Endgame Vol.1 (49 page)

I think the words from
A Study of Assassination: A CIA Manual
describe the culture and the government far more starkly and elegantly than I ever could, so I’ll quote at length: “TECHNIQUES: The essential point of assassination is the death of the subject. A human being may be killed in many ways but sureness is often overlooked by those who may be emotionally unstrung by the seriousness of this act they intend to commit. The specific technique employed will depend upon a large number of variables, but should be constant in one point: Death must be absolutely certain. . . . Techniques may be considered as follows:

“1. Manual.

“It is possible to kill a man with the bare hands, but very few are skillful enough to do it well. Even a highly trained Judo expert will hesitate to risk killing by hand unless he has absolutely no alternative. However, the simplest local tools are often much the most efficient means of assassination. A hammer, axe, wrench, screw driver, fire poker, kitchen knife, lamp stand, or anything hard, heavy and handy will suffice. A length of rope or wire or a belt will do if the assassin is strong and agile. All such improvised weapons have the important advantage of availability and apparent innocence. The obviously lethal machine gun failed to kill Trotsky where an item of sporting goods succeeded. . . .

“2. Accidents.

“For secret assassination . . . the contrived accident is the most effective technique. When successfully executed, it causes little excitement and is only casually investigated. The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface. Elevator shafts, stair wells, unscreened windows and bridges will serve. Bridge falls into water are not reliable. In simple cases a private meeting with the subject may be arranged at a properly cased location. The act may be executed by sudden, vigorous [excised] of the ankles, tipping the
subject over the edge. If the assassin immediately sets up an outcry, playing the ‘horrified witness,’ no alibi or surreptitious withdrawal is necessary. In chase cases it will usually be necessary to stun or drug the subject before dropping him. Care is required to insure that no wound or condition not attributable to the fall is discernible after death.

“Falls into the sea or swiftly flowing rivers may suffice if the subject cannot swim. It will be more reliable if the assassin can arrange to attempt rescue, as he can thus be sure of the subject’s death and at the same time establish a workable alibi. . . .

“Falls before trains or subway cars are usually effective, but require exact timing and can seldom be free from unexpected observation.

“Automobile accidents are a less satisfactory means of assassination. If the subject is deliberately run down, very exact timing is necessary and investigation is likely to be thorough. If the subject’s car is tampered with, reliability is very low. The subject may be stunned or drugged and then placed in the car, but this is only reliable when the car can be run off a high cliff or into deep water without observation.

“Arson can cause accidental death if the subject is drugged and left in a burning building. Reliability is not satisfactory unless the building is isolated and highly combustible. . . .

“3. Drugs.

“In all types of assassination except terroristic, drugs can be very effective. If the assassin is trained as a doctor or nurse and the subject is under medical care, this is an easy and rare method. An overdose of morphine administered as a sedative will cause death without disturbance and is difficult to detect. The size of the dose will depend upon whether the subject has been using narcotics regularly. If not, two grains will suffice. . . .

“4. Edge Weapons.

“Any locally obtained edge device may be successfully employed. A certain minimum of anatomical knowledge is needed for reliability. Puncture wounds of the body cavity may not be reliable unless the heart is reached. The heart is protected by the rib cage and is not always easy to locate. Abdominal wounds were once nearly always mortal, but modern medical treatment has made this no longer true. Absolute reliability is obtained by severing the spinal cord in the cervical region. This can be done with the point of a knife or a light blow of an axe or hatchet.

“Another reliable method is the severing of both jugular and carotid blood vessels on both sides of the windpipe. . . .

“5. Blunt Weapons.

“As with edge weapons, blunt weapons require some anatomical knowledge for effective use. Their main advantage is their universal availability. A hammer may be picked up almost anywhere in the world. Baseball and [illegible] bats are very widely distributed. Even a rock or a heavy stick will do, and nothing resembling a weapon need be procured, carried or subsequently disposed of. Blows should be directed to the temple, the area just below and behind the ear, and the lower, rear portion of the skull. Of course, if the blow is very heavy, any portion of the upper skull will do. The lower frontal portion of the head, from the eyes to the throat, can withstand enormous blows without fatal consequences.

“6. Firearms.

“Firearms are often used in assassination, often very ineffectively. The assassin usually has insufficient technical knowledge of the limitations of weapons, and expects more range, accuracy and killing power than can be provided with reliability. Since certainty of death is the major requirement, firearms should be used which can provide destructive power at least 100% in excess of that thought to be necessary, and ranges should be half that considered practical for the weapon. . . .

“The .300 F.A.B. Magnum is probably the best cartridge readily available. . . . These are preferable to ordinary military calibers, since ammunition available for them is usually of the expanding bullet type, whereas most ammunition for military rifles is full jacketed and hence not sufficiently lethal. . . .

“An expanding, hunting bullet of such calibers as described above will produce extravagant laceration and shock at short or mid-range. If a man is struck just once in the body cavity, his death is almost entirely certain. Public figures or guarded officials may be killed with great reliability and some safety if a firing point can be established prior to an official occasion. The propaganda value of this system may be very high. . . .

“The sub-machine gun is especially adapted to indoor work when more than one subject is to be assassinated. An effective technique has been devised for the use of a pair of sub-machine gunners, by which a room containing as many as a dozen subjects can be ‘purifico’ in about twenty seconds with little or no risk to the gunners. It is illustrated below. . . .

“A large bore shotgun is a most effective killing instrument as long as the range is kept under ten yards. It should normally be used only on single targets as it cannot sustain fire successfully. The barrel may be ‘sawed’ off for convenience, but this is not a significant factor in its killing performance. . . .

“The sound of the explosion of the proponent in a firearm can be effectively silenced by appropriate attachments. . . . The user should not forget that the
sound of the operation of a repeating action is considerable, and that the sound of bullet strike, particularly in bone is quite loud. . . .

“A small or moderate explosive charge is highly unreliable as a cause of death, and time delay or booby-trap devices are extremely prone to kill the wrong man. In addition to the moral aspects of indiscriminate killing, the death of casual bystanders can often produce public reactions unfavorable to the cause for which the assassination is carried out.

“Bombs or grenades should never be thrown at a subject. While this will always cause a commotion and may even result in the subject’s death, it is sloppy, unreliable, and bad propaganda. . . .

“Homemade or improvised explosives should be avoided. While possibly powerful, they tend to be dangerous and unreliable. Anti-personnel explosive missiles are excellent, provided the assassin has sufficient technical knowledge to fuse them properly.”
²⁶⁴

And so on.

Another warning sign of abusers, from that list adapted from Dear Abby, is a history of violence: “He may acknowledge he hit women in the past, but will aver they made him do it. You may hear from ex-partners that he’s abusive. It’s crucial to note that battering isn’t situational: if he beat someone else, he’ll very likely beat you, no matter how perfect you try to be.”

In other words, as we saw earlier, abusers generally don’t change (“there is no cure,” is how
The Guardian
put it), and unless you want to be abused you should probably take past as prologue.

Likewise, we can read the culture’s past as prologue. “Civilization originates,” as I’ve quoted Stanley Diamond before, “in conquest abroad and repression at home.”
²⁶⁵
So we can ask ourselves, Will civilization and the civilized commit genocide? To answer, let’s first ask, Where are the indigenous of the Middle East, the Levant, the Mediterranean, Europe, Africa? Where are the intact and unthreatened indigenous elsewhere? Given the relentless fervency of the prologue (and main body), can we expect the denouement to be different?

Next, Will civilization and the civilized commit ecocide? To answer, just ask, Where are the forests of the Middle East, the Levant, the Mediterranean, Europe, Africa? Where are the other intact biomes in these or other places? How stupid or delusional must we be to expect some sort of magical reduction in the destructiveness?

Next, What does this culture’s past tell us to expect about the treatment of women? Members of this culture—read male members of this culture—have routinely raped, killed, mutilated, enslaved, and otherwise abused women from its beginning. This abuse does not seem to be abating, and there is no good reason to think it will.

A classic line used by abusers and their codependents is that while things may have been bad in the past, now we must move on, start fresh, forget these atrocities that are no longer applicable in these brave new circumstances. This amnesia serves both parties well by allowing them to continue their disturbing and destructive dance of victimization. The abuser gets to continue to act out his (or her) hatred and self-hatred by hurting the victim (and thus himself through destroying the relationship, as well as that with which he has come to identify), and the victim gets to continue to act out her (or his) hatred and self-hatred by allowing herself (or himself) to be hurt. A loss of amnesia would sorely threaten their cozy relationship and reveal the enforced stupidity required on both parts to believe the convenient lies promising future change, promising some future utopia when the violence will no longer have to be.

We hear and too often believe the same lies on the cultural level. We nod our heads solemnly when timber industry spokespeople tell us they’ve reformed their methods of cutting, and
this time
they’ll do it right. Meanwhile rates of deforestation continue to accelerate. Biodiversity collapses. The world burns. We breathe a sigh of relief that at least all the states in the United States have rescinded the bounty rewards they gave to the civilized for bringing in the scalps of dead Indians, and are thankful that at least John Ford is dead and can no longer put out his propaganda, yet we look away as languages and cultures disappear down a memory hole.

I suppose this is when I’m supposed to cite Santayana, that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. And that quote is certainly true so far as it goes. But it won’t remain true very much longer. The pace of everything is increasing: the destruction is becoming more outrageous and omnipresent, extending now from the militarization (and trashing) of space to the changing of the weather to the toxification of the deepest oceans to the manipulation and pollution of our genetic materials; the frantic distractions as attempts to avoid seeing the destruction—have you watched any movies lately, or how about the Home Shopping Network?—are becoming ever more trivial, ever more obscene (as obscenities become trivialized and trivia becomes our staple). Civilization has entered its endgame, reached the end point of its exponential journey on a finite planet. It is consuming the world. It is consuming all of us. It will not last.

It may be possible to save some specific places or peoples or plants or animals or fungi or rocks or other natural life from being devoured and destroyed by this deathly culture (if the 138,000 cell phone towers, for example, kill 27.6 million migratory songbirds per year [roughly mid-range of the estimates] each collapsed cell phone tower saves an average of two hundred migratory songbirds per year). There’s a world to be liberated. What are you going to do about it?