[A-List] interview w/novelist Lierre Keith

[Erik Freye]

http://www.inthewake.org


Aric McBay: Your novels are filled with strong women
who recognize that they and their communities are
actively being harmed by controlling, violent and
patriarchal attitudes and institutions. And having
recognized that fact, they act on it, struggling to
protect themselves and to expose, dismantle and
destroy those attitudes and institutions.

In a complex, convoluted and propaganda-filled society
like the dominant culture, recognizing the sources of
harm can be difficult (especially if the harm is
caused indirectly or at a distance, like cancer from a
pesticide factory). How can we recognize these
sources? And once we've done so, how can we
effectively organize our communities in resistance
against them?

Lierre Keith: That's a huge question. Basically,
you're asking: how do we make a revolution happen?
Naming the power and the agents of power is the first
step, and most people stumble right there. And for a
multitude of reasons: personal cowardice, the
intellectual pitfalls of liberalism, the tremendous
seductions of conformity and privilege, psychological
identification with the powerful and their values, and
a very real fear of retaliation, to name just a few.
This is one of my favorite Andrea Dworkin quotes,
"Feminism requires precisely what patriarchy destroys
in women: unimpeachable bravery in confronting male
power." That bravery is the linchpin of resistance.
Without it, there's no possibility of hope.

One individual may grasp the full horror of the
situation, from the micro to the macro, both her
collusion in her own oppression and the massive and
institutional brutality of systems like patriarchy,
industrialism, capitalism. But the problem with
politics is, it's a group project. One woman or one
small group of women isn't going to transform the
culture of rape. And while consciousness raising and
political education are key components of any
revolutionary movement, if our goal is simply
"education" then we're still firmly liberals, not
radicals.

I think it's crucial to understand what differentiates
liberalism from radicalism. I think we can avoid a lot
of useless discussions and group traumas by
understanding the underlying philosophical currents in
various approaches to social change. One cardinal
difference is idealism vs materialism. Liberalism is
idealist; the crucible of social reality is placed in
the realm of ideas, in concepts, language, attitudes.
And liberalism is individualist. The basic social unit
is the individual.

In contrast, radicalism is materialist. Radicals see
society as composed of actual institutions--economic,
political, cultural--which wield power, including the
power to use violence. The basic social unit is a
class or group, whether that's racial class, sex
caste, economic class, or other grouping. Radicalism
understands oppression as group-based harm.

So for liberals, defining people as members of a group
is the harm. Whereas for radicals, identifying your
interests with others who are dispossessed, developing
loyalty to your people, is the first, crucial step in
building a liberation movement. Liberals essentially
think that oppression is a mistake, a
misunderstanding, and changing people's minds is the
way to change the world. That's where you get this
tremendous emphasis on education as a political
strategy. So for instance, instead of identifying the
institutions that destroy communities of color and
strategizing how to dismantle them, we're supposed to
go to Unlearning Racism workshops and confess to being
racists. Please don't misunderstand, this is not an
excuse to avoid examining whatever privilege we have.
And if we've behaved dishonorably, we need to make
amends. My point is that however important personal
accountability is, it's not political action.

Another example. One time at an activist conference I
brought up some basic statistics on rape and male
violence. And immediately another woman stood up and
said--in that tone that's in the border area between
earnest and self-righteous--"We need to educate."

I replied, "I don't want to educate men, I want to
stop them." This was, of course, met with horrified
silence--what exactly was I suggesting? But there is
no therapy, no rehab program, that works to change
perpetrators. By now, everything has been tried.
Nothing works. They don't ever learn to see women as
human beings. They don't ever stop feeling entitled to
women's bodies. So not only was her suggestion
liberal, it was useless.

And I think that's true of people--men and women--in
industrial cultures as well. They feel entitled to
consume the labor and, essentially, the lives of the
poor, and the body of our planet. And no amount of
education makes a dent in that entitlement. Hell, the
Democrats had a platform in the last election that
said Americans had the right--the right--to drive
whatever kind of car they wanted, including SUVs.
That's not a right. That's sociopathic behavior. It's
destroying the planet. It's insane.

I think that to make the leap to radicalism takes
three insights. The first is that there is a thing
called power, social power, political power. The
second is that some people have it and some people
don't. The third is that there is a causal
relationship between those groups: some people have it
because some people don't. Once you've got that down,
you can pretty much apply it to any situation.

I'm not saying we can't work together. There may be
coalition projects that both progressives and radicals
can engage in, but the philosophical underpinnings are
going to make for permanent tensions in terms of both
analysis and strategy.

Okay, so let's assume everyone reading Aric's website
is a bona fide radical of whatever stripe. You asked
about identifying the sources of harm. I'd say start
with the most obvious, the most egregious harms. A
fist in the face is pretty obvious. So is a hungry
belly night after night.

Now trace it back: who's attached to that fist? Now,
name an agent. If you're talking about male violence,
that's hard. Not intellectually hard--it's easy to see
who's attached to that fist. But emotionally,
psychologically. One reason it's hard is because there
are consequences to naming men and male power. You
will be ridiculed, silenced, maybe physically
threatened. You might be raped. You might be killed.
When the Taliban took over in Afghanistan, women who
refused to wear burkhas, refused to stay entombed
inside their houses, were lined up by the hundreds and
shot. In Algeria, the Islamic fundamentalists have
murdered 80,000 women who have resisted their demands,
and the fundamentalists don't even control the
government. I've heard from someone who's traveled
extensively in Iraq that the same thing is happening
to women there: men are picking women off one by one,
any woman who looks like she's educated or has a job
or is independent is a target for rape and murder.

Another reason it's hard is because there's a
tremendous psychological identification with the
oppressor. There's an absolutely brilliant book called
Loving To Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and
Women's Lives by Dee Graham. She's come up with the
concept of Societal Stockholm Syndrome. Her basic
thesis is that just as captives bond to their captors
in hostage situations, women--and any group that's
oppressed--will bond to men or the group that has
social power. Everybody should read this book. It's
incredibly important.

Once you've named the owner of the fist, because
you're a radical you look for patterns. Who else is
getting a fist in the face? And you find out: in the
USA, every 18 seconds a man beats a woman. Keep
tracing it back. Do the police stop him? Do the
courts, the laws? Does god? Or do they in fact support
his right to hit you? Who says he has a right to hit
you? It's in the bible, you're supposed to submit
because it's all Eve's fault. Why don't you count as a
human being? You see that you're surrounded by images
of women as objects, chopped into body parts, on
display, for sale. In fact, women are being brutalized
in millions of pictures and it's called sex. The
clothes you're supposed to wear put you on display,
make it impossible for you to run or even walk. They
turn you into an object, a victim, and that's called
"sexy." Why are you wearing these clothes? Why do you
want this attention when every 18 seconds it ends with
a fist in the face?

What you find is a whole web of institutions and
cultural practices that support male violence:
religion, laws, the police, the mass media and
pornography, heterosexuality, the very definition of
masculinity. He didn't put that fist in your face
because of who you are as an individual. He did
because he belongs to a class of people called men,
and you belong to a class of people called women, and
that describes a set of power relations.

Likewise, if you're hungry, why? Why don't you have
access to land to grow food, or enough money to buy
food? Who owns the land? Who decides who owns the
land? And what will they do if you decide to take some
land back? Answering those questions will lay bare a
network of interlocking institutions that have the
power to starve you.

So I'd say we identify the harm by asking : where does
it hurt, who else is being hurt, who's doing the
hurting, and what institutions grant the perpetrators
the power to hurt us? And we have to have the courage
to face the answers, and then the stamina to live with
the answers. Political consciousness can grant you
some measure of sanity, but it's also knowledge that
can destroy you with its burden of horrors.

So, how do we change the world? Persuasion is for
liberals, so I'll leave that to them. Political action
is ultimately about force. There's a continuum of
tactics between nonviolence and violence, but they all
start with the understanding that institutions only
change when pressure is applied. In the immortal words
of Frederick Douglas, "Power concedes nothing without
a demand. It never has and it never will." There's an
underlying truth here as well, that doesn't get
articulated as often as it should. I learned this from
Gene Sharp's work, especially The Politics of
Nonviolent Action, which every activist should
immediately, run don't walk, read. His books are
profoundly important. His ideas have been used in
liberation struggles all over the world, from South
Africa to Eastern Europe. He points out that power
depends on obedience, and we don't have to obey. The
moment the oppressed withdraw our consent, the
powerful are left with nothing. Sharp identifies a
range of tactical approaches, but they break down into
two categories: acts of omission and acts of
commission. Omission includes things like boycotts,
strikes, nonparticipation in illegitimate governments.
Acts of commission would include sit-ins,
obstructions, and occupations like the forest defense
elves in the trees. But either way, nonviolent action
is an attempt to coerce an institution that holds
power to change. There's a tremendous misconception,
particularly in the USA, that nonviolent action is
about somehow trying to educate or convert those in
power. It's not. That's pacifism, not nonviolent
action. I mean, does anybody really think that the
owners of the bus company in Montgomery, Alabama had a
sudden epiphany? We've been so terrible to Black
people, oh my god, segregation must end! Of course
not. The boycott brought them to their knees. There
may or may not have been individuals whose consciences
were awakened, but that wasn't the point. People
withheld their economic power until the
institution--in this case, the bus company--caved in.

I think this is so important because the main divide
isn't between violence and nonviolence. It's between
action and inaction. Properly understood, both
militancy and nonviolence are direct confrontations
with power, confrontations backed by the threat of
force. Both strategies require planning, discipline,
and sacrifice. Both kinds of activism will bring the
full weight of the wrath of the powerful down upon the
actionists. The moment you're successful, the moment
power is threatened, you will pay, sometimes with your
lives. The divergence is that proponents of
nonviolence chose tactics that don't physically harm
people.

The left in this country has come completely unhitched
from any notion of actually being effective. Activism
has turned into one big group therapy session. It
doesn't matter what we accomplish--what matters is how
we feel about it. The goal of the action isn't to
change the material balance of power, it's to feel
"empowered". For fuck's sake, who gives a shit how I
feel. Our planet is dying. And radicals are just as
guilty of what I call "emotional activism." It may
feel good to smash that Starbucks window, but does it
actually do any good? I'm speaking here as someone
who's smashed my share of windows. This rerouting of
the goal from political change to inner change is the
reaction of both a spoiled, self-absorbed people, and
the utterly desperate, desperate to do something,
anything.

What any movement needs is an effective strategy. That
means identifying two things: where is power weak and
where are you strong? The overlap is where you strike.
One problem with nonviolence is that it depends on
huge numbers of people to be effective. Rosa Parks on
her own ended up in jail. Rosa Parks plus the whole
Black community of Montgomery ended segregation on the
public transportation system. Without a mass movement,
the technique doesn't work.

Here's another example. In my area there's a small
community of Tibetan immigrants. Tibet is a Buddhist
country and they take their nonviolence seriously. A
friend of mine worked at a local store that employed a
number of Tibetans. One of the men had immigrated to
American, saved up some money and helped his wife
immigrate. But he'd obviously assimilated a little too
well, because when she arrived, he hit her. Three
things happened after that. One, she left him and
never went back. Two, everyone in that community was
prepared to take her in for as long as she needed. And
three, the community shunned this man completely. If
he talked to any of them at work, they would turn
their heads or even shield their eyes and refuse to
acknowledge him. He was totally outcast. This had been
going on for two years! I find that incredible. But my
point is that nonviolence works as a deterrent to male
violence only when everybody is willing to
participate. I can't imagine that happening anywhere
in American outside of that tiny subculture.

So we're faced with two choices. One is to keep trying
to build toward the number of people necessary for
nonviolence to work. But in the meantime, men are
brutalizing woman and girls on a mass scale. So the
other choice is to start providing consequences on our
own. Because clearly the laws aren't stopping male
violence. And yes, this makes you an outlaw. You still
have a choice as to whether your extra-legal means
will involve physically hurting perpetrators. I
personally don't consider property destruction to be
violence, since inanimate objects don't feel pain and
by definition can't be deprived of their lives. But
for me the moral question is not about violence or
nonviolence. The moral imperative for me is to decide
what is going to actually stop the war against women
and the earth, and then find the courage to do
whatever is necessary. If my spiritual beliefs stop me
from effective action, then I think those beliefs are
immoral. My spiritual and moral life take as their
starting point that injustice and brutality have to be
stopped.

Derrick Jensen always asks in his lectures for a show
of hands on who thinks this culture is going to
willingly make the transition to a sustainable way of
life. No one raises a hand. So if we all know that a
mass movement isn't going to happen in time to save
the planet, why are we bothering to consider
nonviolence? Nonviolence only works en mass.

Look, I have friends who are Quakers. I have a
tremendous respect for their long, honorable history
of fighting injustice. Their spiritual practice,
besides being quite beautiful, is what has inspired
them to be agents for change. And north on their moral
compass is nonviolence. Nothing I say is going to
change that. There are lots of people who are going to
reject militant action for many different reasons,
ranging from familial responsibilities to spiritual
beliefs. But even if we're personally not on the front
lines, there are many other ways to use our talents
and skills to support the people who are willing and
able to do what's necessary. Somebody needs to do the
political outreach and proselytizing. Somebody always
needs to do the dishes. And there's a huge task of
building a life-affirming culture that's in opposition
to the dominator mode. This involves everything from
setting up alternate economic systems and sustainable
food production networks to creating matrilinial
family structures. All of that has to be done if we
have any chance of planetary survival. And we're out
of time. I guess what I'm urging here is for all of us
who share a basic analysis of the problem to accept
the necessity of militant action. We don't all have to
do it. But it's a crucial component of whatever chance
we have to stop the horror and destruction.

We have to get serious about proselytizing. Political
education isn't the goal, but it's a necessary task.
It's my observation that there are basically three
kinds of people. The first, which includes most
people, are never going to step out of line or
question anything, let alone stand up and fight back.
Forget them, it's a waste of time.

Then there are those who really don't know that
oppression is happening. They may have experienced
abuse or deprivation, but they have no political
analysis, no language to speak their experience, no
context to understand it. They may carry the
smoldering heart of a radical, but they need exposure
to radical ideas like fire needs oxygen. This is where
radical pedagogy comes in.

The third is people who may profess to be anywhere
from middle-of-the-road to radical. And they know that
things are basically really bad, but they don't want
to hear about it because they feel like there's
nothing they can do about any of it. More information
isn't going to help mobilize them. A serious strategy
will. These people would join in a heartbeat if we
present them with something that at least has a chance
of succeeding.

So I'd say we need to get serious about strategy. The
most militant or extreme action isn't necessarily the
most radical. The question is: what's most effective?
Where are the vulnerable targets on this monster
that's devouring our planet alive?

AM: What sorts of things could that strategy include?
Where can we start? What are some places where the
weaknesses of the powerful and the strengths of
radicals overlap?

LK: Your strategy is going to depend on your primary
emergency, on which oppressive system you're
targeting. Male supremacy is organized very
differently than racism, for instance. And
technological fundamentalism and the industrial jihad
are fueled by separate institutions as well, though
there are certainly ways these systems feed off each
other. But as a general suggestion, I think we need to
study contemporary military strategy. Start with the
October War in 1973, when 170 Israeli tanks with 60
pieces of artillery and 6,000 soldiers routed 1,400
Syrian tanks with 1,000 mortar and artillery pieces
and 45,000 troops. Not a single Syrian tank that
crossed the Purple Line remained in fighting
condition.

This battle changed the way strategists think about
war. "It makes no difference who is outnumbered and
who is outnumbering," writes Col. Donn Starry. "I
realized we had to delay and disrupt, deep into the
enemy's battle area. The orderly advance of their
follow-on echelons would have to be stopped. We
wouldn't have to destroy them all. It would be nice if
we could. But all we really had to do was prevent them
from getting to the battle."

This was how the Persian Gulf War was fought. Combat
no longer takes place just at the front, but deep into
the rear, interrupting the movement of troops,
supplies and especially information. The earliest
attacks hit microwave relay towers, telephone
exchanges, fiber optic nodes, and bridges that carried
coaxial communications cables.

Globalization is utterly dependent on these same
computer and communication networks. The giant
corporations that are stripping the earth bare and
dispossessing local subsistence economies the world
over can't function without two things: computers and
electricity. Those two things are like the central
nervous system and the blood flow of corporate power.
And that's where they're vulnerable. These networks
could be disrupted manually or through computer
hacking. But anyone who wanted to attempt this would
have to approach it like a war, like a serious
resistance movement. Hitting Weyerhaeuser's computers
once might be fun for a day or two, but it's not going
to have any long term effect. But a coordinated effort
of attacks against the electric grid, the biggest
financial markets, and a list of the worst
environmental offenders would. It would require
planning, discipline, and tremendous self-sacrifice on
the part of activists. But it could be done. It would
create social upheaval and possibly civil unrest. The
average American city has enough food to last 13 days.
Economies would have to go local again, and fast. But
this is one of the places where the progressive
sustainability folks should be working in tandem with
the militants, helping to jump start and coordinate
local food production networks while the militants
bring down globalization.

I don't want to sound naïve about this, because there
are very deep problems in cultures around the globe
that have to be addressed. Humans have been intensely
destructive without the use of fossil fuel. Whole
bioregions have been turned to deserts with only
animals for draft power. Deforestation was done with
stone tools. Why so many human cultures have seen fit
to destroy the natural world is a question we have to
answer. And there are plenty of cultures with
sustainable, subsistence lifeways that practiced
torture, rape, slavery, war, even genocide.
Civilization and male supremacy are separate
phenomenon. Embracing a more sustainable level of
technology isn't going to stop men from raping women.
So bringing down the techno-industrial hegemony is
only a first step. But it's a really good step,
because we won't have a planet left unless somebody
takes it.

AM: One of my favourite quotes is something Dietrich
Boenhoeffer wrote while was in prison in Germany
during WWII, as he awaited execution for resisting the
Nazis:

"We have spent too much time in thinking, supposing
that if we weigh in advance the possibilities of any
action, it will happen automatically. We have learnt,
rather too late, that action comes, not from thought,
but from a readiness for responsibility. For you
thought and action will enter on a new relationship;
your thinking will be confined to your
responsibilities in action."

Radicals often like to construct imaginary models of
their hypothetical utopias and sketch out the
improvements they want to see in the future. But as we
know, if industrial civilization doesn't come down
soon -- very soon --there is no future for us. (And
I'm still surprised at how determinedly oblivious even
radicals can be to this simple fact. They really just
don't want to hear it.)

What does it take to move people beyond mere
strategizing and philosophy? How do people acquire a
real "readiness for responsibility"?

LK: I think the biggest reason otherwise radical
people don't want to face the necessity of ending
industrial civilization is privilege. We're the ones
reaping the benefits. We've sold out the rest of life
on earth for convenience, creature comforts, and cheap
consumer goods, and it's appalling. I'm sickened by
this bargain. It's immoral. It's a true sacrilege. And
what's been frustrating to me for twenty-five years is
conversations with people who agree, who know the
planet is dying, who've done civil disobedience,
who've wept over the destruction. And when I say,
"We're going to have to learn to live without
electricity, without cars," they say, "But I like the
convenience. I like having a car. I like air
conditioning." I don't know what to do with these
people. That was worth destroying the planet? Their
hesitation isn't even about real survival needs like
food. Nobody has once said to me, "But what will I
eat?" It's always really stupid shit like air
conditioning.

There's a tremendous lack of imagination here. If
humans hadn't deforested the planet, the shade and
transpiration provided by trees would make a hot day a
lot cooler. And if we weren't stuck inside the demands
of capitalism, we could spend hot afternoons lounging
about beside a body of water. Doesn't that sound like
a lot more fun, not to mention a lot saner, than being
essentially imprisoned inside a cement fortress where
you will broil alive without a huge input of energy?
We could also build houses that stay temperate year
round with almost no input besides the sun. Passive
solar heating and cooling are not difficult. The basic
principles can be learned in a morning workshop. So I
don't understand why everyone imagines life as
unbearable without technological gadgetry. You
mentioned all the utopian visions: maybe these are the
people who need to read more of those visions, to see
that life could be a fine and good thing after the
fall of industrialization.

Then there's another group of people. These people
don't think they're access to ice cream 24/7 is more
important than life on earth. That's good. But they're
sunk in despair, a rational, realistic despair. What
can I do about it, any of it? It's all going to hell,
and nothing I personally do is going to make any real
difference. Why bother to take down a cell phone tower
when there's thousands more across the country? They
understand that personal action is ineffectual and
often foolish. Again, I think a serious resistance
movement would attract these people. It's not useless
to take down that cell phone tower if I know that
tonight five hundred other people are doing the same
thing. Now it's worth the risk. Now my action has
meaning, has impact. But radical environmentalists
haven't moved to that level of organization yet.

I guess there's another questions you're asking here,
and that is, why are some of us desperate for a truly
revolutionary movement, desperate for an opportunity
to act? I don't know. I only know that my whole life I
have wanted to stop the war against women and the
earth. I don't know what's wrong with everybody else.
I don't know why they don't feel it. I don't know how
anyone can look at pictures of women being tortured
and care more about their own sexual arousal than what
happened to that woman. I don't know why they don't
hear the earth crying. Maybe there's an identification
with every living thing that some of us have and some
of us are missing. We share 50% of our genes with
plants, 25% with bacteria. We are all related. We're
their descendants. And all humans are cousins. Once
you know that, how can you not act to protect them? I
think the readiness to act is born from two sources:
rage and love. And we have to have the stamina to keep
loving even when what we love is being destroyed, and
we have to have the courage to make that love be an
action, a verb.

So if you're talking about proselytizing and
education, it means asking people to break through
denial and feel very uncomfortable emotions, like rage
and despair and powerlessness. It means asking them to
give up privilege. It means asking them to revitalize
their imaginations, to replace television and pop
cultural numbness with an active search for better
ways to live.

But if you're talking about recruitment, I wouldn't
bother with anyone who has to be coaxed into action.
I'd say focus on the people who want to act but don't
know what to do. Give them a serious plan for action
and maybe we have a hope.

AM: How do you define "patriarchy," and how does
patriarchy fit into all of this?

LK: Patriarchy means societies where men dominate
women. Like all systems of domination, it ultimately
depends on violence to extract consent from the
subordinated. In patriarchal societies, men rape,
batter, buy or trade, torture and murder women. Other
forms of coercion may include economic, legal and
cultural institutions, but sexual violence is at the
core of patriarchy. Mary Daly points out that
patriarchy is the ruling religion of the planet. It's
all variations on the theme of masculinity asserting
itself by killing women and pretty much everything,
usually for a sexual thrill. In The Chalice and The
Blade, Riane Eisler writes that "underlying the great
surface diversity of human culture are two basic
models of society." The first she calls the
partnership model, societies that are egalitarian,
nonviolent and life-affirming. The second is the
dominator model, which values the power to establish
and enforce domination.

In her ground breaking article "The socio-cultural
context of rape: a cross-cultural study,"
anthropologist Peggy Reeves-Sanday studied 95 band and
tribal cultures and found that 47% were rape-free
while 18% were rape-prone. In rape-free societies,
women are respected and influential members of their
communities; sacred beings are conceived of as both
male and female; economic and political power is held
equally between the sexes; nurturing and childrearing
are understood as the basis of human interactions; and
there is an attitude of reverence instead of dominance
toward the earth. In these cultures, rape is
considered abhorrent and there are severe consequences
for perpetrators. In West Sumatra, the subject of
Reeves-Sanday's book Women at the Center: Life in a
Modern Matriarchy, a man who rapes has disgraced
himself and all his kin, and will face assault, exile
or death.

In contrast, in rape-prone societies, women hold
limited economic and political power; men express
contempt for women as decision makers; god is male;
masculinity is predicated on an ideology of toughness
and cruelty; and violence is an acceptable method of
settling disputes. Welcome to America.

The basic psychological dynamic of masculinity is that
men are men because they aren't women. Women are the
hated Other. Hating her, hurting her, is how boys
become men. Masculinity breeds a personality based on
entitlement, arrogance and cruelty, which is compelled
to prove itself again and again. Inherent in
masculinity is a violation imperative: in acts of
invading and conquering, men become men. The
brilliance of male supremacy is that it links acts of
political oppression to sexual response. Not only is
the soldier-rapist rewarded with orgasm when he
dominates/rapes, but his action feels "natural" rather
than political. This welding of domination and
subordination to sexual arousal, and the accompanying
normalization of oppression, is the deep heart of
patriarchy. And these acts of oppression become what
sex is--how sex is practiced, how arousal is
experienced--under male supremacy.

For instance, researchers tried to show male viewers a
film scene depicting violence--not sexual violence,
just regular old violence--against women. And they
found that they couldn't. No matter what the film
showed (hitting, punching, kicking) at least 25% of
the men would get an erection. Sexual domination and
subordination are institutionalized into the very
concepts of masculine and feminine. Masculinity is
simply a conglomeration of the personality traits
necessary for the patriarchal soldier-rapist:
physically strong, emotionally cauterized, rational,
domineering, cruel. All of this is supposed to add up
to "handsome" as well. Likewise femininity is
ultimately a description of the personality that
results from trauma and powerlessness: weak, passive,
yielding, emotional, hyper-vigilant to the needs of
the dominators and desperate for the dominator's
attention.

In patriarchy, political oppression is thus
experienced as normal and natural. It's easy to turn
the rapist into the soldier--the template is already
in place. Instead of "woman," fill the Despised Other
category with the racial or ethnic group of your
choice, and watch men--good soldiers all--rise to the
occasion. Sheila Jeffries names this the erotic roots
of fascism. This ethic of domination and violation
extends beyond interactions between humans to human
relations with animals and the earth. Animals aren't
seen as sentient beings capable of suffering. They are
instead mechanical units of production to be used in
factory farms and laboratories. Or they aren't seen at
all, as their habitats are destroyed for more
agribusiness plantations, oil wells and suburban
sprawl. The earth isn't a complex web of
interdependent life forms co-creating a living home,
deserving our humility, reverence and respect. It's
instead so many board feet of lumber, so many gallons
of crude: one part garbage dump to two parts profit
margin. The violation imperative inherent in
masculinity finds its full expression in modern
science--invading the boundaries of the atom with
nuclear physics and of life itself with genetic
engineering.

It's heretical to name men. It's blasphemous to state
the simple facts. Around the world and across time men
have beaten, raped and incested us; burned us as
witches and widows; demanded that our feet be bound,
our genitals mutilated, our bodies starved; bought and
sold us; kept us captive and veiled; and simply
tortured us to death. With the advent of technologies
of mass communications, they've also filmed it all and
made a fortune while creating a population of serial
sex killers. The first step in stopping these
atrocities is to name who is doing what to whom. And
that's hard, psychologically. It's not intellectually
hard. The facts are overwhelming, indisputable. But
psychologically it can be terrifying. And you will be
punished. Still, if we want anything like liberty, we
are going to have to do it. There was that famous
speech by Russell Means, "For America to Live, Europe
Must Die." I agree. And I'd add, for the earth to
live, masculinity must die. If we want to end rape,
stop racism, save the planet, men have to stop being
men.

I'm going to end with a comment addressed specifically
to any men who are still reading this. You can be
traitors to your class. You don't have to be good
soldiers, good Germans. You can shift your loyalties.
You can learn to identify with women. It's even to
your benefit to do so. Growing up, I saw what happened
to turn my brother from a child into a boy and then
into a man. It was brutal. Male socialization is
pretty ghastly. And as long as there is war, the rich,
old men will sacrifice the young men on the altar of
power and profit. Men may not be defined a priori as
victims, as fuckable, like women are, but you can be
fucked. 1 in 11 boys are sexually abused. That's a lot
of abuse. As long as domination is eroticized, as long
as violence and violation constitute masculinity, you
aren't free either. My question is: how many of you
will face that and cast your lot with us?

AM: I'd like to tie this in with taking down
industrial civilization. I've heard a number of moral
arguments against taking down civilization; some
people say that conditions for women would be
seriously harmed by that, and that the associated
social upheaval would increase the exploitation of
women. They might also point out that industrial
civilization currently provides many adaptive devices
like voice-recognition programs, and electric
wheelchairs, that aren't possible without large-scale
industrial infrastructure. As a woman and a person
with a disability, what are your thoughts on those
arguments?

LK: Let me take this one piece by piece. First,
technology is not a variable in whether a society is
rape-free or rape-prone. There are hunter-gatherer,
pastoral, and agricultural societies all across the
spectrum of egalitarian to male-dominated. Anyone who
thinks that technological societies are somehow more
egalitarian needs to look at the numbers on male
violence in the USA, where battering is the most
commonly committed violent crime, incest is basic
female socialization, and rape is ubiquitous.
Technology doesn't cure patriarchy, nor does it cause
it.

I think what women are getting at here is a very real
fear of how men from rape-cultures behave when the
social order breaks down. Which is that they become
public predators. They're already assaulting women in
private. But when civic society melts down, like
during wartime, men rape women en mass. Women are
assessing the situation realistically when they
respond with fear to the idea of civilization coming
apart.

So let's talk about where the planet is headed right
now. Peak oil is here. If the earth can sustain one
billion humans, that means that the other five billion
are only alive because of fossil fuel and fossil
water, and they are going to die. I don't know how to
comprehend the level of social disruption that we're
looking at over the next fifty years. Now add to that
global warming and climate change. If the gulf stream
keeps slowing, northern Europe and the northeast USA
will be plunged into an ice age. Meanwhile,
agricultural areas in the American Midwest, central
Africa and Asia will be too hot for agriculture. For
every millimeter that the ocean rises, the shoreline
retreats by 1,500 meters (almost a mile). And if the
Greenland ice sheet melts, sea levels will rise 7
meters (23 ft.). That will dramatically shrink the
land mass of the planet. We're staring at an avalanche
that's coming toward us and gaining momentum every
second.

The idea of stopping industrial civilization now is to
get proactive, to slow the momentum of that avalanche
as much as we can. It's not that things are okay now
and they're going to get better. Things suck now, and
they're going to get dramatically worse if we do
nothing. That "worse" includes a catastrophic melt
down of civic society.

So regarding sexual predators, I've got two words:
Smith and Wesson. As industrial culture falls apart,
we aren't going to survive as individuals. We're going
to survive as local communities, both economically and
civically. Community policing and defense are going to
be the way we protect ourselves from anti-social
elements. Women and pro-feminist men could take charge
of that task. We could make sure that rape counts as
an atrocity and treat predators accordingly, both
predators internal to the community and threats from
the outside. But it's up to us to do it. If we
continue to accept male domination, we'll keep getting
male domination.

The facts are not easy to face. They're painful and
gruesome. Vast numbers of men are predators, and the
looming industrial collapse and civic chaos are going
to provide them with more opportunities to act like
it. Perpetrators don't change. No form of therapy or
rehabilitation makes a dent in their sociopath
entitlement. So to put it bluntly: shoot them. When
the bullets run out, I've got two more words: long
bow. The long bow is such a lethal weapon that the
church tried to ban its use in the middle ages.

And I've got a question here. If everyone knows that
men are going to behave this way, what are we waiting
for? Bullets are available now. Why are we accepting
the unacceptable? We know who they are because they're
already preying on us. And yeah, every perpetrator is
someone's son, someone's father, someone's Mister
Special. Get over it. Every perpetrator has to be
stopped.

My answer to the disability question is similar. The
problem isn't evil Luddites trying to take away
life-enhancing technology from disabled people. The
problem is that technological society is about to come
crashing down. If I was dependent on anything
electric, I'd learn everything I could about how to
fix it, and stockpile parts. Then I'd learn how to
generate electricity --probably small wind
turbines--and stockpile those parts and batteries as
well. Because all the components are dependent on an
industrial platform that is going to start failing
soon. The more disabled you are, the more vulnerable
you are to social upheaval. It sucks. I would like to
hope that humans would reconstitute themselves into
egalitarian, partnership model communities, where the
weak and vulnerable were protected, but I'm not
optimistic.

If you need drugs, stockpile. My life is going to be
harder when I can't get cox-2 inhibitors anymore. I
can't make them, I can't grow them, and they don't
reproduce on their own.

The more of us who know non-technological healing
systems, like Chinese medicine and homeopathy, the
better. And we need to relearn the nutritional wisdom
of our ancestors. There are cultures where the chronic
and degenerative diseases that we now take for granted
were unknown. Let me introduce you to Weston Price.
Price was a dentist in the 1920s who saw the
degenerative changes that took place in the first
generation of children raised on what he called "the
displacing foods of modern commerce." Corporations had
taken control of the American food supply, replacing
traditional nutrient-dense foods--particularly animal
fats--with cheap vegetable oil, white flour and
refined sugar. They wrecked our collective health and
now nobody's alive who remembers different. Price
traveled the world, locating remote cultures whose
traditional foods produced generations of perfect
health. Their teeth fit flawlessly with no dental
decay, they had a total absence of degenerative and
chronic diseases, no mental illnesses, and ease of
childbirth which usually took 3-4 hours. Sounds like a
fairy tale, but it's our birthright. His research
culminated in his book, Nutrition and Physical
Degeneration, which was used as a textbook at Harvard
for many years. You don't have to read it. Just look
at the photographs. Price's brilliance lay in seeing
the underlying nutritional principles at work. The
macro-nutrient ratios varied widely--he found
hunter-gatherers, pastoralists and coastal peoples who
met his definition perfect health. But underneath, the
necessary animal fats, fat-soluble vitamins, and
minerals were always present and often considered
sacred. The best place to start is The Weston Price
Foundation at http://www.westonaprice.org. The book
Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon is based on
Price's work. I've got my own testimonial, too. The
disease I have isn't supposed to get better, not ever,
only worse. But I am better. I haven't needed morphine
in two years. I'd urge anyone with chronic health
problems to investigate this information. But it's
really for all of us. We're all going to be
responsible for our own food soon, and this is
information we desperately need to reclaim.

AM: Above you talked about using violence and killing
if necessarily to stop sexual predators, writing:
"Bullets are available now. Why are we accepting the
unacceptable? We know who they are because they're
already preying on us." A couple of women I talked to
about this agree (as, I would hope, all my friends)
that killing a perpetrator in direct self-defense is
fine. But they expressed worry about someone getting
called a rapist, and then being killed, even if that
is not true. Or, that people would start killing in
response to various other problems for which shooting
isn't the best solution. What are your thoughts on
this?

LK: I think that's a valid concern. The rule of law is
theoretically a really good idea. The problem is that
the laws were set up by rich, often slave-owning men
who wanted to protect their interests, their property
(including human beings) and their power. So we've
basically got two options. One is to change the law,
which basically means changing the constitution of
every nation on the planet. The other is to make
justice ourselves, which by definition makes us into
outlaws. Both of these options are honorable and
necessary. Option two could conceivably be done
nonviolently, but it would take massive numbers, as
nonviolent tactics do. Basically everyone would have
to agree to utterly and forever shun perpetrators. If
there were severe consequences--if a batterer or
rapist lost his job, his apartment, his friends and
family, all social contact, all ability to support
himself financially--there would be a dramatic
decrease in male violence, until the underpinnings of
rape culture and gender socialization were completely
undercut. We could break the chain once and for all.
But we simply don't have the numbers. Most women are
too male-identified, and most men hate women.

Meanwhile, every eighteen seconds a man beats a woman,
every three minutes a man rapes a woman, and every day
two men will murder women. And that's just in the
United States. Either that counts as a state of
emergency or it doesn't. And if it does, what are we
each willing to do about it? I would love it if we
could do this nonviolently. I personally find
committing violence repugnant. I don't kill
mosquitoes. And I've had my own spiritual epiphanies.
I don't think we were meant to commit atrocities. I
think on the deepest level it hurts perpetrators to be
who they are. But only one in a million of them is
ever going to wake up to that. I can't wait for the
other 999,999, and I can't build a political strategy
around that one awakened soul. By using violence, far
fewer of us could provide the consequences to make men
think twice. And every perpetrator that's removed from
the planet is worth his weight in women's liberty, in
the absence of terror.

The vast majority of crimes against women are
committed by intimates, by husbands, fathers,
step-fathers, boyfriends. By men who claim to love us,
which I hope makes every one reading this question
"love" as a political institution. You're not going to
have a case of mistaken identity unless the perp is a
stranger, and mostly they aren't strangers. Crimes
against women are crimes of access. Men hurt the women
they know, the women they love. So we know who they
are. Their identities aren't in question. What it
comes down to is: do you believe that when a woman is
hurt, a person is hurt, a person who doesn't deserve
to be hurt? That's the question.

Look, if you're really worried about taking permanent
action against an innocent, here's my suggestion. Make
a list of all the women and girls you know and love.
Then make a list of all the men who've violated or
assaulted them. There's your personal hit list. The
vast majority of them will be known to the survivors.

As far as a spillover effect, we make distinctions all
the time, as a society and as individuals. Speeding
gets you a fine; holding people up at gunpoint gets
you jail. We all understand that there are differing
levels of anti-social and immoral activity. Israel
didn't have a death penalty, but it made an exception
for Adolf Eichmann. Some crimes--like genocide--are so
heinous that only the most serious consequences are an
adequate response. Rape, battering, sexual torture are
those kinds of crimes and I want a culture where
everyone agrees. Right now we have a culture where
those things are essentially entertainment. The
problem isn't consequences that are too severe. The
problem is there are no consequences at all.

AM: You gave a few suggestions for collapse
preparation for people with disabilities above. Do you
have any broader suggestions for preparation that
you'd like to outline?

LK: On an individual level, any and all skills in
self-sufficiency are going to be valuable. Everyone
who can afford it should sign up for a permaculture
course. Learn all you can about truly sustainable food
production, animals integrated into a perennial
landscape. Natural building and passive solar, basics
of water collection and waste disposal, clothes, tool
making, non-technological medicine, we're going to
need it all.

But I don't think we're going to survive as
individuals. We're going to survive as communities.
And I don't mean sitting in a circle and crying about
your abandonment issues or whatever crap. I mean
feeding your neighbors when their barn burns down, or
sharing what food is left when the drought comes. If
you don't like the people who live on your street, in
your town, if they scare you, then move. Try to
identify places where that community ethic still
exists or can be rekindled, gather up your loved ones,
and get settled there. Then get to know everyone
around you.

As for knowledge and cultural artifacts, there's some
gorgeous music and literature that I hope someone can
preserve. And there's political philosophy and social
progress that I'd hate to see lost, like the U.N.
Declaration of Universal Human Rights. Whatever
problems I have with humanism, I'll take secularism
and democracy over theocracy and religious
fundamentalism in a heartbeat. It took centuries--and
the loss of many lives--for those political ideas to
take hold. A decimal number system and the concept of
zero, maybe some basic algebra and geometry would be
great to hang onto. The nature of infectious
diseases--that's a big one, too. Because the human eye
can't see microbes. We can't see viruses and bacteria
so we've wasted tremendous energy and so many lives
blaming gods, or "sinful" behavior, or scapegoating
the reclusive old woman at the end of the road. And
even if we don't have antibiotics, soap and hot water
can go a long way toward stopping the spread of
infections. Likewise, we may not have vaccines, but we
can make crude inoculations against some of the more
ghastly diseases. These can be either inhaled or
scraped into the skin and they work pretty good. These
kind of inoculations were widely used in China and
India, and British army wives listened to the local
women and brought the practice back to Europe. If
small pox every gets set loose again, we're going to
need this information and I sincerely hope future
generations can remember the basic concepts.

And pray. Get yourself right with the universe. Learn
to listen to everything around you, because everything
is alive and we're a part of it. As a species we're
going to have to remember that if we have any chance
of surviving.

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