Endgame Vol.1 (67 page)

I don’t believe that’s the case in the United States. I’m sorry to break the news to you, George, but I don’t think you’re as central to the continuation of the U.S. corporate (or, following Mussolini, fascist) state as Hitler was to his fascist (or, chasing Mussolini back the way he came, corporate) state. If you were assassinated by, say, an extremely dedicated pretzel, I’m certain that literally hundreds of millions of people worldwide would feel a certain sense of relief (but those people of course don’t count, since most of them are poor, I mean, terrorists), yet the sad truth is that the United States economy would trundle on, destroying the lives of countless humans and nonhumans the world over.
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The question becomes, what do we want to accomplish? The honest answer to that question will point us toward some probable courses of action. (Similarly, examination of our actions and inactions will probably make clear what we really want.)

If we want to bring down the Nazis, we probably have to kill Hitler (among many other tasks). The question becomes a technical one: how do we do it? Similarly, if we want to save salmon, we face six relatively straightforward technical tasks: 1) remove dams, 2) stop deforestation, 3) stop commercial fishing, 4) stop the murder of the oceans, 5) stop industrial agriculture (which destroys waterways by erosion and pollution run-off), and 6) stop global warming, which means stopping the oil economy. With the exception of global warming, which may soon enter a runaway phase, these are very doable, in fact should be reasonably easy for a species and a people who pride ourselves on our problem-solving abilities. The problems only seem insoluble when we refuse—like the Nazi doctors—to look outside the confines of this extractive, exploitative social
structure, and outside of a mythology that causes many to pretend that one can kill the planet and live on it. We can’t have dams and salmon. We can’t have deforestation and salmon. We can’t have commercial fishing and salmon. We can’t have global warming and salmon. If we want salmon, we have to stop each of these.

What would we do, I ask myself again and again, if we fully internalized the understanding that the government is a government of occupation, and the culture is a culture of occupation? What would we do if space aliens (or commie pinko Russkies, or Islamofascists, or ChiComs, or whoever is the enemy of the day) were erecting and maintaining dams on rivers we love and rely on, if they were cutting down forests we love and rely on, vacuuming oceans we love and rely on, changing the climate? Wouldn’t stopping them become a series of straightforward if perhaps daunting tasks? Isn’t that what happens when we cease to identify with the culture that is killing the planet, and remember to identify with our own landbases?

Several pages ago I outlined some possible courses of action for those who don’t want to personally participate in bringing down civilization but who agree that: a) civilization will crash, b) the crash will be messy, and c) because civilization is systematically destroying the planet, the longer civilization lasts the worse things will be. Now, however, I want to ask the other half of that question: if we agree with each of those premises, and if we do want to bring it all down, how do we do that?

So many objections may be made to everything, that nothing can overcome them but the necessity of doing something.

IF WE’RE GOING TO TALK ABOUT BRINGING DOWN CIVILIZATION, WE NEED TO talk about fulcrums.
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If you recall, Archimedes said something to the effect of “Give me a long enough lever and a place to stand and I can move the world.” Well, he was being concise; by emphasizing the length of the lever and the place to stand he left off the lever’s other crucial component: the fulcrum. Archimedes could have the longest and strongest board in the universe, and the most solid place to stand, and he still wouldn’t have been able to leverage his strength without that pivot point.

The purpose of a lever is to transmit or modify (often magnify) power or motion. I can bend metal with a crowbar I couldn’t budge using muscles alone. I can crack nuts easily with a nutcracker, and moving heavy weights is a piece of cake with a wheelbarrow.

What does this have to do with taking down civilization?

Everything.

So long as the dominant culture is still dominant—by which I mean so long as its exploitative mindset holds sway over what’s left of the hearts and minds of the people who run this culture—there will always be a disproportionate number of people willing to kill to perpetuate it (to gain or maintain the power, or the promise of power, associated with being an exploiter
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) compared to the number who are willing to fight to protect life. It’s Jefferson’s line all over again: “In war they shall kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them.” And those who are willing, ready, and oftentimes eager to destroy those who threaten the hegemony of those in power often include their hired guns: Those in power worldwide have about 20 million soldiers and 5 million cops at their command. In the U.S. alone, these numbers are about 1.4 million soldiers and 1.4 million cops (one-third of whom are prison guards), the primary function of whom is to use violence or its threat to serve those in power. Far worse, nearly all of us have allowed ourselves to become convinced of the righteousness of Premise Four of this book: that violence flows only one direction, that it is right and just for servants of power to kill in that service (yet it is proper for their leaders to inevitably declaim on the regrettability of these inevitable murders), and it is blasphemy for the rest of us to fight back.
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This latter is as true for mountain lions who fight
back against those who wish to destroy their habitat as it is for humans who fight back against those who wish to destroy their habitat.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that those in power have the luxury of using that power inelegantly. They can and often do simply overwhelm us with sheer force. (“Shock and awe” is one of the currently preferred terms.) Those of us fighting for life, on the other hand, need to learn how and where to find appropriate fulcrums to amplify our efforts.

From the perspective of members of the German resistance in World War II, Hitler was certainly one such fulcrum. Killing just this one man would have multiplied their efforts to the tune of saving millions of lives. Had someone killed him before the war started—and some tried—the effects of their efforts would have been multiplied by tens of millions.

One man acting alone very nearly curtailed World War II. No, I’m not talking about Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, Josef Stalin, or even Ludwig Beck. I’m talking about Georg Elser.

Who?

Georg Elser was a German who hated what Hitler was doing to his country, and especially what he was doing to workers. Further, he understood that the Nazis were driving his country to war, and thought that by murdering Hitler he would be doing something both great and good.
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In other words, he was a good German, if we just this once use that term sincerely.

He knew that every year on November 8 Hitler gave a speech at the Löwenbräu restaurant
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in Munich in honor of his failed 1924 putsch against the Weimar Republic. In 1938 Elser attended the speech to reconnoiter the hall. Realizing almost immediately there was no way he could get close enough to shoot Hitler with a pistol, he determined to build a bomb.

He got a job at a quarry for the express purpose of stealing 120 pounds of explosives. (“The entrance to the explosives storage bunker was sealed by a door, to which Vollmer [the quarry’s director, who later was sentenced to two years in prison merely for having hired Elser] held the key. Elser secured three different keys of the approximate size and returned to the quarry late one night to try them all. Two would not penetrate the keyhole; the third went in easily enough,
but would not turn. Elser patiently filed down the key until it turned and the tumblers in the lock slipped out of place. The door swung open to reveal a treasure trove of explosives. It was as easy as that.”
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Four or five times each night Elser snuck into the bunker to steal very small amounts of explosives, until he had as much as he needed.) He was also able to obtain a 75 mm military artillery shell,
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as well as other necessary tools: planes, hammers, squares, tin shears, saws, rulers, pliers, clocks, a battery, and so on.

Late the next summer, Elser entered phase two of his plan. He moved to Munich, rented a room, and told his landlady he would be gone each night working at a laboratory on a super-secret invention. His invention was the bomb.

Each night he went to the Löwenbräu for dinner and stayed till near closing. He then moved to a deserted gallery and waited unmoving till the place closed and everyone left. After that came his real work. Here’s how one historian described it: “Working by the weak beam of a flashlight shrouded with a blue handkerchief, Elser carefully prised away the molding that surrounded a rectangular section of the column [just behind where Hitler would speak]. Then he carefully drilled a small hole in one upper corner of the veneer panel and inserted the tip of a special cabinetmaker’s saw. With exquisite care, Elser began cutting away the panel. He worked three or four hours, then cleaned up evidence of his work before falling asleep in a chair. The painstaking sawing a few millimeters at a time, the replacing of the molding, the picking up of each grain of sawdust after each stint of work—none of this tried the craftsman’s patience. He spent three nights just removing the panel. No trace of his tampering could be detected. . . . He chipped out a cavity, bits and pieces at a time, using hammers and steel hand drills of various diameters. Each tap reverberated through the empty hall, sounding to Elser like pistol shots. When some obstruction required heavier blows than usual, he waited for noises from the street to cover the sounds. Since he worked during the pre-dawn hours, he often had to wait a long time between hammer blows.”
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When finally he completed carving out the cavity he attached a sheet of steel beneath the wood so a security guard’s tapping would reveal no hollow space. He inserted the explosives and a five-day timer he’d made from alarm clocks.

Because he knew that each year Hitler’s speech ran from 8:30 to 10:00 PM, Elser set the timer for 9:20.
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Unfortunately for Elser, and for the world, Hitler’s plans changed at the last moment, and he spoke from 8:00 until 9:12. The bomb went off seven minutes later, and killed those who were standing right where Hitler had been.

Elser was arrested one hundred yards from the Swiss border. In his pockets he had a postcard from the Löwenbräu, technical drawings of shells and
detonators, and so on. He spent the next several years in a concentration camp, and was killed by the SS two weeks before Germany surrendered.
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If we’re going to talk about fulcrums, we need to also talk about bottlenecks. Anyone who has ever driven on a freeway knows precisely what a bottleneck is. You’re driving along fine at 69 miles per hour on a six-lane highway. You top a hill and hit your brakes because the person in front of you hit his brakes, because the person in front of him hit her brakes. Traffic slows to a crawl. People begin frantically changing lanes, trying to find one that will get them through this mess three minutes sooner. Eventually people realize they need to get into the center lane (you realize this about ten seconds after you got into the left lane, and just as three semis creep by you in the center). At long last you come across the problem: a car broken down in the left lane and a cop parked on the right. Moments later, you’re zooming again at precisely four miles over the speed limit, but for that forty-five minutes of traffic jam, you had the full bottleneck experience so beloved of motorists everywhere. Or one more example. Take a hose (or a pipeline). Kink it (or disable a pumping station). It doesn’t matter how smoothly the water (or oil) flows through the rest of the hose (or pipeline). If there is a kink (or a disabled pumping station) in even one place, the water (or oil) will not flow. Bottleneck!