The Fourth World

The Next Steps

2009-06-08T22:13:00.000-07:00

Rafael's life here may be over, but for those of you who truly admired his writing, I am hoping to collect some of it and publish it (really, with a cover and everything) in the months ahead.

Rafa left his work, very consciously, to be finished, and he knew he could not finish it alone. I have some idea where he was going, but I can't go there alone, either. So I invite everyone who comes here to look through the Apocalypse No! series especially, but the rest of his writings too, and add to this thread your analysis, questions, and ideas about the next steps. Invite friends who might be on the same path to come and take a look. Rafa has handed us much of a roadmap to the next world: we only need to fill in the next few steps.

Thank you to all who have shared my loss, for your thoughts and prayers. I have felt them deeply, and they have sustained and strengthened me. Rafael has been honored in several public ceremonies, Western and Indigenous, and in innumerable private prayers and rituals, but the greatest honor we can offer him for the gifts he has given us is to continue his work and his course. I invite you to do so.

On to the Fifth World

2009-01-24T21:19:00.000-08:00

Juan Rafael Santos of the Aztlan Mexica Nation Harmony Keepers/American Indian Movement, my brother, passed into the spirit world on Thursday, January 22. That gentle, fierce, loving, brilliant, poetic soul outgrew the shackles of his body and this realm. He is on his way to take his place with the ancestors so he can be with us all. He has found life in balance, but he is not resting, not Rafa. He's writing and laughing and righting great wrongs and showing us all the way to the Fifth World. He has joined the spirits where he can even better shine his truth-revealing light, rescue our Mother Earth, and inspire what he took to calling a Green Renaissance. Listen for him.

--Leslie Radford

Obama, King and Kennedy: Empire and the “End” of Racism An interview with Juan Santos

2009-01-19T01:46:00.000-08:00

Obama, King and Kennedy: Empire and the “End” of Racism An interview with Juan Santos

“King spoke Truth to Power, while Obama spoke Lies to get in Power.

One might say that other than that, and other than the fact that King stood up to end Black people’s suffering while Obama stood silent in the face of it, they’re just alike.”

Juan Santos is a member of the Aztlan Mexica Nation Harmony Keepers/American Indian Movement, and author of the essays Barack Obama and the “End” of Racism, and Obama's Denial: The Fear of a Black Messiah.

Andrea Luchetta interviewed him for a feature piece on Obama’s inauguration for the Italian daily Il Manifesto. The following is the full text of that interview.

______________

Luchetta: I‘ve interviewed Ms. Makeeba Lloyd, of the "Harlem4Obama Commitee". According to her, racism is nowadays a minor problem. The main conflict, for her, is of a class nature, rather than racial in nature. The social dividing line, she says, is now between the rich and the poor, not between the white and the black. What do you think of this position?

Santos: This is nonsense, Lloyd’s claim is in line with Barack Obama’s utterly false claim that peoples of color are “90% of the way to equality” with whites in the US.

Ms. Lloyd is wrong. The poverty line is a race line. Race determines who is poor and who is not. Roughly a quarter of black and brown people in the US live in poverty, while less than 1/10^th of Euro-Americans live in poverty. A black person in the US is 3 times more likely to be poor than a white person.

That’s 90% of the way to “equality”?

No. The very best thing I can say about the idea that peoples of color are approaching equality with whites in the US is that it is an example of extremely bad math, or of people promoting an illusion in hopes that it will come true.

Black unemployment in the US is currently at 11.1% - almost double the average for white people, whose rate of unemployment is 5.9%. Among the general population, - by which I mean those outside of the reservation system that imprisons Native Americans on the remnants of their lands - Blacks have the highest rate of unemployment in the US, followed by Latinos, at 8.8%. Among Black youth unemployment reaches a stunning 32.3 %. From 1976 through today, a new study shows, Latino unemployment rates typically exceeded that of the white population by some 65%. The absolute rate of unemployment for Native Americans on the reservations is, however, roughly SEVENTY PER CENT.

50% of Native American reservation homes have no phones and 1/5 of the homes lack complete kitchen facilities.

It might be interesting to show these figures to Ms. Lloyd to see if, reading them, she is still willing to claim a distinction between a race divide and a class divide in the US.

But economics is by no means the only measure of equality.

Race also determines who is imprisoned and who is not.

Black people in the US are 8.5 times more likely than whites to be imprisoned.

On any given day 1 in 9 young Black men are in prison.

Latinos are 4 times more likely to go to prison than white people.

68% of all U.S. prisoners are people of color, although Black, Latinos and officially recognized Native Americans together make up slightly less than 25% of the overall population of the U.S.

The US has the highest rate of imprisonment in the world. It is a system of mass imprisonment aimed at the control of people of color, who, the elites fear, have the potential to violently and politically rebel again as they did in the 1960s. People in other parts of the world simply cannot begin to imagine the conditions that exist here; the US holds 25% of the world’s prisoners – a Gulag comprised mostly of prisoners from the minority populations of African and Native American descent – Blacks and Latinos.

This is no “minor problem,” contrary to what Ms. Lloyd suggests. It is a form of mass social control of potentially dissident and rebellious populations based on race and class status. Ms. Lloyd has missed the point entirely.

It’s not a matter of race versus class – race and class are in many ways one thing here in the US.

Usually that kind of system is called a caste system. Despite a few exceptions, like Obama himself, that’s exactly what exists in the US: a caste system.

What the white ruling class did here was this: following the mass rebellions and the burning of major US cities in the 1960s, the white ruling class decided on a strategy of divide and conquer. They created a Black middle class almost overnight, largely using government employment to do so, while at the same time they found another way to deal with the millions of people of color who could not fit into the system; mass imprisonment. These developments are 2 sides of the same coin. Ms. Lloyd’s failure to see this is why she can make the kind of mistakes of analysis she’s making. See this link.

Luchetta: You wrote that the price for Obama's election was silence about the racial question. Yet, don't you think, as many participants to the "Great Harlem Debate" have suggested, that his silence was rather tactical?

Santos: Yes it was tactical, but the question is this; what strategy did the tactic serve?

And: Who did that strategy serve? And: Who did that strategy harm?

As someone put it, “Hope is not a strategy.” Hope is nothing but a slogan.

And here’s another question.

If, as Obama claimed, Blacks in the US are “90%” of the way to equality with whites, then why was the tactic of silence necessary in the first place?

If this claim were the truth and not a lie, anyone could talk openly about race and discrimination, openly celebrate the reality that there is only 1/10^th of the way left to go, and put forward plans to quickly eliminate the remaining 10% of the problem. If this were true, such a campaign would draw millions upon millions forward as volunteers, people who would be thankful with all of their hearts, joyful to be part of the push to bring racism in this former Apartheid state to its complete end.

If racism were 90% eradicated in the US, if Blacks and other peoples of color were 90% of the way to equality, there would be absolutely no reason or need for silence.

If 9 out of 10 former racists were no longer racists, the tiny number which remained would already be isolated and powerless. There would be no need for a tactic of silence about racial oppression, because the racists who remained would be so small a group that they could not change the outcome of an election – not against a population that was 90% anti-racist or non-racist. But Obama’s claim was a conscious lie, as I demonstrated in answer 1. There I dealt with the quantifiable measures – the facts of social inequality which disprove Obama’s claim. The verifiable, statistical facts disprove Obama’s claim, and they are widely available for anyone to see who cares.

Obama’s silence showed one thing- that he knew his claim about equality was false, that he knew that to dare to talk openly about race and oppression would alienate the millions of white center-right voters whose support he needed to win the election.

So, Obama’s strategy was to give those voters what they wanted to hear, and to give them silence on what they didn’t want to hear. The tactic he used to give them what they wanted to hear was to offer the lie about “90% equality.” This erased any need on the part of his white audience, the white electorate, to deal honestly with the actual conditions of people of color here in the US. They could believe the lie of racial progress, and never have to think about the millions in poverty and the millions more in prison. That worked just fine for Obama.

Instead of blaming the system and white racism for the conditions of Black people, he could blame Black youth for a lack of “personal responsibility” – that’s exactly the tactic of white racists, and it looks like that is what Obama means by creating “unity” between peoples of color and white people – to unite with white racists in their tactic of blaming the victim of racism for the impacts of racism.

That’s the same kind of logic wife beaters use to justify their brutality.

In effect, Obama filled the silence about the actual conditions of peoples of color with the lie about an “equality” that clearly does not exist, and with a tactic of blaming the victim. So, looking back, it wasn’t really silence at all. It wasn’t wrong to say that this silence was the price of Obamas’ election, but more basically, the price of his election was a price now being paid by Gazans, and by the hungry, incarcerated and unemployed people of color in the US.

A lie filled the silence and took the place of the truths that demanded to be spoken and dealt with. Obama’s strategy and tactics served white racism and served to deeply harm peoples of color by erasing our conditions of life from the imagination of the majority here.

Claiming that Gazans have “almost achieved equality” with Israelis would not make it so, and remaining silent about the rain of bombs will not make them stop exploding. Obama has remained silent about the literal bombs in Gaza, and he has remained silent about the explosively unjust social conditions for people here. In both cases, the bombs keep falling, people keep going hungry, and here, the US Gulag continues to devour the lives of millions of imprisoned people of color.

Along with the wealthy Anglo ruling elite, that’s who his strategy served, and that’s who his strategy harmed.

Yes, Obama’s Black supporters you interviewed in Harlem were correct.

The silence was, in fact, a tactic.

Luchetta: Why don't you seem to believe in the possibility of a change coming from within the institutional framework? What is then the possible alternative?

Santos: Change won’t come from within the system because the wealthy profit from the mass impoverishment of peoples of color here and around the world – wherever their money can penetrate to get the cheapest labor for the most work. Having a color- based caste who you can discriminate against increases the rate of profit. They also profit at the expense of the Earth; they profit from the Earth’s destruction – actually, and in practice, they profit at the expense of all life. They’re not going to give that up because someone votes for them to give it up. They have police and military power at their disposal, and the bullet always trumps the ballot.

Racism rewards the powerful. They have no reason to stop racism unless its continuance results in a level of resistance that endangers the system of profit itself.

To put it in plain words, the system rewards the rich for hurting people. So, from their emotionally deadened standpoint, and given their control of the bullet, why should anything change?

For me, the most important example of an alternative is the EZLN; the Zapatistas and the Mayan people of Chiapas in Mexico are a shining example. They have found a striking balance between autonomy and resistance, and between self determination and the nurturing of their culture and the Earth. The Mayan people have a profound sense of the meaning and potentials of our times. I’m an indigenist and associated with the American Indian Movement.

I’m also enamored of Evo Morales and his MAS party in Bolivia, and I have an intellectual and moral admiration for Hugo Chavez, for his willingness to confront the US and Israel, and to unite other oppressed nations in a bloc of opposition to imperial hegemony, but not for his personal style of management or emotional tone.

And at this juncture in history anyone with a heart has to admire Hamas; I do, even though I don’t view them as a viable alternative… but, then, I don’t have to; it’s not my place to make that determination. I’m not Palestinian.

But, finally, the all-but undeniable reality is that the Empire cultures like the US and the European powers are quickly heading toward “the trash bin of history.”

Their systems are completely irrational, and tend to eat themselves – and the Earth – and us – alive. They have no future.

Increasingly, it seems, the writing is on the wall, and in the hearts of people around the world. I think the alternative is to begin to build a new way and a new culture, establishing autonomy and independence and sustainability for ourselves as communities, even as these Empires collapse as flat as the two skyscrapers in New York a few years ago. One good collapse deserves another, I always say.

Luchetta: You seem quite skeptical toward Obama's rhetoric. What is the "Change" that Harlem's people would really need? Which actions would be needed to tackle the racial question?

Santos: Well, we’ve seen plenty of “change” since the 1960s. But what people forget right now is the common folk wisdom that “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Really, the only thing the system can do for us is collapse, go away, and get out of our lives. I’m a big fan of the American Indian Movement slogan that says, “U.S. out of North America!”

Really, the system can’t do anything to change the caste system that it’s founded on and that it relies on for its continued profit and its continued existence.

As far as tackling the race question goes, they can never tackle it from our perspective and for our good. Just like in the 60s and 70s, they can only tackle the race problem – their race problem, not ours.

We are their race problem, and I’ve never been one to ask bullies to tackle me. It’s not a sound or productive strategy.

Luchetta: Don't you think that, if compared with the situation of the Civil Rights Movement era, a lot of progress has been made on the racial question?

Santos: Again, the old folk saying; “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

My answer?

Sure, if you count a new Black middle class, on one hand, combined with the mass incarceration of peoples of color on the other, and a day to day war in our neighborhoods called the “War on Drugs” - which is really a “War on Us” - if you want to count that as “progress” …then yes, there’s been “progress.” But anyone who actually believes that that is “progress” is lying to themselves.

At the systemic level, there’s been no qualitative, fundamental “change” at all, really. But at the cultural level, yes, there’s been change, and that change - with all of its dramatic difference and all of its dramatic limits, is what Barack Obama represents at his best - as a cultural symbol, not as a champion of the People.

But, yes there has been a limited but very welcome change in people’s attitudes, ethics and their emotional and cultural open-ness. That much has changed. The system, though, hasn’t changed at all.

Luchetta: Why, in your opinion, is Barack Obama often compared with JFK?

Santos: It’s a kind of obvious comparison in terms of their charisma, their intelligence, and their ages. But, it’s not just their personalities or spirits. January 2009 is very much like the period of JFK’s reign. Then - looking back on it now, it’s plain to see that there were two major trajectories the world could take – toward Nuclear Holocaust or toward a Cultural Renaissance. As it turned out, the cultural Renaissance, an effort toward Cultural Revolution, was the path taken from the bottom-up.

The Ecological Holocaust we face today is very similar in it’s meaning to Nuclear Holocaust, and, according to Michael Oritz Hill, the author of a book called Dreaming the End of the World – which is focused on people’s dreams about Nuclear Holocaust and Ecological Holocaust, there are even deep correspondences and similarities between the symbols in these kinds of dreams. By the same token, the feeling is thick in the air today, at least here in California, that another cultural Renaissance is being primed; A Green Renaissance – no, not a “green economic stimulus” – something more profound, and from the bottom-up is coming; that’s how it feels now. I’m sure that if you were in San Francisco or Greenwich Village in the early 60’s, it felt pretty similar.

In the early 60s, Kennedy embodied both potentials, for renewal and destruction. Obama is like that, too – a mix of contradictory elements and psychological, cultural and political trends embodied in a single, charismatic leader. Neither of them brought any focus whatsoever on paths to liberation.

Kennedy was an imperialist and a Cold Warrior. Obama is the 21^st century equivalent of Kennedy – a smart Hawk whose basic commitment is to the existence and furtherance of capitalist imperialism.

As a fine essay in Revolution points out, Kennedy sent the young and hopeful he’d inspired to die and carry out imperial genocide in Viet Nam.

Obama will do the same in Afghanistan, and, perhaps, Iran.

Beyond that; moving out of the Bush era is not unlike moving out of the 50’s and the McCarthy era here, out of a time of a deep grey repression into open air and sunlight. Just getting finished with the Bush years is enough to give people “hope.” Obama just stepped up and rode that wave; he didn’t inspire it; he was just the one to ride it –he was a “fit.”

There are lots of little correspondences; John McCain, Obama’s rival, was almost as stiff and bad on television as Richard Nixon, Kennedy’s rival.

History and Time run in circles and spirals and cycles, not in straight lines. Things come back around. The world is a complete circle. In fact, the Aztec (Mexica) name for the world was Cem Anahautl – “Complete Circle.”

Luchetta: Why did most black people vote for Obama? And why did the US choose a black president just now?

Santos: Because he’s Black. Because Black people are routinely and systematically excluded from full participation and any kind of empowerment in US society, Because they dared to “hope” he might actually turn out to be one of their own, to actually turn the tide for them, despite the political evidence to the contrary. It was largely a symbolic vote, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t truly important at the level of culture. In fact, symbols are, in many ways, the substance of culture.

Look, the guy’s smart, charismatic, and his game is really complex. There is no way that it would be right to “blame” most black people for not seeing through the complex political game, and there is no way that one could fail to love Black people when you take even a second to see it through their eyes; to so many the election of Barack Obama looked exactly like the fulfillment of the Dream - Martin Luther King’s Dream. In one way, in terms of what it said about the changing culture, it had an element of truth, at least in part. At the level of the system, it has no truth at all.

Nor is it the case that Obama represents anything like the values King held to his heart – quite the opposite.

King spoke Truth to Power, while Obama spoke Lies to get in Power.

One might say that other than that, and other than the fact that King stood up to end Black people’s suffering while Obama stood silent in the face of it, they’re just alike.

The Lessons of Gaza in a Time of Collapse and Rebirth: Apocalypse No! part 8

2009-01-19T00:47:00.000-08:00

In loving memory of the late Mayan priestess Jo'b No'j Chomiha (Rosa Maria Cabrera)

By Juan Santos

It can no longer be hidden. What is happening in Gaza is, transparently, ethnic cleansing - genocide.

That genocide has been ongoing for sixty years, sometimes in intense, rapid, and explosive junctures, sometimes more slowly, routinely – but always, it has been executed methodically.

To see clearly the historical and cultural trajectories toward genocide in Palestine or elsewhere, one has only to map the intersection of the stated intentions of the perpetrators and their actions over time – or experience a sudden revelation or flash of deep insight.

I was one of those who saw it all at once. At sixteen years of age, it hit me with an overwhelming and intensely intimate force, one that would require an essay in its own right to elucidate.

I had been watching a documentary on public television about the Nazi Holocaust.

Later that night it hit me: What happened in the Holocaust was not the exception to the rule – it was the most profound expression of the rule; it was a concentrated expression of the way things are in everyday life, in the blind cult of everyday life as we live it. The Holocaust could not have come from nowhere, it was not an aberration, it arose from certain conditions, like a pimple from oily skin – and, like the blemish itself, the Holocaust was only a symptom of what underlay it – the conditions from which it arose. Outbreaks of genocidal horror in concentrated form arise from the norms that underlie them. If there is no basis for a thing to exist, it cannot come into existence.

What is happening in Gaza today is no accident; it is an expression of underlying logics, of underlying and all-permeating attitudes and feeling tones in Israeli culture; logics, attitudes and feelings that rest on a set of fundamental premises.

The most fundamental of these premises is one shared by every civilization and empire on Earth over the historical period of the last several thousand years: that the members of a given culture are vulnerable, whether that vulnerability is to human enemies or the conditions of nature, and that this vulnerability rightly translates into a mindset of kill or die, kill or be killed, conquer or be conquered.

Every empire culture has determined to be the killer rather than the one who dies or who is killed, the conqueror rather than the conquered, and the ruler rather than the ruled. At some point the trauma of some real and limited threat become generalized and embodied in the psychology of individuals, and then in entire cultures, as an ongoing state of psycho-cultural emergency, a mass “neurosis” or “psychosis.” The sense of being threatened became a given of existence and the foundation of a way of “life.”

Every empire faces what it considers an existential threat (indeed, each embodies the mentality that existence – life itself – is a threat.) The founding and continued existence of Israel, and the dispossession, ongoing oppression, and slaughter of the Palestinian people has been “justified” for decades now by the unreal claim of a perpetual threat of a new anti-Jewish Holocaust, one from which Israelis and other Jewish people must perpetually defend themselves. This kind of ever-vigilant self defense is what civilization is fundamentally about.

In the case of Israel, the now-defunct idea was that if any people had a “right” to become wanton killers and conquerors, it was the Jewish people. Israel could kill and rob with impunity; it was justified by the “threat” Jews faced of a new Holocaust, a threat alleged to be so grave that any crime was justifiable in defending against it.

In part because of the Holocaust, in part because of the long and deranged history of European persecution of the Jewish people, the Zionists demanded, and were granted, a blank check to kill. To question that “right” was to be branded as living, walking proof of the ongoing “reality” of the existence of the perpetual threat; it was to be branded an “anti-Semite,” one who is living proof of the potential for a new anti-Jewish genocide, and as a virtual advocate of another anti-Jewish genocide.

Thus, Israel established a sort of unassailable “right” to “defend” itself from “threat” – to eliminate the Palestinian “threat” – which is to say Palestine itself and the Palestinian people. The “threat,” as always, became a license for genocide.

Without cultural agreement on the nature and meaning of an existential “threat,” no empire can justify its existence. Almost all “progress” is measured in terms of overcoming perceived threats, and Empire culture, civilization itself, and all of the horrors it perpetuates, are justified by the “progress” it represents.

It is important to understand, for example, that most Israelis today view the genocide in Gaza as “progress.” That’s why opinion polls show their overwhelming support for it. Likewise, the Nazis had made “progress” in dealing with the “Jewish Question,” until they reached the point where it seemed possible to progress to the point of a cure for the “Jewish disease” they said threatened the German people. Call it the promise of a Final Cure, a Final Solution, a Final Progress. Call it the promise of a Final Redemption, a cultural liberation from the existential threat, the promise of the ultimate “success” of civilization.

There is nothing at all unusual in it. Every aspect of our daily lives is permeated with such promises, and every one of them is a lie. It is the job of politicians to make such promises, and that is why we tend to despise them, even though every one of us is looking forward to the “final solution” of something or another, however serious or however petty.

Every TV commercial is a walking, talking final solution, a new “miracle” cure; real progress – a must buy.

That’s because every time we buy an advertised commodity we aren’t buying an object, we are buying an idea, a culture, a promise, a solution; whether the solution is to the “threat” of bad breath or the “threat” of “global terrorism.” As we make our purchase we are also buying into the basic notion that life is a threat and that civilization and “progress” are its cures. For most Israelis, excluding a tiny conscious minority, the white phosphorous Israel is raining on the people of Gaza is not a burning poison – its medicine – it’s a cure, a solution; if you buy it.

But listen - don’t blame them; you’re not immune, either; you buy into the same lie, in some form or another. “They” are not different; you are not different. They are from the same culture as most of us; one of the Empire cultures - in this case, the West. In the West, as in all Empire cultures, “threats” are dealt with by eliminating them. So, the Nazis sought to eliminate the Jews; The Jews in Israel now seek to eliminate the Palestinians – they call it the Palestinian “threat,” so that the very name “Palestinian” has come to represent a threat in the emotional subtexts of Western empire culture.

Israeli writer Uri Avnery, writing on the genocide in Gaza, makes it plain:

“Every baby metamorphosed, in the act of dying, into a Hamas "terrorist". Every bombed mosque instantly became a Hamas base, every apartment building an arms cache, every school a terror command post, every civilian government building a "symbol of Hamas rule." Thus the Israeli army retained its purity as the ‘most moral army in the world’…”

And, if only Israel would smile as they kill, send in a few doctors and some medicine to anesthetize the pain, they would be both “moral” and “nice.” And no one could object. The slaughter could continue undiluted.

Just as Israel is out to eliminate Palestinians, you, cowboy, sought and still seek to eliminate Indians. Yesterday’s “savage” is today’s “terrorist”… threat…

In the US, Black people are a “threat,” so their elimination is sought in other, diluted ways, ways that don’t look like genocide - through mass incarceration of millions under the guise of “fighting crime” or the “War on Drugs”, or the War on Gangs,” anything that can be made morally justifiable and enlist the support of “nice” people. But the undiluted reality is that we, the descendants of Africans and Native Americans, are your Gazans. And your perception of us as a threat operates in your culture in just the same way as the Israeli perception of the Palestinians. You stole our land, our bodies; just as Israel is built on stolen Palestinian land; only in this case we are talking magnitudes of scale far beyond a small strip of land on the coast of the Mediterranean. We are talking two continents in this hemisphere, and the enslavement and Conquest of Africa, and Australia as well.

Here in the Americas, your ancestors killed 95% of my ancestors – David Stannard in has seminal American Holocaust, published by Oxford University Press, puts the numbers at around 100 million dead. And you thought the 20 million the Nazis killed was unprecedented. That’s what you were taught, that The Nazis were an evil exception to “civilized” rule.

No, the Nazis were not an exception to the rule any more than Israel is an exception to the rule. Neither are the Europeans in the Americas.

Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Conquest of the Americas, The Conquest of Africa, with its fifty million dead, The Nakba (the initial Conquest of Palestine), the US/Mexican War of conquest - all of them are made of the same dynamics: “Progress” and expansion, the elimination of the “Threat”, and the need for internal cultural coherence against the threat (that’s where the stereotype of the “self-hating Jew” comes in – it is a stigma meant to reinforce the internal coherence of Jewish culture in the face of the “threat,” so that those who do not believe in the threat, or who are unwilling to kill to eliminate the “threat become the “internal enemy” – a part of the “threat.” If that a sounds like an extension of the mass psychology of Fascism to you, there is a reason for that. All Empires and colonial settler states, from Rome to Mussolini to the U.S. to South Africa to Israel operate on the same basic premises and through the same basic psycho-cultural dynamics. Empire is Fascism.

Your upbringing was little more than a process of indoctrination into the internal cultural coherence of the Empire, and a way of aligning your life-purposes toward your culture’s promise of the elimination of the threat. To be a “success” means that you have eliminated threats in a way that can be construed or falsified as “nice”. That’s what you buy into with every product and lie you buy. You buy into genocide; you buy into ecocide. You buy into the elimination of life on Earth.

Life itself, after all, is the most fundamental existential threat; life embraces its complement, death. Life is full of wild things, threatening things. The word “wild” in its origins, pertains to life which is unbroken, untamed, undomesticated, uncivilized. In its origins, “wild” means self-willed. Life itself is a threat that must be eliminated. That’s the final logic of the final solution, of the fascistic psychology and culture of Empire.

The “dark” “wilderness,” of course, is simply full of threats. We were taught that, too; it is a sensibility so deeply embedded in Western culture that it barely warrants reference, it’s absorbed through fairy tales and through the pores of the skin.

And if you are a white “American” it is manifestly your destiny to conquer the wild threat, to tame it, to break it- to eliminate it. If you are part of Nazi Germany, your purpose is not so different; if you’re Israeli, Greater Israel is your manifest destiny; or South Africa; or Australia. Name your colonial settler state. It may shake you to look at Israel’s genocide in Gaza as a mirror: but, regardless, you are part of the same genocidal and ecocidal pattern.

This is the most elementary of understandings necessary for an honest approach to and assessment of our current global crisis. It is the single most important factor in understanding white European culture and its dynamics in the Americas and as a global Empire. It is fundamental to any understanding of the basic cultural assumptions that guide our daily lives and understandings of one another. It is an understanding so important, it describes a reality so all pervasive, that without it one simply cannot be an ally to oppressed peoples – in Gaza or anywhere else.

Without this understanding one has understood nothing. One’s “compassion” reduces to do-good-ism and elite rescue missions to the poor miserable brutes - the imperial rabble - beneath one.

Without this understanding the dynamics of Empire and genocide, one cannot be an integral part of the healing that we as humans, the Earth as a living being, and the animals we love so urgently need. Without this understanding one cannot conceive of the actual realities of the “old mind” vs. the “new mind.” Without this understanding one doesn’t even know what the old mind is.

Without having immersed oneself in fundamental understanding of the culture-driven realities of genocide and ecocide, one does not know where we are, the conditions we face, or the depths of denial that surround us about our current crisis. In fact, without this understanding having been deeply integrated into one’s world view, one is by definition in denial. One is by definition part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Without this understanding one hasn’t a clue about the indigenous experience so many would like to emulate. Much less has one approached anything akin to indigenous American “wisdom” – or, for that matter, African experience and wisdom. If that is what you are looking for, then, here is some indigenous wisdom:

In the US today, Lakota men’s life expectancy on the rez in the US doesn’t just “happen” to be 44 years –the lowest on Earth. Lakota teen suicide rates don’t just “happen” to be 150% of the norm in the US. The Lakota unemployment rate and the extremities of Lakota poverty don’t just “happen” to be the case. Native Americans don’t just happen to have the highest incarceration rate on planet Earth, higher, even, than that of African Americans. These conditions are all are a direct result of having been conquered and being kept in subjugated state by an enemy people who promised and intended to wipe Native Americans off the face of the Earth – just as the Nazis intended to wipe the Jews off the face of the Earth. The rez is white America’s Warsaw ghetto (by the way, they don’t call the Black ghetto a “ghetto” for nothing) and people of indigenous descent, be they Lakota or Mexican, are, along with Black people, the “Jews.” Better put – the Palestinians.

In fact Hitler openly admired the extermination of the Indians, and the reservation system, and consciously took them as models. The South African Bantustans and the system of Apartheid had a similar origin, as does the division and colonial settlement of Palestine. Gaza is a temporary Indian reservation, “Indian Territory” only waiting to be taken, an open air concentration camp. Here and there, it’s the same.

Where did you think you were?

Palestine is everywhere.

If one hasn’t faced the historical, ongoing reality of genocide and of the US as a white colonial settler state and global empire immersed in, permeated by, and oozing genocide from every pore, then one doesn’t grasp the pain of oppressed peoples, its daily meaning, or the context of the daily experience of oppressed people here in the US or anywhere else on the planet. One cannot but react – be a reactionary (and I use the term advisedly, deliberately and consciously) when encountering the pain of oppressed people. One cannot understand the anger engendered by utter invisibility felt by those who face the realities of cultural and physical genocide everyday and when who, most often, face it alone, with no recognition from their supposed white “allies.” One will fail to see that what is happening in Gaza has a particular meaning for those who are living through it and dying in it. The drama of the mass slaughter of an innocent people there is only a concentrated expression of the blind cult of oppression that constitutes their every day lives, of the cult of everyday life.

Without conscious understanding of the dynamics of genocide, one can only blame the victim for their pain and anger, and fail to understand that one’s own blindness to the most elementary and basic of realities of everyday life presents a locked box to the oppressed – the same locked box oppressed people confront with their active persecutors and overt enemies – the locked box of denial.

Most of all, without such a conscious understanding one cannot see the reality facing the world today, the utter congruity and continuity between genocide and ecocide, and the ways that the denial and operation of one mirrors the denial and operation of the other, or the ways in which the daily details of a killing culture flow into the stream, the river and the sea of planetary death.

Without understanding genocide, one doesn’t understand anything essential -much less is one among the ranks of the “wise.” Without having faced the fundamental reality that shapes one’s culture and its daily interactions with other cultures, one cannot fully approach “wisdom” or humility or self-reflection, or even understand in a mature way what is happening around and in oneself.

Thank the spirits that the denial that has shaped us is, as we speak, at last, beginning to shatter.

Because what’s happening is that a new choice is being made between life and death on a global scale. The choice before us is also an individual one to be made in the context of one’s own, particular culture and life history; it impacts and shapes every aspect of our lives including our deepest senses of community and intimacy.

But the choice is not between killing or bring killed, killing or dying; it’s between killing and living. And like the choices of the ancient peoples who chose Empire, the choices we make now will affect life at every level and on every scale. Our future will hold either a truly final “solution” - a Final Killing of Life on Earth, or it will hold the foundation of a way of Living that can last for the entire natural life span of our planet and solar system. It’s all in the Balance; right now, in this moment. As the Lakota Chief Arvol Looking Horse has emphasized, it rests with your decision.

It’s important to understand, in this context, that Life on Earth isn’t “dying.” The furry ones, the four footed ones, aren’t “dying.” They’re being killed by a culture that is their conscious and self-declared enemy.

Here, in the midst of the greatest mass extinction in 65 million years, all that is “wild” doesn’t just “happen” to be dying, any more than Gazans “happen” to be dying. The Wild happens to be being killed by a culture that has openly and confessedly intended to eradicate, eliminate the wild, to conquer, tame, subjugate and destroy it all – a culture that is the active enemy of all life – certainly of all self-willed – wild life.

It is a culture that uses dynamite to blow up wolf cubs in the den as if they were so many Palestinian children in their homes; and that, death squad style, Israel-in-Gaza style, then uses helicopters to hunt their parents down from the sky.

If life is endangered, if “endangered” species are a symbol of that, then this is what they are “endangered” by - conscious killers. They are not endangered by accident, not by “well meaning” but ignorant people, but by killers - a culture of killers - even if, by chance, it might be rightly said that the killers do not understand, and dare not face themselves as such. (The reason oppressed people find it a relief to deal with overt racists is that it’s a relief to face someone who knows what they are. Most white middle class people in the US don’t face the nature of their culture. They sense that they can’t afford to face it.

To do so would be to break the code of silence called being “nice.” And being “nice” is what it means to smile as you kill. One must kill. There is a threat. But one can only continue to kill by pretending that what you are doing is something else. Mass murder becomes “defending democracy”; Conquest become “spreading the word of god and saving souls.” As I was told by a dear friend, a radical white feminist lesbian, being “nice” functions something like an anesthetic. (Now that doesn’t hurt, does it?)

There are layers upon layers of misdirection, obfuscation, double entendre, doublespeak, half truths and manipulation that enable the killing, and that make up the cultural context in which the killing can go on without acknowledgement or feeling.

Wisdom, in this context, means, in part, being wise about how to deal with a culture of killers. “Wisdom” cannot be divorced from context, any more than it can be divorced from culture, or from experience within a given culture, or how we navigate – mediate - between cultures.

Without a deep grasp of the dynamics of genocide, one doesn’t even start to get this culture, and one is utterly unfit to mediate between the cultures of the oppressor and the oppressed, much less is one fit to guide the creation or foundation of what is most urgently needed - a new culture and an authentically “new” mind – a mind which, in practice, can only be the outcome and product of a new culture that comes into being as this one collapses and as we consciously dismantle the consciousness that drove it. A “new mind” will be the sign of the new culture coming into maturity over the course of the coming generations.

Beyond that, without a firm grasp of the reality of genocide, and thus ecocide, one cannot love the world – not with competence, and not if love is the ability and will to extend oneself for the spiritual growth of others. One cannot extend oneself to guide others in a terrain one doesn’t understand – not without betraying them. Not if love, like “wisdom,” is actually a verb; an ability in a context.

And here is our context as the world and the Earth around us are on the verge of disintegration: it is the context of the death throes of a death system; the orgasm of a necrophiliac.

A mature capacity to love, in this context, is typified by four activities.

1. Guiding others to see what they are part of;

2. Guiding them to reject what must be rejected;

3. Helping each person we guide to undo the trauma; to learn that they are safe while they re-emerge and deprogram themselves from the cultural matrix of “threat” and “solution”, and;

4. Helping to restore the foundations of original, indigenous, pre-Empire cultures and laying the foundations for a new culture that is utterly different, while saving what we can, within the limits of our abilities, of life on this Earth.

These four things will, ultimately and of necessity, become part of a new mythology. They are, fundamentally, religious tasks.

They will become and must become a part of laying the foundation for a culture of life, and they must be encoded in the new culture that arises from the death of the Empire cultures.

A new culture must know where it came from, where it is going, where it refuses to go, where it is on the path and in its stage of development, and why. Otherwise, it could easily repeat and replicate the most devastating aspects of the death culture which is now collapsing around us.

If we don’t know where we are, and where we come from, we cannot know where we need to go, why we need to go there, and we can provide no means for others to gauge where they are in the stages of development from the old to the new. In other words, lacking such knowledge, we are useless to the future as any kind of leaders or guides; rather, we represent a dead end and a failure of understanding.

It is, by the same token, very dangerous to assume that one “knows” what the “new mind” is or will be. That is in part because what we (both as a species and as specific cultural groupings) do now and in the future will become part of the myth/story that shapes the new mind and the culture that it arises from. Since we don’t know what we are going to do, at best, some of us who intend to help lay the foundations for a new culture can only live as if our story might come to embody worthwhile lessons for the coming generations, if there are to be any. But we cannot predict the outcomes or the meanings of the stories and myths they will comprise.

In the same way, the Hopi who lived through the experiences later embodied in their Emergence Stories could not know the outcome before it unfolded. As they moved thru the Passageway they followed from the destruction of the Third world into the Fourth World, they did not know they would be followed by a “witch” who would corrupt the new world, or other key elements of the story that would give full shape to their culture as it deepened and evolved.

It is such stories that deeply shaped the traditional Hopi world experience or “mind,” and our story, as it will be told by our children’s children’s children, based on how we have actually lived it, will shape the “new mind” of the coming generations. This will happen in the same way that it happened among those who lived long ago, who lived and shaped the story of the “existential threat” and the “final solutions” of Empire, the story that shaped our culture and our minds all these generations later.

So, yes, Gaza is our mirror, it is the shattering mirror of a shattering world system of Empire and domination; it is the magic mirror into which we can look to see the truth of our cultural situation and the forces that drive our psyches, the painful mirror that can lead us to grief and transformation, in which we can see what is revealed, and what, and who, must change, and how. What is happening in Gaza is a Revelation, an Unveiling of the nature of things. That is why we cannot tear our eyes – or our hearts – away.

And as we watch the drama, the tragedy of Empire, oppression, genocide and ecocide unfold before us in Gaza, we will no doubt find occasion to feel both deep grief and rage.

Grief over, and rage at genocide is completely justified. But it is important- central - to remember that the worst thing oppression does to us is make us someone we're not, to rob us of choice, to reduce us to being reactive, to limit our ability to feel and think clearly and with compassion about ourselves and others.

Becoming reactive to the threat of oppression forces us into the mindset wherein what “threatens” us determines our being; our existence becomes little more than a reaction to that “threat.” Then the Empire mentality has “got” us. Empire itself is a form of resistance, and resisting it, while necessary, is a two edged sword. To the extent that our response to trauma and oppression reduces and limits our abilities to make conscious choices, we have become the victims of genocide within ourselves; we have become less than the promise of our full humanity; we are robbed of our birthright.

The ultimate freedom is the freedom to choose from the deepest place of authenticity within us - from our hearts in right relation with all life. We must learn to live and act from love of our peoples, of the land and all life, and not from reaction and mere hatred of those who have foolishly made of themselves our enemies.

This freedom – the freedom to love, foster and nurture life, can never truly or entirely be stripped from us, as the indigenous ancestors and elders - all of those who have handed down the still living traditions from before the time of Empire - have shown us with their lives.

The spiritual elders and guides of the Maya of Guatemala are a recent and deep example of this. The Maya are just recovering from a genocide that took the lives of a quarter million of their people in the latter part of the 1900s; but, even though the denial had not yet shattered, even though the world was silent about their condition then, in that time just before the internet, they kept faith with their ancient traditions, knowledge, and prophecies, and emerged as a people who hold a deep spiritual light for a world in crisis. They re-emerged, as if according to schedule, for this time.

The Zapatistas, born of the Mayan culture of southern Mexico, are another shining example. They have found a striking balance between autonomy and resistance, and between self determination and the nurturing of their culture and the Earth. Let us look closely with the Mayan people at the meaning and potentials of our Time.

Let us live, to the best of our capacities, like them.

- Juan Santos is a member of the Aztlan Mexica Nation Harmony Keepers/American Indian Movement, and a Los Angeles based writer and editor. His essays can be found at: http://the-fourth-world.blogspot.com. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Contact him at: Juan_Santos@Mexica.net.

Children Of Gaza, Run To The Angels , by Suzanne Baroud

2009-01-13T20:18:00.000-08:00

By Suzanne Baroud
10 January, 2009
Palestine Chronicle

Ironically, it was in Palestine, 20 years ago, that I concluded that there is no God. For how could a God, who claims to love all and treat all with impartiality, allow such horrors like those in Palestine to happen?

This unbelief grew stronger with each curfew, with each strike that mourned the death of yet one more martyr, with a decapitation induced by gunfire in the main square on a sunny Ramallah afternoon so many years ago. But it was cemented the day I had to tell one of my fifth grade students that his brother had just been taken away by the Israeli army. His expression, his body going limp, the shuddering of his shoulders as he wept with his classmates…that’s what finally did it.
Nearly 20 years have passed since that day, and I have now married into a Gazan family. I am a wife and mother, the sister and aunt of so many kids living the horror of what Gaza has become. As we watch the footage of Israel’s onslaught, I hear myself, whispering as I see one more martyred child, “Run to the angels….run.” After so many years, this living nightmare is fostering a burning desire to believe once again in the afterlife.

Caged, starved, sniped, suffocated. They are slaughtered like sheep, but the leaders of the free world just cannot seem to find a moment to comment. Golfing, vacationing, Obama, Bush, even the EU, they just aren’t important enough. My mutterings have become a like a canter. I call out to these stricken and shattered little bodies, who frankly never experienced life to lose it. The only consolation to offer is the respite found in death.

A crowd gathers, shrouded in gas, smoke and dust. In the front stand eight young fathers, each holding a white swaddled bundle of what used to be a son, a daughter. For a few moments there is no screaming, no chanting or crying, but a moment of quiet and stillness that presses one to wonder just whom has been granted the greater mercy, the toddler who caught the snipers bullet, or the young father, who will have to find some way to live beyond this moment?

A young boy sits on the sidewalk beside his mother. She is propped up against the wall of a collapsed building and her life is bleeding out all over the sidewalk. It is spattered on his face and smeared on his shirt. She uses the last of her strength to lift her arm and clutch his cheek in her palm and then she is gone. He rests his head in his hands and cries. He is all alone.

The camera zooms in on the scene of a freshly detonated building, a civilian home. A little girls brown curly hair covered in dust and eyes wide open is all that can be found of her. Her mother wails and pulls her hair while her father frantically searches among the rubble for the rest of his daughter, where could she be? I whisper again, “you will be made whole again in Paradise. Run to the angels”.
What amazing faith. What strong devotion that a father loses his mother, father, wife and eight children, that this man before anything can assert, “God is Great, Thank God for Everything”. He holds his child, now still and ashen, he smothers him with kisses and then gently pulls back the sheet to expose two bullet holes in his chest. He then tenderly places the child beside his brother and again, pulls the sheet back of his youngest son to reveal a single snipers bullet to the chest. He can barely compose himself and he moans to the sympathizing camera man, “God is Great, Thank God for Everything”.

An old and wrinkled Imam so lovingly cradles a little girl’s lifeless body, as if mishandling her now could inflict more pain, he mumbles a benediction and gently lies her beside her sisters and her brothers in the mass grave. I try to comfort her, saying, “Finally, a place of safety. Rest beside your sister. Your brother. Put your fears to rest and meet your beloved Prophet and the many of your little friends who have fallen before you.”

Hospitals, schools, mosques, civilian homes, UN shelters, all worthy targets. Doctors, medicines, food and water, truckloads of relief from all corners of the world line up for miles at the Egyptian border but they are refused entry. Security is high, food is scarce, water is completely gone.

Faith seems to spring forth in the strangest of moments. For me, it seems to be coming full circle out of desperation and in agony, for the sake of the snow-white souls of the many bloodied and dismembered innocents of Gaza.

UN workers coordinate with Israelis to get civilians to safety inside a UN school. Hundreds are tucked inside the mutually agreed safe haven. Soon after, the school comes under Israeli fire. Bruised and battered refugees stare Satan in the face, clad in his fatigues. Hundreds wounded, scores dead, many lost and unaccounted for.
Governments negotiate a cease-fire. Rumors buzz of conspiracies. The US President-elect is forever silent. Parents search beneath the collapsed walls for what remains of their children. Shattered concrete, random arms and legs, broken glass, tossed together in a bloody hodge-podge. But, in my mind, I see them whole, their little bodies swiftly being swept up into Paradise and I call out to them, “Run!”

- Suzanne Baroud is the Managing Editor of PalestineChronicle.com.

Capitalism at the Expense of All Life

2008-12-24T00:47:00.000-08:00

CAPITALISM AT THE EXPENSE OF ALL LIFE
Part1: The Killing Horizon

By Juan Santos

The bottom line is profit. Profit and the lust for it is capitalism’s event horizon. Much like what happens at the boundary of a black hole (“boundary of a black hole” is roughly what the term “event horizon” means in the theory of general relativity) any energy, information or meaning that passes the threshold of a consciousness driven by profit disappears into the super-gravitational field of the black hole itself – never to be seen or heard of again.

Nothing can be seen once it enters this realm, and nothing, having entered, ever escapes. No light, no sign, no dawn of understanding can re-emerge. Anything, any light, any object, any thought, any meaning, purpose, or any human feeling is swallowed and for all practical purposes, obliterated there.

No communication can transpire between inside and outside.

The event horizon of profit-consciousness functions as an inviolate barrier between what appear to be mutually exclusive worlds. Those of us on this side of the event horizon can only guess, but never really know, what happens on the other side. What we know of what is inside the black hole of the capitalist consciousness can only be inferred from what seems to happen at its horizon. We are left to assume that what happens there is annihilation, or its equivalent. It seems that the only thing that can enter that realm is money- life stripped of all meaning except a numerical designation, like a concentration camp inmate with a serial number tattooed on her forearm.

There are things we can infer from this side of the horizon about what happens on the other side, in the black hole of the capitalist mentality – things that show up outside that tell us something about what happens within it. Things like the concentration camp victim, like the mass graves in Guatemala, the unearthed Mayan corpses left by death squads… they seem to emerge from the black hole and give us a glimpse of what is inside: and, beyond that, sometimes we almost get real glimpses in. We get glimpses of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, of someone’s recollection of headless frogs spewing blood after the psychopathic child, George W. Bush, has lit a firecracker he’s inserted in their mouths and hurled them through the air. We know these things – we glimpse them, those of us who are paying the strictest kind of attention. But, mostly, nothing escapes, or that which seems to escape the pull of the black hole for a moment is immediately sucked back into the realm of oblivion as if it never happened.

But, as often as not, we can tell what matters to those in the center of civilization’s
black gravity – its centers of “power”, by what doesn’t happen out here in the real world – on this edge of the horizon -as much as by what does happen.

Notice. Notice what is taken “seriously” by the denizens of the dark center of “power” – if anything beyond the next quarterly profit and loss statement can be said to be taken seriously at all.

Notice where the $700 billion in “bailout” money is going. The black hole that some people feared would swallow the Earth when the CERN particle accelerator was launched in Europe didn’t appear there. It appeared thousands of miles away – on Wall Street – and $700 billion in “bail out” money is going into that black hole, never to be seen again.

It’s going to fix problems that have no real existence, that are tied to values that have no real existence. It’s going down the rabbit hole, the black hole, into the land of illusion, the land of swindles, the land of lies, of the selling of the negation of values, of mirrors upon mirrors, into the unreal land of black magic, where it will impact nothing but the “faith” of capitalist financiers and wizards in their ability to live on – and to sustain themselves with – lies and illusion in a system that is fundamentally not sustainable. They call this psychic trick- this denial – “faith” in the markets, liquidity and credit (and to give credit, of course, means nothing but to put faith or belief in something or someone) – even as the credit markets are drying up. They are drying up because no one who is sane can any longer believe the lie. The whole thing is incredible, unbelievable. Unworthy of credit, trust, belief. One might say it this way. The system itself is “subprime.”

Such faith- faith in the unsustainable – is nothing more or less than faith in a lie. The whole thing is based on what Ayn Rand – the late high priestess of capitalism, cruelty, arrogance, free markets and the “virtue” of selfishness, called, ironically enough, given the context, the “blank out.”

All it takes is one stroll down Wall Street to get that Wall Street is “America’s” temple district – the sense of being on “holy” ground is palpable – and all it takes is one glance to get that none of the financial wizards really knows what’s going on… they know not what they have wrought, they know not whom they have robbed; they have invented a house of lies so complex that they themselves can no longer follow the plot or the floor plan. What we know – and what they know, and what Bush knows and Obama and McCain – what they all know- is that the $700 billion the US government has earmarked for the swindlers and deniers is going to cover the lie, is going to keep their asses out of prison, is going to prevent revolt against their system, which profits at the expense of all of us.

It’s not going to so-called “Main Street,” and – even if it did – who’s on Main Street if not merely the junior, local and regional versions of the players on Wall Street – the ones getting their hands dirty – the ones that exploit us face to face, rather than from the remote heights of the now-obliterated World Trade Center?

Yes, who’s on Wall Street, who’s on Main Street, who’s on ghetto streets and barrio streets, and who, after all is on Skid Row, or on a dirt street in a third world village, living, not $700 billion – not even $200 billion, not even $200 or a twenty dollar bill. Living on 2 dollars a day. Or less.

Of course, outside the black hole, outside the house of mirrors, it’s plain to see. All profit comes at someone else’s expense. They have robbed the poor blind – that’s why they are poor. They have gutted the Earth of its soil, plant life, energy, forests and water tables: we are left with deserts and a $700 billion black hole. That’s why the Earth is dying. They profit, as the traditional Hopi elders told us, at the expense of all life. That’s where the limos, and the mansions (whether its one mansion like Obama’s or 13 of them like McCain’s) come from: at the expense of all life. That’s what happens. And they want to maintain their “faith” in it.

Now, notice what doesn’t happen.

Humanity faces a real crisis – one that threatens not only Wall Street, but all life on Earth. Call it Global Warming, call it Peak Oil, call it running out of water on a global scale, call it the collapse of industrial agriculture. Call it fisheries collapsing, call it mass extinction. Call it the potential of planetary death. Call it what is inside the Black Hole made visible, palpable in its meaning. Call it the real event horizon. Call it the Killing horizon. It’s every bit as complex in all of its intersections as the financial “crisis,” but, unlike the financial “crisis,” it’s real.

And what happens?
Nothing. No significant action. At all.

There’s no $700 billion plan to save the Earth – which sustains us all.

The only thing that has ever mattered to the rulers of this empire – and of every other empire- is profit; and profit, we will recall, always comes at someone’s expense – ours, the indigenous peoples in every corner of the planet whose lands and lives have been usurped; at the expense of the enslaved, from Babylon to the USA, at the expense of Polar Bears, Wolves, Buffalo, Dolphins, Bears – and now even the Chimpanzee faces extinction, along with Whales, and as much as 50% of all living species before this century – and this system – is finished with them.

Profit. At the expense. Of all life.

The capitalists can’t look at the meaning of it. They can’t bear to see the meaning and impact of their lives and how they live them. Blank out. They don’t know and can’t know, any more than George W. Bush can really afford to know what was happening when he stuck firecrackers in frog’s mouths and sent them sailing through the air with the fuse sparkling (that, after all, is why he drinks – not to know.) Maybe he imagined as a boy that the frogs were B24 bombers in WW2, and that when the firecracker exploded, it was flak hitting the nose of the plane, right where the navigator sat, and that the blood was the navigator’s blood. Maybe he couldn’t bring himself to look at the shattered skulls, the exposed spines, the blood, and know what he had done. Or maybe he looked, and delighted in what he saw. We’ll never know. It’s lost in the black hole.

Maybe the financial wizards think of derivatives and scam mortgages like Bush thought of frogs. The thrill, the drama of making a kill, of scamming, lying, getting over on others less powerful – the nobodies – the frog people – like you and me, the frog people who live on Elm Street, on ghetto and barrio streets, on Skid Row, on dirt streets, on Reservations, and along trails in the Amazon jungle and paths in the high Andes of Bolivia. We are all, each in our own way, the frog people. One can readily infer, from what happens at the event horizon, that the financiers see us just that way.

But, maybe we’ll never know. It seems to have disappeared in the black hole of denied memory, impossibility, evasions, and lies, just as Bush’s childhood memories lay hidden in the dense black hole of unresolved alcoholism. But we know this; for them, regular people – and animals, forests, polar bears, wolves and glaciers – are invisible. We’re on the other side of their event horizon, and they don’t care what happens to us. They are pulling us all inexorably into the gravity well from which no light escapes. They call the collapse of their house of financial lies a “crisis.” In the U.S., people like the Republican vice presidential candidate call the Killing horizon – the potential of planetary death – a “hoax.”

But, on a planetary scale, as everything unravels and is thrown into increasingly radical imbalance, people are starting to understand that what we see is what we get. And they are starting to see what has remained hidden in the realms of dark gravity and power. The event horizon, the Killing horizon, is drawing ever nearer.

And people are starting to decide for themselves what constitutes a hoax and what is, in fact, an actual crisis. We are deciding what and who needs and deserves a rescue –a “bailing out” – It’s not the wizards and merchants of death; it’s the frogs, lizards, plants, forests, beavers, bears, and human children.

You decide who and what nurtures us all and who and what destroys us. You decide. Is it saner to hug a tree, a cold stone building on Wall Street, or a stock certificate? Look at it. You decide. Everything that matters to you depends on the nature of your decision.

CAPITALISM AT THE EXPENSE OF ALL LIFE
Part 2: Burning Down the House

“...That’s part of the fundamental problem; that people do not even understand that
the real world is what is real; without a real physical world you don’t have any kind of economic system. The real world is primary; that’s the first thing we need to do; is to recognize that the real world is primary.” – Derrick Jensen –

It is upon us now to confront the greatest crisis in the lifespan of humankind.
Civilization – the destructive way of the City – has carried us to a climax of radical imbalances, a global eco-crisis, a state the traditional Hopi elders called Koyaanisqatsi:
koy.aa.nis.qat.si (Hopi) [n] 1. crazy life 2. life out of balance 3. life disintegrating 4. life in turmoil 5. a way of life that calls for another way of living.

Two intersecting realities face us; the two faces of eco-crisis. “Eco” means “home.” It is the root meaning of the terms “ecology” and “economy.” We face collapse in both arenas – arenas which are regarded as “separate” by virtue of a semantic, psycho-cultural sleight of hand, but which are, in reality, profoundly interdependent. In this essay, we will explore three premises, in the hopes that their exploration will help enable us to maintain our balance, to see clearly what is unfolding – collapsing – around us and within us; and so that we might act in accordance with the forces of Life, and thus sustain ourselves for this generation and the generations of our children’s children’s children. We live in a culture and under an economic system that is killing the world, and it is crucial that as it collapses we are able to deconstruct it, to dismantle the illusions that we have been steeped in since birth, that we become sane enough, so that – at a minimum – those of us who survive might never again reproduce a way of “life” that holds the potential to destroy all life; that we might not repeat or replicate a way of death.

All of us have been raised in a global capitalist civilization; all of us, even the most radical and astute among us, the most indigenous among us, have internalized much of its values, its premises; its lenses. The lenses are tinted. Their color is death. We don’t see clearly the relationship between ecology and economy. We are cutting off our own left hands, blow by blow, with an axe at the wrist, and call it “Making a Living.” The elitists see it more clearly: They call it “Making a Killing.”

The first thing we need to understand, in order to grasp the relationship between the economic and ecological crises, is this:

Production = Destruction, and Capitalist Production = Unbridled Destruction

Production of food, for example, for most species, means destruction of members of other plant or animal species. This is the case for humans as well, no matter how society and production is organized, and it is the case for every form of life except those involved in photosynthesis, which destroy no other forms of life, but which, rather, transform sunlight and minerals dissolved in water into life. All other forms of life, from the herbivores to the carnivores, destroy individual members of other species of life in order to survive.

Maintaining the balances between production, reproduction and destruction is utterly essential for the continuance of life on this planet. Such balance depends on reciprocity. In every ecosystem there are untold examples of such reciprocity; for a very simple example, an animal that eats a plant is also likely to play an essential role in that plant species’ propagation by spreading its seed or pollen, either through external bodily contact and transport, or through its digestive system, often providing key nutrients for the growth of new plants.

There is nothing in the nature of industrial capitalism that alters the centrality of this principle or that escapes its implications – the karmic results of willfully ignoring it. But, as I wrote in Apocalypse No! part3: The Law of Life and the Law of Death:

“Modern production is a wedding of opposites, a two faced god: its other face is destruction. Consumption for one is starvation for the Other. Production for one is destruction for the Other, and like a cancer, production has grown beyond all limits: the industrial system lives by destroying without limit, by ignoring the limits to growth.”

Far from entering into a reciprocal relationship with the rest of life, industrial capitalism simply consumes the other, reducing life to the level of a “resource,” without respect or regard for the balances of living systems or the ability of other forms of life to reproduce themselves at the species level – or, often, even at the level of the herd. Short term, short- sighted profit is the all-but universal standard for capitalist production. And profit, as noted in part one of this essay, always comes at someone else’s expense. In a recent interview, Derrick Jensen spoke directly to the essential nature of the process:

“Production, at base, is the conversion of the living to the dead…GNP is a measure of how quickly the world, the real physical world, is turned into economic products.”

At root, profit means the destruction of life and living systems for short term gain – that is its most fundamental relationship to the Earth and to all species – including human beings. Beyond that, in order to survive the competition in the interim before the final bell, every capitalist project must grow in relationship to its competitors or be driven out of business; it must convert more and more of what is living into what is dead, and do so ever more cheaply. As with cancer, the process only stops when the host expires. Capitalism as such, then, is a prescription for global suicide, one that follows its own internal logic, burning down its own house with ruthless, self-reinforcing discipline – like any other death cult. The system is producing exactly what it is designed to produce; Global Death. When the parasitism of profit can no longer expand, due to ecological or political and military limits, or due to its own inherent systemic contradictions, economic growth flips into its opposite, economic contraction – economic depression, it’s called. The disease goes into a temporary period of remission, and reorganizes itself for a new assault on the body of its host.

The next thing we need to grasp to understand the intersecting realities of ecological and economic crisis has already been clearly implied:

Profit = Theft

Profit, by definition, is imbalance, robbery and theft. It can arise only from the long term degradation of life and of the ability of ecosystems to reproduce themselves in balance. Where there is profit, something must become unbalanced, the scales must shift to take from one and add to the other without return.

Of necessity, natural economies, which are local and regional, rely strictly on what is called the solar budget, and they do not involve profit – they involve equitable trade – give and take reciprocal relationships that foster the long term well being of all of life’s communities, and in this they resemble the relationships of all other forms of life to one another; they exist in cooperation and symbiosis, and cannot take more than their “fair share,” lest they diminish or destroy the species and ecosystems upon whose existence and flourishing the natural culture and natural economy immediately depend. If we depend on Buffalo for food, we can’t kill too many of the Buffalo; we can’t destroy or diminish the prairie for our own short term “profit”; to do so would harm the Buffalo, and thus harm ourselves.

Natural cultures understand that the relationship is a tight-knit, close one, a relationship between relatives. They are the Buffalo: The Buffalo people. To destroy the Buffalo would be suicide. For a mountain dwelling people to destroy the mountaintop in order to get at the coal within it would be to, likewise, destroy the minerals, plants, waters and animals on which they directly and immediately depend for their own sustenance. They are the Mountain People. No natural culture or economy is bent on suicide. They are sustainable- which means life-sustaining.

No animal wantonly or systematically destroys other species. In just the same way, no animal wantonly reduces or destroys its own kind: to do so might be called sub-“bestial.” Perhaps “viral” would be the only term, although I know of no virus that attacks itself. Only in the case of the deadliest of conditions – AIDS, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, and cancer, is there anything remotely approaching such a phenomenon.

But profit is theft. It requires not only the robbery, destruction and diminishment of other forms of life, but it also requires the robbery, destruction and diminishment of humans by humans. No one is immune.

One of the fundamental necessities or laws of capitalism – its whole point – is the generation of profit. But, nowhere in the context of the system in its “normal” operation is a word spoken about where capitalist profit comes from. There’s a reason for that.

Profit comes, in its most immediate, social sense, from the exploitation – the robbery, the diminishment – of “labor” – of human beings who work. In the simplest terms, since it is not the intent to turn this into a lecture on Marxist economic theory, profit is the result of the value added to “raw materials” or “resources” by people’s labor. The value added to the “raw materials” is produced by laborers working together in a social process, but the fruit of the process, the added value embodied in the final product, goes not to those whose labor collectively created it (they are paid a “wage” whose value is less than the value of what they produce with their labor during the time they work) – but, rather, the new value they create goes into the pocket of the capitalist, in the form of profit. Once the machinery (fixed capital) and non-human energy involved in production has been paid for by what it has produced, there is no other source for the extra value that comprises profit, except the human labor that has gone into it. The capitalist, operating at a level of function matched in its baseness by no animal on Earth, wantonly and systematically debases, reduces and even destroys its own kind in order to rob them of their energy. The capitalist functions as a parasite on the Earth and on other life forms, and also stands in the same relationship to its own species.

The subprime mortgage scam that threatens to collapse capitalist finance today is not a fluke: it’s an expression of the most fundamental nature of the capitalist system, a system based in deception, exploitation and robbery. The whole thing is a scam. The whole thing is theft. This brings us to the final understanding we need to grasp in order to put the concurrent appearance of global ecological and economic crisis into the beginnings, at least, of a coherent context. Here it is:

Money is Worthless

Not even parasites feed off of other parasites, but capitalists do. And, sometimes the most shopworn and obvious of truths are among the most profound; like this one: You can’t plant or eat money. For that matter, you can’t plant or eat gold or silver, either.

In the subprime mortgage crisis we see the same principle of rip–off that the capitalist applies to the worker, only in reverse. Rather than paying the worker less than the value of what she has produced, in this case the capitalists lured the workers into buying into what they couldn’t afford, a standard of living beyond what they were (under) paid for their labor. “Get ‘em comin’ and goin’” was the idea. After all, it always seemed to work before – the whole principle behind profit is cheating – getting something for nothing.

And, besides, that’s exactly what money is worth – nothing. Its value is invented, then sustained by faith or belief- by widespread cultural agreement. It has no substantive value in and of itself. The same is essentially true of gold and silver. They are essentially glittering metals of little practical use or value in comparison, to say, iron ore, copper or diamonds. When money was tied to the gold or silver standards, its value was just as much a convention – a matter of suspended thought, belief and common agreement, as the value of unbacked currencies – floating paper money – is today. You can’t eat a treasure chest of gold bullion, and you can’t plant it and grow it. There is hardly a rational way to assess its life-value, in the way that one can decide whether this bushel of corn is worth more to you, for your purposes, tastes and dietary needs, in the context of your natural, local ecology and economy, than that bushel of potatoes. Beyond the aesthetic value of their color, pliability and gleam, gold and silver have little tangible, intrinsic or organic value in any ecosystem or natural economy. And, as relatively rare, soft metals, they have historically had little widespread practical use. But, like the “almighty” paper dollar, they are considered “precious.” It’s a matter of sheer invention, sheer faith, sheer abstraction. It’s sheer invented nonsense – worth little more than the paper a sub-prime mortgage agreement is printed on; worth little more than the electrical energy that encodes a numeric value in a computer.

So, having shipped production of all kinds overseas, where workers produce a greater profit margin with their labor than they can in countries with relatively higher standards and costs of living, U.S. bankers and other capitalists began to scam each other, selling one another the debt owed by workers on mortgages they could not – by design – afford. Really, they were selling one another faith, based on the blank belief that the bill would never really come due – the same lie they sold to the workers who bought the mortgages in the first place. They were selling one another electronically configured squiggles in a computer data base, each preceded by a mathematical minus sign. But, the bill came due, the ripped off worker couldn’t afford it, the debt that had been sold could not be paid, and the whole game began to collapse, just like it does in the last days of any gangster. Like the last, desperate days of Bonnie and Clyde as the law closed in on them, karma is closing in on the banksters. In the meantime, someone else equally desperate ripped the copper (not gold) pipes out of the place, and the mortgaged house of cards could no longer be re-sold – except to you, as worker in the role of taxpayer. The end result is that billions, if not trillions of increasingly worthless dollars are being re- transferred, in a massive, unprecedented re-distribution of wealth, to the very thieves and killers who stole it in the first place, then “lost” it in a maze of lies and fraud.

The most important end result, however, is that socially produced wealth that might have gone toward creating a more Earth centered economy – or to halt, at least, the very worst ravages of the capitalist cancer on the body of the Earth and on all of the millions of species who will be driven to, or over, the edge of extinction -including, quite possibly, our own, will instead be funneled, as unearned profit (there is no other kind of profit), into the hands of the very forces that are destroying us all, to enable them to continue destroying us all, if possible.

That’s the logic. Capitalist civilization is a suicide pact. It’s a suicide cult – one that “profits,” however temporarily, at the expense of all life. Thank the Creator it’s falling apart at the seams, and that its smokestacks – its virtual death camps and crematoria – may fall right along with its financial racket. As Richard Heinberg wrote in an essay entitled The End of Growth that hit my mailbox only moments ago, “The worldwide financial crisis, and the decline in available energy, mean that we may also have seen the final year of aggregate world economic growth.” Let us pray that he’s correct; such a collapse may be the only chance we all have to survive.

Heinberg summed it up this way, “Growth is dead. Let’s make the most of it. A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”

Talking Heads – Burning Down the House

Watch out
You might get what you’re after
Cool babies
Strange but not a stranger
I’m an ordinary guy
Burning down the house

Hold tight wait till the party’s over
Hold tight we’re in for nasty weather
There has got to be a way
Burning down the house

Here’s your ticket pack your bag: time for jumpin’ overboard
The transportation is here
Close enough but not too far, maybe you know where you are
Fightin fire with fire

All wet
Hey you might need a raincoat
Shakedown
Dreams walking in broad daylight
Three hun-dred six-ty five de-grees
Burning down the house

It was once upon a place sometimes I listen to myself
Gonna come in first place
People on their way to work baby what did you expect
Gonna burst into flame

My house
’s out of the ordinary
That’s right
Don’t want to hurt nobody
Some things sure can sweep me off my feet
Burning down the house

No visible means of support and you have not seen nuthin yet
Everything’s stuck together
I don’t know what you expect staring into the tv set
Fighting fire with fire

CAPITALISM AT THE EXPENSE OF ALL LIFE
Part 3: For the Earth to Live, Capitalism Must Die

This is the Day of Reckoning. This is the Time of Purification. This is the end of the “world”, the end of the city-state, the end of city life, of “Civilization.” The early Christians called it the “apocalypse,” the unveiling. Now, at last, the truth of what we have been presents itself unclothed. There is nowhere to hide. It is upon us. Like a cancer, capitalism, industrialism- truly the most advanced stage of civilization – “advanced” the way that a cancer is called “advanced” – has ravaged the body of the Earth. Life on Earth is disappearing. Nothing that can be done- or that will be done – under the system of global death called capitalism will save Life on Earth. The capitalist, as Karl Marx rightly noted, is “the soul of capital personified.” – a soul unable to see beyond the limits of its own immediate perception of “gain.” The capitalists as a whole – as a white imperial world-ruling class – understand the depth of the emerging crisis as well as we do. But they advance nothing more than schemes to sustain markets and profits, while life itself is allowed to perish in a holocaust in the making, one whose end is as certain as a nuclear winter.

There are no words to convey the depth of criminal horror and illness of the rulers of a system that would create the conditions not only for genocide on an unimaginable, all but limitless scale, but that would commit the murder of all life – ecocide, biocide and geocide – in order to shield themselves from change and protect and maintain their ability to produce “profit.”

But the holocaust we are entering is not made of a single criminal act – it is not the pushing of a button by a lone madman in a fit of religious mania or suicidal despair, it is, rather, the accumulation of a billion little deaths, the reaching of a critical threshold of death, until death itself boils over, the way that water, when it reaches its threshold of heat, roils over the edges of a pot, waging war on the fire that feeds it. It is the final explosion, the river of blood from the slaughterhouse spilling over its banks, no longer to be contained. It is the millions of children beaten, molested, raped, enslaved and “schooled.” It is the billions who live on less than a dollar a day. It is the slow soul murder of television and of going to “work.” It is a Quarter Pounder with Cheese. It is the homeless and the mad left hungry and frozen in the street. In the US, it is the millions of red, black and brown men locked behind prison bars, the mass terror of a racist system whose aim is to brutally reduce whole peoples to a state of utter subjugation, degradation isolation and immobility. Like the Nazi holocaust or the conquest of the Americas and Africa, it is not a single event, it is an historical process and an all – permeating “way of ‘life.’” It is the “supreme” way of life; the “non-negotiable” way, as GW Bush put it; the “American Way.” The capitalist way.

Marx and Engels had this much wrong. Civilization, slavery-based economies and more efficient forms of production like industrialist capitalism and socialism have not led to “progress,” unless “progress” can be counted as progress toward mass death and destruction, toward the enslavement and grave endangerment of human beings – all of us- and of every living plant, animal, fish and insect. Fundamentally, Marx and Engels believed in “profit” at the expense of the living Earth as much as any industrial capitalist – they just wanted to share the profit more broadly in a different money-system. The fundamental alienation of people from their connection with all life – and the most fundamental exploitation of life – would ultimately remain intact.

The Marxist project has failed, just as capitalism has failed. The state didn’t gradually “wither away” over a protracted period of change called “socialism.” Under the conditions prescribed by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao, the state can’t wither away. The state and the city are a single dialectical identity, a unity of opposites – they’re two faces of a single process, and the state can’t “wither away” unless the fundamental process of domination, control, exploitation, ecocide and genocide called the city – “civilization” – also withers away. The city necessitated the state and the state enabled the city. The city and the state arose together and they will die together. No one has remained free anywhere the city-state has arisen or in any area it’s conquered. No one has been free. Not the rulers. Not the ruled.

But that’s all over.

There’s a capitalist maxim: “Grow or die.” The maxim holds true within the limited sphere of the circulation of money and the accumulation of capital in a particular economic system; each individual capitalist project must compete – grow – or be swallowed by other capitalist ventures; in other words, it must “die.”

The system’s true believers never thought they’d reach the limits of growth, but that is just what has happened. They’ve reached the limits of their “resource” base – the ecological and geological limits of what can be destroyed to produce more profit. The game is over. They broke the bank. They were warned. They didn’t listen. They’re still not listening. For them, and for most of us who’ve not shaken our entrainment in the ways of seeing the world they stewed us in as children, we have come to an unimaginable passage. Call it the end of the world as we know it. That’s the deal. The inescapable deal. It’s over. One way or another. Either this
“non-negotiable” way of “life” ends, or the capacity of Earth to sustain life ends. This is not to say that some solutions can’t be found. It is, rather, to say that any “solution” that doesn’t undo the fundamental theft and imbalance inherent in the system of profit is not really a solution at all. The problem is global – total. The magnitude of the solution must equate with the magnitude of the problem. The system of theft and imbalance called profit is simply not sustainable, not on the whole, not in part. Life that can’t be sustained dies. The capitalist equation is now turned right-side up: “Stop ‘growth’ or die.” And it’s not just the capitalist mode of exploitation that must end. We’ve got to eradicate the cancer at its root, and, of course, capitalism, and modern industrialism more broadly, are built on the foundations of earlier, less “efficient” systems of exploitation and destruction. That’s where the roots of modern industrial systems of death lie.

While the psychological and biological functions or dysfunctions – the emotional splits and repressions that lie at the very core of the origins of our cultural dysfunction – have yet to be fully articulated and formulated into a coherent picture that explains their intersections with cultural suppression, economic exploitation, and political oppression, this much is clear. The first and fundamental practical expression of these dynamics in terms of their impact on the life of the Earth lies in this: The acquisition of land title by force and the enshrinement of “property” as social law.

That’s how “civilization” started: a city cannot exist without seizing the land around it. A city is all-but by definition a concentration of people too large to be supported by the land within its own boundaries – it must seize control of nearby lands or its population will starve.

The seizure of land by force – both for agricultural and herding purposes and for mineral extraction – continues as a key link in the survival and expansion of a global human population whose numbers are rapidly outstripping the capacities of the territories it already dominates to sustain any further population increase. The result is the rapidly escalating destruction of the world’s forests (and the concomitant eradication of a huge and increasing number of plant and animal species), along with the bottom trawling of the oceans for fish to feed the spiraling human numbers, with the concomitant eradication of 90% of the world’s large fish populations. Other clear examples include the seizure of the territory of the nation of Iraq for its oil and the seizure of a significant portion of Navajo Nation land and the forced removal of its population for access to the 18 billion tons of coal that lie beneath its surface – basically the same thing that is happening to the indigenous peoples of the Amazon region as their land is seized for farming, ranching and oil interests. “Growth” means an increase in exploitable “resources,” whether those resources are oil, coal, the fertility of the soil itself, or the “resources” for a “green” economy, like the ores to make the steel to build “environmentally friendly” hybrid cars (auto production creates, to cite just one example, 7 billion pounds of un-recycled scrap and waste annually.) The end result of this orientation toward economic “growth” is death for the land base, for the indigenous cultures that care for it, and for the life the land and native peoples support. It is a cancerous growth. Same as it ever was.

A capitalist – or socialist – “green” economy is little more than another step in the evolution of a millennia long series of more “efficient” systems of exploitation and destruction. The fundamental premise behind the concept of a “green” economy and “green” growth is that the exploitation and destruction of life is somehow ultimately sustainable. “He is blind,” as one Hopi elder put it, “So he destroys himself when he tries to save himself.”

“Green” Growth is a mutually exclusive contradiction in terms.

No matter what we call the mode of production and destruction, and no matter how we distribute the “profit” – the “wealth” extorted from life and living systems – continued growth in production and destruction for the sake of human consumption can lead to only one end. Sooner or later – really sooner than later – we are going to crash full bore into the limits of growth – into the absolute limits of the “carrying capacity” of the Earth – the end of its ability to feed one more human, the end of the capacity of ecosystems to endure the disappearance of one more species without a complete and perhaps irreversible collapse.

There is, if we are honest with ourselves about it, only one possible result that offers hope. It’s not, I am sorry to say, social revolution. Nor is it the process of “bringing down civilization” advocated by some anarchist greens and anarcho-primitivists. The simple fact is that there is no evidence whatsoever that revolutionary movements aimed at an overthrow of the state or at the literal, immediate, physical dismantling of the machinery of death can be developed on a sufficient scale with a sufficient understanding to undo what must be undone – nor could the seizure and wielding of state power do the trick. Not only is the state itself based on the seizure and maintenance of land title by force, but the existence of the state requires the existence of the city – it requires that the fundamental dynamics of empire, “resource” exploitation and “profit” remain intact.

Marx’s postulation notwithstanding, for the state to “wither away” the City must also “wither away”.

It is only the accumulation of wealth at the expense of other forms of life that makes the concentration of power in a state apparatus possible. Only an increasingly radical imbalance in the energy flows of the planet, an imbalance skewed toward humans at the expense of all life, makes for such an accumulation, and the imbalance must grow in concert with the human population’s growth until it reaches the very crossroads we have reached today. The seizing of state power in no way changes the fundamental equation. An ecologist might say that the equations of the solar budget are the only equations – the only bottom lines – that count.

The only way out – which is to say the natural way out – is a population crash. No human-invented scheme can overrule the way – the natural consequences or “laws” – of nature. And what happens to any and every population in overshoot in nature is a population crash. It’s nature’s way.

It can’t be improved upon. It can’t be subverted. It can’t be avoided, although, perhaps, the severity of the collapse can be softened. Blame is irrelevant, except to the extent that in identifying causes, we are able to learn and avoid their repetition. But, a human population crash will do nothing more than delay even worse results – like utter extinction – unless it is accompanied by a profound process of identifying and learning from what went awry in what has gone before.

Under the best of circumstances the global economy and the global system of dominance that rests on it will run into limits it cannot transform – so that it cannot continue until the point that the global ecosystem – life itself – collapses all around us and within us. In the best case scenario, peak oil will prove just such a limit, a limit that sinks the system of production and destruction to such a degree that it prevents it from resurrecting itself.

This formulation can, of course, be denounced as Malthusian. It can also be denounced by revolutionaries of all kinds. But here’s the simple fact. All we can do is hope, and to the best of our ability, align ourselves spiritually and strategically with the forces of life. Yes, as Derrick Jensen suggests, hope is what you do when you have no agency, no power, no control. But then, it is precisely our drive to control and reorder nature that has brought us to this point, and it is that drive for control, and the pain that drives it, that must be healed, transformed and left behind. But, while we may not be able to control outcomes, make a revolution or “bring down” civilization, we can align ourselves spiritually and strategically with the forces of Life.

By the same token and the same logic, the key tasks before us lie not in saving the global economy, not in creating a “green” economy, not in inventing new ways to exploit new energies in order to continue to mine the life of the Earth, nor in any other activity that would seek to preserve this system in any form whatsoever.

The key task before conscious people today is the forging of a profound understanding of what has gone wrong – a sweeping and utter re-evaluation of all values that will be tantamount to a new renaissance, a conscious re-creation and co-creation of culture. Much of that work began to be undertaken in the 1960s, and has borne important fruit, like William Kotke’s work, The Final Empire. It is ours to forge an authentically sustainable culture, even in the midst of this civilization’s fast approaching end – by relying on and integrating the deepest, clearest and most coherent teachings of traditional indigenous cultures, of students of the ecology, and of the multivalent healing practices of both indigenous cultures and of the new therapies that have arisen in the last 50 years. Such a movement – one that is intent on restoring the Earth and fostering social justice and renewing our cultures by incorporating the values and vision of indigenous peoples – is already underway on a global scale. Paul Hawkens, in his important book Blessed Unrest, calls it an “unstoppable movement to re-imagine our relationship to the environment and one another.” His research shows that it is the largest movement in human history, involving some 2-3 million organizations worldwide and some 200 – 300 million people whose cultural, ethical, political and ecological creativity are already impacting billions. That the processes of renewal – of healing, rectifying and relearning – will best be fostered among those in living in direct contact with, and in a caretaking relationship with the Earth and other, non- human living beings should, I hope, be self evident.

Juan Santos is a Los Angeles based writer and editor. His essays can be found at: http://the-fourth-world.blogspot.com/. He can be reached at: JuanSantos@Mexica.net.

Saving the South Central Farm: Listening to the Land

2008-07-18T01:24:00.000-07:00

A teaching story

To many, it looked like the struggle to save the world's largest urban garden -the South Central Farm in Los Angeles - was defeated, a dream buried beneath the treads of the bulldozers that plowed the Farm under following the brutal invasion of an army of L.A. County Sheriffs that crushed the resistor's encampment, turning the land from a liberated zone into an oppressive, occupied one. But now, two years later, all that could change. Here's why, and how you can help make it change.

By Juan Santos and Leslie Radford

“The secret of storytelling amongst the poor is the conviction that stories are told so that they may be listened to elsewhere, where somebody, or perhaps a legion of people, know better than the storyteller or the story’s protagonists, what life means. The powerful can’t tell stories: boasts are the opposite of stories, and any story however mild has to be fearless and the powerful today live nervously.

“A story refers life to an alternative and more final judge who is far away. Maybe the judge is located in the future, or in the past that is still attentive, or maybe somewhere over the hill, where the day’s luck has changed (the poor have to refer often to bad or good luck) so that the last have become first.

“Story-time (the time within a story) is not linear. The living and the dead meet as listeners and judges within this time, and the greater the number of listeners felt to be there, the more intimate the story becomes to each listener. Stories are one way of sharing the belief that justice is imminent. And for such a belief, children, women and men will fight at a given moment with astounding ferocity. This is why tyrants fear storytelling: all stories somehow refer to the story of their fall.”

From John Berger's That have not been asked: ten dispatches about endurance in the face of walls

It’s not always a matter of justice; there are simply too many of us who know not to expect justice from this system that profits at the expense of all life: Sometimes it’s not a matter of justice, but as John Berger says above, it’s a matter of “luck.” Good luck or bad. Good Karma and bad, who’s in synch with the flow of change and the Times, and who stands foolishly against the tide. It’s like that this time. It’s a matter of luck, of grace, of Karma, of what is necessary as the times change. This time, we are determined: the last shall be first, life will come before profit, the poor before the wealthy, the natural will supercede the artificial. This time, if we have something to say about it- and we do – all of us – the Conquest is over.

No one could have predicted it, and frankly, no one did. There were those of us who had nothing to go on but this: we listened to the land, and the land spoke to us. We listened; we listened to what might be possible but seemed impossible; We refused to surrender dreaming; we refused to forget what had been born, the ancient, magical connection of land and a newly arising culture that touched so many of us here in LA: a connection that touched a nerve so deep in us that its resonance spread in a web of connection – and yes, we will say it – hope – across the world. Mayan Indians in a Zapatista community prayed for the land and for the life unfolding there. Native elders came and shared the lessons of their peoples. Red tailed hawks visited the trees.

The place is this one: The South Central Farm. More than any struggle in the history of this city, the forbidden ones, those with no face, no history, no role in the formal or informal myths that comprise the “image” that is Los Angeles, simple farmers and gardeners – campesinos, the indigenous and their descendants - broke through all barriers, uniting people from every racial and cultural group, and every strata and class in a deeply felt unity that spoke to the world entire. They never backed down, although, to all appearances, they went down along with the fences, trees and plants that were bulldozed when the land was seized by an army of Los Angeles Sheriffs. Even then one of the first bulldozers was stopped cold by the resistors who had liberated and occupied the land during a drawn out siege. Imagine. A bulldozer. Stopped. Cold. By a zucchini!

A zucchini sent down its exhaust pipe. No one could have made it up. No one would have believed it.

Just like no one might have imagined that the Farm could be reborn. Given the stranglehold of the myth of private property that has weighed on the land like an invading and occupying army for two years now, since the Farm was seized by the state on behalf of its alleged “owner” - developer Ralph Horowitz – it has seemed impossible that the stranglehold might be broken.

But, as luck would have it, there is a zucchini at hand. Sometimes it’s a matter of luck. Sometimes luck, and just a little imagination applied just so. Sometimes Karma catches up with the bad guys. Just so. That’s how it is this time. And so, there is hope where it seemed all hope had been slain or carried, deeply wounded, from the field.

Here’s the deal. Ralph Horowitz and his partner in crime, City Councilwoman Jan Perry, played it cool. They waited two years for things to cool off after their brutal take down of the Farm. They thought it was all forgotten. They didn’t raise a stir or a peep. Horowitz worked quietly, overseeing the design of a new, giant warehouse distribution center on the land the City Council had all –but given him, selling it at a loss of millions of taxpayer dollars. The man had a deal, and he knew it. So, he laid low, waited for the turmoil and the questions to blow over, for the Farm’s organization to unravel and dissipate, and laid his plans. He wanted something. He was going to prove to the world who he was and what he was. He was going to obliterate the last vestige of what had been the world’s largest urban garden, and replace it with a warehouse shaped like a giant “h.”

“h” for Horowitz, obvious as the “S” on Superman’s chest. He’d show us. He’d show us all.

Perhaps, as one writer suggested, the giant “h” really stands for “hubris.” Be that as it may, Horowitz is no rank amateur. It takes a pro to corner the City into giving you a free gift of $11 million dollars worth of land. It takes a pro to spin the tale into one about “the victimized capitalist” whose “property rights” have been violated. It takes a lot of pure nerve to take a gift of $11 Million dollars, then accuse those who worked the land you’ve been given of “expecting something for nothing.” He did it with a straight face. The man is a pro. And he’s got the title to the land, after all. Never discount a man like that.

The thing is, a long time ago, Horowitz did own the land, if such a thing can be called legitimate by any standard. But, the City of Los Angeles exercised eminent domain, stripping Horowitz of the title so it could build a trash incinerator - the Lancer project, it was called - there in the heart of South Central. But, the neighborhood, in one of the first major mobilizations around environmental justice for peoples of color, forced the city to capitulate on its plan. There’d be no incinerator. And Horowitz, showing the long range determination for which he’s known, made a bid to have the land returned his way. It didn’t happen.

To make a long story short, after the LA rebellion of ’92, the City sold the land to the semi-independent Port of Los Angeles in 1994 for $13M, and the Harbor let the food bank across the street from the site use it for a community garden. It blossomed into the largest urban farm in the world - the South Central Farm - feeding over 350 families and many in the neighborhood. Then, eleven years after it was first purchased for the Lancer Project incinerator, in backroom dealings that have yet to be explained, the City sold the land back to Horowitz for just $400,000 more than the price they originally paid him for it years before – very roughly speaking the City charged Horowitz about a third of the land’s market value – and considerably less than the price the Harbor had paid for it. Given spiraling land prices, it was a de facto gift of millions of dollars of taxpayers' money to Horowitz – a fact that can not have escaped anyone, least of all Horowitz, who would soon attempt to market the 14 acre plot for over $16 million, all the while complaining about the “free ride” he was giving the Farmers.

In fact, when asked why he wanted the records of the City Council meeting in which he was granted the land to remain sealed to public scrutiny, Horowitz testified under oath this way:

Horowitz: " I don't want it public record."

Interviewer: "And why is that?"

Horowitz: "Why should I make whatever real estate purchase I make public record?"

Interviewer: "Even with a public entity?"

Horowitz: " With anybody." Well, if I purchase a property for five thousand dollars and two weeks later I want to sell it for fifty thousand dollars I don't want the buyer to know that I paid five for it. If you got a gift from your father, is the fact that you got if for nothing have any bearing on the purchase price?

Interviewer: What if you get a gift from the City of Los Angeles?"

Horowitz "If you get - "

Horowitz Counsel: "Objection! Hypothetical. You don't need to answer that question."

For two years, the Farmers took time from their jobs and their farming to make twice-weekly trips to City Council meetings to implore the City to return the land to them, but by 2006 Horowitz had lined up the support of the Ninth District's councilmember, Jan Perry, who iconic US representative Maxine Waters would soon characterize as Horowitz’s business “partner.” The Council wasn’t listening. Often, some of its members literally turned their backs as the Farmers spoke, an open insult.

As an eminent eviction approached, the Farmers occupied the land, supporters encamped there, with 24 hour patrols, tree sitters, blockades. Indigenous ceremonies, rock, hip hop and Son Jarocho concerts, and press conferences with an array of celebrities from Hollywood, the music industry, and the realm of people- powered politics. Support poured in not only from Los Angeles or the US Left, but from around the world. Even the L.A. Times called the Farm “Magic.” They were right. It was a kind of Earth magic blossoming, to the amazement of millions, in what is arguably the most alienated city in the most alienated country in the world. But, the Times editors pretended to lament, property rights trump “magic” – no matter how captivating. And so it seemed. The whole thing has been bulldozed, the encampment smashed. What remains, to the naked “rational” eye, is a giant field of dried stubble.

And all this time, Horowitz has been waiting. And, he’s been dealing. Like we said, the man is a pro. His next slight of hand was almost as stunning as his last. This time, he got the City planning Department to waive an Environmental Impact Report normally required for major developments under California law.

Now, it’s quite a feat to get people responsible for even a modicum of environmental oversight to ignore reality so blatantly – to pretend that a warehouse distribution center that will pull over 2,500 diesel truck trips a day into a small residential area will have no appreciable negative environmental impacts. The feat is doubly stunning when you consider that there is not an environmental regulator walking who is unaware that diesel emissions, and, especially, what’s called diesel particulate matter, causes cancer, asthma and other severe respiratory problems, and that children, the ill, and the elderly are particularly vulnerable to it. It might seem like rocket science to some, but you can find the truth in your first online search under “diesel emissions.” It’s terribly common knowledge. But, whatever the string, Horowitz, or perhaps his buddy Jan Perry, found it – and pulled it. And even though the site is near a middle school, Horowitz got his waiver. Not only were no significant conditions imposed on his project – but the City planners claimed the risks were so negligible that Horowitz didn’t even need to file an Environmental Impact Report – the potential problems didn’t even warrant an investigation, so to speak. The California State Legislature might disagree. It recently passed a bill, SB 974, sponsored by Sen. Alan Lowenthal of Long Beach that will generate $400 million a year, specifically to reduce diesel emissions associated with California ports in areas like the Alameda Corridor, (where the Farm land is located) in order to protect children from harm.

But, it looked like Horowitz was batting a thousand. Laughing on his way to the bank, like they say.

The Farmers had little notice, and almost no chance to act. Well, they had one chance, which is right next to no chance. That chance came on July 2^nd. Tezozomoc, who, along with Rufina Juarez, the Farmers had elected to lead them, swore to himself that he would be at the one scheduled public hearing on the waiver of the Environmental impact report all by himself if need be.

As luck would have it, though, in three short weeks, Farm activists scoured the neighborhood, generated 140 original, mostly hand-written letters opposing the waiver from nearby residents, got hundreds of petition signatures from across the city, lined up support from major environmental groups – one group with a million members or more – the NRDC - filed their own report -a 21 page analysis objecting to the waiver – and the Farmers brought over 100 people out to the hearing to insist on protection for the lives and health of area residents. They ultimately overflowed the hearing chambers while the media flocked to the Farmer’s press conference and rally on the City Hall lawn. The demonstrators chanted, Azteca danzantes danced, musicians strummed vihuelas, and car horns gleefully pierced the din of downtown traffic– all on a weekday morning during the work week.

The Deputy Advisory Board of L.A.'s Planning Department relented even before the first resident spoke, announcing that the Board would reconsider the waiver of the Environmental Impact Report. The matter had already been cinched, just by the volume of letters the Department had received, even before the hearing opened. The period for filing comments by the public was extended for three more weeks.

Like luck. Like magic. Like the Lakota and Cheyenne – the ones who made it Custer’s last stand - where Custer ran out of luck.

It began to look like Horowitz’s luck was running out, too.

CAUGHT RED- HANDED

“No matter what you or anyone else did, Marx said, history would catch up with you: it was inevitable, it was relentless. The turning, the changing, were inevitable.

The old people had stories that said much the same, that it was only a matter of time and things European would gradually fade from the American continents. History would catch up with the White man whether the Indian did anything or not. History was the sacred text. The most complete history was the most powerful force.” - Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead

Someone thought – wrongly – that the ploy to waive an Environmental Impact Report for the Horowitz warehouse distribution center would slip right under the radar. Reports from inside Jan Perry’s staff indicate that Perry and Horowitz had assumed the South Central Farmers had evaporated as a political force to be reckoned with in L.A., and that they were shocked and angered on the 2^nd of July to discover the Farmers and area residents in the streets –and once again in their faces – demanding justice. But the vitality, cohesion and determination of the Farmers and their support network wasn’t the only thing Perry missed – she also missed the last meeting of board of the South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD – the air pollution agency mainly responsible for regulating and licensing stationary sources of air pollution for most of L.A., San Bernadino, Orange and Riverside Counties.) And, it seems, she never saw a devastating new critique of the Horowitz project coming from within her own domain as a SCAQMD board member. While she wasn’t looking, it seems someone made a move to cut Jan Perry’s political throat – at least as far as her infamous alliance with Ralph Horowitz goes.

On the same day the Farmers filled the chambers of the advisory board of the Department of City Planning to overflowing, the staff of the SCAQMD filed a report that not only served as a brutal calling to accounts on the waiver of an Environmental Impact Report for Horowitz, but that recommended in the strongest possible terms that any project that produces the kind of harms that the warehouse distribution center portends for the area be expressly “prohibited” by the City Planning Department.

The report faults the Planning Dept. on numerous counts, from elements as simple as using a skewed map of the area, to its failure to adequately assess the environmental impacts of the construction process and its failure to accurately assess the actual diesel emissions the warehouse will concentrate in the area (especially of cancer-causing diesel particulate matter) or to make meaningful recommendations for mitigating these dangers. Even beneath the bureaucratic language of the report, it is hard to miss the almost palpable sense of disgust, even outrage, that underlies the message.

The report insists that the Planning Dept. re-examine its recommendations on a number of fronts, and strongly suggests stringent guidelines for mitigating potential environmental and health impacts of the project – while noting for example that certain mitigations the Department takes almost for granted could result only from the use of equipment that, in one case, does not even yet exist. The SCAQMD insists that if City Planning is going to claim such mitigations as a given, that it also show how it is going to access such non-existent equipment to ensure them.

And, while City Planning has suggested that any environmental or health impacts would be so minimal as to not even require an Environmental Impact Report, the SCAQMD insists that, were the Department to approve such a project over the SCAQMD’s objections, that necessary mitigations might include, for example, the construction of new freeway off-ramps that lead directly to or near the Horowitz facility (at the cost, no doubt, of millions of taxpayer’s dollars, millions beyond the millions Horowitz has already pocketed.)

Dust in the Wind

Ralph Horowitz has tried to destroy every root of every plant that was the South Central Farm. Like a killer driving a knife into his target over and over, he’s plowed the land over and over in an attempt to dismember the last remnants of an identity he seems to want to erase from the face of the Earth. He’s planned to erase what was, and replace it with his giant warehouse - which is to be designed in the shape of a giant “h”. The soil remains rich with the organic remains that have been plowed under time and again, although, with the destruction of the many of the root networks that permeated it, much the soil has become silty, loose and windblown, shifting to fill and slightly flatten the crevices between the mounds of the plowed furrows, and lifting with the winds to leave fine layers of dust on the windows of houses and of cars parked nearby. The planned construction would kick up immense amounts of dust into the air, as 57,00 cubic yards of soil are excavated and exported by truck from the 14 acre site.

Air Quality regulators call such airborne particulate matter “fugitive dust,” and they’re calling out City planners for calculating the amount of such dust based on an assessment that only five of the site’s 14 acres will be involved in the excavation. Beyond that, they note, planners focused only on the excavation of the soil itself, and failed to make clear whether their calculations included the impacts of trucks hauling out the tons of soil. They insist that the “fugitive dust analysis” be revised, that the City guarantee that the excavation will be limited to five acres, and that construction emissions do not exceed the phony claims made by City planners.

Further, the City planners claimed that all of the equipment used during construction will be fitted with a special diesel oxidation catalyst to lower the impacts of diesel emissions by 40% in the area during construction. The SCAQMD, however, notes that such specialized equipment is only available for a total of 3 engine types, and that it is all-but unavailable for off-road construction equipment.

In effect the SCAQMD challenges the City planners to prove that such equipment will be available and used on the Horowitz construction, or to demonstrate exactly by what method the City plans to ensure the 40% reductions they are claiming will be achieved. They are flatly calling the City planner’s bluff.

Alongside seven other recommendations on the construction phase of the warehouse complex alone, the Air Quality people also insist that watering or other non-toxic means be used to reduce the “fugitive dust” – a method proven to reduce airborne particulate matter by some 60%. According to sources with industry experience, however, watering 3 times per day, as recommended by the Air Quality staff, would likely turn the slowly expanding mini - dust bowl that was the South Central Farm into a bowl of heavy mud and water, greatly increasing the difficulty of excavating the underground parking facility Horowitz wants to serve the giant “h” shaped warehouse. Ralph Horowitz has a new problem he can’t just plow under, this time.

The Free Ride is Over

City planners can’t dart under the radar on this one, either. The SCAQMD is demanding written responses on all of the issues it raises, as per the law (public resources code, section21092.5), and they want these responses in writing before a final Environmental Impact Report is issued. The problem for City planners is obvious. They hadn’t planned to require an environmental report from Horowitz at all. That’s what the so-called “neg dec” they issued was all about in the first place - another free ride for Jan Perry’s favorite developer. Like children darting under turnstiles, they somehow weren’t counting on conductors checking for tickets.

But as the report progresses, it looks even worse for Horowitz and the giant “h”. It seems they not only lack tickets, but they may not be able to cover the fare, even if they were to admit that the free ride is over.

To excuse (or cover-up) their complicity in the harms of the Horowitz plan, City planners apparently tried other slight of hand maneuvers to evade detection of the reality behind the waiver they offered the developer. The Air Quality District called them out for one scam, in particular. The City planners estimated diesel emissions for the Horowitz project using a supposedly “similar” facility and its emissions as a measure for the probable impacts on South Central residents in this case.

But the warehouse used in the comparison served “substantially fewer” trucks than the 2, 581 trips a day reported for the Horowitz facility, thus, the District notes that diesel emissions (and, consequently, cancer risks) were “substantially underestimated” by City planners. The District calls on the City to “correct or explain this apparent discrepancy.” The report also accuses City planners of underestimating the amount of time trucks will stand, engines idling at the facility, by as much as one third. Air quality regulators insist on a mitigation plan that prohibits trucks from idling for more than the ten minutes City planners claim is realistic, and they demand the City show an enforcement mechanism that will make such a prohibition credible.

But it doesn’t stop there. The SCAQMD lists an additional 16 measures that would be warranted to mitigate the impact of diesel exhaust and particulate matter – including the multimillion dollar construction of one or more additional freeway exits that would bypass the community or limit the amount of time any given truck is on the surface roads in the immediate area.

The bottom line, however, is this. The SCAQMD recommends that the City “specifically prohibit” land uses at the site that would, in an area already full of warehouses, “further expose” nearby schools, health facilities, the aged and the ill to “additional cancer risks from diesel particulate matter.”

In other words, the SCAQMD is telling the City “Shut this project down.” “Prohibit its construction and operation.” The struggle for environmental justice is full of situations like this one, and lawsuits are a constant and predictable part of the terrain. The air quality regulators cannot be unaware that any effort on the part of the City to ignore or bypass these recommendations opens the door to a strongly based lawsuit to force the City to comply.

Force the City to comply… With the law… No more free rides… Conductors... Sometimes your luck just runs out. Sometimes you stand too long, too strong, against the wrong tide, and do so with the wrong ethics. Sometimes, one might notice, for things to go right in the end, you have to be right: for things to be sustained, one might notice, they have to be sustainable, they have to be grounded in the real. Sometimes, as Leslie Marmon Silko notes, history catches up with you. It’s inevitable. Relentless, she says. Every house of cards, like every empire, falls when the right wind blows. Sometimes, all it takes is a quick puff of air from the lips; or a zucchini dropped just so in the exhaust pipe of a bulldozer clanking over the land the way that tanks clank over people’s lives. The way a sophisticated developer in the second largest city in the Empire falls before the onslaught of a few Indian campesinos from Mexico and their backers with a few cell phones, a copier, and almost no money at all. Like magic. Like karma, Like luck. Like someone, somewhere, “located in the future, or in the past that is still attentive, or maybe somewhere over the hill” is listening.

The way we’ve been listening to the land…

Like that.

And it’s a good thing. With all the changes coming, we’re gonna need that land. We’re gonna need that food, those skills, these Farmers. All of us. Together.

If you’re paying attention, it’s obvious.

Someone’s listening.

Right now.

We’re certain of it.

-30-

Update: South Central Farm. Yes! Warehouse? No!

As a result of the July 2 hearing, there is a 21 day extension (till July 23^rd, 2008) on comments that can be submitted to the Advisory Agency of the Planning Commission. They will render a decision in 5-6 weeks.

Please consider what YOU can commit to doing to help this effort. Then email the SCFs (southcentralfarmers@southcentralfarmers.com) and let others know.

View "The Garden". See the trailer http://www.blackvalleyfilms.com/trailer/

We need to get 1,000 more petition signatures prior to the July 23rd deadline date. Please get some forms and help with this effort! We need volunteers for this effort. Please contact Rufina Juarez if you wish to volunteer (juarezrufina@yahoo.com). I have included a link to the petition form. We need to get them in before July 23^rd 2008. Use can still use the ONLINE PETITION (http://www.southcentralfarmers.com/index2.php?option=com_philaform&form_id=7&Itemid=0 ) or PAPERCOPY version. They can be mailed here:
Los Angeles City Hall
Expedited Processing Section
200 N. Spring Street, 7th Floor
Los Angeles, Calif. 90012

Why haven't the park and rec commissioners not weighed in on the recreation site with sensitive receptors to contamination next to the diesel warehouse? They will be impacted in the future.
Commissioners:

Barry A. Sanders, President
Luis A. Sánchez, Vice President
Maria Casillas, Member
Candy Spelling, Member
Johnathan Williams, Member

Mailing Address:
Los Angeles City Recreation and Parks Department
Office of Board of Commissioners
1200 W. 7th Street, Suite 762
Los Angeles, CA 90017

Telephone: (213) 928-9040
Fax Number: (213) 928-9048
Email Address: rap.commissioners@lacity.org

Our vision for the land and our own discourse. Re-uniting the people and the land. Hybrid farm/park. Here is the original proposal.

Join us Monday Night @ 7:00 pm at the SCF Center located 1702 e. 41^st St, Los Angeles, CA 90058 (800) 249-5240 for a meeting to discuss shutting down the warehouse.

Listen to the July 2^nd, 2008 Planning meeting with community testimony.
http://cid-05e26b0875003ffb.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/Public/Proposed%20Ware\
house%20on%20SCF%20Land/July%202nd%20Audio

Review all the available documents and make your own decision.
http://cid-05e26b0875003ffb.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/Public/Proposed%20Warehouse%20on%20SCF%20Land

Obama’s Denial: The fear of a Black Messiah / Part Two of Barack Obama and the “End” of Racism

2008-03-24T01:21:00.000-07:00

By Juan Santos

"The hour of judgment and doom is upon White America for the evil seeds of slavery and hypocrisy she has sown…” - Malcolm X from “God’s Judgment of White America” (The Chickens Come Home to Roost) New York City, December 4, 1963 -

“The judgment of God is on America now!”

- Martin Luther King - August 6, 1967

__________________

"The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a “three strikes” law, and then wants us to sing “God Bless America! No, no, no, not “God bless America,” God damn America- it’s in the Bible!”

– The Rev Jeremiah Wright

__________________

The Negro Revolution is controlled by foxy white liberals, by the government itself. But the Black Revolution is controlled only by God.”

- Malcolm X – ibid.

“For maximum effectiveness of the Counterintelligence Program, and to prevent wasted effort, long range goals are being set.

1. Prevent the coalition of black nationalist groups. In unity there is strength, a truism that is no less valid for all its triteness. An effective coalition of Black nationalist groups might be the first step toward a real “Mau” in America, the beginning of a true black revolution.

2. Prevent the rise of a “messiah” who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement. Malcolm X might have been such a “messiah”; he is the martyr of the movement today. Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, and Elijah Muhammad all aspire to this position. Elijah Muhammad is less of a threat because of his age. King could be a very real contender for this position should he abandon his “obedience to “white liberal doctrines” (nonviolence) and embrace black nationalism…”

- F.B.I. memorandum, March 4, 1968, as cited in Malcolm X, the F.B.I. File, by Clayborne Carson

When the late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover set about to disrupt, frame, imprison and murder Black nationalists under COINTELPRO in the 1960s, his openly stated aim was to prevent the rise of a Black Messiah. He wasn’t thinking of a figure like Barack Obama. He was thinking of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture’). In the Judeo – Christian – Islamic tradition the original Messiah, the Hebrew Messiah, was a national savior who would defeat the gentile nations and restore the kingdom of Israel. Hoover feared a Black Messiah, one who would restore the Black Nation, not a Barack Obama.

Hoover could not have known, then, in 1968, that a new religious trend would arise, wedding the traditional Black church in the U.S. with the philosophy of Black Nationalism in a Black theology of liberation known as Black Christian Nationalism. He could not have known that the Rev. Albert Cleage (aka Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman), founder of the Shrines of the Black Madonna / Pan African Orthodox Christian Church, would write a book called The Black Messiah. Jesus, in Cleage’s theology, was a Black revolutionary. He said that the ahistorical insistence on Jesus as a white man was the crowning demonstration of the “white supremacist conviction that all things good and valuable must be white."

As a youth, I lived about a mile south of the Shrine, and after we dropped out of high school, my debate partners and I passed the Shrine everyday, on our five mile walk to the labor pool downtown. I never went into the church, although I did frequent the cultural center, art gallery and bookstore that flanked it. To be honest, the Shrine itself felt too holy. I knew who the Shrine was for, and sensed what it was for.

As I noted in Part One of this series, I used to buy The Black Panther Newspaper out front of a little store only a few blocks from the Shrine, and it was by no means a rarity to find a brother from the Nation of Islam selling the latest edition of The Final Call at the same spot, or nearby. But the Shrine was different. Not only was there the bookstore, community center and art gallery, but they were building a village, so to speak. At least it felt like a village. The Shrine had bought an apartment complex across the street from its sanctuary, and many church members lived there.

We would see them on the street from time to time, dressed in black and red, and there was something separate about them, something set aside - something sacred - and something very wholesome in their bearing. They never spoke to me beyond a warm “hello.” But it didn’t feel like a cult. I’d visited, by the time I was 16, a commune of the Children of God (the hippie Christians or Jesus freaks) about 3 or 4 miles from my home in the opposite direction from the Shrine, but it was just too strange. Nor did the people of the Shrine remind me of the Nation of Islam brothers with their suits and bow ties, nor of the followers of Wallace Muhammad. They didn’t seem rigid like that. And they weren’t selling anything. I understand now what I only felt then. In retrospect, it seems the Shrine members understood the inseparability of culture, the practice of community, religion and politics; that these three were all one thing to them, an integrated whole. It seems to me now that that’s what felt so different, what felt holy, so sacred, so set apart to me then as a youth.

I remember seeing books like Black Athena in the Shrine’s cultural center, but I would not read The Black Messiah or Black Athena until years later, after I had studied under a Black professor who’d sat at the feet of the revered Black historian John Henrik Clarke.

Clarke made it plain in a speech entitled The African Mind: “We could not address God in a language of our own choosing, or imagine God as any person that looked like us, and we began to accept the image of God resembling our slave master. This image has damaged our minds, because, no matter what that image has done to you, you are reluctant to challenge the image, for fear you are harming the image of God.”

Barack Obama, keeps silence on the most pressing matters facing the Black Nation, for fear of alienating the members of a white culture that he knows is mired in a deeply internalized and all but unquestioned sense of white superiority and white impunity. He dares not affront the image of the white god, and it is amazing that he is a member of a church that harbors no such fear. What is not amazing, however is that he has denounced his own minister, in effect renouncing the very tenets of his own, self- professed religion, in order not to offend the white godlets he so relies on for his imagined future as president of the White Empire. If one cannot worship both god and Mammon, Obama has made his own choice in the matter crystal clear. He has rejected both the traditions of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, which is to say the broad spectrum of Black religio- political belief and practice.

Malcolm X, said of Jack Kennedy’s assassination that Kennedy "never foresaw that the chickens would come home to roost so soon."

"Chickens coming home to roost,” he added, “never made me sad. It only made me glad."

Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, echoed Malcolm’s words when he spoke of the events of 9-1-1 as “America’s chickens comin’ home… to roost.”

In the same spirit, Wright’s pronouncement “God damn America!” echoes Martin Luther King’s declaration on August 6th, 1967 that “The judgment of God is on America Now!” In December of that same year, King spelled out truths that have been banished from the whitewashed image of the keeper of the “Dream,” truths that expose the ongoing hypocrisy of white Amerikkka. King himself echoed Malcolm’s insistence that “The hour of judgment and doom is upon White America for the evil seeds of slavery and hypocrisy she has sown…”

King spoke bitterly. “I tried to talk to the nation about a dream that I had had, and I must confess...that not long after talking about that dream I started seeing it turn into a nightmare...just a few weeks after I had talked about it. It was when four beautiful...Negro girls were murdered in a church in Birmingham, Alabama. I watched that dream turn into a nightmare as I moved through the ghettos of the nation and saw black brothers and sisters perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity, and saw the nation doing nothing to grapple with the Negroes' problem of poverty. I saw that dream turn into a nightmare as I watched my black brothers and sisters in the midst of anger and understandable outrage, in the midst of their hurt, in the midst of their disappointment, turn to misguided riots to try to solve that problem. I saw the dream turn into a nightmare as I watched the war in Vietnam escalating....Yes, I am personally the victim of deferred dreams, of blasted hopes."

And the Rev. Jeremiah Wright never missed a beat. ““Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run,” he declared.

In their latest feeding frenzy, in the case of Rev. Wright, the white media has played what I will call here “the white man card”, an upside down and backwards image of the King of Diamonds, the image of a people , a culture, that refuses to identify itself as a group. The upshot of this evasion is that if one calls out the historically demonstrable record, the proof of the actions and attitudes of such a group as a group, one is defamed as a racist,, as one who refuses to judge individuals on the basis of the content of their character, not on the basis of the color of their skin. It is considered invalid by the white man – or, perhaps I should say, in white culture – to remark upon his collective record. No one is to turn an anthropological or historical lens on white Amerikka and its record.

Studying a people and their culture as a culture is imagined to be the preserve of white academics and anthropologists. The generations upon generations of observation of whites by peoples of color, who examine them with the same care as women look at men, and who hold close a similar body of lore about them – a lore developed for group survival in the face of immense oppression - is not even to be entertained as “folk wisdom.” One would think that only anthropologists, and white ones at that, could make valid generalizations about cultural values that cut across lines of class, gender and “individuality” to mark, however imprecisely in the case of a given, culturally deviant “individual,” the moral, political and cultural character of a group –its baseline values and their consistent and repetitive enactment over the course of generations by members of that group.

The sad truth here is that Dr. King bought into this white individualist mythos, and made of it a litmus test, one in which racism is not measured in terms of group values, institutional practices and the allegiance to those institutions and practices on the part of whole cultures, but as a matter of individual attitudes.

Everybody knows what we mean when we say “Apartheid South Africa,” for instance, as a blend, a gestalt, of these factors, and everyone knows how absurd it would be to reduce white South African racism to a matter of individual prejudice, rather than to understand it as a cultural and economic system of structured inequality, but that is just what white America demands we do in its case.) And Barack Obama plays exactly and strictly and precisely by those rules. He is playing the white man’s card for him – and playing it against his own pastor and spiritual mentor.

One is left to assume that Obama would disrespectfully characterize the comments of both Malcolm and Martin as he has characterized the comments of his own pastor - who stands squarely in their tradition – as the “inflammatory” ravings of an “old uncle” who he keeps locked in his attic, away from public view or scrutiny, or, in more modern terms, in his darkened closet. Obama has, in effect, “distanced” himself from the entire tradition of Black Liberation and the Black Church –from every icon of Black freedom, from El Hajj Malik El Shabazz (Malcolm X) to Louis Farrakhan (who has admitted his part in creating the atmosphere that led to Malcolm’s death), to Dr. King, to the Reverend Jesse Jackson, to his own pastor, Rev Wright.

Obama has made it a point to “distance” himself from Rev. Wright’s comments But one might fairly imagine that Obama has listened very carefully, and with a Machiavellian intent, to every word uttered by Rev. Wright, if only to learn what not to say in the presence of whites, if only to learn which truths must not be uttered, with the intent of gleaning which truths must not be spoken aloud. One might also suppose that Obama never got it, never actually converted to Black Christian Nationalism, or the variant of it his church embraced, that he never embraced his people’s religion. But one cannot assume he never heard it; it is more sensible to believe that like most Amerikkans, he didn’t take his religion seriously, and that like most politicians, he was willing to appear to embrace a belief only so long as it served his political career.

“Distance” is just another word for “deny,” and Obama’s denial of Wright, King, Malcolm and Jackson reminds me of nothing so much as these lines on Peter’s denial of Jesus:

“MAID BY THE FIRE I think I've seen you somewhere.
I remember, You were with that man they took away.
I recognize your face.
PETER You've got the wrong man lady. I don't know him,
And I wasn't where he was tonight. Never near the place.
SOLDIER That's strange, for I am sure I saw you with him.
You were right by his side, and yet you denied.
PETER I tell you I was never ever with him.
OLD MAN But I saw you too. It looked just like you.
PETERI don't know him!
MARY MAGDALENE Peter, don't you
know what you have said?
You've gone and cut him dead.
PETERI had to do it, don't you see?
Or else they'd go for me.
MARY MAGDALENE It's what he told us you would do.
I wonder how he knew.”

- “Peter’s Denial” from Jesus Christ Superstar

But Obama’s denial is more than just denial: His entire campaign is little more than an effort - to use the only phrase uttered by Minister Malcolm X that Obama dares to use himself - to “hoodwink” and “bamboozle” people from the oppressed nationalities in the U.S. with the notion that the country that variously enslaved us, stole our land, lynched us and subjected us to genocide – and that (as Rev Wright rightly points out) now incarcerates us in the most intensive mass incarceration in world history, is really our friend, our country.

But, as Brother Malcolm taught, you can put a kitten in the oven, but that don’t make it a biscuit. Not only history, but the current conditions of millions of Red, Black and Brown youth point to the truth. We are not a part of this country. There is,as a general rule, no “we” to be had between oppressors and the oppressed, any more than there is a shared “we,” – a common identity, between Palestinians and citizens of the Zionist occupiers of their land. We are not part of America, any more than Palestinians are part of “Israel.” We are the targets of America –generation after generation. After all, for a member of the dominant group to be an ally to the oppressed, he or she must defect from the ranks of the oppressors. To hear Obama tell it, however, we are “90%” of the way to practical “equality” with whites.

The reality is that Obama knows better. We all know better than that. The present day reality is that we are 90% of the way down the road to conditions worse than Jim Crow. And for all Obama’s talk about Rev. Wright supposedly being stuck in the past, he knows that, too.

And the Obama’s false claim is nothing like a mistake. His claim is a conscious and deliberate lie, one meant to appeal to white people and their win their votes, to comfort them with the illusion that “everything’s changed” when nothing essential has changed. Jim Crow has simply been replaced with mass criminalization and mass incarceration; a figurative social prison has been replaced with literal chains and bars in a huge step backward in the direction of slavery, not toward any kind of “dream,” “hope,” or “progress.” You don’t call moving from Jim Crow conditions to conditions in which your people have the highest absolute numbers of prisoners of any minority in the world and call it “progress.”

Obama’s greatest audacity is not in offering hope: it is the audacity of his lies about the present day realities of oppression. It is such lies, not the comments of Rev. Wright, that are “completely inexcusable.” As I write, Obama is scheduled to give a “major address” on issues of race tomorrow in Philadelphia. But then, he knows that the mainstream white media will never contradict him in the promotion of his Big Lie about racial “progress.”

After all, it’s their lie in the first place.

God damn them all, Reverend Wright, God damn them all.

The Speech

It was late tonight before I had a chance to read Barack Obama’s speech on race matters. As has so often been the case, Obama’s words brought me close to tears, at times. The man is good at what he does. One should not underestimate the power of his ability to speak to hopes all of us harbor, in particular, in this case, to speak to our longing to love, to love those who are different, to love people even from among those who have oppressed us, even in spite of the historical record and present day reality;to walk that line of danger and have it all turn out alright in the end, to respond without reservation to the nobility and dignity we see in individuals across the lines that divide us so deeply.

I believe it is fundamental to our nature to love one another – not that it is a “commandment” – (I could care less about what authorities – any authority - commands me to do) but that it is simply natural, that tender regard and respect for one another are natural, that excitement and the embrace of our mutual and inherent brilliance live in our most fundamental character. I also feel very strongly that our natural love for one another across all of the lines that divide us is so very strong that that love has to be beaten out of the children of oppressor groups, threatened out of them, shamed and ridiculed out of them, that people have to be taught the strategy of replacing their own losses and hurts with the substitute of the power to hurt and oppress others, that people have to be taught to degrade others in order not to feel our own pain, and that this is so, whether the target for degradation is women, peoples of color, or any other vulnerable group.

I hate white racism. I utterly despise it and oppose it and have made it my business to understand, as thoroughly as I can, the dynamics of its operation. But while I have loved white people, some of them at least, from the very depths of me, the question of trust is by no means readily or easily resolved – ever.

Such trust is dangerous, as far too many instances of betrayal and enmity have demonstrated in my experience, and in the experience of millions of others. Real love is based in trust; it might be said that real love is little more than the natural emotions that emerge and flow from trust and admiration. And while I admire Barack Obama’s speech, I cannot trust his words. This was not a speech given from love and hope. Although it seemed to have been written largely from a place of compassion, from an authentic effort to embrace the best in us all, there were points at which Obama gave away things he could not have intended to be seen, heard or consciously understood.

The Senator delivered the speech without emotion, dryly, almost clinically, from a place of detachment, a detachment that belied the power of the words on the page. There were other clues to the falsity of his comments. Obama’s only targets for criticism were people of color – his own minister primary among them, and his only stinging rebukes were leveled at Rev. Wright and at Muslims, a group he slandered with a racist and xenophobic bile normally heard only from the likes of a Rush Limbaugh. His targets were the targets of the Right. His rebukes were aimed at the targets of the Right. In attacking Wright and, respectively, Muslims, he pandered to the racism and xenophobia of the Right.

It’s more or less what he’s always done. Obama found himself openly degrading those who are vulnerable to oppression, and took special care of the feelings of the members of oppressor groups – he couldn’t even bring himself to call Geraldine Ferraro’s comments offensive, much less to repudiate them in anything like the terms he reserved for Rev Wright. Some might say he took care of Massa’s emotional needs first and foremost.

Obama got it backwards. He inverted the truth. As Glen Ford of Black Agenda report wrote, Wright was correct. “America” Ford writes, “was born in a charnal house of mass racial murder and every conceivable abomination to God and Man. This is the great genesis of the U.S.A. And it is incontrovertible fact, from which all our racial conflicts and disparities flow.”

Obama has managed, in this speech, to indirectly attack every young person of color in the U.S. who sees the reality of daily life before them, who sees the reality that young Black men are over 8 times more likely to be imprisoned than white men, who sees their friends locked away for decades, who find themselves – without cause - listed by police as “gang” members, and who have to endure the incessant barrage of racist stereotypes on the evening news painting them, en masse, as “criminal elements.” He has endeavored to paint justified Black rage as a thing of the past. He has betrayed an entire generation of youth, just as he has betrayed their parents and grandparents.

It is only by addressing the realities of history, it is only by carefully examining the ways in which the present conditions of oppression have arisen from and are rooted in historical reality and in ongoing cultural and institutional practice – not by evading these realities, or by dismissing the recognition of reality as being “old school” or “stuck in the past,” as Obama would prefer, that restitution and rectification can even begin. Without justice there can be no peace, no matter what Barack Obama preaches. Until all of us can be at peace, none of us can ever be at peace. Amerikkka had its chance to repent. Instead it slaughtered Minister Malcolm and Dr. King, and locked millions of people of color behind bars. Reconcile that.

Barack Obama and the “End” of Racism

2008-02-10T15:36:00.000-08:00

Barack Obama and the “End” of Racism

By Juan Santos

“It’s impossible for a chicken to produce a duck egg. The system in this country cannot produce freedom for an Afro-American. It is impossible for this system, this economic system, this political system, period… And if a chicken ever did produce a duck egg, I am certain you would say it was certainly a revolutionary chicken.”

– Malcolm X - 05/29/64

________________________

"Yes, I am personally the victim of deferred dreams, of blasted hopes." -MLK - 12/24/67

"The judgment of God is on America now!" - MLK - 08/ 06/67

___________________________

“What life has taught me
I would like to share with
Those who want to learn...

Until the philosophy which hold one race
Superior and another inferior
Is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned
Everywhere is war, me say war

That until there are no longer first class
And second class citizens of any nation
Until the colour of a man's skin
Is of no more significance than the colour of his eyes
Me say war

That until the basic human rights are equally
Guaranteed to all, without regard to race
Dis a war

That until that day
The dream of lasting peace, world citizenship
Rule of international morality
Will remain in but a fleeting illusion
To be pursued, but never attained
Now everywhere is war, war

And until the ignoble and unhappy regimes
that hold our brothers in Angola, in Mozambique,
South Africa sub-human bondage
Have been toppled, utterly destroyed
Well, everywhere is war, me say war”

- Bob Marley -

Barack Obama deeply troubles me. As a Mexican who grew up in a Black neighborhood in the U.S. at the height of the Black Power era, I absorbed Black people’s rage- their righteous rage with the aim of justice and, ultimately, with the aim of healing - until it had sunk into my very bones. It was not a rage aimed at me; and no one “taught” it to me, no one schooled me in it. School was just everyday life in a Black senior high, for example; school was having my own personal cop who stopped me every time he saw me, the first pig who ever took me to jail. I didn’t try to act Black; I didn’t try to talk Black; I never tried to walk Black or dress Black; I didn’t even particularly listen to Black music outside of Motown and funk – the crossover stuff.

So, I was a little stunned and more than a little confused when, as I entered my 20’s, I had to confront how different I was from people in the white world and in the Mexican world. I didn’t realize it as a teenager, of course; It was just natural. But as I came into deeper contact - and sharp conflict – with the world I had not grown up in – the world outside of the working class area that people now would call the “ghetto,” I came to realize that while I had not adopted Black culture, I viewed the world through a Black lens; and since I had only been a kid when I developed the lens, there was little about it I could articulate, and almost nothing I could find to help me illuminate my experience of what post modernists and other people who long to go slumming these days now call “the borderlands”- a phrase they ripped out from under Gloria Anzaldua, a Chicana lesbian feminist writer, poet and cultural theorist. They talk about “alterity” and “difference,” and it’s nothing more than chic poses and impotent cultural elitism by those who have no authentic experience of what difference really is.

Growing up on the border I grew up on was not exotic; nor did I think of it as a kind of crucifixion or torment. It was just normal. The Black world and my odd presence in it were just normal. The sense of torment would only come later, when I learned that I reacted to white middle class bullshit – the “polite” evasions of naming the daily realities of power and pain that characterize the white middle class – just the way any Black youth of my time would have reacted. They dumbfounded and enraged me. It took a long time to get that they are not just outright phonies, straight-up deliberate hypocrites, almost every one of them - but that they don’t see - and that for that reason, they are very dangerous to those who do. My reality was not their reality.

Today, I am blessed to have a radical white friend, Tim Bennett, who gets this clearly. He calls white people like this “Not-Sees.” His pun is intentional. But I didn’t get the white world at all as a kid. They just enraged me. Not one of them talked straight, as far as I could see. The “nicer” they were the more they enraged me.

The real torment came later, when I had to learn, not only to see, but to fully articulate what I see. And for someone in my position, there were very few guideposts then for me to follow. I had to learn for myself and largely from myself which part of me was which, what was Mexican, what was absorbed from white culture, and what was Black in how I experienced myself and the world I lived in. It’s easy now; I can switch culture and tone like switching a channel or clicking a link. I can do it, but usually I don’t bother; I just come from where I am at the moment, secure in who I am and what I know about the world and the dynamics of it that I am meeting in the moment. I rely less on my own tone than on understanding and knowing how to listen. Then, however, it was all sheer suffering.

I came from both inside and outside the Black world. My reality was Black reality, a Black world – and even at that it wasn’t really mine, in a sense, although I grew up in it. The Mexican community wasn’t quite mine either: I was lacking in the proper resepto, and there was nothing – or very little, of the agachado in me. I was arrogant, a sinvergüenza. Besides, my Spanish was poor. White people very often had no idea what to make of me; I felt they instinctively feared me, and I despised their thinly veiled brutality.

I reacted to the world like a Black youth, not as a Mexican or white youth would react, and I didn’t understand it.

When I was 16, I used to buy The Black Panther newspaper at a little convenience store across from the local supermarket on what is now called Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. It came to haunt me. I always bought it- for a quarter - from the same brother. Then, one day, I was listening to the radio. The pigs had the local Panther headquarters under siege. There was a shoot-out. I don’t know what may have happened to him, but I never saw the brother again. And I never talked to anyone about it. There was no one to talk to. It never occurred to me to talk to anyone about it. As I said, I had no teacher. I was just a kid, I wasn’t Black, and no one in my family cared – just me. I remained silent. Millions of people from the oppressed nationalities in the US remain silent; and it’s not just that white people don’t care about oppression – it’s that we are punished for speaking out, for saying what we really see.

Here’s one simple example. About half the workers at my place of employment are people of color. Supervisors are hired in-house, as a rule. The boss is a “liberal” white woman in a company whose work is devoted to “liberal” causes. She came to our office after busting a union on behalf of the company in another city. In her first year and a half here not a single person of color became a supervisor. In my case, she tried to fire me – she sent my case to the corporate president and the corporate lawyers to see if they could fire me for having organized a union in another, similar workplace in the past. I came to work every day for four and a half months last year not knowing, if, that day, I would be fired. That’s the way it is, that’s the atmosphere white Amerikkka - liberal and conservative alike - has created for poor people and minorities.

Yes, of course, those of us who work there are the working poor. The “passionate” liberals who run the company act like they never heard of a living wage - but there is a shelf in the kitchen with “free food” for the people whose paycheck didn’t stretch far enough this week. It’s bought with money the liberal boss solicits from the workers. No one says anything. We all know the nature of the white liberal façade; We all know we’ll be punished if we speak up, if we demand equality in hiring or a raise, much less a living wage. So, our rage simmers in a pot with a tight lid. There’s one guy, though, who has blown up at work a couple of times over racist incidents at work. He’s one of the company’s most productive employees. I was told by a lower level supervisor that he was passed over for a promotion only because he’d gotten angry on the floor about racism – he’d created “conflict.” He wasn’t trustworthy.

So we stay silent, as a rule, on the job. We stay silent as a rule, in the white world.

Barack Obama is the living symbol of our silence. He is our silence writ large.

He is our Silence running for president –

With respect to Black interests, Obama would be a silenced Black ruler: A muzzled Black emperor. A Black man at the head of the White Amerikkkan State – one who’s unwilling to speak truth to power, but more than willing, like a Condi Rice or a Colin Powell, to become that power and to launch wars of aggression against other people of color.

In Obama’s case the targets will be Iran (which he has threatened with “surgical” missile strikes) and Pakistan, rather than Iraq. That’s the only difference between Obama and Rice and Powell, or Bush, for that matter.

Even ABC News notes that “Obama, one of the more liberal candidates in the race, is proposing a geopolitical posture that is more aggressive than that of President Bush.” Washington Post columnist Robert Kagan, in a column entitled “Obama, the Intervensionist,” cites Obama’s claim that “he wants the American military to ‘stay on the offense, from Djibouti to Kandahar.’” To help the empire stay on the offensive, and despite the fact that US military spending is breaking the bank at over $1 trillion a year, and far outstrips the spending of any potential imperial rival, Obama wants to beef up military spending, adding 65,000 troops to the Army and 27,000 more Marines beyond the obscene levels already under arms in the so-called “War on Terror.”

That’s another matter. Most of us at my workplace, for example, don’t want to become that power, we don’t want to lord it over others or punish them if they disobey the corporate rules, much less the rules of Pax Amerikkkana. We don’t want to “succeed” that badly, not badly enough to sell our souls and boss around - and certainly not kill - people who, we know, suffer every day just like we suffer.

Nor do we want to be cops – pigs – or to be the commander in chief of pigs, be they local police or the cops of the world. No one imagines themselves the commander.

We’d like things to be better in our personal lives, of course, if we could have them better and still feel clean.

And that’s the Obama equation. Keep your Black/ Brown mouth shut and you can “succeed.” And you can still feel “clean.” Here we have the real story behind Obama’s portrayal of his squeaky clean-ness. Yes, Black man, yes, Black woman, you can have power in this killer-racist system and stay “clean.” In Obama’s carefully constructed image lies a symbolic resolution of a profound inner conflict that all people of color in the US face in their daily lives.

Obama plays the role of a Black Cinderella. He does for Black folks what Cinderella does for girls. He shows that oppression and silence can be good for you – at least if you are the one the prince chooses, or if you are the one who gets to be the prince. It’s total fantasy. It’s a glass slipper that will break at the arch and be turned on us like a broken beer bottle or a jagged-edged knife; the same knife Obama has threatened to turn on the people of Iran and Pakistan.

But, he’s getting over with it, if for no other reason than that the inner conflict I’ve described remains largely unconscious for oppressed people in the US. That’s why one Black poet, spoken word artist Darian Dauchan, wrote a piece called “Damn You Barack Obama You Pretty Mothafucka.” It’s because Dauchan was trying to sort it through. Even though he fails – he buys into the Obama myth- nonetheless he had to sort it through as best he could, because Obama is the walking illusion of the realization of an impossible dream; the dream that in white racist Amerikkka a Black man could be judged on the content of his character, not the color of his skin.

There is, of course, a racist subtext to Obama being called “pretty”- it’s the subtext of internalized racism and the imposition of an internal color-caste system within the Black nation itself, a color-coded stratification held over from the era of slavery - the era of the “mulatto, the “half-breed,” “quadroon” and “octoroon”; a caste system in which “whiter” is better – smarter, “prettier,” more worthy, etc.

The rest of the racist subtext is this: Obama, with his extraordinary intelligence and presence (by any standard), is, in the eyes of white Amerikkka,(and, according to the standards of the so-called “Enlightenment,” which still rule the thinking of Euro-Americans) the half-white, and thus, half-redeemed “Black savage” – “redeemed” by his “white blood”, “civilized” by it - redeemed by his relative whiteness- ultimately redeemed and refined by the white nation itself.

The question from the Black perspective has been posed as to whether Obama is “Black enough” – which is to say, “Is he loyal enough to the Black nation? The more decisive question, viewed from the white electorate’s standpoint, at least, is this; “Is he white enough, is he loyal enough to whiteness and to the white nation?” That’s why the question of his religion, and of his Arabic name, are points of attack and vulnerability from the standpoint of the more openly racist and xenophobic sectors of the white public. That’s why his “patriotism” is also questioned, unlike any white candidate. After all, everyone in the US knows that people of color with Arabic names are the enemy. It doesn’t matter, apparently, how many nukes Obama wants to hit Iran with, he’s got to stand up and recite the pledge of allegiance to prove he’s not a terrorist – at least not an anti-US terrorist.

Obama is not being judged on the “content of his character” – the question of how his character is perceived in a racist nation and, conversely, among a colonized African people, is a question that is sociologically inseparable from the color of his skin.

Many people, nonetheless, think Obama is the realization of Dr. King’s dream. The power of this archetype is immense. It’s why the completely empty catch-phrase “Change” works for him, and it’s the deeper reason for the quasi-religious wave of “Obama fever.” Obama is Cinderella and King’s Dream rolled into one. He’s even had the myth of Kennedy’s so-called “Camelot” invoked on his behalf. For many, he’s not only phenomenally charismatic, but irresistible. There’s even been talk of an “Obama Cult.” {The comments at this link, many of which attack the essay, are every bit as interesting as the essay itself.}

But, if Obama is the realization of King’s dream, then the price of the dream is silence. And, as the slogan goes, “Silence = Death.” If Obama is the realization of King’s dream, then the price is silence about the oppression of Black people - and the abandonment of the millions locked away under the conditions of mass incarceration that have replaced Jim Crow. If Obama is the realization of King’s dream, then being Black means being white – then Black is white, or at least it’s Black on white terms. It’s a Blackness that dare not speak its name.

Obama’s shot at the presidency doesn’t signal the end of racism in the U.S. It is made possible, rather, by the new form racism itself has taken, a form that offers a prison cell to poor people of color, and, for the middle class, on the other hand, an Apartheid-style pass card stamped “SILENCED.”

The functioning of this new dynamic of racism is plain to see in Obama’s attitude toward the newest persecuted “Other” in U.S. society – Brown migrants. On one hand, in one of his most impressive moments, he very rightly called attacks on migrants “scapegoating” (although he failed to critique NAFTA or US Imperialism at any level.)

His campaign even lifts and translates the migrant chant of “!Si Se Puede!” into English as “Yes we can,” and uses it as a slogan. (Obama himself has been a prime beneficiary of the mass opposition of the wrongly labeled “New Civil Rights Movement” in 2006 – the pro-migrant movement that not only cracked open and deeply divided the Republican Party so severely that it has not been able to re-group, but that also put white Amerikkka on notice that a it would never get by with making instant felons of millions of Brown people, and that openly racist persecution, at least, would not be tolerated from Republicans or anyone else.)

Obama favors driver’s licenses for the undocumented, but he’s all for the Apartheid Wall being built on the US side of the Mexican/ US border. Obama is willing to issue pass cards to migrants who make no trouble, since – after all - they’re here, for god’s sake.

Obama’s attitude toward brown migrants is the much the same as that of white liberals toward the Black middle class. It’s much the same as the attitude of the white ruling elite toward him. Keep up the racist wall, but give the “trustworthy ones” a pass. In the case of the Black middle class, the “trustworthy ones” are the ones who maintain silence about oppression. In the case of immigrants the “trustworthy ones” are the ones who have “learned English”, and “ have paid a fine,” as Obama puts it, for the violation of having been driven from their countries by hunger - by the gutting of their nation’s economies by the global capitalist empire headquartered in the U.S.

Even more telling is Obama’s refusal to recognize the right of Palestinians to return to the land stolen from them by Israel during the Nakba of 1948– the disaster of the birth of the Israeli regime. Obama supports and promotes the character of Israel as an exclusively Jewish state – in other words, as an Apartheid state, a Jim Crow state that not only keeps Palestinians separate, but which uses its military might to bomb them at will.

Like the Israelis themselves, Obama wants a separate Palestinian state – separate, but certainly not equal.

There can be no authentically autonomous Palestinian state located on the border of a nuclear-armed Israel – only a subjugated state militarily controlled by its neighbor – its oppressor. Such a state can be nothing but a Bantustan. In the meantime, while the whole world condemned the recent Israeli closure of Gaza, including a cut off of electricity that impacted its hospitals, Obama asserted that “Israel was forced to do this.”

Obama knows the rules of the game, after all - he is the rules of the new race game- his candidacy itself is a manifestation of the new system of racism.

He knows how to make white Amerikkka feel good about the status quo, here and abroad.

There’s a reason for that.

If he told the truth, if he stood up for justice, and on that basis, authentic healing, he couldn’t be president.

Under those circumstances, if he’d attracted any measurable attention, much less the global attention he’s gained today, more likely be dead.

Like King.

Like Malcolm.

Dead, like Steven Biko of the Black Consciousness Movement of Azania / South Africa, or Fred Hampton from Chicago.

Or imprisoned for decades, like Nelson Mandela was.

But Barack Obama doesn’t have that kind of vision and courage.

And he’s not, in the end, even a street activist. He’s been bought. What kind of “street activist” or “community organizer,” after all, ends up a millionaire?.

One who won’t say what white people don’t want to hear.

What white Amerikkka doesn’t want to know, Obama is not about to tell them. That’s a large part of why they like him; it’s key. Whites don’t want to know, as a rule, the actual conditions of Black America, just as the German people, as a rule, didn’t want to know the actual conditions of the Jews and Gypsies, even as the smoke of the crematoria drifted through their streets.

Here’s one part of the core truth that Obama is silencing:

The U.S., which has roughly 6% of the world’s human population, imprisons 20% of the world’s prisoners. The vast majority of those it imprisons are men of color. American Indians have the highest incarceration rate on the planet. Black men have the world’s next highest rate, although their absolute numbers make up the largest group of US prisoners. Mexicans and other Spanish speaking Natives in the U.S. have the third highest rate of imprisonment of all the world’s peoples.

According to a report from MSNBC, about 16% of black men in their twenties who are not college students are currently either in jail or in prison, while almost 60% of black male high school dropouts in their early thirties have spent time in prison.

Human rights Watch notes that in the U.S., “Nationwide, blacks are incarcerated at 8.2 times the rate of whites. That is, a black person is 8.2 times more likely to be in prison than a white person. Among individual states, there are even more extraordinary racial disparities in incarceration rates. In seven states -- Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin -- blacks are incarcerated at more than 13 times the rate of whites. Minnesota has by far the highest disparity -- blacks in that state are incarcerated at 23 times the rate of whites. In the District of Columbia, blacks are incarcerated at 34 times the rate of whites. Even in Hawaii and Vermont, the states with the smallest racial disparities in incarceration rates, blacks are still incarcerated at more than twice the rate of whites.”

But to hear the mainstream media spin it, racism in the US is over.

After all, Barack Obama might be president of the US.

To hear Barack Obama tell it, “There is no divide that we can’t bridge.” The easiest divide to “bridge”, of course, is the one you pretend doesn’t exist, the one you never mention.

White Amerikka wants to believe it is innocent- that racism is over. It doesn’t want to know that its rulers solved the “problem” presented to them by the end of Jim Crow segregation and by the eruption of the Black Power movement by replacing the de facto chains of Jim Crow with the even more literal shackles of mass imprisonment.

Obama rejects the Black militant stance – even the pro-Black stance of Dr. King or Reverend Jackson– not only by distancing himself from Jackson, but, much more importantly, by remaining silent about the fact that the white imperial ruling class met the challenges they faced with the end of segregation and the rise of the Black Power movement by flooding Black streets with crack cocaine and guns - creating a “gang problem” out of nowhere - then by inventing “The War on Drugs” and “The War on Gangs” to carry out the greatest mass imprisonment in human history, a campaign more Draconian and Machiavellian than anything most dictators, even the demonized Saddam Hussein, ever dreamed of.

The isolation engendered by a quarter-century of the War on Drugs and the War on Gangs – which is actually a war on poor people of color in the US – is overwhelmingly intense. It’s suffocating: and the silence about the war on poor people of color in the US has been punctured only twice - first, by the Los Angeles rebellion in 1992, and secondly by the mass marches of millions of Brown people protesting the State’s efforts to retroactively turn even more millions of migrants into instant felons in 2006.

The war against the oppressed nationalities in the US is real. In the ghettos, the barrios and on the rez it’s a palpable phenomenon: Millions of families are missing their sons and daughters. Again, their children make up roughly 20% of the prison population of the world, again – not just of the US – of the world.

But for white Amerikkka, it may as well be taking place in Baghdad, not next door. They know a little about what’s up in Iraq, of course, but not about what is happening to much more intimately, right next door, and in their names.

Barack Obama, in the meantime, says that the invasion of Iraq was misdirected. It was the wrong war. The Empire’s real enemy, he says, lay elsewhere.

He says nothing at all about the War at Home against his own people.

It’s not after all, that racism is over. It’s that whites imagine that they can now be at peace about it – that the race war in Amerikkka is over as a two-sided affair. Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report, in a fascinating and important debate with Michael Eric Dyson, says the Obama campaign is "relentlessly sending out signals to white people that a vote for Barack Obama, an Obama presidency, would signal the beginning of the end of black-specific agitation, that it would take race discourse off of the table." Ford says, “Barack Obama does not carry our burden, in addition to other burdens. He in fact promises to lift white-people-as-a-whole’s burden, the burden of having to listen to these very specific and historical black complaints, to deal with the legacies of slavery. That is his promise to them.”

An exhaustive NAACP report indicates that there is very little difference between the stances of Obama and Clinton on issues important to Blacks. Others have noted the centrist nature of the Obama campaign more broadly. Black legal scholar Vernellia Randall, of the University of Dayton, Ohio, says that Obama has No specific plan for addressing institutionalized racism, and that he doesn’t even acknowledge the issue. (Others have noted the centrist nature of the Obama campaign more broadly.)

In the white imagination, Barack Obama represents, not the “End of Racism” (racism has an experiential, existential meaning for only the barest sliver of the white population), but, he represents, rather, the end of the struggle to end racism.

The “End of Racism,” like the ”End of History” proclaimed by Francis Fukuyama with the fall of the Soviet Union, is meant to signify and hail the end of polarization and struggle, a final assimilative victory in which the antagonist (Communist or Black, respectively) is absorbed into the benevolent embrace of the white capitalist empire – there to disappear as a problem - even as a distinct entity.

Obama, in this context, can be viewed as a kind of Gorbachev, a figure that surrendered the sovereignty and independence of his nation, opened it to overt capitalism, collapse and chaos, and who, in the process, became the darling of the capitalist world; who became, in the West, at least, a figure representing “reconciliation and peace” – not capitulation and betrayal.

In the Amerikkkan imagination, Obama signals the co-optation, not of the pseudo-Marxist Soviet style socialism, but of the drive for Black liberation, autonomy and self –determination – the end of Black Nationalism, of the Black nation as a distinct people with a distinct history, distinct needs, a distinct culture, a distinct oppression and a distinct agenda. It signifies the supremacy of the white nation over the Black nation, just as the so-called “End of History” is meant to signify the supremacy of capitalism over all anti-capitalist potentials for organizing society.

The only awareness most whites have of racism comes as a result of the immediate and very short term impact of the struggle of peoples of color upon their consciousness. The silencing of that struggle means only the end of its painful intrusion into white awareness – not the end of racism as an omnipresent, violent burden on the oppressed, not the end of racism as omnipresent oppression and degradation. As noted above, Obama has no plan, and thus, it is fair to say, no intention of ending systemic racism in the US. It’s easier to pretend for popular consumption, that it no longer exists.

Barack Obama is priceless. If he didn’t exist, as the saying goes, they’d have had to invent him. And, no matter Obama’s subjective intentions – white people did just that in their imaginations and in setting the social terms of the New Racism. The very best one can say is that Obama’s let them get by with it by pandering to it. I’ll leave the worst one can say to you. It’s closer to the point, and to the truth.

It should be more than clear by now that Barack Obama will not save us. But neither is the point to expose the man as an individual, or even as a hypocrite, betrayer or oppressor. The point is to see him in context,

within the limits of the system, the matrix, the cultural and political environment in which he arose and in which he operates. It’s not that Barack Obama, per se, is worthless, it’s that none of the dreams in us that he speaks to so deeply in us can be fulfilled under the system of oppression he is an expression of and that his candidacy concentrates in visible form.

There is nothing wrong at all in the hopes we have that Obama’s rhetoric speaks to. The problem lies in what Herbert Marcuse called “repressive desublimation – a hope, a need, that has been buried and denied by an oppressive system, is allowed some room to breathe, then co-opted and redirected back into a form that ultimately reinforces the oppressive system that denied and suppressed out hopes and needs in the first place. That’s what Obama represents.

He speaks to our dreams of connection, of reciprocity, of balance, sanity and a noble way of life. He speaks to our hope for a world worth living in, to our hope for the future generations that have been crushed for decades now under the heel of the Bush regime and its predecessors. The enormous energy for change unleashed in the 1960s has been buried deeper and deeper under the weight of oppression, and, especially for the last 7 years, under the weight of the most cynical, sadistic, apocalyptic regime of our lifetimes, a regime that has embraced a vision of global destruction and that has denied every life-giving hope.

The Bush regime was and remains an expression of a conscious plan by the far right – especially of the Christian fascists under the leadership of Paul Weyrich, founder of the Heritage Foundation and co-founder of the Moral Majority - to crush everything that came to life in the upheavals of the cultural revolutions of the 60s era. They meant, as they consciously expressed it, to counter the counter culture, the culture of hope, and offer a new “hope” of a “purpose driven life” in the context of the old traditions of oppression. They meant to, as they put it, “reframe this struggle as a moral struggle, as a transcendent struggle, as a struggle between good and evil” along traditional Christian lines.

The Christian Fascist strategist Eric Heubeck wrote, “We will maintain a constant barrage of criticism against the Left. We will attack the very legitimacy of the Left. We will not give them a moment's rest. We will endeavor to prove that the Left does not deserve to hold sway over the heart and mind of a single American. We will offer constant reminders that there is an alternative, there is a better way. When people have had enough of the sickness and decay of today's American culture, they will be embraced by and welcomed into the New Traditionalist movement.”

The regime of Bush the Lesser was the pinnacle of this effort – he carried the agenda as far as it could go, before it began to fracture and collapse under the weight of its own madness – before it met the determined resistance of society’s most vulnerable, scapegoated and openly stigmatized targets, as they marched in their millions refusing to be victims. The combined force of the Christian fascist juggernaut, the repressive powers of the State, and the US war machine looked unstoppable until it met this opposition at home, and until it met the mad and fierce resistance of the people of Iraq who have, however chaotic and horrifying their tactics, refused to be conquered. With these events, the aura of invincibility and unstoppable momentum was destroyed, the lid of repression began to crack, and what had been suppressed in us rose again to the surface. Literally, in terms of time in office, and as a sweeping reactionary social agenda, the Bush regime is coming to an end. With its end, inevitably, comes a wave of hope and euphoria.

This is the wave Obama is riding, the ocean of energy he is trying to steer into an acceptance of the same old deal, the same old wars, the same old systemic racism, packaged as if it were something new. This wave of energy is not something he’s inspired, it’s something he’s riding and that he is uniquely qualified to channel toward his own ends – which are not our ends.

As we have seen, Obama doesn’t represent peace – he represents an expansion of war and the power of Empire. He’s even more extreme on this than Bush himself, except in his public rhetoric. He doesn’t represent the real and legitimate needs, desires and hopes of Black people - he refuses to speak openly of the most fundamental issues affecting Black people. He doesn’t represent the “end of racism,” but the perpetuation of oppression in a new guise.

Obama doesn’t represent a new system or the new way of life we dreamed of and fought for and that has been suppressed - he represents the old one. He represents a system that is fundamentally rooted in exploitation, oppression and destruction on a global scale, and he is living proof that no fundamental change for the better can – or will - come about under the system he represents and upholds. It doesn’t work that way. To tell the truth is to betray the system, and he can’t bring himself to do it, even though he is far too conscious not to know it.

Attaining authentic freedom requires, as its barest starting point, the naming of what keeps us subjugated. What keeps us subjugated is the very system Obama wants to rule. The system, even with Barack Obama as its first Black emperor, is not our hope. It’s our enemy, the enemy of the world, and, because this system is rapidly undermining the ability of the planet to foster and sustain life, it is the enemy of all Life on Earth. This is exactly the understanding that the Christian fascists like Weyrich and Heubeck wanted to crush out of our awareness, and the lack of such awareness is exactly what Barack Obama depends on if he is to remain a symbol of the impossible dream that the system can be something other than what it is.

Apocalypse No! Part 5: Celebrating Collapse: The Coming Adventure

2008-01-12T01:09:00.000-08:00

Apocalypse No! Part 5:

Celebrating Collapse: The Coming Adventure

“We are forces of Chaos and Anarchy; Everything they say we are, we are.” - Jefferson Airplane

“We can deny the reality of collapse, but that will not prevent it from happening. We can continue to live the nightmare of civilization, clinging to the old paradigm, allowing the old stories to shape our lives. Or, we can choose to live the new story-the story of the life/death/life cycle, the story of collapse, community, and commutation. This is the story we were meant to live-the one the soul has been whispering in our ears since we were born but was silenced by the cacophony of empire. For all the uncertainty and angst evoked by collapse, its unsurpassable gift may be the opportunity to live and tell that story.” – Carolyn Baker

What extraordinary fortune to be here at the close of the drama, and to have the chance to learn from it and to practice within it, to be certain that what we do now really, really counts. We’ll have the chance to learn what it might mean to live as free human beings. It is entirely possible that the coming Crisis will create bonds between us, where nothing else has done so before, the same kind of bonds created by hurricanes, floods and other “disasters.”

As a kid, I always loved hurricanes. Everything was taken over by something larger than any of us, something that felt immense and mysterious.

We taped the windows. The sky darkened. Electricity went out. Lightening struck. Bathtubs were filled with water to drink. Streets flooded. Branches - sometimes whole trees and telephone poles - snapped like matchsticks. Battery operated radios crackled. Candles cast long shadows on the walls. Thunder exploded overhead; a dark wind howled, and rain battered the windows. Our world came to a halt, bowing before the power of the Earth, sky and water, before Huru Can, the ancient god of the Maya.

In Mexico he is known as Hunab Ku, and he is calling us again to open ourselves before him. The story of our times, of this civilization, is ending.

Tonatzin is the name of the Earth. She is calling us home to her, home to witness the deaths of her children, her children we are murdering. Mariposa, Oso, Mono, Tigre…

By 2050 the list will expand to a million. The ones that are dying are the wild ones. As they die, what we have called civilization- City Life- is also dying. And whether we join them in death or not, we or our children are going to, inevitably, rejoin the ranks of the Wild.

Thank god. It’s coming – the adventure many of us have been waiting decades - even our whole lives for. It’s been laying quietly, waiting for us, for this juncture, for thousands of years, and now it’s here. We’re about to go back. Back to normal. Back to a life that- if we can survive to live it - might just be free. Free of all this. Free at last of push buttons, cell phones, nuclear madmen, advertising, prisons, cops, jobs, cars, bosses, screaming bombs, plastics, and every kind of daily sickness. Thunder and lightening are about to explode right overhead, about to shake our windows and walls until the whole place trembles. Some of us can already hear it and feel it. Some of us are listening. Of course it’s going to be horrible, but if this way of life continues, things can only get worse than the worst we can actually imagine now. The day will inevitably come when we wipe ourselves off the face of the Earth, and all life with us, unless things drastically change.

It’s not like living under the shadow of nuclear war for five decades makes for a life of contentment or happiness, or like you just love death on the freeway. It’s not like many of us in the West have ever heard real silence, or spent a moment truly alone. We don’t live lives of lasting integrity wherein we know with certainty that we are safe to express ourselves openly and honestly among those who undeniably care for us. It’s not like we really feel connected, now, to this madness.

There’s a constant humming beneath the surface of our awareness. Isn’t there a throbbing question that repeats itself again and again, saying “Is this shit Really, Really Worth it?” Of course there is. But some of us have just been afraid to face it. Some of us thought we were alone with it, that it was our unique problem, and no one else’s. Like you were the only one who couldn’t adjust. Like the Human Zoo was someplace natural where we belong, where everyone fit but you, where the glitter of potential wealth or fame left everyone else in a solid trance, except for you and your problem and your weird friends.

No, Sister. No. Even George Bush hates “America” and this “way of life.” That’s why he’s so eager to blow it up, that’s why he wants to bring on Armageddon That’s why he recently threatened World War 3. Just look at the obvious. You’re not alone.

So, the reality, if James Lovelock is as right about the future as he was about Gaia – about the nature of life on earth, about the Earth as a single, living, interconnected organism – is not so pretty. If he’s right, most of us are going to die, about 95% of humanity, by 2100. The heartbreak that’s coming is unimaginable.

But, on the other hand, and the arrogance of this question is all but beyond redemption, but, so what? 100% of us are going to die, sooner or later, anyway. But that leads us to another question -

How?

It’s as much a question about how you live as it is about how you die. And, if you hadn’t noticed, the questions are much the same. Are you going to die a slave, or are you going to die trying to break free? Are you going to live a slave, or are you going to live trying to break free? Are you going to die loving and connected and in service, somehow, to life and all beings, or are you going to cling to the illusions of your power and the obsessions of “individuality”? And how are you going to live? The questions that matter are the same, whether you ask them of life or of death.

The questions that matter are the same, whether this way or life continues or dies, and whether you survive it or go down with it. However things go, we have this one power; to answer these questions: to decide the meaning of it all. As a general rule, that’s all any of us gets. It’s all any human has ever gotten.

Here’s the thing, though. We are going to have a chance no one has had for thousands of years – not in the way it will pose itself to us. We’re going to have the chance to break out, break free, and start totally over. The sad truth, though, is this. It may be too late to start to change now. If you’re not young, or if you haven’t been at the business of change for awhile, if you never turned on, tuned in or dropped out, if you’re “normal,” if you’ve adjusted, if you’ve become the moral equivalent of “institutionalized,” if you’re too “civilized,” the shock may be too great when the walls come tumblin’ down.

You might not be fit for freedom anymore- physically or emotionally, or morally, or spiritually or socially. Time will tell - for all of us. But not for even one of us, alone. One of the lies that has been exposed for all of us in the global Crisis we face is that we are alone. Everything, and everyone of us, reverberates. Our lives reverberate like overlapping ripples of water. No one, alone, shapes themselves. No one’s life fails to shape the lives of others. We can be together. We have never been apart. Now, it’s just that it’s changing. We can change with it.

For my part, whether it’s now, at 52, or god help me, at 62 or 72 or 82, I’m going to die changing - trying to break free, just as I have lived. In the worst case scenario, one with no afterlife, death itself will change nothing for me, personally, or if it does, I won’t be aware of it.

Or, god knows, maybe some of us will have seized the moment, that small opening that may lead to a different future as all of this falls down around us. Maybe we will die free. Maybe we will have lived free. Maybe you, too. Maybe we will die in the claws of a jaguar, the teeth of a wolf, in the power of the wind and rain and the stars, or in the long shadow cast by candles, in silence. Maybe we could live that way. As close to Wild as can be. All of us. Forever.

_______________________________

There is a reason I loved hurricanes, and there is a reason why I still love floods, although I haven’t been in one in years, living as I do now, in a desert.

In a flood, find the drivers who’ve found a high place. Park with them. You’re all stranded together.

But we’re not forced together; the sheer reality of being in a world that is out of human control magnetizes us to one another, makes it clear we are here together, all in one boat, different only in the details of what we call our “separate” lives. But the world has changed. That freeway underpass you’ve all traversed a thousand times is no longer what it was. Now it’s a fiercely coursing channel, a new riverbed sprung to surging life, a life that- seemingly out of nowhere - can now take our own in an instant. Before it was nothing but math and concrete. Now it’s alive with power and presence.

Look at the footage of New Orleans after the levies broke. When all this falls apart, we come together in an instant. For those who stay free, “tribes” form on the spot. When things are no longer “in control” the Sacred Hoop reasserts itself, the Circle is unbroken. It’s not just pragmatic survival; it’s recognition, the shattering of our isolation, the instant recognition of our common humanity, our vulnerability, tenderness and bravery. We’re suddenly in it together, FEMA or no FEMA, law or no law, Guard or no Guard, life or death. That’s what floods are good for, and that’s why I love them, just like I love hurricanes and the god they are named for.

That’s what collapse is good for. The promise it holds: To Return us to ourselves, to one another and to the Earth.

It is from the stories of our Return that the myths that sustain a new culture, an authentic way of living, may, at last, re-emerge among us.

Apocalypse No! Part 6: The Tower: Breaking the Death Grip of Profit and Power

2008-01-12T00:48:00.001-08:00

Apocalypse No! Part 6: The Tower: Breaking the Death Grip of Profit and Power

By Juan Santos

If we don't take action now
We settle for nothing later
We'll settle for nothing now
And we'll settle for nothing later

- Rage Against the Machine -

“When the confluence of events described in this article occurs, it
will be very difficult to maintain order and control in our society
and the world. Once the stun of reality wears off, the bonds of
social order will be loosened. Authority and power, as they are
today, will be at risk. For those who hold power and authority, these
will be turbulent, dangerous times that our rulers believe will
require strong laws and the use of strong police power. For the many
of us who have neither power nor authority, this will be a time when
our own community and ingenuity and will to survive will be tested.
We will be tested as much by the times to come as by the control
mechanisms that will be imposed upon us in response to them.”

- Zbignew Zingh -

“I cannot stand by while the world is destroyed, and I see no hope of reform. This is true whether we talk about the lack of realistic possibility of psychological or social reform, or whether we talk about the structural impossibilities of civilization ( which requires the importation of resources) ever being sustainable. And, really, think about it for a moment. This culture is changing the climate – changing the climate – and those in power are doing nothing to stop it. In fact they’re burning more oil each year than the year before. If changing the climate is not enough to make them change their ways, nothing will. Nothing. Not petitions, not letters, not votes, not the purchase of hemp hackysacks. Not visualizations. Not sending them love. Nothing. They will not change. They must be stopped. Through any means necessary. We’re talking about the life of the planet. They must be stopped.”

- Derrick Jensen -

It is worse than anything I can imagine, to be so alone, in a practical sense, almost entirely in the absence of a living community, so alone in being willing to face the meaning of this Time and to prepare for the devastation that awaits. The title of a famous science fiction novel by Harlan Ellison almost captures the feeling: I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream. But that’s not quite it. I have a voice. I am whispering, reasoning, incanting, pleading, screaming - but you have no ears. I’m not telling you “We’re all going to die!” Of course, we’re all going to die. That’s not news. The news is that billions of us are going to die more or less at once. The dying is going to start Soon.

Not that the official story can be believed- not at all- but there is a reason that the image of the jet slamming and melting into a cloud of smoke against the second of the Twin Towers has become the image of our decade.

It’s because we’re all going down together. There’s a pilot on this plane who knows the trajectory, and who is hell bent on the ecstasy of impact. There are madmen with him who will kill anyone who tries to stop it.

It’s like a nightmare. The pilot is Bush, the mad terrorists with him are the police - enforcers of every description, from the ghetto streets to Guantanamo – the building is Earth, and I imagine myself with a group of passengers – with practice you can spot the type in a glance - people who imagine themselves immortal and immune - who cannot really think of death - or who are so brainwashed with the automatic fear of authority – any authority, however illegitimate, that breaking the shell of benumbed passivity, even to grasp the reality of the situation, much less to act in response to it, is far beyond their capacity or potential. They have no ears, but I cannot act alone and succeed. There are only minutes to spare.

They have no ears and I must scream.

All of these people - pilot, guards, and passengers – are killing the world in the most literal sense, taking ecosystems and economic systems past the point of no return. The meltdown is happening faster than anyone predicted – not only the meltdown of the Arctic – which didn’t wait to collapse for the quarter-century scientists supposed it would, but the economic meltdown hasn’t waited either - it’s on us now, as well. It didn’t wait for the impacts of peak oil, the way we imagined. Bush and company collapsed it early, just like they collapsed the Towers.

As a child, Bush used to put firecrackers in the mouths of frogs, light the fuse, throw them up in the air, and blow their heads off. Even now, he can’t wait for the thing to blow. The man has the same psychology as the suicide bombers he’s obsessed with, except that he lacks the courage to blow himself up, and except that he’s not desperate and crazed from oppression and occupation, but, rather, by whatever terror drove him to splatter frog’s blood through the air as a kid. Please, don’t take it wrong. The man is perfect. Bush is the poem to white America’s prose, the metaphor that completes the American anthem. He’s the walking Revelation of the nature of the American Beast.

The problem is not the man; it’s the psyche of a nation, a civilization. He’s not to blame as a lone individual, and being rid of him would change little, in any immediate way, one way or another. It’s just that he’s terribly ill and in his illness he’s become the perfect storm trooper for the perfect storm, the perfect conductor for the screeching finale of the New American Century, the Final Emperor, the perfect terrorist for the ultimate target – the entirety of Life on Earth.

His sabotage of the Bali accords is just his latest frog. Before that it was the threat of world war against Iran, based on his lies about a nuclear weapons program there, and before that it was the lies about Iraq, also centered on “weapons of mass destruction” and “terrorism.” He used “terrorism” as an excuse to drop white phosphorous bombs on Fallujah, bombs that blackened, burned, and literally melted down the faces of innocent children there. They, too were Bush’s frogs, and so are the inmates of Guantanamo, and all those he’s disappeared and tortured – each “rendered,” just as he rendered the frogs into tiny, headless, bleeding, pulsing husks. His sickness is not his alone; it’s the American sickness, the sickness of the “civilized,” with its mask stripped down to the bone, down to the headless, shattered spine.

Bush is not alone. In America, frogs don’t matter, Life doesn’t matter. The coming extinction of a million species doesn’t matter. Just search Google News under “Global Warming.” You’ll still see headlines saying global warming is a “hoax.” What’s the big deal, after all, about a little firecracker and a frog? And, even though their lives are literally at stake in the matter, people stand for it. There’s a truism among public opinion pollsters and market researchers – that what you don’t reject you accept. And almost no one says a word – or, rather, we’re getting nothing but talk and more talk. Almost no one is doing anything real to stop this. Not even the end of the world seems to stop the trance of business as usual, the business of terror, abuse and death. Some of us even call the trance being “spiritual.”

One way or another, we’ve been hypnotized into going along with it, We’ve even been hypnotized, by now, into imagining that global warming is everyone’s fault, the fault of the wealthy and the poor alike; just as if the destruction of the topsoil brought on by the cotton plantations of the Old South were equally the fault of the African slave and the European slave master.

But it’s not like that. It’s time to drop such illusions. Here in California, the statistics prove otherwise. Almost all of the greenhouse gases come from industries owned and operated by the wealthy, for the wealthy, and which profit no one but the wealthy. You would think in California- the world’s fifth largest economy and the most car-dependant place on Earth – that the sources of greenhouse gases would be omnipresent, but they’re not. Exhaustive research by the California Air Quality Board has pinpointed a mere 800 sources that, by themselves, produce 94% of the state’s greenhouse emissions - 800 large industrial facilities.

According to the L.A. Times, these industries include “electric generators and marketers, oil refineries and cement plants -- any industrial outlet that emits more than 25,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide and other gases each year.” In California, at least, it’s known with certainty exactly who is killing the world, exactly who is “profiting at the expense of all life” as the traditional Hopi elders put it. We know exactly what industries to target, and why. We know exactly where to apply the leverage to force them to stop, and we must do so by every means possible, if there is to be a future for Life on this planet. That said, Exxon Mobile, the world’s largest oil company, a corporation that has spent huge sums funding global warming deniers, is the single largest source of global warming gases in the world. Its operations alone account for the production of 5% of such gases on a global scale. All of these operations must be radically curbed, or better yet, they must cease entirely.

Since the production of global warming gases is so heavily skewed toward industry, even in car-dependant California, what, then, is the case in places like New York, Boston, Atlanta, London or Paris, places where mass transportation is either serviceable or ubiquitous? Or in the Third World, where cars are scarce? Who – exactly who – really profits at the expense of all life? (Certainly it’s the common people in post-communist China. Following the coup by the infamous capitalist roader Deng Xiao Ping, China has been turned into little more than a massive sweatshop for the West.)

The future of Life depends on finding these answers, and on terminating the ability – at the source - of these people to destroy us.

Not that this alone would let us off of the hook - the entirety of capitalist culture – including patterns of mass consumption in the West - will have to be radically transformed on a planetary scale, and it will have to be transformed or be eradicated very quickly indeed, if Life on Earth is to remain in any way viable for humans, much less for the million species that the industrialists will slaughter in the next 45 years to maintain their death grip on production, profit and power. Responsibility is a meaningless concept if it is not accompanied by the power to choose and to act in decisive ways. In capitalist societies only the capitalist has such power, and thus only the capitalist class has primary responsibility for the devastation of the world.

The working person and the “consumer” have no alternative, there are no choices to choose among, and no means available to create alternatives. The means of production, including means of producing alternatives, are monopolized by the capitalist and imperial classes, and remain unavailable to us - they are not, by definition, under capitalism, socialized. We have no power over them, nothing like any direct control of the distribution and application of the available resources that would allow us to make the social choice to create alternative sources of energy, nothing like direct control over whether we want to engage in the kind of massive biofuels program the capitalists are now pushing, nothing like control over whether Brazil, for example, goes in that direction under the US whip, and nothing like control over whether Brazilians and others around the globe starve en masse as a result. The only real alternative we have is whether to continue to live under such a system, or whether to risk our lives to overcome it. It’s a life or death choice, and one that cannot be evaded, in the final analysis. In the final analysis, we face life or death as a planet. No one can escape the decisions we face.

As Richard K. Moore wrote recently:

" Only when you have reached that deep level of hopelessness, where you see no avenue of escape, can you clear your mind enough to begin to see where the real problem lies. The real problem lies, my friends, in the fact that you and I have nothing to say about how our societies are run. Any one of us has more sense than the people who are running things, and we certainly have our fellow beings more at heart. Our problem lies in our own powerlessness, leaving power in the hands of those who always abuse it, in one way or another, in one age after another.

Our challenge as a sentient species, and our response if we seek to do anything about the growth-thru-genocide agenda, is to begin to empower ourselves, us ordinary people, without reference to the useless political process. How to pursue our empowerment must be the aim of our investigations, and pursuing that empowerment must be the point of our activism."

There’s not much time left before we slam into the Tower. It’s immensely dangerous that the first of the shocks we’re in for, economic collapse- a recession or depression - is widely predicted, even in the mainstream press around the globe, for 2008, G.W. Bush’s last official year in office ( On January 8, 2008, in fact, the BBC declared “Recession in the US 'has arrived'”)

Here in the US, and perhaps around the world, the conditions will be ripe for the imposition of what Naomi Klein has called The Shock Doctrine. In the U.S. there is a real likelihood that the massive stripping away of democratic rights that has been formalized in law since 9-1-1 will be used to impose a system of fascistic control that goes far beyond a mere formality of law, and that the Bush regime will spring into vicious practice with the declaration of national emergencies, mass incarceration, and sweeping economic changes reminiscent of the torture state in Chile that followed the coup by Augusto Pinochet in 1973. It would be a fool’s game to assume that Bush and company, having laid the legal foundations for fascism following the “shock” of the Towers episode, would be reluctant to implement the laws they’ve emplaced outside the barbed wire gates of Guantanamo, given the opportunity presented by an even deeper shock.

Almost everyone, including capitalist cheerleader Al Gore in his speech at the Bali conference on global warming, has been counting on the 2008 US elections to rid the world of the Bush gang. The delegates to that conference staked the future of the Earth on that notion, thanks to Gore’s speech, striking a “compromise” on global warming that assumed that Bush would soon be gone and replaced with more moderate imperialists.

But if Bush uses the Defense Authorization Act of 2006, for example, to impose fascist rule in the wake of an economic collapse in the short term, the idea of peaceful regime change in the US may prove to be nothing but a fantasy. Not only might formal democracy and formal democratic rights die in the U.S., but a sudden turn to open fascism in the U.S would mean a green light to similar moves by US client states on a global scale and radically increase the dangers of global war. In either case, business as usual efforts – such as they are - to mitigate the impacts of global warming could sink in a pile of rubble, and put every living being and every form of life on the planet in an even more extreme peril than we already face.

The world can’t wait, Life can’t wait. If Bush and company take the final step, if they cross the line into open fascism, it’s going to be a hell of a fight - literally a fight for all Life - a fight to the death, either our death or the system’s death. Either their insane drive for production, power, and profits come first, or our lives, the lives of our children, and the lives of the animals comes first. In such a scenario, there is no other possible outcome. One side is going to win, and one side is going to lose. There is no negotiating. Bush himself has said this way of life is not negotiable. There is no win-win to be had. However it’s fought, there is only win- lose or lose-lose. If the wealthy and their system win, then we all lose - the rich included. If they win, we all die. If we win, they too, will have a chance at life, but not, any longer, as systematic destroyers, abusers, profiteers, nouveau fascists and mass killers. Not even as killers of frogs. They will lose that power. They must lose that power.

Now, one way or another, the game is over.

Notwithstanding the possibility of a few survivors, and a slender hope of rebirth and a renewal of the Earth in the far future if we fail now to really change the world, there is no longer any other way out.

A review of The Shock Doctrine: The Face of Fascism in a Global System Heading for Collapse

2007-12-30T14:58:00.000-08:00

"The signs of war on the horizon are clear.

The war, like fear, also has a smell.

And now we can begin to breathe its stench in our lands.

In the words of Naomi Klein, we need to prepare ourselves for the shock."

- Subcomandante Marcos, EZLN –

A review of The Shock Doctrine:

The Face of Fascism in a Global System Heading for Collapse

By Juan Santos

Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatistas is a poet, but he is not just any poet: he’s a poet armed not only with words, but with bullets – and not only with words and bullets, but with the heart of the Mayan people of Chiapas. He is a poet and a revolutionary who abandoned the ivory tower for the jungle – for the Selva Lacandona - to live with, to fight with, and to die with los de ‘bajo – the people on the bottom, who lives are crushed beneath the weight of the pyramid of Empire. He has taken their part, their lot, their future as his own.

Naomi Klein is a writer, one who sees with the eyes of her heart, one who backs the knowledge and vision of the heart with the most rigorous research - research she uses to build the sharpest and most aggressively articulated and documented of cases, a case developed as if our lives depended on it. They do. And Klein, like Subcomandante Marcos, has taken sides, the side of the poor. Marcos has said her latest book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, “is one of those books that is worth having in your hands. It is also a very dangerous book.”

“Its danger,” he says, “resides in that it is possible to understand what it says.” In the clearest terms, The Shock Doctrine lays bare the vicious nature of capitalist globalization, and shows us how and why our world has been so radically transformed over the last half-century; Klein spills the blood of the lie that “free markets” mean free people. She builds and proves a solid - often breathtaking– case that the global “free market” has been imposed around the world through terror. She calls it “shock” – with all the graphic undercurrents of electric shock treatments, torture and deep trauma that the word implies – spelled out in exquisitely researched detail. Her tale is the tale of the rise of “corporatism” – a technical word for the economic and political system called fascism – on a global scale. While a few Left pundits like Alexander Cockburn almost dismiss Klein’s work for ignoring the precedents of capitalist terrorism prior to the era of globalization, they miss entirely that her book is focused on a particular period of history and on stripping bare the real meaning of the time we have lived through over the last generation. They also miss the power of the writing and the sense of values and the heart-felt methodology that guides and informs it.

Subcomandante Marcos is right when he says that the book’s danger for the rulers “resides in that it is possible to understand what it says.” Klein has written a book on global political economy – one that is as gripping as the best murder mystery, as well researched as the best investigative journalism – on a par with the work of a Seymour Hersh. The Shock Doctrine is as accessible as a history by Howard Zinn, and nearly as evocative in some of its storytelling as the writing of Eduardo Galeano.

That’s why The Shock Doctrine – surprisingly for a scathing and in-depth leftist critique of globalization – is already on the best seller lists in six countries. Klein tells a meaningful and fully comprehensible story in human terms that makes sense of the world we have lived in. It’s the global story of our lives, one that contextualizes, crystallizes and personalizes the meaning of what we’ve lived through and often only dimly understood. She brings our recent history, the world around us, and thus our lives themselves, into sudden clarity and focus.

Klein’s central metaphor – yes, this is a book on fascism and global political economy that has a central metaphor – is shock treatment; its development as a means to wipe clean the meaning of a human personality and to replace it with a newly programmed persona, one in line with the electrical master’s wishes. At the outset of her book, she talks in depth with – she encounters - a survivor of electroshock - one of the victims of the early experiments that would be used by the CIA to write manuals on torture - as the woman struggles daily with the problems of reclaiming a memory that has been erased, and with reconstructing a life, a history and a personality that has been wiped out by a man - call him a doctor, call him a torturer -sworn to heal her, by a man sworn to do no harm.

In The Shock Doctrine the personal and political are inseparable. The lies, betrayals and brutal political manipulations of its antagonists (who seek to wipe the slate clean in “maladjusted” countries and bring them under their own control the way that experts in electroshock and CIA torturers seek to wipe out human memory and personality) and the valiant and often tragic resistance of its protagonists, are told with an immediacy that is lacking in any kind of “charitable” pity or condescension. Instead, the immediacy and vividness of her story is empowered and made more compelling by a consistently rigorous research that, in Klein’s hands, nails the truth and that makes its emotional impact inescapable.

Although she doesn’t bore us with the “correct” theoretical arguments that critics like Cockburn would seem to prefer, Klein is dealing in The Shock Doctrine with one of the core contradictions of capitalism, the relationship between bourgeois dictatorship and bourgeois democracy, and she shows us, through example after compelling example, how, under capitalism and imperialism, the reality of bourgeois dictatorship trumps the illusion of bourgeois democracy every time.

She shows us in vivid examples the reality behind the theory, how “democracy” and negotiation and the power to make decisions over our lives is reserved for the capitalist and imperial elites, who then impose the end result of their of their debates - their desires - on those who are most vulnerable to them, and how they do so, consciously, just at the moments when we are most critically vulnerable. As “free market” economist Milton Friedman put it, “Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change.” The logic, actually, the pathology, Klein exposes, is the now-global pathology of the rapist, the serial killer, the fascist, of the torturers of Abu Ghraib; of the Hannibal Lectors in business suits who both run and gorge themselves on the world. Here the essence of the world capitalist, who, as Marx put it, is the “soul of capitalism personified.” The brutal pathology and machinations of these men are shown, in concrete example after example, unmistakably for what they are; the pathology and methodology of torturers whose aim is not mere terror, but the gutting of people’s lives and livelihoods - the gutting of the world for their own enrichment. Klein doesn’t rely, as such, on the terms for them that I’ve just used. She’s not name-calling or breathing hell and damnation. She lets the stories she tells and the documentation that backs the stories - the documentation that makes them coherent extensions of one another across decades and vast distances – speak for themselves. They do just that, and the conclusions to be drawn from the picture the stories reveal are unavoidable.

What do the iconic events of our era - Pinochet's coup in Chile, the death squads throughout Latin America, Tienanmen Square and the capitalist conversion of China and Russia, the strangulation of the liberation struggle in South Africa, NAFTA, the birth of a new spirit of resistance in Latin America, the planes slamming into the towers in New York, the “Shock and Awe” unleashed against Iraq, the so - called "War on Terror," and the preparations for fascism in the US have to do with one another? What are globalization and neoliberalism, and how and why did they arise? Klein lays it out in stunning detail. See the finely produced short film that introduces the book at the link below.

http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/short-film

For all the horror and overwhelming power of the global elites that Klein depicts, her conclusion is as hopeful as it is realistic. She tells us, in effect, that systems based on shock, terror, repression and exploitation cannot be sustained. She puts the matter simply and with concrete examples from around the world: Shock wears off. The story returns, memory, continuity, coherence and meaning return. The soul returns. The victim of torture can come to her senses once more. Submission can be cast aside, the will to resist, the will to live, reasserts itself. Lives, homes, cultures and economies shattered by crisis and repression – wiped out by shock- can be restored. “Information,” she tells us, “is shock resistance. Arm yourself.”

Apocalypse No! Part 4: The True Sister and the True Brother: Love in the Age of Collapse

2007-12-07T01:26:00.000-08:00

Apocalypse No! Part 4: The True Sister and the True Brother: Love in the Age of Collapse

by Juan Santos

“…Only those who are obedient to the guidance of the Great Creator's laws will survive. If it is the will of the Creator, if the earth is totally destroyed by the willfulness of man, the true sister and brother will give a rebirth to recycle the earth and renew its life.”

-from the newsletter of the traditional Hopi Elders, Techqua Ikachi, # 16

Part 1: Gridlock

It is simply beyond me. The earth itself is dying, and most of us will die with it. Tonight in a restaurant, I sat alone with tears in my eyes, watching the people run through the routines of personality and “meaning,” a “meaning” adapted to a way of life that is already over, whose prognosis is terminal; I am all but certain I was the only person there who knew it.

It is not a hard job to keep them in ignorance. They are entranced by what the Hopi call Koyaanisqatsi, all of the things that glitter with death, that bind us in a spell of comfort and numbness to the radical reality of a life out of balance. That the masters of war and global death keep them all in ignorance of what is coming is made simple by their entrancement. It is a simple matter of keeping the spellbound asleep, of making sure no disturbance awakens them.

One wonders if such ignorance is a blessing or a curse. Was it better that the Jews in the death camps did not know that they were entering a gas chamber, that the entranced among them thought they were to get clean, rather than that they were about to be “cleansed” from the face of the Earth? I couldn’t say, because I know we are not heading for a shower, and I cannot find the right words to break the spell. Even if I knew them, I would have no means to speak them soon enough to enough people. I couldn’t really help them prepare, and the leap from this dull ignorance and the hypnosis of death, into a living rebellion and a thrust toward life is simply too large for them to make in the time we have left. We have no time left. With the Nazis at the gas chambers it was Zyklon B: for us it’s Carbon Dioxide and Methane. Although they are odorless –we cannot smell them- they’re already filling the room, and the first of us are already dying.

No, you won’t read it in the paper, certainly not spelled out just this way. They will tell you certain gases may cause death or “endanger millions,” as they put it now. They will never say that it is a system of profit, a way of life, and not the gases, as such, that are killing us. They will only tell us, in the words of the US president, G.W. Bush, that their way of life is “not negotiable.” What this means is that nothing will stop them, that to keep what they have – even for awhile, they will let the rest of us die. They will never say, “Yes, we could stop it, but we won’t.”

Instead, the sergeants among them will point their fingers, talking about Zyklon B “alarmists” while the President simply remains unconvinced that Zyklon B really kills. He will claim that there is doubt, scientific doubt, about where Zyklon B really comes from, and whether or not it is anthropogenic – made by humans. Conservatives will say that Zyklon B is essential for the economy, or that the nation must break its dependence on foreign sources of Zyklon B. The debate will rage on the back pages of the newspaper, the pages no one reads. And the ones who want to wake up, the ones who want us to live, will pray that god sends a message, but no one reads that paper, either. Their eyes are glued to “American Idol” and “America’s Most Wanted.” Others will write essays like this one that will be read by 6 thousand of the Earth’s 6 thousand million people. A few of us will understand what we’re facing, a few of us will understand in depth. Very, very few. One in a million, maybe 10 in a million. Even as more begin to stir, it is certain that they will lack the power to make a difference. The guards have guns, while the inmates have only their striped uniforms and television sets, their inertia, their poverty and 6^th grade reading level.

Not unlike Carolyn Baker, I am told by people whose focus is on the spiritual that I am too “negative,” too angry, that only love can save the world now, that I should give up my anger and distrust of the Good Germans with their Zyklon B, that I must forgive them, that I have “no Harmony” in my soul, that publishing “missive after missive” of bad news only “brings down” those who need their full attention to be placed on creating the spiritual conditions for the coming Shift to a world of peace and harmony. The advocates of the Love Solution have met me with contempt and anger and , as Baker points out, self -“righteousness.”

But the truth is that I have listened to them with deep carefulness. Because one thing is clear. What we have been doing doesn’t work. Another thing is clear to me, as well: that what we have called our “selves” is a temporary construct, a construct adapted to an artificial environment that is about to, unimaginably and unambiguously, disappear. But oddly, as radical as I have been these last thirty years – and I have been as radical as I could manage, and even much more radical than I could manage, I find myself stuck in the middle now, with no clear solution to this dilemma about love.

But, I know this. That the worst thing oppression has done to me is to eat me alive, to render null the meaning and potential of what I was born to be, to consume my time and my emotional and intellectual and creative and spiritual energies, to block me in from all sides, to make me constantly have to react to the barrage of abuse, poverty, physical and emotional suffering, exploitation, indignity, subterfuge, manipulations and constrictions that make oppression what it is, and which make the world go ‘round. I’ve known since I was 16 that this is not a way of life, but a way of death. The knowledge was more than I could absorb, then, but over the decades I have absorbed it, learned to understand it, name it, pin it, identify its games, their rules and their permutations.

But, looking around, all of that has not helped me to escape it, even though the truth of my own private mythology is that the task that was set for me was to understand it so that when the Time came, as it has come, I could help to create a new culture, one free of oppression, one that would not be a living death. Nevertheless, I still have to reckon with the reality that my understanding has not set me free. I know how not to live, I know what not to repeat. But, I don’t know how to live. I know only a little of that.

I assume that my situation is simply part of a larger one, a situation one self-appointed New Age guru has rightly described as an all but all encompassing Karmic Gridlock.

If today is the culmination of everything that has gone before it, if the current global crisis is the singular product of “history,” of civilization, then all of the contradictions of that history, in all of their permutations, economic, cultural, social, physical, mental and emotional, are coming to a head as part of this culmination, this crisis. The totalism of the system, of this way of death, has reached a new threshold we can call Gridlock and Collapse. The cat has caught its tail, the Matrix has trapped itself. It has destroyed its own options and has nothing left to feed on but itself, as if it were a cancer with nothing left to feed on but more cancer, with no healthy flesh left to invade.

Part 2: The Good News

The good news is that the death system is dying. It could come to no other end.

The bad news is that it has become so all encompassing that there is nowhere left to run if we were able to escape it. Escaping global warming would be like escaping the air itself, the atmosphere itself. But we cannot escape the air, there are no spaceships to carry us elsewhere, and we probably couldn’t breathe if we got there.

I don’t think dying is so bad, personally. I came close to dying a few months ago. Later, it occurred to me it would have been easier than living. If it were to happen, I later realized, all it would take is to close the eyes. Easy, but cheap and faithless.

What we have been doing – dying – doesn’t work. What we have been doing – fighting or resisting, or going along or “getting ours” – doesn’t work. It didn’t work.

And its time is over.

This whole way of life is over. Everything my generation rebelled against is over This cancerous consumption and the growth of consumption is over. It can’t take another step. As George Monbiot points out, if the economy grows by only 3% a year, global economic activity- and consumption- will double in roughly a quarter of a century.

Monbiot writes, “In other words, if our economy grows at 3% between now and 2040, we will consume in that period economic resources equivalent to all those we have consumed since humans first stood on two legs. Then, between 2040 and 2063, we must double our total consumption again. Reading that paper I realised for the first time what we are up against.”

There are no easy fixes. Short of a very severe global economic collapse there may be no fixes at all. An article in the Los Angeles Times shows why. The Times reports that overall there has been a 12% decrease in global warming emissions since the forging of the Kyoto Protocol. But, the Times reports, “It [the apparent success of Kyoto] was an illusion. The progress wasn't due to a global embrace of green power, but rather to the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, which shut down smoke-belching factories across the region."

Here’s the result of the Eastern Bloc collapse:

“Russia: Down 29% in carbon dioxide emissions since 1990.

Romania: A 43% reduction.

Latvia: A resounding 60% drop.”

Far from reducing emissions- an utterly urgent necessity – the Times says that “total carbon dioxide emissions from countries bound by Kyoto's caps have risen by more than 8%.” Among developing nations, China's emissions grew 138% since Kyoto was adopted. The U.S., the number one polluter, never even signed the accord.

There is no reason to assume that a market based plan that comes out of Bali will do any better at all.

When absolute survival depends on a certain set of actions, it is pure death and foolishness to set up a system with competing survival drives, one with built-in conflicts that undermine what must be done. But any market based plan does just that. In the real world, survival depends on cutting greenhouse gas emissions. But in the artificial world of the market, for the capitalist, “survival” depends on growth, on cutting costs, on making as much as possible for as little as possible – on making profit and on making more profit than your competitors in an ever-expanding cycle. Any market based system of “credits” to pollute – credits to kill, licenses to kill - pits the short term survival of a few capitalists against the survival of Life on Earth.

It’s not just greenhouse gases that must be cut. Industrial production itself – which produces greenhouse gases and a million other plagues - must not grow, certainly not at a rate that will cause us to produce and consume – and thus pollute - as much in the next quarter century as we have consumed in the entire existence of the human species.

Well, there is an alternative, but it is one that no government on Earth will ever embrace. The only thing that can stop the increase in production, and thus the destruction of all Life, is a Global Depression, which, by definition, drastically reverses economic growth. Maybe then we can meet the standards science says must be met – an 80% reduction in greenhouse gases - or more– a rate of reduction over twice the size of the reduction created by the Russian collapse.

Since any Kyoto-style accord can be nothing more than a deadly mix of food and poison, we may thank god that such a Depression, and with it, real reductions in greenhouse gases, seems increasingly likely, even inevitable. Take your choice: Relative poverty, even the deepest poverty, in the short term, or Global Death. But let’s be more specific in laying out the meaning of the choice. Consider this: James Lovelock of “Gaia” fame has projected that unchecked global warming will lead to conditions, where, by 2100, there will remain only 500 million humans on Earth, and they will live at or near the poles. Lovelock contends that the rest of the planet will be uninhabitable. Consider. By 2050 Global warming will have destroyed one million species of Life on Earth. Human global population is due to reach 9 billion in the same year. If only 500 million humans survive in 2100, that means that roughly 8 and ½ billion – about 95% of all humans living at mid-century - will die. It comes down to it: Either this way of death- in-life dies, or the human species will be eradicated or all-but eradicated, along with the vast majority of Life on the planet. Let’s revisit our premises. The market requires growth if individual formations of capital (banks, corporations, companies, businesses) are to survive; while Life requires no growth, or negative economic growth, if we are to survive. It’s that plain, that simple. In all likelihood, what comes out of the UN conference in Bali, which is meant to lay the groundwork for a “New Kyoto,” will be nothing but a compromise with global death, one in which death has the upper hand. Economic collapse is the one thing that might give Life itself a way to continue.

Of course, under capitalism, the state has a primary function: it is not to protect Life; it is to create a controllable populace so that there is a stable zone of production for capital, and to create stable markets for the distribution (including exports) of commodities, and the seizure of resources. In other words, to suppress the people at home, and to intimidate or conquer people abroad. Needless to say, economic collapse leads to war, as competing states seek to use warfare to maximize their control of markets and overseas resources and emerge from the collapse “on top,” The next depression will be no different, unless the capitalists realize that reconstituting their system is a hopeless task. Which, given the impending realities of peak oil, just might be the blessed case. Economic collapse, war, peak oil, and a vastly over-extended US empire are all intimately linked and mutually reinforcing realities that lead in one direction - to the death of the Empire and the impossibility of its resurrection. Let us pray and let us work to make sure its death comes in time for us all to survive it. Let us pray and work as if we were in line for the gas chamber. Because we are.

Part 3: Renewing the World

Let us pray and let us work and let us learn how to build a completely different future once this way is finally dead and buried. It will take everything we have, and more. It will take what we don’t have.

Since this way of life is over, since this culture is over, the fiction of who we have assumed ourselves to be is also over. We are not that. We never were that. It’s just that our survival in the system meant we had no choice but to pretend- even to ourselves – to be that. It is time, now, for us to deliberately and consciously to enter into what my generation called the psychedelic experience, the dissolution of our egos- I mean our stories, the stories we have told ourselves about what it is to be alive, to be a human being on Earth. Like an actor when the stage is being torn down after the show, it’s time to abandon who we were, what we were, what we said, what we did, and what we planned. That’s what it means to die consciously, to allow the ego to die, to let go of a life that can no longer be sustained. That’s what it means to die with joy, to see death as liberation from suffering. All the stuff the Buddha said. It’s Time now. It’s time to die, so that the world might be re-born.

I imagine, rightly or wrongly – I haven’t asked - that the people who’ve been preaching love and forgiveness to me already understood this. I don’t know, and it matters little. I let them work in me, I let their words dismantle me, even though I had felt profoundly insulted by them, even though some of the things that were said were arrogant and clearly meant to be insulting. Nevertheless, I began to give up the story. Slowly, the anger is giving way to sadness. Sadness is a step closer to love than anger. That’s good. Beneath the anger is grief, and beneath the grief is light and joy and renewal and the colors of the rainbow. Beneath the grief is life, not the phony “life” we’ve been led to lead, but real life. I know, because I’ve been down the road before. That’s how I knew to listen to the love preachers in the first place. That’s how I knew it was time to shut up, to sit with the impossible and let it answer itself. And here’s the deal.

Death’s own answer is love. No, it’s not death vs. love. Love is death’s own answer. The answer we have always needed under the death system is love - a way to love and a way to be loved. A way to connect, to break down, to open up. Oppression is nothing but a block to love, to connection, to inclusion. Love is the road. Oppression is not sustainable, and to that extent, it is not fundamentally real. It is doomed to collapse. Love is fundamentally real. Connection is fundamentally real. Death and oppression have no victory if we know we are connected, if we know that the door is open to our love, if we can still give it and receive it, if we can pledge it beyond the grave, beyond the prison’s bars. It is our love for life, for kids and animals, that we can pledge now, and pledge it beyond the grave, to a future we will never live to see. To a new world whose parents and ancestors we may become if we but choose it and lay the foundations for it. We will have to lay them the only place they can be laid, in the midst of the destruction and unimaginable anguish to come.

It is love that we, ourselves, will need, as the world we have been shunted into dies around us. What we will need is those who will love us enough to help us face death, the death of our ego-“lives” and the real death that will accompany economic collapse or ecological collapse, or both. We will need people willing to become boddhisatvas, people willing to try to become something like we imagine Christ or Quetzalcoatl to have been, people willing to be with us, in love, until the end, and beyond the end. It’s Time now. It’s time to get free. It’s time to become the True Sister and the True Brother, those who know they are related, those who know they are connected, those who can remember how to love, those who the Hopi said might renew the Earth.

-30-

Note: “Love” is the palpable assurance or insurance of connection and inclusion. It is the certainty of one's own connection and the guarantor of connection for the beloved. It is a verb, not a feeling, per se, and not only a spiritual state of being. It is an act of will; a commitment and a discipline and a capacity for understanding, admiration, compassion, risk and expression, more than it is a feeling or a state of being, although it is also these, as well. The palpable assurance or insurance of connection and inclusion is made manifest in acts that express admiration and compassion , and through work, risk or sacrifice aimed at extending one’s self and one’s boundaries to include the other, their well being, survival and spiritual growth. It is inseparable from and identical with acts of caring.

We are, as the Hopi Elders and other indigenous elders tell us, the Caretakers of Land and Life. Our role is to love the Earth – not to destroy Her. This is who and what we are, our identity and purpose outside the Matrix of Death.

In Nahuatl, the word for “humanity” itself is “Macehua”; the caretakers who are obligated to preserve land and life.

The Fourth World

The Next Steps

On to the Fifth World

Obama, King and Kennedy: Empire and the “End” of Racism An interview with Juan Santos

The Lessons of Gaza in a Time of Collapse and Rebirth: Apocalypse No! part 8

Children Of Gaza, Run To The Angels , by Suzanne Baroud

Capitalism at the Expense of All Life

Saving the South Central Farm: Listening to the Land

Obama’s Denial: The fear of a Black Messiah / Part Two of Barack Obama and the “End” of Racism

Barack Obama and the “End” of Racism

Apocalypse No! Part 5: Celebrating Collapse: The Coming Adventure

Apocalypse No! Part 6: The Tower: Breaking the Death Grip of Profit and Power

A review of The Shock Doctrine: The Face of Fascism in a Global System Heading for Collapse

Apocalypse No! Part 4: The True Sister and the True Brother: Love in the Age of Collapse

Juan Santos is a writer and editor living in Los Angeles, California. He can be reached at JuanSantos@Mexica.net