💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › neo-bonobo-against-the-global-godzilla.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 12:55:38. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-06-20)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Against the global godzilla Author: Neo Bonobo Date: 2003 Language: en Topics: Fifth Estate, Fifth Estate #360, Iraq, war Notes: From Fifth Estate #360, Spring 2003
The deportations, detentions, and disappearances have begun. Matched
only by mass denial among Babylon’s denizens, the brave new empire has
struck back. The many-headed capitalist dragon is licking its lips for
an Easter dinner of Iraqi children. No, it shouldn’t be news that
someone’s stolen the century. Clearly, the global Godzilla of
geopolitical, technoindustrial trauma has treated us all to a gory
preview of hell.
But we are digging in for a fight; the dire reality cannot forestall our
fierce desire to manifest something radically different. In the
aftermath of February 15, we gather steam for mass resistance. An
outspoken outsider nation is waging its own war against war and
capital’s ubiquitous uglification.
What was once wild conspiracy theory is now sober prophecy. The
sickening miasma of life under late capitalism manufactures fear and
terror — real or televised. The weight of tragedy tears at the very
fabric of our historical optimism.
Now, marching behind a fork-tongued, fascist bully and his
fundamentalist jihad for Ashcroft’s Jesus, America prepares to renew its
imperial mission. How do we stop this stupendously draconian drift? Is
it hopelessly naive to believe that the universe is on the side of
justice? That the arc of the future bends towards freedom? If fate is
impartial, we had better not be.
The messianic grandiosity of these grave-digging demagogues ridicules
our desires and disparages our faith in the necessity of peace and
justice. But a handful of handpicked plutocrats cannot plunder
everything! A puny faction of B-movie bad-guys subjugating six billion
people? Who wrote this script?
I’m writing on the eve of war, but that’s not all that has me worried.
Even mainstream environmentalists have warned us that with industrial
capitalism’s present pace, we have less than fifty years left on the
planet. Even the pious editors in the liberal punditocracy have heeded
the dire warnings about global warming; they’re printing apocalyptic
pleas urging us, to slow the malignant menace. Mass extinction anyone?
This year, massive television ratings — next year, mass graves.
It’s a strange time to contemplate sustainability. The world’s most
powerful, unwieldy, unsustainable system taunts and teases — as it
prepares to crush. Monolithic mega-masters care little for livelihoods
or lives. Press leaks about the first days of war predict a barrage of
cruise missiles unlike anything we’ve seen; Baghdad burning under the
Pentagon strategy known as “shock and awe,” intended to terrify the
Iraqis, quickening surrender. The possible use of tactical nukes is
still on the table. (According to a national security report; other
planned or proposed tactics in the tyrannical tool box include eerie
elements of non-lethal war such as the use of holograms — huge
projections of an enemy army or religious prophet — that psychologically
manipulate the enemy into submission). All their anticipated methods of
domination combined with the inevitability of error looks like a
reliable recipe for revulsion. But what are we going to do about it?
Science fiction dystopias forecast this predicament quite accurately.
Time to take Orwell off the shelf or hack into the Matrix. Many know
it’s bad but hesitate rather than act. Some people ignore; others preach
moderation. Either way, skeptical folks must transform cynicism into
solutions. Some people contend the end-of-the-world isn’t around the
corner, the sky isn’t falling; America isn’t becoming a theocratic
gulag, the world a concrete desert.
I’m sick of the people pretending nothing’s wrong. We’re under attack,
our lives threatened — not by two-bit terrorists but by a multilateral
megamachine managed by avaricious monsters. Rhetorically charged
assessments of our shaky circumstances may be underestimating the drama
that awaits us.
Worse than the delusion that we’re not in danger from the devastating
system of global capitalism is cognizance of how bad things are combined
with inaction. The whole world is watching and waiting for us to
challenge and de-throne George W. Bush and his whole team of
tyrants-in-waiting. A society without sociopath profiteers steering the
ship might be a society worth sustaining. The time for silent
fence-sitting, navel-gazing, apathetic day-to-day obedience is over. The
window of opportunity is now. The time for serious disobedience and
festive noncooperation is here.
We need a leap into tomorrow without restraint. You are the revolution.
— Neo Bonobo, Planet Earth, February 2003