KAIROS supports the ZAD, against a sick world, and calls for the indignation to spread

The terrorist interventions of the French state against Notre-Dame-des-Landes are not surprising. Because what works differently, the « off-system » attempts, act as a mirror that reflects the abnormality of this normalized everyday life in which we indulge. And this pathological continuity, the capitalist state does not want it to change. We must continue to want to consume, produce, work, privatize, not share. The Frenchman has to waste his daily average of oil, driving, eating, living. The Belgian and the others too. Those who have not reached the level will only have to « develop ».

The ZAD should strike all consciences, give us the glasses that would allow us to see the reality of our societies for what it is: a zone of generalized nonsense. The city, in this role, is perfect. Let’s think about the stale air we breathe, while every day the traffic is getting denser; about those who scream about an obstacle to their individual freedom when we propose to close the street to cars one day a month (one day!), or to replace parking spaces by bicycle spaces, chicken coops, vegetable gardens… They are convinced that they are defending their freedom, while they are only perpetuating a way of life imposed at birth, and that they have made their own. Everything is the same: these waves that make you sicker and sicker, in the intimacy of homes, while the state and industry, with universities, are working to provide us with 5G(The « free « University of Brussels in particular). This continues with the obsolescence of the products we consume, programmed not to last, which therefore implies more work, more waste, more consumption. This is what is needed: more throw away to consume more and work more: until 70 years old, 38 hours/week. Growth.

Nothing goes right, especially when everything seems to work. Every day, in our jobs, our non-jobs, our under-jobs; in our food, pestiferous, with additives and colorings; in our supermarkets, monopsones* that put producers in competition, one against the other, create alienating tasks and destroy them whenever they want. Such jobs should no longer be defended, because this is only working to perpetuate what is harmful. Meaningful activities should be substituted. We should put an end to our wars, which serve no purpose except to enrich the multinationals and gun merchants, feeding the hatred of the West. It would be necessary to give up these supposedly essential smartphones, to refuse to progressively make digital school a pedagogical priority, with these technologies colonizing our brains and dumbing down our children. We should change our streets, our roads, our paths, where cars cause, every year in the world, 1.3 million deaths (the WHO predicts 2.3 million deaths and some 50 million injuries for 2030). We should clear our skies of air traffic that brings hordes of tourists colonizing the last virgin places on earth or joining the formatted tourist areas, releasing tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. There should be other media than those that do not give any key to understanding the world and belong to the same people who make the wars, the banks, the supermarkets, the fashion.

The ZAD should strike all consciences, give us the glasses that would allow us to see the reality of our societies for what it is: a zone of generalized nonsense

 » Ethiopia is dying little by little »,  » We are the world, we are the children « … Ah, these shows affected by the good conscience of the West, which insidiously put in our children’s heads in the 70s and 80s, the idea that famines were accidents, the result of a lack of aid, of « development », while we were happily plundering them, constituting our reserves of slaves and foodstuffs. The success of digital technology would remind them that the West appreciates them and needs them to produce our useless objects and to recover the waste when we change them. A child dies of hunger every 5 seconds, let’s not complain any more: it is the price to pay on the altar of growth.

If the Notre-Dame-des-Landes ZAD can serve a global objective, it is, in addition to the indispensable localized struggle that it leads, that of no longer tolerating anything from this world that makes us less human every day, and thus distances us from nature and from each other. The State will not let go, it does not want this to spread, because private property (of the soil, of the places of life, of the water, of the seeds…) is the base of the bourgeois society.

However, all this will have made sense only if the revolt spreads. Everywhere. In all these indecent places and projects, it is obvious, but also, and especially, where we thought they were not: in the areas of « normality ».

Alexandre Penasse

* « An economic situation in which a company has the exclusive privilege of purchasing a product or service. »