Submitted by An_Old_Big_Tree in anticiv

As we have said, their infrastructures-political, economic, phys­ical are, in fact, immensely vulnerable. Perhaps the gold standard of resistance against industrial civilization is MEND, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta. The oil industry has earned liter­ ally hundreds of billions of dollars from taking Nigeria's oil. The country currently takes in $3 billion a month from oil, which accounts for 40 percent of its GDP} The Niger Delta is the world's largest wet­ land, but it could more readily be called a sludgeland now. The indigenous people used to be able to support themselves by fishing and farming. No more. They're knee-deep in oil industry waste. The fish population has been "decimated" and the people are now sick and starving. The original resistance, MOSOP, was led by poet-activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. Theirs was a nonviolent campaign against Royal Dutch/Shell and the military regime. Saro-Wiwa and eight others were executed by the military government, despite international outcry and despite their nonviolence.
MEND is the second generation of the resistance. They conduct direct attacks against workers, bridges, office sites, storage facilities, rigs and pipelines, and support vessels. They have reduced Nigeria's oil output by a dramatic one-third. In one single attack, they were able to stop 10 percent of the country's production. And on December 22, 2010, MEND temporarily shut down three of the country's four oil refineries by damaging pipelines to the facilities. Their main tactic is the use of speedboats in surprise attacks against simultaneous targets toward the goal of disrupting the entire system of production.
According to Nnamdi K. Obasi, West Africa senior analyst at the I nter­ national Crisis Group, "MEND seems to be led by more enlightened and sophisticated men than most of the groups in the past." They have uni­ versity educations and have studied other militant movements. Their training in combat is so good that they have fought and won in skirmishes against both Shell's private military and Nigeria's elite fighting units. They've also won "broad sympathy among the Niger Delta community." This sympathy has helped them maintain security and safety for their combatants as the local population has not turned them in. These are not armed thugs, but a true resistance. And they number just a few hundred.
Understand: a few hundred people, well-trained and organized, have reduced the oil output of Nigeria by one-third. M E N D has said, " It must be clear that the Nigerian government cannot protect your workers or assets. Leave our land while you can or die in it. ... Our aim is to totally destroy the capacity of the Nigerian government to export oil." I can guarantee that 98 percent of the people who are reading this book have more resources individually than all of M E N D put together when they started. Resistance is not just theoretically possible. It is happening now. The only question is, will we join them?

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rot wrote

liter­ ally

this is a funny typo when writing about oil. sorry had to point it out.

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