deep green resistance: strategy to save the planet

[miss pixie]

 

taken from website: http://deepgreenresistance.org/

 

Deep Green Resistance is an analysis, a strategy, and a movement being born — the only movement of its kind.



 

As an analysis, it reveals the last 10,000 years of human history–the rise and dominance of civilization–as the culture of death that is now threatening every living being on Earth.

 

As a strategy, it critiques ineffective lifestyle actions and explains their inevitable failure to stop the destruction of people, species, and the planet. In contrast, DGR offers a concrete plan for how to stop that destruction.

 

As an aboveground movement, just now taking its first steps, Deep Green Resistance is based on this analysis and implementing this strategy. And we’re recruiting.

 

No more ineffective actions – piecemeal, reactive, and sad. No more feel-good, magical-thinking, navel-gazing, consumer-based, capitalist-approved denial and dead ends.

 

The goal of DGR is to deprive the rich of their ability to steal from the poor and the powerful of their ability to destroy the planet. This will require defending and rebuilding just and sustainable human communities nestled inside repaired and restored landbases. This is a vast undertaking but it needs to be said: it can be done. Industrial civilization can be stopped.

 

DGR’s strategy involves two separate parts of the movement – an aboveground and an underground. The aboveground works for sustainable, just, and participatory institutions, and assists the frontline activists with loyalty and material support. And In any resistance scenario, the underground dismantles the strategic infrastructure of power. This is a basic tactic of both militaries and insurgents the world over for the simple reason that it works. But such actions alone are never a sufficient strategy for achieving a just outcome. This means that any strategy aiming for a just future must include a call to build direct democracies based on human rights and sustainable material cultures. Which means that the different branches of resistance movements must work in tandem: the aboveground and belowground, the militants and the nonviolent, the frontline activists and the cultural workers. We need it all.

 

And we need courage. The word “courage” comes from the same root as coeur, the French word for heart. We need all the courage of which the human heart is capable, forged into both weapon and shield to defend what is left of this planet. And the lifeblood of courage is, of course, love.

So while DGR is about fighting back, in the end this movement is about love. The songbirds and the salmon need your heart, no matter how weary, because even a broken heart is still made of love. They need your heart because they are disappearing, slipping into that longest night of extinction, and the resistance is nowhere in sight. We will have to build that resistance from whatever comes to hand: whispers and prayers, history and dreams, from our bravest words and braver actions. It will be hard, there will be a cost, and in too many implacable dawns it will seem impossible. But we will have to do it anyway. So gather your heart and join with every living being. With love as our First Cause, how can we fail?

 

Want more? Here’s the strategy:

[Alan Durant]

Good luck with the tribe Roger. I just divide people into the ones I like and the ones I don't.

Roger Hicks said:

". . . how about doing away with Nations. Then we can just get on with being people, problem solved."

Alan, What you are suggesting is that we all belong to just one big tribe, or nation, called humanity.

That is a nativity you share it with millions of others and which liberal-fascism/statism has elevated to a moral imperative.

We are as deeply tribal as we are social animals. To deny this is just plain stupid. We need to organise ourselves into tribes and nations. Otherwise we are not going to survive.

As I keep trying to point out, at the moment we are organised by the state and capital, which is why society is in such a terminal mess. 

[bert louis]

I don't get it why the words of mister Hicks seem so upsetting. ... Oh, wait a second ... there must be ideological issues at stake. Jeez, I am bored with ideology.

Amongst the many other phrases from everybody l like, I pick these to shortly comment on:

Alan, What you are suggesting is that we all belong to just one big tribe, or nation, called humanity.
(Yeah, In theory. But who ever felt and lived it that way ... in our thought maybe a holy man, a Buddha or Jesus perhaps.?)
That is a nativity you share it with millions of others and which liberal-fascism/statism has elevated to a moral imperative.
Even deeper and  simpler too me thinks:  the idea of a moral unity of all man is a metaphysical concept spread by religion.

We are as deeply tribal as we are social animals. To deny this is just plain stupid. We need to organise ourselves into tribes and nations.

Of course are tribal. Individually  we really can't interact in an other way.

Wolfbird @ Roger: ... you seem to be motivated by some problem with your personal sense of identity, aren't you ?

I don't know about Roger, but I have always had problems with my identity. Just by myself it has not been a problem since I grew out of puberty, but when 'tribalising' there is always this notion of not really belonging - but that's just me.
.

[Alan Durant]

I was trying to suggest that rather the artificially splitting us up into tribes it might be better to try and find common ground for a decent future.

Define a tribe.

Ideological my arse.
bert louis said:

I don't get it why the words of mister Hicks seem so upsetting. ... Oh, wait a second ... there must be ideological issues at stake. Jeez, I am bored with ideology.

Amongst the many other phrases from everybody l like, I pick these to shortly comment on:

Alan, What you are suggesting is that we all belong to just one big tribe, or nation, called humanity.
(Yeah, In theory. But who ever felt and lived it that way ... in our thought maybe a holy man, a Buddha or Jesus perhaps.?)
That is a nativity you share it with millions of others and which liberal-fascism/statism has elevated to a moral imperative.
Even deeper and  simpler too me thinks:  the idea of a moral unity of all man is a metaphysical concept spread by religion.

We are as deeply tribal as we are social animals. To deny this is just plain stupid. We need to organise ourselves into tribes and nations.

Of course are tribal. Individually  we really can't interact in an other way.

Wolfbird @ Roger: ... you seem to be motivated by some problem with your personal sense of identity, aren't you ?

I don't know about Roger, but I have always had problems with my identity. Just by myself it has not been a problem since I grew out of puberty, but when 'tribalising' there is always this notion of not really belonging - but that's just me.
.

[Roger Hicks]

"I just divide people into the ones I like and the ones I don't."

At a personal level, Alan, so do I. But how many people do you know personally? What about the millions - or indeed, billions - of people you don't and can never know personally? How do you divide these up?

We are not supposed to worry about this, because the STATE does it for us.

What I'm suggesting is that we relieve the state of this responsibility, because for far too long it has abused the power that goes with it. Not that I'm suggest we should rush into it. On the contrary, we need to give if a great deal thought and consideration first, and proceed careful, very carefully, because it's a dangerous path to take, but the only one, I believe, with any prospect of leading us to our goal of a more just, humane and sustainable social order.

[Roger Hicks]

Wolfbird, you are right, I am very much motivated by issues of personal and group identity, which I believe are absolutely central to the issues relating to the survival of our civilisation, which attracted me to the Dark Mountain Project.

". . you seem to have the 'football hooligan' approach, where only your own club matters and every one else is a threat which must be repelled."

That's a good analogy, but needs correcting. I do feel very passionately about my team, i.e. my tribe and nation (as evolution adapted me to), but have come to realise that the British STATE (which is the only tribe that in practice really counts, because of the immense power its wields) only poses as such, in order to facilitate society's self-exploitation, leaving me effectively without a tribe or nation, which I sorely miss. 

If I were a "hooligan", as you unkindly suggest I am, I would be verbally and physically abusing those I see as belonging to other tribes and nations, but I'm not. I try to be, and generally am, very respectful of others. It's just that to you and the state ideology you embrace, my insistence on defining my own national identity (as ethnic European), rather than accepting the state's definition (of globalised, multi-ethnic, post-racial and post-European British), makes me a hooligan, i.e. a "racist".

[Roger Hicks]

". . it might be better to try and find common ground for a decent future."

To do that, Alan, we HAVE to organise ourselves. At the moment we are organised by state and capital, which is why we are in such a mess. Thus the urgent need to find other ways of organising ourselves. How else, but into genuine tribes and nations? Only not warring, as in the past, but consciously, rationally and humanely.

[Alan Durant]

We are organised in the interest of the Capitalist system if that's what you mean. Any state is just a representative of this system, giving it a veneer of democracy and has limited power to act against the Capitalists interest even if it wanted to.

I think exaggerating our differences is what this system does as a divide and rule tactic.

You ask how we divide people up. I don't see that we need to. Your answer if I understand correctly is that we should be divided into our tribes. Who would do this? How would it be done? Using what criteria and what exactly would be the gain form doing it? Sounds like apartheid where you could have people from the same family designated as whit or black or coloured depending on weird criteria. Even if you could identify the native English, (please tell me how) what would you do with the other residents of England. The ones of mixed backgrounds would go where? Dismembered and sent to different parts of the world by parcel force?

It seems to me that by the time you'd finished messing about with all this we'll be sat in the middle of a global catastrophe.

Will the Hungarians make me go back to England. Will I have to leave bits of me in France, send some bits to Scotland, (will they deep fry them). If I can still function without my bits. will I have to join the Brigantes? But my dads from Portsmouth, what to do?

I've just thought my daughters partner has some native American blood. perhaps they'd have me. Will the Other Americans have to go home? will there be room? What's the carbon footprint of all these people being moved.

Time for a glass of wine. What have the Romans ever done for us. I'm Spartacus!

Best Alan

Roger Hicks said:

"I just divide people into the ones I like and the ones I don't."

At a personal level, Alan, so do I. But how many people do you know personally? What about the millions - or indeed, billions - of people you don't and can never know personally? How do you divide these up?

We are not supposed to worry about this, because the STATE does it for us.

What I'm suggesting is that we relieve the state of this responsibility, because for far too long it has abused the power that goes with it. Not that I'm suggest we should rush into it. On the contrary, we need to give if a great deal thought and consideration first, and proceed careful, very carefully, because it's a dangerous path to take, but the only one, I believe, with any prospect of leading us to our goal of a more just, humane and sustainable social order.

[Roger Hicks]

Alan, I think it is essential for everyone to know where, to what tribe and nation, they belong. Only then will people behave responsibly, with love and commitment towards their OWN and respect towards OTHERS. At the moment, so-called society is organised, by state and capital, as an exploitable environment of human resources and markets. That is why we are in the mess we are in.

I have a pretty clear idea of my own tribe and nation, i.e. native English and ethnic European, not that I'm prepared to accept every native Englishman and ethnic European as belonging to my nation. There are other qualifications as well. But ethnicity is the fundamental one. Why? Because I feel it to be the most natural. I spontaneously identify with members of my own race (even when they are complete arseholes), without having to know them personally, which I don't do with members of other races.  I know, the state wants us to believe that that is "racist", but I assure it's not. It's perfectly normal and health human nature. We just need to stop suppressing it.

This doesn't mean that I can't be friends - even close friends - with members of other ethnic groups. Quite the contrary. I have friends and relatives even of different ethnicity to my own, but that doesn't mean I have to see them as belonging to my tribe and nation. Otherwise, we are forced to see 7 billion people as belonging to our tribe and nation, which is nonsense. I'm be quite happy to make an exception for the people I know, which wouldn't compromise my ethnic identity, but not for the millions I don't know, which would compromise my ethnic identity.

[Roger Hicks]

Wolfbird, It's not a "lack of tribalism" that is the problem, but our failure to recognise and understand what deeply tribal animals we are, which results in us not catering for and guiding our tribal nature it in a rational and civilised fashion, but allowing it to be suppressed, demonise, manipulated and exploited by the state (which uses it to pose as our nation) and capital.

To the vast majority of people we can only relate abstractly, of course, but relate to them we must, the world now being so intimately interconnected. I can relate to anyone, irrespective of race and ethnic origins, as an individual, but when it comes to strangers and masses of people, I need to know whether they belong to my tribe or nation, or not. That's something we all need to know, but of course, don't, because the state prevents it, occupying the  space (emotional and material) where our tribe and nation should be. This, I believe, is the route to the necessarily radical solutions to our existential problems. 

I'm sure that most crime and anti-social behaviour is a result of individuals failing to relate to those or the society they are harming, either as (a member of) their own tribe or nation, or as (a member of) another tribe or nation they should respect.

With some of your, and Alan's, questions you are asking me for a blueprint. I don't have one. What I have are some signposts, which I believe are reliable - although, I can't be sure until we have followed them. You seem to be insinuating that they must lead to genuine racism, Nazism, apartheid or other horrors, but I disagree, notwithstanding that there may be paths leading off in these directions. It is up to us to be aware and not to take them. However, going in the exact opposite direction, as we are now, of demonising and suppressing our tribal nature, I'm quite sure is the wrong way to go.

[Roger Hicks]

"I'm not tribal or nationalistic."

Saying that reveals just how little you understand about human nature - for all your reading - which explains why you are so hostile to my views.

Some people aren't sexual, but most are. Many suppress their sexuality (me, for example, when I was a boy, because I'd learned that it was wicked), and, of course, their tribal nature, or only allow expression of it in ways sanctioned by the state.

 

[Alan Durant]

None of what you say makes any sense to me. When I ask a simple question you avoid answering making any discussion pointless.

Alan

[bert louis]

I am a bit slow - I'm Dutch you see. I had no problem with what Roger Hicks was saying - the message seemed to make perfect sense to me.
It may be that I interpreted the term 'tribe' differently, that Rogers words made good sense to me. With 'tribe'  I think of a group of people - say 1000 - 20.000,  spread out over small villages and bands, who share some basic morals derived from a shared metaphysics - religion if you please.
I just thought that Roger needs not to bother at all,  because it seems to be the common belief on Dark Mountain that 'we' will get there without any extra effort at all ... you know: this capitalist technoculture is going down down down, and from what remains band will again form tribes and the cycle will start again. (Boring!)

I also read Rogers text as if it was taken in to account that our capability to keep personal relations is limited (somewhere between a 100 and 150 I understand.)  Any group larger than that needs something extra to keep 'it' together, and I call that 'something' an ideology.
Was I correct in doing so?

From Alan Durant I like this too:  "Ideological my arse." Still,  I know of no culture that has no ideology. Could anyone think one up?  Dark Mountain is after all also about new stories and by that about the forming of a new cultural paradigm. Is it not?