What would we do, I ask myself again and again, if we fully internalized the understanding that the government is a government of occupation, and the culture is a culture of occupation? What would we do if space aliens (or commie pinko Russkies, or Islamofascists, or ChiComs, or whoever is the enemy of the day) were erecting and maintaining dams on rivers we love and rely on, if they were cutting down forests we love and rely on, vacuuming oceans we love and rely on, changing the climate? Wouldn’t stopping them become a series of straightforward if perhaps daunting tasks? Isn’t that what happens when we cease to identify with the culture that is killing the planet, and remember to identify with our own landbases?
Several pages ago I outlined some possible courses of action for those who don’t want to personally participate in bringing down civilization but who agree that: a) civilization will crash, b) the crash will be messy, and c) because civilization is systematically destroying the planet, the longer civilization lasts the worse things will be. Now, however, I want to ask the other half of that question: if we agree with each of those premises, and if we do want to bring it all down, how do we do that?
FULCRUMS
So many objections may be made to everything, that nothing can overcome them but the necessity of doing something.
Samuel Butler 366
IF WE’RE GOING TO TALK ABOUT BRINGING DOWN CIVILIZATION, WE NEED TO talk about fulcrums.367
If you recall, Archimedes said something to the effect of “Give me a long enough lever and a place to stand and I can move the world.” Well, he was being concise; by emphasizing the length of the lever and the place to stand he left off the lever’s other crucial component: the fulcrum. Archimedes could have the longest and strongest board in the universe, and the most solid place to stand, and he still wouldn’t have been able to leverage his strength without that pivot point.
The purpose of a lever is to transmit or modify (often magnify) power or motion. I can bend metal with a crowbar I couldn’t budge using muscles alone. I can crack nuts easily with a nutcracker, and moving heavy weights is a piece of cake with a wheelbarrow.
What does this have to do with taking down civilization?
Everything.
So long as the dominant culture is still dominant—by which I mean so long as its exploitative mindset holds sway over what’s left of the hearts and minds of the people who run this culture—there will always be a disproportionate number of people willing to kill to perpetuate it (to gain or maintain the power, or the promise of power, associated with being an exploiter368) compared to the number who are willing to fight to protect life. It’s Jefferson’s line all over again: “In war they shall kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them.” And those who are willing, ready, and oftentimes eager to destroy those who threaten the hegemony of those in power often include their hired guns: Those in power worldwide have about 20 million soldiers and 5 million cops at their command. In the U.S. alone, these numbers are about 1.4 million soldiers and 1.4 million cops (one-third of whom are prison guards), the primary function of whom is to use violence or its threat to serve those in power. Far worse, nearly all of us have allowed ourselves to become convinced of the righteousness of Premise Four of this book: that violence flows only one direction, that it is right and just for servants of power to kill in that service (yet it is proper for their leaders to inevitably declaim on the regrettability of these inevitable murders), and it is blasphemy for the rest of us to fight back.369 This latter is as true for mountain lions who fight back against those who wish to destroy their habitat as it is for humans who fight back against those who wish to destroy their habitat.
All of this is a roundabout way of saying that those in power have the luxury of using that power inelegantly. They can and often do simply overwhelm us with sheer force. (“Shock and awe” is one of the currently preferred terms.) Those of us fighting for life, on the other hand, need to learn how and where to find appropriate fulcrums to amplify our efforts.
From the perspective of members of the German resistance in World War II, Hitler was certainly one such fulcrum. Killing just this one man would have multiplied their efforts to the tune of saving millions of lives. Had someone killed him before the war started—and some tried—the effects of their efforts would have been multiplied by tens of millions.
One man acting alone very nearly curtailed World War II. No, I’m not talking about Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, Josef Stalin, or even Ludwig Beck. I’m talking about Georg Elser.
Who?
Georg Elser was a German who hated what Hitler was doing to his country, and especially what he was doing to workers. Further, he understood that the Nazis were driving his country to war, and thought that by murdering Hitler he would be doing something both great and good.370 In other words, he was a good German, if we just this once use that term sincerely.
He knew that every year on November 8 Hitler gave a speech at the Löwenbräu restaurant371 in Munich in honor of his failed 1924 putsch against the Weimar Republic. In 1938 Elser attended the speech to reconnoiter the hall. Realizing almost immediately there was no way he could get close enough to shoot Hitler with a pistol, he determined to build a bomb.
He got a job at a quarry for the express purpose of stealing 120 pounds of explosives. (“The entrance to the explosives storage bunker was sealed by a door, to which Vollmer [the quarry’s director, who later was sentenced to two years in prison merely for having hired Elser] held the key. Elser secured three different keys of the approximate size and returned to the quarry late one night to try them all. Two would not penetrate the keyhole; the third went in easily enough, but would not turn. Elser patiently filed down the key until it turned and the tumblers in the lock slipped out of place. The door swung open to reveal a treasure trove of explosives. It was as easy as that.”372 Four or five times each night Elser snuck into the bunker to steal very small amounts of explosives, until he had as much as he needed.) He was also able to obtain a 75 mm military artillery shell,373 as well as other necessary tools: planes, hammers, squares, tin shears, saws, rulers, pliers, clocks, a battery, and so on.
Late the next summer, Elser entered phase two of his plan. He moved to Munich, rented a room, and told his landlady he would be gone each night working at a laboratory on a super-secret invention. His invention was the bomb.
Each night he went to the Löwenbräu for dinner and stayed till near closing. He then moved to a deserted gallery and waited unmoving till the place closed and everyone left. After that came his real work. Here’s how one historian described it: “Working by the weak beam of a flashlight shrouded with a blue handkerchief, Elser carefully prised away the molding that surrounded a rectangular section of the column [just behind where Hitler would speak]. Then he carefully drilled a small hole in one upper corner of the veneer panel and inserted the tip of a special cabinetmaker’s saw. With exquisite care, Elser began cutting away the panel. He worked three or four hours, then cleaned up evidence of his work before falling asleep in a chair. The painstaking sawing a few millimeters at a time, the replacing of the molding, the picking up of each grain of sawdust after each stint of work—none of this tried the craftsman’s patience. He spent three nights just removing the panel. No trace of his tampering could be detected. . . . He chipped out a cavity, bits and pieces at a time, using hammers and steel hand drills of various diameters. Each tap reverberated through the empty hall, sounding to Elser like pistol shots. When some obstruction required heavier blows than usual, he waited for noises from the street to cover the sounds. Since he worked during the pre-dawn hours, he often had to wait a long time between hammer blows.”374
When finally he completed carving out the cavity he attached a sheet of steel beneath the wood so a security guard’s tapping would reveal no hollow space. He inserted the explosives and a five-day timer he’d made from alarm clocks.
Because he knew that each year Hitler’s speech ran from 8:30 to 10:00 PM, Elser set the timer for 9:20.375 U
nfortunately for Elser, and for the world, Hitler’s plans changed at the last moment, and he spoke from 8:00 until 9:12. The bomb went off seven minutes later, and killed those who were standing right where Hitler had been.
Elser was arrested one hundred yards from the Swiss border. In his pockets he had a postcard from the Löwenbräu, technical drawings of shells and detonators, and so on. He spent the next several years in a concentration camp, and was killed by the SS two weeks before Germany surrendered.376
If we’re going to talk about fulcrums, we need to also talk about bottlenecks. Anyone who has ever driven on a freeway knows precisely what a bottleneck is. You’re driving along fine at 69 miles per hour on a six-lane highway. You top a hill and hit your brakes because the person in front of you hit his brakes, because the person in front of him hit her brakes. Traffic slows to a crawl. People begin frantically changing lanes, trying to find one that will get them through this mess three minutes sooner. Eventually people realize they need to get into the center lane (you realize this about ten seconds after you got into the left lane, and just as three semis creep by you in the center). At long last you come across the problem: a car broken down in the left lane and a cop parked on the right. Moments later, you’re zooming again at precisely four miles over the speed limit, but for that forty-five minutes of traffic jam, you had the full bottleneck experience so beloved of motorists everywhere. Or one more example. Take a hose (or a pipeline). Kink it (or disable a pumping station). It doesn’t matter how smoothly the water (or oil) flows through the rest of the hose (or pipeline). If there is a kink (or a disabled pumping station) in even one place, the water (or oil) will not flow. Bottleneck!
Now, how does this apply on a larger scale?
Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments for the Third Reich, later commented that the Allied bombing efforts could have been more effective had they more often targeted bottlenecks. One small example of this was that when the Allies bombed tractor factories, the Germans were no longer able to manufacture engines for tanks and airplanes there until the factories had been rebuilt, but when the Allies bombed ball bearing plants, the Germans were hindered from rebuilding factories. You need ball bearings to manufacture manufacturing plants. Ball bearing plants were bottlenecks in the process.
Here’s an example of the Allies not hitting bottlenecks: the firebombing of Hamburg, which killed tens of thousands of people and destroyed much of the city, cost less than two months of productivity.377 As a result of not targeting bottlenecks, Allied bombing reduced total German production by only 9 percent in 1943, and by building new factories, overworking undamaged factories, and diverting consumer production towards military ends, the Germans still met their production targets.378
But it ends up that ball bearing plants were trivial bottlenecks compared to others. Transportation networks, for example, were an even larger bottleneck. Eventually the Allies were able to destroy about two-thirds of the German rolling stock.379 A United States military analysis later determined that the difficulties this caused the Germans in moving raw materials and finished goods made the attacks on railroads “the most important single cause of Germany’s ultimate economic collapse.”380
We all know (and Hitler knew this too) that oil was another bottleneck.381 You can have the most powerful tanks in the world, and without oil they’re just big hunks of steel. Without oil you have no modern army. Heck, without oil, you have no modern civilization. Keep that in mind. Hitler’s understanding of these basic facts was one reason for his ultimately fatal choice to try to take the oil fields of the Caucasus instead of just pushing toward Stalingrad. Further, once the Allies started pounding the German synthetic oil industry—hitting the selected targets again and again and again—they were able to reduce monthly oil production from 316,000 to 17,000 tons.382 These shortages obviously crippled the German war economy.
Just so we’re clear that there are lots of bottlenecks, and that a little creativity can discover them, here’s another bottleneck from World War II: industrial diamonds. Industrial grinding and drilling is almost impossible without diamonds. Both the Nazis, who had on hand only an eight-month supply, and DeBeers, which controlled the world’s diamond supply, knew this. The Nazis smuggled several million carats into Germany. DeBeers could have acted to stop them—and thus effectively stopped wartime production, which means effectively stopped the war—but did not.
The new questions become: What are some of civilization’s bottlenecks? What are some of civilization’s limiting factors? Like transportation networks, oil, and industrial diamonds for the Nazis, what are some of the objects or processes that, if interdicted, could cause civilization to grind to a halt?
Similarly, where can we find fulcrums, pivot points, to magnify our efforts? Where do we put the levers, what do we use for fulcrums, how and when and how hard do we push to help topple this culture of death?
Are these fulcrums psychological? I hear all the time that it would do no good to take out dams, for example, because that would leave intact the mindset that leads to their erection in the first place. We need to change hearts and minds, I am told, and once these hearts and minds have been changed everything else will fall into place. Civilization will disappear because people are no longer insane enough to want it.
But maybe that question is too vague. Whose hearts and minds are we trying to reach? Where do we place our efforts in changing hearts and minds to achieve the most effect? Is it among the politically and economically powerful? Is it among the “mass of Americans”? Is it among the disaffected? Is it among the poor? Is it among the so-called criminal classes? Is it among the cops and the military? These latter, after all, have a lot of guns.383 Where will we achieve the most good?
Are the fulcrums spiritual? People value what they consider sacred. They sacralize what they value. Perhaps we should attempt to desacralize power for power’s sake. Perhaps we should attempt to break down the divine right of science, the divine right of corporations, the divine right of production, the divine right of nation-states. Perhaps we should attempt to help people to remember that spiders who live in their bathrooms are sacred, as are salmon who spawn in rivers outside their homes, plants who push up through sidewalks, salamanders who live high in the hollows of ancient redwoods, their own bodies, their own experiences, their own sexuality, their own flesh free from industrial carcinogens. Where do we place the levers, the fulcrums, to help people remember that they are humans living in a landbase, that they are animals?
Are these fulcrums personal, such that, like Hitler, the “removal” of this or that person will make a tangible difference? Would it help the redwoods and workers of northern California to make sure Charles Hurwitz, CEO of MAXXAM, does not damage them from his high-rise home in Houston, Texas? If so, where and how and when do we act in this way?
In cases where it’s not the individual CEO, but the position—where social framing conditions make it so that most people who would take up that position share the same deadened worldview that would cause them to commit the same atrocities—where then do we place the levers and fulcrums? Do we go CEO to CEO, “removing” them one by one? We always hear that the machine-like characteristics of corporations mean that CEOs are simply cogs—albeit large ones—in these community-destroying institutions, and so it would do no good to remove them. It’s an odd argument to make, even when I make it myself (as I did a few pages ago).384 There are few who suggest that simply because arresting or killing one rapist does not stop other men from raping, that this means we should not stop whatever rapists we can through any means necessary. Yet when it comes to CEOs the argument seems to hold: Someone else will just take this one’s place, so we must not stop this one personally. In fact, we must allow him to continue to be rewarded with millions of dollars per year in salaries and stock options. Where are the fulcrums to stop these people, these institutions? Where are the bottlenecks?
Or perhaps the fulcrums are social. Perhaps instead of (or in addition to) removin
g individual CEOs, we need to change the social institutions that themselves amplify the destructive efforts of these individuals. Charles Hurwitz does not kill redwoods by cutting them down. He kills them by ordering them cut down, or even more abstractly, by ordering someone to maximize profits. Are there counterlevers we can use to pry away his levers of power? Are there social means by which we can do that?
Or perhaps, as was also true of the Nazis, some of the fulcrums are infrastructural. John Muir is famously noted as saying, “God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools.” The thing is, a fool couldn’t cut down trees by him or herself. I used to think that we were fighting an incredibly difficult battle in part because it takes a thousand years of living to make an ancient tree, while any fool can come along with a chainsaw and cut it down in an hour or two. I’ve since realized that’s all wrong. The truth is that thriving on a living planet is easy—the whole forest, for example, conspires to grow that tree and every other, and we don’t have to do anything special except leave it alone—while cutting down a tree is actually a very difficult process involving the entire global economy. I wouldn’t care how many ancient redwoods Charles Hurwitz cut down, if he did it all by himself, scratching pathetically with bloodied nails at bark, gnawing with bloody teeth at heartwood, sometimes picking up rocks to make stone axes. To cut down a big tree you need the entire mining infrastructure for the metals necessary for chainsaws (or a hundred years ago, whipsaws); the entire oil infrastructure for gas to run the chainsaws, and for trucks to transport the dead trees to market where they will be sold and shipped to some distant place (once Charles had downed the tree by himself, I would wish him luck transporting it without the assistance of the global economy); and so on. It takes a whole lot of fools to cut down a tree, and if we break the infrastructural chain at any point, they won’t be able to do it.
Endgame Vol.1 Page 44