A leader of a major West Papuan political movement has praised the recent judgment of the Permanent People’s Tribunal on the Melanesian region colonised by Indonesia for the past 63 years.
“Indonesia knows they have lost the political, legal, and moral argument over West Papua,” said United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) interim president Benny Wenda.
“Their only remaining tactics are brutality and secrecy — brutality to crush our struggle and secrecy to hide it from the world.”
Saying he welcomed the release of the judgment of the Permanent People’s Tribunal (PPT) on West Papua, he added: “Our independence is not only urgent for West Papua, but for the entirety of Planet Earth.”
After testimonies from West Papuans on the ground and from legal and academic experts, the tribunal found Indonesia guilty on all four counts:
Taking by various means the ancestral land of the Indigenous Papuan people against their will, employing racial discrimination which leads to the loss of culture, traditions and Indigenous knowledge, erases their history and subsumes them into the Indonesian national narrative;
Violent repression, including unlawful detention, extra-judicial killing, and population displacement in West Papua as a means of furthering industrial development;
Organised environmental degradation, including the destruction of eco-systems, contamination of land, the poisoning of rivers and their tributaries and of providing the permits, concessions and legal structure of non-compliance for national and foreign companies to invest in West Papua in a way that encourages environmental degradation; and
colluding with national and foreign companies to cause environmental degradation, population displacement and sustain violent repression in West Papua.
The Hague,has hosted a Climate Change gathering prior to hearing the ICJ meeting where Koteka Wenda, fwpc spoke person from West Papua spoke, about WP being the 3rd largest rainforest after the Amazon and the Congo. “If you save West Papua, you save the lungs of the world” pic.twitter.com/aUJzV354qG
“This judgment is a total vindication of everything the West Papuan liberation movement has been saying for decades. We are not safe with Indonesia,” said Wenda.
“If we continue to be denied our right to self-determination, everything that makes West Papua unique will disappear.”
“But not only this: the judges also linked Indonesia’s ecocidal destruction to the systematic destruction of West Papua as a people,” said Wenda.
“As they put it: ‘ecological degradation can’t be disaggregated from state and corporate projects which are tending toward the obliteration of a people, or what was called by more than one witness a ‘slow genocide’.”
The PPT adds to the large body of evidence, including independent studies from Yale University and Sydney University, arguing that West Papuans are the victims of a genocide. Image: PPT screenshot APR
The PPT found in West Papua everything that the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights would also find — ecocide, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and mass displacement, said Wenda.
Wenda said thde ULMWP considered this judgment a “significant step forward in our quest for liberation”.
‘Nothing left to save’
“The case for self-determination presented by the PPT is comprehensive and undeniable. We already know that our people want freedom — the West Papuan People’s Petition for self-determination was signed by 1.8 million Papuans, more than 70 percent of our population.
“Now the PPT has shown how urgently we need it.,” Wenda said
“Our independence is not only urgent for West Papua, but for the entirety of Planet Earth.
Because Papuans are the stewards of the third largest rainforest in the world, the Indonesian occupation is one of the most severe threats to a habitable global climate.
“If Indonesia continues to destroy our forest at its current rate, there will soon be nothing left to save.”
Judges of the Permanent People’s Tribunal deliberate over the West Papuan issue. Image: ULMWP
On Papuan Independence Day, the focus is on discussing protests against Indonesia’s transmigration programme, environmental destruction, militarisation, and the struggle for self-determination. Te Aniwaniwa Paterson reports.
By Te Aniwaniwa Paterson of Te Ao Māori News
On 1 December 1961, West Papua’s national flag, known as the Morning Star, was raised for the first time as a declaration of West Papua’s independence from the Netherlands.
Region-wide protests Protests have been building in West Papua since the new Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto announced the revival of the Transmigration Programme to West Papua.
This was declared a day after he came to power on October 21 and confirmed fears from West Papuans about Prabowo’s rise to power.
This is because Prabowo is a former general known for a trail of allegations of war crimes and human rights abuses in West Papua and East Timor to his name.
Transmigration’s role The transmigration programme began before Indonesia gained independence from the Dutch colonial government, intended to reduce “overcrowding” in Java and to provide a workforce for plantations in Sumatra.
After independence ended and under Indonesian rule, the programme expanded and in 1969 transmigration to West Papua was started.
This was also the year of the controversial “Act of Free Choice” where a small group of Papuans were coerced by Indonesia into a unanimous vote against their independence.
Indonesia has also said transmigration helps with cultural exchange to unite the West Papuans so they are one nation — “Indonesian”.
West Papuan human rights activist Rosa Moiwend said in the 1980s that Indonesians used the language of “humanising West Papuans” through erasing their indigenous identity.
“It’s a racist kind of thing because they think West Papuans were not fully human,” Moiwend said.
Pathway to environmental destruction Papuans believe this was to dilute the Indigenous Melanesian population, and to secure the control of their natural resources, to conduct mining, oil and gas extraction and deforestation.
This is because in the past the transmigration programme was tied to agricultural settlements where, following the deforestation of conservation forests, Indonesian migrants worked on agricultural projects such as rice fields and palm oil plantations.
The ecology in West Papua was being damaged by mining, deforestation, and oil and gas extraction, he said. Mote said Indonesia wanted to “wipe them from the land and control their natural resources”.
He emphasised that defending West Papua meant defending the world, because New Guinea had the third-largest rainforest after the Amazon and Congo and was crucial for climate change mitigation as they sequester and store carbon.
Concerns grow over militarisation Moiwend said the other concern right now was the National Strategic Project which developed projects to focus on Indonesian self-sufficiency in food and energy.
Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate (MIFEE) started in 2011, so isn’t a new project, but it has failed to deliver many times and was described by Global Atlas of Environmental Justice as a “textbook land grab”.
The mega-project includes the deforestation of a million hectares for rice fields and an additional 600,000 hectares for sugar cane plantations that will be used to make bioethanol.
The project is managed by the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Agriculture, and the private company, Jhonlin Group, owned by Haji Andi Syamsuddin Arsyad. Ironically, given the project has been promoted to address climate issues, Arsyad is a coal magnate, a primary industry responsible for man-made climate change.
Conservation news website Mongabay reported that the villages in the project site had a population of 3000 people whereas a battalion consisted of usually 1000 soldiers, which meant there would be more soldiers than locals and the villagers said it felt as if their home would be turned into a “war zone”.
Merauke is where Moiwend’s village is and many of her cousins and family are protesting and, although there haven’t been any incidents yet, with increased militarisation she feared for the lives of her family as the Indonesian military had killed civilians in the past.
Destruction of spiritual ancestors The destruction of the environment was also the killing of their dema (spiritual ancestors), she said.
The dema represented and protected different components of nature, with a dema for fish, the sago palm, and the coconut tree.
Traditionally when planting taro, kumara or yam, they chanted and sang for the dema of those plants to ensure an abundant harvest.
Moiwend said they connected to their identity through calling on the name of the dema that was their totem.
She said her totem was the coconut and when she needed healing she would find a coconut tree, drink coconut water, and call to the dema for help.
There were places where the dema lived that humans were not meant to enter but many sacred forests had been deforested.
She said the Indonesians had destroyed their food sources, their connection to their spirituality as well destroying their humanity.
“Anim Ha means the great human being,” she said, “to become a great human being you have to have a certain quality of life, and one quality of life is the connection to your dema, your spiritual realm.”
Te Aniwaniwa Paterson is a digital producer for Te Ao Māori News. Republished with permission.
Raising the West Papuan Morning Star flag in Tāmaki Makaurau in 2023. Image: Te Ao Māori News
A West Papuan advocacy group for self-determination for the colonised Melanesians has appealed to the United Kingdom government to cancel its planned reception for new Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto.
“Prabowo is a blood-stained war criminal who is complicit in genocide in East Timor and West Papua,” claimed an exiled leader of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP), Benny Wenda.
He said he hoped the government would stand up for human rights and a “habitable planet” by cancelling its reception for Prabowo.
“Prabowo has also restarted the transmigration settlement programme that has made us a minority in our own land. He wants to destroy West Papua,” the UK-based Wenda said in a statement.
‘Ghost of Suharto’ returns
“For West Papuans, the ghost of Suharto has returned — the New Order regime still exists, it has just changed its clothes.
“It is gravely disappointing that the UK government has signed a ‘critical minerals’ deal with Indonesia, which will likely cover West Papua’s nickel reserves in Tabi and Raja Ampat.
“The UK must understand that there can be no real ‘green deal’ with Indonesia while they are destroying the third largest rainforest on earth.”
Wenda said he was glad to see five members of the House of Lords — Lords Harries, Purvis, Gold, Lexden, and Baroness Bennett — hold the government to account on the issues of self-determination, ecocide, and a long-delayed UN fact-finding visit.
“We need this kind of scrutiny from our parliamentary supporters more than ever now,” he said.
Prabowo is due to visit Oxford Library as part of his diplomatic visit.
“Why Oxford? The answer is clearly because the peaceful Free West Papua Campaign is based here; because the Town Hall flies our national flag every December 1st; and because I have been given Freedom of the City, along with other independence leaders like Nelson Mandela,” Wenda said.
This visit was not an isolated incident, he said. A recent cultural promotion had been held in Oxford Town Centre, addressed by the Indonesian ambassador in an Oxford United scarf.
The people of West Papua have spoken.
Just today (15/11/24), rallies against Indonesia’s settler-colonial Transmigration plan were held in:
Takeover of Oxford United
“There was the takeover of Oxford United by Anindya Bakrie, one of Indonesia’s richest men, and Erick Thohir, an Indonesian government minister.
“This is not about business — it is a targeted campaign to undermine West Papua’s international connections. The Indonesian Embassy has sponsored the Cowley Road Carnival and attempted to ban displays of the Morning Star, our national flag.
“They have called a bomb threat in on our office and lobbied to have my Freedom of the City award revoked. Indonesia is using every dirty trick they have in order to destroy my connection with this city.”
Wenda said Indonesia was a poor country, and he blamed the fact that West Papua was its poorest province on six decades of colonialism.
“There are giant slums in Jakarta, with homeless people sleeping under bridges. So why are they pouring money into Oxford, one of the wealthiest cities in Europe?” Wenda said.
“The UK has been my home ever since I escaped an Indonesian prison in the early 2000s. My family and I have been welcomed here, and it will continue to be our home until my country is free and we can return to West Papua.”
15/11/24 Jayapura, West Papua
Another angle showing that the rally against Transmigration was peaceful, but the police forcibly dispersed it.
SPECIAL REPORT:By Te Aniwaniwa Paterson of Te Ao Māori News
West Papuan independence advocate Octo Mote is in Aotearoa New Zealand to win support for independence for West Papua, which has been ruled by Indonesia for more than 60 years.
Mote is vice-president of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) and is being hosted in New Zealand by the Green Party, which Mote said had always been a “hero” for West Papua.
ULMWP president Benny Wenda has alleged more than 500,000 Papuans have been killed since the occupation, and millions of hectares of ancestral forests, rivers and mountains have been destroyed or polluted for “corporate profit”.
The struggle for West Papuans “Being born a West Papuan, you are already an enemy of the nation [Indonesia],” Mote says.
“The greatest challenge we are facing right now is that we are facing the colonial power who lives next to us.”
If West Papuans spoke up about what was happening, they were considered “separatists”, Mote says, regardless of whether they are journalists, intellectuals, public servants or even high-ranking Indonesian generals.
“When our students on the ground speak of justice, they’re beaten up, put in jail and [the Indonesians] kill so many of them,” Mote says.
Mote is a former journalist and says that while he was working he witnessed Indonesian forces openly fire at students who were peacefully demonstrating their rights.
“We are in a very dangerous situation right now. When our people try to defend their land, the Indonesian government ignores them and they just take the land without recognising we are landowners,” he says.
The ‘ecocide’ of West Papua The ecology in West Papua iss being damaged by mining, deforestation, and oil and gas extraction. Mote says Indonesia wants to “wipe them from the land and control their natural resources”.
He says he is trying to educate the world that defending West Papua means defending the world, especially small islands in the Pacific.
West Papua is the western half of the island of New Guinea, bordering the independent nation of Papua New Guinea. New Guinea has the world’s third-largest rainforest after the Amazon and Congo and it is crucial for climate change mitigation as they sequester and store carbon.
Mote says the continued deforestation of New Guinea, which West Papuan leaders are trying to stop, would greatly impact on the small island countries in the Pacific, which are among the most vulnerable to climate change.
Mote also says their customary council in West Papua has already considered the impacts of climate change on small island nations and, given West Papua’s abundance of land the council says that by having sovereignty they would be able to both protect the land and support Pacific Islanders who need to migrate from their home islands.
In 2021, West Papuan leaders pledged to make ecocide a serious crime and this week Vanuatu, Fiji and Samoa submitted a court proposal to the International Criminal Court (ICJ) to recognise ecocide as a crime.
Support from local Indonesians Mote says there are Indonesians who support the indigenous rights movement for West Papuans. He says there are both NGOs and a Papuan Peace Network founded by West Papuan peace campaigner Neles Tebay.
“There is a movement growing among the academics and among the well-educated people who have read the realities among those who are also victims of the capitalist investors, especially in Indonesia when they introduced the Omnibus Law.”
The so-called Omnibus Law was passed in 2020 as part of outgoing President Joko Widodo’s goals to increase investment and industrialisation in Indonesia. The law was protested against because of concerns it would be harmful for workers due to changes in working conditions, and the environment because it would allow for increased deforestation.
Mote says there has been an “awakening”, especially among the younger generations who are more open-minded and connected to the world, who could see it both as a humanitarian and an environmental issue.
The ‘transfer’ of West Papua to Indonesia “The [former colonial nation] Dutch [traded] us like a cow,” Mote says.
The former Dutch colony was passed over to Indonesia in 1963 in disputed circumstances but the ULMWP calls it an “invasion”.
From 1957, the Soviet Union had been supplying arms to Indonesia and, during that period, the Indonesian Communist Party had become the largest political party in the country.
The US engineered a meeting between both countries, which resulted in the New York Agreement, giving control of West Papua to the UN in 1962 and then Indonesia a year later.
The New York Agreement stipulated that the population of West Papua would be entitled to an act of self-determination.
The ‘act of no choice’ This decolonisation agreement was titled the 1969 Act of Free Choice, which is referred to as “the act of no choice” by pro-independence activists.
Mote says they witnessed “how the UN allowed Indonesia to cut us into pieces, and they didn’t say anything when Indonesia manipulated our right to self-determination”.
The manipulation Mote refers to is for the Act of Free Choice. Instead of a national referendum, the Indonesian military hand-picked 1025 West Papuan “representatives” to vote on behalf of the 816,000 people. The representatives were allegedly threatened, bribed and some were held at gunpoint to ensure a unanimous vote.
Leaders of the West Papuan independence movement assert that this was not a real opportunity to exercise self-determination as it was manipulated. However, it was accepted by the UN.
Pacific support at UN General Assembly Mote has came to Aotearoa after the 53rd Pacific Island Forum Leaders summit in Tonga last week and he has come to discuss plans over the next five years. Mote hopes to gain support to take what he calls the “slow-motion genocide” of West Papua back to the UN General Assembly.
“In that meeting we formulated how we can help really push self-determination as the main issue in the Pacific Islands,” Mote says.
Mote says there was a focus on self-determination of West Papua, Kanaky/New Caledonia and Tahiti. He also said the focus was on what he described as the current colonisation issue with capitalists and global powers having vested interests in the Pacific region.
The movement got it to the UN General Assembly in 2018, so Mote says it is achievable. In 2018, Pacific solidarity was shown as the Republic of the Marshall Islands, Tuvalu and the Republic of Vanuatu all spoke out in support of West Papua.
They affirmed the need for the matter to be returned to the United Nations, and the Solomon Islands voiced its concerns over human rights abuses and violations.
ULMWP vice-president Octo Mote . . . in the next five years Pacific nations need to firstly make the Indonesian government “accountable” for its actions in West Papua. Image: Poster screenshot
What needs to be done He says that in the next five years Pacific nations need to firstly make the Indonesian government accountable for its actions in West Papua. He also says outgoing President Widodo should be held accountable for his “involvement”.
Mote says New Zealand is the strongest Pacific nation that would be able to push for the human rights and environmental issues happening, especially as he alleges Australia always backs Indonesian policies.
He says he is looking to New Zealand to speak up about the atrocities taking place in West Papua and is particularly looking for support from the Greens, Labour and Te Pāti Māori for political support.
The coalition government announced a plan of action on July 30 this year, which set a new goal of $6 billion in annual two-way trade with Indonesia by 2029.
“New Zealand is strongly committed to our partnership with Indonesia,” Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters said at the time.
“There is much more we can and should be doing together.”
Te Aniwaniwa Paterson is a digital producer for Te Ao Māori News. Republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.
Image: researched, obtained and verified by @tibettruth
Have you noticed increasing mentions of China’s so-called green credentials? Across social media we see various environmentalists and organizations praising Chinese investments in renewable energy projects. Talk about being one-eyed! Seems the cult of reducing man-made CO2 emissions is tolerant of anything that realizes such an objective. Including the degradation and ecocide which China has inflicted upon the once pristine lands of Tibet!
Israel’s relentless bombing campaign in Gaza has, over the course of 300 days, created a staggering amount of debris — not only burying Palestinians alive and destroying life-supporting infrastructure, but also putting Palestinians at risk to a number of pollutants that could cause diseases like cancer long after the genocide has ended. According to an assessment of satellite imagery by UN…
The Chinese Academy of Lies (oops a typo there) ‘Sciences’ has today issued a report claiming, thanks to ‘environmental security’ interventions of the Chinese Regime, Tibet’s ecology is now flourishing. Clearly it required the invasion and military occupation of Tibet to enable this supposed improvement. Meanwhile, on the ground, far from the cynical lies of China’s disinformation the lands of Tibet are being denuded, its soils and waters polluted, while the once lush forested valleys of Eastern Tibet, destroyed leaving a lunar-like landscape.
West Papuan pro-independence supporters are calling Indonesia’s condemnation of Israel hypocritical considering its occupation of Papua for 61 years.
The Indonesian government, through the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the President, has condemned the Israeli government’s handling of the conflict in Gaza.
In a statement, a United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) spokesperson said: “Indonesia’s stance on the international stage contrasts with its actions in Papua”.
“Indonesia mediates conflicts in several Asian countries but lacks a roadmap for resolving the conflict in Papua.”
The group is calling for the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to immediately form a fact-finding mission to investigate alleged human rights violations. They have also asked for a review of Indonesia’s UN membership.
In November last year, the Pacific Islands Forum appointed the Fiji and Papua New Guinea prime ministers as special envoys to Indonesia to “address the West Papua issue“.
The ULMWP are asking for Indonesia to let the two leaders visit Papua.
Hard to compare with Gaza
Human Rights Watch researcher in Indonesia Andreas Harsono said the situation in West Papua was hard to compare to Gaza.
“Palestine, Gaza and the West Bank, of course, is recognised by more than 130 countries, members of the United Nations. Meanwhile, West Papua is being discussed mostly among seven or maybe 10 other countries, so this is difficult to compare.”
He said Indonesia — the most populous Muslim majority country — had religion in common with Palestine.
But Harsono said West Papua did need more international attention and there was little understanding of the conflict inside Indonesia because of propaganda.
ULMWP executive secretary Markus Haluk reiterated calls for a UN fact-finding mission.
“We want the UN to send their fact-finding mission to West Papua to witness and to prove that there is a slow-motion genocide, ethnocide and ecocide happening in West Papua,” Haluk said, speaking to RNZ Pacific through a translator.
It is an ongoing plea for the United Nations to visit. In 2019, the Indonesian government agreed in principle to a visit by the Human Rights Commissioner but that promise has not been fulfilled.
Haluk said the “big brothers” in the region — referring to New Zealand and Australia — could bring up the UN fact-finding mission when the nation’s leaders meet with their Indonesian counterparts.
“There has been several visits by the leaders but it seems like the issue of West Papua is not as important as the other issues such as trade,” he said.
‘Refusing to take responsibility’ Former New Zealand Greens MP Catherine Delahunty said she felt frustrated that West Papua had not got the attention it should, especially considering it was in “our own backyard”.
Nearly all foreign media has been banned from entering West Papua.
“Anyone that criticises the regime has great difficulty getting into that country to report and local journalists are subjected to sustained threats and so we’re in a very unhealthy situation in terms of public understanding of just how drastic the situation is,” she said.
Delahunty said Indonesia had been intimidating smaller nations, while larger ones like New Zealand and Australia were “refusing to act”.
“They are refusing to take responsibility for their own part in allowing this to continue.”
She said New Zealand and Australia could create consequences for Indonesia if it continued to not allow the fact-finding mission, by doing things like stopping military exchanges.
A spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade said New Zealand “follows human rights developments closely, and takes all allegations of human rights violations seriously”.
“New Zealand continues to register concerns about the human rights situation in Papua via appropriate fora. New Zealand encourages Indonesia to promote and protect the rights of all its citizens, and to be transparent in policy relating to Papua.
“New Zealand recognises Indonesia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, including in Papua.”
In a statement to RNZ Pacific, the Indonesian Embassy in Wellington said the government of Indonesia was committed to accelerate the development of all provinces, “including our brothers and sisters in Papua”, to lead and enjoy a prosperous way of life.
“Papua is highly respected as an honourable region and will continue to be maintained as such,” it said.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
For more than 76 years, Palestinians have resisted occupation, dispossession and ethnic cleansing, culminating in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.
Yet in the midst of this catastrophic seven months of “hell on earth”, it is a paradox that there exists an extraordinary oasis of peace and nature.
Nestling in an Al-Karkarfa hillside at the University of Bethlehem is the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability (PIBS), a remarkable botanical garden and animal rehabilitation unit that is an antidote for conflict and destruction.
“There is both a genocide and an ecocide going on, supported by some Western governments against the will of the Western public,” says environmental justice advocate Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh, the founder and director of the institute.
It has been a hectic week for him and his wife and mentor Jessie Chang Qumsiyeh.
On Wednesday, May 15 — Nakba Day 2024 — they were in Canberra in conversation with local Palestinian, First Nations and environmental campaigners. Nakba – “the catastrophe” in English — is the day of mourning for the destruction of Palestinian society and its homeland in 1948, and the permanent displacement of a majority of the Palestinian people (14 million, of which about 5.3 million live in the “State of Palestine”.)
Three days later in Auckland, they were addressing about 250 people with a Palestinian Christian perspective on Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine and the war in the historic St Mary’s-in-Holy-Trinity Church in Parnell.
This followed a lively presentation and discussion on the work of the PIBS and its volunteers at the annual general meeting of Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) along with more than 100 young and veteran activists such as chair John Minto, who had just returned from a global solidarity conference in South Africa.
Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh’s speech at Saint Mary’s-in-Holy-Trinity Church in Parnell. Video: Radio Inqilaab
Environmental impacts less understood
While the horrendous social and human costs of the relentless massacres in Gaza are in daily view on the world’s television screens, the environmental impacts of the occupation and destruction of Palestine are less understood.
As Professor Qumsiyeh explains, water sources have been restricted, destroyed and polluted; habitat loss is pushing species like wolves, gazelles, and hyenas to the brink; destruction of crops and farmland drives food insecurity; and climate crisis is already impacting on Palestine and its people.
The PIBS oasis as pictured on the front cover of the institute’s latest annual report. Image: David Robie/APR
The institute was initiated in 2014 by the Qumsiyehs at Bethlehem University along with a host of volunteers and supporters. After 11 years of operation, the latest PIBS 2023 annual report provides a surprisingly up-to-date and telling preface feeding into the early part of this year.
“In 2023, there were increased restrictions on movement, settler and soldier attacks on Palestinians throughout the occupied territories, combined with the ongoing siege and strangulation of the Gaza Strip, under Israel’s extreme rightwing government.
“This led to the Gaza ghetto uprising that started on 7 October 2023. The Israeli regime’s ongoing response is a genocidal campaign in Gaza.
Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh . . . In contrast to false perceptions of violence about Palestinians, “these methods have been the exception to what is a peaceful and creative.” Image: Del Abcede/Pax Christi
“[Since that date], 35,500 civilians were brutally killed, 79,500 were wounded (72 percent women and children) and nearly 2 million people displaced. Thousands more still lay under the rubble.
“An immense amount – nearly two-thirds – of Gaza’s infrastructure was destroyed , including 70 per cent of residential buildings, hospitals, schools, universities and government buildings.
Total food, water blockade
“Israel also imposed a total blockade of, among other things, fuel, food, water, and medicine.
“This fits the definition of genocide per international law.
“Israel also attacked the West Bank, killing hundreds of Palestinians in 2023 (and into 2024), destroyed homes and infrastructure (especially in refugee camnps), arrested thousands of innocent civilians, and ethnically cleansed communities in Area C.
“Many of these marginalised communities were those that worked with the institute on issues of biodiversity and sustainability.”
This is the context and the political environment that Professor Qumsiyeh confronts in his daily sustainability struggle. He is committed to a vision of sustainable human and natural communities, responding to the growing needs for education, community service, and protection of land and environment.
Popular Resistance in Palestine cover (2011). Image: Pluto Press/APR
In one of his many books, Popular Resistance in Palestine: A history of Hope and Empowerment, he argues that in contrast to how Western media usually paints Palestine resistance as exclusively violent: armed resistance, suicide bombings, and rocket attacks. “In reality,” he says, “these methods have been the exception to what is a peaceful and creative
Call for immediate ceasefire
An enormous global movement has been calling for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, to end decades of colonisation, and work toward a free Palestine that delivers sustainable peace for all in the region.
Professor Qumsiyeh reminded the audience at St Mary’s that the first Christians were in Palestine.
“The Romans used to feed us to the lions until the 4 th century,” when ancient Rome adopted Christianity and it became the Holy Roman Empire.
He spoke about how Christians had also paid a high price for Israel’s war on Gaza as well as Muslims.
PSNA’s Billy Hania . . . a response to Professor Qumsiyeh. Image: David Robie/APR
Christendom’s third oldest church and the oldest in Gaza, the Greek Orthodox church of Saint Porphyrius in the Zaytoun neighbourhood — which had served as a sanctuary for both Christians and Muslims during Israel’s periodic wars was bombed just 12 days after the start of the current war.
There had been about 1000 Christians in Gaza; 300 mosques had been bombed.
He said “everything we do is suspect, we are harassed and attacked by the Israelis”.
‘Don’t want children to be happy’
“They don’t want children to be happy, they have killed 15,000 of them in Gaza. They don’t want us to survive.”
Palestine action for the planet . . . a slide from Professor Qumsiyeh’s talk earlier in the day at the PSNA annual general meeting. Image: David Robie/APR
He said colonisers did not seem to like diversity — they destroy it, whether it is human diversity, biodiversity.
“Palestine is a multiethnic, multicultural and multireligious country.”
“Diversity is healthy, an equal system. We have all sorts of religions in our part of the world.
“Life would be boring if we were all the same – that’s human. A forest with only one kind of trees is not healthy.’
Professor Qumsiyeh was critical of much Western news media.
“If you watch Western media, Fox news and so on, you would be told that we are people who have been fighting for years.”
That wasn’t true. “We had the most peaceful country on earth.”
“If you go back a few years, to the Crusades, that is when political ideas from Europe such as principalities and kingdoms started to spread.”
Heading into nuclear war
He warned against a world that was rushing headlong into a nuclear war, which would be devastating for the planet – “only cockroaches can survive a nuclear war.”
“Humanity for Gaza” . . . a slide from Professor Qumsiyeh’s talk earlier in the day. Image: David Robie
Professor Qumsiyeh likened his role to that of a shepherd, “telling the world that something must be done” to protect food sovereignty and biodiversity as “climate change is coming to us with a vengeance. So please help us achieve the goal.”
The institute says that they are leaders in “disseminating information and ideas to challenge the propaganda spread about Palestine”.
It annual report says: “We published 17 scientific articles on areas like environmental justice, protected areas, national parks, fauna, and flora.
“Our team gave over 210 talks locally, only and abroad, and over 200 interviews (radio and TV).
“We produced statements responding to attacks on institutions for higher education, natural areas, and cultural heritage.
“We published research on the impact of war, on Israel’s weaponisation of ‘nature reserves’ and ‘national parks, and a vision for peace based on justice and sustainability.”
When it is considered that Israel destroyed all 12 universities in Gaza, the sustaining work of the institute on many fronts is vital.
Professor Qumsiyeh also appealed for volunteers, interns and researchers to come to Bethlehem to help the institute to contribute to a “more liveable world”.
Seven months of Israel’s genocidal attack — with massive U.S. support — has left more than 35,000 Gazans dead with thousands more missing and tens of thousands injured. Israel has obliterated more than 70 percent of all homes in Gaza. Hospitals and ambulances have been destroyed, with medical staff imprisoned, tortured and killed. The annihilation of Palestinian life and culture includes…
The widespread destruction Israel’s military has inflicted on Gaza’s farmland and agricultural infrastructure amounts to a “deliberate act of ecocide,” according to a new investigation that uses satellite imagery to survey the extent of the damage. Released Friday ahead of Palestine’s Land Day, the analysis by the London-based research group Forensic Architecture (FA) shows that Israel’s ground…
One of the most formative moments of my life was when I was running a small eco blog called Earth Mums in the mid-00s which focused on consumer solutions to the problem of environmental destruction. Back then I still believed that while capitalism was driving the destruction of our biosphere, it could still be hacked into being part of the solution in some ways.
I got a call from a biofuels startup who saw my work with Earth Mums and wanted to hire me to write search engine-friendly articles to draw traffic to their website. I went to their office for a meeting, and while I was waiting I listened to the three partners — real high-octane entrepreneur types — laughing and talking about the various business plates they were spinning.
One of them had apparently just come back from a consulting job for a product called Lectric Soda, which Earth Mums had a lot of affection for because it was an environmentally friendly household cleaning compound that you could buy for less than a dollar a bag.
“Don’t tell me, lemme guess: you told ’em to double the price?” asked one of the partners.
“I told ’em to quadruple it!” said the consultant guy.
I found it incredibly sleazy how they were making a product that could actually help make households a kinder to the environment less accessible while presenting themselves as eco warriors who want to save the planet. I told them I charge way more than I knew they’d ever pay me for the job and got the hell out of there, but lo and behold I did see Lectric Soda shoot up in price fourfold shortly thereafter.
It left me so deflated and disheartened I wound up shutting down Earth Mums. I could see that these guys and people like them were going to turn consumer ecological responsibility into this trendy elite thing priced way out of range for normal people, and that’s exactly what ended up happening. It wasn’t long before I saw the arrival of eco chic and Whole Foods and Tesla and the rest of this whole new luxury market designed to let rich people feel good about themselves while the world burns and create the illusion that we can profiteer our way out of our problems.
It was just such an in-your-face illustration of the problem. Lectric Soda wasn’t improved in quality, didn’t become harder to make or more difficult to obtain, the supply and demand remained the same; the price was changed because the market would bear it. The hidden hand of the market was not going to magically restore the product to its “correct” value; the value of such products was going to be determined by the narrative manipulations of entrepreneurs, consultants, con-artists, marketeers and ad-men.
“Let the market decide” really means let the manipulators decide, because the markets are dominated by those who excel at manipulating. We’re taught that letting the market decide means letting supply and demand take its natural course, as though we’re talking about ocean tides or seasons or something, but in reality both supply and demand are manipulated constantly with extreme aggression. Manipulating the supply of diamonds. Manipulating the supply of housing. Manipulating the supply of oil. Manipulating people into wanting things they’d never thought to want before through advertising. Manipulating women into feeling bad about their bodies so they’ll buy your beauty products. Manipulating people into paying $2000 for a $20 bag using branding. Manipulating people into buying Listerine by inventing the word “halitosis” and convincing them to be worried about it. Manipulating people into believing Beanie Babies were prized collectors items when they were just standard stuffed toys.
Capitalism gives us a civilization that is dominated by trickery. Those who get to the top are those who succeed in tricking as many people as possible. Tricking them into paying more. Tricking them into buying your product and not someone else’s. Tricking people who actually produce something of value into making you their middle man who gets paid despite producing nothing. Tricking competitors into making the wrong move. Tricking people into asking their doctor about your extremely lucrative pharmaceutical product. Tricking people into buying or selling certain stocks or cryptocurrencies or NFTs. Tricking people by using the legal system and your team of lawyers who understand it better than normal people do. Tricking people into letting you privatize their own drinking water and then selling it back to them in bottles.
It’s a scam competition. Whoever scams the best wins. How can you save the planet from destruction by human behavior when all of human behavior is driven by a bizarre scam competition? And the biggest scam of all is the narrative that this system is totally working and is entirely sustainable. That’s the overarching scam holding all the other scams together.
Proponents of capitalism often decry socialism as a coercive system that people are forced to participate in, but what the hell do you call this? Did any of us sign up to be thrown into the middle of a giant unending scam competition? What if I don’t want to spend my whole life being subjected to people’s attempts to trick me? What if I don’t want to live in a society where everyone’s trying to trick and scam each other instead of collaborating toward the greater good of our world? Guess what? I don’t consent to any of that. I am being coerced into this.
Whenever you talk about the destructiveness and depravity of capitalism online you’ll get people saying “Hurr hurr, and yet here you are participating in capitalism” like that’s an own instead of the exact problem that’s being discussed. Yes! Yes I am coerced into participating in a capitalist society in order to pay the bills and stay alive. That’s the problem I’m trying to address here. It’s like prisoners complaining about the prison system and being called hypocrites because they are in prison.
I’m convinced that this is a huge factor in the mental health crises our society is experiencing today. We’re trapped in this system where we’re constantly being psychologically pummelled with an endless barrage of messaging trying to make us think and feel and desire and loathe specific things for no other reason than because it will make someone money. How can mental health prevail in a civilization where everyone’s mind is continuously being yanked this way and that by mass-scale psychological manipulation? Capitalism poisons our minds as much as it poisons our air and our water.
It’s already so, so bad and it’s set to get so, so much worse, and we’re so, so far from any real changes in our political status quo looking anywhere remotely achievable. All we can do is keep drawing attention to this in as many ways as we can, and hoping enough people open their eyes and start to see what’s needed.
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All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Julian Assange is a journalist who’s been imprisoned for doing journalism on war crimes, by an empire that claims to defend journalists and oppose war crimes.
Assange and his persecution expose the giant plot holes in every story the western power structure tells about itself. About its love of free speech and the free press. About its opposition to tyranny. About its wars and why it wages them. Assange exposes the empire’s true face.
And in that sense it’s interesting that the empire made the decision to jail and silence Assange, since in doing so it exposed its own tyranny and criminality far more than WikiLeaks could have ever hoped to.
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Assange said, “It is the role of good journalism to take on powerful abusers.” If you accept this as true, you must also accept that there are precisely zero good journalists anywhere in the western mass media, and that Assange is the greatest journalist who has ever lived.
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The moderate position on Ukraine is to hold both Russia and the US empire responsible for their respective roles in starting and continuing this war. That’s the middle ground. But this position is regarded as freakish fringe extremism in the western mainstream and you’ll be accused of literally conducting psyops for a foreign government if you voice it, because the western mainstream is just that freakishly extremist.
The mainstream position in the west is that Putin invaded Ukraine solely because he is evil and hates freedom, and that Moscow is 100% responsible for this conflict in every way while the US is just an innocent little flower who just wants to protect freedom and democracy. When you actually spell out what the mainstream position on Ukraine is it sounds like a silly fairy tale for children, but that’s what all the most influential western pundits, politicians and government officials are actually saying. That’s how bat shit insane things are.
The Overton window has been shifted so far in support of NATO warmongering that this middle-ground position is now regarded as fringe extremism, so they just debate things like whether or not cluster bombs should be used to fight this war that is obviously 10000% Russia’s fault. As is often the case this dynamic has already been well-described by the elderly scholar who we all love to share our opinions about:
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.” ~ Noam Chomsky
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The claim that NATO is a “defensive” alliance that’s set up to promote peace is a lie that’s refuted by a swift glance at recorded history; in terms of evidence it’s crazier than saying there are alien aircraft in our skies. But you constantly hear respected pundits saying it.
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The US presidential race is that wonderful season American liberals set aside to remind socialists that they hate them far more than they hate the right and would cheerfully burn the whole country to the ground before they’d share one iota of power with them:
The only people who hate leftists more than rightists do are liberals, which is a bit funny because rightists think leftists and liberals are the same.
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It’s trippy how people pour such effort into disputing whether the planet is warming when the biosphere is showing us many, many other signs of looming collapse. They completely ignore the oceandeadzones, plummeting insect populations, loss of wildlife, trees, fertile soil etc.
I mean, what specifically is the claim here? That there’s a big evil plot across the entire scientific field to lie about warming, but all the other signs of environmental collapse are legit? Or are those fake too? If so, why only focus on the one message that benefits fossil fuel companies?
Obviously there are powerful people looking to exploit global warming to shore up wealth and power; that’s to be expected. It would be surprising if that wasn’t happening. None of that changes the need to drastically alter the way humanity operates on this planet right away.
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One reason it’s so hard to set up beneficial systems is because in negotiations manipulators always push for the absolute maximum amount of gain they can possibly grab while good people only push for a normal, human-sized amount of space for themselves. You see this constantly in union negotiations and politics alike: people come to the negotiation table with demands that are viewed as “reasonable” by those in power and then are negotiated back halfway from that point of “reason” as a “compromise”, while those with the power grab up everything they can get their mitts on and walk back only if forced to. This has a ratchet effect over the years which sees ordinary people losing more and more power to the ruling class.
That’s not going to change until normal people stop letting the manipulators set the bar of what’s “reasonable” and start pushing out space for themselves with as much force and entitlement as bad people. People are going to have to stop coming to the negotiating table with their compromise, and instead show up with the demand to take back everything that was stolen from them — and more — with as much force as necessary.
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All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
I just read a disturbing paragraph in a New Yorker article about the Instant Pot, a popular electronic pressure cooker whose parent company recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy:
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“So what doomed the Instant Pot? How could something that was so beloved sputter? Is the arc of kitchen goods long but bends toward obsolescence? Business schools may someday make a case study of one of Instant Pot’s vulnerabilities, namely, that it was simply too well made. Once you slapped down your ninety dollars for the Instant Pot Duo 7-in-1, you were set for life: it didn’t break, it didn’t wear out, and the company hasn’t introduced major innovations that make you want to level up. As a customer, you were one-and-done, which might make you a happy customer, but is hell on profit-and-growth performance metrics.”
Just think about that for a second. Under our current systems for profit generation, which is the primary driver of human behavior on this planet, making a quality product that lasts a long time instead of quickly going obsolete or turning into landfill will actually drive you into bankruptcy.
An article in The Atlantic about the bankruptcy filing similarly illustrated this point last month:
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“From the point of view of the consumer, this makes the Instant Pot a dream product: It does what it says, and it doesn’t cost you much or any additional money after that first purchase. It doesn’t appear to have any planned obsolescence built into it, which would prompt you to replace it at a regular clip. But from the point of view of owners and investors trying to maximize value, that makes the Instant Pot a problem. A company can’t just tootle along in perpetuity, debuting new products according to the actual pace of its good ideas, and otherwise manufacturing and selling a few versions of a durable, beloved device and its accessories, updated every few years with new features. A company needs to grow.”
This just says such dysmal things about why our planet is facing the existential crises it’s now facing. Corporations will die if they don’t continually grow, and they can’t grow without things like inbuilt planned obsolescence or continued additional purchases, which in a sane society would just be regarded as shoddy craftsmanship. Our entire civilization is driven by the pursuit of profit, and to keep turning large profits your corporation needs to continually grow, and your corporation can’t continually grow unless you’re manufacturing a crappy product that needs to be continually replaced or supplemented, and you can’t manufacture those replacements and supplementations without harvesting them from the flesh of a dying world.
As writer Robert Moor recently observed on Twitter, “The fact that Instant Pot is already being framed as a corporate cautionary tale — the company that went bankrupt because they made a product so durable and versatile that its customers had little need to buy another one — instead of as a critique of capitalism is deeply, deeply depressing.”
It’s really heartbreaking to think about all the ways human potential is being starved and constricted by these ridiculous limitations we’ve placed on the way we operate as a collective. Resources being allocated based on how well they can turn a profit stymies technological innovation, because the most profitable model will always lose out to less profitable ones that are more beneficial to people and our environment. Someone could invent a free energy machine that lasts forever and costs next to nothing, and even though it would save the world you can be certain it would never see the light of day under our current systems, because it couldn’t yield huge and continuous profits and it would destroy many current means of profit generation.
Science should be the most collaborative endeavor in the world; every scientist on earth should be collaborating and communicating. Instead, because of our competition-based models, it’s the exact opposite: scientific exploration is divided up into innovators competing against other innovators, corporations competing against other corporations, nations competing against other nations.
If we could see how much we are losing to these competition-based models, how much innovation is going unrealized, how much human thriving is being sacrificed, how we’re losing almost all of our brainpower potential to these models, we’d fall to our knees and scream with rage. If science had been a fully collaborative worldwide hive mind endeavor instead of divided and turned against itself for profit and military power, our civilization would be unimaginably more advanced than it is.
This is doubtless. We gave up paradise to make a few bastards rich.
Our competition-based, profit-motivated systems limit scientific innovation, and they also greatly limit the scope of solutions we can avail ourselves of. There’s a whole vast spectrum of potential solutions to the troubles we face as a species, and we’re limiting ourselves to a very small, very inferior fraction of it. By limiting solutions to ones that are profitable, we’re omitting any which involve using less, consuming less, leaving resources in the ground, and leaving nature the hell alone. We’re also shrinking the incentive to cure sicknesses and eliminate problems rather than offer expensive, ongoing treatments and services for them.
Or even a project as fundamental to our survival as getting all the pollution out of our oceans. The profit motive offers no solution to this problem because there’s no way to make a surplus of money from doing so, and in fact it would be very costly. So the pollution stays in our seas, year after year. People have come up with plenty of solutions for removing pollution from the sea, but they never get rolled out at the necessary scale because there’s no way to make it profitable. And people would come up with far more solutions if they knew those solutions could be implemented.
How many times have you had an awesome idea and gotten all excited about it, only to do the math and figure out that it’s unfeasible because wouldn’t be profitable? This is a very common experience, and it’s happening to ideas for potential solutions to our problems every day.
The profit motive system assumes the ecocidal premise of infinite growth on a finite world. Without that, the entire system collapses. So there are no solutions which involve not growing, manufacturing less, consuming less, not artificially driving up demand with advertising, etc.
It’s hard to appreciate the significance of this artificial limitation when you’re inside it and lived your whole life under its rules. It’s like if we were only allowed to make things out of wood; if our whole civilization banned the entire spectrum of non-woodcraft innovation. Sure such a civilization would get very good at making wooden things, and would probably have some woodcrafting innovations that our civilization doesn’t have. But it would also be greatly developmentally stunted. That’s how badly we’re handicapping ourselves with the profit motive model from the pursuit of viable solutions.
But we’re not getting solutions, we’re getting a world ruled by corporations whose leaders are required to place growth above all other other concerns, even concerns about whether the future will contain an ecosystem which corporations can exist in or a human species for them to sell goods and services to. Corporations function as giant, world-eating sociopaths, because our current models let their leaders and lawyers wash their hands of all the consequences of the damage their monsters inflict in the name of growth and the duty to maximize shareholder profits.
People worry about the world getting destroyed by machines driven by a heartless artificial intelligence, but we might end up destroying it with a kind of artificial mind we invented long before microchips: the corporation. So much of humanity’s dysfunction can be explained by the fact that corporations (A) pretty much run the world and (B) are required to act like sociopaths by placing profit above all other concerns.
As long as human behavior remains driven by profit, ecocide will continue, because ecocide is profitable.
As long as human behavior remains driven by profit, wars will continue, because war is profitable.
As long as human behavior remains driven by profit, exploitation will continue, because exploitation is profitable.
As long as human behavior remains driven by profit, corruption will continue, because corruption is profitable.
There is no “good” model in which human behavior can remain driven by profit without these destructive behaviors continuing, because so many kinds of destructive behavior will always necessarily be profitable. No proponents of any iteration of capitalism have ever been able to provide any satisfactory answers to this.
The call then is to move from competition-based, profit-driven systems to systems which are based on collaboration toward the common good of all. We’re a long way off from that, but a long way can be cleared in a short time under the right conditions. Our species is at adapt-or-die time, and the adaptation that must be made is clear.
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All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
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Our civilization is sick because all its systems ensure that human behavior is driven by profit, and health isn’t profitable. Nobody gets rich from everyone staying healthy all the time. The gears of capitalism will still keep turning if its populace is made shallow and dull by bad education and crappy art made for profit. Billionaires aren’t made by leaving forests and oceans unmolested, consuming less, mining less, drilling less, using less energy. The economy doesn’t soar when the world is at peace and nations are working together in harmony.
If you programmed an advanced AI to arrange human behavior solely around extracting the maximum amount of profit possible using existing technologies, its world wouldn’t look a whole lot different from the real one. We’re being guided by unthinking, unfeeling systems that don’t care about the good of our minds, our hearts, our health, or our biosphere, which will sacrifice all of the above to accomplish the one goal we’ve set them to accomplish.
It’s just a dogshit way to run a civilization. It doesn’t work. It’s left us with a dying world full of crazy morons hurtling toward nuclear armageddon on multiple fronts. Our systems have failed as spectacularly as anything can fail.
It’s simple really: we settled for capitalism as the status quo system because it’s an efficient way to churn out a lot of stuff and create a lot of wealth, but now we’re churning out too much stuff too quickly and society is enslaved by the wealthy. So now new systems are needed.
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So much of modern political life consists of the ruling class tricking the public into trading away things the ruling class values in exchange for things the ruling class does not value. Trading revolution for the feeling of being revolutionary. Trading actual freedom and democracy for the story of having freedom and democracy. Trading away the civil rights our rulers actually care about like unrestricted speech and freedom from surveillance in exchange for culture wars about racism and transphobia. Trading real labor for imaginary money. In every way possible we’re being duped into trading away real power for empty narrative fluff.
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One part of the problem is that in this mind-controlled dystopia people are prevented from knowing how deeply evil their government is, so the idea of their government surveilling them and regulating their speech and their access to information doesn’t scare them like it should.
This is why it annoys me when people say “Stop talking about the problems, we need to talk about solutions!” It’s like mate, we’re so far from ever being able to implement solutions — we haven’t even gotten to a point where a significant number of people know the problems exist. Step one is spreading awareness of the problems and their sources, because nobody’s going to turn and fight an enemy who they still believe is their friend. Systemic solutions are pretty far down the track from that point.
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It’s a pretty well-established fact by now that free will doesn’t exist nearly to the extent that most religions, philosophies and judicial systems pretend it does. Our minds are very hackable and propaganda is very effective. If you don’t get this, you don’t understand the problem.
Do a deep dive into cognitive biases and how they operate. Look into the research which shows our brains know what decisions we’re going to make several seconds before the conscious mind thinks we’re making them. You’re going to tell me these are organisms with free agency?
In order to understand what we’re up against you have to understand psychological manipulation, how effective it is, and why it works, because mass-scale psychological manipulation is the primary force preventing the public from turning against our rulers in our own interest.
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It seems like a lot of the inertia and self-defeating hopelessness that people have about fighting the machine comes from knowing the political awakenings of the sixties fizzled out, but I don’t think that would be the case if people understood just how much hard work the machine had to put into making them fizzle.
The amount of energy the western empire has poured into killing all leftist and antiwar movement is staggering, but people just think the acid wore off and the hippies turned into yuppies and the Reagan administration happened on its own. It didn’t. They had to work hard at that.
The revolution didn’t organically fizzle out, it was actively strangled to death. And what’s left in its place is this defeatist attitude where people want a healthy society but believe it can’t be attained, so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We COINTELPRO ourselves now.
People think we can’t use the power of our numbers to force the emergence of a healthy society, and we don’t deserve one because we dropped the ball. But we didn’t knowingly drop the ball, we were manipulated out of it. And the manipulators had to work very, very hard to do so. Those movements died out because the machine understood very clearly that it needed to stomp them out with extreme aggression and knew exactly what it needed to do to accomplish this, while ordinary people did not. It’s not a fair fight if only one party knows it’s a fight.
The machine won one battle and everyone’s acting like they won the war. They didn’t. We can absolutely pick up the fight again, and we can overwhelm them with our numbers. If we had any idea how hard they had to work to win that one battle, this would be clear to everybody.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
The Supreme Court is deciding whether to intervene in the private prosecution that sent embattled environmental lawyer and human rights activist Steven Donziger to federal prison and nearly 1,000 days under house arrest. The court’s decision whether to take up his case, which could come as soon as this week, could rewrite the separation of powers between the three branches of the federal…
It’s hard to grasp just how badly humanity is handicapping itself by excluding all solutions that can’t generate a profit. There’s a whole vast spectrum of potential solutions to the troubles we face as a species, and we’re limiting ourselves to a very small, very shitty fraction of it. By limiting solutions to ones that are profitable, we’re omitting any which involve using less, consuming less, leaving resources in the ground, and leaving nature the fuck alone. We’re also shrinking the incentive to cure problems rather than offer expensive, ongoing treatments.
Or even a project as fundamental to our survival as getting all the pollution out of our oceans. The profit motive offers no solution because there’s no way to make a surplus of money from doing so, and in fact it would be very costly. So the pollution stays in our seas, year after year. People have come up with plenty of solutions for removing pollution from the sea, but they never get rolled out at the necessary scale because there’s no way to make it profitable. And people would come up with far more solutions if they knew those solutions could be implemented.
How many times have you had an awesome idea and gotten all excited about it, only to do the math and figure out that it’s unfeasible because wouldn’t be profitable? This is a very common experience, and it’s happening to ideas for potential solutions to our problems every day.
The profit motive system assumes the ecocidal premise of infinite growth on a finite world. Without that, the entire system collapses. So there are no solutions which involve not growing, manufacturing less, consuming less, not artificially driving up demand with advertising etc.
It’s hard to appreciate the significance of this artificial limitation when you’re inside it and lived your whole life under its rules. It’s like if we were only allowed to make things out of wood; if our whole civilization banned the entire spectrum of non-woodcraft innovation. Sure such a civilization would get very good at making wooden things, and would probably have some woodcrafting innovations that our civilization doesn’t have. But it would also be greatly developmentally stunted. That’s how badly we’re limiting ourselves with the profit motive model.
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A lot of the “Great Reset” environmental chatter comes from the capitalist class flailing around trying to reconcile impossible contradictions baked into capitalism like the premise of infinite growth on a finite world and the fact that there’s no way for saving the environment to be profitable. So they’re planning all these new models which won’t do anything to save the environment, but will yield massive profits.
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Anyone accusing you of “repeating Russian talking points” is just saying you criticize the foreign policy of the US and its allies. That is always what they truly mean by that once you really drill down on what they’re saying and why they are saying it. The argument is that because Russia criticizes the foreign policy of the US-centralized empire, you never should. Which is self-evidently extremely moronic.
It’s literally impossible to be an aggressive critic of US foreign policy with a sizeable audience and not be accused of repeating Russian taking points. Literally every single high-profile person who does so gets accused of Kremlin loyalty, without a single, solitary exception.
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Those who tell you to “move to Russia” when you criticize the foreign policy of the western empire are the same people pushing for internet censorship and the silencing of unauthorised media and demanding retractions from any western outlet that forgets to parrot the official line.
“Move to Russia!” No, you move to Russia. You’re the one trying to suppress dissent and criticism of the powerful. I’m the one who is living by western values as they were sold to me and demanding normal scrutiny of the most powerful empire of all time. You don’t belong here.
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Hello we’re the westerners, we’re awesome because we live in free democracies with a free press where everyone is equal. Also, let’s spend weeks crying over a dead monarch at the urging of the news media because her blood makes her better than normal people.
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One of the many consequences of learning about how fucked things are is a growing frustration over wanting things to change while they only get worse. In my experience, which you may of course take or leave, the answer to this dilemma is contained in the Serenity Prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” A more secular version might read, “Make peace with what you can’t change in this moment, bravely make whatever changes can be made in this moment in your surroundings and in yourself, and learn to distinguish between the two.”
You’re only one human in a chaotic, confusing cacophony of eight billion, and there’s very little you can do to single-handedly effect the massive changes our species needs no matter how clever you are. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do anything. You can do little things to help make this planet a slightly gentler place every day, you can work to spread awareness of what’s true, and you can contribute in your own small way to the expansion of human consciousness (both in yourself and in the world).
Act to whatever reasonable extent you can act, then let go and relax into this beautiful existence. Make peace with what you cannot change in this moment, make what small changes you can, and learn to tell the two apart. The more you learn about our current plight the more necessary it becomes to learn how to do this.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible get to just stay in power indefinitely and suffer no meaningful consequences of any kind.” ~ John F Kennedy (paraphrased)
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Ecocide will continue as long as ecocide is profitable. No possible iteration of capitalism can address this problem. This, in and of itself, is a sufficiently strong argument that capitalism must be abandoned.
No model where human behavior remains driven by profit can address the problem that ecocide will continue as long as ecocide is profitable. That’s why so many capitalism proponents are reduced to simply pretending that ecocide isn’t a problem.
Eco-consciousness and anti-capitalism go hand in hand, but the liberals are dominating environmentalist discourse while the commies frequently neglect it. This is a strategic and moral error. This is the strongest argument against capitalism, and it’s one which needs to be made.
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It can take a while for a principled antiwar leftist to learn that in the big picture they have very little in common with so-called progressives who mostly ignore US imperialism and just want the empire to forgive their student loans. The difference between a leftist who opposes capitalism and empire and your average Bernie Sanders progressive is considerably greater than the difference between your average Bernie Sanders progressive and your average MSNBC Clintonite.
None of this means progressives can’t be worked with on points of convergence, it just means they’re ideologically different and it serves no one to pretend otherwise. The same is true of antiwar right-libertarians. Ultimately there’s commonality wherever class interests align.
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I’m as distrustful as anyone of the new mainstream UFO narratives, but when congress is saying UFOs are a threat that is “expanding exponentially“, it probably deserves attention. I don’t know why they’re saying it, but they’re not saying it for no reason. There’s an agenda here, whether it’s weaponizing space or running cover for new military technology or just securing more money for the military-industrial complex. I’m not willing to commit to any position on what exactly they’re up to, but they’re clearly up to something.
Not many people from my sector of the political fringe are looking at this, and I think that’s partly because there’s so much uncertainty and partly because it doesn’t really fit into any of our models for understanding the world. But whatever it is, it’s worthy of at least some attention.
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The more information that comes out about the effectiveness of psychedelics in treating psychological trauma the more outrageously criminal it looks that these medicines have been suppressed for generations while the world was being destroyed by a highly traumatized species.
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We’ve all had the experience of wanting to change something undesirable about our behavior but not being able to. This happens because the forces driving that behavior are not yet conscious. This is what’s happening with the self-destructive behavior of humanity as a whole, too.
There’s a misconception in our society that people stop their self-destructive behavior when they apply “willpower”, which is really just empty head noises. Actually people change when there’s an expansion of consciousness. That’s what we’re waiting on with the human species too.
That’s ultimately why we’re destroying our planet despite knowing it’s bad for us. We can talk all we want about capitalism, corruption, empire and ecocide, but underneath it all what we’re really looking at is the struggle of a thinking species to become a conscious species.
So for me the answer to the “what can we do?” question is usually, expand consciousness. Spread awareness of what’s going on in the world, expand our consciousness of what’s going on in ourselves, anything you can do to bring awareness to previously unconscious important matters.
And people are already doing this. That’s all healthy activism generally is: people working to spread awareness of an important issue. That’s also what real journalism is, it’s what real political dissent is, and what authentic spirituality is. It’s all about expanding awareness.
Working toward a healthy humanity is essentially the task of strolling through the dark hallways of our collective unconscious and flicking on the lights, one by one. It’s not easy, but the more lights get switched on the more awake people there will be helping us switch on the rest of them.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.
I’ve been kicking around some ideas for a dystopian novel lately, and I was hoping readers might be able to provide me with some feedback.
I’m picturing a story set in a world where everyone’s a slave but doesn’t know it. People think thoughts they believe they came up with themselves, make decisions and lifestyle choices that they think are their own, buy things they sincerely believe they want, consume entertainment they honestly feel they enjoy, vote for political candidates they truly think they support, when in reality they’re all marching in complete obedience to an elite ruling class whose high-level mastery of mass-scale psychological manipulation has bent the public to their will.
In my novel people will be funneled from early childhood through an education system designed by plutocrats and social engineers to create efficient and compliant gear-turners, then when they are grown their programming continues in the form of mass media indoctrination. If they become politically aware they are funneled into artificially constructed ideological perspectives that are designed to look truthful and appealing but which don’t challenge existing power structures in any meaningful way.
In the same way, the political system in this dark alternate reality is designed to look free and democratic, but there’s no real connection between how people vote and the way their civilization actually functions. An unacknowledged, unofficial alliance of plutocrats and government operatives makes the actual decisions about how money, industry, government, and military forces will behave from day to day, and this secretive alliance controls the official political system the public believes is responsible for overseeing those matters. What people call “elections” are actually just the public choosing between two lackeys of that ruling alliance, and their only meaningful disagreements are on how the will of those rulers should best be advanced.
My dystopian society is built on endless violence, oppression and exploitation, but because in this world the science of mass-scale psychological manipulation is so advanced, people don’t even know that it’s happening. Mass murder is committed continuously in nonstop military operations overseas, and the public is successfully convinced that it’s to promote freedom and democracy and keep them safe from terrorism. People have to work multiple jobs in the wealthiest nation in the world just to put food on the table, and they are brainwashed into believing it’s their fault for not making better life choices. People die of exposure on the streets while billionaires rake in exponentially more wealth, and the public is programmed to believe it’s because the latter work harder than the former. Police forces and prison systems keep expanding in order to exert more control and people are trained to believe it’s to make them safe from crime. Journalists are imprisoned for telling the truth and people are told it’s to protect national security. Information on the internet is aggressively controlled and people are propagandized into accepting that it’s to protect them from dangerous speech.
In my dystopian novel the powerful will simply do as they please and then promote narratives to explain why those actions were justified. If a smaller, weaker government isn’t sufficiently obedient to the world’s dominant power structure, reasons will be manufactured to explain why they must be ousted. If it’s necessary to exert more control at home or abroad, justifications will emerge for why military expansionism is needed in this or that geostrategically important region or why increased domestic surveillance is required to keep people safe. The armed goons and war machines move wherever they are needed, and the public is either kept in the dark about those movements or told made-up stories explaining why they must occur.
Endless mass military slaughter is essential for the existence of the ruling power structure in this dystopia, because without it the world’s governments would simply behave in whatever way advances their own interests. The government is so profoundly corrupt that the corporations who manufacture military weaponry are inseparably intertwined with the decision-making apparatus of its foreign policy establishment and are permitted to actively lobby for more wars so that more of its expensive weaponry will be used. Mountains of human corpses are amassed for no other reason than because it is more profitable to launch weapons at them than to leave them alone. Nuclear weapons are stockpiled and placed around the world for no other reason than because it is profitable to make more of them.
It’s the same with environmental and economic policies. A global system is held in place at gunpoint in which mass-scale human behavior is driven by the pursuit of profit for its own sake, so environmental and economic policies just like military policies are formed not based on what would be best but on what would be most profitable for the plutocrats who shape those policies. Industry moves in whatever way rakes in the most money, no matter who it hurts, no matter how badly it imperils humanity.
And everyone just marches along with it, because they are manipulated into accepting this disaster by sophisticated propaganda systems, by movies and TV shows designed to normalize the dystopia they exist in, by tightly controlled information access, and by their own psychological compartmentalization since the reality of their situation is too disturbing to look at directly. They turn the gears of their dark world and then stay up late binging on soulless comedy shows to distract them from the horrors lurking just beneath the surface.
Obviously such a dystopia would be completely unsustainable and the most obvious ending would be to kill the whole world off within a few books by nuclear war or ecological disaster or something equally terrible, but maybe I could have the populace simply wake up to the manipulations and take back their will and shrug off the elites’ control like a warm coat on a summer’s day? I dunno. Something tells me that for some unknown reason today’s readers are too inured with learned helplessness and knee-jerk pessimism to be able to even imagine such a scenario, let alone accept it as a believable development.
Anyway, that’s my pitch. What do you all think? Does this thing have legs? Or is it too different from today’s world for people to relate to?
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
As far back as 2005, the United Nations had estimated that Iraq was already littered with several thousand contaminated sites. Five years later, an investigation by The Times, a London-based newspaper, suggested that the U.S. military had generated some 11 million pounds of toxic waste and abandoned it in Iraq. Today, the country remains awash in hazardous materials, such as depleted uranium and dioxin, which have polluted the soil and water. And extractive industries like the KAR oil refinery often operate with minimal transparency. On top of all of this, Iraq is among the countries most vulnerable to climate change, which has already contributed to grinding water shortages and prolonged drought. In short, Iraq presents a uniquely dystopian tableau—one where human activity contaminates virtually every ecosystem, and where terms like “ecocide” have special currency.
The British Lawyer And Author Has Held Nazis And Presidents Accountable For Crossing The Moral Red Line. Now, He Argues, The Time Has Come To Pursue Those Who Commit Crimes Against The Environment. His lectures are part of a global campaign, led by Stop Ecocide International, to make acts of mass environmental destruction a crime within the purview of the International Criminal Court, which has a mandate to investigate and prosecute individuals who otherwise would evade accountability after committing the most serious crimes of concern to humanity at large.
Liberal pundit Keith Olbermann shared a video the other day where he ranted about people who don’t want to take the Covid vaccine with such emotional vitriol that spittle flew from his mouth and drool poured down his chin. I found it hard to watch, partly because it’s always uncomfortable to see someone come apart like that and partly because it made me realize that I’ve probably spent the last few years making fun of a media personality who has some actual diagnosable psychological disorders.
Rather than lay out what he thinks are the best arguments for taking the vaccine as most of his peers have been doing, Olbermann instead spouts vituperations about what “cowards” and “snowflakes” unvaccinated people are.
“They’re afraid!” Olbermann screams over and over again, as though being afraid of something makes you some sort of monster. As though we’re not all afraid of something, whether it be the vaccine or the virus or being alone or the fact that thawing arctic permafrost is pouring methane into the atmosphere. This commonality should draw us closer together, but here it’s being used for partisan us-vs-them theatrics which drive us further apart.
Us-vs-them frameworks are used constantly to manipulate people into espousing various narratives, and narrative manipulation is the underlying source of all of humanity’s problems.
Today’s world is dominated by a unipolar power structure loosely centralized around the United States government. It is comprised of many nations which are ostensibly independent, but, since they move in near-complete alignment with each other on all international issues of major importance, this power structure can effectively be called an empire. This empire sets the economic, environmental and military policies which are causing all the ecocide, war and nuclear brinkmanship we see driving humanity toward its destruction today.
The empire’s greatest weapon is not its military but its propaganda machine. There’s simply never been anything like the global narrative control provided by the western news media, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood. The military fights wars; the propaganda machine wins them long before they even start.
When you use the military to eliminate opposition, everyone knows it happened. When you use propaganda to eliminate opposition, people aren’t even aware you did it. They think it was their own idea to suddenly become super concerned about Saddam or Putin or Maduro or whomever or to go along with this or that power-serving agenda. Beyond the hard, concrete realities of war and militarism there’s a whole other war being fought on a far greater scale and of far greater consequence, and most people don’t even know it’s happening: the mass-scale psychological manipulation of the entire human species.
This is why human behavior looks so irrational when taken together. Why are we fighting all these wars, engaging in nuclear brinkmanship and destroying the biosphere when we know intellectually these are bad things? It’s not because humans are inherently destructive, it’s because a few destructive humans manipulate the rest of us into doing destructive things using propaganda.
A lucid and well-informed examination of the world’s problems will keep bringing you back to this one fundamental issue: that Earth’s inhabitants are being psychologically manipulated at mass scale into organizing themselves in ways that serve the powerful instead of the people.
Most propaganda is based on us-vs-them framing; support the oligarch-controlled Democratic Party because Republicans are bad, support the oligarch-controlled Republican Party because Democrats are bad, those evil Muslims/Russians/Chinese want to hurt us, that evil dictator over there is doing things which we good freedom-loving people cannot allow, etc. A tremendous amount of energy goes into feeding into these us-and-them frameworks to keep the propaganda engine running efficiently.
Manipulative narcissists, cult leaders and propagandists all do this, and they do it because it is effective. A video titled “The science behind ‘us vs. them’” by Big Think does a good job of breaking down how deeply hardwired the human brain is to think in terms of an “in” group who we like and an “out” group who we don’t like, citing numerous experiments which have shown this to be true around the world.
“What becomes clear when you look closely is it is virtually inevitable that we divide the world into ‘us’es and ‘them’s and don’t like ‘them’s very much and don’t treat them well,” explains neuroendocrinology researcher Robert Sapolsky. “But we are incredibly easily manipulated as to who counts as an ‘us’ and who counts as a ‘them’.”
“We could be manipulated by all sorts of ideologues out there as to deciding that people who seem just like us really aren’t, they’re really so different that they count as a them,” Sapolsky adds.
“We turn the world into ‘us’es and ‘them’s, and we don’t like the ‘them’s very much and are often really awful to them, and the ‘us’es we exaggerate how wonderful and how generous and how affiliative and how just like siblings they are to us,” says Sapolsky.
Can you see how easy it would be for someone who understands this aspect of our psychology to exploit it to seed propaganda in our minds? Set up a “them” side who we distrust and an ‘us’ side who we trust, and any information which comes from the “us” side will slide in unchecked by critical thinking.
If you can split the population into two sides and control the “us” narratives of both of them, you can easily insert propaganda narratives into most of the population. If Rachel Maddow is in your “us” team you’ll desire increased cold war aggressions against Russia, if Tucker Carlson is on your “us” team you’ll want more escalations against China, both of which happen to advance the interests of the aforementioned empire. As does the status quo both sides promote in their own ways.
People Don't Understand How Unfree We Already Are
"The biggest and most widespread blind spot among those who oppose totalitarian control by the powerful is the assumption that it has not already been achieved."https://t.co/Oq1if82Zcc
This happens constantly, throughout the empire all around the world. Fake “us”es and “them”s are set up for us by powerful manipulators, and our receptiveness to the “us” side allows the manipulators who control it to continually feed narratives into our minds about what’s going on in the world.
Power is controlling what happens. Real power is controlling what people think about what happens.
I don’t know exactly what’s going on with this virus and the vaccines; sometimes it seems like I’m the only person on the internet who doesn’t. But what I do know is that the intensely heated polarization over this issue on both sides feeds into the us-vs-them dynamic where power-serving propaganda about any subject can easily flourish. This benefits someone, and it ain’t you.
Humanity’s problems are made possible by mass-scale manipulation, and mass-scale manipulation is made possible by us-vs-them beliefs. If people weren’t being aggressively manipulated into consenting to the status quo they would have used the power of their numbers to end the status quo a long time ago. Divide-and-conquer isn’t just useful because it prevents people from unifying against their oppressors, it also pours rocket fuel in the oppressors’ propaganda machine.
What’s interesting is that humanity does have within itself the potential to dissolve its us-vs-them cognitive habits and thereby render the propaganda machine ineffective. The phenomenon commonly called spiritual enlightenment consists of a shift in perception which causes the sense of separateness to fall away, making it clear on a deep, experiential level that we are one, not just with all people but with the entire universe. You still have your own ideas, disagreements and preferences when it comes to politics and society, but the sense that anyone is some kind of “other” separate from you and yours falls away.
So there just happens to be a potentiality within us all that could solve all our problems if it were to somehow become unlocked at mass scale. Every species eventually arrives at a point where it must either unlock a potentiality within itself and adapt to a changing situation or go extinct. It looks like we are arriving at this point currently, and that collective enlightenment is the potentiality we will need to unlock if we’re to turn away from our trajectory toward doom.
And that will either happen or it won’t. I personally don’t think it’s some random aberration that this potentiality which sages have been writing about for millennia just so happens to be exactly what we need at this particular juncture with this particular collective psychological dilemma. But if I’m wrong and humanity does go the way of the dinosaur, it would be a damn shame if we didn’t at least hold hands on our way down.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
Oh dear god please let this be the peak of Jimmy Dore Derangement Syndrome.
Progressive commentator and journalist Nomiki Konst has a tweet out that honestly needs its own article to unpack, not because of its own intrinsic insanity but because of what it says about what’s happening to left-wing punditry and the western left in general.
“I feel like we are on the verge of the end of humankind and the Koch brothers, the Christian Coalition, big oil, the private military contractors, big real estate, Manchin, Sinema, Biden and Dore are responsible. Who else am I missing?”
One of these things is not like the others.
Yes, Nomiki Konst literally believes that comedian and left-wing YouTube personality Jimmy Dore is causing the end of the world, in the same way big oil, the military-industrial complex, and the most powerful elected officials of the most powerful government on earth are causing the end of the world.
This was not a joke, nor was it some ill-considered tweet made in a drunken haze or momentary lapse in judgement and quickly regretted. Hours later Konst was adamantly arguing with people who criticized the inclusion of Dore in her Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
“Ah yes it’s not like media is powerful or it’s not like the far right hasn’t used comedians to gain power globally,” Konst told one such critic.
“Have you looked at the far right wing Comediens who built movements globally and got into government lately? Off of splitting the left? You think media isn’t powerful? Mmkay,” she told another.
“The dude sucks up oxygen and splits the left,” she told another.
To be clear, Konst is referring to a moderately popular podcaster whose YouTube channel has under nine hundred thousand subscribers. Relatively few people outside of extremely online Americans on the political left know who he is, and she’s talking about him like he’s some kind of powerful “media” mogul like Rupert Murdoch (who did not make the Horsemen of the Apocalypse list).
I feel like we are on the verge of the end of humankind and the Koch brothers, the Christian Coalition, big oil, the private military contractors, big real estate, Manchin, Sinema, Biden and Dore are responsible. Who else am I missing?
The absolute bat shit hysteria that has consumed progressive punditry about Jimmy Dore hit what looked like fever pitch intensity some three months ago when Dore stepped forward to defend journalist Aaron Maté from despicable McCarthyite claims by The Young Turks that he is paid by dictators and works for the Kremlin, causing an absolutely freakish meltdown which got so insane that even Glenn Greenwald did a full segment on it.
And yet, somehow, it keeps getting crazier.
While there is no level of manipulativeness I would put past a TYT alum like Konst, I don’t actually think she was being manipulative in her inclusion of Dore in the world’s deadliest power structures. I think Dore actually consumes that much oxygen in her mind, and her obsessive hatred is validated so thoroughly and continuously by her peers in progressive US punditry, that she actually does see him as a central gargantuan figure in the global power dynamics that are leading human civilization to its collapse.
To understand my point, I need you to watch this three-minute video clip made earlier this year by Matt Orfalea featuring Majority Report’s Sam Seder continuously uttering Dore’s name in discussions with his associates (including Konst) instead of actually talking about the powerful people who are destroying our world:
This is pure madness. If you sincerely believe as I do that our species is being driven to its doom by ecocidal capitalism and omnicidal imperialism and that this is the single most important subject in the world, then there is no legitimate reason for you to be spending this period in history obsessing over a comedian making YouTube videos in his garage. How is this not completely obvious to everyone?
Everybody’s got their opinions about Dore; he’s loud and blunt and unapologetically goes against the grain of the leftist commentariat whenever he feels like it, and that will lead to people having strong opinions about you (I personally love that shit). But this inability to set disagreements with Jimmy Dore aside as a distant background issue in the face of humanity’s current plight is entirely because garden variety egotism has caused these people to lose sight of what made them care about leftist causes in the first place.
And really this isn’t about Dore, and it isn’t about Konst. It’s about the tremendous amount of success the powerful have had in manipulating, sabotaging, undermining, fragmenting and diverting the left in the Global North to keep us all turning the gears of capitalism and empire for their benefit. We’ve been so effectively neutered and nullified and our movements so removed from real-world consequence that our “leftism” is increasingly relegated to online influence, giving rise to the false impression that some lefty podcaster acting naughty is the most significant matter on the table.
There is a globe-spanning empire that's responsible for the lion's share of violence, devastation and suffering in this world. Those who are interested in fighting real power spend their energy opposing that empire. Those who aren't spend their energy shrieking about Jimmy Dore.
Replacing capitalism and imperialism with equality, justice, peace and harmony is what our world needs if our species is to survive into the future, but the agenda to make that transition sets us directly at odds with the largest power structures in the history of civilization. For this reason there’s been a generations-long campaign of psyops, infiltration and propaganda to keep the left down which surely continues to this day in online circles, but even if it didn’t the chaos, paranoia and confusion created on the left over the years by programs like COINTELPRO would be enough to significantly hinder our efforts to organize and overturn the status quo.
Something big is going to have to change if we’re going to win this thing, and that change isn’t going to come from the powerful. It’s going to have to come from within us. Not until we as a collective have enough inner clarity not to get bogged down by ego and manipulation will we be able to stand up to our oppressors at our full height and shrug off the shackles they have placed on us.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
The fact that our world is hurtling toward man-made obliteration on multiple fronts should probably occupy more of our conversational bandwidth than it does.
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My basic overall position is that humanity is about to end itself via climate chaos or nuclear war due to global capitalism and oligarchic imperialism, that propaganda prevents people from rising up to stop this, and our only path out is a mass-scale psychological transformation.
If you’ve ever been curious why I don’t write more about this or that subject, it’s usually because the above is my area of focus. Everything I write points to this in some way. That’s what I do here.
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There are a lot of narratives circulating about what’s really happening between the US and China and whether the aggressions are actually as dangerous as they seem, and all of these narratives are rendered moot by the undeniable buildup of US military weaponry around China.
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If you’re more concerned about China’s domestic affairs than your own country’s aggressive foreign policy toward China it’s because you’ve been propagandized. Change your media consumption habits accordingly.
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Not even the craziest imperialists want a hot war with China. They’d much rather China to bow and be absorbed into the US-centralized empire as so many other nations before, or to collapse and fragment after a decades-long subversion campaign à la the USSR. In that order.
The empire will happily make life miserable for Chinese people in coming decades to pressure Beijing into accepting that it’s in the people’s interests that the PRC kiss the ring. The problem of course is that China will be resisting these maneuvers in ways that can easily blow up in catastrophic ways. It’s entirely possible for any of the planned escalations and proxy conflicts geared toward undermining nuclear-armed China to provoke a response which causes a chain reaction from which there is no return.
A simple miscommunication, misfire or weapons malfunction could do it. In a steadily intensifying “great power competition” that imperialists are saying will likely consume the entire 21st century, that’s a lot of chances for something to go catastrophically wrong. We repeatedly came close to this happening in the last cold war.
And none of this insane brinkmanship is necessary. There’s no reason the US and China can’t simply get along and work toward the benefit of the world together. The only obstacle to this is a few western imperialists deciding US unipolar hegemony must be preserved at all cost. There’s no legitimate reason the life of every terrestrial organism must be gambled over some moronic geostrategic agenda which benefits none of us, just because a few people with too much power got some idiotic ideas between their ears.
Don’t consent to the new cold war. They’re working so hard to manufacture the consent of the public for this bullshit because they require that consent. So don’t give it to them. Fight the unleashing of this omnicidal horror every step of the way.
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This is an illegitimate military occupation made possible by a CIA-backed coup in 1975 and is being escalated in a move that was shoved through without Parliamentary debate. I as an Australian do not consent to this illegitimate occupation. #YankeeGoHome#auspolhttps://t.co/GAXomjtyvz
There’s not a labor shortage, there’s a paying people enough to live shortage.
“So people aren’t coming to work because they’re tired of being robbed by the boss?”
Yep. The problem with capitalism is you eventually run out of other people’s money.
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Most of us intuitively understand that our true enemies are the powerful and not other rank-and-file members of the public, and most of us immediately forget this understanding the instant we log on to social media.
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You don’t own your comrades. A lot of people will get angrier about a political ally disagreeing with them on one percent of total issues than a political enemy disagreeing with them on 99 percent.
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Most people navigate social interactions like novice poker players: they bluff the opposite of whatever hand they’re holding. If they feel inferior they act superior. If they feel small they act big. If they feel vulnerable they act invincible. If they feel dumb they act like they’re smarter than you. Don’t buy into their bluffs. Be gentle.
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If you resolve on a deep level to get real with reality, to want the truth at all cost whatever it is, it will turn your life upside down. You’ll lose careers, relationships, you’ll experience white-knuckle terror. But you’ll also give life a chance to astonish you with miracles.
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Science tells us that matter and time don’t exist in the way our minds perceive them and what we’re actually experiencing are our own conceptual models of something that isn’t actually there. So, you know, feel free to change your own story in whatever way works for you and start over whenever you want.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
I talk a lot about how we’re destroying our environment with a global system where human behavior is driven by the pursuit of profit, how the power structure which dominates that system does so by violence, exploitation, oppression, and the threat of nuclear war, and how we’re all going to die if we don’t change this system.
Whenever I say this I get a bunch of capitalism cultists bleating “You just don’t understand economics bruh,” which is the line they’ve been trained to say to anyone they see criticizing capitalism. It’s silly for a number of reasons, among them the fact that nobody who regurgitates that line understands economics themselves, and the fact that one’s understanding of economics has nothing to do with the death of the ecosystem our species relies on for survival.
The claim that anyone who opposes capitalism “just doesn’t understand economics” is premised on the notion that unfettered capitalism is the best way for a civilization to attain economic growth, which is arguably true; governments like China saw their economies explode when they started implementing elements of capitalism for pragmatic reasons. If you want to create a bunch of stuff and generate a tremendous amount of wealth, a good way to do that is by giving the capitalist class the protection of the state so they can rake in billions of dollars exploiting the global proletariat without being guillotined.
Problem is, that only looks like a valid point if economic growth is the only value by which you judge a system’s success. If you value quality of life, overall happiness, health, average lifespan, education, eliminating poverty, homelessness and hunger, and many other possible metrics, nations like the United States are far from ideal. If you value avoiding climate collapse, then the only way to think capitalism is the answer is to espouse on blind faith the belief that the world will be saved by greedy union-busting tech oligarchs who just want to make more stuff and send us all to space.
The Unspoken Premise Of Modern Capitalism Is That The World Will Be Saved By Greedy Tech Oligarchs
"The plutocratic class are not good custodians of our world. They are not good people. They are not wise. They are not even particularly intelligent."https://t.co/df8gxTjwHy
That’s not to say that socialism in and of itself has all the answers on this front either. Nations which have attempted socialism have not historically had the best environmental records, and even a hypothetical ideal socialist society where workers own all the means of production would not be inherently dissuaded from destroying the environment for profit.
What we need, if we are to turn away from the path of extinction and begin working in collaboration with our ecosystem, is a society which values the un-making of things.
Since the dawn of civilization humanity has valued achievement, conquest, invention, creation; it has valued doing things, and it has not valued the undoing of things. Creating a new kind of machine will bring you fame and fortune and put your name in the history books, while figuring out how to clean up all the pollution caused by the manufacturing and operation of that machine will not. Discovering a new way to kill thousands of people at a time will make you rich, while choosing to sit on that invention instead of unleashing that horror upon the world will not. Cutting down a tree to make toothpicks will make you money, while leaving it to grow for future generations will not.
Interestingly this disparity parallels with the inequality in traditional gender roles throughout the ages. While hunter-gatherer societies were largely egalitarian, after the invention of agriculture some twelve thousand years ago women came to be generally regarded as second-class citizens because they were unable to do fieldwork or conquer other tribes for their land. Since that time women have had very little say in the construction of our society and its values systems, and for that reason the work they traditionally do — cleaning, caring, conserving, resolving conflicts and building community — has gone unrewarded by money or esteem compared to traditional men’s work. Doing and making are valued, undoing and unmaking are not. The rise of capitalism poured rocket fuel on this dynamic.
Most mothers will tell you it’s a pretty thankless job compared to how much labor you pour into it from the moment you wake up in the morning to the moment you lay your head down at night. Because so much of her work goes into disappearing things — dirty diapers, laundry, messy floors, dishes in the sink, owwies, tears, tantrums — people who are conditioned by a society that has for millennia only valued making and doing tend to only notice when her work doesn’t get done. Their attention scans right over all the undoing she spent all day working on; it’s not paid, it’s not rewarded, and for the most part it’s not even appreciated.
In the same way, and for the same reason, people’s attention tends to scan right over the obvious solutions to the ecocidal trajectory our species has been on. Because thousands of years of conditioning have trained us to value doing things and making things and turning over a profit, our attention skips right over the simple solution right under our noses to do less and unmake things and stop pursuing profit at the expense of future generations.
This is why people who are awake to what’s going on in our world so often feel hopeless and despondent, and why the quote “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism” resonates with so many. Because we live in a society that has no framework or conceptual infrastructure for valuing the disappearing of things, and because making things and turning a profit has no answer for our situation, solutions look impossible.
But solutions are not impossible. They just won’t involve turning millionaires into billionaires and billionaires into trillionaires.
Cleaning up this mess will take a lot of work and cost a lot, and the reward for that investment won’t be anyone getting rich or any power structure securing a geostrategic advantage, it will be a future for our children and grandchildren. The oceans for example are one of our planet’s biggest carbon sinks, and their ability to function as such is being choked off by plastics in the water. Getting that plastic out of there in an environment-friendly way won’t turn a profit like clearing a forest or drilling an oil field will, so if we leave it to the Captains of Industry nothing will be done about it. Capitalism offers no incentive to do it.
Capitalism requires infinite growth or it collapses. It cannot solve climate change, ever. End of discussion.
Ending growth for its own sake, producing less, consuming less, paying people to stay home instead of commuting to pointless jobs; all of these would help the ecosystem far more than producing some new battery made of strip-mined materials. But there’s no profit, so they’re overlooked as viable solutions. You’re only ever going to look for solutions to problems through the reality tunnel you’ve been conditioned to look through. For thousands of years human civilization has been valuing the making of more things and devaluing the unmaking of things, when the latter is what we need right now.
A hidden cost is mental illness. In order to manipulate people to buy things that they don’t need with money they don’t have to keep capitalism from collapsing, you need to keep up a non-stop barrage of trauma-inducing consumerist propaganda. We are all suffering from various mental disorders, from the subtle to the extreme, as a result of this relentless onslaught of brainwashing. Some of these disorders are so prevalent that people assume they are normal. Everything from eating disorders and obesity, to hoarding and shopping addictions, can be traced back to advertising constantly and repetitively ringing our pavlovian bells, while also constantly reminding us that we are not perfect or whole or worthy of love (but maybe if you buy this you will be).
Many readers will attest that you don’t have to be that far along in your waking up journey to start becoming really sensitive to the psychological violence of TV advertising. A TV ad break suddenly becomes physically repellant. In the future we will look back on how coercive and non-consensual mass-scale advertising is and shake our heads in wonder that it was ever allowed to be a thing. Of course, by then, advertising will barely work because too many people will be too awake to manipulate in mass numbers.
'Finding Meaning Under A Meaningless System: How many of people's mental health diagnoses are really just them struggling to function in a capitalist system that is amoral, destructive, overwhelming, overbearing, unsatisfying, and bereft of meaning?' https://t.co/J2KiMhEhnz
But for now, we are manipulated by the millions into consuming massive amounts of products that aren’t good for us, don’t serve us, or are just another thing that we won’t hardly use but we need to find some cupboard space for. Ending advertising would allow so much health to rebuild in our minds and reduce consumption of materials dramatically; but ending advertising would mean ending capitalism. They are inseparable. We have the tools now to find everything we need via word-of-mouth, but capitalism requires infinite growth. Even your mom-and-pop shop owner feel the pressure to grow in order to keep up cash flow and cover increasing overheads.
Growth is baked in to capitalism, and right now we need more than anything just to chill. Do less, be less, compete less, expect less of ourselves and each other, produce less, consume less, commute less; but take more naps, be more kind, be more gentle with ourselves and each other, laugh more, cry more, feel more, and regenerate all the energy stolen from us from a rat race that we were never gonna win anyway.
Only when we have systems in place that make this possible will we find the energy to start cleaning up our world and begin living in harmony and integrity with the very ecosystem that we are intrinsically a part of.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
To hear people talk about it, you’d think we all had some say in the way our society is organized, the way food, goods and energy are distributed, the kinds of vehicles which dominate our civilization, the way our planet is being stripped bare to turn millionaires into billionaires and billionaires into trillionaires.
And of course, we don’t. We’ve never gotten to vote on how corporations behave in our world. We never got a vote on which technologies would be suppressed and which would be subsidized and backed by wars and military scams. We never got a vote on the US war machine becoming the worst polluter of any institution on earth. We never got a vote on whether a tree should be cut down for profit or left standing for the benefit it provides to our ecosystem.
And the things we do get to vote on don’t count because our dominant political systems are owned by corporate elites. And even if they weren’t it wouldn’t matter because those elites use media propaganda to brainwash us at mass scale and manufacture our consent for the ecocidal paradigm that has turned them into modern-day kings.
Remember:
1. The oceans are being killed. 2. Forests will soon be gone. 3. Fertile soil is disappearing. 4. Megafauna risk extermination. 5. Insects are vanishing. 6. Climate chaos is inevitable. 7. Extinction is now. 8. Plastic is in our blood.
The kings of today do not live as the kings of old. They don’t sit on thrones publicly issuing decrees to their subjects; they hang out in the background behind the theatrical performance of the officially elected government, quietly funding think tanks and corporate lobbyists, buying up media, bribing politicians with campaign donations, rigging the system, amassing more and more wealth and power, and shaping the fate of our world.
Yet if you ask the wealthy who is to blame for the death of our planet, they’ll tell you it’s the fault of the riff raff for having too many babies. If you ask the billionaire-owned media who is to blame, they’ll tell you it’s your fault because you didn’t go vegan and ride your bike to work.
In our extinction existence of invisible kings and wall-to-wall lies, those with all the wealth and power are completely free of responsibility, while their rank-and-file victims are made to justify their very existence to the system every day and pay through the nose for every misstep. None of the world’s worst people are in prison, and if you tell the police your employer stole your wages you’ll get a very different response than if your employer tells them you stole from the company.
You can get a hefty fine for throwing a paper cup out a window, but corporations can fill the oceans with plastic without ever being told “This is your fault. Fix it.” You can go to jail for smoking a leaf, but corporations can blacken the air at immense profit without ever facing any consequences.
Extreme heat roasting parts of North America is not a mere weather event – it's evidence of a crime.
The oil industry deceived us for decades knowing its operations would create mass death events like this.
They are living as kings on wealth they made by raping the planet we all live on, whose health we all depend on for survival, and because their mass media propaganda is so successful it hardly ever even occurs to anyone that they should have to pay for it. They take what they want and do as they please, at our expense, for free. They are spoiled little boys with flamethrowers.
The people who are leading us to armageddon are hailed as charitable and industrious job creators. Rob a man for money and they’ll call you a thief. Rob a planet for money and they’ll call you a philanthropist.
This cannot stand. The one area in which we do have power is the fact that there are a lot more of us than there are of them, a fact that secretly terrifies them which they spend vast amounts of energy making sure we never notice ourselves. As folk singer Utah Phillips famously said, “The Earth is not dying, it is being killed. And those who are killing it have names and addresses.”
But this insight does us no good if only a few of us realize it. Until a critical mass of the human collective rises up against these sociopathic ecocidal tyrants, we won’t be able to stop them. But stop them we must, which is why it’s so important to spread awareness of what’s going on and where the blame really lies. All positive changes in human behavior are always preceded by an increase in awareness, whether it be individually or collectively.
And from there, perhaps we can create a healthy world directed not for the greed of the few but for the good of everybody. Where scientific endeavor is poured not into creating billionaires and finding new ways for the war machine to kill people but into ways we can harmoniously collaborate with our natural environment.
If we can’t find some way to pull this off, humanity’s epitaph will read, “In the end it was easier to let them kill the ecosystem than to take away rich people’s rocket money.”
_____________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
I am of the opinion that people have the right to decide whether to accept vaccines or not, especially since these are experimental vaccines … My concern is I know there are risks but we don’t have access to the data … We don’t really have the information we need to make a reasonable decision.
No, it is not the sky is falling overreach. Any leftist worth her or his understanding of Capitalism’s History, of the entire project of this country’s Indian Removal campaign, the entire force of slavery then and slavery now, and the dirty murderers in every aspect of American government and corporate prostitution of government/politicos, knows this new normal policing of the Internet is just another variation on a theme of USA Surveillance Central: snitches, Scarlet Letters, superstitious Skull and Bones antihuman Ivy Elites, House Committee on Unamerican Activities (HCUA), COINTELPRO, CIA Murder Inc., Confessions of Economic Hit Men, Chicago School, Edward Bernays School of Pulling the Wool Over the Sheeple’s Eyes.
Note that the YouTube interview of me has been scrubbed, and Andy Libson thinks it’s Artificial Intelligence doing it, though I am surfing the internet all the time for jobs, and many remote jobs are in the pipeline, and there are humans doing $20 an hour gigs surfing the internet with those tools of oppression provided them to, well, scour the internet of ideas! Here, Andy’s email to me:
Hey Paul,
I thought this might happen…and it did!
If you want you can post your episode up on bitchute.
I actually wonder if they got all bent out of shape about the comments. Who knows with these creatures.
Our team has reviewed your content, and, unfortunately, we think it violates our medical misinformation policy. We’ve removed the following content from YouTube:
We know that this might be disappointing, but it’s important to us that YouTube is a safe place for all. If content breaks our rules, we remove it. If you think we’ve made a mistake, you can appeal and we’ll take another look. Keep reading for more details.
It is childish, all “vice principal thuggery like”, suspensions for not standing during the pledge of allegiance, or expulsions for defending oneself with fists when a bunch of thugs jump you in the high school bathroom. The nanny state on growth hormones, and this just is a long line of compliancy, the school system John Taylor Gatto discussed. One hundred and fifty years in the making, until today: Zoom Doom Schools, adult teachers as children, children as infants, wasted thoughts, busy work, coloring and snack-snack-snack, all that school loyalty, mascots on underwear, administrators who sound like two-bit car salespersons: the rise of Consumo Pithecus and Retailosapiens:
Twentieth-century scientific schooling is best described as the social experiment of inculcating into children what Gatto calls the “seven lessons of school teaching.” These lessons of mass forced schooling merit lengthy quotation:
It confuses the students. It presents an incoherent ensemble of information that the child needs to memorize to stay in school. Apart from the tests and trials, this programming is similar to the television; it fills almost all the “free” time of children. One sees and hears something, only to forget it again.
It teaches them to accept their class affiliation.
It makes them indifferent.
It makes them emotionally dependent.
It makes them intellectually dependent.
It teaches them a kind of self-confidence that requires constant confirmation by experts (provisional self-esteem).
It makes it clear to them that they cannot hide, because they are always supervised.
Or, as Rockefeller’s General Education Board summed up in a 1906 document on scientific schooling:
In our dreams … people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [intellectual and character education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk…. The task we set before ourselves is very simple…. We will organize children … and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.
This is the new normal since we’ve had 150 years of Gestapo schooling, even before the words, Geheime Staatspolizei (Secret State Police) were put together in order to exact obedience. You can hear Glen Greenwald’s most recent analysis of the cancel culture, and worse, the libeling and destruction of human beings with a counter thought, contrarian, outside the main paradigm, critical of systems, left, right or center under this fascist state, USA:
On this special edition of System Update, Glenn Greenwald dives into the latest online war to erupt in the Liberal media ecosystem to explore the underlying pathologies driving liberal and Democratic Party discourse. He focuses on two reputation-destroying cancers in particular that have become dreadfully commonplace: baselessly accusing people of being paid Russian agents, and weaponizing accusations of sexual misconduct.
The irony of my hour and 49 minutes with Andy, Eduardo and Kenny, on their three-year-old show, What’s Left, is that I bar no holds, and actually critique the entire mess that is the echo chamber, the Jimmy Dore’s, Bill Maher’s, Jon Stewart’s, SNL’s, all of them who think they are giving to humankind in their endless prattling and rattling. Millionaires, like Joe Rogan? Really. Oh, the work they don’t do to have $ thrown at them. All the prognosticators, all those making hay commenting on the commenters and the news (sic) and the political whoring that is DC/K-Street/Big Media/DoD/Three Branches of the Poison Tree called Government! It is endless, meaningless, and worthless in the scheme of things, but should never be 86-ed off any platform.
Do we get taken off Word Press for the stories Dissident Voice runs, the fun word play I have with life in the Matrix? Gestapoization connected to YouTube, Google, Twitter, Microsoft, Facebook, this concept too much for the worldwide net? Do those algorithms and deep boring AI tools go looking for these sorts of juxtaposed concepts by writers, to tally up and then eventually remove?
I’m attempting to get Andy, Eduardo and Kenny to get me in on interviewing THEM at What’s Left, and, the irony is, we can’t talk about bans by YouTube, or discuss this Internet Gestapoization without, well, getting the bloody YouTube video banned, culled, taken down, First Amendment Ripped! Here’s what I just email What’s Left:
So, how many times has this happened to What’s Left, Andy? I will be writing a piece on this ASAP, but give me a sense of the times you all got taken down, by YouFuckYourselfTube, so I can frame some of what I write about ties into your work. What are the takedowns about? Just “medical misinformation”?
Andy — We’ve had 4 episodes removed.
1. What’s Left came about why?
Andy — About saying the the previous prez election was stolen. And that the “insurrection” was a setup and a fraud. (Yours) … I think it’s the idea that it is a bioweapon. That is my guess at least.
2. What are some of the more compelling topics and issues you all have covered? Why?
Andy — They were about talking about vaccines and maintaining that they were gene therapy techniques and were dangerous. And we were skeptical of them even being vaccines.
3. What topics would you like to cover in the future?
+–+
4. What’s your background, quickly (I did see your interview on Left Lockdown Skeptics)?
5. As a socialist, for you and Kenny and Eduardo, what has all of this Facebook and YouTube and Twitter lockdowning, censoring, etc., done to your framing, your perspective?
6. Are you three educators? This sort of culling of discussion and debate and information flow back and forth being culled by ruthless people, the elites and their foot soldiers, it seems like something you all would talk about in HS current events, communications classes, history, no? What would you tell students who might ask you why all the websites and podcasts and videos are coming down.
7. Here you go, Green Peace gets Exxon, but this is business as usual for the elites. And, Green Peace will be sued. Discuss?
8. So much for peaceful protests — how do you frame a story like this to your compadres and students? “In Iowa, a federal judge has sentenced climate activist Jessica Reznicek to eight years in prison for damaging parts of the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016 and ’17. U.S. District Court Judge Rebecca Goodgame Ebinger also ordered Reznicek to pay nearly $3.2 million in restitution. In 2016, Jessica Reznicek and fellow activist Ruby Montoya set fire to five pieces of heavy machinery being used to construct the Dakota Access pipeline.”
Harkens to Bidder 70, Tim DeChristopher — “Tim DeChristopher disrupted an illegitimate Bureau of Land Management oil and gas auction in December of 2008, by posing as Bidder 70 and outbidding oil companies for parcels around Arches and Canyonlands National Parks in Utah. For his act of civil disobedience, DeChristopher was sentenced to two years in federal prison. Held for a total of 21 months, his imprisonment earned him an international media presence as an activist and political prisoner of the United States government.”
9. Define what it means to be a human/man in 2021 — your perspective.
10. What does community mean to you?
11. Each of us has the elevator (masked and only two aboard under Covid-19 Craziness) speech on what is socialism, what is communism. What’s yours?
12. Where do you see USA in 20 years?
13. Where do you see the world in 20 years?
14. Are you a pacifist, and if so, why, and if not, then what, and why?
15. Biggest influencers in your life to have gotten you where you are now?
16. And, exactly where are you know? Define!
That’s the idea, at least, to drill down and peel back all the obfuscation and over and covert propagandization and disenfranchisement of real leftists, for sure — revolutionaries, socialists, communists.
Getting knocked off of YouTube pales in comparison to the issues of the day, of the hour, of the second, but it does have reverberations. All the people looking into the fascist states around the world and the fascist corporations and the thugs of the World Economic Forum and World Health Organization kind, well, those stories will be culled, and if you do an Internet search, not only are stories put to the 20th page of a Google search, there are 19 pages of fake articles, faux forums and other variations of mass media mush that hit you/us with countervailing articles (sic) on the very topic you might be writing about and posting/publishing.
They are at war with the people, with ideas, with free thinking, with free learning, with freedoms. The elites and their handmaids of oppression, subjugation and repression are working 24/7, each nanobit and nanosecond we breathe:
2,700 billionaires and 36,000,000 millionaires running through every aspect of life, of communities, families, regions like wildfire, pathogens, cancers, viruses, armies
patriarchy as ham-fisted murderers of the military industrial complex kind
Hollywood (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, too) as the arbiters of the lies, the propagandists, the chosen few — Lies Incorporated
any given minute, read the news feeds of your choice and see the perversions the elites and the mainstream feed the minds of Westerners
digital gulags
educational gulags
economic gulags
environmental gulags
personal gulags
agricultural gulags
health system gulags
pharmacological gulags
legal gulags
AI & Surveillance gulags
It all adds up — polluted skies, polluted thoughts, polluted discourse, or lack of discourse, that is!
Finally, the inventor of the mRNA process, Dr. Robert Malone, has been not just scrubbed from YouTube, but from Wikipedia. This is how Gestapo works:
… the adult public are basically research subjects that are not being required to sign informed consent due to EUA waiver. But that does not mean that they do not deserve the full disclosure of risks that one would normally require in an informed consent document for a clinical trial.
And now some national authorities are calling on the deployment of EUA vaccines to adolescents and the young, which by definition are not able to directly provide informed consent to participate in clinical research — written or otherwise.
The key point here is that what is being done by suppressing open disclosure and debate concerning the profile of adverse events associated with these vaccines violates fundamental bioethical principles for clinical research. This goes back to the Geneva convention and the Helsinki declaration.12 There must be informed consent for experimentation on human subjects. (Source; Source)
Pulitzer or Izzy or Project Censored awards? Those don’t matter in these Mad Hatter times of faux news, invented news, spurious news, demented news. It’s just another day in the “if it bleeds, it leads” gambit of mainstream and askew stream news. We have to keep digging, keep interviewing, keep researching. The ultimate arc of social justice and freedom is truth.
The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you’re going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins. In order for somebody to win an important, major fight 100 years hence, a lot of other people have got to be willing — for the sheer fun and joy of it — to go right ahead and fight, knowing you’re going to lose. You mustn’t feel like a martyr. You’ve got to enjoy it.
— I. F. Stone, quoted from, The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, Paul Rogat Loeb
As a possibilist, I see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible. This is not optimistic. It is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful. — Hans Rosling1
There are a thousands images each hour, if one were to scour the world wide net, and the news services, wires, that would put a pit in the stomach of any humane human.
You have one 9 minute video of hog-tied, tasered, knee-on-back, then flip over to a story on how Idaho is murdering wolves the US and taxpayers set out as “protected” to the tune of millions of dollars. No water for Southern/Northern California farms and ranches, then flip to a mass shooting in San Jose.
Forget about the click-bait of celebrity-millionaire-billionaire-perverse politician/athlete/ actor/musician blurbs/features/stories on all the major and minor mush head “news” outlets, actually, news organs, as in the alimentary canal.
Blinded by the images, brought you/us via Yahoo, Bing, Google, you name it.
For months, Turkish fishermen in the Sea of Marmara have been running into a problem: They can’t catch fish.
Concerns that the unappealing mucus could discourage tourism abound, and some have called for the government to do more. Ismet Cigit, a columnist for the newspaper Ses Kocaeli, lamented that humans had “betrayed this world’s most beautiful sea” by allowing chemical storage facilities, fuel tanks, factories and other industrial sites to be built along the coast.
“Clearly, there are no deterrent penalties for those who pollute the sea,” he wrote in Turkish, adding, “Marmara is dying.” (Source)
That, of course, in a nutshell, is the crux of the world — “no deterrence for those who pollute . . . the sea . . . soil . . . fetuses . . . air . . . food . . . the airwaves . . . humanity’s brain (collectively).”
“Polluted” as a term goes a long way in retail capitalism. Homo retailopithecus and Homo consumo erectus are the vessels for every known and soon-to-be-developed pollutant.
Given the images one might see to illustrate the rapacious, inhumane, murderous ways of big and little man business, and of the corporations, and of the law makers (thugs in a protection racket for the corporations), compared to the murders of Palestinians over a 10-day bombing campaign seem small in comparison.
That’s the point, then, for those images after bloody images to mean, well, nothing in the end. We are in a constant chaotic and self-dellusional mindset, collectively, and those that resist, well, you know the story of Man/Woman against Nature; against God; against Culture; against Self; against Man/Woman; against Artificial Intelligence/Robotics/Internet of Things. Stirring a few wet tears, gulps, and then onto the next thing. Because capitalism is about stealth distraction, stealth and mostly overt ways to pull the wool over the eyes of everyone. Even those who doubt governments and corporations and so-called experts, yet, well, yet — Covid-19 Jab; Covid-19 Booster Jab; No Jab, No Job; Covid-19/SARS-CoV2 a Novel Man/Woman made (engineered) SUPER virus; Lockdown; Masks; Social 3, 6, 10, 20 feet Distancing.
Sometimes the wool is easily pulled over one’s eyes when that person wants no conscience. When the media and the mob/bandwagon pushes whichever narrative to force compliance, well, that is Capitalism. Things Go Better with Pfizer Jabs, err, better with CocaCola.
Tobacco kills, no? USA “aid” to Israel kills, no? Even those double cheeseburgers kill, no?
You think there’d be people on the streets protesting against and vying to stop the fast-food killers, no? It is so clear, however, if we put the brakes on bad stuff, which is all of capitalism, then there will be blood to pay. Even a small pumping of the brake pedal means war:
A chilling documentary released a few years ago, Fed Up, narrated by Katie Couric, highlighted how the U.S. government capitulates to Big Food lobbies such as the sugar industry and followed the money involved in keeping people fat. Moreover, labs across the country ensure that such junk food is addictive. Finally, Big Food has launched aggressive campaigns, sanctioned by governments, to cast obesity as “lack of exercise” and not something they cause. (Source)
Think about this — if there were campaigns to cut the eating of bad food, fast food, by, oh, say, one-third, or even one-fifth, well, again, there would be blood. Capitalism is all about the business of making money any way possible, and once that money stream is steady — fats, sugars, salts, high calorie foods, nicotine, opioids — no amount of action and citizen uprising could do shit. Kids born into one to six generations drive-thru, fast-food, Uber Eats normality (baseline), well, the eating and the wrongs of capitalism are baked into DNA. How many times were penny or three penny taxation bills against soda companies (so-called sugar taxes) fought and shot down? We are talking a few pennies tax.
And, let it be known, that High Fructose Corn Syrup has many wonderful things cooked into it to create an addiction cycle, and creates the “I am never full even after four Big Gulp Mountain Dews” biophysical reality. There are studies on the RNA of papa’s sperm baking in obesity for offspring. Oh, the epigenetics of bad food, chemical food, and high density calories, the like, well, I would have to say after decades of reading and being on the front lines, that obesity is actually cooked into the gene code, the epigenetics of it all.
Don’t be fooled by the lie after lie coming from industry lobbies and those sons of bitches who would file lawsuit after lawsuit against any citizens’ group or government group tying fast-food to faster death and plethora of chronic illnesses on the way to that death.
Svelte Biden and Svelte lawmaker x or y are all part of the show. The disease is the dollar, and each pinch of the profit margin precipitated by real sanctions and laws and regulations is a poke into the hornets nest that is rapacious capitalism.to
Oh, those Ivy Leaguers, all those beautiful people, running the show, they must get a kick out of the overweight, limping, ragged masses. It is a tale of two worlds. They get stem cell cocktails, plasma and blood doping, IV’s full of herbs and vitamins and, well, the rest of us, we get, hmm, disease maintenance by USA Big Med/Big Pharma/ Big Insurance.
There is no “choice” for this child. I have been in the schools, people, for more than 48 years. This is it for choice (habituation). It is criminal what we do to their minds, but absolutely sadistic what we do to their bodies:
But the images are rarely tied to deep stories, deeper analyses, and deeper regard that the system is sick — that “system” is industrial food, education, media, social media, advertising, the entire system of “capitalism makes right” any form of “offering” or “choice” these Mengele Types continue to bark anytime groups of people decide to question their narrative, the entire wasted system of exploitation.
The exploitation is at the cellular level, at the nanoparticle level, even the electromagnetic waves exploit us, to the tune of profits galore, gushing in every which way possible under the mantel of dirty capitalism.
So we just continue to cruise the insanity of the wasteland, and here, in my neck of the woods, successionists: The proposed new border would encompass 18 full and three partial Oregon counties and account for about 860,000 people in Oregon, which is 21% of the state’s population; however, that chunk would represent 70% of its land.
The land of the original people’s — imagine if those Yanquis/Stars’n’Bars dudes and dudettes really looked at the land, the original benefactors and stewards of the land. Again, redneck, mean as cuss, and, yes, Portland is mean as cuss, sure, and this is what we have looking forward to. This is 2021, major snowpack deficits, major government subsidies to these big old tough independent farmers wanting to create a bigger Aryan Brotherhood Idaho. It ain’t your land, boys and girls.
This is the reality of the White Settler/Colonial/Racist/Slave Embodied people. It may seem hickster out in Idaho, but you can find the same DNA and big mouthed whites in the Fatherlands — Germany, Nordic countries, France, Belgium, UK. The amount of hate for anyone other than white, well, this is a disease throughout the land throughout the EU Zone.
Real issues of crop failures, cancer rates out the roof (all those poisons for all that farmland), extreme weather, and, well, just whose land and whose farms and ranches and goods and services are those?
The sham is the American system of bowing to two corrupt parties, allowing the elites and the riff-raff corrupt ones to run the society, through electoral politics, which is just a giant bribery scheme. All those sniveling Rachel Maddow freaks, with the Trump Derangement Syndrome, well, they do not give a shit:
“Biden says his hands are tied.”
The absence of a strong and well organized movement means that harm reduction is always a fantasy. The Democratic Party establishment chose Biden to be the nominee and didn’t get the pushback that was needed against their backroom deal making. Unscrupulous Black operatives derided anything other than obedience to their bosses. We were told to go along and be quiet and that any other response meant the return of Trump. The lack of demands set us up for failure, propaganda about cutting poverty, and phony progressives taking a dive instead of standing up for the people. Black people have nothing to show for a Biden presidency despite turning out in droves to put him in office.
The moment is ripe to acknowledge that this system is a complete sham and exists only to help the 1% do as much as they can to oppress the 99%. We will live with a cycle of Republicans and Democrats who use different methods but always end up working against our needs. (Black Agenda Report)
The capitalists paint us all into their corners, while they reap the benefits of billions in bribery. We are children, unorganized, malcontents, wasted lives in their eyes. It’s how they see ‘us versus them.’ They as a collective go to the same schools, believe in the same propaganda, and tout the stupidity of patriotism and exceptionalism. Arrogant and dumb, this is the America we all have been sucked into. By birth, for fuck sake, some of us.
The scam is the scam, really, all those spinning bullshit and good cheer amongst themselves at their Aspen Institute conferences, or what have you. They have no plan, except for shoveling with front end loader, the cash they make in the big scam. There is no Green Deal for the Environment when it goes through the jagged teeth of the rich and superrich capitalists.
To the scientists’ warnings, there have been rumblings of concern from some financial investors, businesspeople (in non-oil-producing industries), and local politicians. But overall, the response of conventional politicians has been business-as-usual. The main proposals for limiting climate change has been to place some sort of taxes on carbon emissions. From liberals to conservatives, this has been lauded as a ”pro-market” reform. But, as Richard Smith (2018) has explained, these are inadequate, and even fraudulent, proposals. “If the tax is too light, it fails to suppress fossil fuels enough to help the climate. But…no government will set a price high enough to spur truly deep reductions in carbon emissions because they all understand that this would force companies out of business, throw workers out of work, and possibly precipitate recession or worse.” (Source)
Richard Wolff: The reason the U.S. government takes in less than it spends is because it chooses not to tax corporations and the rich at the rates applied to them in the 1950s and 1960s. Then the government turns around and borrows money. It borrows from foreign governments, but also from banks, insurance companies, large corporations, and rich individuals who purchase Treasury bills, notes, bonds, and securities. In effect corporations and the rich can not only keep more tax dollars; they can then turn around and loan the money they kept to the government and earn interest on it. The interest that must be paid to them comes either from taxes levied upon the mass of Americans or from the savings the government achieves by cutting its payrolls and programs. So the rising deficits are a result of an unjust tax system. Eventually, as the financial burdens grow and the public grasps why, social tensions will rise. The U.S. tomorrow could look like Greece today. [9 years ago, interview by David Barsamian]
Oh boy, recall the Suez canal container ship logjam?
Now, this Singapore-flagged ship carrying 1,486 containers, including 25 tons of nitric acid and other chemicals that were loaded at the port of Hazira, India, on May 15, is burning, baby, with a 25-member crew includes Philippine, Chinese, Indian and Russian nationals.
Globalization! Daily scene. How many oil spills, how many chemical spills, how many barrels of DDT or radioactive sludge are leaking? Christ, do the math.
[You’ll notice “Evergreen” is written across the Ever Given’s body, but confusingly, that’s branding for the Taiwanese company that operates the ship. (Julianne Cona/Instagram)]
All of this is unsustainable, way beyond insane, and, until we do more localized work big time, and until we stop cruise ships, container ships like these on a second to second basis; until we stop cutting down North American forests, to send logs (full trees, delimbed) to overseas markets, and then have that come back in another container ship as cardboard, fiberboard and wood products; until we stop California orange juice tankers meeting up with Florida orange juice tankers in Houston on their east-west crisscrossing journeys; until we go way beyond any new or old green deal; until we actually work with the poor, the subsistence farmers and fishers, and work on real harvest, real sustainable ecologies, with restorative conservation AND anti-poverty programs and peasant worker cooperatives; until, until and until.
I contacted this film maker/scientist/professor, and complained about how white, how “great white burden” like his short piece on net carbon zero, zero dark 2030, or what have is you coming off. No response, yet, however, we need to pushback on these people who always work within the frame of Capitalism. They will never see that, Capitalism, for how polluted, globally heating, water scarce, amazingly diseased the world and our food and sisters and brothers in flora/fauna land.
James Dyke, Senior Lecturer in Global Systems, University of Exeter — I doubt he will respond.
Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, 2018.
Before we butchered their ancestors, and filled their oceans with plastic?
And I wonder what they’re doing with all that brain matter? The sperm whale has the largest brain of the animal kingdom; it doesn’t take that much brain mass to make a tail go up and down.
We don’t even know what these creatures are. I wonder if we’ll ever meet them? Have a real connection, a close encounter, with these alien life forms in our own oceans, before we wipe them out for good?
And I wonder if we’ll ever make it out of this mess. Where we have to keep destroying our home because it is profitable to destroy our home. Where we have to keep waging wars because it is profitable to wage wars. Where we have to keep human beings on conveyor belts of exploitation and oppression, because to do otherwise would hurt profit margins?
I write notes on paper airplanes and sail them off the cliff’s edge, sending messages in bottles down the stream, never knowing who will read them or if it will ever make any difference. I live on the Outskirts, a crone who everyone says is crazy but they still listen when I speak.
The juggernaut treads on, in cold indifference to the pleadings of the poets and the tears of the Indigenous. It leaves fire and corpses in its wake.
And the news man stares into the camera with lifeless eyes telling us that this is how it has to be, that this is the only way it could ever possibly be, while fantasizing about the whiskey he will get to drink when he gets home so he doesn’t have to feel the gnawing sensation where his heart used to be.
And the Earth Eaters funnel living things into a machine which turns them into dead things, because living things are an unprofitable waste of valuable parking lot space. When they’re at home they stare at screens watching fake actors pretending to do fake things so they don’t have to think about the real people doing real things.
And the weapons manufacturers coolly calculate how many coins they can get for every human corpse, and how many coins it will take to help start the next war, because it’s still illegal to eliminate the middleman and simply kill people to sell their meat.
And empire architects with broken empathy centers say “If we can just force every molecule of the universe to align with our will, we will finally feel safe, because we will have total control, and then the tiny baby who lives in our chest crying out for its mother can finally go to sleep.”
And Bank Boys with broken empathy centers say “If I can control all the money then it won’t hurt to live, because I will be safe and secure and nobody can ever tell me no if there’s something I need, and I will finally stop feeling the cold sting of my father’s disapproval.”
And the whales say “We are here, we are here, you can get to know us if you try, if you just silence your yammering talkbrains for a moment, if you just take a moment to simply feel your lives, feel the water on your skin, feel the thrum of the Earth, feel your Mother instead of waging your endless war against Her.”
And the Earth says “I am here. I am ready whenever you are. If you ever are.”
And we stumble through, muddle through, turning gears because the boss told us to, praying at the Church of the Patriarchal God because our parents told us to, forming our understanding of the world based on what the news man tells us because our teacher told us to do.
We stare at screens, we pop pills, we drink fuckporn candycarbs adrenalinelove somebody-please-validate-me so we don’t look at what’s happening, so we don’t feel what’s happening, so we are anywhere but here, so we can sedate ourselves into slumber, so we can spin away into the void without having to experience our own extinction.
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