notes.slowroots.org

words on the land, liberation, transformation, & practicing relationship. (this site has moved)

[notes-slowroots]

Justice is only possible where debt never obliges, never demands, never equals credit, payment, payback. Justice is possible only where it is never asked, in the refuge of bad debt, in the fugitive public of strangers not communities, of undercommons not neighbourhoods, among those who have been there all along from somewhere. To seek justice through restoration is to return debt to the balance sheet and the balance sheet never balances.

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. (2013, p. 63).

[notes-slowroots]

Today more than ever, the people of Saudi Arabia want to have a say in political as well as economic, social, and cultural life. To think otherwise is to at worst reify regime narratives about Saudis not having political will or sensibilities, and at best to be disconnected from everyday lived realities there. The social contract in the kingdom was not so much based on the exchange of oil wealth for political subordination. Rather, it has always been based on violence—and the extreme threat thereof—coupled with religious legitimation, in return for subordination in all realms of life: economic, political, social, and cultural. Those who continue to regurgitate tropes about the apolitical, bought-off Saudi subject not only fail to comprehend the political economy of oppression in the kingdom; they also reinforce the state-centered view the regime has sold to the world since the very creation of the Saudi state.

Rosie Bsheer, "How Mohammed bin Salman Has Transformed Saudi Arabia". Jadaliyya, June 27, 2018.

[notes-slowroots]

Taking land by force was not an accidental or spontaneous project or the work of a few rogue characters. The violent appropriation of Native land by white settlers was seen as an individual right in the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, second only to freedom of speech... In 1658, the colony [Virginia] ordered every settler home to have a functioning firearm, and later even provided government loans for those who could not afford to buy a weapon. Similarly, New England colonial governments made laws such as the 1632 requirement that each person have a functioning firearm plus two pounds of gunpowder and ten pounds of bullets. Householders were fined for missing or defective arms and ammunition. No man was to appear at a public meeting unarmed....The militaristic-capitalist powerhouse that the United States became by 1840 derived from real estate (which included enslaved Africans, as well as appropriated land). The United States was founded as a capitalist state and an empire on conquered land, with capital in the form of slaves, hence the term chattel slavery; this was exceptional in the world and has remained exceptional. The capitalist firearms industry was among the first successful modern corporations. Gun proliferation and gun violence today are among its legacies.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, "Settler Colonialism and the Second Amendment". Monthly Review, January 1, 2018.

[notes-slowroots]

...[H]ow can science help in the preparation for the present and coming storm?... [H]ow can science be reimagined as a tool of resistance that can expand fractures in the wall of capitalism, and its many-headed hydra? These two guiding questions surround the re-imagination of science—away from an enterprise intertwined with the production of capital—and towards a system of knowledge production that is humanized, which has a transformative social purpose. *La tormenta* (the storm) is coming... Julía [a Zapatista delegate] implored the scientists: "Don’t exchange truth for lie, and especially not for money. This is what makes you good scientists. We know that you’re great, but we Zapatistas ask you to be even better by working in collectives. Study scientifically, figure out who is responsible for the problems that we have. Who are the really guilty ones? Be the ones who speak with truth, and not in order to get a model. Be honest. This might have consequences of humiliation and threats, but you don’t have to give up because of that. Brother and sister scientists, it’s time to be awake, vigilant, to not lose love for our struggle. We must work everyday to build a collective future." Decolonizing science requires scientists to organize in their own communities, and to deconstruct how their own research methodologies and epistemologies have been employed as tools of colonialism and neocolonialism. Such a process of decolonization also demands scientists become engaged allies, co-conspirators, and accomplices who can share methodological and theoretical insights with grassroots movements about how to build a new vision of science within the cracks of capital’s wall.

David Meek, "Cracks in the Wall of Capitalism: The Zapatistas and the Struggle to Decolonize Science". Toward Freedom, February 26, 2018.

[notes-slowroots]

Cannupa Hanska Luger, Dylan Mclaughlin, Ginger Dunnill, Merritt Johnson, Nicholas Galanin, "We Are In Crisis" (2017)

[notes-slowroots]

We huge many-celled creatures have to coordinate millions of different oscillation frequencies, and interactions among frequencies, in our bodies and our environment. Most of the coordination is effected by synchronising the pulses, by getting the beats into a master rhythm, by entrainment... Being in sync—internally and with your environment—makes life easy. Getting out of sync is always uncomfortable or disastrous. Then there are the rhythms of other human beings. Like the two pendulums, though through more complex processes, two people together can mutually phase-lock. Successful human relationship involves entrainment—getting in sync. If it doesn’t, the relationship is either uncomfortable or disastrous... Listening is not a reaction, it is a connection. Listening to a conversation or a story, we don’t so much respond as join in—become part of the action.

Ursula K. Le Guin, "Telling is Listening", in The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination

[notes-slowroots]

When you speak a word to a listener, the speaking is an act. And it is a mutual act: the listener’s listening enables the speaker’s speaking. It is a shared event, intersubjective: the listener and speaker entrain with each other. Both the amoebas are equally responsible, equally physically, immediately involved in sharing bits of themselves. The act of speaking happens NOW. And then is irrevocably, unrepeatably OVER.

Ursula K. Le Guin, "Telling is Listening", in The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination

[notes-slowroots]

A number of factors appear responsible for the steep recent rise in civilian deaths [in the US-led war against the so-called Islamic State]—some policy-related, others reflecting a changing battlespace as the war enters its toughest phase. In one of his first moves as president, Trump ordered a new counter-ISIS plan be drawn up. Second on his list of requests were recommended “changes to any United States rules of engagement and other United States policy restrictions that exceed the requirements of international law regarding the use of force against ISIS.” In short, Trump was demanding that the Pentagon take a fresh look at protections for civilians on the battlefield except those specifically required by international law. That represented a major shift from decades of U.S. military doctrine, which has generally made central the protection of civilians in war.

Samuel Oakford, "Coalition civilian casualty claims double under Donald Trump" (Airwars, July 17, 2017)

[notes-slowroots]

The active Coalition allies –  the United States, the UK, France, Belgium and Australia, and possibly Jordan and Saudi Arabia – cumulatively dropped 39,577 bombs and missiles in airstrikes against ISIS in 2017. Weapon releases from the air were up 29% on the previous year. Even so, in December 2017 just 584 munitions were fired – the lowest reported number since August 2014... Potentially the worst alleged incident recorded by Airwars in Syria occurred on March 20th-21st in Al Mansoura, near Raqqa. Local sources reported that anywhere from 40 to 420 civilians died in an alleged Coalition strike on Al Badiya school, in which hundreds of displaced women and children were seeking shelter. Human Rights Watch investigators who visited the site put the death toll firmly above 40. The Coalition confirmed the strike, but denied any civilians were killed. It has yet to re-open an investigation into the event, despite HRW’s findings... In the greatest confirmed loss of life in any one civilian casualty event of the war, the Coalition itself admitted to killing between 105 and 141 civilians on March 17th-18th in a US airstrike on Mosul’s Al Jadida/New Mosul neighbourhood. The strike hit a house holding hundreds of displaced civilians near the Al Rahma Al Ahli Hospital. While that one incident sparked international outrage, civilian deaths continued to rise as the battle ground on.

Alex Hopkins, "Airwars annual assessment 2017: civilians paid a high price for major Coalition gains" (Airwars, January 18, 2018)

[notes-slowroots]

[G]overnments have often used food as a weapon to sway politics. In the 1960s, for instance, the US government halted food aid shipments to Nasserite Egypt in the hope of tempering the country’s revolutionary foreign policy aspirations. It also contemplated food boycotts in retaliation to the 1973 Arab oil embargo and the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis. In a more recent and tragic example, Iraq was on the verge of famine by the mid-1990s as a result of the multilateral UN embargo against the country in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War.

Eckart Woertz, "The Geo-Economics of Gulf Food Imports" (Jadaliyya, January 13, 2016)

[notes-slowroots]

Herein lies the essence of counterinsurgent colonialist warfare: no resistance can be tolerated. Historian William Appleman Williams aptly described the US imperative as "annihilation unto total surrender."

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States (2014, p. 150)

[notes-slowroots]

Exploitation by the largest corporations, often in collusion with politicians at local, state, and federal levels, and even within some Indigenous governments, could spell a final demise for Indigenous land bases and resources. Strengthening Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination to prevent that result will take general public outrage and demands, which in turn will require that the general population, those descended from settlers and immigrants, know their history and assume responsibility.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States (2014, p. 10)

[notes-slowroots]

Neither superior technology nor an overwhelming number of settlers made up the mainspring of the birth of the United States or the spread of its power over the entire world. Rather, the chief cause was the colonialist settler-state's willingness to eliminate whole civilizations of people in order to possess their land.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People's History of the United States (2014, p. 96)

[notes-slowroots]

If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (2013, p. 359)

[notes-slowroots]

The commodity economy has been here on Turtle Island for four hundred years, eating up the white strawberries and everything else. But people have grown weary of the sour taste in their mouths. A great longing is upon us, to live again in a world made of gifts. I can scent it coming, like the fragrance of ripening strawberries rising on the breeze.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (2013, p. 32)

[notes-slowroots]

I wonder: where is the place of a spiritual ecology in a movement that in order to gain traction must be constantly validated through being based in scientific empiricism?... In my galaxy of private epiphanies in Utah’s mountains and deserts, I have found a way to create an interconnected mesh of my heritage & my fierce love of this planet. I think of my heritage as my sharpest needle that I have been handed to both pierce and play on the music of resilience. For me, forward ecological thinking and movement forward takes root in grounding & consolidating all my various identities into one based in empathy, kindness and connectedness; teachings I have found time and time again in The Quran. I tuck away the book & find sleep under a gnarled lattice of pines that go on & on among the unknown reefs of eternity.

Jai Hamid Bashir, "Reading the Quran in the Canyons" (Torrey House Press, September 28, 2017)

[notes-slowroots]

It is the furtive character of DU weapons manufacturing, its testing (primarily and secretly in the American southwest), the scale of its use, and ultimately, the nature and impact that result, that makes it simultaneously difficult to investigate, but also so useful for the American military and its clients... This invisibility is not trivial. Rather, it is productive, arresting the possibility of scrutiny, operating on multiple small levels simultaneously and over time, rendered local rather than caught up in the much broader networks of which it is a part, and almost entirely uncontested because the unseen is unseen.

Toby Craig Jones, "Invisibility and the Toxic Economy of War in Iraq" (Jadaliyya, August 29, 2017)