Race, Murder and the Lies We Tell Ourselves
Derrick Jensen is a true info-warrior.
In the introduction to “The Culture of Make Believe” (Context, 2002), he calls his latest book “a weapon. It is a gun to be put into the hands of all of us who wish to oppose these atrocities, and a manual on how to use it. It is a knife to cut the ropes that bind us to our ways of perceiving and being in the world. It is a match to light a fuse.”
“We are members of the most destructive culture ever to exist.”
The book’s central thesis is that we live in a society that is blind to its own destructiveness, racism, and bloody history. Jensen, who teaches writing to some of the hardest of the hard at California’s notorious Pelican Bay State Prison, pulls no punches, “We are members of the most destructive culture ever to exist. Our assault on the natural world, on indigenous and other cultures, on women, on children, on all of us through the possibility of nuclear suicide and other means–all these are unprecedented in their magnitude and ferocity.”
In many ways, “The Culture of Make Believe” picks off where Jensen left off in his previous book, “A Language Older Than Words,” where he bravely compared his own abuse at the hands of his father to the wider violence and oppression he sees lurking beneath the surface of our society.
“The Culture of Make Believe” is just as powerful, and equally disturbing. Starting off with a description of two brutal murders, first the 1918 lynching of an African-American woman, eight months pregnant, the other, the more recent killing of a Colombian peasant at the hands of a right-wing death squad, Jensen brings the dark, blood-stained reality of violence in the Western world into shocking focus.
If you can make it through this book, you won’t forget it.
In this wide-ranging conversation with GNN.tv Executive Editor Anthony Lappé, Jensen examines the true nature of the term ‘hate group,’ discusses the absurdly Orwellian Espionage Act of 1916, and calls us out on our seemingly pathological inability to face what we are actually doing to ourselves and the planet . . .
Begin reading the interview here:
http://www.guerrillanews.com/media/cointel/doc484.html
Comments
3 responses to “Culture of Make Believe”
…"When I used to teach and Washington University, I used to ask my students if we lived in a democracy and this is a conservative school, and they would – out of all the hundreds and hundreds of students I asked, you know what their response was every time? They laughed. I think that we believe the rhetoric on one level, but on another level, everybody knows that this isn’t a democracy."….
Niiiice
So how many truly democratic countries do we have in the world?
I laughed when Bush was talking to Fidel Castro about "democracy" [insert "capitalism" whenever that word comes out of GW’s mouth] and Castro said that Cuba has one of the highest LITERACY rates and lowest mortality rates in the world…as well as universal healthcare…so what is this "DEMOCRACY" Bush speakes of, especially coming from a country where so many of its citizens are poor, uneducated and without health insurance?
Main reason Cuba is so poor is because the U.S. Govt. will not trade with them or allow us [FREE? citizens] to visit …and trade/tourism is essential to that country’s existence. So the U.S. Govt. is waging a silent war because Cuba would rather not ***** over its citizens and sell its ass to capitalizm.
The reason Cuba is seen as a threat to capitalism is because that system EDUCATES its people, not merely makes them productive workers who will not have any interest in the affairs of the government.
So here we are, the product of our system…uninterested and unwilling to do anything as planned. Helping to starve and isolate people and not giving a (@*$@*_{$
Well, I guess that’s my rant…now I just got to go to Cuba and spend some of my $$$$ there ILLEGALLY.
toodles
c
Reading the interview with the author I was pretty blown away by his comment on women and rape. He said that there are thousands of sites on the net with women tied and gagged and no one thinks of this as a hate crime.
*****! I didn’t think of that either but it’s something that I’m glad he commented on. Perhaps other people will take this into consideration as well and look at it in a different way.
correction … ( sorry ), he was talking about all the porography sites with women bound and gagged.
– sorry! –