As objective conditions get worse, the greater the pressure to live the lie that we are different to those in the past.
I am under pressure not to compare the “climate” with what happened in World War Two. Being human, all too human, I temporarily submit to such constraints.
That said, there was one scene from The Zone of Interest that sticks with me. The laying of the table. The exactness of the placing of the cutlery. The affordance of precision. The clinical aesthetic, shutting out the noise of death from over the wall. The forced normality. The thickness of the air.
And within a year of the laying of that table Soviet troops had invaded Poland and the east of Germany, ripping up society and spitting it out – 12 million refugees – 2 million rapes: the women often gang raped with officers looking on. How could this happen? Maybe part of the answer is the 3 million Soviet prisoners of war deliberately starved to death by the Nazis in the final months of 1941. Packed into camps, turned into cannibals, dying in their shit. Only one of the many forgotten crimes of humanity during that period.
They laid the table so precisely because they could. For a while at least. And then they couldn’t anymore. Today people eat meat, fly planes, stand by and refuse to resist. Because they can. And then soon they won’t anymore. Hundreds of millions of refugees, many more than in the Second World War, will be on the move. And we should know what that means.
Art can say what politics cannot. It speaks before the political explodes. It senses the coming death. It escapes the constraints of repression. After all, nothing clear is being said. The clarity of the message is communicated through the lack of clarity. It’s just art, right?
While our society dreams of control it will destroy any control we have. We have yet to learn this bitterest of lessons. We are not in this world to serve power – we are here to serve truth, beauty, and love – what used to be called “God”. It takes a long time to realise this.
For our society the lesson has not yet been learned, and we are about to suffer the consequences.
I’ve got two focuses:
- Revolution – Building social formations to create revolution and guide moments of social disruption.
- A Balanced Society – Building the new civilisation, based on a new balance of deliberative democracy, compassion, and limited consumption.
Sign up for nonviolent civil resistance with Just Stop Oil in the UK or via the A22 Network internationally. Alternatively, you can now join a new collaborative project called Humanity, which aims to build the new world ahead based on deliberative democracy.
The Climate Situation is F*cked
Help me to get on with the job of sorting it out.
This article on a recent JP Morgan report makes clear why there is no hope for the liberal illusion that capitalism can be constrained from destroying civilisation.
The pathological corporate class thinks that in order to provide “higher living standards” there will be no foreseeable reduction in fossil fuel use even after 2030. And if the government tries to go too fast then they will create “social unrest”. The idea of stopping investing in oil and gas would be “the road to hell for America”.
The statistics support the realist Right-wing position rather than that of wishful-thinking liberals. Emissions continue to rise and the backlash on “climate policies” is evident everywhere – the farmer’s protests, Labour and the Scottish government abandoning climate commitments, and oil companies backtracking on decarbonisation. There is overwhelming evidence that contemporary international capitalism cannot be brought to heel by reformist liberal politics.
Except of course the “realists” are subject to the greatest delusion of all – that physics is subject to economics. What they cannot see is that the “climate crisis” will create the greatest fiscal crisis of the state – meaning “social unrest” leading to “hell”. There is no stability at 2C+, and there is no way to stop passing 2C within the present carbon political regime.
Nothing unusual there. All regimes collapse because they reach a point where whatever they do, they are doomed. It’s called history.
What comes after the collapse? That is the question. Fascism or Democratic Revolution.
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