Supervisors told them to falsify records, etc… How many people bought their way out of fighting the Civil War? Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and Andrew Mellon. Are you surprised? Did you know that Warren G. Funny how the most interesting tidbits of U.
History are the least flattering. The U. Our sanctions made Vietnam ranked economically lower than Mozambique. Every generation of Americans has experienced war. Lower class words today in English betray Anglo-Saxon roots. Anglo-Saxons were conquered by Normans in and even now, Latinate words defecated, urinated, intercourse are still considered civilized and while the Anglo-Saxon words shit, piss, fuck are considered vulgar. The Holocaust has a capital H in front of it to suggest its uniqueness.
But if you study the human price tag of Civilization since the birth of agriculture, you see many genocides forced to be kept written with lower cases suggesting no uniqueness. Butt such large-scale violence is unique only to Civilization.
German companies improved the mobile Nazi killing vans by helping with better drainage and making them easier to clean. This book left me sad and hopeful and rethinking everything I thought I knew about Western culture. And I consider myself a tremendous skeptic, especially about this country we call America. But Jensen interweaves economics, religion, history, media just to name a few and shows why the way we live now - as "civilized" Americans, or Westerners - is, not to put too fine a point on it, destructive.
Destructive to our humanity. Destructive to other cultures and races and people. Destructive to the planet. This system and its rulers not to mention some of its subjects who, though they are slaves to the system, also benefit just enough from it not to go around questioning it value these things at all costs. They're not giving it up. They're not giving it a second thought. In fact, they'll kill to defend it. The first thing Jensen suggests we who are willing do is to speak out about it.
If, as he writes, the first rule of the dysfunctional family is "Don't talk about it," then the first rule of stopping the destruction is "Do. Don't let assumptions go unquestioned. Then, once you've started talking, start acting. I will speak and act and think and perceive differently because of this book. Very interesting and eye opening. Imperialism isn't dead it just goes by a different name. This book may have made me an anarchist. Mary Slowik. Author 1 book 17 followers.
Down with the patriarchy! Down with the matriarchy! Down with So much of this is brilliantly written, and there's so much that I agree with that I was certain I would end up rating it five stars, end of story.
It begins as a study of hatred, as it relates to slavery, lynching, holocausts, extinctions and other atrocities. Eventually the core thesis emerges: our acquisitive, consumptive-destructive civilization is the problem, along with our refusal to even acknowledge the crimes that it leads to. There's a biblical allusion he revisits repeatedly, that of Noah cursing his son Ham for looking upon Noah's nakedness, when his other two sons shuffled backwards, didn't look, and covered their drunken father up.
Nothing to see here! Many of the chapters revolve around conversations he had with other intellectuals, which reminded me, in a positive way, of Richard Linklater's movie Waking Life. So, what's my problem? Well my interest was stretched a little thin during some of the later chapters, like the one devoted to the Bhopal disaster.
It seemed as though he'd already made his point but had to pile on more evidence. There's only so much preaching to the choir I can take.
This relates to the other unfortunate, inevitable aspect which isn't Derrick Jensen's fault at all: most of the people who read this will already be on his side. The people who need to read it probably won't, and those who do will likely hold to their misplaced faith in civilization, due to something tragic known as "sticky theory": when confronted with evidence to the contrary, humans tend to cling even more tightly to whatever bullshit they believed in the first place.
My other reaction has more to do with the conclusion Jensen reaches, and the necessary balancing act it requires through the whole book. Despite all the cited examples of human atrocities, he still exhibits a desire to 'save' the human race, mostly by a return to anarchy, by the destruction of modern science and technology, by the cessation of international trade, et cetera. He also reflects a deep consideration for non-human persons: meaning animals, and even trees.
Other life-forms. The problem is, he doesn't seem to realize, let alone consider, the moral dimension inherent in the choice to continue as a species. Forget about the curse that is consciousness "parent of all horrors," to borrow Thomas Ligotti's phrase , if we looked at it from a purely environmentalist perspective, nothing could be better for the global ecosystem than our voluntary extinction.
This speaks to the double-think, also known as hypocrisy, which I find in most animal-rights vegans or environmentalists. It stirs us with the excitement of being in a truer world, being our truer selves. The planet Earth is alive, period. Human beings are one of many living populations on the living Earth, period. Armed with a heart-stopping language older than words, Jensen is a mathematician, a comedian, a fierce critic of decent white male human history and its complex web of racism, sexism, hate; its greed and wanton disregard for life.
Read this book. Writing with the same driven passion and intense intelligence as his critically acclaimed A Language Older Than Words , which examined the interconnections between personal and social violence, Jensen says this book "is more about racism—and far more broadly hate as it manifests itself in our Western world.
The book is packed full of startling details—South African apartheid laws were enacted at the direct request of the De Beers diamond company to facilitate business; aspects of Christian doctrine supported slavery until about years ago. But the uniqueness and enormous power of Jensen's work is his ability to forge these events into an emotionally compelling and devastating critique of the intellectual, psychological, emotional and social structures of Western culture.
Along with greed and globalization he says that the valuing of production over life and the abstract over the particular have set Western culture on a course that will end "really, with the end of the planet. Forecast: The Culture of Make Believe looks to be a breakout title for Context, which also will be releasing a collection of Jensen's interviews from The Sun entitled Listening to the Land.
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