Conversation

It's frustrating that with catastrophe after catastrophe people still are so reluctant to discuss retaliation against the owners and shareholders of ecocidal companies.

If one talks of doing violence to skinhead nazi punks everyone is like, yass slay. But an oil executive who knowingly profited from the death of millions, a landowner who ordered the murder of indigenous folk to burn rainforest, a capitalist who invests in climate disinformation campaigns—damage on a scale that the skinhead nazi can only dream of, and somehow it is taboo to even suggest that maybe our ancestors had a point in their predilection for arson, bombs, insurgent tactics, and assassinations.

I blame a few tendencies for this—the disastrous "anti-militarism" of First World activists, the success of police fear campaigns in terrifying people too much for direct action, a generalised phobia of the situation of violence—but most of all I think this is because even climate activists are still invested in the illusion of normalcy, even while understanding collapse. The military occupations we all live under have told us that we aren't at war, and people will cling as long as they can to the routines given to us—university, jobs, marriage—to avoid the reality that our enemies are in power and killing more of us every day.

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