One night last August I was sitting at a table on the smoking patio of the Heart & Dagger Saloon in the Lakeshore district of Oakland, a place I fancy for the sole reason that it has a smoking patio. This was less than a month after I had returned from Sun Dance, an annual Lakota renewal ceremony that I’ve been attending for many years. After two weeks of freedom—camping in the woods, prayer songs, flesh offerings, late-night conversations by the kitchen fire, and the now-rare experience of being part of a genuine community—the visit to the saloon was my first venture into a public place other than the grocery store.
I was accompanied by a white friend of mine who I first met in 2015, during my brief career in the Non-Profit Activism Industrial Complex. He’s a writer and a historian, creator of the Cross-Cultural Solidarity project, an extensive resource for civil rights history and anti-racist activism. Upon returning from the periodic autonomous zone of ceremony, it usually takes me at least a month to re-adjust to TechnoBabylon enough to keep company with my non-Native friends. I typically spend most of that month chain-smoking and sobbing.
At some point in our conversation he was expressing to me his concern over the “increasing right-wing extremism” here in America. This prompted an epic rant from me on the subject. My rant, like so many I’ve enjoyed at the ol’ Heart & Dagger, climaxed with me standing on the table’s bench, splashing pale ale out of a pint glass, and hollering into the general vicinity of the clueless gentrifiers who were also on the patio—Look at these motherfuckers, with their pastel clothes and their goddamn spacephones! Braindead yuppie cyborgs! They don’t give a FUCK!
As you may imagine, anyone who wants to stay friends with me must have both a good sense of humor and a basic immunity to public embarrassment. Fortunately, I have an instinctual mastery of just how far I can push things before someone summons the stormtroopers.
Anyway, the crux of my rant was this: frankly, I don’t believe there’s anything extreme about “right-wing extremism.” The fascist MAGA crowd believes that they represent the True America, and in a sense I have to agree with them. This country would not exist without Native genocide, chattel slavery, oppression of women and queers, exploitation of laborers, and ecological murder. While the everyday experience of life for many in this country is indisputably multicultural and polymorphous, there is a trunk from which those branches spring: white supremacism. To believe differently is a dangerous fantasy.
I was reminded of that night’s conversation by one of author Eve Ottenberg’s recent pieces on Counterpunch. In it, she defines fascism as consisting of “corporate control of government, [and] persecution of leftists, non-Christians, and trade unionists.” I wish to perform a bit of savage exegesis on this definition, in order to illuminate what I see as a planet-sized blind spot in most (white) leftist thought regarding the nature of the anti-life machine we call Civilization.
Fascism and Civilization are two things that differ only in degree; they do not differ in kind. Any critique of the evils of fascism is equally true of Civilization itself, if one is willing look past its distractions. Liberal Democracy™, the rapid disintegration of which so many leftish writers have been lamenting, is nothing but a minor and temporary skin rash on the inherently authoritarian body of Civilization. Fascism, which The Left™ claims to oppose, is just an old-fashioned tyrant with stock options instead of a gilded chariot.
Corporate control of government
The earliest state religious temples were also banks; writing itself was invented to keep track of debt. Don’t be fooled by the current (nominal) separation of corporate & financial entities and the state. Babylon is a caste system in which economic and political interests have never been meaningfully distinct. The “economy” of such a system is based on converting the living into the dead, invasion, oppression, and slavery. In America, talk of political freedom is little more than a mask for the consolidation of wealth and power by the merchant & finance oligarchy. Whatever freedoms that do exist here in comparison to, say, Franco’s Spain or Stalin’s Russia, are permitted to the extent that they either facilitate or fail to prevent that consolidation.
It’s all smoke & mirrors; a dead planet is the cost for failing to see past the illusion.
Persecution of leftists
If we dig into the term leftists, examine it for evidence, and conclude our investigation by determining—tentatively, generously—that the term broadly refers to those who are anti-authoritarian, then we can celebrate a revelation: all human societies for most of our existence were non-authoritarian. However, as of today, almost all of those societies have been ruthlessly destroyed by states. As recently as 300 years ago, my Turtle Island ancestors were still living more or less the same way that humans lived for most of our time on earth. Now, their descendants live in concentration camps (“reservations”), on the street, or in prisons.
Persecution of non-Christians
I would argue that the atheism, consumerism, and vague cybernetic agnosticism that are the most common religious affiliations in this country are essentially versions of Christianity. Since Christianity is just another Cosmic Sky Daddy religion of hierarchical hokum—a necessary accompaniment to empire—we can extrapolate “persecution of non-Christians” to mean persecution of non-hierarchical spiritual forms.
Most of the so-called “world religions,” i.e. Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Scientism, etc., are all products of Civilization. While it’s true that they all have their heretical, non-authoritarian fringe sects (the human spirit does not submit easily to the cult of Control), they primarily serve to spiritually justify subjugation.
Non-civilized spiritual practices are not religions per se, but rather part of a holistic way of life, encompassing all aspects of living as a communal species in a habitat. As such, they are inherently non-authoritarian; their very existence is a threat to the pyramid cults, and so they have always been relentlessly persecuted.
Persecution of trade unionists
Unions only exist because they serve as a means for regular working people to mitigate exploitation by the corporate mafia. Employment itself is a nightmarish torment that no sane person would undergo for any reason other than survival… but labor is simply a part of life; hunt, gather, create, make. Civilization has always attempted to subvert and/or crush any means of survival that it could not control. Of course fascists persecute trade unionists; Civilization wants every drop of your blood, unto death.
***
Here’s the thing: fascism is not encroaching, it’s encroached. What we’re seeing now is Civilization sealing the final deal; fascism is merely the endgame of an anti-life system. Dictators are just the ones who have shed the velvet glove from the iron fist.
***
One of the reasons I have a hard time taking seriously any leftist teeth-gnashing about The End of the World is that I’m a descendant of two diasporas that have already passed through their own versions of Apocalypse: Natives and enslaved Africans. As I told a friend in conversation over a decade ago—before the super-storms and record heat waves really started flexing—for us, the world ended when Europeans invaded Turtle Island. The Nazi’s holocaust was directly inspired by America’s genocide of the indigenous. I am absolutely certain that if the Final Solution technology of Nazi Germany had existed in, say, the year 1750, there would be no Natives left.
As it is, very few of us survived, and we are now trapped in varying degrees of subjugation. The old ways are largely dead… which makes us the walking dead.
***
I have a new housemate who moved in last August, a mixed white & Mexican dude who looks white, grew up solidly middle-class, and is a refugee of the Mormon church. In the last couple of weeks he’s been on a book-reading kick (unusual for a 25-year-old American), and I’ve been passing him selections from my substantial library. The first couple that I let him borrow are two of my favorite books of all time; first was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which he loved, followed by Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions.
Within a couple of days he was already half-way through Lame Deer, and we were talking about it on the back porch. Sometimes I forget that most people know dick about the indigenous, or about the various horrors that invaders have visited upon us over the centuries. Whereas for me, as with most of the Natives I know, those horrors are part of my baseline understanding of the world. So whenever I read Lame Deer, it’s a book of rousing adventure, hilarious tales, great humor and humility, and deep spiritual truths. The basic evils of the context in which Lame Deer’s story takes place do not stand out to me.
As such, it caught me off guard when I asked my housemate what he thought of the book so far, and the first thing he said was: It’s really sad. I asked him what he meant; as he was explaining, I realized that this book was his first real exposure to those horrors with which I am so familiar. Upon reflection, I also realized that this was the first time I’d ever been present for another person’s introduction to the legacy of American atrocities against Natives.
No wonder these liberoid and leftist motherfuckers don’t get it. Our stories have been so thoroughly deleted from the matrix—or worse, rendered into colorful seasoning for the wokester version of eurocentrism—that non-Native anti-authoritarian thinkers are trapped in the iron maiden of their own bullshit, with nothing else to really compare it to… no matter how “educated” they are. I’ve yet to hear of a Philosophy department that teaches classes on indigenous thought. For that matter, even our art, as Winona LaDuke pointed out, is found not in Fine Arts, but in Anthropology. To white folks, we are still mere objects, a background feature of The Real Story, relics of a dead past.
Oh, the irony; thanks to the Machine, everyone is now a relic of a dead future. The remaining species on this planet, including humans, are at almost certain risk of extinction due to global warming, if not nuclear holocaust. The key word here is remaining; most of the earth’s “biodiversity” (we call them people) was killed off forever by the civilized long before I was born.
And now comes the part where I play the Angry Indigenegro: yes, libs and lefties, the world is ending; extinction is imminent. And yes, it’s your fault. Why? Because you share with fascists the most deadly conviction of all: that Civilization is a good thing.
You believe this no matter how much of the living world is murdered. You believe this even after all your book-learnin’ tells you the gruesome details of what happened to us, and what continues to happen. Slogans be damned, the proof is in the pudding—our lives do not and have never mattered to you. And I’ll keep saying this until y’all hear it or until it’s inscribed on my tombstone: when I say us and our, that includes all my nonhuman relatives. It makes little difference to the creatures of the desert what “politics” are claimed by the humans who smother it with cement… or with solar panels. From the perspective of life, I don’t have to squint my eyes too hard to see that fascists and leftists are on the same side—they’re civilized.
If I have any feeling about this situation that even vaguely resembles hope, it’s this: if even a small percentage of liberoids and lefties could deal with this truth and get over their selfish fear and guilt, then we might be able to actually do something.
Sometimes I wonder what their threshold is. How bad does it have to get?
I suspect we’re all going to find out the hard way.
