More striking visuals

via Shaun – Speaking of grass as an invasive species (see previous post), check out this video animation of changes in ‘global land cover’ over the last 8,000 years, detailing the loss of ‘natural vegetation’ during that period:

The problem remains of how to define ‘natural’. If it simply means the presence of human beings  then practically nowhere on the map should be coloured dark green even at the start because a) all the continents except Antarctica were populated by humans by at least 14,000 years ago, b) there’s no way to inhabit a landscape and not affect it and c) hunter-gatherer peoples are known to have shaped plant and animal communities, sometimes drastically, even before the onset of full-scale cultivation. If ‘non-natural’ vegetation means that native species have been gradually replaced by non-natives then this gets us a little closer to the above depiction but you then have to define what you mean by native, a task that runs into difficulties as soon as you observe that 1) no species has been around since the dawn of time and, 2) they have all come to the space they currently occupy through, if not physical migration, then a journey into existence through evolutionary design space. Also, wouldn’t you have to admit that the various crops and weeds responsible for changing these ecologies had their own native ranges? Therefore, strictly speaking, China should stay green because of its subsistence on native rice, as should the Middle East (the home of wheat and barley) and the various regions in Africa and South & Central America who developed their own crops. Maybe the best description for what is being measured here is the spread of plant & animal domestication. Again, this runs into problems of definition, given that i) low-key forms of cultivation have been around in one form or another since the dawn of humanity ii) (again) there’s no way to inhabit a landscape and not affect it and iii) where exactly are you supposed to draw the line anyway? I suppose it would correlate pretty well with deforestation too. But, dammit, where do you draw the line between ‘pristine’ forest and planted fruit & nut orchards? It would help to know what data this was based on…

Anyway, what I meant to say originally was that it was interesting to watch this while reading Marvin Harris’ classic, Cannibals and Kings, which talks about the origins of ‘hydraulic societies’ (a term coined by the historian Karl Wittfogel) in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and China, each of which developed

[...] amid arid or semi-arid plains and valley fed by great rivers. Through dams, canal, flood control and drainage projects, officials diverted water from these rivers and delivered it to the peasants’ fields. Water constituted the most important factor in production. When it was applied in regular and copious amounts, high yields per acre and per calorie of effort resulted. (p.174)

These massive public works, which were necessary if the settled populations were to be fed (an important factor was the lack of opportunities for subsistence in the wilderness surrounding the floodplains – beyond a certain level of population density the people were trapped), led to the emergence of totalitarian hierarchies, enforced by bureaucracies acting out of self-interest for their share of the spoils of the wealth which was produced by the masses, most often living in a state of abject poverty a few steps removed from starvation.

Interestingly, Harris thinks that these states were initially quite self-contained and that the sickness took quite a while to reach the same ferocity in the Northern regions of Europe and Russia – a contention which the above animation seems to confirm. While he describes iron age societies in Britain, France and Germany as ‘secondary states called into existence to cope with the military threat of the Mediterranean empires and to exploit the possibilities of trade and plunder provided by the great wealth of Greece and Rome’ (p.183), the fact that meltwater and rain provided all a peasant farmer needed meant there was no need for a huge state superstructure:

Despite the rigidities introduced by serfdom into the feudal system, the post-Roman political organisation of Europe continued to contrast with that of the hydraulic empires. Central bureaux of internal and external plunder and of public works were conspicuously absent. There was no national system for collecting taxes, fighting wars, building roads and canals or administering justice. The basic unit of production were the independent, self-contained rainfall-farming manorial estates. There was no way for the more powerful princes and kings to interrupt or facilitate the production activities that took place in each separate little manorial world.

Unlike the hydraulic despots, Europe’s medieval kings could not furnish or withhold water from the fields. The rains fell regardless of what the king in his castle decreed, and there was nothing in the productive process to necessitate the organization of vast armies of workers. (pp.185-6)

Indeed, he even goes as far to say that ‘Long after the great river valleys were packed from horizon to horizon with human settlements, northern Europe stood to the Mediterranean and the Orient as America was later to stand to Europe: a frontier still covered by virgin forests’ (p.183) – forests into which they could escape if the going got too rough. At least until iron axes, saws and ploughs became cheaply & widely available enough to allow mass felling and the instatement of the open field system….

Okay, next: a cool little animation by Steve Cutts, simply titled ‘MAN’*:

And, one I’ve been saving – You know you’re making progress when a video about the chemical extermination of unwanted plants and the whole culture built around this act upsets you more than a documentary about the Nazi holocaust. Witness Dow Chemical’s 1947 advertisement / propaganda piece for 2,4-D herbicide (later used in Agent Orange as previously discussed), ‘Death to Weeds’:

OMFG I nearly crapped my pants when I saw this footage in a BBC/Discovery documentary series, ‘Human Planet‘. If you think I’m exaggerating when I describe agriculture as an all-out war against the rest of the living world, just … wait for it:

(There’s some context missing from this clip. You can watch the whole Grasslands episode here, with the relevant passage starting from 24:30. Count how many military metaphors the narrator uses.) This is what I mean by my talk about ‘wealth redistribution’. Brief wikipedia research tells me that the Red-billed Quelea ‘is the world’s most abundant wild bird species’ with a total population of up to 10 billion individuals all living in sub-Saharan Africa. They feed mainly on ‘annual grasses, seeds and grain’, although they apparently feed their chicks with caterpillars & insects for a few days before switching to the seed diet. Here’s the telling passage:

Being such a considerable part of the savanna biomass, Red-billed Quelea flocks and colonies attract huge numbers and diverse types of predators and scavengers. Birds known to live extensively off queleas include herons, storks, raptors, owls, hornbills, rollers, kingfishers, shrikes and corvids. Additionally, snakes, lizards and several types of mammals, especially rodents and small carnivores, are regular predators.

And why do they form ‘such a considerable part’ of the biomass? Because human farmers have made available highly concentrated stores of food that support their population at numbers massively higher than they would otherwise be! I think there’s a message to be read in the huge swarms of these ‘locust birds’: If you grain farmers keep on hoarding all of the land’s productivity for yourselves, we will be forced to descend upon you in great numbers, ruining your efforts and returning the biological wealth to those you stole it from; those who will now feed on us.

I could be wrong…

Finally, a hero:

(source – please ask me to take it down if it’s not okay for me to republish)

Later in the day a quick-thinking defender scaled this time not a tree but a telegraph pole on the other side of the road to where the chainsaws were felling. Work had to stop because of the potential danger and this time security climbers found it impossible to evict the defender, unable as they were to find a higher point to secure on to. Instead, a bunch of coppers closed off the road (which was unecessary, and no doubt intended to hack off the locals) and stood about ready to nick the pole-sitter when he came down. Holding out until the contractors had beaten a retreat a valiant attempt was made by supporters to “de-arrest” the defender upon his descent, but were met with the full force of sussex police, who piled out of a nearby riot van screaming “pepper spray them, pepper spray them all”, and duly dispensed their canisters. In the ruckus the pole-sitter cut open his leg and, after being nicked, was taken to hospital for 8 stiches. He was released in the early hours and, just as in the previous arrests, bailed off site. He was charged with obstruction of the public highway (that is, the same public highway that the police themselves closed…?!). (link)

Protestors are resisting the construction of a new road between Hastings and Bexhill (near the south coast of England) which will carve through a valley containing a peaceful water meadow and pockets of ancient woodland. Go to: Combe Haven Defenders for more information and to see how you can help.

————————

* – Obligatory nit-pick: these actions do not represent all of humanity. As Daniel Quinn wrote:

Man was born MILLIONS of years ago, and he was no more a scourge than hawks or lions or squids. He lived AT PEACE with the world … for MILLIONS of years.

This doesn’t mean he was a saint. This doesn’t mean he walked the earth like a Buddha. It means he lived as harmlessly as a hyena or a shark or a rattlesnake.

It’s not MAN who is the scourge of the world, it’s a single culture. One culture out of hundreds of thousands of cultures. OUR culture.

Herbicide: The Gift That Keeps On Giving

I’ve finally started reading a book by Timothy Lee Scott, Invasive Plant Medicine: The Ecological and Healing Abilities of Invasives (click on the image to go to the website) and it has provided further support and confirmation for a lot of the things I’ve been writing here as well as further provocative fuel for thought while I go about my business with conservationists and gardeners. I’ve just finished the chapters titled ‘Invasive Herbicidal Impacts’ and ‘The Economics of Weeds’. A passage in the latter confirms my earlier contention that ‘Biocidal poisons used to further the Green Revolution in the mid 20th century came directly from the re-tooled factories of World War Two’:

Nazi Germany pioneered chemical engineering for combating plants, pests, and people by developing highly poisonous organophosphate compounds used in agricultural pesticides and as chemical warfare nerve gases. In America after the two World Wars were over, there was a movement to find use for the millions of pounds of wasted ammunition and explosives that remained. Factories that once manufactured war machinery were waiting to be filled, soldiers needed jobs, and there were plenty of raw materials to use. The first widely used herbicides and pesticides were nothing but leftover weapons of war. Nitrogen- and phosphorous-based compounds accumulated in massive, stockpiled amounts during wartime, which then led to the practice of discarding them on agricultural fields as a synthetic fertilizer throughout America and, eventually, the world.

DuPont was the largest manufacturer of gunpowder during WWI and now is the parent company of the world’s largest seed company, Pioneer HiBred, and Monsanto saw a one-hundred-fold increase in profits by supplying chemicals to produce highly reactive explosives such as TNT. Dow Chemical and Monsanto have been the leading manufacturers of herbicides for decades, reaping huge profits from Agent Orange’s campaign against the Vietnamese jungles and with the Roundup family of herbicides for every dangerous [sic] plant imaginable. (pp.76-7, citing this article by Brian Tokar)

…while the story of ‘Agent Orange and the Rainbow Herbicides’ in the former is pretty horrific:

(source: Wikipedia)

The use of herbicides for warfare was first brought to our attention in the Vietnam War, when rainbow herbicides were sprayed across territories to reveal hideouts, destroy agriculture, and poison the enemy. The barrels containing these agents that Dow Chemical Company and Monsanto, among others, manufactured had a coloured stripe painted on them to identify the contents:

Agent Orange, Agent Green, Agent Pink, Agent White, and Agent Purple

The most common was Agent Orange, an equal blend of two phenoxy herbicides (2, 4-D and 2, 4, 5-T). Between 1961 and 1971, about forty-six thousand tonnes of it was sprayed at intensified rates over 3.5 million acres of southern Vietnamese forests and cropland. Not only were ecosystems completely ravaged by this mass poisoning effort, but also millions of civilians and allied troops were caught in the crossfire. The toxin dioxin used in all of these poisons has been reported by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to cause a wide variety of illnesses that affect various bodily systems and is still present in our [sic] environment at high concentrations. Some known ailments that are compensated under VA benefits include type 2 diabetes, prostate cancer, respitory cancers, multiple myeloma, Hodgkins disease, non-Hodgkins lymphoma, soft-tissue sarcoma, chloracne, porphyries cutanea tarda, peripheral neuropathy, and spina bifida in the children of veterans. Since 1984, Dow Chemical Company has lost various class-action lawsuits regarding these poisonings of American, Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, and South Korean veterans in Vietnam. All have won health care compensation for the unforseen hazards of their service. (p.69, citing this allmilitary forum post)

Of course the generations of Vietnamese victims have had no such luck, with lawsuits against Dow Chemical and Monsanto and subsequent appeals getting thrown out various US courts between 2004 and 2009. To get a deeper sense of this atrocity, read the Wikipedia article and associated links or, if you’ve got a strong stomach, type ‘agent orange effects’ into an image search engine.

I subscribe to the notion articulated by Hireesh Chandra of the Department of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology at Gandhi Medical College, who said, referring to the Bhopal disaster, that individuals or institutions “shouldn’t be permitted to make poison for which there is no antidote” (quoted in Jensen, Culture of Make Believe, p.285)

It seems Agent Orange is still poisoning people in Japan, where:

The U.S. Marine Corps buried a massive stockpile of Agent Orange at the Futenma air station in Okinawa, possibly poisoning the base’s former head of maintenance and potentially contaminating nearby residents and the ground beneath the base, The Japan Times recently learned from interviews with U.S. veterans.

The barrels were apparently abandoned in Okinawa at the end of the Vietnam War — when the U.S. government banned the dioxin-laden defoliant for health reasons — and were buried at the installation in the city of Ginowan after the Pentagon ignored requests to safely dispose of them, according to the veterans who served at the installation in the 1970s and 1980s.

[...]

In 1972, the U.S. removed its stockpiles of Agent Orange from South Vietnam to Johnston Island in the North Pacific where, after a five-year debate over how to dispose of them safely, they were eventually incinerated at sea in 1977.

Scientists researching the dangers of Agent Orange in South Vietnam have discovered that because its highly poisonous dioxin is not dissolved by rainwater, it can remain in the soil, poisoning people for decades. In southern Vietnam today, there are more than 20 dioxin hot spots at sites used by the U.S. military to store Agent Orange.

Where is the accountability for these motherfuckers? How can they get away with this? What incentive do they have to not commit the same crimes in the future?

I don’t expect an answer to these questions anytime soon.

In the meantime I have my work cut out trying to persuade my bosses of the insanity of torching gardens, driveways and even bodies of water with Glyphosate (Monsanto’s patented chemical in Roundup) to kill the plants they or their clients, in their definitely less-than-infinite wisdom, have decided don’t belong.

Fascism in the garden

[***May 31st updates in bold***]

(The Forest Swastika)

I’ve touched before on the ‘curious parallels’ between the language people use when speaking about so-called invasive species and the ‘language of racism and genocide’, especially when you compare it to tabloid-style attitudes toward immigrants ‘stealing all the jobs of our native-borns’. It has also become increasingly apparent to me – as I work in the gardens of acquaintances and friends of the family doing all the ‘necessary’ but physically taxing tasks of mowing, weeding, pruning, trimming, and as I continue to work with a volunteer conservation group manipulating local habitats in an effort to replace ‘unwanted’ with ‘wanted’ plant & animal species – that the prevalent cultural attitudes and subsequent actions toward those we term ‘weeds’ closely resemble the irrationality, fear, prejudice and blind hatred so often evident in acts of genocide. Even dictionary definitions, faithfully reflecting cultural values, practically froth at the mouth at these plant ‘mongrel races’. For example:

weed

–noun
1. a valueless plant growing wild, especially one that grows on cultivated ground to the exclusion or injury of the desired crop.
2. any undesirable or troublesome plant, especially one that grows profusely where it is not wanted: The vacant lot was covered with weeds. (source)

Ouch! ‘Valueless’, ‘undesirable’, ‘troublesome’, ‘not wanted’ according to who? Ah, I see: according to the one who invested his energy in cultivating the ground; who expects to maximise the return from his ‘desired crop’. The definition is written from the point of view of the farmer/gardener. Of course: he has chosen to fight a war (of extermination, no less) and, as we all know, the victor gets to write the histories – and definitions, it would seem – as best suits his self-image and ongoing propaganda purposes. I imagine the plants in question would describe themselves rather differently…

Anyway, what I didn’t realise was that at least one person had already arrived at this analogy between weed-killing and genocide, only they had come to it from rather the opposite direction. Here’s the quote that was waiting for me near the end of Derrick Jensen’s book, The Culture of Make Believe, which I finally got round to finishing the other day:

The fundamental metaphor of National Socialism as it related to the world around it was the garden, not the wild forest. One of the most important Nazi ideologists, R.W. Darré, made clear the relationship between gardening and genocide: “He who leaves the plants in a garden to themselves will soon find to his surprise that the garden is overgrown by weeds and that even the basic character of the plants has changed. If therefore the garden is to remain the breeding ground for the plants, if, in other words, it is to lift itself above the harsh rule of natural forces, then the forming will of a gardener is necessary, a gardener who, by providing suitable conditions for growing, or by keeping harmful influences away, or by both together, carefully tends what needs tending and ruthlessly eliminates the weeds which would deprive the better plants of nutrition, air, light, and sun. . . . Thus we are facing the realization that questions of breeding are not trivial for political thought, but that they have to be at the center of all considerations, and that their answers must follow from the spiritual, from the ideological attitude of a people. We must even assert that a people can only reach spiritual and moral equilibrium if a well-conceived breeding plan stands at the very center of its culture.” (pp.589-90)

Jensen comments that ‘We still believe in the metaphor of the garden’. In fact it’s a reality – I was in a garden center just last week and an advertisement for the latest brand of herbicide came over the tannoy, bristling with Darré’s justifications for ‘ruthlessly [eliminating]‘ weeds/lesser races which still have the audacity to ‘deprive the better plants of nutrition, air, light, and sun’, basically ‘stealing’ – using for their own independent purposes – the resources which we ourselves wanted to appropriate for our favoured crops.

The best-selling herbicide worldwide ‘since at least 1980′ is agro-bio-tech giant Monsanto’s Roundup, based on the patented active ingredient Glyphosate. It seems between 1996 and 2009 the company was accused and finally convicted of false advertising, having claimed, among other things, that:

• Glyphosate is less toxic to rats than table salt
•  ”Roundup can be used where kids and pets’ll play and breaks down into natural material.” This ad depicts a person with his head in the ground and a pet dog standing in an area which has been treated with Roundup.
• You can feel good about using herbicides by Monsanto. They carry a toxicity category rating of ‘practically non-toxic’ as it pertains to mammals, birds and fish. (source)

In fact Roundup comes with a whole host of toxic effects for animals, including humans, and entire ecosystems (see Wikipedia page linked above for details), but what interests me more is that nobody’s complaining about the avowed intent of the product, explicitly stated in the same adverts, namely: to kill plants. It’s not the same one I heard in the garden center, but if you can stomach it have a look at this Roundup infomercial, which I’m guessing has been specifically targeted for a UK audience. I predict future generations will find this shocking and disgusting:

With Roundup rest easy knowing that your problem weeds will soon have died, right down to their roots, so they can never come back.

Right down to the roots!! (Can you hear the repressed hatred behind the announcer’s calm delivery?) Then, necessary cleansing rituals performed, the Brave New Briton can return to his civilised activity of ‘[relaxing] with a tea and the Sunday papers’, secure in the knowledge that his ‘enjoyment’ won’t be ‘spoilt’ by ‘unwanted weeds [...] which look unsightly and compete with our treasured plants.’

It’s Genesis all over: We, the farming cultures, have eaten at the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and consequently feel able to take over the gods’ (or, if you prefer, evolution’s) work of deciding who shall live and who shall die.* We take it for granted that we have the right – indeed, the obligation – to take these matters into our own hands, and we feel compelled to continue even when the results prove manifestly catastrophic for the biosphere and for ourselves.

And it’s a war we’ve chosen to fight. Biocidal poisons used to further the Green Revolution in the mid 20th century came directly from the re-tooled factories of World War Two. I always remember the sequence of visuals in this episode of Bill Mollison’s ‘Global Gardener’ series (watch from 15:35):

[16:48] I came from traditional farming families and we’d cared for soils for over 200 years, but in the period from 1950 to 1990 most of those soils were destroyed. In 1951 I saw the first chainsaw, in 1953 we saw the modern tractor arrive, by 1954 many farms were pouring phosphate all over their fields. We didn’t have to worry about the soil any more. We were in charge of fertility. In the 50′s, therefore, we declared war on the soil. We were using just that equipment we would have used had we gone to war: heavy machinery, crawler [?] tractors, biocides, poison gas, the lot.

Daniel Quinn made the point this way, referring to Isaiah 2:4:

[...] what you see in this business of beating swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks is not people turning from war to peace but rather people turning from one war to another war–from an inTRAspecies war to an inTERspecies war. From the conquest of nations to the conquest of nature–the mythological war that the people of our particular culture have been waging here for the past ten thousand years.

The plowshare has always been understood by the people of our culture as the sword they follow across the face of the earth. They followed it out of the Fertile Crescent eastward to India and China, they followed it northward into Europe, and finally they followed it westward into the New World. (link)

For me, the distinctions between tractors and tanks, cropdusters and fighter-bombers, or DDT/Agent Orange/Roundup and Zyklon B have been blurred ever since.

And if we’re starting to think of plants as people in this way, maybe we can also begin to look at ourselves as plants; ourselves in the employ of the Master Gardener. How did your school or higher education experiences, for instance, compare to life in a plant nursery, with every effort on the part of your keepers geared towards maximising your value at the point of sale? An extract from a poem I wrote a year ago:

…They had me trained, they had me staked, they had me pruned and brutalised ever-constant to wring the greatest possible harvest from my twisted form. So for them I would provide no fruit; I would send forth no shoot – I reserved all my growing for where they could not see. They could not touch me, reaching through the starving soils, growing strong, growing hard and deep and long at the root…

Back in Culture of Make Believe we read more about the garden metaphor:

There are useful species, off of which we can turn a buck, and, there are species in the way. Likewise, there are useful people—those who are instrumental, productive—and, there are those who clutter up land we could otherwise use. (p.590)

and previously:

Within our culture there are tremendous pressures on people to be “high-functioning,” to be “productive,” to “realize their potential.” When I finished my degree in physics, which I did not enjoy, then bailed partway through a graduate degree in economics, which I enjoyed just as little, and took up beekeeping, the father of one of my friends decried the waste of my potential. Never mind that I was happy. When he later learned that I was a writer, he was mollified. At least I was, in his worldview, producing. (p.513)

This is so true it hurts. Even beekeeping is an ‘instrumental, productive’ way for a human plant to occupy itself, looked at from the economic perspective (the arbiter of all value in our culture) whereby bees provide a service by pollinating our crops. So the lifestyle / business model is tolerated, as are the bees. For now.

This shit makes me so sick I can hardly speak. It’s why last year I wrote (personal correspondence) that ‘all ways of making a living that don’t kill the planet have been (are still being) systematically uprooted to ensnare people in centralised modes of production.’ It’s why the year before I drew this cartoon of Nazi parents persuading their child to enter the deathcamp economy. What other option does the boy – silent, head bowed under the weight of lies – have?

I don’t want to grow for Them or their life-ending agenda.
If I grow I want to do it for Me & Mine.

Fortunately there exist ways of relating to other plants & animals in mutually beneficial ways that don’t involve a constant war-footing. As Ken Fern wrote in the Plants For A Future book:

For so many people, growing plants is a constant battle against all the setbacks nature throws at us. It really need not be like this. Instead of fighting against her and always complaining about our lot we would do better by trying to work with her. Nature is self-regulating and, when left to her own devices, finds a balance between the various species of plants and animals. A natural woodland receives no artificial fertilisers, fungicides or herbicides yet its lush growth feeds a wide range of mammals, birds and insects. There are fluctuations in the populations of different species but the overall picture is one of balance. (pp.5-6, online preview)

I’ve noticed this in myself as well. Like Jean Liedloff pointing out that children are naturally sociable (duh); like Ran Prieur writing that ‘after many years of activities that were forced’ it can take ‘years before you can build up the life inside you to an intensity where it can drive projects that you actually enjoy and finish’ – it’s so obvious: The plants want to grow. All the shouting, all the worrying, all the external input over the years intended (perhaps sometimes with the best of intentions) to encourage, to foster, to guide, ultimately to control my development, and eventually I just wilted under the constant pressure, stress and strain. Now, fiercely guarding the growths that, miraculously and to my surprise and wonder, still manage to arise from me, I feel like telling it this way: The plants grow best when you leave them the fuck alone. Maybe there will be opportunities for mutually supporting relationships in the future, but for now hands off!

Let’s finish with more from Derrick Jensen, here describing how things used to be and (by extension) how they might start to look once again if things take a turn for the better:

It is significant that oftentimes when Europeans searched for Indian gardens to destroy, they could not readily tell what was garden and what was forest (not that, ultimately, this stopped the Europeans, as, in time, they destroyed them both). To not see the world in strictly utilitarian terms is not to cease having preferences. It is merely to see that—and sometimes how—things (or, rather, beings) fit together, how they move in short and long patterns of rhythm and consequence. And it is to attempt to fit oneself into those patterns, taking care to not upset the sometimes delicate balance that must remain between those one considers friends and those one considers honored enemies. Hitler did not understand this, and, for the most part, neither do we. (Make Believe pp.590-1)

I think that’s where the plants will take us, if we can allow ourselves to follow.

***

Epilogue

***

An experiment: Watch what happens inside you when you read these words: Kike, Wog, Nigger, Paki, Pikey, Gyppo, Chink, Gook, Queer, Faggot, Spastic, Retard, Chav, Slut, Whore. Have you ever used any of these or been on the receiving end of one of them? How did it feel? Funny? Neutral/descriptive? Spiteful? Normal? Scathing? Belittling? Physically traumatic? Now ask yourself about the historical relationships implied by these words. Now think about where you fit into these relationships, both during your formative experiences in the past and in your current state in the present. How does where you’re coming from affect your reaction? Some of these words have acquired new significances or gone out of common parlance due to association with historical events (eg: the Jewish holocaust) assertive cultural movements (eg: civil rights) or otherwise changed social circumstances. Others, not.

Now try this one: Weed.

My understanding of prejudice is that it arises to fulfill a specific purpose: to block the senses and otherwise erect barriers which impede the spontaneous emergence of relationships when this proves expedient in the pursuit of other social goals. Thus the dehumanisation of the enemy during wartime (the depersonification of others in inTERspecies wars). Thus the biting epithets used to put down the natives and lower classes and the deference and glorification accorded to the upper/aspirational classes – all to make sure people ‘know their place’ and stick to their given roles. Thus the cold language of bureaucracy and ‘regrettable necessity’ when a culture feels the urge to exterminate those it can find no ‘use’ for; to destroy that in which it sees no value. These situations require the death of empathy: you have to kill the Other inside yourself before you can do the same in the outside world. If we started to view ‘weeds’ as individuals in their own right, with their own unique lifestories and personalities, could we continue to kill them in droves so callously, so thoughtlessly, so absent-mindedly in the blind pursuit of our insane Master-Race-1,000-Year-Reich goals? Of course not.

All the more reason to do it, says I!

—————

* – see chapter 9 of Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael (online)