📽️The Zone Of Carbon
As objective conditions get worse, the greater the pressure to live the lie that we are different to those in the past.
I am under pressure not to compare the “climate” with what happened in World War Two. Being human, all too human, I temporarily submit to such constraints.
That said, there was one scene from The Zone of Interest that sticks with me. The laying of the table. The exactness of the placing of the cutlery. The affordance of precision. The clinical aesthetic, shutting out the noise of death from over the wall. The forced normality. The thickness of the air.
And within a year of the laying of that table Soviet troops had invaded Poland and the east of Germany, ripping up society and spitting it out - 12 million refugees - 2 million rapes: the woman often gang raped with officers looking on. How could this happen? Maybe part of the answer is the 3 million Soviet prisoners of war deliberately starved to death by the Nazis in the final months of 1941. Packed into camps, turned into cannibals, dying in their shit. Only one of the many forgotten crimes of humanity during that period.
They laid the table so precisely because they could. For a while at least. And then they couldn’t anymore. Today people eat meat, fly planes, stand by and refuse to resist. Because they can. And then soon they won’t anymore. Hundreds of millions of refugees, many more than in the Second World War, will be on the move. And we should know what that means.
Art can say what politics cannot. It speaks before the political explodes. It senses the coming death. It escapes the constraints of repression. After all, nothing clear is being said. The clarity of the message is communicated through the lack of clarity. It’s just art, right?
While our society dreams of control it will destroy any control we have. We have yet to learn this bitterest of lessons. We are not in this world to serve power - we are here to serve truth, beauty, and love - what used to be called “God”. It takes a long time to realise this.
For our society the lesson has not yet been learned, and we are about to suffer the consequences.
I've got two focuses:
- Revolution - Building social formations to create revolution and guide moments of social disruption.
- A Balanced Society - Building the new civilisation, based on a new balance of deliberative democracy, compassion, and limited consumption.
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Sign up for nonviolent civil resistance with Just Stop Oil in the UK or via the A22 Network internationally. Alternatively, you can now join a new collaborative project I'm helping with called Humanity which is aiming to build the new world ahead based on deliberative democracy.
