The die is cast

Is it any wonder that only an abuser can preach about restraint!?

The so-called tech broligarchs who owe their existence to an unbridled consumerism, no doubt founded on the plunder of the planet’s abundant resources, are also at the helm of an enterprise whose governance consists in the management of paucity. Their excesses are the cause of the paucity to which they purport to provide the antidote. As greed begets paucity, finitude goes hand in hand with expansionism.

There is such a disparity between the nation-charted land of geopolitics and the land-community of mineral, vegetal and animal entities inclusive of humans. Geopolitical intrigue is superimposed on the ecological mesh of the planet which, not bound by national borders, is not lacking in silk roads, trade routes and collective migrations. There is no permeability of the geopolitical layer towards a global, planet comes first approach. A community that secretes its own sustainable habitat is severed from the political map even though for all the exploitation and terraforming of colonial powers, there are serious limitations imposed on them by the shape of continents, the merging or portioning of seas, the porosity of mountains and the demands of climate.

The notion of land as the practice of a community of interdependent entities forming the biome is alien to the instrumentalization of slavery by settler colonialism and its automation in capitalistic production. A conquering and extractive logic that seeks to dominate its environment by sheer force could not be further removed from the practice of land as a community of organisms, large and small, simple and complex, alone or in clusters, participating in a maze of overlapping food chains. It is injurious to the biome, tampering with its diverse communities’ ability to survive, to alter its internal balance by willing some of its member-species to disappear. The subjugation of races and populations derives from such disrespect and abusive exploitation of these vital realms.

For months on end, the brazen IOF army has falsely claimed achievement and victory when in reality it was collapsing from failure and exhaustion. Thus the overconfident aims of empire, the unflinching laws of capital, the uncontested reign of brute force have in store a systemic deterioration proportionate to their propagandized legitimations. There is no one to protect the hardnosed acolytes of the far right from the entropy to which they are willfully headed. No one to save Israel from its own corrosive venom. No one to bar Trump, the unwitting accelerationist, from the transhuman exultation of America the great on a funeral pyre.

Whereas there are countless ways of inhabiting the world or at least as many as the entities that populate it, land appropriation is only the rigueur for colonizers and imperialists who are happy to exonerate the theft with airstrikes and invasions. In the 1940’s, Aldo Leopold, a Wisconsin forester and ecologist was concerned that “land to the average citizen is still something to be tamed, rather than something to be understood, loved and lived with. Resources are still regarded as separate entities, indeed, as commodities rather than as our cohabitants in the land-community”. Around the same time, the antithesis to this notion of land as a living organism was being forcefully enacted with the parasitic encroachment of Zionism in the land of Palestine, with the nefarious application of the Sykes-Picot agreement and Balfour declaration to solve a European problem on middle-eastern soil. The situation has only gotten worse eighty years later, with war profiteers motioning to turn an ethnically cleansed Gaza into a real estate extravaganza.

Lamenting the ill effects of industrialization, Aldo Leopold reckons that “the erasure of a human subspecies is largely painless – to us – if we know little about it…We grieve only for what we know” Granted that we can only react to what we are exposed to, one would expect more responsibility from the brokers of knowledge, especially in universities and yet it is deplorable how a large constituency of academics and intellectuals, hopelessly harnessed by their cultural institutions, refrain from going out of their way or stopping in their tracks to denounce actions that demand outright condemnation. It is a very particular climate hanging over academia since October 7th, 2023, with student discontent reverberating throughout campuses to spill over into society at large. Meanwhile, the repressive silence of instructors and faculty members not inclined to civil disobedience casts a long shadow on their legitimacy and exposes the self-interest behind the dubious alliances that buttress their hegemonic consent.