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