Why we love to hate conspiracy theories: 911 Truth as threat to the intelligentsia

by Denis G. Rancourt
This essay was first posted on the Activist Teacher blog.


Especially left and liberal professionals and service intellectuals but also right-wing members of the intelligentsia vehemently attack and ridicule “conspiracy theories” such as the present 911 Truth movement.

Why?

It’s as though power did not covertly orchestrate its predation of us? Is that not the modus operandi of power?

Is it so difficult to believe that the complex and highly successful military attack on US soil that was 911 (levelling three gigantic sky scrapers, blasting a hole into the Pentagon, and destroying four commercial jets and their passengers) was not orchestrated by a religious zealot from a cave in Afghanistan and executed by failed Cessna pilot trainees with box cutters? Or that those who measurably benefited in the trillions had nothing to do with it?

What the hell? Not even (admittedly rare) authoritative mainstream reports seem to matter [1].

What ever happened to “war is a racket” and “follow the money”?

In rigorous compliance with the true meanings of "academic freedom" [2] and "freedom of the press" virtually no academics or mainstream journalists have made it their research to find truth or to radically (at the root) question the establishment version.

Indeed, all the major and considered-radical academic pundits such as Noam Chomsky and Ward Churchill, have actively avoided the possibility that the 911 attacks could have been known or aided from within the finance-corporate-military complex.

What keeps them from crossing that line? What makes them demean attempts to cross that line? [3]

Similarly, even outspoken dissident parliamentary politicians such as George Galloway have ridiculed the concerns of 911 truthers (at his last public talk in Ottawa).

Is such self and projected censorship by star intellectuals only the result of the fear of being mobbed by ridicule? Is asking these questions in public fora so dangerous?

When barred and suppressed Afghan Member of Parliament Malalai Joya was asked about 911 by a truther in Ottawa last year she replied that those who sought answers in this matter should address their questions to the occupiers of the White House. To this writer’s knowledge, this is the furthest that any politician has gone in this direction, coming from “the bravest woman in Afghanistan” no less.

But what shocked the present writer more is the derision to which was subjected the truther at the Malalai Joya Ottawa event, at the hands of an “activist” and “progressive” crowd.

INTELLIGENTSIA SELF-DEFENCE

The intelligentsia appears to be addicted to the illusion that it has a monopoly on valid analysis and understanding. In order to preserve this illusion and to protect its standing in providing interpretations of the World, the intelligentsia must limit the scope of all investigations to domains that fall within its self-established interpretational paradigms (right-left, power politics, geopolitical chess board, corporate motives, etc.) and self-established research protocols.

Those paradigms and protocols, in turn, and the rigorously followed discipline of not supposing the worst in one’s research stance, were established in academia at the time when “academic freedom” was being defined by the cornerstone nineteenth century US battles for professional independence in academia. The academics and society lost that battle [2]:

“[T]he economists were the first professional analysts to be “broken in,” in a battle that defined the limits of academic freedom in universities. The academic system would from that point on impose a strict operational separation between inquiry and theorizing as acceptable and social reform as unacceptable.

Any academic wishing to preserve her position understood what this meant. As a side product, academics became virtuosos at nurturing a self-image of importance despite this fatal limitation on their societal relevance, with verbiage such as: The truth is our most powerful weapon, the pen is mightier than the sword, a good idea can change the world, reason will take us out of darkness, etc.”

Academics and “radical professors” train the intelligentsia…

And power owns the media.

TRUTH ABOUT TRUTH

But much more importantly power owns us, owns our jobs, owns students at school and owns the homeless on the street, the First Peoples on the reserves and the prisoners in the jails. As long as we are owned, information about abuse of power is irrelevant for social change.

This is the sociological fact that the 911 Truth movement has failed to recognize [4]. Truth will not set us free. Truth and information do not lead to action. It’s not a question of how many folks know the truth.

It’s only a question of what the truth means in real terms to however few individuals and will these individuals rebel, actually rebel and individually take back power over their lives.

Contrary to the mantra of our left academic idols, truth and research are not threatening to power in a culture of subservience and obedience. In such a culture, radical-in-thought academics only stabilize the system by neutralizing the more action-minded youth. [5]

In such a culture, the only truth that is threatening to power is one that it perceives as an attack on its self-image [6]. And, in such a culture, psychological self-image arising from power’s connection to the broader society is the only force that can move power to constrain itself [6]. In this measure, in the present culture, 911 Truth could have an impact. In this way, some of the low-level actual perpetrators and facilitators of 911 could eventually be sacrificed in show trials or in mainstream smear campaigns.

In conclusion, the intelligentsia works at protecting itself (and by extension the system) and therefore will be a visceral opponent of 911 Truth until it can integrate 911 Truth and participate in neutralizing 911 Truth in order for power to save face. Or, some citizens might actually rebel? The extent and projection/potential of such pockets of rebellion is the only force capable of leveraging real concessions from power [7][8][9].

Endnotes

[1] “Major media articles on 9-11 raise questions” by Fred Burks, 2010, Want to Know.

[2] “Some big lies of science” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.

[3] “Questioning Foundations: An Interview with Denis Rancourt” by Michael Barker, 2010, Dissident Voice.

[4] “911 Truth” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.

[5] “Against Chomsky” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2008.

[6] “Psycho-biological basis for image leverage and the case of Israel” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.

[7] “On the racism and pathology of left progressive First-World activism” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.

[8] “Roundabout as conflict-avoidance versus Malcolm X’s psychology of liberation” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.

[9] “Murder and genocide are natural, therefore rebel!” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.

RELATED VIDEO REPORTS:
corbettreport.com: 9/11 Truth is Still the Issue
TheRealNews: 9/11 Questions Remain Unanswered

Chomsky dispels 9/11 conspiracies with sheer logic

Denis G. Rancourt was a tenured and full professor of physics at the University of Ottawa in Canada. He practiced several areas of science which were funded by a national agency and ran an internationally recognized laboratory. He published over 100 articles in leading scientific journals. He developed popular activism courses and was an outspoken critic of the university administration and a defender of student and Palestinian rights. He was fired for his dissidence in 2009 by a president who is a staunch supporter of Israeli policy. [See rancourt.academicfreedom.ca]

Murder and genocide are natural, therefore rebel!

A socio-biological critique of First-World middleclass activism

by Denis G. Rancourt
This essay was first posted on the Activist Teacher blog.


Evolution can be societal. Here I argue that we must recognize our primal drive for murder and genocide and society’s propensity for violently oppressive hierarchies in order to react with the needed determined and sustained individual-based rebellion. This rebellion is against the rogue warlords and hierarchies that dominate us. Warring and its hierarchical support serve no useful purpose now that the human species is not ecologically threatened by natural competitors and now that there is no need for genetic selection (otherwise imposed on a small gene pool by an unforgiving natural environment).

This is a critique of First-World middleclass activism, in the hope that it will start contributing to human evolution.

I argue that laws and ethical systems are diversions that serve hierarchy and I argue that a victim mentality induced by hierarchy makes us susceptible to the appeal of canned justice and to various escapes into cowardice; rather than allowing us to perceive the otherwise obvious possibility of rebellion and self-defence.

I describe a positive feedback trap in which perturbed activists respond to perceived threats by launching into behavioural rule generation (an anxious quest for the perfect model) which in turn supports the system causing the threats. This leads to off-target and co-opted actions such as ineffective appeals to politicians, lobbying for new laws and regulations, adopting extreme personal lifestyle rules, and extremes in applied political correctness (“inclusive language,” “safe space,” etc.). The more the activists feel threatened the more they spin pseudo-comforting behavioural rules and make requests to the hierarchical oppressors for better rules, thereby increasing their societal isolation and further distancing themselves from effective means.

The gargantuan failures of First-World middleclass activism in the face of advancing soul-battering corporate fascism, murderous militarism and exploitive finance globalization since the 1970s should be cause for radical self-examination. Canadian queer pride parades (that can’t agree on whether Israel is an apartheid sate), reparationless apologies for aboriginal residential schools, zero-impact demonstrations and petitions, and tolerated and disappeared public musings about proportional representation and parliamentary free votes just don’t cut it; whereas corporate greening counts negatively. It’s like the activism was designed to fail. There is little sign of actual resistance from the First-World middleclass.

MURDER IS NATURAL AND HEALTHY IS SICK

Animal rights activists believe that abstaining from killing animals is a higher moral state to which humans should aspire. But is it helpful and productive to aspire to a state that is not natural?

On the other hand, some animal rights activists internally accentuate the murderous ways of humans and react by acting externally on behalf of other species to concretely oppose the killing. These resistors, such as members of the Animal Liberation Front, are among the boldest and most effective direct action First-World activists around. They act in true solidarity with the animals with which they identify. [1]

Most other First-World activists prefer to believe that humankind has a natural tendency towards cooperation and altruism that can flourish given a sufficiently humane system such as socialism or communism or constrained capitalism infused with more participatory decision making, and so on. [2]

But is it helpful and productive to aspire to a state that is not natural? And is it not harmful to be deceptive about one’s nature rather than practice honest self-appraisal? [3]

Should we not first ask whether or not humans have a natural tendency to practice murder and genocide? After all, genocides are far more common than the Israel lobby would have us believe. [4][5]

Certainly the spider, with its complex behaviour in hunting, stalking, and ambushing prey, is a sentient being. Presumably the spider could not survive on tomatoes and grass. The spider thrives on killing and devouring (alive) other sentient beings (including birds and small mammals when circumstances permit). Is it immoral for the spider to practice this behaviour? Has evolution privileged humane killing methods in the spider?

What about the killer whale? Is it not often observed to play with its prey for hours before killing it or simply letting it escape? We’ve all seen the documentary films where a live seal is repeatedly thrown like a rag doll; and the monkeys who torture a captured bird before eating it, or not.

Among large apes, dominant males maintain harems and violently prevent most other males from reproducing, while expecting complete submission and sexual favours from the females. They kill offspring that are not their own.

We know that birds mob individuals from their flocks and kill the undesirables for no apparent reason related to flock survival. And we know that human groups also practice mobbing.

If something is natural can it be wrong? Would it not produce healthier societies to recognize what is natural human behaviour and to make practical decisions based on realistically evaluated primal impulses rather than mask it all with moralistic rituals and myths?

We determine that an animal behaviour is natural by correctly supposing that animals left to themselves exhibit their natural behaviours. We can supplement this by physiological arguments. For example, we know that carnivores do better when they eat meat and that herbivores do better when they eat grass.

Let us apply the same rules to humans. Throughout history and as far as we can deduce, humans have predominantly been omnivorous and competitive for territory, resources, and reproductive projection. Clans have killed clans. Families have feuded. Patriarchies have maintained themselves. Nations have invaded other nations and taken slaves and resources at will. Entire peoples have been exterminated or enslaved every time superior war technology or tactics have been developed. The present is not excluded.

Human history is a story of human carnage. Is this not the first truth about humankind? Stable societies established by military strength are characterized by slavery, serfdom, kingdoms, prisons, mental institutions and every form of domination and exploitation; now including globalized wage slavery and resource expropriation.

On this backdrop, are philosophical discussions about morals and justice mere camouflage and deception only intended for temporary and superficial relief from reality? Or do they have another utility?

Canadian society’s crimes include, a continuing genocide against aboriginal peoples [5], a geopolitical war in Afghanistan, support for the US Empire, support for the genocidal and apartheid state policies of Israel [6], overturning the democratic popular government in Haiti, corporate and finance predation throughout the world, an immoral prison system used to maintain social inequities [7], vast structural social inequities with mass public health consequences, mass civil rights violations perpetrated at will and without consequences for the decision makers (e.g., G20-Toronto), mass indoctrination and pacification of the youth [8], continual social engineering manipulation, universal pharmaceutical and medical establishment predation [9] and much more.

And as I write this there is a cultural and racial global war of dominance raging. Geopolitical alliances are defining boundaries and leveraging control of energy resources. Enemies are formed in the ape minds of our leaders who distribute territory and privilege to their ape friends.

All of this appears thrust upon us by the natural world where predator species fight for territory and dominance. Don’t ask the lions to get along with the hyenas. A balance of forces is the only justice. The only thing keeping a dominant male from killing another male’s offspring is the birthing female’s teeth and wits.

THE POINT OF THE LAW

Is it not therefore somewhat artificial for humans to administer a “justice” system in form as though it related to justice and to criminalize murder as though it was some kind of unnatural anomaly? Is it not a rather cynical farce in our societal politics of the killing machine to talk about God and to pay lip service to morals and to ethics?

Or do laws and ethical systems play an essential role in justifying some murder and exploitation (war, economic predation) while providing some restraints at home? Such as: Father can go out into the world to steal, exploit and murder but it says he can’t just kill his dependent wife and children when he gets tired of them.

Or in our hierarchies are laws and ethical systems meant to keep the masses in their place with a false sense of security; an understanding between masters and slaves? The slaves provide servitude in exchange for the promise of safety. They demand to be exploited fairly. They are conned to accept punishment as “justice”.

In view of the above, laws and ethical systems appear to serve complimentary functions:

● They provide enforceable mechanisms to facilitate monopoly building by the top corporate and finance predators.

● They provide enforceable structure and codifications to preserve and strengthen the hierarchy.

● They codify the impotence of hierarchical underlings and define the place of underlings.

● They create an illusion of needed master-provided safety to underlings, in exchange for required compliance and servitude.

● They create the double standard whereby strict penalties for harming or attacking the hierarchical masters are enforced while killing in the service of the masters (military, police, accountants, etc.) is legitimized.

The Ten Commandments appear to be primarily concerned with nuclear family patriarchy as a basis for society. The Geneva Conventions deal with the rules of war between nation states, thereby legitimizing both war and nation states. And so on.

We invent morals and ethics to codify servitude and to establish dominance. We develop and maintain these codes and we come to believe that they are natural and that they provide security in themselves.

As war and exploitation technologies and social systems progress and as hierarchies grow and collide, so-called civil society and the diplomats, law makers and regulators follow explicit and unspoken directives in spinning more and better overarching webs of behavioural codification, in the hope of protecting us all while in fact entangling us more securely into the killing machines that we inhabit.

These codes, like all laws, are delimited and defined by power – they must be or they would not serve the acting hierarchies. All resource-intensive political endeavours in a hierarchy must serve the hierarchy.

It is not surprising that organized religions have been used to justify a majority of the most horrendous wars. This is a primary political function of religions, to expand the hierarchy. You have to admire some Jews for their honesty and transparency in this regard [18].

It is also not surprising and not operationally contradictory that organized religions are used to manage the home front. This is also a primary political function of religions, to maintain the hierarchy. It is natural for organized religion to collaborate with nationalism and to support corporate fascism; such as with the Nazi holocaust and now with US fundamentalist “Christian” support for the apartheid state of Israel – America’s military cash cow and thug in the Middle East.

POSITIVE FEEDBACK LOOP, DOWNWARD SPIRAL

In a bad habit gone mental, the more underlings and progressives feel threatened by hierarchies that have tapped into humanity’s murderous tendency the more desperately they strive for “better” laws, rules, and ethical codes; the more they seek to strengthen the very hierarchies that feed on us all.

Instead of finding the strength within, the warrior instinct that would fend off competing predators, hierarchical underlings beg for a more just master and expect a process that they do not control to wield a better world.

A now classic example is how the green movement was co-opted by atmospheric CO2 euphoria in which corporate leaders, First-World governments, global financiers, mainstream media, the NOG sector, the service scientists, and environmentalists all aligned to defeat a mythical carbon threat by advancing the largest planetary finance scam and economic development policing code ever conceived, thereby solidifying planetary social injustice in the name of social justice. [9][10][11][12]

And there is no lack of other examples. The entire apparatus of government is dedicated to spinning laws and regulations that provide more control to power and a continually renewed illusion of justice-from-rules to those underlings fortunate enough to have the luxury of illusions.

There have been times when governments and laws served to partly counter corporate fascism but these times were episodes during which underlings did find strength within to force some concessions from power. The resulting resistance regulations, laws and rulings have had short half-lives in a social environment of servitude and were quickly replaced and degraded. For example, how long did it take since the 1970s for health and safety government regulators to become corporate whores? [13] How long did it take in Canada since the 1970s for somewhat student-centered public education to become mind-numbing obedience training? [8]

Now in victim mode, the greater the perceived threat to we privileged middleclass hierarchical underlings, the more frantically we spin and scream, the more diligently we appeal to the humanity of our “representatives”, the harder we work to establish sane alternatives and “safe spaces”, to escape impending disaster.

INCLUSIVE LANGUAGE AS SICKO

I see many alternative networks, pathological desires to be isolated in “like mindedness” and extreme expressions of political correctness all around, as ineffective victim-mindset escapes from and shields against a violent and increasingly oppressive hierarchy.

As a consequence of this perceive-threat/spin-rules positive feedback trap, many of the resulting socio-behavioural escapes can be extreme. Veganism is often originally such a reaction towards an extreme rule-based behaviour, one which is contrary to natural consumption opportunism. There are no economic-underclass vegans in the First World. Other extreme lifestyle rule systems include physical activity ritualism, carbon footprint reduction obsession, off grid fetishism, etc. When extreme, these reactions can be all-consuming and can determine relationships and fundamental beliefs.

For example, how crazy is a frazzled clique of middleclass First-Worlders that develops and maintains an elaborate social behaviour code centered on “sensitivity/anti-oppression training” emphasizing the enforcement of “inclusive language” and the criminalization of racist expression as “hate speech” while not effectively and directly resisting the very hierarchical structure that so causes it to behaviourally suppress reality rather than physically confront its own immediate oppressors? This latest political correctness extreme social reaction is post-advent of nineteenth century anarchism and is therefore retarded. Academic feminist theorists have done little to stop this sad and regressive phenomenon.

Even one fully escape-integrated progressive academic [14] has critiqued these peaking political correctness excesses as having gone too far. [15]

CONCLUSION

A more healthy and self-respecting activism would be to recognize humankind’s primal capacity and impulse for invasion and murder and human society’s propensity for violent hierarchical oppression and to react in self-defence rather than to escape into isolation and pathology or to grope subserviently for power’s protection.

Self-respecting activists and anarchists and libertarians worthy of these titles need to practice day to day distributed rebellion as the only defence against our rogue killer-warrior masters who insist on running prison and extermination camps rather than serving as protectors only when needed. The species is no longer at risk from the outside. It’s time for a biological reality check and a vigorous and persistent program to keep these thugs in line.

There is no “then what?” Murder and genocide will stay alive and hierarchy will always tend to broaden its scope and sharpen its control. Rebellion (direct participation, resistance, sabotage, personal influence, taking back control, having a direct say) is the antidote to hierarchical violence and oppression. Rebellion creates a real and evolving alternative. Our constant rebellion is also our liberation, growth, and connection. Rebellion is anchored in the individual fighting his/her own oppression at the point of strongest individual contact with the control hierarchy – at work, at school, on the street, in the prison, on the reserve; wherever the individual is controlled in his/her own life. [2][3][16][17]

Endnotes

[1] “Memories of Freedom” by the Western Wildlife Unit of the Animal Liberation Front.

[2] “On the racism and pathology of left progressive First-World activism” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.

[3] “Roundabout as conflict-avoidance versus Malcolm X’s psychology of liberation” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.

[4] “The Holocaust Industry” by Norman G. Finkelstein, 2000.

[5] “A little matter of genocide – Holocaust and denial in the Americas 1492 to the present” by Ward Churchill, 1997.

[6] Norman G. Finkelstein’s web page on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

[7] “About the obscenity of the legal mind and its grotesque displays of arrogance” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.

[8] “Canadian Education as an Impetus towards Fascism” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2009.

[9] “Some big lies of science” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.

[10] “Questioning Climate Politics” by Dru Oja Jay, 2007.

[11] CFACT YouTube interview of Denis Rancourt about climate change politics, 2010.

[12] “The corporate climate coup” by David F. Noble, 2007, 2010.

[13] “Corrupt to the Core” by Shiv Chopra, 2008.

[14] “Global Warming Suspicions and Confusions” by Justin Podur, 2007.

[15] “Contested spaces worth defending” by Justin Podur, 2010.

[16] “Need for and Practice of Student Liberation” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.

[17] “G20-Toronto property damage is a good thing” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.

[18] "How To Kill Goyim And Influence People - Torat Ha'melech" YouTube video, 2010.

Denis G. Rancourt was a tenured and full professor of physics at the University of Ottawa in Canada. He practiced several areas of science which were funded by a national agency and ran an internationally recognized laboratory. He published over 100 articles in leading scientific journals. He developed popular activism courses and was an outspoken critic of the university administration and a defender of student and Palestinian rights. He was fired for his dissidence in 2009 by a president who is a staunch supporter of Israeli policy. [See rancourt.academicfreedom.ca]

George Carlin on expressing the inner rebel

There has not been a period like the 1960s in North America since the 1960s, only a steady forced march towards corporate fascism... (LINK)

Here is a glimpse of the 1960s through George Carlin's story of personal liberation. It was all about letting your inner rebel out...

Related:
George Carlin featured on climate change blog

Against diversity of tactics, in support of direct action

by Denis G. Rancourt
This essay was first posted on the Activist Teacher blog.
(en francais ICI)


Here I argue that “diversity of tactics” in social justice activism is a misguided effort to unite incompatible sides and that the “diversity of tactics” stance harms the direct action anarchist side and helps the pacifists; where pacifists necessarily support the hierarchical oppressor. [1][2] “Diversity of tactics,” distinct from usual strategic and risk-benefit considerations, is a compromise position between activists that have not only different tactics (direct action versus non-violent) but also opposite views about society (anarchism versus socialism, in the broad sense). This compromise serves the hierarchical system which causes the social injustices being verbally denounced by both groups.


DIVERSITY OF TACTICS

Note that within groups having identified a common enemy or target and a sufficiently common unbearable injustice, determinations of varieties and combinations of tactics and of which individuals will do what are the usual strategic and risk-benefit considerations, distinct from the “diversity of tactics” defined and discussed in the present essay.

“Diversity of tactics” is the position or principle whereby activist groups preferring different tactics of resistance against systemic injustice agree to not get in each other’s way, agree to not interfere or sabotage each other’s different chosen tactics.

It could arguably be stated bluntly as: “Don’t trash me for doing what is needed that you don’t dare do,” addressed to those who don’t agree that it’s needed.

Rabble.ca diplomatically puts it this way [3]: “Generally, those who criticize a diversity of tactics believe that such a philosophy fails to provide a critical analysis of protest strategies that may in fact harm the broader cause. Conversely, those who support a diversity of tactics generally believe that criticism of others' type of protest harms the unity of the movement by undermining solidarity to the benefit of those whose policies and actions the movement resists.” (In the present essay, I argue that those who support it should stop supporting it…)

“Diversity of tactics” as an operational concept was developed as an attempt to resolve the tension between activists or demonstrators who employ non-violent methods (marching, slogans, theatre, sit-ins, etc.) and activists who employ so-called direct action (targeted property damage, taking down barricades, de-arresting co-activists, physically resisting police attacks, etc.).

Following “diversity of tactics,” activists at anti-globalization events (and other demonstrations) accept even fundamentally different tactics arising from opposing views of society [1][2][4] and rationalize this acceptance by advancing that the degree of risk that an activist takes is a personal decision based on a personal evaluation. They do not try to coerce others to take higher risks. They try to not have behaviours which would put other activists at higher risk.

The latter point is not black and white in the discourse. For example, some would argue that showing up at a demonstration puts all the demonstrators at higher risk by increasing the size of the demonstration thereby “provoking a police response” while others would argue that showing up helps to give safety in numbers. In the end, it is most often the police and their bosses who decide if demonstrators will be safe, if demonstrators will be attacked or not and the degree of force. [5]

“Diversity of tactics” arose as a response to the tension between pacifists and direct action anarchists. The majority pacifists mostly see the anarchists as a negative force that draws unneeded violent police response and that hijacks media attention away from a positive public opinion of most demonstrators and their cause. “Diversity of tactics” is used as a rallying call for liberal activists to join in accepting more radical methods of protest and resistance as part of an overall strategy. [6]

NOT JUST A DIFFERENCE OF TACTICS

It is a common misconception among activists advancing “diversity of tactics” to consider all tactics as contributing to fighting injustice and only differentiated by level of risk. In fact, direct action and pacifist tactics are fundamentally different both in the underlying assumptions about how societal change occurs and in the underlying beliefs about society’s structure and about how society should be structured. [1][2][4][7][8][9][10]

The anarchists believe that hierarchy itself is the problem and that hierarchy allows concentrated power to generate and maintain social injustices including war, occupation, colonization, economic predation, wholesale exploitation and social engineering. The goal of the anarchists is to flatten the non-democratic hierarchical pyramid as much as possible to provide space for individual agency (participatory democracy, self-organization, decentralized and distributed control of resources and the economy, etc.). [11][12]

The pacifists or socialists (in the broad sense) or “progressives” or liberals believe that justice can be achieved and maintained by the present system of social organization which only needs to be fixed and improved but not by flattening the hierarchical pyramid.

They believe that the system is amenable to being adjusted and improved via opinion input from citizens. They believe that present First World governments can be directed by “critical masses” of citizens’ opinions. They therefore design their actions around “education” (read progressive propaganda), opinion forming, and mass expression via the corporate media, petitions, street demonstrations and so on. They also often have vested interests with workers unions, NGOs, and so on, that are very much tied to the system. Most of the “improvements” they seek involve strengthening the system’s hierarchical control and increasing the system’s legitimacy (e.g., progressive legislation with more control).

WHO’S THE CRIMINAL?

In fact, our First World “free and democratic” system is practicing horrendous crimes with virtual complete complicity of First World populations. Canadian crimes include, a continuing genocide against aboriginal peoples [13], a geopolitical war in Afghanistan, support for the US Empire, support for the genocidal and apartheid state policies of Israel, overturning the democratic popular government in Haiti, corporate and finance predation throughout the world, an immoral prison system used to maintain social inequities [14], vast structural social inequities with mass public health consequences, mass civil rights violations perpetrated at will and without consequences for the decision makers (e.g., G20-Toronto), mass indoctrination and pacification of the youth, continual social engineering manipulation, universal pharmaceutical and medical establishment predation … [15]

Since the system is doing this, the system should be stopped, or at least impeded. Since we condone the system by our compliance at school, at work and on the streets every day, we are responsible at least for our own oppressions (wage slavery, financial debt extortion, professional indoctrination, mental environment control, criminalized lifestyle behaviour, etc.). Every time we collaborate with the non-democratic economy and the illegitimate control structures in our lives we strengthen the system and enable its criminality.

Those who do not resist and impede collaborate.

The struggle between direct action and pacifism is a struggle between enemies, between resistors and collaborators. This needs to be clear. [16]

CONCLUSION

“Diversity of tactics” is an accommodation that saves pacifists from being exposed and perturbed in their collaboration with and support for a violently oppressive system. Anarchists using “diversity of tactics” seek protection from the majority pacifists or seek to at least not be attacked by the “pacifists”. But anarchists are looking in the wrong place for support. The enemy (the collaborator) cannot provide support. The enemy can only provide coercion, co-optation, and elimination.

Collaborators will break ranks with the enemy only to the extent that the heat is turned up. You can’t influence with words alone – the needed words acquire meaning through confrontation. You cannot make revolutionary changes by collaborating and accommodating.

We individually need to act everywhere we can, especially where it counts, including on pacifist collaborators, and not only at globalist propaganda events. There is no solidarity without individuals who resist and there can be solidarity only to the extent that there are individuals who resist. [4][8][9][16]


Endnotes

[1] “Pacifism as Pathology” by Ward Churchill, 1986.

[2] “How non-violence protects the state” by Peter Gelderloos, 2007.

[3] “Panel Discussion: A Diversity of Tactics - A Diversity of Opinions”, rabble.ca, 2010.

[4] “The Activist Wars” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2009.

[5] “They’re not just pigs” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.

[6] "In defence of the diversity of tactics" by Alex Hundert, 2010.

[7] “Against Chomsky” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2008.

[8] “G20-Toronto property damage is a good thing” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.

[9] “On the racism and pathology of left progressive First-World activism” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.

[10] “G20-Toronto and lost sovereignty - A critical examination of the role of the CCLA” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.

[11] “The Basic Bakunin – Writtings 1869-1871” by Mikhail Bakunin.

[12] “Anarchy” by Errico Malatesta, 1891. English translation by Vernon Richards, 1974, last revised 2001. (Richards’ translation essential.)

[13] “A little matter of genocide – Holocaust and denial in the Americas 1492 to the present” by Ward Churchill, 1997.
(Available at Google Books, http://books.google.ca/)

[14] “About the obscenity of the legal mind and its grotesque displays of arrogance” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.

[15] “Some big lies of science” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.

[16] “Roundabout as conflict-avoidance versus Malcolm X’s psychology of liberation” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.


Denis G. Rancourt was a tenured and full professor of physics at the University of Ottawa in Canada. He practiced several areas of science which were funded by a national agency and ran an internationally recognized laboratory. He published over 100 articles in leading scientific journals. He developed popular activism courses and was an outspoken critic of the university administration and a defender of student and Palestinian rights. He was fired for his dissidence in 2009 by a president who is a staunch supporter of Israeli policy. [See rancourt.academicfreedom.ca]

Roundabout as conflict-avoidance versus Malcolm X’s psychology of liberation

by Denis G. Rancourt
This essay was first posted on the Activist Teacher blog.

In the present essay I introduce the general notion of “roundabout” as a mechanism of conflict avoidance used by privileged social justice activists. I then contrast this pseudo-liberation activism with the needed true liberation activism of Malcolm X, which I argue to be consistent with the model of liberation of Freire.

INTRODUCTION

The now familiar concept of “pacifism as pathology” was introduced by Ward Churchill as the central characteristic of First-World middleclass so-called social justice activism. Churchill argued from history that all liberations were leveraged through violence and proposed that pacifism as cowardice was pathology. [1]

Gandhi stated that it was better to practice armed resistance than to use pacifism as an excuse for cowardice [2]. Both men (Churchill and Ghandi) saw acceptance of and self-justification for one’s (legal or circumstantial) slavery as pathology.

Paulo Freire’s work showed that all hierarchies, no matter how cushioned in comfort, are violent and oppressive and argued that we could only fight our own oppression – that “solidarity” meant standing side by side with those fighting our same oppression. Freire advanced that all liberations had to be rooted in and driven by the struggles of the oppressed themselves no matter how underprivileged and that inter-social-class “solidarity” was insignificant and limited to rare individuals who joined in battle on the front lines. [3]

Churchill concentrated on the use of pacifism as an excuse to avoid the needed direct confrontation with the oppressive system. He and others have deconstructed and exposed First World pacifism as avoidance; including mainstream life-style environmentalism, ecological or economic isolationism, love ideologies, and so on, when taken to be activisms in themselves. These authors did not explore the main creative active strategies whereby pacifism can be enacted.

I explore the latter strategies of evasive action (roundabout) used by the most activist-minded sector of concerned citizens.

My goal is to provide a radical self-criticism for dedicated anti-hierarchy (social justice) activists to help ensure that we are as effective as possible and are not simply fooling ourselves. I hope that my analysis will help us to more easily recognize when we are fooling ourselves and wasting our energies and will help us to identify optimally effective outlooks and strategies.

EXAMPLES OF ROUNDABOUT

Education and progressive legislation

Here is an example. A visible minority suffers racism. As a way of avoiding effective direct challenges to this racism, members of this visible minority ally themselves (in “solidarity”) with privileged social justice activist whites in order to train the majority societal group away from overt racist behaviour using social engineering managed by the establishment - using sponsored “education” and progressive legislation.

As a result, a privileged class of educated and integrated whites become self-conscious about racist behaviour and self-sensor their racist expression, the establishment strengthens its illusion of fairness, and the minority looses its ability and perceived legitimacy for effective direct daily confrontations against now-more-covert racism.

A victim in this particular roundabout is the collaborating visible minority because it puts its efforts in collaborating and its hopes in the social engineering rather than practice its liberation. It denies itself praxis (in the sense of Freire) and instead integrates itself more fully with the oppressive dominant hierarchy, thereby becoming more oppressed and more of an oppressor. Other victims are the lower social class individuals of the visible minority who loose actual solidarity with the now more integrated higher social class individuals of the visible minority and who are saddled with a stronger establishment more able to deflect their legitimate and persistent interests.

The above described roundabout is common as a general model for any oppressed group in a “free and democratic” First World setting: women, queers, blacks, language or cultural minorities, working class, working poor, homeless, disabled, non-status, elderly, disease-infected, professional workers, students, migrant workers, colonized aboriginals, prisoners, consumers, wage earners, tenants, home owners, single fathers, single mothers, and so on.

The above example involves a social class divide of the oppressed group but the class divide is not an essential feature because the roundabout is equally effective when there is no underclass of the oppressed group.

The essential feature of this roundabout is that the collaboration with the establishment, with the hierarchical system of control, is a conscious or unconscious diversion (in terms of personal psychology and personal resource allocation) away from effective direct confrontations, away from the praxis of liberation and away from Freire’s needed revolt and authentic rebellion.

The dominant group partner in this roundabout also avoids its own immediate oppressions, instead of its members practicing their liberation. As a result of this dedicated exercise of avoidance, members of the dominant group partner in the roundabout are perpetually depressed, in search of “hope”, and routinely experience “burn out” despite self-identifying as privileged. This is because the authentically concerned dominant group partners (as opposed to the cynical higher-hierarchical-level dominant group partners such as law and policy makers) are attempting to removed themselves from their own pain and have denied themselves any possibility of directly and effectively addressing their own immediate oppression.

Organizing and politics

Another example of roundabout is when a concerned and sensitized individual, often burdened with survival guilt associated with his/her relative privilege and damaged by an institutionalization (school, work, etc.) against which he/she has no personal experience of effective resistance, identifies an injustice needing to be redressed and launches into “organizing” as a substitute for immediate and direct action, as a substitute for initiating a praxis of liberation focussed on one’s own oppression.

This type of organizing is based of recruiting membership, education regarding the issues, building a growing pool of progressive opinion, and so on, but it guards itself against “radical” actions that would scare off potential allies and clings instead to the mythology of a critical mass of opinion as a motor for societal change. [4][5]

In contrast, organizing that supports liberation is driven by the need for efficient learning, protection and power amplification in a group of individuals already joined in solidarity via their practices of liberation. It is an organizing that is an organic part of the praxis, not a holding pattern of risk and confrontation avoidance.

Deferring societal agency

In another roundabout the concerned and sensitized individual makes a conscious decision to temporarily sacrifice himself/herself to fully integrate the system and to seek advancement within the hierarchy with the rationalization that he/she will be more able to make positive change once a sufficient degree of power and influence is achieved.

The nature of a hierarchy is of course such that this is impossible. The rare individuals who break free from the top layers are expelled from the establishment. The other climbers serve the system astonishingly well or blame themselves for failure and drop out if they cannot.

The sacrifice of willing integration is a large price to pay if the individual does not discover rebellion and creative anti-hierarchical sabotage as methods to change the system from within. Workers and students play the system to survive and their suffering is evident in absenteeism (both physical and mental), indifference, detachment, cynicism, escapism, self-destruction, and so on.

This process and these difficulties are described by Schmidt for the case of professional workers [6]. Adapted to our schooling, this is the story of our institutionalization into the hierarchy, into an economy controlled by concentrated power. In this sense, student liberation during the developmental years would be a most fertile ground for societal transformation [7]. This is why schools are guarded from outside influence and from ideological divergence as rigorously or more than prisons. [8]

Anytime the individual substitutes direct self-defence using his/her body, language, personal influence in community and personal power at school or at work with some indirect or circuitous make-work near-zero-risk scheme that involves going along or convincing others to also not act, then the individual is practicing roundabout rather than liberation activism.

MALCOLM X ON LIBERATION SPYCHOLOGY

The Black Panther Party (originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defence) was founded in 1966, one year after the murder of Malcolm X. The spectre of such an organized and focussed resistance was the main concrete driving force which led to significant civil rights gains for blacks. The Black Panther Party was eliminated by the white state’s (FBI) political assassination unit known as COINTELPRO which was also involved in the Malcolm X assassination. Today US blacks disproportionately populate the lowest economic class and US prisons.

In the words of Rev. Albert Cleage [9]:

“Malcolm X was tremendously important, beyond our comprehension today … Malcolm laid down certain basic principles that we can never forget. He changed the whole course. The first basic principle that Malcolm laid down that we can’t forget is this: The white man is your enemy. That is a basic principle, we can’t forget it. I don’t care what else they drag in from wherever they drag it – remember one thing, Malcolm taught one truth: The white man is our enemy. We can’t get away from it, and if we accept and understand that one basic truth, his life was not lived in vain. Because upon that one basic truth we can build a total philosophy, a total course of action for struggle. Because that was the basic confusion which distorted the lives of black people, with corrupted the movements of black people.”

“He didn’t just say it … he went out and he lived it. He asked for moments of confrontation. He said we have got to break our identification, we can’t go through life identifying with the white man or his government. … We must break our identification with the enemy, we must confront him, and we must realize that conflict and violence are necessary parts of a struggle against an enemy – that is what he taught. Conflict, struggle, and violence are not to be avoided. Don’t be afraid of them…”

This foundational principle that in the hierarchical oppression of blacks your enemy is your enemy can be generalized to any particular hierarchical oppression and to all oppressions by hierarchies.

The oppressor by nature is your enemy. You cannot collaborate with your enemy devoted to your oppression and come out ahead. At best, you will be used and transformed into your enemy.

Malcolm X’s psychology of liberation is one where you recognize that the oppressor is an enemy that you cannot integrate, where you know that this enemy can only be deterred by your strength and your willingness to defend yourself.

In this psychology, like in Freire’s, you do not fight the enemy in order to replace him in a hierarchy. You fight for liberation, not for an opportunity to create your own system of oppression. But you fight. You understand that this is an enemy and that all hierarchies can only violently oppress.

If it’s not clear that you are oppressed or that your oppressor is your enemy, then not only are you trapped and confused but you also protect and serve the oppressor. And you act against all those who are oppressed by the oppressor. You collaborate.

One does not like to live during a time of war and one does not like to have enemies. But this is a time of war and you are harmed by the system, denied your full humanity, as surely as the million directly killed in Iraq and as surely as those held in the open air prison known as Gaza and illegally maintained by Israel.

By not fighting your own oppression directly as an individual person you protect the same system that practices these war crimes. By not understanding in your pores that this system and those who sustain, protect and project it are your enemy until they stop, by not understanding this, you are co-opted into collaborating and into denying yourself your own liberation.

You can’t even start a praxis of liberation until you start to recognize the enemy. And you can’t sustain the struggle without knowing who the enemy is and that he is the enemy.

There is an us and them. You are oppressed and you have an oppressor. Indeed, you are oppressed by an entire hierarchical system of oppression. You target where you can best defend yourself, where you will inflict the most punishment. Call it punitive justice.

As soon as you loose sight that you are dealing with an enemy, then you are part of the oppressor. All the internal and external forces will make every attempt to confuse you on this point and to buy or to force your cooperation. In particular, those who invest in roundabout will vehemently pressure and coerce you to follow them because you represent a threat to their psychological investment [4][5].

CONCLUSION

If I keep my individual personal agency, my direct ability to have influence, my direct bodily ability to defend myself against my oppressor understood to be my enemy, at the point of my strongest connection to my oppressor, then I will not partake in roundabout. I will have all my available resources for my praxis of liberation which will naturally include organizing and community.

Endnotes:

[1] “Pacifism as Pathology” by Ward Churchill, 1986.

[2] "Resolving the Israel-Palestine Conflict: What we can learn from Gandhi" by Norman G. Finkelstein, 2009.

[3] “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” by Paulo Freire, 1970.

[4] “On the racism and pathology of left progressive First-World activism” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.

[5] “The Activist Wars” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2009.

[6] “Disciplined Minds” by Jeff Schmidt, 2000.

[7] “Need for and Practice of Student Liberation” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.

[8] “The Student as Nigger” by Jerry Farber, 1969.

[9] "Myths about Malcolm X" by Rev. Albert Cleage, speech delivered in Detroit, February 24, 1967.

See many RELATED POSTS on the Activist Teacher blog

Denis G. Rancourt was a tenured and full professor of physics at the University of Ottawa in Canada. He practiced several areas of science which were funded by a national agency and ran an internationally recognized laboratory. He published over 100 articles in leading scientific journals. He developed popular activism courses and was an outspoken critic of the university administration and a defender of student and Palestinian rights. He was fired for his dissidence in 2009 by a president who is a staunch supporter of Israeli policy. [See rancourt.academicfreedom.ca]

CO2 emission from fossil fuel burning is not more than from breathing

by Denis G. Rancourt
This essay was first posted on the Activist Teacher blog.


The present (2010) rate of CO2 emission from fossil fuel burning, expressed as kilograms of carbon per year, is 0.8 x 10^13 kg-C/y (where, in scientific notation, 10^13 = 10,000,000,000,000 with thirteen zeros). This includes all fossil fuel CO2 emissions; from petroleum, coal, natural gas, and cement production.

My calculation (below) shows that this rate of CO2 emission is roughly equal to the CO2 emissions from the simple breathing of air of humans and domestic animals (humans, cattle, swine, sheep, goats, chickens, pets, etc.), so-called anthropogenic (from humankind) animal breathing.

Energy for life comes from the burning of food fuel. Organic matter is burned using the oxygen that we breathe and this controlled combustion produces CO2 gas and H2O water. Organic matter can be represented by the generic formula C-H2-O and the breathing (or burning) reaction is simply the reverse of the photosynthesis reaction as:

C-H2-O + O2 = H2O + CO2 + energy.

In this reaction, each C in organic matter produces one CO2 molecule on burning.

The metabolic rate of an animal (or living being) is the rate of energy expenditure needed to sustain life functions (such as the pumping of blood, etc.) and to power any work done by the animal (such as walking, running, lifting, etc.)

The metabolic rate for humans primarily depends on age, sex, and body weight. Representative values (somewhat similar for all large warm blooded animals) are: 1 Watt per kilogram of body weight (W/kg) for sleep, 4 W/kg for walking, and 18 W/kg for running. Below we use a representative average value for all humans and domestic animals to be 5 W/kg.

Our task therefore is to evaluate the metabolic rate of energy use requirements of all humans (6.7 billion individuals) and their domestic animals (1.3 billion cows, etc.), in order to use the above chemical reaction to obtain the needed global rate of O2 consumption which, in turn is equal (on a per molecule basis) to the rate of global CO2 production from anthropogenic animal breathing.

In evaluating the energy required for burning organic matter (food), a most convenient approximation is to note that the energy produced is proportional to the amount of oxygen consumed. The proportionality is fairly constant for all food types and is approximately twenty kilojoules of energy per litre of oxygen gas at standard atmospheric conditions: 20 kJ/L. (One litre of gas at normal pressure and temperature conditions contains 0.04 moles of the gas molecules. One mole is 6.02 x 10^23 molecules.)

Now rather than use living body weight in the metabolic rate formula, we use the same convention as for biomass and express all human and domestic animal body weights in kilograms of carbon, kg-C. Dry weight (water removed) is approximately 30% of living body weight and approximately half of the weight of dry natural organic matter is carbon.

This leads to the convenient final formula:

R-CO2 = Rmet x Mbio x [5.5 kg/Wy]

where R-CO2 is the calculated rate of CO2 emission (expressed in kilograms of carbon per year, kg-C/y) corresponding to an amount Mbio (expressed in kg-C) of breathing biomass (whatever humans or domestic animals one wishes to count) and where the factor of 5.5 kg/Wy is in units of kilograms per Watt-year.

Using Rmet = 5 W/kg and Mbio for all humans and domestic animals on the planet equal to 4 x 10^11 kg-C, we obtain R-CO2 = 1 x 10^13 kg-C/y which is comparable in value to the present rate of CO2 emission from fossil fuel burning of 0.8 x 10^13 kg-C/y.

The global CO2 emission rate from fossil fuel burning is comparable to the rate of CO2 emission from global anthropogenic animal breathing. Our fossil fuel burning contributes the same amount to atmospheric CO2 as our breathing and the breathing of our domestic animals.

Furthermore, if we consider that all living things breathe (admittedly some microbes don’t breathe oxygen) and that Earth’s (living) biomass is approximately 10^15 kg-C, then total global breathing may well exceed the CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning by a factor of between ten and one thousand times greater.

I hope that the present comparison to the natural act of breathing will serve to encourage a re-examination of the misguided notion that the trace gas and essential nutrient known as CO2 could be of any danger to humans or to Earth’s ecological systems.

The day CO2 became a pollutant was a sad day for both establishment science and First-World middleclass canned policy consumers.

HIGHLY RELATED ARTICLE:
"Taking CO2 Seriously" by Noble and Rancourt

RELATED ESSAYS BY THE SAME AUTHOR:
Some big lies of science
Global warming: Truth or dare?
Is the burning of fossil fuel a significant planetary activity?

Denis G. Rancourt was a tenured and full professor of physics and environmental science researcher at the University of Ottawa in Canada. He practiced several areas of science which were funded by a national agency and ran an internationally recognized laboratory. He published over 100 articles in leading scientific journals. He developed popular activism courses and was an outspoken critic of the university administration and a defender of student and Palestinian rights. He was fired for his dissidence in 2009 by a president who is a staunch supporter of Israeli policy. [See rancourt.academicfreedom.ca]

Is the burning of fossil fuel a significant planetary activity?

by Denis G. Rancourt
This essay was first posted on the Activist Teacher blog.



After all, the Earth is a planet. Is even the presence of humans significant on the rough and diverse thin surface of this planet?

We certainly make every effort to see ourselves as significant on this spinning ball in space. We like to point out that the lights from our cities can be seen from our extra-atmospheric “spaceships” at night and that we have deforested continents and reduced the populations of large wild mammals and of fishes but is all this really significant in the planetary web known as the biosphere?

INSIGNIFICANCE OF FOSSIL FUEL BURNING ENERGY RELEASE

The present (2010) historic maximum of anthropogenic (caused by humans) fossil fuel burning is only 8% or so of global primary production (GPP) (both expressed as kilograms of carbon per year, kg-C/y). GPP is the rate at which new biomass (living matter) is produced on the whole planet. And of course all biomass can in principle be considered fuel that could be burned with oxygen (O2) to produce CO2 gas, H2O water, energy, and an ash residue.

This shows the extent to which anthropogenic energy production from fossil fuel burning is small in comparison to the sun’s energy delivery to Earth, since biomass primary production results from the sun’s energy via photosynthesis.

The sun’s rate of raw energy delivery to the planet is, in turn, much greater (more than one thousand times greater) than the energy captured by GPP because most of the sun’s light energy is not used for photosynthesis but instead is either sent directly back out into space or produces fluid convection, wind, rain, water currents, erosion, etc., and because photosynthesis itself, even for the light directly striking a plant’s photoactive surface, is highly inefficient (less than 2% of incident light energy is converted to biomass chemical bond energy).

So, on the global scale of things fossil fuel burning energy release is miniscule (8% of 0.07% = 0.006%).

Given all the fuss that is made about the present rate of fossil fuel burning (2010; 0.8 x 10^13 kg-C/y where 10^13 = 10,000,000,000,000 with thirteen zeros), it is important to keep in mind that this represents an amount of CO2 release comparable to or somewhat less than the CO2 released by simple breathing from humankind and its domestic animals [LINK]. The combined biomass of humankind and its domestic animals (cattle, sheep, goats, chickens, pigs, pets, etc.) is in turn estimated to be only 0.04% of Earth’s living biomass (all expressed as kilograms of carbon, kg-C), which is a lot more CO2-producing breathing. (Ants, for example, are estimated to represent ten to one hundred times the biomass of humankind and ants can be argued to have “transformed” the planet and its ecology far more than humans.)

The corporate-finance-military-empire interest in fossil fuel is that it is concentrated, extractable and compositionally homogeneous enough to be amenable to industrial processing, that its demand can be created and its supply controlled, and that new and existing alternative transportation technologies or strategies can be sabotaged and are not presently competitive on the geopolitical military battlefront (although hydrogen-based fuels are presently used for rocket propulsion).

INSIGNIFICANCE OF FOSSIL FUEL AS A CARBON POOL

The total pool of fossil fuel carbon itself, which has been burned to date (2010), is not large compared to organic and non-mineral carbon on the planet. It is 3.7 x 10^14 kg-C.

By comparison, the present total mass of CO2 as carbon in the atmosphere is 8.6 x 10^14 kg-C where CO2 is a trace gas with present concentration 390 ppmv (parts per million by volume) and where the atmosphere is the smallest global reservoir of carbon on the planet.

Even as Earth’s atmosphere goes the present concentration of CO2 is historically low compared to biomass highly productive periods during which CO2 concentrations where as high as 20 times the present level. Past bio-productive periods are part of the reason we have fossil fuels today.

The present low concentration of CO2 is growth limiting for plants under conditions where other essential nutrients do not first limit growth. Indeed, experiments have shown that today’s plants grow up to 50% faster than under present conditions when the CO2 concentration of the ambient atmosphere is 1000 ppmv, all other factors remaining the same and non-growth limiting.

Beyond the atmospheric carbon reservoir, the present planetary biomass alone (1 x 10^15 kg-C) is approximately three times the amount of total post-industrialization fossil fuel burned to date where even this biomass carbon is only carbon in living organisms.

In addition there is at least 10 times more carbon contained in non-living organic matter than in biomass – in organic detritus, soils, bogs, natural waters, lake sediments, marine sediments, and so on. For example, from my own research, the boreal forest (the largest ecosystem on Earth) contains millions of lakes that have not even been counted. These virtually unstudied lakes have accumulated organic-rich bottom sediments (preserved by anoxia) that have not yet been included in global carbon accounting studies.

Furthermore, there is approximately fifty times more dissolved carbon in ocean water than contained as CO2 in the atmosphere.

These bio-available carbon pools (biomass, organic matter, atmosphere, ocean water) do not include geological stores and sources from volcanoes and active geothermal sites. Volcanic activity, in particular, is unpredictable and has been highly variable in intensity since life burst onto the planet (billions of year ago), with often dramatic impacts on global ecology.

In summary, the total amount of post-industrial fossil fuel burned to date (and expressed as kilograms of carbon) represents less than 1% of the global bio-available carbon pools.

More importantly, bio-available carbon is a minor constituent of the Earth’s surface environment and one that is readily buffered and exchanged between compartments without significant consequences to the diversity and quantity of life on the planet. The known history of life on Earth (over the last billions of years) is unambiguous on this point.

Left progressive First-World elitist and disconnected policy consumers and service intellectuals need to recalibrate their sense of self-importance and correct the blindness that this sense produces.

WHERE IS THE FOSSIL CARBON GOING?

(Falsely) assuming direct input and no other inputs or outputs, the total post-industrial fossil fuel burning to date (2010) should have produced a post-industrial increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration from 275 ppmv (parts per million by volume) to 500 ppmv or so. Instead, the measured increase to 390 ppmv is half the “expected” amount.

Likewise, on the dynamic time scale of one year, the present (2010) rate of fossil fuel burning CO2 release to the atmosphere (4.0 ppmv/y) is twice the present measured rate of increase of actual atmospheric CO2 concentration (2.1 ppmv/y).

A factor of two (in both the amount and the annual rate) is not nothing. This factor of two is in fact an underestimate because the post-industrial deforestation would also have contributed CO2 to the atmosphere. Where is the anthropogenic CO2 going?

It is too great an amount to have gone into biomass but it could have spurred plant and phytoplankton growth and gone into organic matter?

It is generally believed to have been quickly dissolved into the ocean water. This has in turn led to tenuous proposals (and an associated research industry) that the mean ocean water has been acidified by 0.1 pH units and that this postulated acidification alone may cause ecological change putting certain shell-forming organisms at risk. To date there has been no direct experimental validation of a change in ocean pH, nor has there been a conclusive demonstration that ecological damage arises from increased ocean acidity.

This ocean acidification side show on the global warming science bandwagon, involving major nation research centers and international collaborations, is interesting to compare with the 1970s-1980s hoax of boreal forest lake acidification. [1][2]

More importantly, scientists know virtually nothing about the dynamic carbon exchange fluxes that occur on all the relevant time and lengths scales to say anything definitive about how atmospheric CO2 arises and is exchanged in interaction with the planet’s ecological systems. We are barely at the point of being able to ask intelligent questions.

As with most areas of science and medicine, however, despite our gargantuan ignorance we are unfortunately able to sound knowledgeable and able to write impressive grant proposals and governmental reports. It’s a dangerous place to be for society when you have a demonstrated bad habit of serving powerful economic interests. Common sense and independent thinking are going to have to prevail if we do not want to continue with this circus.

WILL WE SURVIVE GLOBAL WARMING AND CLIMATE CHAOS?

The present foray about carbon is of course motivated by the ongoing debate between “warmists” and “deniers”.

What use to be called “global warming” is now dubbed “climate change”. The climate modeller crew went from proposing out of thin air (otherwise known as the amplification hypothesis) that an anthropogenic increase in trace gas and essential nutrient CO2 would cause global warming to proposing that it would cause an increase in extreme weather events and in abnormally large regional climate changes.

The change in name appeared at about the time when many statisticians were pointing out in published papers that the global mean temperature was an ill-defined quantity. That’s technical language for “has not and cannot be reliably determined”. That pretty much put an end to all the nice temperature graphs.

There are many problems with the revised climate modeller crew story. To name a few (see also [2]):

(1) There is no justification beyond conjecture for the “amplification hypothesis”.

(2) The models are vast oversimplifications of reality and the model predictions are sensitive both to the values of ill-constrained (not known) needed parameters and to changes that would make the models more realistic.

(3) All the most dramatic regional climate and ice-cover changes can be explained simply using plausible known processes without the use of computer models. [2]

(4) Historic climatologists and climate statisticians who have published on the topic have concluded that recent weather and regional climate changes are not out of statistical norms.

The astounding recent exposure (known as climategate [3]) of wholesale corruption in the climate modelling and climate data massage scientific establishment only muzzled the warmist corporate media frenzy (as part of the cover up) but did not stop the mega-financier-driven push towards creating the largest ever paper economy anchored in “cap and trade” and “carbon credits” [4], nor did it dampen the enthusiasm and conviction of the associated gravy train NOGs and special-sector public-opinion-dependent green associations, groups, and political parties.

This would be the largest financial scam in history (barring only the fractional reserve private banking money monopoly), taxing life itself and non-First-World industrial development under a militarily backed extortion regime of global extent. The powerful have eyed the prize and are not about to let go without a sustained run for the money and for global control of aspiring economic competitors.

First World left progressives, with their pathological avoidance of conflict [5], would help usher in this scheme as a way to convince themselves that they are buffering corporate exploitation and destructive resource extraction, while continuing to not directly or effectively confront corporations and the governments that work for corporations.

CONCLUSION

Whereas humankind has relatively little impact on the quantity and diversity of life in the biosphere, humankind is the main determinant factor in the welfare and health of humans and human communities. The health and welfare of human communities in turn are the main factors that determine the extent to which humans destroy the environment.

There is no lack of examples. Brutal colonial rule and occupation transformed Africa into a continent of unsustainable practices and a war zone of resource extraction for powerful global players and collaborating local elites, at the expense of war-torn populations. American militarily backed corporate occupations in Latin America have devastated the landscapes and the peoples. The mass insane agri-food corporate enterprise in North America is based on a most efficient genocide of the aboriginal peoples, the survivors of which are in prisons and on controlled reserves. And so on.

For left progressives to collaborate with First World governments that practice global extortion and geopolitical wars in order to pass carbon schemes to undemocratically manage and control the developments of non-First-World communities and sovereign states is obscene, racist, and cruelly cynical.

I would hope that concerned citizens would instead join in thoroughly ridiculing the carbon fixation of our service intellectuals and myopic-at-best politicians in order that this latest scam and similar ones go the way of the dodo. [6] Let us focus on “stop killing and exploiting”. [7]

Endnotes

[1] “Some big lies of science” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.

[2] “Global warming: Truth or dare?” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2007.

[3] Climategate warming bubble burst – YouTube videos

[4] “The corporate climate coup” by David F. Noble, 2007, 2010.

[5] “On the racism and pathology of left progressive First-World activism” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.

[6] For an essay about the power of public opinion and image maintenance vulnerability see “Psycho-biological basis for image leverage and the case of Israel” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.

[7] “Voter psychology and the bloodless revolution to end bloodshed” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.

Other essays by the same author:
http://rancourt.academicfreedom.ca/blogs-etc/essays.html

Same author's blog specifically about climate:
http://climateguy.blogspot.com/

Denis G. Rancourt was a tenured and full professor of physics and environmental science researcher at the University of Ottawa in Canada. He practiced several areas of science which were funded by a national agency and ran an internationally recognized laboratory. He published over 100 articles in leading scientific journals. He developed popular activism courses and was an outspoken critic of the university administration and a defender of student and Palestinian rights. He was fired for his dissidence in 2009 by a president who is a staunch supporter of Israeli policy. [See rancourt.academicfreedom.ca]