Lessons in Activism
The Intercept has another interesting article on the Standing Rock activist protests in North Dakota. Military-grade infiltrators were deployed to spy on the water-rights activist and to ensure that the protests to protect their primary water source would fail.
I’ve warned about this kind of subversion before. Virtually EVERY activist movement, overt and covert, is under constant surveillance, using a host of techniques to monitor the group’s activities.
The FBI reported years ago (don’t have the link handy) that they are involved in widespread surveillance of ‘subversive’ groups, including militias throughout the United States. This is happening throughout Canada too, especially where indigenous activists are involved in any land disputes over oil extraction, water pollution, minerals and timber harvesting.
What’s interesting about the Standing Rock activists is they posed no threat to anyone (most activist don’t), but because they were an indigenous-led ‘resistance’ movement, they were deemed a high priority threat. The Dakota Access pipeline was proposed to run underneath the Missouri River, and the amount of money involved in this project was in the billions.
That’s a lot of dough, which is why the mercenary security firm TigerSwan, was hired as a key player in Energy Transfer’s multi-state effort to defeat the resistance. Utilizing the same counter-insurgency tactics deployed in a theater of war, TigerSwan operatives infiltrated the Standing Rock activists with spies and phony supporters of the movement.
Eventually, their spying operations came to light, but not before enormous damage had already been done to to the movement. And now, the denials are flying fast and furious.
The documents make clear just how far security companies hired by energy industry firms — in this case, TigerSwan and Energy Transfer — will go to protect their clients’ business interests against a growing climate movement, and how much the energy companies are willing to spend for these aggressive defenses: An invoice from December 2017 said TigerSwan had billed Dakota Access LLC, a subsidiary of Energy Transfer, some $17 million up to that point.
Climate rights are something that nobody really seems to think about. Water rights strike closer to home, as do land rights. Polluted water supplies and poisoned air aren’t easily deniable when your unable to drink the water or breath the air. But climate is another matter, variations in weather don’t readily ‘prove’ themselves to be linked to land use changes or industrial activity. Greenhouse gasses emitted by the burning of fossil fuels are invisible too, but they can last for over ten thousand years in the atmosphere.
As the climate worsens, activists from around the world have mobilized to bring attention to these issues. Farmers are feeling the impacts, as are climate refugees having to flee their former homes. The inability to grow food is a primary effect with climate change that can be experienced in near real time.
Yet climate is more then just the accumulated effects of weather – climate change also means water and whether or not it will be available. In some parts of the world, it’s now too much water as the changing climate dumps massive amounts of energy in the form of hurricanes, typhoons and flooding. In other parts of the world, it’s too little water, creating starvation as food crops collapse. Somalia for example, is presently in the midst of a massive level of starvation numbering in the millions, but the Western press is scarcely paying attention.
Activists seek to protect the land for present and future generations, energy and resource companies seek to exploit the land for profit now. This war has been fought all over the planet for hundreds of years, and it’s patently clear which side is still losing. With billions and trillions of dollars eventually at stake, the war to protect a sustainable future preserving life is being lost for the profit of taking lives, present and future.
The future of human habitability on Earth is the real issue facing humanity. We’ve been focused on the pandemic, and in the United States, the election and the aftermath, but both of these issues are temporary, transient, and they’ll happen again. Meanwhile, rapid exploitation of the biosphere continues, impacting climate, lives and the ability for all life forms to exist. An extremely lop-sided ‘war’ between business interests and activists is being waged.
There seems to be a reality ‘disconnect’ that is held by the majority of the world’s populations. This isn’t just a Trump supporter issue, or an American issue, it’s found everywhere. We fail to connect what is real and what is essential. We want jobs (income), safety, security, peace and opportunity. We want individual freedom to live our lives however we want. But this changes when it comes to business activities.
Many of these essentials become replaced with demands for profits, markets and business opportunity when we come together as a business or corporation. We willingly engage in our own destruction by wholesale depleting and polluting the biosphere for profits. Even a billion dollars in profit isn’t enough, we insist on even more ‘growth’, which is just a euphemism for destruction.
This is both odd and perplexing without deeper examination. We’re acting in harmful ways against our own best interests. The ‘climate rights’ of individuals are subjugated to the rights of corporations and business entities to make obscene profits. Just as the rights to life of others are being ignored by anti-maskers, we seem to be destined to act against our own best interests.
I found this over on Twitter, which reveals the depths of delusions we embrace:
I have a night off from the hospital. As I’m on my couch with my dog I can’t help but think of the Covid patients the last few days. The ones that stick out are those who still don’t believe the virus is real. The ones who scream at you for a magic medicine and that Joe Biden is Going to ruin the USA. All while gasping for breath on 100% Vapotherm. They tell you there must be another reason they are sick. They call you names and ask why you have to wear all that “stuff” because they don’t have COVID because it’s not real. Yes. This really happens. And I can’t stop thinking about it. These people really think this isn’t going to happen to them. And then they stop yelling at you when they get intubated. It’s like a fucking horror movie that never ends. There’s no credits that roll. You just go back and do it all over again.
Denial and delusion, refusing to accept facts and reality, the inability to make essential connections, can quite literally lead to your death. Climate change denial just takes longer. It may not be you that dies either, but it could be your kids or your grandkids trying to live on a hellish, uninhabitable Earth.
Activists around the world have attempted to put a stop to climate denial and the destruction of the biosphere. But most of the world is like this patient, who doesn’t want to believe it’s happening to them as they lay there slowly dying. The world is dying under our stewardship and most of us refuse to admit it. The Earth will remain, but on the path we are headed, humans won’t.
Corporate interests are very, very busy making sure that they pollute this core message. They’ve buried it under enormous mountains of propaganda and fabricated reports. They’re infiltrating, subverting and undermining the efforts of activists all over the world, and when that doesn’t work, they have them killed. These are the actions of people who are in denial, people who think profits are ‘essentials’ as they’re intubating the world’s population. They’re not able to keep their promises on anything.
These are people who have lost their way and forgot about the needs that we all have, the actual requirements for life to exist on this planet. A poisoned, polluted, raped and depleted planet isn’t going to be ‘better off’ for human kind in any way imaginable. There may be enormous skyscrapers and bullet trains and cheap airline flights, but at what price? Look around now, despite our technological advancements and the development of society, we’re trying to pack ourselves into smaller and smaller spaces. We’re ‘connected’ to the entire world at a push of a key, but to none of the places that actually matter.
Our carefully crafted isolation from the real world has desensitized us, insulating our minds to the real price being paid, but not by us, by all the other things and lives we have killed and destroyed, taking away from the future. We may have what we need now, but at what cost to the future? Will there even be a future for humanity or any other life form on this planet if we exploit it all now?
There is another way to live, in a society that is designed around the concepts of sustainability in the real, true sense of the word. But before that happens, we have to stop trying to undermine and kill off the activists that are desperately trying to get our attention. They’re the real prophets in our midst, foretelling the future as it will be if we do not stop and listen.
