Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [234]
All these acknowledgments are in a sense premature. It is customary after finishing a book for authors to acknowledge in print all those who helped bring the book to fruition. But this book isn’t yet finished. If it is to be more than mere words, this book will only be complete when this culture of death no longer imperils life on earth. At that point the acknowledgments and gratitude will flow like rivers rushing through canyons once blocked by now-crushed dams.
Notes
1. Bonhoeffer, 298.
Apocalypse
2. This is of course premise four of this book. We can say the same thing for police or the military killing regular people versus those people fighting back.
3. Eckert, 176.
Five Stories
4. McIntosh, 46.
5. Combs, 2. I’m sorry about the masculine-pronoun use here.
6. San Francisco Chronicle, September 13, 2001, 1.
7. “Media March to War.”
8. Ibid.
9. Z Magazine, 62. Even here, however, Cohen was being disingenuous; because of corporate welfare programs “we” generally provide the investment as well.
10. Edwards, Burning All Illusions, 141.
11. There is a fifth version I did not include, which is that the bombings on 9/11 were at the very least committed with the foreknowledge (if not connivance) of those in power, and have served as a pretext to ratchet up repression and state and personal power, à la the Reichstag Fire. The last half of this equation—that the bombings have served as pretext—is undeniable, while the first half is quite possible.
12. Jefferson, 345.
13. George Draffan, Endgame Research Services: A Project of the Public Information Network, http://www.endgame.org (accessed July 10, 2004).
14. Of course it is manifestly true that the corporate managers, stock brokers, financial analysts, FBI and CIA employees, and so on (I am explicitly excluding the janitors, food service workers, temp workers, undocumented employees, firemen, and so on) who worked in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon did extraordinary harm—far more than mere frontline soldiers—to most of the humans and nonhumans in the world. As I wrote in The Culture of Make Believe, “It is possible to kill a million people without personally shedding a drop of blood. It is possible to destroy a culture without being aware of its existence. It is possible to commit genocide or ecocide from the comfort of one’s drawing room. Presumably, the people who profit from the manufacture of ozone-depleting substances are fine and upstanding men and women. Presumably, the people who profit from the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction are well respected within their communities. Most of the horrors we are forced to live with have been caused by respectable—even great—men who themselves most often have clean hands. Warren Anderson, responsible for so many deaths in Bhopal, killed not a single Indian. The owners of Carbide who ordered the expansion of the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel killed not a single black man. Thomas Jefferson killed no Indians (the same cannot be said for Andrew Jackson). If you are a god you can kill from afar, and if you kill from afar you can maintain in your own mind the objectivity to believe that those you are killing are objects, or better, you can think of them not at all.” And I also wrote, “The oftentimes physical and psychic distance between financier and the activities which are financed in no way lessens their mutually reinforcing relationship. This must be understood if one is to