The Great Trap (guest post)

For a change, I'm publishing a guest post. I'll do that for people who are broadly in agreement with my thinking. As a very brief aside, my thinking on issues does evolve and change...

The guest post is written by Miguel Martinez who lives in Florence’s Oltrarno district, where he is involved in community organisation and manages a blog in Italian.

The post reproduced below was first published here in Italian on 31.7.23.

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A few days ago, on the train, I opened a booklet, published by a small anarchist publishing house. I read two pages and suddenly it becomes clear to me what I have been trying to formulate for some years.

I'll give you the title of the booklet later - let me jump straight to the conclusion.

There are corporations that have trillions to invest in shaking up the world in order to make even more trillions. The trillions must always be more, and so the process inevitably involves constant acceleration.
There are state organisations which (for example) build the highways on which the trucks of the destroyers pass. And they put in jail those who would prevent their construction.
There are media and universities that have been extolling all this as progress and growth for a couple of centuries.
Extracting a planet's finite resources at increasing speed; turning these resources faster and faster into products, which become waste faster and faster, can only quickly lead to catastrophe.
This is something that the small band of environmentalists have known for decades.
Then at some point the obvious was also realised by those who are paid to advise investors.
Who have realised for some years now that even the catastrophe they themselves have created can be an investment.
During the Iran-Iraq war, there were Italians who got rich selling missiles to both sides. And there were Italians who got rich selling anti-missile systems to both contenders. And I know one who sold a million crutches to the Iraqi health system. There’s money to be made even from the bones you’ve smashed.
So for a few years now, instead of hiding the impending catastrophe (as they had been doing for decades), they have been wrapping it up and imposing it under the name of climate crisis.
Because for the climate crisis they invented the remedy, the ecological transition.
Now, the term climate crisis allows them to focus everything on a single symptom, global warming.
Due to a single cause, the increased concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Solvable, therefore, with an immense investment: trillions for the total renovation of the world's car fleet, the reconstruction of buildings, the invention of synthetic foods and, above all, the digital control of every inch of the planet, with a decorative garnish of wind turbines and a lucrative trade in new indulgences, the carbon credits.
And in all likelihood, they will eventually erect a solar radiation management technosystem (geoengineering) to darken the skies and see what effect it has.
The money for an enrichment of this magnitude, in the end, can only come from the state, either directly or through impositions on citizens.
In order to convince citizens to pay, the corporate/state/media complex promotes the new great investment, by the same means by which it has always promoted that other great investment, which are wars: by arousing Passions and proclaiming an Emergency.
Now, let's be clear: all this will simply add to the ongoing destruction.
They will continue to extract oil as much and more than before, but the fields we used to take food from will become biofuel crops.
Let us remember that the European Union spends 17 billion of our money every year to pay Italians to destroy their forests that are struggling to revive, and transform them ecologically into 'biomass'. So it will do nothing to prevent environmental catastrophe and probably won't even reduce CO2 in the atmosphere. But this is irrelevant in the face of the opportunity for a whole new field of investment.
In the face of this picture, humanity is divided into two, which are essentially the two homefront sides in any war: the Patriots and the Shirkers. Where the 'Fatherland', in a Global Market, is now that round cartoon figure called “the Planet”.
The Patriots are those who are Informed - that is, they listen to the news carefully; they know that the Enemy CO2 is at the gates; and they are willing to make Sacrifices for a Better Future. What sacrifices are to be made, the Generals, the Experts, the Technicians will tell us.
The Shirkers, on the other hand, are those who only look after their own little garden, who close their eyes to the disaster, who instead of being informed, are misinformed.
Obviously, the Shirkers have to be educated, but if after a certain point, they continue to pretend not to understand, they have to be dealt with firmly.
Now, let me tell you about a friend of mine, who is like many people I know in Tuscany.
She has had the same car for 26 years, and has driven only 100,000 kilometres in it so far, because when she can, she walks. However, she lives in the mountains, and she can't go everywhere on foot.
She only eats organic food, much of it picked by her in the garden, and she does not touch meat because she does not want to feed the companies that destroy the earth with intensive livestock farming.
At home, she uses heating very sparingly partly because she is certainly not rich and partly because she does not want to pollute; and it goes without saying that she does not use air conditioning.
To clean she uses vinegar as much as possible so as not to pollute with synthetic products, so she uses the rinse water to water the garden.
And she has a mobile phone that's even less smart than mine.
True, she has had many trees cut down, with all the books she reads.
Now, in order to make her 'eco-sustainable', the state is threatening to force her to enrich the corporation by buying a new car full of electronic gadgetry, turning her old one into a piece of rubbish; to put a meter in her house that spies on her consumption; to enrich the building materials companies by insulating her house at her expense, with money she does not have as a pensioner.
And by imposing regulations on her that will eventually force her - on pain of erasure from the human race - to use a smartphone made from minerals extracted from mines in the Congo and Australia and that sends her data day and night to a US-based corporation.
My friend is (moderately) an 'anthropogenic CO2 sceptic' or if you prefer, a 'climate denier'. She is by no means a sceptic of global environmental catastrophe, which she understands better than 95% of other Italians, and has studied for a lifetime.
I disagree with her on 'climate change', but I find our disagreement irrelevant.
The point is that every war is justified by a Myth.
A little-known piece of history: Italy occupied South Tyrol in 1918 on the grounds that it had been part of the Roman Empire, that Napoleon had called a piece of that region 'Upper Adige' in the manner of French departments, and that every place in the district had a “real” Italian name - the unpronounceable Gsies for example was “really” Casies.
One of the facts is true, one is irrelevant and the third is pure and simple invention: but together they constitute a Myth that justified the stabbing of the Austro-Hungarian ally in the back, the slaughter of 600,000 young Italian lives and the imposition of foreign rule over a population that had nothing Italian about it.
The so-called 'deniers' are a bit like certain South Tyroleans: they cling to the details of the Myth.
Someone rightly denounces a falsehood (like Casies), someone perhaps goes so far as to invent a counter-falsehood (like, South Tyrol was never Roman).
But it is clear that the problem is not the Myth.
It is the fact that the Myth served to legitimise the arrival of Italian soldiers, the closure of schools, the ban on language teaching, the privileges granted to immigrants from the rest of Italy, even re-writing the names on tombstones to make them look “Italian”.
Climate Change is a Myth - if you want my opinion, based on pretty solid facts, but packaged in this way, it hides the whole environmental catastrophe.
However, there is no point in wasting time arguing about how much is true or false in the Myth, because it creates a false division of humanity.
The Patriots are both the young men and women of Just Stop Oil who put their future at risk because they want to 'save the environment', and the bankers who fly business class from one end of the world to the other peddling carbon credit.
The Shirkers are both my Tuscan friend and the nasty characters who would park their SUVs even on a farmer's vegetable garden.
Let's stop arguing about how true the Myth is, and look at the War.
The same system that created the Ecological Catastrophe, is trying to impose the Ecological Transition on us.
And now back to the book I leafed through on the train.
Celia Izoard, Merci de changer de métier. Lettres aux humains qui robotisent le monde . Apparently never published in the English language, I read the Italian translation put out by the small but brave anarchist publisher Malamente.
In France, representatives of some of the most devastating global multinationals convinced the government to enact the 'Transport Orientation Law' in 2019, which among other things envisages the introduction of driverless vehicles.
Driverless vehicles are presented as “environmentally friendly” because a form of car-sharing can be envisaged, where instead of having lots of private cars, people can take and leave a car belonging to a multinational company. Shirkers will immediately ask, 'but why would car-sharing without a driver be more ecological than car-sharing with one?', but one should never debate shirkers, haters and fake-news spreaders.

And so it is not the Ministry of Transport, but the Ministry of Ecological Transition which gets to work:
"Teams of experts are now at work regulating licences, liability regimes and insurance policies. An arsenal of laws and protections must be created to limit data collection excesses and cyber attacks. Standardise the roads across Europe to make them more intelligible to the thousands of sensors in autonomous cars and trucks. Deploy a big data infrastructure with tens of thousands of antennas, servers and computers at the roadside to make the full potential of this technology work
by connecting traffic lights, information panels, vehicles to each other..."
It is easy to predict that the more convenient it is to travel, the more people will travel, and thus self-driving vehicles will increase traffic, the need for asphalting, the ecologically devastating construction of new cars, trucks and buses.
While they will allow the dismissal of millions of bus, truck and taxi drivers. Sure, if some of them commit suicide, there will be slightly less CO2 emissions....
But if you object to them nosing into your house to put an antenna on top of it, you are a selfish enemy of the environment, a Shirker who is sabotaging the survival of all humanity.
At this point, I really feel trapped.
If I dare to oppose the devastation of the environment, in any form, they will crush me as an enemy of the environment.
But it is from this trap that we must start.