Endgame Vol.1 (14 page)

Instead, after all this time, those in power have finally gotten to the point. Or rather, their powers to surveil and kill have finally caught up with their lust for control. And they have articulated this clearly. The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff recently put out their
Joint Vision 2020
, which defines their goals for the next twenty years and beyond. The U.S. military, according to the first words of this document, consists of: “Dedicated individuals and innovative organizations transforming the joint force for the 21st Century to achieve full spectrum dominance.” To make sure we get the point, the military bolded the phrase “full spectrum dominance.” Just in case we still don’t get it, the phrase is repeated thirteen more times in this brief, 8,700-word document, and is specified in U.S. military press releases and articles as the “key phrase” of the vision statement.
⁹⁵

I suppose we should at least thank them for their directness, although the question remains, as always: do we really get the point?

The condemnation of liberation movements for resorting to violence or armed struggle is almost invariably superficial, hypocritical, judgmental, and unfair, and tends strongly to represent another example of the generalised phenomenon of “blaming the victim.” The violence of the situation, the pre-existing oppression suffered by those who eventually strike back, is conveniently ignored. The violence of the oppressed is a form of defensive
counterviolence
to the violence of conquest and oppression. In no armed national liberation movement I know of in history has this not been the case.

THIS BOOK ORIGINALLY WAS GOING TO BE AN EXAMINATION OF THE circumstances in which violence is an appropriate response to the ubiquitous violence upon which this culture is based. More specifically, it was going to be an examination of when counterviolence, as termed by Franz Fanon, is an appropriate response to state or corporate violence. I wanted to write that book because whenever I give talks in which I mention violence—suggesting that there are some things, including a living planet (or more basically clean water and clean air, by which I mean our very lives), that are worth fighting for, dying for, and killing for when other means of stopping the abuses have been exhausted, and that there exist those people (often buttressed or seemingly constrained by organizations) who will not listen to reason, and who can be stopped no way other than through meeting their violence with your own—the response is always the same. Mainstream environmentalists and peace and justice activists put up what I’ve taken to calling a “Gandhi shield.” Their voices get thin, and I can see them psychically shut down. Their faces turn to stone. Their bodies do not move, but the ghosts of their bodies form fingers into the shapes of crosses as they try to keep vampires and evil thoughts at bay, and they begin to chant “Gandhi, Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King, Jr.” in an effort to keep themselves pure. Grassroots environmentalists generally do the same, except after the talk some will sidle up to me, make sure no one is watching, and whisper in my ear, “Thank you for raising this issue.” Often, young anarchists get excited, because someone is articulating something they know in their bones but have not yet put words to, and because they’ve not yet bought into—and been consumed by—the culture. The most interesting response comes from some of the other people with whom I’ve spoken: survivors of domestic violence; radical environmentalists; Indians; many of the poor, especially people of color; family farmers; and prisoners (I used to teach creative writing at Pelican Bay State Prison, a supermaximum security facility here in Crescent City). Their response is generally to nod slowly, look me hard in the eye, then say, “Tell me something I don’t already know.” Some will say, “What are you waiting for, bro? Let’s go.”

A major reason for the difference in response, I realized a long time ago, was that for these latter groups violence is not a theoretical question to be explored
abstractly, philosophically, or spiritually,
⁹⁷
as it can often be for more mainstream activists, for those who may not have experienced violence in their own bodies, and who can then be more distant, even—and I’ve seen this a lot—acting as if these were political or philosophical games instead of matters of life and death. The direct experience of violence, on the other hand, often brings these questions closer to the people involved, so the people are not facing the questions as “activists” or “feminists” or “farmers” or “prisoners,” but rather as human beings—animals—struggling to survive. Having felt your father’s weight upon you in your bed; having stood in clearcut-and-herbicided moonscape after moonscape, tears streaming down your face; having had your children taken from you, land stolen that belonged to your ancestors since the land was formed, and your way of life destroyed; having sat at a kitchen table, foreclosure notice in front of you for land your parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents worked, shotgun across your knees as you try to decide whether or not to put the barrel in your mouth; feeling the sting of a guard’s baton or the jolt of a stun gun (“I was tired,” one of my students wrote of being tasered, “I was 50,000 volts of tired”)—to suffer this sort of violence directly in your body—is often to undergo some sort of deeply physical transformation. It is often to perceive and
be in
the world differently.

Not always. We can all list political prisoners who have been tortured, nuns who have been raped, who have emerged from these horrors uttering forgiveness for their tormentors. But this is not, for the most part, the experience of the people I have met—(funny, isn’t it, how the ones who forgive are the ones whose stories we’re most likely to hear: could there possibly be political reasons for this? Remember, all writers are propagandists)—and I’m not convinced that this forgiving response is necessarily and generically better, by which I mean more conducive to the survivor’s future health and happiness, and by which I mean especially more conducive to the halting of future atrocities. Sometimes it may be, and sometimes, as we shall eventually see, it may not.

A story. Seattle, late November, 1999. Massive protests against the World Trade Organization, and more broadly against the consumption of the world by the rich, turn violent, as police shoot tear gas, pepper spray, and rubber bullets against nonviolent, nonresisting protesters. Among the tens of thousands of protesters are several hundred members of what is called the Black Bloc, an anarchist group that doesn’t play by the rules of civil disobedience. Civil
disobedience is normally a fairly straightforward dance between police and protesters. There are certain rules, such as trespassing, that protesters and police generally agree protesters will break, after which it is just-as-generally agreed that protesters will be arrested, often roughed up a little bit, and then usually given nominal fines. Sometimes, as in the case of Plowshares activists, whose courage can never be questioned, the dance becomes surreal. The activists show up at military installations, beat on pieces of military technology with hammers (thus the name; beating weapons into plowshares), and pour their own blood onto the devices in symbolic protest of the blood these weapons shed. They then wait for the military police to show up—or call the police themselves to
make sure
they show up—get arrested, and sentenced to years and years in prison. Other times the dance becomes comical, as when protest organizers provide police with estimates of the numbers of people who have volunteered to be arrested (so police can schedule the right number of paddy wagons), and also provide police with potential arrestee’s IDs so the process of arrest will be smooth and easy on everyone involved. It’s a great system, guaranteed to make all parties feel good. The police get to feel good because they’ve kept the barbarians from the gates, the activists feel good because they’ve made a stand—
I got arrested for what I believe in
—and those in power feel good because nothing much has changed.

The Black Bloc doesn’t play by these rules (not, as we’ll eventually see, that their rules necessarily work better). In Seattle, they broke windows of targeted corporations in order to protest the primacy of private property rights, which they distinguish from personal property rights: “The latter,” a subgroup of the Black Bloc stated, “is based upon use while the former is based upon trade. The premise of personal property is that each of us has what s/he needs. The premise of private property is that each of us has something that someone else needs or wants. In a society based on private property rights, those who are able to accrue more of what others need or want have greater power. By extension, they wield greater control over what others perceive as needs and desires, usually in the interest of increasing profit to themselves.”
⁹⁸

Although the actions of the Black Bloc have been painted as violent by pacifists, members of the corporate media, and, ironically enough, by gun-wielding police, Black Bloc members themselves deny this: “We contend that property destruction is not a violent activity unless it destroys lives or causes pain in the process. By this definition, private property—especially corporate private property—is itself infinitely more violent than any action taken against it.”
⁹⁹
It seems pretty obvious that unless you’re a hard-core animist, it’s not really possible to
perceive breaking a window—especially a store window, as opposed to a bedroom window at three in the morning—as violent. But because of Premise Five, when the window belongs to the rich and the rock to the poor, that act becomes something akin to blasphemy. The anarchists continued, “Private property—and capitalism, by extension—is intrinsically violent and repressive and cannot be reformed or mitigated.”
¹⁰⁰
Their stated reason for the property destruction was, “When we smash a window, we aim to destroy the thin veneer of legitimacy that surrounds private property rights.”
¹⁰¹
Of course the Black Bloc did not target just any property—so don’t worry, they’re not going to break
your
windows next—but they instead targeted the property of egregiously violent corporations, such as, “Fidelity Investment (major investor in Occidental Petroleum, the bane of the U’wa tribe in Columbia); Bank of America, U.S. Bancorp, Key Bank and Washington Mutual Bank (financial institutions key in the expansion of corporate repression); Old Navy, Banana Republic and the GAP (as Fisher family businesses, rapers of Northwest forest lands and sweatshop laborers); NikeTown and Levi’s (whose [
sic
] overpriced products are made in sweatshops); McDonald’s (slave-wage fast-food peddlers responsible for destruction of tropical rainforests for grazing land and slaughter of animals); Starbucks (peddlers of an addictive substance whose [
sic
] products are harvested at below-poverty wages by farmers who are forced to destroy their own forests in the process); Warner Bros. (media monopolists); Planet Hollywood (for being Planet Hollywood).”

Now here’s the interesting thing. As members of the Black Bloc broke windows, the police, who already had their hands full shooting at the civil disobedience crowd (many pacifists later claimed police fired in response to Black Bloc actions, but this is demonstrably untrue: police were shooting long before the first Starbucks window exploded into shards), were unable to protect this corporate property. That’s a good thing, right? Well, according to some of the pacifists, evidently not. They stepped in to protect the corporations, going so far as to physically attack individuals targeting corporate property.
¹⁰²

These protectors of corporate property included many people who otherwise do a lot of good work. For example there were longtime liberal/Green politicians and activists associated with Global Exchange, a “fair trade organization” focusing on corporate accountability and on eradicating sweatshops around the world. One can go to Global Exchange’s website, and learn that “Global Exchange and other human rights organizations have taken steps to eradicate sweatshops by organizing consumer campaigns to pressure corporations such as GAP Inc. (GAP, Old Navy, and Banana Republic) and Nike to pay workers a living wage and respect workers’ basic rights.”
¹⁰³
One can also learn that “Sadly,
there is not one major clothing company that has made a commitment to completely eradicate abusive labor practices from its garment factories. While we [Global Exchange] continue to pressure corporations to become socially responsible, we as consumers can support the following alternatives.”
¹⁰⁴
It’s misleading for Global Exchange to use the plural on
alternatives
, since the only alternative that follows consists of variations on the theme of their next three words (bolded!): “
Buy Fair Trade!
”
¹⁰⁵
Coincidentally enough, shoppers can Buy Fair Trade! right there at the website, as the good people at Global Exchange “offer consumers the opportunity to purchase beautiful, high quality gifts, housewares, jewelry, clothing, and decor from producers that [
sic
] were paid a fair price for their work.”
¹⁰⁶
Thus I could buy a Guatemalan Shopping Bag (“for her”) for $43, or a “Traveler’s Basket” (“for him”) priced at a mere $59 (“Say the perfect Bon Voyage to a loved one on pursuit of the next adventure [or treat yourself before the journey begins]. The Traveler’s Basket offers a warm collection of traveling essentials from around the world. Guatemalan Hemp Trifold Wallet from Hempmania, Zip Passport Holder from Guatemala, Handmade Natural Paper Journal from Nepal, Guatemalan Hacky Sack”). The Traveler’s Basket would be really handy if you also have several thousand dollars you can pony up to go on one of Global Exchange’s “Reality Tours” of third world nations (Sheesh, would you quit your worrying?
Of course
you’ll stay in three-star hotels). Afterwards you’ll be able to tell your friends that you “watched a performance of the band made up of young people (with tin cans for drums) and toured the favela.” (And geez-Louise, will you get over the whining thing?
Of course
when you’ve finished the Reality Tour, you won’t have to stay in the favela:
you
get to come home! )
¹⁰⁷