We All Must Become Zapatistas

Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatistas in the resort
city of Playa del Carmen, Mexico, in 2006. AP/Israel Leal

Truthdig.org | Jun 2, 2014 | Chris Hedges

Subcomandante Marcos, the spokesman for the Zapatistas (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, or EZLN), has announced that his rebel persona no longer exists. He had gone from being a “spokesman to a distraction,” he said last week. His persona, he said, fed an easy and cheap media narrative. It turned a social revolution into a cartoon for the mass media. It allowed the commercial press and the outside world to ignore traditional community leaders and indigenous commanders and wrap a movement around a fictitious personality. His persona, he said, trivialized a movement. And so this persona is no more.

“The entire system, but above all its media, plays the game of creating celebrities who it later destroys if they don’t yield to its designs,” Marcos declared.

The Zapatistas form the most important resistance movement of the last two decades. They are a visible counterweight to the despoiling and rape of the planet and the subjugation of the poor by global capitalism. And they have repeatedly reinvented themselves—as Marcos has now done—to survive. The Zapatistas gave global resistance movements a new language, drawn in part from the indigenous communal Mayan culture, and a new paradigm for action. They understood that corporate capitalism had launched a war against us. They showed us how to fight back. The Zapatistas began by using violence, but they soon abandoned it for the slow, laborious work of building 32 autonomous, self-governing municipalities. Local representatives from Juntas de Buen Gobierno, or Councils of Good Government, which is not recognized by the Mexican government, preside over these independent Zapatista communities. The councils oversee community programs that distribute food, set up clinics and schools and collect taxes. Resources are for those who live in the communities, not for the corporations that come to exploit them. And in this the Zapatistas allow us to see the future, at least a future where we have a chance of surviving. 

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The Saboteurs

AP/Mike Groll A protester raises a fist during
a rally against hydraulic fracturing of natural
gas wells at the Legislative Office
Building in Albany, N.Y., in 2012.

The Saboteurs
Dec 2, 2013 | Truthdig | Chris Hedges

CALGARY, Canada—Oil and natural gas drilling in the province of Alberta has turned Calgary in a boomtown. Glittering skyscrapers, monuments to the obscene profits amassed by a fossil fuel industry that is exploiting the tar sands and the vast oil and natural gas fields in Alberta, have transformed Calgary into a mecca for money, dirty politics, greed and industry jobs. The city is as soulless and sterile as Houston. The death of the planet, for a few, is very good for business.

The man who waged North America’s first significant war against hydraulic fracturing was from Alberta, an eccentric, messianic Christian preacher named Wiebo Ludwig who died last year. He, with his small Christian community in the remote north of the province, sabotaged at least one wellhead by pouring cement down its shaft and blew up others. The Canadian authorities, along with the oil and gas barons, demonize Ludwig as an ecoterrorist, an odd charge given that they are the ones responsible for systematically destroying the environment and the planet. And as the ecosystem deteriorates—and the drive by corporations to extract the last remaining natural resources from the earth, even if it kills us all, becomes more and more relentless—the resistance of Wiebo Ludwig is worth remembering.

“Wiebo felt that our society was in a spiritual crisis, rather than an environmental or an economic crisis,” David York, whose film “Wiebo’s War” is a nuanced portrayal of Ludwig and his fight with the oil and gas industry, told me when I reached him in Toronto by email. “He felt that our addiction to fossil fuels, rampant consumerism and materialism, addictions, breakdown of family units were all symptoms of a society that has lost its root connection to God. Further, he felt that we are in a kind of end times state, where the forces of good are in a terrible struggle with the forces of evil. He wasn’t so crass as to put a timetable on it, but in his view ‘any fool can see the times.’ ”

That one of our era’s most effective figures of resistance against the oil and gas industry was a devout Christian is perhaps not coincidental. I do not share Ludwig’s Christian fundamentalism—his community was a rigid patriarchy—but I do share his belief that when human law comes into conflict with God’s law, human law must be defied. Ludwig grasped the moral decadence of the consumer society, its unchecked hedonism, worship of money and deadening cult of the self. He retreated in 1985 with his small band of followers into the remoteness of northern Alberta. His community, called Trickle Creek, was equipped with its own biodiesel refinery, windmills and solar panels—which permitted it to produce its own power—a greenhouse and a mill. Its members, who grew their own food, severed themselves from the contaminants of consumer culture. But like the struggle of Axel Heyst, the protagonist in Joseph Conrad’s novel “Victory,” Ludwig’s flight from evil only ensured that evil came to him.

Ludwig’s farm happened to be atop one of the largest oil and gas reserves in the world. In Canada when you own land you own only the top six inches of soil; the mineral rights below it belong to the state and can be sold without the knowledge or acquiescence of the landowner. Beneath Ludwig’s farm lay a fossil fuel known as sour gas, a neurotoxin that if released from within the earth can, even in small amounts, poison livestock, water tables and people. 

 “Wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions,” wrote Henry David Thoreau. And this is what happened to Ludwig.

The oil and gas companies soon began a massive drilling effort. At first, like many other reformers and activists, Ludwig used legal and political channels to push back against the companies, which were drilling on the edge of his 160-acre farm. He spent the first five years attending hearings with civil regulators, writing letters—he even wrote to Jane Fonda—and appealing in vain to elected officials, government agencies, the press, environmentalists and first nations groups. His family—he had 11 children—posted a sign in 1990 that decried “the ruthless interruption and cessation” of privacy; “the relentless greedy grabbing of Creational resources”; “the caloused [sic] disregard for the sanctity of the Lord’s Day”; the legislation of land and mineral ownership policy “that does violence to the God-given ‘right to property.’ ” Ludwig then presented the offending oil company, Ranchmen’s, with a bill for the sign.

“He was primarily motivated by his love for his family and a strong sense of justice,” said Andrew Nikiforuk, the author of a good book on Ludwig called “Saboteurs: Wiebo Ludwig’s War Against Big Oil.” I had dinner with Nikiforuk last week in Calgary. He told me: “It did not seem right to him that the oil industry could park a drilling well for sour gas in view of his family’s communal dining room. ‘Is a man not even master in his own house, let alone his own land, on matters like these?’ ”

“His war against industry illustrated the cost of our addiction to hydrocarbons: Our materialistic way of life is based on the destruction of groundwater, the devaluing of rural property, the invasion of rural communities, the poisoning of skies with carcinogens, the fragmentation of landscapes,” Nikiforuk said. “Urban people do not understand the sacrifices now being imposed on rural people.”

Ludwig’s first acts of sabotage were minor. He laid down nail beds on roads. He smashed solar panels. He blocked roads by downing trees. He disabled vehicles and drilling equipment. But after two leaks of hydrogen sulfide sour gas from nearby wells—which forced everyone on the farm to evacuate and saw numerous farm animals giving birth to deformed or stillborn offspring, as well as five human miscarriages or stillbirths within Ludwig’s community—and after the destruction of two of his water wells, he declared open war on the oil and gas industry. He began to blow up oil and gas facilities. He said he had to fight back to “protect his children.”

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, accompanied by private security agents hired by the oil companies, spent millions to investigate and attempt to halt the sabotage. Ludwig’s farm was occupied by police five times and searched for incriminating evidence. The police and Encana Corp. infiltrated Ludwig’s tight community with an agent provocateur who, to prove he could be trusted, blew up a well owned by what was then Alberta Energy Corp., now Encana. The explosion, although orchestrated by the police and Encana, was publicly blamed on Ludwig. The oil company also brought in a “terrorism expert” from Toronto to speak at local town hall gatherings—York captures one of those talks in his film—and the expert warned residents of the rising “terrorism” of religious cults led by fanatic, charismatic leaders.

Ludwig was undeterred. “People are talking here that maybe someone should be shooting guys in pinstripe suits to get them to stop,” he said.

Ludwig, whose knowledge of the terrain allowed him to outfox hundreds of police officers, was never caught in an act of sabotage, but he probably had a hand in damage at hundreds of remote well sites estimated at $12 million. The federal government in Ottawa, in desperation, considered sending in the army. Ludwig was finally arrested in 2000 on five counts of property damage and possession of explosives and imprisoned for 18 months. He spent his time in prison reading a treatise in Dutch on the nature of hell.

Ludwig referred to the biblical story of David and Goliath in justifying his struggle against colossal forces, saying “the war is won before it is fought.” He believed that if you fought for righteousness you always were ensured spiritual victory, even if you were defeated in the eyes of the world. “It’s not size,” he said. “It’s whether a man is right or not. The fight is won on principle.” In his home he kept a poster of activist and journalist Ken Saro-Wiwa, a Nigerian hanged in 1995 after he campaigned against Shell Oil’s exploitation of his country. The poster read: “The environment is man’s first right. Without a clean environment man cannot exist to claim other rights be they political, social or economic.”

 Ludwig once invited visiting civil servants who worked for oil and gas regulators to dinner. He fed them homemade cheeses, preserves, jams and wild cranberry wine. The pièce de résistance, which Ludwig unveiled with his usual flair, was the skull of a horse killed by sour gas. “It’s just a symbol of all the death we’ve had around here,” he informed his startled guests.

On another occasion he dumped noxious sour crude on the carpet in the office of local regulators to see if it “bothered” them.

The sabotage did not end with Ludwig’s 2012 death. There are reports of ongoing sabotage along the path of the XL pipeline and in the Alberta oil fields.

“I’d also say that sabotage in the oil patch is one of the oil and gas industry’s dirty little secrets,” York said. “It is widespread, and to many landowners it is a natural consequence of the industry’s attitudes and behavior to those whose land they are occupying. The industry doesn’t make a big fuss because they don’t want to encourage the response.”

But violence begets violence. And the more Ludwig blew up facilities the harsher became the intrusion of the state.

“Meeting industrial violence against livestock and families with more industrial violence against oil and gas installations is not the answer,” said Nikiforuk. “It is an act of frustration as well as a reflection of the captured state of regulators. And it submits an entire community to a reign of industry- and state-sanctioned terror. A second war broke out in the bush in the 2000s during an intense period of hydraulic fracking. Six bombings occurred at Encana well sites in northern British Columbia just 50 kilometers from Ludwig’s farm. The government sent in 250 officers to investigate. They treated rural citizens like members of the Taliban. The campaign ended as mysteriously as it began and had all the earmarks of Ludwig. It did not change industry practices.”

Ludwig’s gravest mistake was his decision, or the decision of someone in his small community, to fire on two trucks carrying rowdy teenagers. The sons and daughters of oil and gas workers roared through the group’s compound at about 4 a.m. on June 20, 1999. Karman Willis, a 16-year-old girl, was fatally shot by someone on the farm, and a second teenager survived a wound. York in his film shows Ludwig family members repeating like automatons that they thought they were under attack because the backfiring of the vehicles sounded like gunshots. No one on the farm took responsibility for the shooting, and no one was charged. The killing of the girl saw the neighboring communities cut off Ludwig and his band in revulsion. Local businesses put up signs that read: “No Service for Ludwigs.”

Ludwig, before he died at age 71 after refusing chemotherapy for esophageal cancer, turned away from violence. The renunciation came a year or two after his final bombing campaign. He would read, with his family, Jacques Ellul’s 1969 book “Violence: Reflections From a Christian Perspective.” Ellul, like Ludwig’s Dutch father, had fought in the resistance against the Nazis in World War II.

“What constantly marked the life of Jesus was not nonviolence but in every situation the choice not to use power,” he wrote. “This is infinitely different.”

“The Christian should participate in social and political efforts in order to have an influence in the work, not with the hope of making a paradise (of the earth), but simply to make it more tolerable—not to diminish the opposition between this world and the Kingdom of God, but simply to modify the opposition between the disorder of this world and the order of preservation that God wants it to have—not to bring in the Kingdom of God, but so that the Gospel might be proclaimed in order that all men might truly hear the good news,” Ellul wrote.

Ludwig said: “We feel weak in all the things we are fighting. I think the match is very unequal. But it’s all right. Instead of griping about it, we might as well give ourselves to it.”

Chris Hedges on the Role of Art in Rebellion

Chris Hedges on the Role of Art in Rebellion
Nov 27, 2013 | truthdig

After a talk on the collapse of complex societies, Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges answers an audience question: "Will it take [literature, music and art] to waken us to the empathy of other suffering or hardship?"

Chris Hedges: "Markets and Morals."

Chris Hedges: "Markets and Morals."
July 28, 2013 | Information Clearing House

Chris Hedges argued that American propaganda has done two key things. Through a “bombardment of cultural lies and manipulations,” it has erased every progressive movement from the face of the country.

The system has also created a “psychosis of permanent war,” Hedges said.

Hedges, traced the demise of liberal values in America since World War I and emphasized the importance of social movements in maintaining democracy.


Posted July 24: 2013

[77] Chris Hedges: Death of Liberal Class, OWS Surveillance Exposed, Clean Energy

[77] Chris Hedges: Death of Liberal Class, OWS Surveillance Exposed, Clean Energy
Jan 8, 2013 | breakingtheset

Abby Martin Breaks the Set on Alternative Energy, Government Surveillance, and Serious Revolt in the US with Chris Hedges.

The Idol Smasher

© Mr. Fish

The Idol Smasher
Dec 31, 2012 | Truthdig | Chris Hedges

Ishmael Reed has spent the last five decades smashing idols—idols of race, idols of capitalism, celebrity idols and the idols of national virtue and greatness. His essays, novels, poems, plays, songs and cartoons routinely shatter the delusions and myths of a nation stubbornly unwilling to confront its past or understand its present. He rips open a history that saw white Europeans exterminate one race and enslave another to create the nation’s prosperity, a past that includes the violent plundering of nations around the globe—Cuba, the Philippines, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan among them—to show us who we have become. He names the corrosive disease of empire. He excoriates what Alexis de Tocqueville called our “perpetual practice of self-applause.” He battles back against the sophisticated forms of propaganda—especially from Hollywood—that perpetuate patriotic fantasies and pander to the dark streams of paranoia, racism and fear that run like electric currents through white society.

Reed’s righteous fury is a heartening antidote to the squeamishness of liberals and the lunacy of the right wing. He says the editors of The New York Times and most other major media outlets “sound like they get their instructions from Julius Streicher [the Nazi propagandist] when it comes to blacks.” He calls the HBO series “The Wire” “a Neo-Nazi portrait of black people” and dismisses the movie “Precious” as a film that “makes D.W. Griffith look like a progressive.”

“Lazy, no-good black people, who are welfare cheats, sitting around eating chicken, and having sex with their children, right out of the Lee Atwater-Paul Ryan playbook,” he said of the portrayals in “Precious” when I reached him by phone at his home in Oakland, Calif. “The wonderful novelist Diane Johnson was right when she said that ‘largely white’ audiences are thrilled by images of black people as dysfunctional. This has become a billion-dollar market which led critics to assert that Black Bogeyman movies sell better than sex, according to the critic C. Liegh McInnis. You even have a critic at The Root website, a post-racial ‘Talented Tenth’ hangout for ‘exceptional blacks,’ praising Quentin Tarantino’s latest sick exercise into racial porn, called ‘Django Unchained,’ ” which I critique at the Wall Street Journal site Speakeasy. This movie is being praised by the same critics who loved ‘The Color Purple’ and ‘Precious,’ probably because it revives Stanley Elkins’ discredited ‘Sambo Thesis.’ ”

Reed has no time for Black Bloc anarchists, whom he calls “alienated, spoiled middle-class white kids from the suburbs” as well as “vandals and thugs.” He calls the Oscar presentation “a white supremacist pageant.” He detests the Clintons, who he reminds us sold out the poor and the working class. Hillary, he says, makes “Eva Peron seem benign.” He predicts more tragedies like the recent Connecticut massacre, noting that many white Americans stockpile assault rifles because they are terrified of black people and that mass shootings in the United States almost always are carried out by estranged white men.

“ ‘The Turner Diaries,’ the book that inspired Timothy McVeigh to bomb the federal building in Oklahoma, and assaults by gunmen including one against the North Valley Jewish Community Center [in Granada Hills, Calif.,] in 1999, are very explicit,” he said not long after we were on a panel together at the Miami Book Festival. “The [novel] tells whites they need guns because if they give up their assault weapons blacks will kidnap white women and Jewish men will be their pimps. This fantasy, however absurd, at least addresses the deepest, unspoken fears of whites. The white power structure looks around at what is happening. It sees we are going down. It is terrified of an uprising by a coalition of whites, blacks, Asian-Americans and Hispanics that elected Obama—even though Obama with his pretty, multicultural face and elegant style and his spouse, who is more militant than he and who for that reason has been silenced, serve the empire. The only problem is that white crazies like [Michele] Bachmann and the others are so blinded by white supremacy that they won’t go along with the script. She [Rep. Bachmann] said that Obama was costing the taxpayers $250 million per day on his trip to India, a lie, when Obama’s taking over 100 CEOs along with him brought back billions in contracts.”

 “The other part of the white public, the underclass and working class, has proven that they will go to any lengths to uphold white supremacy,” he said. “Even when they had no fight in the Civil War, owning no slave assets like the planters, they caused the deaths of 640,000 Americans in order to uphold white supremacy. Then, as now, parts of the white working class, who are anti-union and get drunk on the cheap moonshine of racism, are willing to exercise self-extinction in order to uphold white supremacy.”

“One part of the slavery deal was the patriarchal planter’s ownership of black women’s wombs,” he went on. “Now they [the powerful] are mandating this demand of all women. Yet, white women favored Romney by 14 points. They’re intimidated I think by their husbands, brothers, fathers and employers, which is why they scapegoat the [black] brothers for worldwide misogyny.” 

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Stand Still for the Apocalypse

AP/Elizabeth Dalziel

In much of the world, including China and
the United States, dirty energy remains cheap
and plentiful, with disastrous consequences.

Stand Still for the Apocalypse
Nov 26, 2012 | Chris Hedges

Humans must immediately implement a series of radical measures to halt carbon emissions or prepare for the collapse of entire ecosystems and the displacement, suffering and death of hundreds of millions of the globe’s inhabitants, according to a report commissioned by the World Bank. The continued failure to respond aggressively to climate change, the report warns, will mean that the planet will inevitably warm by at least 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, ushering in an apocalypse.

The 84-page document,“Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4°C Warmer World Must Be Avoided,” was written for the World Bank by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Climate Analytics and published last week. The picture it paints of a world convulsed by rising temperatures is a mixture of mass chaos, systems collapse and medical suffering like that of the worst of the Black Plague, which in the 14th century killed 30 to 60 percent of Europe’s population. The report comes as the annual United Nations Conference on Climate Change begins this Monday [Nov. 26] in Doha, Qatar.

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