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23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Culture of Make Believe, May 16, 2002
Derrick Jensen continues his deep examination of our dysfunctional civilization from his previous two beautifully powerful works, A Language Older Than Words and Listening to the Land, delving deeper still into the horror of man's (yes, gender specific) inhumanity to man. In this compelling mammoth volume, The Culture of Make Believe, Jensen bombards the reader with historical and contemporary accounts of atrocity after atrocity of our own destructive culture, until we can no longer look away with a blind eye or deaf ear. We can no longer "make believe" that the American Dream comes without cost to our own shared humanity and the planet.Starting by exploring and defining the hate crimes of racism and rape, Jensen continues, chapter after chapter, to prove that the ultimate hate crime is towards ourselves. He successfully weaves meticulously-researched historical accounts, statistics and interviews, with his own personal deep ecological commentary. Jensen delves deeply, sociologically and psychologically, into the perpetuation of violence, hatred, exploitation and domination of non-white cultures from the beginnings of colonial America, through the slavery and genocide of African slaves, Native Americans and immigrants, to other crimes of power and exploitation by early American capitalists, and now, modern globalizing corporations. He follows by lacing together the hate legacy of African slavery and the KKK with the modern capitalistic economics of the modern judicial and prison system. (and asks- aren't we incarcerating the wrong people?) In reflective commentary, Jensen consciously self-examines the abstract meaning of his own white privilege. Jensen continues relentlessly to confront capitalism as The System of exploitation -- the conversion of humans into machines and ecosystems into waste -- questioning the basis for the objectification of all Life forms -- human and non-human. He asks passionately, how have we come to value economic production over the process of living, and of Life itself? And who is benefiting? Jensen continues on by exposing the U.S. military system and the war at hand. He asks, who is profiting from these economic wars (hate crimes) of past and present, resulting in our civilization's continued legacy of genocide? After chapters and chapters of unquestionable and painful evidence, Jensen asks the reader to question Western Industrial Civilization itself and our own participation in it. He asks us boldly to confront these painful truths of how and why have we as a civilization have come to conquer the world, and how we can stop wanting it. The power of this book is not in the facts themselves (as convincing and important as they are), but rather, in Jensen's courage to not be afraid to point out the obviously insane state of the world that we continually deny: that Western Industrial Civilization is causing the greatest mass extinction in the history of the planet. He reminds us that the Holocaust by the Nazis in the last century was not the only holocaust; we must wake up to the current holocausts against the forests, the salmon, the soil, the water, the Earth -- of Life itself. But most poignantly and effectively, what Jensen emphasizes is the meaning of Ecocide -- that this hatred and distruction, this ongoing Holocaust, this annihilation of Life itself, is ultimately against ourselves. And the question is: whether the cultural urge to convert living things to dollars is stronger than the will to survive. This question dangles precariously over our conscience like a rope left tied for hanging ourselves, as we blindly and deafly go about our daily lives of consumption and alienation from the Other. Ultimately, Jensen asks us to question our own obedience to this cultural dysfunctionality, to speak out vehemently against it. And the reader cannot ignore this call. By the end, at the thirty-first chapter, we sit convinced, exhausted, and yet, motivated to stand up and revolt. What solution does he offer us? Caught up in a tangled web of our own enslavement of a system that rewards the conversion of the living to the dead, our only hope, he implores, is a return to our humanity. He asks us to bravely tell our own stories, to simply tell the truth, and simply not to fight the reality of the despair. We must question, question, question; we must dismantle this civilization and rebuild one based on the power of interconnectedness, not alienation. Jensen's passionate words are powerful weapons themselves, and it is about time that they were fired. He is not afraid to speak the truth; this book is a brilliantly articulate incantation of revolution of not only thought but action that is so desperately needed in this time of wasted power, fear, illusion, fascist censorship and paramount distruction. The audience of this book is not just historians, economists or sociologists of slavery and racism, war and politics. Neither is it just for social and environmental activists, but rather it is for all of us, because ultimately, we are all interconnected partners (knowingly or unknowingly) in this hate crime of Ecocide.
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by Derrick Jensen
by Derrick Jensen
by Derrick Jensen
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