Class War on the Sinking Titanic

A Metaphor for a Dying Planet.
I’ve completed 16 ocean passages in the Pacific Ocean on small yachts between 37 and 75 feet. More than half of them as skipper. I sailed 5000miles in the 37-footer at an average speed of 4/5knots! Surfing the boat down 15 metre ocean swells at double our hull speed, accompanied by Dolphins and Pilot Whales, followed by an 800-mile sail down my beloved Great Barrier Reef, diving every day for 6 weeks before crossing the Tasman Sea via Lord Howe Island and back to Aotearoa New Zealand.
I sailed a transit of the Mediterranean Sea from Gibraltar to Greece, pre-GPS satellite navigation. That 1200 miles doesn’t count as an “Ocean Passage” as it’s an inland sea.

We came close to being shipwrecked off the coast of Tanzania with the passengers of a sister ship sailing in tandem, being lost when it foundered. Adventures in Africa- Brushes with Death- A Love Story

Every skipper has to have a plan in the back of her or his mind, how they would act when the vessel is sinking, on fire or otherwise compromised and how to respond, bearing in mind everyone is looking to you for answers and some have daggers in their eyes and no doubt in their pockets or life jackets!

I’ve spent 4 decades considering my response.

I’ve saved a few yachts in distress, each were frightening and the challenge dangerous. Shit can go wrong very fast on the ocean. Especially when it has already gone wrong, and you’re flung into the rescue, often without a moment’s preparation, often during extreme weather events, once after an evening of Scotch Whiskey I was roused from my slumber and into the storm we rode!
My rescue of Sea Toy was a cracker! First came the rescue and after the Shark Attack! Shark Attack at Minerva Reef I once asked a mate to come as crew on one of my ocean passages and he replied, “No way Hester, shit always happens on your watch”.
So, it seems!

Had I been the Skipper of the Titanic, this is what I would have done, immediately after the untimely rendezvous with the iceberg.

What Elon Musk would call an “Unscheduled Disassembly” began unfolding within minutes of impact!!! Orwell and Huxley would be cackling like banshees at that double speak!

Your first responsibility to the passengers and crew, is to burst the crew into action, first on mitigation of the immediate danger and then to come up with an ongoing strategy to protect the vessel, passengers and crew. Instilling confidence and leadership at this crucial moment is imperative. Everyone needs to be reassured the captain and crew have this ‘under control’ or at least have a “Plan”. Leadership is imperative.

The captain, the vessel designer and the engineers knew that because of the Titanic not having full height bulkheads, an omission due to allowing “Bean Counters” to decide how safe to make the vessel, that the boat was doomed! Did they tell everyone? Of course, not. Remember the capitalists behind the construction jinxed the vessel by describing it as being “Unsinkable”! No other skipper in the history of our species would vomit up that hubris.

My next ‘command’ would be to release everyone from steerage, otherwise known as “Cattle Class” and ask them to assemble in the massive First Class lounges. I’d have food waiting for them.
First, we divide our “Human Resources”, how I despise that notion, into teams.
Nurses here, tradesmen here, families, the disabled, the elderly and children here.

Then I instruct all the tradesmen and able bodied to start ripping down the satin curtains and their miles of curtain rope and by combining the deck furniture and squabs, etc together, we start making rafts to be strung between the lifeboats that designated members of the crew are launching. The aforementioned accountants decided that they only needed lifeboats for the first-class vultures/passengers so a battle for the life rafts was preordained, by design. The ‘second-class’ passengers were caged below deck.

When the Titanic sunk the seas were dead calm, pardon the pun. The opportunity to successfully save the vast majority of the passengers was at hand but the ongoing class war killed most of them, including the wealthiest of them, because the ruling class, whose ego’s had sunk the ship, only thought of themselves. They died as a direct result of that class war.

Now to get to the real point of the story:

We are on Planet Earth, which should have been called “Planet Ocean”, heading rapidly into the abyss of abrupt climate change and extinction.
If I were the skipper of this ship, I’d let everybody know that the ships on fire, that’s clear to see and it’s sinking “Faster than previously thought” and that no one is coming to the rescue.
In my own country, Aotearoa New Zealand, as a government policy, I would buy as much staple foods as possible on the global markets and stockpile them in multiple “Strategic Reserves” around the country, employing local rural people as their own “Civil Defence” force, community involvement is imperative. Borrow the fucking money, if necessary, money will clearly be worthless soon, as will be debt.
After New Zealand recently closed down it’s only oil refinery, yes you read that correctly, I’d buy as much diesel as I could store, old oil tankers are an immediate way to store fuel, in an emergency. During the Covid lockdowns oil had a negative value at times. I submitted an Official Information Act request to find out what are Aotearoa New Zealand’s strategic reserves of petrol, diesel and grains and the faux liberal Labour government declined to answer my request!
That’s how insane our predicament has become! Oil crash explained: How are negative oil prices even possible?
The Insanity of Aotearoa New Zealand Closing It’s Only Oil Refinery
To understand the importance of diesel read Alice Friedemann’s epic book “When the Trucks Stop Running”.

Because no one will admit how far over the cliff we have careened, our moronic ‘leaders’ are preparing for a world that simply no longer exists. Fortunes will be made, and millions wasted on ridiculous attempts to hold back the rising seas. As Paul Henry said to Guy McPherson when interviewing him at TV Three “We may as well shout at the tide not to come in” Humans ‘don’t have 10 years’ left thanks to climate change – scientist

The “Cognitive Dissonance” is a mind fuck for your inhouse skipper!

Climate change has always been about the class war and racism. 50 years ago my dear departed dad said to me “If we don’t overthrow capitalism, it will make the planet uninhabitable”. Here we are, staring down the barrel of abrupt, non-linear climate change with governments worldwide continuing to target growth as an indicator of “Progress” when in reality it’s killing us and quite possibly all complex life on our beleaguered planet.

Infinite growth on a finite planet is clearly unsustainable. Edward Abbey the “Desert Anarchist” said “Infinite growth is the ideology of the cancer cell”.
Planet Ocean has terminal cancer, and we are the carrier.
The Pain You Feel Is Capitalism and the Living Planet Dying.

“The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence. It is nothing but love and emotion; it is the Living Infinite…”

“If the Oceans die, we die” Captain Paul Watson

As I have previously pointed out on this blog, clearly our oceans are dying: Chronicling Ecosystem Collapse from the Tropics to the Antarctic

About Kevin Hester

I'm an anti-imperialist, environmental activist and blue ocean sailor, who is passionate about the earth and all it's inhabitants without favour. Brace for imminent impact as we bare witness to the non-linear unraveling of the biosphere and habitability disappearing for most if not all complex life on the only habitable planet we know of. To quote President Niinistö in North Russia: ‘If We Lose the Arctic, We Lose the World’. Folks we have lost the Arctic.