41 Comments

1. Da' Buffalo Amongst Wolves:

   “This action is dedicated to those affected by the recent immigration raids in Watsonville, a town just south of Santa Cruz. These raids were part of a nationally coordinated attack on immigrants, with a notable concentration around the Bay Area of California.”

   “From the magnetic card readers at many of the dorms and buildings on the UCSC campus that track and log information on students entering and exiting (which has been used in students’ arrests in the past), to the militarization of the borders, preventing our ability to travel and migrate freely, contributing to the organizing of the global economy to the whims of the bosses. There are limitless examples of the pervasiveness of social control technology both locally and globally. There is also a growing resistance.”

   In Full: Six surveillance cameras destroyed at UC Santa Cruz - IndyMedia

   30 May 2008, 5:52 pm

2. Stan:

   Very nice link. Thank you. Perhaps we can begin describing how those cameras work, to perfect the techniques for one of my fictional characters in my latent novel.

   I would suggest that cameras that seem specifically placed to prevent attacks on women, however, be bypassed by said fictional character… I’ll name her Minerva Isom.

   Still interested in stories about removing those grease fittings on front-end loaders (VERY easy).

   30 May 2008, 7:25 pm

3. David Archer:

   Greetings all. I have been a fascinated lurker at Feral Scholar for the last several weeks. There is no doubt in my mind that my role, for now, might be best kept to learning, absorbing, and considering the new ideas I find here. I therefore had no intention of presuming to participate in discussions of concepts and histories of which I have only recently become aware of.

   However I find myself wondering about the morality of a decision to engage in Monkeywrenching - that is to say the ecotage or tampering with a machine - when a result from such an action that must be considered is the injury or death of a machine operator or an uninvolved passer by. Admittedly, there may not be passers by in remote locations, but Monkeywrenching, by your description, does not seem limited to remote locations and this still leaves the issue of potential risk to the operator.

   Judging from your bio Stan, I doubt many people would have a better understanding of the inevitable progress to breakdown that humans and systems inflict on each other than you.

   A certain percentage of these events will end in disaster. No?

   It seems to me that this - from any ethical standpoint that I am able to grasp - is an unconscionable risk.

   And of course, some say Murphy was an optimist.

   I know little of how you think, but I would never think for a moment that you had not considered this and doubtless many, many more possible ramifications.

   Look, really I am just a musician. It’s not an exaggeration to say I’m way out of my league here and I hope you can sense I mean no disrespect. Perhaps I overlook the obvious, but I do also hope you might take a few moments to address this issue.

   Are really we at this point? Are these now justifiable risks?

   At any rate, you folks have opened my eyes on subjects I scarcely knew existed and I give deep thanks for this.

   Respectfully

   David Archer

   http://loontheory.wordpress.com/

   31 May 2008, 12:44 am

4. Stan:

   Not encouraging sabotage, you understand… this is a theoretical-literary discussion.

   But monkeywrenching does not have to entail great risk to others, and done correctly works very hard to ensure against just that. Removing grease fittings, for example, does not cause a machine to go wild, blow up, or kill an opeator. It just grinds to a halt. And contrary to popular belief, tree-spiking does not kill timber cutters.

   But you concern is not misplaced. All resistance must be non-violent, that is, designed not to hurt human beings or animals or the environment generally. That does not ethically exclude self-defense, imo. But self-defense is another matter. I think of the Warsaw Ghetto here… which is NOT our situation.

   I would never condone the use of explosives, for example. Not only do people not generally know how to use them with precision, they are inherently unpredictable, and detonations are often done remotely, or even on timing devices… meaning no one can know who or what might be witin a bursting radius or within the span of a secondary missile hazard.

   But we very well may, theoretically, be arriving at a point historically where the consequences of what industrial development is doing are so terrifying and irreversible that there is an ethical case to be made for sabotaging machines on a mass scale without centralized supervision.

   The trick, looking at this now from a Christian perspective, is not to demonize human beings as “enemies.” The life of each has value, and the possibility for redemption is available to all via the possibility for change. Call it prevenient grace, or whatever. Resistance movements of the past, especially in the exterminist 20th Century — including left resistance — ended up behaving like the “enemy” and naming it “historical necessity,” that is, killing and kidnapping and injuring human beings. There is a powerful whiff of masculinity in this enemizing trope, wherein we earn our esteem with the willingness to take lives. “Are you in it to win it, or what?” But that challenge of sincerity need not include harming humans… and as you suggest, David, we risk becoming the thing we resist if we are not very thoughtful.

   31 May 2008, 5:52 am

5. Miraculix:

   Keeping my first comment for the Feral Scholar short but sweet, I find myself smiling — despite myself — at the “literary discussion” unfolding before my eyes.

   I am, by nature perhaps, a born “Monkeywrench” type. I’ve spent the better part of my nearly forty-two years of life learning and re-learning the best advice Joyce had to offer: “silence, exile and cunning”.

   Now mix that sentiment with what wisdom my mother had on hand as I departed for MCRD San Diego and beyond (an illuminating time of a different flavor than that experienced by our moderator) many moons ago: “and this too shall pass”.

   These days you’ll find my expat American arse attached to a small rural family farm in western Europe with nearly a thousand years of actual recorded history behind it, learning how to build and maintain stone walls and make cheese and slaughter chickens and so on. Exile and cunning then, if not silence, based on this post and others left elsewhere.

   The detail I always nake a point to mention to the Americans who frequently pass through our little patch of the Ardennes is designed to make a specific point about today’s state of military affairs: World War Two was completed in 1945, and Germany is STILL an occupied nation.

   Voluntarily perhaps, at least at the management level, as I know all too well how near the beating heart of “Old World” fascism we actually are in our little green redoubt. Can you say ‘Gladio’? Do you recognize the name “Dutroux?” I do.

   To drop the occasional wrench in the works here is no simple matter, but I have been “measuring” my surroundings since I arrived. If the world continues in its present direction, I know what I can do to help the greater cause, in my own minor way.

   As we live in surroundings that have been “managed” — in specific locations — since Roman times, I’ve come to see human impact with different eyes than in my younger days in the pacific northwest. What I’ve come to realize is that my role in the years ahead — when it becomes necessary — will be to handicap command & control.

   And if that is beyond my means, I will serve as a refuge and a center of knowledge for the next generation of those who would fight the good fight, when I’m no longer any good in the still of the night and all that remains are the final years of my gardening phase.

   Stan, like me you can get pretty long-winded when you get rolling on Rosa and the academic side of the argument, but I have long appreciated your perspective on direct action. And I must agree, the time is nigh, literary or otherwise. As they used to say, I can “feel it in my bones”.

   Thankfully, my wife and I are attached to land on which we can grow everything we need and then some, the skills with which to do so, and access to the remaining local staples and generational wisdom necessary to live well. It really hasn’t been so hard. Sure, the physical work is demanding, but after growing up immersed in technology I must admit I revel in the lack of complexity I am able to build into our future.

   And that’s the thing. Civilization is all about complexity and it’s undoing isn’t all that difficult, if you’re careful about where you drop the wrench…

   31 May 2008, 5:05 pm

6. Archer:

   Stan, I thank you for your thoughtful and gracious reply. I do need to explore and reflect further on these issues before I can add anything more to the discussion, but I very much appreciate your response and the opportunity to engage with and learn from you and the other contributors at Feral Scholar.

   Somehow, you’ve all struck a chord with me.

   http://loontheory.wordpress.com/

   31 May 2008, 9:27 pm

7. DeAnander:

   What I’ve come to realize is that my role in the years ahead — when it becomes necessary — will be to handicap command & control.

   Nicely put.

   I can’t think of a better mission in life. Really it all comes down to that — why are we opposed to capitalism, really? because capitalism is a system of command and control, just like feudalism, just like patriarchy, just like… you name it. We want to abolish command and control and replace it with self-organisation, autarky, symbiosis. At least, I want to…

   31 May 2008, 11:09 pm

8. Required:

   DeAnander, how do you see autarky being different from autonomy?

   1 June 2008, 12:21 am

9. Stan:

   [De — westcoaster that she is — is probably still abed, so I’ll take a shot.]

   au·tar·ky or au·tar·chy

   a policy of national self-sufficiency and nonreliance on imports or economic aid; a self-sufficient region or country.

   au·ton·o·my

   1: the quality or state of being self-governing; especially : the right of self-government: self-directing freedom and especially moral independence: a self-governing state

   Autarky is more specific than autonomy (more specifically economic — and therefore less abstract).

   1 June 2008, 7:13 am

10. Required:

    Stan, how is what you have said regarding “Resistance movements of the past, especially in the exterminist 20th Century — including left resistance — ended up behaving like the “enemy” and naming it “historical necessity,” that is, killing and kidnapping and injuring human beings”
    different from the what you criticized in FSD about the way people judge the FARC and the Zapatistas? I’m not necessarily saying that they’re not different, I was just wondering what differences you saw.

    (I’ll quote not cause I don’t think you don’t remember your own book, but for the benefit of others…)

    “The metropolitan anticommunist left are now claiming that the FARC has evolved into some kind of authoritarian monstrosity that oppresses the people just like the government, or that it has become some criminal enterprise, or that it fails to bargain in good faith. They are now “terrible” and has “gone to far.” This is a classic case of the left falling for the slanders of the mainstream press, assisted in their fall by the “bourgeois right” (as opposed to wrong, not left), or moral imperialism - the convenient morality of the fed and fat in the imperial cores who’ve never known war and who never tire of telling all those brown people what the right thing is to do.”

    &

    “So when we judge the armed struggles of the left around the world, we need to be mindful of Sherman’s statement that “war is cruel and cannot be refined.” No commander worth a damn can ever measure decisions using the ethical tools of peacetime. Either the struggle is worth a war or it is not. We can’t have it both ways. The political goal is paramount, not the accolades of pacifists in the imperial centers, not the approval of the liberal media, not the blessing of those who should be our allies but are not there and cannot comprehend the urgency the sometimes leads to terrible mistakes, sometimes even crimes.”

    “So I will say this about the Zapatistas and the FARC-EP. At the end of the day, the difference between the two, aside from which is condoned and condemmed by those outside the conflict, is that one is winning and one is losing… because one understands the iron logic or war, and the other does not.”

    As for explosives being unpredictable, you’d be more likely to know then I would, but from all reports I’ve seen, The Weather Underground managed to use them pretty predictably for considerable period of time with only one self inflicted casualty.

    1 June 2008, 9:10 am

11. Required:

    & thanks for the definition!

    1 June 2008, 9:10 am

12. Stan:

    Stan, how is what you have said regarding “Resistance movements of the past, especially in the exterminist 20th Century — including left resistance — ended up behaving like the “enemy” and naming it “historical necessity,” that is, killing and kidnapping and injuring human beings” different from the what you criticized in FSD about the way people judge the FARC and the Zapatistas? I’m not necessarily saying that they’re not different, I was just wondering what differences you saw.

    Pretty obvious difference, which is a reflection of my own evolution on these questions. I don’t have any easy answers on this, because the complexity of Colombia and other places defies simple moral constructions… and in some regards they are none of my business except as it relates to my own country’s policies and practices. But feminism, ecology, my rejection of “Marxism-Leninism” as having reached an historical dead-end, and — I have to add — the influence of radical Christianity, have gone a long way toward reorienting my analyses of these questions since FSD.

    1 June 2008, 2:07 pm

13. m.c.:

    HURRAY FOR OZ!!!

    According to Reuters on Wiki’s Current Events Portal, Australia just pulled its 500 combat troops out of sourthern Iraq fulfilling the pre-election promise of the new PM Kevin Rudd.(bad news is that the 500 will be replaced by US troops)

    Is this a glass half full argument?

    1 June 2008, 4:38 pm

14. Archer:

    “As for explosives being unpredictable, you’d be more likely to know then I would, but from all reports I’ve seen, The Weather Underground managed to use them pretty predictably for considerable period of time with only one self inflicted casualty.”

    Okay. Then perhaps The Squamish Five and the Litton bombing represent the other side of that coin.

    It didn’t take them long to rack up ten casualties.

    1 June 2008, 9:08 pm

15. DeAnander:

    related reading: Zodiac by N Stephenson… and of course Abbey’s book that started the meme: The Monkeywrench Gang, alas somewhat compromised by Abbey’s 70’s-style sexism, but still a fine and at times inspiring read. followed by the sequel Hayduke Lives, which I never got around to reading. Abbey’s love of the SW desert shines through the pages of TMG. Derrick Jensen’s comments on demolishing dams for the sake of salmon also come to mind (Endgame II).

    most/many people are deeply shocked by such actions — far more shocked by a transgression of the laws of private property, in fact, than they are by the destruction of essential biotic systems. it is — by analogy — as if we were more protective of the arsonist’s right to his private property in the form of gas cans and lighter than we were outraged by his burning down ten thousand acres of life-supporting trees. the notion that we have the right and obligation to defend the biotic systems that support all life — ours as well — is curiously alien to our “Enlightenment” mindset. we are more likely to feel sympathy for the owner of the ecotaged equipment, and fear of the “lawless” monkeywrenchers. perhaps this is because we all know, at some gut level, that our every waking moment is filled with consumption habits, privileges and conveniences which are literally costing us a biosphere; if environmental crimes are subject to vigilante action, then “who shall ’scape whipping?” since we are all, like it or not, environmental criminals…

    it seems to me that the defence of life and health, and the defence of profit/capital, must in the end be incompatible goals — since, as the entropy-aware have been pointing out for decades, the rate of return necessary to pay usurious interest (and hence stimulate “value creation” and “growth” in the economy) is incompatible with robust, natural life processes or the solar budget…

    2 June 2008, 12:24 am

16. Miraculix:

    “…it seems to me that the defence of life and health, and the defence of profit/capital, must in the end be incompatible goals — since, as the entropy-aware have been pointing out for decades, the rate of return necessary to pay usurious interest (and hence stimulate “value creation” and “growth” in the economy) is incompatible with robust, natural life processes or the solar budget…”

    “Nicely put” right back at you DeAnander, and I would add at every level of scale, for emphasis. However, despite the “must” being a true statement logically, strategically and ethically, first the meme (and massive cognitive disconnect it enables) that shapes the false “money = value” equation will need to be broken cleanly in two, if not shattered into irreparable pieces. Then and only then will the mandatory separation of ideals to which you allude even become possible.

    Given the state of human development and the study thereof, most of which was funded by government largess by way of developing better passive C&C structures to rein in the “mass” audience at various mental leverage points, I am not inclined to believe that the modern version of “revolution” will much resemble those of the past.

    We may see a few million-man mobs forming up here and there in less important backwaters, for the sake of keeping the appearance of freedom in play, but we are also well down the slippery slope of technology enabling not only the modern techno-surveillance state but also the putative Era of Invisible Pain and Coercion (V2K, et al).

    To wit, my background in the USMC many years ago was ECM (electronic countermeasures) in the aviation community, and what truly scares me isn’t the cyborg soldier of film legend, it’s all the theoretical energy-based weapons in the pipeline coming to fruition in recent years. The very same “integration” that makes possible all those snazzy mobile phone/beard trimmer/knob polisher toys is also enabling the Rise of the Scary Machines.

    This collision, of million-man marches and microwave-based monstrosities, will likely serve as one of the means by which the “mass” still suckling the teat of “civilization” will finally be weaned from the intellectual and physical defense of the wrong team.

    By then, however, I expect it will be too late to do them much good at all.

    The long-held belief that the cities will empty into the countryside when the “s**t hits the fan” seems reasonable on the surface, but in actuality I suspect the socio-economic C&C systems put in place will limit this phenom to a steady trickle of the most capable, rather than the expected flood of rabble.

    I also suspect most urbanized folks will cling to their desperate circumstances to the bitter end, unwilling to embrace necessary change. They’ll grovel for their Soylent Green, decry those “terrorists” outside the electronic walls responsible for their plight and go right on dying in great numbers.

    And we who prefer to remain on the outside will serve whatever role befits us in the emerging “feudalism” of the future. The more adaptable you can become, the better your chances of being around long enough to give the next generation or outsiders a good head-start on the next generation of H-K’s and their weakest design points…

    2 June 2008, 3:27 am

17. Stan:

    …as well as raising cucumbers… (from a related post)

    Hey, it’s Monday, my day off from money-work, and I have coffee in hand. Be afraid. (:

    I think that before we can make limited sense of our situation we need to do a bit of intellectual multitasking. What are the various interacting perspectives and dimensions of a problem, how do they behave, and how do we behave?

    Predictions of future scenarios are notoriously awful, mainly because the future is … well, unpredictable. Einstein did make one pretty reliable aphoristic prediction, and that is that we cannot simultaneously prepare for war and prevent it. This aphorism bears close resemblence to the meaning of another one: if all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail (thanks, De).

    Monkeywrenching taks us into some pretty heavy ethical terrain; and the temptation to invoke all manner of categorical imperatives in advance of, or in the absence of, any concrete experience, is a liberal habit of thought that grabs abstractions with the same inner compulsion with which a chicken pounces on a roach.

    Hypothetical scenarios, like Derrick Jensen’s damn explosions, sound great when you are already in a state of righteous outrage over what is happening to many bioomes and the creatures in them. But once you look at concrete scenarios, they become infinitely more complex… how does one blow up a dam (actually most big ones can’t be blown up except by giant munitions available and deliverable by the military), does one have to be willing to kill $8-an-hour security guards to do it; where is the charge placed; what happenes, and to whom, downstream if the cathartic cascade becomes a flash flood? On and on.

    Looking at this as a question of scale, how much monkeywrenching does it take to have a generalizable effect? Whatever is going on now is pretty negligible… not even a blip in the larger scheme of things. Just in my urban area (”The Triangle” of NC), there are literally hundreds of construction projects with thousands and thousands of acres going under all the time. I know of no monkeywrenchers here; and if they are here, they are doing a piss-poor job. To be an effective force that really made a difference, this hypothetical force would require at least 100 dedicated, skillful people, with the time and sand in their craw to create a “situation.”

    If they did manage to create a situation, how would the public react? Sabotage costs an economy some jobs, which pisses a lot of people off. There is a persuasion/propaganda aspect to this that cannot be overlooked; but the reality is that those who might be willing to do this kind of work now are quite capable of caricaturing themselves with a bunch of shopworn anarcho-lefty phrasemongering that is designed more to show each other who is the most revolutionary than to persuade Jane and Joe Average of the necessity for doing what they are doing.

    If history has taught us anything, it is that sanctimony and efficacy are not conjoined twins… in fact, they are often cousins with a lot of bad blood between them.

    Which brings me back to “enemizing.” The solution to epistemic anthropomorphism (as well as “progress,” civilization, industrial dependency, et al) is certainly not misanthropy. In the real world, when people hear others talk about humans as a kind of infective epidemic (an imperial meme, btw), they not only hear the sneering sense of personal superiority by the “enlightened few,” they think of actual people (as we should) who are dismissed in this trope… like their close friends, like their kids, like babies and really old people… those are concrete people, not an abstraction upon which we can predicate some dystopian (mostly male) fantasy.

    In reality, there are forms of resistance out there, and they are not all subject to the kind of repression that Miraculix alludes to (crowd-control weapons). There is “cucumber resistance,” in the growing number of food-and-community autarky projects that are taking root (even if they are largely ignored by the media that shapes our imagination of the big bad world); and there are nascent political movements that are trying (with great difficulty) to break away from the entrenched and moribund movement standards and strategic orientations still carried by a small but vocal and powerful element within the gerentocratic left.

    I think here of YES magazine, a very fine publication that tries to draw on this urge toward a new politics of resistance, that is apparently viable, but that is still very limited in its reach as an organ of both networking and persuasion. Its limitations are not created by its language of appeal (it is very philosophcially optimistic), but by the cultural sponge of disinterest.

    DIS-interest is an outgrowth of DIS-enchantment with nature and DIS-embeddedness within society. Because Interest has been successfully directed to things within the monetized economy, to the desires created by acquisitive individualism, and sales-pitches to the pathologies of our alienation.

    The abstracted, hypothetical WE does not have a glimmer of a chance of changing these symptoms on a mass scale. That requires political power (the as-well-as that goes with cucumber-resistance), which under current circumstances is still a ways off.

    Wendell Berry says, in one of his poems, “plant sequoias.” I love that. We just have to understand that we can’t make the sequoia grow any faster than it does, and as individuals we are unlikely to be around to see the grown tree. Sure transcends the acquisitive individual, eh. Perspective.

    That sponge of enculturated disintrest can change, but not under our impetus and direction. The culture itself is a reflection of stable social forms of value and power. It is material and it is — as the feminists showed decades ago — epistemic.

    Systemic disruptions are more often than not the consequences of “internal contradictions,” maybe the most useful idea we have inherited from the traditional left.

    “We” can exploit these disruptions (and we have to figure out whether our interventions are efficacious both materially and epistemically!!!), but we cannot ourselves create them. Of course, you have to see a thing to respond to it.

    We can also colonize the interstices of a system in the process of decay.

    We need to be like Felix the Cat, who carried around his bag of tricks.

    The employment of sabotage as one item from our bag of tricks has to be assessed not categorically, but in how it relates to all dimensions of a larger struggle, how it fits in with the local situation, how it is likely to produce an OODA cycle, and by a kind of CARVER targeting formula (an old Special Forces planning matrix): criticality, accessibility, recoverability, vulnerability, effect on local population, and recognizability.

    Is sabotage advancing mass support? Depends really. If it is unrecognized by the larger population as sabotage, then it has a more material effect (without mobilizing mass resentment against you). Is it against something that is already unpopular?

    As things go forward, here is my most pressing concern: Is sabotage and other direct action crowding out other tactical options and social initiatives in a kind of masculinity arms race? Is is creating a war metaphor, instead of a transformation metaphor? Is it directed at a result, or against “enemies”?

    I obviously don’t eschew sabotage as a theoretically valid option in social struggles. I posted this thread after all. But it has some dangers against which theoretical movements need to inoculate themselves.

    Yesterday there was this guy on the radio who said the US is a population that has elected to trade in democracy for government by contract. There is the episteme. How do our actions, projects, and words combine to transform that thought process at the same time we plant our cucumbers and begin to seek after political power?

    2 June 2008, 7:47 am

18. jack:

    an interesting account of the effects of sabotage on mass movements can be found in Direct Action, an account written by a woman who was involved in a small bombing campaign in canada against nuclear proliferation as well as environmental issues. when they targeted a site that was making guidance systems for cruise missiles, it increased the visablity and popularity of the protests that up to that point had been largely ignored. definitely an interesting read to get perspective on the sort of mentality that can permeate a small group of frustrated activists.

    stan, i have been following your writings on resistance since i first picked up you book FSD, around the time it initially was printed. i have seen how your embrace of radical christianity has influenced your tactical and moral outlook. i want to know what you have to say to me when i look back at the history of radical christianity and i ultimately see 3 outcomes within the current us context.

    ineffectiveness (or more accurately accommodation)- many “radical” christian activists i know or have met seem to relegate their activism to decidedly un effective forms of protest, largely symbolic actions like crossing the line at SOA or chaining themselves to this or that. sometimes they get arrested. sometimes they get peppersprayed or manhandled into a paddywagon, but thats about it. their resistance changes nothing, and is often accompanied by macho posturing and talk of arrest counts and arrestability. as often as not it seems like an exercise in just doing “something” that might one day “change things”. and rarely seems connected to any larger strategic plan or initiative.

    martyrdom- some radical christians place themselves in positions of real danger, and in the course of following their christian principals, become martyrs, like norman morrison (the quaker who immolated himself in front of the pentagon) some would count MLK as the most famous radical christian martyr in the us, but he was not above exploiting the violent acts of others to advance his agenda. while condemning the violence of ghetto riots, he would position himself as the lessor of two evils to advance civil rights.

    insurgency- wait a minute?!?! christian insurgents? in america? this strain of radical chrisianity goes back to the days of the underground rail road and the abolitionists, and continues through to the deacons for defense. i use insurgency broadly just as pacifists use pacifism broadly. to me insurgent christians are those who are willing to defend themselves and those they claim to be in affinity with to selected and strategic actions of offensive action. i personally feel that the actions of insurgent christians have shaped american politics in immense (yet unacknowledged) ways.

    my point is that to form a truely revolutionary christian movement, you need to be able to accomadate all three strains. a movement of chirstian pacifists cedes all armed power to the state or people acting on the states behalf, while isolated acts of sabotage, armed self defense and insurgency are just angry shouts into the void. combined the two protect each other, provide the carrot and the stick, allow each other to breath. to look back at the last two major internal struggles for african liberation in north america, where would the fredrick duglases be without john browns, and where would the MLK’s be without the decons.

    gotta get back to the grind

    2 June 2008, 10:32 am

19. Archer:

    Re: Litton bombing

    Read the “communique” released after the bombing and before the arrests(link below) for a truly bizarre journey through the intricacies of severe cognitive distortion and disorientation.

    http://www.rabble.ca/everyones_a_critic.shtml?x=3218

    2 June 2008, 11:51 am

20. James M:

    I’ve taken a while to seriously ponder what’s been said here and my response to it, so that what I have to say will hopefully come out in measured tones … because to be honest, this post raised my hackles when I first saw it. This is, oddly enough, a very emotional subject for me in light of recent events … you’ll see why in a minute.

    I hope that, in the course of this hypothetical fictional narrative, our monkeywrencher protagonist(s) will be made aware, before undertaking their actions, of certain facts:

    1) While local laws and penalties for this sort of activity vary, federal law tends to be uniformly severe.

    2) Any unlawful act toward any facility, institution, pencil sharpener, or object of any kind that can conceivably be construed as having been the recipient of federal money (such as, say, a university or a highway) can and will be prosecuted in the federal system.

    3) This opens the accused to very severe mandatory minimums, such as 30 years(!) for “use of a destructive device”, not to mention various “terrorism enhancements” and provisions of our friend the Patriot Act.

    4) Federal prosecutors have a roughly 95% conviction rate, often due to the draconian nature of the penalties — people often plead out rather than risk a trial.

    5) Press attention (and thus the jury pool) is generally very unfavorable to the accused, given the tendency to describe eco-sabotage in more loaded terms as “eco-terror.” “Eco-terrorism” is, by the way, is listed as the Justice Dept.’s highest priority for domestic threats.

    Also to be considered by our hypothetical characters is the fact that when confronted by law enforcement with all of the above, usually at least one member of any hypothetical conspiracy will fold under questioning and rat out everyone in a 10-mile radius. Ironically, it’s often the most “ideologically pure” and zealous member of the group who is the one to sing first.

    Even if our hypothetical characters are apprised of such information and are prepared to possibly martyr themselves for their cause, they should be aware of the risk that others may unwillingly become martyrs of their operations as well — and it’s not just explosives that can cause this kind of regrettable collateral damage. For, you see, in the interest of reducing his / her sentence to as little as one tenth of the original term, and in the interest of promoting some prosecutor’s career, sometimes an unprincipled accused person is persuaded to finger people who are completely innocent in order to expand the circle of prosecution. Most people who undertake eco-sabotage actions can never conceive of themselves behaving in such a way … that is, until they’re faced with the threat of spending the majority of the remainder of their lives in a federal pen. Perhaps such a person can assuage their conscience somewhat by naming a person who, while innocent, they have a personal grudge against.

    So I hope our fictional character(s) will think — hard — about the consequences of their actions before they do anything, so that they don’t possibly find themselves in an unanticipated scenario. Because all of the above happened in a not-so-fictional way to a friend of mine, who I’m sure (as sure as I can be of anything in this world) is completely innocent of the charges against them. This friend got fingered by a couple of finks with a personal grudge who were looking to lighten their sentences.

    So when I see “MONKEYWRENCHING IS FUN” staring up at me from a computer screen, well … hopefully you can understand why I have a strong reaction. Writing letters to your friend in jail is not fun. Having to enclose xeroxed coloring book drawings in the letters so this friend can have a semi-decent interaction with their young child in a prison visiting room is not fun. I can not begin to imagine how not-fun it is for my friend.

    This whole argument of mine is quite apart from whether eco-sabotage is morally justified or strategically efficacious; I’m glad to see that being discussed here. What concerns me is that sometimes this kind of activity seems to be advocated in much the same way LSD used to be advocated in the 60’s — almost as a fun, hip countercultural activity, without enough consideration of the fact that there will be casualties.

    2 June 2008, 3:07 pm

21. Stan:

    All points very gratefully taken, James. This stuff has consequences; and if it were to become — as you say — the activist-culture equivalent of LSD, there can be some real problems.

    One of the reasons I hate hate hate — and have for a few years now — even pointing out that we are entering into a dangerous period of history where no one gets a “by,” popular culture has already poisoned this pill with macho adventurism. Still things must be said. “Mask no difficulties.”

    The pamphlet by the EarthFirsters has lots of practical guidance, but your criticism of the “fun” comment is dead-center.

    We are entering a period of history that has no good answers, no good options, no soft landings… a period of the most awful kinds of triage. The rest of the world is already there in many ways.

    There are no strong arguments I have heard against resistance. It is unconscionable to not-resist. What frightens me is that the right and traditional left have already decided that at certain crucial junctures, that resistance will take the form of violence against people.

    I’m of the 3D school of measured, phased resistance: demystify, disobey, disrupt… in that order. The enemizing feature of ideological politics — especially after the 20th Century — makes the last almost synonymous with killing. I’m not interested. Others are; but I’ve had my fill of that both practically and ideationally.

    What’s left for us (no pun intended) is a mix of legal and extralegal tactics, projects, counterinstitution-building, and public education, which can include elections as well as boycotts, sabotage as well as sit-ins, alternative communities as well as public persuasion… on it goes.

    My own point about machines is that they are the actual things that mediate the relation between social power and the environment. it’s a Hornborgian argument. Think about it in the context of — say — environmental justice struggles. If someone is pumping poison into a community, better to attack the machines than the board of directors. the latter are people and can change. The former are created for what they do.

    As to the threat of fascism, which I have raised as an issue myself from time to time, I still want to think more about whether what we need to study is not the history of Italy, Spain, and Germany, but contract theory (a la Carole Pateman). That comment from the radio yesterday — that we have surrendered democracy to rule-by-contract — keeps buzzing around the “important truth” cells in my brain.

    2 June 2008, 3:41 pm

22. Archer:

    Add the fourth D of “de-stabilization” - which is probably not our preferred option - and we can consider some of that work as being done for us. That may also make “disobey” and, if absolutely necessary, “disrupt”, a shorter distance to travel for your average citizen.

    Me, I’m just starting to learn about what needs to be de-mystified.

    2 June 2008, 8:14 pm

23. catlady/speck:

    De, your list of recommended books reminded me of a favorite young adult book my sister and I read many years ago: General Felice by Dahlov Zorach Ipcar. At the time, I didn’t understand the monkeywrenching connection, and as I’m searching for information now, I find it described as a young girl/horse book.

    I do remember finding the book disturbing–though the girls were monkeywrenching the Uglibiznessvölker who were destroying a beautiful family farm, their actions also led to a fair amount of mess. At the end, when the parents returned from travels to set things right, there was no indication that the farm could be restored (century old walnut grove having been cut down, gardens ripped out for a hog CAFO, etc).

    3 June 2008, 1:05 am

24. Archer:

    Hi De.

    If it is true that we are more alarmed by the transgression of property rights and laws than by the destruction of any given element (or all) of the biotic system, and as you assert, the idea that we have the right and the obligation to to defend our biosphere is oddly (un-naturally?) missing from our collective mind-set - is the source of these seemingly counter-intuitive disconnects to be traced to our distant past or more from our recent history? Is it a blind, flawed survival instinct or is it a blind, flawed learned behavior? Is it a severely uninformed value judgments that could be corrected (if there’s time) through de-mystification? Or does the fault line run deeper, through and back to hyper masculinity and patriarchal systems of order defining value? Has it developed or increased since the onset of information technology and could it be a direct result of the chaotic wash of data into our minds?

    Mmmm. That is a string of questions, isn’t it?

    3 June 2008, 11:17 am

25. m.c.:

    I’m not a lawyer, but I browsed the Bill of Rights on Wikipedia yesterday. Has anyone read the 9th & 10th Amendments recently?

    The 10th is fairly straight-forward, and was probably used in the past by state’s rights people(perhaps George Wallace types and others)??; “…, or to the people.”[which is not necessarily in the State’s Rights realm; BUT the 9th is more Subtle. They are Not reserved to(the language of the 10th)/// “…shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

    3 June 2008, 5:00 pm

26. Required:

    “The Squamish Five and the Litton bombing represent the other side of that coin. It didn’t take them long to rack up ten casualties.”

    Yes, I guess they do represent the other side of the. But I never said that explosives couldn’t be used poorly, just that maybe they’re not as completely unpredictable as they may seem. The burden of proof should obviously be very high for the viability and necessity of such actions, but it seems that it’s not an impossible task to learn how to carry out. Or at least it wasn’t then.

    I find the absolute (not tactical) exclusion of armed tactics in any situation except self defense to be some what selfish. Like, ‘I’m worth defending by any means necessary, but other people aren’t’. This position may be interpreted as “Are you in it to win it, or what?” It’s not meant like that. And I can’t see how one could advance any widely disapproved of tactic with it having the potential to be percieved as masculine posturing. Like, ‘I’m the exceptional one’! I’m not I wouldn’t do it. But it seems there could be a case made for it in certain situations.

    That said, I’m aware I’m a young white male who’s been raised in a culture where (among other things) a huge chunk of my recreational time has been spent playing simulations which involve committing atrocities against an enemy. So I know that there’s probably stuff I’m not seeing. But if there is, it would be good if it could be pointed out specifically and not just alluded to. I’m not trying to be aggitational or provoke anyone into anything. Taking advice like that from random people on the internet is very bad idea. I’m just not where other people are and I’m wondering how they got there.

    3 June 2008, 7:19 pm

27. Stan:

    But it seems there could be a case made for it in certain situations.

    My mom calls this “borrowing trouble,” and in the army, I called it “what-if-ing.” The number of hypothetical situations one might dream up are almost as infinte as the number of ways that reality will wreck our best prognostications.

    One of the side points that has come center stage for me as I think about this is the question of enemizing, as opposed to the abstract question of waging armed (or explosive) struggles.

    The latter is abstract, because there is simply no way to develop a fitting categorical imperative for its use. It is too concrete. That’s why I have real questions about the Leninist/anarchist notion of this on some imaginary continuum of struggle; and I have equally strong reservations about “just war” theories like those articulated by Niebuhr (a Christian socialist). Decisions in real situations are then held up against a predetermined (and necessarily ovversimplified) set of criteria, even shoe-horned into the criteria… and the triggers get pulled.

    We may be focusing on the wrong thing, and ignoring the constant… that enemizing thing.

    This has become an ethical discussion at this point — always an arduous topic. Everyone comes to the conversation with some ethical framework. But within those frameworks, we all carry certain assumptions that may not have been recognized or fully critiqued.

    As De, among others, has pointed out fairly often, one can easily identify certain people with their hands on the levers of power (an assumptive metaphor right there), but within a social system we are all participants… and so we can make an objective claim that we are all in some way complicit…. in both what we COMmit and Omit in our daily behaviors. This places us at a kind of ethical-moral impasse between what should be done and what can be done and what we do or do not understand about all this doing.

    One of the tensions in every discussion on these pages is the withering doubt that lurks in the bushes along the periphery: can anything be done at all? Another level of ethical anguish (with a big flashing red EXIT door for the feint-hearted).

    One of the things that feminism taught me (the reason feminism led me deeper into ecology and even to faith as a response to some prevenient grace for we embodied creatures) is that feminism — not the fun kind — begins and ends with the body. Humans are not disembodied; and living bodies can not be abstracted away.

    Starting with that radical acknowledgement of our fundamental physicality… we exist as bodies… what do we do, then, about the question of subjects and objects? Are we ethically bound in any way to recognize the subjectivity of every other human… or at least to make the attempt? Something in us tells us that there is a rightness and wrongness associated with violating people’s bodily integrity. We may imagine attacking people all day; but when confronted with an actual human being, standing there before us, that violent imagination dissolves into the overwhelming and immediate recognition of the existence of another embodied subject.

    It takes an effort, and a trick, to objectify people; and enemizing is othering.

    Don’t get me wrong… there are people who are maddeningly wicked in their behavior. Most maddening when they have power and privilege… which seems to facilitate their wicked behavior.

    I have a fantasy about slapping the cowboy shit out of Tucker Carlson. Don’t know why. He reminds me of something from my childhood, no doubt, the kinds of privileged cliques that persecuted weird kids.

    But I myself was as wrong as he is; and as a trainer of thugs in several other countries, mine was a gift that probably keeps on giving. Carlson is just a propagandist… AND maybe he would beat me up. I can’t really slap anyone because I’m developing arthritis in my hands, and it would hurt to slap anoyone. I might even recognize something in him face-to-face that would remind me that behind his privileged arrogance, he is desperately afraid of something. Who knows… it’s different when the person is in front of you.

    So how do we move forward? Act, react, react to reaction? Where does this mimetic cycle end?

    It is entirely too easy in this day and age to see “winning” anything as synonymous with the utter destruction of an enemy. And we can hypothesize (fantasize) ourselves into this synonym.

    One of my points earlier was that machines are objects. If I wrecked a bulldozer, I doubt I’d have the same dreams I have now about human beings. But even that is hypothetical.

    I appreciate the thoughts of others on all this.

    4 June 2008, 6:06 am

28. skol:

    Because I’m otherwise lazy (i.e., I don’t want to, y’know, work), my main job is dispute resolution on Wikipedia. Constantly refreshing my watchlist has taken the place of constantly refreshing this blog, as a matter of fact, and waiting for my “disputees” to start talking and working with each other.

    The first case I mediated (there’s a process and structure for this on WP) was about an Israeli soldier who was abducted (or taken) and held hostage (or captive) in (I believe) ‘06 by Hamas. The problem was, one editor thought that he should be a captive (with numerous citations to back this up), and another thought he should be a hostage (again, many citations). Now, with my background of presupposition, I had plenty of reservations about the Israeli who insisted on “hostage”, and was secretly kinda rooting for the guy who insisted on captive, although I knew all the policies and guidelines for mediation (which is learned, in the end, so it didn’t help me in that instance; I had good intentions, though, for getting mediation on track). More on this later, because it’s “important” or something.

    This was very silly of me: to assume. First of all, the guy who was insisting on captive was not that great at participating in the discussion, making it appear he was stonewalling. Anyway, that mediation attempt failed, and is now being taken a step further, albeit a couple of months after the case I was working on.

    And now - much later - I’m mediating between 1 Turk, 2 Bulgarians, and 1 Iranian. None of this matters. The only relevant abstraction on Wikipedia is “editor”, and right behind that is “online human”. Anytime an editor views a fellow editor through the abstraction of religion, politics, etc, things just go to hell. Needless to say, these guys are doing exactly that: viewing each other not as editors whose goal is to improve the project, but as warring nationalities hell-bent on pushing their point of view on a particular article. I’ve been (relatively) successful at putting a (minor) stop to that, at least for now. That’s not to toot my own horn, either (well…a bit), but to point out that the process for harmonious editing precludes naturally harmonious editors in large part.

    Because of this system, and if you understand it to a point, you can’t even claim that “here’s this white guy telling all the brown people they’re being idiots”, which is more than a little relieving (I never quite trust myself on these matters, though; I wonder which part of me I’m listening too much to, or if I’m just not listening enough. I pray for the former, minding the latter). We’re editors first and foremost; everything else is secondary to the project. I wonder if state communism worked a bit like this - ideally - like cogs in a happy machine. The difference is WP is pretty human no matter what, with only one tool inbetween (the software).

    Anyway, I’m rambling: The Israeli up above I’ve made friends with. He’s just some guy. He’s Zionist, all that stuff that I normally would’ve “bah!”‘d at and think he’s all devious (irony-meter should read ~90% on that note, if for any reason that it would read ~100% on his). Nope, just human. I think the system (the software) is more important than the individuals in this case. I can’t exactly explain why. It’s convivial? Maybe some bottom-up work (wikipedia) needs top-down structures (mediawiki software; well, it’s open source, so I don’t know if that qualifies, but maybe I get my drift enough that I’m explaining it in a way that’s understandable (-;).

    I have no clue where I’m going with this. Abstraction rarely helps (”seek context, flee abstraction”), unless you’re explicitly talking abstractions. Also, since Required mentioned spending a good deal of his time playing games where terrible things happen to people, I’m reluctant but rather excited to mention Final Fantasy VII, because I love the game and wonder if he’s played it. In a parallel reality, it’d be the first one to talk about.

    Ugh. Where’s the show preview button? You should turn this into a wiki and proclaim yourself GodKing (-:

    Also: I want to slap Tucker Carlson too. Uuugh. C’est la vie!

    4 June 2008, 7:31 am

29. Archer:

    Stan, I just gotta say, the image you invoke with the Tucker Carlson remark is just one of d*mn funniest things I’ve pictured in ages. I don’t always like when I give into this (my daughter and I - she’s 12 -recently had a conversation about the implications of slap-stick comedy…) but….. well…. my friend, thanks for a much needed laugh.

    4 June 2008, 1:06 pm

30. Archer:

    In the Litton case, I believe the explosives did indeed work predictably - pretty much exactly as they were meant to. It’s just that nothing and no one else followed the cues of the imaginary script written by the primary actors.

    My point in this is that reducing the equation down to “maybe explosives are not as unpredictable as they seem” glosses over a whole lot of other factors.

    Equally so, attempts at declaring a moral and ethical high ground or establishing a starting place of safe and easy moral/ethical decisions - quite possibly based on substantial amounts of incorrect assumptions and biases - will also gloss over other issues or crash on the rocks of such ideas as justified war or self defense.

    In a broad moral sense, I object to to individual/cell/gang/community/corporate/government action that causes injury and death to those who - from another viewpoint - may be considered innocent or uninvolved, even if those individuals intent on this action have declared to their own satisfaction that everyone is involved - and therefore free to be seen as pieces on a chess board or “non-player class” characters in a computer game.

    Otherwise referred to euphemistically as collateral damage.

    In my (current) view, even Monkeywrenching and definitely escalated versions of the same are simply too high of an uncontrollable risk to fall within the category of tactics and weapons we consider as morally or ethically viable during this stage of proceedings. This being the “we don’t know which way is up” phase.

    If our entire system of civil sanity (such as it is) implodes - all bets are off.

    Until then, there is no burden of proof high enough to past muster in an undeclared war. There are no convenient standards of viability and necessity of action when the targets are unclear and there are innocent beings in between you and your target.

    Clearly others do not share this view.

    Anyone is free to proceed as they wish in this matter but I believe that, even as it may save our lives - it is still wrong.

    But that does not mean we can’t do it.

    There are many kinds of collateral damage and an infinity of unintended consequences. Some days, life looks like nothing but a series of unintended consequences, like a hockey game where 99.9% of the all actions are broken plays. (Go Pens)

    In extremis, every single decision and action we make impacts in a negative way somewhere along the line. We do this merely by being. Then, in trying to make it better, we make it worse. This is where our ability to co-exist with our own cognitive dissonance becomes a good thing - from a strictly blind survival basis. And a bad thing from every other point of view.

    I recognize that trying to take this as a moral stand creates a moral/material gridlock that pretty much leaves one paralyzed. And removing certain actions and weapons from our quiver leaves us very vulnerable or possibly even helpless.

    But I also believe we would never succeed with those actions anyway.

    It also occurs to me that the actions we discuss here are the wrong strategy, the wrong tactics, the wrong targets and the wrong war. Lest anyone think I am dissing our host here, I also view Stan’s “educational- on- steroids” endeavors as a primary example of the correct strategy, tactic, targets etc.

    That is the larger reason for my persistent presence here lately.

    As an aside, if you’ve ever wondered about that old idea of an insane person knowing or not knowing they are insane, it’s possible an answer can be found in the experience of being aware that a lot of what one knows could be wrong, yet - until that state is corrected - still having to use that same data in all our decisions.

    Looking over these words, I see how incredibly flawed my ideas are. What hubris. Hole in logic, meet Mack truck.

    But how could it be any other way. I know so little and so much of what I do know is suspect.

    I’m now going to return to working on nailing this killer guitar part with as few edits as possible.

    What could be more important than that?

    4 June 2008, 7:41 pm

31. Michael:

    My friends were fuming once about an obnoxious sign that went up right in front of their apartment and contemplated taking direct action…

    …with a beet.

    Aparently the Mangel, a form of fodder beet, has growth caracteristics that can be quite destructive if properly employed. It was thought that if one planted a Mangel next to the base it might, eventually, cause the sign to collapse. They indicated that other plants, such as Eucalyptus, might have similar potential.

    To the best of my knowledge and belief no one in the conversation actually did anything with these ‘Mangel Wrenching’ techniques and I don’t know that they would actually be effective but it might be worth checking out. I mean if this wasn’t just a theoretical discussion.

    It would allmost be worth doing and getting caught just to end up in Federal court on a charge of felony beet planting.

    rb

    7 June 2008, 7:26 pm

32. Required:

    “It takes an effort, and a trick, to objectify people; and enemizing is othering.”
    - Stan

    Quotes from Derrick Jensen’s Endgame Vol. 2…

    “I’ve also had this line crammed down my throat more times than I want to consider - often phrased as “You keep saying that in this struggle for the planet that you want to win, but if someone wins, doesn’t that mean someone has to lose, and isn’t that just perpetuating the same old dominator mind set?” - an I’ve always found it both intellectually dishonest and poorly thought-out.”

    “(A man tries to rape a woman). She can’t get away. She tries to stop him non-violently. It doesn’t work. She pulls a gun and shoots him in the head. Obviously her freedom from being raped came at the expense of his life. Did she exploit him? Of course not. It all comes back to what I wrote earlier in the book: defensive rights always trump offensive rights. My right to freedom always trumps your right to exploit me, and if you do try to exploit me, I have the right to stop you, even at some expense to you.”

    “The insanity continues. If you recall, Ghandi said, “Mankind has to get out of violence only through non-violence. Hatred can only be overcome by love….”

    “Ghandi’s statement reveals an almost total lack of understanding of both abusive and pathological dynamics. His comment is one of the worst things you can say to anyone in an abusive situation, and one of the things abusers most want to hear. As I mentioned earlier, among the most powerful allies of abusers are those who say to the victims, “You should show him some compassion even if her has done bad things. Don’t forget that he is a human, too.” As Lundy Bancroft comment, “To suggest to her that his need for compassion should come before her right to live free from abuse is consistent with the abuser’s outlook. I have repeatedly seen the tendency among friends and acquaintances of an abused woman to feel that it is their responsibility to make sure that she realizes what a good person he really is inside - in other words, to stay focused on his needs rather than her own, which is a mistake. I want to underscore that Gahndi’s perspective is, following Bancroft, “consistent with the abuser’s outlook.”

    Too often pacifists have said to me, “When you look at a CEO, you are looking at yourself. He’s a part of you, and you’re part of him. If you ever hope to reach him, you must recognize the CEO in your own heart, and you must reach out with compassion to this CEO in your heart, and to the CEO in the boardroom…”

    “It’s remarkable that pacifists tell me to look at the killer and see myself, while never telling me to look at the victim and see myself: they are telling me to identify with the killer, not the victim.”

    “Schiller’s line too, that “Peace is rarely denied to the peaceful,” is more magical thinking, and the people who spout it really should be ashamed of themselves. What about the Arawaks, Semay, Mbuti, Hopi? Peace has been denied to them. What about the peaceful women who are raped? What about the peaceful children who are abused? What about Salmon? What about rivers? What about redwood trees? What about bison? What about prairie dogs? What about passenger pigeons. I hate to steal a line from someone so odious as John Stossel, but give me a break.”

    “Setting rhetoric aside, there is simply no factual support for the statement that ends don’t justify the means, because it’s a statement of values disguised as a statement of morals. A person who says ends do justify means is merely saying: I value outcome more then process. Looked at this way, it becomes absurd to make absolute statements about it. There are some ends that justify some means, and there are some ends that do not.”

    14 June 2008, 10:43 pm

33. Stan:

    This all assumes that situations are static, or that they exist in some never-changing cycle of reality until confronted by direct rebellion. It assumes that the living people are synonymous with the job descriptions of ruling groups. Neither is true.

    What is missing here is the twinned-need for both tactical agility and for a deeper moral imagination than identifying “enemies.”

    Pacifism seems too simple and categorical a word.

    15 June 2008, 7:44 pm

34. Required:

    How does it assume “that situations are static, or that they exist in some never-changing cycle of reality until confronted by direct rebellion”?

    15 June 2008, 9:35 pm

35. Jonathan:

    Jensen seems to interpret compassion as being a wholly inactive principal, which demands nothing from the “you” in the relation - perhaps an interpretation that is justified if we take it as how it is propagated by abusers and CEO’s. However, I think compassion could also be understood as an active, subversive and radical principal.

    There is such a thing as righteous anger, righteous indignation and righteous resistance - all of which are not exclusive of compassion, nonviolence and love. There is a fine line between this and when “objectifying an enemy” becomes an obstacle for healing.

    I haven’t read the book that was quoted above, so perhaps I am misjudging from limited understanding and perhaps he says in a sense what I have already said, but from what I’ve picked up from various discussions here and elsewhere about the book it feels to me as if the ethical framework he is setting up given the unfolding global catastrophe, or the extreme situations many personally face, deserves some criticism. I think we should be careful not to let the magnitude of the problem(s) we face lead us into either/or reactions.

    15 June 2008, 11:10 pm

36. Stan:

    What he said. (:

    Circumstances are described in a very crystalized way, where the main antagonisms (primary contradictions) are highlighted. This is an explicit reduction, even though it is a very useful intellectual move, like cleaning out a lab before conducting experiments. I focuses the reader on the part of the problem that is ignored by most discourse. It also, however, implies that (1) the essence of power exists apart from the consequences of inevitable change, and (2) that this makes that power impermeable to anything except a bomb placed on a dam.

    In the real world, the ability to seriously blow up a dam is limited to states and their destructive machinery, and the acquisition/employment of that ability by activists would set social change efforts back decades in one explosive moment; because the masses would rally to the state to go after the “terrorists.”

    Pacifism and strategic non-violence are two entirely different things. Baiting actual pacifists as ineffectual sissies — as many lefty manly-men do (no one here yet) — is just schoolyard machismo. Pacifists are very fine political actors in my experience, deeply committed.

    We have to leave the war metaphors for social revolution, and enemizing is a war metaphor.

    I very much appreciate Jonathan bringing up compassion as “an active principle.” This is what is meant by “deeper moral imagination.” It’s sissified relational stuff…

    16 June 2008, 7:03 am

37. Required:

    I want to say up front, I don’t understand a lot of what is being said. Maybe not a lot, but some crucial parts. I don’t know if this necessary, because as I say, I don’t understand. Having explained esoteric concepts to people before I know that sometimes it’s just a matter of me using simpler language or being aware that some people are unfamiliar with the topic. Other times the other person actually has to go and learn a bunch of new stuff. I’m not sure which this is, but I just thought I’d raise it.

    I don’t fully understand Jonathon’s 1st paragraph. What’s an “inactive principal”? Are you saying Jensen doesn’t think a person needs to take action in order to be compassionate? And that this is similar to the way abusers and CEO’s perceive compassion?

    Nor his second paragraph (ok, maybe there was a lot I didn’t understand). What does it mean to be exclusive “of” something. Is that the same to being exclusive to something? Are you saying that justified anger, indignation and resistance (does that include violent resistance?) is not exclusive to compassion, nonviolence and love? I’m just asking as many questions as I can think to ask, so I can get my head around this.

    So, given that I don’t know what “this” is, I don’t know about the fine line that separates it from “objectifying an enemy” is either, so some clarification on that may be in order. But I am curious as to whether “objectifying an enemy” is always an obstacle for healing. And specifically for healing what?

    In regards to Stan’s post, I understood everything up until you said “the essence of power exists apart from the consequences of inevitable change.” I don’t understand what that means and so I also don’t fully understand what the second point either. Some elaboration on these points would be nice.

    So that’s all the stuff that I don’t understand, but even with my very limited grasp I want to convey what I am feeling rather then what I understand. What I sense is that Stan has made some implications, that are broad and don’t apply to specific situations ie. explosives can’t be used with any predictability and that killing humans requires dehumanizing them which must be avoided at all costs.

    Then when I’ve counter with similarly broad points (if not narrower), ie. the Weather Underground blew up a lot of stuff with a high amount of predictability and that despite the dehumanizing aspect some situations may call for certain people to be killed, all of a sudden the same openness which was acceptable for Stan’s initial claims are too broad for my counters. I have to come up with a specific plan for when and where and how, and it has to be real and it has to be now, or else I’m “borrowing trouble” or “what-if-ing.” This may not be what is happening, as is abundantly clear, I’m only grasping a limited part of the conversation. But that’s the gist I’m getting.

    16 June 2008, 11:39 am

38. DeAnander:

    In defence of DJ, he raises the same points I did years ago in an essay “Justice is a Woman with a Sword,” in which I pondered the implications of preaching nonviolence to the victims of successful violence, and the potential of violent action to achieve specific, concrete change for the better. I’m still divided on this one; and I note also that DJ specifically recommends violence against structures (dams) rather than against persons. He also recommends personal micro-action against micro-dams, particularly older, abandoned ones already slowly (too slowly for the fish) decaying in remote spots, rather than grandiose (as in Ed Abbey’s fantasy novel) attempts on giant hydro facilities.

    Having said that, the enemising meme is indeed dangerous stuff. We only have to recall the more grotesque moments of the Red Guard’s ascendancy in China, the persecutions under Stalin, etc. to understand the danger of zealous enemising in a revolutionary effort. Pursued with sufficient energy, it turns the vanguard — and their State — into a vicious bully (in the eyes of international opinion and of their own population). Which delegitimises the whole shebang.

    Somewhere, it seems to me, there is a fine line between the soppy “forgiveness” meme that expressly suggests victims shut up and accept their lot or even learn to love their oppressors, and a demand for change (of systems, of behaviour) that doesn’t lose track of the humanity of the offender and the possibility of redemption/reparations. I’m not real verbal this morning and can’t wax eloquent on this topic, but it seems to me related to the broader principles of a more robust self-organising paradigm…

    16 June 2008, 2:21 pm

39. Jonathan:

    Re: Required. I actually had a lot more to say in my first post to give a little more background to what I was trying to say, but frankly I’m not completely sure where I stand on these ideas either - as to what is morally acceptable action given the circumstances - and whatever else I was putting in seemed to dilute the point I was trying to make - so I decided to go short and risk ambiguousness. But here it goes:

    I guess I was trying to say that DJ is justified in criticizing the kind of “soppy forgiveness,” as DeAnander put it, which demands nothing of the one who is “forgiven” and doesn’t change the relation of power between the two parties (whether that be between an abuser and victim, or between those communities of resistance and the “CEO’s” who are at the controls of the machines precipitating global catastrophe.)

    However, I was worried that he seemed to be taking this notion of compassion as “soppy forgiveness” to be the only way that we could understand compassion. This was brought up specifically by his criticisms of Ghandi. DJ’s scenerio of someone preaching to a victim of abuse “You should show him some compassion even if her has done bad things. Don’t forget that he is a human, too.” is certainly inexcusable, but seems to me to be an oversimplified notion of compassion and the power of nonviolence and love.

    This is why I was saying that there is such a thing as righteous anger, indignation and resistance (something that the person in DJ’s scenario with the abuse victim is denying them) and that these feelings and actions are not separate from love and in fact may be necessary for true compassion and true forgiveness. This is not the kind of love and compassion that simply lets the abuser or those in power off the hook, but demands a change in them and in their relationships, and it is the kind of transformational change that will occur outside of any conscious decision and their part. This is the power of nonviolence and love that Ghandi talked about. This kind of active compassion may have more power to make the necessary change in our world than blowing a dam, which may also be necessary, but we shouldn’t limit ourselves in our “moral imagination” as Stan says.

    Helping to heal victims of abuse (whether it be a person or the earth) is what we are talking about here - the desired outcome. Healing is a dynamic process and one that is never over, certainly not in a lifetime. This is perhaps what Stan was talking about when he was saying that these situations are purposed as being static. There are times when anger is righteous, but there is also a thin line when anger also becomes hatred, when those we direct our anger at are no longer in the realm of our compassion, an objectified enemy, and this anger becomes an obstacle for healing.

    In this way, I think we can come to understand our roles as “healers” in the mode of a “self-organizing paradigm” as DeAnander mention above which has also been a strain in this thread. I think permaculture has a lot to offer in this discussion and it hit me the other day while studying it. The role of a permaculture designer is to be a “guider of change” not to be an intervenor. When we intervene in our environments in an attempt to “fix” a perceived problem, our action of intervention, which often has limited, short term effect, causes other unforeseen consequences that then demand our further intervention. However, in designing permaculture systems one should observe and recognize that the ecological environment is always attempting to change and correct the imbalances we have caused and that the designer’s role is to put the necessary pieces into play to speed this recovery. The ultimate desired aim is to design oneself out of the system, and barring that to guide the change that is in play (irrespective of our actions) so that our needs as living beings are met.

    So to bring this idea to the present discussion, and perhaps bring it a concrete personal example I was (and in many ways still am) very close to someone who grew up in an abusive family. When my advice was sought (which unfortunately I often gave when it wasn’t) I always struggled with how to help them see the difference between their justifiable anger and the anger that burned through every experience and was an obstacle to the healing process. Unfortunately in my own weakness I would project myself into the problem – I became and intervenor and lost credibility. However, someone more capable (perhaps someone with wisdom of experience and who was further down the path) would have guided them in the process of self-discovery of the difference in righteous anger and the anger of hate.

    Now with a wider focus my uneasiness with the actions that DJ is purposing is not necessarily in the actions themselves, but in the mode that they might be done in – as intervention. I think to be the guiders of the kind of change that is necessary we must recognize that a force for change, for healing, and I’ll say it – love – occurs without our intervention, we must realize the need to stand aside when necessary and to carefully guide it when necessary – a very subtle art. With this recognition and, ahem… faith, in the force of change that is outside ourselves (and in whatever way we choose to explain it) – then we can get out of our own way and these self-organizing communities of action will take shape as they are already doing in their own way, even as we speak.

    I hope this makes more sense, or that I didn’t say to much.. in some ways its easier to be ambiguous :).

    16 June 2008, 5:30 pm

40. Charles:

    For everybody’s legal protection, somehow this discussion has to be about four “orders of magnitude” more hypothetical and fictional. The “new” fascist laws Bush and Clinton put in… and all that.

    Clarence Darrow, your lawyer

    23 June 2008, 2:48 pm

41. Lisa:

    Death of Free Internet is Imminent
    Canada Will Become Test Case

    By Kevin Parkinson

    Global Research, July 20, 2008

    In the last 15 years or so, as a society we have had access to more information than ever before in modern history because of the Internet. There are approximately 1 billion Internet users in the world B and any one of these users can theoretically communicate in real time with any other on the planet. The Internet has been the greatest technological achievement of the 20th century by far, and has been recognized as such by the global community.

    The free transfer of information, uncensored, unlimited and untainted, still seems to be a dream when you think about it. Whatever field that is mentioned- education, commerce, government, news, entertainment, politics and countless other areas- have been radically affected by the introduction of the Internet. And mostly, it’s good news, except when poor judgements are made and people are taken advantage of. Scrutiny and oversight are needed, especially where children are involved.

    However, when there are potential profits open to a corporation, the needs of society don’t count.

    ….

    Maintaining Internet (free) access is the only way we have a chance at combatting the global corporate takeover, the North American Union, and a long list of other deadly deeds that the elite in society have planned for us. Yesterday was too late in trying to protect our rights and freedoms. We must now redouble our efforts in order to give our children and grandchildren a fighting chance in the future.

    Full article:

    http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9627

    21 July 2008, 12:10 pm

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