The Monk Seal Conspiracy
12. The Unseen War
Despite all the glowing references and pledges of support, and the project’s renewed vigour in translating a holistic philosophy into flesh and blood, I felt an inexplicable weariness. I could muster no enthusiasm for another year-long tug of war with Kyrios Drumpis. During 1979 we had committed every waking thought, every ounce of strength, every cent of our personal savings, and perhaps had even risked our lives, to prevail in this seemingly endless saga stage-managed by YPEA and the Ministry of Defence. Out in the eastern Aegean we had been virtually alone, and only last-minute interventions had saved the project from collapse. Through force of circumstance, we had been obliged to spend more time defending our own human rights than the ebbing life of a species soon destined to leave this Earth for eternity. Even without YPEA’s harassment, our vain crusade against red tape had already been fraught with pitfalls, lending us the image of being disreputably anti-establishment. The shuffling bureaucracy in Athens, where even the most simple procedure must, for the sake of its own inane protocol or dreary routine, take inevitable detours through a maze of obstacles, was not only utterly frustrating, but threatened to become the final nail in the coffin of the species – and ultimately, perhaps, in our own coffins as well.
With so much time consumed by meaningless details, by YPEA’s vendetta, and by scraping up just enough funds to keep the project ticking over, we had often lost sight of broader visions. Many of the ideas which should have made the project holistic and all-embracing had been shelved. Our project plan for the new year attempted to restore our lost equilibrium but, like most project plans, it allocated no time for us to gnaw through the entangled knots of officialdom, no time for the seesaw of influence between Drumpis and Yeroulanos, and no time to deal with the perverse counter-intentions of the secret police who were probably already conspiring to scuttle our endeavours.
And then there were the rancid hypocrisies on our own side. As soon as the first letters arrived conferring upon our humble project the support of the most eminent persons in the conservation hierarchy, suddenly all the others came pouring in too. It was as though these lesser mortals had been waiting for the signal from above. as though it was deemed safe to associate with us now that we had been awarded the badge of respectability. I had even received an urgent telephone call from David McTaggart, the mandarin of Greenpeace International, begging us to return to the fold and apologizing profusely for their past neglect. But I still had grave doubts as to whether any of them had yet grasped the holistic concept of the project, its subtle yet vital connections. Sometimes it seemed indeed as though these visions were little more than alibis to placate our conscience, and that we were conforming to the roles hammered out for us to become superficial ecologists enacting the usual makeshift and temporary measures to isolate a threatened species from an implacably hostile environment. It was as though we were expected to concentrate exclusively on saving the seal and conveniently forget about what forces were actually causing its death. We were to herd the surviving seals into reservations like aboriginal tribes, marvel at humanity’s altruism, and hope for the best. The malignancy of urban growth, pollution, dying villages, deforestation, mass tourism, the conflict between commercial and traditional fishermen – these all belonged to different specializations. And human rights of course were not only regarded as alarmingly political, but totally outside the domain of ecology. Yet where on Earth was the awareness that all of these problems were interrelated, and only fragmented in the neat compartments of 20th-century Realism? Where was the conviction that only by bridging these specializations would we begin to make fundamental progress, healing the cause of the disease rather than suppressing the symptoms? It was precisely our own fragmentation that made these problems seem so forbidding and insurmountable.
For the first time, I really understood why the conservation movement was losing its battle to save the Earth. All over the world, an Unseen War was raging, and it was humanity’s division, its schizophrenia, its disassociation of words, emotions, thoughts and actions which were at the root of the conflict. The conservation movement was no different. Its fragmentation was as much a symptom of global disintegration as were the dying seas and forests.
The Siberian crane, the bumblebee bat, the pampas deer, the Sumatran rhinoceros, the woolly spider monkey, the blue whale, the mountain gorilla, the golden lion tamarin, the snow leopard, the peregrine falcon, the eagle owl, the hawksbill turtle… these are just some of the names that might be inscribed on a cenotaph commemorating the war dead by the first decades of the 21st century: a long black wall bearing a million names, not of individuals but of entire species. And by the year 2000, a full-time stonemason or sculptor would have to be employed to chisel in, every hour, the name of another species that had become extinct.
The names alone could hardly convey the enormity of this holocaust or the war crimes perpetuated against the inhabitants of Earth. Indeed, the Unseen War is so vast and all-pervasive that it could be symbolized in a multitude of different ways. Perhaps the baby deer lying in a field of tall grass, its legs severed by farm machinery. Perhaps the tiger trapped in a cage where it is unable to move, a red-hot poker being slowly driven into its anus, a convenient method of killing without spoiling the pelt for the rigid standards of haute couture. Perhaps the baboon mothers who, sensing a terrible fate, have been known to decapitate their own children while being driven to the vivisection laboratories.
But no, even this would not be enough to illustrate a war which is raging not only against the wild creatures of the planet, but also against the creature-planet itself. The mushroom cloud is perhaps the most potent symbol of our disintegration. It represents not only mass killing at its most refined, but also the seemingly limitless human ingenuity in evolving the weapon from a simple wooden club to an intercontinental ballistic missile. The human race now possesses enough nuclear explosive to kill everything on the planet at least a hundred times over, and yet 30 per cent of the most qualified scientists and technicians continue to devote their skills and energy into perfecting ever more efficient methods of destruction.
Hell may indeed be easier to create on Earth than heaven, but even in 1979, weapons cost US $400 thousand million, more than twice the amount it would cost to provide clean water for everyone in the world and 40 times the estimated cost of cleaning up the Mediterranean.
Over the last three decades, the superpowers have presided over the most massive arms build-up ever witnessed in the history of the world, feverishly trying to outrace and outspend each other. Together with their allies, they have now reached the point of spending US $2 million a minute on the toys of war, but just where this race will end is anyone’s guess. Despite pronouncements by some high-level government officials in Washington that a nuclear war is not only thinkable but winnable, computer predictions suggest that if only a third of the world’s nuclear forces are unleashed, it will be humankind’s final war. A thousand million people would be exterminated before the mushroom clouds even had time to dissipate. An equal number would perish from radiation sickness. And then the nuclear winter would close in, its morbid grip claiming the entire planet. Within a few days the black smoke and debris in the atmosphere would absorb so much of the sun’s rays that less than 5 per cent of the normal amount of light would reach the earth, causing such a pall of darkness that even plants would be unable to survive. Temperatures would plunge by as much as 40 degrees centigrade, extinguishing the firestorms that had raged across the devastated landscape. The air we now breathe would be poisoned not only by radiation but also by carbon monoxide, dioxins and cyanides. Rain would fall as corrosive as concentrated sulphuric acid. Envying the dead, any unlucky survivors would then be confronted by searing amounts of ultraviolet sunlight, because at least 50 per cent of the ozone layer would have been destroyed. Monstrously deformed mutations would develop. I doubt if there could be a more accurate resemblance to the supposedly mythical domain of hell, and yet the United States government recently set alight an entire forest in an effort to disprove the nuclear winter theory.
Even conventional war can turn a green planet into a desert. During the Vietnam war, US planes sprayed 72 million litres of dioxin-laced herbicides over the country and dropped 13 million tons of bombs. Their targets were forests, mangrove swamps and even elephants, which supposedly could have provided transport for the enemy. Ten years after the war, almost 2 million hectares of land still remained unusable because of dioxin poisoning.
If it is true that our species has become a parasitic organism, relentlessly draining the life-blood of Earth, then what are its deeper psychological motivations? A lust for power? A determination to tame an environment viewed as capricious and hostile? To control fate itself, perhaps, and, like the greatest of the Roman emperors, for humanity to reach the glory of its own apotheosis?
Expelled from the warmth and security of the garden of Eden, perhaps out of sheer resentment and defiance, our species relentlessly began to carve out its own separate destiny, careering towards a point where the bond of consciousness with the mother Earth would be severed forever. Deep in our subconscious mind, we were bitter and incensed that we should have to be subjected to the risks of life, the torments of pain and death, constantly at the mercy of the elements and their spiteful hostility or indifference to us. In revenge, we would have to tame and subjugate the mother, if only to calm our own jealousy. And somehow, to cure this burning humiliation, we would have to find a way of not only challenging but also usurping the authority and powers of God. To quench this inferiority and the lust to become a god in our own right, we would have to subdue everything around us. If Earth’s power was in creation, then ours would be in destruction. But to conquer the Earth we would first have to divide it.
Just as war is said to have brought about the domination of society by the male sex, so by denying his own innate femininity, his anima, man would be able to prove his supremacy over the Earth by machismo and brute force. Driven on by a kind of primeval Oedipus complex, he would kill his father, the spiritual animus of Gaia, and rape his mother – the body of the Earth – and eventually, after perceiving the enormity of his crime, he would end up blind and raving.
At least, perhaps this is the symbolic way in which our anthropocentric Reality was born, and its parasitic conquest of Earth. And rapidly taking on a life of its own, this Reality began to sort and imprison the oneness and diversity of the world into inanimate concepts and categories, entirely separate from each other, whereas it is the dynamic interdependence of its parts which proves that Earth is living.
Our great fear of the unknown, exacerbated by our divorce from Nature’s all-embracing wholeness, prompted us to reach for methods of absolute control, absolute security. The condition rapidly became pathological, for the more we segregated ourselves from Nature, the more vulnerable, misguided and schizophrenic we became. It was to be reflected in the dwellings and settlements we began to build, our villages, towns and cities which were forever becoming larger and more fortified; from the primitive circular huts to the concrete and steel mammoths of today, their sharp box-like designs a blatantly scornful affront to the graceful curves of Nature.
We devised a simple solution for the intimidation we felt by the Great Unknown: make it smaller by imposing dogma. This was to become the basis of modern science, in that nothing could be allowed to exist unless it could be proved conclusively. It had a dual benefit: perpetual doubt and scepticism about the existence of the soul and spirit, and the ability to manufacture proof for expedient forms of knowledge. It would serve to protect even the greatest absurdities of our mechanistic Reality.
Ultimately, in order to reach the dizzying heights of our own deification, to tame and subjugate the Earth, we needed a Reality that was patriotic to homo sapiens alone, a Reality that was willing to prove that he was the most intelligent and sentient being in the universe. Darwinism gave the concept of human supremacy scientific credibility at a time when implicit spiritual faith was already beginning to waver; it emphasized the competition of species rather than their co-operation, justifying the hostile image of Earth and inviting civilized humanity to tame it. It must be one of the most supreme ironies that this doctrine germinated in Charles Darwin’s mind precisely as he explored the Galapagos, where even today the creatures who inhabit these remote islands hardly seem to know the meaning of fear. Their tameness however is not domestication, but an implicit trust in being embraced by wholeness in its most sublime and pristine form.
Fear of course played an instrumental role in the conquest of the Earth. Historically, the army may have been the first machine ever created by man, owned and controlled by the supreme hunter who, proclaiming himself king, ordered castles and fortified cities built to protect the growing dynasty of Power. The farmers who tilled the surrounding land, reduced to serfdom and virtual slavery, were obliged to pay for the hunters’ mafia-like protection by supplying them with food and taxes. The threat of war and violence hung over their heads like the sword of Damocles, yet they were forced to nourish and sustain the tyranny of the hunters for fear of reprisals and fear of the enemy. And the hunters of course made sure that there always was an enemy. The gifts and resources of Nature were reduced to material wealth so that, in effect, Power became equated with the ownership of God.
By declaring Nature soulless, the Christian church was able to condone and even participate in the plundering of the Earth. Even today, the glittering wealth of the Roman Catholic establishment is sustained by its investments in multinational chemical industries, in urban construction, mining and forestry. But in all of the world’s major religions, God was expediently promoted aloft, safely exiled into a purely spiritual domain. This strategy had a dual benefit: not only did it remove inconvenient moral obstacles to the plundering of the Earth, it also gave the hierarchies a sole monopoly on the gods that they had locked into the untouchable purity of heaven. Jealously guarding the keys, it became essential to portray the gods and their thankfully dead saviours and prophets as entirely perfect, entirely omniscient and entirely infallible – for how else could they prevent commoners from relating to them, heart to heart? This also enabled the priests, bishops, popes and kings to declare themselves the sole intermediaries and representatives of God, and to confer upon each other a similar perfection and infallibility.
It was for this reason that the ‘one god’ of Christ was conveniently interpreted to mean the ‘only god’. In a sense it marked the birth of humanity’s mechanistic Realism, a revolution which was to rule and devastate the entire Earth, a doctrine which meant that maltreating the Earth was no longer synonymous with maltreating God. Conveniently forgotten was the wisdom found in Job: ‘Speak to the Earth and it shall teach thee…’ Conveniently forgotten were the teachings of Mohammed: ‘There is no beast on Earth, nor bird which flieth with its wings, but the same is a people like unto you.’ Conveniently forgotten too were the words of the Buddha, who attained enlightenment more than 2,500 years ago under the shade of the Bodhi tree: ‘A tree is a wonderful living organism which gives shelter, food, warmth and protection to all living things. It even gives shade to those who wield an axe to cut it down… One thing only do I teach: suffering and the cease of suffering. Kindness to all living creatures is the true religion.’
Because Power could only be nourished by wealth, virtually every war in the history of humankind has been a war over the ownership and exploitation of Earth and her natural resources. Perhaps the most recent and lucid example of this was the Falklands conflict. Although waged ostensibly to protect the human rights of the inhabitants against the tin-pot dictators of Argentina, it can hardly be sheer coincidence that Britain also covets the islands as a staging point for its future exploitation of the mineral-rich Antarctic. Indeed, to the most powerful nations on Earth, oil, uranium and other scarce minerals have become of vital ‘strategic’ importance to their national security.
Borders are perhaps the most perverse manifestations of man’s schizophrenia. Bearing testament to their unseen ecological malignancy are millions of trees and thousands of lakes which are dying from acid rain. But even as the toxic fallout invades those borders with impunity, each nation’s first priority continues to be its own self-interest, its own economic competitiveness, a fact of industrial life – and death. As the rain falls over the devastated landscape, sometimes only marginally weaker than battery acid, the same corrosive pollution is also eating its way into human throats and lungs, with four times as many people suffering chronic bronchitis in the main fallout areas. Suffocating within their own patriotism, it is no wonder then that nations cannot understand or even be bothered that forests destroyed on another continent could ultimately haunt an entirely different part of the Earth with climatic changes, famine, political instability and war.
Dividing humanity with fear and suspicion, borders have also institutionalized the global game of brinkmanship between the superpowers and their allies, their proxy wars and skirmishes being waged across the Earth for the control of strategic natural resources. Indeed, sometimes it may seem as though the two blocs are in a tacit conspiracy to overawe and subdue each other’s populations, the effect being to assimilate and legitimize Power’s grip on the human race and the world’s destiny. Like the protection-selling hunters of old, by raising the spectre of barbaric domination and nuclear holocaust the military-industrial elites in both blocs are able to ever increase their lucrative investments in the weapons industry, demand ever greater taxes and spending on defence, and reap the enormous benefits in wealth and power.
Over the centuries, control of the Earth’s natural wealth has also included the management of human labour as a resource. And yet realizing that there are two threats to a nation state, external attack or internal revolution, Power’s monopolization of natural resources, including the very staples of life in the form of food, energy and housing, has become an efficient way of controlling human destiny. The more dependent the masses are on Power and the more independent Power is of the masses, the more Power can ensure its own longevity. Nowhere is this more evident than in today’s labour-saving technological revolution and its obsession with centralization and gigantism. Today, even in all-out war, mass human participation – apart from dying – has become obsolete.
At the forefront of the control and exploitation of the Earth’s natural resources are the multinational corporations, involved in everything from oil and mineral recovery to weapons, chemicals and drugs. Together with their Soviet equivalents, they now control more than a third of world production, and their share of the market is rising inexorably as smaller companies are devoured.
Indeed, Mechanistic Realism in both East and West is dismayingly similar. In Russia and her republics, tens of thousands of villages have been earmarked for extinction. Centralization, after all, poses less problems for the control of people, and Power, by now endowed with a life of its own, must surely realize that by evicting people from their villages and smallholdings it will eventually make them fully dependent upon the vast mechanized farms which are superseding them.
With the lust for centralization comes the plague of bureaucracy, with laws in western countries doubling every decade, and the inhabitants of the USA spending 1,276 thousand million hours every year filling out 5,000 assorted government forms.
As the villages die, the cities are becoming vast monoliths dedicated to the Reality of Power. By the year 2000, half of the world could be living in cities, aggravating the already intense polarization between humanity and Nature. And with the growing concrete landscape comes overcrowding, rootlessness, alienation and stress, bringing about disease, mental illness and crime. At least 18 megacities will each be inhabited by more than 10 million people by the turn of the century, illustrating just how relentless the malignancy of urbanization can become. Indeed, it can hardly be pure coincidence that some scientists have remarked that the creeping urban landscape bears a startling resemblance to cancer, the plague of 20th-century civilization.
In the schizophrenia of our times, it is not only the wilderness that is being bulldozed into oblivion. In developed countries alone, more than 3,000 square kilometres of prime agricultural land is lost to urbanization every year. By the year 2000, arable land may have decreased by a third, so that ever greater amounts of poisonous chemicals will have to be applied to the soil in a frantic effort to increase yields. Already today, agricultural chemicals are sprayed over the soil at a rate of 500 grams per head for every person in the world. But all is well at the profit-chasing pharmaceutical and chemical conglomerates, since theirs of course is the most perfect and cyclical of businesses. They supply the land not only with pests and diseases through the chemical destruction of natural predators and natural immunity, not only with the chemicals to attack those pests and diseases, but also with the drugs to combat the human illnesses produced by consuming those chemicals.
It takes between 2,000 and 8,000 years for the Earth to create soil a mere 30 centimetres in depth, but because of intensive mechanized farming, and severe erosion by wind and water caused by the felling of forests, the planet is losing soil at a rate of 75,000 million tons a year, so that today a quarter of the Earth’s land surface is in danger of becoming desert. Again, the story is no different in Russia, where scientists believe that the fertility of the Ukraine, the Soviet Union’s breadbasket, will be exhausted within a few decades.
At the same time, barring war, famine, disease or perhaps some measure of self-control, the Earth’s human population is expected to reach 10,000 million before it stabilizes, and will increase from 5,000 million today to around 6,000 million by the turn of the century. Yet despite the global population explosion, the governments of those few countries that are experiencing a demographic decline, such as France, Russia and Israel, have launched a baby-boom publicity drive, fearing dangers to their ‘national security’.
With labour-saving technologies and an overwhelming glut of unskilled workers, human resources will plummet in value. Will Reality’s cynicism allow many more millions to die by starvation or war, expediently disposing of its unwanted and threatening masses?
As for food from the sea, two-thirds of the world’s fisheries are dependent upon coastal wetlands where marine creatures breed, but these are rapidly being devoured by urbanization. Coupled with pollution and an unmitigated greed in overfishing the seas, many if not most of the present major fisheries will collapse by the year 2000. Floating factories have already exterminated whole species of whale, seacow, turtle and seal, and every year at least 1 million sea birds perish in nets.
The plundering of the Earth’s natural resources rages on, unabated. As they become scarcer and competition even more ferocious, global political instability will also become more acute. Inexorably, this is leading to a corresponding erosion of human rights and civil liberties. Year after year, millions of people are seeing their human rights decline or vanish, while those who see their rights restored or improved are pitifully few.
The Earth’s vast tropical rain forests are perhaps the most ancient life forms, and like Nature as a whole, benevolent, providing moderate climate, ensuring constant supplies of fresh water and the basic staples of life in the form of food, fuel, building materials and medicine. Aided and abetted by transnational corporations and international banks, developers are now tearing down these forests with gigantic bulldozers and chain-saws in a ‘slash and burn’ strategy, leaving to rot anything that is not of economic value. In their place often come vast cattle farms, providing cheap beefburger meat for the world’s fast-food chains. Although the rain forests provide a home for half of the Earth’s plant and animal species, an area the size of Austria is being bulldozed every year, and within 25 years they will have vanished forever.
Like gigantic sponges, the forests soak up rainwater and release it gradually over the Earth. But as the trees are felled, the water flows off the land immediately, washing away the soil, creating desert, and subjecting at least half of the Third World’s farmers who live in valleys to a devastating succession of floods and droughts. With these come epidemics and famine, political instability and war.
The rain forests are also the lungs of the Earth. As vast areas are cleared of their forest cover, there will be a substantial increase in carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere. Coupled with the vast energy-burning requirements of the industrialized world and the leaching into the atmosphere of ozone-destroying chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons, this has already begun to create a phenomenon of global warming known as the ‘greenhouse effect’. This in turn is expected to cause erratic fluctuations in the world’s climate and have a potentially disastrous impact on agriculture. It is said that precipitation patterns may shift, ultimately creating a hot, dry climate in the breadbasket agricultural lands of the United States and Canada. At the same time, the western Antarctic ice sheet is expected to melt, causing a sea-level rise of 5 metres by the year 2100 and inundating coastal plains, towns and cities.
As Mahatma Gandhi said, poverty is the worst form of violence. Today, rich countries use over two-thirds of the world’s energy and food although they have less than a third of its population. The sheer polarization between rich and poor, North and South, has brought about an ecological holocaust in the Third World. In many Third World countries, from the Philippines to El Salvador, from Mozambique to Colombia, poverty and the inequality of land distribution has incited insurgency or civil war, abuse of human rights and an increase in tensions between the superpowers.
For at least a third of the world’s population, the starving, malnourished and destitute, and the 1,500 million people whose only fuel is wood, dung or crop wastes, conservation has literally become a matter of life and death. Year after year, the deserts of the Third World are expanding because the abject poverty of these people forces them to tear away vegetation at the edge of the deserts simply in order to survive. The Sahara is currently moving southwards at five kilometres a year and in Mauritania an inexorable tide of sand has almost swallowed the country. In Ethiopia, where famine has claimed over a million lives, 1,000 million tons of topsoil is being blown away every year. At the same time, birth-rates are soaring all over the poverty-stricken continent. Kenya’s population explosion is one of the highest in the world, and yet when Pope John Paul II visited the country in 1986, he enjoined the people to ‘be fruitful and multiply; fill the Earth and subdue it’.
Poverty is also a major cause for the vigorous international trade in endangered species. The demand for luxury goods in the developed world in 1979 led to the death of 2 million crocodiles, 500,000 wildcats and 70,000 elephants. Despite rigorous legislation, there is still a vast and lucrative trade in exotic animals and plants, partly because it has been driven underground and is now being conducted by organized crime. It is estimated that animals make up 10 per cent of all airline passengers, and falcons have been found with their eyelids crudely sewn together, monkeys, pumas and other wildcats chained and packed in cases scarcely bigger than themselves. Thousands arrive dead at their destinations, but the profit rate still makes the barbarity worthwhile.
The poaching of wild animals in national parks has also reached epidemic proportions, as people are forced into crime by their poverty. Yet in richer countries, too, where greed is the motivating force, national parks are coming under a similar threat. Even under the restrictive regime of the USSR, poachers are regularly using machine-guns to kill their prey in protected areas.
The majority of the world’s research and development is firmly under the control of the rich nations of the North. At the same time, aid and loans – with all their attached political and economic strings – are devoted to making the Third World’s technologies increasingly labour-saving and sophisticated, in stark contrast to what is urgently needed. Investment in high-technology schemes with short-term financial gains is one
of the greatest culprits in environmental destruction, massive unemployment and political instability. Such gigantic projects are weighted towards hard exploitation of natural resources and capital-intensive economic methods. Again, the rich are the first to benefit and the recipient governments – more often than not riddled with corruption – receive their greatest prize in the form of power and control, by becoming the sole supplier of staple goods. This is perhaps the core of modern neo-colonialism.
When it comes to development aid, Egypt’s Aswan High Dam is probably one of the most colossal environmental disasters ever known, affecting the whole of the eastern Mediterranean. The Nile’s huge load of nutritious silt, which once flowed down the river to enrich the valley and the sea beyond, is now trapped behind the dam in Lake Nasser. Because of this, immense amounts of chemical fertilizer have to be spread on once naturally fertilized land, and a sardine fishery off the mouth of the Nile, which used to provide half of Egypt’s catch, collapsed in the 1970s.
From the Third World we move back to the rich nations again, almost like closing a circle, back to the multinational corporations, international banks, government bureaucracies and gigantic concentrations of Power – because the production and sale of weapons, the superpowers’ proxy wars and conflicts, the torture of prisoners of conscience, the sale of toxic chemicals and the dumping of hazardous wastes, the felling of the world’s forests, the death of the seas, the malignant grip of high technology, our rapidly deteriorating health, drought, flood, famine, disease, the trade in endangered species – all either originate or are exacerbated in those corridors of Power.
Within the chemical and pharmaceutical corporations and inside military laboratories, there is another kind of genocide. It is based on the famous doctrine of Claude Bernard, the apostle of modern vivisection, an insane doctrine which seems to have conquered the entire world: ‘I demonstrate that one can act upon living bodies as upon inanimate objects; this is the basis.’
On that basis, over 800,000 animals a day are dying in the world’s research laboratories, the casualties rising at an annual rate of 5 per cent each year. These silent victims – often conveniently silent, since many of them have been ‘devocalized’ – are subjected to everything from routine toxicity trials to stress-induced madness.
Epitomizing the mechanistic foundations of modern Realism, they are used to test drugs, toxic chemicals, cosmetics and weapons, to practise surgery and to provide ‘models’ for more esoteric research such as head transplants and split-brain studies. Sickened by radiation, monkeys are even trained to control flight simulators, on their way to drop nuclear bombs on Russia.
In the United States alone, during the last decade at least 85,000 primates have been dying every year in laboratories, as well as 500,000 dogs, 200,000 cats, 700,000 rabbits, 190,000 turtles, 20 million frogs, 45 million mice and rats, and an untold number of other animals including fish, birds, horses, dolphins, and even whales and elephants.
For many years, the trade in endangered species was no stranger to the research laboratory. The hundreds of thousands of animals imported every year from the Third World actually helped to endanger them in the first place. Even with today’s more rigorous controls, Science alone is afforded the legislative loopholes which allow it to import and kill thousands of endangered species.. Thus newborn chimpanzees are snatched from their mothers in order to study maternal love, and dolphins have electrodes hammered into their skulls to discover the secrets of biological sonar . .
Vivisection’s most significant contribution to knowledge is not only that civilization is wallowing in its own moral corruption. Science itself, severed from spiritual values, has gone insane. But like all of the other wars raging across the planet, there are tremendous profits at stake. It does not seem to matter that each species and each individual reacts in a different way during tests, nor that hundreds of drugs passed as safe for human consumption during such trials have later been found to cause cancer, birth defects, mental instability and a litany of other, often fatal, side-effects. After all, there will always be another drug to combat the diseases actually created by the laboratories themselves, like the proverbial old woman who swallowed the fly.
As we learned from the devil-doctors of Auschwitz, vivisection is not confined to animals, it can be practised on ‘inferior’ humans too. According to information which has managed to escape the ritual camouflage of ‘national security’, experiments sponsored by the CIA and other intelligence services around the world – usually involving mind-altering drugs – have been performed on newborn children, on conscripts, homosexuals, prisoners, mental patients, comatose victims and the terminally ill, in other words people who are deemed not worthy of human rights.
In its ambition to become god, parasitic humanity is progressing well. There has been more irreparable damage done to the planet in the last fifty years than in the whole of previous history. By the first decade of the next century, between 20 and 35 per cent of all animals and plants may have become extinct, up to a third of all life forms on the planet. As the war goes on, we are also destroying the myriad interdependences of life which together form the Earth’s consciousness; as this happens, it is perhaps no wonder that our schizophrenia is reaching terrifying and epidemic proportions.
Now that Nature is merely exploitable material, and those natural resources are governed by gigantic concentrations of Power, humanity begins to reach its cherished dream of deification, a deification which will of course end in its own death and perhaps that of the Earth too, this being, with a terrible irony, the very nature of parasitism.
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