A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [105]
This does not mean that Jesus, Spartacus, and the Arawaks lived and died in vain. They merely came too soon for their words and actions to alter the destructive course of this culture: they intersected this cannibal culture before it had sufficiently destroyed its ecosystemic base, and entered its endgame. Although I cannot predict the future, I do know that any culture that consumes its natural environment base will eventually collapse under the weight of its own strengths. Until then, what we each need to do is awaken to our own personal role in this nightmare, to loosen the delusion's hold. Once we have awakened, once we know that the man does not sit atop the box through divine right, once we recognize that cultural convention is merely cultural invention, once we know that it does not have to be this way, that not all cultures have as their trajectory centralized control and ultimate annihilation, it is time to start the real work, time to devote our lives to saving what few fish remain, time to make sure that no one ever again sits atop the box.
Violence Revisited
"What I fear is being in the presence of evil and doing nothing. I fear that more than death." Otilia deKoster
I’M NOT SUGGESTING, by the way, that a few well-aimed assassinations would solve all of our problems. If it were that simple, I wouldn't be writing this book. But to assassinate Slade Gorton and Larry Craig, for example, two Senators from the Northwest whose work may be charitably described as unremittingly genocidal and ecocidal, would probably not slow the destruction much more than it would for me to write them each a letter. For that is where the analog between my family and the culture begins to fall apart, or at least lose simplicity. Although my father is not unique within the culture, he was alone within the family, in that he was a discrete package of violence, which means that his removal would have stopped the horrors. Once his violence had been eliminated, the rest of us could have attempted to pick up the pieces of our shattered lives and to heal, both physically and psychically. Although his removal would not have guaranteed our emotional survival, it would have helped promote it. But Slade Gorton and Larry Craig are not discrete packages of violence. They are neither unique nor alone within the culture, but are merely tools for enacting genocide, ecocide, and other atrocities, as surely as are dams, corporations, chainsaws, napalm, nuclear weapons, Colonel Chivington, the Malleus Maleficarum, and claims to virtue.
If I were to kill Slade Gorton and Larry Craig—and remember as you read this the difficulty I have killing fish or birds, and the surge of emotion I feel at the killing of an aphid by a ladybug larva, and know that to kill a human being would be extremely difficult for me, if not impossible—they would simply be replaced by two more people with the same worldview. The geno-cidal and ecocidal programs originating specifically from the damaged psyches of Gorton and Craig would die with them, but the shared nature of the destructive impulse would continue, making their replacement as easy as buying a new hoe.
I recently shared a heated argument on this subject with my Buddhist friend George. I suggested, sort of contradicting the previous paragraph, that there are some cases where assassination is appropriate. Hitler, for example. Had the German resistance succeeded in killing Hitler in their July 20, 1944 bomb plot, or better, long before, the lives of literally millions of Jews, Gypsies, Russians, Slavs, homosexuals, communists, intellectuals, and so forth would have been spared. The generals had planned to negotiate a peace with the Allies, which means that millions of soldiers would also not have lost their lives; the same would have been true for millions of civilians killed by United States and British terror bombings, and millions more killed by German and Soviet programs of systematic terror.
George argued, rightly enough,