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“Yes,” she says.”

I need to be explicit. While I think it’s pretty easy (and necessary) to make a moral and tactical case for the assassination of Hitler, I’m not attempting to make a moral or tactical case for assassinating Bush, or for that matter, any other American political figure.

In the early days of the resistance to the Nazis, many still believed it possible to overthrow the regime without killing Hitler.362 But, as Peter Hoffmann notes in his crucial book The History of the German Resistance 1933-1945, “As the war went on influential opposition circles came to realize that the removal of the dictator in person, his murder in other words, was an essential prerequisite to the success of any attempted coup. A sacred oath had been sworn to him; in strict legal terms and in the minds of the unthinking citizenry and soldiery, the majority in fact, he was the legally established warlord and Supreme Commander. Unless, therefore, its Supreme Commander were first removed, the Army could not be counted upon; yet it was the sole instrument with which a coup could be carried out.”363 Pacifists can complain all they want about this statement, but those in the resistance knew more about this than the pacifists or I ever will. And Hitler said much the same thing in his own inimitable way, “There will never be anyone in the future with as much authority as I have. My continued existence is therefore a major factor of value. I can, however, be removed at any time by some criminal or idiot.”364

I don’t believe that’s the case in the United States. I’m sorry to break the news to you, George, but I don’t think you’re as central to the continuation of the U.S. corporate (or, following Mussolini, fascist) state as Hitler was to his fascist (or, chasing Mussolini back the way he came, corporate) state. If you were assassinated by, say, an extremely dedicated pretzel, I’m certain that literally hundreds of millions of people worldwide would feel a certain sense of relief (but those people of course don’t count, since most of them are poor, I mean, terrorists), yet the sad truth is that the United States economy would trundle on, destroying the lives of countless humans and nonhumans the world over.365

The question becomes, what do we want to accomplish? The honest answer to that question will point us toward some probable courses of action. (Similarly, examination of our actions and inactions will probably make clear what we really want.)

If we want to bring down the Nazis, we probably have to kill Hitler (among many other tasks). The question becomes a technical one: how do we do it? Similarly, if we want to save salmon, we face six relatively straightforward technical tasks: 1) remove dams, 2) stop deforestation, 3) stop commercial fishing, 4) stop the murder of the oceans, 5) stop industrial agriculture (which destroys waterways by erosion and pollution run-off), and 6) stop global warming, which means stopping the oil economy. With the exception of global warming, which may soon enter a runaway phase, these are very doable, in fact should be reasonably easy for a species and a people who pride ourselves on our problem-solving abilities. The problems only seem insoluble when we refuse—like the Nazi doctors—to look outside the confines of this extractive, exploitative social structure, and outside of a mythology that causes many to pretend that one can kill the planet and live on it. We can’t have dams and salmon. We can’t have deforestation and salmon. We can’t have commercial fishing and salmon. We can’t have global warming and salmon. If we want salmon, we have to stop each of these.

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,