Perhaps the reason Malm’s text feels a tad underwhelming is because it is getting so much coverage right now. It doesn’t hurt having a film made, ostensibly of the same book, and I look forward to seeing it, because it’s hard to see how this slight and largely theoretical text would make a movie. The book’s killer title is an obvious selling point, but the book then tells us very little about how to actually go about blowing up anything. Rather, it’s a meditative discourse on the validity of violent (“terrorist”) actions in defence of a cause, in particular the cause of resisting ecocide. Referring to classic campaigns, assessing to what degree they were actually non-violent (Gandhi; MLK; the Suffragettes etc) and concluding that effective resistance cannot occur without an extremist wing being prepared to go beyond the dictates of the law, an action which contains an implicit violence against the status quo. Quite how that should manifest itself in concrete terms is something the book seems to shy away from, even as it refers to more recent acts of environmental resistance.
No comments:
Post a Comment