Category: Global warming

“We’s Who’s the Earth is For”: Storm Visions

by Ciarán O’Rourke

A decade ago I began to form a habit that in the intervening years has evolved into a strange passion: going to the cinema, and watching movies, alone. Two films in particular, from those early days, seemed so urgent and exhilarating, so attuned to what was then (and is still) being talked about as the greatest threat to civilization, climate change, but at a human level, that I lay a good deal of the responsibility for my cinematical hermeticism at their feet. I saw Take Shelter and Beasts of the Southern Wild in short succession, and they both taught me something about how to see, and read, and think about environmental devastation as a collective experience, from the confines of my own small life. Each picture still filters my understanding of the many dooms that are already taking shape about us, and are promised to intensify in the time ahead.

Take Shelter (2011) begins with an apocalypse that only Curtis (Michael Shannon) can see, which nevertheless threatens to envelop everything he knows. Staring at trees shaking and shimmering in the wind, Curtis watches, as in the backdrop an immense storm cloud gathers, and oleaginous rain begins to splatter his shirt and head. The film proceeds as a close-focused portrait of a loner in crisis, as Curtis risks his job, family, financial stability, and standing in his community to build an underground bunker for his loved ones, in anticipation of an ecological and social disaster that nobody else understands, or wants to.

Jeff Nichols’s film stands (as the title suggests) as an admonitory projection of an atomised America drowning in a storm of oil, a storm that only one incorrigibly reticent man, whose sanity is questioned throughout, can discern. Take Shelter was released three years before the Flint water crisis laid bare the reality of the USA’s poisoned waters, and the social regimes ensuring that some people would suffer the effects of failed public infrastructure more than others. Likewise in 2005, six years prior to Nichols’s picture, the people of New Orleans had been left to fend for themselves by the federal government in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and then criminalised for surviving. Nichols’s cinematic parable is alert to the reality of these murder traps, and still perturbs, mixing fantastical foreboding with the sharp, persistent tang of realism.

Watching the movie now, it’s difficult to imagine any other actor than Shannon for the part of Curtis. Shannon, in his late thirties in the film, has the truculent, creviced features and uneasy, watchful gaze of an ageing veteran from a forgotten war. He conveys both seething anxiety and blank-eyed stolidity, and seems always to have wandered onto the screen from some Great Nowhere, that lost hinterland where America’s ghosts have been left to die. Curtis wakes from nightmares screaming, or asphyxiated in terrified paralysis. When lightning crashes in a far-off field, he flinches, and lurches instinctively to draw his young daughter (who is deaf) into the house. The lines between sight and vision, climactic crisis and personal breakdown, grow blurry, as Curtis mutters in disbelief and trepidation: “Is anyone seeing this?”

In some respects, Shannon is comparable to Henry Fonda in The Grapes of Wrath, the “only actor” of the 1930s with whom the writer James Baldwin “identified” as a youth, just “by the way [he] walked down the road at the end of the film”. For Baldwin, Fonda’s on-screen presence was such that his whiteness was almost erased, composed not of savage entitlement but of empathic anger and downtrodden longing: he epitomised in his person those dispossessions endured by predominantly black and brown communities in the actual nation that Baldwin knew while growing up. The foreboding that we see encoded into Shannon’s permanently pained expression is, in part, the face of white America turned back upon itself; he is a witness to catastrophe that none of his neighbours recognises, and against which there is no protection.

Nichols’s picture is set in America’s backlands, near Elyria, Ohio, where Walmart remains one of the city’s top five employers, and (in the movie) Curtis and his friend Dewart (Shea Whigam) work in a gravel pit. Left deflated and unappeased by liberal America, within half a decade of the film’s making, places like this would embrace the demagogic populism of Donald Trump, as he began his march to the White House. The dread Curtis feels in nightmares, as friends and neighbours are driven to acts of visceral violence and desperation, accurately foreshadows the rancour and resentment stoked by Trump in reality.

In the micro-drama of Curtis’s escalating distress, which may be madness, we also glimpse the macro-epic of climate catastrophe, baring its fangs. “It rained for two hours yesterday,” his boss snaps in exasperation. “Two hours, and our entire [drilling] schedule went into the toilet.” Industrial productivity, not to mention human survival, becomes considerably more difficult and dangerous when the natural systems it depends on move with a gargantuan rhythm and momentum of their own. Take Shelter registers the pulse of a maelstrom that later films like Parasite dramatise in full-blown action.

Bird-murmurations swarm the skies, then vanish at a glance. When Curtis expresses his disquiet during a medical appointment, his doctor swivels his chair away from him, asking, “You been out to see your mother,” living in psychiatric care, “lately?” For Curtis, to question the seeming complacency of his peers is to be consigned to outsider status, exiled. When he does visit his mother (Kathy Baker), he wonders quietly if she can remember what happened before she was “diagnosed”. “It was a real stressful time,” she says in a soft voice. “Your father was gone a lot…there was always a panic that took hold of me.”

Nichols’s visual grammar is often so beguiling because of his parallel capacity to enter the inner (and intimate) life of his characters. Much of the power of Take Shelter lies in its recognition that many of its central characters can’t: the precarity and many burdens of their days are such that the very idea of safety, sustainable comfort, enduring happiness is constantly endangered. “You got a good life,” says Dewart (Shea Whigam) to his friend and workmate. “Well, it ain’t always so easy,” Curtis replies, looking away.

This is a drama in which basic medical procedures and prescriptions are frequently out of financial reach; where people are expected to suffer, or (somehow) pay. Curtis’s wife, Samantha (Jessica Chastain), sells hand-sewn curtains and quilts at the local car-boot sale for extra cash. When Curtis gets “a home-improvement loan” from the bank to build the tornado shelter in his back garden, he jeopardizes his ability to cover the expense of Hannah’s hearing implants. “How could you do that without talking to me,” Samantha almost pleads: “Tell me something that helps me understand why you’re being like this.” He breathes heavily: “There’s nothing to explain.”

Communication and mutual understanding, their necessity and frustration, are organising motifs in this strangely symphonic drama of private calamity and collective crisis. We watch transfixed as Chastain’s Samantha, whose searching intelligence makes even silence eloquent, teaches Hannah “a new sign” word, and the windows of the house grow grey: “S-T-O-R-M.” When Curtis eventually tells his wife about the “dreams, I guess they’re more like nightmares”, he evokes “this dark, thick rain, like fresh motor-oil”. Such terse, weighted lines could be taken from a play by Sam Shepard (an actor-writer who adds to the grounded gravitas of Nichols’s 2012 feature, Mud). “It’s not just a dream,” Curtis says. “It’s a feeling. I’m afraid something might be coming. Something that’s not right. I cannot describe it. I just need you to believe me.” The times are out of joint.

The question of belief, of human faith-in-one-another, is resolved only ambiguously in this film, which brings us face to face with a premonition of extinction that is at once powerful and difficult to absorb in full. Curtis’s slow diffidence and physical unease nevertheless convey what we (and he) cannot quite define in verbal terms.

In Field of Dreams (1989), despite accusations from all sides of insanity, financial and medical, the character Ray (Kevin Costner) knows that “if he builds” a baseball field on his land, “people will come”:

They’ll arrive at your door, as innocent as children, longing for the past…. Then they’ll walk off to the bleachers, sit in their shirtsleeves on a perfect afternoon…and they’ll watch the [baseball] game, and it will be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters.

Curtis’s nightmares repeat the same parable, but in altered form. If he builds his storm shelter, his vision will be true and his fears vindicated: the apocalypse he’s felt brewing for so long will strike.

In a vivid distillation of Curtis’s anguish, after fighting with Dewart in the mess hall, frothing at the mouth he yells: “There is a storm coming. Like nothing you’ve ever seen. And not one of you is prepared for it.” None of his friends and neighbours can look him in the eye. “Sleep well in your beds,” he screams, “because if this comes true there ain’t gonna be any more.” Then, turning to Samantha and Hannah, his eyes clearing as he looks into their faces, he crumples into tears, in agony and shame.

“To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, – that is genius,” Emerson once wrote, urging that each “man” should “carry himself in the presence of all opposition, as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he”. Curtis’s actions exemplify the stubborn wildness of such a credo, while exposing the preposterous insulation of its originator. Curtis’s need to trust his convictions “in the presence of all opposition”, his will to act on the recurring, fearful visions he sees, cost him nearly all he has. Emerson’s sermon at the pulpit exacted no such toll on the eminent philosopher.

In similarly immersive fashion, Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012) dramatises the experience, at an almost bodily level, of fragility in the midst of social and climactic collapse. Set on a small Louisiana island, in a forgotten town called the Bathtub, the film is narrated and led by Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis), who lives in a decrepit portacabin, suspended by trees, with her father Wink (Dwight Henry). Their home is alive with rust, and roots; lit by weather and lived in by birds and (sometimes the strangest of) beasts.

The first words we hear in the film, in voice-over, are faltering, precise, and powerfully expressive of the world Hushpuppy knows and the binding laws she intuits to be true there: “All the time, everywhere, everything’s hearts are beatin’ and squirtin’, and talkin’ to each other the ways I can’t understand.” Hushpuppy’s statement of incomprehension is deep and real with wisdom, partly because (like Curtis) she understands more, perhaps, than she can allow herself to say out loud.

We see Hushpuppy holding a chick in her small hands firmly, and yet with total gentleness. Patrolling a nearby junkyard in her faded yellow wellington boots, she lays her arm across a recumbent hog, sleeping in the mud, and listens for its heartbeat, a gesture she repeats throughout the film, motivated by the nameless but palpable sickness that is increasingly depleting Wink of energy and aggravating his mood.

“I hope you die,” she shouts at Wink, after he has struck her in anger and panic. She punches his chest, and we see, on his face, a flicker of remorse and grief. He will die (soon), and he recognises that at some instinctive level Hushpuppy already knows it. When Wink collapses, in seizure, a rumble of thunder sounding in the skies, Hushpuppy quivers in open-eyed distress at this great apocalypse descending on her father, and overtaking their life together, which is grubby, precarious, and full.

Hushpuppy and Wink fish in a scrap-metal boat that floats on the mud-brown river, which, as in one of Mark Twain’s quintessential (and insightful) yarns, is always “raising”. After floods, the water becomes choked, in large measure due to a forbidding levee, which separates Hushpuppy and her people from the smoke-spewing industrial landscape beyond, where the American State reigns supreme. “Ain’t that ugly over there,” Wink says, nodding in the direction of the factory towers. “We got the prettiest place on earth.” In moments like this, Benh Zeitlin’s film (his first) has truth and grit in equal measure, which may account for its overall vitality, its magnificent flavour.

“They built the wall that cut us off,” Hushpuppy proclaims, with a kind of triumph. “They think we all gonna drown down here, but we ain’t goin nowhere…. The Bathtub has more holidays than the rest of the world!” In the form of the Bathtub, the commons has survived, and we see its openness and revelry, the plenteous river, and the companionship that thrives in and around it, up-close. This is a place where people share their resources, knowledge, and company, together in nature.

“Everything is part of the buffet of the universe,” smiles the kindly Miss Bathsheba (Gina Montana), who tells the local huddle of listening children before her of the fierce, ravenous aurochs, now extinct, which once roamed the earth. As Wink’s illness takes hold of his body, violent storms rocking and wracking their home, Hushpuppy is haunted by these creatures, looming and immense: they shadow her world. “I’m recording my story for the scientists of the future,” she says, without irony, fear or self-pity.

This is also, however, a community attuned to its own destruction. “Ice-caps gonna melt, water’s gonna rise,” Miss Bethsheba says, so “y’all better learn to survive now,” an instruction Hushpuppy internalises, and converts to poetry, a boat-speak vernacular:

One day, the storm’s gonna blow, the ground’s gonna sink, and the water’s gonna rise up so high, there ain’t gonna be no Bathtub, just a whole bunch of water…. But me and my daddy, we stay right here. We’s who’s the earth is for.

The radicalism of Hushpuppy’s world-view is ultimately less impressive than her resounding trust in it. Her intent, soft, observing eyes, her mellow, thoughtful words, find truth wherever they rest. “We’s who’s the earth is for.”

Take Shelter evokes the terror of a grown man both lost and anchored in a world overshadowed by lethal catastrophes; Beasts of the Southern Wild re-creates the lush and often urgent textures of childhood, a time of true magic and deep yearning, in this case imperilled by those hungry predators, natural death, social and environmental devastation, and a coercive State. When Wink commits an act of sabotage on the dam in an attempt to clear the area of the now-stagnant waters, police and rescue teams arrive to implement an “emergency evacuation”, forcibly transferring the Bathtub community into homeless services. “It didn’t look like a prison,” Hushpuppy remarks of the crowded medical centre where Wink is transferred. “It looked like a fishbowl with no water.” If it is stirringly humane and fluently constructed, the film remains alive (in A. S. Hamrah’s words) to “an America that is divorced from social services and beset by environmental collapse”.

The movie holds in balance an unflinching recognition of precarious lives faced down by (sometimes lethal) inevitabilities, and a child’s experience of community and fellowship – with nature and her people. Everything Hushpuppy loves comes close to vanishing, or actually drowns, as the monsters that stalk her life knock down the walls, covering her world with swampy water.

Without shirking its responsibility to these sureties and circumstances, the final act dares to imagine some of the ways in which lost children may find warmth and protection: in the arms of outcasts, or in the companionship of one another. Hushpuppy can walk back to the “raising” river and call it home. As we look into a future of certain loss and potential planetary ruin, the tenderness and fierce courage of this film quickens the heart.

Further Reading

James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work (1976).

A. S. Hamrah, The Earth Dies Streaming: Film Writing 2002–2018 (2019).

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” (1841).

Ciarán O’Rourke is a poet, based in Galway, Ireland. His first collection, The Buried Breath, was issued by Irish Pages Press in 2018 and highly commended by the Forward Foundation the following year. His miscellany of essays, One Big Union, was published in 2021, and his second poetry collection is forthcoming. More information about his work can be found here. http://www.ragpickerpoetry.net/books

A letter from a revolutionary eco-socialist in pain.

It’s been a very bad month for blue tits, for the poor and for me!

By Gordon Liddle

Zombie Apocalypse, 18th Sept 2021

Blue Tits tend to have only one brood per year. They feed their young on caterpillars and have to gauge when these are freely available to choose when to lay their eggs. If they get it wrong, the brood will starve, or they will only be able to feed one chick. Either way, the risks to getting it wrong are huge. Add in climate change and Insect Armageddon, and the risks just got a lot worse. This year must have been a bad one, as our quota of Blue Tits in the garden at this time of year is a lot less than those of last year. We have had a rubbish summer with ridiculous weather events, flooding and basically crap weather. Our tomatoes are late, the potatoes got blight and our onions are not worth lifting. On the swing side we have our largest ever apple crop and the late carrots seem to be doing OK. But all is not right in the garden. As the Blue Tits have shown, the insects are leaving us.

On the political front our Selfservative government goes from bad to worse. Whilst the Zombie Apocalypse grinds on and into another wave, they seem to blindly stagger from one bad policy decision to another. As the rich have managed to storm ahead and are making the biggest fortunes in history, the poor and sick are being punished for simply being. In the current dystopia here in the UK, the poor are marginalised and lined up for a punishment beating to allow a narrative to exist that we have somehow to ‘pay for the pandemic’, or that ‘we are all in it together’ and the punishment is part of ‘levelling up!’ They are about to remove the £20 uplift for UC at a time of rising prices for basics, food, electricity, rents, and the only thing the minister in charge can mutter is that they can easily make it up by working a couple of hours extra per week. Disregarding the fact this is a lie, as the average worker will have to put in about seven to nine hours to make up the loss due to the way the credits are worked, many are already working at two or three jobs just to keep their heads above water. On top of that, the Chancellor has decided the poorest will contribute the most with new tax rises via National Insurance. At a time when prices are rising and the economy is struggling, it makes no sense to take money out of the economy, but they seem determined to do so. Fiscal responsibility is the key phrase sung by Sunak, the jug eared idiot with the crocodile smile, as he hurls more key workers onto the bonfire of poverty and despair. One could think of his as an economic illiterate until one understands the conscious cruelty of these decisions.

As the rich have managed to storm ahead and are making the biggest fortunes in history, the poor and sick are being punished for simply being.

Don’t forget, the government is not just taxing the poor with these new NI taxes (10% rise), it is gaslighting us as well. It could easily order the Bank of England to buy some government issued bonds. There was no need to tax at all for social care, nor for funding the NHS. The debt is rolled on and sometime in the future will be cancelled. But to do this, it would undermine the absolute message that we can’t ‘afford’ the public services that we need. There are a lot of rich people who control the politicians and the government with the argument that there is no ‘Magic Money Tree!’ This debt narrative is why we are having this NI increase of ten percent now. It is criminally and consciously cruel on those most in need and will for instance, instantly give nurses, and health care ‘essential’ workers a pay cut. The real purpose of this chance is to ring fence the wealthy and allow them to pass on their inheritance to their children. In essence, it, as Richard Murphy has pointed out, transfers money from the poor to the wealthy. This should be an open goal for Labour, but Sir Rodney Woodentop is too busy purging socialists and left-wing Jews out of the Party. During this zombie apocalypse, the rich have seen their wealth grow by 35% whist foodbank usage has risen 33%. This latest poll tax type is just another insult to ordinary workers. The Unions should be calling for a general strike, but I suppose we will just roll over and remember when we were affronted when a politician called for communist broadband during the election.’ Maybe we deserve these bastards?

During this zombie apocalypse, the rich have seen their wealth grow by 35% whist foodbank usage has risen 33%.

The NHS is struggling, and the new wave of infections is going to put it under more pressure, perhaps terminal. Ten years of engineered decline by the Tories, waiting lists becoming longer and longer, even before the pandemic, has put it in a terrible state. Capita, Serco, Interserve and other parasites of the public purse have thrived, sucking billions out of the economy and making their shareholders rich, whilst the Tories are chopping off the limbs of our treasured NHS. The steady drip, drip, drip, of recent comments in the media of how the service is failing is meant to leave us with a bad taste in our mouths, a desire for a new shiny, efficient, privatised health care system, to allow their American and Corporate Healthcare Companies to ride to the rescue, an all-insurance new health service, that will eviscerate and other the poor, disabled and chronically sick. On top of this the disinformation and conspiracy theories about the virus are still rife and complicating vaccination take-up, particularly in the US, where, according to Fox News and others, people are sticking keys to their foreheads and pushing their swollen gonads around in wheelbarrows.

Capita, Serco, Interserve and other parasites of the public purse have thrived, sucking billions out of the economy and making their shareholders rich, whilst the Tories are chopping off the limbs of our treasured NHS.

The recent cabinet reshuffle has been in the news for the last couple of days, as one incompetent minister is shown the door only for another equally incompetent one to come in, one of which has the claim to fame of having eaten an Ostrich anus on live TV. It makes the news cycle excited for a few days, but it will make no discernible difference to any of us. One has to understand that the current PM is not interested in governance, nor in any real policy decisions. He wants to be in power. There will be no levelling up, to do so would upset his base. If the North were to be given a helping hand, it would be at the expense of the South, and they wouldn’t contemplate that. Shops are running out of products due to the shortage of HGV drivers and broken supply chains from Brexit. Will they do anything meaningful? Don’t be ridiculous. Just more gaslighting and lies. Our client journalists are all over the front pages spouting nonsense about bringing back Imperial weights and measures now we are free from the ‘shackles’ of the EU, with the great British pint crown back on our beer glasses. Meanwhile, due to the lack of foresight, or as it should be called, criminal negligence, the water industry cannot obtain the chemicals needed to treat our water and sewage, the results of which are huge measures of sewage and waste being pumped into almost every river in England at extraordinary rates, poisoning our rivers and fish, killing the vegetation and wildlife. Another example, if one were needed, of privatisation of public commons and basic life necessaries for private profit. Capitalism is literally poisoning our waters. Fines by a toothless watchdog are just passed off an ‘industry expenses’, a small price to pay for huge renumeration for the executives and shareholders.

the water industry cannot obtain the chemicals needed to treat our water and sewage, the results of which are huge measures of sewage and waste being pumped into almost every river in England

Meanwhile, we are hurling toward the COP26 Earth Summit in November. Over the last fortnight I have been suffering from a back injury that has left me in great pain and the resulting take-up of painkillers has made my sleepy and out of kilter. Taking a couple of Tramadol last week as the pain got really bad led to me hallucinating. It was like a very bad LSD trip. It was very depressing and very visual and more frightening that I was awake the whole time, the scenes visualising on the back of my eyelids like an arthouse film. The one thing I realised is that I have for months been suffering from what Srecko Horvat calls Post Apocalypse Melancholy. And I’m not talking about the pandemic.

I’m talking the actual Apocalypse, of which this past two years has been a highlighted symptom. My Christian friend is convinced we are nearing the end times, and to him the Apocalypse is the Revelation, the revealing of a new world, where those which are chosen are saved. The Apocalypse, as Horvat explains, is to them a great revealing, something to be welcomed, a transformation, a release. But it isn’t. My friend is deluded. He bought into a simple story, from more ignorant times, where an understanding of the biosphere was in its infancy, from which we have barely matured. The Apocalypse is extinction. The end of everything. The end of humanity, of human experience, of culture, language, of the arts, architecture, science, of love and shared empathy, of understanding of nature, of our place in it.

The Apocalypse is extinction. The end of everything. The end of humanity, of human experience, of culture, language, of the arts, architecture, science, of love and shared empathy, of understanding of nature, of our place in it.

The only ‘revelation’ I have experienced over the last few years, as I have researched a manifesto (and failed in real terms), is that we are in a very bad place. I am already mourning from the Post Apocalypse. Not only are our ‘leaders’ psychopaths and sociopaths, almost to a man (and they are mainly men), but that they believe that permanent growth invasive and extractive Capitalism is the only game in town. No other approach to how we live within our system is allowed nor contemplated. The controllers of Capitalism decided, some time ago, and with absolute certainty, that they were just going to endure and allow the impacts of climate change and ecological collapse for the following reasons. Firstly, they cannot and will not contemplate the taming or elimination of a system that has made them extremely wealthy and powerful. Secondly, they are psychologically unable to contemplate any other system that allows empathy and understanding, or even love of the natural world to displace their idea that we are ‘above’ nature, and we have to rule. That we are somehow unique and not part of the ecological cascades that make up life on earth, and possibly elsewhere. To tame is and conquer it like any other colony in the name of their Imperialism is ingrained into their being. Thirdly, they believe no-one will challenge this system as we have become too weak and subjugated ourselves to their dominance, and thus, as we go over the cliff with them, we are partly to blame for being so dumb and subservient. I this they are correct.

Not only are our ‘leaders’ psychopaths and sociopaths, almost to a man (and they are mainly men), but that they believe that permanent growth invasive and extractive Capitalism is the only game in town.

Only this week our government here in the UK decided to strip out the environmental portion (which met the very soft Paris Climate Change provisions) from a Trade Deal with Australia to make it easier to agree, but in the same week the US, Australia and the UK agree a pact to confront by force if necessary, the alleged threat of China. To supply new Nuclear submarines to Australia and make it the new base for a second Cold War. To my knowledge China has never invaded another country in recent times, and, since being co-opted into the Capitalist system, has acted as the World Factory for goods, then using the wealth created, has lifted its people out of poverty and is now using such wealth to trade and invest in other countries. I make no great case for the Leadership of China, authoritarian that it is, but, comparing China to the US or past Imperial Britain, Belgium or Germany, they look positively innocent. The determination of the US to provoke a conflict with someone, as it’s Empire fades is as Thucydides laid out. Possibly the end game will end with China after a practice on Iran.

And it is not just the right that are laying the paving to the Apocalypse, the left too has capitulated. Many believe they can tweak Capitalism into a less destructive model, or they can control it better and with magnanimity. They can’t. At the Labour conference here in the UK, the leadership has stopped a motion to discuss Climate Change, and instead has committed itself to purging what remains of the left as the number one priority for the Party. Anyone left in Labour who believes it can be a part of the future is delusional or has taken the same painkillers that sent me hallucinating last week. It’s over. It is part of the problem, not part of a solution. In the US, we saw this week that great left firebrand AOC turning up for an establishment evet wearing an expensive evening dress with ‘Tax The Rich’ on the back. It made me sick. This virtue signalling was accepted at the evening even directly because the establishment see her as no threat whatsoever. A jolly good joke and a good titter among the thieves and crooks at the event. Meanwhile, outside, a real demonstrator was arrested for being an actual threat. As AOC capitulated in full view of the media, the protester outside, out of view, was the real deal, not a sell-out. 

At the Labour conference here in the UK, the leadership has stopped a motion to discuss Climate Change, and instead has committed itself to purging what remains of the left as the number one priority for the Party.

Over the last year as I have researched for a realistic Green New Deal, one of the things I have realised is that it cannot be done by the rich North. Their proposals involve more of the same, or a reliance in technology, tweaks to Capitalism, more appropriation of the poor South, more colonialism and more theft of resources. The Green New Deal has to be one which allows Indigenous Peoples to have an equal say, has to involve the relief of debt and has to involve Land Back, decolonialisation. It also has to allow them to catch up, real CO2 relief for them, they didn’t do this tragedy, we did. It isn’t their eating of meat which has denuded soils and aquifers. It wasn’t their farming practices that has destroyed the earth, it was ours. It isn’t them playing with nuclear annihilation, it is us. I have also realised I am no longer just a socialist. Our democracies are a sham. I am now a revolutionary eco-socialist. The fight back is outside our democratic systems. I’ve seen the Apocalypse. It’s here already. There is no going back to normal. That time has passed.

Gordon Liddle in the Yemen in the 1990s

Gordon Liddle was born 1956, Horden, County Durham, United Kingdom Married, lives and works at his Derbyshire studio. BA Hons, Sheffield Psalter Lane Art College Gordon has had numerous positions and travelled extensively through the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Yemen, Lebanon, Bahrain, Africa and Europe, with particular interests in religion, democracy, politics, economics, MMT, and culture. The results of these studies form the basis of the series of works now under way. Numerous works bought by private collectors #Madonna Victorian Mood Bought by Andrew Cavendish the 11th Duke of Devonshire is owned by the Chatsworth Collection. ‘Celestial Teapot’ was exhibited at La Galleria Pall Mall in London for one week in 2013, 4 days at Art Basel in 2014. Currently working on Gaia, The Sixth Extinction Series, of paintings, woodcuts and hopefully etchings soon. Also writing two books and a book of poems and rants. Gordon is on Twitter @sutongirotcip and his website is pictorignotus.com 

Capitalism is what happens when the psychopaths and gangsters are running the neighbourhood. Our only chance is to wrestle the wheel from them.

… and create a National Forest the length and breadth of the UK.

Zombie Apocalypse, 16th Aug 2021

by Gordon Liddle

Time to pause. Stop. Time to take stock. We are drifting toward war and ecological collapse like drunks seeking the next open bar. Staggering along, bouncing off lampposts and cars, desperate for the next drink to avoid reality. And the reality isn’t pretty.

            It’s been quite a week hasn’t it? IPCC report all doom and gloom, quickly whisked off the front pages of every newspaper, Ken Loach removed from the Labour Party, along with thousands of other socialists, as Sir Rodney Woodentop continues the purges, and the end game in Afghanistan, which we all new was coming. Apparently, some journalists and politicians are shocked at the events unfolding, which is quite a thing. Where have they been for the last twenty years and what were they thinking was going to be the result? These are well paid, supposedly intelligent and well read, what goes on in their heads? To be a journalist in the West and specifically in the US and UK it seems the only qualification is to turn up, don’t write anything untoward or probing, keep your head down and recycle the double speak handed to you by your line manager. Astonishing.

‘Spaffer’ Johnson in Morrisons

Brexit, the gift that keeps on giving, has, together with the zombies, left us short of lorry drivers, according to the press. This is bullshit. Our government has made the UK a place where any ‘forinners’ aren’t welcome, so ‘forrin’ drivers have stayed away. Many companies in the EU can’t be bothered with all the red tape which is now involved to export goods to the UK, so they gave up exporting here, so no return drivers to take goods back to the EU. On top of that the UK government classed lorry drivers as ‘unskilled’ so no free movement of drivers from abroad to keep driving here. Add to this that drivers have been leaving the profession for years because the pay and conditions are dire, and you have the perfect storm. You don’t become a heavy goods vehicle driver overnight, and the training is expensive, so this is a problem that isn’t going away anytime soon. It’s what happens when you have a government of idiots. So, we have the armed forces stepping in to deliver goods to supermarkets. Join the army and meet people, in Morrison’s warehouse. The Queens Own Broccoli Regiment step forward please!

Join the army and meet people, in Morrison’s warehouse. The Queens Own Broccoli Regiment step forward please!

            The Dark Knight has been continuing his purge of the Labour Party, an extra shove as conference draws near. You are five time more likely to be purged for antisemitism if you are a Jewish member than a non-Jewish member. Let that sink in. This week was the turn of the world-renowned film director and humanitarian Ken Loach. Apparently, he was in a group proscribed by Labour and refused to disassociate himself from the others and wouldn’t name them to save himself. The director of Cathy Come Home and I Daniel Blake is now outside the Party again whilst Islamophobes and downright racists adorn the PLP and Labour councillors across the country. Remember, this man, Sir Rodney Woodentop, pledged to unite the Party and follow on from the 2019 manifesto commitments. He lied. From the very start he was a plant, an establishment shill brought in to make Labour a toothless lapdog of the established order.

You are five time more likely to be purged for antisemitism if you are a Jewish member than a non-Jewish member. Let that sink in.

Remember rent-a-gob James O’ Brien muttering into his mike that ‘any other leader and Labour would be twenty points ahead in the polls?’ Well, they certainly aren’t that, with the worst Tory government in living memory. Whoever does the promotions for his utterances online is also an idiot, which we saw this week with him coming up with the line that he could sanction the killing of an Alpaca. That made all the wrong headlines. Who was he trying to recruit to vote Labour? Harold Shipman? The Dark Knight is destroying Labour as a political force and destroying the Party into the bargain. He is an utter disgrace, and what’s worse, as we desperately need an alternative government to take up the challenge of global warming and ecological collapse, he is wasting the time of the only Party in the UK at least of making the case for drastic changes, and for that most of all I shall never forgive him. His screech back to Blairite neoliberalism in the face of what is looking on the horizon is unforgiveable. I expect it from the Tories, we all know their indifference to suffering and ecology, but the glimmer of hope we had under Labour’s GND manifesto commitments at least offered that, hope. Now we probably have another term of Tories in power, with all the time wasting on reform that entails, and that to me is Labour’s biggest crime.

Remember rent-a-gob James O’ Brien muttering into his mike that ‘any other leader and Labour would be twenty points ahead in the polls?’

            The IPCC report came and went this last week. Although the report is of course conservative in its approach, not surprising as it has to accommodate many governments and bodies who are to say the least rather sceptical, it was still a damning citation of where we have allowed ourselves to drift. The situation is dire. The horse hasn’t quite bolted yet, but the stable door is wide open, and the groom is asleep on the job. Ten million acres are burning out of control across Siberia as I write this. Italy, Turkey and other parts of Europe are still ablaze, meanwhile billionaires are talking about putting billboards into space and opening up space tours. It’s madness. Starting from the base point of reference that all our political leaders and corporate billionaires are for the most part psychopaths, it wasn’t long before they trotted out the usual platitudes in response to the report. Biden gave a presser in which he waxed lyrical about the $1 Trillion GND package he was getting through the House and then, just at the end, the Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm announced in reply to a press question that she ‘had made it clear to OPEC countries that she expected them to increase oil production to reduce the cost of fuel to boost the economy.’ This on top of Biden giving another 2000 fracking and drilling permits on Federal Land as well as confirming the Line 3 Tar Sands pipeline. Talk about cognitive dissonance.

Capitalism is literally burning all our planetary resources to accumulate vast sums of wealth for a very few people and we are just observers.

Capitalism is literally burning all our planetary resources to accumulate vast sums of wealth for a very few people and we are just observers. When people ask me, what is the biggest driver of global warming and ecological collapse I am always temped to mutter, ‘it’s the economy, stupid!’ Our so called ‘leaders’ are like gangsters, they move into the neighbourhood, give all sorts of false promises, then, in no time at all they are running criminal rackets and demanding protection money. The real time gangsters are no different but at least they are honest, the don’t pretend to be anything but gangsters. The Tories have made themselves, their hedge fund and big Pharma buddy’s colossal amounts of money from this pandemic, whilst the rest of us have to get by, prices rising across the board from food to building supplies. And yet we do nothing. More people are vexed about Abi and Dale being chucked out of Love Island.

The Tories have made themselves, their hedge fund and big Pharma buddy’s colossal amounts of money from this pandemic, whilst the rest of us have to get by

            By this weekend of course, the media had moved on from the upcoming Extinction Event and had the Premiership football to tout, as well as other mind-numbing bits of trivia to keep the ignorant occupied.  The BBC had even de-listed the IPCC report from its hot news list. Then we had the debacle in Afghanistan.

Saigon 1975, Kabul 2021

           

Knowing the oncoming storm of troop departure and chaos that would follow, the PM and Foreign Secretary, as well as the rest of the Cabinet went on their holidays. As events followed their logical course during the week and then this weekend, our government was conspicuously missing in action. Twenty years, where the end result was always inevitable and still, they couldn’t prepare to leave in an orderly manner, nor protect the hundreds of thousands of women and children who, along with anyone who participated with the occupying forces, will be subject to the most horrifying crimes. Only weeks ago, Spaffer went before Parliament and said, ‘there was no military route to power for the Taliban!’ Either he was badly advised by intelligence services that don’t deserve the title or he was lying again. Either way the ordinary people of the area are the ones to suffer once again. Both Biden and Johnson should resign but we know that leaders don’t do honour anymore.

Only weeks ago, Spaffer went before Parliament and said, ‘there was no military route to power for the Taliban!’

As the rest of the World looks on in shock, we are resigned to the fact that our government will do all it can to stop refugees from Afghanistan from reaching our shores. The Mail and Telegraph, Sun and Express will be soon pumping our more bile about migrants in the Channel and scroungers coming here to get free hotel stay and access to our health service (if it still exists by then). All over social media we had pictures of thousands on the runway in Kabul trying to board planes, even as they were taking off, falling helplessly to their deaths as they gained height. Shocking.

            This is what happens when the psychopaths and gangsters are running the neighbourhood. Our only chance is to wrestle the wheel from them.  Then pause! Stop and think.

Let’s plan a route away from the suicidal path we are on.

Start with some very obvious things, immediately cut to a four-day week.

Stop promoting the consuming of endless rubbish.

Start taxing the commons and make companies place a deposit before mining to cover the costs of reparations when they have finished.

Write off the debt of the Global South so they can prepare for the coming ecological onslaught that they had no part in engineering.

Ban tax havens and then tax billionaires till they squeal.

Nationalise all water Companies and Power Companies and Grids.

Pay a decent state pension so oldies can actually retire instead of taking jobs which younger people could do, the money is a multiplier and just goes straight back into the economy.

Close all Public (private) Schools and educate our citizens properly (it will never happen whilst the elite can opt out).

Promote the arts, sciences, things that make life worth living.

Teach kids ecology and how to have a social relationship with the natural world, let them do some gardening, kids actually love it.

Start rewilding parts of the UK, we could start with Grouse Moors. Upland sheep farmers could be made countryside stewards with the same subsidies we give them to allow sheep to keep the uplands denuded of trees and wild areas.

Create a National Forest the length and breadth of the UK.

Ban all external funding for MP’s and remove the House of Lords replacing it with a people’s assembly.

Ban deep sea trawling, remove our nuclear weapons, we don’t need them.

Set up a doughnut economy with doughnut cities.

Link executive pay to the pay of the lowest worker in the organisation.

The list of what we could do is endless, it just needs vision. Draw up a Marshal type plan to work with other governments toward a common goal, which is now, survival.

We cannot afford Capitalism anymore. Until we realise that, we are heading to oblivion. The upcoming COP26 will be lots of hot air and happy clapping, then Biden will go home and announce more drilling, Putin will start to mine in Siberia and the Chinese will still be our offshore factory churning out more tat, whilst Bolsanaro lays waste to the Amazon. You know they will. Then as the power of the US wanes, and that of China grows, the receding power will want to start a war. Possibly a little trial run with Iran first but then inevitable with China. And it will be the last one. The gangsters are insane. It’s time to change them

            On Sunday, Joan and I went for a walk along a local nature trail. In the hour and a half walk we saw only four butterflies, a few bees and a couple of hoverflies. Hardly any birds and no mammals. It is a dessert. We are already in deep, deep shit. Keep washing your hands.

Gordon Liddle was born 1956, Horden, County Durham, United Kingdom Married, lives and works at his Derbyshire studio. BA Hons, Sheffield Psalter Lane Art College Gordon has had numerous positions and travelled extensively through the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Yemen, Lebanon, Bahrain, Africa and Europe, with particular interests in religion, democracy, politics, economics, MMT, and culture. The results of these studies form the basis of the series of works now under way. Numerous works bought by private collectors #Madonna Victorian Mood Bought by Andrew Cavendish the 11th Duke of Devonshire is owned by the Chatsworth Collection. ‘Celestial Teapot’ was exhibited at La Galleria Pall Mall in London for one week in 2013, 4 days at Art Basel in 2014. Currently working on Gaia, The Sixth Extinction Series, of paintings, woodcuts and hopefully etchings soon. Also writing two books and a book of poems and rants. Gordon is on Twitter @sutongirotcip and his website is pictorignotus.com 

What will it take for the British to reach a tipping point and realise they are being shafted by this bunch of Eton inbreds?

…and ban plastic grass!

Zombie Apocalypse, 05th Aug 2021

By Gordon Liddle

As miserable weather continues with more miserable weather, the crop from the garden is poor this year. Polytunnel is miles behind last year and even the potatoes outside have been poor. If we had to survive on what we grow we would have had to put in a lot more effort than we did this year. Growing organically, it is hard to keep ahead of weeds, pests and fungi but at least we get to see the animals and insects thrive.  Or do we. There have been a lot less butterflies, hoverfly’s, bees, wasps and generally most insects this year, even though I know they are somewhere as out bird and bat population here seem to be fine. The empty snail shell around the Thrush anvil is proof to that. However, we are a small hotspot in an area of farmlands and gardens that poison everything and anything in sight, and the residues wash down to us, killing plants and wildlife in no small quantities. These poisons are readily available in all supermarkets and garden shops and it’s time to ban them all. Oh, and whilst we are at banning stuff, can we also ban plastic grass. Who the hell thought it would be a good idea to cover acres of gardens in a plastic carpet which degrades and ends up as micro particles in the rivers and oceans should be taken out and tarred and feathered. I bet it was someone linked to the oil industry, ‘what other shit can we make from the oil, oh I know, plastic grass!’

Oh, and whilst we are at banning stuff, can we also ban plastic grass.

So instead of intensive gardening I have been working in the studio, trying to bring on a painting I started about seven years ago, part of the Sixth Extinction Series, a painting which involves a lot of animals and a few figures, including a child. We used our grandchild for the figure and there is an old saying, never work with children or animals, for good reason. Trying to pose a cute granddaughter and not make it look cute chocolate box is almost impossible, but the weight of the rest of the painting which includes a hanging scene should temper the cute bit. Now if the animals and Gaia (metaphor only, no teleological link) decided to hang a few humans for destroying the planet then you would think there would be quite a list of possibilities to step up to the scaffold (or in this case to be lifted up off the ground by a snake). The list is endless and getting longer by the day, but I finally decided on one of the most evil men I could think of but you will have to guess whom until the painting is finished. I will give you a clue, he has probably financed more global warming and ecological collapse denial and obfuscation groups and think tanks than any other man on the planet, and yet most people have never heard of him. And no, he isn’t, as far as I know, building a spaceship.

Trying to pose a cute granddaughter and not make it look cute chocolate box is almost impossible

So, apparently the Olympics are going on, more bread and circuses to distract the gullible whilst the world burns. I was so uninterested I did some synchronised strimming over the weekend to tidy up the meadow. I feel sorry for the athletes as a severe lack of crowds and the risks of catching the virus are high and it seems to have affected the performances of some, and, like the football did, brought out the racist hoards to mock and abuse black athletes. I have watched Simone Biles’s floor routine in slow motion, and it is incredible, she seems to defy gravity and the laws of physics at the end. No wonder a bout of the ‘twisty’s’ is so hard on her. Without total focus and spacial awareness, it would have been downright dangerous for her to attempt it. She’ll get another chance.

We have slid very far down the slippery slope.

Meanwhile, back in the UK, our politicians and journalists are carrying on as normal. The politicians ramp up the fraud, corruption and downright theft and the media cover up the lies by omission, disinformation and untruths to keep their cosy positions and access all areas. It stinks. Using burner phones is all the rage apparently so as to hand contracts to their pals whilst being untraceable and hands off. There are no depths to which this government will stoop as they know they will get away with it and the press pack will move on by the next morning, the public will shrug their shoulders and the next deal can be lined up by Friday. New laws are being rushed through Parliament to give protesters ten years in the jug for protesting, fourteen years in prison for journalists who embarrass the State and actually do their fecking job, bringing out the truth. Holding power to account. We have a bill on the statute book which allows police to secretly abduct, torture, rape and murder political dissidents. This isn’t Belarus we are talking about, or even America, this in Britain in 2021. We have Assange being held as a political prisoner in Belmarsh for bringing war crimes to light. This week Craig Murray was sent down for a year for reporting a trial. A trial where the alleged perpetrator was found not guilty. The State will brook no dissent. You have been warned. Protesters who protested against the crime bill have just been jailed for three years for protesting the Bill. We have slid very far down the slippery slope.

We have Assange being held as a political prisoner in Belmarsh for bringing war crimes to light.

Last year we had ‘eat out to die out’ but it seems this year, as Brexit hits home, we will have ‘eat nowt as the shops and restaurants are empty!’ The Chimps got their Brexit ‘Done’, but they can’t have the tea party as there is absolutely f—k all to put on the table. The big lie of glorious Britain is being cruelly exposed, and it will be interesting to see how the experiment progresses as the shops and supply chains start to crumble and the food is rotting in the fields because we don’t have any lorry drivers. Will people wake up? Most will be whinging about the weather and wondering if they can party or top up their tan, whilst the nurses and health staff are once again fighting to deal with trauma in ICU’s, as the Tories utterly fail once again to deal with this crisis. 257 deaths in the last 48 hours. Hundreds of thousand with long covid. What will it take for the British to reach a tipping point and realise they are being shafted by his bunch of Eton inbreeds? Whilst the Zombie Apocalypse rages, the world burns and the supply chains dissolve, our glorious leader is suggesting hi-viz chain gangs for prisoners and teaching Latin in all schools. I can imagine a chain gang of artists and intellectuals, dissidents of all types, led by Craig Murray, digging for chicken nuggets in the wastelands of Chipping Norton, singing old negro slave songs and asking for a break, ‘wiping off here bass, wiping off!’ Or in Latin, ‘accipies confractus’ (apologies for my Latin, it’s a bit rusty, just like my pitchfork).

What will it take for the British to reach a tipping point and realise they are being shafted by his bunch of Eton inbreeds?

Meanwhile Farage has declared war on the RNLA for saving migrants in the channel. Apparently, it would be better for them to drown than for the RNLI to be a’ taxi service by taking them to shore.’ Known locally as the C-nt in Kent, Farage seems to have endless time to get out to sea in a boat and fetishize sinking dinghies and their desperate occupants like some old twat watching a snuff movie. Who pays for all this propaganda and hate? He seems to be doing very well out of it all, although the fishermen and farmers he spent a decade ’defending’ seem to have been dropped in the doo-doo. Never mentions them now. Brexit is so yesterday.

He is taking the piss out of the Red Wall and they will suck it up because ‘Boris is a bit of a lad, and his hair, chortle.’ The English are dumber than paint.

Sir Rodney Woodentop has said he is about to relaunch his leadership campaign in the autumn, for the umpteenth time, and is desperately scrambling around for ideas, whilst inviting rich Corporate funders to come up with some cash to help him think. Having squandered the £27 Million Corbyn left as funds, and purged any real socialist and non-Zionist Jews from the Party, he has to resort to the begging bowl. To oil the corporate wheels, he is to model his version of Nu Nu Labour on Nu Labour and rehabilitate Blair’s ideas as a starting point. So, expect more wars, tough on the causes of crime, cutting the workshy of their benefits and PFI to finance the Green New Deal which he has downgraded from the 2019 manifesto commitment of £250 billion to £30 billion. That should just about cover the cost of a new app once the corruption team have used their burner phones to give it to their mates. Don’t think the PLP are any less corrupt than the Tories. Other than a few very quiet socialist cowards you could swap the lot with the Tories and not notice much difference. We get the government we deserve. Spaffer mocks the miners claiming she who can’t be named did it to stop using coal because of climate change. No mention of then importing coal from Columbia and elsewhere using child slave labour. He is taking the piss out of the Red Wall and they will suck it up because ‘Boris is a bit of a lad, and his hair, chortle.’ The English are dumber than paint.

Eight separate teams of scientists are reporting the Gulf Stream is near to collapse

Meanwhile, the forests across the Arctic, Siberia, Turkey, Greece, Canada and the US are burning brightly. In Athens last night a close friend of Yannis Varoufakis died in his room, of smoke inhalation. Whole villages have burnt to the ground in Turkey. Eight separate teams of scientists are reporting the Gulf Stream is near to collapse, with catastrophic results for huge swathes of ocean and landmass ecosystems. Our PM’s big idea this week is to ‘wash your plates before putting them in the dishwasher!’ Yup, that’s going to stop the Gulf Stream from imploding.

These people are psychopaths. We can see the tsunami coming, the warning bells have been ringing for decades, but they aren’t listening.

Cop26 is approaching. The great and good will gather in Glasgow to decide humanity’s next steps. Nothing will happen. They will argue and pose, strut about what type of fire extinguisher is the most cost effective as the house is burning down. The Oligarchs and their influential Think Tanks and media puppets will heave out loads of copy saying, ‘it’s too late now, we can’t stop it, we need to adapt,’ The Doomster message is all they have left because the argument of the deniers is lost. Because they still think things can carry on as normal. Their ‘normal. Neoliberal Consumer Capitalism. They can neither conceive nor permit any other version of civilisation that does not revolve around greed, free taking and consuming (burning) of the commons, and free reign to destroy any eco-system on the planet for profit. They will mumble about carbon offsetting and other ridiculous ‘cures’ which is like a family head cooking a big dinner for himself (this is a very male problem btw) and telling the rest of the family they can share a carrot. Ignoring the fact that two of these carbon offset forests burned to the ground last week these ideas are just perpetuating more of the same. These people are psychopaths. We can see the tsunami coming, the warning bells have been ringing for decades, but they aren’t listening. We are tying our hands behind our backs for a rich elite to carry on plundering the planet. Extinction Rebellion will wave a few flags outside and maybe block an underpass or a public square, and The Greens (middle class liberals in wellies) will mutter about losing their lattes or a particular mammal or butterfly they like, but the plunder will carry on regardless. If you look at the earth from the space station, there are no border lines drawn on the landscape, there is just this beautiful blue planet awash with a myriad of species. Yet our governments cannot agree a plan for those species. The more you know, the more you understand what is happening, the greater the rage. Are we really not going to fight these bastards and fight for a life worthy of what we could call a morally just civilisation? Do we condemn entire species to a grim future and risk everything because of lethargy and ignorance? Because we lacked vision? Because we couldn’t be bothered? The left is fractured, atomised, almost imperceptible in the States, even the ‘Squad’ are limp liberals and Imperialists. I am convinced the only way through this battle is ecological based socialism. No ‘free market’ is going to coagulate around a ‘Manhattan type’ project to buckle down and tackle the upcoming storm. It will take coordinated multi-State co-operation to do so. A war footing no less.

Keep washing your hands.

Gordon Liddle was born 1956, Horden, County Durham, United Kingdom Married, lives and works at his Derbyshire studio. BA Hons, Sheffield Psalter Lane Art College Gordon has had numerous positions and travelled extensively through the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Yemen, Lebanon, Bahrain, Africa and Europe, with particular interests in religion, democracy, politics, economics, MMT, and culture. The results of these studies form the basis of the series of works now under way. Numerous works bought by private collectors #Madonna Victorian Mood Bought by Andrew Cavendish the 11th Duke of Devonshire is owned by the Chatsworth Collection. ‘Celestial Teapot’ was exhibited at La Galleria Pall Mall in London for one week in 2013, 4 days at Art Basel in 2014. Currently working on Gaia, The Sixth Extinction Series, of paintings, woodcuts and hopefully etchings soon. Also writing two books and a book of poems and rants. Gordon is on Twitter @sutongirotcip and his website is pictorignotus.com 

The Doomers vs Humanity

Global warming is the Doomers’ excuse to voice their hatred of people.

By Phil Hall


The debate about global warming parallels the debate about nuclear catastrophe. We are as close as we ever were to catastrophe, to the danger of bio-warfare, chemical warfare and nuclear warfare. To this we have now added cyber-warfare. Despite this danger, CND is utterly invisible. Has the danger disappeared? It has not. How can we explain CND’s disappearance? I asked a young activist about CND. She had never heard of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

The forgotten symbol of CND


In the 1980s anyone who claimed nuclear war was survivable was shouted down; they were screamed at by weeping militants, people who shed hot, passionate tears for the future generations of mutant, starving children; the ones you see all around you.

They are looking fondly at albums of marches and their camps around missile sites, as if it were all just an old hobby. Where are those camps now? Has the danger passed? It has not! Where are those middle-class activists now?

They are here. The people who glue themselves to trains and wear billboards saying the world is about to end behave in much the same way as their apolitical middle class counterparts did in the 80s when we faced the prospect of nuclear war. They don’t believe in socialism and they don’t point the finger squarely at capitalism. Instead they just bleat: For heaven’s sake, someone do something!

Worse than the ultra middle class ecologists are the Doomers. They have joined Extinction Rebellion. Philosophers of Deep Ecology and their fellow travellers often compare humans to parasites. They are misanthropes and hardly the right people to guide us. Fascists can be ecologists too. The Green Party is a Trojan horse that anyone can use. The Green Party is hollow, it is not a socialist party.

It’s too late. Don’t bother trying to save the planet. Game over.

The philosophers of Deep Ecology don’t even argue for the survival of humanity, but for the survival of systems and they make grand generalisations about destruction with hysterical gravitas to support their arguments; arguments for the end of civilisation, for the death of the cities and the depopulation of the Earth.

These are sometimes the same people who want to save the Amazon from the depredations of those pesky poor farming mulattos; all those brown people ruining the ecology for sensitive first world oxygen breathers, for gap year students. These are the new eco imperialists. Save Africa for the lions and rhinos and to hell with the Africans.

For some people global catastrophe is a kind of pathetic fallacy, the reflection of their own psyche and their sweet longing for Thanatos. Survivalists dribble in anticipation of the destruction of civilisation.

The dangers of global warming are real.


The dangers of global warming are real. The best estimates are that global temperatures will go up by 6 degrees by the end of the century and that sea levels will increase to 5 metres and that impoverished low-lying nations like Bangladesh, which has a population of 161 million crammed into a river delta, will see terrible suffering from sea level rise. There are many terrible consequences. Rivers will run dry. Places that were warm will become very cold. Places that were cold might become very hot. Fires will rage. Hurricanes and typhoons will dash against coasts everywhere. It’s biblical.

Some scientists are even more pessimistic. But even their pessimism has its limits. What will happen, awful as it may be, seems to be just about within the limits of human tolerance. Hundreds of millions of people will be displaced, tens of millions will suffer terribly, millions will die. That’s bad, as bad as a world war but it will not mean the end of the world.

To catastrophise and exaggerate and to whip the younger generation into a frenzy of fear and despair is an evil act.


Meanwhile, the North West Passage opens and Greenland actually becomes green, and the north of Russia melts into arable land. The prospect of capitalism’s Lebensraum growing makes ruthless corporations rub their hands.


Piazzetta san Marco during the 1966 flooding, Wikimedia commons

The enemies of humanity are the self-declared enemies of humanity. They are misanthropes. People haters. They are the people who see other people as a plague, but who don’t consider themselves to be members of that set. They remind me of those tourists who go to Venice and complain about all the tourists. They are complaining about people poorer than themselves. They are Doomers.

The Doomers are philistines. They believe in the God of nature and in the self-healing powers of natural systems. Although there is some truth in this, in fact there can no longer be any real rewilding because there is no longer any real wild. French philosophers explained this fact to us in the 1980s.

The wild is partitioned off and managed. Ask the people in charge of the safari parks and they will explain to you how they manage the wilderness, how careful and studied their actions are. Nature can never be left to heal on its own. It needs a knowledgeable push.

If a wild and natural meteor headed wildly and naturally towards earth in order to smash into Earth in a natural, wild way, causing a wild and natural extinction, it is astronomy and rocketry that will allow us to divert it. It is technology and understanding that will rescue the environment, not letting systems recover.

Doomers don’t generate a feeling of constructive engagement, but of nihilistic outrage.


Doomers don’t generate a feeling of constructive, positive engagement, but of nihilistic outrage. They know how to catastrophise without pointing the finger at the cause of the catastrophe: capitalism.

Extreme climate change activists get their jollies from frightening millions of people with the prospect of the end of the world. They do immense psychological damage in their attempts to manipulate. Their visions are a form of nihilistic, castrating, disempowering, terrorism.

Doomsday cultists are always dangerous – from Jim Jones to the survivalists – even when they are partly right. Some of the people who were partly right about nuclear war also used it as a form of social and personal catharsis. The problem continues, but they felt better after they did their primal screaming, and then they moved on. They left CND and forgot about it. It makes you suspicious. What was the purpose of all those protests? Was it just to scream; to emote and feel better afterwards?

Doomsday fantasists are always dangerous people – from Jim Jones to the survivalists – even when they are partly right.

Doris Lessing wrote a book about surviving in a nuclear holocaust. The Swiss government made it the law that every house had to be built with a proper nuclear bunker under it. Nuclear war is eminently survivable and not everyone is going to die. The Swiss were preparing for it. The dangers of nuclear fallout were exaggerated, though the dangers were real. Cynically, you can manipulate and herd people using fear.

Their visions are a form of nihilistic, castrating, disempowering, terrorism.


To catastrophise and exaggerate and to whip the younger generation into a frenzy of fear and despair is evil. It is enough that global warming is real without it being the opportunity for people with damaged psyches to allow themselves the indulgence of emoting about it and project their own unpleasantness onto the external world.

After the very middle class Extinction demonstration, a street cleaner was left to tidy up the huge amount of detritus its well off, organically fed participants left behind.

It was as if I was invisible to them’ he said. Not one of them thanked me for cleaning up after them. I would vote Brexit again just to annoy them.

Phil Hall is a college lecturer. He is a committed socialist and humanitarian. Phil was born in South Africa where his parents were in the ANC. There, his mother was imprisoned and his father was the first journalist from a national paper to be banned. Phil grew up in East Africa and settled in Kingston-upon-Thames. He has also lived and worked in the Ukraine, Spain, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi. Phil has blogged for the Guardian, the Morning Star and several other publications and he has written stories for The London Magazine. He started Ars Notoria in May 2020.

Where’s your vision Sir Keir?

By Paul Halas

The blame game continues. Meanwhile…

While the general public and the media obsess about Coronavirus – both those who are terrified of it and the others who think the whole issue’s blown out of proportion – and while the planet is steadily passing various tipping points of climate change, the Labour Party has busied itself gazing at its navel.

As was said throughout the Corbyn era, the Conservatives should be there for the taking. If Theresa May’s government was accident-prone, Boris Johnson’s is the Frank Spencer of administrations. The one thing they do well is getting people to vote for them. At the last election they played their hand exceedingly well, tapping into popular discontent and appealing for the first time to a demographic of have-nots with a diet of gung-ho nationalistic Brexitism, dog-whistle xenophobia and faux anti-establishmentism. They were also able to take their traditional voter base for granted, because the only genuine alternative on offer was was viewed as highly tainted for a variety of reasons

See the source image
God save us all.

The Tories still have some of their potent weapons. Thanks to Dominic Cummings and his shady little pals they still have a distinct advantage when it comes to cyber-campaigning, data mining and targeted canvassing. They still have the weight of dark money and wealthy corporate backing to bolster them. But thanks to the pandemic their rabble-pleasing, blagging front man has lost his lustre far quicker than anyone would’ve expected. The normally supine press has started to turn on him. And Dominic Cummings, previously portrayed as a back-room mastermind, is now seen as a shifty, Rasputin-like figure, reviled rather than respected.

The Conservatives will be thanking their lucky stars they still have four years in which they can steady the ship. Remove the figurehead and appoint a leader with a little more credibility – although last year’s sacking of anyone with any gumption from the cabinet will hinder the cause. But the party is not in good shape. They will be under intense scrutiny as the world eases its way out of the Coronavirus crisis, and lumping the cost of bailing out the economy on the poor for the second time in a decade will not go down well.

Meanwhile the silence from across the House is palpable. You get the impression that the Labour Party has its mind on other things – and indeed it has. The party may have a new leader, but all the soul-searching and recriminations following the general election defeat continues to occupy minds. Much as the new leadership would like to draw a line under the wrangling, it shows no sign of abating just yet.

The left and the right of the party have very different takes on what transpired, and, with the unsubtle support of many media commentators, it’s the right – aka the Centrists – whose voices are being heard the loudest.

The Centrist perspective is that Corbyn’s Labour Party was unelectable. Under him the party’s ideas were way too far to the left, its policies were pie in the sky, questions had to be asked about Corbyn’s connections with numerous controversial figures, and then there was his supposed tolerance of antisemitism. Add to the mix that Corbyn was weak on the EU and should’ve declared outright for Remain, and that the public had developed a high degree of personal antipathy towards him, and you have a narrative that demands that every trace of Corbynism be expunged from the party henceforth. To quote Polly Toynbee in the Guardian – itself no friend of Corbyn of the Labour Left – “The memory of Jeremy Corbyn will take years to erase. Starmer has sought unity, but he will have to challenge the Corbyn legacy before long.”

The Labour left, however, sees these issues differently. Labour’s policies under Corbyn were mainstream centre-left, pretty much in line with many of the UK’s near neighbours, and the loony-left scenario was a fabrication by an antagonistic media commentariat and hostile right wingers in the party. In fact, the argument goes, many of Labour’s policies were shown to be very popular with the public, which explains why Corbyn’s opponents usually chose to play the man rather than the ideas. Brexit was seen as a fiasco, with formerly safe seats falling to the Tories because the party failed to back Brexit wholeheartedly… according to many. The media had it in for Corbyn, and used every low down trick in the book to smear him – especially over the antisemitism issue. The last straw was the exposure of the party’s internal report into antisemitism, which showed that many Labour Party workers had pursued a hate campaign against the left, especially targeting some BAME members, and conspired to help lose two general elections. While one or two of the rogue apparatchiks have been suspended, this long history of subversion couldn’t have taken place without the support of the Labour right’s backers and more than a few anti-Corbynites in the PLP.

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The ever loyal Tom Watson

And will the twain ever be brought back together? The new management’s ‘new broom’ approach appears to be to sweep the left away. Starmer and his backers’ thinking appears to be that Labour will only ever regain power by swinging sharply towards the perceived centre ground. He certainly has support for this from the media – which is perhaps acknowledging that the Good Ship Tory is sailing in reef-strewn waters – and also from the City. And this, by implication, suggests that the establishment doesn’t see Starmer’s New Improved Labour as any sort of threat to its vested interests.

The left is under pressure. Numerous left wingers have left the party, saddened that many of the ideas they held dear are apparently no longer shared by party leaders, and many who are still hanging in there feel their days may be numbered.

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Lefties

There was always a degree of control freakery within the party mechanism, but now many members feel increasingly worried that speaking their minds could land them in hot water. The opinion is growing that the ‘members upwards’ approach to forming party policy is under attack, but the extent of it will only really become apparent whenever the next party conference takes place. There is a feeling that Keir Starmer will pander to establishment interests as much Tony Blair did, and neither his words nor his actions appear to contradict this.

What does Keir Starmer actually stand for? What is his vision for the future? Like others before him in the prelude to their taking power – Tony Blair and David Cameron spring to mind – Starmer is very sparing with specifics, light on policy. He is trading on his image of being prime-ministerial and electable, of appealing to the broad centre, the possessor of a safe pair of hands.

We need rather more than that, especially now. When the Coronavirus issue recedes we’ll still have a far larger and infinitely harder problem to combat: climate change. To cope with the vast societal changes that’ll have to take place in the swiftly deteriorating world situation that we’ll face over the next five, ten, forty years, we’ll need a politics with the will and ability to implement enormous and far reaching changes over a short period of time. The Labour Party currying favour with the establishment and the numerous vested interests that always seek to maintain the status quo, that desperately cling to an obsolete neoliberal system that has imploded twice is the last dozen years, does nothing to inspire confidence that it’s willing or able to do so. The current Labour leadership is harking back to an outdated, busted paradigm, when a completely fresh approach will be necessary if we’re to stand any chance of an equitable, sustainable future.

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Over the past three years the Labour Party took the climate change issue very seriously, producing plans for a Green New Deal to help combat the twin evils of inequality and climate change. Alan Simpson (Corbyn and McDonnell’s advisor on sustainable economics) has since produced an updated vision for a GND, but it’s almost as if the issue has become a niche interest under the present leadership – just something to placate the muesli-eaters. Climate change is alluded to in some communications – but it should be front and centre in everything the Labour Party is speaking about. It’s deeply worrying that it isn’t.

The party is no longer a comfortable place for left wingers, but they have to stay and make their voices heard. Labour needs its Jiminy Cricket voices – and will do so more and more as our worrying and uncertain future unfolds. It will be up to a future Labour government – perhaps in collaboration with other smaller, progressive parties – to effect the seismic changes that’ll have to take place.

So come on Sir Keir, show us what your vision is. Playing safe just shouldn’t be an option.

Paul Halas’s escape from 1970s hippidom was the discovery that he could invent stories. He spent forty years contributing to various Disney magazines and books, as well as a variety of non-Disney comics, books and animated films. His retirement from commercial writing coincided with Jeremy Corbyn becoming the Labour Party leader, which led to five years’ political activism. He left the party two years ago with a heavy heart.

Climate change: it’s later than we think

Photo by Loïc Manegarium on Pexels.com

Socialists and capitalists together have ruined the planet.

by Pete Field


Even though climate scientists tell us we have not much time, their forecasts – despite their academic tentativeness – might actually be  too optimistic. We already know for sure that man-made climate change is upon us and having an enormous effect on weather, climate and ecosystems all over the world. In some places it is more visible, especially in the Arctic and Antarctic, but in other ways it is also affecting the rest of the world, not least through sea level rise and habitat destruction.

forecasts – despite their academic tentativeness – might actually be  too optimistic

Habitat destruction, whether at sea or on land, is caused by a rise in temperature because plants and animals have evolved to live within certain limits and cannot quickly adjust. The unprecedented man-made extinctions caused by deliberate and accidental habitat destruction and pollution affect every continent to the point where the web of life is stretched increasingly thin.

One of the features of the natural world is the fact that systems can flip from one stable state to another very quickly. Some patterns may be reversible but many are not. When many major factors are changing at the same time the system is then in a condition of instability which goes beyond its own homeostatic ability to readjust. Were it not for our continued and increasing pressure on natural systems they might bounce back, but we are overwhelming their ability to do so and we are doing this on a planetary scale.

Were it not for our continued and increasing pressure on natural systems they might bounce back

There are tipping points and actions at those tipping points reinforce each other, creating negative feedback loops that lead to irreversible and, to us, damaging change. None of this is new and it has been known for a long time.The numbers have been done. The workings of the system, though not perfectly understood, are nonetheless well enough understood to see where all this is going.

Our civilisation in its present globalised form, industrial and with high consumption by billions of people means that we not only have a very heavy unsustainable footprint, but we are also extremely vulnerable to disruption. Ultimately our entire society depends on the weather and climate for our ability to have breathable air and grow sufficient food. If anything happens to disrupt either of these we are in for trouble.

If all governments took immediate and drastic action to cut carbon, preserve the environment etc etc we might stand some small chance of survival.

If all governments took immediate and drastic action to cut carbon, preserve the environment etc etc we might stand some small chance of survival, but it now seems very sure that business as usual is a recipe for disaster. The only question is how much time we have to change radically and how soon conditions will become intolerable.

There is no wiggle room because the laws of nature are not amenable to persuasion. The only reasonable course of action is massive commitment to immediate drastic measures for a low carbon world that will allow us to survive. That would involve a very different lifestyle, but it is a price I would be willing to pay to help keep the earth in a fit state to live on.

Humanity has caused climate change and the only innocent people are the poor of the earth. Socialists and capitalists together have ruined the planet.

So far this year the British government has effectively done nothing on climate change. Luckily engineers and business people have low-carbon projects which are going ahead. It is actually the capitalists who are coming up with the solutions because they know the big money is moving out of hydrocarbons. Follow the money!


Life may or may not be too short to stuff a mushroom, but Marxist-Leninists appear to have taken their eyes off the ball. Humanity has caused climate change and the only innocent people are the poor of the earth. Socialists and capitalists together have ruined the planet. We missed our opportunity to act when the facts were first known so now we will have to do more and faster and without being ready with the perfect politics.


We could probably start by not shopping and not flying and not doing a lot of other harmful things. Plant stuff, cycle and walk, stop using plastic – there are many actions, including campaigning for massive government action at all levels. But it better start soon, it better start now. We may already be too late.

Pete Field

Pete Field was born in a small town near Newcastle. He studied Geography at Oxford where he was in the rowing team and then he left to France to work as the assistant to a Lumberjack among other jobs. He travelled around Europe picking up French, Italian, German and Spanish and worked as a teacher and translator. He also worked at Bell Schools for a period where he experimented with different methods of teaching and learning, resulting in a consultancy in Brazil. Pete worked at Manchester University for many years before working in the Middle East. He is an artist and illustrator and has illustrated several textbook series. He maintained his interest in geography and climate change and he has a particular interest in energy, the oil and gas industry and, in particular, renewable energy.

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