was crucial to the northern victory.
Violence Against Humans
The fourth and final means of direct conflict is violence against humans. Here we’re using violence specifically and explicitly to mean harm or injury to living creatures. Smashing a window, of course, is not violence; violence does include psychological harm or injury. The vast majority of resistance movements know the importance of violence in self-defense. Malcolm X was typically direct: “We are nonviolent with people who are nonviolent with us.”
In resistance movements, offensive violence is rare—virtually all violence used by historical resistance groups, from revolting slaves to escaping concentration camp prisoners to women shooting abusive partners, is a response to greater violence from power, and so is both justifiable and defensive. When prisoners in the Sobibór extermination camp quietly SS killed guards in the hours leading up to their planned escape, some might argue that they committed acts of offensive violence. But they were only responding to much more extensive violence already committed by the Nazis, and were acting to avert worse violence in the immediate future.
There have been groups which engaged in systematic offensive violence and attacks directed at people rather than infrastructure. The Red Army Faction (RAF) was a militant leftist group operating in West Germany, mostly in the 1970s and 1980s. They carried out a campaign of bombings and assassination attempts mostly aimed at police, soldiers, and high-ranking government or business officials. Another example would be the Palestinian group Hamas, which has carried out a large number of violent attacks on both civilians and military personnel in Israel. (It is also a political party and holds a legally elected majority in the Palestinian National Authority. It’s often ignored that much of Hamas’s popularity comes from its many social programs, which long predate its election to government. About 90 percent of Hamas’s activities are these social programs, which include medical clinics, soup kitchens, schools and literacy programs, and orphanages.)
It’s sometimes argued that the use of violence is never justifiable strategically, because the state will always have the larger ability to escalate beyond the resistance in a cycle of violence. In a narrow sense that’s true, but in a wider sense it’s misleading. Successful resistance groups almost never attempt to engage in overt armed conflict with those in power (except in late-stage revolutions, when the state has weakened and revolutionary forces are large and well-equipped). Guerilla groups focus on attacking where they are strongest, and those in power are weakest. The mobile, covert, hit-and-run nature of their strategy means that they can cause extensive disruption while (hopefully) avoiding government reprisals.
Furthermore, the state’s violent response isn’t just due to the use of violence by the resistance, it’s a response to the effectiveness of the resistance. We’ve seen that again and again, even where acts of omission have been the primary tactics. Those in power will use force and violence to put down any major threat to their power, regardless of the particular tactics used. So trying to avoid a violent state response is hardly a universal argument against the use of defensive violence by a resistance group.
The purpose of violent resistance isn’t simply to do violence or exact revenge, as some dogmatic critics of violence seem to believe. The purpose is to reduce the capacity of those in power to do further violence. The US guerilla warfare manual explicitly states that a “guerrilla’s objective is to diminish the enemy’s military potential.” (Remember what historian Bruce Catton wrote about the Union Army’s engagements with Confederate soldiers being incidental to their attacks on infrastructure.) To attack those in power without a strategy, simply to inflict indiscriminate damage, would be foolish.
The RAF used offensive violence, but probably not in a way that decreased the capacity of those in power to do violence. Starting in 1971, they shot two police and killed one. They bombed a US barracks, killing one and wounding thirteen. They bombed a police station, wounding five officers. They bombed the car of a judge. They bombed a newspaper headquarters. They bombed an officers’ club, killing three and injuring five. They attacked the West German embassy, killing two and losing two RAF members. They undertook a failed attack against an army base (which held nuclear weapons) and lost several RAF members. They assassinated the federal prosecutor general and the director of a bank in an attempted kidnapping. They hijacked an airliner, and three hijackers were killed. They kidnapped the chairman of a German industry organization (who was also a former SS officer), killing three police and a driver in the attack. When the government refused to give in to their demands to release imprisoned RAF members, they killed the chairman. They shot a policeman in a bar. They attempted to assassinate the head of NATO, blew up a car bomb in an air base parking lot, attempted to assassinate an army commander, attempted to bomb a NATO officer school, and blew up another car bomb in another air base parking lot. They separately assassinated a corporate manager and the head of an East German state trust agency. And as their final militant act, in 1993 they blew up the construction site of a new prison, causing more than one hundred million Deutsche Marks of damage. Throughout this period, they killed a number of secondary targets such as chauffeurs and bodyguards.
Setting aside for the time being the ethical questions of using offensive violence, and the strategic implications of giving up the moral high ground, how many of these acts seem like effective ways to reduce the state’s capacity for violence? In an industrial civilization, most of those in government and business are essentially interchangeable functionaries, people who perform a certain task, who can easily be replaced by another. Sure, there are unique individuals who are especially important driving forces—people like Hitler—but even if you believe Carlyle’s Great Man theory, you have to admit that most individual police, business managers, and so on will be quickly and easily replaced in their respective organizations. How many police and corporate functionaries are there in one country? Conversely, how many primary oil pipelines and electrical transmission lines are there? Which are most heavily guarded and surveilled, bank directors or remote electrical lines? Which will be replaced sooner, bureaucratic functionaries or bus-sized electrical components? And which attack has the greatest “return on investment?” In other words, which offers the most leverage for impact in exchange for the risk undertaken?
As we’ve said many times, the incredible level of day-to-day violence inflicted by this culture on human beings and on the natural world means that to refrain from fighting back will not prevent violence. It simply means that those in power will direct their violence at different people and over a much longer period of time. The question, as ever, is which particular strategy—violent or not—will actually work.
by DGR News Service | Dec 4, 2019 | The Solution: Resistance
Excerpted from the book, Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet. Click here to buy a copy of the book or read it online.
We’ve all seen biological taxonomies, which categorize living organisms by kingdom and phylum down to genus and species. Though there are tens of millions of living species of vastly different shapes, sizes, and habitats, we can use a taxonomy to quickly zero in on a tiny group.
When we seek effective strategies and tactics, we have to sort through millions of past and potential actions, most of which are either historical failures or dead ends. We can save ourselves a lot of time and a lot of anguish with a quick and dirty resistance taxonomy. By looking over whole branches of action at once we can quickly judge which tactics are actually appropriate and effective for saving the planet (and for many specific kinds of social and ecological justice activism). A taxonomy of action can also suggest tactics we might otherwise overlook.
Broadly speaking, we can divide all of our tactics and projects either into acts of omission or acts of commission. Of course, sometimes these categories overlap. A protest can be a means to lobby a government, a way of raising public awareness, a targeted tactic of economic disruption, or all three, depending on the intent and organization. And sometimes one tactic can support another; an act of omission like a labor strike is much more likely to be effective when combined with propagandizing and protest.
In a moment we’ll do a quick tour of our taxonomic options for resistance. But first, a warning. Learning the lessons of history will offer us many gifts, but these gifts aren’t free. They come with a burden. Yes, the stories of those who fight back are full of courage, brilliance, and drama. And yes, we can find insight and inspiration in both their triumphs and their tragedies. But the burden of history is this: there is no easy way out.
In Star Trek, every problem can be solved in the final scene by reversing the polarity of the deflector array. But that isn’t reality, and that isn’t our future. Every resistance victory has been won by blood and tears, with anguish and sacrifice. Our burden is the knowledge that there are only so many ways to resist, that these ways have already been invented, and they all involve profound and dangerous struggle. When resisters win, it is because they fight harder than they thought possible.
And this is the second part of our burden. Once we learn the stories of those who fight back—once we really learn them, once we cry over them, once we inscribe them in our hearts, once we carry them in our bodies like a war veteran carries aching shrapnel—we have no choice but to fight back ourselves. Only by doing that can we hope to live up to their example. People have fought back under the most adverse and awful conditions imaginable; those people are our kin in the struggle for justice and for a livable future. And we find those people—our courageous kin—not just in history, but now. We find them among not just humans, but all those who fight back.
We must fight back because if we don’t we will die. This is certainly true in the physical sense, but it is also true on another level. Once you really know the self-sacrifice and tirelessness and bravery that our kin have shown in the darkest times, you must either act or die as a person. We must fight back not only to win, but to show that we are both alive and worthy of that life.
Acts of Omission
The word strike comes from eighteenth-century English sailors, who struck (removed) their ship’s sails and refused to go to sea, but the concept of a workers’ strike dates back to ancient Egypt.3 It became a popular tactic during the industrial revolution, parallel to the rise of labor unions and the proliferation of crowded and dangerous factories.
Historical strikes were not solely acts of omission. Capitalists went to great lengths to violently prevent or end strikes that cost them money, so they became more than pickets or marches; they were often pitched battles, with strikers on one side, police and hired goons on the other. This should be no surprise; any effective action against those in power will trigger a forceful, and likely violent, response. Hence, historical strikers often had a pragmatic attitude toward the use of violence. Even if opposed to violence, historical strikers planned to defend themselves out of necessity.
The May 1968 student protests and general strike in France—which rallied ten million people, two-thirds of the French workforce—forced the government to dissolve and call elections, (as well as triggering extensive police brutality). The 1980 Gdańsk Shipyard strike in Poland sparked a series of strikes across the country and contributed to the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe; strike leader Lech Wałęsa won the Nobel Peace Prize and was later elected president of Poland. General strikes were common in Spain in the early twentieth century, especially in the years leading up to the civil war and anarchist revolution.
Boycotts and embargoes have been crucial in many struggles: from boycotts of slave-produced goods in the US, to civil rights struggles and the Montgomery bus boycott in the name of civil rights, to the antiapartheid boycotts; to company-specific boycotts of Nestlé, Ford, or Philip Morris.
The practice of boycotting predates the name it itself. Captain Charles Boycott was the agent of an absentee landlord in Ireland in 1880. Captain Boycott evicted tenants who had demanded rent reductions, so the community fought back by socially and economically isolating him. People refused to work for him, sell things to him, or trade with him—the postman even refused to deliver his mail. The British government was forced to bring in fifty outside workers to undertake the harvest, and protected the workers with one thousand police. This show of force meant that it cost over £10,000 to harvest £350 of potatoes. Boycott fled to England, and his name entered the lexicon.
As we have discussed, consumer spending is a small lever for resistance movements, since most spending is done by corporations, governments, and other institutions. If we ignore the obligatory food, housing, and health care, Americans spend around $2.7 trillion dollars per year on their clothing, insurance, transportation, and other expenses. Government spending might be $4.4 trillion, with corporations spending $1 trillion on marketing alone. Discretionary consumer spending is small, and even if a boycott were effective against a corporation, the state would bail out that corporation with tax money, as they’ve made clear.
But there’s no question that boycotts can be very effective in specific situations. The original example of Captain Boycott shows some conditions that lead to successful action: the participation of an entire community, the use of additional force beyond economic measures, and the context of a geographically limited social and economic realm. Such actions helped lead to what Irish labor agitator and politician Michael Davitt called “the fall of feudalism in Ireland.”7
Of course there are exceptional circumstances. When the winter’s load of chicken feed arrived on the farm today, the mayor was driving the delivery truck, nosing carefully through a herd of curious cattle. But most people don’t take deliveries from their elected officials, and—with apologies to Mayor Jim—the mayors of tiny islands don’t wield much power on a global scale.
Indeed, corporate globalization has wrought a much different situation than the old rural arrangement. There is no single community that can be unified to offer a solid front of resistance. When corporations encounter trouble from labor or simply want to pay lower wages, they move their operations elsewhere. And those in power are so segregated from the rest of us socially, economically, culturally, and physically that enforcing social shaming or shunning is almost impossible.
Even if we want to be optimistic and say that a large number of people could decide to engage in a boycott of the biggest ten corporations, it’s completely reasonable to expect that if a boycott seriously threatened the interests of those in power, they would simply make the boycott illegal.
In fact, the United States already has several antiboycott laws on the books, dating from the 1970s. The US Bureau of Industry and Security’s Office of Antiboycott Compliance explains that these laws were meant “to encourage, and in specified cases, require US firms to refuse to participate in foreign boycotts that the United States does not sanction.” The laws prohibit businesses from participating in boycotts, and from sharing information which can aid boycotters. In addition, inquiries must be reported to the government. For example, the Kansas City Star reports that a company based in Kansas City was fined $6,000 for answering a customer’s question about whether their product contained materials made in Israel (which it did not) and for failing to report that inquiry to the Bureau of Industry and Security.8 American law allows the bureau to fine businesses “up to $50,000, or five times the value” of the products in question. The laws don’t just apply to corporations, but are intended “to counteract the participation of US citizens” in boycotts and embargoes “which run counter to US policy.”
Certainly, large numbers of committed people can use boycotts to exert major pressure on governments or corporations that can result in policy changes. But boycotts alone are unlikely to result in major structural overhauls to capitalism or civilization at large, and will certainly not result in their overthrow.
Like the strike and the boycott, tax refusal has a long history. Rebellions have erupted and wars have been waged over taxes; from the British colonial “hut taxes” to the Boston Tea Party. Even if taxation is not the cause of a war, tax refusal is likely to play a part, either as a way of resisting unjust wars (as the Quakers have historically done) or as part of a revolutionary struggle (as in a German revolution in which Karl Marx proclaimed, “Refusal to pay taxes is the primary duty of the citizen!”).
The success of tax refusal is usually low, partly because people already try to avoid taxes for nonpolitical reasons. In the US, 41 percent of adults do not pay federal income tax to begin with, so it’s reasonable to conclude that the government could absorb (or compensate for) even high levels of tax refusal.
Even though tax refusal will not bring down civilization, there are times when it could be especially decisive. Regional or local governments on the verge of bankruptcy may be forced to close prisons or stop funding new infrastructure in order to save costs, and organized tax resistance could help drive such trends while diverting money to grassroots social or ecological programs.
Through conscientious objection people refuse to engage in military service, or, in some cases, accept only noncombatant roles in the military. Occasionally these are people who are already in the military who have had a change of heart.
Although conscientious objection has certainly saved people from having to kill, it doesn’t always save people from dying or the risk of death, since the punishments or alternative jobs like mining or bomb disposal are also inherently dangerous. It’s unlikely that conscientious objection has ever ended a war or even caused significant troop shortages. Governments short of troops usually enact or increase conscription to fill out the ranks. Where alternative service programs have existed, the conscientious objectors have usually done traditional masculine work, like farming and logging, thus freeing up other men to go to war. Conscientious objection alone is unlikely to be an effective form of resistance against war or governments.
For those already in the military, mutiny and insubordination are the chief available acts of omission. In theory, soldiers have the right, even obligation, to refuse illegal orders. In practice, individual soldiers rarely defy the coercion of their superiors and their units. And refusing an illegal order only works when an atrocity is illegal at the time; war criminals at Nuremberg argued that there were no laws against what they did.
Since individual insubordination may result in severe punishment, military personnel sometimes join together to mutiny. But large-scale refusal of orders is almost unheard of because of the culture, indoctrination, and threat of punishment in the military (there are notable exceptions, like the mutiny on the Russian battleship Potemkin or the mass mutinies of Russian soldiers during the February Revolution). Perhaps a greater cause for hope is the potential that military personnel, who often have very useful skills sets, will join more active resistance groups.
Shunning and shaming are sometimes used for severe social transgressions and wrongdoing, such as domestic or child abuse, or rape. These tactics are more likely to be effective in close-knit or low-density communities, which are not as common in the modern and urbanized world, although particular communities (such as enclaves of immigrants) may also be set apart for language or cultural reasons. The effect of shunning can be vastly increased in situations like that of Captain Boycott, in which social relations are also economic relations. However, since most economic transactions (either employment or consumption) are mediated by large, faceless corporations and alienated labor, this is rarely possible in the modern day.
Shunning requires a majority to be effective, so it’s not a tool that can be used to bring down civilization, although it can still be used to discourage wrongdoing within communities, including activist communities.
Civil disobedience, the refusal to follow unjust laws and customs, is a fundamental act of omission. It has led to genuine successes, as in the civil rights campaign in Birmingham, Alabama. In the 1960s Birmingham was among the most racially segregated cites in the US, with segregation legally required and vigorously enforced. The Commissioner of Public Safety was “arch-segregationist” Bull Connor, a vicious racist even by the standards of the time. Persecution of black people by the police and other institutions was especially bad. The local government went to great lengths to try to quash any change; for example, when courts ruled segregation of city parks unlawful, the city closed the parks. However, civil rights activists, including Martin Luther King Jr., were able to conduct a successful antisegregation campaign and turn this particularly nasty situation into a victory.
The Birmingham campaign used many different tactics, which gave it flexibility and strength. It began with a series of economic boycotts against businesses that promoted or tolerated segregation. Starting in 1962, these boycotts targeted downtown businesses and decreased sales by as much as 40 percent. Black organizers patrolled for people breaking the boycott. When they found black people shopping in a target store, they confronted them publically and shamed them into participating in the boycott, even destroying purchased merchandise. When several businesses took down their segregation signs, Commissioner Connor threatened to revoke their business licenses.
The next step in the civil disobedience campaign was “Project C,” the systematic violation of segregation laws. Organizers timed walking distances between the campaign headquarters and various targets, and conducted reconnaissance of segregated lunch counters, all-white churches, stores, federal buildings, and so on. The campaign participants then staged sit-ins at the various buildings, libraries, and lunch counters (or, in the case of the white churches, kneel-ins). Businesses mostly refused to serve the protesters, some of whom were spat on by white customers, and hundreds of the protesters were arrested. Some observers, black and white, considered Project C to be an extremist approach, and criticized King and the protesters for not simply sticking to negotiation. “Wasteful and worthless,” proclaimed the city’s black newspaper. A statement by eight white clergyman called the demonstrations “unwise and untimely,” and wrote that such protests “incite to hatred and violence” when black people should focus on “working peacefully.” (Of course, they blamed the victim. Of course, they cautioned that an action like sitting down in a deli and ordering a sandwich is only “technically peaceful” and warned against such “extreme measures.” And, of course, it’s never the right time, is it?)
The city promptly obtained an injunction against the protests and quadrupled the bail for arrestees to $1,200 per person (more than $8,000 in 2010 currency). But the protests continued, and two days later fifty people were arrested, including Martin Luther King Jr. Instead of paying bail for King, the organizers allowed the police to keep him in prison to draw attention to the struggle. National attention meant the expansion of boycotts; national retail chains started to suffer, and their bosses put pressure on the White House to deal with the situation.
Despite the attention, the campaign began to run out of protesters willing to risk arrest. So they used a controversial plan called the “Children’s Crusade,” recruiting young students to join in the protests. Organizers held workshops to show films of other protests and to help the young people deal with their fear of jail and police dogs. On May 2, 1963, more than a thousand students skipped school to join the protest, some scaling the walls around their school after a principal attempted to lock them in. Six hundred of them, some as young as eight, were arrested.
Firehoses and police dogs were used against the marching students. The now-iconic images of this violence drew immense sympathy for the protesters and galvanized the black community in Birmingham. The situation came to a head on May 7, 1963, when thousands of protestors flooded the streets and all business ceased; the city was essentially defeated. Business leaders were the first to support the protestors’ demands, and soon the politicians (under pressure from President Kennedy) had no choice but to capitulate and agree to a compromise with King and the other organizers.
But no resistance comes without reprisals. Martin Luther King Jr.’s house was bombed. So was a hotel he was staying at. His brother’s house was bombed. Protest leader Fred Shuttlesworth’s house was bombed. The home of an NAACP attorney was bombed. Some blamed the KKK, but no one was caught. A few months later the KKK bombed a Baptist church, killing four girls.
And the compromise was controversial. Some felt that King had made a deal too soon, that the terms were less than even the moderate demands. In any case, the victorious campaign in Birmingham is widely regarded as a watershed for the civil rights movement, and a model for success.
Let’s compare the goals of Birmingham with our goals in this book. The Birmingham success was achieved because the black protestors wanted to participate in economy and government. Indeed, that was the crux of the struggle, to be able to participate more actively and equally in the economy, in government, and in civil society. Because they were so numerous (they made up about one-third of the city’s population) and because they were so driven, their threat of selective withdrawal from the economy was very powerful (I almost wrote “persuasive,” but the point is that they stopped relying on persuasion alone).
But what if you don’t want to participate in capitalism or in the US government? What if you don’t even want those things to exist? Boycotts aren’t very persuasive to business leaders if the boycotts are intended to be permanent. The Birmingham civil rights activists forced those in power to change the law by penalizing their behavior, by increasing the cost of business as usual to the point where it became easier and more economically viable for government to accede to their demands.
There’s no doubt that we can try to apply the same approach in our situation. We can apply penalties to bad behavior, both on community and global scales. But the dominant culture functions by taking more than it gives back, by being unsustainable. In order to get people to change, we would have to apply a penalty proportionally massive. To try to persuade those in power to made serious change is folly; it’s effectively impossible to make truly sustainable decisions within the framework of the dominant system. And persuasion can only work on people, whereas we are dealing with massive social machines like corporations, which are functionally sociopathic.
In any case, what we call civil disobedience perhaps is the prototypical act of omission, and a requirement for more than a few acts of commission. Refusing to follow an unjust law is one step on the way to working more actively against it.
The most generalized act of omission is a withdrawal from larger society or emigration to a different society. Both are common in history. These choices are often the result of desperation, of a sense of having run out of other options, of the status quo being simply intolerable. Of course, if the culture you are leaving is so terrible, good people leaving is unlikely to reform or improve it. Which doesn’t mean people shouldn’t emigrate or try to leave intolerable or dangerous social situations. It just means that leaving, in and of itself, isn’t a political strategy likely to affect positive change.
Perhaps the biggest problem with withdrawal as a strategy now is that civilization is global. Where are you going to go? Where do you think you can escape climate change, for example? And what real effect will withdrawal have on the dominant culture? There is no shortage of labor, so huge numbers of people would have to withdraw in order to make a difference. Not buying things will not end the capitalist economy, and refusing to pay taxes will not bring down the government. If you did have enough people to do such things, you would become a threat, a dangerous example, and would be treated accordingly. As soon as enough people withdrew to become a bad example, civilization would go after them, thus ending their withdrawal and forcing them to engage with it, either by giving in or by fighting back.
History already tells us that withdrawing is not an option that the civilized will allow. First Nations people across Canada and the US, for instance, were not allowed to remain outside of the invading European civilization. Their children were taken by force to be abused—“enculturated”—and forced into settler culture.
It’s a paradox. Withdrawal can only persist when it is ineffective, and so is useless as a resistance strategy.
Other acts of noncooperation can operate in smaller contexts such as individual religious temples, for example, or romantic relationships (as in the Lysistratan example). These smaller social structures may not have as great an impact on society at large, but smaller numbers of people are required to affect change. If nothing else, it’s good practice.
All acts of omission require very large numbers of people to be permanently effective on a large scale. There are plenty of examples of strikes shutting down factories temporarily, but what if you don’t ever want that factory to run again? What if you work at a cruise missile factory or a factory that manufactures nuclear warheads? Is everyone working there willing to go on strike indefinitely? The large pool of unemployed or underpaid working poor means that there are always people willing to step in to work for a wage, even a relatively low one. Failing that, the company in question could just move the factory overseas, as so many have. All of this is especially true in a time when capitalism falters, and attempting to bring down civilization would definitely make capitalism falter.
The same problems apply to economic boycotts. You and I could stop buying anything produced by a given company. Or we could stop buying anything that had been sold through the global capitalist economy. We probably will see widespread acts of economic omission, but only when large numbers of people get too poor to buy mass-produced consumer luxuries. But because of globalization and automation, these acts of omission will be less effective than they were in the past.
Which isn’t to say we shouldn’t undertake such acts when appropriate. Acts of omission are commonly part of resistance movements; they may be implicit rather than explicit. Pre-Civil War abolitionists would not have owned slaves. But this was an implicit result of their morality and political philosophy rather than a means of change. Few abolitionists would have suggested that by refraining from personally owning slaves they were posing a serious or fundamental threat to the institution of slavery.
An effective resistance movement based on acts of omission might need 10 percent, or 50 percent, or 90 percent of the population to win. One in a thousand people withdrawing from the global economy would have negligible impact. Acts of commission are a different story. What if one out of a thousand people joined a campaign of direct action to bring down civilization? Seven million brave and smart people could ensure the survival of our planet.
If we are going to talk about survival—or about courage, for that matter—we should talk about Sobibór. Sobibór was a Nazi concentration camp built in a remote part of Poland near the German border. Brought into operation in April 1943, Sobibór received regular train loads of prisoners, almost all Jewish. Like other Nazi concentration camps, Sobibór was also a work camp, both for prisoners skilled in certain trades and for unskilled labor, such as body removal. Sobibór was not the largest concentration camp, but it ran with murderous efficiency. Records show that by October 1944 a quarter of a million people had been murdered there, and some argue the casualties were significantly higher.
Sobibór presented two distinct faces. Upon arrival to the camp, those selected to be killed received a polite welcoming speech from the Nazis (sometimes dressed in lab coats to project expertise and authority), and heard classical music played over loudspeakers. The door to the extermination “showers” was decorated with flowers and a Star of David. Touches like these encouraged them to go quietly and calmly to what some surely realized was their death. In contrast, those who were selected for work were shown a more overtly violent face, suffering arbitrary beatings and sometimes killed for even the smallest failure in cooperation. As at other concentration camps, if individual prisoners even attempted to escape, other prisoners would be killed as a reprisal. (At Auschwitz it was common practice for the SS to kill ten random prisoners for each escapee.)
Sobibór is a lesson for us because it became the site of the most successful—and also the most audacious—concentration camp uprising during the entire Holocaust. A small number of prisoners recognized that it was only a matter of time until they, too, were murdered, and decided that it was worth the risk to escape. However, they knew that those left behind would suffer the consequences of their act. So they hatched a bold plan to allow everyone in the camp to escape.
This was not an easy task. The camp was surrounded by multiple razor wire fences and a minefield, beyond which was forest. In addition to the SS, the camp had SS-trained guards of various Eastern European nationalities, guards who had themselves been brought in from POW camps. The perimeter of the camp had bright lighting systems and numerous machine gun towers.
A breakthrough came with the arrival of a group of Jewish-Russian POWs, with whom the long-time prisoners joined together and devised an escape plan. But to avoid being discovered, they had to keep the plan secret from all but a small group, meaning that the majority of the prisoners would be expected to escape at a moment’s notice without preparation. A Russian POW leader, Alexander “Sasha” Aronowicz Pechersky, understood the benefits. “As a military man, I was aware that a surprise attack is worth a division of solders. If we can maintain secrecy until the last minute of the outbreak, the revolt is 80 percent accomplished. The biggest danger was deconspiration.” In preparation for the escape, the conspirators used their trade skills to make or steal knives and axes small enough to conceal in their clothes.
At four o’clock on the day of the escape, they sprang into action. Carefully but quickly, they began to lure SS guards into private locations one by one, under various false pretexts. Then, small groups of prepared prisoners would quickly and quietly kill the SS men by striking them on the head with an axe, or by covering their mouths and stabbing them to death. Within an hour they had killed eleven SS men, half of the SS guards present at the time, and concealed the bodies. At five o’clock they came together for evening roll call, but they arrived slightly early, before the remaining SS men had gathered. Their plan was to avoid the minefield by simply marching as a group to the front gate, as though they were on their way to a work detail. Upon reaching the gate, they hoped to shoot the two Ukrainian guards present and then rush out the front way.
Though they had been lucky so far, one of the bodies was discovered at the last moment, before they could make for the front gate. The Russian Sasha made a very brief “every man for himself” speech and encouraged everyone to escape immediately. The camp then burst into chaos, with some proceeding to the front gate, and others breaking their way through the fence and taking their chances with the mine field. All had to deal with machine gun fire from the guard towers.
Of the roughly 550 prisoners, 150 were unwilling or unable to escape. Some were separated in a different subcamp and were out of communication, and others simply refused to run. Anyone unable or unwilling to fight or run was shot by the SS. About eighty of those who did run were killed by the mines or by hostile fire. Still, more than 300 people (mostly with no preparation) managed to escape the camp into the surrounding woodlands.
Tragically, close to half of these people were captured and executed over the following weeks because of a German dragnet. But since they would have been killed by the SS regardless, the escape was still a remarkable success. Better yet, within days of the uprising, humiliated SS boss Heinrich Himmler ordered the camp shut down, dismantled, and replanted with trees. (See, they don’t always rebuild.) And a number of the escapees joined friendly partisan groups in the area and continued to fight the Nazis (including Sasha, who later returned to the Red Army and was sent to a gulag by Stalin for “allowing” himself to be captured in the first place).
The survivors would spend decades mulling over the escape. In many ways, they could hardly have hoped for better luck. If their actions had been discovered any earlier, it’s very possible that everyone in the camp would have been executed. Furthermore, it’s simply amazing that half of the group—very few of whom had any weapons, survival, or escape and evasion training—managed to avoid capture by the Nazis.
They certainly would have benefitted from further training or preparation, although in this case that was at odds with their priority of security. Another issue identified by survivors was that almost all of the firearms went to the Russian POWs, meaning that most escapees were defenseless. They also lacked prearranged cells or affinity groups, and many people who did know each other became separated during the escape. A further problem was the fact that the prisoners did not have contact with Allies or resistance groups who could have helped to arrange further escape or provide supplies or weapons. In the end, a large number of escaped prisoners ended up being killed by anti-Semitic Polish nationals, including some Polish partisans.
Despite these issues, we can learn a lot from this story. The prisoners made remarkable use of their limited resources to escape. The very fact that they attempted escape is inspiring, especially when literally millions of others went to their deaths without fighting back. Indeed, considering that so many of them lacked specific combat and evasion skills and equipment, it was solely the courage to fight back that saved many lives.
No withdrawal or refusal would help them—their lives were won only by audacious acts of commission.
Visit the DGR News Service on Friday for the next portion of this chapter.
by DGR News Service | Nov 18, 2019 | The Solution: Resistance
Written and photographed by Max Wilbert
In 1941, as World War II thundered across half the planet, my grandfather was drafted into the United States military.
Faced with the prospect of being sent overseas to kill other young men in World War II, his morality rebelled. He refused to join the military and applied for conscientious objector status, which he was eventually granted.
This was not a popular stand to take. Among 10 million draftees, about 43,000, or less than half of one percent, became COs. He and other COs were widely criticized, attacked, and ostracized. Their beliefs were tested by draft boards, families, and communities who rejected their moral convictions and labeled them cowards, deserters, and traitors.
Nearly fifty years later, I was born into a family that looked up to my grandfather’s example. He was a warm, kind grandfather to me. When I was a child, discussions of war, imperialism, racism, exploitation of women, oppression, and the destruction of the planet were not unusual among my family. I was taught that these things must be ended. Social change was a necessity, and non-violent resistance was the method.
Faced with the prospect of World War II, what choices would I have made in my grandfather’s place? On the one hand, the Nazi regime was one of unspeakable evil, and imperial Japan’s actions were equally horrific. On the other hand, the actions of US empire—before, during, and after the war—were not exactly benevolent. As Howard Zinn writes, before the war broke out the United States:
“had opposed the Haitian revolution for independence from France at the start of the nineteenth century. It had instigated a war with Mexico and taken half of that country. It had pretended to help Cuba win freedom from Spain, and then planted itself in Cuba with a military base, investments, and rights of intervention. It had seized Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and fought a brutal war to subjugate the Filipinos. It had “opened” Japan to its trade with gunboats and threats. It had declared an Open Door Policy in China as a means of assuring that the United States would have opportunities equal to other imperial powers in exploiting China. It had sent troops to Peking with other nations, to assert Western supremacy in China, and kept them there for over thirty years.”
And of course, this is just a partial list. In 1942, the U.S. was still a rigorously segregated society (which it remains today) committed to extracting value from people of color using any means necessary. Slavery built the wealth of the United States, and literally built the White House. And of course, the entire country was built on a settler-colonial genocide—a genocide that Hitler took as inspiration for his “final solution.”
Many prominent Americans, like Henry Ford, were supporters of the Nazi regime. The U.S. government not only failed to speak out against persecution of German Jews before the war, despite clear evidence, but actively rejected those seeking refuge and thereby condemned them to death.
The United States did not fight because of fascism, although individual soldiers may have. Critical history tells us that the U.S. fought Germany, Italy, and Japan primarily for geopolitical reasons: to control a competitor in Germany, to contain communist Russia, and to expand control of the Pacific.
For example, historian Gabriel Kolko says “the American economic war aim was to save capitalism at home and abroad.” This was achieved by consolidating American control over oil in the Middle East, gaining access to new markets formerly dominated by the British, and by a concentrated injection of public funds into private corporations: Boeing, Lockheed, and the other war profiteers.
And at the conclusion of the war, the United States killed 150,000 Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in the militarily unnecessary atomic bombing that P.M.S. Blackett calls “the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia.” In other words, 150,000 people were murdered not out of military necessity, but for the sake of geopolitical posturing.
The fascists needed to be stopped, yes. But the United States’ war was not a particularly just one.
I respect my grandfather’s choice. Most especially, I am impressed by the ethical toughness required to endure serious personal and professional consequences while maintaining his principled stance. There are not many people with that dignity and conviction.
Eighty years after the rise of Nazi Party, we’re faced with rising fascism around the world.
Trump, Bolsonaro, Duterte, Erdogan, Putin. Countless fascist political parties and grassroots movements are on the march. Their main systemic opposition comes from neoliberal capitalism, a soft fascism of it’s own and the primary force which has decimated the planet over the past 40 years. By dismantling public institutions, embracing corporate power and unbridled militarism, corrupting the language of justice, and doubling down on exploitation of the poor and the third world, neoliberals like Barack Obama and the Clintons have helped pave the way for the rise of outright fascism today.
Capitalism itself is a war against the planet and the poor. The global economy is built on exploited farmworkers, sweatshop labor, and a toxic electronics industry that drives workers to mass suicide. All this takes place on top of stolen indigenous lands and a legacy of ongoing genocide.
The material goods that drive economic growth are made from the dead bodies of the land. Mountains are mined and blown to pieces. Rivers are dammed and enslaved. Prairies are plowed under. Forests are scalped. The oceans are strained of all life. Biodiversity is collapsing, the oceans are collapsing, and global warming is advancing faster than the worst-case scenarios. Greenhouse gas emissions are higher year after year, despite slick marketing campaigns about green industry.
The mindset of exploitation and greed is mirrored in the dominant culture. Sexual assault is endemic. Black and brown people are disenfranchised and exploited for slave labor in the prison system, then regularly executed on the streets in a form of modern public lynching. The poor, the homeless, addicts and countless other people are treated as disposable in this society, and they die by the millions as people like Jeff Bezos enjoys a cruise in his latest $100 million yacht.
Now we must grapple with the same question our grandparents did.
What is the moral course of action in this world?
Before we can know the right course of action, we have to understand the root of the problems we face. This step of diagnosis is essential to proper cure. And in fact, the origin of the term radical comes from the Latin word meaning “root.”
Too many people in society today look only at surface-level causes. We must go deeper.
First, we must understand that the problems we face are not an accident or the result of a glitch in the system. This is the normal functioning of industrial civilization. This is business as usual. The economy is booming, and the wealthy are doing very well. Things are working perfectly.
For those in power, times are good
I’ve heard it said that capitalism is a war against the planet and the poor. This is not a metaphor. The dominant economic system is killing, maiming, and destroying the lives of countless billions of humans and trillions of non-humans.
As the world’s third-richest man, Warren Buffett, once said, “there’s class warfare alright, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
This is a war, and it is a one-sided one.
Working people, the poor, and especially environmentalists often don’t see this system as a form of warfare against us. Relentless propaganda, fed to us through mass media and education, teaches us that we live in a beautiful, just society. All the problems we face—migration, climate disasters, terrorism, sexual abuse—are externalized. Instead of being factors integral to the American experience, these are regarded as someone else’s problem, or ignored completely.
Propaganda, besides inculcating American exceptionalism and the capitalist ethic, also enforces a rigid box of acceptable ways to change the world. Social struggles, we’re told, should take place via policy changes, at the ballot box, and in non-profit offices.
But these models aren’t working
Legislative change, for example, is rarely permanent. Long-standing policies like the Voting Rights Act can easily be struck down or undermined. This is happening right now. The Voting Rights Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act—all of these laws, which are very limited in the first place, are being gutted.
The business of running empire is firmly bipartisan. The Democratic and Republican parties in the United States play out a society-wide “good cop/bad cop” routine. They deceive us into believing that we live in a democracy. They allow robust debate within an extremely narrow range of acceptable politics, and therefore keep people distracted from the theft and violence of the ruling class.
The truth is we have little to no say in how our own communities operate, let alone in how the country is governed.
Constrained by felon disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, the electoral college, constant propaganda, and a representative system with zero accountability, our votes are largely meaningless.
We are so alienated from the concept of self-governance that we have a hard time even imagining it. When was the last time you made a meaningful decision about the political, economic, and social future of the neighborhood, the city, the state, or the country you live in?
For most of us, the answer is “never.”
To call the United States a democracy is laughable. Scholars have proven that our society is an oligarchy. Professor Martin Gilens and Professor Benjamin Page concluded, in their 2014 research paper, that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”
This is reflected in the nation’s capital. It has been decades since Congress passed a major bill that didn’t benefit the ultra-rich and corporations. Every major national policy decision is designed to steal more from the poor, to destroy the planet even faster, and in the process to make the owning class even more decadently wealthy.
The Non-profit Industrial Complex (NPIC)
Faced with a bankrupt political system, where do people go? Many turn to non-profits, expecting to find a world of small, fiery, organized groups fighting for social change. Instead, they find a new nightmare of bureaucracy, 60-hour work weeks, and starvation wages.
The non-profit system emerges from a liberal ideology that sees American-style capitalism as righteous. In this worldview, small gradual reforms are all that is needed to keep the system humming along happily.
Many of today’s largest foundations we’re created by tax-dodging ultra-wealthy elites in the early 20th century. These have been lucrative investments. Liberal foundations have long served to pacify social movements and prevent radical change.
One of the biggest examples of this is the professionalization of black resistance in the 1970’s and 1980’s. In the wake of revolutionary social upheavals of the 1960’s, foundations invested billions of dollars to create countless new non-profits and social service organizations. Vietnam War hawk McGeorge Bundy, head of the Ford Foundation, led a nationwide push to address racism. But behind the rhetoric was a desire not to address the roots of racism, but to pacify and assimilate oppositional black power movements into the dominant power structure.
Today’s non-profit movement politics reflect the same values: elitist liberalism, individual empowerment, and the optics of diversity. And they produce the same results: endless campaigning for progressive candidates, countless fundraising campaigns, and burnout.
What is absent is a revolutionary agenda for collective liberation from systems of oppression.
The Indian dissident Arundhati Roy, one of the most brilliant writers of our time, has a blistering critique of the non-profit system. She writes:
“Corporate-endowed foundations administer, trade and channelize their power and place their chessmen on the chessboard, through a system of elite clubs and think-tanks, whose members overlap and move in and out through the revolving doors.
Contrary to the various conspiracy theories in circulation, particularly among left-wing groups, there is nothing secret, satanic, or Freemason-like about this arrangement. It is not very different from the way corporations use shell companies and offshore accounts to transfer and administer their money—except that the currency is power, not money.
There are now millions of non-profit organizations, many of them connected through a byzantine financial maze to the larger foundations… The Privatization of Everything has also meant the NGO-isation of Everything. As jobs and livelihoods disappeared, NGOs have become an important source of employment, even for those who see them for what they are. And they are certainly not all bad. Of the millions of NGOs, some do remarkable, radical work and it would be a travesty to tar all NGOs with the same brush.
However, the corporate or Foundation-endowed NGOs are global finance’s way of buying into resistance movements, literally like shareholders buy shares in companies, and then try to control them from within. They sit like nodes on the central nervous system, the pathways along which global finance flows. They work like transmitters, receivers, shock absorbers, alert to every impulse, careful never to annoy the governments of their host countries.”
Greenwashing the environmental movement
One of the most damning examples of the bankruptcy of the non-profit system comes from the large environmental organizations. From The Sierra Club taking $25 million from the fracking industry to Greenpeace cooperating with the Canadian Lumber Industry to the Nature Conservancy’s collaboration with the world’s most polluting corporations, environmental non-profits have a track record of atrocities, compromises, and failures.
On their watch, everything is getting worse. And their solutions? Vote for a democrat, change your lightbulbs, and ride your bike. It’s pathetic.
Today, the global non-profit industrial complex serves as a “pressure relief valve” for budding revolutionary sentiments. By redirecting the energy that should demand fundamental change into piecemeal reformism, organizations like this are worse than distractions. They are in some ways complicit in the system that is killing the planet. Instead of radical change, these groups campaign for relatively minor reforms, such as a shift away from fossil fuels and towards green energy. These efforts are applauded by international conglomerates like General Electric, which stand to make billions in guaranteed government contracts in this so-called “green transition.”
Meanwhile, the forests continue to fall, mountains continue to be mined, and greenhouse gas emissions trend upwards.
Even in places like Germany, home to the supposed “green miracle” of wind and solar energy, emissions continue to rise and corporations grow ever more bloated on government handouts and electricity rebates, while the poor pay for big business to expand the electric grid. To be clear: big business is exempted from the taxes to pay for grid expansions and wind energy projects, then turns around and profits from the contracts to build these industrial megaprojects. Meanwhile, working people foot the bill.
This is a massive wealth transfer from poor to rich.
From one capitalist agenda to another, major environmental non-profits are shaped by what can get funded, and what gets funded is a de facto pro-corporate, pro-capitalist agenda of industrial energy production and “green products.” Driven by a results-oriented framework designed to please large donors, this system inherently deprioritizes radical critiques and revolutionary ideas in favor of what makes money and political sense in the short term.
In short, large non-profits are the social wing of the capitalist system.
Individuals within these non-profits may mean well, but intentions are not as important as outcomes when the fate of our world is at stake.
Cory Morningstar calls liberal climate activism “the hope industry,” writing that “350.org and friends serve a vital purpose . . . [by making] the public feel good about themselves. Simultaneously, they ensure obedience and passiveness to the state in order to secure current system/power structures and keep them intact… We have now reached the critical juncture where corporations will begin the slow process of ridding themselves of their toxic holdings while preparing for a new wave of unprecedented, unsurpassed ‘climate wealth.’ We are about to witness the global transition to profitable false solutions under the guise of ‘green economy’ . . . all while they simultaneously greenwash themselves as noble stewards of the Earth.”
This is how the ruling class rules
In his book Brave New World, Aldous Huxley wrote that an effective totalitarianism doesn’t look like pointing a gun at every person, all the time. “A really efficient totalitarian state,” he writes, “would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.”
Today’s elites have worked hard to create such a world. They ride the dynamic tension between reform and reaction. When political and economic conditions make it possible to do so, they mercilessly expand their exploitation of the planet and the poor. When groundswells of social discontent force concessions, they offer limited reforms. With the illusion of democracy provided by elections, legislative changes, and the non-profit industrial complex, the ruling class manipulate global society. In this way, they defuse revolutionary potential, expand their power, and consolidate their gains.
These elites, the owning class in global society, are waging an offensive struggle. Meanwhile, progressives and radicals are stuck in a reactionary position, defending ourselves against the latest assault and falling ever further behind. Our work is almost entirely defensive.
But as any experienced warrior knows, wars are not won defensively. These defensive measures can only end one way: in steady erosion of victories, slow slides into fascism, and eventual defeat. This is what we are experiencing right now.
Counter-revolutionary propaganda
Systems for social change have been co-opted by the corporate elite. But agents of oppression are never satisfied with dismantling organizations and institutions alone. They must murder revolutionary leaders, too.
When Che Guevara was on the firing line, his last words were: “Shoot, coward. You’re only going to kill a man.” Fred Hampton, murdered by the police as he lay drugged in his bed at the age of 21 years, once said “You can kill a revolutionary, but you can’t kill a revolution.” Thomas Sankara, the Burkinabé revolutionary sometimes called “Africa’s Che,” had the same message before he was killed: “While revolutionaries as individuals can be murdered, you can’t kill an idea.”
This hasn’t stopped those in power from murdering dangerous individuals and trying to smash dangerous ideas. Psychological and information warfare is constant in modern society. Popular music, television, movies, and other media, as well as institutions like the school system and non-profits, all promote vicious counter-revolutionary propaganda.
According to the psychologist John F. Schumaker we “are by far the most propagandized people in history.” Corporations are expected to spend $2.1 trillion on media in 2019.
Developing an effective offense requires that we discard the mythologies and misconceptions taught by these systems. In other words: as long as our minds are still colonized, we will not be able to fight and win.
One of the most pervasive misconceptions we must dismantle is the mythology of pacifism. This mythology is carefully constructed. School lessons around social movements—if the topic is covered at all—paint a picture of civil non-violent struggle. This is no accident. A whitewashed version of Martin Luther King, Jr. is emphasized, while the Black Panthers are never discussed. The bourgeois American Revolution is celebrated, while the Haitian Revolution is ignored. Women’s suffrage is mentioned, but the radical direct action of suffragists around the world is bypassed. In this way, the imaginations of entire societies are shaped and molded.
The reality, of course, is that social change is won through struggle. The history of our society is the history of class warfare. And revolution is the solution to the problems we face. But revolutionaries are ignored in our education system, slandered in the mass media, and actively opposed in US policy. We must reject these toxic lessons to have a chance.
Beyond non-violence
Non-violence is a profoundly moral way of changing society. In the right conditions, it can be highly effective. But deepening inequality, global ecological collapse, and the utter failure of established institutions to address these crises have led me to question non-violence—not as a moral guiding light, but as a practical strategy.
This morning, I am following the latest news from the Unist’ot’en Camp. In western Canada, the Unist’ot’en have stopped proposed tar sands and fracked gas pipelines for nearly a decade.
They have never ceded their land to the Canadian Government or signed a treaty. Under Canadian law, their land has been recognized as sovereign. But in December, the pipeline company applied for an injunction from Canadian courts. This injunction gives the police (the RCMP) authority to removing any blockades from the roads.
Now, as a result of the injunction, armed men are in Wet’suwet’en Territory to remove the land defenders and facilitate the fracking, logging, water poisoning, road building, and other destruction the pipeline will bring.
The late Secwepemc organizer and international leader on indigenous rights Arthur Manuel called injunctions the “ace in the sleeve of the Canadian government.” He said, “every time there is a dispute between indigenous people’s territories and industry, the court pulls out their court injunctions and sides with industry.”
This fight is still in progress. We don’t know how it will end. It might end in a victory, as did anti-fracking fights on Mi’kmaq territory in 2013. Or it might end in a defeat like at Standing Rock.
But we do know that, as this fight continues, industry is going about their business unimpeded elsewhere. We are not able to fight them everywhere at once. Around the world, coal oil and gas extraction is booming. Tar sands in South America, offshore drilling in the Arctic Ocean, fracking in the Marcellus Shale, coal mining in Mongolia. Major industrial projects are booming worldwide, and greenhouse gas emissions are rising to unprecedented levels as forests, wetlands, grasslands, and oceanic preserves are destroyed for industry. Carbon emissions in 2018 surged by 3.4 percent over the previous year—the largest increase in eight years. Time is short.
To have a chance of stopping the forces that are squeezing the life from the planet, defensive stands like Unist’ot’en Camp are crucial. But defense alone is not enough, and governments continue to side with industry. If we want to survive, we need legitimate offensive strategies.
What does offensive struggle look like?
Legislative change, voting, and the non-profit industrial complex are all controlled by the ruling class. Offensive struggle is, by design, essentially impossible in these arenas.
Real offensive struggle is inherently revolutionary. A revolution is “a forcible overthrow of a government, class, or social order, in favor of a new system.” While that force does not necessarily mean open violence, violence is a part of every revolutionary struggle.
Most people who want social and environmental justice have been taught that violent revolution is morally indefensible. Through fear and lies, elites have shamed us out of organizing and carrying out a revolution. Thus, they limit us to defensive action.
Breaking our allegiance to the dominant system is the first step to effective resistance. This requires we decolonize our minds and remember the true source of life. We all need to choose sides: life or the machine.
Which side do you choose?
Even the preeminent strategist on non-violence, Gene Sharp, talks about non-violent resistance as a form of war. Perceiving our struggle in this way is important. Defensive struggles are possible to undertake while denying that you are engaged in a war. But once you acknowledge that we are in a war, offensive struggle becomes a legitimate possibility.
Once our imaginations have expanded, we can attempt to answer the question: what does offensive struggle look like?
In military strategy, the purpose of offensive action is to destroy your opponents ability to wage war. After effective offensive action, they cannot continue to fight you, no matter how badly they want to.
In my analysis, the primary weapon of war being used against the planet and the poor is the global industrial economy. Therefore, offensive struggle today means breaking the supply lines of industrial capitalism by targeting and destroying key bottlenecks in the the global economic system, and dismantling the institutions of the dominant culture.
If this were carried out, it would change the balance of power globally. Those in power would no longer be physically able to destroy the world, and the way would be clear for alternative cultures, land restoration, and the Earth itself to begin the process of healing.
Ending the war
The war against the planet and the poor is raging right now. To end this war as quickly as possible and with the smallest possible loss of life, our only feasible path is to stop the aggressor’s ability to harm the poor and destroy the planet.
Capitalism has made this a life-or-death struggle. Voting isn’t working. Signing petitions isn’t working. Liberal institutions are in shambles. Those of us who reject this system cannot survive by trying to coexist with the system. At the current rate, it appears that either industrial civilization will survive, or the biosphere will.
War is terrible, and business as usual is a war. The faster the global industrial economy is ended, the less suffering there will be. Ending this war must be our overriding objective. This means destroying capitalism’s ability to wage war. Anything less is merely whistling on the way to our collective grave.
Fighting a war is dangerous, difficult, and demanding. Sometimes I imagine sitting this war out, becoming a modern conscientious objector, and living simply. But that path isn’t a moral one. Given our current political situation, we must make adult choices. The crisis we face is calling all of us to become revolutionaries.
I wish that my grandfather was still alive so I could sit down with him to discuss all of this. Alzheimer’s disease claimed him before I was fully grown. But I still know that, unlike so many, he would not flinch away from these realities. He would face the truth, think, and decide on the right course of action.
My political stances are extremely unpopular at every level. I have received death threats from racist far-right ideologues. I have been shouted down by the left and the environmental community. And I have been harassed by federal agents. When she heard about the FBI harassment, one of my aunties told me that my grandfather would have been proud of me. She told me that he would have said, “you must be doing something right.”
That is what we must do: what is right.
Max Wilbert is an organizer, writer, and wilderness guide who grew up in Seattle’s post-WTO anti-globalization and undoing racism movement. He is a longtime member of Deep Green Resistance. Max is the author of two books: the forthcoming Bright Green Lies, and We Choose to Speak, a collection of essays released in 2018.
