Green Scare - Reflections in Green and Black

Looking Back on our Lives/ Looking Forward
by Armadillo

After the battle of Seattle the corporate media descended on Eugene, Oregon and began a circus show to highlight the 'eugene anarchists'. It spent a lot of time focusing on the philosophies of certain bio-privitimists like John Zerzan.

The corporate elite does not do anything by accident. It was an intentional move to both create fear in the middle class towards 'ecological radicals' and to simultaneously give 15 seconds of fame to certain radicals and anarchists who had been in Seattle. By giving this drug of fame to people, some who gave their 'real' names to the cameras, was a carefully calculated game of cat and mouse in the psychic labyrinth of the materialist world. It made the anarchists feel more powerful and important than they really are/were to the struggle in Seattle and elsewhere. It also provided a tool in beginning the dismantlement of a movement that had the potential to shift the power relations in the ecotopian bioregion and possibly spread beyond.

The occupations at Warner Creek, and Redwood Summer in 1990 brought together direct action activists and old time union organizers and old school loggers. It was a fear of a fusion of these currents in an economy that was on a dead-end road of clearcuts, the potential of real human solidarity and effective organizing tactics and strategy that caused the FBI to bomb Judi Bari and Darryl Cherny's car. It wasn't because they were eco-saboteurs, it was because they were effectively uniting people who were natural allies in the war against big timber. This was a far greater threat to the power establishment than the occasional forest service headquarters going up in flames. Yet to this day how many up and coming forest defenders have read Judi's Timber Wars as compared to reading Green Anarchy or some of Zerzan's rantings against all civilization? This is not by chance, this is a deliberate result of the power structure looking at the threat of the radical envionmental movement uniting with the labor movement and other currents of the peace and justice movement that actually took place on the streets of Seattle. The deliberate attempts by the state and corporate media to drive wedges between the steelworkers and the spokes council direct actioners began immediately and continues to this day, some might say culminating in the streets of Miami during the FTAA protests when the lack of solidarity between the unions and direct action faction was so painfully evident.

The system wanted/s us to believe that it is extreme tactics that make us radical, that score us cool points with our companeras/os. They wanted us to believe that it was the sound of breaking glass that shut down the WTO meeting in Seattle. This is patently not true. What shut down the WTO meeting was a coordinated and international effort of unions and NGO along with intense bravery of direct action tactics. Don't get me wrong, I love a good fire, I love the thought of going up against the police in the streets if we have the numbers to pull it off, but tactics do not make a revolutionary strategy. Revolutionary strategy requires an infrastructure to be built that can sustain and move foward. Tactics minus strategy is suicide. In the face of eco-cide, suicide is often an honorable option, in fact all of us should have our hats off to the defendants in these cases. But we should also find ourselves culpable in not creating an effective movement that was/is as attractive to young radicals as the fires that were started.

We need to stand with these defendants, stay in touch with them, all of us constantly learning from eachother and preparing the infrastructure that will be alive and growing when they are released/freed from their maximum security installations back into the minimum security prisions of our cities. We stand at a incredibly critical time for our planet and our social movements. Anarchy is not chaos, nature is not chaos, it is highly organized and interdependent, outwardly spiraling and relational to its core. Long live the blockade, long live the barricade, long live the warriors who have been caught in the cages, and long live the intelligent mind of all species to adapt, change, transform.