Derrick Jensen in Los Angeles:
A review and analysis of an evening in reality


I usually don’t attend these types of events anymore.

Political gatherings of folks who think that they are going to change the world when they can’t even hear one another’s arguments over their own wind bagging – it’s just too much of a farce for me to stomach anymore. But this time I decided to make an exception for an exceptional author – an author who is able to look the death culture in its face and see deep into its soul and live to tell (and write) about it.

I gathered up my tolerance, and hope, and got into my car to drive across Southern California to see Derrick speak. I was extremely surprised to see a very diverse (and overflowing crowd) packed into Sand Paper Books where the speech was held. The crowd ranged from youth to elder, represented many different ethnicities, and spanned the political spectrum from vegan straightedgers to seasoned anti-imperialist activists.

I have read all of Derrick’s major works. Books like A Language Older than Words, The Culture of Make-believe and Welcome to the Machine are lucid accounts of the inherent destructiveness and death urge that fuels Western Civilization and they articulate a world view that just might help us save ourselves from our impending doom.

Derrick does not flinch from indicting all that needs to be indicted, and he refuses to fear or despair at the realization that it ALL needs to go. Western Civilization is a culture based upon an anti-social death urge – a cannibal culture that will not stop until it devours every living thing it can convert to its own uses. There is none of the usual leftist denial to be found in Derrick Jensen’s writings – just an honest look at the reality that faces us.

More than anything, I went to see Derrick speak to get a feel for him as a real person – to see what kind of vibes he shot out and to see him as an individual rather than an abstract author. Is Derrick Jensen just a gloom and doomsayer? Is Derrick Jensen a misanthropic sociopath? Is he just another author that likes to hear his own voice? Is he just plain crazy? I already felt like I knew the answers to these questions were in the negative after reading his works but I still wanted to see the person in the flesh to get a more direct human feeling from him.

No. Derrick Jensen is not any of these things. From what I could see from his demeanor and his responses to the audience, he seemed to be a gracious, intelligent, caring and well grounded individual. He is not a man who hates humanity; he is a man who cares so much for all life that he feels compelled to do the one thing that most of us cannot bring ourselves to do.

That is to hone up to the reality that Civilization itself, with all its technology and promises of progress will never save us from ourselves. That it is time to abandon the delusions of historical progress and to return back to where we came from. We must turn back to the Earth and a natural earth based life way. We must move forward to the Stone Age once again.

As Derrick would say, the denial of the destructiveness of our present civilized culture grows from the reality that we will need to abandon nearly everything that we have been taught that we need to survive, in order to survive.

But as Derrick teaches, no matter the ideological opposition one might receive, that is exactly what we are going to have to do.

In metaphorical language, Derrick would say that our relationship to western culture is like that of an abused woman to her violent husband. She knows that she is being abused yet she feels that she is dependant on her abuser and although she wants to leave, she feels she cannot. She feels unable to make that break and dive into another reality that is free from domination and oppression.

Self reliance can be a frightening proposition to one who is trained by their abusive spouse, or their abusive culture, to feel dependent. But in order to liberate ourselves and our planet it will be necessary to look that fear in the face to reclaim our freedom.

Derrick is a very articulate advocate for a world view that is increasingly going to be making more sense to people in the industrialized world in the very near future. This world view has been labeled many things, from primitivist, to anti-civilizationist, to green-anarchist to autonomist. Whatever one chooses to call this world view, it is becoming more and more obvious to more and more people that this 10,000 year experiment in Western Civilization has been one of the worst disasters to have befallen humanity in the history of its existence on this planet.

The evident truth is that this civilization will collapse – as all civilizations do – whether one likes it or not. The question is whether or not you or I will be prepared when this happens.

Derrick would tell us that given this reality, the sooner civilization collapses the better, as each and every day lived in this civilization makes its hold over us, and our dependence on it, that much stronger.

Derrick asks us all; how long will you wait to do something? At what point does reality necessitate action? At what point does one realize that they are that frog slowly boiling alive in a scientific experiment? When will we bail out?

These are his questions to us, and we had all better take notice.

We are now witnessing the final days of Western Civilization. As this civilization decays around us – as the wars spread and the natural disasters increase in frequency – and as those trapped by western culture slowly break from their cognitive dissonance and open their hearts and minds, a new reality will begin to reveal itself.

Our task is to let this transformation take its course, and to speed it along where we can.

Derrick reminds us all that it’s time for us to stop trying to re-arrange the chairs on the titanic and bail off this ship of fools before we all go down with it.

The sooner the better.

- Jeff Hendricks




I urge everyone to go out and get themselves a copy of one or all of Derrick Jensen’s books.

If you would like to support a D.I.Y book seller, you can purchase many of Derrick’s books from Tiamat Publications.

www.tiamatpublications.com

Or, if you would rather save a few dollars and order the books from a corporate giant they are all available on Amazon.

Some of Derrick’s best books:

Endgame Volume I: The Problem of Civilization
Endgame Volume II: Resistance
Welcome to the Machine: Science, Surveillance and the Culture of Control
The Culture of Make Believe
A Language Older than Words
Strangely Like War: The Global Assault on Forests

Jensen was charming, funny and disarmingly plain. It is clear from watching him that he enjoys what he's doing, he likes thinking, likes the challenge of the Q+A - and doesn't pretend to have all the answers.

It was a great evening: the crowd was very engaged in the Q+A, and there was a lot of back and forth - not just the featured speaker pontificating. Jensen openly expressed appreciation and admiration for those who made comments from angles he hadn't thought of, and by evening's end we were all pretty energized.

Definiately not your typical speaking engagement.

I like Jensen's books. But it would be a huge mistake if all one takes from them and the bleak realities they highlight is a counsel of despair for the entire project of post neolithic "human civilization."

Another, more hopeful view is possible and necessary. First of all, nothing in history ever truly "repeats" or goes "backwards." Knowledge, once learned, cannot be truly be "unlearned," and discoveries made cannot be "unmade."

A lot of bad and toxic products have flowed out of civilization. But we are not the same humans as those who lived ten thousand years ago. We will not become the same by mere force of will. And neither should we seek to "become the same," because nostalgia is hardly ever conducive of any kind of positive change.

We are a product of everything in our social and natural environments. If we are even capable of thinking and arriving at insights about this world and producing works of critical reflection like Jensen's, then that alone puts the lie to the notion that humanity's current state is irredeemably flawed.

Read Adam Hochschild's book, "Bury the Chains," if you need a proof of the possibility and reality of social progress. It recounts the story of the birth of the first worldwide social movement of modern times. the antislavery movement that led to the abolition of the slave trade throughout the 19th century British empire, the world's largest empire at that time. The abolition of the slave trade in the British empire precipitated its legal abolition worldwide.

All the Enlightenment principles of human rights, and the great truths of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity that they set forth are important milestones in human progress. So too is the fact that, at the very time when the destructive potential of the human race has reached a global crisis point, the means of collectively and deliberately addressing the crisis also exist -- if only we choose to do it.

This last factor should be viewed as miraculously hopeful. Who knows if the hope will bear fruit;. But the very fact that, for the first time in our species's history, humanity has the tools at its disposal to communicate worldwide and initiate a universal, collective conversation about our future common destiny, at precisely the moment when such a conversation is most desperately needed, is extraordinary.

It might seem like a vain hope. But I think not. Humans are not amoeba. We're not necessarily doomed, like bacteria in a petri dish, to inevitably overshoot our carrying capacity and consume all the nutrients and oxygen around us until we hit a catastrophic global die-off.

We have a unique and novel capacity to communicate with each other. We have developed cultural innovations that could allow us to act with wisdom and foresight to head off the worst disasters that would otherwise strike us if we let greed and stupidity do their worst.

The future of humanity is not "backwards." it's "forwards," but into something wholly different than anyone has seen before or can even guess at. But the lesson we should draw from the bleak facts that Jensen points out is that, if human societies allow themselves to be seduced by power, arrogance, and comfort at the expense of others, if they start functioning on the "autopilot" set by social elites, then they are indeed headed towards continuing unfathomable disasters.

Apocalypse No!
an indigenist perspective

by Juan Santos


The Script

From the beginning, this culture—civilization—
has been a culture of occupation. - Derrick Jensen


It’s scripted: a tragedy whose end is embedded in its beginnings, an unfolding logic whose conclusion is the inevitable result of its premises.

It’s simple. And obvious. We find ourselves in the midst of the most rapid mass extinction in Earth’s history; we have the power to all-but end life on Earth. We can do so with nuclear weapons, today, in Iran, or simply by turning the ignition switch on our automobiles and gliding over paved surfaces where nothing can live. A little more carbon dioxide, just a little, will tip the scale - unleashing our potential for matching the greatest mass extinction ever – the one called The Great Dying.

Science has given us until roughly 2012 to take radical action to change the course we’re on. In the next six years, they tell us, we will determine the fate of the Earth.
With the US and its white colonial puppet Israel on a nuclear collision course with Iran and Syria, we may have less time than that.

250 million years ago 95% of all species died. Only one large land animal was left. Carbon dioxide and methane – the two most deadly of the greenhouse gases – were responsible. We can do it again. We’ve followed the script, we know our lines, and we’ve reached the final scene.

For that reason, this is a most exciting juncture for the Armageddon mongers among us.

That’s most of who believe in the colonizer’s religion, in the Beast, the Great Tribulation, the Four Horsemen, the Seven Seals, and the other visions of St. John the Apocalyptic, whose hallucinogenic fantasies penetrated clearly into the essence, unveiling the inevitable end, the direction this civilization must head and the end it must reach.

Fundamentalist Christians everywhere are working overtime to “bring it on”; they want to fulfill the conditions for the return of Christ, whose first priority and purpose in action, according to the book of the Revelation, will be the destruction of the Earth.

But first, the fundamentalists believe, they must be certain of two things: the stability and existence of the white colonial settler state of Israel, and that the “gospel” is “preached to every creature” on Earth.

Throughout history the “gospel” has been “preached” through conquest. Otherwise there might not have been a single Christian in the Americas, Africa, or, for that matter, Europe. Christianity spread with the Roman Empire, and, in the midst of the Inquisitions, “spread” to the Americas in the wake of the Conquest, a conquest in which as many as 100 million native people died. It spread to Africa in the late 1800s as Europe divided the continent and colonized it in wars that cost another 50 million lives. It spread like a disease, bringing death to millions as part of the two greatest, most racist Holocausts in the history of “civilization.”

A practical interpretation of the fundamentalist perspective might view the matter this way: the fundamentalists believe that they have failed to conquer the world, and Jesus, or the Antichrist (there’s little functional difference – both come as Destroyers) will come back and conquer it for them in the battle of Armageddon. For this scenario to unfold requires the existence of Israel, and, at a minimum, that every living human has heard the “good news” of “salvation.”

Then, Jesus will come back with a vengeance. Everything will be under control; everything will be dead. And if it’s not, then there’s always the Last Judgment for backup.

The images of the “end times,” the symbols of the Revelation, Armageddon, and the rest are familiar throughout “Christendom” – the lands and peoples conquered by the church and its allies – the people who survived, at least.

For many of us, they serve as a frame of reference that’s not only familiar, but normal – images lodged, unquestioned, in the subconscious and that function as a mythic encoded drama – a script about where we come from, where we are, and the nature of our destiny. Like all such encoded dramas this one frames our identity. It’s the myth we’re living, as Joseph Campbell would have it.

It doesn’t matter if you “believe” in it or not.

If you live in a “Christian Nation” and think you’re not a “Christian” – if you think you’re above all that, put aside the question of “belief” for a moment. Dwell, instead, with the images: The Beast; Armageddon; the Seventh Seal, and watch as their compelling power asserts itself.


A Way of Death

Our current sense of self is no more sustainable
than our current use of energy or technology. - Jensen


Since the dropping of the Bomb on Hiroshima the cultural identity based on these images has been shattering.

No one openly admitted that “success,” according to the script, meant success as the total domination and destruction of Life on Earth –even though we are on the brink of doing just that - or that the essence of civilization’s “meaning” is to be found etched in the shadows burnt by the Bomb’s atomic flash into Hiroshima’s walls. No teacher openly tells a room full of school children “Success means destruction and meaning, in our culture, means death.”

In the US, elements of the sixties generation either clearly understood the matter – beginning with Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the onset of the Black movement for freedom – or they were caught up in the mass discontent that spread like a wave from Ground Zero, and from the worldwide anti-colonial uprisings of the post-war era.

The most conscious elements of humanity got the deeper message – often at great personal cost: not only that the Bomb is evil, or that slavery, conquest and genocide are evil, but that this way we live is a way of death, in its entirety. Many understood that there must be an alternative, and they were by no means naïve or merely “idealistic” in demanding it “NOW.”

They were, rather, speaking the language of life, a language most were unable to hear or speak.

This was the impetus behind the great cultural transformations of that time. Much of the exploration, the seeking of a way out of here, led toward an embrace of various forms of salvationist ideology and practice – Marxist, Buddhist, Hindu and their thousand and one New Age variations - none of which break the fundamental mold of the civilization that shaped them.

So much has changed for nothing to have changed.

But underlying much of these explorations and permeating the approach of many of the explorers was a “new” – actually ancient, paradigm – one ultimately grounded in the science of ecology and the intuition of ecologists and those close to the Earth – holistic thinking.

This approach to the world has gained a toehold in Western Civilization over the last 35 years or so - just soon enough for many to begin to remember what indigenous peoples have always held close. The Earth is one living being. And now, as a species and as a planet of living beings, we have nothing but a toehold between us and the abyss.

It’s not just the bomb, of course, it’s the whole thing – the Earth isn’t “dying” – we’re killing Her. This is the Apocalypse; Mass Extinction, Peak Oil, Agricultural Collapse, Ecosystem Collapse, Nuclear War: the Apocalypse goes by many names. Its most occult name is “Everyday Life.”

Our “way of life” has never worked on planet Earth and it never will – every empire in world history has collapsed, every empire overshot its “resources” – and this empire will be no different.

We’ve had, as Daniel Quinn has put it, our Great Forgetting of our place on Earth.

Now, we urgently need a Great Remembering.



Resource Wars and Fascism: Babylon’s Way Out

Those in power rule by force, and the sooner we break ourselves
of illusions to the contrary, the sooner we can at least begin to
make reasonable decisions about whether, when, and how
we are going to resist. - Jensen



Cognizant that life itself has but a bare toehold on the planet, the bible thumpers are thumping, the business as usual clock is ticking, and the empire builders are gunning for oil.

They don’t think that when it goes down, they’ll go down with us. The bible-ists think they’ll be “raptured” into “Heaven.” The capitalists and super capitalists have their own brand of “rapture.” They plan to buy the lifeboats, to live in ease, squeezing the earth for every copper cent and ounce of oil left in Her. And they mean for their progeny to rule what is left after the wall comes tumbling down.

That’s what today’s massive and deliberate redistribution of wealth and resources toward the rich is about.

They mean to run what’s left on “clean nuke,” as Bush calls it, even though – like the reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas, uranium will mostly be depleted by 2100.

They plan to control the world’s nuclear weaponry, as best they can, and thus what remains of the oil. As the rest of the world sinks into oil starvation, economic depression, and mass starvation, no one – the US imperialists hope - will be able to challenge their dominance of the Earth’s “resources.”

In the meantime, they mean to overthrow or face down the Big 3, the oil rich 3, the new evil axis of Iraq, Iran, and of course, the newest target – Venezuela. Bolivia will not be far behind; it’s also hydrocarbon-rich, and its government is no more “cooperative” than the rest. Mexico, with its stolen elections, and Saudi Arabia, with its bloated royal family, are under control, for the moment, and Bush, the idiot savant, will never let go of Iraq.
The current US/ Israeli assault on Lebanon and Hizbollah is phase two of a plan to gain strategic control over the Middle East. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice calls it a “New Middle East,” in the same spirit as the “New World Order” declared by Bush1. Prominent members of the Bush 2 administration, such as Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others linked to the “Project for a New American Century”, speak openly of a Pax Americana and openly advocate that the US totally dominate the globe militarily, beginning with the Middle East.

The aim is to crush non-state resistance groups like Hamas and Hizbollah, to squeeze Syria, and lay the groundwork for a massive assault on Iran – whose vast reserves of oil and Islamic ideology represent the most formidable block to utter US power over the region and its oil reserves, and thus, over the world. "It is time for a new Middle East, it is time to say to those who do not want a different kind of Middle East that we will prevail; they will not," Rice said in Jerusalem.

The Project for a New American Century says Iran is “rushing to develop ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons as a deterrent to American intervention...”

Even the hint that Iran might – one distant day - combine its vast reserves of hydrocarbons with a nuclear capacity to defend them and thus remove them permanently from the grasp of the American Empire, has unleashed a storm of preparations for a major war - even a nuclear war - one pitting the US, Israel and Turkey against Iran and its ally Syria. Such an aggression could readily draw China, Russia, or even France into the fray in an effort to protect their own stakes in Iran’s oil, lighting the fuse of a nuclear Armageddon.

Make no mistake, however – the elites of each of these nations mean to milk Mother Earth of fossil fuels for their own benefit – not that of the US, and certainly not in the interest of planetary stability and the sustenance of Life. This is a way of death -rebel state, rogue state and Empire alike. Only Cuba is different at all, and it has no oil.

All civilization is about power and the addiction to power; Euro-American culture is permeated with nothing but power; all the West does is in its pursuit. For now, at least, they’re the “experts.”

Enter the era of resource wars and fascism.

It’s “necessary” if “civilization” and our “way of life” and “standard of living” are continue for even a while – even for the elites.

We are entering the dark tunnel of the new era now. The US’s colonial war of occupation in Iraq is a resource war. The overt threats against Iran, the rumblings and assassination plots against Venezuela and the bombing of Lebanon portend more of the same.

As the economy – and thus the civilization – based on oil runs dry, as it can no longer deliver, as it consumes itself in “economic downturns” the powerful will see only one choice. War and mass repression.

As the availability of cheap energy evaporates, as oil production peaks, Third World economies will begin to collapse, even as the Green Revolution – the hydrocarbon based agricultural “miracle” that has led to a doubling of the Earth’s population – also begins to collapse.

Starvation, mass rebellion and insurrection will become the order of the day for already impoverished peoples on a global scale. With the onset of increasingly dramatic impacts of global warming and the rapidly escalating depletion of the world’s aquifers much of the Third World may become as desperate and chaotic as sub-Saharan Africa is today.

The Pentagon has developed plans, not only for resource wars, but for dealing with a global and vastly accelerating refugee crisis – their aim is to keep the refugees out of the First World entirely. This is the backdrop for today’s targeting and scapegoating of migrant populations within the US and Europe. Under such conditions the ruling elites see migrant peoples as a potential source of acute internal instability.

As the Empire seeks to establish its hegemony over oil and to maintain its hegemony over its Third World puppets while suppressing its colonized and dispossessed populations at “home”; as it is forced to become increasingly brutal to carry out its aims (witness Lebanon) mass discontent and rebellion could erupt, even in the belly of the beast.

It would seem that mass repression –- even open fascism -– are the only things that might keep the peasants –- us – starving in line. Peoples of color within the US will be the first and most visible mass targets. But every targeted group – including women, will be increasingly at risk of overt, violent repression as the State careens toward open fascism.

If the destroyers have their way, there will be no light at the end of the tunnel we are entering, only starvation, limited but ceaseless resource wars, and the thousand year reign of the Anti-Christ - a permanent new Reich.

Their other option is Armageddon.



The City of God

“Hell is empty, all the devils are here.” - William Shakespeare


Even as Israel launched its devastating assault on the Lebanese people, US neo-con darling Newt Gingrich called it the opening phase of World War lll, and over 3,000 members of a Christian fundamentalist sect hit Washington DC in a mass lobbying effort to urge that the US attack Iran.

Their leader, the Rev. John Hagee, wants to bring on the apocalypse and believes the Book of Esther predicts that such an attack would set off the “End Times.” His followers are not alone. In 2002 a Time/CNN poll held that 59 percent of US citizens believe that the prophecies of the Book of Revelations will come true. Other polls show that roughly 40 percent of people in the US believe that a sequence of events that presage the biblical “End Times” is now under way.

Hagee – a televangelist called “Pastor Strangelove” by some – is the author of Jerusalem Countdown, which has sold some half million copies. It was the nation’s top “inspirational” book and stayed on best-seller lists for weeks. Hagee holds that the US and Israel must launch war against Iran to fulfill God’s plan – that they must launch the opening salvos of Armageddon.

Such is the wrath of god – or of those who claim to be god’s earthly representatives. As portrayed in the book called the Revelation it is a wrath extreme beyond measure. The book’s mixed metaphors, messages and morality are equally extreme.

Revelation 11:18 brings the message – and the confusion – home: “It is time,” the passage declares, “to destroy those who destroy the Earth.”

But that’s not what happens. Instead, in his vengeance, the deity – following precisely the logic of Western civilization, destroys the Earth himself. The most generous interpretation that can be offered is that he destroys the village in order to save it.

He then – having destroyed all Life - creates a new, “pure”, and patently sexless world to replace it. But really, it’s not a world at all; at least there is no description of the “New Earth.” It serves only as a backdrop to the “New Jerusalem.” It’s as if there were nothing but a city, a city with no countryside, no surroundings, no Earth, no sea, no animals, no life—a heavenly place, a place that can at last be ruled with no disorder – with nothing left to destroy.

The creation of this Disney style future is the aim and end result of god’s “plan.” It’s “god’s way” out of the conundrum of civilization, the way out the “World” that Christian fundamentalists are taught to “hate,” and to destroy even as they replicate it. The “City of God,” as Augustine preached, would ultimately triumph.



Babylon System: The City of Man

“The Babylon System is the Vampire” – Bob Marley


But the real City – i.e. civilization – obviously doesn’t work like that. The City, with its concentration of wealth, with its division of labor, with the inability of its population to feed itself, cannot exist without exploiting the Earth and the people that surround it. As its population grows in both size and density, it must expand its control of the surrounding territory in order to access more food and resources. This is the foundation of all Empire and mass enslavement. It is the beginning of genocide. As Daniel Quinn points out, the cultures that stand in the way of the city’s territorial expansion must be destroyed, or assimilated, which amounts to the same thing.

To get rid of the city – the “World” – is among the main themes of the Revelation. To do so, before he can create the Disney version, the New Jerusalem, god must rid the Earth of the real city – Babylon. Here’s the message: god, like Bush and the fundamentalists, is going to make civilization work – or kill us and all life while trying.

The most clear-cut and unequivocal action of the deity of the Revelation is the destruction of the Great Babylon.

Represented metaphorically as a wealthy whore, Babylon is explicitly identified as a city, a global capitol of commerce and corruption with links to craven, lust-filled businessmen in a network that envelops the globe.

The Rastafarians, certainly, have taken this reading straightforwardly and made of it a central image in their eclectic theology of liberation. They’re not the first and won’t be the last, to turn a repressive ideology on its head and make of it a liberatory one. Nor have they been the first to selectively emphasize biblical passages to fulfill their own cultural purposes – and the cultural purposes and functions of this myth are altogether different in the Euro-American cultural matrix.

While the oppressed – particularly those of African and Indigenous American descent - have made of the bible a “way out” of their oppression at the hands of their Babylonian captors, in a Euro-American framework the Revelation offers a different “way out” – a way to avoid responsibility for the destruction that comes as the climax of their “civilization.”

For the oppressed, in their theologies of liberation, apocalypse is restorative. It restores the natural order – it is the restoration, as well, of human justice.

In the syncretic Mayan Book of the Chilam Balam of Chumayal the sentiment is clear; the return of christ means the end of Spanish rule in Mayan lands. Once the Spanish have been driven out, the rule of Jesus Christ and the Mayan leadership will begin again.

In the most coherent and morally consistent of the indigenous prophecies -¬ that of the Hopi nation – it is said that during the Time of Purification a brave person will stand up and demand of the rulers, “You profit at the expense of all life. Come here and pay your debt.”

It is that payment – the moral and practical responsibility for the debt of destruction - that the Euro-American script encoded in the Revelation means to avoid.

Those who take refuge in god’s “rescue” and god’s “plan” fail to realize that we live in Babylon as if it were the New Jerusalem, and that there is no essential difference between them.

It is the emotional, psychological, cultural and economic compulsion to ignore the reality of that which surrounds the City and its elites that makes Babylon and the ecological destruction and human and animal oppression it represents possible.

The New Jerusalem, the “City of God,” is only an idealized projection of the same dynamic – except that in the “heavenly” case it’s projected that there is no real Earth surrounding the City – it has been and can be destroyed. Even under such conditions, the City – civilization - can, must and will live on. The triumph of will, the dominance of the City of God, is the triumph of Babylon, and both are predicated on omnicide - the destruction of Life on Earth. The so-called New Earth, in this scenario, is, apparently unworthy even of description in the Book of Revelation. It has no reality.


The Destroyer

“We also have to work… the dark side, if you will.” - US Vice President Dick Cheney

“In terms of the despiritualization of the universe, the mental process works so that it becomes virtuous to destroy the planet.” – Russell Means


The distinction between a Hitler and a “Good German” is a distinction without a difference.

Those who are not outright death mongers – which is to say those unconscious of the implications of the script, don’t get off the hook. If they don’t know, the chances are they don’t want to know.

The Euro-American rendering of the tale of the apocalypse nonetheless provides an inoculation against any real awareness of the reality of our global situation and against taking responsibility for its consequences.

In the US, the middle class is as addicted to power and to things – junk – as are the elites. The main difference is that they can only access smaller doses of these pain killers.

The addiction to power and to things leaves us, like any addiction, psychologically and emotionally “invulnerable.” That’s the whole idea; someone gets hurt, but it’s not us. We have ours. We don’t sympathize.

Hierarchical civilization is based on just this, something so simple; hurt, power, the repression of meaning and the evasion of consequences. The Latin root of “evade” means to “walk out” on.

The meaning of the myth of the apocalypse in its Euro-American context can’t be abstracted from these fundamental dynamics.

The Revelation story means that the destroyers of the Earth who “believe” in Jesus will be wisked away on god’s great broom in a moment akin to emotional/ mystical/ sexual “rapture.” The believer / destroyers get off the hook, and leave the “sinners” behind to suffer the final destruction of the Earth.

They “evade” – they walk out on – the consequences.

They are, after all, the “elect.”

We all know them; smug, fearful, arrogant: they all but identify themselves to us at a glance. They consider themselves superior, if not supreme, beings.

They “have theirs” – their small power, their willingness to hurt those “beneath” them, and a veiled fear of the consequences. They are the “civilized” ones. They keep the rest of us in line.

The script that underlies the Revelation has a message for them; it tells them this:

“You need not – dare not – think about or authentically acknowledge news about the impending death of the planet. You need not act. It’s in god’s hands – where all “spooky” things, all “ghostly” and frightening things belong. The signs of doom are not for you. This is god’s plan. It is not we but he who will destroy the Earth, in his just wrath against evil.

“But remember, you are not “of” this World – you do not belong here. The world is evil; you are to hate it as you love god. God himself hates it and that is why he destroys it. That is why he saves you –because you hate the Earth as he does.”

Such is the madness of god’s wrath. Such is the “secret” evil and madness of his followers.

Having then, destroyed the Earth, god replaces it. But this is no Garden of Eden – he’s not making that “mistake” again. There will be no innocence and no fall – those are no longer options. He replaces the Garden with the City State – the shining New Jerusalem. He replaces natural freedom in nature with civilized “security.”

There are angels at every gate. Watching. God can’t escape civilization. The story, the script, can’t escape its own premises. He re-enacts the inherent logic of destruction embedded in civilization by re-establishing the City State. He re-establishes the disease, the City that cannot live without destroying the Earth. This time, civilization is an act of god; god the Destroyer; god the Evader.

The Garden is gone. Forever. There is nowhere left to turn, no way out. There is a guard at every gate.

He hasn’t learned the most fundamental lesson: that life is vulnerability; that power – this kind of power - is death.

Is it any wonder the Christian fascists resonate with this tale?



Turning Point

“The time of warnings, passive resistance and conformity is already passed. All of us are now confronted with an enormous challenge: SURVIVAL" - Council of Indigenous Elders and Priests of the Americas

“A growing body of western scientific evidence now suggests what Indigenous Peoples have expressed for a long time: life as we know it is in danger.” - THE ALBUQUERQUE DECLARATION



We live in the most critical moment in the history of humanity on Earth, and at one of the three most critical junctures in the record of life on this Earth.

Hiding under our desks will not – no matter what they told us as children – stop nuclear war. It will not stop Peak Oil, the collapse of the Green Revolution in agriculture, the collapse of civilization or of life on the planet. Neither will huddling behind the bible.

We urgently need a different script, a different vision. It is time for a different kind of reckoning, a new Judgment. We need it now.

The possibility of global nuclear war is upon us in the Middle East. The window of opportunity to avert the most horrendous impacts of global warming is rapidly closing. By 2012 it will be too late. Some scientists, like James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia theory, say that it is already too late.

We need a new script – one that will tell us how we might save life on Earth, how we might survive what the scientists and indigenous elders alike tell us is coming. A script that will ensure we never make the same mistakes again – if we survive.

Those of us who sought – inspired by the upsurges of the 60’s – to re-evaluate all values, were right. Those who sought to counter the dominant culture, to decolonize, to seek more ancient and deep rooted spiritual, cultural and political values were right.

Some intuited what indigenous cultures have always known; the need to place our focus in beauty, balance, and the renewal of the world: to protect land and life.

Many intuited the bottom line: that we are responsible.

This attitude of rectitude and reckoning is inherent in indigenous cultures – which are, by definition, identified with the land, who are identified with all the power and personality of Place, and who experience themselves as an inseparable part of the web of life particular to that place.

Indigenous peoples want no escape.

They belong.

They know that to separate from the web of life is to destroy it; and the very heart of their spiritual and ritual lives is to maintain the balance between humans, Earth and Life in a spirit of reciprocity and mutual respect.

It’s been written of one indigenous elder, for example, that he “carries with him a little pouch filled with cornmeal… whenever he takes anything he needs from Mother Earth, he puts or sprinkles a little pinch of cornmeal at that place… By this gesture he pays homage to the Source of all life and survival.”

From the depths of this simple respect and from the understanding of the implications of separation from the web of Life, has arisen a kind of prophecy that, in its moral consistency and practical clarity is the antithesis of the Revelation. Among them are the prophecies of the Hopi, the Kogi, the Lakota and the Maya. There are many others. Perhaps some who are interested in a different vision or a different script might look there. My purpose is not to proselytize. No one needs to be “saved” or changed into anything they are not.

We’ve already been “saved” and “changed” to the point that many of us are out of our bodies and minds. We can, must, will and do find our own way.

Our task, if anything, is to cast aside the script we’ve been handed – to cast aside our colonization and “salvation”; to reckon simply, intimately and directly with our life –and death – situation, and with what we, personally, are going to do about it.

Perhaps we will be so fortunate as to learn that to know ourselves once again is to know the power of place and our relationship to it, to regain our role as caretakers of the land, and to find our place, once more, as part of the Living Earth. Perhaps we will be so fortunate as to survive.


Acceptance

“We need to take a close look at this and then really come to terms with ourselves. To move ahead into the next 500 years we must leave some things behind or they will contaminate or even eliminate the future. We cannot go forward if we keep destroying the earth. But we must also ask, what is good and healthy and helpful? Those good things can be part of our foundation, part of our pathway into the next 500 years.” - Navajo Elder Leon Secatero

The forces arrayed against us are immense, so immense that, even were the world to suddenly awaken to the depths of the danger – even if the rulers and the fundamentalists themselves were to awaken - the sheer inertia, the momentum toward destruction, might still carry us over the edge.

But in the US some 60 million people say they are gravely concerned about global warming. The war for control of the Middle East, and the moves toward fascism in the US, have made George W. Bush the most unpopular president of our time.

If – and it is a huge if – we were to wake up – to understand the utter magnitude of the threat posed by the US empire to the world and to all life on every front, then the possibility of an effective movement spurred by a tremendous and urgent energy might develop in time to make a difference.

It does no good, however, to note the slim odds – because if we don’t act in just this way, the odds of survival for most of the Earth’s species – ourselves included, drop precipitously.

For all that the Third World is destined to suffer the harshest of the coming blows, it may well be in the non-industrialized areas that any non-fascistic reorganization of society is possible. Cuba’s response to its national peak oil crisis is a case in point.

Not only are the Third World nations more susceptible to peoples’ struggles, but the fragmentation they will undergo under the conditions on the horizon, combined with the relative closeness of the peasantry to the land in those places, lends itself more readily to the kind of small, local, sustainable solutions that appear to be the only solutions that will be possible or desirable.

That is, if we manage, somehow, to avoid a nuclear World War lll, if global warming and desertification don’t turn the land into an oven, if local ecosystems can be sustained, or only partially collapse; if the aquifers aren’t depleted; and if the rivers and lakes don’t disappear with the glaciers…

First World conditions are more likely to develop in a fascistic direction. Going “back to the land” as a survival matter may not make any more sense for tomorrow’s survivors than it did for David Koresh to hold up in his compound in Waco.

Those best positioned and prepared to survive independently will be the remnants of the Native American nations, who have a recognized land base, and, in most cases, at least fragmentary living traditions and lore for living directly in tune with the land.

But there are no guarantees at all. The same ecological issues will confront First Worlders as Third Worlders who join in local efforts at sustainable communities.

How can we stop this? How can we survive if we cannot stop it?

The mind rebels.

Having spent thousands of years developing the tools of prediction and control, civilization has now brought us to a juncture in which war, water, weather, food, shelter and our very social structure will be less predictable than they were when we rebelled against maintaining our lives as hunters and gatherers, taking up instead what Quinn calls totalitarian agriculture – the “Agricultural Revolution” - in order to ensure a predictable survival. Our survival, human survival and advantage came first; no matter what the cost to the animal and plant life around us, no matter the cost to our fellow human beings who may find themselves socially “beneath” us and no matter what cost we might pay in our own tortured psyches.

We live – very truly – in a state the Hopi call Koyannisqatsi – life disintegrating; life out of balance; a way of life that calls for another way of living.

In 1980, Russell Means gave his most famous speech, called “For America to Live Europe Must Die.” In it, he points to another way of living. Means said:

”There is another way. There is the traditional Lakota way and the ways of the other American Indian peoples. It is the way that knows that humans do not have the right to degrade Mother Earth, that there are forces beyond anything the European mind has conceived, that humans must be in harmony with all relations or the relations will eventually eliminate the disharmony. A lopsided emphasis on humans by humans - the European's arrogance of acting as though they were beyond the nature of all related things - can only result in a total disharmony and a readjustment which cuts arrogant humans down to size, gives them a taste of that reality beyond their grasp or control and restores the harmony. There is no need for a revolutionary theory to bring this about; it's beyond human control. The nature peoples of this planet know this and so they do not theorize about it. Theory is an abstract; our knowledge is real.

“American Indians have been trying to explain this to Europeans for centuries. But, as I said earlier, Europeans have proven themselves unable to hear. The natural order will win out, and the offenders will die out, the way deer die when they offend the harmony by over-populating a given region. It's only a matter of time until what Europeans call "a major catastrophe of global proportions" will occur. It is the role of American Indian peoples, the role of all natural beings, to survive. A part of our survival is to resist. We resist not to overthrow a government or to take political power, but because it is natural to resist extermination, to survive. We don't want power over white institutions; we want white institutions to disappear. That's revolution.

“American Indians are still in touch with these realities - the prophecies, the traditions of our ancestors. We learn from the elders, from nature, from the powers. And when the catastrophe is over, we American Indian people will survive; harmony will be reestablished. That's revolution.”

With this understanding, we are free.

We have the freedom of truly having nothing to lose.

We are free to break down into madness, or into sanity. We are free to rediscover, to nurture our role as human beings – as caretakers of the Earth.

It is totally in our hands, and totally out of our hands.

We are free to break down, tune in and stop living as madmen bent on destruction. Free to give up our paranoia, our massive obsession with prediction and control, free, sooner than later, of the cult of everyday life.

We are free to, as the Elder Leon Secatero said, to leave some things behind. Free to trust, once again, our intuition, our bodies, our own thoughts, and to trust the rivers, the animals and our dreams. To be part of the world again. To belong here.

Even to die here, just as it is. Knowing our Place.
As John Lennon once put it in another context, the dream is over. A door is opening to the end of this madness.

We are free to walk through it.

Together.

Wherever it leads.

To life, or to death.

>This last factor should be viewed as miraculously hopeful. Who knows if the hope will bear fruit;. But the very fact that, for the first time in our species's history, humanity has the tools at its disposal to communicate worldwide and initiate a universal, collective conversation about our future common destiny, at precisely the moment when such a conversation is most desperately needed, is extraordinary.

The knowledge about our effect on the environment is, itself, a product of communication technologies. Until we had thermometers, we didn't have a number to measure temperature. Likewise, until we had computers, it wasn't possible to "know" about global changes in the climate. It was possible, but more expensive than it is to know, today. The scientists were probably harder to motivate, and the public couldn't get so much information, either.

Back in the early 90s, CBE broke new ground, and taught people in Richmond, CA, to gather air in big paint buckets. They then measured and recorded the air quality data, establishing that a local oil company was harming their environment, and their health. The company was forced to change.

Conditions there were bad for years. But, the polluters didn't "know" until the people being harmed could prove it, using science and technology, which is considered superior to folk knowledge. (They say, "people have been dying from the soot for years!")

There's a dynamic here between power, knowledge, access to technology and education, and what actions seem to be the best ways to achieve change.

If you have knowledge, acces, and some power, the best actions to take will appear to be those that exercise what you have. If you lack those things, the best actions will appear to be very different. Every ski lodge that's set afire by a radical ecological vandal is just another expression of powerlessness, lack of access, and an excess of knowledge that's supposed to be kept secret.

we can't blow up a social relationship.

It is an expression of love for our cause and our comrades. But unless it actually accomplishes something, it's a dangerous waste of time and talent. Symbolic explosions are particularly useless. Symbolic actions in general are useless. Whether they are violent or non violent matters not. Either way, they are merely symbols. We are are not oppressed by symbols, but by men. Kill them. Round 'em up. Heard 'em off a cliff. Put them in front of walls. Bring back the guillotine. Death to the ruling class. Kill them all. When the last boss is dead, the working class will be free, not one moment sooner. But remember, unless they all die at once and together, we will fail. If we kill only some, the others will kill us. Only a simultaneous mass uprising can rid this world of rulers. To truly globalize the intifada, we must first lay the organizational groundwork necessary to insure that our efforts are coordinated to the degree necessary for them to succeed. At last, advances in communications technology has made grassroots organizing possible on a planet wide scale. So now it's only a matter of time.

> Not sure about this- its a way of getting attention and of empowering folk. I personally like symbolic actions as a way of increasing people's motivation. Examples furnished upon request.

Lack of motivation is not the problem. The problem is that a few thousand men, and a few million of their lackeys treat the other six billion of us as livestock, and the countries we live in as pens, and most of us go along with it, not because we lack motivation to resist, but because we don't know how.

Do you want people to feel empowered or *be* empowered? Symbolic actions empower no one. If anything, they make things worse by providing us with a way to blow off steam. Steam should not be blown off. Steam should be used to drive turbines.



>Can people kill each other without losing their essential humanity?

Ask the Jews who survived the Holocaust by killing their guards and escaping Treblinka.



>Violence begets violence in a cycle that poisons all of us .

Balderdash. What begets violence is the perps' knowledge that they can get away with it. Except for a tiny handful of psychopaths, when wannabe perps know that they wont get away with it, they don't try. The best way to prevent violence against you is to be ready, willing and able to stop it with physical force. No one ever raped a .45


>Or are we just substituting a new class for our bosses?

Absolutely not. This is where anarchists differ from bolshiveks. They just want the boss's job. We want to do away with bossism. The worker self-owned, worker self-managed workplace is is the only safe, sane consensual future available.


>Most of the world still doesn't have electricity.

That's no longer true. It used to be, but not any more, unless of course by "the world," you mean the planet. If by "the world" you mean humanity, no, it's no longer true. A lot of people don't have electricity, but they are no longer the majority. The majority of humanity is urban.

The world of the last century, the one they taught you in school was "the" world, no longer exists. Time to recalculate. It's a whole new world out there, and it's getting newer by the day.



>Most of the world is still struggling to find enough to eat.

That's not true anymore, either. There is, however, a substantial minority for whom food is a problem, not because it is scarce (it isn't) but because they lack the money to buy it. This is capitalism. This is how capitalism works. Get rid of capitalism, and no one will starve. It's a bountiful planet. We could all live very well here, as long as we share, cooperate and stop over breeding.



>To a starving child in Asia, Nessie, you are the ruling class that needs to be destroyed.

That is patently absurd. To a starving child in Asia, or Africa, or South America, I'm completely and totally irrelevant. They don't even know I exist. Those people who do know I exist are a minuscule minority of our species, but every last one of them knows that I rule nothing and no one. I live a simple, frugal life. I waste nothing. I never give orders. I merely make suggestions. Smart people follow them. Stupid people don't. Be smart. Take my advice. Stop lumping all Americans, or all white people, or all men, or all Anglophones, or whatever group you see me as part of, into one homogeneous lump. It's an analysis at odds with the facts on the ground. Every single human being is an individual. Smart people judge them by their actions, not where they live, what they look like or any of the rest of that crap.

Actions are the essence of social process. Society is not composed of individuals. Society is composed of relationships. Relationships are composed of actions committed by those individuals. The act of ruling is what defines the ruling class. I don't rule, so I'm not part of the ruling class. Are you?

The problem is that a few thousand men, and a few million of their lackeys treat the other six billion of us as livestock, and the countries we live in as pens, and most of us go along with it, not because we lack motivation to resist, but because we don't know how.

I disagree. I think we are pacified with cheap consumer goods and lulled into inactivity with televison. I think its lack of motivation. I think if we had the will to resist, the pragmatics of it would be second nature. I think the majority have lost their will.

Do you want people to feel empowered or *be* empowered?

Of course, to "be" empowered.

Symbolic actions empower no one. If anything, they make things worse by providing us with a way to blow off steam. Steam should not be blown off. Steam should be used to drive turbines.

Interesting analogy. But in my experience, offering people opportunities for small successes primes them for riskier endeveurs. Others see results and are more willing to join in. It has a snowballing effect.


>Can people kill each other without losing their essential humanity?

Ask the Jews who survived the Holocaust by killing their guards and escaping Treblinka.

We aren't talking self defense here. Not an appropriate analogy.

>Or are we just substituting a new class for our bosses?

Absolutely not. This is where anarchists differ from bolshiveks. They just want the boss's job. We want to do away with bossism. The worker self-owned, worker self-managed workplace is is the only safe, sane consensual future available.

I don't disagree.

Most of the world still doesn't have electricity.

That's no longer true. It used to be, but not any more,

Its estimated that 2 billion people do not have access to regular electricity. Yes I mean the planet. Yes I also mean humanity

>Most of the world is still struggling to find enough to eat.

That's not true anymore, either.
Its estimated that one billion people go to bed hungry each day.

We could all live very well here, as long as we share, cooperate and stop over breeding.

We've likely reached the carrying capacity for our planet.

>To a starving child in Asia, Nessie, you are the ruling class that needs to be destroyed.

That is patently absurd. To a starving child in Asia, or Africa, or South America, I'm completely and totally irrelevant.

Not you as an individual- you as an urban American

Smart people judge them by their actions, not where they live, what they look like or any of the rest of that crap.

Do you have confidence that most people are "smart"?

The act of ruling is what defines the ruling class. I don't rule, so I'm not part of the ruling class. Are you?

Under that definition, no. But in spite of your frugal, simple lifestyle, do you doubt that you consume a disproportionate share of the earths resources than, for example, a comparable adult male in Niger?

Present-day US "radicals" have to be the most limp broken-backed excuse for same in the history of the world. The forces of perceptual engineering and social control mounted against this society are enormous and extremely effective. This project has been the actual raison d'etre of the "socal sciences," psychology in particular. From birth and via culture, political rhetoric, all media, the schools -- in short all dominant institutions -- your brain has been silly-puttied by design into a shape that will never pose a REAL threat to supreme class authority.

The people doing this have been at it continuously for thousands of years. They've got it refined into quite the incredible art form.

The proof of it all is in your neurotic conditioned aversion to doing the one thing that can actually work: showing them that King Kong is now fully awake, completely aware of their game, and eager to smash them into a puree if they don't cease and desist. By this I mean physically kill them*.

They know full well that King Kong is in fact in a flatlined coma and that their design for keeping him there is working perfectly

*That *intent* is the only thing they take seriously, because it's the only thing that can give people the resolve to overwhelm their means of control, which are superlative and openly murderous when the mask falls off. There has NEVER been a succesful movement to overturn class power that has not explicitly understood these things. Communists explicitly understood all of it. This is why your class masters have sought to exterminate communists everywhere on earth for the past 80 years

Please do not start waving around Martin Luther King and M. K. Ghandi. Think back. Where is it that you picked up your "enlightened knowledge" that these guys were supremely effective?

I'll tell you where: from government-mandated education programs and from billionaire-dominated mass media, including feature films, television, and ALL forms of news. That's where.

If King and Ghandi were really and truly onto the "ultimate weapon" to use against these elites, WHY WOULD THEY TELL YOU ABOUT THEMSELVES? Huh, fool?

There is no subject -- no area of perception -- that they seek to manipulate more drastically than YOUR sense of history, and in fact Ghandi and MLK were a joke. The British bailed out of India in the late '40s for the same reason they bailed out of 20 other colonies at the same time: cuz WWII laid waste their economic ability to remain in the global empire game. They and all the other royalists on earth just realized they could cook your brain after the fact by telling you "Ghandi did it," that's all.

King wasn't a serious threat until right toward the end, when he realized he needed to get more confrontational and build a bridge to the white underclass. This is according to Zinn. Building bridges between groups conquered-and-divided, this is extremely threatening, so that's when they killed him. Just like they killed Malcolm X WAY sooner. Malcolm X, after all, was WAY more of a threat -- way more militant and agitative -- right out of the starting gate. Listening to him wasn't like breathing valium gas, UNLIKE listening to King. X knew precisely what he was about. King was more like you, i.e. timid and compromised. He lived as long as he did BECAUSE he advocated non-violence

"Then you found yourself following a group of people who are so drenched in blood that they have lost their ability for human compassion. Can people kill each other without losing their essential humanity? I'm not sure of this. Can people kill each other in mass without losing their essential humanity? No. Violence begets violence in a cycle that poisons all of us."

This is such textbook canned "morality." You're quite the sponge. The root source of this stuff is, I believe, the Christian church, and guess what THAT is? The Western elite's main instrument of mass mind-control from 300 AD up until 100 to 200 years ago, and now very much on the rebound, that's what!

"The meek shall inherit the earth"

Yeah, RRRRRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT. Just sell me some Oklahoma ocean-front property while you're at it.

As long as you insist on thinking this way, the people who would enslave you and all your progeny forever don't have to even think about you. You're a castrated nothing. And that's precisely WHY they've been conspiring to get you to think this way for hundreds if not thousands of years.

You've been talking this shit

"[Symbolic action is] a way of getting attention and of empowering folk. I personally like symbolic actions as a way of increasing people's motivation. Examples furnished upon request."

for decades now, and meanwhile you've been steadily losing ground on EVERY front, AND THIS IS WHY!!!!! Yours is the exact nature of the trance they ENCOURAGE by tossing you meaningless "victories" every so often.

"Love conquers all"

"Peace is the answer"

These are the maunderings of cowards and slaves

Their most powerful weapon of all is handing you JUST ENOUGH privilege to keep you invested in the status quo, i.e. plugged into the CORRUPTION of class position so that you'll never have a self-interest in seeing what REALLY needs doing.

It all works so beautifully. They really are your masters

""Love conquers all"

"Peace is the answer"

TW: These are the maunderings of cowards and slaves "

Naw, they're the words of a person with compassion for humanity. Someone who doesn't want to kill a child's parents because they happen to be in a position of power. I tend to think that killing isn't going to do a thing. Others will rise and get greedy, it's human nature. Violence is temporary. Education can change a person's life. Law is obviously of upmost importance as well, and with enough energy can be reformed. How about simple things like consumer choices? Shopping at small cooperatives, such as, dare I say, Bound Together Books? And on an international level...donations and volunteer work are always helpful. If you truly care, consider donating to Oxfam...they don't just give food and vaccinations, they also work on a political level to make sure that these much needed supplies can get to the people.

Yes, violence can be necessary in dire circumstances, and fully acceptable as self defense. I see no reason to, in our positions right now, concentrate on violence rather than alternatives...our lives are not in danger, let us not jump to such an extreme before we do everything we can to peacefully help.

I take it you haven't read Derrick Jensen's books End Game I and End Game II - one you do you will then understand how it will help the World.

I am reposting this - it was hidden.

I have eliminated the identification of the pacifist poster as a racist - although I have left the argument re pacifism and racism intact.

My guess is that it is not the "name calling" that bothers the all - but - all - white Indy Media censors - but the identification of pacifism with privilege and racism, (and by extension classism and sexism.)

My guess is that even without the name calling, this will be censored again for that reason

_____________________________________

Check out this remarkable and unbeliveable statement...

"...our lives are not in danger, let us not jump to such an extreme before we do everything we can to peacefully help."

"Our" lives... are not in danger... who is this "we" who is not endangered? Who is not endangered by the possibility of the US launching a nuclear attack on Iran? Who is not endangered by global wariming, peak oil, the developments toward fascism in the US?

"Our" lives indeed....

This points very clearly to the first problem with pacificsm - that by and large it is the outlook of a privileged group who do not perceive their lives to be endangered.

In other words, it is an ideology of priviledge and denial.

Just to focus in on the USA - for those of us who are peoples of color face DANGER every time we walk out on the streets, danger from the official enforcers, danger of prison and death. The Black community is under siege, facing quasi-genocidal conditions of mass incarceration.
The Brown community is facing mass deportation.

But to hear the pacifist tell it, some mythical, universal white "we" is not in danger.

This pacifist then tells us ..."In my observation, people's world view tend to mirror their self view- if you are greedy, cruel and brutish, you tend to believe the world is greedy cruel and brutish."

If you are not in danger, you tend to think the world is not in danger - in fact you deny the dangers others face - you deny the reality of oppression. You call this denial "caring and trusting."

The pacifist continues... "I suspect our "friends" who preach violence, only understand violence. "

I suspect many pacifists are too fearful to confront the reality of systemic, systematic violence - or have never had to face it in the flesh. There is almost always that sneer - based on a Christian sense of moral superiority. The sneer actually translates like this... I / we are part of a _superior_ moral group, while _you_ are savages."

In other words much of pacifist's attitudes are rooted in the imagined "superiority" white Western culture - they view themselves as "civilized" (sneer) and those who disagree with them as savages.

This pacifist continues ..."I suspect the problem they have with dialog is related to this."

The "problem" with dialog non - pacifists supposedly have is nowhere substantiated. The racist/ pacifists comment reeks of the kind of dynamic so presnt in racism - we all "know" "they're" mentally inferior and "uneducated (uneducable).

This is the kind of "love" and """understanding""" pacifiists routinely offer. It is riddled through and through with sickness, prejudice and denial - a denial that ultimately _enables_ the oppressor.

Derrick Jensen: ENDGAME: THE PROBLEM OF CIVILIZATION

PREMISE ONE: Civilization is not and can never be sustainable. This is especially true for industrial civilization.

PREMISE TWO: Traditional communities do not often voluntarily give up or
sell the resources on which their communities are based until their communities have been destroyed. They also do not willingly allow their landbases to be damaged so that other resources—gold, oil, and so on—can be extracted. It follows that those who want the resources will do what they can to destroy traditional communities.

PREMISE THREE: Our way of living—industrial civilization—is based on,
requires, and would collapse very quickly without persistent and widespread violence.

PREMISE FOUR: Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy.Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.

PREMISE FIVE: The property of those higher on the hierarchy is more valuable than the lives of those below. It is acceptable for those above to increase the amount of property they control—in everyday language, to make money—by destroying or taking the lives of those below. This is called production. If those below damage the property of those above, those above may kill or otherwise destroy the lives of those below. This is called justice.

PREMISE SIX: Civilization is not redeemable. This culture will not undergo
any sort of voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living. If we do not put a halt to it, civilization will continue to immiserate the vast majority of humans and to degrade the planet until it (civilization, and probably the planet) collapses. The effects of this degradation will continue to harm humans and nonhumans for a very long time.

PREMISE SEVEN: The longer we wait for civilization to crash—or the longer
we wait before we ourselves bring it down—the messier the crash will be, and the worse things will be for those humans and nonhumans who live during it, and for those who come after.

PREMISE EIGHT: The needs of the natural world are more important than the needs of the economic system. Another way to put Premise Eight: Any economic or social system that does not benefit the natural communities on which it is based is unsustainable, immoral, and stupid. Sustainability, morality, and intelligence (as well as justice) require the dismantling of any such economic or social system, or at the very least disallowing it from damaging your landbase.

PREMISE NINE: Although there will clearly someday be far fewer humans than there are at present, there are many ways this reduction in population may occur (or be achieved, depending on the passivity or activity with which we choose to approach this transformation). Some will be characterized by extreme violence and privation: nuclear Armageddon, for example, would reduce both population and consumption, yet do so horrifically; the same would be true for a continuation of overshoot, followed by a crash. Other ways could be characterized by less violence. Given the current levels of violence by this culture against both humans and the natural world, however, it’s not possible to speak of reductions in population and consumption that do not involve violence and privation, not because the reductions themselves would necessarily involve violence, but because violence and privation have become the default of our culture.Yet some
ways of reducing population and consumption, while still violent, would consist of decreasing the current levels of violence—required and caused by the (often forced) movement of resources from the poor to the rich—and would of course be marked by a reduction in current violence against the natural world. Personally and collectively we may be able to both reduce the amount and soften the character of violence that occurs during this ongoing and perhaps longterm shift. Or we may not. But this much is certain: if we do not approach it actively—if we do not talk about our predicament and what we are going to do about it—the violence will almost undoubtedly be far more severe, the privation more extreme.

PREMISE TEN: The culture as a whole and most of its members are insane.
The culture is driven by a death urge, an urge to destroy life.

PREMISE ELEVEN: From the beginning, this culture—civilization—has been
a culture of occupation.

PREMISE TWELVE: There are no rich people in the world, and there are no
poor people. There are just people. The rich may have lots of pieces of green paper that many pretend are worth something—or their presumed riches may be even more abstract: numbers on hard drives at banks—and the poor may not. These “rich” claim they own land, and the “poor” are often denied the right to make that same claim. A primary purpose of the police is to enforce the delusions of those with lots of pieces of green paper. Those without the green papers generally buy into these delusions almost as quickly and completely as those with. These delusions carry with them extreme consequences in the real world.

PREMISE THIRTEEN: Those in power rule by force, and the sooner we break
ourselves of illusions to the contrary, the sooner we can at least begin to make reasonable decisions about whether, when, and how we are going to resist.

PREMISE FOURTEEN: From birth on—and probably from conception, but
I’m not sure how I’d make the case—we are individually and collectively enculturated to hate life, hate the natural world, hate the wild, hate wild animals, hate women, hate children, hate our bodies, hate and fear our emotions, hate ourselves. If we did not hate the world,we could not allow it to be destroyed before our eyes. If we did not hate ourselves,we could not allow our homes—and our bodies—to be poisoned.

PREMISE FIFTEEN: Love does not imply pacifism.

PREMISE SIXTEEN: The material world is primary. This does not mean that the spirit does not exist, nor that the material world is all there is. It means that spirit mixes with flesh. It means also that real world actions have real world consequences. It means we cannot rely on Jesus, Santa Claus, the Great Mother, or even the Easter Bunny to get us out of this mess. It means this mess really is a mess, and not just the movement of God’s eyebrows. It means we have to face this mess ourselves. It means that for the time we are here on Earth—whether or not we end up somewhere else after we die, and whether we are condemned or privileged to live here—the Earth is the point. It is primary. It is our home. It is everything. It is silly to think or act or be as though this world is not real and primary. It is silly and pathetic to not live our lives as though our lives are real.

PREMISE SEVENTEEN: It is a mistake (or more likely, denial) to base our decisions on whether actions arising from them will or won’t frighten fence-sitters, or the mass of Americans.

PREMISE EIGHTEEN: Our current sense of self is no more sustainable than
our current use of energy or technology.

PREMISE NINETEEN: The culture’s problem lies above all in the belief that
controlling and abusing the natural world is justifiable.

PREMISE TWENTY: Within this culture, economics—not community wellbeing,
not morals, not ethics, not justice, not life itself—drives social decisions.
Modification of Premise Twenty: Social decisions are determined primarily
(and often exclusively) on the basis of whether these decisions will increase the monetary fortunes of the decision-makers and those they serve.
Re-modification of Premise Twenty: Social decisions are determined primarily
(and often exclusively) on the basis of whether these decisions will
increase the power of the decision-makers and those they serve.

Re-modification of Premise Twenty: Social decisions are founded primarily
(and often exclusively) on the almost entirely unexamined belief that the
decision-makers and those they serve are entitled to magnify their power
and/or financial fortunes at the expense of those below.

Re-modification of Premise Twenty: If you dig to the heart of it—if there is
any heart left—you will find that social decisions are determined primarily on
the basis of how well these decisions serve the ends of controlling or destroying wild nature.

xii endgame, volume i: the problem of civilization