How do you know? Were you there? Or are you just taking the word of a few post Mussolini fascist fetishists as gospel? Try thinking for yourself, you might enjoy it. Why would Gramsci deny Catholicism all his life, rot away for years in prison, only to go grovelling back to the Mother Church just as he was about to expire.

Wow, you know about Gramsci and indoctrination, but you show you’re a victim of the indoctrination.

What has congealed as an environment is a relationship to the world based on management, which is to say, on estrangement. A relationship to the world wherein we’re not made up just as much of the rustling trees, the smell of frying oil in the building, running water, the hubbub of schoolrooms, the mugginess of summer evenings. A relationship to the world where there is me and then my environment, surrounding me but never really constituting me. We have become neighbors in a planetary co-op owners’ board meeting. It’s difficult to imagine a more complete hell.

No material habitat has ever deserved the name “environment,” except perhaps the metropolis of today. The digitized voices making announcements, tramways with such a 21st century whistle, bluish streetlamps shaped like giant matchsticks, pedestrians done up like failed fashion models, the silent rotation of a video surveillance camera, the lucid clicking of the subway turnstyles supermarket checkouts, office time-clocks, the electronic ambiance of the cyber café, the profusion of plasma screens, express lanes and latex. Never has a setting been so able to do without the souls traversing it. Never has a surrounding been more automatic. Never has a context been so indifferent, and demanded in return – as the price of survival – such equal indifference from us. Ultimately the environment is nothing more than the relationship to the world that is proper to the metropolis, and that projects itself onto everything that would escape it.

It goes like this: they hired our parents to destroy this world, now they’d like to put us to work rebuilding it, and – to top it all off – at a profit. The morbid excitement that animates journalists and advertisers these days as they report each new proof of global warming reveals the steely smile of the new green capitalism, in the making since the 70s, which we waited for at the turn of the century but which never came. Well, here it is! It’s sustainability! Alternative solutions, that’s it too! The health of the planet demands it! No doubt about it anymore, it’s a green scene; the environment will be the crux of the political economy of the 21st century. A new volley of “industrial solutions” comes with each new catastrophic possibility.

The inventor of the H-bomb, Edward Teller, proposes shooting millions of tons of metallic dust into the stratosphere to stop global warming. NASA, frustrated at having to shelve its idea of an anti-missile shield in the museum of cold war horrors, suggests installing a gigantic mirror beyond the moon’s orbit to protect us from the sun’s now-fatal rays. Another vision of the future: a motorized humanity, driving on bio-ethanol from Sao Paulo to Stockholm; the dream of cereal growers the world over, for it only means converting all of the planet’s arable lands into soy and sugar beet fields. Eco-friendly cars, clean energy, and environmental consulting coexist painlessly with the latest Chanel ad in the pages of glossy magazines.

We are told that the environment has the incomparable merit of being the first truly global problem presented to humanity. A global problem, which is to say a problem that only those who are organized on a global level will be able to solve. And we know who they are. These are the very same groups that for close to a century have been the vanguard of disaster, and certainly intend to remain as such, for the small price of a change of logo. That EDF had the impudence to bring back its nuclear program as the new solution to the global energy crisis says plenty about how much the new solutions resemble the old problems.

From Secretaries of State to the back rooms of alternative cafés, concerns are always expressed in the same words, the same as they’ve always been. We have to get mobilized. This time it’s not to rebuild the country like in the post-war era, not for the Ethiopians like in the 1980s, not for employment like in the 1990s. No, this time it’s for the environment. It will thank you for it. Al Gore and degrowth movement stand side by side with the eternal great souls of the Republic to do their part in resuscitating the little people of the Left and the well-known idealism of youth. Voluntary austerity writ large on their banner, they work benevolently to make us compliant with the “coming ecological state of emergency.” The round and sticky mass of their guilt lands on our tired shoulders, coddling us to cultivate our garden, sort out our trash, and eco-compost the leftovers of this macabre feast.

Managing the phasing out of nuclear power, excess CO2 in the atmosphere, melting glaciers, hurricanes, epidemics, global over-population, erosion of the soil, mass extinction of living species… this will be our burden. They tell us, “everyone must do their part,” if we want to save our beautiful model of civilization. We have to consume a little less in order to be able to keep consuming. We have to produce organically in order to keep producing. We have to control ourselves in order to go on controlling. This is the logic of a world straining to maintain itself whilst giving itself an air of historical rupture. This is how they would like to convince us to participate in the great industrial challenges of this century. And in our bewilderment we’re ready to leap into the arms of the very same ones who presided over the devastation, in the hope that they will get us out of it.

Ecology isn’t simply the logic of a total economy; it’s the new morality of capital. The system’s internal state of crisis and the rigorous screening that’s underway demand a new criterion in the name of which this screening and selection will be carried out. From one era to the next, the idea of virtue has never been anything but an invention of vice. Without ecology, how could we justify the existence of two different food regimes, one “healthy and organic” for the rich and their children, and the other notoriously toxic for the plebes, whose offspring are damned to obesity. The planetary hyper-bourgeoisie wouldn’t be able to make their normal lifestyle seem respectable if its latest caprices weren’t so scrupulously “respectful of the environment.” Without ecology, nothing would have enough authority to gag any and all objections to the exorbitant progress of control.

Indeed.

Latest: Iranian judiciary supposedly hanging protesters. So, again, where’s the blaring outrage from “social justice” groups? Why aren’t they advocating “direct action” against the mullahs? Will Rev. Al Sharpton stop grinding chicks at Michael Jackson memorials long enough to lecture his Iranian clerical brethren about the sanctity and dignity of The People?

Tangentially Related Bonus: Cynthia “Look Into My Crazed Eyes” McKinney arrested by the Israelis for gun running. (Okay, so nobody said she was running guns, but who are they kidding?)

YES! YES! YES!
But ANSWER is unlikely to care because the Iranians are not being oppressed by eeevil Joooooos.

I’m always happy to go on about my own b.s. theories.

BTW, I’m thinking somebody should ask groups like ANSWER where the big protests, benefit concerts, and ships full of aid are for the Iranian protesters. Like they did for the Palestinians in Gaza when the evil Israelis decided to finally hit back against Hamas rockets being shot into their country.