Henry O’Mad

The new EF! Genetics/toxics/whatever it is campaign

An open letter or discussion document or toilet paper.

As a result of the government’s unwillingness to spend any money on curing people with real mental health problems, there are large numbers of dangerously deranged people at large throughout all sectors of our society. This unwillingness is in large part due to the shortage of public funds. Funds are instead spent on drugging, sedating, electrocuting and incarcerating people who in various ways are resisting the zombification process that modern society necessitates. Most of these people don’t even realise that they are resisting, they actually believe the lie that they are ill. It is society that is ill.

In the meantime the real nutters are having billions of pounds spent on ‘research’ facilities and various large-scale infrastructure developments to enable them to realise their insane vision of the future.

They brought us thalidomide, They brought us DDT, They brought us Agent Orange, particularly popular with Vietnamese peasants. The list of their disasters is almost endless, and is growing daily. Now they want us to eat potatoes crossed with chickens and tomatoes crossed with viruses. They have laced every living thing on this planet with poison. They have made variety of life into mind-numbing mediocrity. They have turned loyalty into a commodity on plastic supermarket cards, and will be bringing love to the market as soon as a system of control has been found.

They have done this by use of a global ‘education’ system by which the young of our species are psychologically terrorised into believing that the mad people are leading the way to a bright new future in which those who don’t join in the competition will not attract members of the opposite sex and will therefore not have a happy and fulfilling life. Normality becomes narrower every year.

Our young are taught to admire and try to emulate those with the ability to push ahead with a project without thinking of the long term consequences, to ignore anything that may go against their ideas, and to concentrate on being ‘positive’. These people are called ‘entrepreneurs’. They are described as dynamic and self-motivated. Job advertisments often stipulate these as essential qualities, and the propaganda states that if you don’t get a job, you are a failure.

The nature of your job is irrelevant. You could spend all your time selling weapons of mass destruction, or dripping irritants into the eyes of rabbits to enable some sicko to sell gakk that makes skin age prematurely to people who have been led to believe that it does the opposite. Or you could sell shoes that fall to bits after thirteen months (if the guarantee is for twelve) for a ridiculous price to people who can’t afford them, and wouldn’t need them anyway if your colleagus in the advertising department hadn’t hypnotised them into believing that they were an essential part of their reproductive faculties.

All of these are ‘jobs’. But someone who does the shopping for an elderly person next door, then goes and spends a few nights in a homeless shelter doing voluntary work, who spends a lot of time helping freinds to sort out their problems — someone who does all this and doesn’t have time to waste promting the latest useless consumer bauble — is classed as ‘unemployed’. Useless to society, they are harangued, accused of scrounging, of living off the state. Made to feel inadequate, all but the strongest willed succumb eventually.

Although they actually contribute more to society than the vast majority of office layabouts and ‘health’ service drug pushers, this contribution is of no value as it has no effect on Gross National Product. Things like earthquakes and other disasters are actually of more value, as they increase GNP!

Generally speaking, the less harm you do to the the earth or to your fellow humans, the more worthless you are to industrial civilisation. This is reflected in the pittance that is paid to home helps, nurses and the like compared to the salaries of the corporate destroyers. It is often said in justification of this disparity that the high earners have worked hard to get to their position, they have specialised skills, and a large amount of responsibility.

Let’s look more closely at this assertion. Firstly, no-one works harder than nurses. This is a fact, backed up by the fact that they have the highest rate of nervous breakdowns and occupational injuries of all the professions. So they, by the working hard philosophy, should be paid the most. Also, most of the hard work involved in getting into a position of power is only the backstabbing of competitors, the personal acquisition of that power, not the wielding of it. Stupid statement number one taken care of.

Secondly, nurses also have specialised skills. These take many years to acquire. Surely this qualifies them for the elite in the second criterion? The specialists who claim a right to higher wages usually say that they went through a very long period of training during which they were unsalaried and living on a small grant, therefore they deserve more than everyone else. (Presumably because this everyone else was earning while they weren’t.) Who paid that grant? Who paid for the enormously expensive University system that they used. Indeed, who paid for their entire education? Could it perhaps have been the everyone else? These people do not own their skills, they are the property of the society that provided them.

Thirdly, there is the issue of responsibility. A company director, for example will assert that he has a greater responsibility than most other people. But responsibility for what? The managing director of the company that makes Reebok footwear is responsible for the abject poverty of the third world slaves who make them. And for the poisoned rivers and lands that surround the places where the raw materials are plundered and then processed. He (for it will almost certainly be he) will say that he is responsible for the well being of thousands of workers, but will they stop working just because he makes a mistake, or will some other parasite move in and take his place? He will say that it is a very important position he occupies in comparison with someone who just minds a machine. But who, apart from reebok, really gives a shit whether reebok shoes exist at all? His job is actually of no consequence whatsoever to anything other than the corporation. The machine minder, on the other hand, actually produces shoes, and could easily carry on doing so without reebok, for as long as there were suckers to buy them. If reebok went bust, the factory wouldn’t just go poooff! and revert to forest overnight (sadly). Nurses, on the other hand, are only responsible for the lives of a few patients.

What on earth has all this got to do with genetic engineering or toxics? You might well ask. There were a few things that were easier to show in the above way. We don’t necessarily have to look solely at genetic engineering if we are looking for a solution. We need to look at far wider issues. The relevant part of the foregoing polemic can be summarised thus:

The major decisions that affect all of us are not made in the interests of humans (not even those of the decision makers themselves) but in the interests of the corporations whose survival depends upon them. The corporations are totally unnecessary, we can live well without them. But somehow they have acquired a life of their own, and their needs are contrary to ours. The people who carry responsibility for the survival of the corporations are vastly more important — to the corporations — than the people who have responsibility for other humans, or who try to stop destruction of life of any form. They are paid accordingly and have access to worldly power in order to carry out their plans.

We are never asked if we actually want more roads, dangerous chemicals to wash ourselves with, or genetically modified food. I can remember a time not so long ago when, at least to public knowledge, no genetic mutants had been released into the environment at all. There was a fierce debate going on about it and many scientists were totally opposed to any release at all. This debate remained among the experts and is still going on. Regardless of the wishes of the people, thousands of mutant organisms have been released, and are mixing with wild relatives. This is not speculation. It is not the misgivings of a few scientists. It is happening. The regulatory authorities are unable to say ‘no danger to the public’ in this case because it is a provable lie. All they can say is that it is impossible to test all the new organisms that are being produced. But that doesn’t matter.

What matters is the consolidation of the power of the corporations over every aspect of our lives. This is not a conspiracy. The next time I hear a hypnotised zombie parroting the phrase “oh, conspiracy theory”.... This is just what is happening. Whether or not it is all being planned by some shady boys’ club is not relevant and these speculations merely obscure the fact that it is happening. The only aim the corporations have is growth. There is no other purpose, they don’t want to kill us all off, or instigate some super race or any of the other scatty ideas that the conspiracy people rabbit on about in their sad circles. As some famous film producer said recently: “The beast doesn’t know it exists.”

We try to make the thing more complicated than it really is. The simple fact is that corporations must grow to survive. So everything else — the economy, the infrastructure, the pain and misery of most humans and the desecration of our home — must grow too. The corporations are blind. There is no central intelligence there, no guiding force, so the consequences of this growth are irrelevant. Cancer growths are always doomed from the word go, but this doesn’t stop them as they have no awareness of the future. If growth necessitates the seizure of control of life from nature, or the covering of the entire planet in concrete, tarmac and toxic waste, then this is what the corporation will do. There is no long term vision in these institutions, as any honest economist will admit.

We, however, are aware of the consequences. We are also, collectively and individually, responsible for the existence of the corporations. If we, as individuals, buy something non-essential (and I do this as well, I’m not excluding myself) which was not produced and made locally, or not brought into the area independently of the corporations, we are supporting the corporations. Any essential item (that is, essential to life) that we consume where there is an alternative produced locally, is also supporting the corporations. We must drastically reduce our consumption of everything. It is no use bleating about the fact that ‘the others aren’t’, with the assumption that this makes it ok, and individual action is of no consequence. If we ourselves cannot do this, how can we expect anyone else to? If we ourselves cannot get together and co-operate to support local small scale farmers, or even to buy from shops that support them, how can we expect anyone to? What is the point of locking ourselves to bulldozers to stop a road being built when we give the small amount of power we have in this society (ie our incomes) to the very corporations that are building them?

Genetic engineering is a minor issue. The whole lot must go, and by campaigning about individual bits we obscure further this fact. It’s fine to say we are opposed to it, and to do actions to alert people to its dangers, but the most important dangers are the hardest to explain. And explain them we must, or we will have to go through the same charade time and time again as we oppose each and every new development. And we will end up being hijacked time and time again by clever solutions that only address the part of the problem we highlighted. Electric or hydrogen powered cars is a good example. They are a solution to the very minor issue of where the pollution comes out — in the town where the cars are, or elsewhere. There isn’t enough time for that. We must find a way to put across the whole picture every time, regardless of whether this makes us popular or not. This is the meaning of the phrase ‘no compromise in defence of the earth’. It doesn’t say ‘No Compromise with certain people in defence of the earth’, we must not compromise the message itself. The time for single issues is over, the roads protests should have taught us that, at least.

We do have a choice. It may not seem very attractive. No pubs, no goods from any supermarket, no products of the music industry (this actually would mean more music!)... the list goes on. This is real hardship. Bollocks, no it isn’t, what a load of self indulgent whinging hipocrites we are. “We must have some fun” is the reply I often get from this kind of conversation. This actually shows that we ourselves are just as addicted to the easy fix technology provides as everyone else. If I suggest that nuclear power is a bad thing, there is agreement all round. If I suggest that in that case we should not indulge in any entertainment that involves the use of electricity from the national grid, I am met with looks of horror. No parties? This kind of reaction shows a lot. The thinking behind it is that we can’t have fun without pubs, raves, videos, whatever. (I have a stereo system, I go to pubs etc, so I am no different. I abandoned the tv because it is shit, not for any other reason.) There are one thousand million people on this planet who would still be ‘worse’ off than us if we boycotted electricity altogether and managed without it. What a weedy bunch of warriors we are! If we ourselves believe that we need the accoutrements of civilisation to keep us sane, to provide entertainment — if we ourselves can’t eschew these things and make our own alternatives (now, not sometime or other) — what is the point in opposing them? I will if you will? Bollocks, we must practice what we preach and we must work towards that now. None of us can do this on our own, we need each other’s mutual support and encouragement. If it is a difficult path, and I think it will be at first, we will need each other to make it happen, but happen it must or we will all die chained to the factory.

Extraneous comment looking for an appropriate slot: I personally am not prepared to do any more work on single issues, unless the whole thing is prominently and uncompromisingly included in everything to do with it. I don’t enjoy fucking my eyes up using computers nor do I like getting arrested, and over the years I have seen my efforts assimilated into a movement that is going nowhere. Earth First! I hope will will not go with it.

The personal mental and physical effort and angish which I put into the Twyford Down campaign, for example, has helped to provide a platform for wishy washys like alarm uk to promote a massive increase in the rail infrastructure. I might as well have worked for British Rail and stayed out of debt. It’s all very well being nice to the greens, but they will subvert our message more efficiently than our supposedly common enemy. This isn’t a hobby or something to fit in with the rest of our lives, it’s life or death and we must decide if we want to take it on. No half measures you can do that in greenpeace.