Post by art on Mar 15, 2015 16:35:50 GMT -5
A blog post, but since I know people don't read blog post, I will post it here as well:
In a recent conversation, I was accused of advocating eugenics since I was stating the anarcho-primitivist position of the likelihood of a mass die-off. Of course, I stated that there is a world of difference between stating that billions of people will probably die as a result of civilization, and actively advocating and working towards that die off. Of course, my interlocutor was not satisfied with that distinction.
One could state that even bring up such a horrific thing is problematic. The fact that I don't recoil in horror at the prospect might mean that there is something wrong with me. Then I realized just now that, if I am comparatively lukewarm concerning the prospect of the virtual extinction of humanity, it is perhaps that I have been already walking in a graveyard of life-ways and cultures, "little worlds" that were destroyed and languages that will never be heard again. Stories that have been silenced forever. If I don't jump up and lament the death of this culture, this world, perhaps it is because I am numb from contemplating how this culture and world are the result of the death of so many others; a pile of bones is the foundation of this metropolis. Perhaps part of me sees it as cosmic justice. Or part of me knows that this culture only thrives insofar as it swallows up others and spits them out as plastic and profit.
The only difference is a numbers game: billions vs. a few million or a few thousand or a few hundred. But when a village is massacred and its language and culture destroyed, when its sacred lands are paved over and their mountains obliterated, how is that not just as bad as our whole civilization being extinguished due to its unquenchable thirst for profit and progress? Why is the death of our own way of life more tragic? What of all the tragedies caused by capitalist civilization, the most accelerated one of all, civilization par excellence, that has spread this cancer to the ends of the earth? Why should it be an unacceptable tragedy when it happens to me and mine?
Perhaps I am just callous. But mostly I just think that when it's time to pay the Piper, we shouldn't be surprised.
elblogdelmonoliso.wordpress.com/2015/03/15/on-genocide/
In a recent conversation, I was accused of advocating eugenics since I was stating the anarcho-primitivist position of the likelihood of a mass die-off. Of course, I stated that there is a world of difference between stating that billions of people will probably die as a result of civilization, and actively advocating and working towards that die off. Of course, my interlocutor was not satisfied with that distinction.
One could state that even bring up such a horrific thing is problematic. The fact that I don't recoil in horror at the prospect might mean that there is something wrong with me. Then I realized just now that, if I am comparatively lukewarm concerning the prospect of the virtual extinction of humanity, it is perhaps that I have been already walking in a graveyard of life-ways and cultures, "little worlds" that were destroyed and languages that will never be heard again. Stories that have been silenced forever. If I don't jump up and lament the death of this culture, this world, perhaps it is because I am numb from contemplating how this culture and world are the result of the death of so many others; a pile of bones is the foundation of this metropolis. Perhaps part of me sees it as cosmic justice. Or part of me knows that this culture only thrives insofar as it swallows up others and spits them out as plastic and profit.
The only difference is a numbers game: billions vs. a few million or a few thousand or a few hundred. But when a village is massacred and its language and culture destroyed, when its sacred lands are paved over and their mountains obliterated, how is that not just as bad as our whole civilization being extinguished due to its unquenchable thirst for profit and progress? Why is the death of our own way of life more tragic? What of all the tragedies caused by capitalist civilization, the most accelerated one of all, civilization par excellence, that has spread this cancer to the ends of the earth? Why should it be an unacceptable tragedy when it happens to me and mine?
Perhaps I am just callous. But mostly I just think that when it's time to pay the Piper, we shouldn't be surprised.
elblogdelmonoliso.wordpress.com/2015/03/15/on-genocide/
