But I immediately fell in love with this kid’s fierce sincerity. I thought a moment. There was no one around. I said, “Now, I would never want to discourage you or anyone from burning down a factory. But at the same time I want to emphasize that you have to be smart. One stupid mistake can cost you a lot.”
He nodded.
“How old are you?”
“Sixteen.”
“Can I ask you a personal question?”
He nodded again.
“Have you ever had sex?”
He shook his head.
“If you do this, and you get caught, you won’t be having sex for at least twenty years. I’m not saying don’t do it. I’m just saying this isn’t a game, and there are real consequences for acting against the wishes of those in power, for effectively opposing production. That doesn’t mean we should be afraid of those in power. It means we should be very, very smart. Think it through, and then think it through a hundred more times. And then follow your heart.”
He nodded again.
I don’t always respond that way. Sometimes, as I said, I get as far away from them as I can. But once I was approached by someone who said, “I know how destructive dams are, and I know what’s at stake. My people are people of the salmon. Our entire way of life is centered around them. If you can get me the explosives I’ll take out a dam.”
I’d never met this man before, but I knew him by reputation. He wasn’t a fed. Nor was he crazy. Nor did he have bad boundaries. Nor was he young and inexperienced. He knew what he was talking about, and he knew what he would be risking.
He said, “I have young children, so I can’t do it for a few years. But when they’re old enough, I’ll do it.”
Unsaid, but hanging in the air between us, was the fact that once his children were old enough to understand, he would be prepared to die or go to prison to help the river run free.
“I don’t know how to do it,” I said. “And I don’t know how to get explosives.”
He nodded and smiled wryly, then said, “That’s okay. You’ve got a few years.”
A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE
Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.
Arthur Miller263
WHEN I WROTE ABOUT THE CIA’S HUMAN RESOURCE EXPLOITATION Training Manual, I forgot to mention that the Agency also put out instruction manuals on how to commit murder. The manuals make pretty fascinating reading in a ghoulish sort of way, if you can force yourself to forget that the book belongs not in the fiction section of the CIA bookshelf (along with their press releases and their analyses of the threats posed by other countries) but in the how-to section.
I think the words from A Study of Assassination: A CIA Manual describe the culture and the government far more starkly and elegantly than I ever could, so I’ll quote at length: “TECHNIQUES: The essential point of assassination is the death of the subject. A human being may be killed in many ways but sureness is often overlooked by those who may be emotionally unstrung by the seriousness of this act they intend to commit. The specific technique employed will depend upon a large number of variables, but should be constant in one point: Death must be absolutely certain. . . . Techniques may be considered as follows:
“1. Manual.
“It is possible to kill a man with the bare hands, but very few are skillful enough to do it well. Even a highly trained Judo expert will hesitate to risk killing by hand unless he has absolutely no alternative. However, the simplest local tools are often much the most efficient means of assassination. A hammer, axe, wrench, screw driver, fire poker, kitchen knife, lamp stand, or anything hard, heavy and handy will suffice. A length of rope or wire or a belt will do if the assassin is strong and agile. All such improvised weapons have the important advantage of availability and apparent innocence. The obviously lethal machine gun failed to kill Trotsky where an item of sporting goods succeeded. . . .
“2. Accidents.
“For secret assassination . . . the contrived accident is the most effective technique. When successfully executed, it causes little excitement and is only casually investigated. The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface. Elevator shafts, stair wells, unscreened windows and bridges will serve. Bridge falls into water are not reliable. In simple cases a private meeting with the subject may be arranged at a properly cased location. The act may be executed by sudden, vigorous [excised] of the ankles, tipping the subject over the edge. If the assassin immediately sets up an outcry, playing the ‘horrified witness,’ no alibi or surreptitious withdrawal is necessary. In chase cases it will usually be necessary to stun or drug the subject before dropping him. Care is required to insure that no wound or condition not attributable to the fall is discernible after death.
“Falls into the sea or swiftly flowing rivers may suffice if the subject cannot swim. It will be more reliable if the assassin can arrange to attempt rescue, as he can thus be sure of the subject’s death and at the same time establish a workable alibi. . . .
“Falls before trains or subway cars are usually effective, but require exact timing and can seldom be free from unexpected observation.
“Automobile accidents are a less satisfactory means of assassination. If the subject is deliberately run down, very exact timing is necessary and investigation is likely to be thorough. If the subject’s car is tampered with, reliability is very low. The subject may be stunned or drugged and then placed in the car, but this is only reliable when the car can be run off a high cliff or into deep water without observation.
“Arson can cause accidental death if the subject is drugged and left in a burning building. Reliability is not satisfactory unless the building is isolated and highly combustible. . . .
“3. Drugs.
“In all types of assassination except terroristic, drugs can be very effective. If the assassin is trained as a doctor or nurse and the subject is under medical care, this is an easy and rare method. An overdose of morphine administered as a sedative will cause death without disturbance and is difficult to detect. The size of the dose will depend upon whether the subject has been using narcotics regularly. If not, two grains will suffice. . . .
“4. Edge Weapons.
“Any locally obtained edge device may be successfully employed. A certain minimum of anatomical knowledge is needed for reliability. Puncture wounds of the body cavity may not be reliable unless the heart is reached. The heart is protected by the rib cage and is not always easy to locate. Abdominal wounds were once nearly always mortal, but modern medical treatment has made this no longer true. Absolute reliability is obtained by severing the spinal cord in the cervical region. This can be done with the point of a knife or a light blow of an axe or hatchet.
“Another reliable method is the severing of both jugular and carotid blood vessels on both sides of the windpipe. . . .
“5. Blunt Weapons.
“As with edge weapons, blunt weapons require some anatomical knowledge for effective use. Their main advantage is their universal availability. A hammer may be picked up almost anywhere in the world. Baseball and [illegible] bats are very widely distributed. Even a rock or a heavy stick will do, and nothing resembling a weapon need be procured, carried or subsequently disposed of. Blows should be directed to the temple, the area just below and behind the ear, and the lower, rear portion of the skull. Of course, if the blow is very heavy, any portion of the upper skull will do. The lower frontal portion of the head, from the eyes to the throat, can withstand enormous blows without fatal consequences.
“6. Firearms.
“Firearms are often used in assassination, often very ineffectively. The assassin usually has insufficient technical knowledge of the limitations of weapons, and expects more range, accuracy and killing power than can be provided with reliability. Since certain
ty of death is the major requirement, firearms should be used which can provide destructive power at least 100% in excess of that thought to be necessary, and ranges should be half that considered practical for the weapon. . . .
“The .300 F.A.B. Magnum is probably the best cartridge readily available. . . . These are preferable to ordinary military calibers, since ammunition available for them is usually of the expanding bullet type, whereas most ammunition for military rifles is full jacketed and hence not sufficiently lethal. . . .
“An expanding, hunting bullet of such calibers as described above will produce extravagant laceration and shock at short or mid-range. If a man is struck just once in the body cavity, his death is almost entirely certain. Public figures or guarded officials may be killed with great reliability and some safety if a firing point can be established prior to an official occasion. The propaganda value of this system may be very high. . . .
“The sub-machine gun is especially adapted to indoor work when more than one subject is to be assassinated. An effective technique has been devised for the use of a pair of sub-machine gunners, by which a room containing as many as a dozen subjects can be ‘purifico’ in about twenty seconds with little or no risk to the gunners. It is illustrated below. . . .
“A large bore shotgun is a most effective killing instrument as long as the range is kept under ten yards. It should normally be used only on single targets as it cannot sustain fire successfully. The barrel may be ‘sawed’ off for convenience, but this is not a significant factor in its killing performance. . . .
“The sound of the explosion of the proponent in a firearm can be effectively silenced by appropriate attachments. . . . The user should not forget that the sound of the operation of a repeating action is considerable, and that the sound of bullet strike, particularly in bone is quite loud. . . .
“A small or moderate explosive charge is highly unreliable as a cause of death, and time delay or booby-trap devices are extremely prone to kill the wrong man. In addition to the moral aspects of indiscriminate killing, the death of casual bystanders can often produce public reactions unfavorable to the cause for which the assassination is carried out.
“Bombs or grenades should never be thrown at a subject. While this will always cause a commotion and may even result in the subject’s death, it is sloppy, unreliable, and bad propaganda. . . .
“Homemade or improvised explosives should be avoided. While possibly powerful, they tend to be dangerous and unreliable. Anti-personnel explosive missiles are excellent, provided the assassin has sufficient technical knowledge to fuse them properly.”264
And so on.
Another warning sign of abusers, from that list adapted from Dear Abby, is a history of violence: “He may acknowledge he hit women in the past, but will aver they made him do it. You may hear from ex-partners that he’s abusive. It’s crucial to note that battering isn’t situational: if he beat someone else, he’ll very likely beat you, no matter how perfect you try to be.”
In other words, as we saw earlier, abusers generally don’t change (“there is no cure,” is how The Guardian put it), and unless you want to be abused you should probably take past as prologue.
Likewise, we can read the culture’s past as prologue. “Civilization originates,” as I’ve quoted Stanley Diamond before, “in conquest abroad and repression at home.”265 So we can ask ourselves, Will civilization and the civilized commit genocide? To answer, let’s first ask, Where are the indigenous of the Middle East, the Levant, the Mediterranean, Europe, Africa? Where are the intact and unthreatened indigenous elsewhere? Given the relentless fervency of the prologue (and main body), can we expect the denouement to be different?
Next, Will civilization and the civilized commit ecocide? To answer, just ask, Where are the forests of the Middle East, the Levant, the Mediterranean, Europe, Africa? Where are the other intact biomes in these or other places? How stupid or delusional must we be to expect some sort of magical reduction in the destructiveness?
Next, What does this culture’s past tell us to expect about the treatment of women? Members of this culture—read male members of this culture—have routinely raped, killed, mutilated, enslaved, and otherwise abused women from its beginning. This abuse does not seem to be abating, and there is no good reason to think it will.
A classic line used by abusers and their codependents is that while things may have been bad in the past, now we must move on, start fresh, forget these atrocities that are no longer applicable in these brave new circumstances. This amnesia serves both parties well by allowing them to continue their disturbing and destructive dance of victimization. The abuser gets to continue to act out his (or her) hatred and self-hatred by hurting the victim (and thus himself through destroying the relationship, as well as that with which he has come to identify), and the victim gets to continue to act out her (or his) hatred and self-hatred by allowing herself (or himself) to be hurt. A loss of amnesia would sorely threaten their cozy relationship and reveal the enforced stupidity required on both parts to believe the convenient lies promising future change, promising some future utopia when the violence will no longer have to be.
We hear and too often believe the same lies on the cultural level. We nod our heads solemnly when timber industry spokespeople tell us they’ve reformed their methods of cutting, and this time they’ll do it right. Meanwhile rates of deforestation continue to accelerate. Biodiversity collapses. The world burns. We breathe a sigh of relief that at least all the states in the United States have rescinded the bounty rewards they gave to the civilized for bringing in the scalps of dead Indians, and are thankful that at least John Ford is dead and can no longer put out his propaganda, yet we look away as languages and cultures disappear down a memory hole.
I suppose this is when I’m supposed to cite Santayana, that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. And that quote is certainly true so far as it goes. But it won’t remain true very much longer. The pace of everything is increasing: the destruction is becoming more outrageous and omnipresent, extending now from the militarization (and trashing) of space to the changing of the weather to the toxification of the deepest oceans to the manipulation and pollution of our genetic materials; the frantic distractions as attempts to avoid seeing the destruction—have you watched any movies lately, or how about the Home Shopping Network?—are becoming ever more trivial, ever more obscene (as obscenities become trivialized and trivia becomes our staple). Civilization has entered its endgame, reached the end point of its exponential journey on a finite planet. It is consuming the world. It is consuming all of us. It will not last.
It may be possible to save some specific places or peoples or plants or animals or fungi or rocks or other natural life from being devoured and destroyed by this deathly culture (if the 138,000 cell phone towers, for example, kill 27.6 million migratory songbirds per year [roughly mid-range of the estimates] each collapsed cell phone tower saves an average of two hundred migratory songbirds per year). There’s a world to be liberated. What are you going to do about it?
WHY CIVILIZATION IS KILLING THE WORLD, TAKE SIXTEEN. Polar bears: “About half a mile upriver, I came to a very strong shoot of water, from thence I saw several white-bears fishing in the stream above. I waited for them, and in a short time, a bitch with a small cub swam close to the other shore, and landed a little below. The bitch immediately went into the woods, but the cub sat down upon a rock, when I sent a ball through it, at the distance of over a hundred and twenty yards at the least, and knocked it over; but getting up again it crawled into the woods, where I heard it crying mournfully and concluded that it could not long survive.
“The report of my gun brought some others down, and another she bear, with a cub of eighteen months old, came swimming close under me. I shot the bitch through the head and killed her dead. The cub perceiving this and getting sight of me made at me with great ferocity; but just as the creature was about to revenge the death of his dam, I saluted him with a lo
ad of large shot in his right eye, which not only knocked that out, but also made him close the other. He no sooner was able to keep his left eye open, than he made at me again, quite mad with rage and pain; but when he came to the foot of the bank, I gave him another salute with the other barrel, and blinded him most completely; his whole head was then entirely covered with blood. He blundered into the woods; knocking his head against every rock and tree that he met with.
“I now perceived that two others had just landed about sixty yards above me, and were fiercely looking round them. The bears advanced a few yards to the edge of the woods, and the old one was looking sternly at me. The danger of firing at her I knew was great, as she was seconded by a cub of eighteen months; but I could not resist the temptation.”
The author, a Captain George Cartwright, really the first person to solidly establish civilization on the shores of Newfoundland, then moved toward another part of the river. “I had not sat there long, ere my attention was diverted to an enormous, old, dog bear, which came out of some alder bushes on my right and was walking slowly towards me, with his eyes fixed on the ground, and his nose not far from it. I rested my elbows, and in that position suffered him to come within five yards of me before I drew the trigger; when I placed my ball in the centre of his scull, and killed him dead: but as the shore was a flat reclining rock, he rolled around until he fell into the river.
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