In a recent batch of post I’ve received is a map and tables of the UK’s mines, gas and oil wells, and exported raw materials.
My friends are teaching me about the metals and (not so) rare earth elements that make the war machinery designed to obliterate the world as we know it. Clear as day is the understanding that the process of mining itself is as destructive as the wars that these mines feed.
I’ve been learning about the resistance to mining in the Sperrins, West Papua, and Sudan; Sulawesi, Dupax Del Norte, the DRC, the Amazon. As Elbit Systems becomes a politically toxic household name in the UK, I’m learning about Elbit Dynamics in Rwanda, and Elbit sites popping up in Romania and Czechia. It’s obvious that we are in danger of playing whack-a-mole, or pushing the problem away, when, to stop it, we need to drain it of its resources.
Thanks to YLNM, London Mining Network, Save our Sperrins, and my new friend in Falmouth, I’ve been funnelled a lot of information pretty quickly, even with the prison censorship. Frustrated, I try to remind prison security that I am trying to stop bombs, not build them, before I realise that, to their twisted minds, that is the greatest threat.
Sacrifice zones
This summer of wildfires and deadly heat is only the tip of our melting iceberg. The sacrifice zones that “the West” has made of the so-called Global South are part of the same system of “exploitation here, annihilation there, profit everywhere.”1
200,000 litres of toxic fluid is pumped into the Ajkwa river system every day. The inquiry for the gold mine in the Sperrins is happening right now. The people’s barricade of Dupax Del Norte has been torn down. The metals that are (or soon will be) coerced from their lands go on to the F-35’s bullets and bombs.
The disconnection we have towards our resources is one of the mining and war machines guaranteed strengths. The idea, in the “UK”, that we are a post-industrial country solely reliant on imports, is another. In the UK, they mine tungsten, for bullets and bombs, by Dartmoor. In the UK, they mine polyhalite, for white phosphorus, under the North Yorkshire moors.
The difference between the DRC, or open-pit mines in places long since designated sacrifice zones by white supremacy, and the UK is that the UK sometimes bothers to hide. They bother to build 22-mile tunnels to transport the polyhalite mined from our national park to an Israeli Chemicals Ltd factory, in Balby. After all, it would be much easier to blame people arriving on small boats as invaders if it doesn’t look like the British government is bombing its own people.
And yet, isn’t that what’s happening? Aren’t weekly explosions that crack the foundations of village houses not the state bombing its own citizens? How much closer to civil war can we get than bedroom wallpaper splitting, holes in the earth, the ground shaking, mining dust coating vegetable patches?
Mining for consent
If you are evicted from your home in Cornwall to mine the lithium beneath it, it will not be for the electric car battery – which is already made more efficiently with hydrogen, but whatever. It will be for the 1.8 kilograms of lithium that each of the missile guidance systems needs so it can light up our TV screens to Iranian, Lebanese, Palestinian, and Yemeni backdrops. If you are displaced from your home in Lancashire, Cymru or Cornwall, you will have even more in common with the people of these shellshocked countries than you do with the Duchy.
This is probably why our rulers – the tech giants and their mouthpieces in Parliament – have doubled down on their dirtiest mines to date – us. In Didcot Parkway, Swindon, Brick Lane, data centres will mine your Internet cookies, your social media algorithms, until “the digital kill chains”2 of Palantir, Meta, and Elon Musk can manufacture their most powerful weapon of mass destruction – consent.
Soon there will be no sand left to bury our heads in, no copper left to suck us into our tailored escapes. However much we divert from our farmlands, the data centres will melt. We cannot continue to let them claw deep into our only life source, chew once and spit out.
The fact that it is absurd to us to mine raw materials for war only to justify more wars for raw materials does not stop this paradox from being a reality. When did we stop believing life could be more than this? Because if we wanted to, we could stop this tomorrow.
Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Rio Tinto, Aryan Gold, Freeport-McMoRan, Elbit Dynamics – they don’t work alone. If you think about it, they don’t work at all. How hard can it be to walk away from the bomb site – present; future – and learn to rebuild?
- Soumaya Ghannoushi, “From Epstein to Gaza: The depravity of the western elite is now fully exposed“, Middle East Eye, 3 February 2026. ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎