Happy Summer Solstice 2012

Would you like to see the modern face of fascism? Here you go.

If you link to the page, scroll all the way to the bottom. The Breakthrough Institute is a front organization, environmental in name only, soft-pedaling environmental and economic concerns, using the language of ecology. They just released a major report, that is likely to receive heavy play in the media. What are they saying? Paraphrased, 'The destruction of the biosphere has been good for humanity! Species extinction? No problem! The solution to climate change? Charge straight ahead just as we are. Everything is fine, don't worry about it, it's all under control.' If you look closely at the very bottom of that page, and notice the affiliation, you will see the words Philanthropy and Inc. behind that name. Right, philanthropy as a business.

 I've never been much in favor of the word Illuminati. Most of the information out there is raving paranoia, fantasies of seriously disturbed people. The folks over at the Doomstead Diner are about the only ones I know of, who use the word and are otherwise talking sense. I still don't care much for the word, but what do you call uber-billionaires and uber-billionaire families that have their fingers in oil, chemicals, logging, coal, big ag, security states, weapons systems, information surveillance etc? Regular people?

The two guys who started the Breakthrough Institute, wrote a book called The Death of Environmentalism. How appropriate. It is dead, in the sense that America's environmentalists are mostly empirical shills for consumerism, yuppies who want to live like yuppies, who have sacrificed protecting the earth for doomed and utterly useless CO2 controls and a vision, or rather a fantasy, of an America exactly as empirical/consumer as it is, except run on green energy. Their evident delusion and hypocrisy has made it possible for the Right to demonize the word environmentalist, as though anyone who cares about the earth or their local ecosystem is somehow hostile to people. The former Sheriff of my hometown who is now a state senator, is fond of using the word as a pejorative, in defense of a foreign multinational, extracting copper from Minnesota and taking most of the wealth generated overseas - as example.

What has to happen here? Here is what is happening. You see, multinational institutions are denuding the last of the biosphere's resources, ratcheting up that rate of extraction and exploitation, the leveling of forests, mining, drilling, the hollowing out of the seas, etc, and increasingly, wherever people are standing up in defiance, they are being shuttled aside, beaten, ruined, raped and killed.

What is pacifism? Jesus talked about turning the other cheek, but Jesus seems mostly to have resulted in Christians justifying military adventurism and empire, or otherwise acting like obedient sheep. Ghandi? How many times have you heard lately, "Be the change you wish to see in the world?" Are Hindus better off than they were under the Brits? Have you heard about the estimated 200,000 poor Indian farmers who have killed themselves in the last decade because industrial agriculture has taken over farming in India, and ruined them? Martin Luther King? Black folk got the vote, and now 40% of black men are at some time incarcerated and disenfranchised, increasingly for profit. The memory of all three of these men has been subsumed by the empirical consumer culture, acting mostly as propaganda to keep people thinking that their empirical lifestyles are justified.

As the industrial world begins it's collapse, do you suppose all those people who think the meaning of life is to consume and control as much as possible, are going to stop and say, "I guess we were wrong, let's dismantle the system and start over in a way that is ecologically responsible?" No, they are going to scapegoat the people who are saying that is what we should do, throwing them in cages, beating them up, ostracizing them, even raping and killing them.

Where are the warriors of the earth, is what I'm wondering?

Now, I'm not advocating going out and being violent. That will only result in blowback ten or a thousand fold, and it will likely ruin you and possibly the people closest to you. The American military, intelligence and police are the most fearsome, intimidating and powerful fighting machine ever devised. Any serious movement in the name of defending the earth is going to be crushed with prejudice, in the way of brutalizers. That doesn't mean, that at some point in your life, the playing field won't be leveled. Are you going to be ready for that day? There's a difference between being violent, and knowing one is capable of violence when necessity calls.

Meanwhile you can undermine. That is most effectively done by stealth. Psychological warfare, so to speak. Like, the next time you happen to be standing behind an oil tanker, or a Wal-Mart truck or whatever, scrawl in the dust, GLOBAL ECONOMIC MELTDOWN - FAMINE + CONSUMERISM = CANNIBALISM, or some such variation. Maybe THE EARTH WILL BE AVENGED. Write it on walls. Spray paint works good too, in prominent locales. You might spray your local Fed, or chemical or weapons or big ag contractor (building) with pigs blood, or maybe just red paintballs. Monkeywrenching works too. Use your imagination. Have fun with it. Just don't get caught. The worst of them will treat you worse than the pedophiles - they will attempt to destroy you, in the way of making examples.

Happy Solstice.