CIVILIZATION MUST DIE

By ____ _____*

     Civilization as we know it is unsustainable. All the experts agree on that. And just so there’s no confusion as to what “unsustainable” means, here are some examples: (1) Gouges by an iceberg, the Titanic was UNSUSTAINABLE as a sea-going vessel; (2) After being struck by planes, the Twin Towers were UNSUSTAINABLE standing structures; (3) Without gas in their van, the band’s nation-wide tour was UNSUSTAINABLE.

Unsustainable means it can’t keep going; it’s going to end whether we like it or not; it’s doomed. Civilization as we know it is going down. Built on a process of chewing up the natural world and expanding a global human ghetto, its days are numbered. It’s unsustainable. It can’t keep going.

Personally, I don’t find that to be a bad thing. Tomorrow, we could revert to living in a wigwam and cooking food over an open fire and I’d be happy. In fact, if you care about the natural world—about plants and animals, water, air and soil—then the faster civilization goes down, the better.

So, given the fact of our civilization’s unsustainability, I’m puzzled by the reaction of most people—even those who have no love for this system in the first place. They’re all down with “going”green.”

The “go green” movement which now saturates our culture claims to be concerned with “saving” the environment. By “going green,” we who are destroying the environment are going to save it by consuming less and conserving more. We’re still going to eat that food and expand our population past the planet’s limits, still going to use the rest of the living world as “resources” and drive all life to extinction, and we’re still going to be unsustainable. But we’re convinced we’re going to “save” the environment by destroying it more slowly than we used to.

So, is destroying something more slowly the same as saving it? I ask because, by this logic, the Nazis were “going Semitic.” If at any time they slowed down the rate of exterminating captives in the death camps, they could say they were “saving” Jews. After all, they would be engaged in genocide more slowly than before.

This is the false logic of “going green.” It’s the logic of committing omnicide but doing it slowly—an eco-friendly omnicide, one where we hug the plants and animals we toss into the mass grave we have collectively dug slowly…and are still digging.

I suspect this argument may be hard to swallow for most. There are plenty of revered smart people on the “go green” bandwagon, so I expect most readers to defer to these experts’ big, big brains and dismiss my words as fantastical kookery. After all, why would everyone “go green” if it didn’t really save the environment? Why “go green” on a national and international scale?

I think I can answer that. When we “go green,” we don’t save the environment. But we do save civilization. At least for a time. We make our unsustainable system a little less destructive and we enable it to stick around a little while longer. We save a few feet of topsoil, a cup of drinkable water, some land-fill space for dumping plastic bottles—so we can use it up tomorrow. The plants, animals, air, water and soil aren’t saved—small amounts are simply set aside to be destroyed tomorrow, as fuel for our expanding death-camp civilization. We aren’t stopping the mass extinction of life, we’re just budgeting the mass extinction of life so we can keep our civilization rolling a little while longer, keep the Titanic afloat a few more miles. Going green extends the life of civilization as we know it—the same civilization destroying the environment in the first place. To make an analogy, are empowering a rapist so he can rape his victim slower, and rape his victim longer, and we are somehow convinced that our empowerment of the rapist equates with “saving” his victim.

This saves the community of life (which includes you and me) how? Life on the planet isn’t served by this collective effort to keep the rapist violating it slower and longer. If we want to save the environment, to save the community of life including ourselves, we have to come up with a plan to get rid of the rapist, the killer murdering it…and murdering us. We have to take it down as totally and completely as possible.  The sooner, the better.

To me, this only makes rational sense. If you oppose the Nazi death camps, you don’t support a policy of slower extermination and call it “going Semitic,” patting yourself on the back for “saving” the Jews. No—you attack all of the systems and institutions that keep the death camps going. You interrupt its supply lines, liberate its captives, bomb its structures, shoot its masterminds. You don’t oppose genocide by stretching it out; you oppose it by taking away the enemy’s power to continue his program. Our only way to save the environment is to take down civilization—the whole death camp system. We have to interrupt its supply lines, liberate its captives, bomb its structures, shoot its masterminds and render the program inoperable. We have to employ the same tactics we would employ if our lives depended on it—because they do. Recycling bottles, marching and voting for well-intending politicians won’t cut it. That’s a plan for mass extinction.

I know the implications of this argument are probably pretty disturbing. The argument challenges everything we have been taught to believe to be true about right and wrong. Not only is it not evil or crazy to attack the social, political and economic institutions that keep civilization rolling, but it’s a moral duty, an act of self-defense, the only rational response to our situation. We have a duty to engage in conduct we’ve been taught to call “terrorism.”

By this thinking, everything that we always thought makes us good citizens really makes us the equivalent of “good Germans,” collaborators in a vast crime against all life. Our self-preservation demands that we attack and never surrender until the larger system is destroyed. It’s illegal to advocate political kidnappings, political assassinations, and bombings of government and corporate facilities. Because it’s illegal, I won’t say we should do all that, whether we should do all that or not.

These are difficult implications to swallow. Admittedly, if I wasn’t perfectly, reasonably correct in my analysis, it would be easy to write me off as a crackpot and return to being a thoughtless accomplice to this vast crime called civilization without blinking an eye. But, I believe, everything I’ve written is observably true: civilization is a death camp driving us to mass extinction.

So that leaves only one question…

What are we going to do about it?

***This article may or may not be written by Sean Swain but, because U.S. District Court Judge Jack Zouhary has given prison officials free license to punish Sean Swain any way they see fit for his social and political opinions published beyond prison walls, Swain has been selectively stripped of all constitutional protections and silenced by the United States government. As a free thinker subject to a fascist police state, Sean Swain cannot be credited for any published work such as this article, whether he wrote it or not. So, if Sean Swain wrote this, and no one is saying he did, he must do it anonymously to avoid government reprisals because U.S. District Court Judge Jack Zouhary repealed the First Amendment and forced the truth underground.