Members of Deep Green Resistance Canary Islands are creating a web conference on horizontal hostility, consisting of interviews with multiple speakers. “The aim of the conference is to raise consciousness about the mechanics of oppression
and how its complex but predictable ways operate to keep us all neatly “in our place”, divide us & effectively stop us achieving social, political, environmental & economic change as quickly as we need to.”
The first interview is of Max Wilbert, by Stella Strega. Wilbert describes some of the horizontal hostility he’s experienced and witnessed, mostly around the strong stance Deep Green Resistance has taken in defense of women’s right to their own space. He laments the loss to social justice and environmental movements when activists are incapable of organizing across political differences to work together on issues of mutual concern. This wedge is especially tragic when activists turn a legitimate passion for justice against each other in attacks on insufficient “purity.”
Wilbert also compares classic government COINTELPRO repression of social movements to contemporary Internet smear tactics recently laid out by JTRIG, a secret unit of the NSA. JTRIG is devoted to sowing distrust and suppressing social movements by manipulating online discourse, through, for example, publishing lies anonymously to discredit targeted people and groups.
Learn more about horizontal hostility and how we can defend against it by watching the video or playing the audio-only version of the interview below, or reading Max Wilbert’s The Modern COINTELPRO and How To Fight It.
Browse all Deep Green Resistance member appearances.