The Next Steps

Rafael's life here may be over, but for those of you who truly admired his writing, I am hoping to collect some of it and publish it (really, with a cover and everything) in the months ahead.

Rafa left his work, very consciously, to be finished, and he knew he could not finish it alone. I have some idea where he was going, but I can't go there alone, either. So I invite everyone who comes here to look through the Apocalypse No! series especially, but the rest of his writings too, and add to this thread your analysis, questions, and ideas about the next steps. Invite friends who might be on the same path to come and take a look. Rafa has handed us much of a roadmap to the next world: we only need to fill in the next few steps.

Thank you to all who have shared my loss, for your thoughts and prayers. I have felt them deeply, and they have sustained and strengthened me. Rafael has been honored in several public ceremonies, Western and Indigenous, and in innumerable private prayers and rituals, but the greatest honor we can offer him for the gifts he has given us is to continue his work and his course. I invite you to do so.

The Lessons of Gaza in a Time of Collapse and Rebirth: Apocalypse No! part 8

In loving memory of the late Mayan priestess Jo'b No'j Chomiha (Rosa Maria Cabrera)

By Juan Santos

It can no longer be hidden. What is happening in Gaza is, transparently, ethnic cleansing - genocide.

That genocide has been ongoing for sixty years, sometimes in intense, rapid, and explosive junctures, sometimes more slowly, routinely – but always, it has been executed methodically.

To see clearly the historical and cultural trajectories toward genocide in Palestine or elsewhere, one has only to map the intersection of the stated intentions of the perpetrators and their actions over time – or experience a sudden revelation or flash of deep insight.

I was one of those who saw it all at once. At sixteen years of age, it hit me with an overwhelming and intensely intimate force, one that would require an essay in its own right to elucidate.

I had been watching a documentary on public television about the Nazi Holocaust.

Later that night it hit me: What happened in the Holocaust was not the exception to the rule – it was the most profound expression of the rule; it was a concentrated expression of the way things are in everyday life, in the blind cult of everyday life as we live it. The Holocaust could not have come from nowhere, it was not an aberration, it arose from certain conditions, like a pimple from oily skin – and, like the blemish itself, the Holocaust was only a symptom of what underlay it – the conditions from which it arose. Outbreaks of genocidal horror in concentrated form arise from the norms that underlie them. If there is no basis for a thing to exist, it cannot come into existence.

What is happening in Gaza today is no accident; it is an expression of underlying logics, of underlying and all-permeating attitudes and feeling tones in Israeli culture; logics, attitudes and feelings that rest on a set of fundamental premises.

The most fundamental of these premises is one shared by every civilization and empire on Earth over the historical period of the last several thousand years: that the members of a given culture are vulnerable, whether that vulnerability is to human enemies or the conditions of nature, and that this vulnerability rightly translates into a mindset of kill or die, kill or be killed, conquer or be conquered.

Every empire culture has determined to be the killer rather than the one who dies or who is killed, the conqueror rather than the conquered, and the ruler rather than the ruled. At some point the trauma of some real and limited threat become generalized and embodied in the psychology of individuals, and then in entire cultures, as an ongoing state of psycho-cultural emergency, a mass “neurosis” or “psychosis.” The sense of being threatened became a given of existence and the foundation of a way of “life.”

Every empire faces what it considers an existential threat (indeed, each embodies the mentality that existence – life itself – is a threat.) The founding and continued existence of Israel, and the dispossession, ongoing oppression, and slaughter of the Palestinian people has been “justified” for decades now by the unreal claim of a perpetual threat of a new anti-Jewish Holocaust, one from which Israelis and other Jewish people must perpetually defend themselves. This kind of ever-vigilant self defense is what civilization is fundamentally about.

In the case of Israel, the now-defunct idea was that if any people had a “right” to become wanton killers and conquerors, it was the Jewish people. Israel could kill and rob with impunity; it was justified by the “threat” Jews faced of a new Holocaust, a threat alleged to be so grave that any crime was justifiable in defending against it.

In part because of the Holocaust, in part because of the long and deranged history of European persecution of the Jewish people, the Zionists demanded, and were granted, a blank check to kill. To question that “right” was to be branded as living, walking proof of the ongoing “reality” of the existence of the perpetual threat; it was to be branded an “anti-Semite,” one who is living proof of the potential for a new anti-Jewish genocide, and as a virtual advocate of another anti-Jewish genocide.

Thus, Israel established a sort of unassailable “right” to “defend” itself from “threat” – to eliminate the Palestinian “threat” – which is to say Palestine itself and the Palestinian people. The “threat,” as always, became a license for genocide.

Without cultural agreement on the nature and meaning of an existential “threat,” no empire can justify its existence. Almost all “progress” is measured in terms of overcoming perceived threats, and Empire culture, civilization itself, and all of the horrors it perpetuates, are justified by the “progress” it represents.

It is important to understand, for example, that most Israelis today view the genocide in Gaza as “progress.” That’s why opinion polls show their overwhelming support for it. Likewise, the Nazis had made “progress” in dealing with the “Jewish Question,” until they reached the point where it seemed possible to progress to the point of a cure for the “Jewish disease” they said threatened the German people. Call it the promise of a Final Cure, a Final Solution, a Final Progress. Call it the promise of a Final Redemption, a cultural liberation from the existential threat, the promise of the ultimate “success” of civilization.

There is nothing at all unusual in it. Every aspect of our daily lives is permeated with such promises, and every one of them is a lie. It is the job of politicians to make such promises, and that is why we tend to despise them, even though every one of us is looking forward to the “final solution” of something or another, however serious or however petty.

Every TV commercial is a walking, talking final solution, a new “miracle” cure; real progress – a must buy.

That’s because every time we buy an advertised commodity we aren’t buying an object, we are buying an idea, a culture, a promise, a solution; whether the solution is to the “threat” of bad breath or the “threat” of “global terrorism.” As we make our purchase we are also buying into the basic notion that life is a threat and that civilization and “progress” are its cures. For most Israelis, excluding a tiny conscious minority, the white phosphorous Israel is raining on the people of Gaza is not a burning poison – its medicine – it’s a cure, a solution; if you buy it.

But listen - don’t blame them; you’re not immune, either; you buy into the same lie, in some form or another. “They” are not different; you are not different. They are from the same culture as most of us; one of the Empire cultures - in this case, the West. In the West, as in all Empire cultures, “threats” are dealt with by eliminating them. So, the Nazis sought to eliminate the Jews; The Jews in Israel now seek to eliminate the Palestinians – they call it the Palestinian “threat,” so that the very name “Palestinian” has come to represent a threat in the emotional subtexts of Western empire culture.

Israeli writer Uri Avnery, writing on the genocide in Gaza, makes it plain:

“Every baby metamorphosed, in the act of dying, into a Hamas "terrorist". Every bombed mosque instantly became a Hamas base, every apartment building an arms cache, every school a terror command post, every civilian government building a "symbol of Hamas rule." Thus the Israeli army retained its purity as the ‘most moral army in the world’…”

And, if only Israel would smile as they kill, send in a few doctors and some medicine to anesthetize the pain, they would be both “moral” and “nice.” And no one could object. The slaughter could continue undiluted.

Just as Israel is out to eliminate Palestinians, you, cowboy, sought and still seek to eliminate Indians. Yesterday’s “savage” is today’s “terrorist”… threat…

In the US, Black people are a “threat,” so their elimination is sought in other, diluted ways, ways that don’t look like genocide - through mass incarceration of millions under the guise of “fighting crime” or the “War on Drugs”, or the War on Gangs,” anything that can be made morally justifiable and enlist the support of “nice” people. But the undiluted reality is that we, the descendants of Africans and Native Americans, are your Gazans. And your perception of us as a threat operates in your culture in just the same way as the Israeli perception of the Palestinians. You stole our land, our bodies; just as Israel is built on stolen Palestinian land; only in this case we are talking magnitudes of scale far beyond a small strip of land on the coast of the Mediterranean. We are talking two continents in this hemisphere, and the enslavement and Conquest of Africa, and Australia as well.

Here in the Americas, your ancestors killed 95% of my ancestors – David Stannard in has seminal American Holocaust, published by Oxford University Press, puts the numbers at around 100 million dead. And you thought the 20 million the Nazis killed was unprecedented. That’s what you were taught, that The Nazis were an evil exception to “civilized” rule.

No, the Nazis were not an exception to the rule any more than Israel is an exception to the rule. Neither are the Europeans in the Americas.

Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Conquest of the Americas, The Conquest of Africa, with its fifty million dead, The Nakba (the initial Conquest of Palestine), the US/Mexican War of conquest - all of them are made of the same dynamics: “Progress” and expansion, the elimination of the “Threat”, and the need for internal cultural coherence against the threat (that’s where the stereotype of the “self-hating Jew” comes in – it is a stigma meant to reinforce the internal coherence of Jewish culture in the face of the “threat,” so that those who do not believe in the threat, or who are unwilling to kill to eliminate the “threat become the “internal enemy” – a part of the “threat.” If that a sounds like an extension of the mass psychology of Fascism to you, there is a reason for that. All Empires and colonial settler states, from Rome to Mussolini to the U.S. to South Africa to Israel operate on the same basic premises and through the same basic psycho-cultural dynamics. Empire is Fascism.

Your upbringing was little more than a process of indoctrination into the internal cultural coherence of the Empire, and a way of aligning your life-purposes toward your culture’s promise of the elimination of the threat. To be a “success” means that you have eliminated threats in a way that can be construed or falsified as “nice”. That’s what you buy into with every product and lie you buy. You buy into genocide; you buy into ecocide. You buy into the elimination of life on Earth.

Life itself, after all, is the most fundamental existential threat; life embraces its complement, death. Life is full of wild things, threatening things. The word “wild” in its origins, pertains to life which is unbroken, untamed, undomesticated, uncivilized. In its origins, “wild” means self-willed. Life itself is a threat that must be eliminated. That’s the final logic of the final solution, of the fascistic psychology and culture of Empire.

The “dark” “wilderness,” of course, is simply full of threats. We were taught that, too; it is a sensibility so deeply embedded in Western culture that it barely warrants reference, it’s absorbed through fairy tales and through the pores of the skin.

And if you are a white “American” it is manifestly your destiny to conquer the wild threat, to tame it, to break it- to eliminate it. If you are part of Nazi Germany, your purpose is not so different; if you’re Israeli, Greater Israel is your manifest destiny; or South Africa; or Australia. Name your colonial settler state. It may shake you to look at Israel’s genocide in Gaza as a mirror: but, regardless, you are part of the same genocidal and ecocidal pattern.

This is the most elementary of understandings necessary for an honest approach to and assessment of our current global crisis. It is the single most important factor in understanding white European culture and its dynamics in the Americas and as a global Empire. It is fundamental to any understanding of the basic cultural assumptions that guide our daily lives and understandings of one another. It is an understanding so important, it describes a reality so all pervasive, that without it one simply cannot be an ally to oppressed peoples – in Gaza or anywhere else.

Without this understanding one has understood nothing. One’s “compassion” reduces to do-good-ism and elite rescue missions to the poor miserable brutes - the imperial rabble - beneath one.

Without this understanding the dynamics of Empire and genocide, one cannot be an integral part of the healing that we as humans, the Earth as a living being, and the animals we love so urgently need. Without this understanding one cannot conceive of the actual realities of the “old mind” vs. the “new mind.” Without this understanding one doesn’t even know what the old mind is.

Without having immersed oneself in fundamental understanding of the culture-driven realities of genocide and ecocide, one does not know where we are, the conditions we face, or the depths of denial that surround us about our current crisis. In fact, without this understanding having been deeply integrated into one’s world view, one is by definition in denial. One is by definition part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Without this understanding one hasn’t a clue about the indigenous experience so many would like to emulate. Much less has one approached anything akin to indigenous American “wisdom” – or, for that matter, African experience and wisdom. If that is what you are looking for, then, here is some indigenous wisdom:

In the US today, Lakota men’s life expectancy on the rez in the US doesn’t just “happen” to be 44 years –the lowest on Earth. Lakota teen suicide rates don’t just “happen” to be 150% of the norm in the US. The Lakota unemployment rate and the extremities of Lakota poverty don’t just “happen” to be the case. Native Americans don’t just happen to have the highest incarceration rate on planet Earth, higher, even, than that of African Americans. These conditions are all are a direct result of having been conquered and being kept in subjugated state by an enemy people who promised and intended to wipe Native Americans off the face of the Earth – just as the Nazis intended to wipe the Jews off the face of the Earth. The rez is white America’s Warsaw ghetto (by the way, they don’t call the Black ghetto a “ghetto” for nothing) and people of indigenous descent, be they Lakota or Mexican, are, along with Black people, the “Jews.” Better put – the Palestinians.

In fact Hitler openly admired the extermination of the Indians, and the reservation system, and consciously took them as models. The South African Bantustans and the system of Apartheid had a similar origin, as does the division and colonial settlement of Palestine. Gaza is a temporary Indian reservation, “Indian Territory” only waiting to be taken, an open air concentration camp. Here and there, it’s the same.

Where did you think you were?

Palestine is everywhere.

If one hasn’t faced the historical, ongoing reality of genocide and of the US as a white colonial settler state and global empire immersed in, permeated by, and oozing genocide from every pore, then one doesn’t grasp the pain of oppressed peoples, its daily meaning, or the context of the daily experience of oppressed people here in the US or anywhere else on the planet. One cannot but react – be a reactionary (and I use the term advisedly, deliberately and consciously) when encountering the pain of oppressed people. One cannot understand the anger engendered by utter invisibility felt by those who face the realities of cultural and physical genocide everyday and when who, most often, face it alone, with no recognition from their supposed white “allies.” One will fail to see that what is happening in Gaza has a particular meaning for those who are living through it and dying in it. The drama of the mass slaughter of an innocent people there is only a concentrated expression of the blind cult of oppression that constitutes their every day lives, of the cult of everyday life.

Without conscious understanding of the dynamics of genocide, one can only blame the victim for their pain and anger, and fail to understand that one’s own blindness to the most elementary and basic of realities of everyday life presents a locked box to the oppressed – the same locked box oppressed people confront with their active persecutors and overt enemies – the locked box of denial.

Most of all, without such a conscious understanding one cannot see the reality facing the world today, the utter congruity and continuity between genocide and ecocide, and the ways that the denial and operation of one mirrors the denial and operation of the other, or the ways in which the daily details of a killing culture flow into the stream, the river and the sea of planetary death.

Without understanding genocide, one doesn’t understand anything essential -much less is one among the ranks of the “wise.” Without having faced the fundamental reality that shapes one’s culture and its daily interactions with other cultures, one cannot fully approach “wisdom” or humility or self-reflection, or even understand in a mature way what is happening around and in oneself.

Thank the spirits that the denial that has shaped us is, as we speak, at last, beginning to shatter.

Because what’s happening is that a new choice is being made between life and death on a global scale. The choice before us is also an individual one to be made in the context of one’s own, particular culture and life history; it impacts and shapes every aspect of our lives including our deepest senses of community and intimacy.

But the choice is not between killing or bring killed, killing or dying; it’s between killing and living. And like the choices of the ancient peoples who chose Empire, the choices we make now will affect life at every level and on every scale. Our future will hold either a truly final “solution” - a Final Killing of Life on Earth, or it will hold the foundation of a way of Living that can last for the entire natural life span of our planet and solar system. It’s all in the Balance; right now, in this moment. As the Lakota Chief Arvol Looking Horse has emphasized, it rests with your decision.

It’s important to understand, in this context, that Life on Earth isn’t “dying.” The furry ones, the four footed ones, aren’t “dying.” They’re being killed by a culture that is their conscious and self-declared enemy.

Here, in the midst of the greatest mass extinction in 65 million years, all that is “wild” doesn’t just “happen” to be dying, any more than Gazans “happen” to be dying. The Wild happens to be being killed by a culture that has openly and confessedly intended to eradicate, eliminate the wild, to conquer, tame, subjugate and destroy it all – a culture that is the active enemy of all life – certainly of all self-willed – wild life.

It is a culture that uses dynamite to blow up wolf cubs in the den as if they were so many Palestinian children in their homes; and that, death squad style, Israel-in-Gaza style, then uses helicopters to hunt their parents down from the sky.

If life is endangered, if “endangered” species are a symbol of that, then this is what they are “endangered” by - conscious killers. They are not endangered by accident, not by “well meaning” but ignorant people, but by killers - a culture of killers - even if, by chance, it might be rightly said that the killers do not understand, and dare not face themselves as such. (The reason oppressed people find it a relief to deal with overt racists is that it’s a relief to face someone who knows what they are. Most white middle class people in the US don’t face the nature of their culture. They sense that they can’t afford to face it.

To do so would be to break the code of silence called being “nice.” And being “nice” is what it means to smile as you kill. One must kill. There is a threat. But one can only continue to kill by pretending that what you are doing is something else. Mass murder becomes “defending democracy”; Conquest become “spreading the word of god and saving souls.” As I was told by a dear friend, a radical white feminist lesbian, being “nice” functions something like an anesthetic. (Now that doesn’t hurt, does it?)

There are layers upon layers of misdirection, obfuscation, double entendre, doublespeak, half truths and manipulation that enable the killing, and that make up the cultural context in which the killing can go on without acknowledgement or feeling.

Wisdom, in this context, means, in part, being wise about how to deal with a culture of killers. “Wisdom” cannot be divorced from context, any more than it can be divorced from culture, or from experience within a given culture, or how we navigate – mediate - between cultures.

Without a deep grasp of the dynamics of genocide, one doesn’t even start to get this culture, and one is utterly unfit to mediate between the cultures of the oppressor and the oppressed, much less is one fit to guide the creation or foundation of what is most urgently needed - a new culture and an authentically “new” mind – a mind which, in practice, can only be the outcome and product of a new culture that comes into being as this one collapses and as we consciously dismantle the consciousness that drove it. A “new mind” will be the sign of the new culture coming into maturity over the course of the coming generations.

Beyond that, without a firm grasp of the reality of genocide, and thus ecocide, one cannot love the world – not with competence, and not if love is the ability and will to extend oneself for the spiritual growth of others. One cannot extend oneself to guide others in a terrain one doesn’t understand – not without betraying them. Not if love, like “wisdom,” is actually a verb; an ability in a context.

And here is our context as the world and the Earth around us are on the verge of disintegration: it is the context of the death throes of a death system; the orgasm of a necrophiliac.

A mature capacity to love, in this context, is typified by four activities.

1. Guiding others to see what they are part of;

2. Guiding them to reject what must be rejected;

3. Helping each person we guide to undo the trauma; to learn that they are safe while they re-emerge and deprogram themselves from the cultural matrix of “threat” and “solution”, and;

4. Helping to restore the foundations of original, indigenous, pre-Empire cultures and laying the foundations for a new culture that is utterly different, while saving what we can, within the limits of our abilities, of life on this Earth.

These four things will, ultimately and of necessity, become part of a new mythology. They are, fundamentally, religious tasks.

They will become and must become a part of laying the foundation for a culture of life, and they must be encoded in the new culture that arises from the death of the Empire cultures.

A new culture must know where it came from, where it is going, where it refuses to go, where it is on the path and in its stage of development, and why. Otherwise, it could easily repeat and replicate the most devastating aspects of the death culture which is now collapsing around us.

If we don’t know where we are, and where we come from, we cannot know where we need to go, why we need to go there, and we can provide no means for others to gauge where they are in the stages of development from the old to the new. In other words, lacking such knowledge, we are useless to the future as any kind of leaders or guides; rather, we represent a dead end and a failure of understanding.

It is, by the same token, very dangerous to assume that one “knows” what the “new mind” is or will be. That is in part because what we (both as a species and as specific cultural groupings) do now and in the future will become part of the myth/story that shapes the new mind and the culture that it arises from. Since we don’t know what we are going to do, at best, some of us who intend to help lay the foundations for a new culture can only live as if our story might come to embody worthwhile lessons for the coming generations, if there are to be any. But we cannot predict the outcomes or the meanings of the stories and myths they will comprise.

In the same way, the Hopi who lived through the experiences later embodied in their Emergence Stories could not know the outcome before it unfolded. As they moved thru the Passageway they followed from the destruction of the Third world into the Fourth World, they did not know they would be followed by a “witch” who would corrupt the new world, or other key elements of the story that would give full shape to their culture as it deepened and evolved.

It is such stories that deeply shaped the traditional Hopi world experience or “mind,” and our story, as it will be told by our children’s children’s children, based on how we have actually lived it, will shape the “new mind” of the coming generations. This will happen in the same way that it happened among those who lived long ago, who lived and shaped the story of the “existential threat” and the “final solutions” of Empire, the story that shaped our culture and our minds all these generations later.

So, yes, Gaza is our mirror, it is the shattering mirror of a shattering world system of Empire and domination; it is the magic mirror into which we can look to see the truth of our cultural situation and the forces that drive our psyches, the painful mirror that can lead us to grief and transformation, in which we can see what is revealed, and what, and who, must change, and how. What is happening in Gaza is a Revelation, an Unveiling of the nature of things. That is why we cannot tear our eyes – or our hearts – away.

And as we watch the drama, the tragedy of Empire, oppression, genocide and ecocide unfold before us in Gaza, we will no doubt find occasion to feel both deep grief and rage.

Grief over, and rage at genocide is completely justified. But it is important- central - to remember that the worst thing oppression does to us is make us someone we're not, to rob us of choice, to reduce us to being reactive, to limit our ability to feel and think clearly and with compassion about ourselves and others.

Becoming reactive to the threat of oppression forces us into the mindset wherein what “threatens” us determines our being; our existence becomes little more than a reaction to that “threat.” Then the Empire mentality has “got” us. Empire itself is a form of resistance, and resisting it, while necessary, is a two edged sword. To the extent that our response to trauma and oppression reduces and limits our abilities to make conscious choices, we have become the victims of genocide within ourselves; we have become less than the promise of our full humanity; we are robbed of our birthright.

The ultimate freedom is the freedom to choose from the deepest place of authenticity within us - from our hearts in right relation with all life. We must learn to live and act from love of our peoples, of the land and all life, and not from reaction and mere hatred of those who have foolishly made of themselves our enemies.

This freedom – the freedom to love, foster and nurture life, can never truly or entirely be stripped from us, as the indigenous ancestors and elders - all of those who have handed down the still living traditions from before the time of Empire - have shown us with their lives.

The spiritual elders and guides of the Maya of Guatemala are a recent and deep example of this. The Maya are just recovering from a genocide that took the lives of a quarter million of their people in the latter part of the 1900s; but, even though the denial had not yet shattered, even though the world was silent about their condition then, in that time just before the internet, they kept faith with their ancient traditions, knowledge, and prophecies, and emerged as a people who hold a deep spiritual light for a world in crisis. They re-emerged, as if according to schedule, for this time.

The Zapatistas, born of the Mayan culture of southern Mexico, are another shining example. They have found a striking balance between autonomy and resistance, and between self determination and the nurturing of their culture and the Earth. Let us look closely with the Mayan people at the meaning and potentials of our Time.

Let us live, to the best of our capacities, like them.

- Juan Santos is a member of the Aztlan Mexica Nation Harmony Keepers/American Indian Movement, and a Los Angeles based writer and editor. His essays can be found at: http://the-fourth-world.blogspot.com. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Contact him at: Juan_Santos@Mexica.net.

Apocalypse No! Part 4: The True Sister and the True Brother: Love in the Age of Collapse

Apocalypse No! Part 4: The True Sister and the True Brother: Love in the Age of Collapse

by Juan Santos

“…Only those who are obedient to the guidance of the Great Creator's laws will survive. If it is the will of the Creator, if the earth is totally destroyed by the willfulness of man, the true sister and brother will give a rebirth to recycle the earth and renew its life.”

-from the newsletter of the traditional Hopi Elders, Techqua Ikachi, # 16

Part 1: Gridlock

It is simply beyond me. The earth itself is dying, and most of us will die with it. Tonight in a restaurant, I sat alone with tears in my eyes, watching the people run through the routines of personality and “meaning,” a “meaning” adapted to a way of life that is already over, whose prognosis is terminal; I am all but certain I was the only person there who knew it.

It is not a hard job to keep them in ignorance. They are entranced by what the Hopi call Koyaanisqatsi, all of the things that glitter with death, that bind us in a spell of comfort and numbness to the radical reality of a life out of balance. That the masters of war and global death keep them all in ignorance of what is coming is made simple by their entrancement. It is a simple matter of keeping the spellbound asleep, of making sure no disturbance awakens them.

One wonders if such ignorance is a blessing or a curse. Was it better that the Jews in the death camps did not know that they were entering a gas chamber, that the entranced among them thought they were to get clean, rather than that they were about to be “cleansed” from the face of the Earth? I couldn’t say, because I know we are not heading for a shower, and I cannot find the right words to break the spell. Even if I knew them, I would have no means to speak them soon enough to enough people. I couldn’t really help them prepare, and the leap from this dull ignorance and the hypnosis of death, into a living rebellion and a thrust toward life is simply too large for them to make in the time we have left. We have no time left. With the Nazis at the gas chambers it was Zyklon B: for us it’s Carbon Dioxide and Methane. Although they are odorless –we cannot smell them- they’re already filling the room, and the first of us are already dying.

No, you won’t read it in the paper, certainly not spelled out just this way. They will tell you certain gases may cause death or “endanger millions,” as they put it now. They will never say that it is a system of profit, a way of life, and not the gases, as such, that are killing us. They will only tell us, in the words of the US president, G.W. Bush, that their way of life is “not negotiable.” What this means is that nothing will stop them, that to keep what they have – even for awhile, they will let the rest of us die. They will never say, “Yes, we could stop it, but we won’t.”

Instead, the sergeants among them will point their fingers, talking about Zyklon B “alarmists” while the President simply remains unconvinced that Zyklon B really kills. He will claim that there is doubt, scientific doubt, about where Zyklon B really comes from, and whether or not it is anthropogenic – made by humans. Conservatives will say that Zyklon B is essential for the economy, or that the nation must break its dependence on foreign sources of Zyklon B. The debate will rage on the back pages of the newspaper, the pages no one reads. And the ones who want to wake up, the ones who want us to live, will pray that god sends a message, but no one reads that paper, either. Their eyes are glued to “American Idol” and “America’s Most Wanted.” Others will write essays like this one that will be read by 6 thousand of the Earth’s 6 thousand million people. A few of us will understand what we’re facing, a few of us will understand in depth. Very, very few. One in a million, maybe 10 in a million. Even as more begin to stir, it is certain that they will lack the power to make a difference. The guards have guns, while the inmates have only their striped uniforms and television sets, their inertia, their poverty and 6^th grade reading level.

Not unlike Carolyn Baker, I am told by people whose focus is on the spiritual that I am too “negative,” too angry, that only love can save the world now, that I should give up my anger and distrust of the Good Germans with their Zyklon B, that I must forgive them, that I have “no Harmony” in my soul, that publishing “missive after missive” of bad news only “brings down” those who need their full attention to be placed on creating the spiritual conditions for the coming Shift to a world of peace and harmony. The advocates of the Love Solution have met me with contempt and anger and , as Baker points out, self -“righteousness.”

But the truth is that I have listened to them with deep carefulness. Because one thing is clear. What we have been doing doesn’t work. Another thing is clear to me, as well: that what we have called our “selves” is a temporary construct, a construct adapted to an artificial environment that is about to, unimaginably and unambiguously, disappear. But oddly, as radical as I have been these last thirty years – and I have been as radical as I could manage, and even much more radical than I could manage, I find myself stuck in the middle now, with no clear solution to this dilemma about love.

But, I know this. That the worst thing oppression has done to me is to eat me alive, to render null the meaning and potential of what I was born to be, to consume my time and my emotional and intellectual and creative and spiritual energies, to block me in from all sides, to make me constantly have to react to the barrage of abuse, poverty, physical and emotional suffering, exploitation, indignity, subterfuge, manipulations and constrictions that make oppression what it is, and which make the world go ‘round. I’ve known since I was 16 that this is not a way of life, but a way of death. The knowledge was more than I could absorb, then, but over the decades I have absorbed it, learned to understand it, name it, pin it, identify its games, their rules and their permutations.

But, looking around, all of that has not helped me to escape it, even though the truth of my own private mythology is that the task that was set for me was to understand it so that when the Time came, as it has come, I could help to create a new culture, one free of oppression, one that would not be a living death. Nevertheless, I still have to reckon with the reality that my understanding has not set me free. I know how not to live, I know what not to repeat. But, I don’t know how to live. I know only a little of that.

I assume that my situation is simply part of a larger one, a situation one self-appointed New Age guru has rightly described as an all but all encompassing Karmic Gridlock.

If today is the culmination of everything that has gone before it, if the current global crisis is the singular product of “history,” of civilization, then all of the contradictions of that history, in all of their permutations, economic, cultural, social, physical, mental and emotional, are coming to a head as part of this culmination, this crisis. The totalism of the system, of this way of death, has reached a new threshold we can call Gridlock and Collapse. The cat has caught its tail, the Matrix has trapped itself. It has destroyed its own options and has nothing left to feed on but itself, as if it were a cancer with nothing left to feed on but more cancer, with no healthy flesh left to invade.

Part 2: The Good News

The good news is that the death system is dying. It could come to no other end.

The bad news is that it has become so all encompassing that there is nowhere left to run if we were able to escape it. Escaping global warming would be like escaping the air itself, the atmosphere itself. But we cannot escape the air, there are no spaceships to carry us elsewhere, and we probably couldn’t breathe if we got there.

I don’t think dying is so bad, personally. I came close to dying a few months ago. Later, it occurred to me it would have been easier than living. If it were to happen, I later realized, all it would take is to close the eyes. Easy, but cheap and faithless.

What we have been doing – dying – doesn’t work. What we have been doing – fighting or resisting, or going along or “getting ours” – doesn’t work. It didn’t work.

And its time is over.

This whole way of life is over. Everything my generation rebelled against is over This cancerous consumption and the growth of consumption is over. It can’t take another step. As George Monbiot points out, if the economy grows by only 3% a year, global economic activity- and consumption- will double in roughly a quarter of a century.

Monbiot writes, “In other words, if our economy grows at 3% between now and 2040, we will consume in that period economic resources equivalent to all those we have consumed since humans first stood on two legs. Then, between 2040 and 2063, we must double our total consumption again. Reading that paper I realised for the first time what we are up against.”

There are no easy fixes. Short of a very severe global economic collapse there may be no fixes at all. An article in the Los Angeles Times shows why. The Times reports that overall there has been a 12% decrease in global warming emissions since the forging of the Kyoto Protocol. But, the Times reports, “It [the apparent success of Kyoto] was an illusion. The progress wasn't due to a global embrace of green power, but rather to the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, which shut down smoke-belching factories across the region."

Here’s the result of the Eastern Bloc collapse:

“Russia: Down 29% in carbon dioxide emissions since 1990.

Romania: A 43% reduction.

Latvia: A resounding 60% drop.”

Far from reducing emissions- an utterly urgent necessity – the Times says that “total carbon dioxide emissions from countries bound by Kyoto's caps have risen by more than 8%.” Among developing nations, China's emissions grew 138% since Kyoto was adopted. The U.S., the number one polluter, never even signed the accord.

There is no reason to assume that a market based plan that comes out of Bali will do any better at all.

When absolute survival depends on a certain set of actions, it is pure death and foolishness to set up a system with competing survival drives, one with built-in conflicts that undermine what must be done. But any market based plan does just that. In the real world, survival depends on cutting greenhouse gas emissions. But in the artificial world of the market, for the capitalist, “survival” depends on growth, on cutting costs, on making as much as possible for as little as possible – on making profit and on making more profit than your competitors in an ever-expanding cycle. Any market based system of “credits” to pollute – credits to kill, licenses to kill - pits the short term survival of a few capitalists against the survival of Life on Earth.

It’s not just greenhouse gases that must be cut. Industrial production itself – which produces greenhouse gases and a million other plagues - must not grow, certainly not at a rate that will cause us to produce and consume – and thus pollute - as much in the next quarter century as we have consumed in the entire existence of the human species.

Well, there is an alternative, but it is one that no government on Earth will ever embrace. The only thing that can stop the increase in production, and thus the destruction of all Life, is a Global Depression, which, by definition, drastically reverses economic growth. Maybe then we can meet the standards science says must be met – an 80% reduction in greenhouse gases - or more– a rate of reduction over twice the size of the reduction created by the Russian collapse.

Since any Kyoto-style accord can be nothing more than a deadly mix of food and poison, we may thank god that such a Depression, and with it, real reductions in greenhouse gases, seems increasingly likely, even inevitable. Take your choice: Relative poverty, even the deepest poverty, in the short term, or Global Death. But let’s be more specific in laying out the meaning of the choice. Consider this: James Lovelock of “Gaia” fame has projected that unchecked global warming will lead to conditions, where, by 2100, there will remain only 500 million humans on Earth, and they will live at or near the poles. Lovelock contends that the rest of the planet will be uninhabitable. Consider. By 2050 Global warming will have destroyed one million species of Life on Earth. Human global population is due to reach 9 billion in the same year. If only 500 million humans survive in 2100, that means that roughly 8 and ½ billion – about 95% of all humans living at mid-century - will die. It comes down to it: Either this way of death- in-life dies, or the human species will be eradicated or all-but eradicated, along with the vast majority of Life on the planet. Let’s revisit our premises. The market requires growth if individual formations of capital (banks, corporations, companies, businesses) are to survive; while Life requires no growth, or negative economic growth, if we are to survive. It’s that plain, that simple. In all likelihood, what comes out of the UN conference in Bali, which is meant to lay the groundwork for a “New Kyoto,” will be nothing but a compromise with global death, one in which death has the upper hand. Economic collapse is the one thing that might give Life itself a way to continue.

Of course, under capitalism, the state has a primary function: it is not to protect Life; it is to create a controllable populace so that there is a stable zone of production for capital, and to create stable markets for the distribution (including exports) of commodities, and the seizure of resources. In other words, to suppress the people at home, and to intimidate or conquer people abroad. Needless to say, economic collapse leads to war, as competing states seek to use warfare to maximize their control of markets and overseas resources and emerge from the collapse “on top,” The next depression will be no different, unless the capitalists realize that reconstituting their system is a hopeless task. Which, given the impending realities of peak oil, just might be the blessed case. Economic collapse, war, peak oil, and a vastly over-extended US empire are all intimately linked and mutually reinforcing realities that lead in one direction - to the death of the Empire and the impossibility of its resurrection. Let us pray and let us work to make sure its death comes in time for us all to survive it. Let us pray and work as if we were in line for the gas chamber. Because we are.

Part 3: Renewing the World

Let us pray and let us work and let us learn how to build a completely different future once this way is finally dead and buried. It will take everything we have, and more. It will take what we don’t have.

Since this way of life is over, since this culture is over, the fiction of who we have assumed ourselves to be is also over. We are not that. We never were that. It’s just that our survival in the system meant we had no choice but to pretend- even to ourselves – to be that. It is time, now, for us to deliberately and consciously to enter into what my generation called the psychedelic experience, the dissolution of our egos- I mean our stories, the stories we have told ourselves about what it is to be alive, to be a human being on Earth. Like an actor when the stage is being torn down after the show, it’s time to abandon who we were, what we were, what we said, what we did, and what we planned. That’s what it means to die consciously, to allow the ego to die, to let go of a life that can no longer be sustained. That’s what it means to die with joy, to see death as liberation from suffering. All the stuff the Buddha said. It’s Time now. It’s time to die, so that the world might be re-born.

I imagine, rightly or wrongly – I haven’t asked - that the people who’ve been preaching love and forgiveness to me already understood this. I don’t know, and it matters little. I let them work in me, I let their words dismantle me, even though I had felt profoundly insulted by them, even though some of the things that were said were arrogant and clearly meant to be insulting. Nevertheless, I began to give up the story. Slowly, the anger is giving way to sadness. Sadness is a step closer to love than anger. That’s good. Beneath the anger is grief, and beneath the grief is light and joy and renewal and the colors of the rainbow. Beneath the grief is life, not the phony “life” we’ve been led to lead, but real life. I know, because I’ve been down the road before. That’s how I knew to listen to the love preachers in the first place. That’s how I knew it was time to shut up, to sit with the impossible and let it answer itself. And here’s the deal.

Death’s own answer is love. No, it’s not death vs. love. Love is death’s own answer. The answer we have always needed under the death system is love - a way to love and a way to be loved. A way to connect, to break down, to open up. Oppression is nothing but a block to love, to connection, to inclusion. Love is the road. Oppression is not sustainable, and to that extent, it is not fundamentally real. It is doomed to collapse. Love is fundamentally real. Connection is fundamentally real. Death and oppression have no victory if we know we are connected, if we know that the door is open to our love, if we can still give it and receive it, if we can pledge it beyond the grave, beyond the prison’s bars. It is our love for life, for kids and animals, that we can pledge now, and pledge it beyond the grave, to a future we will never live to see. To a new world whose parents and ancestors we may become if we but choose it and lay the foundations for it. We will have to lay them the only place they can be laid, in the midst of the destruction and unimaginable anguish to come.

It is love that we, ourselves, will need, as the world we have been shunted into dies around us. What we will need is those who will love us enough to help us face death, the death of our ego-“lives” and the real death that will accompany economic collapse or ecological collapse, or both. We will need people willing to become boddhisatvas, people willing to try to become something like we imagine Christ or Quetzalcoatl to have been, people willing to be with us, in love, until the end, and beyond the end. It’s Time now. It’s time to get free. It’s time to become the True Sister and the True Brother, those who know they are related, those who know they are connected, those who can remember how to love, those who the Hopi said might renew the Earth.

-30-

Note: “Love” is the palpable assurance or insurance of connection and inclusion. It is the certainty of one's own connection and the guarantor of connection for the beloved. It is a verb, not a feeling, per se, and not only a spiritual state of being. It is an act of will; a commitment and a discipline and a capacity for understanding, admiration, compassion, risk and expression, more than it is a feeling or a state of being, although it is also these, as well. The palpable assurance or insurance of connection and inclusion is made manifest in acts that express admiration and compassion , and through work, risk or sacrifice aimed at extending one’s self and one’s boundaries to include the other, their well being, survival and spiritual growth. It is inseparable from and identical with acts of caring.

We are, as the Hopi Elders and other indigenous elders tell us, the Caretakers of Land and Life. Our role is to love the Earth – not to destroy Her. This is who and what we are, our identity and purpose outside the Matrix of Death.

In Nahuatl, the word for “humanity” itself is “Macehua”; the caretakers who are obligated to preserve land and life.

Juan Santos is a writer and editor living in Los Angeles, California. He can be reached at JuanSantos@Mexica.net

Apocalypse No! part 3: The Law of Life and the Law of Death

Part 3 of Apocalypse No!

The Law of Life and the Law of Death

by Juan Santos

1. The Great Emergency: Global Warming, Mass Death and Resource Wars in the 21^st Century

"We are the watchers. We are the witnesses. We see what has gone before. We see what happens now, at this dangerous moment in human history. We see what's going to happen, what will surely happen unless we come together---we, the Peoples of all Nations---to restore peace, harmony and balance to the Earth, our Mother."

--Chief Arvol Looking Horse, from White Buffalo Teachings

At the Sundance Film Festival Al Gore declared, "We have a category five denial of this issue [global warming]. I believe our political system is broken, however, I have optimism and hope. A rebellion is gathering." But rebellion isn’t what Al Gore is fostering. Speaking at NYU against what one commentator called a “stately backdrop of American flags,” Gore’s comments were focused on “uplift,” and calls to action slathered in a “thick layer of patriotism” and good old capitalist know-how. He seemed oblivious to irony, saying of the US, “Our natural role is to be the pace car in the race to stop global warming."

The feel good approach Gore pushes is dead wrong: Economic growth and saving life on Earth are not compatible goals. Industrial civilization isn’t harming the Earth, it’s killing the Earth. The system has long since passed the limits of growth - it can’t be sustained.

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a four-year analysis of the world's ecosystems sponsored by the Worldwatch Institute, showed that 15 out of 24 ecosystems essential to human life are "being pushed beyond their sustainable limits," toward a state of collapse that may be "abrupt and potentially irreversible." These ecosystems and the civilization that is killing them are both approaching an endpoint.

People are calling Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth the most terrifying movie you will ever see – but really, Gore’s film is a soft sell, one that underestimates the dangers we face and that veils not only the root causes of global warming, but the drastic military responses the US is planning in the event of an abrupt shift in the climate.

Call it Category 4 denial. Gore ignores the real problem. Global heating isn’t “caused” by CO2, it’s caused by industrial production and those that profit from it – capitalists in oil, gas, coal, electricity and automobiles, among others. And the system isn’t “broken,” no matter what Gore claims. The system is producing what it’s supposed to produce; power and profit and the corollaries of power and profit; denial and death.

For those addicted to power and profit, who are “winning” at the expense of all life, global warming is business as usual.

Try telling an abusive alcoholic he’s taken one drink too many, that animals and plants, even other people, are not objects, that he’s beaten his wife one too many times, or that, as Brother Malcolm put it, the chickens are coming home to roost. Unless he’s hit bottom, he’s not listening. Even George Bush has publicly acknowledged the obvious: the system is addicted to oil. But he’s not listening.

The analogy to addiction is not facile and the denial of the crisis we face is no accident; it is both conscious and deliberate. In this system, denial of suffering is the key to success. The ability to distance themselves from the meaning of their actions is what put those who are on top on top in the first place.

Look at Exxon and its global warming disinformation campaign. They’ve spent millions on propaganda to consciously deceive us about the reality of global warming and the impending mass death it implies, much like the Nazis told their victims they were heading for a shower, not a gas chamber, like the cigarette capitalists told us smoking carries no harm. But the genocide the Nazis perpetrated was not this extreme. This is different. This is not ethnocide or genocide. This is omnicide. Life on Earth is in the balance.

The stakes, the costs of this crime and its coverup, could not be higher. World renowned paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey tells us, “Whatever way you look at it, we're destroying the Earth at a rate comparable with the impact of a giant asteroid slamming into the planet, or even a shower of vast heavenly bodies."

Within 50 years a million species will be extinct. Within 100 years 50% of all species now living - 5 million forms of living beauty - will be gone forever. Within a mere 30 years, a quarter of all mammal species may be gone.

Today, bears are no longer hibernating in the north of Spain. With the melting of polar ice, the Polar Bear is on its way out. The Orangutan has ten years left.

Fish are starving to death in the Great Barrier Reef – the unthinkable equivalent of primates starving in the jungle. In the meantime, the jungle, the Amazon Rainforest, which provides 20% of the world’s oxygen, will be a savannah, or perhaps a desert, by 2100.

Forty percent of the world’s species will die with the Amazon.

The new Age of Extinctions is being driven by global heating, ozone depletion, toxic chemicals, habitat destruction, and invasive or infectious species. The cause isn’t just CO2, it’s our whole way of life. The Earth is in its most profound crisis since the mass extinctions of the Eocene period, 54 million years ago.

Before that, two hundred and fifty million years ago at the end of the Permian era, 95% of all species perished due to runaway global warming, warming that occurred due to the same kind of positive feedback loops that we see emerging in today’s heating trends. Scientists call it The Great Dying, a period in which life on Earth was all-but wiped out.

The Permian mass extinction was apparently caused by a series of gigantic volcanic eruptions, triggering a runaway greenhouse effect. Geologists have said the impact of this "post apocalyptic greenhouse" was so severe that only one large land animal was left alive. 100 million years would pass before species diversity returned to its former levels.

In light of such potentials, how many people are willing to wager that the world scientific community is wrong and that George W. Bush – the idiot savant of the Christian Fascists – is right when he claims the verdict is still out on global warming? How many will be willing to leave the fate of the Earth, of their children and their children’s children, in the hands of propagandists for ExxonMobile? The impact of global heating - on humans alone - would be almost beyond imagining.

James Lovelock, who developed the Gaia Theory – the scientific theorem that Earth acts as a single self-sustaining, self-balancing organic system – tells us that by 2100 there will only be 500 million humans left on Earth. The Earth, he says, will no longer be able to sustain more than that. There are 6.5 billion of us now; by 2050 that number will rocket to 8.9 billion, then drop precipitously. If Lovelock is right, only one out of 18 people will be left alive at the century’s end. 95% will be dead. And Lovelock is only looking at global warming. He isn’t counting the threats posed by Peak Oil or nuclear resource wars over oil, water and arable land that, if current trends continue, will become all but inevitable.

The glaciers of the Himalayas are disappearing. Forty percent of the people in the world draw their water from sources directly fed by the regular summer melting cycles of Himalayan ice and snow. Their sources of food will melt with the glaciers. With mass starvation in Asia, the probabilities of war over water and arable land - and of mass death - grow exponentially.

By the summer of 2040 all of the sea ice in the Arctic Ocean will be gone. That means that theromohaline circulation in the North Sea – the Gulf Stream, which carries vast amounts of heat from the equator to the North Atlantic - will cease. Even as the planet heats, northern Europe will freeze. In Britain, for example, the Gulf Stream provides 27,000 times more heat than all current power supplies can generate, warming that nation by 5-8C. Warm winds from the Gulf Stream eventually reach the Himalayas, where they play a role in stimulating and regulating the East Asian monsoon system.

With the collapse of the Gulf Stream, temperatures in Europe could fall by 20 or more degrees Fahrenheit, creating an ecological nightmare as farmland turns to frozen tundra, with temperatures dropping to below -20C. Europe is currently self sufficient in agriculture, feeding its 600 million inhabitants, an obvious impossibility under such devastating new conditions.

Would Europe, with its vast armaments and its history of colonization, genocide and global wars aimed at re-dividing world resources and markets, slip quietly into a frozen death - or would it find war, even a Third World War, preferable to collapse and relentless famine at home?

The question is far from academic. Ice sheet melting from the Greenland ice cap into the Greenland Sea and the melting of floating ice during the 1980s caused the Gulf Stream to diminish by 80%. A recent report shows that the Gulf Stream came to a dead halt for ten days in 2004. The melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet and the Arctic Sea’s ice all but guarantees the end of the Gulf Stream before mid century.

Which lands a frozen Europe might target in order to feed itself could eventually pose an all-but insoluble problem for the sub-continent’s rulers. A recent study by the British government shows that if current trends continue, a third of the planet will be desert by 2100. According to their calculations, areas susceptible to moderate drought will double to 50% of the Earth’s surface. Areas susceptible to severe drought will more than triple to 30% of the Earth’s surface.

Exxon-Bush Inc. would have us believe these impacts and their causes are debatable. Republican Senator James Inhofe would have us believe that the world scientific community is perpetrating an elaborate anti-capitalist hoax – the biggest hoax in human history, with the highest stakes. Rush Limbaugh says global warming is just another way to make civilized white people and capitalists feel guilty, the moral equivalent of a commie plot. The Right wants to cast doubt on climate science and the impending realities of climate chaos, because by pretending that there is a debate, they can defer action and continue to profit. For these men, the world itself can end, but not profit.

The fossils of our time sit in Washington, apparently inured by the pleasures of power and wealth to the realities before us. But, appearances notwithstanding, the ruling elites understand that we are on an irreversible path to global heating, caused largely by the burning of fossil fuels for the sake of production and profit. The question is what they plan to do about it.

As resources of petroleum peak and begin to expire, the Bush regime offers no alternative other than resource wars – war, not to end the use of the fuels that are destroying the Earth – but to get more of them, the last of them. Their aim is not to save the world, but to ensure their continued ability to dominate it by controlling the rapidly dwindling sources of oil. This, after all, is what the war in Iraq is about, and this is the meta-madness that guides the imperial preparations to attack Iran.

The ruling elites know exactly where we are heading and exactly what they are doing. Quietly, they call global warming a “national security threat.”

A 2004 Pentagon report, "An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security," cautions US strategic planners that in a scenario of abrupt climate change “Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.” The report predicts that Third World countries will develop their own nuclear threat to secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. By 2020, the report concludes, “catastrophic” shortages of water, food and energy will plunge the planet toward war. The United Nations identifies some 150 flash points where wars may be fought over water, alone.

The Pentagon report suggests that there could be global economic depression, destruction of technological infrastructure on a global scale, nuclear war, mega-droughts, famine, mass migrations from Third World countries, and widespread rioting around the world.

“Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,” the Pentagon says. “…warfare would define human life.”

The report calls for the development of what it calls “no-regrets strategies” by the U.S. Department of Defense.

Welcome to the apocalypse. This is the Great Emergency. The future of all Life on Earth is in our hands, in the hands of this generation. We have two choices: stop them, or prepare our children and grandchildren to be among the 5% who might be so fortunate – or unfortunate – as to survive.

The Law of Life and the Law of Death

“If we are to survive, we need to learn to discern the difference between real and false hopes. We must eliminate false hopes, which blind us to real possibilities, and bind us to unlivable situations.” - Derrick Jensen -

“Indigenous people still live in a universe, but we don't; we live in an economic system.” - Thomas Berry –

___________

Facing the reality of our times, facing the apocalypse, means stripping down. As bare as you can get. The truth about the condition of the world, if you can take it in – even in part - will lay you flat, for days, or weeks. It will take your breath away. Adrienne Rich speaks with depth, prayerfully, of what reckoning, real reckoning, can cost:

Final Notions

It will not be simple, it will not take long

It will take little time, it will take all your thought

It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath

It will be short, it will not be simple

It will touch through your ribs, it will take all your heart

It will not take long, it will occupy all your thought

As a city is occupied, as a bed is occupied

It will take your flesh, it will not be simple

You are coming into us who cannot withstand you

You are coming into us who never wanted to withstand you

You are taking parts of us into places never planned

You are going far away with pieces of our lives

It will be short, it will take all your breath

It will not be simple, it will become your will

To face the apocalypse you will have to strip what you call your life away. That’s what it means to acknowledge truth. It’s like fire sweeping through chaparral; in fire ecologies there are seeds that only germinate and grow when the brush burns; new life requires fire.

It is time to strip away denial to make room for remembering ourselves, our primal selves, the tribal self, the knower, the one that knows its life and environment like any other living creature knows it; intimately, directly, totally - the deep one inside us who lives on Earth without the plagues of doubt, contingency and anxiety that fill our every day with disease.

We will not survive otherwise. Otherwise we are blocked, locked in a double bind that forbids recognition of what lies before us, blind to the simple and obvious. The distress that led us to this end cannot itself undo this end, the disease cannot heal itself. The false self can only produce false solutions, the self in denial can only produce solutions formed from its own matrix of denial.

There is every indication that our society, civilization as we know it, is on the verge of collapse. Whatever and whoever is left, it will not be you; not as you know yourself today.

“You,” as you call your civilized self, are on your way to extinction.

Maybe you don’t want to know... Maybe you should put this down now.

Apocalypse is not an event, and it’s not by the numbers. Apocalypse is a process. It’s a way of life. It’s this way of life. And whatever else may be said of it, this way of life is finished. You are finished with it; it is time for it to be finished.

Some have said that there are no more warnings to be had, that the time for warnings has passed, none are needed. Anyone who looks can see. “Doomsday” is not approaching; it may already have passed. The scales may already have tipped without our having noticed the finality of the moment; that moment when the extinction of millions of species or the probabilities of a final war became inevitable – irrevocable and irreversible.

We’ve been living with this knowledge for a generation now. It’s permeated every aspect of our lives, whether we’ve acknowledged it or not.

I remember as a child, standing in the window near the front door of the little wood frame house, looking out, wondering if we were going to the country, to see the family; if there would be time, if the highways would be too crowded and if it was far enough away. I had a plastic army helmet on my head – a plastic liner for a WWII US Army helmet - and a stuffed tiger under my arm. It was the Cuban Missile Crisis.

We knew then it could all be gone.

The youth of the early 80’s knew it too. By then we were painting red and orange mushroom clouds on public walls, clouds slashed through by the “no” sign. We were marching by the millions to stop Reagan - with his cowboy hat, death squads, nuclear tipped cruise missiles and charming grin - from committing omnicide. We all knew what that grin hid. Reagan was a front man for the Empire, an evil empire run by people who know exactly what they are doing.

They are killing the world.

If you’re an activist, you know just what this means. Whether its polar bears, seals, coral reefs, rain forests, mountaintops blown into gaping pits, minefields, human rights, incest, torture, wife beating, police beatings and murder, nuclear war, animal rights, nuclear waste, global warming, rape, racism, genocide, mass incarceration, mass deportation, mass starvation or mass extinction, you spend your time doing one thing: staving off or seeking somehow to transform the omnipresent reality of utter destruction spawned by this system at every conceivable level.

The US neo-cons, with their openly proclaimed goal of utter global domination, are nothing new. The US and Europe have followed the logic of Empire for hundreds, even thousands of years, and they have followed it to the bitterest of ends, ends that violate every aspect of natural law.

One need look only at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the genocide of 100 million Native Americans and 100 million Africans, to understand exactly what those who rule intend and the inevitable conclusion of their logic. Plainly stated it is a Hitlerian logic. Hitlerian rationalism. It’s never been otherwise. Only the thinnest of veils separates the cult of every day life from the mass reality of a new, global holocaust. We face that holocaust today. The system we live under is producing it step by logical step.

Death underlies the logic of industrialism – that’s its premise. No one has kept this a secret - for a generation it is has been impossible not to know. Industrialism is nothing without the logic of efficiency in production - capitalism not only produces, of course, but only the most efficient, ecologically reckless and exploitative producers survive. Beyond that, capitalism creates crises of overproduction that lead to global economic depressions and world wars aimed at re-dividing resources and markets between competing capitalist empires.

Modern production is a wedding of opposites, a two faced god: its other face is destruction. Consumption for one is starvation for the Other. Production for one is destruction for the Other, and like a cancer, production has grown beyond all limits: the industrial system lives by destroying without limit, by ignoring the limits to growth.

Derrick Jensen makes it plain:

“It is acceptable for those above to increase the amount of property they control—in everyday language, to make money—by destroying or taking the lives of those below. This is called production. If those below damage the property of those above, those above may kill or otherwise destroy the lives of those below. This is called justice.”

The logic is this. There is a strict relationship between the denial of kinship and empathy – objectification – on one hand, and the willingness to produce the unlimited death of the Other – to wipe out every Indian and every Buffalo – and to do so for the sake of one’s own “prosperity.” The ability to renounce feeling and objectify the Other lies at the heart of Western standards of “thought” and provides the fuel that drives the engine of destruction.

Jensen takes us one step further:

"Production is the manifestation in the physical world of the psychic process of objectification. It is the turning of the subject (a cow for example)into the object (profit on the hoof, as agribusinessmen say).To do so, necessarily kills the subject, first inside the objectifier's experience, and then in the physical world. Production, however, is not the end point. Production, deified as it has become, is not the god who stands behind the god. The god who stands behind the god is annihilation. Where does our production lead us? Psychic death. Emotional death. Physical death. And, as should be increasingly clear to anyone paying attention whatsoever, it is leading us ever more quickly toward the death of every living being."

Jensen walks right into the heart of the matter, into the final result of objectification, denial of the inner reality of the Other, the denial of kinship, and the soul murder involved in “rational” and efficient” production.

“The endpoint of civilization is assembly line mass murder. The assembly line mass murder of the Nazi Holocaust is production stripped of the veneer of economics. It is the very essence of production. It took the living and converted them to the dead. That’s what this culture does.”

This is where Hitler’s logic in the efficiency of the production of death – the horror of the death camps – comes from. It is not abnormal; it is merely the intensified expression of the dynamics of the cult of every day life; which, of course, is a cult of death rooted in the denial that we are part of a living planet, and that all life, and the balances of life, are sacred.

Like a cancer industrial capitalism must grow to survive, it must consume its host to prosper. In consuming its host, it lays the foundation for its own cessation. When the body dies, the cancer also dies. In The Final Empire William Kötke writes:

“The culture of empire has severed itself from its center in the life of the earth. Civilized people find their survival not in the life of the earth but in human society. They are dependent upon what human society produces. The empire feeds on the earth like a tumor, irrespective of natural patterns. The individual person in the culture of empire does not directly feed from the earth, as do forager/hunters, that person feeds from the tumor body.”

With globalization, the culture of the production of death is being exported to the whole world. Two thirds of all Earth’s “resources” have already been consumed. Other cultures, including indigenous cultures, the cultures of life, are also quickly being consumed.

Life itself is being turned into death, and consumed.

The “Real” World

Globalization is the spread of the logic of industrialism everywhere; it is the spreading of the logic of mass death to everything. Globalization means the mass death of everything, the cancer metastized.

Look around you. There is no other logic in control. We’ve killed 90% of the large fish in the oceans; seals go mad from the toxic results of human shit dumped in the sea; they bare their fangs and bite the heads of their newborns. Israel blows a hole in the spine of a fetus in a mother’s womb in Beirut. They drop cluster bombs, then claim they blew the hole in the woman’s womb, in her child’s spine, in self defense.

They call it “peace,” or “democracy” when any madman can see it is nothing but destruction and death, racism and power lust. Any madman can see they cry “peace, peace,” when there is no peace.

The “great tribulation” is on us, and it’s not what they told us it would be.

This is not about geopolitical strategy – even though there are profound and sometimes moving analyses of that aspect of the science of death lust and of the clinical coldness of the ruler’s calculations.

The plans of the Christian fascists and US Neocons for global empire and the concrete strategies they pursue are like the plans of a serial killer for his next murder; understanding them is only useful insofar as it might tell us just how close we may be to the final disaster, and what openings, if any, might occur in which we might intervene. But at bottom, their plans aren’t the basic thing. The sickness is.

All the cold thought, like all the “rational” plans and cold science behind Hitler’s death camps, is still just necrophilia, the sick, sexualized psychological thrill of power over others, of manic killing, death, and cold bodies.

It’s not just the torture camps at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo; you, yourself, are the product of torture and degradation – the life instincts have all but been burnt out in you and replaced over a lifetime of rules and punishment with fear. We are all prisoners, and the ruling elites and their enforcers are our wardens and guards. If you are a woman you know that there is nothing fundamentally strange – uncommon - in the sexual torture at Abu Ghraib; it’s hovered over your daily life from the moment you first learned to fear rape. It’s your prison, too. You are its inmate. Abu Ghraib and your daily life are part of a single continuum.

And it’s not just one thing - it’s not just our social prison – it’s everything. There is a continent of floating plastic garbage in the Pacific Ocean as large as Texas. Next door are Columbine and Beirut, a maddened seal, the spine of a fetus, a woman’s rape, and a plastic doll’s head washed up among the trash on a Pacific island beach: these are all the very same thing. These are multiple symptoms of a single sickness.

Ten thousand years of civilization have so traumatized us – ten thousand years of trauma have so civilized us, that it can no longer be endured or contained.

Civilization is undergoing a psychotic break, and to paraphrase Ward Churchill, you’re locked in a room with it, as its mask of “niceness” falls away; as its cold face shows; when it looks, for all the world, like there’s nothing you can do. After all, the psychopath writes your check. They’re selling us so much Prozac and Ritalin that it’s filtering into the soil, polluting the waters, imbalancing the brains of other mammals. 80% of people in the US say their jobs are "meaningless." One out of four takes psychiatric medication.

It’s called competing survival drives. We have to survive in the system, but the system creates death as its product. As Thomas Berry put it, “Indigenous people still live in a universe, but we don't; we live in an economic system.” We depend on the production of mass death to live. We live in a system of death, where survival means self-destruction and destruction of the Earth. Trying to survive, we destroy ourselves and the world. It’s as simple as driving to work.

Listen. I’m not leaning out the window screaming “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore.” And this is not 1984. It’s different. It’s worse than anything Orwell postulated. It’s not just Freedom is Slavery and War is Peace.

It’s Life = Death.

Like shocked and beaten prisoners, like concentration camp inmates, most of us can’t stop and look or even think for ourselves – and when we do, for even a moment, we tell ourselves to calm down.

This calming down, this containment and redirection of fear, grief, pain and rage, this inability to remember ourselves, is what we call “civilization,” and “being civilized.”

We’re domesticated. Like any other beaten, cowed, tamed, rewarded and cringing animal. This is what we call being “nice.”

We forget, we refuse to acknowledge, that the wealthy own us. They, not we, spend our lives.

Forgetting, we make it safe for the destruction to continue. Like any other inmate, we do our jobs quietly, not so differently than how others did our jobs in Germany, under the Nazis, not so differently than the death camp inmates did their jobs. The product of our work is ultimately the same; our own deaths: and the deaths of the Others.

All My Relations

It hasn’t always been like this. The world renowned paleoanthropologist, Richard Leakey, came to a stunning and beautiful conclusion about human evolution. He says that what set us on the path to human-ness was one thing: sharing - that sharing is the key to our evolution and the primary cause of the evolutionary leap that created us.

No other primate shares its food. While other primates occasionally hunt, and have even been seen to hunt cooperatively, no other primate gathers its food and shares it with others. Other primates don’t gather food and share it, they forage for it, and eat it themselves, where they find it.

No other primate has a division of labor that is predicated on sharing what the gatherers gather with the hunters and what the hunters hunt with the gatherers. Leakey suggests that in the most literal sense sharing fueled human evolution, making immense stores of energy available to our ancestors. Sharing fueled our growth in every sense.

Sharing food involves what Leakey calls reciprocal altruism; those that shared had better chances of survival; he says that our evolution “selected” for certain traits; “sympathy, gratitude, guilt and moral indignation” – empathy, in a word. Those who will not or cannot share are ostracized; their chances for survival plummet.

Leakey is unequivocal. “We are human because our ancestors learned to share their food and their skills in an honored network of obligation,” he writes in People of the Lake (emphasis added.)

In every original, ancient human culture this sense of sharing, honor and obligation – this sense of kinship – extends beyond the self to the family, beyond the family to the band, beyond the band to the tribe, and beyond the tribe to the plants and animals, to the very stones.

Our primal sensibility is that we are related, that we belong, that we are wrapped in a matrix of living that is fundamentally secure, and that our part is to reciprocate, to ensure the balances that sustain our living matrix, our living mother.

The Lakota nation has a word for this: mitakuye oyasin: all my relations. The term so deeply expresses the indigenous sensibility of an honored and beloved network of reciprocal obligation with land and life that it has been adopted as a byword, a sacred expression, by indigenous peoples throughout the US.

But something has gone terribly wrong. Around the Earth those who hold to this original law have been systematically destroyed.

Such destruction is called genocide, but it is more than that. It is the mass murder of the keepers of the Law of Life, the Law of the Land. It is an act of profound spiritual darkness.

The destruction of those who remember the original law of our being implies, in the most obvious and literal sense, the abandonment, destruction and repudiation of the Law of Life and the destruction and repudiation of our actual, practical relationships to one another and to life itself.

The violation of this Law, and the spirals of pain that have resulted from it, have set us on a path to suicide, to omnicide. For ten thousand years, since the advent of “civilization,” we’ve been on a path to a single destination: apocalypse.

The “fathers” of civilization have, at some level, always known it: that’s why the myths of a coming apocalypse have been with us for so very long.

Entrapped in what we call “civilization,” we live by another law. Robert Oppenheimer, progenitor of the atomic bomb, understood himself, and perhaps he understood the matrix of pain and destruction that has captured us:

“I am become Death, destroyer of worlds,” he said.

The law we live by is more than obvious. We live by the law of death. We have replaced the Law of Land and Life with the law of death, with a law of reverse evolution we call “progress.”

The Aboriginal peoples of Australia understand the matter with utter clarity. David Suzuki and Peter Knudston describe the Aboriginal view of the radical disconnection in the Western, civilized experience of the world:

“In their cultural detachment from the true dynamics of life’s origins and the fundamental burdens and boundlessness of time, these arrogant intruders are hopelessly confused. Not knowing what to remember and what to forget, they follow dead laws, fail to recognize living ones, and in their power and denial promote death.”

Other Ways

“The original instructions of the Creator are universal and valid for all time. The essence of these instructions is compassion for all life and love for all creation. We must realize we do not live in a world of dead matter, but in a universe of living spirit. Let us open our eyes to the sacredness of Mother Earth, or our eyes will be opened for us.”

-- Traditional Hopi Elder David Monongye

It wasn’t always like this; other cultures have known other ways.

Deborah Bird Rose suggests that the Aboriginal ethos can be summed up in four main points, four basic Laws about the respect and the kind of relationships we owe to other living beings:

“Balance: A system cannot be life enhancing if it is out of kilter, and each part shares in the responsibility of sustaining itself and balancing the others.

“Response: Communication is reciprocal. There is here a moral obligation: to learn to understand, to pay attention, and to respond.

“Symmetry: In opposing and balancing each other, parts must be equivalent because the purpose is not to “win” or dominate, but to block, thereby producing further balance.

“Autonomy: No species, no group, or country is “boss” for another; each adheres to its own Law. Authority and dependence are necessary within parts, but not between parts.”

These laws – laws that are fundamentally about kinship, reciprocity and balance - bind the people in eternal relationships to the Earth and Life. Native Americans have similar understandings; there were original agreements between humans and animals that must not be broken; these are expressions of an original medicine that serves to heal and keep the world in harmony. One of the central images of the Hopi Nation is a symbol that means “Together with all nations we protect both land and life and hold the world in balance.” Indigenous peoples follow the Law of the Land; they do not seek to impose their own laws on the land, or on other living beings.

The ethic of protecting land and life, and the consequences of not doing so, are conscious for indigenous peoples. Jim Kipp describes the understanding of his people, the Blackfeet:

”…Creator gave me a choice in life – a 'red road' leading to him or the path that is curving, dangerous, and leads to death. Being able to live in a respectful way in Creator's name teaches how to be humble because it acknowledges that Creator's presence is in everything.”

In the Maori language, Whenua, the word for land, is also the word for afterbirth; the relationship of living creatures to the living Earth is like that of a fetus to the placenta. The Maori word for a sub-tribe or band is the same as the word for a pregnant woman. The same sense of kinship permeates the Maori sensibility at every level;

The Māori believe that they have whakapapa (genealogical) links to everything - not just to humans but to the universe as well. As such, forests, mountains, seas, rivers and lakes are viewed as siblings (brothers and sisters) in the same family tree (whakapapa). Their sacred relationship with the natural world was visible in the strict laws of tapu (sacredness) and mana (divine spiritual authority) - developed to live in harmony with their world – and still holds true for many Māori today. The land is part of who Māori are as a people, and links them to their tribal roots. These spiritual and family connections are what make Māori tangata whenua … the people of the land of Aotearoa.

The science of genetics tells us unequivocally that we are, in fact, related to every other living being on Earth. But we think we’re different. We’re here to dominate life, not to share it. Our “god” tells us so.

A recent poll shows that some 58% of people in the US are deeply concerned about the impacts of global warming, but only 18% are concerned about its potential impacts on animals. The destruction of entire species doesn’t touch most of us, even though their rate of extinction is already as much as 10,000 times the norm. After all; we don’t live with them unless they, like us, are domesticated; we never see them at all unless they’re caged or captured on film.

Life isn’t real to us now; we’ve adapted to a new environment, a new matrix made of asphalt and electronics. Our relatives are traffic signals and policemen; those we loved most, our families, our fathers and mothers, were the agents of our indoctrination. They taught us to live in the death camp, to accept it as normal, to deny our most basic instincts, feelings and intuitions, to accept a system of control, reward and punishment. They taught us to perform, and called it success and life.

Aboriginal peoples in Australia, however, have not yet lost their connection to and feelings toward their kin. They are not yet fully enslaved in an economic system. In important ways, they still live in nature, in a connected universe: they still remember. Here they speak for themselves of a recent slaughter of kangaroos; broken hearted and enraged, they describe the slaughter as genocide.

Aboriginal Tent Embassy Outraged with Kangaroo Massacre

The Aboriginal Tent Embassy demands for an immediate stop to the massacre of aboriginal animals at Googong Dam in the A.C.T. Environment ACT described the shooting of 800-1000 eastern grey kangaroos at Googong Dam as “Operation Success.” The Aboriginal Tent Embassy is vocalizing the uproar from the Aboriginal community, which has been traumatized by the recent massacre of the kangaroos. "They same way they killed our old people, dig a big hole and put all their bodies in it, we still feel their spirits. It’s too much," said Lorna Laurie, resident of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy.

"This massacre is a desecration of Aboriginal law and spirituality, to kill so many creatures, for no good reason, and just dump their poor carcasses in the ground is an abomination of these ancient laws" declared another embassy resident Arinya Freeman. "Even though the government is saying they have completed the cull we can’t be sure they are not planning to massacre more kangaroos - we want it all to end".

"We can’t see the reason for why this would need to happen. The reason being given is that there is not enough food or water for the kangaroos, but we know it’s for the expansion of development, farming and industry to perpetuate this economic system. Indigenous people from all over the world are facing genocide from this same system," stated Gungalidda elder Aunty Wadjurlabinna.

"The government do not care about the land or water, if they did care about the land and water then they wouldn’t be selling it all off to foreign corporation for mining, or cotton irrigation, they would close down the wood chip mills. They need to understand that the kangaroos have been living in this country long before they came so they have more rights to use the water then anyone" said enraged embassy resident Terra Freire.

Under section 116 of the Constitution, the Commonwealth cannot use its powers to prohibit freedom of religion. "This land has its own law, this other law is foreign, it belongs to a foreign system, not our system; people had better come to learn, respect and understand our system, the kinship system. We are sovereign people of this land and our law is sovereign in this land. To continue to violate these ancient laws of Aboriginal culture, to disregard Aboriginal natural and spiritual law, while contradicting the constitution, is further perpetuating genocide against indigenous people" continued Aunty Wadjurlabinna.

"Under natural and spiritual law through the kinship system, the kangaroo is my mother and uncles. These disconnected people are killing my mother and uncles. They are part of the system like us, related to us the same as people, we are all equal under the rule of natural law, that binds us through our language, this is the Aboriginal way," stated Gungalidda elder Aunty Wadjurlabinna. "Genocide has taken many forms, this is another example of the genocide against our people and our lands and everything that makes our continent. The animals are part of us. The kangaroos and other indigenous animals are related to us through a unique and powerful system known as the kinship system. They are family. This system is made up of the rule of natural law and spirituality that has been in place since the dreamtime, the beginning of time. No one has the god given right to destroy these sacred animals."

It is difficult, at best, for us to experience such a quality of connectedness or the morality that arises from it - we experience it only occasionally, or as an epiphany. Our common experience is an experience of the alienation and isolation that we call individualism. Native peoples belong; they are in place. We feel we have no place. Our rulers call having no place being “free.” Walter Lippman wrote:

“These are the prisoners who have been released. They ought to be happy. They ought to be serene and composed. They are free to make their own lives. There are no conventions, no taboos, no gods, priests, princes, fathers or revelations which they must accept. Yet the result is not as good as they thought it would be. The prison door is wide open. They stagger out into trackless space under a blinding sun.”

This is among the deepest fears of indigenous people – to be cut off, excommunicated from the family of the living, the tribe, the Mother, and the rituals and symbols, the culture, feelings and morality that keep us connected to the web of life. To be cut off is to be subject to demonic forces, to the diabolical; that which divides. To the indigenous the most powerful and most disconnected among us are like the central figures in the dark film Natural Born Killers. They dreamed of the demon years before. Now it walks among them.

The most profound evidence for the power of kinship, among us, the disconnected – at least when we are in our “normal” state of consciousness - is to be found in our own experience of its absence. Most of us who are not in the deepest kind of denial acknowledge, at least in private – even if only to ourselves – that our constant experience is one of uprooted-ness, insecurity and deep loneliness. We wonder if we are the only one who feels this way.

The answer is “no.” Our senses of relatedness, of place, belonging and autonomy have been radically and systematically undermined. It’s not only that we have been made alone and lonely: the reality is that to pierce the shell, to reorder our lives, to reconnect, to come together in new ways threatens the very stability of a system that is built and depends for its functioning on our sense of unworthiness and isolation, and on cultivating in us a sense of being both without hope and ineffectual. A deep sense of kinship is a fundamental threat to a system that can only establish itself on the basis of denying, “rationally” reordering, and containing our abilities to relate.

And because we are adapted to such a system, breaking through the barriers of isolation threatens our own emotional defenses, as well, and the defenses of those around us. We are allowed to care, but only for certain animals we call pets, only for certain people we call family, and only within certain limits; to show our feelings only to certain people, who we pay; the rest remain emotionally untouchable. The question is one of identity and loyalty, who we are together.

The Critical Art Ensemble writes:

“To be sure, kinship (which may or may not be based on genetic connection) is a manifestation of nonrational forces that can transcend the alienation of separation. For this reason, the true intention of authoritarian culture is the destruction of kinship. If such human bonds were allowed to exist, people could define themselves, and thereby find self-esteem, by means other than one's labor role, bureaucratic affiliation, and consumption process. Kinship loyalties, as with friendship, and other forms of affinity, could lead to an inversion of the structure of duty. People would be loyal to other individuals rather than to institutions and offices. The authoritarian channeling of kinship into the nuclear family is the authoritarian answer to such a possibility. The intention is to reduce kinship to the specialized micro-role of the reproduction of the work force and of consumer markets. The meaning of "family values" is efficient reproduction that solely benefits the macro processes of production and consumption. The family has no value in and of itself; it has value only in relation to market forces. Whenever kinship escapes this rational order, powerful resistance through transgression has occurred.”

In other words, what remains of kinship in our experience has been restricted and channeled into the service of “production,” into the service of the death camp.

The kinship that resists and escapes the demands of the death camp is not at all the same thing as socialist “solidarity.” Kinship carries the sense of an intimate, personal commitment, not an abstracted and generalized political comradeship at arms. We have to go deeper than that.

All of the mass social movements of the past century – communism, the counterculture, the various anti-colonial revolutions and cultural nationalisms – even mass advertising - have had, as their most enduring appeal, the implicit promise that we don’t have to be alone anymore. To break through, to end the oppression and separation, to come together, was the great, global hope of the 1960s.

Slavery = Progress

But the premises of civilization – viewed from the Right or the Left - are the direct opposite of the indigenous laws. The Earth is not here to serve us as property, neither the property of a “superior” collective or of “superior” individuals. The oppression inherent in the dominance of life by the powerful demands a skewed system, one profoundly imbalanced, aimed at meeting human needs above all others. By definition an oppressive system, an oppressive culture, is one that forgets that we are all equal under the rule of natural law, one in which disconnection, objectification and death have become the new law.

The establishment of human dominance and the subjugation of non-human beings lead directly and inevitably to the dominance of human over human - to meeting the needs of only certain humans without regard to Others. For this reason, no theory or practice that fails to shatter the chains of human domination over our Mother, the Earth, can free us from our social prison. The model for the enslavement of humans is the enslavement of animals.

Jim Mason writes in The Animal Question: Uncovering the Roots of Our Domination of Nature and Each Other:

“As movers of the mind, thought and feeling, animals are very strong stuff to human beings. No wonder our ancestors believed they had souls and powers. After centuries of manipulative animal husbandry, however, men gained control over animals and their life processes. In reducing them to physical submission, people reduced animals psychically as well. Castrated, yoked, harnessed, hobbled, penned and shackled, domestic animals were thoroughly subdued. They had none of that wild mysterious power of their ancestors when they were stalked by hunter-foragers. Domestic animals were disempowered by confinement, selective breeding, and familiarity with humans. They gradually came to be seen more with contempt than awe.

“In subjugating animals, farmers reduced animals and nature, in general, because crop conscious farmers saw wild species as pests, and natural elements as threats. But it was animal husbandry, in particular, that nudged people from seeing animals as spiritual powers to viewing them as commodities and tools. It drastically upset the ancient human-animal relationship, changing it from partnership to master and slave, from being kin with the natural world to lord over it.”

Once the premise of enslavement is established in the first instance, the logic of enslavement unfolds and encompasses culture, and our relationships to the land and all life.

Seneca traditionalist John Mohawk writes in A Basic Call to Consciousness: The Hau de no sau nee Address to the Western World :

“Herding and breeding of animals signaled a basic alteration in the relationship of humans to other life forms. It set into motion one of the true revolutions in human history. Until herding, humans depended on nature for the reproductive powers of the animal world. With the advent of herding, humans assumed the functions which had for all time been the functions of the spirits of the animals. Sometime after this happened, history records the first appearance of the social organization known as "patriarchy."

“…Within these cultures, stratified hierarchical social organization crystallized. The ancient civilizations developed imperialism, partly because of the very nature of cities. Cities are obviously population concentrations. Most importantly though, they are places which must import the material needs of this concentration from the countryside. This means that the Natural World must be subjugated, extracted from, and exploited in the interest of the city. To give order to this process, the Semitic world developed early codes of law. They also developed the idea of monotheism to serve as a spiritual model for their material and political organization.”

These laws stemmed from a need to predict and control the direction of a way of life uprooted from the natural world and natural law, and to control the actions of those who were now subjugated.

Each of these imperial religions and cultures has its own book or books relating its experiments in social and moral subjugation, and each posits the coming of a messianic figure who will set civilization aright, when all else has failed, saving it from the apocalyptic results of its following its own unnatural laws.

The death and assimilation of indigenous peoples and the destruction of ways of life rooted in reverence for the natural world meant that the survivors were left with no mooring posts, no common understandings or traditions. Having invented an artificial world predicated on subjugation, they must now invent artificial laws to predict, control and channel its direction.

They now lacked an intuitive understanding of the natural world – they had divorced themselves from it, and from the ancient cultural traditions that guided a life in balance with nature. They no longer had a self evident, empirically verifiable moral and cultural foundation, a natural way of life. They needed someone to tell them what to do; they needed someone to force others to do their bidding, if they were to continue to “profit” from the subjugation they had imposed on the world.

As Daniel Quinn has noted, the sense grew within them that something was terribly wrong. They called it sin, the failure to be a good slave to “god.” They had only the vaguest of understandings that what they called “god’s laws” were being violated, that “wickedness” and cruelty ruled their new world. They competed with one another to establish their own way of death as the “one way” all must follow, to impose their own religion and eschatology on others. This competition of ignorances and forms of control and subjugation became the foundation of modern and “post” modern morality, religion and culture.

Sadly, just like their capitalist counterparts, Marxists applaud the end of Earth based “primitive communism,” as they call it, and the rise of the family, private property and the state, of the new civilizations that arose some 10,000 years ago. Marxists acknowledge that the civilizations of the Middle East were established through an economy based in mass human enslavement. But mass enslavement, in this view, lead to “progress,” a progress that winds its way toward new and more efficient systems of “production” (see Jensen, above) like feudalism and capitalism, and toward the most efficient systems of all, socialism, then, at last, communism, a system with no rulers and no exploitation of human by human.

This more “advanced” communism is thought of as the “promise” of “primitive communism” made real by technological and cultural “progress.” It is the final promise of a technological and organizational utopia based on the premise of human domination of the Earth and all her creatures.

Production is key to capitalism, of course, but also to Marxist and much of Anarchist theory. Not only are humans seen as producers by their very nature – the opposable thumb and tool using are imagined to be humanity’s most distinctive traits – but the entire theory of historical materialism rests on the centrality and supremacy of production.

The means of production and the relations of people to the processes of production are thought to define the “level” or “stage” a society has supposedly “reached,” and human rights to self determination and to land are thought to be contingent on how “advanced” a culture is. Animals are not thought to have rights at all. Indigenous, Earth based cultures – so-called “primitive” cultures - are slated for the “waste bin of history” – for elimination.

Socialism and Communism are said to represent new stages in the relations of production, the relations between people as defined by what they produce and how they produce it. New relations of production are said to lead to new cultures and to a new “socialist man.”

But while Marxism is, at one level, a powerful dream of becoming human again – of sharing again - sadly, its underlying premises reduce to a view of history that can be summed up like this: Slavery = Progress.

Intended as a theory of liberation, Marxism falls prey to the logic and laws of death. It views humans as “superior” to “nature,” and “advanced” humans as superior to “primitive” ones. It cannot find its way out of its civilized box. Like all modern, “civilized” political theories, it rests on the subjugation of the Earth, the destruction of our original sense of kinship, its replacement with new relationships based on new roles in industrial production, and the destruction of the cultures of those who have kept the Law of Life.

This holds true across the Left. Consciously or not, “progressives,” by definition, are as committed to “progress” as the most reactionary capitalist or Christian Fascist.

Progress in production is progress in “dominion” – in the biblically mandated domination of the Earth, a domination sanctioned by every civilization, a dominion that is the core principle on which civilization is founded. It is of course no accident that one faction of the Destroyers would call themselves “dominionists,” or that today that faction should be the cutting edge of the “dark side” in the center of the world empire.

The Hopi Traditional Elders, on the other hand, never lost sight of the principles of Land and Life. They say that one day, in a time of deep crisis that they call the Time of Purification, a brave person will stand up and demand of the elites, “ You profit at the expense of all life: come here and pay your debt!” That time, they say, is upon us.

The transition from a culture immersed in life to one immersed in death, from a culture that based itself in reciprocity among people and between people and bears, plants, insects, deer, stones, kangaroos and buffalo, to one that sought to dominate all life, to “conquer” nature and all natural beings and put them to a foreign “use” for one’s own benefit, the transition from a culture that honored all life to one that profits at the expense of all life, was nothing like a benign “enlightenment” or a natural “advance.”

Civilization begins and ends with the progressive disruption and destruction of kinship; kinship with the land, between humans and animals, between women and men, with the disintegration of kinship systems; it begins and ends with the destruction of our sense of relationships as sacred and their replacement by relationships of oppression.

No longer are there sacred animals, plants, stones and places. No longer do we live

in reciprocal obligation with the world around us. The world itself ceases to live for

for us, to be alive to us. It comes to be managed, controlled, suppressed and enslaved – killed. The life of the world is reduced to serve one end and one end only; it is now no longer our Mother, our nurturer, our home, where we belong. It has been reduced to utter servitude to human ends; the original relationship is shattered.

Our Mother, our matrix, the womb of our being, is reduced to “lifeless matter,” which is to say, in literal keeping with the Latin from which the term “matter” is derived, “Mater Morduus”: Lifeless Mother: Dead Mother.

This is the central tenet of the western world view: that matter is inert, that reality is “matter in motion,” dead matter moving. Dead Mother moving: this is the signal, sign and symbol of the death of relationship that is the hallmark of civilization. By its very nature civilization is totalitarian; when the Dead Mother does not move to suit us, our technology moves her, like Frankenstein’s monster on a wench. Like macabre scientists in a grade B movie, we “produce” movement.

In popular culture in the US, the most enduring image of evil is the image of the mad scientist; he is the central figure in our conception of “horror.” What civilization produces is horror, and it is in such films that we indirectly face the moral and emotional reality of what western civilization has wrought. Reductionistic science is, in itself, a kind of storytelling: the story it tells ends in death. The story ends with the dead mother. And with loneliness.

The rupture of our sense of kinship with the world meant the end of our obligation to the sacred Other. The constraints on the exercise of violence that kinship implied were gone.

The rule of civilization, the systematic destruction of original kinship, has always been imposed by force, by violent destruction and disintegration of the cultures and peoples it has invaded and conquered, followed by a seduction into a new way of being, a new hierarchy with new mores. Civilization, as such, is based on the exercise of violence over the Other – plant, animal and human.

That’s how we got here, in this condition, in this time and place: we are the product of a violence divorced from feeling, from connection and meaning – a violence meant to reduce all meaning to the narrow scope of that which serves to enrich and make the purveyors of violence “secure.” Like a Jonah, we’ve been swallowed by something huge; we are inside it with no apparent way out and with no clear avenue for the exercise of our original integrity.

Civilization consumes and destroys original cultures. Indigenous cultures disintegrate before the onslaught of its illness just as Native American peoples disintegrated when touched by smallpox. All it takes is a touch of the sickness; as the delicate balances between human and nature and human and human are ruptured, the infection spreads.

Traditions and ancient authorities nested in millions of years of trial and error begin to unravel.

The lessons of power – for a people conquered - are profound and immediate. The new way has established itself supreme over the old. It has been imposed. The apparent “advantages” of new technologies seem palpable. For those who internalize the lessons, who internalize the terror and destruction, who internalize the meaning of the horrid power of the new weapons and the new language of the superior and the inferior, the powerful and the powerless, continued resistance seems to make little sense.

Emotional trauma precedes disconnection from our deep sense of kinship with all life, a kinship expressed through and embodied in culture. Trauma and disconnection precede hopelessness. Hopelessness precedes ambition, and ambition precedes conversion to the new way, the way of death.

After only a few years of contact and conquest, things begin to break down.

The Kogi people of Columbia are a recent example. After maintaining a profound isolation for hundreds of years, until the late 20^th century, the mountain dwelling Kogi, whose traditions remained unbroken and unaltered in a direct lineage from a major pre-Conquest culture, have begun to disintegrate.

As the government and leftist guerrillas seize control of the land around them; as pesticides aimed at the coca plant blanket the forests; as people sicken from the poisons; and as it becomes dangerous in the face of right wing death squads for the priests and elders - for anyone - to expose themselves outside the confines of the community, the old traditions and the authority of the Earth based spiritual leadership have begun to come unraveled.

Messages

But the Kogi have sent us a message. Like the Hopi before them, the Kogi had maintained their culture and spiritual traditions largely intact throughout the period of the Conquest. And like the Hopi in 1945, the Kogi, in 1990, decided they must speak out to the rest of us. Too much was at stake to do otherwise. They brought their isolation to an end. Their prophecies had spoken of the coming of the Younger Brother and the destruction he would wreak. On their mountain, which they call the Heart of the World, snows had dwindled, the ice receded. Something was terribly wrong: the Heart of the World was dying.

"Up to now,” they said, “we have ignored the Younger Brother. We have not deigned even to give him a slap. But now we can no longer look after the world alone. The Younger Brother is doing too much damage. He must see, and understand, and assume responsibility. Now we will have to work together. Otherwise, the world will die."

The Kogi, who never succumbed to Spanish rule, who evaded it by fleeing high into the mountains, are now faced with their own subjugation and their culture’s disintegration in what some have called a final stage in the conquest of the Americas, a final stage in the destruction of the kinship between human beings, and the plants, animals and Earth that are our placenta, the womb and source of life.

The Kogi hold that they are the "Elder Brother," guardians of life on the Earth. Like the Hopi, they are called to hold the world in balance. Their spiritual leaders are “in agreement,” they tell us, “about what it is we are going to say and how to speak.” They work in the realm of the Mother, of "Aluna," the inner world they call Memory and Possibility. From there they speak to us, saying:

“They are cutting off the flesh of the Mother’s body. They have taken everything. They have stolen the spirits of all things from the Mother. They are stealing the very spirit and thought of the Mother... The Mother is suffering. They have broken her teeth and taken out her eyes and ears. She vomits, she has diarrhea, she is ill.

If we cut off our arms, we can’t work, if we cut off our legs, we can’t walk. That is how it is with the Mother. The Mother is suffering. She has nothing.

Does the Younger Brother understand what he has done? Does he?”

Today, in the Amazon, a shaman whose father survived an assassination attempt for his resistance to the encroachment of oil companies into the rain forest, declares, “Give me the gun or give me the arrow: I will die with nature!”

“I don’t want the people from America to come here and destroy by sucking out the blood of our ancestors, the ‘black gold,’” he continues. “Who do they think they are with that technology? Are they so clever? No. We, here, are the intelligent ones, those who defend the lungs of the Earth, the jungle, the pure air, the pure water. I call upon the Yachacs, all the shamans of the world. To unite, to say to the world ‘Don’t destroy nature. Don’t destroy the roots of the trees.’ Materialism is finishing our world. Our world is the Spirit of the trees, of the magic leaves.”

Many tribal groups – our ancestors - have so highly valued their kinship with Life and Earth that they have fought to the death to preserve it; untold numbers committed suicide during the Conquest to escape the new power of the new way; others, whole tribes, did the same for another reason, to avoid submitting to it – ever.

The choices before us today are every bit as fundamental as the choices made by our ancestors. This much is in our hands: to follow the Law of Land and Life, or the law of death. Chief Arvol Looking Horse speaks to us clearly:

“In our Prophecies it is told that we are now at the Crossroads, either unite Spiritually as a Global Nation, or be faced with chaos, disasters, diseases and tears from our relatives eyes.

“This new millennium will usher in an age of harmony or it will bring the end of life as we know it. Starvation, war and toxic waste have been the hallmark of the Great Myth of Progress and Development that ruled the last millennium.

“To us, as caretakers of the heart of Mother Earth, falls the responsibility of turning back the powers of destruction.

“We have come to a time and place of great urgency.

“The fate of future generations rests in our hands.

“We must understand the two ways we are free to follow, as we choose the positive way or the negative way.. the spiritual way or the material way.

“It's our own choice--each of ours and all of ours.

“You yourself are the one who must decide.

“You alone-and only you--can make this crucial choice.

“Whatever you decide is what you'll be, to walk in honor or to dishonor your relatives. You can't escape the consequences of your own decision.

“On your decision depends the fate of the entire World. You must decide. You can't avoid it.

“Each of us is put here in this time and this place to personally decide the future of humankind.

“Did you think the Creator would create unnecessary people in a time of such terrible danger?

“Know that you yourself are essential to this World.

Believe that!

“Understand both the blessing and the burden of that. You yourself are desperately needed to save the soul of this World.

“Did you think you were put here for something less? In a Sacred Hoop of Life, where there is no beginning and no ending!"

Mitakuye Oyasin,

Chief Arvol Looking Horse

19th Generation Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe
________

Juan Santos is a Los Angeles based writer and editor. His essays from 2006 can be found at: http://the-fourth-world.blogspot.com/. He can be reached at: JuanSantos@Mexica.net.