Endgame Vol.1 (73 page)

If you’ve ever seen a cop movie, I’m sure you’ve seen this same plot. Dirty Harry would and could be clean if only the bad guys were not so terribly dirty. And it’s not just Harry who is dirty: the same is true for cop after cop in movie after movie. It’s a genre convention.

It wasn’t really possible for me to see cop or war movies the same after reading Slotkin’s work. Nor was it possible for me to see civilized wars the same.

I received confirmation of this pattern yet again just today, as I read the justification by a U.S. soldier for the torture of Iraqi noncombatant prisoners, which includes rape, sodomy, taking pictures of them while forcing them to masturbate, taking pictures of them while forcing them to simulate sex, sensory deprivation, water deprivation, forcing them to kneel or stand for hours, attaching electrical wires to their genitals, forcing them to stand on boxes holding electrical wires and telling them that if they step off the box they will die, putting a saddle on at least one woman in her seventies and riding her around while telling her that she is a donkey, and of course good old-fashioned smackyface leading to their deaths. His justification? “You got to understand, although it seems harsh, the Iraqis they only understand force. If you try to talk to them one on one as a normal person, they won’t respect you, they won’t do what you want, prisoner or just normal person on the street. So you’ve got to be forceful with them in some ways.”
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If you don’t beat them, they won’t do what you want: the key to understanding our culture’s relationship ethos in one phrase.

Slotkin could have predicted his justification. By now we should be able to as well.

But that’s not really why I bring it up now. I bring it up now because I don’t want to fall into the same trap Slotkin describes. In some ways this is similar to my concern over claims to virtue: a daily round of self-examination. I don’t want to say, “Just this once I need to deviate from my peaceful ways to enter into defensive warfare” unless I’m sure that a) my ways really are peaceful; b) the warfare really is defensive, and c) this deviation really is a need. At the same time I don’t want to be narcissistic and short-sighted enough to presume that my own sense of self-righteousness—
After all
, says the pacifist™,
I choose the moral high ground
—is more important than the survival of salmon, murrelets, migratory songbirds, my nonhuman neighbors whose land this was long before I was born. Nor do I want to choose my own self-righteousness over the survival, ultimately, of human beings. Because if we continue on this same path, it is not only murrelets who will be exterminated. Human beings will not survive.

Sometimes I think we think too much. Sometimes I think we don’t think very clearly. Usually I think it’s both at the same time. Our thinking, which so often isn’t thinking, makes us crazy, ties us in knots. This is not accidental. It is common to abusive situations. As Lundy Bancroft, former codirector of Emerge, the nation’s first therapeutic program for abusive men, writes in his book
Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men
, “In one important way, an abusive man works like a magician. His tricks largely rely on getting you to look off in the wrong direction, distracting your attention so that you won’t notice where the real action is. . . . He leads you into a convoluted maze, making your relationship with him a labyrinth of twists and turns. He wants you to puzzle over him, to try to figure him out, as though he were a wonderful but broken machine for which you need only to find and fix the malfunctioning parts to bring it roaring to its full potential. His desire, though he may not admit it even to himself, is that you wrack your brain in this way so that you won’t notice the patterns and logic of his behavior, the consciousness behind the craziness.”
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As I tried to make clear in
Language
and
Culture
, nearly everything in civilization leads us away from being able to think clearly and from being able to feel. If we were able to do either, we would not allow those in power to kill the world, to kill our nonhuman neighbors, to kill humans we love, to kill us. And once we have been inculcated into this thinking that is not thinking, this feeling that is not feeling, the culture does not need to do much to continue to
confuse us. We will continue to confuse ourselves with all of our not-thinking and not-feeling. We will do this gladly, because if we did not confuse ourselves, if we allowed ourselves to think in a way that really was thinking and to feel in a way that really was feeling, we would suddenly understand that we need to stop the horrors that surround us, and we would suddenly understand that we
can
stop the horrors that surround us, and we would suddenly understand what we need to do in order to stop the horrors—the problems are not cognitively challenging—and we would start to do it.

I do not think the nonhuman mothers I mentioned earlier entered into philosophical debates on the purity of their motives.
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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.”
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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.

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.

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—or if they should attempt to stop them by force.

I see and hear these conversations in Aotearoa,
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Mosir,
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Hbun Squmi,
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Chukiyawu,
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Yondotin,
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iTswani,
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and in thousands of other places whose real names are not now remembered. I see and hear people having these conversations in great communal gatherings in maraes and longhouses, and I see them having these conversations singly, with friends, brothers, grandmothers. I see men (and women) sharpening their arrowheads and honing the edges of their tomahawks. I see them preparing for war, and I see the determination in their eyes and in the set of their jaw. I see also sorrow, for what’s been lost, and joy and exuberance, excitement and clarity at the prospect of finally fighting back. They are of all races, from all places, getting ready to fight to defend their lives and the land they love. I see others wrapping their weapons in skins, putting them away, vowing to bring them out again only to hunt, but to fight the civilized no more forever.

I can hear those who argue against fighting back. I hear the Choctaw Pushmataha, for example. The night is warm. Fall has not yet fully arrived in this land. The fire is low. It is late. Pushmataha says, “The question before us now is not what wrongs they have inflicted upon our race, but what measures are best for us to adopt in regard to them; and though our race may have been unjustly treated and shamefully wronged by them, yet I shall not for that reason alone advise you to destroy them, unless it was just and expedient for you so to do; nor, would I advise you to forgive them, though worthy of your commiseration, unless I believe it would be to the interest of our common good. We should consult more in regard to our future welfare than our present. What people, my friends and countrymen, were so wise and inconsiderate as to engage in a war of their own accord, when their own strength, and even with the strength of others, was judged unequal to the task?”
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We should not fight, he says, because we cannot win.
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Now I hear another also argue against fighting back. It is the Santee Sioux Taóyatedúta. His people are starving to death because his tribe has been forced onto a reservation—forced into dependency—and the food they were promised in exchange for giving up their land has (of course) not arrived. Most of the Santee are ready to go to war. Taóyatedúta warns against this, for reasons as pragmatic as Pushmataha’s, though in language more direct: “See!—the white men are like the locusts when they fly so thick that the whole sky is a snow-storm. You may kill one—two—ten; yes, as many as the leaves
in the forest yonder, and their brothers will not miss them. Kill one—two—ten, and ten times ten will come to kill you. Count your fingers all day long and white men with guns in their hands will come faster than you can count. . . . Yes; they fight among themselves, but if you strike at them they will all turn on you and devour you and your women and little children just as the locusts in their time fall on the trees and devour all the leaves in one day. . . . You will die like the rabbits when the hungry wolves hunt them in the Hard Moon [January].” After saying all of this, Taóyatedúta looks at the faces of those around him. He again begins to speak. He thinks those who clamor for war are fools, but if his people are foolish enough to go to war against these overwhelming odds, he says, “Taóyatedúta is not a coward: he will die with you.”
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I see and hear others who do not counsel caution or cooperation with those who are killing them, but who wish to strike back, and strike back hard. Standing at the same low fire as Pushmataha, the great Shawnee Tecumseh states, “If there is one here tonight who believes that his rights will not sooner or later be taken from him by the avaricious American pale-faces, his ignorance ought to excite pity, for he knows little of the character of our common foe. And if there be one among you mad enough to undervalue the growing power of the white race among us, let him tremble in considering the fearful woes he will bring down upon our entire race, if by his criminal indifference he assists the designs of our common enemy against our common country. Then listen to the voice of duty, of honor, of nature and of your endangered country. Let us form one body, one heart, and defend to the last warrior our country, our homes, our liberty, and the graves of our fathers.”
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