A climate change journalist talks about climate change induced despair
This can be expanded to anyone who writes about the state of the U.S.
Actually can we stop acting like the end of the US in any way compares to the end of thousands of species and the end of the lives and possibly whole cultures of people living in vulnerable areas (mostly poor, not white)?
The US is an empire in the darkest sense. American imperialism is at the helm of this crisis. The US is driving itself to destruction. Oh me, oh my, what can we do about it?
We can thank our lucky stars. There’s nothing to complain about there. Only the destruction being wrought along the way.
You realise the ‘self-destruction’ of the US is currently heading squarely towards fascism, right? And fascism tends to kill millions of people (mostly poor, not white)?
& since imperialist aggression is a big part of fascism a fascist US will also go beyond its own borders to end lives and whole cultures of people living in other vulnerable areas (mostly poor, not white)?
“Late stage capitalism” as in the ends of a terminal disease. Not “then we have socialism”. If we don’t stop this we die.
Terms like ‘late stage capitalism’ do not make a good topic for left-wing jokes or a cause for optimism when you realize how very likely the same period is to be remembered in history books as ‘early stage fascism’.
Like, I would love it if I was wrong and we are on the eve of an anarcho-communist revolution but that is not what I’m seeing in the late stage capitalist societies around me.
I’m not so optimistic about it either, to be perfectly honest. There is no way I can see for this empire to crumble without bringing millions down it it’s wake. But I don’t think we’re seeing early stage fascism. I think fascism is but one stage in the end of this empire. It isn’t separate from what we have now, it’s only the next logical step. It cannot be a whole new era because it won’t be able to sustain itself. It will pillage the rest of the world in an attempt to do so, but there’s only so much pillaging to be done and we are nearing the end of that rope, not the beginning.
It would be naive to imagine this empire imploding with minimal harm to the vulnerable communities within and around it. It is destroying us and it will continue to do so without question. But somehow it has to end. The blood spilled will largely be the blood of the poor and the marginalized as it always has been (I’m not talking about the US military blood, we know who they are and whose side they’re on and in the grand scheme not things most of the blood they’ve spilt hasn’t been their own).
It bothers me that someone would equate this necessary fall of a violent empire–tragic and tremendous though the causalities will be–with the death of millions of species and ecosystems which is but another of the tremendous causalities of this empire. The end of ecosystems is heartbreaking. The end of an empire is bloody but necessary.
We can mourn the loss of everyone and everything the US brings down with it. We cannot mourn the state, it has to go.
Look, I think we just have a different understanding about fascism. That’s okay. Here’s why I see it as such a big threat:
See, based on what we’ve seen with the Third Reich, fascism is also self-destructive to the point of bringing about the end of the world if it can. Not just in terms of its leaders but right down to its ideology. Fascists believes in ‘survival of the most powerful’ in the most brutal way. Fascists believe that those who lose don’t deserve to exist.
The Nazis not only believed they existed to bring about the perfect world through glorious warfare, they also believed that if the German race did not win this war they no longer deserved to exist. Hitler and the other top national socialists literally signed ‘end of the world’ orders, instructing the
incineration
of musea, the destruction of argiculture and for every single person to die fighting. If their dreams were going to end, they would take everyone with them.
It’s an ‘all or nothing’, ‘if we can’t have this world nobody can’ sort of ideology. And US fascism so far seems consistant with that. I can definitely imagine US fascists seeing ‘America’ as being so important that if it dies, everything dies.
Deep at the heart of fascist ideology is the belief that losers must perish and take all the decadent non-fascists with them if they can.
Now, imagine that ideology, and imagine it in the hands of the state with the biggest nuclear arsenal in the world.
So yeah, I’m saying that fascist US can potentially destroy all of life on earth in ways just as destructive as global warming or worse. Now I’m not saying that will happen, but it’s a possibility unless we stop it and that’s why the threat of fascism is most definitely as high on my list of ‘likely to extinguish countless cultures, species and ecosystems’ as global warming.
I think US imperialism (which is fast-becoming fascist) is the main cause of climate change. The idea that it is somehow just as reasonable to mourn the fall of this state as it is to mourn all of the havoc it is wreaking on its way down makes no sense to me, and in fact it pisses me off.
Obviously we have to stop US fascism. But we cannot in any way stop it while salvaging the US state because this is ultimately the only direction this state could’ve gone.
There’s this weird liberal pipe dream of somehow turning this trainwreck around before it turns fascist and before the state is doomed. I’m pretty sure we’re past that point. Fascist ideals have been gaining traction steadily since 9/11 or arguably much earlier (like the Cold War, or the Constitutional Convention. Or maybe the genocide that preceded all of that). We lost that battle years ago. We are deep in this mess. The US government is deep in this mess. The only option now is to tear it all up, roots and all, and start something new growing.
I am going to stop this conversation because I am 100% in agreement with you but you do not seem to hear it. I am an anarchist. I have no love for the US or for any other state. I want it gone. I won’t mourn one second about the end of the US as a power structure. The sooner it’s gone, the better. NO ONE is mourning the state here. At all. I can not be more clear about this.
I am scared, angry and in mourning about all the life fascism is going to extinguish in its race to the bottom, and I honestly believe that could mean that they extinguish all life on this fucking planet. To say that we have ‘lost that battle’ is as unacceptable as to say that we have ‘lost the battle’ to save some ecosystems from the effects of global warming.
Both have a long history, both should have been stopped much much earlier, both are going to cause mass extinction if they’re not interrupted. Both are probably already at a point where they’re going to kill millions of lives no matter what we do, but we’ve got to fight for the lives we can still save.
You can never decide to have lost the battle against an all-or-nothing we-all-die sort of event.
QueerAnarchism 