Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [219]
I do not think the nonhuman mothers I mentioned earlier entered into philosophical debates on the purity of their motives.427 They just knew in their bodies what they needed to do. As we know in ours.
The Chinese poet Sengtsan wrote, “The more talking and thinking, the farther from the truth.”428 I sometimes think he was talking about us.
Several thousand years of inculcation and ideology all aimed at driving us equally out of our minds and our bodies, away from any realistic sense of self-defense, have gotten us to identify not with our bodies and our landbases, but with our abusers, with governments, with civilization. This misidentification is a marker of our insanity, and it is one of the things that drives us further insane, that leads to further confusion, that leads to further inaction.
Break that identification, and one’s course of action becomes so much clearer.
SHOULD WE FIGHT BACK?
Kind-hearted people might, of course, think there were some ingenious way to disarm or defeat an enemy without too much bloodshed, and might imagine that this is the true goal of the art of war. Pleasant as it sounds, it is a fallacy that must be exposed.
Carl von Clausewitz
A BIG ARGUMENT BROKE OUT RECENTLY ON THE DERRICK JENSEN discussion group, between those who believe that civilization must be brought down now by any means necessary—and they mean any means necessary—and those who “will not budge,” to use their phrase, from the belief that no human blood should ever be shed, and especially, to once again use a phrase of theirs, no “innocent” blood. Members of this latter camp state—again and again—that if only we feel sufficient compassion for those who are killing the planet, then they will, by basking in the reflected glow of our own shining and munificent love, come to see the error of their ways and stop all this silly destruction. The pacifists say that no one should ever under any circumstances, for example, kidnap Charles Hurwitz, nor especially his children, even if that could somehow force him to stop deforesting. The others counter by asking about all the nonhuman innocents murdered so Hurwitz can make a buck. They ask as well about the humans whose water supplies are trashed by Hurwitz’s activities. Where, they ask, is accountability? How do we stop him?
I’ll tell you the part of the discussion I’ve found most interesting: I’ve been imagining the thousands of somewhat similar conversations—some even more heated than this one—held around thousands of campfires and in thousands of longhouses by members of hundreds or thousands of indigenous tribes as they desperately strove (and strive) to figure out strategies and tactics that would (and will) save their lives and their ways of life. I see them standing around fires in forests in Europe, preparing as a people to face down Greek phalanxes or later the legions of Rome or still later priests and missionaries (and still later merchants and traders: what would now be called businesspeople and resource specialists) carrying the same message: submit or die. I see them in the forests and plains of China choosing whether to fight against an encroaching civilization—is there any other kind?—or to be dispossessed, then given that same choice of assimilation (submission) or death. Or maybe they’ll move away, then move again, and again, each time being pushed away by civilization’s insatiable lust for land, for conquest, for control, for expansion, each time being pushed onto the land of other of the indigenous. Or maybe their choice will be to simply disappear, evaporate like mist in the heat of this other culture.
I see them standing outside the forts of the Dutch or Portuguese in Africa, wondering whether they should try to talk these strange people from across the sea into stealing no more of their land—as they have tried time and again to talk to them, all to no end