Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [197]
“Make no mistake. The dams are instruments of genocide, just as surely, explicitly, and intentionally as the gas chambers at Treblinka, Birkenau, and Auschwitz. Lest you think this connection is spurious, no less an authority than Adolf Hitler said he based his genocidal lebensraum policy on the ‘Nordics,’ as he called them—that’s us—of North America who’d had ‘the strength of will,’ in his words, to exterminate an ‘inferior’ people.360 Just as Hitler’s genocide was only able to take place through the witting or unwitting assistance of hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats, technicians, scientists, businesspeople, and politicians who were merely ‘doing their jobs,’ so, too, with this ongoing genocidal and ecocidal project.
“From the inside, it’s possible to rationalize any horror. First person account after first-person account of genocide and ecocide reveals that the psyches of nearly all high-level perpetrators are surrounded by an almost impenetrable wall of denial and abstract justification. Nazis never killed Jews; they used ‘scientific treatments’ to improve the health and vitality of the German nation. By the same token, members of this culture have never killed Indians or destroyed their cultures; it’s merely Manifest Destiny to ‘overspread the continent.’ Likewise, none of you on this panel are killing salmon, you’re producing electricity and helping irrigators.
“Any of you who represent Kaiser Aluminum, Bonneville Power, or other corporate, commercial, or governmental interests—which are fundamentally the same—and who fail to see how you are lending your talents to a genocidal project—why mince words, how you are committing genocide—are in famous company. While on trial for his life in 1961, part of Adolph Eichmann’s defense was that no one ever told him what he was doing was wrong. Eichmann was merely running a railroad, efficiently transporting human cargos east and cargos of clothing, hair, and gold fillings west. His hands were clean. He killed not a single Jew. Yet by lending his talents to the project he was responsible—and was ultimately held responsible—for the deaths of millions. The same holds true today for each of you. You are merely trying to improve corporate profits, or make the region’s economy run more smoothly, or otherwise just ‘doing your job.’ But ‘doing your job’ in this case means committing ecocide and genocide.
“I say this to every bureaucrat here, to every representative of Kaiser Aluminum, the Bonneville Power Administration, Senator Slade Gorton’s office, Senator Larry Craig’s office, Senator Jim McClure’s office, to all members of the Northwest Power Planning Council: I will not allow you Eichmann’s excuse. What you are doing is wrong. It is genocidal conduct under the 1948 United Nations Convention on Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide, to which the United States is a signatory. I plan on someday seeing each and every one of you brought to justice and accountability for your crimes, and I want for it to be a matter of public record that you have been told that what you are doing is wrong.
“As for the rest of us, those of us who care about salmon, we must learn the difference between real and false hopes. Sea minks, great auks, passenger pigeons, Eskimo curlews, Carolina parakeets, great runs of salmon. You would think by now we would have learned that this economic and political structure is antithetical to life on this planet.
“We keep hoping that somehow corporations like Kaiser Aluminum will do the right thing.361 By now we should have learned. To expect corporations to function differently than they do is to engage in magical thinking. The specific and explicit function of for-profit corporations is to amass wealth.