The story of industrial-scale wind energy, that is, large wind turbines connected to supply the electric grid, is the same old tale of exploitative industry, of predatory capitalism, of consumerism run riot over the concerns of nature and humanity.
Wind energy does not represent change from a consumption-driven quest of continuing dividends for the investor class. It is a change of brand, nothing more. The same people behind digging up the tar sands of Alberta, drilling in the Arctic, blasting off mountaintops for coal, fracking the ground beneath our feet for methane, mowing down the rain forests, are industrializing rural and wild landscapes with the sprawling tax shelters called wind “farms”.
Like American politics, where choice is limited to which waiter you prefer to serve you from the same Wall Street kitchen (as Huey Long described it), energy policy around the world is “all-of-the-above” with politicians pretending to position themselves against one or another source to flatter different diners. Wind energy operates entirely within that game. As the realities of large-scale wind development — the decimation of habitat, birds, bats, health of human neighbors, and more — have made it harder to sell as “green”, the industry lobby group American Wind Energy Association has strategized: “We need to create a space for the wind energy industry without defining it as an alternative to fossil fuels and coal and that goes beyond being one of many ‘renewables’” (Leadership Council and Board of Directors Meeting, Carlsbad, Calif., Nov. 2, 2011). The reality is that a consumption-based economy dependent on continued “growth” doesn't need alternatives, only more choices: all of the above, whether it works or not. And that imperative excuses all.
As Arkansas Governor Mike Beebe said on June 4, 2012, at the AWEA’s annual convention in Atlanta, “Anyone standing in the way of this industry, frankly, they’re un-American.”
Because there are “important” people making a lot of money in wind, and the opening up of previously undeveloped land will enrich them well beyond wind.
Enron invented the modern wind industry by buying the support of environmental groups for large-scale “alternative” energy and all that makes it profitable: tax avoidance schemes, public grants and loan guarantees, artificial markets for “green credits”, and laws requiring its purchase. Texas Governor George W. Bush was instrumental in getting the first of these implemented at the national level on behalf of his friend Ken Lay, Enron's CEO. Texas is the USA’s leader in wind energy development, not because of some environmentalist vision, but because of the opposite: Wind energy is just one more extractive industry, and with the collaboration of Enron's environmentalists it opens up land normally off limits to such development.
The twisted rationalizations of former environmentalists to excuse the obvious adverse impacts of industrial development in the form of wind “farms” are a study in madness, akin to the military “logic” of having to destroy a village to save it. The typical refrain from the likes of the Audubon Society or Sierra Club — when they acknowledge adverse impacts at all — is that wind energy, by its theoretical and never documented reduction of carbon emissions from other electricity sources, saves more birds etc than it kills. They cling to this even as only the latter is increasingly documented and the former is increasingly clearly not. They further flaunt their moral bankruptcy by dismissing the adverse effects as a drop in the bucket compared to all the other killers of birds etc. And they join the reactionary chorus of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in presenting their plea to shovel more public money to big energy investors as one for (“American”) jobs (at any [public] cost).
At the same time, neighbors of giant wind turbines who suffer adverse health effects are derided as hysterical or mendacious. The unsurprising acoustic effects of jumbo-jet-size turbine blades cutting through vertical air spaces of almost 2 acres are simply denied. Wind's apologists reverse cause and effect and blame the victims for publicizing noise problems even as ever larger blades are increasingly documented to generate intrusive throbbing and low-frequency noise, both of which not only disturb sleep and raise stress but are increasingly tied to direct adverse physiological and psychological effects. Yet the industry fights all efforts to set even inadequate minimum distances between turbines and homes or noise limits. The CEO of Danish wind turbine manufacturer Vestas, Ditlev Engel, wrote to the Danish Environment Minister on June 29, 2011, against such limits: “At this point you may have asked yourself why it is that Vestas does not just make changes to the wind turbines so that they produce less noise? The simple answer is that at the moment it is not technically possible to do so.” Especially because, as he goes on to note, they are planning even larger machines.
And if human neighbors are treated with such naked contempt in the mad logic of corporate profit growth, pity the wildlife whose last refuges are invaded, divided, and destroyed by big wind (and now big solar as well) — all with the blessing of many environmental groups.
Invaded, divided, and destroyed — nineteenth-century colonialism and twentieth-century globalism are now openly revived against our own communities. Just as the Spanish company Iberdrola steals farmland from the Zapotecas of Oaxaca, and the Indian company Suzlon steals forest from the Adivasis, wind developers in more “developed” countries — in Europe, North America, Australia — prey on their rural populations, pitting paid-off landowners against their neighbors, leaving bitterness and discord, a blighted landscape, shattered peace and quiet, an industrial waste land from which the limited liability companies extract what profit they can and then move on to the next marks.
Industrial wind development may not be the worst scourge on the planet, but that does not excuse it. Big wind is not separate from the rest of exploitative and extractive industry. It is not separate from the persistent efforts of the investor class to hoard for themselves more of the public wealth. It is, however, particularly evil because it presents itself as the opposite of what it is. It is not even an alternative evil: To add insult to injury, wind is not even a good way to generate electricity for the grid: Since it does not blow according to customer demand, it still has to be 100% backed up by other sources.
Break the spell! End the charade!
See the swindle for what it is. Big wind is an enemy of the planet, its animal and plant life, its people. It is a new brand in an old game whose rules were written to ensure one winner only, and it isn't you.
—Eric Rosenbloom
wind power, wind energy, wind turbines, wind farms, environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights, Vermont, anarchism, ecoanarchism, anarchosyndicalism
August 15, 2012
Ridden by the Wind
Write In Annette Smith for Vt. Governor
STOP SHUMLIN’S CORPORATE TAKE-OVER OF VERMONT
Vermont is being overrun by corporate interests. Rather than trying to prevent this takeover, Governor Shumlin is encouraging it through his cozy relationships with the big corporations and their lobbyists. None of the other candidates are campaigning on these crucial issues!
GMP/CVPS merger: The Shumlin Administration pushed for the takeover of Vermont’s largest electric utility, CVPS, by Gaz Metro, a Canadian corporation that owns Green Mountain Power, giving Canadian energy corporations control of 70% of Vermont’s electric power distribution. Thanks to a behind-the-scenes deal worked out by Shumlin’s Department of Public Service, Shumlin also cheated CVPS customers out of $21 million they were owed.
Destructive wind development: With Shumlin’s encouragement, national and multi-national corporations are turning our pristine ridgelines into industrial zones, in the process destroying fragile mountain ecology and critical wildlife habitat. Shumlin refuses to pay any attention to the huge amount of credible data that shows that wind turbines in Vermont would reduce carbon emissions by only a miniscule amount, if at all, and that the detriments far outweigh any benefit.
F-35s: Shumlin is in favor of the F-35 basing in Burlington because he sees this further militarization of our major airport as a jobs creator. Meanwhile in exchange for a few new war industry jobs, thousands of modest homes are either being vacated or will be made virtually unlivable by this extremely loud new warplane.
Smart Meters: With Shumlin’s encouragement, GMP is trying to profit from yet another violation of our right to privacy.
We are encouraging Vermonters – independents, Democrats, Republicans, and Progressives alike – to vote in the August 28 primary election and draft Annette Smith of Danby as Progressive candidate for Governor by writing in her name on the Progressive primary ballot. Annette Smith has been an articulate voice for Vermont citizens for more than a decade as the head of Vermonters for a Clean Environment, an effective and independent environmental organization. She consistently stands up for ordinary Vermonters, helping them take on the big corporations and their lawyers and lobbyists. She is deeply knowledgeable about the corporate take-over of Vermont in all its many forms, and she is an excellent and passionate debater. (If you are voting Dem or Rep but oppose Shumlin, please write in Annette Smith there.)
For more information, go to: annettesmithforvermontgov.blogspot.com
Vermont
August 11, 2012
What Is.
It’s extremely dangerous to stop growing because at that point you begin to die. It’s extremely dangerous to commit yourself to one idea. Be careful you’re not caught in your own net.
We live from minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day, and at each point we are a little different. we are not the same twice on any two occasions. When you realize that, it becomes extremely important that the next minute be better than the last one. If you’re going to change, change for the better, not the worse. No question you will change, the only question is the direction. If there is no change, this is the open door to death. Life is a progression. It is not a standing still. It is either a plus or a minus.
— Scott Nearing (1883–1983), obituary interview with Jean Hay, May 1981 (from Meanwhile, Next Door to the Good Life, Jean Hay Bright, Brightberry Press, Dixmont, Maine, 2003)
Q: I would like to know whether you believe in God.
What is God? If you can tell us what you mean by the term, we can discuss the matter. If not, there's no way to get down to specifics.
If you think of God as a heavenly Father who can be nudged or cajoled into granting benefits and excusing delinquencies . . . no, we do not believe.
If you think of God as an arbitrary, autocratic ruler of the universe to be propitiated and worshiped . . . our answer, again, would be no.
If “your” God is a tribal chief, a God of battle, and a leader of a chosen people . . . we do not believe in Him (or Her).
However, if you see God as the unity of all things, including rocks, grass, beasts, clouds, stars, and humans . . . if your God incorporates the above and the below, the plus and the minus, the killer and the killed, the sinner and the saint, the creator and the destroyer . . . yes, we believe.
— Helen and Scott Nearing, ‘Homesteading Tools, Dividing Household Chores, and other Wisdom from Helen and Scott Nearing’, Mother Earth News, March/April 1981
All religions have truth in them, and all can be accepted in part. But there is no religion higher than truth, and Truth is the whole magnificent universe. What is. We believe in that — and strive to lend a hand.
— Helen and Scott Nearing, letter, 10 May 1981, in reply to response to above (from Meanwhile, Next Door to the Good Life)
Satyan nasti paro dharmah
We live from minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day, and at each point we are a little different. we are not the same twice on any two occasions. When you realize that, it becomes extremely important that the next minute be better than the last one. If you’re going to change, change for the better, not the worse. No question you will change, the only question is the direction. If there is no change, this is the open door to death. Life is a progression. It is not a standing still. It is either a plus or a minus.
— Scott Nearing (1883–1983), obituary interview with Jean Hay, May 1981 (from Meanwhile, Next Door to the Good Life, Jean Hay Bright, Brightberry Press, Dixmont, Maine, 2003)
Q: I would like to know whether you believe in God.
What is God? If you can tell us what you mean by the term, we can discuss the matter. If not, there's no way to get down to specifics.
If you think of God as a heavenly Father who can be nudged or cajoled into granting benefits and excusing delinquencies . . . no, we do not believe.
If you think of God as an arbitrary, autocratic ruler of the universe to be propitiated and worshiped . . . our answer, again, would be no.
If “your” God is a tribal chief, a God of battle, and a leader of a chosen people . . . we do not believe in Him (or Her).
However, if you see God as the unity of all things, including rocks, grass, beasts, clouds, stars, and humans . . . if your God incorporates the above and the below, the plus and the minus, the killer and the killed, the sinner and the saint, the creator and the destroyer . . . yes, we believe.
— Helen and Scott Nearing, ‘Homesteading Tools, Dividing Household Chores, and other Wisdom from Helen and Scott Nearing’, Mother Earth News, March/April 1981
All religions have truth in them, and all can be accepted in part. But there is no religion higher than truth, and Truth is the whole magnificent universe. What is. We believe in that — and strive to lend a hand.
— Helen and Scott Nearing, letter, 10 May 1981, in reply to response to above (from Meanwhile, Next Door to the Good Life)
Satyan nasti paro dharmah
August 10, 2012
A problem with solar power
Like wind, direct solar energy is diffuse, requiring a rather large apparatus to collect a useful amount. On a rooftop — a large area that is already collecting/reflecting the sun — solar panels may make a useful contribution to a single home or office. To expect more, however, means taking more solar energy, i.e., taking more from nature.
Vermont mandates a high payment for electricity from approved solar facilities up to 2.2 MW in capacity. A couple of solar projects under this program are a 1.0-MW facility in Ferrisburgh and a 2.2-MW facility in South Burlington.
The latter takes up a 25-acre field. That acreage is now an industrial site, without life. The field has essentially been paved with solar panels. Over the past 12 months its output has averaged 17.5% of its capacity, an average rate of 385 kW. The Ferrisburgh site averaged 15.9%, or 159 kW. In January, their average outputs were 5.4% and 7.3%, respectively, or 120 and 73 kW. Of course, that output followed the curve of daylight, decreasing every evening to 0, so they require complete duplication with some other source of power. Such duplication in the form of battery storage, as an off-grid home system uses, is impractical at the grid scale.
These facilities are clearly not making any meaningful contribution to Vermont’s electricity supply, which must meet an average load of about 650 MW. If the cost to taxpayers to subsidize these projects (i.e., provide generous profits for their owners, such as the governor’s friend David Blittersdorf) is judged to be worth it to learn about grid-level or industrial-scale solar, then what have we learned so far?
Using a capacity factor of 15% for sun-tracking solar and the ratio of 2.2 MW capacity per 25 acres, we would need almost 50,000 acres, over 75 square miles, to provide Vermont’s average load. That’s more than all of the land area of Burlington, South Burlington, Winooski, Colchester, and Essex Junction combined.
(For comparison, the McNeil generating plant (wood and natural gas) in Burlington takes up about 16 acres and produces at a rate of 50 MW. Thirteen such plants, requiring 210 acres, would provide the state's entire average load. Using the McNeil plant to provide heat [instead of letting it escape up the chimney] as well as power has been explored in recent years and would essentially double its usefulness.)
If we based it on a January capacity factor of 5%, add the land areas of Shelburne, Williston, Essex, Milton, and most of Jericho.
Of course, the capacity factor represents output only during daylight hours, so less land might be required to meet demand during the day. On the other hand, demand is higher during daylight hours as well, so there would actually not be much leeway there.
And still, other sources would be needed as night falls — a complete duplicate system. In other words, solar would not replace any other sources. It would pave over more than half of Chittenden County to at best reduce the use of those other sources.
There’s a better way to reduce the use of existing energy sources — without taking from the earth yet more by building sprawling “renewable” energy facilities that require 100% backup. It is to reduce the use of energy.
But of course, no backers of politicians get rich by people consuming less.
Large-scale solar, like large-scale wind, is a consumption-based solution. It is a change of brand, nothing more.
Question, 11 July, 2014: Has anyone compared the (minuscule) carbon effect of covering a field with solar panels versus letting it return to carbon-capturing forest, or even versus just leaving it as a green field?
solar power, solar energy, environment, environmentalism, animal rights, Vermont
Vermont mandates a high payment for electricity from approved solar facilities up to 2.2 MW in capacity. A couple of solar projects under this program are a 1.0-MW facility in Ferrisburgh and a 2.2-MW facility in South Burlington.
The latter takes up a 25-acre field. That acreage is now an industrial site, without life. The field has essentially been paved with solar panels. Over the past 12 months its output has averaged 17.5% of its capacity, an average rate of 385 kW. The Ferrisburgh site averaged 15.9%, or 159 kW. In January, their average outputs were 5.4% and 7.3%, respectively, or 120 and 73 kW. Of course, that output followed the curve of daylight, decreasing every evening to 0, so they require complete duplication with some other source of power. Such duplication in the form of battery storage, as an off-grid home system uses, is impractical at the grid scale.
These facilities are clearly not making any meaningful contribution to Vermont’s electricity supply, which must meet an average load of about 650 MW. If the cost to taxpayers to subsidize these projects (i.e., provide generous profits for their owners, such as the governor’s friend David Blittersdorf) is judged to be worth it to learn about grid-level or industrial-scale solar, then what have we learned so far?
Using a capacity factor of 15% for sun-tracking solar and the ratio of 2.2 MW capacity per 25 acres, we would need almost 50,000 acres, over 75 square miles, to provide Vermont’s average load. That’s more than all of the land area of Burlington, South Burlington, Winooski, Colchester, and Essex Junction combined.
(For comparison, the McNeil generating plant (wood and natural gas) in Burlington takes up about 16 acres and produces at a rate of 50 MW. Thirteen such plants, requiring 210 acres, would provide the state's entire average load. Using the McNeil plant to provide heat [instead of letting it escape up the chimney] as well as power has been explored in recent years and would essentially double its usefulness.)
If we based it on a January capacity factor of 5%, add the land areas of Shelburne, Williston, Essex, Milton, and most of Jericho.
Of course, the capacity factor represents output only during daylight hours, so less land might be required to meet demand during the day. On the other hand, demand is higher during daylight hours as well, so there would actually not be much leeway there.
And still, other sources would be needed as night falls — a complete duplicate system. In other words, solar would not replace any other sources. It would pave over more than half of Chittenden County to at best reduce the use of those other sources.
There’s a better way to reduce the use of existing energy sources — without taking from the earth yet more by building sprawling “renewable” energy facilities that require 100% backup. It is to reduce the use of energy.
But of course, no backers of politicians get rich by people consuming less.
Large-scale solar, like large-scale wind, is a consumption-based solution. It is a change of brand, nothing more.
Question, 11 July, 2014: Has anyone compared the (minuscule) carbon effect of covering a field with solar panels versus letting it return to carbon-capturing forest, or even versus just leaving it as a green field?
solar power, solar energy, environment, environmentalism, animal rights, Vermont
August 8, 2012
You have only yourself to blame
A friend writes:
Friedman is at it again: Average is Over, Part 2. Jesus, this guy is dumb. And scary. Who wants to live in the world he envisions; a fascist hell on earth — in fact this hell is already here in the US, with corporations pulling all the strings and calling all the shots, and shipping jobs overseas to slaves, or importing PhDs in from India, etc.... People are told again and again that they need so much "education" to survive well now, and then get stuck with an obscene amount of debt that in many cases forever stunts their lives, often can't even find work, it's just a horrible scam. Education should be free.
Education is important, but not the kind Friedman and most Americans think of. Friedman, and a lot of dumb Americans, think it's perfectly okay to tailor our lives to what the corporations want, they don't even question the whole notion of hyper-competitiveness and cut-throat workaholic get-ahead-ism. No, when corporations say "jump" it's our duty as foot-soldiers in the brave new world of fascist America to ask "how high."
A truly good education would give us the power and courage to say "fuck off" to these corporate monsters, not how can I deform myself enough to get you to hire me. Also a truly good education would move Americans to say goodbye to the government we have — a revolution is desperately needed, a real one and a revolution in thinking, but people seem so willing to go along with these fascist fantasies of the Friedmans of the world.
There are some good comments to the essay, but not many and out of the hundreds of comments thus far, most are lame and insipid, merely pointing fingers at parents for not being good enough re education, or kids being lazy, blah blah blah. No real questioning of the system, of it being driven by malevolent forces, and what is life for anyway, just to work like hell for a corporate master until you drop??!! Here is the ONLY unique and thoughtful comment out of hundreds (actually there was one other really good one but this one really gets it — it didn't get many recommends, no surprise):
Friedman is at it again: Average is Over, Part 2. Jesus, this guy is dumb. And scary. Who wants to live in the world he envisions; a fascist hell on earth — in fact this hell is already here in the US, with corporations pulling all the strings and calling all the shots, and shipping jobs overseas to slaves, or importing PhDs in from India, etc.... People are told again and again that they need so much "education" to survive well now, and then get stuck with an obscene amount of debt that in many cases forever stunts their lives, often can't even find work, it's just a horrible scam. Education should be free.
Education is important, but not the kind Friedman and most Americans think of. Friedman, and a lot of dumb Americans, think it's perfectly okay to tailor our lives to what the corporations want, they don't even question the whole notion of hyper-competitiveness and cut-throat workaholic get-ahead-ism. No, when corporations say "jump" it's our duty as foot-soldiers in the brave new world of fascist America to ask "how high."
A truly good education would give us the power and courage to say "fuck off" to these corporate monsters, not how can I deform myself enough to get you to hire me. Also a truly good education would move Americans to say goodbye to the government we have — a revolution is desperately needed, a real one and a revolution in thinking, but people seem so willing to go along with these fascist fantasies of the Friedmans of the world.
There are some good comments to the essay, but not many and out of the hundreds of comments thus far, most are lame and insipid, merely pointing fingers at parents for not being good enough re education, or kids being lazy, blah blah blah. No real questioning of the system, of it being driven by malevolent forces, and what is life for anyway, just to work like hell for a corporate master until you drop??!! Here is the ONLY unique and thoughtful comment out of hundreds (actually there was one other really good one but this one really gets it — it didn't get many recommends, no surprise):
The future will hopefully hold out for something other than science and technology. The concerns of this article arouse feelings that seem very very "old hat." What has been forgotten is the rape of planet Earth, mostly committed by the hyper-competitive hedonistic cohort that Friedman is championing here. It is hoped that the future will be won by those wise enough and courageous enough to see that business as usual must end, that the future demands an enlightened citizen, one who cares about the Earth and about universal sustainability. Someone who cares deeply about the many other species who share the planet, who cares about the unique cultural contributions of peoples everywhere, a citizen who doesn't measure worth in money, power, prestige — one who doesn't insist upon having more of everything than the next guy. If we're going to survive on this planet, have any future at all, we must stop this race to nowhere, come together across all continents to save the world from hyper-competitiveness, exploitation, greed and the wrong-headedness that has brought us to this frightful impasse. —Susan R., Honoluluenvironment, environmentalism, human rights, anarchism, ecoanarchism, anarchosyndicalism
August 7, 2012
Western Civilization Is Obsolete
Providing sufficient relief to end physical hardship and formulating a program aimed to achieve social justice is outside the scope of western civilization. Its institutions were not designed to share abundance. On the contrary, they reached their present proportions of planetwide diffusion under an economy of scarcity so organized that only a propertied and privileged minority of mankind, with their middle class retinues, could enjoy e necessaries and comforts, leaving the vast majority in the outer darkness of hunger, malnutrition, periodic famine, inadequate housing, ill health, ignorance, superstition and despair. A social pattern which has served for a thousand years as a means of benefiting the few at the expense of the many must be redesigned and rebuilt before it can serve as an instrument of shared abundance. Until that rebuilding is completed the obsolete social pattern must continue to be one of the chief obstacles blocking the path to social improvement.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to state that western civilization has had a thousand years to demonstrate its capacity to assimilate and utilize the abundance which science and technology make possible and, barring accidents, inevitable. By any standard of judgment the results of this millenium of testing permit only one interpretation: the outlooks, activities and institutions of western civilization are inadequate to share abundance or to achieve social justice.
First, it has been operated for generations by an aristocratic-business minority to defend and promote minority interests. This minority has concerned itself with the general welfare only in so far as advancing the general welfare furthered minority interests. Consequently, in the chief centers of western civilization (the capitals and the commercial and industrial cities) poverty and riches have existed side by side as two parts of the establishment. The oligarchs drew their necessary cheap exploitable labor and their cannon fodder from among the poor.
The countryside of civilized nations was run by and for the landlords who used unpaid forced labor or wretchedly paid seasonal farm hands to do the necessary work. Poverty was so widespread and exploitation was so savage in the countryside, especially in the more fertile areas, that workers hoping to better their lot fled to city slums as an escape from countryside under-employment, degradation and wretchedness.
Second, throughout their history the civilized oligarchies which decided the policies of European nations, devoted their energies to the concentration and monopoly of wealth and power in their own hands. Their chief source of wealth was the ownership of land in the countryside and of land and capital in the cities. Property ownership, one of the pillars of western civilization, enabled the owners to live without labor and accumulate rent and profit by exploiting the labor power of poverty-ridden peoples.
Third, during the last four centuries of western civilization, oligarchies of the wealthiest and most powerful European nations organized colonial empires in the Americas, Asia and Africa by invading, occupying, and sometimes colonizing the conquered territory, plundering its wealth and using slave labor, forced labor and grossly exploited wage labor to provide the European imperialists with cheap food and raw materials, captive markets and investment opportunities in which they made super profits. Living standards among the colonials were even lower than the poverty levels among workers in the European homelands. Such shocking conditions persisted until colonial independence movements and revolts put an end to the imperial-colonial relationship.
Fourth, the major political preoccupation of West European oligarchs was preparation for war and the waging of wars, organized by the oligarchs and fought by the healthiest and sturdiest sons of the people. The oligarchs planned and officered military operations. During the later centuries businessmen made fortunes providing money, supplies and weapons. It was into these wicked and wasteful enterprises that the West poured its wealth and manpower during five centuries of competitive free enterprise empire building.
Fifth, the economic, political and social institutions of the West were developed during an era of economic scarcity, intensified by the wastes of war and conspicuous consumption. Ideas, practices and institutions generated under conditions of scarcity cannot be adapted easily to conditions resulting from the abundance developed by mechanized and automated assembly lines.
Sixth, during the half century following 1910, western civilization suffered a catastrophic breakdown, including two general, devastating wars; economic inflation, insolvency and depression; planetwide colonial independence movements, and the rise, after 1917, of a socialist sector which presently includes about one-third of the planet.
The accumulation of this mass of damaging evidence led up to the anti-imperialist and essentially anti-western movement which has played so conspicuous a part in the international relations of the 1960s. On the face of the evidence, western civilization stands condemned as inadequate, anti-social and obsolete.
Leaders of western civilization do not aim at adapting their outmoded social apparatus to mechanized productivity with its consequent abundance, shared among the planet’s inhabitants on the basis of need. On the contrary, since 1946 they have utilized the surpluses of their vast mechanical, automated productivity to plan, construct and stockpile weapons of mass destructivity which threaten the existence on the planet of the entire human race.
Advocates of the new capitalism or “people’s capitalism” (symbolized by states like Britain and France, with large public sectors in their economies and an extended welfare program; or most important, the United States — the home of assembly-line production and widely distributed stock ownership in giant trusts and cartels) argue that western civilization has made a come-back and is adapting itself to the mandates of mechanization and abundance. The facts do not support this contention. Not only has widespread poverty continued among members of the Atlantic Alliance, but the Cold War, waged since 1946 against socialism-communism, is directed against the principle that income should be distributed according to need.
The weight of evidence today makes it probable that the coalition of empires and former empires, led by Washington, will fight another general war rather than permit the socialization of the social means of production, the ending of exploitation and unearned income, and the distribution of abundance according to need.
Recent developments, particularly the direction and scope of the Cold War, lead to only one conclusion: western civilization is out of line with presentday trends toward social justice, symbolized by shared abundance, and is the victim of internal contradictions and conflicts which must eventuate in its self-destruction.
(from Chapter VI, The Conscience of a Radical, Scott Nearing, Harborside, Maine: Social Science Institute, 1965)
Buy a copy of the book directly from The Good Life Center, Harborside, Maine.
[Click here for all more excerpts.]
Perhaps it would be more accurate to state that western civilization has had a thousand years to demonstrate its capacity to assimilate and utilize the abundance which science and technology make possible and, barring accidents, inevitable. By any standard of judgment the results of this millenium of testing permit only one interpretation: the outlooks, activities and institutions of western civilization are inadequate to share abundance or to achieve social justice.
First, it has been operated for generations by an aristocratic-business minority to defend and promote minority interests. This minority has concerned itself with the general welfare only in so far as advancing the general welfare furthered minority interests. Consequently, in the chief centers of western civilization (the capitals and the commercial and industrial cities) poverty and riches have existed side by side as two parts of the establishment. The oligarchs drew their necessary cheap exploitable labor and their cannon fodder from among the poor.
The countryside of civilized nations was run by and for the landlords who used unpaid forced labor or wretchedly paid seasonal farm hands to do the necessary work. Poverty was so widespread and exploitation was so savage in the countryside, especially in the more fertile areas, that workers hoping to better their lot fled to city slums as an escape from countryside under-employment, degradation and wretchedness.
Second, throughout their history the civilized oligarchies which decided the policies of European nations, devoted their energies to the concentration and monopoly of wealth and power in their own hands. Their chief source of wealth was the ownership of land in the countryside and of land and capital in the cities. Property ownership, one of the pillars of western civilization, enabled the owners to live without labor and accumulate rent and profit by exploiting the labor power of poverty-ridden peoples.
Third, during the last four centuries of western civilization, oligarchies of the wealthiest and most powerful European nations organized colonial empires in the Americas, Asia and Africa by invading, occupying, and sometimes colonizing the conquered territory, plundering its wealth and using slave labor, forced labor and grossly exploited wage labor to provide the European imperialists with cheap food and raw materials, captive markets and investment opportunities in which they made super profits. Living standards among the colonials were even lower than the poverty levels among workers in the European homelands. Such shocking conditions persisted until colonial independence movements and revolts put an end to the imperial-colonial relationship.
Fourth, the major political preoccupation of West European oligarchs was preparation for war and the waging of wars, organized by the oligarchs and fought by the healthiest and sturdiest sons of the people. The oligarchs planned and officered military operations. During the later centuries businessmen made fortunes providing money, supplies and weapons. It was into these wicked and wasteful enterprises that the West poured its wealth and manpower during five centuries of competitive free enterprise empire building.
Fifth, the economic, political and social institutions of the West were developed during an era of economic scarcity, intensified by the wastes of war and conspicuous consumption. Ideas, practices and institutions generated under conditions of scarcity cannot be adapted easily to conditions resulting from the abundance developed by mechanized and automated assembly lines.
Sixth, during the half century following 1910, western civilization suffered a catastrophic breakdown, including two general, devastating wars; economic inflation, insolvency and depression; planetwide colonial independence movements, and the rise, after 1917, of a socialist sector which presently includes about one-third of the planet.
The accumulation of this mass of damaging evidence led up to the anti-imperialist and essentially anti-western movement which has played so conspicuous a part in the international relations of the 1960s. On the face of the evidence, western civilization stands condemned as inadequate, anti-social and obsolete.
Leaders of western civilization do not aim at adapting their outmoded social apparatus to mechanized productivity with its consequent abundance, shared among the planet’s inhabitants on the basis of need. On the contrary, since 1946 they have utilized the surpluses of their vast mechanical, automated productivity to plan, construct and stockpile weapons of mass destructivity which threaten the existence on the planet of the entire human race.
Advocates of the new capitalism or “people’s capitalism” (symbolized by states like Britain and France, with large public sectors in their economies and an extended welfare program; or most important, the United States — the home of assembly-line production and widely distributed stock ownership in giant trusts and cartels) argue that western civilization has made a come-back and is adapting itself to the mandates of mechanization and abundance. The facts do not support this contention. Not only has widespread poverty continued among members of the Atlantic Alliance, but the Cold War, waged since 1946 against socialism-communism, is directed against the principle that income should be distributed according to need.
The weight of evidence today makes it probable that the coalition of empires and former empires, led by Washington, will fight another general war rather than permit the socialization of the social means of production, the ending of exploitation and unearned income, and the distribution of abundance according to need.
Recent developments, particularly the direction and scope of the Cold War, lead to only one conclusion: western civilization is out of line with presentday trends toward social justice, symbolized by shared abundance, and is the victim of internal contradictions and conflicts which must eventuate in its self-destruction.
(from Chapter VI, The Conscience of a Radical, Scott Nearing, Harborside, Maine: Social Science Institute, 1965)
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August 6, 2012
A Good Life for Fellow Creatures
While our fellow creatures are put behind bars or held captive in the camouflaged cages of modern zoos, where they are stared at and poked by the young, the curious and the idle, our consciences should continue to disturb us. So long as animal hunting and fishing licenses are issued by the million, permitting the holders to trap or shoot our fellow creatures for sport or as a business, we cannot rest content. While our fellow creatures are bred and raised by tens of millions to be butchered in cold blood, their bodies hung up or laid out for sale in public markets and finally cooked and eaten, cannibal fashion, those of us who are radicals in our interpretation of the precept “thou shalt not kill” must continue to agitate and organize on behalf of these myriad victims of artificially stimulated and jaded human appetites.
Restraint does not cease to be imprisonment when it is applied to our fellow creatures. Nor is a form of sport tolerable which maims its victims or deprives them of their lives. Deliberate killing is murder whether the object of the attack is a human being or a fellow creature.
Violations of fellow creature rights take many forms: trapping and shooting wild life for food or sport; saturation spraying and dusting of poisons which destroy birds, mammals and insects; raising and slaughtering creatures for food; torturing and killing fellow creatures for educational, diversional or experimental purposes; the use of fellow creatures as “work animals”; shearing the wool from sheep, goats, camels, rabbits; using the fur of wild or domestic animals; the incarceration of fellow creatures in circus and zoo cages; the maintenance, in permanent servitude, of domestic pets who would not know how to care for themselves if released, who “enjoy their servitude,” “love their masters,” and who, if released, would return voluntarily to live parasitical lives.
There was a time, not too long ago, in the United States or elsewhere, when human beings were hunted and eaten, bred, bought and sold as chattels. For the most part, this form of slavery is a thing of the past. The enslavement, torturing, imprisonment and killing of animal, bird and insect fellow creatures to satisfy human fancy. whim, habit or assumed need is still practiced, on a larger scale than elsewhere, in highly industrialized and civilized communities, where mass slaughter, mass chemical poisoning, mass experimentation with fellow creatures, and mass incarceration behind barbed wire and other restraining means are matters of every day occurrence.
Restraints, incarceration, exploitation, torture and murder of fellow creatures attracts no more attention and arouses no more comment in the leading civilized countries of today than the like treatment of human slaves aroused in the leading civilized countries of previous centuries. Humanity has passed through periods of cannibalism and of chattel slavery. In the course of its evolution, it will surely reach a point at which the greatest good to the greatest number of living creatures will be accepted and applied with equal rigor to humanity’s fellows and neighbors.
If there is a “right” to the demand for security, for dignity and for life itself, that right must apply with equal force to all living things. We humans, as trustees for the planet and its inhabitants are duty bound to recognize and uphold such rights and to protest against their denial, no matter who or what the victims of the denial may be.
(from Chapter VI, The Conscience of a Radical, Scott Nearing, Harborside, Maine: Social Science Institute, 1965)
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environment, environmentalism, animal rights, vegetarianism, ecoanarchism
Restraint does not cease to be imprisonment when it is applied to our fellow creatures. Nor is a form of sport tolerable which maims its victims or deprives them of their lives. Deliberate killing is murder whether the object of the attack is a human being or a fellow creature.
Violations of fellow creature rights take many forms: trapping and shooting wild life for food or sport; saturation spraying and dusting of poisons which destroy birds, mammals and insects; raising and slaughtering creatures for food; torturing and killing fellow creatures for educational, diversional or experimental purposes; the use of fellow creatures as “work animals”; shearing the wool from sheep, goats, camels, rabbits; using the fur of wild or domestic animals; the incarceration of fellow creatures in circus and zoo cages; the maintenance, in permanent servitude, of domestic pets who would not know how to care for themselves if released, who “enjoy their servitude,” “love their masters,” and who, if released, would return voluntarily to live parasitical lives.
There was a time, not too long ago, in the United States or elsewhere, when human beings were hunted and eaten, bred, bought and sold as chattels. For the most part, this form of slavery is a thing of the past. The enslavement, torturing, imprisonment and killing of animal, bird and insect fellow creatures to satisfy human fancy. whim, habit or assumed need is still practiced, on a larger scale than elsewhere, in highly industrialized and civilized communities, where mass slaughter, mass chemical poisoning, mass experimentation with fellow creatures, and mass incarceration behind barbed wire and other restraining means are matters of every day occurrence.
Restraints, incarceration, exploitation, torture and murder of fellow creatures attracts no more attention and arouses no more comment in the leading civilized countries of today than the like treatment of human slaves aroused in the leading civilized countries of previous centuries. Humanity has passed through periods of cannibalism and of chattel slavery. In the course of its evolution, it will surely reach a point at which the greatest good to the greatest number of living creatures will be accepted and applied with equal rigor to humanity’s fellows and neighbors.
If there is a “right” to the demand for security, for dignity and for life itself, that right must apply with equal force to all living things. We humans, as trustees for the planet and its inhabitants are duty bound to recognize and uphold such rights and to protest against their denial, no matter who or what the victims of the denial may be.
(from Chapter VI, The Conscience of a Radical, Scott Nearing, Harborside, Maine: Social Science Institute, 1965)
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environment, environmentalism, animal rights, vegetarianism, ecoanarchism
August 5, 2012
Liberals: the stalking horse of reaction
In the context of our discussion [good is that which benefits or advantages the most; evil disadvantages, harms the most], radicals choose the good and try to live it. Liberals choose the lesser evil and dress it up to look good. Conservatives accept the evil and make no bones about it. Reactionaries want to force the evil on everyone. ...
Private enterprise, laissez-faire capitalists, nation and empire builders have found the good-better-best [evolutionary] formula profitable when applied to natural science, engineering and business, but they have balked proposals to apply the same developmental formula to social practices and social institutions.
Conservatives support this static position. Liberals believe, theoretically, in improvement but they want to protect their property and preserve their privileges. Therefore in a crisis, they use their influence to perpetuate the exploitative institutions of capitalism and imperialism.
Radicals demand the application of the improvement principle: “How can we do a better job?” to the entire realm of social relations and social institutions. It is nearly 200 years since the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789 opened the way for an application of the improvement formula to politics. It is half a century since the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the Chinese Revolution of 1911 and the Russian Revolution of 1917 opened the way for the application of the improvement formula to economics.
... These efforts to plan and construct an economy and a society on scientific principles (socialist construction) are welcomed and applauded by radicals, questioned and sabotaged by liberals and fought tooth and nail by conservatives and reactionaries.
Private enterprise, laissez-faire capitalists, nation and empire builders have found the good-better-best [evolutionary] formula profitable when applied to natural science, engineering and business, but they have balked proposals to apply the same developmental formula to social practices and social institutions.
Conservatives support this static position. Liberals believe, theoretically, in improvement but they want to protect their property and preserve their privileges. Therefore in a crisis, they use their influence to perpetuate the exploitative institutions of capitalism and imperialism.
Radicals demand the application of the improvement principle: “How can we do a better job?” to the entire realm of social relations and social institutions. It is nearly 200 years since the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789 opened the way for an application of the improvement formula to politics. It is half a century since the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the Chinese Revolution of 1911 and the Russian Revolution of 1917 opened the way for the application of the improvement formula to economics.
... These efforts to plan and construct an economy and a society on scientific principles (socialist construction) are welcomed and applauded by radicals, questioned and sabotaged by liberals and fought tooth and nail by conservatives and reactionaries.
—Scott Nearing, The Conscience of a Radical (Harborside, Maine: Social Science Institute, 1965), Chapter V
August 4, 2012
Seven Roadblocks to the Good Life: (7) The International Imperialist Conspiracy
Revolution breaks up existing social relations, benefiting some individuals, groups and classes while depriving others of property, privilege and power held under the pre-revolutionary social order. The dispossessed, outraged by the deprivation of “rights” which they had taken for granted in the old society, protest, organize and endeavor to take back or “restore” their former privileges and authority. Such efforts are labeled counterrevolution.
Revolution on a planet-wide scale, during the past half century, stimulated and generated counter-revolution. Revolution in each country leads to counter-revolution, as the dispossessed attempt to seize the seats of unstable power. Generally such efforts at restoration depend upon aid from the propertied and privileged in neighboring countries. Where ferment is widespread, ruling elements in threatened countries invade the area in which a revolution is taking place in an effort to reverse the revolutionary process and restore the privileges of the dispossessed ruling classes.
The Mexican Revolution of 1910, the Chinese Revolution of 1911 and the Russian Revolution of 1917 all led to counter-revolutions which included military invasion by the armed forces of imperialist powers.
After war’s end in 1945, as colonial and dependent peoples rose against their imperial masters, counter-revolution was hurriedly organized on an international scale. The same imperialist elements that had sent arms and armies into Russia after the Revolution of 1917 prepared to use the United Nations as the spearhead of their counter-revolutionary drives. When that plan failed, they built up the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. NATO was an exclusive clique into which representatives of all of the 19th century empires were welcomed. Its declared purpose was to contain, combat and finally to overthrow the revolutionary regimes that were being established in Europe, Asia and Latin America.
John Foster Dulles, one of the chief architects of NATO, declared that the aim of the organization was to destroy “the international communist conspiracy.” A century earlier, similar efforts were made by the Holy Alliance of monarchists and imperialists, whose purpose was to destroy “the international republican conspiracy.”
If a conspiracy is a joint effort to carry out an unlawful or harmful purpose, NATO, like the Holy Alliance of 1815, is a conspiracy. Both organizations represented the propertied and privileged of a passing social order. Both proposed, by the use of armed force, to turn back the clock of history, restore deposed masters to their former positions of prestige and power, and keep subject peoples in bondage.
Overthrow in April, 1964, of the duly elected progressive government of Brazil, is a first-class example of the work done by the International Imperialist Conspiracy. Brazilian progressives under the leadership of one of the large landholders of Brazil, João Goulart, were attempting, by constitutional and legal means, to clear out feudal survivals and modernize their country. The task was difficult and complicated but it might have been carried to a successful conclusion, had it not been for the illegal and unconstitutional action of Goulart’s Brazilian opponents, backed by the International Imperialist Conspiracy operating in Brazil. First among these forces was the Brazilian opposition to Goulart, led by the landlords, the church, the dominant factions in the Army and certain Brazilian business interests working closely with foreign investors. Important foreign interests worked against the Goulart Government: (1) foreign investors in Brazilian enterprises: oil, automobiles, mining; (2) representatives of U.S.A. and other foreign military establishments; (3) U.S.A. and other embassies, consulates, military missions; (4) foreign projects in Brazil such as the Alliance for Progress; (5) the C.I.A. and other foreign under-cover agencies. These agencies, operating with their Brazilian opposite numbers, and using the Brazilian military organization, overthrew the duly elected government of Brazil in 1964, imposed a military dictatorship on the country, acting for Brazilian property and privilege, while serving as the handymen of foreign imperialist interests.
Spokesmen for the “free world” presently are proclaiming their crusade to preserve freedom in Vietnam, Laos, the Congo, Cuba and China, using arms where necessary to uphold unpopular regimes. The proposed “freedom” would prevent local populations in Southeast Asia and elsewhere from choosing a communist way of life and force on them the “free enterprise” way under which the planetwide 19th century empires held more than a billion colonials in bondage.
Imperialists have suffered a shattering defeat during the past half century: first at their own hands, in two general suicidal wars fought by rival imperialist gangs; second, by a planetwide revolt of their erstwhile colonials and dependents, and third, through a series of social revolutions that turned a third of the planet from imperialist bondage to socialist construction.
Currently, in Iran, in Malaysia, in the Congo and in Southeast Asia attempts are being made by the International Imperialist Conspiracy to check the trend toward socialism-communism; return the imperialists to their former privileged positions in the colonies; re-establish white supremacy over the colored peoples, and restore the property and class relationships, the exploitation and military ascendancy associated with private enterprise and national (imperial) sovereignty.
(from Chapter III, The Conscience of a Radical, Scott Nearing, Harborside, Maine: Social Science Institute, 1965)
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Revolution on a planet-wide scale, during the past half century, stimulated and generated counter-revolution. Revolution in each country leads to counter-revolution, as the dispossessed attempt to seize the seats of unstable power. Generally such efforts at restoration depend upon aid from the propertied and privileged in neighboring countries. Where ferment is widespread, ruling elements in threatened countries invade the area in which a revolution is taking place in an effort to reverse the revolutionary process and restore the privileges of the dispossessed ruling classes.
The Mexican Revolution of 1910, the Chinese Revolution of 1911 and the Russian Revolution of 1917 all led to counter-revolutions which included military invasion by the armed forces of imperialist powers.
After war’s end in 1945, as colonial and dependent peoples rose against their imperial masters, counter-revolution was hurriedly organized on an international scale. The same imperialist elements that had sent arms and armies into Russia after the Revolution of 1917 prepared to use the United Nations as the spearhead of their counter-revolutionary drives. When that plan failed, they built up the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. NATO was an exclusive clique into which representatives of all of the 19th century empires were welcomed. Its declared purpose was to contain, combat and finally to overthrow the revolutionary regimes that were being established in Europe, Asia and Latin America.
John Foster Dulles, one of the chief architects of NATO, declared that the aim of the organization was to destroy “the international communist conspiracy.” A century earlier, similar efforts were made by the Holy Alliance of monarchists and imperialists, whose purpose was to destroy “the international republican conspiracy.”
If a conspiracy is a joint effort to carry out an unlawful or harmful purpose, NATO, like the Holy Alliance of 1815, is a conspiracy. Both organizations represented the propertied and privileged of a passing social order. Both proposed, by the use of armed force, to turn back the clock of history, restore deposed masters to their former positions of prestige and power, and keep subject peoples in bondage.
Overthrow in April, 1964, of the duly elected progressive government of Brazil, is a first-class example of the work done by the International Imperialist Conspiracy. Brazilian progressives under the leadership of one of the large landholders of Brazil, João Goulart, were attempting, by constitutional and legal means, to clear out feudal survivals and modernize their country. The task was difficult and complicated but it might have been carried to a successful conclusion, had it not been for the illegal and unconstitutional action of Goulart’s Brazilian opponents, backed by the International Imperialist Conspiracy operating in Brazil. First among these forces was the Brazilian opposition to Goulart, led by the landlords, the church, the dominant factions in the Army and certain Brazilian business interests working closely with foreign investors. Important foreign interests worked against the Goulart Government: (1) foreign investors in Brazilian enterprises: oil, automobiles, mining; (2) representatives of U.S.A. and other foreign military establishments; (3) U.S.A. and other embassies, consulates, military missions; (4) foreign projects in Brazil such as the Alliance for Progress; (5) the C.I.A. and other foreign under-cover agencies. These agencies, operating with their Brazilian opposite numbers, and using the Brazilian military organization, overthrew the duly elected government of Brazil in 1964, imposed a military dictatorship on the country, acting for Brazilian property and privilege, while serving as the handymen of foreign imperialist interests.
Spokesmen for the “free world” presently are proclaiming their crusade to preserve freedom in Vietnam, Laos, the Congo, Cuba and China, using arms where necessary to uphold unpopular regimes. The proposed “freedom” would prevent local populations in Southeast Asia and elsewhere from choosing a communist way of life and force on them the “free enterprise” way under which the planetwide 19th century empires held more than a billion colonials in bondage.
Imperialists have suffered a shattering defeat during the past half century: first at their own hands, in two general suicidal wars fought by rival imperialist gangs; second, by a planetwide revolt of their erstwhile colonials and dependents, and third, through a series of social revolutions that turned a third of the planet from imperialist bondage to socialist construction.
Currently, in Iran, in Malaysia, in the Congo and in Southeast Asia attempts are being made by the International Imperialist Conspiracy to check the trend toward socialism-communism; return the imperialists to their former privileged positions in the colonies; re-establish white supremacy over the colored peoples, and restore the property and class relationships, the exploitation and military ascendancy associated with private enterprise and national (imperial) sovereignty.
(from Chapter III, The Conscience of a Radical, Scott Nearing, Harborside, Maine: Social Science Institute, 1965)
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August 3, 2012
Seven Roadblocks to the Good Life: (6) The Counter Revolution
I began this discussion of the roadblocks which prevent human advance to higher levels of social awareness and well-being by listing ignorance, greed and a number of corrosive and devitalizing forces and practices which blunt the cutting edge of the crusade to end social backwardness and promote the full use of nature, of human genius, of science, technology, and the social apparatus as means for opening wide the doors of opportunity for the entire human race. Ignorance, poverty, unemployment, dissipation, war and other forms of waste are barriers which must be surmounted and liquidated by the concerted demand of humanity as it struggles for enlightenment, and the fuller use of natural resources and technical equipment to enlarge opportunity, increase knowledge and thus broaden and deepen the stream of human culture.
There are other roadblocks which are deliberately built and maintained, to preserve obsolete features of Western civilization, to limit and restrict human advance and to make such minor reforms in the social apparatus as are necessary to blunt the worldwide movement for social betterment, and to preserve the wealth-poverty balance: wealth for the owners and masters; poverty for those who do much of the world’s work. I shall call these planned, tailor-made roadblocks to social advance “the counter-revolution” because they are the answer of property, privilege and the status quo to the planet-wide revolution of the past half century.
There is nothing casual or customary about the counter-revolution. It has been planned, organized, financed, armed and led by the richest and most powerful big businesses and the richest and most powerful governments of the “free world.” For years after 1917 the big business-military oligarchies which were running the Western empires considered the Russian Revolution and the Chinese, Cuban, Philippine, Turkish and other revolutions which clustered around the Russian Revolution as “impermanent rather than permanent.” When at long last they awoke to the fact that revolution at various levels was sweeping over the planet like a prairie fire, they took the matter seriously and began planning and organizing the counter-revolution.
Needless to say, the counter-revolution had as its purpose the preservation and strengthening of the status quo. It was stimulated and activated in all areas where revolution succeeded or threatened to succeed.
Counter-revolution was directed against revolutionary movements and revolutionary governments in Mexico, Russia, Central Europe, the Near and Middle East, South East Asia, Latin America, Africa. It was so successful in the United States that it all but eliminated the Left as an effective political factor.
Behind the counter-revolution were the prestige, wealth and political authority of western civilization. Immediately after the Russian Revolution it took organized form in the drive to overthrow the Bolsheviks and the parallel revolutions in Germany and Central Europe. Then it appeared as Fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany. Later, as the threat of planet-wide revolution mounted after war’s end in 1945, it became the Cold War, waged by the remnants of the chief 19th century empires against syndicalism, socialism, communism or any other ideology which questioned the theory and practice of private enterprise and empire building as the logical end and aim of human life. Led aggressively by the business-military complex of the United States after 1946, the Cold War took the center of the western stage and has occupied it ever since, fighting the collectivist “enemy” in the Soviet Union, People’s China, Korea, Vietnam, Iran, the Congo, Cuba, Bolivia, Brazil, and wherever private enterprise profiteers were threatened by popular uprisings.
The counter-revolutionary drive has six chief aspects: the circus aspect; the convenience, comfort, conformity aspect; the petty reform aspect; the corruption aspect; the espionage aspect; and the violence and terror aspect.
The circus aspect of counter-revolution is aimed to amuse, entertain and divert attention from some of the chief issues that concern mankind. Mass conditioning is a very old story. It is being repeated in the present-day West with camera, printing press, movies, radio, television and the other means of communication which modern technology has provided so generally and so generously. Thanks to these discoveries and inventions it is possible for those in authority to reach people in their homes, in their work places, in their schools and recreation centers and on the street, twenty-four hours of each day, with blandishments, scandal, horror stories, doctored “news,” admonitions, warning, threats. Since the means of present-day communication in the West are under the control of the same oligarchies that own the economy, operate the political apparatus and administer the social services, the people can be fed half-truths and lies, or, through silence, kept in virtual ignorance of t~le course of events. At the same time they are told, repeatedly, through the same channels that they are the most enlightened public anywhere on earth.
The convenience, comfort, conformity aspect of the counter-revolution was designed to buy off the popular masses by flooding the mass market with a dazzling, bewildering, engrossing supply of goods and services.
Counter-revolutionaries are in control of production apparatus capable of converting natural resources and human energy into a huge volume and an infinite variety of gadgets and appliances in addition to the assembly-line output of food, clothing, shelter and the social services. These goods and services were poured into the mass market and were matched by wage and salary payrolls which enabled their recipients to buy back two-thirds of the national product.
Trusts, cartels and other forms of economic concentration reduced the number of self-employed enterprisers and professionals. At the same time they increased the number of wage earners and salaried employes, so that those who wished to buy in the mass market were increasingly dependent on blue-collar and white-collar jobs. Holding a job owned by somebody else thus became the key to affluence and the economic basis for status, prestige, promotion.
Jobs were owned by the business-military-political oligarchies which controlled every essential aspect of the more highly industrialized communities. The oligarchs held the key to convenience, comfort, status, preferment.
Did job-holders and their families wish to share in the goods and services heaped on mass market shelves? Did they want to revel in processed food, drive their own cars, own their own homes, enjoy status and get promotions? There was one simple, universal credit card that gave the holder a job with its regular pay check admitting to the mass market. Conformity credit cards (jobs) were issued to those who followed the approved way of life. Approval came from the oligarchy. Acceptance was the oath of fealty sworn by the prospective job-holder. Those who differed and opposed were refused jobs and thus reduced to second-class economic status. They were subversive unemployables, screw balls, misfits, troublemakers.
The Way of Life was outlined in school, in church, in the press, over radio and television. The Way of Life became a religious obligation and a patriotic duty. Those who accepted and followed it had all of the rights and privileges provided for first-class citizens and job holders. Non-conformers received second-class treatment.
Petty reforms are part and parcel of the arsenal with which counter-revolution fights its battles. Revolutionary demands go to the roots and are far-reaching, involving changes in property, class relations and the status of those engaged in the revolutionary struggle. Petty reforms are crumbs, thrown to those who demand bread.
Petty reforms satisfy immediate demands, leaving property and class relations as they were before the reforms were offered. They may include limited hours of labor, better working conditions, broadened education, political representation, an extended suffrage, elections within a specified period, extension of civil rights and social services. Reform preserves the essential structure of society so that those presently in power continue to exercise authority.
Promises of petty reforms are the IOU’s with which the counter-revolution seeks to dull the edge of revolutionary demands and decrease revolutionary enthusiasm.
Nevertheless, each reform (conceded however grudgingly by the masters) involves some limitation of arbitrary authority and adds to the rights and privileges which the ruled are able to exercise and enjoy. Experience in Scandinavia and Great Britain is significant in this respect. In these countries manifold reforms have been made over recent years, in the working and living conditions of the populace. Social services have been improved. Housing has been bettered. Unemployment has been reduced. As a result, the revolutionary movements in these countries have been correspondingly weakened.
“Corrupt” means to debase, deprave, worsen. Corruption undermines integrity and purpose, impairs vitality, decreases effectiveness. It is therefore an important instrument of the counter-revolution. Corruption is particularly effective where the counter-revolutionaries own and control an efficient productive apparatus which is able to provide an abundant supply of goods, services, gadgets and (most important, in a society build around a money economy) to provide quantities of money.
The present-day counter-revolution can offer not only immense quantities and varieties of goods and services but, through its elaborate apparatus of credits and securities, can offer permanent parasitism to those who will follow its line and do its bidding.
Supplied with an abundance of goods, services, money, credit and securities, the counter-revolution can satisfy human hungers to the point of satiety, gratifying the appetites of drug addicts and gamblers, providing amusement and diversion on a grandiose scale, and guaranteeing the supply of such desiderata so long as the existing order endures.
Counter-revolutionaries aim their corrupting activities especially at the younger and less experienced leaders of the revolution, offering them secure, well-paid jobs, regular promotions, status and social recognition, and whatever money will buy.
Espionage is an important aspect of counter-revolution. Early in the present century spies and spying were generally regarded with disfavor in the United States. In Europe, with its semi-popular monarchies, its intense national rivalries and its militant revolutionary minorities, espionage was expected and even taken for granted. In a democratic republic it was considered an intruder.
Today, with the spread of revolutionary activities, the extension of the Cold War and the emergence of the United States government as the patron, financier, armorer and organizer of counter-revolution across the planet, spies and spying have become an integral part of the American Way of Life. In continental United States the Federal Bureau of Investigation fills its dossiers on millions of individuals with fact, fiction and gossip. Abroad the Central Intelligence Agency snoops, prys, plots, and organizes counter-revolution.
These two are the chief spy agencies under the immediate direction of the Federal Government. In addition, the diplomatic and consular services are spying agencies. Each of the armed services has its intelligence department. The treasury has its secret service. Both House and Senate have investigative committees patterned on the notorious House Committee on Un-American Activities. The Post Office, like the Internal Revenue and the Custom Service, have their under-cover men. The Post Office, Customs and the F.B.I. check printed matter coming into the country and exclude undesirable publications. The Post Office may check the personal mail of non-conformists. Individual states and cities have their spies, legislative committees and police departments.
United States big business is honey-combed with spies. Large corporations have their intelligence services which plant spies and spying apparatus in factory departments, in offices, in toilet and social rooms, in the room of the Board of Directors. For smaller enterprises there are national and international detective agencies which specialize in spying and place spies for business enterprises on the premises of their rivals.* Espionage is justified by the one word: security, but as the spy network proliferates and penetrates every corner of society, privacy disappears and insecurity becomes universal.
[*For details, see Vance Packard’s The Naked Society, N. Y.: David McKay 1964]
Most alarming to radicals, among activities of the counter-revolution, has been its use of violence and terror. During the opening years of the present century two assumptions were widespread among western intellectuals: first, western man was too civilized to permit another general war; second, the West had left behind terror tactics such as physical manhandling and physical torture. Both assumptions were blown to bits in the events that accompanied the wars after 1914.
It is difficult for anyone born since 1914 to realize the totality of the revolution in social techniques which took place during this period. In the Victorian Age, which ended in 1914, British, Germans, Frenchmen, and other peoples in the West took it for granted that mankind had advanced to a level far above that of the Middle Ages, with a consequent humanitarianism, a respect for human dignity and a whole-hearted rejection of practices associated with the words “savagery” and “barbarism.” The word “civilization,” as then used, automatically repudiated such savage and barbaric approaches to life. War, revolution and counter-revolution re-opened the flood gates to violence and terror on a scale far exceeding anything known to have existed among the pre-civilized peoples.
Revolution and counter-revolution in the same political area are, in effect, cold or hot civil war, with relative against relative and neighbor against neighbor. Such struggles are traditionally fierce and bloody. Experience during the present period of social revolution and counter-revolution runs true to civil war form.
Since the closing years of the 19th century there have been five parallel and inter-related movements: (1) the technological revolution; (2) the revolts of suppressed and oppressed peoples demanding self-determination and setting up republics dedicated by their constitutions to representative or democratic governments; (3) advances in military preparations and in the weaponry used in two general wars and scores of civil and local wars: (4) the growth of the economic and political labor movement, reaching its climax in the building of planned, socialist societies; and (5) the general and stubborn refusal of the bourgeois to accept and bow to the verdict of social evolution and history. It is the refusal of the business class, led by that of the U.S.A., which has involved humanity in the cold war with its accompanying violence and terror directed not only against socialism, but against the extension or use of the democratic process.
Violence and terror during the past half-century have included the formal denial of human rights as specified in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. These rights include movement, communication, persuasion, organization and joint acts up to the point of disturbing public order and endangering the continuance of existing governments. By common consent during grave emergencies civil rights are subordinated to the need of defending and promoting the common welfare. However, the denials and violations of human rights, especially among the colonial and other dependent peoples has been and still is a matter of course. These denials extend beyond colonial areas into the homelands of the great empires.
Vigilantism and mob violence are permitted, encouraged and often participated in by the police. Vigilante mobs, with no pretense of authority, violate human rights, destroy the property, maim and often take the lives of opponents and victims.
Political opponents are persecuted and prosecuted. They are arrested and detained for long periods without formal charges and without trial; they are tried in secret with public and press excluded. Long prison sentences are imposed and served, under sub-human conditions. Often political opponents are shot out of hand. Physical and psychological torture designed to force admissions of guilt or information concerning associates of the torture victims are carried out by public authorities.
Assassination by public authorities or by private agencies with the connivance of public authority is utilized as a political instrument.
There are mass killing and maiming by troops and police, firing on demonstrations of unarmed people, including women and children. Petrograd, at the Winter Palace in 1905, the Amritzar massacre in 1916 by the British authorities, and the official beating of unarmed Negroes and whites demonstrating in the Deep South of the United States during 1964-65 are outstanding examples.
Genocide is practiced. Mass extermination of political opponents or racial minorities; undernourishment in concentration camps; gas chambers are employed. These methods reached the highest level of scientific efficiency in Germany under the Nazis, when Jews, Poles, Russians, Yugoslavs and other opponents were destroyed by millions. The victims included men, women and children.
Police and military persecution and suppression of minority political organizations and religious faiths are carried on inside political frontiers. Examples are the anti-socialist drive in Central and East Europe after the Russian Revolution and the Cold War against communism after 1945.
Mob violence and public participation in drives against racial and religious minorities have occurred In South Africa, India, and the United States since the Civil War.
Mass deportations for political reasons have accompanied war and have been carried out for political purposes.
The entire half-century beginning with 1910 has been marred and scarred by unofficial and official violence and terror: by “man’s inhumanity to man.” A radical must describe human conduct during this entire period as disgusting, revolting, appalling, indefensible, degrading and unworthy of reasoning, ethically motivated human beings.*
[*The ghastly array of evidence supporting the charge that during the past half-century humanity had used violence and terror at levels ordinarily associated with one or another form of primitivism must be qualified by reference to another aspect of human behavior during the same period of war and revolution: the movement for non-violent action in opposition to violence.
Within the vast military machines built up by governments to destroy life and property across the frontiers, individual conscientious objectors have taken their stand against war and violence. Some of them were shot out of hand, but the movement of conscientious objection reached minority proportions in the war-ready and warring countries.
There were mass refusals of duty in the face of the enemy. The most massive was the disintegration of the Russian armies before the October Revolution of 1917. Armed men on the front lines during the War of 1914-18, fraternized with their opponents, abandoning discipline and threatening the entire war-waging system. Armed men, waging civil war, turned to agriculture and industry, producing instead of destroying. This was notably true in the People’s Liberation Armies of China. Outstanding examples of non-violent action in the face of overwhelming military power were the campaigns organized by Mohandas Gandhi among Indians in South Africa and later in his native India.
Latest among examples of non-violent action are the campaigns of mass civil disobedience aimed to obstruct the activities of the military. Such demonstrations have been organized in Japan against United States armed forces there; in Britain against the installation of Polaris Missiles; in the United States against biological and chemical warfare. Most notable are the non-violent protests against racial segregation and discrimination in South Africa and in the Deep South of the United States. Mention should be made also of the impressive student demonstrations which frequently have .had profound political effects during the past half century. These have occurred in Japan, South Korea, South Vietnam, Turkey, Egypt, and now are occurring in the Western Hemisphere.]
(from Chapter III, The Conscience of a Radical, Scott Nearing, Harborside, Maine: Social Science Institute, 1965)
Buy a copy of the book directly from The Good Life Center, Harborside, Maine.
[Click here for all seven roadblocks.]
There are other roadblocks which are deliberately built and maintained, to preserve obsolete features of Western civilization, to limit and restrict human advance and to make such minor reforms in the social apparatus as are necessary to blunt the worldwide movement for social betterment, and to preserve the wealth-poverty balance: wealth for the owners and masters; poverty for those who do much of the world’s work. I shall call these planned, tailor-made roadblocks to social advance “the counter-revolution” because they are the answer of property, privilege and the status quo to the planet-wide revolution of the past half century.
There is nothing casual or customary about the counter-revolution. It has been planned, organized, financed, armed and led by the richest and most powerful big businesses and the richest and most powerful governments of the “free world.” For years after 1917 the big business-military oligarchies which were running the Western empires considered the Russian Revolution and the Chinese, Cuban, Philippine, Turkish and other revolutions which clustered around the Russian Revolution as “impermanent rather than permanent.” When at long last they awoke to the fact that revolution at various levels was sweeping over the planet like a prairie fire, they took the matter seriously and began planning and organizing the counter-revolution.
Needless to say, the counter-revolution had as its purpose the preservation and strengthening of the status quo. It was stimulated and activated in all areas where revolution succeeded or threatened to succeed.
Counter-revolution was directed against revolutionary movements and revolutionary governments in Mexico, Russia, Central Europe, the Near and Middle East, South East Asia, Latin America, Africa. It was so successful in the United States that it all but eliminated the Left as an effective political factor.
Behind the counter-revolution were the prestige, wealth and political authority of western civilization. Immediately after the Russian Revolution it took organized form in the drive to overthrow the Bolsheviks and the parallel revolutions in Germany and Central Europe. Then it appeared as Fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany. Later, as the threat of planet-wide revolution mounted after war’s end in 1945, it became the Cold War, waged by the remnants of the chief 19th century empires against syndicalism, socialism, communism or any other ideology which questioned the theory and practice of private enterprise and empire building as the logical end and aim of human life. Led aggressively by the business-military complex of the United States after 1946, the Cold War took the center of the western stage and has occupied it ever since, fighting the collectivist “enemy” in the Soviet Union, People’s China, Korea, Vietnam, Iran, the Congo, Cuba, Bolivia, Brazil, and wherever private enterprise profiteers were threatened by popular uprisings.
The counter-revolutionary drive has six chief aspects: the circus aspect; the convenience, comfort, conformity aspect; the petty reform aspect; the corruption aspect; the espionage aspect; and the violence and terror aspect.
The circus aspect of counter-revolution is aimed to amuse, entertain and divert attention from some of the chief issues that concern mankind. Mass conditioning is a very old story. It is being repeated in the present-day West with camera, printing press, movies, radio, television and the other means of communication which modern technology has provided so generally and so generously. Thanks to these discoveries and inventions it is possible for those in authority to reach people in their homes, in their work places, in their schools and recreation centers and on the street, twenty-four hours of each day, with blandishments, scandal, horror stories, doctored “news,” admonitions, warning, threats. Since the means of present-day communication in the West are under the control of the same oligarchies that own the economy, operate the political apparatus and administer the social services, the people can be fed half-truths and lies, or, through silence, kept in virtual ignorance of t~le course of events. At the same time they are told, repeatedly, through the same channels that they are the most enlightened public anywhere on earth.
The convenience, comfort, conformity aspect of the counter-revolution was designed to buy off the popular masses by flooding the mass market with a dazzling, bewildering, engrossing supply of goods and services.
Counter-revolutionaries are in control of production apparatus capable of converting natural resources and human energy into a huge volume and an infinite variety of gadgets and appliances in addition to the assembly-line output of food, clothing, shelter and the social services. These goods and services were poured into the mass market and were matched by wage and salary payrolls which enabled their recipients to buy back two-thirds of the national product.
Trusts, cartels and other forms of economic concentration reduced the number of self-employed enterprisers and professionals. At the same time they increased the number of wage earners and salaried employes, so that those who wished to buy in the mass market were increasingly dependent on blue-collar and white-collar jobs. Holding a job owned by somebody else thus became the key to affluence and the economic basis for status, prestige, promotion.
Jobs were owned by the business-military-political oligarchies which controlled every essential aspect of the more highly industrialized communities. The oligarchs held the key to convenience, comfort, status, preferment.
Did job-holders and their families wish to share in the goods and services heaped on mass market shelves? Did they want to revel in processed food, drive their own cars, own their own homes, enjoy status and get promotions? There was one simple, universal credit card that gave the holder a job with its regular pay check admitting to the mass market. Conformity credit cards (jobs) were issued to those who followed the approved way of life. Approval came from the oligarchy. Acceptance was the oath of fealty sworn by the prospective job-holder. Those who differed and opposed were refused jobs and thus reduced to second-class economic status. They were subversive unemployables, screw balls, misfits, troublemakers.
The Way of Life was outlined in school, in church, in the press, over radio and television. The Way of Life became a religious obligation and a patriotic duty. Those who accepted and followed it had all of the rights and privileges provided for first-class citizens and job holders. Non-conformers received second-class treatment.
Petty reforms are part and parcel of the arsenal with which counter-revolution fights its battles. Revolutionary demands go to the roots and are far-reaching, involving changes in property, class relations and the status of those engaged in the revolutionary struggle. Petty reforms are crumbs, thrown to those who demand bread.
Petty reforms satisfy immediate demands, leaving property and class relations as they were before the reforms were offered. They may include limited hours of labor, better working conditions, broadened education, political representation, an extended suffrage, elections within a specified period, extension of civil rights and social services. Reform preserves the essential structure of society so that those presently in power continue to exercise authority.
Promises of petty reforms are the IOU’s with which the counter-revolution seeks to dull the edge of revolutionary demands and decrease revolutionary enthusiasm.
Nevertheless, each reform (conceded however grudgingly by the masters) involves some limitation of arbitrary authority and adds to the rights and privileges which the ruled are able to exercise and enjoy. Experience in Scandinavia and Great Britain is significant in this respect. In these countries manifold reforms have been made over recent years, in the working and living conditions of the populace. Social services have been improved. Housing has been bettered. Unemployment has been reduced. As a result, the revolutionary movements in these countries have been correspondingly weakened.
“Corrupt” means to debase, deprave, worsen. Corruption undermines integrity and purpose, impairs vitality, decreases effectiveness. It is therefore an important instrument of the counter-revolution. Corruption is particularly effective where the counter-revolutionaries own and control an efficient productive apparatus which is able to provide an abundant supply of goods, services, gadgets and (most important, in a society build around a money economy) to provide quantities of money.
The present-day counter-revolution can offer not only immense quantities and varieties of goods and services but, through its elaborate apparatus of credits and securities, can offer permanent parasitism to those who will follow its line and do its bidding.
Supplied with an abundance of goods, services, money, credit and securities, the counter-revolution can satisfy human hungers to the point of satiety, gratifying the appetites of drug addicts and gamblers, providing amusement and diversion on a grandiose scale, and guaranteeing the supply of such desiderata so long as the existing order endures.
Counter-revolutionaries aim their corrupting activities especially at the younger and less experienced leaders of the revolution, offering them secure, well-paid jobs, regular promotions, status and social recognition, and whatever money will buy.
Espionage is an important aspect of counter-revolution. Early in the present century spies and spying were generally regarded with disfavor in the United States. In Europe, with its semi-popular monarchies, its intense national rivalries and its militant revolutionary minorities, espionage was expected and even taken for granted. In a democratic republic it was considered an intruder.
Today, with the spread of revolutionary activities, the extension of the Cold War and the emergence of the United States government as the patron, financier, armorer and organizer of counter-revolution across the planet, spies and spying have become an integral part of the American Way of Life. In continental United States the Federal Bureau of Investigation fills its dossiers on millions of individuals with fact, fiction and gossip. Abroad the Central Intelligence Agency snoops, prys, plots, and organizes counter-revolution.
These two are the chief spy agencies under the immediate direction of the Federal Government. In addition, the diplomatic and consular services are spying agencies. Each of the armed services has its intelligence department. The treasury has its secret service. Both House and Senate have investigative committees patterned on the notorious House Committee on Un-American Activities. The Post Office, like the Internal Revenue and the Custom Service, have their under-cover men. The Post Office, Customs and the F.B.I. check printed matter coming into the country and exclude undesirable publications. The Post Office may check the personal mail of non-conformists. Individual states and cities have their spies, legislative committees and police departments.
United States big business is honey-combed with spies. Large corporations have their intelligence services which plant spies and spying apparatus in factory departments, in offices, in toilet and social rooms, in the room of the Board of Directors. For smaller enterprises there are national and international detective agencies which specialize in spying and place spies for business enterprises on the premises of their rivals.* Espionage is justified by the one word: security, but as the spy network proliferates and penetrates every corner of society, privacy disappears and insecurity becomes universal.
[*For details, see Vance Packard’s The Naked Society, N. Y.: David McKay 1964]
Most alarming to radicals, among activities of the counter-revolution, has been its use of violence and terror. During the opening years of the present century two assumptions were widespread among western intellectuals: first, western man was too civilized to permit another general war; second, the West had left behind terror tactics such as physical manhandling and physical torture. Both assumptions were blown to bits in the events that accompanied the wars after 1914.
It is difficult for anyone born since 1914 to realize the totality of the revolution in social techniques which took place during this period. In the Victorian Age, which ended in 1914, British, Germans, Frenchmen, and other peoples in the West took it for granted that mankind had advanced to a level far above that of the Middle Ages, with a consequent humanitarianism, a respect for human dignity and a whole-hearted rejection of practices associated with the words “savagery” and “barbarism.” The word “civilization,” as then used, automatically repudiated such savage and barbaric approaches to life. War, revolution and counter-revolution re-opened the flood gates to violence and terror on a scale far exceeding anything known to have existed among the pre-civilized peoples.
Revolution and counter-revolution in the same political area are, in effect, cold or hot civil war, with relative against relative and neighbor against neighbor. Such struggles are traditionally fierce and bloody. Experience during the present period of social revolution and counter-revolution runs true to civil war form.
Since the closing years of the 19th century there have been five parallel and inter-related movements: (1) the technological revolution; (2) the revolts of suppressed and oppressed peoples demanding self-determination and setting up republics dedicated by their constitutions to representative or democratic governments; (3) advances in military preparations and in the weaponry used in two general wars and scores of civil and local wars: (4) the growth of the economic and political labor movement, reaching its climax in the building of planned, socialist societies; and (5) the general and stubborn refusal of the bourgeois to accept and bow to the verdict of social evolution and history. It is the refusal of the business class, led by that of the U.S.A., which has involved humanity in the cold war with its accompanying violence and terror directed not only against socialism, but against the extension or use of the democratic process.
Violence and terror during the past half-century have included the formal denial of human rights as specified in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. These rights include movement, communication, persuasion, organization and joint acts up to the point of disturbing public order and endangering the continuance of existing governments. By common consent during grave emergencies civil rights are subordinated to the need of defending and promoting the common welfare. However, the denials and violations of human rights, especially among the colonial and other dependent peoples has been and still is a matter of course. These denials extend beyond colonial areas into the homelands of the great empires.
Vigilantism and mob violence are permitted, encouraged and often participated in by the police. Vigilante mobs, with no pretense of authority, violate human rights, destroy the property, maim and often take the lives of opponents and victims.
Political opponents are persecuted and prosecuted. They are arrested and detained for long periods without formal charges and without trial; they are tried in secret with public and press excluded. Long prison sentences are imposed and served, under sub-human conditions. Often political opponents are shot out of hand. Physical and psychological torture designed to force admissions of guilt or information concerning associates of the torture victims are carried out by public authorities.
Assassination by public authorities or by private agencies with the connivance of public authority is utilized as a political instrument.
There are mass killing and maiming by troops and police, firing on demonstrations of unarmed people, including women and children. Petrograd, at the Winter Palace in 1905, the Amritzar massacre in 1916 by the British authorities, and the official beating of unarmed Negroes and whites demonstrating in the Deep South of the United States during 1964-65 are outstanding examples.
Genocide is practiced. Mass extermination of political opponents or racial minorities; undernourishment in concentration camps; gas chambers are employed. These methods reached the highest level of scientific efficiency in Germany under the Nazis, when Jews, Poles, Russians, Yugoslavs and other opponents were destroyed by millions. The victims included men, women and children.
Police and military persecution and suppression of minority political organizations and religious faiths are carried on inside political frontiers. Examples are the anti-socialist drive in Central and East Europe after the Russian Revolution and the Cold War against communism after 1945.
Mob violence and public participation in drives against racial and religious minorities have occurred In South Africa, India, and the United States since the Civil War.
Mass deportations for political reasons have accompanied war and have been carried out for political purposes.
The entire half-century beginning with 1910 has been marred and scarred by unofficial and official violence and terror: by “man’s inhumanity to man.” A radical must describe human conduct during this entire period as disgusting, revolting, appalling, indefensible, degrading and unworthy of reasoning, ethically motivated human beings.*
[*The ghastly array of evidence supporting the charge that during the past half-century humanity had used violence and terror at levels ordinarily associated with one or another form of primitivism must be qualified by reference to another aspect of human behavior during the same period of war and revolution: the movement for non-violent action in opposition to violence.
Within the vast military machines built up by governments to destroy life and property across the frontiers, individual conscientious objectors have taken their stand against war and violence. Some of them were shot out of hand, but the movement of conscientious objection reached minority proportions in the war-ready and warring countries.
There were mass refusals of duty in the face of the enemy. The most massive was the disintegration of the Russian armies before the October Revolution of 1917. Armed men on the front lines during the War of 1914-18, fraternized with their opponents, abandoning discipline and threatening the entire war-waging system. Armed men, waging civil war, turned to agriculture and industry, producing instead of destroying. This was notably true in the People’s Liberation Armies of China. Outstanding examples of non-violent action in the face of overwhelming military power were the campaigns organized by Mohandas Gandhi among Indians in South Africa and later in his native India.
Latest among examples of non-violent action are the campaigns of mass civil disobedience aimed to obstruct the activities of the military. Such demonstrations have been organized in Japan against United States armed forces there; in Britain against the installation of Polaris Missiles; in the United States against biological and chemical warfare. Most notable are the non-violent protests against racial segregation and discrimination in South Africa and in the Deep South of the United States. Mention should be made also of the impressive student demonstrations which frequently have .had profound political effects during the past half century. These have occurred in Japan, South Korea, South Vietnam, Turkey, Egypt, and now are occurring in the Western Hemisphere.]
(from Chapter III, The Conscience of a Radical, Scott Nearing, Harborside, Maine: Social Science Institute, 1965)
Buy a copy of the book directly from The Good Life Center, Harborside, Maine.
[Click here for all seven roadblocks.]
August 2, 2012
Seven Roadblocks to the Good Life: (5) Combativeness and the Cult of Violence
Competition for existence, expression, recognition and supremacy in a complex, interdependent highly organized society generates a survival struggle in which man’s combativeness, courage, determination and tenacity are severely tested. Such rivalry sifts out weaklings, while it grades and regrades the strong, the shrewd, the masterful.
Survival struggle goes on locally in family and neighborhood. It goes on regionally and nationally. Survival struggle is central and basic in the life process. In its most elaborate form it is called war. Acts of war are exercises in the application of violence.
War is a form of human association in which one party to the combat seeks not only to impose his will upon his rival, but seeks to exterminate the rival by the use of a maximum of violence, directed against the person, the associates and the property of his opponents.
Preparations for war require training in the efficacious use of violence. Violence is therefore taught as an art. A cult of violence is developed and every effort is made to dignify and even deify violence. This process has been an essential phase of the military preparedness that has played so large a role in the life of Western civilization.
Since every tool is a potential weapon, as technology has advanced, the possibilities of violence have been multiplied and magnified until with the advent of atomic and nuclear weapons used in waging total war, it becomes possible, in an instant, to vaporize property and exterminate life wholesale.
Linking combativeness, the cult of violence and nuclear technology has created a situation so decisive that in one supreme combat the existing stockpiles of nuclear weapons could destroy the totality of man’s culture and exterminate man himself, bringing an end to the period of human habitation on the planet earth.
Among the roadblocks to further human progress, the destructive potential of nuclear war seems to impose the most emphatic finality on the future of the human race.
(from Chapter III, The Conscience of a Radical, Scott Nearing, Harborside, Maine: Social Science Institute, 1965)
Buy a copy of the book directly from The Good Life Center, Harborside, Maine.
[Click here for all seven roadblocks.]
Survival struggle goes on locally in family and neighborhood. It goes on regionally and nationally. Survival struggle is central and basic in the life process. In its most elaborate form it is called war. Acts of war are exercises in the application of violence.
War is a form of human association in which one party to the combat seeks not only to impose his will upon his rival, but seeks to exterminate the rival by the use of a maximum of violence, directed against the person, the associates and the property of his opponents.
Preparations for war require training in the efficacious use of violence. Violence is therefore taught as an art. A cult of violence is developed and every effort is made to dignify and even deify violence. This process has been an essential phase of the military preparedness that has played so large a role in the life of Western civilization.
Since every tool is a potential weapon, as technology has advanced, the possibilities of violence have been multiplied and magnified until with the advent of atomic and nuclear weapons used in waging total war, it becomes possible, in an instant, to vaporize property and exterminate life wholesale.
Linking combativeness, the cult of violence and nuclear technology has created a situation so decisive that in one supreme combat the existing stockpiles of nuclear weapons could destroy the totality of man’s culture and exterminate man himself, bringing an end to the period of human habitation on the planet earth.
Among the roadblocks to further human progress, the destructive potential of nuclear war seems to impose the most emphatic finality on the future of the human race.
(from Chapter III, The Conscience of a Radical, Scott Nearing, Harborside, Maine: Social Science Institute, 1965)
Buy a copy of the book directly from The Good Life Center, Harborside, Maine.
[Click here for all seven roadblocks.]
Wind power promotes extractive industries
Reuters reports on the increasing demand for copper due to mandates requiring the building of giant wind turbines:
“Copper is used in wind turbine installations and for sub-sea cables that transfer power back to the grid. ... [W]ind turbines use 3.6 tonnes of copper per megawatt.”
A dissertation from England concludes that wind turbines use ~5.64 tonnes/MW capacity onshore and ~9.58 tonnes/MW capacity offshore.
See also: “Green power LOVES chemicals” and “Green energy”.
wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism
“Copper is used in wind turbine installations and for sub-sea cables that transfer power back to the grid. ... [W]ind turbines use 3.6 tonnes of copper per megawatt.”
A dissertation from England concludes that wind turbines use ~5.64 tonnes/MW capacity onshore and ~9.58 tonnes/MW capacity offshore.
See also: “Green power LOVES chemicals” and “Green energy”.
wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism
August 1, 2012
Seven Roadblocks to the Good Life: (4) Six Human Hungers Which Squander Resources, Time and Energy
Side by side with the six corrosives that devitalize human beings are six human hungers. Attempts to satisfy these hungers squander needed resources, consume time and use up energy that could be employed to greater advantage in other directions.
These hungers are for self-preservation; food and drink; sex satisfaction; power; something for nothing; soporifics. All six plead personal or social necessity as a justification for top priority. Over-indulgence in any or all of them warps, frustrates and cripples normal human functioning and prevents the rounded fruition of human life. All six demand attention, time and energy to a point at which the undisciplined individual is wholly involved and totally committed. Other aspects of life recede into the background until the satisfaction of particular human hungers enslaves the victim.
Food, drink, air, sunshine and sex are prerequisites to the continuance of human life. Without them there would be no life as we know it. All are essential elements in the preservation of the individual and the human race. They are the basis of life and are among the driving forces animating the individual and the race. Man shares these hungers with animals, birds and insects. They are general characteristics of terrestrial creatures.
In a previous section I commented on greed for power. Power hunger is easily stimulated in concentrations of population. The urge behind human hungers inheres in the individual. Sex satisfaction demands at least one partner. Power hunger is associated with population aggregates from the family to larger and more complex social groups.
Gambling (taking a chance on getting something for nothing) is an urge arising out of group life. Drug addiction stems from the effort to overcome pain, to compensate for nutritional imbalance, to off-set weariness and exhaustion or emotional disappointments, as an alternative to boredom.
Through the ages unscrupulous exploiters have used human hungers as a source of easy money. As society moved from a scarcity level to a level of abundance, crafty crooks and grasping businessmen have artfully stimulated human hungers by various forms of propaganda and cashed in on satisfying the hungers at top prices.
Urges to satisfy hungers arouse human beings and stimulate them to greater expenditures of interest and energy. Immoderate indulgence, especially in soporifics, diverts human beings from creative and social usefulness, makes them hapless victims of their animal appetites and denies them any effective role in broadening and ennobling human existence.
(from Chapter III, The Conscience of a Radical, Scott Nearing, Harborside, Maine: Social Science Institute, 1965)
Buy a copy of the book directly from The Good Life Center, Harborside, Maine.
[Click here for all seven roadblocks.]
These hungers are for self-preservation; food and drink; sex satisfaction; power; something for nothing; soporifics. All six plead personal or social necessity as a justification for top priority. Over-indulgence in any or all of them warps, frustrates and cripples normal human functioning and prevents the rounded fruition of human life. All six demand attention, time and energy to a point at which the undisciplined individual is wholly involved and totally committed. Other aspects of life recede into the background until the satisfaction of particular human hungers enslaves the victim.
Food, drink, air, sunshine and sex are prerequisites to the continuance of human life. Without them there would be no life as we know it. All are essential elements in the preservation of the individual and the human race. They are the basis of life and are among the driving forces animating the individual and the race. Man shares these hungers with animals, birds and insects. They are general characteristics of terrestrial creatures.
In a previous section I commented on greed for power. Power hunger is easily stimulated in concentrations of population. The urge behind human hungers inheres in the individual. Sex satisfaction demands at least one partner. Power hunger is associated with population aggregates from the family to larger and more complex social groups.
Gambling (taking a chance on getting something for nothing) is an urge arising out of group life. Drug addiction stems from the effort to overcome pain, to compensate for nutritional imbalance, to off-set weariness and exhaustion or emotional disappointments, as an alternative to boredom.
Through the ages unscrupulous exploiters have used human hungers as a source of easy money. As society moved from a scarcity level to a level of abundance, crafty crooks and grasping businessmen have artfully stimulated human hungers by various forms of propaganda and cashed in on satisfying the hungers at top prices.
Urges to satisfy hungers arouse human beings and stimulate them to greater expenditures of interest and energy. Immoderate indulgence, especially in soporifics, diverts human beings from creative and social usefulness, makes them hapless victims of their animal appetites and denies them any effective role in broadening and ennobling human existence.
(from Chapter III, The Conscience of a Radical, Scott Nearing, Harborside, Maine: Social Science Institute, 1965)
Buy a copy of the book directly from The Good Life Center, Harborside, Maine.
[Click here for all seven roadblocks.]
USDA advocates, then denounces, vegetarian diet
As Mark Bittman reports in the New York Times, an internal newsletter at the USDA (“Greening Headquarters Update”, July 23, 2012) promoted not only “meatless Mondays” but even vegetarianism:
environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights, vegetarianism, anarchism, ecoanarchism
One simple way to reduce your environmental impact while dining at our cafeterias is to participate in the “Meatless Monday” initiative http://www.meatlessmonday.com/. This international effort, as the name implies, encourages people not to eat meat on Mondays. Meatless Monday is an initiative of The Monday Campaign Inc. in association with the John Hopkins School of Public Health.Cowed by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the USDA has renounced those facts and suppressed the newsletter. The NCBA complained that the USDA “does not understand the efforts being made in rural America to produce food and fiber for a growing global population in a very sustainable way”. Bittman notes
How will going meatless one day of the week help the environment? The production of meat, especially beef (and dairy as well), has a large environmental impact. According to the U.N., animal agriculture is a major source of greenhouse gases and climate change. It also wastes resources. It takes 7,000 kg of grain to make 1,000 kg of beef. In addition, beef production requires a lot of water, fertilizer, fossil fuels, and pesticides. In addition there are many health concerns related to the excessive consumption of meat. While a vegetarian diet could have a beneficial impact on a person’s health and the environment, many people are not ready to make that commitment. Because Meatless Monday involves only one day a week, it is a small change that could produce big results.
that meat is not fiber, that its industrial-style production is not sustainable by any normal definition, and that “agriculture” produces the food “Meatless Monday” advocates eat, too.The only possible good that might come of the USDA's brief airing of the truth, if not their subsequent caving to corporatist pressure, is that reactionaries like Senator Charles Grassley and Representative Steve King, both of Iowa, have promised to hasten their own demises by doubling down on their corpse consumption every Monday.
environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights, vegetarianism, anarchism, ecoanarchism
July 31, 2012
Seven Roadblocks to the Good Life: (3) Six Corrosives Which Deplete Vitality
Human beings are unable to devote themselves to constructive and creative tasks because of six corrosives which deplete vitality. They are malnutrition, ill health (physical, mental, emotional), worry, anger, fear, and hatred. Each one of the six is present, to a greater or less degree, in every human life.
Food intake is one of the chief sources of human energy. The human organism, like any other functional apparatus, can operate only so long as it is adequately supplied with the necessary nourishment. Perhaps three-fifths of mankind attempts to survive on a diet that is insufficient in quantity. Many among the other two-fifths consume stale, processed, devitalized food which is lacking in nutritive value. Comparatively few people are aware of the need for correct food combinations. A rapidly increasing proportion of mankind is being actively poisoned by pollution of the water supply, by the use of chemicals in food processing, and by spraying and dusting foods with high-power poisons aimed at the prevention of food deterioration and at the destruction of harmful micro-organisms and vermin.
Resulting malnutrition leads to a crippling failure of energy. Continued over long periods it lowers vitality, impairs the efficiency of body tissues and organs and becomes a major factor in physical degeneration. Malnutrition is one of the chief causes of physical, mental and emotional disability. There is a direct relation between nutritional deficiencies and the mal-functioning of the human organism.
Ill health also can be caused by natal influences, by accidents, by contagions and infections, by the disintegration of the organism. Where these causes are sufficiently severe, they result in premature death; otherwise they use up vital energy, and force their victims to drag themselves about, suffering constant pain or to spend their days in wheel chairs or in bed.
Worry is hard to measure. There are chronic worriers who devote their lives to this futile practice. There are victims of occasional worry spells. Under stress, most people worry-devoting their attention and consuming their energies upon some imaginary situation which seldom or never actually arises.
Anger, fear and hatred are widely prevalent in the daily lives of human beings. All consume energy, lower vitality and detract attention from constructive and creative endeavors.
Corrosive factors which deplete human vitality should be avoided with the same care that one takes in avoiding collision with a tree, a wall or a moving vehicle. All detract from health and well-being. The normal, healthy individual attempts to avoid them as a matter of course. But mass poverty, mass infection and mass unemployment cannot be dealt with by individuals acting singly. They are social mal-adjustments. As such they can be handled effectively only by social plans and action programs aimed to revive the victims of social maladjustment and to make the changes necessary to remove the causes that undermine individual health and fitness and thus lower the levels of community well-being.
(from Chapter III, The Conscience of a Radical, Scott Nearing, Harborside, Maine: Social Science Institute, 1965)
Buy a copy of the book directly from The Good Life Center, Harborside, Maine.
[Click here for all seven roadblocks.]
Food intake is one of the chief sources of human energy. The human organism, like any other functional apparatus, can operate only so long as it is adequately supplied with the necessary nourishment. Perhaps three-fifths of mankind attempts to survive on a diet that is insufficient in quantity. Many among the other two-fifths consume stale, processed, devitalized food which is lacking in nutritive value. Comparatively few people are aware of the need for correct food combinations. A rapidly increasing proportion of mankind is being actively poisoned by pollution of the water supply, by the use of chemicals in food processing, and by spraying and dusting foods with high-power poisons aimed at the prevention of food deterioration and at the destruction of harmful micro-organisms and vermin.
Resulting malnutrition leads to a crippling failure of energy. Continued over long periods it lowers vitality, impairs the efficiency of body tissues and organs and becomes a major factor in physical degeneration. Malnutrition is one of the chief causes of physical, mental and emotional disability. There is a direct relation between nutritional deficiencies and the mal-functioning of the human organism.
Ill health also can be caused by natal influences, by accidents, by contagions and infections, by the disintegration of the organism. Where these causes are sufficiently severe, they result in premature death; otherwise they use up vital energy, and force their victims to drag themselves about, suffering constant pain or to spend their days in wheel chairs or in bed.
Worry is hard to measure. There are chronic worriers who devote their lives to this futile practice. There are victims of occasional worry spells. Under stress, most people worry-devoting their attention and consuming their energies upon some imaginary situation which seldom or never actually arises.
Anger, fear and hatred are widely prevalent in the daily lives of human beings. All consume energy, lower vitality and detract attention from constructive and creative endeavors.
Corrosive factors which deplete human vitality should be avoided with the same care that one takes in avoiding collision with a tree, a wall or a moving vehicle. All detract from health and well-being. The normal, healthy individual attempts to avoid them as a matter of course. But mass poverty, mass infection and mass unemployment cannot be dealt with by individuals acting singly. They are social mal-adjustments. As such they can be handled effectively only by social plans and action programs aimed to revive the victims of social maladjustment and to make the changes necessary to remove the causes that undermine individual health and fitness and thus lower the levels of community well-being.
(from Chapter III, The Conscience of a Radical, Scott Nearing, Harborside, Maine: Social Science Institute, 1965)
Buy a copy of the book directly from The Good Life Center, Harborside, Maine.
[Click here for all seven roadblocks.]
Thoughts on Americanism and Freedom
When I was growing up in Florida some decades ago, the state required an “Americanism versus Communism” course in 11th grade. “Communism” meant not any economic system, but rather the totalitarian Soviet Union, and “Americanism” presumably its opposite — not only in the means of working towards achieving the universal aspirations of human society, but also in what those aspirations might be. Mostly, of course, the intention was to define Communism as all bad and Americanism as all good. (Our teacher subverted the state’s intention by teaching us a lot of Russian history and about world power politics. She used the official course guide as a spur to commentary and analysis. Today, illustrating how much freedom has been lost with the ascendancy of capitalism, it is unlikely that she could have gotten away with that.)
Americanism is the premise that market capitalism is the best means of securing individual freedom. At its most crude level, it is the belief that everyone striving to maximize his or her own acquisition of wealth ensures the most equitable distribution of wealth. (And too bad if you have other interests than such striving and acquisition — that’s your choice — or if you lack the advantages of the already wealthy — that’s just a greater spur.) The belief has followed that capitalism is synonymous with freedom; and consequently, that any social structure that limits the liberty of capital is an enemy of freedom itself.
Yet by definition, capitalism is a system of hoarding, such that the success of one requires the diminished wealth of many. The imperatives of Americanism require an imperial program of conquest and exploitation both to prevent socialist sharing and to expand wealth.
As more of the world is forced to live by the terms of Americanism, however, it must keep more of its own wealth. American capital must turn on its own citizens to maintain the level of hoarding it expects. Capitalism becomes the enemy of freedom, and Americanism reveals itself as fascism — no longer pretending to benefit the many and redoubling the myth that a weakening of the power of capital is a threat to the liberty of all.
The lie of American democracy also is revealed. Dissent that challenges the myth of Americanism is viewed as not just subversive, but even treasonous: a rebellious act of war. As for an alternate vision of individual freedom, secured by a social system that equitably shares the common wealth, that does not allow one individual or group to hoard while others suffer a lack of food, shelter, leisure, medical care, education, and economic security — such a vision can not be allowed publicity. Its proponents must be vilified as terrorists, whose aim is no less than to bring down the American way of life (which is true, as far as Americanism is a barrier to freedom and not its guarantor).
Politics in the U.S.A. forbids a challenge to Americanism. Only a tinkering with the capitalist myth is allowed, an occasional crumb when the people clamor for bread. One party continues to work to expand Americanism throughout the world, and the other party works to reinforce the equation of unfettered capital and individual freedom. Liberalism is the tool of the former, religion the latter’s weapon. Both muster the energies of self-righteousness and fear which characterize their cynical politics. Hand in hand, they protect capital and strengthen its power against the needs of the people. War — at home as well as abroad — is the price the people must pay for the freedom of capital. The approved parties must either minimize or deny, or deny as currently impractical, the fact that every expansion of popular freedom has been by the limitation of capitalist power.
human rights, anarchism, anarchosyndicalism
July 30, 2012
Seven Roadblocks to the Good Life: (2) Greed for Wealth, Prestige, Power
Webster’s dictionary defines greed as “an unsatiable desire to possess or acquire something to an amount inordinately beyond what one needs or desires.” I would modify this definition thus: greed is the desire to have more of a good, service, or experience after one has had a reasonable sufficiency. Greed violates the Greek slogan “nothing too much.”
Greed shows itself in five chief directions: getting and keeping goods and services; attracting attention to oneself; gaining recognition, prestige, status; attaining and maintaining security, and achieving and holding power.
Miserliness is the most extreme expression of greed for goods and services. The miser accumulates for the sake of accumulation, and short of extreme provocation he refuses to part with any of his hoard. In a society based on scarcity only a genius can reach this level of greed. In a modern, affluent society, however, the abundance and variety of goods and services makes it possible for even the rag-picker to acquire and accumulate more than he can use. Stories of beggars who die leaving valuable property and large bank accounts often make the news columns.
The average home in an industrialized community is littered, cluttered and stuffed with clothing, bric-a-brac, gadgets, utensils, appliances, most of which have no great aesthetic appeal and are seldom used. Despite this glut, the householder continues to acquire, greedily, as occasion offers.
Attracting notice to oneself is a second expression of greed. It begins in infancy and grows into extreme forms of egomania among adults. It is particularly prevalent in a society of potential abundance which measures success in life by the quantity and variety of possessions. “How much is he worth” means “how much has he accumulated.”
Greed finds a third outlet in the desire to gain and hold recognition, prestige, position, status. Status seeking and status keeping preoccupy people whose objective is to get ahead of others by climbing toward the top of the social pyramid.
Greed turned in the direction of power is usually called “ambition.” Power is the possibility of pushing others around, using others to advance the interests of the power-seeker, keeping others in a permanent position of subordination and, if possible, servility. The power-holder is able to satisfy his power urge by keeping the largest possible number of his fellows at his beck and call. In a private enterprise society the power-hungry gain and hold economic, political and social positions which enable them to say: “You work and I will enjoy the product of your labor.”
Greed for power may be seen in families, on school playgrounds, in the economy, notably in politics and in general social relations. It is found at all levels, local, regional, national.
Greed is one of the chief driving forces in an acquisitive society. The clever, the shrewd, the unscrupulous use their talents to get and keep more than their just share of life’s good things. By this unreasonable accumulation of material possessions the greedy separate themselves from their fellows and lay the foundations for a class and caste-divided society.
Greed is an essentially anti-social force. In an acquisitive society it not only has unique opportunities for expression but it absorbs attention, consumes energy and expresses itself in activities which are directed to the aggrandizement of one, rather than the advancement of general well-being.
(from Chapter III, The Conscience of a Radical, Scott Nearing, Harborside, Maine: Social Science Institute, 1965)
Buy a copy of the book directly from The Good Life Center, Harborside, Maine.
[Click here for all seven roadblocks.]
Greed shows itself in five chief directions: getting and keeping goods and services; attracting attention to oneself; gaining recognition, prestige, status; attaining and maintaining security, and achieving and holding power.
Miserliness is the most extreme expression of greed for goods and services. The miser accumulates for the sake of accumulation, and short of extreme provocation he refuses to part with any of his hoard. In a society based on scarcity only a genius can reach this level of greed. In a modern, affluent society, however, the abundance and variety of goods and services makes it possible for even the rag-picker to acquire and accumulate more than he can use. Stories of beggars who die leaving valuable property and large bank accounts often make the news columns.
The average home in an industrialized community is littered, cluttered and stuffed with clothing, bric-a-brac, gadgets, utensils, appliances, most of which have no great aesthetic appeal and are seldom used. Despite this glut, the householder continues to acquire, greedily, as occasion offers.
Attracting notice to oneself is a second expression of greed. It begins in infancy and grows into extreme forms of egomania among adults. It is particularly prevalent in a society of potential abundance which measures success in life by the quantity and variety of possessions. “How much is he worth” means “how much has he accumulated.”
Greed finds a third outlet in the desire to gain and hold recognition, prestige, position, status. Status seeking and status keeping preoccupy people whose objective is to get ahead of others by climbing toward the top of the social pyramid.
Greed turned in the direction of power is usually called “ambition.” Power is the possibility of pushing others around, using others to advance the interests of the power-seeker, keeping others in a permanent position of subordination and, if possible, servility. The power-holder is able to satisfy his power urge by keeping the largest possible number of his fellows at his beck and call. In a private enterprise society the power-hungry gain and hold economic, political and social positions which enable them to say: “You work and I will enjoy the product of your labor.”
Greed for power may be seen in families, on school playgrounds, in the economy, notably in politics and in general social relations. It is found at all levels, local, regional, national.
Greed is one of the chief driving forces in an acquisitive society. The clever, the shrewd, the unscrupulous use their talents to get and keep more than their just share of life’s good things. By this unreasonable accumulation of material possessions the greedy separate themselves from their fellows and lay the foundations for a class and caste-divided society.
Greed is an essentially anti-social force. In an acquisitive society it not only has unique opportunities for expression but it absorbs attention, consumes energy and expresses itself in activities which are directed to the aggrandizement of one, rather than the advancement of general well-being.
(from Chapter III, The Conscience of a Radical, Scott Nearing, Harborside, Maine: Social Science Institute, 1965)
Buy a copy of the book directly from The Good Life Center, Harborside, Maine.
[Click here for all seven roadblocks.]
Wildlife consultants hired to find minimal wildlife impact
Westwood Professional Services was hired as wildlife consultants by National Wind to find no threat to eagles from their proposed wind energy plant in Goodhue County, Minnesota. A presentation by Rob Bouta of Westwood Professional Services, titled “Wildlife Consultants: Narrowing the Gap between Wildlife Agencies and Wind Energy Developers”, clearly shows the fact that their interest is not in reducing — let alone preventing — risks to wildlife but in reducing the developer's risk of losing financing and approval by minimizing the perception of risks to wildlife with the appearance of objective science. Some excerpts:
Goal of Wildlife Consultantswind power, wind energy, wind turbines, wind farms, environment, environmentalism, animal rights
• Establish scientific credibility.
• Achieve an acceptable level of wildlife risk.
• Obtain agency approval or concurrence.
Scientific Credibility
• Consultants demonstrate or earn credibility
• Support conclusions with data
• Address concerns of neighbors
• Wildlife agencies have default credibility
• Viewed as experts by permitting agencies
How Much Does Science Matter?
• Permitting decisions are based on politics rather than science
• Perception is reality
• Null hypothesis of agencies: Presumed risk
• Influence the perception of decision makers
What Is Risk?
USFWS Land-Based Wind Energy Guidelines:
• The likelihood that adverse impacts will occur to individuals or populations of species of concern as a result of wind energy development and operation.
Wind Energy Developers:
• Anything that threatens the likelihood that a wind project can be successfully designed, permitted, financed, and constructed.
Challenges and Obstacles
Affect potential for wind project financing:
• Wind turbine curtailment
• Agency requests viewed as project risks
• Requests for concurrence met with requests for more studies
July 29, 2012
Seven Roadblocks to the Good Life: (1) Ignorance, Indifference, Inertia
Most universal of all the obstacles to human advancement and social improvement is the failure of most human beings to play a rational, energetic and conscious part in the direction of their own lives and of the social groups to which they belong. We attribute this failure to ignorance (not understanding or knowing); to indifference (not caring sufficiently to translate discomfort into action), and [to] inertia (continuing in the established ruts of tradition, custom and habit.
Ignorance, indifference and inertia are due to a failure of vision, and to unwillingness to couple understanding with effective action. Together they exercise their immense blocking influence over the thoughts and actions of human beings, because it is easier to stay put or drift with the current than it is to break away and swim upstream. Their influence is felt by all members of the human race. In the lives of most people, most of the time, these are the influences which determine both thought and action.
The immense hold which ignorance, indifference and inertia have over men’s lives is not due in the main to any deficiency in human nature, but to the deliberate, determined efforts of ruling minorities to maintain their authority and perpetuate their power. Until recent years, landlords, ecclesiasts and militarists needed docile, obedient dependents who would work, pay rent, contribute to the church and when necessary turn from their ordinary pursuits to fight in wars arranged by their masters.
Industrial revolution brought with it the need of sufficient technical skills to build, service, improve and direct the new machines and the increasingly complex social apparatus. A working class capable of reading drawings and specifications, carrying out technical directives and writing reports became a prime necessity. General education, developed to meet these new requirements, entailed grave dangers. Men and women trained to read and reason would not be content to promote the interests of their masters. Once trained, they were more than likely to advance their own interests and those of the groups or classes to which they belonged. In order to counter this danger, the masters provided the bread, beer and luxuries which have played such an important role in keeping industrial wage earners and the ranks of the rapidly growing middle class in line behind the interests of those who owned the economy and formulated public policy.
Today this phase of masters class activity is called variously advertising, persuasion, indoctrination, brain-washing or propaganda and is covered by one word: “promotion,” or, in the vernacular, “selling.” Men “sell” themselves. Enterprises “sell” ideas, merchandise, services, beliefs, policies. Promotion is taken for granted in business. It is equally widespread in politics. It is the coin current in religion, education and in the multitude of patriotic and social service organizations.
New means of communication and recently developed channels of information have played an important part in this process. Tidal waves of national loyalties, pride and aspiration have helped in the same direction. Equipped with the new technology of persuasion and coercion, the masters are able to keep 24 hour supervision over those who serve them and promote their interests. The same instruments are equally effective against their opponents and enemies at home and abroad.
Modern society is conditioned, rather than enlightened, at state expense and under state control. The process is called “educational.” Unquestionably modern education encourages and imparts technical skills. The educational apparatus presently existing in the “free world” turns out a citizen who is ignorant, insensitive and unaware of the forces, techniques, instruments and machinations which plan, arrange, organize and supervise the environment in which he exists. The products of this conditioning live in deadly fear of change, lest it lead to “communism.” Dulled into the belief that whatever is, is right in this best of all possible worlds, citizens accept regulation, and conform to a social pattern designed by their exploiters to keep their victims ignorant, indifferent, inert.
(from Chapter III, The Conscience of a Radical, Scott Nearing, Harborside, Maine: Social Science Institute, 1965)
Buy a copy of the book directly from The Good Life Center, Harborside, Maine.
[Click here for all seven roadblocks.]
Ignorance, indifference and inertia are due to a failure of vision, and to unwillingness to couple understanding with effective action. Together they exercise their immense blocking influence over the thoughts and actions of human beings, because it is easier to stay put or drift with the current than it is to break away and swim upstream. Their influence is felt by all members of the human race. In the lives of most people, most of the time, these are the influences which determine both thought and action.
The immense hold which ignorance, indifference and inertia have over men’s lives is not due in the main to any deficiency in human nature, but to the deliberate, determined efforts of ruling minorities to maintain their authority and perpetuate their power. Until recent years, landlords, ecclesiasts and militarists needed docile, obedient dependents who would work, pay rent, contribute to the church and when necessary turn from their ordinary pursuits to fight in wars arranged by their masters.
Industrial revolution brought with it the need of sufficient technical skills to build, service, improve and direct the new machines and the increasingly complex social apparatus. A working class capable of reading drawings and specifications, carrying out technical directives and writing reports became a prime necessity. General education, developed to meet these new requirements, entailed grave dangers. Men and women trained to read and reason would not be content to promote the interests of their masters. Once trained, they were more than likely to advance their own interests and those of the groups or classes to which they belonged. In order to counter this danger, the masters provided the bread, beer and luxuries which have played such an important role in keeping industrial wage earners and the ranks of the rapidly growing middle class in line behind the interests of those who owned the economy and formulated public policy.
Today this phase of masters class activity is called variously advertising, persuasion, indoctrination, brain-washing or propaganda and is covered by one word: “promotion,” or, in the vernacular, “selling.” Men “sell” themselves. Enterprises “sell” ideas, merchandise, services, beliefs, policies. Promotion is taken for granted in business. It is equally widespread in politics. It is the coin current in religion, education and in the multitude of patriotic and social service organizations.
New means of communication and recently developed channels of information have played an important part in this process. Tidal waves of national loyalties, pride and aspiration have helped in the same direction. Equipped with the new technology of persuasion and coercion, the masters are able to keep 24 hour supervision over those who serve them and promote their interests. The same instruments are equally effective against their opponents and enemies at home and abroad.
Modern society is conditioned, rather than enlightened, at state expense and under state control. The process is called “educational.” Unquestionably modern education encourages and imparts technical skills. The educational apparatus presently existing in the “free world” turns out a citizen who is ignorant, insensitive and unaware of the forces, techniques, instruments and machinations which plan, arrange, organize and supervise the environment in which he exists. The products of this conditioning live in deadly fear of change, lest it lead to “communism.” Dulled into the belief that whatever is, is right in this best of all possible worlds, citizens accept regulation, and conform to a social pattern designed by their exploiters to keep their victims ignorant, indifferent, inert.
(from Chapter III, The Conscience of a Radical, Scott Nearing, Harborside, Maine: Social Science Institute, 1965)
Buy a copy of the book directly from The Good Life Center, Harborside, Maine.
[Click here for all seven roadblocks.]
July 20, 2012
I live in a dangerous neighborhood
Roger Ebert writes:
I was sitting in a Chicago bar one night with my friend McHugh when a guy from down the street came in and let us see that he was packing heat.
“Why do you need to carry a gun?” McHugh asked him.
“I live in a dangerous neighborhood.”
“It would be safer if you moved.”
I was sitting in a Chicago bar one night with my friend McHugh when a guy from down the street came in and let us see that he was packing heat.
“Why do you need to carry a gun?” McHugh asked him.
“I live in a dangerous neighborhood.”
“It would be safer if you moved.”
July 17, 2012
Diggers 2012: towards a new Magna Carta
George Monbiot writes in The Guardian:
To be young in the post-industrial nations today is to be excluded. Excluded from the comforts enjoyed by preceding generations; excluded from jobs; excluded from hopes of a better world; excluded from self-ownership.
Those with degrees are owned by the banks before they leave college. Housing benefit is being choked off. Landlords now demand rents so high that only those with the better jobs can pay. Work has been sliced up and outsourced into a series of mindless repetitive tasks, whose practitioners are interchangeable. Through globalization and standardization, through unemployment and the erosion of collective bargaining and employment laws, big business now asserts a control over its workforce almost unprecedented in the age of universal suffrage.
The promise the old hold out to the young is a lifetime of rent, debt and insecurity.
diggers2012.wordpress.com
human rights, anarchism, ecoanarchism
To be young in the post-industrial nations today is to be excluded. Excluded from the comforts enjoyed by preceding generations; excluded from jobs; excluded from hopes of a better world; excluded from self-ownership.
Those with degrees are owned by the banks before they leave college. Housing benefit is being choked off. Landlords now demand rents so high that only those with the better jobs can pay. Work has been sliced up and outsourced into a series of mindless repetitive tasks, whose practitioners are interchangeable. Through globalization and standardization, through unemployment and the erosion of collective bargaining and employment laws, big business now asserts a control over its workforce almost unprecedented in the age of universal suffrage.
The promise the old hold out to the young is a lifetime of rent, debt and insecurity.
diggers2012.wordpress.com
human rights, anarchism, ecoanarchism
July 16, 2012
Wind Energy Impacts on Groundwater Resources
If a wind energy project is proposed for a site that is within a groundwater recharge area, any contaminants released at the site have the potential to be carried downward with the infiltrating stormwater, leading to contamination of the aquifer. Groundwater discharge points occur as seepage into wetlands, lakes, and streams. If a site is proposed in a groundwater discharge area, surface disturbances (such as construction or the building of stormwater retention facilities) that disrupt the local hydrology can lead to such consequences as draining the wetland or causing stream flow to become intermittent, even if the activity does not occur directly in the wetland or surface water.
During construction blasting can have an adverse impact on water supplies. Groundwater yields (including both wells and springs) are influenced by the flow of groundwater through the aquifer materials. Any disruption to these materials can potentially affect both groundwater flow and water quality. In some cases, vibrations from blasting can cause aquifer materials to collapse and compact, thereby limiting flow. In addition, bedrock fractures may be created that draw in flow from other portions of bedrock with poorer water quality, and the use of blasting agents that contain perchlorate may result in groundwater contamination.
—Wind Energy Siting Handbook, American Wind Energy Association
wind power, wind energy, wind turbines, wind farms, environment, environmentalism
July 15, 2012
‘Dominion’: Judeo-Christian justification for meat-eating?
And God said: Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he them. And God blessed them; and God said unto them: Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that creepeth upon the earth.
And God said: Behold, I have given you every herb yielding seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed — to you it shall be for food; and to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is a living soul, every green herb for food.
The last word above is rendered as “meat” in the King James and many other translations. The original Hebrew word, AKLH, in fact means simply “food” or “eating”. The translation used here is that of the Jewish Publication Society of America (1917).
Regarding “dominion”, compare “rule”:
And God made the two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night; and the stars. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness.
The words are also different in the original Hebrew. Whereas the sun, moon, and stars provide guiding lights to and define day and night, man simply dominates the rest of creation as the conscious embodiment of the creator, as a trustee of the creator. In the next section describing food, the word dominion is not used.
There is nothing here to justify destructive exploitation of the earth's resources or harassment, enslavement, and consumption of animals, human or otherwise.
As for the commandment to “subdue” the earth, following the command to “replenish” the earth it clearly refers to a nurturing agriculture. Indeed, God plants a garden in Eden and puts man in charge:
And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.
But this is a prelapsarian idyll and hardly applicable to the realities of later life. Because, of course, the overseers eventually took what was meant for only the boss, who readily sensed they were hiding something and expelled them:
Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in toil shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread ...
Still nothing about exploitation and consumption of animals.
Alas, by chapter 4 of Genesis, “the Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering” of “the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof”, even to the extent of not respecting Cain and Cain's offering of “the fruit of the ground”. The writers are already rationalizing their way of life, which was rather different from what God (called “ALHYM” in the first 3 chapters) commanded Adam and Eve, even to now represent the thoughts of God (now called “YHVH”) as simply reflecting their own.
Which is exactly where we still are today, where vegetarians are cursed as Cain and the only moral demand in slaughtering animals is that it be done with “respect”, which doesn't change anything. A being killed without respect is as dead as one killed with. It means nothing to talk about acting “humanely” when the result is the same as without such talk.
Latter-day apologists of the killing and eating of animals are as degraded as the priests writing Genesis 4, shaping morality to fit their habits and appetites and prejudices rather than the other way around. Making the effort to make sure your victim is healthy and happy, and/or taking the time to pray over your act, is not acting morally, but rather psychotically.
And there is nothing nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing whereof it is said: See this is new? — it hath been already, in the ages which were before us.
environment, environmentalism, animal rights, vegetarianism, ecoanarchism
And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he them. And God blessed them; and God said unto them: Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that creepeth upon the earth.
And God said: Behold, I have given you every herb yielding seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed — to you it shall be for food; and to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is a living soul, every green herb for food.
The last word above is rendered as “meat” in the King James and many other translations. The original Hebrew word, AKLH, in fact means simply “food” or “eating”. The translation used here is that of the Jewish Publication Society of America (1917).
Regarding “dominion”, compare “rule”:
And God made the two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night; and the stars. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness.
The words are also different in the original Hebrew. Whereas the sun, moon, and stars provide guiding lights to and define day and night, man simply dominates the rest of creation as the conscious embodiment of the creator, as a trustee of the creator. In the next section describing food, the word dominion is not used.
There is nothing here to justify destructive exploitation of the earth's resources or harassment, enslavement, and consumption of animals, human or otherwise.
As for the commandment to “subdue” the earth, following the command to “replenish” the earth it clearly refers to a nurturing agriculture. Indeed, God plants a garden in Eden and puts man in charge:
And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.
But this is a prelapsarian idyll and hardly applicable to the realities of later life. Because, of course, the overseers eventually took what was meant for only the boss, who readily sensed they were hiding something and expelled them:
Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in toil shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread ...
Still nothing about exploitation and consumption of animals.
Alas, by chapter 4 of Genesis, “the Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering” of “the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof”, even to the extent of not respecting Cain and Cain's offering of “the fruit of the ground”. The writers are already rationalizing their way of life, which was rather different from what God (called “ALHYM” in the first 3 chapters) commanded Adam and Eve, even to now represent the thoughts of God (now called “YHVH”) as simply reflecting their own.
Which is exactly where we still are today, where vegetarians are cursed as Cain and the only moral demand in slaughtering animals is that it be done with “respect”, which doesn't change anything. A being killed without respect is as dead as one killed with. It means nothing to talk about acting “humanely” when the result is the same as without such talk.
Latter-day apologists of the killing and eating of animals are as degraded as the priests writing Genesis 4, shaping morality to fit their habits and appetites and prejudices rather than the other way around. Making the effort to make sure your victim is healthy and happy, and/or taking the time to pray over your act, is not acting morally, but rather psychotically.
And there is nothing nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing whereof it is said: See this is new? — it hath been already, in the ages which were before us.
environment, environmentalism, animal rights, vegetarianism, ecoanarchism
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