Posted on 10/21/2019 1:47:08 PM PDT by Mount Athos
Yes, yes, I know. The climate is breaking down. It’s urgent. An emergency. We’ve only got a few years left to ‘fix’ it.
Indeed, we won’t fix it. Weather patterns will become increasingly unstable and unpredictable, and the effects it will soon have on how humans around the world grow food will be devastating, likely causing harvests to fail across entire continents and food prices to sky-rocket. Millions have already suffered due to the amplified instability. We’re facing imminent societal collapse (whatever that means), both around the world and in the UK. All of our lives are soon going to radically change. None of this is particularly controversial. When a bus is driving with a certain momentum towards a person, it gets clearer and clearer that it will hit the person. After a certain point, it’s inevitable. And that’s where we stand now, with regards to the momentum of climatic change. The bus is about to hit us. Our lives are about to change. It’s not clear whether or not we’ll survive (as a species). Many species have already been run over. Two hundred species each and every day go extinct.
I’ve been with Extinction Rebellion (XR) from the start. I was one of the 15 people in April 2018 who came together and made the collective decision to try to create the conditions that would initiate a rebellion. I was a coordinator of one of the original five working groups, and I’ve been organising with XR day-and-night since then (frugally living off my savings so I don’t have to work, having quit an industry that paid me £1000/week). And I’ve been in RisingUp (the organisation from which XR has emerged) since the first RisingUp action in November 2016. I’m a RisingUp Holding Group member, and a member of the XR Guardianship Team.
And for the sake of transparency: that previous paragraph is all about me ‘pulling rank’ — I’m trying to convince you to listen to what I have to say…
And I’m here to say that XR isn’t about the climate. You see, the climate’s breakdown is a symptom of a toxic system of that has infected the ways we relate to each other as humans and to all life. This was exacerbated when European ‘civilisation’ was spread around the globe through cruelty and violence (especially) over the last 600 years of colonialism, although the roots of the infections go much further back.
As Europeans spread their toxicity around the world, they brought torture, genocide, carnage and suffering to the ends of the earth. Their cultural myths justified the horrors, such as the idea that indigenous people were animals (not humans), and therefore God had given us dominion over them. This was used to justify a multi-continent-wide genocide of tens of millions of people. The coming of the scientific era saw this intensify, as the world around us was increasingly seen as ‘dead’ matter — just sitting there waiting for us to exploit it and use it up. We’re now using it up faster than ever.
Euro-Americans violently imposed and taught dangerous delusions that they used to justify the exploitation and reinforced our dominance, while silencing worldviews that differed or challenged them. The UK’s hand in this was enormous, as can be seen by the size of the former British empire, and the dominance of the English language around the world. There is stark evidence that everyday racial bias continues in Britain, now, today. It’s worth naming some of these constructed delusions that have been coded into societies and institutions around the world: The delusion of white-supremacy centres whiteness and the experience of white people, constructing and perpetuating the myth that white people and their lives are somehow inherently better and more valuable than people of colour. The delusion of patriarchy centres the male experience, and excludes/hinders female assigned people from public life (reducing them to a possession or object for ownership or consumption). Patriarchy teaches dominating and competitive behaviours, and emphasises the idea that the world is a place of scarcity, separation and powerlessness.
The delusions of Eurocentrism include the notion that Europeans know what is best for the world. The delusions of hetero-sexism/heteronormativity propagate the idea that heterosexuality is ‘normal’ and that other expressions of sexuality are deviant. The delusions of class hierarchy uphold the theory that the rich elite are better/smarter/nobler than the rest of us, and make therefore better decisions. There are other delusions. These delusions have become ingrained in all of us, taught to us from a very young age.
None of these delusions have ended, although some of the arguments that supported them (e.g. phrenology) have been dispelled. They continue to play out through each of us, in our ways of relating, regardless of our identity. The current pride in the history of the British empire, or the idea that the USA is on the side of ‘good’, continues to enable neo-colonialism in 2019, taking the form of palm-oil plantations, resources wars, and the parasitical financial sector, to name but a few. The task of Extinction Rebellion is to dispel these delusions. We need to cure the causes of the infection, not just alleviate the symptoms. To focus on the climate’s breakdown (the symptom) without focusing attention on these toxic delusions (the causes) is a form a denialism. Worse, it’s a racist and sexist form of denialism, that takes away from the necessary focus of the need for all of us to de-colonise our selves.
My ancestors are European, some of whom claimed to ‘own’ people as slaves. There are black people with the name Basden in the Americas, and I have begun to mobilise my (white) family to make contact in order to seek to pay reparations.
However, my own accountability cannot be fully paid through this. The insanity* of the mind of the coloniser continues today. It continues in the extraction of fossil fuels, minerals and water from the earth. It continues in deforestation and industrial agriculture. It continues in a callous culture of consumption, which intensifies each Christmas. It continues in evictions and deportations. It continues in the ways of relating to those around us that perpetuate separation and division.
The result is isolation, pain and suffering. The result can be felt at the individual level — in the endemic levels of loneliness and mental-health illness. It can be felt at the community level — in the theft of land for plunder and profit by largely-European-and-US-based banks and corporations. And it can be felt at the global level — in the polluting of our air and oceans.
So Extinction Rebellion isn’t about the climate. It’s not even about ‘climate justice’**, although that is also important. If we only talk about the climate, we’re missing the deeper problems plaguing our culture. And if we don’t excise the cause of the infection, we can never hope to heal from it.
This article is calling to all of those who are involved in XR who sometimes slip into saying it’s a climate movement. It’s a call to the American rebels who made a banner saying “CLIMATE extinction rebellion”. It’s a call to the XR Media & Messaging teams to never get sloppy with the messaging and ‘reduce’ it to climate issues. It’s a call to the XR community to never say we’re a climate movement. Because we’re not. We’re a Rebellion. And we’re rebelling to highlight and heal from the insanity that is leading to our extinction. Now tell the truth and act like it.
This person has a mental problem. They ignore reality to their peril. (and ours)
This guy and group is channeling Paul Ehrlich with his “Population Bomb” book of 1968, and repeated articles/books of the 1970’s It never happened. Neither did the New Ice Age nor World death by Ozone depletion nor many of their other predictions. Now we have no summer sea ice in the arctic - wrong. The polar bears are going extinct - wrong. More powerful hurricanes - wrong. The list goes on and on.
What an extreme sociopath.
Extinction Rebellion is not about climate. It is about a political drive to take over centralized control of all human activities.
Its about hatred of humanity and America and capitalism in that order.
Liberals can set the example and commit voluntary human extinction.
Leave the rest of us out of it.
Back then leftist eggheads were warning us about global cooling. Today its global warming.
Note they never put out the daily list of freshly extinct species with its 200 bullet points and Latin species names.
And note how they believe in evolution but apparently think it stopped at some point and new species aren't evolving as we speak.
And everything to them is natural and behaves naturally except humans, so that when a beaver cuts down trees or builds a dam it is natural and good, but when a human cuts down trees or builds a dam it is unnatural and evil and not merely what humans naturally evolved to do.
Just remember this, it explains a lot: “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”
....”many false prophets will arise and mislead many”... Claiming to be wise, they have become fools!
At a news conference last week in Brussels, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.'s Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to destroy capitalism.
The author needs to join Hillary in her padded cell (Oval Office).
It’s getting clearer how the German people were forced into electing a man like Hitler.
The Soviet communist were the mass murderers of the then Soviet Union and they were not about to go down that route.
Now, between going “Nazi”, i.e. Trump, and the loons that infest the Democratic Party, the choice is easy.
Lots of blue collar Dims will make this choice, too.
Well he got one thing right - it’s not about climate. But then climate change activism isn’t about the climate either so he’s in good company.
A new age Charles Manson.
Getting dumb chicks into bed, getting wasted, all to “right’ the the “wrongs’ of the past generation only to cause more people to die, for a highly dubious “solution”
100%
Selfish stupid and lost people choose not to have children and dont have stable relationships
Anyone who tries to protest by being angry and aggressive shows anti-societal behavior
Doesn’t seem like they’re getting anywhere with their protests
Well, there was the homecoming queen (or whatever she was).
Until she became a hard-core drug user, a concubine for multiple Manson guys and eventually a rabid killer.
OTOH, she became a hero for Barack Obama’s friend, Bill Ayers’, wife.
What a fun group of people.
Exactly correct.
According to this fascist-in-waiting sophisticated moron, “ torture, genocide, carnage and suffering “ did not exist until Europeans promulgated it !
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