Thank you for posting this. Even people with no personal interest in DGR should read this for the excellent breakdown of how groups attempting to do good can cloud our understanding of so many issues-if we take their statements unquestionably as fact. Before DGR the book was released I was really looking forward to it. The fact that we need a global resistance movement to counter environmental destruction is self evident. But I couldn’t finish reading the book. It bothered and disturbed me. I was unable to deconstruct it’s problems as this article has done. I just didn’t feel good about it. It seemed lacking in many ways and the focus on hierarchy was to me just laughable.
Occupy and horizontalism are not a cancer-they are imho the first manifestations of the next evolutionary step for humanity. If we mean to survive we will evolve socially, mentally and emotionally into beings comfortable with decentralized, intuitive functioning. Or really rather than evolve just bring back skills and attitudes long buried by colonization. By using things like NVC and working together in trust instead of looking to hierarchy and violence we can turn our global crisis into opportunity. We can use the crisis to end oppression instead of increasing it. But that involves letting go of fear based reasoning.
Even though every man ( including trans women born as men) is *capable* of rape-it does not logically follow that every man is a rapist. Just because white privilege exists does not make every light skinned human a racist. Patriarchy is oppressive and awful but it doesn’t mean all men are to blame.
We are all born into a world that’s a big mess-and we all have to learn and grow and change on the fly as we live. Excluding whole groups of people as unacceptable beings guarantees failure.
It is exactly in learning how to live and work with those who are different from us that we can create solutions. None of which are likely to be top down prescriptions. Like distributed computing in technology, parallel processing creative solutions to global problems through 7 billion biocomputers is much more effective than any 2 or 3 individuals no matter how brilliant.
Warrior Publications note: Get your dictionary, this is some heavy mental material here…
by Michelle Renee Matisons and Aalexander Reid Ross, Institute for Anarchist Studies, August 9, 2015
For a book that advertises itself as a “shift in strategy and tactics,” Deep Green Resistance (DGR) has an overwhelmingly dispiriting tone, and is riddled with contradictions.[1] While DGR provocatively addresses many pressing social and ecological issues, its opportunistic, loose-cannon theoretical approach and highly controversial tactics leaves it emulating right-wing militia rhetoric, with the accompanying hierarchical vanguardism, personality cultism, and reactionary moralism. By providing a negative example, DGR does us the service of compounding issues into one book. Take it as a warning. As we grasp for solutions to multiple and compounding social and ecological crises, quick fixes, dogmatism, and power grabbing may grow as temptations. By reviewing DGR, we are also defending necessary minimal criteria for movements today: inclusivity, democracy…
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