The War on Terra
It is one thing to have a theory that describes the (de-/re-)construction of a world, but it is another thing to have a story that narrates the (de-/re-)construction of a world. Though they can and should defer to one another, the theory that describes and the story that narrates will always differ from one another.
Thus far, I have only been articulating theories and describing my approach to the (de-/re-)construction of our deathly world of suffering.
Beginning with this dispatch, I would like to begin telling my story and narrating my approach to the (de-/re-)construction of our deathly world of suffering.
My story goes something like this…
Imperialist patriarchies have been, by turns, a greater or lesser scourge on our planet for five millennia, but a new and more virulent strain of imperialist patriarchy emerged around five centuries ago — one hellbent on conquering the entire Earth, subjecting the vast majority of her peoples to ethnocide and the vast majority of her places to ecocide.
This new scourge: imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
Turbo-charged by racist and capitalist techniques and technologies of power, this modern scourge has proven itself more virulently ethnocidal, more virulently ecocidal, and more virulently expansionary than previous scourges. In the five-centuries between 1492 and 1992, imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy has managed to spread itself across the globe and establish the (capital “E”) Empire — a globalized capitalist system that advances itself by modulating the balance of power amongst the (lowercase “e”) empires of the various territorial nations that have staked claims to all of the terrestrial habitats on Earth.
The “War on Terra” is my preferred term for the series of expansionary, ethnocidal, and ecocidal projects that have advanced (and been advanced) by imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy since 1492 — from the genocides of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, to the Late Victorian Holocausts, to the ongoing Late Davosian Holocausts.
As I conceive of it, the War on Terra is an interminable war of aggression and extermination that imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchs (along with their proxies and redeemers) have waged against “the beautiful and differentiated languages, cultures, customs, and ways of life of the Earth’s people[s], [which are] vital to the health of the planet.”
No one living on Earth today has not been touched by the War on Terra: everyone living has some sense and understanding of the devastation that it has wrought. That being said, however, prevailing liberal prejudices demand that most of our esteemed commentators and thinkers refuse to acknowledge the War on Terra for what it is.
In a previous dispatch on this matter, I wrote:
The evidence of ecocide is mounting everyday. A radio news broadcast informs us, “Human activities have caused the world's wildlife populations to plummet by more than two-thirds in the last 50 years, according to a new report from the World Wildlife Fund.” And keen observers tell us the crisis is much more than an extinction crisis, “The numerical robustness, the plenitude within nature, has dwindled. Many species continue to exist but in greatly diminished numbers, which means that the species itself has a far more tenuous hold on existence. As species crash and vanish, the world loses diversity, but the loss of abundance is even more startling.” Yet when liberals in positions of power speak of promoting sustainability and conserving wildlife, I find that they are not earnestly speaking of countering ecocide and promoting robust natural diversity. To the contrary, I find that they are speaking of adopting a more deliberate and controlled approach to ecocide, an approach that destroys more habitats but leads to fewer outright extinctions.
The evidence of ethnocide is also mounting everyday. A newspaper article informs us, “Of the estimated 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, linguists say, nearly half are in danger of extinction and are likely to disappear in this century. In fact, they are now falling out of use at a rate of about one every two weeks.” But when liberals in positions of power speak of promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion, I find that they are not earnestly speaking of countering ethnocide and promoting robust cultural diversity. To the contrary, I find that they are speaking of enlisting more and more individuals of diverse ancestries as proxies in the ethnocidal and ecocidal endeavors of imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
To do away with liberal prejudices and to develop a deep sense and understanding for the War on Terra, I suggest that we take our cues from Michel Serres and recognize how, in the decades since the Second World War, “Our peacetime economic relations, working slowly and continuously, [have produced] the same results as would a short global conflict.” This means recognizing that the War on Terra does not belong to soldiers alone: “it is [being] prepared and waged with devices […] used by civilians in research and industry.” It is as if becoming a worker and consumer in an industrial capitalist society today means becoming a conscript in the service of the ethnocidal and ecocidal forces of imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
The War on Terra has been raging for five-hundred years but it has only truly come into its own in the decades since the Second World War. Prior the First World War, the War on Terra had wrapped itself in the guise of wars of colonial conquest, domination, and exploitation. It was only after the carnage First and Second World Wars that the War on Terra revealed its true face to the world at large, an sneering face that had only previously been seen by those living in the colonized world.
In a remarkable passage from A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari describe how this shift took place.
The various factors that tended to make war a "total war," most notably the fascist factor, marked the beginning of an inversion. […] The entire fascist economy became a war economy, but the war economy still needed total war as its object. For this reason, fascist war still fell under Clausewitz's formula, "the continuation of politics by other means," even though those other means had become exclusive. [...]
It was only after World War II that the automatization, then automation of the war machine had their true effect. The war machine, the new antagonisms traversing it considered, no longer had war as its exclusive object but took in charge and as its object peace, politics, the world order, in short, the aim. This is where the inversion of Clausewitz's formula comes in: it is politics that becomes the continuation of war; it is peace that technologically frees the unlimited material process of total war. […] In this sense, there was no longer a need for fascism. The Fascists were only child precursors, and the absolute peace of survival succeeded where total war had failed. The Third World War was already upon us. [...] Wars had become a part of peace.
[...] [The perpetual and total war machine that now threatens to “keep the peace”] is terrifying not as a function of a possible war that it promises us, as by blackmail, but, on the contrary, as a function of the real, very special kind of peace it promotes and has already installed[.]
As a result of their Eurocentric perspective, Deleuze and Guattari overlooked the fact that the inversion of Clausewitz’s formula had already taken place outside of Europe in the colonized world long before the Second World War. For at least a century before the rise of fascism in Europe, the “keeping of the peace” in the colonized world had become a perpetual and total war waged by colonial corporations and governments against the subject peoples of the colonized world. That being said, however, Deleuze and Guattari are on point with their assertion that it was only after the Second World War that the situation of the colonized world became the situation of the world at large. Following the Second World War, the “keeping of the peace” all over the world became a perpetual and total war waged by corporations and governments against subject peoples all over the world.
Long before the Westernized peoples at the centers of Empire had a clue, the colonized and enslaved peoples at the peripheries of Empire had developed a deep sense and understanding of the ethnocidal and ecocidal character of the War on Terra. Following the Second World War, however, Westernized peoples discovered that they could no longer keep up the ceremony of ignorance and innocence as scrupulously as they once could. The War on Terra’s blood-dimmed tide had been loosed on the European continent, the homeland of the West, and Westernized peoples were finally being forced confront its true character. Ever since the Second World War, Westernized peoples have been hard pressed to acknowledge the true character of the War on Terra and to admit their part in advancing it. But this has not meant that most or even many Westernized peoples have made such acknowledgements and admitted responsibility. To the contrary, many Westernized peoples, if not most of them, have actually sought to keep the ceremony of ignorance and innocence alive in the most unscrupulous of ways. That being said, however, as the historian Tony Judt has pointed out, “Since 1989 it has become clearer than it was before just how much the stability of post-war Europe rested upon the accomplishments of Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler. Between them, and assisted by wartime collaborators, the dictators blasted flat the demographic heath upon which the foundations of a new and less complicated continent were then laid.” This is to say, in other words, that the West increasingly knows itself to have inflicted traumas upon “internal others” akin to the traumas it has inflicted upon “external others”, and it is obvious to every sober observer that all of these traumas put together have conditioned the “democracy, peace, prosperity, and stability” that has prevailed in the West and failed most everywhere else since the Second World War.
For those of us who have developed a deep sense and understanding of the ethnocidal and ecocidal character of the War on Terra, the question is, of course, “What can be done to bring the War on Terra to a peaceful end?”
As I see it, no offensive action against the forces of imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy will ever bring a peaceful end to the War on Terra. To effectively launch an offensive action against the forces of imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy is to establish oneself as an even more virulently ethnocidal and ecocidal force. Those readying themselves to wage offensives against the forces of imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriachy are, in fact, readying themselves to take over the reins in the War on Terra.
As I see it, the perpetual and total character of the War on Terra is such that the only way to seek its peaceful end is to enable people(s) to desert the forces of ethnocide and ecocide and to defect to the forces that are countering ethnocide and ecocide. A peaceful end to the War on Terra will only follow from a critical mass of desertions and defections.
I use the term “forces of nature” to refer to the various counterforces that are arrayed against the forces of ethnocide and ecocide, against imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy and its would-be successors. Since there are no effective offenses that the forces of nature can make against the forces of ethnocide and ecocide, the forces of nature are always making defenses. Working to bring the War on Terra to an end, the forces of nature make their defenses by and through furnishing potential deserters and defectors with motives, means, and opportunities to desert the forces of ethnocide and ecocide and to defect to the forces of nature.
To bring all of this on home, allow me to situate myself and this project within this story.
I was born during the summer of 1987 in New York City, the most prominent node in the network of “Global Cities” where the administrative and supervisory organs Empire are headquartered — the home of Wall Street and the United Nations.
Like all born New Yorkers, my survival has been dependent on the consumption of commodities sold on the global market and on the global exploitation of natural and cultural resources. In other words, as Ivan Illich would say, I was born into a life of “modernized poverty […]combining the lack of power over circumstances with a loss of personal potency”. Modernized poverty is the experience of “frustrating affluence” that occurs in persons “mutilated” by their absolute dependence on the “riches” of industrial productivity. While I cannot help but love the glamorous and gritty city where I began my life, I cannot deny the fact that it is “an urban landscape that is unfit for people unless they devour each day their own weight in metals, plastics, and fuels, […] in which the constant need for protection against the unwanted results of more commodities and more commands has generated new depths of discrimination, impotence, and frustration.”
I was born to Black Africans who had legally migrated to the United States of America. The promised land of “freedom an opportunity” for some, the United States is an exceptional nation for having been built on the genocide of indigenous peoples and the enslavement of black peoples and having risen in industrial and military might to serve as Empire’s reigning hegemon/henchman. In spite of these exceptionally disturbing realities, my parents still strove to realize the American immigrant fantasy of “freedom and opportunity” for themselves and their children by championing the virtues of “hard work and upwardly mobility”. I was taught from early childhood that it was imperative that I work hard to become a “Black man of distinction” — a proxy or a redeemer for imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy and its Empire — as opposed to “just another Black man in America”.
Lacking the financing necessary to secure my future, my parents taught me to value schooling as the surest route to achieving distinction. To cite Ivan Illich once more, I was taught to believe that “grace is reserved for those who accumulate years in school” and to accept the organization of society into “many layers of failure, with each layer inhabited by dropouts schooled to believe that those who have consumed more [schooling] deserve more privilege because they are more valuable assets to society as a whole.”
To sum up my childhood and adolescence in a single sentence: I was effectively born and raised to serve the forces of ethnocide and ecocide in the War on Terra.
Fortunately for me, but much to my parents’ chagrin, the forces of nature conspired to teach me to value learning more than schooling and, better still, to value learning about the makings of my world above all else. In my pursuit of such learning, I discovered many facts that horrified me, and I became disgusted at the prospects of becoming a proxy or a redeemer for the ethnocidal and ecocidal forces of imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Indeed, I became convinced that I had to desert the forces of ethnocide and ecocide, defect to the forces of nature, and come to the aid others doing the same. My problem, then, became this: I lacked reliable theoretical-and-practical guides to teach me how to desert, how to defect, and how to commune with other deserters and defectors.
The (De-/Re-)Constructing Worlds project is, thus, the log of my own self-guided attempts to desert, defect, and commune with other deserters and defectors; and my hope is that the failures and successes logged here might serve as a theoretical-and-practical resource for others like me.
