Sadly the poor Star Wars geeks at BoingBoing got duped by Derrick Jensen‘s unfortunate parody video, which slams all environmental strategies that don’t advocate violent resistance. Apparently he cannot differentiate the cartoon world of Star Wars with his own vision of the world, which seems to be a 19th Century caricature of far more complex reality than one in which it is possible to attack a center of power. To be sure, Jensen is a prolific writer and tireless advocate against the Empire, but having read many of his articles and books, I’ve grown weary of this kind of criticism that ultimately ends up leaving one feeling powerless. His latest missive in Orion Magazine made the false analogy that composting didn’t stop slavery. It’s a rhetorically witty retort to all us idiots who recycle, or even to those of us who advocate personal change.
I give Jensen credit for asking tough questions and for reminding us that what’s at stake is not just personal consciousness, but social justice. He’s right to criticize solutions that are only individualistic. Yet in identifying the enemy, he draws on Industrial-era assumptions of power and resistance:
If every act within an industrial economy is destructive, and if we want to stop this destruction, and if we are unwilling (or unable) to question (much less destroy) the intellectual, moral, economic, and physical infrastructures that cause every act within an industrial economy to be destructive, then we can easily come to believe that we will cause the least destruction possible if we are dead.
The good news is that there are other options. We can follow the examples of brave activists who lived through the difficult times I mentioned—Nazi Germany, Tsarist Russia, antebellum United States—who did far more than manifest a form of moral purity; they actively opposed the injustices that surrounded them. We can follow the example of those who remembered that the role of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much integrity as possible, but rather to confront and take down those systems.
I think this is a rather simplistic view of these particular confrontations and their outcomes. After all, it’s the Empire that took Hitler down, no? The fact is we have an opportunity to confront the system every time we make a lifestyle choice or eat a bite of food. To disparage these kinds of actions at the moment of actual contact we have with the system on a daily basis is asking people to surrender these opportunities to some abstract dream of bloody revolution. Me sense is that Jensen has not entered in on a Star War plot, but rather into a PK Dick novel, in which the sci-fi sage wrote, “To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement. This is a paradox: whoever defeats a segment of the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus, imposing its form on its enemies. Thereby it becomes its enemies” (from Valis, p.134).
