Person or Group: Deep Green Resistance

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Active resistance: The Decision to Die, The Decision to Kill

In this new essay, Will Falk of DGR San Diego explores the extreme possibilities of violence: choosing to die, and choosing to kill. He asks how these decisions relate to the ongoing violence of civilization and asks what we need to do, and what we’re willing to do in response:

It is becoming increasingly clear the dominant culture must be stopped. The more effective we become at resisting, the more violence will be visited upon us. Will we be strong enough to decide to die for a better world? Will we be strong enough to decide to kill for a better world? If this sounds too extreme, then I ask you what decisions were faced by Tecumseh, Nat Turner, Crazy Horse, Denmark Vesey, and Padráic Pearse when they picked up rifles and hatchets to meet bullets and swords?

Falk grapples with the question of how to justify violent resistance to violent abusers, drawing on his participation recently in a group discussion of tree spiking:

When I imagine this logging operation and listen to people urging advocates of direct action tactics like tree spiking to think of the loggers that may be hurt or to disregard any option that involves violence, I cannot help but ask: What about the trees? What about the mycelia networks living in mutual relationship with tree roots? What about the chicks living in the treetops?

These are important questions for individuals and organizations to ask themselves and address. Violence is already happening all around us, for our immediate benefit but probably leading to our premature deaths. Will we face this honestly and make active decisions about whether to die, whether to kill?

Read the entire essay: Will Falk – The Decision to Die, the Decision to Kill.

Interview of Meghan Murphy

Ernesto Aguilar, a former DGR member, interviewed Meghan Murphy of Feminist Current for Women’s History Month in March 2013. Murphy presents a clear and articulate analysis of the current state of online feminism – strengths and weaknesses, successes and works in progress, allies and backlash. She spoke extensively on the destructive tendency of online discussions to turn into horizontal hostility, and the ongoing pattern of silencing women:

I don’t think that attacking and harassing feminists online counts as activism, or as supporting women, even if you kind of pretend you’re doing it on behalf of women. Regardless of how you frame it, it’s still about woman-hating, and it’s about anti-feminism, and that’s not progressive. If you’re a man and you’re harassing or silencing women, you can’t pretend to be a progressive person or a person who cares about liberty or human rights or women’s lives or the well being of women. That’s not what allies do.

Later in the interview, she gets specific about a prominent silencing mechanism:

There’s this thing that’s become popular in the feminist blogosphere, and that’s this overuse of the phobia language. I think that’s a big problem. It’s become common practice to label any [feminist] critique as a phobia. You hear things like “kink phobia”, or “whore phobia”, “transphobia”, on and on and on. And I’ve personally been accused of all of these things, and I don’t hate or fear prostituted women or trans people or kinky people.

What I want to have is conversations, and this is just another way to shut down conversation, and it’s a part of the bullying that goes on in some parts of online feminism. It’s about keeping people in line, and it’s about keeping conversations restricted within narrow boundaries. If you don’t like what someone says, you can call them some version of “phobic” and you can call someone a bigot and everyone shuts up. These are kind of the magic words that put fear in every feminist’s heart, because they know that if they’re called one of these things – some kind of “phobic” – that no one will stick up for them, because everyone else is afraid of being labeled by association. Everyone’s afraid to have real conversations, because they see what happens, and they see what happens to other feminists, and they don’t want that to happen to them.

Listen to the entire interview embedded below (originally posted at Feminist Current). And for elaboration on the tactic of shutting down feminist discourse by threatening to apply vague but powerful labels, see the latest article at Feminist Current: “How ‘TERF’ works”, by Sarah Ditum.

Download mp3

What Is a Woman? – New Yorker article

The New Yorker just published “What Is a Woman? – The dispute between radical feminism and transgenderism” by Michelle Goldberg. Her piece provides a good summary of the differences in political analysis between radical feminsts and liberal transgenderists, from their different views on gender and whether “girl brains” exist to the real-world effects on women. Having interviewed Lierre Keith and Rachel of DGR, other radical feminists veteran and new, and prominent transactivists, Goldberg provides a useful introduction to this decades-old debate.

The article makes clear the need for women to have women-only safe spaces for meeting, organizing, and letting down their guard. Goldberg describes the pattern of threats against and silencing of women who question queer theory, from deplatforming to cancelation of venues to straight-up death threats. (The article does not attempt to cover transactivists’ pattern of physically assaulting women who disagree with them.) The article quotes Sandy Stone, a man who identifies as a woman: “I am going to have to say [to women who want women-only spaces], It’s your place to stay out of spaces where transgender male-to-female people go. It’s not our job to avoid you.” Sandy’s statement perfectly illustrates the male entitlement behavior radical feminists are working so hard to dismantle.

Read the whole article to better understand radical feminism & transgenderism, and accusations of transphobia against Deep Green Resistance

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Short reflection on Unis’tot’en Camp by Justin Ellenbecker

Justin Ellenbecker, one of the DGR members who joined the July caravan to the Unis’tot’en Camp, reports back on his experience:

I’ve had many opportunities over recent years to attend some of the best training in theoretical concepts and workshops. This action camp provided that and something deeper: a chance to join with those on the front lines, to be a part of actively resisting, guided by people who understand the need to militantly respond to the threats facing the living world. I personally witnessed before my eyes people undergoing radical changes as they saw the material needs for a true resistance as more important than their ideological purity. I spent hours on security, construction, and permaculture tasks where for once the work was more important than group affiliation or rumor mongering. Conversations always took a path towards how the environmental movement needs to start winning offensive battles, crippling the means for those in power to destroy living ecosystems. People new and veteran to this type of work were tossing away the shells of symbolic dogmatism they had long sheltered themselves in, and craving more concrete ways to challenge the dominant culture. I dare say I found a place where my pessimism and extreme caution weren’t a necessary facet of negotiating the world of activism.

This is a place to get work done, and there is much work left to do. If you think you can possibly make it to the area, directly support the camp. If you can’t make it in person, donations of money and materials are always needed, and there may be ways to volunteer from afar. Please get in touch!

Will Falk series on Unis’tot’en Camp

DGR member Will Falk has been writing a regular series on his experiences at the Unis’tot’en Camp blockade of proposed pipeline construction. We’ve highlighted some of them here already, but thought it would be useful to link to the whole series of thoughtful essays on what it takes to build a true culture of resistance, and for members of settler culture to ally with indigenous peoples on the front lines:

Deep Green Resistance East Coast Roadshow videos

We reported a while back on the summer 2012 East Coast Roadshow. We recorded the presentation at the final stop in Washington, D.C. View the videos below (English subtitles available), or browse all our Deep Green Resistance youtube videos or Deep Green Resistance member appearances.

Sam Leah

Sam Leah gives a crash course in what civilization is, how it works, and why it can’t continue.

Rachel

Rachel analyzes environmental activism to date, including an explanation of liberal vs radical approaches.

Xander Knox

Xander Knox looks briefly at what we can learn from past resistance movements. Unfortunately, the recording cuts off before he describes the resulting DGR strategy of Decisive Ecological Warfare.

Horizontal Hostility Conference – Max Wilbert

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.

Download mp3

Browse all Deep Green Resistance member appearances.

Feminist Current – smart analysis of feminist issues

Meghan Murphy at Feminist Current writes a steady column of insightful and incisive articles from a strong feminist perspective, and regularly interviews women and men on a broad range of feminist issues. She lives in Canada, so some of her focus is specific to that country, but most of it is relevant to all of North America and the rest of the world. Smart and often funny, her analysis from current events to issues fought by feminists for decades is always worth the read. She also does a good job of moderating comments, so the space is useful and safe for women and feminist allies to have productive discussions.

Last summer, Murphy interviewed DGR’s Rachel and Lexy Garza in the podcast Deep Green Resistance Under Attack, and has provided outstanding coverage in general of the backlash to radical feminism by Men’s Rights Activists, trans/queer activists, and other misogynist attackers of women. You can see all the available Feminist Current podcasts or read the most recent Feminist Current articles. We highly recommend taking some time to peruse the site and its contents!