Deep Green Resistance - Strategy to Save the Planet Part 4 of 7

Gandhi learned most of what he
knew from the Suffragists.

He subscribed to 3 different
London newspapers

so he could keep up with their actions
'cause they were such great strategists.

They were also loved by their movement and this
is something we don't see that much anymore.

The left now has this terrible
tendency to cannibalize its leaders.

I think that goes right back to those adolescent values, that
knee-jerk against all authority. This was not always the case though.

So here is Emmeline [Pankhurst]
talking to a crowd.

The lengths that people
went to to protect her

because the police were always
trying to re-arrest her.

'Cause they knew if they could destroy the
leadership they would bring the movement down.

Christabel, her daughter, actually spent 2 years
in Paris, running the movement from Paris in exile

because she didn't want
to get arrested again.

But Emmeline, there's
just great stories.

They knew what the parade route was down to where she was
gonna be speaking, so they knew she'd be traveling that route

and the police went to every single house,
this was a poor section of London,

they went to every single house
and offered them like £100,

“will you let us set up in the front
room and arrest her when she goes by?”

Not a single house
would take the money.

It was just incredible amounts
of loyalty to these people.

Resistance movements need that infusion, you
know the young, the moral vigor, the courage.

We don't get anywhere
without that.

But they also need the experience, the stability, and the
material resources of the people who are middle aged and older.

And the take-home point is that
successful resistance movements

are always multi-generational.
You gotta have both.

If you break the natural bonds
between the young and the old,

it means that political wisdom never accumulates.
So you never learn what you need to learn.

What it means now is that the young are not
being socialized into a culture of resistance.

What they're being socialized into
is this absolutely toxic culture

created by corporate America
which has everything to gain by

destroying our capacity for community,
never mind our capacity for resistance.

A few simple questions here: Are we after
shock value or are we after justice?

Is the problem a constraining set of values
or an oppressive set of material conditions?

Are we content to coexist along side the state of
things with all the horrors that are going on?

Are we content to just coexist in our own little
bubble no matter how repelled we are by those horrors?

And is the self really an appropriate long term project
or could we move on to something a little bit bigger now?

Because another 200 species went
extinct today and they were my kin.

What we need is organized
political resistance.

The task of an activist is not to navigate
around these systems of oppression

with as much personal integrity as possible—it's to
dismantle those systems. This is where we've gone wrong.

To get to a real resistance we're gonna need
that culture, the culture of resistance.

Instead what we have, I call
this the permaculture wing,

not that I've got anything
against permaculture.

But the permaculture, the transition town,
the voluntary simplicity people...

I actually call them the
OIMBYs—Only In My Backyard.

Taken as a whole they dismiss political
action as impractical or impossible,

and this is a very bad habit that the left is going
to have to break if we are going to get anywhere.

We are the people who should be shouting from
every rooftop and from every street corner.

Not only is resistance possible, failure
is impossible given what's at stake.

So let's pretend for a minute, thought
experiment, we are in Nazi-occupied France,

we are in U.S.-occupied Vietnam, we are
in U.S.-occupied North America...

does anybody really want to suggest that riding bikes
and buying organic shampoo would drive them out?

Yet this is the strategy that the
left seems to be suggesting.

I know that it's really hard
to name a perpetrator.

It's certainly hard to name the perpetrators of global
destruction and there's a lot against us in this.

But they do have names and addresses,
as Utah Phillips famously pointed out.

And more important, the infrastructure of
industrial civilization is incredibly vulnerable.

That's a point to which we
will return in a minute.

So how would a resistance
movement be organized?

Across history you've got
pretty much the same pattern.

You've got the one side that's the
tasks of the culture of resistance.

Their job is to build the new
institutions that can take over

and will organize the new, better society
as the old one comes down in whatever way.

And then on the other side you've got these combatants
that are doing the actual front line resistance.

They're doing the direct
confrontations with power.

Now I want to be very clear when I say
“combatants”, that does not have to mean violence.

Nonviolence and violence are
not the distinctions here.

The distinction is really between
doing something and doing nothing.

Between fighting power in whatever
way, naming power and fighting it,

doing that confrontation and submitting to
power. Those are the main distinctions.

From there we can make other distinctions, we
can make other decisions but those come later.

You've gotta decide first that you're
actually going to do something.

So we need lots and lots of people to do that
standard work that cultures of resistance do—

the local economies, the participatory democracy,
systems of justice that we can all agree to,

I would say character building toward self-respect,
breaking that identification with the overlords,

and then direct support for the front lines. So
loyalty and whatever materials we can come up with.

All right, here's the truth: the vast majority of people are not
going to resist shit, and I think that we just have to accept that.

I fought that a lot when I was in my 20s.
I fought and fought and fought.

I fought with everybody I could fight with.
There's no point.

Most people simply don't
have it in them.

Of those that do, it's still only 2% that
are needed for those front line positions.

And that's true in regular armies. Only 2% of
the U.S. military actually has a combat role.

The other 98% do support. It was true in the IRA.
Only 2% of those guys ever picked up a weapon.

The other 98%, and it was
a huge range of people,

there were 10 year olds who carried messages,
I mean it was an amazing mobilization,

but 98% of those
people did support.

Most people do not have the personality
to do the direct front line stuff

or they can't take the risks for lots
and lots of legitimate reasons.

If you've got kids you're pretty much out of the picture. If
you've got aging parents who need you, you can't do this.

We have responsibilities,
human responsibilities.

So it's mostly going to be young people who don't
have a lot of responsibilities yet, on their plates

who can take this up and
you find that all over.

The last 40 minutes of this though, the
last 40 years of my life, really,

this has been for those of you who are
the 2% because I know you're here.

And you're really the ones
that I want to talk to.

We need warriors who will put themselves between
what is left of this planet and fossil fuel.

We need to stop
industrial civilization.

If we had the numbers we could
do that using nonviolence.

We could shut this party down by
midnight using human blockades.

I don't see the numbers. I
would love to be wrong.

I would vastly prefer to wage this struggle
using nonviolence but I don't see the numbers.

My longing will not bring them forth and it's
a little late in the day for millenialism.

So given a realistic assessment
of what we actually have,

the only strategy that I can
see that can be effective

is direct attacks on infrastructure. In
very blunt terms, we need to stop them.

This is not a game for children and this
revolution is not for the hell of it.

We need a serious underground movement that has the
discipline, the training, the command structure,

and the strategic savvy to coordinate decisive attacks
on a continental scale. And we needed it yesterday.

It would be really great if the
permaculture wing would get on board

and at least provide the
loyalty and material support.

But the smallest thing they can do is to
stop saying that this can't be done.

It can. The only real question
is why aren't we doing it?

And I hate that part
of the answer may be

that we are the people who benefit from this repulsive
arrangement of power, and that makes it hard.