permaculture

[lbsaltzman@aol.com]

This essay starts out examining the plight of the Palestinians and ends up 
holding a mirror to the human psyche and what we are doing to nature.


THE LESSONS OF GAZA IN A TIME

OF COLLAPSE AND REBIRTH

January 15, 2009

?

It can no longer be hidden. What is happening in Gaza is, transparently, 
ethnic cleansing genocide.? That genocide has been ongoing for sixty years, 
sometimes in intense, rapid, and explosive junctures, sometimes more slowly, 
routinely but always, methodically.? To see clearly the historical and 
cultural trajectories toward genocide in Palestine or elsewhere, one has only 
to map the intersection of stated intentions of the perpetrators and their 
actions over time or experience a sudden revelation or flash of deep 
insight.? I was one of those who saw it all at once. At sixteen years of age, 
it hit me with an indescribable force, one that would require an essay in its 
own right; I had been watching a documentary on public television about the 
Nazi Holocaust. Then it hit me: What happened in the Holocaust was not the 
exception to the rule it was the most profound expression of the rule; it was 
a concentrated expression of the way things are in everyday life, in the 
blind cult of everyday life. The Holocaust could not have come from nowhere, 
it was not an aberration, it arose from certain conditions, like a pimple 
from oily skin and, like the blemish itself, the Holocaust was only a symptom 
of what underlay it the conditions from which it arose. Outbreaks of 
genocidal horror in concentrated form arise from the norms that underlie them.

?

?If there is no basis for a thing to exist, it cannot come into existence. 
What is happening in Gaza today is no accident; it is an expression of 
underlying logics, of underlying and all-permeating attitudes and feeling 
tones in Israeli culture; logics, attitudes and feelings that rest on a set 
of fundamental premises.?? First among these premises is one shared by every 
civilization and empire on Earth over the historical period of the last 
several thousand years: that the members of a given culture are vulnerable, 
whether that vulnerability is to human enemies or the conditions of nature, 
and that this vulnerability rightly translates into a mindset of kill or die, 
kill or be killed, conquer or be conquered. Every empire culture has 
determined to be the killer rather than the one who dies or who is killed, 
the conqueror rather than the conquered, and the ruler rather than the ruled. 
Every empire faces what it considers an existential threat (indeed, each 
embodies a mentality that existence life itself is a threat.)

Without that threat, the empire cannot justify its existence. Almost all 
progress is measured in terms of overcoming perceived threats. It is 
important to understand, for example, that Israelis today view the genocide 
in Gaza as progress. Thats why opinion polls show their overwhelming support 
for it. Likewise the Nazis had made progress in dealing with the Jewish 
Question, until they reached the point where it seemed possible to progress 
to the point of a cure for the Jewish disease they said threatened the German 
people. Call it the promise of a Final Cure, a Final Solution, a Final 
Progress. Call it the promise of a Final Redemption, a cultural Liberation 
from the existential threat, the promise of the ultimate success. There is 
nothing at all unusual in it. Every aspect of our daily lives is permeated 
with such promises, and every one of them is a lie. It is the job of 
politicians to make such promises, and that is why we tend to despise them, 
even though every one of us is looking forward to the final solution of 
something or another.

Every TV commercial is a walking, talking final solution, a new miracle cure, 
real progress.? Every time we buy an advertised commodity we arent buying an 
object, we are buying an idea, a culture, a promise, a solution; whether the 
solution is to the threat of bad breath or the threat of global terrorism. As 
we make our purchase we are also buying into the basic notion that life is a 
threat and that civilization is its cure. For most Israelis, excluding a tiny 
conscious minority, the white phosphorous Israel is raining on the people of 
Gaza is not a burning poison its medicine its a cure, a solution.? But listen 
dont blame them; youre not immune, either; you buy into the same lie, in some 
form or another. They are not different; you are not different. They are from 
the same culture as you and I; one of the Empire cultures - in this case, the 
West. In the West, as in all Empire cultures, threats are dealt with by 
eliminating them. So, the Nazis sought to eliminate the Jews; The Jews in 
Israel now seek to eliminate the Palestinians they call it the Palestinian 
threat, so that the very name Palestinian has come to represent a threat in 
the emotional subtexts of Western empire culture.

Israeli writer Uri Avnery, writing on the genocide in Gaza, makes it 
plain:Every baby metamorphosed, in the act of dying, into a Hamas terrorist. 
Every bombed mosque instantly became a Hamas base, every apartment building 
an arms cache, every school a terror command post, every civilian government 
building a symbol of Hamas rule. Thus the Israeli army retained its purity as 
the most moral army in the world And, if only Israel would smile as they 
kill, send in a few doctors and some medicine to anesthetize the pain, they 
would be both moral and nice. And no one could object. The slaughter could 
continue undiluted. Just as Israel is out to eliminate Palestinians, you, 
cowboy, sought and still seek to eliminate Indians. Yesterdays savage is 
todays terrorist threat In the US, Black people are a threat, so their 
elimination is sought in other, diluted ways, ways that dont look like 
genocide through mass incarceration of millions under the guise of fighting 
crime or the War on Drugs, or the War on Gangs, anything that can be made 
morally justifiable and enlist the support of nice people.

But the undiluted reality is that we, the descendants of Africans and Native 
Americans, are your Gazans. And your perception of us as a threat operates in 
your culture in just the same way as the Israeli perception of the 
Palestinians. You stole our land, our bodies; just as Israel is built on 
stolen Palestinian land; only in this case we are talking magnitudes of scale 
far beyond a small strip of land on the coast of the Mediterranean. We are 
talking two continents in this hemisphere, and the enslavement and Conquest 
of Africa, and Australia as well.? Here in the Americas, your ancestors 
killed 95% of my ancestors David Stannard in his seminal American Holocaust, 
published by Oxford University Press, puts the numbers at around 100 million 
dead. And you thought the 20 million the Nazis killed was unprecedented. 
Thats what you were taught, that The Nazis were an evil exception to 
civilized rule. No, the Nazis were not an exception to the rule any more than 
Israel is an exception to the rule. Neither are the Europeans in the Americas.

Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Conquest of the Americas, The Conquest of Africa, 
with its fifty million dead, The Nakba (the initial Conquest of Palestine), 
the US / Mexican War of conquest all of them are made of the same dynamics: 
Progress and expansion, the elimination of the Threat, and the need for 
internal cultural coherence against the threat.? Your upbringing was little 
more than an indoctrination into that internal cultural coherence, and a way 
of aligning your life-purposes toward your cultures promise of the 
elimination of the threat. To be a success means that you have eliminated 
threats in a way that can be construed or falsified as nice. Thats what you 
buy into with every product and lie you buy. You buy into genocide; you buy 
into ecocide. You buy into the elimination of life on Earth. Life itself, 
after all, is the most fundamental existential threat; life embraces its 
complement, death. Life is full of wild things, threatening things. The word 
wild in its origins, pertains to life which is unbroken, untamed, 
undomesticated, uncivilized. In its origins, wild means self-willed. Life 
itself is a threat that must be eliminated. Thats the final logic of the 
final solution.

The dark wilderness is simply full of threats, you know. We were taught that, 
too. And if you are a white American it is manifestly your destiny to conquer 
the wild threat, to tame it, to break it- to eliminate it. If you are part of 
Nazi Germany, your purpose is not so different; if youre Israeli, Greater 
Israel is your manifest destiny; or South Africa; or Australia. Name your 
colonial settler state. It may shake you to look at Gaza as a mirror: but, 
regardless, you are part of the same genocidal and ecocidal pattern.This is 
the most elementary of understandings necessary for an honest approach to and 
assessment of our current global crisis. It is the single most important 
factor in understanding white European culture and its dynamics in the 
Americas and as a global Empire. It is fundamental to any understanding of 
the basic cultural assumptions that guide our daily lives and understandings 
of one another. It is an understanding so important, it describes a reality 
so all pervasive, that without it one simply cannot be an ally to oppressed 
peoples in Gaza or anywhere else.? Without this understanding one has 
understood nothing.

Ones compassion reduces to do-good-ism and elite rescue missions to the poor 
miserable brutes beneath one. Without this understanding one cannot be an 
integral part of the healing that we as humans, the Earth as a living being 
and the animals we love, so urgently need. Without this understanding one 
cannot conceive of the actual realities of the old mind vs. the new mind. 
Without this understanding one doesnt even know what the old mind is.? Thank 
the spirits that the denial that has shaped us is, as we speak, at last, 
beginning to shatter. Without having immersed oneself in fundamental 
understanding of the culture driven realities of genocide and ecocide, one 
does not know where we are, the conditions we face, or the depths of denial 
that surround us about our current crisis. In fact, without this 
understanding having been deeply integrated into ones world view, one is by 
definition in denial. One is by definition part of the problem, not part of 
the solution.? Without this understanding one hasnt a clue about the 
indigenous experience so many would like to emulate. Much less has one 
approached anything akin to indigenous American wisdom or, for that matter, 
African experience and wisdom.

If that is what you are looking for, then, here is some indigenous wisdom:

In the US today, Lakota mens life expectancy on the rez in the US doesnt just 
happen to be 44 years the lowest on Earth. Lakota teen suicide rates dont 
just happen to be 150% of the norm in the US. The Lakota unemployment rate 
and the extremities of Lakota poverty dont just happen to be the case. Native 
Americans dont just happen to have the highest incarceration rate on planet 
Earth, higher, even, than that of African Americans. These conditions are all 
are a direct result of having been conquered and being kept in subjugated 
state by an enemy people who promised and intended to wipe Native Americans 
off the face of the Earth just as the Nazis intended to wipe the Jews off the 
face of the Earth. The rez is white Americas Warsaw ghetto (by the way, they 
dont call the Black ghetto a ghetto for nothing) and people of indigenous 
descent, be they Lakota or Mexican, are, along with Black people, the Jews. 
Better put the Palestinians.? In fact Hitler openly admired the extermination 
of the Indians, and the reservation system, and consciously took them as 
models. The South African Bantustans and the system of Apartheid had a 
similar origin, as does the division and colonial settlement of Palestine. 
Gaza is a temporary Indian reservation, Indian Territory only waiting to be 
taken, an open air concentration camp. Here and there, its the same.

Where did you think you were?? Palestine is everywhere. If one hasnt faced 
the historical, ongoing reality of genocide and of the US as a white colonial 
settler state and global empire immersed in, permeated by, and oozing 
genocide from every pore, then one doesnt grasp the pain of oppressed 
peoples, its daily meaning, or the context of the daily experience of 
oppressed people here in the US or anywhere else on the planet. One cannot 
but react be a reactionary (and I use the term advisedly, deliberately and 
consciously) when encountering the pain of oppressed people. One cannot 
understand the anger engendered by utter invisibility felt by those who face 
the realities of cultural and physical genocide everyday and when who, most 
often, face it alone, with no recognition from their supposed white allies. 
One will fail to see that what is happening in Gaza has a particular meaning 
for those who are living through it and dying in it. The drama of the mass 
slaughter of an innocent people there is only a concentrated expression of 
the blind cult of oppression that constitutes their every day lives, of the 
cult of everyday life.

Without conscious understanding of the dynamics of genocide, one can only 
blame the victim for their pain and anger, and fail to understand that ones 
own blindness to the most elementary and basic of realities of everyday life 
presents a locked box to the oppressed the same locked box oppressed people 
confront with their active persecutors and overt enemies the locked box of 
denial.

Most of all, without such a conscious understanding one cannot see the 
reality facing the world today, the utter congruity and continuity between 
genocide and ecocide, and the ways that the denial and operation of one 
mirrors the denial and operation of the other, or the ways in which the daily 
details of a killing culture flow into the stream, the river and the sea of 
planetary death.? Without understanding genocide, one doesnt understand 
anything essential -much less is one among the ranks of the wise. Without 
having faced the fundamental reality that shapes ones culture and its daily 
interactions with other cultures, one cannot fully approach wisdom or 
humility or self-reflection, or even understand in a mature way what is 
happening around and in oneself.? Whats happening is that a choice is being 
made between life and death on a global scale. The choice before is also an 
individual one to be made in the context of ones own, particular culture. But 
the choice is not between killing or bring killed, killing or dying; its 
between killing and living. And like the choices of the ancient peoples who 
chose Empire, the choices we make now will affect life at every level and on 
every scale. It will be Killing or Living

Life on Earth isnt dying. The furry ones, the four footed ones, arent dying. 
Theyre being killed by a culture that is their conscious and self-declared 
enemy.? Here, in the midst of the greatest mass extinction in 65 million 
years, all that is wild doesnt just happen to be dying, any more than Gazans 
happen to be dying. The Wild happens to be being killed by a culture that has 
openly and confessedly intended to eradicate, eliminate the wild, to conquer, 
tame, subjugate and destroy it all a culture that is the active enemy of all 
life certainly of all self-willed wild life. It is a culture that uses 
dynamite to blow up wolf cubs in the den as if they were so many Palestinian 
children; and that, death squad style, Israel-in-Gaza style, then uses 
helicopters to hunt their parents down from the sky.?

If life is endangered, if endangered species are a symbol of that, then this 
is what they are endangered by - conscious killers. They are not endangered 
by accident, not by well meaning but ignorant people, but by killers a 
culture of killers even if, by chance, it might be rightly said that the 
killers do not understand, and dare not face themselves as such. (The reason 
oppressed people find it a relief to deal with overt racists is that its a 
relief to face someone who knows what they are. Most white middle class 
people in the US dont face the nature of their culture. They sense that they 
cant afford to face it.

To do so would be to break the code of silence called being nice. And being 
nice is what it means to smile as you kill. One must kill. There is a threat. 
But one can only continue to kill be pretending that what you are doing is 
something else. Mass murder is defending democracy; Conquest is spreading the 
word of god and saving souls. As I was told by a dear friend, a radical white 
feminist lesbian, being nice functions something like an anesthetic. Now that 
doesnt hurt, does it?) There are layers upon layers of misdirection, 
obfuscation, double entendre, doublespeak, half truths and manipulation that 
enable the killing, and that make up the cultural context in which the 
killing can go on without acknowledgment or feeling.

Wisdom, in this context, means, in part, being wise about how to deal with a 
culture of killers. Wisdom cannot be divorced from context, any more than it 
can be divorced from culture, or from experience within a given culture, or 
how we navigate mediate between cultures. Without a deep grasp of the 
dynamics of genocide, one doesnt even start to get this culture, and one is 
utterly unfit to mediate between the cultures of the oppressor and the 
oppressed, much less is one fit to guide the creation or foundation of what 
is most urgently needed - a new culture and an authentically new mind which, 
in practice, can only be the outcome and product of a new culture that comes 
into being as this one collapses and as we consciously dismantle the 
consciousness that drove it. A new mind will be the sign of the new culture 
coming into maturity over the course of the coming generations.

Beyond that, without a firm grasp of the reality of genocide, and thus 
ecocide, one cannot love the world not with competence, and not if love is 
the ability and will to extend oneself for the spiritual growth of others. 
One cannot extend oneself to guide others in a terrain one doesnt understand 
not without betraying them. Not if love, like wisdom, is a verb; an ability 
in a context. And here is our context as the world and the Earth around us 
are on the verge of disintegration: it is the context of the death throes of 
a death system; the orgasm of a necrophiliac.

A mature capacity to love, in this context, is typified by four activities.? 
1. Guiding others to see what they are part of; 2. Guiding them to reject 
what must be rejected;? 3. Helping them to learn that they are safe while 
they re-emerge and deprogram themselves from the cultural matrix of threat 
and solution, and;? 4. Helping to restore or lay the foundations for a 
culture that is utterly different, while saving what we can, within the 
limits of our abilities, of life on this Earth. These four things will, of 
necessity, become part of a new mythology. They are, fundamentally, religious 
tasks.? They will become and must become a foundation for the understandings 
of a culture of life, and they must be encoded in the new culture that arises 
from the death of this one.? A new culture must know where it came from, 
where it is going, where it refuses to go, where it is on the path and in its 
stage of development, and why. Otherwise, it could easily repeat and 
replicate the most devastating aspects of the death culture which is now 
collapsing around us.

If we dont know where we are, and where we come from, we cannot know where we 
need to go, why we need to go there, and we can provide no means for others 
to gauge where they are in the stages of development from the old to the new. 
In other words, lacking such knowledge, we are useless to the future as any 
kind of leaders or guides; rather, we represent a dead end and a failure of 
understanding.? It is, by the same token, very dangerous to assume that one 
knows what the new mind is or will be. That is in part because what we (both 
as a species and as specific cultural groupings) do now and in the future 
will become part of the myth/ story that shapes the new mind and the culture 
that it arises from. Since we dont know what we are going to do, at best, 
some of us who intend to help lay the foundations for a new culture can only 
live as if our story might come to embody worthwhile lessons for the coming 
generations, if there are to be any. But we cannot predict the outcomes or 
the meanings of the stories and myths they will comprise,

In the same way, the Hopi who lived through the experiences later embodied in 
their Emergence Stories could not know the outcome before it unfolded. As 
they moved thru the passageway - following the destruction of the Third world 
into the Fourth World, they did not know they would be followed by a witch 
who would corrupt the new world, or other key elements of the story that 
would give full shape to their culture as it deepened and evolved.? It is 
such stories that deeply shaped the traditional Hopi world experience or 
mind, and our story, as it will be told by our childrens childrens children, 
based on how we have actually lived it, will shape the new mind of the coming 
generations. This will happen in the same way that those who lived long ago, 
who lived and shaped the story of the existential threat and the final 
solutions of Empire, shaped our culture and our minds.

So, yes, Gaza is our mirror, it is the shattering mirror of a shattering 
world system of Empire and domination; it is the magic mirror into which we 
can look to see the truth of our cultural situation and the forces that drive 
our psyches, the painful mirror that can lead us to grief and transformation, 
in which we can see what is revealed, and what, and who, must change, and 
how. What is happening in Gaza is a Revelation. That is why we cannot tear 
our eyes or our hearts away.

And as we watch the drama, the tragedy of Empire, oppression, genocide and 
ecocide unfold before us in Gaza, we will no doubt find occasion to feel both 
deep grief and rage. Grief over, and rage at genocide is completely 
justified. But it is important- central - to remember that the worst thing 
oppression does to us is make us someone were not, to rob us of choice, to 
reduce us to being reactive, limiting our ability to feel and think clearly 
and with compassion about ourselves and others.? It forces us into the 
mindset wherein what threatens us determines our being, and our existence 
becomes little more than a reaction to that threat. Then the Empire mentality 
has got us. To the extent that the oppression reduces and limits our 
abilities to make conscious choices, we have become the victims of genocide 
within ourselves, we have become less than the promise of our full humanity; 
we are robbed of our birthright. The ultimate freedom is the freedom to 
choose from the deepest place of authenticity within us from our hearts in 
right relation with all life. We must learn to live and act from love of our 
peoples, of the land and all life, and not from mere hatred of those who have 
foolishly made of themselves our enemies.

This freedom the freedom to love, foster and nurture life, can never truly or 
entirely be stripped from us, as the indigenous ancestors and elders all of 
those who have handed down the still living traditions from before the time 
of Empire have shown us with their lives. The spiritual elders and guides of 
the Maya of Guatemala are a recent and deep example of this. The Maya are 
just recovering from a genocide that took the lives of a quarter million of 
their people in the latter part of the 1900s; but, even though the denial had 
not yet shattered, even though the world was silent about their condition 
then, in that time just before the internet, they kept faith with their 
ancient traditions, knowledge, and prophecies, and emerged as a people who 
hold a deep spiritual light for a world in crisis. They re-emerged, as if 
according to schedule, for this time.? Let us live, to the best of our 
capacities, like them.

Juan Santos is Los Angeles based writer and editor. His work can be read at 
The Fourth World Read other articles by Juan, or visit Juan's website.

By Juan Santos

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2009/01/the-lessons-

of-gaza-in-a-time-of-collapse-and-rebirth/