Wrong Way of Life: European Civilization

Fri Jan 6 21:01:11 2006

The earth is limited with finite everything. Yet this reality is largely irrelevant for those people, who have given up the fundamental respect for life to advance their own narrow interests. A way of life, which consumes life without need, is violent. A way of life, which defines everything living according to only its own premises and definitions can only be a totalitarian nightmare. That is the European way of life.

Industrial Agriculture and Food

In agriculture we can see the transition from family farms and herdeing groups to agricultural factories. This means high inputs of water, chemicals and energy to produce with a focus on world markets, unavoidably creating strong dependencies on money and debt. Industrial agriculture is a clear failure when it comes to food security and soil preservation, energy and chemical inputs, water quality and quantity. There can be a high yield per acre, but with only one crop measured and seen from a short-term profit-oriented perspective.

Producers are not so much concerned with providing food for the people, but with maximizing profit for themselves. The crops are not selected because of the need of the people on the land for sufficient, nutritious and varied food, but according to market expectations. The monetarization of agriculture, high costs and debt, coupled with market conditions not guaranteeing stable and sufficient income, forces many farmers to sell their land. In effect, industrial agriculture and fishery has eroded the food-security and has destroyed food-sovereignty from many millions of growers, herders, fishers and hunters.

These changes in food 'production' are closely related to the industrialization of food processing, distribution and retailing, and has become inseparable from the chemical industry. Many intermediate steps have been added between the producers and consumers of foods. Instead of buying produce from local growers and herders, we shop in supermarkets for processed foods from huge corporations. People got disconnected from the land and became used to having access to global foodstuffs at all times. Food processing companies and consumers demand standardized quality, which means a drastic reduction of varieties and tastes. Control of food has increasingly been taken over by M/TNCs, largely because most consumers are ignorant and unconcerned.

Money as a Weapon

Money is supposedly a means of storage and exchange of value. Yet it is other things too. Money becomes a formidable weapon, when our very existence is dependent upon having enough of it. When peoples loose control of their food, food security becomes dependent upon the ability to control enough money to buy the necessary food on the market. Food price fluctuations now condemn millions to hunger and starvation.

Hundreds of millions of humans are put under market competition for their survival. Whoever does not control or is afforded enough money necessary for water, food, energy, sanitation, health care, will suffer and have her/his life cut short. We are in the process of the greatest mass extermination ever, the most cruel and violent of all times.

If we continue, and further escalate mass extermination to adjust population to diminishing 'resources', we will further degrade our humanity from the low we are already suffering after centuries of European colonization and expansionism.

Human relations have been so degraded that for profit every conceivable exploitation and abuse is pushed further and further to generate more and more. To create needs where there were none, to hastily replace everything still sufficient, but no longer en vogue, to monetarize more and more areas and aspects of our lives.

Money has become the ultimate enforcer of social and economic relations. Therefor, the relations we have to build must free ourselves from money. We need to starve the monetary system so that it can no longer function. The less money we need, the better it is. The economy based on world financial markets may collapse and disintegrate.

Constant War and Destruction

European civilization is one of constant war and destruction, to which peaceful coexistence can at best be a temporary tactical approach. The European doesn't know about the sacredness of life. He doesn't act like he talks and doesn't talk like he acts. Don't trust a European, always suspect the worst intentions hidden behind nice words and declarations, sweetened with gifts or violently imposed.

All planning for a better future faces the fundamental barrier to implementation which is the continued domination of the European way of life. Developed on the basis of looting, military conquest, and the commodification of humans (slavery), through an unbounding of science and morality, and a spreading of greedy materialism and selfish individualism, the European way of life led to the current state of transnational mass-production and over-consumption of the privileged.

Ruthless plunder and destruction of earth and life are inseparable from this way of life. There is no possibility of curing the ills through reforms and adjustments if only because the privileged powerful are not willing or capable to live peaceful within the limits set for them by that part of the earth given to them. The Europeans need to be forced from their positions of privilege and out of their areas of domination. We need to end White Supremacy and decolonize our minds and relations.

Rotten at the Roots and Incurably Diseased

If not forced, the dominant societies will not give up their positions of hegemony and privilege, simply because we won't. We, that is the members of the DTS. Our societies are rotten at the roots and incurably diseased, yet still far too many don't see the ugly reality under our makeup facade.

We are helpless particles of mass consumer societies, dependent upon the continued functioning of networks and processes mostly beyond our comprehension and completely out of our control. As individuals we are free to senselessly maximize fun and happiness, or despair uselessly. As particle of the whole, the individual by itself is replaceable and powerless, while at the same time contributing in many ways to its continued functioning. That means, responsibility is not eclipsed by powerlessness, because we can always change ourselves and act differently.

Under democracy political parties and elections are a tool to help manipulate the masses into a permanent state of complicity and obedience. Faces and names, but nothing fundamental ever changes. Democracy works well as a preventive counterinsurgency strategy, to make it very difficult to challenge rule and order. You can speak out and protest as much as you want, as long as it won't change a thing. But any effort to fundamentally change the dominant order, which cannot be completely marginalized, is being violently criminalized and attacked.

"If we take care of the earth, it will take care of us"

The earth provides us with everything that has been created, or there is. The more we live in destructive ways, the more we endanger the very basis of our lives. At this time of escalating destruction of earth and mass extermination of peoples, whom their basis of existence has been violently taken from their control, we need to focus on root causes. Without control of sufficient territory, which gives identity, food-sovereignty and basic reproductive support for a people and their way of life, no peoples can be independent. We lost any self-determination as peoples to those who control the land and its use.

Major scarcities are being planned, organized and executed to satisfy the desires of those living in abundance. The land and water in particular are being increasingly being managed under a regime of forced scarcity. There is plenty of land if we would concentrate on food-sovereignty and basic self-sufficiency of peoples. There is plenty of water if we would not allow it to be used for non-essential industrial activities, and care to keep it clean.

There is clearly enough land and water, if it would be used for life instead of being exploited for profit. Overproduction and overconsumption on the one side produce a mass of people which are called overpopulation by those who want to defend white supremacy and justify the injustice which is their way of life. No longer are foreign domination, dispossession, destruction and exploitation causing maldevelopment and poverty, but the number of children are cynically presented as a problem. Not the bloodsuckers, but the sufferers are said to cause their own suffering. Poverty is blamed on the poor.

Sacred Elements

There is no doubt about the massive destruction of earth through exploitation and expansion. In the European worldview, the earth is thought of in terms of resources. A mountain itself has no value as itself, but with microscopic particles of gold, it is worth processing the whole thing to extract some truckloads of gold. Yet the earth is not resources, but a living entity of which we are a part. Not just a part, but totally dependent. We cannot be without the earth, the sun and the universe. Water, air, land are no resources and no property, but sacred elements. The creator created the earth and therefor is the sole legitimate owner, who never sold anything, but placed us among all that exists.

The sacred elements are treated as resources and their exploitation causes a rapidly progressing degradation and depletion. A continuation of current practises, resulting in massive degeneration and loss of land, and the pollution and depletion of sweet water reserves, particularly drinking water, will result in escalating mass extermination as significant reduction of world population. It is already happening today for example in the Great Lakes Region and the Horn of Africa. Or in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, and many other places. A triage of integration, assimilation and extermination is violently imposed.

Necessary Changes

There are the fundamental physical needs of every human, like water, food, cooking, heating, clothing, and shelter. These needs can only be organized in community. Provided there is sufficient will, to secure these physical needs of everyone and their children and children of their children, however numerous, is only a temporary transitional problem. To reorganize our lives apart from the dominant order and world markets and finally overcome the culture of death and destruction of the Europeans.

In a situation, where the way we have walked for so long already led us into mass extermination and destruction in previously unknown dimensions, what can we do? Those, who hope they can manage the crisis and stay on top, prefer to engage in empty talk or modest reform, while waging and preparing for more war. They want to continue to walk the same way, knowing it will lead to more and bigger disasters. They say, there is no other way.

But that is obviously wrong. There are other ways which for millenia have successfully proven to be both sustainable and focussing on preserving and caring for life. Many say, this is idolizing the past and that we can't go back. But while we can't go back in time, we can surely learn from the past how to reorganize, and connect to before the disaster of European expansion and colonization struck. This does not mean to ignore the ills of societies before the colonizers came, or to say that all peoples of the past had successful ways of life in the sense of what we need today. It also doesn't mean that there is one way for all to walk and follow.

The point is that when we look for guidance out of the vicious cycles of growth and progress, let us be led by those who have proven to live in a peaceful and sustainable way. Let us be led by the earth and stop further destruction and pollution. And we should never forget that the Europeans and their ways, who are mainly to blame for centuries of destruction, pain and suffering, cannot be part of any solution.

Our main goal should be the dissolution of multi -and transnational networks and lines of communication. That includes corporations, organisations, and institutions. Industrial mass production, and particularly multi- and transnational production and distribution networks, must again be replaced with small scale local production for local consumption. World markets, and especially access to worldwide 'resources', must be abandoned in favor of self-sufficiency in self-determination. The technologies of today are mostly unusable for any decent human society with respect for life. Machine power again needs to be replaced by human and animal power. Food sovereignty seems a good and necessary beginning to rebuild the whole economy apart from the dominant one.