Olhai meus irmãos, chegou a primavera; a terra recebeu os abraços do sol e em breve veremos os resultados desse amor!
Cada semente despertou e o mesmo se passa com toda a vida animal. É através desse misteriosos poder que também nós temos o nosso ser e que do mesmo modo consentimos aos nossos vizinhos, mesmo aos animais vizinhos, um direito igual que temos, de habitar a terra.
No entanto, ouvi-me, minha gente, nós agora temos que tratar com outra raça – que era pequena e fraca quando os nossos pais a encontraram pela primeira vez, mas agora é inumerável e esmagadora. Por estranho que pareça, tem propensão para cultivar o solo mas o amor da posse é uma doença entre eles. Essa gente fez muitas regras que os ricos podem quebrar mas não os pobres. Tiram dos pobres e dos fracos para alimentar os ricos que mandam. Afirmam que esta nossa mãe de todos nós, a terra, é deles e separam-se com vedações dos vizinhos, e desfiguram-na com os seus edifícios e o seu lixo. Essa nação é como uma torrente furiosa que salta das suas margens e destrói todos os que estão no seu caminho.
Não podemos habitar lado a lado. Há sete anos apenas, fizemos um tratado no qual nos era assegurado que o país do búfalo seria nosso para sempre. Agora ameaçam tirá-lo de nós. Meus irmãos, devemos submeter-nos ou devemos dizer-lhes: “ Matem-me antes de tomar posse da minha Terra Natal…”

Assembleia do rio Pó em 1877 discurso de Tatanka Yotanka (Touro sentado)

Behold, my brothers, the spring has come; the earth has received the embraces of the sun and we shall soon see the results of that love!
Every seed has awakened and so has all animal life. It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being and we therefore yield to our neighbours, even our animal neighbours, the same right as ourselves, to inhabit this land.
Yet hear me, my people, we have now to deal with another race - small and feeble when our fathers first met them, but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possessions is a disease with them (. . .)
They claim this mother of ours, the earth, for their own, and fence their neighbours away; they deface her with their buildings and their refuse (…)
They threaten to take [the land] away from us. My brothers, shall we submit, or shall we say to them: "First kill me before you take possession of my Fatherland."

Tatanka Yotanka (Sitting Bulls) speech at the Powder river council, 1877.

 
The Politics of Extinction  
By William deBuys, TomDispatch
Posted on Mar 16, 2015

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_politics_of_extinction_20150316/
   
 dinotude (CC BY 2.0)
   

Maybe baby steps will help, but the world needs a lot more than either the United States or China is offering to combat the illegal traffic in wildlife, a nearly $20-billion-a-year business that adds up to a global war against nature. As the headlines tell us, the trade has pushed various rhinoceros species to the point of extinction and motivated poachers to kill more than 100,000 elephants since 2010.

 

Last month China announced that it would ban ivory imports for a year, while it “evaluates” the effectiveness of the ban in reducing internal demand for ivory carvings on the current slaughter of approximately 100 African elephants per day. The promise, however, rings hollow following a report in November (hotly denied by China) that Chinese diplomats used President Xi Jinping’s presidential plane to smuggle thousands of pounds of poached elephant tusks out of Tanzania.

 

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has launched its own well-meaning but distinctly inadequate initiative to curb the trade. Even if you missed the roll-out of that policy, you probably know that current trends are leading us toward a planetary animal dystopia, a most un-Disneyesque world in which the great forests and savannahs of the planet will bid farewell to the species earlier generations referred to as their “royalty.” No more King of the Jungle, while Dorothy’s “Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!” will truly be over the rainbow. And that’s just for starters.

 

The even grimmer news that rarely makes the headlines is that the lesser subjects of that old royalty are vanishing, too. Though largely unacknowledged, the current war is far redder in tooth and claw than anything nature has to offer. It threatens not just charismatic species like elephants, gibbons, and rhinos, but countless others with permanent oblivion.

 

If current trends hold, one day not so very long from now our children may think of the T. rex and the tiger as co-occupants of a single Lost World, accessible only in dreams, storybooks, and the movies. Sure, some of the planet’s present megafauna will be bred in zoos for as long as society produces enough luxury to maintain such institutions. Even the best zoo, however, is but a faint simulacrum of wild habitat and its captives are ghosts of their free-roaming forebears.

 

That’s why the Obama administration deserves some credit for highlighting the urgent need to curb the wildlife trade. Its plan calls for using assets of the National Intelligence Council to advance enforcement efforts. Unfortunately, the administration proposes boosting the enforcement budget of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency with primary responsibility in this area, by only $8 million. Such an increase would lift its force of inspectors just slightly above the levels of 30 years ago when the illicit trade in wildlife was far smaller.

 

To grasp the breadth of the carnage now going on, it’s essential to realize that the war against nature is being waged on an almost infinite number of planetary fronts, affecting hundreds of species, and that the toll is already devastating. Among the battlefields, none may be bloodier than the forests of Southeast Asia, for they lie closest to China, the world’s most ravenous (and lucrative) market for wildlife and wildlife parts.

 

China’s taste for wildlife penetrates even the least visited corners of the region, where professional poachers industriously gather live porcupines and turtles, all manner of venison, monkey hands, python fat, pangolin scales, otter skins, gall bladders, antlers, horns, bones, and hundreds of other items. These goods, dead or alive, are smuggled to markets in China and elsewhere. Meanwhile, an expanding economy enables ever more millions of people to purchase expensive animal commodities they believe might stave off disease or provide the fancy restaurant meals that will impress in-laws and business associates.

 

To put the present war in perspective, think of it this way: every year, more and more money chases fewer and fewer creatures.

 

Slaughter at the Ground Level

 

In a typical forest in Southeast Asia you might encounter a snare line stretching a kilometer or more along a mountain ridge or running down one side of a canyon and all the way up the other. These barriers are waist-high walls of chopped brush, with gaps every few meters. They are hedges of death.

 

Almost any mammal traveling in this landscape, if larger than a tree shrew (which would fit in a modest handbag), sooner or later will have to pass through one of these gaps, and in each a snare awaits. Powered by a bent-over sapling, it lies beneath a camouflage of leaves and hides a loop of bicycle brake cable—or truck winch cable for larger animals like tigers. The trigger controlling each snare is made of small sticks and can be astonishingly sensitive. I’ve seen snares set for deer and wild pig that were no less capable of capturing creatures as light of foot as a jungle fowl, the wild cousin of the domestic chicken, or a silver pheasant, the males of which shimmer in the dusky forest like bundles of fallen moonbeams.

 

On an expedition to central Laos, my companions and I made our way into a forest distinguished mainly by its remoteness. The Vietnamese border lay perhaps a dozen kilometers to the east, closer by far than the nearest village, four days’ hard march away, where we’d recruited the guides and porters traveling with us. That village, in turn, lay two days by foot and motorized pirogue from the end of the nearest road. The head of our expedition, conservation biologist William Robichaud, the only other westerner in our group of 14, told me that, unless a distressed American pilot had parachuted into the sprawling watershed that lay before us during the Vietnam War, ours were the first blue eyes that had glimpsed it.

 

Isolation, however, failed to protect the canyons and ridges we surveyed. Evidence lay everywhere of commercial poachers who had crossed the mountains from Vietnam to feed the Chinese market. In a matter of days, we collected wires from almost a thousand snares. In them, we found the decaying carcasses of ferret badgers, hog badgers, mongooses, various species of birds, and several critically endangered large-antlered muntjacs, a species of barking deer, one of which, in its struggle to free itself, had pulled off its own foot before dying nearby.

 

We camped by fish-rich rivers that had been stripped of their otters and saw the remains of dozens of poachers’ camps, some elaborately equipped with butchering tables and smoking racks. Saddest of all was the sight of a red-shanked douc (also called a douc langur), perhaps the most beautiful monkey in the world, dangling upside down at the end of a snare pole, having succumbed to as slow and cruel a death as might be imagined.

 

The indiscriminant wastefulness of this massive trapping enterprise is hard to absorb even when you see it yourself. Poachers check their snare lines haphazardly and leave them armed when they depart the area. This means the killing goes on indefinitely, no matter if the bodies languish and rot.

 

A Unicorn Still in the Wild?

 

Though we were in that forest in part to remove snares and assess the nature of the ongoing damage, our main goal was to find a unicorn—or actually an animal almost as rare, a creature that might indeed have already moved, or might soon move, from Earth’s natural realms to the realm of mythology. We were searching for any sign of saola (Pseudoryx nghetinhensis), one of the rarest large mammals on the planet. Its very existence, though known to locals, was revealed to science only in 1992, when researchers spotted a strange set of horns on the wall of a hunter’s shack high in the mountains of Vietnam.

 

Saola proved to be much more than a new species. It represented a new genus, possibly even a new taxonomic tribe, although the jury is still out on that. A kind of bovid, a ruminant with cloven hooves, its nearest evolutionary relatives appear to be wild cattle, yet it looks nothing like a cow or bison. A saola stands a little higher than a carousel pony. Deer-like, but thicker in form, its powerful build helps it push through the densest vegetation. Its muzzle is splashed with camo patterns of white, and its tri-colored tail—white, chocolate brown, and black—blends with similar bands of color on its rump. Its long, nearly straight horns are elegantly tapered, and in profile they seem to blend into a single horn, giving the creature the otherworldly look of a unicorn.

 

At best, the existing population of saola numbers between a few dozen and a few hundred, making it nearly as rare and hard to find as a unicorn. Even stranger, its disposition, except when the animal is directly threatened, appears to be as gentle as that of the unicorns of medieval European lore.

 

In 1996, Robichaud spent two weeks in a rough crossroads town in central Laos observing a captive saola. The unfortunate creature did not survive long in the menagerie in which it was held—no saola has lasted more than a few months in confinement and none is held anywhere today—but he had ample opportunity to note that it reacted alertly, even violently, to the presence of a dog outside its enclosure. (Wild dogs, or dholes, are among its natural enemies.)

 

Eerily, however, the saola was calm in the presence of humans—far more so than the barking deer or the serow (a species of mountain goat) in nearby cages, even though they had been in the menagerie far longer. Captured in the wild just before Robichaud arrived, the saola proved calmer than any domestic goat, sheep, or cow he had known from farms in his native Wisconsin. The captive saola even let him pick ticks from its ears. Local information buttressed Robichaud’s sense of the creature’s almost unearthly serenity. A Buddhist monk from a nearby temple told him that people in the area had dubbed the creature “sat souphap,” which translates roughly as “the polite animal.”

 

Today, no one knows if the clock of extinction for the species stands at two minutes before midnight or two minutes after. The greatest threat to its survival is the kind of snaring we witnessed on our expedition, which is doubly tragic, for saola do not appear to be a target of the poachers. In spite of its exotic horns, the animal is unknown in traditional Chinese medicine. (Its omission from that medical tradition’s encyclopedic command of Asian fauna and flora testifies to its profound isolation from the rest of the world.) Rather, the last living remnants of the species risk being taken as by-catch, like sea turtles in a shrimper’s net.

 

The Politics of Extinction

 

The situation may be terrible, but at least there are parks and protected areas in Southeast Asia where wild creatures are safe, right?

 

Alas, wrong. Our travels took place in an official National Protected Area in Laos where snaring of the kind we witnessed is blatantly illegal. Yet the deadly harvest continues, there and elsewhere, thanks to insufficient investment in protection and law enforcement, not to mention insufficient political will in countries whose overriding priority is economic development. Last year in the protected area of more than 4,000 square kilometers (1,544 square miles) that we visited, a small number of government patrols removed nearly 14,000 snares, undoubtedly a small fraction of what’s there.

 

The same is true elsewhere. According to the Saola Working Group, a committee sponsored by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, patrols that its members help to fund and supervise in just five protected areas in Laos and Vietnam (including the one in which we traveled) have destroyed more than 90,000 snares since 2011. And yet that, too, is just a drop in the bucket of the wildlife trade.

 

While the trade’s reach is global, the stakes may be highest in Southeast Asia (including Indonesia and the Philippines). About half the world’s people live there or in the adjacent countries of China, Bangladesh, and India. The region leads the world in the proportion of its birds and mammals that are endemic; that is, found nowhere else. Unfortunately, it also leads in the proportion in imminent danger of extinction, due in large measure to the wildlife trade. Worse yet, no country in Southeast Asia possesses a tradition of effective biological conservation.

 

Already many forests that once were rich in tigers, leopards, gaur, banteng, and gibbons are devoid of any mammals larger than a cocker spaniel. If the rest of the world truly wants to protect the planet’s endangered biodiversity, assisting the governments and NGOs of Southeast Asia in safeguarding their region’s natural heritage needs to be a global priority.

 

Critics often point out that the West is hypocritical in urging the East to do what it failed to accomplish in its own grim history of development. Indeed, the present sacking of Asian forests is analogous to the stripping of beaver from western American streams and the subsequent extirpation of bison herds in the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, if the West has learned one thing, it’s that conservation in advance of calamity costs much less than repairs after the fact and that it is the only way to prevent irreparable mistakes. No matter what moral ground you stand on, the facts in the field are simple: our best chance to avert catastrophe lies before us, right now.

 

Other critics complacently observe that extinction has always been part of evolution and that other epochs have seen similar waves of species loss. New species, they say, will emerge to take the places of those we destroy. Such a view may be technically correct, but it commits an error of scale.

 

Evolution will continue; it cannot not continue. But the inexorable emergence of what Darwin called “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful” proceeds at a nearly geological pace. By comparison, our human tenancy of Earth is a fleeting breath. Within the time frame of what we call civilization, the extinctions we cause are as eternal as any human accomplishment.

 

A Loneliness That Could Stretch to Infinity

 

The essential conservation task before the world is to protect key habitats and wildlife populations long enough for generational attitudes to change in China and its neighbors. At least in part, this means meeting the war on nature with a martial response. Whether protecting elephants in Kenya, mountain gorillas in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (a cause movingly depicted in the documentary film Virunga), tigers in Thailand, or saola in Laos, one has to prepare, quite literally, to meet fire with fire.

 

In the case of our expedition in Laos, three of our guides doubled as militia and carried AK-47s. The weapons were not for show. Poachers are generally similarly armed. On one occasion, such a band, traveling in the dead of night, nearly walked into our camp, only to melt back into the forest when they realized they’d been discovered.

 

Good news, however, glimmers amid the bad. Although the shift will take time, cultural values in Asia are beginning to change. Witness the recent abandonment of shark fin soup by Chinese consumers. The San Francisco-based NGO WildAid reports that sales of shark fins have plummeted 82% in Guangzhou (formerly Canton), the hub of the shark trade, and that two-thirds of the respondents to a recent poll cited public “awareness campaigns” against the global destruction of shark populations as a reason for ending their consumption.

 

Only by rising to the challenge of species protection—not “eventually,” but now—can we ensure that nature’s most magnificent creations will persist in the wild to delight future generations. Only through generous cooperation with Asian partners, boosting both law enforcement and political resolve, can we preserve the stunning, often cacophonous, and always mysterious diversity of a large share of the planet’s most biologically productive ecosystems.

 

The dystopian alternative is terrible to consider. Uncounted species—not just tigers, gibbons, rhinos, and saola, but vast numbers of smaller mammals, amphibians, birds, and reptiles—are being pressed to the brink. We’ve hardly met them and yet, within the vastness of the universe, they and the rest of Earth’s biota are our only known companions. Without them, our loneliness would stretch to infinity.

 

William deBuys, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of eight books. His latest, just published, is The Last Unicorn: A Search for One of Earth’s Rarest Creatures (Little, Brown and Company, 2015). His website is williamdebuys.com.

 

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me, and Tom Engelhardt’s latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

 

Copyright 2015 William deBuys

 

 

By Franco “Bifo” Berardi



The Spanish colonization of Mesoamerica was essentially a process of symbolic and cultural submission.

 

The “superiority” 
of the colonizers lay on the operational effectiveness of their technical production. The colonization destroyed the cultural environment in which indigenous communities had been living for centuries: the alphabetic technology, the power of the written word overwhelmed, jeopardized and finally superseded the indigenous cultures. The conquistadors re-coded the cultural universe of nowadays Mexico and Central America.

 

Before the arrival of the Spanish invaders Malinche (Malinalli in Nahuatl language, Marina for the Spaniards), the daughter
 of a noble Aztec family, was given away as 
a slave to passing traders after her father died and her mother remarried. By the time Cortés arrived, she had learned the Mayan dialects spoken in the Yucatan while still understanding Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. As a youth she was given as tribute again, this time to the invaders.

 

She became the lover of Cortés and accompanied him as interpreter. She translated the words exchanged by Cortés and Moctezuma, king of the Aztec population of Tenochtitlan, and she translated the conqueror’s words when he met crowds of indigenous persons. She translated for Nahuatl-speaking people the words of Christian conquerors and of Christian priests. The Christian message melted with pre-colonisation mythologies, and the modern Mexican culture emerged. She and Cortés had a child, Martín, the first Mexican. She betrayed her own people by linking with the invaders. By the moral point of view, however, she owed nothing to her own people who had sold her into slavery, and treated her as a servant. She betrayed the conquerors, too, though they did not realize it as such.

 

Malinche is the ultimate symbol of the end of a world, and also the symbol of the formation of a new semiotic and symbolic space. Only when you are able to see the collapse as the end of a world, can a new world be imagined. Only when you are free from hope (which is the worst enemy of intelligence) can you start seeing a new horizon of possibility. This is the lesson that Malinche is teaching us.

 

DEMOCRACY

 

On 31 October 2011, George Papandreou announced his government’s intentions to hold a referendum for the acceptance of the terms of a Eurozone bailout deal. He wanted the Greek people to decide if the diktat of the financial class that was strangling Greek society would be accepted or rejected. Overnight, the elected Prime Minister of Greece was obliged to resign. In the very place where it was invented and named twenty-five centuries ago, democracy was finally cancelled. It will never again come to life. Financial abstraction has swallowed the destiny of billions of people. European workers’ salaries have been halved in the last ten years and unemployment and precariousness are on the rise. Meanwhile, profits skyrocket.

 

WAR

 

The Eurasian continent is heading toward a proliferation of fragmentary conflict. At the same time, the infinite war launched by Cheney and Bush has paved the way to the establishment of the Caliphate. In Japan, the Prime Minister travels the world looking for allies against China. In India, a racist mass murderer (neoliberal of course) has been elected Prime Minister. In Europe, a Euro-Russian war is in the making at the Ukrainian border. In Ferguson, Missouri, another racialized killing reveals the American police state and the poverty industrial complex — two million homeless in the US and counting. In Gaza, Israel bombards the world’s largest open air prison and blames the victims, most of them children, for dying while the world looks on. In Northern Africa, Western powers prepare for the next season of Gaddafi blowback. In Liberia, Ebola fans the flames of civil and regional war, one bleeding eyeball at a time. In Mexico, a momentary silence shrouds the bloodiest drug war humanity has ever known, with cartels ranking among the wealthiest corporations.

 

While capitalism will continue to thrive thanks to massive slavery and eco-catastrophe, the next 20 years will be marked by the clash between financial abstraction and biofascism. A social, cognitive breakdown is estranging the masses from the body, so the decerebrated body is taking the form of aggression. Those who have been lost in the competition react under the banners of aggressive identification. We can even see fascism revived by the vengeful spirit of the dispossessed.

 

BIO-FINANCIAL POWER

 

Nation states are over, stripped by the global machine
 of finance, computation and all-pervading behavioral Big Data algorithms. Global corporations are replacing nation states as holders of power. We now embrace the first stages of the automation of mind, language and emotions ... the architecture of bio-financial power. Power, in fact, is no longer political or military. It is based more and more on the penetration of techno-linguistic automatisms into the sphere of language. Soon, life will be based on the automation of cognitive activity. Who cares if the US military machine is running on empty because of Bush’s self-defeating strategy — it’s a remnant of geopolitical thinking now dead.

 

THE CIRCLE

 

Mediocre as it is, Dave Eggers’s novel 
The Circle is a metaphor for the relation between technology, communication, emotion and power. "The Circle" is the name of the most powerful corporation 
in the world, a sort of conglomerate of Google, Facebook, Paypal and YouTube. Three men lead the company: Stockton 
is a financial shark, Bayley is a utopian and Ty Gospodinov is the project’s hidden mastermind.

 

The main character of the book is Mae, a young woman hired by The Circle during “the Completion,” the final phase in the implementation of TrueYou, a program intended to enforce the recording of every instant of life for pervasive, ceaseless sharing. Mae becomes the corporation’s spokesperson, the face that appears every day on the infinite channels of The Circle’s television network — the ambassador of the new credo.

 

The Circle is all about the utter
 capture of human attention: ceaseless communication, mandatory friendliness and creation of a new neediness — the obsessive need to express and share. One may remark that Eggers is simply re-enacting Orwell more than 60 years after the publishing of 1984. That’s true, but in the final pages of the novel, Eggers goes further than Orwell, when Ty exposes the transhuman potency of the totalitarian nightmare.

 

In the last scene of the novel, the inventor and founder of The Circle manages to covertly meet Mae, the newbie seducing
 the global audience. He has lost control of his own creature, the project he originally conceived, and is deprived of all power in its unstoppable self–deployment.

 

“I did not intend any of this to happen. And it’s moving so fast. I didn’t picture a world where Circle membership was mandatory, where all government and all life was channeled through one network ... there used to be the option of opting out. But now that’s over. Completion is the end. We are closing the circle around everyone. It’s a totalitarian nightmare.”

 

The automaton cannot be stopped, as even the creator himself becomes overpowered by his own invention: the circle of continuous attention, the circle of perfect transparence of everybody to everybody, the circle of total power and of total impotence.

 

PLEASURE, AFFECTION AND EMPATHY

 

At the beginning of the 21st century we are in a position that is similar to the position of Malinche: the conqueror is here, peaceful or aggressive, functionally superior, unattainable, incomprehensible. The bio-info automaton is taking shape from the connection between electronic machines, digital languages and minds formatted in such a way to comply with the code. The automaton’s flow of enunciation emanates a connective world that the conjunctive codes cannot interpret, a world that is symbolically incompatible with the social civilization that was the outcome of five centuries of Humanism, Enlightenment and Socialism.

 

The automaton is the reification of the networked cognitive activity of millions of semio-workers around the globe. Only if they become compatible with the code, the program, can semio-workers enter in the process of networking.

 

This implies the de-activation of old, subconsciously engrained, modes of communication and perception (compassion, empathy, solidarity, ambiguousness and irony), paving the way to the assimilation of the conscious organism with the digital automaton.

 

Will the general intellect be able to disentangle itself from the automaton? Can consciousness act on neural evolution? Will pleasure, affection, empathy find a way to re-emerge? Will we translate into human language the connective language of the automated meaning-making machine buzzing and buzzing in our heads?

 

These are questions that only 
Malinche can answer, opening to the incomprehensible other, betraying her people and reinventing language in order to express what can not be said.

 

—Franco “Bifo” Berardi is an Italian Marxist theorist and activist in the autonomist tradition. He writes about the condition of media, mental breakdown
 and information technology within post-industrial capitalism. His next book, Heroes, dedicated to the suicidal wave provoked by financial nihilism, will be out in the first months of 2015.

 

https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/116/malinche-and-automaton.html

 

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/sacrificing_the_vulnerable_from_gaza_to_america_20140914/

Posted on Sep 14, 2014

By Chris Hedges



A Palestinian stands in the rubble of destroyed houses Aug. 1 in the heavily bombed town of Beit Hanoun, Gaza Strip, close to the Israeli border. AP/Lefteris Pitarakis

Chris Hedges gave this speech Saturday at the Sauk County Fairgrounds in Baraboo, Wis., before a crowd of about 2,000. His address followed one there by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent who seems to be preparing to run in the Democratic presidential primaries. The Fighting Bob Fest, the annual event at which they appeared, brings together progressive speakers from around the country and honors Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette (1855-1925), a U.S. senator from Wisconsin who opposed the United States’ entry into World War I. Parts of this talk were drawn from Hedges’ past columns.

I would like to begin by speaking about the people of Gaza. Their suffering is not an abstraction to me. I was the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times. I spent seven years in the region. I speak Arabic. And for much of that time I was in Gaza, including when Israeli fighter jets and soldiers were attacking it.

I have stood over the bodies, including the bodies of children, left behind by Israeli airstrikes and assaults. I have watched mothers and fathers cradle their dead and bloodied boys and girls in their arms, convulsed by an indescribable grief, shrieking in pitiful cries to an indifferent universe.

And in this charnel house, this open-air prison where 1.8 million people, nearly half of them children, live trapped in an Israeli ghetto, I have witnessed the crimes of occupation—the food shortage, the stifling overcrowding, the contaminated water, the lack of health services, the crippling poverty, the endemic unemployment, the fear and the despair. As I have witnessed this mass of human suffering I have heard from the power elites in Jerusalem and Washington the lies told to justify state terror.

An impoverished, captive people that lack an army, a navy, an air force, mechanized units, drones, artillery and any semblance of command and control do not pose a threat to Israel. And Israel’s indiscriminate use of modern, industrial weapons to kill hundreds of innocents, wound thousands more and make tens of thousands of families homeless is not a war. It is state-sponsored terror and state-sponsored murder.

The abject failure by our political class to acknowledge this fact, a fact that to most of the rest of the world is obvious, exposes the awful banality of our political system, the cynical abandonment of the most vulnerable of the earth for campaign contributions. Money, after all, has replaced the vote.

The refusal to speak out for the people of Gaza is not tangential to our political life. The pathetic, Stalinist-like plebiscite in the [U.S.] Senate, where all 100 senators trotted out like AIPAC windup dolls to cheer on the Israeli bombing of homes, apartment blocks, schools—where hundreds of terrified families were taking shelter—water treatment plants, power stations, hospitals, and of course boys playing soccer on a beach, exposes the surrender of our political class to cash-rich lobbying groups and corporate power. The people of Gaza are expendable. They are poor. They are powerless. And they have no money. Just like the poor people of color in this country whose bodies, locked in cages, enrich the prison-industrial complex.

When you are willing to sacrifice the most vulnerable for political expediency it becomes easy, as Barack Obama and the Democratic Party have amply illustrated, to sacrifice all who are vulnerable—our own poor, workers, the sick, the elderly, students and our middle class. This is a Faustian compact. It ends by selling your soul to Goldman Sachs and ExxonMobil. It ends by deifying a military machine, now largely beyond civilian control, that, along with our organs of state security, has established surveillance and a security state that make us the most spied-upon, eavesdropped, monitored and photographed populace in human history. It is impossible to describe yourself as free when you are constantly watched. This is the relationship of a master and a slave.

Politics, if we take politics to mean the shaping and discussion of issues, concerns and laws that foster the common good, is no longer the business of our traditional political institutions. These institutions, including the two major political parties, the courts and the press, are not democratic. They are used to crush any vestiges of civic life that calls, as a traditional democracy does, on its citizens to share among all its members the benefits, sacrifices and risks of a nation. They offer only the facade of politics, along with elaborate, choreographed spectacles filled with skillfully manufactured emotion and devoid of real political content. We have devolved into what Alexis de Tocqueville feared—“democratic despotism.”

The squabbles among the power elites, rampant militarism and the disease of imperialism, along with a mindless nationalism that characterizes all public debate, which Bob La Follette denounced and fought, have turned officially sanctioned politics into a carnival act.

Pundits and news celebrities on the airwaves engage in fevered speculation about whether the wife of a former president will run for office—and this after the mediocre son of another president spent eight years in the White House. This is not politics. It is gossip. Opinion polls, the staple of what serves as political reporting, are not politics. They are forms of social control. The use of billions of dollars to fund election campaigns and pay lobbyists to author legislation is not politics. It is legalized bribery. The insistence that austerity and economic rationality, rather than the welfare of the citizenry, be the primary concerns of the government is not politics. It is the death of civic virtue. The government’s system of wholesale surveillance and the militarization of police forces, along with the psychosis of permanent war and state-orchestrated fear of terrorism, are not politics. They are about eradicating civil liberties and justifying endless war and state violence. The chatter about death panels, abortion, gay rights, guns and undocumented children crossing the border is not politics. It is manipulation by the power elites of emotion, hate and fear to divert us from seeing our own powerlessness.

As long as most citizens believe in the ideas that justify global capitalism, the private and state institutions that serve our corporate masters are unassailable. When these ideas are shattered, the institutions that buttress the ruling class deflate and collapse. The battle of ideas is percolating below the surface. It is a battle the corporate state is steadily losing. An increasing number of Americans are getting it. They know that we have been stripped of political power. They recognize that we have been shorn of our most basic and cherished civil liberties. They know that nearly half the country lives in poverty or a category called “near poverty.” Many of the rest of us, if the corporate state is not overthrown, will join them. These truths are harder and harder to hide.

It appears that political ferment is dormant in the United States. This is incorrect. The ideas that sustain the corporate state are swiftly losing their efficacy across the political spectrum. The ideas that are rising to take their place, however, are inchoate. The right has retreated into Christian fascism and a celebration of the gun culture. The left, knocked off balance by decades of fierce state repression in the name of anti-communism, has yet to rebuild itself and turn on a feckless liberal class that has sold its soul to a bankrupt Democratic Party.

The tinder of revolt is piling up. No person or movement can ignite this tinder. No one knows when the eruption will take place. No one knows what form it will take. But it is certain that a popular revolt is coming. The refusal by the corporate state to address even the minimal grievances of the citizenry, the continued pillaging of the nation and the ecosystem, remind us that, as Karl Marx pointed out, unregulated, unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force. It commodifies everything. Human beings and the natural world become commodities that are exploited until exhaustion or collapse. This is why the economic crisis is intimately twined with the environmental crisis. The corporate state—a system described by the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin as “inverted totalitarianism”—is incapable of a rational response to the crisis. A rational response, especially after your uprising in Madison and the Occupy movement, would at a minimum include a moratorium on all foreclosures and bank repossessions, a forgiveness of student debt, universal health care for all and a massive jobs program, especially targeted at those under the age of 25. But the corporate state, by mounting a coordinated federal effort led by Barack Obama to shut down the Occupy encampments, illustrated that the only language it will speak is the language of force.

Revolutions, when they erupt, appear to the elites and the establishment to be sudden and unexpected. This is because the real work of revolutionary ferment and consciousness is unseen by the mainstream society, noticed only after it has largely been completed. Throughout history, those who have sought radical change have always had to first discredit the ideas used to prop up ruling elites and construct alternative ideas for society, which [today] means the articulation of a viable socialism as an alternative to corporate tyranny.

By the time ruling elites are openly defied, there has already been a nearly total loss of faith in the ideas—in our case free market capitalism and globalization—that sustain the structures of the ruling elites. And once enough people get it, a process that can take years, “the slow, quiet, and peaceful social evolution becomes quick, militant, and violent,” as Alexander Berkman wrote. “Evolution becomes revolution.”

This is where we are headed. I do not say this because I am a supporter of revolution. I am not. I prefer the piecemeal and incremental reforms of a functioning democracy. I prefer a system in which our social institutions permit the citizenry to nonviolently dismiss those in authority. I prefer a system in which institutions are independent and not captive to corporate power. But we do not live in such a system. Revolt is the only option left. Ruling elites, once the ideas that justify their existence are dead, resort to force. It is their final clutch at power. If a nonviolent popular movement is able to ideologically disarm the bureaucrats, civil servants and police—to get them, in essence, to defect—nonviolent revolution is possible. But if the state can organize effective and prolonged violence against dissent, it spawns reactive revolutionary violence, or what the state calls terrorism. And our backlash, if we on the left do not regain the militancy of the old anarchists and socialists, could be a right-wing backlash, a species of Christian fascism.

The people in Gaza deserve to be free. So do we. But do not look to our political mandarins for help, or expect anything but vaudevillian smoke and mirrors from the billions poured into our campaign circus.

Look within.

We too are powerless. We have undergone a corporate coup d’état in slow motion. It is over. They have won. If we want to wrest power back, to make the consent of the governed more than an empty cliché, we will have to mobilize, to carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience to overthrow—let me repeat that word for the members of Homeland Security who may be visiting us this afternoon—overthrow the corporate state. And maybe, once we have freed ourselves, we can free the people of Gaza.

 

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_coming_climate_revolt_20140921/

The Coming Climate Revolt  
By Chris  Hedges
Posted on Sep 21, 2014
 
More than 100,000 people march through midtown Manhattan as part of the People’s Climate March on
Sunday in New York. John Minchillo/AP Images for AVAAZ



Chris Hedges made these remarks Saturday at a panel discussion in New York City titled “The
Climate Crisis: Which Way Out?”The other panelists were Bill McKibben, Naomi
Klein, Kshama Sawant and Sen. Bernie Sanders. The event, moderated by Brian
Lehrer, occurred on the eve of the People’s Climate March in New York City. For
a video of some of what the panelists said, click here. 
 
We have undergone a transformation during the last few decades—what John Ralston Saul calls a
corporate coup d’état in slow motion. We are no longer a capitalist democracy
endowed with a functioning liberal class that once made piecemeal and
incremental reform possible. Liberals in the old Democratic Party such as the
senators Gaylord Nelson, Birch Bayh and George McGovern—who worked with Ralph
Nader to make the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Mine Safety and Health
Act, the Freedom of Information Act and the OSHA law, who made common cause with
labor unions to protect workers, who stood up to the arms industry and a bloated
military—no longer exist within the Democratic Party, as Nader has been
lamenting for several years. They were pushed out as corporate donors began to
transform the political landscape with the election of Ronald Reagan. And this
is why the Democrats have not, as Bill Curry points out, enacted any major
social or economic reforms since the historic environmental laws of the early ’70s.

We are governed, rather, by a species of corporate totalitarianism, or what the political
philosopher Sheldon Wolin describes as “inverted totalitarianism.” By this Wolin
means a system where corporate power, while it purports to pay fealty to
electoral politics, the Constitution, the three branches of government and a
free press, along with the iconography and language of American patriotism, has
in fact seized all the important levers of power to render the citizen impotent.

The old liberal class, the safety valve that addressed grievances and injustices in times of
economic or political distress, has been neutered. There are self-identified
liberals, including Barack Obama, who continue to speak in the old language of
liberalism but serve corporate power. This has been true since the Clinton
administration. Bill Clinton found that by doing corporate bidding he could get
corporate money—thus NAFTA, the destruction of our welfare system, the explosion
of mass incarceration under the [1994] omnibus bill, the deregulation of the
FCC, turning the airwaves over to a half dozen corporations, and the revoking of
FDR’s 1933 Glass-Steagall reform that had protected our banking system from
speculators. Clinton, in exchange for corporate money, transformed the
Democratic Party into the Republican Party. This was diabolically brilliant. It
forced the Republican Party to shift so far to the right it became insane. 
 
By the time Clinton was done the rhetoric of self-professed liberals was a public relations game.
This is why there is continuity from the Bush administration to the Obama
administration. Obama’s election did nothing to halt the expanding assault on
civil liberties—in fact Obama’s assault has been worse—the Bush bailouts of big
banks, the endless imperial wars, the failure to regulate Wall Street, the
hiring of corporate lobbyists to write legislation and serve in top government
positions, the explosion of drilling and fracking, the security and surveillance
state as well as the persecution of government whistle-blowers. 

This audience is well aware of the Democratic Party’s squalid record on the environment, laid out
in detail in a new Greenpeace report written by Charlie Cray and Peter Montague,
titled “The Kingpins of Carbon and Their War on Democracy.” The report
chronicles what it calls “a multi-decade war on democracy by the kingpins of
carbon—the coal, the oil, and gas industries allied with a handful of
self-interested libertarian billionaires.” 

The Obama administration, in return for financial support from these kingpins of carbon,
has cynically undermined international climate treaties, a fact we discovered
only because of the revelations provided by Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks. It
uses its intelligence agencies, these revelations revealed, to spy on those
carrying out climate negotiations to thwart caps on carbon emissions and push
through useless, nonbinding agreements. The Obama administration has overseen a
massive expansion of fracking. It is pushing through a series of trade
agreements such as the TPP and the TAFTA that will increase fracking along with
expanding our exports of coal, oil and gas. It authorized the excavation of tar
sands in Utah and Alabama. It approved the southern half of the Keystone
pipeline. It has permitted seismic testing for offshore drilling in the Gulf of
Mexico, the East Coast and in parts of Alaska, a process that kills off hundreds
of sea mammals. It authorized drilling within four miles of the Florida
coastline, violating one of Obama’s 2008 campaign promises. This expansion of
offshore drilling reversed 20 years of federal policy. 

If we appeal to self-identified liberals in the establishment who have no capacity or desire to
carry out the radical reforms, we will pour energy into a black hole. And this
is what the corporate state seeks. It seeks to perpetuate the facade of
democracy. It seeks to make us believe what is no longer real, that if we work
within the system we can reform it. And it has put in place a terrifying
superstructure to silence all who step outside the narrow parameters it defines as acceptable.


The Democratic Party speaks to us“rationally.” The party says it seeks to protect civil liberties,
regulate Wall Street, is concerned about the plight of the working class and
wants to institute reforms to address climate change. But in all these areas,
and many more, it has, like its Republican counterpart, repeatedly sold out the
citizenry for corporate power and corporate profits—in much the same manner
that Big Green environmental groups such as the Climate Group and the
Environmental Defense Fund have sold out the environmental movement. 
 
To assume that Obama, or the Democratic Party, because they acknowledge the reality of climate
change, while the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party does not, is better
equipped to deal with the crisis is incorrect. Republicans appeal to one
constituency. The Democrats appeal to another. But both parties will do nothing
to halt the ravaging of the planet.

If Wolin is right, and I believe he is, then when we begin to build mass movements that carry out
repeated acts of civil disobedience, as I think everyone on this panel believes
we must do, the corporate state, including the Democratic Party, will react the
way all calcified states react. It will use the security and surveillance
apparatus, militarized police forces—and, under Section 1021 of the National
Defense Authorization Act, the military itself—to shut down all dissent with
force. The legal and organizational mechanisms are now in place to, with the
flip of a switch, put the nation effectively under martial law. When acts of
mass civil disobedience begin on Monday morning with Flood Wall Street and later
with Occupy the U.N., the face of the corporate state will, as it did during the
Occupy movement, reveal itself. 
 
If the response of the corporate state is repression rather than reform then our strategy and our
tactics must be different. We will have to cease our appealing to the system. We
will have to view the state, including the Democratic Party, as antagonistic to
genuine reform. We will have to speak in the language of ... revolution. We will
have to carry out acts of civil disobedience that seek to cripple the mechanisms
of corporate power. The corporate elites, blinded by their lust for profit and
foolish enough to believe they can protect themselves from climate change, will
not veer from our path towards ecocide unless they are forced from power. And
this means the beginning of a titanic clash between our corporate masters and ourselves. 
  .

"The Climate Marches On" 
By Amy Goodman


 


 

"Disruption" a film by
Kelly Nyks & Jared P. Scott

 
Disruption is an unflinching look at the devastating consequences of our inaction in the face of climate change -- and gives a behind-the-scenes look at a part of the effort to organize the People's Climate March.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_rules_of_revolt_20140608/

Posted on Jun 9, 2014

By Chris Hedges


A visitor to Hong Kong’s June 4th Museum—dedicated to the Tiananmen Square massacre of
1989—watches a film last month. The phrase on the wall reads “Refuse to forget.”
AP/Vincent Yu


There are some essential lessons we can learn from the student occupation of Beijing’s
Tiananmen Square, which took place 25 years ago. The 1989 protests began as a
demonstration by university students to mourn the death of Hu Yaobang, the
reformist Communist Party chief who had been forced out by Deng Xiaoping. The
protests swiftly expanded to include demands for an end to corruption, for press
freedom and for democracy. At their height, perhaps a million people were in the
square. The protests were crushed on the night of June 3-4 when some 200,000
soldiers, backed by tanks and armored personnel carriers, attacked. Hundreds,
perhaps thousands, of unarmed demonstrators were killed. 
 

Lesson No. 1.
A nonviolent movement that disrupts the machinery of state and speaks a truth a
state hopes to suppress has the force to terrify authority and create deep
fissures within the power structure. The ruling elites in China, we now know
from leaked internal documents and the work of a handful of historians, believed
the protests had the potential to dislodge them from power. Monolithic power, as
we saw in China, is often a mirage. Some of the internal documents that exposed
the fears and deep divisions within the ruling elite have been collected by the
Princeton University Library. 

Lesson No. 2.
An uprising or a revolution usually follows a period of relative prosperity and
liberalization. It is ignited not by the poor but by middle-class and elite
families’ sons and daughters, often college-educated, whom Mikhail Bakunin
called déclassé intellectuals, and who are being denied opportunities to advance
socially and economically.

This is what happened in China. Chairman Mao Zedong’s death in 1976 saw Deng Xiaoping assume
leadership. Deng instituted political and free market reforms. The reforms
created a new oligarchy. It led to widespread corruption, especially among the
party elites. For workers there was a loss of job security and social benefits,
including medical care and subsidized housing. University graduates were no
longer guaranteed jobs, and many could not find employment. 
 
The political liberalization that followed the terror of the Cultural Revolution expanded
internal freedoms. A mixture of declining expectations, especially among college
graduates, and the political opening provided the classic tinder for revolt.
Political theorists such as James C. Davies and Crane Brinton have found that a
period of relative liberalization coupled with declining prospects for
advancement commonly precedes revolutions. 
 
Once a regime abolishes civil liberties and acts in the middle of an uprising to restore
“order,” resistance becomes more dangerous. The Chinese government, after
suffering more than a month of protests, declared martial law on May 20, 1989.
Nonviolent mass demonstrations, while costly in human terms, often are more
effective in totalitarian societies. Fear and forced submission to power are the
only weapons left in the arsenal of the ruling class at such a point; when
people are no longer afraid, the regime loses control. 
 

Lesson No. 3.
Radical mass movements often begin by appealing respectfully to authority for
minimal reforms. The students, gathering in Tiananmen Square to mourn Hu, asked
that the Chinese constitution, with its guarantees of rule of law and freedom of
speech, be respected. Radicalization within the movement happened in the midst
of the demonstrations. Once a movement educates itself about structures of
power, and once those in state authority display their indifference to the tepid
demands of the demonstrators, a movement becomes bolder and wiser. The Tiananmen
Square occupation, begun as a spontaneous reaction to a death, swiftly evolved
into a revolt. Students eventually drafted what became known as the Seven
Demands. These were:

 —Affirm as correct Hu Yaobang’s views on democracy and freedom;

 —Admit that the campaigns against spiritual pollution and bourgeois liberalization had been wrong;

 —Publish information on the incomes of state leaders and their family members;

 —End the ban on privately run newspapers and stop press censorship;

 —Increase funding for education and raise intellectuals’ pay;

 —End restrictions on demonstrations in Beijing;

 —Provide objective coverage of students in official media.


Lesson No. 4.
Once déclassé intellectuals make alliances with the working class a regime is in
serious danger. The protest by the students resonated throughout China.
Thousands of people, many from the working class, held their own demonstrations
in cities across the country. Workers in Beijing rallied to the students. The
state’s relentless demonization of the protesters, something we saw in the
United States in response to actions of the Occupy movement, was aimed primarily
at preventing a student/worker alliance. Once the crackdown was complete, many
workers who had taken part were executed. Student leaders, who came from
families with connections and privilege, were usually given prison
sentences.


Lesson No. 5.
The most potent weapon in the hands of nonviolent rebels is fraternizing with and
educating civil servants as well as the police and soldiers, who even though
they suffer from the same economic inequality usually are under orders to crush
protest. This demands a counterintuitive response from protesters. They must
show respect and even compassion to forces deployed to stop the rebellion.
Demonstrators are required to exercise tremendous self-discipline as they endure
acts of violence and repression. They must refuse to retaliate. If bonds of
sympathy are established between protesters and some of the police and soldiers,
the ruling elites are unsure whether they can trust the security apparatus to
obey. This engenders paralysis within the centers of power. In China the ruling
Communist Party watched in dismay May 20 as the initial military assault to
crush the protesters failed. Thousands of people surrounded military vehicles.
They spoke to the soldiers about the reasons for the protests. They offered them
food and water and invited them into their homes. Friendships were formed. The
protesters and their supporters built so much solidarity with the soldiers that
the government was forced to withdraw the military from Beijing four days later. 


Lesson No. 6.
When a major authority figure, even in secret, denounces calls to crush a resistance
movement the ruling elites are thrown into panic. Maj. Gen. Xu Qinxian, leader
of the 38th Group Army, refused to authorize an attack on the unarmed protesters
in the square, saying, “I’d rather be beheaded than be a criminal in the eyes of
history,” according to the historian Yang Jisheng. He was stripped of his
command and arrested. His refusal sent shock waves throughout the rulers,
especially after seven senior commanders signed a petition that called on the
leadership to withdraw the troops. In many uprisings the ruling elites, after
members of their inner circle defect, see distrust and potential disobedience
among other authority figures, even those who are loyal. To protect themselves
the elites carry out internal purges, such as those conducted in the Soviet
Union by Josef Stalin—purges that are self-destructive. One person in authority
saying “no” is an effective form of resistance. The elites know that if enough
people refuse to co-operate they are doomed. They cannot let this spread. 
 

Lesson No. 7.
The state seeks to isolate and indoctrinate soldiers and police before sending them
to violently quash any movement. This indoctrination hinges on portraying the
protesters as elitists and traitors, often with ties to foreign governments, who
do not share the traditional cultural, religious and moral assumptions of the
wider population. The Chinese leadership and state press called the
demonstrators tools of “bourgeois liberalism.” The government quarantined troops
for 10 days outside Beijing and subjected them to daily indoctrination before
the final armed attack on Tiananmen Square. State propaganda, while denouncing
the protesters as disloyal, portrays the state as the ally of the working class
and the defender of traditional values. Any successful mass revolutionary
movement, to counter this propaganda, must exhibit respect for the traditional
values of society, including religious and patriotic values. 
 

Lesson No. 8.
Secrecy is self-destructive to a nonviolent resistance movement. Openness and
transparency expose the endemic secrecy and deceit used by regimes to maintain
power. Openness inspires confidence in a movement, not only among those within
it but among those who sympathize with it. The nature of secrecy is
manipulation, the hallmark of despotic power. If people believe they are being
manipulated they will distrust a movement and refuse to participate. Secrecy is
also an admission of fear, which is what the state wants to instill in those who
resist. Finally, the huge resources available to the state to employ informants
and carry out surveillance mean that most resistant acts planned in secret are
not secret to the state. Only under extreme totalitarian conditions—Nazi Germany
or Stalinism—can secrecy be justified by protesters. But even then it rarely works.


Lesson No. 9.
The state on the eve of breaking a rebellion with force seeks to make police and
soldiers frightened of the protesters. It does this by sending in agents
provocateurs to direct acts of violence against symbols of state authority. It
is imperative to the state that police and soldiers believe they are in mortal
danger, especially when the state is demanding that they use deadly force to
quell an uprising. Indoctrinated soldiers sent into Tiananmen Square in June of
1989 believed they would come under fire from armed dissidents or disloyal army units.


Lesson No. 10.
After deadly force is used to end a revolt, which happened when Deng Xiaoping sent
more than 200,000 soldiers to gun down protesters in Beijing, the state invests
tremendous energy to foster historical amnesia. Those in China who seek to
remember the uprising—even 25 years later—are silenced. Parents whose sons or
daughters were killed in the military assault on Tiananmen Square are forbidden
to openly mourn. It is imperative to the ruling elites that the true historical
narrative be erased. The use of deadly force against unarmed citizens exposes
the tyranny of the state and therefore must be banished from memory. 
 

Lesson No. 11.
Once a movement is put down, wholesale retribution occurs. It is estimated that 4
million people were investigated by state security after the Tiananmen Square
massacre on suspicion of involvement in the protests. An additional 1 million
government employees were investigated. Tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of
thousands, were arrested and sent to labor camps. Many were executed. 
 

Lesson No. 12.
Nonviolence does not protect demonstrators from violence. It also does not always succeed.
Nonviolence requires—despite what those who advocate violence contend—deep
reserves of physical and moral courage. State violence is defeated through the
refusal to be afraid, even after violence is used by the state to stamp out
protests, and through continuing acts of nonviolent resistance. The goal is to
show that violence will not work. But like hundreds of protesters in Tiananmen,
many in the first generation of rebels may perish in the process. The generation
that begins a revolt often does not live to see its conclusion.