Response to Greer’s “Strange Bright Banners”

It was a little surprising to have our popular work “The Power of Community” tied together with Nick Griffin, the head of Britain’s neo-fascist British Nationalist Party and David Korten, whose book The Great Turning, John characterizes as “among the most antidemocratic books of recent years’. I know nothing about Griffin and a great deal about Korten, who has written widely over the years and who has certainly been a leader in trying to find a path through the complex morass in which we find ourselves.

John notes that the film is a worthwhile case study of how a society can weather an extreme energy shortage. But he notes that this apparent success was because Cuba is a dictatorship and gives Castro credit for imposing the “draconian restrictions on energy that got his country through its ‘Special Period’”. Castro did not impost restrictions on energy – that was done by the Soviet Union when they simply stopped shipping oil to Cuba. And this was exacerbated by the “draconian” restrictions of the US that used this opportunity to try to cripple Cuba more by the vicious Torricelli Act which strengthened the economic embargo on Cuba. This was one time Russia and the US cooperated in causing great suffering to a small poor nation.

Of course we have our own version of dictatorial powers relative to energy. In the first energy crisis in the US, one could only buy gasoline every other day and in limited quantities. The speed limit was lowered and other measures taken. It was an emergency and the government used its emergency power to deal with immediate problems.

John’s knowledge of Cuba is quite limited and denigrates the Cuban people (who were the ones going hungry) and their own efforts to survive without killing each other. To assume Castro managed this situation by top down decrees is naïve.

John notes that “A great deal of the American left seems to have seen nothing wrong in this curious definition of “community.” In my book Plan C: Community Survival Strategies for Peak Oil and Climate Change”, I offered some definitions of community (page 258) that did not include anything suggesting dictatorial powers or neofasicism. These included definitions from people like Wendell Berry, Robert Bellah, James Kunstler and our founder Arthur Morgan. Berry’s definition is “By community, I mean the commonwealth and common interests commonly understood, of people living together in a place and wishing to continue to do so. To put it another way, community is a locally understood interdependence of local people local culture, local economy, and local nature.”

Linking the word community to neo-fascism and anti-democracy may make good copy but the tradition is deep in our souls and I assume most thoughtful people will simply reject this journalistic connection.