Deja Vu All Over Again: Plantations and PsyOps
In the early 1990s, when I was living in northern Ghana, an elderly woman farmer decided that I needed some education. In a rather long lecture, she detailed the devastating effects that the Green Revolution – the first one, which outside experts and donors launched in Africa in the 1960s and 70s – had had on farmers’ crops, soils, trees and lives. She said that the imported seeds, fertilisers, pesticides and tractors, the instructions to plant row after row of imported hybrid maize and cut down precious trees that protected the soils and nourished the people – even the invaluable shea nut trees – had ruined the diverse, productive farming systems that had always sustained her people. When she finished, she cocked an eye at me and asked, with a cagey grin, “Why do you bring your mistakes here?”
I started out trying to quote this article selectively, but it is information-dense and difficult to excerpt; highly recommended reading. Note the deep involvement of the “philanthropist” Gates Foundation. Note the admission (as yet covert, not open) that the Grand Plan for the Transformation of Africa involves dispossessing the peasants — Haiti all over again. Note the “biofuels” connection and the greenwashing campaign already ramping up.
Once again food, land, and food security are central issues in the big geopolitical game plan. Once again the Great Powers are packaging this recipe for immiseration and slavery as “progress”. Once again, their proposed “solution” is a biotic and social disaster. The question is, will we all be fooled again? Already, millions of hectares of African land have been sold, often without the knowledge (let alone consent) of the smallholders. What next? How can this energy-intensive, long-distance imperial Enclosure be maintained as the fossil fuel gets more expensive and less plentiful? Will Africans take this expropriation meekly?
In the next breath I want to offer another puzzle piece… a recent CP article that Stan flagged on facebook: Human Terrain Systems Dissenter Resigns, Tells Inside Story of Training’s Heart of Darkness. Again, the whole thing is worth a thoughtful read. But the bit I want to highlight is this:
John’s last day of HTS training was the first day of MARDEX, a military role playing exercise designated as “Weston Resolve.” For the exercise, the class was presented with a training scenario in which the fictional nation of “Lakeland” was located in an area to the northeast of Kansas City was the focus of operations. John wrote that,
“In the PowerPoint slide presentation laying out the background for the “operations”, the Wargame role-playing is represented by staff as merging into the real world drug, crime, and environmental “contention” within the community. The whole mission is represented as bringing a military state control of the local population which has recently elected a local government that is a “permissive” (supportive) environment for US Army activities after the previous local government had withdrawn from the US as a sovereign society. Now the US military is taking over the area to reestablish public security.”
The class was then told that the mission they were training to support was one in which the military was establishing order in a setting where environmentalist-separatists had taken over. John explained that in this hypothetical training scenario,
“IATAN, a coal-fired power plant on the Missouri side of the river is one of the main military foci due to “contention within the community” over the environmental pollution it is causing. Sierra Club and other, more radical groups have been active in this area: ELF is one such radical group. Even though there is an elected government and rule of law in Lakeland, there are some ‘insurgents’ who are opportunistic.’ That is why the US Army has moved into this area that has broken away from US control.
Staff Assignment to the several Human Terrain Teams that make up the class of the November Cycle were issued as follows: 1. ‘Find out more details on the criminal activity.’ 2. Find out the best conduits to pass ‘information’(PsyOps and InfoOps) to the local population. 3. HTT is assigned to produce a ‘Research Plan’ to understand the situation at the IATAN power plant – people’s concerns, desires, etc., and identify those who were ‘problem-solvers’ and those who were ‘problem-causers,’ and the rest of the population whom would be the target of the information operations to move their Center of Gravity toward that set of viewpoints and values which was the ‘desired end-state’ of the military’s strategy.
As I thought about what was being done in this activity, and the way it adapted COIN strategy for Afghanistan/Iraq to be applied by the US military in situations in the USA where the local population was seen from the military perspective as threatening the established balance of power and influence, and challenging law and order, I began to think back on stories that circulated among the ant-war movement in the 1960s-70s, about concentration camps being developed just for imprisoning such protestors an “problem-causers”. And I wondered who would be working on the Human Terrain Teams to enable the US military’s actions against unruly segments of their own countrymen; perhaps Afghan and Iraqi anthropologists who had specialized in US ethnography?”
Human Terrain Teams practicing training scenarios set in regions actually within the United States bring the very notion of “human terrain” back home to its domestic counterinsurgent roots. As anthropologist Roberto Gonzalez documents in his book, American Counterinsurgency: Human Science and the Human Terrain, the very phrase “human terrain” grew out of domestic counterinsurgency initiatives. Gonzalez describes how in 1968 the US House Un-American Activities Committee released a report entitled “Guerrilla Warfare Advocates in the United States” which warned that the Black Panthers and other militant groups threatened the country’s political stability. HUAC warned that “irregular forces…possess the ability to seize and retain the initiative through a superior control of the human terrain.” The clear implication was that the control of civilians in America’s cities was vital to winning the counterinsurgency struggle at home.
Sorry about the lengthy quote. My point is that the US military is even now, even as we speak, being trained and prepared for COIN operations against environmentally-motivated “breakaway” groups (i.e. polities, regions, villages such as Transition Towns attempting to secede formally or informally from the fossil/consumer economy). “Environmentalists” are being defined as a potential enemy/subversive group to be defeated. Nothing new in this of course; the fossil lobby more or less is the government and hence the armed forces more or less are the Pinkertons of the fossil industries. But this training scenario (which surely violates posse comitatus no?) brings into sharp focus the degree to which relocalisation, sustainability, alternative energy, polyculture/permaculture, local currencies and all the other tools with which we might try to soften the crunch at the end of the cheap fossil energy era … are being regarded by our military/industrial complex as threats to national security, warranting training exercises and COINTEL planning. And public opinion on these issues is being regarded as a legitimate target for black-ops and psyops: US armed forces are seriously and openly considering themselves as an armed and dangerous PR agency for the fossil fuel lobby.
Or so I read the tea leaves. I’d sure like someone to convince me otherwise.
Guy Montag:
Stuart Cohen’s novel, “Army of the Republic,” was based in the near future with the US government and a “Blackwater” security company versus resistance groups (both violent and nonviolent). Cohen obviously did his research; readers can certainly see echos of operations against the Black Panthers, the various repressions in South America, and more recently against environmental groups in the Pacific Northeast.
Cohen doesn’t provide any simple answers. Thought-provoking book. Cohen points out the pros/cons of both violent and nonviolent resistance and doesn’t paint the “good” guys and the “bad” guys as entirely black and white.
17 February 2010, 7:31 amCurt:
Guy,
17 February 2010, 8:53 amMy wife is .telling me all the time that not only is violence counterproductive but even making comments that seem extreme in the prevailing political climate is counter productive. I tell her that her attempts to subtly change people 1% at a time is completely useless as events will move so much faster than people’s ideas. If you try to change them a little at a time you may as well do nothing. Perhaps we are both right but I like my method of failure better. I learned a few years ago that one prerequisite of being a revolutionary is being optimistic. I find that being optimistic is very hard to do. I am still pretending.
Curt Kastens:
Guy,
17 February 2010, 1:17 pmI find it quite funny that a picture of Stuart Cohen that I just saw looks a heck of alot like the last picture that I saw of Stan Goff.
DeAnander:
It is sometimes hard to suppress the suspicion that the Serious People in Charge (i.e. the Mafia that calls itself legit) have a Serious Plan for dealing with the exhaustion/poisoning of topsoil and depletion of other food resources in the industrialised nations. That plan would be to depopulate Africa and turn it into a giant hacienda to grow food for the wealthy Northern Hemi. A grander version of annexing the Sudetenland, I guess. It’s What Empires Do:
One of the reasons empires annex other people’s lands is for profit; but the other reason is for the survival of the costly and complex structure of the empire itself, as its cost/benefit ratio starts to fall. The core grows ever more dense and energy-intensive (and runs on debt based on compound interest, which requires exponential “growth”) and thus has to ravage a larger and larger radius more and more rapidly; but that extended looting operation itself takes more and more energy and resources to maintain — area goes up by the square of the radius! — as we’ve seen from some of the numbers on gal of gas per diem required to keep US soldiery in the field to claim ownership of other people’s fossil fuel deposits. Unfortunately, the whole looting process is so profitable for all the careerists and panderers who have made a profession out of it, that no one is ever interested in backing off; kinda like the Alberta Tar Sands fiasco. Even if the EROEI is negative, so much money is to be made by the contractors installing and maintaining equipment, building roads, etc. that no one really cares if the entire project is futile in the long term.
The process seems inevitable, mindless as yeast. I begin to think there is nothing to be done other than build what resilience we can into our local lives and social networks, stockpile skills and knowledge, and try to prepare ourselves and others for the accelerating madness. Recently reading a novel set in the pre-Fall Soviet Union, I was powerfully struck by the similarities to present-day US. We don’t yet have the Lubyanka round the corner, but the trend towards paranoia, mindless loyalty tests, centrally controlled media, huge discrepancies between official stories and lived reality, public cynicism, barefaced corruption, scapegoating and persecution, chanting of empty slogans… it all sounds very familiar, just a more advanced case. Like reading a detailed account of the final hours of someone dying from cancer, when you’ve only just noticed that oddly persistent ache…
17 February 2010, 4:22 pmCurt Kastens:
OK this is an education web site not an activist web site per say.
18 February 2010, 4:26 pmSo in the spirit of education I would like to pass along an idea that someone suggested to me a few days ago.
It is a form of civil disobediance. The goal would be to shut down the US military telephone system, and second just to disrupt the work of people in the military. In short The method would be to recuit a large number of people who would be willing to call a militray telephone number once a day a speak with whichever member of the military answers the telephone. Of course these large numbers of people are going to half to be supplied with numbers to call. Many numbers are available from open sources on the internet. I think that the key to this project would be to get a large institution like Green Peace to back it.
Here is the catch however. Green Peaces backing would have to be “unofficial” because if it were official the US government might try to counter this action by sueing Green Peace and attempting to bankrupt them through a death by legal fees. None the less I am going to contact Green Peace and suggest this to them.
But perhaps some of you might know other organizations that might be interested in considering this idea.
I am not endorsing this idea I am just stating it for educational purposes.
I can imagine that another counter tactic that the powers that be might take would be to disrupt the telephone service of anyone taking part in this project.
That would be a double edged sword on their part however. I can also imagine that if this project were successful that the military may take legal action against some of the callers to try to make examples of them. So this would not be a risk free action.
If anyone else would like to bring up what likely counter measures would be I would of course appreciate being further educated. Your thoughts would be appreciated. Of course the military itself could monitor our posts but it seems preety clear to me that they could not learn anything that would be very useful other than that their telephone system is going to be attacked from with in the US by Americans in a fashion in which it would be very hard to combat against a determined foe. Of course I have never never done this myself so I have no personal expierience with it. You may want to ask yourself if I have not done this why should you? It can only have an effect if lots of people are willing to devote a small amount of thier time each day to the project. So of course recruting people would be another key task. But of course if institutions can be recruited that would have a multiplyer effect. Of course you would never never take part in such a program would you now. Of course no one that you know would ever take part in such a program either. Obviously a program with no particpants is a program that does not exist.
I do not exist and I never said this. You can put that in writing.
Kirt
Stan:
Re-working (slowly) a serial piece I was doing once upon a time – Homeland Security. In it, and the companion piece I can hopefully merge – The Insurgent’s Handbook, these two threads also converge: land/food politics & counterinsurgency operations.
Ideas and observations on this synthesis are welcomed.
These trends imo are inevitable now, and their merger in the world is equally inevitable. This will be preceded by an intensive and protracted campaign to normalize the accompanying discourse… eco-terrorism, etc. It’s already there, albeit directed at people who appear very fringe-ish (and therefore disposable foils, like the ALF et al), but that can be built on… and will.
Here are some interesting links:
FULL
FULL
FULL
Note that the links to the original Homeland Security documents uncovered by Wikileaks have disappeared from the web.
My point is that the scare-story that “ecoterrorism” is just an attack on civil liberties by power hungry government types is wrong. Neither governments, nor NGOs allied with governments, nor the economic interests that are hegemonic within government, operate that way. They are not ideological. They are pragmatic.
The real expansion of capital requires real land and real food-dependency, as a business matter. Forward thinking policy types see this in front of them, and also anticipate the specific forms of resistance that the further enclosure of food will engender. The goal of this kind of verbiage is not to whittle away at our liberties; it is to protect Property in a foreseeable era where food enclosure is the next logical step. Those who will inevitably resist are being pre-enemized, in a very cautious and incremental way, so that when this conflict comes into bolder relief, supporting resistance of any kind will be tantamount to joining the Nazi Party or the Man-Boy Love Association.
21 February 2010, 4:05 pm(Boer) Tom:
@Stan
Teach/include lock-sport. It takes a lot of concentration and patience to learn, can be self-directed, and gives a broad understanding of the workings of mechanical and other systems.
As for the statements of the NGOs, police, armies and other terrorist organizations, why not confront people about their beliefs and the actions of these groups? I frequently call the RCMP and OXFAM Quebec de jure terrorist organizations, e.g. on the basis of their actions in Haiti wrt Aristide, and I’m always sure to provide relevant references/evidence, although sometimes it is more workable to show the evidence first, then draw the relevant conclusions to the person to whom one presents it. Legally you have a democracy, so why not use it? If you look at anti-colonial struggles, showing or acknowledging the law to be the farce that it is is often an early step in large-scale recruitment (Cuba, Kenya, South Africa) as resentment against the ‘legal’ institutions is typically rife; one need only explain a few basics to someone who has been on the receiving end of it (e.g. a friend of mine, whose innocence I could testify to, who had no practical alternative but to take a plea bargain) – a meaningful prosecution against the state (e.g. police) is rarely possible, more rarely meaningful, and then tends to coups (Greek colonels, anyone?). The main danger is to leave people dispirited.
21 February 2010, 9:24 pmCurt:
The second thing that is bothering me is some months ago it was reported on the MSM that the US intellegence community came to the consensus that Iran did not have a nuclear weapons program. Yet with in just a few weeks the US politicians were having meeting with Europeans to discuss how to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. It was like the mind of the government was totally ignoring what its eyes ears and nose were telling it.
25 February 2010, 10:19 amBut the US government is a bit different people work in those agencies that reached that conclusion about Iran’s weapons programs. So we have an apparent situation in which the mind of the government spit in it own face and it expected not only the face to go along with it but it expected that every one would just continue to carry on as if nothing funny had happened. What kind of a psy op is this? The American government must think that the American people are really really stupid. Based upon the actions of the American people it looks like those running the American government are right. But then also consider the reaction of the the US Intelligence Agencies to this strange behavior by their leaders. What are they doing? Are they trying to fool the Iranian government leaders in to thinking Oh the US politicians are just acting for domestic popularity. Do not take it seriously. We are not going to attack you. (Because we really ARE planning to attack you.) If the US leadership and the heads of the Intelligence Agencies were not on the same page you would think that the leadership would replace the heads of the intelligence agencies. If they could not replace the heads of the intelligence agencies you would think that they would have some fear that the Intelligence Agencies would replace the leadership one way or another if the leadership crossed them. Yet the leadership acts as if it has no fear of the Intelligence agencies what so ever. So the only conclusion that one can come to is the conclusion that I came to above. Do not think that we are planning to attack you. (Because we really are planning to attack you.) Which is perhaps just what the desired effect would be. An Iranian pre emptive strike that the US could then claim was an unprovoked attack on the US or its allies. What stupid games people are playing. One miscalculation and some people will probably make billions of dollars. Disturbing.
Curt:
When you get right down to it the US is already wagging war against Iran. I am referring not to acts of sabotage and bombings that have been carried out in Iran. Who really knows who carried them out. What I am referring to is the boarding of Iranian vessels or Iranian bound vessels on the high seas and to the seizure of Iranian weapons shipments bound for Hezbollah. Iran has just as much right to arm Hezbollah as the US does Israel. So when the US government lies and pressures the Iranians over their nuclear program and the Iranians know that the Americans know that they are lying and the Americans know that the Iranians know the Americans are lying it could be an American taunt, see we are lying to the hole world and even the Russians and the Chinese are going along with it. What the fuck do you think that you are going to be able to do about it? Dial up Allah and have him come rescue you. You better learn and fast that on this planet we are Allah. Well, that might be bad for the Iranians.
25 February 2010, 12:35 pmFor me it means that I can hit two birds with one stone. Disturbing.
Curt:
Hip Hip Horray. It is just not fun celebrating alone.
2 March 2010, 5:12 pmSome one ripped the antenna off my car. For most people that would be a reason to be pissed off. But for me it is a reason to celebrate. Why, becasue I do not think that that the timing this act of vandalism was a mere coincidence. Even if this attack had nothing to do with my prose I still do not view it as a mere coincidence. I would take it as a sign from a higher power that I really pissed someone on the oppossing team off. That means that I must have done something right. I do not know what IT was. I do not know if it was skill or if it was luck, luck I suspect. In either case celebrations are in order. Heck, that might even include alchohol, just a bit mind you.
I look forward to pissing off someone on the oppossing team again. I do not know if I can do it or not. I pray for Luck.
Curt:
Damn, some one sure did react fast. When I went out to walk my dog someone was setting off fire works not so far away. Of course I could not go and question them because my dog is terrified of fire works. Perhaps it was only a coincidence. Well, of course it was only a coincidence. I did not know myself that I was going to write about celebrating until 2 minutes before I wrote about it. That was only a few minutes before I walked my dog. No human could have reacted that fast. Well there is the possiblity that who ever set off the fire works had planned to do this for some time in advance. Could I have known that? Could I have cleverly written about celebrating a short time before fire works go off? Why that would imply a conspiracy. That would imply that I am clever and not really just lucky. Nothing could be further from the truth.
2 March 2010, 6:33 pmOne thing that I find sad. I do not think that the Russians have had a good laugh for a long time. They deserve to see a really really funny incident that will leave them breathless with laughter.