Endgame Vol.1 (66 page)

I received a standing ovation for that testimony (from the audience, obviously, not from the panelists), and throughout the rest of the evening, many of the speakers said simply, “I support the Jensen alternative. Blow the dams.”

Weeks later, I gave the following testimony at another panel:
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“Every morning when I wake up I ask myself whether I should write or blow up a dam. Every day I tell myself I should continue to write. Yet I’m not always convinced I’m making the right decision. I’ve written books, good ones, and people have read them. At the same time I know it’s not a lack of words that’s killing salmon, but rather the presence of dams.

“Anyone who lives in this region and who knows anything about salmon knows the dams must go. And anyone who knows anything about politics knows the dams will stay, at least for now. Scientists study, politicians and businesspeople lie and delay, bureaucrats hold sham public-input meetings, activists write letters and press releases, I write books and articles, and still the salmon die. It’s a cozy relationship for all of us but the salmon.

“In the 1930s, prior to building the dams, the United States government knew the dams would kill salmon, and proceeded anyway. One reason they proceeded, and they were very explicit about this, is that salmon are central to many of the region’s indigenous cultures, and much as killing buffalo helped bring Plains Indians to terms, the government knew killing salmon would break the collective cultural back of the region’s Indians. This is all a matter of public record. I repeat, one explicit reason dams were built was to destroy salmon stocks, and thus destroy native cultures. This is genocidal behavior under the law. It is a Crime Against Humanity, and anyone who participates in it, to this day, is guilty of a Crime Against Humanity.

“Make no mistake. The dams are instruments of genocide, just as surely, explicitly, and intentionally as the gas chambers at Treblinka, Birkenau, and Auschwitz. Lest you think this connection is spurious, no less an authority than Adolf Hitler said he based his genocidal lebensraum policy on the ‘Nordics,’ as he called them—that’s us—of North America who’d had ‘the strength of will,’ in his words, to exterminate an ‘inferior’ people.
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Just as Hitler’s genocide was only able to take place through the witting or unwitting assistance of hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats, technicians, scientists, businesspeople, and politicians who were merely ‘doing their jobs,’ so, too, with this ongoing genocidal and ecocidal project.

“From the inside, it’s possible to rationalize any horror. First person account
after first-person account of genocide and ecocide reveals that the psyches of nearly all high-level perpetrators are surrounded by an almost impenetrable wall of denial and abstract justification. Nazis never killed Jews; they used ‘scientific treatments’ to improve the health and vitality of the German nation. By the same token, members of this culture have never killed Indians or destroyed their cultures; it’s merely Manifest Destiny to ‘overspread the continent.’ Likewise, none of you on this panel are killing salmon, you’re producing electricity and helping irrigators.

“Any of you who represent Kaiser Aluminum, Bonneville Power, or other corporate, commercial, or governmental interests—which are fundamentally the same—and who fail to see how you are lending your talents to a genocidal project—why mince words, how you are committing genocide—are in famous company. While on trial for his life in 1961, part of Adolph Eichmann’s defense was that no one ever told him what he was doing was wrong. Eichmann was merely running a railroad, efficiently transporting human cargos east and cargos of clothing, hair, and gold fillings west. His hands were clean. He killed not a single Jew. Yet by lending his talents to the project he was responsible—and was ultimately held responsible—for the deaths of millions. The same holds true today for each of you. You are merely trying to improve corporate profits, or make the region’s economy run more smoothly, or otherwise just ‘doing your job.’ But ‘doing your job’ in this case means committing ecocide and genocide.

“I say this to every bureaucrat here, to every representative of Kaiser Aluminum, the Bonneville Power Administration, Senator Slade Gorton’s office, Senator Larry Craig’s office, Senator Jim McClure’s office, to all members of the Northwest Power Planning Council: I will not allow you Eichmann’s excuse. What you are doing is wrong. It is genocidal conduct under the 1948 United Nations Convention on Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide, to which the United States
is
a signatory. I plan on someday seeing each and every one of you brought to justice and accountability for your crimes, and I want for it to be a matter of public record that you have been told that what you are doing is wrong.

“As for the rest of us, those of us who care about salmon, we must learn the difference between real and false hopes. Sea minks, great auks, passenger pigeons, Eskimo curlews, Carolina parakeets, great runs of salmon. You would think by now we would have learned that this economic and political structure is antithetical to life on this planet.

“We keep hoping that somehow corporations like Kaiser Aluminum will do the right thing.
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By now we should have learned. To expect corporations to
function differently than they do is to engage in magical thinking. The specific and explicit function of for-profit corporations is to amass wealth. The function is
not
to save salmon, nor to respect the autonomy or existence of indigenous peoples, nor to protect the vocational or personal integrity of workers, nor to support life on this planet. Nor is the function to serve communities. It never has been and never will be. To expect corporations to do anything other than the purpose for which they are expressly and explicitly designed, that is, to amass wealth at the expense of human and nonhuman communities, is at the very least poor judgment, and more accurately delusional.

“Similarly, after Hanford, Rocky Flats, the Salvage Rider, dams, governmental
inaction
in the face of the Bhopal, the ozone hole, global warming, the greatest mass extinction in the history of the planet, surely by now there can be few here who still believe the purpose of government is to protect us from the destructive activities of corporations. At last most of us must understand that the opposite is true: that the primary purpose of government is to protect those who run the economy from the outrage of injured citizens.

“The responsibility for protecting our landbases thus falls to each of us. This means that all of us who care about salmon need to force accountability—
force accountability
—onto those causing their extinction; we must learn to be accountable to salmon rather than loyal to political and economic institutions that do not serve us well. If salmon are to be saved, we must give BPA and Kaiser Aluminum a reason to save them. We must tell these institutions that if they cause salmon to go extinct, we will cause these institutions to go extinct. And we must mean it. We must then say the same to every other destructive institution and to those who run them, and we must act on our words; we must do whatever is necessary to protect our homes and our landbases from those who are destroying them. Only then will salmon be saved. Only then will the genocide stop.

“Saving salmon from extinction means taking out dams. Everyone knows this. Even the Corps of Engineers now acknowledges this. But there is a vast difference between acknowledgement and action. So we must tell the government that if it will not help us in this, if it will not back up our resolve to save salmon, to stop the committing of genocide, to save our communities, if it will not remove the dams, then it must be us who do so. Again, we must mean it.

“When dams were erected on the Columbia, salmon battered themselves against the concrete, trying to return home. I expect no less from us. We too must hurl ourselves against and through the literal and metaphorical concrete that keeps us imprisoned within an economic and political system that does not blanche at committing genocide and ecocide.

“I’ve been told that before making important decisions, members of many native cultures would ask, ‘Who speaks for wolf? Who speaks for salmon?’ I ask that here. If salmon were able to take on human manifestation, to assume your body, or yours, or yours, or yours, what would they do?

“And why aren’t you doing it?”

The response by members of the panel? They called security on me.

The response by the rest of us, myself included? The dams still stand. The salmon still slide toward extinction.

So much for discourse.

It’s one thing, as my friend Jim at the Post Office pointed out, to talk or write about taking out dams, to talk or write about taking down civilization, to talk or write about protecting the landbases where we live, and it’s quite another thing to make it all happen.

I’m riding in a car with my friend Carolyn Raffensperger. It’s late, and we’re making good time across northern Iowa, in part because everyone else drives so fast. If I drive 85, everyone passes me. Driving 75 in, say, Oregon, makes me the fastest driver on the road. Carolyn asks what I hope to accomplish with my work.

I say, “I would like to change discourse so that we start talking honestly and deeply about bringing down civilization.”

She responds immediately: “That’s not what you want.”

“You’re right,” I say. “That’s not what I want. I want to bring it all down.”

“Yes,” she says.”

I need to be explicit. While I think it’s pretty easy (and necessary) to make a moral and tactical case for the assassination of Hitler, I’m not attempting to make a moral or tactical case for assassinating Bush, or for that matter, any other American political figure.

In the early days of the resistance to the Nazis, many still believed it possible to overthrow the regime without killing Hitler.
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But, as Peter Hoffmann notes
in his crucial book
The History of the German Resistance 1933-1945
, “As the war went on influential opposition circles came to realize that the removal of the dictator in person, his murder in other words, was an essential prerequisite to the success of any attempted
coup
. A sacred oath had been sworn to him; in strict legal terms and in the minds of the unthinking citizenry and soldiery, the majority in fact, he was the legally established warlord and Supreme Commander. Unless, therefore, its Supreme Commander were first removed, the Army could not be counted upon; yet it was the sole instrument with which a
coup
could be carried out.”
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Pacifists can complain all they want about this statement, but those in the resistance knew more about this than the pacifists or I ever will. And Hitler said much the same thing in his own inimitable way, “There will never be anyone in the future with as much authority as I have. My continued existence is therefore a major factor of value. I can, however, be removed at any time by some criminal or idiot.”
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