Good afternoon, friends —
(The more practical part of this letter is at the bottom. Scroll down to read it first if you wish. We left it there because those practical suggestions need to be properly introduced. Our historical context is changing.)
There is a great deal afoot in the public sphere, with many fine possibilities for engagement — and enjoyment. While to a great extent this is always the case, the present moment seems more labile than usual.
Why? We aren’t sure. Perhaps for these reasons:
- Some large propaganda narratives are getting awkward for our news media and officials to maintain. Others are strongly contested by significant minorities of voters. We could make a fairly long list.
In our view, it’s important to realize that most of the mainstream media, especially the so-called elite media, are now providing more propaganda than truth regarding many or most major issues.
Much of the deception is accomplished by omission, but there is also an increasing slavishness — parroting the same exact same perspectives uncritically — and an increasing number of highly-consequential, flat-out lies. Most national journalists are now in the business of pitching narratives, with little or no questioning of authority.
The more “the news” is curated along official lines, and the more that independent journalism is policed, censored, and cancelled, the more obvious — and uglier — the situation is getting. Appropriately in our view, Americans now have very low — and declining — trust in the news media, with 34% having no trust at all. Only “7% of U.S. adults say they have ‘a great deal’ and 29% ‘a fair amount’ of trust and confidence in newspapers, television and radio news reporting.” This is very good news.
As Caitlin Johnstone correctly points out, our near-total immersion in officially-sanctioned propaganda — propaganda that is in one way or another connected to the coercion, i.e. violence, that is the monopoly of the State — creates deeper effects than just establishing this or that narrative. It undercuts independent thought in general and creates obedience and passivity in general. Many if not most of our political leaders and national security actors want us to trust The Authorities (i.e. themselves) reflexively and completely, including with our very lives and those of our children. They crave that trust to perpetuate their own careers, ideologies, and profits (e.g. LANL, see below). In other words, what’s at stake are souls. Having a soul can be a source of economic friction in the “job market,” and is antithetical to the entire notion of a “market” to the extent that the “jobs” on offer are degrading, immoral, or useless. We leave this here without going deeper, although it is very germane to our first suggestion below.
Much depends on whether young people can avoid being morally uprooted in this way, as they make decisions about their futures. They are the most vulnerable among us.
- Confidence in major institutions is appropriately low and generally falling over the last year. It’s not good news that many of our major institutions are failing, but it is good news that many people see this.
- The number of people who think the country is on the wrong track has increased by 17% over the past 7 months, to 66%. They are right. This number is all but certain to grow further this year as environmental, economic, and foreign policy crises multiply, with few responsible and effective policies visible.
- Officially, inflation is at a 39-year high. It is higher still if historic methods of calculation are faithfully applied, as most people see for themselves.
- Resource limitations are becoming economic limitations. In the U.S., and First World generally, declining prosperity is inevitable and underway, even as inequality reaches grotesque proportions. A growing global energy crisis is now upon us, the scale and effects of which we in the US see only the smallest part, so far.
- Globally, the US empire is failing. The exceptionalist ideology that has guided this and every administration so far is resulting in historic foreign policy debacles. We agree with “b” at the Moon of Alabama and many other analysts that 1) since Obama, the U.S. has attempted to use Ukraine as a battering ram to harm and ultimately break up Russia and 2) that this has failed and will continue to fail, at great cost to U.S. dreams of continued world domination.
Truly historic changes are now occurring. “Business as usual” has ended; the “old normal” is gone and the situation will remain too dynamic for any “new normal” to stabilize. The U.S. as we have known it is more or less in free-fall. So there’s a lot to do — many ways to open our eyes, and to serve.
It is better to act in freedom by what light we have, rather than be acted upon, as a victim or a “non-player character.” As Spanish physicist Antonio Turiel put it (video, at 23:35) at our November 5, 2021 demonstration,
We are now in a situation in which some sort of collapse cannot be avoided. But what you can choose is the way in which you are collapsing. You can collapse in a more democratic manner, or you can collapse in a more authoritarian manner. This is the actual truth of the thing….go local, go resilient…climate change is real and it is going to complicate your life. You are going to struggle with many things at the same time, but if you understand well what you are doing, and you make a decision to do the right thing, you can [be mentally free]. You can improve your life in many senses. It may be different from your current expectations, but you can live a very plentiful life. If you just take the [upper? meaning, higher or more noble?] decisions — and mainly, you do not allow others to make your decisions for you.
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People often ask, what can I do — say, about the tremendous push to build a nuclear weapons factory at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL)?
Before answering, it’s important to realize that the mental framework most of us bring to this question, and really to all the major crises in our society, is no longer adequate.
We don’t live in a democracy. Government responds mainly to the super-wealthy and corporations.
This is a plea to be realistic. The world will not be rescued — or in New Mexico, a fascist, neocolonial dystopia avoided — with an hour’s work here and there by disorganized individuals, or by people who don’t want to offend the powers-that-be (which in northern and central New Mexico includes the nuclear labs and the ruling Democratic Party).
The powers-that-be will change in major ways only if they sufficiently fear for their careers. Until then, they are the last people who will be persuaded. Meanwhile there are other audiences, more receptive, which can be reached directly. In this state, this is what we mostly recommend as explained below.
There’s a big difference between making a gesture, and planning realistically how to win and then carrying out that plan. Castles in the air are fine, but as Henry Thoreau said we need to build foundations under them.
So let’s. Many of us are constrained in various ways — by our health, by our obligations as parents and caregivers, by economic precarity, by the crucial roles some of us have already undertaken in society. Believe me, we get all that. We each contribute how we can.
But let’s be serious regardless. “Make-believe democracy,” buoyed by an altogether unwarranted optimism, is perhaps the greatest problem we face, after sheer distraction.
The introduction to Robert Bly’s The Sibling Society contains these pertinent lines:
It is hard in a sibling society to decide what is real. We participate in more and more nonevents. A nonevent transpires when the organizer promises an important psychic or political event and then cheats people, providing material only tangentially related. An odd characteristic of the sibling society is that no one effectively objects. Some sort of trance takes over if enough people are watching an event simultaneously. It is a contemporary primitivism, “participation mystique,” a “mysterious participation of all the clan.
“Kierkegaard once, in trying to predict what the future society would be like, offered this metaphor: People will put up a poster soon saying, Tonight John Erik will skate on thin ice at the very center of the pond. It’ll be very dangerous. Please come. Everyone comes, and John Erik skates about three inches from shore, and people say, “Look, he’s skating on thin ice at the very center of the pond!” A lecturer says: On Friday night we will have a revolution. When Friday night comes, the hall is filled, and the radical talks passionately and flamboyantly for an hour and a half; then he declares that a revolution took place here.
We don’t need “activists” and we don’t need “protests.” We need to seek truth, and we need resistance based on it.
Obviously, “environmental cleanup” is not resistance and has nothing to do with nuclear disarmament — except at LANL, insofar as removal of legacy transuranic (TRU) waste competes for space in the shipments of new TRU waste from pit production heading to WIPP. Which it very much does.
Apart from this, “cleanup,” to the extent it is real, without the quote marks, is a separate good thing from preventing a nuclear arms race. LANL will never be completely — or likely very much more — cleaned up, of course. Legacy TRU waste, some of which is dangerous until it is permanently buried deeply at WIPP, can and should be removed as soon as possible.
By the way, the U.S. will never sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). We were deeply involved in the negotiations that produced this Treaty, but we were never so deluded as to think the U.S. would sign it — or that it would be a good basis for organizing in the United States, let alone in New Mexico! It’s one of those generic distractions we mentioned earlier, except insofar as it shows that many countries have rejected nuclear weapons and are starting to take action to affirm a global norm against them. The TPNW does not “make nuclear weapons illegal” for countries which have not signed and ratified it. The use of nuclear weapons was and is already illegal in nearly all circumstances under long-standing humanitarian law, as is the planning to use nuclear weapons (under the Genocide Convention), as is the foreign basing of nuclear weapons (under the NPT). For its States Parties, the TPNW expresses, refreshes, and extends these laws and norms in important ways. In time the States Parties may decide to take further action together against nuclear weapons. All that is another story, for another time.
As always, letters to editors (LTEs) and guest editorials can be helpful but they will not even remotely suffice absent nonviolent direct action and direct, targeted education in various forms. The expansion of the nuclear weapons mission at LANL isn’t occurring for rational reasons. It’s happening because of greed and the lust to dominate. Don’t imagine that your excellent, rational arguments will persuade NM decisionmakers. They won’t.
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So what can be done?
Please understand that New Mexico is in a special situation. Generalities won’t do. The LANL pit production project is the largest nuclear warhead project in the U.S. It is happening here and now. If we don’t oppose this in particular we aren’t opposing nuclear weapons at all. We are just blowing hot air.
1. LANL is having a hard time recruiting for its pit production and other missions. We hear this from various sources in both New Mexico and in Washington, DC. The language we are hearing is that Northern New Mexico is pretty much “drained of bodies”…”tapped out.” This is one of the greatest concerns of nuclear managers nationwide — and at LANL. Two or three thousand more staff must be hired, plus temporary construction workers, on a net basis. Roughly 500 staff retire or are otherwise lost each year. This is a real problem for LANL and a real opportunity for peace-loving people.
The lab is “partnering” with our NM colleges, universities, and high schools (see below) to build a “pipeline” (their word) to provide LANL with the workforce it needs for plutonium pit production.
Persuasion will be fruitful in many nonviolent, loving ways. You — and your friends, your church, your organizations — can do this.
For sickening (and helpful!) background, you can see some of LANL’s hiring efforts here, here, and here. Hopefully these pages will inspire you to stop this outrageous takeover of young bodies and minds before it goes any further.
Trish asks:
Do you want your child, relative, friend, or neighbor to get caught up in this whirlpool of plutonium? They will certainly be paid well, made to leave their conscience behind, be rewired to believe a brand new narrative, sign over their privacy and family history. And there is nothing “sustainable” about this, from any perspective.
Why aren’t more New Mexicans outraged by LANL’s blatant takeover of our schools, our youth and our workforce? Surely some of you could speak to your church, schools, families, at your work places, at your city and county councils. Why aren’t more people getting mad about this? I don’t hear much from any of the community organizations about LANL’s takeover and ruination of our state. Have all of you given up? You think NM isn’t worth fighting for? Are you thinking New Mexico is the “sacrifice zone” and we just have to swallow what crap we are given?
This makes me furious. I cannot understand people who spout how much they love New Mexico and at the same time stand by and let LANL and the NNSA just walk all over us and ruin our state and our children’s future. Climate change and poverty are here, but LANL’s goal of manufacturing plutonium pits for nuclear weapons does not have to be a part of our future. As New Mexicans we already have a lot on our plate to try and combat climate change, poverty, lack of healthcare, bottom of the charts quality of education, etc. Why would anybody want to damage our state and our children’s future even more by inviting LANL to control, destroy, and contaminate at will?
According to LANL, there are now eight formal partnerships in place between LANL and regional colleges and high schools for workforce “pipeline” programs, mainly for pit production, including the following universities and colleges. They also have partnered with some, possibly all, northern NM high schools. These institutions are:
- New Mexico Highlands University (Computer Science, Teacher Education)
- Northern New Mexico College (Radiation Protection)
- Santa Fe Community College (Science, Machining)
- University of New Mexico-Los Alamos (Mechanical Engineering, Project Management)
- Los Alamos National Laboratory Foundation (Los Alamos Employees’ Scholarship Fund, Northern New Mexico Inquiry Science Education Consortium)
There are many ways to intervene at these and any schools. Educate the educators and keep the war machine out of our schools. Call your friends and get started!
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Here are some other suggestions for effective disarmament action in New Mexico. This is not an all-inclusive list by any means, and as you can see some categories are broad.
2. Relentlessly bird-dog politicians in public events so they can’t get away from the LANL pit production issue. Our concerns, and their actions, have to be focused here and now or they are worse than useless. “Nuclear disarmament” is much too general and pie-in-the-sky. “No pit production anywhere” is an artful dodge, since LANL is the only place pit production can happen for at least a decade and a half. That is the crucial and decisive decade in human existence.
You may ask, “Whom do you serve, really?” “Why are more weapons of mass destruction a good thing, and why are they good for New Mexico?” You will have dozens of similar questions.
Don’t ask them for an environmental impact statement, by the way. As we said last time, that water has long ago gone under the bridge.
3. Let politicians know you are pulling any and all contributions and you are reaching out to everyone you know to do the same (and if you want, change your registration away from their party and tell them about it) unless their party leaders and congressional representatives start visibly opposing preparations for pit production at LANL. Go on the political offensive, visibly and forcefully.
4. Organize nonviolent direct actions that impede LANL operations and recruitment, of any of 1,000 different ways.
5. Recruit individuals and especially groups to sign the “Call for Sanity, Not Nuclear Production.” The bizarre reluctance of many people to stand with others in public against pit production is revealing.
6. Raise money so we can hire help at the Study Group to take advantage of the abundant opportunities we see, and to advertise widely (like this).
7. Find ways for churches to support young people in climate and disarmament vocations and gap years — including working with us. We have helped many young people on their way to important careers, and some have told us that their time with us was life-altering in a very positive way.
New Mexico’s negative contribution to climate protection comes in two major ways: as a leading oil and gas state, and as the leading nuclear warhead state, upholding the Empire with better and more* weapons of mass destruction. (*Yes, more, in the case of pits for the proposed W87-1 warhead vs. using only the existing W87-0 warheads in a single warhead configuration as currently deployed, with no “upload hedge.”) Climate leadership in New Mexico means decreasing one or both of those major negative “contributions.” NM’s recent increases in oil and gas production are swamping any climate benefits from the state’s proposed energy transition.
8. Organize meetings at which we can speak and educate others. It takes a lot more time to organize meetings than to speak at them or conduct them more generally. Our knowledge and relationships make our work among decisionmakers in Washington DC uniquely valuable, and our analysis needs a much wider audience. We need time to do these things. We are counting on you to help organize in New Mexico.
9. There need to be conversations among Catholics as to how to put Archbishop Wester’s articulate Letter on nuclear disarmament into practice locally. It is up to us to follow through and fulfill the teaching provided in that Letter. The Archbishop’s letter is not self-executing, in other words. We aren’t sure that everyone understands that, at this point. It’s up to us. It always was.
Will the Archbishop and the Archdiocese sign the “Call for Sanity, Not Nuclear Production,” we wonder? Twice in the past, the Archdiocese has agreed to statements calling for no new construction pending environmental analysis (in the early 1990s, hard copy in files) and no pit production at LANL. (The Archdiocese signed as part of the New Mexico Council of Churches, which included the Archdiocese. We were present.) So the “Call for Sanity” is not necessarily a huge leap for the Archdiocese.
10. Other churches can follow the same path, again with the consciousness that general disarmament statements are like motherhood and apple pie: standard political fare. (In fact the US government has already agreed to complete nuclear disarmament, in a binding treaty. That happened in 1968; the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons went into force in 1970.)
11. Recruit volunteer help for us. Volunteer yourself!
12. Get out of your political comfort zone. Most of you are Democrats. Reach out to other parties. Bring Independents, Republicans, Libertarians, Greens, and Socialists into the picture whenever and wherever possible. In recent history, some Republican presidents (hint: whose last names are Bush), cut the U.S. nuclear arsenal a lot. Clinton and Obama did not. Find and promote anti-war and nuclear disarmament candidates in every party.
Thanks for all you are doing, and for your solidarity in these challenging times.
Greg and Trish, for the Los Alamos Study Group