Defenders of life and nature

[Plus audio version]

As life itself is increasingly menaced by the cancerous growth of industrialism, the importance of those rare voices across the world alerting us to this threat becomes ever more acute.

In the USA, Jennifer Bilek warned on August 2, 2025: “A society that obscures biological sex through technology, pharmaceuticals, language, and legal changes risks undermining human reproduction.

“The gender industry, encompassing gender ideology and transgenderism, markets human reproductive systems as fragmented parts, aligning with advancements in reproductive technologies like surrogacy, IVF, sperm banks, egg harvesting, and genetic screening.

“These industries, already generating billions in revenue and poised for growth, pave the way for ectogenesis and multi-parent genetic configurations.

“The LGB movement, once rooted in civil rights, has evolved into a powerful force promoting a high-tech family model, detached from biological norms, and families as we currently understand them, through the addition of TQI+ and gender ideology (marketing).

“The struggle is not about ‘trans’ rights versus women’s rights or men versus women, but biological reproduction versus technological reproduction”.

In Italy, Silvia Guerini (pictured) wrote on August 5, 2025: “Gender ideology is a ramified system that modifies and reconfigures the perception of one’s body and reality.

“This ideology must be seen as part of the transhumanist advance, demolishing and reconfiguring the human being and life.

“It leads to dissociation from the body, the spirit, nature and reality. It leads to the dissolution of sexual roots, to artificial reproduction and genetic tinkering.

“It is part of the process of denying the human being as such, in preparation for genetic modification, brain implants, in vitro life and a laboratory world.

“It artificially reconfigures what will be considered man, woman, procreation, reality, nature, artifice, machine and human being.

“Bodies are inviolable and unavailable; they are not living laboratories in the hands of transhumanist and eugenicist technocrats”.

She remarked: “It is no coincidence that there has been an increase in requests for cryopreservation of eggs and sperm before embarking on the transition process.

“Those who wish to become parents in the future will only be able to do so by resorting to artificial reproduction centres”.

And in France, Renaud Garcia likewise warned in an interview in the July-August 2025 issue of La Décroissance print newspaper that the aim of industrialism was to “artificialize birth”.

He described how contemporary thinking has been deliberately shaped to shut down all criticism of the industrialist system, even in “environmentalist” circles.

There, he explained, it has become trendy to parrot academic Philippe Descola’s line that “nature does not exist”.

This is predicated on the notion that naming “nature” is a purely modern and Western notion.

But, argued Garcia, if nature does not exist, what are peasants in Africa or Asia doing when they live in the traditional way?

“They are not armed with a Western notion of nature, but they still live with that which is born, grows and dies”.

He added, crucially: “If nature does not exist, we lose the critical basis of all anti-industrialism”.

Another trick used by “left-wing” ideological agents of the system is to deliberately associate the term “nature” with a certain “right-wing” outlook attached to a rigid idea of a patriarchal and authoritarian “natural” social hierarchy.

The point of this manoeuvre is to disallow challenges to the industrial system’s threats to natural life, Garcia told La Décroissance.

“Criticism of artificial reproduction is seen as an attack on the rights of ‘reproductive minorities’”, he said. Dissidents are quickly labelled “fascists”, “reactionaries” or “transphobes” and their meetings cancelled or disrupted.

Garcia described this stifling of intellectual debate through vindictive smears and threats as “Stalinist”.

He has himself been on the receiving end of this treatment, as The Acorn can testify first-hand. But, like Bilek and Guerini, he remains determined to defend the real and the natural.

He concluded the interview by insisting: “Only the living life – and not the machine life that today serves as its substitute – is worth being led”.

[Audio version]

I wrote the above article for the latest Acorn bulletin over on the Winter Oak site. As is now customary, I will now share more of the content…

Uniting against the empire of greed

Divide and rule is the principal technique through which a numerically-small occupying power can maintain domination over an indigenous population.

Political parties and “left” or “right” labelling are designed to stop us from talking, stop us from finding common ground, stop us from coming together against the despotic rule of global Capital.

If somebody else does not agree with everything we think or say, we are supposed to regard them as our enemy, with no further communication possible – apart from insults and denunciations.

Jan Goodey is a long-term friend of Winter Oak, and an occasional contributor to The Acorn, who has just brought out a booklet entitled All Hands on Deck: Climate Activism and the way ahead. [1]

Now, the Winter Oak view has long been that the “climate” struggle is not only a distraction from the real struggle against industrial slavery, but pretty much its reversal in that it promotes industrial “solutions” to the crisis it presents.

But this does not mean we do get on with Jan, because we know that the core of his worldview is one we share.

In the booklet he argues that, for all its limitations, the recruiting power of the “climate” movement can feed authentic revolt.

“Many who are first attracted to the mainstream movement based on climate science alone will, through education and exposure, go on to develop a far deeper understanding of – and affinity with – anarchist principles and values”. [2]

These values, he explains, involve a preference for “localised economies managed by organised, friendly, grassroots communities”. [3]

There we see the only dividing line that really matters – that between the future planned for us by the global oligarchs and that favoured by most of humankind.

Jan writes: “Anarchists, like many activists in the mainstream movement, cherish freedom, mutualism, wildness – while the prevailing capitalist governments desecrate our wild lands and seas and our human and animal ecologies; taking us into a world of social licence built on AI and technocracy, steel and glass and a virtual, chipped existence, which is no existence at all”. [4]

He insists that, in this great battle for our future freedom, “even historically opposed groups can collaborate to advance shared interests”. [5]

And he gives the example of a British group called Vegans Support the Farmers which aims to “help farmers with their fight for fairer treatment against a cabal of rich, profiteering, supermarkets”. [6]

An interesting section of the 48-page booklet consists of advice for any dissident finding themselves imprisoned by the state – as Jan was, in 2022, for his direct action eco-campaigning. [7]

He says, for example: “Remember that the stories you tell – from the very start in the holding cell – will follow you throughout your stay, so don’t be tempted to make stuff up.

“Prisoners tend to be sharper than those on the outside because they have had the added time for reflection and cogitation, so they can detect a lie at ten paces”. [8]

“By going to prison as a political prisoner and giving your time and skills freely to help others whose most basic freedoms are being oppressed, you are resisting the inevitability of a capitalist economics that desecrates the planet whilst making the rich richer, and the poor poorer”. [9]

Jan also addresses the issue of violence in prison – something that he says worries a lot of people facing a stretch inside.

He admits: “If you grass/snitch and you get found out, or if you’ve been sent down for paedophilia, punishment will be swift, unexpected, and brutal”. [10]

But he stresses: “You’ll soon realise that in prison you reap what you sow: if you’re honest and treat others with respect, you’ve got little to fear”. [11]

Mutual respect and honesty are likewise qualities that need to be nurtured by all inmates of the larger global-industrial prison, as we come together to tear down its concrete walls of domination and destruction.

The booklet is on sale for a mere £1.50 from Active Distribution.

[1] Jan Goodey, All Hands on Deck: Climate Activism and the way ahead (Active Distribution, 2025). All subsequent page references are to this booklet.
[2] p. 16.
[3] p. 9.
[4] p. 8.
[5] p. 39.
[6] Ibid. https://www.veganssupportthefarmers.co.uk/
[7] https://theecologist.org/2023/may/15/id-protest-again-despite-prison
[8] p. 32.
[9] p. 36.
[10] p. 31.
[11] Ibid.

The Megamachine and the loss of community

Below are some excerpts from a new English-language publication, Minimal Theory of the Process of Abstraction: Diagnosis, produced by the Gemeinwesen Group in Italy in tribute to organic radical inspiration Jacques Camatte, who died earlier this year. These concise theoretical points are accompanied, on the relevant website, by links to an anthology of passages by various authors.

1.3. Disappearance of creativity 
The cornerstone of human expression – the ability to create with our hands and our tongues – is gradually atrophying. Men and women have always lived through daily acts of creation: gestures, words, and objects that gave meaning to existence because they arose from an immediate, practical, and emotional relationship with the world, responding to everyday needs. Gathering berries and weaving a basket larger than one’s hands, carrying them elsewhere, crushing and eating them – simple gestures that gave the day its meaning and fullness. With the division of labor, entire aspects of life began to be delegated to certain members of the community, who became specialized in one domain, inevitably closing themselves off from others. With the advent of machines, the dispossession of creativity reached its peak. And with the ultimate machine – artificial intelligence – even the ability to create language and thought is on the verge of vanishing. For thousands of years, singing and dancing were part of everyday life. They were not skills, but ways of being present. People sang and danced everywhere: in groups or alone, young and old, in daily life and in rites of passage – births, deaths, weddings, celebrations. These were shared, continuous practices that wove together work, nourishment, mourning, and joy. Individual singing expressed manifest delight. Dance, even when barely suggested, signaled the vitality of the body. Today, these practices have vanished from lived experience. They survive, disfigured, in the entertainment industry – among the many already absorbed, or soon to be absorbed, by combinatory logic.

1.5. Generalized anxiety and depression 
Anxiety and depression are no longer exceptional states; they become cyclical polarities of ordinary existence in a performance-driven society. Anxiety is fueled by the imperative of constant self-promotion: every aspect of life is subjected to market logic, demanding that we appear desirable, efficient, and competitive. Personal value is measured in real time through achievements, images, and self-narratives, generating chronic tension. Man becomes a commodity that sells itself; the subject becomes a company of himself, compelled to optimize his survival as human capital. Depression emerges as the effect of devaluation: invisibility and failure in competition plunge the individual into subjective collapse, where psychological and symbolic bankruptcy converge. The relentless expansion of pharmacological intervention – and the recourse to suicide, beginning in pre-adolescence – are irrefutable evidence of this.

2.2.3. Egalité • Deletion of differences 
Equality among humans is conceived as the elimination of qualitative differences. Everything about the human must be made measurable. Heterogeneity becomes suspect. Equivalence replaces relationship, laying the groundwork for the revocation of individual faculties in favor of a higher institution that becomes the sole regulator of action. Equality thus coincides with the equal subordination of all to the institution. The bond of proximity is broken, replaced by a condition of estrangement in which indifference prevails.

3.2.1. City 
The city is the spatial embodiment of the state and of value: an enclosure that separates and organizes, geometrizes life, transforms the territory into a grid. The first cities were born as simultaneous devices of protection, power, and accumulation: mighty walls, central granaries, temples. From the outset, the city carries with it the implicit promise of immortality: to endure beyond bodies, beyond seasons, offering a second nature more stable than nature itself. It defines itself in opposition to the countryside: if not with open contempt for peasants, then always with forms of distancing that mark evolutionary, cultural, and moral superiority.

3.7.3. Megamachine 
The megamachine is the integrated totality of people and tools in a unified functional system. It is not a sum of machines, but a totality that encompasses bodies, rules, flows, and objectives. Every element is subordinate to it.

4.1.1. Gemeinwesen 
The community (Gemeinwesen) is the environment that nourishes human beings: a network of living relationships that binds human beings to each other, to the earth, to animals, to natural cycles, to nourishment, to care, to language, to the rhythms of life. It is not an ideal to be restored, but an elementary reality that has made human life possible for tens of thousands of years. Historical and anthropological evidence demonstrates its concrete, never utopian, variety. Abstraction gradually erases the very possibility of “being-with”: the loss of community is also a loss of shared presence, of certainty about one’s position. Thus, the reality of earthly happiness – which, for Epicurus, is based on friendship, an elementary, lasting, and reciprocal form of relationship – vanishes.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o: an organic radical inspiration

The latest in our series of profiles from the organic radicals website.

“To control a people’s culture is to control their tools of self-definition”

Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1938-2025) was a writer and cultural activist who called for resistance to the domination of Western imperialism in Africa and elsewhere.

Influenced by Frantz Fanon, he emphasised the crucial cultural aspect of the way the empire oppresses and controls populations.

Ngugi wrote in his 1986 book Decolonising the Mind: “The real aim of colonialism was to control the people’s wealth: what they produced, how they produced it, and how it was distributed; to control, in other words, the entire realm of the language of real life.

“Colonialism imposed its control of the social production of wealth through military conquest and subsequent political dictatorship.

“But its most important area of domination was the mental universe of the colonised, the control, through culture, of how people perceived themselves and their relationship to the world.

“Economic and political control can never be complete or effective without mental control. To control a people’s culture is to control their tools of self-definition in relationship to others”. (1)

Ngugi explained that language is part of the authentic organic culture that imperialist power has to crush in order to impose its centralised system.

Decolonising the Mind was his last book in English and his official renunciation of the coloniser’s language: thereafter he chose to express himself in his native Gikuyu.

He wrote: “Values are the basis of people’s identity, their sense of particularity as members of the human race.

“All this is carried by language. Language as culture is the collective memory bank of a people’s experience in history. Culture is almost indistinguishable from the language that makes possible its genesis, growth, banking, articulation and indeed its transmission from one generation to the next”. (2)

In a 2018 interview he pointed to the way that the transatlantic slave trade sought to disempower uprooted people by cutting them off from their cultural identity.

He said: “Remember that the first thing that happened to African people was forced loss of language and names.

“The resistance of African American people is one of the greatest stories of resistance in history. Because against all those arduous conditions they were able to create a new linguistic system out of which emerges spirituals, jazz, hip-hop, and many other things.

“Resistance is the best way of keeping alive. It can take even the smallest form of saying no to injustice. If you really think you’re right, you stick to your beliefs, and they help you to survive”. (3)

Ngugi followed the organic radical tradition in stressing the importance of authentic, grass-roots socio-cultural self-expression within the larger framework of an internationalist humanism.

He told an audience in South Africa in 2017: “If you know all the languages of the world but not your mother tongue, that is enslavement. Knowing your mother tongue and all other languages too is empowerment”. (4)

Video link: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o Interview: Memories of Who We Are (18 mins)

1. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London; James Currey, 1986), p. 16.
2. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind, p. 15.
3. www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/12/ngugi-wa-thiongo-wrestling-with-the-devil-interview
4. www.huffingtonpost.co.za/2017/03/03/9-powerful-things-ngugi-said-at-his-public-lecture_a_21872421/

Acorninfo

Any lingering doubt that might have existed in people’s minds about the World Economic Forum being part of ZIM, the zio-satanic imperialist mafia (see ‘The truth about Davos’), has surely now been dispelled. The WEF has just appointed two new co-chairs of its board of trustees – Larry Fink and André Hoffmann. Fink, busy privatising the UK with Keir Starmer, of course heads BlackRock, believed to be ultimately owned by ZIM godfathers the Rothschilds. His fellow co-chair, vice-chair of Swiss Big Pharma company Roche Holdings, has proudly lent his name to the “André Hoffmann Fellowship for the Fourth Industrial Revolution”. An announcement states: “The Fellow will be based jointly at the World Economic Forum’s Center in Geneva, Switzerland and the Porter School of the Environment and Earth Sciences at Tel Aviv University, Israel”.

* * *

The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change has been linked to a project widely condemned for proposing the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, involving a sweeping redevelopment of the besieged Strip, reports Middle East Eye. This seems like a good moment to remind readers of researcher Ben Rubin’s 2023 warning that “Tony Blair is coordinating with the Rothschild family to fundamentally reshape British society and implement a global, digital slave state”.

* * *

In a significant interview with historian Mark Curtis, retired British diplomat Sir Richard Dalton has warned of “sheer mendacious propaganda” and “the effect of intense Israeli lobbying and the linkage of Israeli lobbying to financial interests”. He says: “It is a very powerful force in our society. Those who support the Israeli government through thick and thin have traditionally been very influential. Israeli influence and the influence of supporters of the government of Israel has got stronger… Opinion polls in Britain show that the stances the British government has taken are not in accordance with majority opinion in Britain”. In other words, Britain is not a democracy but a ZIM colony.

* * *

Former CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton “secretly oversaw a top-level spy ring involving Jewish émigrés and Israeli operatives”, write Kit Klarenberg and Wyatt Reed on The Grayzone site. They add: “Angleton may not have been operating with US interests in mind throughout his 21-year tenure”. For instance: “According to Angleton, after the Irgun ‘blew up the British embassy in Rome’ in 1946, the CIA intervened to ensure they escaped Italy without prosecution”.

* * *

“ZIM doesn’t just kill people. It kills timelines. It slaughters clarity. It replaces lived history with engineered myth. Inversion is the operating system: the scapegoat becomes the villain, the financiers become the saviors, and those who dare to remember become labeled as threats”. An excellent piece from The Cosmic Onion.

* * *

“Detailed evidence suggest the entire British Empire, in its actions regarding the future of Palestine, behaved as a Zionist entity… The two holiest sites in Islam are today governed by the Saudi clan and Wahhabi teachings because they helped the British Empire lay foundations for Zionism in Arabia during and after World War One”. A most enlightening article by Rez Karim, relayed by Vanessa Beeley.

* * *

“The ideological convergence of Hindu nationalism and Zionism” is explored in an August 26 article by José Alberto Niño. He notes the role in this process of Lieutenant General Jack Farj Rafael Jacob (pictured), “the highest-ranking Jewish officer to serve in the Indian Army throughout its history” and remarks: “Jacob’s prominence within India’s defense establishment made him a symbolic bridge between Indian and Israeli strategic thinking”. Niño concludes: “Hindutva has become the vector through which Zionist influence enters Indian policy, reshaping a country that once opposed Israel’s existence into one of its most dependable partners”.

* * *

“There are many allegorical stories that describe how being afraid to name your opponents will leave you forever under their control”, advises Helen of the Keep Bristol Moving! blog in an article entitled “Calling A Spade A Spade. Hiding in Plain Sight: Liveable Neighbourhoods, 15 Minute Cities, Net Zero and the World Economic Forum”. She adds: “Naming your opponent is not about defeating them: it is about dissolving their power over you – the power you have given them”. And Helen does just that by pointing to a section of Bristol City Council’s website called “Bristol Global City”, in which the “local” authority boasts of its Global Goals Centre promoting the UNSDGs and of the fact that it “works closely with global organisations” such as the World Economic Forum (WEF); various United Nations agencies; Open Society Foundations; the Brookings Institution and Bloomberg Philanthropies. And they call this “democracy”?

* * *

“To tell the truth is to render yourself an enemy of the state – that is just the reality that I am living and I am accepting”. Candace Owens talks about her research on Jeffrey Epstein and global Zionist power in just one of many unmissable episodes of her online show. Her conversation with Tucker Carlson is also well worth watching.

* * *

Two French researchers have been vindicated in their claim that the “wife” of president Emmanuel Macron, Brigitte, is in fact a man pretending to be a woman. Originally found guilty of defamation, Amandine Roy and Natacha Rey were cleared on appeal in July. French media described the Paris court’s verdict as “very bad news” for the person known as Brigitte. For the background, see “A grotesque spectacle of lies and abuse“.

* * *

“The systematic uglification of our world represents one of the most successful yet unrecognized forms of social control ever deployed. While we argue about politics and economics, the very environments that shape our consciousness – our buildings, our public spaces, our visual culture – have been deliberately degraded to produce specific psychological effects: demoralization, rootlessness, and a desperate readiness to escape physical reality altogether”. A superb August 22 essay from Unbekoming.

* * *

“The system is evil, and the most evil system there has ever been. Forget the Nazis, the Soviets, Rome, Babylon – what we are facing today is worse than a combination of the worst aspects of all of those combined”. A powerful message from The Light paper.

* * *

Economist Richard Werner says the concept of GDP/GNP was invented just before the creation of the Bank of England in 1694 “because the bankers were going to lend to England and they wanted to figure out ‘what is the ability to pay of these people in England?’ It’s the ability to service national debt”.

* * *

On July 6, BRICS member states signed the Joint Declaration of the 17th BRICS Summit, “Strengthening Global South Cooperation for More Inclusive and Sustainable Governance”, in Rio de Janeiro. Writes the Edward Slavsquat blog: “This year’s BRICS declaration serves as a manifesto for the Multipolar World Order”. The declaration states that “the International Monetary Fund (IMF) must remain adequately resourced and agile”, stresses “the role of the World Health Organization as the directing and coordinating authority on international health work within the UN System” and, of course, calls for “global governance”.

* * *

“You know, it really bothers me sometimes, to see so many good people taken advantage of by the predators and parasites who lie to them. And use the things they love and care about against them. If I could snap my fingers and wake the people from this trance they’ve been under, I would. But I can’t. So they’ll continue to get screwed. Day after day, year after year, until they open their damn eyes and stop imagining they can vote their way out of this shit”. James “Natty” Jones [Lee Gaulman] in the 2025 (free) feature film Barnum World.

* * *

Paul Cudenec’s short satirical piece ‘Introducing Walk-A-Bot!‘ now features in video form, thanks to Drs Sam and Mark Bailey in New Zealand, who used it in their presentation of the AI-critical work of Eric Coppolino.

* * *

More than 100 campaign groups are joining forces on Tuesday September 9 to try to shut down the first day of the death-dealing DSEI arms fair at the Excel Centre in London, a sickening hub for war, corporate greed and global imperialism. Say campaigners: “Israeli weapons companies will be exhibiting their ‘genocide-tested’ weapons to a clientele of arms dealers using videos and photos of genocide in Gaza. We cannot let these genocide profiteers shop for more lethal weapons in London”.

* * *

Five and a half years after the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) uprising was brought to a premature halt by the Covid manoeuvre, France is set for another potential wave of revolt against the oligarchical occupation. A call has gone out to bring the country to a halt from Wednesday September 10, by staying away from work and school, refusing to shop in big supermarkets, not using debit and credit cards – the suggestions are pouring in thick and fast. Against a background of smouldering resentment at Rothschild-backed president Emmanuel Macron’s blatantly corrupt regime, and the increasing impoverishment of working people, perhaps the final straw has been the government’s announcement that it is going to scrap two annual paid bank holidays. Will this much-discussed day of action amount to anything significant? We will see in a couple of weeks’ time…

* * *

Acorn quote:

“Modern civilization suffers from a lack of principles, and it suffers from it in every domain. By a monstrous anomaly, it is, alone, among the others, a civilization without principles, or with only negative ones, which amounts to the same thing. It is as if an organism with its head cut off went on living a life that was at the same time intense and disordered…”

René Guénon, East and West.

(For many more like this, see the Winter Oak quotes for the day blog)