Download (MP4 51MB)
Transcribe / Translate
This short piece explores the third premise of Derrick Jensen’s “Endgame”
The cast:
Tenant – Dave Markland
Pig – Dave Cunningham
Production assistance from Carlos Melendres
The music is by stig inge oy.
Social Media
END:CIV on DVD
END:CIV on Twitter
- endciv: END:CIV at #OccupyMelbourne tonight at 8PM - http://t.co/hZakztD4
- endciv: END:CIV with filmmaker Franklin López tonight in Melbourne at the Loophole Community Centre http://t.co/Kl9QDtgD
- endciv: Thousands of indigenous people rally against #Enbridge #Pipeline http://t.co/TWYnVky3 #OccupyVancouver
- endciv: Vote for END:CIV as your favorite Cinema Politica film of 2011 - http://t.co/gzBVxttM
- endciv: END:CIV tonight in Sydney with Director Franklin López 6:30pm at the Red Rattler http://t.co/AuT8nwkJ
great job frank!
this piece is incredible.
Several months ago, I read “A Language Older Than Words” by Derrick. It was a powerful, paradigm-shifting book. It raised many troubling questions which I need to seek the answers for myself.
However, I don’t like his examples. All of his examples involve a person stealing from another person. Shouldn’t society have a method of protecting me from someone stealing my things? Theoretically this is what the police are for, despite the level of corruption within and that which has been forced upon that institution.
Perhaps my idealism has been too influenced by one of my favorite books:”Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do” by Peter McWilliams. The premise is that an adult should be able to do whatever they want as long as they don’t harm a non-consenting adult’s person or their property. It puts forth the idea that the role of the police should solely be preventing violence to people or property. Or perhaps I’m unduly influenced by growing up in a capitalist society. I’ve been watching Stim for a while now as a wonderful, alternate source of what’s going on so I know my position may be slightly on the unpopular side here, but what the point of ideals if you don’t stick to them? (Sidenote: sticking to ideals does not mean that you will stick with them without discussion, rational thinking, or change – I am definitely not a fundlementalist. Our ideals and understanding of those ideals changes over time as we live life. etc etc.)
Regardless of the reasons, I have a hard time agreeing with Derrick’s examples of violence as something that is wrong. Perhaps the right or wrong isn’t his point and it’s just about the violence? Well then I’d disagree because I think that a minimal level is violence is needed in society to keep people safe. That doesn’t mean that I agree with the level of violence present in our society today. Not at all.
Assumptions. I think I need to watch the rest of his speech to put the clip into context.
Hey thanks for this, I really enjoyed it, nice points. I reported on my blog, keep’em coming!
Je n ai pas pu regarder jusqu au bout !!! Je suis dégoutée …
your pairing of the commercials with images of the violence behind the products is spot on, stimulator. the soundtrack has an amazing synergy. i want to show this bit to everyone i know, and especially to everyone i don’t know.
thank you *very* much for the work you do–it is truly inspiring on multiple levels. it reminds me of the truth (we need constant reminders, as this culture works hard to help us forget), it reminds me of the effectiveness of art as resistance,and it makes me think that we can actually do this thing.
may the blessings rain down upon your work.
Hi Stim, This is great. Violence in Everyday Life 101. I don’t see how anyone could fail to understand it.
awesomely done.
That part about the sheriff taking you away for eating at a store or living at your house is something I’ve thought about at times. People comply because they have no other choice if they want to remain in good standing with friends and family, it’s a vicious cycle.
Does it make any sense that we live in a world where someone has multiple properties while other people are homeless? Where there are stockpiles of food sitting in a building while people are starving?
Watching this video only validates what my friends and I are trying to do with my wife’s and my farm.
ken, Perhaps you would be interested in reading up on the idea/slogan “property is violence”. I certainly agree that stealing is wrong, but your statements above operate on the assumption that the stuff in a store belongs to a person, or that most people pay rent because something is owed.
If you have ever worked in a grocery store, or looking their dumpsters, you’ll know that massive amounts of the food there gets thrown away simply because it has minor blemishes. Sure some of it gets donated to homeless shelters (ie. warehouses for unwanted people) but a lot of it just tossed out because it is no longer profitable. I once found a fried-green-tomato “kit” that was thrown out because the tomatoes had ripened and were red instead of green!
We produce enough food on this planet to feed 11 billion people, but if you were to go into a dumpster at the wrong hour to get some of that food, security guards may detain you, call the cops, and send you through the “justice” system, simply for trying to salvage some perfectly edible food from the trash. This is what Derrick means when he talks about the absurdity of having to pay to exist on this planet, and the way violence is used to maintain that system.
Good one Franklin!
Great how you really bring out Derrick Jensen’s words and put them into real action!
This is dumb, of course we have to pay rent and pay for food! Good job on trying to scare dumb little kids!
Worthless scum with no understanding of chemestry, geology, or thermodynamics in general, you will never convince anyone of you illconcieved notion to bring our glorious empire down. The entire biosphere you hold in such high regard is nothing but organic chemistry running on the Gibbs Free Energy Equation. There is no balance or equilibrium. The heat within the earth that drive the lithophere is derived mostly from the forces unleashed as the planet compacted and radioactive decay. The biosphere derives its energy mainly from the ball of hydrogen undergoing fusion above our heads. Nothing is sustainable forever, even these reations shall evenetually end. But we may live on even after that. Nuclear pulse propulsion alone could send us to the stars(albeit slowly), and there we could live around red dwarfs for a hundred billion years or more. You will not save this species, you are trying to damn it to extinction. Thankfully you will fail.
Wandered back here from the new email from stim.
Thanks for your reply fladude. I will look into that concept. I know that many stores forbid dumpster diving/giving away food because it is against policy (they don’t want to get sued for giving away expired food) and also for profit. Some business do give the food to non-profits, but that is few and far between. I had a friend that used to work at a grocery store and would regularly get into trouble for letting the homeless people take the food. (She would set it out next to the dumpster instead of throwing it in the dumpster because she knew they were outside just waiting for that food.)
Perhaps the focus shouldn’t on the violence used to enforce the rules (because I don’t think violence – in the context used here and in general – will ever go away completely), but the rules themselves. Many of the rules I’ve seen have come from fear and a lacking sense of community. I think that is why I enjoyed Derrick’s book so much – it really opened me up to some preconceptions that I hadn’t realized that I had already accepted. Personally, I’d like to focus on changing the rules. But the struggle has to be continued on many fronts which is why I keep finding myself back here and following stim.
The “violence” you talk about is the rule of law, and what happens if you don’t pay your dues. Even the primitive societies you seem to cherish so much also understood that if “you don’t pay bad things will happen to you”. If you don’t hunt, you can’t eat. If you don’t sit down and make your bow and arrow, you can’t hunt. If you don’t speak nicely to your fellow villagers and pull your weight around town, then you probably won’t get looked after by their local warriors when the other village invades. Or why is it that you respect those villagers so much? They worked hard! They paid their version of ‘the rent’ to survive, or they died. “Bad things” happened to them too.
But ultimately, if you think the violence of our modern democratic world is bad, try going back in time and living without the rule of law, freedom of the press, and democracy. Try going back and living with the ‘noble savages’. I guarantee you’ll long for today. The ‘noble’ savages were not that noble after all.
Not that today is perfect: I too share the many environmental concerns you have. I’ve been a doomer peak-oiler in the past. If you read my blog you’ll see that I really do get the sheer speed and magnitude of the environmental crisis before us. At one point I lost all hope.
Then I started reading about Integral Fast Reactors that could run the world for 500 years off today’s nuclear waste, plasma burner waste recyclers that turn any waste into a variety of useful resources, ecocities, New Urbanism and biofarming. Basically, a variety of new technologies and systems approaches can provide everyone on the planet with everything we need, and economic forces will soon be demanding these technologies.
As environmental scientist Professor Barry Brook puts it, asking society to self-destruct or ‘power-down’ to a lesser quality of life is not going to work.
Back to your Star Wars analogy. It is as if Darth Vader and Grand Moff Tarkin WERE actually beginning ot realise that a planet is a really useful thing, and just blowing it up as a show of force ignored the sheer prosperity guaranteed for all who live on it and care for it. It is as if the Death Star’s beam weapon were being cannibalised to power their energy systems. Swords into ploughs, or megatons into megawatts. 10% of the USA’s electricity comes from nuclear power burning old Soviet warheads.
We can and will probably make the changes necessary: not because it is the right thing to do, but because it will make more money in the end.
Sorry, I forgot to provide the link for my Barry Brook quote. He’s a climate scientist from the University of Adelaide, Australia. He thinks that GenIV nuclear power plants that eat nuclear waste could run a 100TW civilisation for 500 years on today’s waste, let alone all the uranium and thorium in the ground.
(Which I don’t think we’ll need to touch as in 500 years time, we may finally have cheap enough batteries that allow renewable energy to become economically competitive. But right now, the only choice we have is nukes. Let’s burn the waste from the last generation of reactors and beat peak oil, global warming, and nuclear waste in one hit!)
http://bravenewclimate.com/renewable-limits/
I believe people are confusing their duty or union with their community(which is what money replaces in a place that has no morals), with these ideas of theft and crime.
Why do we send armed men to evict members of our community into the ‘wild’, instead of simply helping them back up, perhaps even giving a little?
I believe people confuse the issue to avoid the raw violence Derrick is talking about… and then say it is not there.
Our society offers nothing but pain and suffering for the ill-fated mistakes that some make, to the point where, I see family treat one another like complete strangers. Only something brutal could be doing this.
But heck, how can you know what the love of your own children is, when you enslave your neighbors.
This is the best of the videos, the one that can really draw people into the site. To think about looking in your closet, seeing where your clothes are made, then looking up conditions at the textile factories in those countries and the history of how the factories came to be there. That will teach you more about your place in this civilization than anything. You basically have slaves working for you under threat of violence, starvation and ostracision just so you can get through the day without being arrested for public nudity. It goes downhill from there. Why are you getting dressed? To go to work. Why? To do what? Sell real estate? Someone’s going to be paying rent on that. Plus, you’ll be driving around all day in a sedan to show houses to people. You know where that leads. It starts with your clothes and never ends, not even while you sleep.