Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [147]
“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is that while things may have been bad in the past, now we must move on, start fresh, forget these atrocities that are no longer applicable in these brave new circumstances.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