Now, how does this apply on a larger scale?
Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments for the Third Reich, later commented that the Allied bombing efforts could have been more effective had they more often targeted bottlenecks. One small example of this was that when the Allies bombed tractor factories, the Germans were no longer able to manufacture engines for tanks and airplanes there until the factories had been rebuilt, but when the Allies bombed ball bearing plants, the Germans were hindered from rebuilding factories. You need ball bearings to manufacture manufacturing plants. Ball bearing plants were bottlenecks in the process.
Here’s an example of the Allies not hitting bottlenecks: the firebombing of Hamburg, which killed tens of thousands of people and destroyed much of the city, cost less than two months of productivity.
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As a result of not targeting bottlenecks, Allied bombing reduced total German production by only 9 percent in 1943, and by building new factories, overworking undamaged factories, and diverting consumer production towards military ends, the Germans still met their production targets.
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But it ends up that ball bearing plants were trivial bottlenecks compared to others. Transportation networks, for example, were an even larger bottleneck. Eventually the Allies were able to destroy about two-thirds of the German rolling stock.
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A United States military analysis later determined that the difficulties this caused the Germans in moving raw materials and finished goods made the attacks on railroads “the most important single cause of Germany’s ultimate economic collapse.”
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We all know (and Hitler knew this too) that oil was another bottleneck.
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You can have the most powerful tanks in the world, and without oil they’re just big hunks of steel. Without oil you have no modern army. Heck, without oil, you have no modern civilization. Keep that in mind. Hitler’s understanding of these basic facts was one reason for his ultimately fatal choice to try to take the oil fields of the Caucasus instead of just pushing toward Stalingrad. Further, once the Allies started pounding the German synthetic oil industry—hitting the selected targets again and again and again—they were able to reduce monthly oil production from 316,000 to 17,000 tons.
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These shortages obviously crippled the German war economy.
Just so we’re clear that there are lots of bottlenecks, and that a little creativity can discover them, here’s another bottleneck from World War II: industrial diamonds. Industrial grinding and drilling is almost impossible without diamonds. Both the Nazis, who had on hand only an eight-month supply, and DeBeers, which controlled the world’s diamond supply, knew this. The Nazis smuggled several million carats into Germany. DeBeers could have acted to stop them—and thus effectively stopped wartime production, which means effectively stopped the war—but did not.
The new questions become: What are some of civilization’s bottlenecks? What are some of civilization’s limiting factors? Like transportation networks, oil, and industrial diamonds for the Nazis, what are some of the objects or processes that, if interdicted, could cause civilization to grind to a halt?
Similarly, where can we find fulcrums, pivot points, to magnify our efforts? Where do we put the levers, what do we use for fulcrums, how and when and how hard do we push to help topple this culture of death?
Are these fulcrums psychological? I hear all the time that it would do no good to take out dams, for example, because that would leave intact the mindset that leads to their erection in the first place. We need to change hearts and minds, I am told, and once these hearts and minds have been changed everything else will fall into place. Civilization will disappear because people are no longer insane enough to want it.
But maybe that question is too vague. Whose hearts and minds are we trying to reach? Where do we place our efforts in changing hearts and minds to achieve the most effect? Is it among the politically and economically powerful? Is it among the “mass of Americans”? Is it among the disaffected? Is it among the poor? Is it among the so-called criminal classes? Is it among the cops and the military? These latter, after all, have a lot of guns.
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Where will we achieve the most good?
Are the fulcrums spiritual? People value what they consider sacred. They sacralize what they value. Perhaps we should attempt to desacralize power for power’s sake. Perhaps we should attempt to break down the divine right of science, the divine right of corporations, the divine right of production, the divine right of nation-states. Perhaps we should attempt to help people to remember that spiders who live in their bathrooms are sacred, as are salmon who spawn in rivers outside their homes, plants who push up through sidewalks, salamanders who live high in the hollows of ancient redwoods, their own bodies, their own experiences, their own sexuality, their own flesh free from industrial carcinogens. Where do we place the levers, the fulcrums, to help people remember that they are humans living in a landbase, that they are animals?
Are these fulcrums personal, such that, like Hitler, the “removal” of this or that person will make a tangible difference? Would it help the redwoods and workers of northern California to make sure Charles Hurwitz, CEO of MAXXAM, does not damage them from his high-rise home in Houston, Texas? If so, where and how and when do we act in this way?
In cases where it’s not the individual CEO, but the position—where social framing conditions make it so that most people who would take up that position share the same deadened worldview that would cause them to commit the same atrocities—where then do we place the levers and fulcrums? Do we go CEO to CEO, “removing” them one by one? We always hear that the machine-like characteristics of corporations mean that CEOs are simply cogs—albeit large ones—in these community-destroying institutions, and so it would do no good to remove them. It’s an odd argument to make, even when I make it myself (as I did a few pages ago).
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There are few who suggest that simply because arresting or killing one rapist does not stop other men from raping, that this means we should not stop whatever rapists we can through any means necessary. Yet when it comes to CEOs the argument seems to hold: Someone else will just take this one’s place, so we must not stop this one personally. In fact, we must allow him to continue to be rewarded with millions of dollars per year in salaries and stock options. Where are the fulcrums to stop these people, these institutions? Where are the bottlenecks?
Or perhaps the fulcrums are social. Perhaps instead of (or in addition to) removing individual CEOs, we need to change the social institutions that themselves amplify the destructive efforts of these individuals. Charles Hurwitz does not kill redwoods by cutting them down. He kills them by ordering them cut down, or even more abstractly, by ordering someone to maximize profits. Are there counterlevers we can use to pry away his levers of power? Are there social means by which we can do that?
Or perhaps, as was also true of the Nazis, some of the fulcrums are infrastructural. John Muir is famously noted as saying, “God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools.” The thing is, a fool couldn’t cut down trees by him or herself. I used to think that we were fighting an incredibly difficult battle in part because it takes a thousand years of living to make an ancient tree, while any fool can come along with a chainsaw and cut it down in an hour or two. I’ve since realized that’s all wrong. The truth is that thriving on a living planet is easy—the whole forest, for example, conspires to grow that tree and every other, and
we
don’t have to do anything special except leave it alone—while cutting down a tree is actually a very difficult process involving the entire global economy. I wouldn’t care how many ancient redwoods Charles Hurwitz cut down, if he did it all by himself, scratching pathetically with bloodied nails at bark, gnawing with bloody teeth at heartwood, sometimes picking up rocks to make stone axes. To cut down a big tree you need the entire mining infrastructure for the metals necessary for chainsaws (or a hundred years ago, whipsaws); the entire oil infrastructure for gas to run the chainsaws, and for trucks to transport the dead trees to market where they will be sold and shipped to some distant place (once Charles had downed the tree by himself, I would wish him luck transporting it without the assistance of the global economy); and so on. It takes a whole lot of fools to cut down a tree, and if we break the infrastructural chain at any point, they won’t be able to do it.
The same is true, of course, for the rest of this culture’s destructive activities, from vivisection to factory farming to vacuuming the oceans to paving the grasslands to irradiating the planet: every one of this economy’s destructive activities requires immense amounts of energy and worldwide economic, infrastructural, military, and police support to accomplish. If any one of these supports fail—I want to emphasize, if
any one of these supports fail
—the destructive activities will be curtailed. Where do we place our levers?
Or maybe the fulcrums are all of the above. Maybe changing people’s hearts
has a place. Maybe so do all the others, and maybe we should pursue them all, according to our gifts, proclivities, and opportunities.
The bottom line so far as fulcrums and bottlenecks: What will it take to stop this culture of death before it kills the planet?
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VIOLENCE
I believe there will ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those who do the oppressing. I believe there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice and equality for everyone, and those who want to continue the system of exploitation. I believe there will be that kind of a clash, but I don’t think it will be based on the color of the skin.
Malcolm X
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I’M SURE BY NOW WE’VE ALL HEARD THE CLICHÉ ABOUT HOW ESKIMOS have something like ninety-seven words for snow. It ends up that’s kind of bullshit. First, they’re not Eskimos, but Inuits. Second, the translations for their words for snow aren’t all that exciting, kind of like “fluffy snow,” “hard snow,” “cold snow,” and so on. The reason they have so many words for snow is that they don’t have adjectival forms the way that English has.
Along these lines, though, I do think we need more words in English for violence. It’s absurd that the same word is used to describe someone raping, torturing, mutilating, and killing a child; and someone stopping that perpetrator by shooting him in the head. The same word used to describe a mountain lion killing a deer by one quick bite to the spinal column is used to describe a civilized human playing smackyface with a suspect’s child, or vaporizing a family with a daisy cutter. The same word often used to describe breaking a window is used to describe killing a CEO and used to describe that CEO producing toxins that give people cancer the world over. Check that: the latter isn’t called violence, it’s called production.
Sometimes people say to me they’re against all forms of violence. A few weeks ago, I got a call from a pacifist activist who said, “Violence never accomplishes anything, and besides, it’s really stupid.”
I asked, “What types of violence are you against?”
“All types.”
“How do you eat? And do you defecate? From the perspective of carrots and intestinal flora, respectively, those actions are very violent.”
“Don’t be absurd,” he said. “You know what I mean.”
Actually I didn’t. The definitions of violence we normally use are impossibly squishy, especially for such an emotionally laden, morally charged, existentially vital, and politically important word. This squishiness makes our discourse surrounding violence even more meaningless than it would otherwise be, which is saying a lot.
The conversation with the pacifist really got me thinking, first about definitions of violence, and second about categories. So far as the former, there are those who point out, rightly, the relationship between the words violence and violate, and say that because a mountain lion isn’t violating a deer but simply
killing the deer to eat, that this would not actually be violence. Similarly a human who killed a deer would not be committing an act of violence, so long as the predator, in this case the human, did not violate the fundamental predator /prey relationship: in other words, so long as the predator then assumed responsibility for the continuation of the other’s community. The violation, and thus violence, would come only with the breaking of that bond. I like that definition a lot.
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Here’s another definition I like, for different reasons: “An act of violence would be any act that inflicts physical or psychological harm on another.”
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I like this one because its inclusiveness reminds us of the ubiquity of violence, and thus I think demystifies violence a bit. So, you say you oppose violence? Well, in that case you oppose life. You oppose all change. The important question becomes: What types of violence do you oppose?
Which of course leads to the other thing I’ve been thinking about: categories of violence. If we don’t mind being a bit
ad hoc
, we can pretty easily break violence into different types. There is, for example, the distinction between unintentional and intentional violence: the difference between accidentally stepping on a snail and doing so on purpose. Then there would be the category of unintentional but fully expected violence: whenever I drive a car I can fully expect to smash insects on the windshield (to kill this or that particular moth is an accident, but the deaths of some moths are inevitable considering what I’m doing). There would be the distinction between direct violence, that I do myself, and violence that I order done. Presumably, George W. Bush hasn’t personally throttled any Iraqi children, but he has ordered their deaths by ordering an invasion of their country (the death of this or that Iraqi child may be an accident, but the deaths of some children are inevitable considering what he is ordering to be done). Another kind of violence would be systematic, and therefore often hidden: I’ve long known that the manufacture of the hard drive on my computer is an extremely toxic process, and gives cancer to women in Thailand and elsewhere who assemble them, but until today I didn’t know that the manufacture of the average computer takes about two tons of raw materials (520 pounds of fossil fuels, 48 pounds of chemicals, and 3,600 pounds of water; 4 pounds of fossil fuels and chemicals and 70 pounds of water are used to make just a single two gram memory chip).
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My purchase of the computer carries with it those hidden forms of violence.