anarchy in the military?

I’ve been concerned for a long time about the tendency among anarchists and other radical folks to dehumanize the police and the military. Of course, there’s a lot of justified anger towards those who violently defend the interests of the rich and the privileged. When this anger hardens into hatred, into a desire for vengeance, though, it becomes harmful. Such hardening makes one less flexible, less able to respond to change, less able to imagine change. Hatred makes it harder for us to see clearly, to distinguish between a person and the choices they make, to differentiate between an institution and the people in it.

Being aware of those possibilities is crucial, because in order to give birth to the world we want, we need people to join us, including people currently working as police officers and soldiers. We need soldiers to disobey their orders. I have been thinking about this because of the recent report that “[s]ome of America’s most senior military commanders are prepared to resign if the White House orders a military strike against Iran[.]” While it is quite doubtful that these military leaders have had a charge of heart regarding hierarchy and imperialism, this is still good news. The news article linked to above reports that “[a] generals’ revolt on such a scale would be unprecedented.” This is a change that I would like to encourage, nurture, and spread. The most effective means to do so, at least at this point, seems to me to be indirectly. I want to create a culture of disobedience. I want to see poems, support groups, plays, anarchist holidays, music videos, epic graffiti, measured newspaper editorials, spontaneous operas – all praising disobedience and challenging to the santification of obedience.

Here’s a start, from Howard Zinn:

Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience… Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world, in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country.

unmasking homophobia

Leonard Pitts, in a recent column, argues that “[g]ay people should be thankful” for Tim Hardaway’s recent declaration of hatred. This is because Hardaway “cut through the clutter of weasel words and half-truths that traditionally surrounds homophobia, showed us what lies behind honeyed euphemisms (“traditional values”), and claims to speak for God.”

And what does lie behind those masks?

rootbones

I found new insight in this quote:

Real support can be very difficult to get, especially when indigenous people are the ones who are asking… You have a lot of people wanting to save the rain forest but not caring to listen to the people who live there. I think this happens because people in the dominant society think people are separate from the land. They think people can be removed from their lands, assimilated and educated, and still be OK. They also think the land can somehow survive in a healthy way without those people who are part of it. They don’t understand that these people are natural and essential to that environment.

-Jeannette Armstrong, interviewed by Derrick Jensen in Listening to the Land: Conversations about Nature, Culture, and Eros

I have a deep yearning to live in simultaneous union with the land and a community of people. This is difficult to achieve, for many reasons. One of which is the fact that, as a white person, I grew up in that dominant culture Jeannette Armstrong discusses. Starhawk, in The Twelve Wild Swans, elucidates this:

As Pagans practicing an earth-based spirituality in North America, we inherit a deeply painful contradiction. The very core of our spiritual life is our bond with the land, yet the land we live on was stolen from its original people. Their bonds were too often forcibly disrupted; their sacred places continue to be desecrated. Most of us come from ancestors that originated elsewhere. Yet this is where we were born; this is the land we know and love. How do we even begin healing this wound?

…[W]e must begin by facing the reality of our situation, unearthing the hidden histories. But… [we must] not wallow in guilt… We can resolve the pain of the past only by looking toward the future, asking, “What work do we need to do to make our communities ones that can foster diversity and resilience? How can we learn to know and begin to heal the land we live on? How do we become indigenous again?”

gleanings

Here are some interesting things I have come across online today:

Affinities: A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture, and Action… “a web-based journal that focuses on groups, movements, and communities that set out to construct sustainable alternatives to the racist, hetero-sexist system of liberal-capitalist nation-states.”

SIT DOWN! SIT DOWN!: an article about a pivotal, intense showdown between the United Auto Workers Union and General Motors in Flint in 1937.

Oaxacan Teachers Support the APPO and the Ninth Megamarch: an update about the uprising in Oaxaca.

rachel p blogs about her thoughts on the war, and includes this call for submissions from Critical Moment:

What can be done to end the bloody, wasteful war in Iraq? Now more than ever we need ambitious thinking to spark action to end the war.

Critical Moment invites you to contribute your vision to a special section in our next issue on “Ideas to End the War.”

Submissions to this section should be one to three paragraphs long and are due Sunday, February 11 at 5PM. Please forward this call for contributions to people in the Southeast Michigan area who will challenge themselves to envision a way towards a just end to the war.

Contributions to this section can be sent to mike(at)alliedmediaconference.org.

Hecate quotes Derrick Jensen: “No Population Can Survive A Global Economy”

Happy Imbolc!

(If you want to learn more about Imbolc, check out this post. Here’s another interesting take as well.)

To celebrate, I’m joining in the Second Annual Brigid in Cyberspace Poetry Reading. Here is a poem by one of my favorite writers, Margaret Atwood.

Against Still Life

Orange in the middle of a table:

It isn’t enough
to walk around it
at a distance, saying
it’s an orange:
nothing to do
with us, nothing
else: leave it alone

I want to pick it up
in my hand
I want to peel the
skin off; I want
more to be said to me
than just Orange:
want to be told
everything it has to say

And you, sitting across
the table, at a distance, with
your smile contained, and like the orange
in the sun: silent:

Your silence
isn’t enough for me
now, no matter with what
contentment you fold
your hands together; I want
anything you can say
in the sunlight:
stories of your various
childhoods, aimless journeyings,
your loves; your articulate
skeleton; your posturings; your lies.

These orange silences
(sunlight and hidden smile)
make me want to
wrench you into saying;
now I’d crack your skull
like a walnut, split it like a pumpkin
to make you talk, or get
a look inside

But quietly:
if I take the orange
with care enough and hold it
gently

I may find
an egg
a sun
an orange moon
perhaps a skull; center
of all energy
resting in my hand

can change it to
whatever I desire
it to be

and you, man, orange afternoon
lover, wherever
you sit across from me
(tables, trains, buses)
if I watch
quietly enough
and long enough
at last, you will say
(maybe without speaking)

(there are mountains
inside your skull
garden and chaos, ocean
and hurricane; certain
corners of rooms, portraits
of great-grandmothers, curtains
of a particular shade;
your deserts; your private
dinosaurs; the first
woman)

all I need to know:
tell me
everything
just as it was
from the beginning.

From Selected Poems I: Poems Selected and New 1965-1975 by Margaret Atwood. Copyright © 1987 by Margaret Atwood.