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Title: We Are All Going to Die Author: Black Oak Clique Date: 3/28/2019 Language: en Topics: green anarchy, anti-civ, insurrection, climate offensive, extinction rebellion, earth strike, nonviolence Source: [[https://heresydistro.noblogs.org/files/2019/03/we-are-all-going-to-die.pdf]]
When the world ends, people come out of their apartments and meet their
neighbors for the first time; they share food, stories, companionship.
No one has to go to work or the laundromat; nobody remembers to check
the mirror or scale or email account before leaving the house. Graffiti
artists surge into the streets; strangers embrace, sobbing and laughing.
Every moment possesses an immediacy formerly spread out across months.
Burdens fall away, people confess secrets and grant forgiveness, the
stars come out over New York City...and nine months later, a new
generation is born.
CrimethInc. Collective
The Earth is not dying, it is being killed, and those who are killing it
have names and addresses.[1] But us – me, you, even those who are
killing the earth? We’re going to die.
In the worst case scenario, you drown, you starve, or you succumb to
heat stroke. Not figuratively. You will drown, you will starve, you will
succumb to heat stroke. Perhaps there’s the small chance that you will
survive the mass migration to the last reaches of habitable land in and
around the poles.
Perhaps.
But let’s be realistic here: In all likelihood, you’re going to die. A
slow, horrible, excruciating death at that. We would like to say this is
the future we’re hurtling towards at an ever-increasing rate. But it
isn’t: it’s the present, the material, graspable present. Islands are
sinking into the ocean. The poverty-stricken are freezing to death on
the streets. People are burning to death in gigantic wildfires.
The collapse is not to be a single event. It’s a process, and it’s
currently underway.
In the best case scenario, death is liberation. Perhaps the real “you” –
your body, your consciousness, your soul, what have you – won’t die, per
se: instead, the abstract “you” – your way of life, your social
relationships under capitalism, your system of meaning that’s been
drilled into your head since day one – will die.
No. We can’t. The system is the problem, and the system runs deep. The
problem isn’t just capitalism. It’s also the state, but it also isn’t
just the state. It’s the ideology of consumption itself: that beings –
plants, animals (including humans deemed to be *sub*human), fungi, even
inanimate natural “resources” – are objects to be bought, sold, and
eventually, consumed. This ideology is perhaps the deepest ideology we
have. It permeates every form of knowledge: from science, to art, to
politics. It seeps through our language (one must think how often we
refer to feeling, living beings – ones with the capacity to suffer – as
“it.”) It permeates our relationships. It is the very basis of our
societies, if it cannot be deemed our “society” itself – the group of
capital-h Humans deemed to be worthy enough to be circumscribed by the
abstract Community, that constructs itself in opposition to literally
everything else.
Your favorite pet politician isn’t immune to this. Not Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, not Bernie Sanders, not Jill Stein. Not the Democratic
Socialists, not the Green Party, not the CPUSA, and not anyone else,
either.
Perhaps their hearts are in the right place – but sadly, that isn’t
enough.
To quote the amazing piece Anarchy Works by Peter Gelderloos:
Some people oppose capitalism on environmental grounds, but think some
sort of state is necessary to prevent ecocide. But the state is itself a
tool for the exploitation of nature. Socialist states such as the Soviet
Union and People’s Republic of China have been among the most ecocidal
regimes imaginable. That these two societies never escaped the dynamics
of capitalism is itself a feature of the state structure — it
necessitates hierarchical, exploitative economic relationships of
control and command, and once you start playing that game nothing beats
capitalism.
Concerning nonviolence: it is criminal to teach a man not to defend
himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks.
Malcolm X
The struggle against ecocide was never nonviolent, and it never will be,
because it cannot be. That’s because ecocide is violence: violence
against me and you, against animals (wild and domestic,) against the
trees and the grass and the water and the mountains.
Climate insurrection is self-defense.
Strict adherence to nonviolence – that is, the rejection of violence –
is complicity in the face of ecological destruction. It is not
“offensive,” it is not “rebellion,” and it’s not a “strike” at climate
change.
Many of us do not have the privilege of being nonviolent – namely, those
of us who already marginalized. We will be the first to go. We’re the
rural farm workers and their families being sprayed with pesticides.
We’re the houseless freezing to death in polar vortices. We’re the
indigenous peoples whose homes are being swallowed by the sea. We’re the
poor who will not have the capital necessary to complete the long trek
north to the last remaining habitable lands.
If we aren’t violent – if we don’t rebel against the system that
oppresses us – we will be crushed. Don’t be complicit in our death, in
your death.
Perhaps the only hope me or you have. It’s destroying that which
destroys us — by any means possible.
No. A better question would be: what has “nonviolent” protest won us in
the long run? The answer: absolutely nothing. Many supposedly
“nonviolent” movements, such as the Civil Rights Movement, were
incredibly violent. There were hundreds of riots throughout the United
States, and of course, the existence of armed paramilitary groups such
as the Black Panthers, or the Brown Berets. One could make the argument
that this narrative of nonviolence is pushed by the very people whose
power would be threatened by violence, because violence means (perhaps
immediate) change. Hence: why those in the US celebrate Martin Luther
King Day, a federally recognized holiday; but not Malcolm X Day.
Even the most-oft example of nonviolent resistance, the Indian
independence movement, was not so. Bhagat Singh, who after his execution
became a folk hero of the cause, was inspired by French anarchist
Auguste Vaillant to bomb the British Raj’s Central Legislative Assembly.
Less than a year before, he had assassinated a British police officer in
retaliation for the death of the nationalist leader Lala Lajpat Rai.
Counterproductive to what? Getting meaningless reforms passed? Getting
empty pyrrhic victories in the legal circuit? Performing impotent
marches through major cities that don’t achieve anything other than
receiving lukewarm press from second-rate newspapers?
Ask the battery hen liberated from cramped cages by animal activists, or
the old-growth forest protected indefinitely by logging saboteurs (and
all the animals who call those forest home): is direct action
productive?
Anarchist action — patient, hidden, tenacious, involving individuals,
eating away at institutions like a worm eats away at fruit, as termites
undermine majestic trees — such action does not lend itself to the
theatrical effects of those who wish to draw attention to themselves.
Anonymous (in Desert)
To quote the great illusionist Georges Méliès, “I must say, to my great
regret, the cheapest tricks have the greatest impact.”
They are. You just haven’t heard of it because the media is smart enough
to hide it. Hearing about the heroic stories of those who fight back
would be too dangerous for most to hear – it runs the risk of
radicalizing them. Movements like the Animal and Earth Liberation
Fronts, have been waging war against ecocide since the 1970s.
We dream of a world without prisons.
We’re scared too, friend. We should be, but we should be strong, too.
We’ll let the great animal activist Keith Mann speak for us.
Labs raided, locks glued, products spiked, depots ransacked, windows
smashed, construction halted, mink set free, fences torn down, cabs
burnt out, offices in flames, car tires slashed, cages emptied, phone
lines severed, slogans daubed, muck spread, damage done, electrics cut,
site flooded, hunt dogs stolen, fur coats slashed, buildings destroyed,
foxes freed, kennels attacked, businesses burgled, uproar, anger,
outrage, balaclava clad thugs.
You do, even if you can’t physically. Despite the tone of this letter,
we aren’t totally opposed to above-ground action. In fact, in some
cases, we think it’s necessary.
Groups like the Earth Liberation Prisoners Support Group and the Animal
Liberation Front Supporters Group are active in representing and
advocating for operatives. As Sinn FĂ©in, the Irish political party once
associated with the militant IRA has been described:
Both Sinn FĂ©in and the IRA play different but converging roles in the
war of national liberation. The Irish Republican Army wages an armed
campaign... Sinn FĂ©in maintains the propaganda war and is the public and
political voice of the movement.
We don’t know. But with any luck, we’ve laid out our options.
[1] A faumous quote from Utah Philips