All these acknowledgments are in a sense premature. It is customary after finishing a book for authors to acknowledge in print all those who helped bring the book to fruition. But this book isn’t yet finished. If it is to be more than mere words, this book will only be complete when this culture of death no longer imperils life on earth. At that point the acknowledgments and gratitude will flow like rivers rushing through canyons once blocked by now-crushed dams.
Notes
Apocalypse
2. This is of course premise four of this book. We can say the same thing for police or the military killing regular people versus those people fighting back.
3. Eckert, 176.
4. McIntosh, 46.
5. Combs, 2. I’m sorry about the masculine-pronoun use here.
6.
San Francisco Chronicle
, September 13, 2001, 1.
7. “Media March to War.”
8. Ibid.
9.
Z Magazine
, 62. Even here, however, Cohen was being disingenuous; because of corporate welfare programs “we” generally provide the investment as well.
10. Edwards,
Burning All Illusions
, 141.
11. There is a fifth version I did not include, which is that the bombings on 9/11 were at the very least committed with the foreknowledge (if not connivance) of those in power, and have served as a pretext to ratchet up repression and state and personal power, à la the Reichstag Fire. The last half of this equation—that the bombings have served as pretext—is undeniable, while the first half is quite possible.
12. Jefferson, 345.
13. George Draffan, Endgame Research Services: A Project of the Public Information Network,
http://www.endgame.org
(accessed July 10, 2004).
14. Of course it is manifestly true that the corporate managers, stock brokers, financial analysts, FBI and CIA employees, and so on (I am explicitly excluding the janitors, food service workers, temp workers, undocumented employees, firemen, and so on) who worked in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon did extraordinary harm—far more than mere frontline soldiers—to most of the humans and nonhumans in the world. As I wrote in
The Culture of Make Believe
, “It is possible to kill a million people without personally shedding a drop of blood. It is possible to destroy a culture without being aware of its existence. It is possible to commit genocide or ecocide from the comfort of one’s drawing room. Presumably, the people who profit from the manufacture of ozone-depleting substances are fine and upstanding men and women. Presumably, the people who profit from the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction are well respected within their communities. Most of the horrors we are forced to live with have been caused by respectable—even great—men who themselves most often have clean hands. Warren Anderson, responsible for so many deaths in Bhopal, killed not a single Indian. The owners of Carbide who ordered the expansion of the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel killed not a single black man. Thomas Jefferson killed no Indians (the same cannot be said for Andrew Jackson). If you are a god you can kill from afar, and if you kill from afar you can maintain in your own mind the objectivity to believe that those you are killing are objects, or better, you can think of them not at all.” And I also wrote, “The oftentimes physical and psychic distance between financier and the activities which are financed in no way lessens their mutually reinforcing relationship. This must be understood if one is to fully apprehend the inhumanity of our culture. Most people do not
cut down forests, pollute rivers, force indigenous peoples off their land and commit genocide, or exploit workers out of a conscious sense of hatefulness (conscious perhaps being the operant word); they do it for money. Money fuels economic activities, and at the same time is the reward for participation in a culturally valued enterprise, causally linking financier to activity; without venture capital there can be no capitalist venture, and without monetary reward no venture capital will be provided. Another way to say this is that slavery would not have been viable without loans from bankers like Junius Morgan, and while Junius never once wielded the whip he undeniably, and from a distance, benefited from the lashings. It’s very simple: our culture allows, even encourages (demands would probably be the best word) someone to profit—to gain power, material possessions, or prestige—at the expense of another’s misery” (Jensen,
Culture
, 408, 410).
15. See, for example, Lewis Mumford, Farley Mowat, R. D. Laing, and Derrick Jensen.
16. Diamond, 1.
17.
Webster’s New Twentieth-Century Dictionary of the English Language
, 2nd ed., s.v. “civilization.”
18.
Oxford English Dictionary
, compact ed., s.v. “civilization.”
19. Stannard, 4.
20. Ibid.
21. Mies, 98.
22. Mumford,
Technics
, 186.
23. Diamond, 1.
24. Mumford,
Technics
, 186. There is awkwardness in the original, even though Mumford is normally an exquisite stylist.
25. Diamond, 4.
26. Turner, 182.
27. Faust, 293.
28. Personal communication, December 11, 1998.
29. George W. Bush and others stated in response to the World Trade Center attack that it was our patriotic duty to go out and shop: “Take your family,” Bush also said, “down to Disneyworld.”
30. Most women I know consider those numbers to be low, with actual numbers approaching unity. Many women tell me they know of no women who have not been sexually assaulted.
31. Caputi,
Age of Sex Crime
, 91.
32. Ibid., 160.
33. I’m speaking theoretically on this one: I love doing research, but my love does know bounds.
34. Mullan and Marvin, 157.
35. The work of Charlene Spretnak was important to my understanding here.
36. Paz, 212.
37. Mowat, Stannard, Drinnon, and Turner, for example.
38. Laing, 58.
39. For example, that the damn New York Yankees go to the World Series every year; oh, scratch that: the Yankees in the Series
is
about as inevitable as you can get.
40. Previous paragraphs cobbled together from Scheffer, et al.; “Gradual Change”; and “Accumulated Change.”
41. Cited in Vidal, 19.
42. Mumford,
Pentagon
, plate 24.
43. Peter, 115.
44. Mies, 99.
47. “States Get $16 Million.”
48. Center for Defense Information,
http://www.cdi.org/
(accessed January 16, 2002). It’s very hard to find old budgets on their website, but the numbers are just as startling, if not more so, in more recent budgets.
49. Stark and Stark.
51. Ibid.
53. Walker and Stambler, 23.
54. Ibid., 24.
55. Matus.
56. Edward Herman, 24.
58. Anderson.
59. Tomlinson.
60. Cockburn, “Left,” 1.
61. “CNN Says Focus.”
62. “Fox: Civilian Casualties.”
63. Ibid.
64. “Victims.”
65. Oxborrow.
66. Watson.
68. I first accidentally typed
hell
, but this couldn’t have been a Freudian slip, could it?
69. “Biased Process” and “Coming Your Way.”
73. Ibid.
74. “Information on Depleted Uranium.”
76. “Information on Depleted Uranium.”
77. Kershaw.
79. Davidson.
80.
San Francisco Chronicle
, February 16, 2002, 1-3.
81. Mowat, 27.
82. Root, 7.
83. Judith Herman, 33.
84. Ibid., 34.
85. Ibid., 35.
86. Ibid., chap. 2.
87. Ibid., 121.
88. Bright and Ryle.
89. And who have bought into the notion that “resources” are in fact resources at all.
90. Cottin.
91. Chomsky, 33.
92. Ibid.
93. Ibid., 48.
94. Flounders, 5.
95. See, for example, Garamone.
97. I’m not saying, of course, that all spirituality is abstract, but merely that for some people, and indeed for some entire traditions, spirituality can certainly be a way to
transcend
, i.e., avoid, embodied responses.
98. ACME Collective.
99. Ibid.
100. Ibid.
101. Ibid.
102. Ibid.
104. Ibid.
105. Ibid.
109. “Report to the Seattle City Council,” 7, n. 5.
111. “Anarchists and Corporate Media.” The Global Exchange activist denies saying this to the
New York Times
reporter.
113. “Frequently Asked Questions.”
114. Ibid.
116. Dimitre, 10.
117. Locke, 48.
118. Personal communication, October 30, 2001.
119. Planck, 33-34.
120. An argument I’ve heard too often having to do with this is that because I was abused as a child, I am not, in fact, angry at the culture but rather at my father. According to this argument, all of my impassioned defense of the land where I live is a displacement of the defense of myself I wish I could have made as a child. The people who say this nearly always have a look on their face that suggests they’re saying something incredibly profound, the possibility of which has never occurred to me. Of course I’ve long since sorted this one out. I despise my father because of his own despicable actions, not because of the actions of the industrial economy. I despise the industrial economy not because of my father but because of the despicable actions of the industrial economy and because of its effects on those I love. They’re entirely separable.
I always respond to this argument: “I could have had the best childhood in the world, and 90 percent of the large fish would still be gone from the oceans. Salmon would still be in trouble. Dioxin would still be in every mother’s breast milk.”
The argument is a transparent attempt to avoid looking at the real issues.
121. Roycroft, 8.
122. Note that I said
raise
not
give birth to
. There are already too many industrial humans, and there are plenty of unwanted industrial humans already here who need plenty of love.