Tag: John Trudell

Starving the Tree of Racism or Reparations on a Psychological Level: How Seemingly Moral Values and Beliefs Feed Racism

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“We know the predator. We see them feed on us. We are aware to starve the beast is our destiny.”
— John Trudell

Preface: The Roots of Racism are the Roots of Empire

Dear fellow white men, but I hope others stick around as a Greek chorus.

An honest recognition of this culture’s history of treachery, kidnapping, torture, and murder is needed to read this. 

Yes, every empire has been racist and murderous.

However, our own empire is not yet history. And ours has become more destructive than any previous empire, because it coincided with the development of new technologies of control. And this gives our own brutalities more destructive force on a global scale, compared with other violent organizations of the past, such as the Roman Empire. 

So, even though this is a human problem, the hypocrisy of my “own” people (our conviction that we’re the good guys no matter what history has to say) is the particular expression or surface bark on this trunk of human suffering, through which we need to start drilling, in order to reach the wider roots of the problem. 

So, I start by the simple and now seemingly obvious confession that America has not been a “good guy”, like white people wished to believe. 

It’s easy to blame MAGA for their loyalty to a corrupt system (and I’ve done that in several essays). But I’m talking to white men (to myself primarily). If we wish to confront the roots of racism in ourselves, then we can’t merely blame the overt racists.

It’s not only Maga that has helped perpetuate a racist power dynamic and empire. The liberal establishment (the Democratic Party in particular) blames MAGA too easily and doesn’t look deeply enough in the mirror. There’s a contempt for the “ignorant working class” that distracts us from noticing our own forms of collusion. 

Both liberal and MAGA elements of society show different forms of allegiance to the corrupt organization of empire. The one gives its bodies, its muscle, its enforcement; the other works to interrupt the formation of a peasant-wide coalition that would bring the whole Epstein class down.

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Extinction and Responsibility: Why Climate Disaster Might Heal Us Even As it Kills Us

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earth

This appeared on Counterpunch.

Alice O’keeffe: “Even if we can’t escape its consequences, it is not too late to escape the mindset that brought us here.”

If climate disaster has left us with no future do we still feel responsible to the earth that outlives us? Or do we say “who cares?”

If we say “who cares?” then our sense of responsibility was never anything more than a moral rule, a business deal of sorts, where we agreed to behave honorably as long as we were allowed to project our egos into future generations. But I think real empathy for a world without us is still possible, and I think it matters in some way that can’t be calculated on a strictly transactional basis.

The possibility of near-term extinction is new, but the underlying dilemma this presents is as old as the Big Bang, or older. Death is death. It comes to the individual as surely as it comes to the species, the planet, and the exploding universe itself. What’s different now is only this onrushing inability to avoid facing this fact. And I think this is a good thing, because it forces a confrontation with the many reductive delusions that have limited our creative participation in the world, which is our responsibility to something more than ourselves. The chief among these limitations has been a strict and too literal image of who we are, an identity that keeps us trapped in a solipsistic circle.Read More »