In this excerpt from his book Endgame: The Problem of Civilization, author Derrick Jensen explores how limited the English language is when considering different aspects of “violence.”
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.
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.”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). My purchase of the computer carries with it those hidden forms of violence.
There is also violence by omission:
By not following the example of Georg Elser and attempting to remove Hitler, good Germans were culpable for the effects Hitler had on the world. By not removing dams I am culpable for their effects on my landbase.
There is violence by silence.
I will tell you something I did, or rather didn’t do, that causes me more shame than almost anything I have ever done or not done in my life. I was walking one night several years ago out of a grocery store. A man who was clearly homeless and just as clearly alcoholic (and inebriated) approached me and asked for money. I told him, honestly, that I had no change. He respectfully thanked me anyway, and wished me a good evening. I walked on. I heard the man say something to whomever was behind me. Then I heard another man’s voice say, “Get the f*** away from me!” followed by the thud of fist striking flesh. Turning back, I saw a youngish man with slick-backed black hair and wearing a business suit pummeling the homeless man’s face. I took a step toward them. And then? I did nothing. I watched the businessman strike twice more, wipe the back of his hand on his pants, then walk away, shoulders squared, to his car. I took another step toward the homeless man. He turned to face me. His eyes showed he felt nothing. I didn’t say a word. I went home.
If I had to do it again, I would not have committed this violence by inaction and by silence. I would have stepped between, and I would have said to the man perpetrating the direct violence, “If you want to hit someone, at least hit someone who will hit you back.”
There is violence by lying.
A few pages ago I mentioned that journalist Julius Streicher was hanged at Nuremberg for his role in fomenting the Nazi Holocaust. Here is what one of the prosecutors said about him:
“It may be that this defendant is less directly involved in the physical commission of crimes against Jews. The submission of the prosecution is that his crime is no less the worse for that reason. No government in the world . . . could have embarked upon and put into effect a policy of mass extermination without having a people who would back them and support them. It was to the task of educating people, producing murderers, educating and poisoning them with hate, that Streicher set himself. In the early days he was preaching persecution. As persecution took place he preached extermination and annihilation. . . . [T]hese crimes . . . could never have happened had it not been for him and for those like him. Without him, the Kaltenbrunners, the Himmlers . . . would have had nobody to carry out their orders.”
The same is true of course today for the role of the corporate press in atrocities committed by governments and corporations, insofar as here is a meaningful difference.
Featured image: U.S.-made CS gas (“tear gas”) canister used against civilians during the 2011 uprising in Bahrain. Photo by Mohamed CJ, CC BY SA 3.0.
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In A Language Older Than Words, author Derrick Jensen explores the relationship between silencing and clearcutting, between abuse of human beings and abuse of salmon, and offers us a different way to listen. This passage is taken from the opening of the book.
There is a language older by far and deeper than words. It is the language of bodies, of body on body, wind on snow, rain on trees, wave on stone. It is the language of dream, gesture, symbol, memory. We have forgotten this language. We do not even remember that it exists.
In order for us to maintain our way of living, we must, in a broad sense, tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves. It is not necessary that the lies be particularly believable. The lies act as barriers to truth. These barriers to truth are necessary because without them many deplorable acts would become impossibilities. Truth must at all costs be avoided. When we do allow self-evident truths to percolate past our defences and into our consciousness, they are treated like so many hand grenades rolling across the dance floor of an improbably macabre party.
We try to stay out of harm’s way, afraid they will go off, shatter our delusions, and leave us exposed to what we have done to the world and to ourselves, exposed as the hollow people we have become. And so we avoid these truths, these self-evident truths, and continue the dance of world destruction.
As is true for most children, when I was young I heard the world speak.
Stars sang. Stones had preferences. Trees had bad days. Toads held lively discussions, crowed over a good day’s catch. Like static on a radio, schooling and other forms of socialization began to interfere with my perception of the animate world, and for a number of years I almost believed that only humans spoke.
The gap between what I experienced and what I almost believed confused me deeply. It wasn’t until later that I began to understand the personal, political, social, ecological, and economic implications of living in a silenced world.
The silencing is central to the workings of our culture.
The staunch refusal to hear the voices of those we exploit is crucial to our domination of them. Religion, science, philosophy, politics, education, psychology, medicine, literature, linguistics, and art have all been pressed into service as tools to rationalize the silencing and degradation of women, children, other races, other cultures, the natural world and its members, our emotions, our consciences, our experiences, and our cultural and personal histories.
Vincent Emanuele is a writer and organizer born and raised in America’s Rust-Belt. A former US marine and Iraq War veteran, Vince refused orders for a third deployment in 2005 and immediately began working with the anti-war movement during the Bush years.
In the following excerpt from “Resistance Radio” with Derrick Jensen, Vince shares his thoughts regarding how discipline plays out an important role in activism and how to become disciplined by starting to make small but constant changes in our day-to-day activities.
Revolutionary Discipline
Vince Emanuele, with Derrick Jensen
[Starts: 1:08]
Vince Emanuele: [My friends] and I will often say things about simple day-to-day interactions. For instance when we are at a dinner, and a server walks up and, you know, to make eye contact and not to just keep eating if they drop something off at the table without acknowledging their presence, making sure that you hold doors for people, making sure that you are courteous with people. Those things for me on a smaller level operate as form of discipline that should carry over to other forms.
So let’s bring this back to military training (…) let’s put it this way: you don’t go into boot camp on day one or week one and start patrolling with a weapon in your hand.
Discipline in Small Actions
In fact, as an infantry soldier or Marine, and I’ll speak from my personal experience, you don’t really do that until sixteen weeks of training. You actually sit in a formation with a group of people with weapons, let alone live ammunition which might only happen once over the course of twenty-four weeks of training. So what do they start you with first? Can you stand up straight? And I don’t mean to sound ableist when I say some of these things, I just wanna throw that out there, but, you know, can you stand there on the line? Can you keep a straight face? Can you keep your hands and your knuckles at the seam of your pants? Can you make your bed or what we call a rack? Can you fold your socks? Can you have everything in line? Can you have your footlocker organized? Can you follow simple commands like “yes, sir” after certain commands, or kill after other commands? Will you move to the right or to the left when you are given a command to do so?
Now, that is an extreme example and it is obviously in a very destructive institution particularly here in the Unites States, but I think that you could take a lot of those lessons and the fundamentals which for me mean starting off very small with people. So, if you can’t be disciplined enough to get up and at least make your bed, at least maybe get something healthy to eat if you can afford it, if you have access to it. Making little schedules for yourself, making sure that you are living up to your commitments, and just doing the smaller things then I think after weeks and weeks of training, finally, as I was explaining to my neighbor who didn’t know this the other day, in Marine Corps Boot Camp you don’t shoot a weapon until, I think, week eleven of a thirteen-week boot camp. So, you’re doing your training and learning discipline for eleven weeks before the United States Marine Corps even gives you a weapon to fire.
So, when I think of resistance movements, when I think of even say non-violent direct actions groups who are performing very illegal actions but, say, in a non-violent action, but who still face serious repercussions, I think to myself we need activists and organizations who are disciplined on the same level, and maybe not in the same manner, obviously, but I do think some of those techniques and some of the long view that, you know, we are not just gonna discipline people in the course of a weekend workshop or we’re not gonna just discipline people, even if you could spend a week with someone, I mean, we’re talking about having people for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for 16 weeks before you can trust them enough ,and that’s under great duress and stress for those 16 weeks just to get people to the point where they can walk down a street together, and know what to do when someone fires on them.
I don’t want to overly stress that, I don’t want to like people who are thinking out there: “Gee, I just want my group to be a little more disciplined “or “I just wanna find some discipline for myself to do that.” That’s the ideal I would say, and I would say that’s a model, but in any small way and I think that extends to day to day courtesies looking at someone when they’re talking to you – listening someone who’s talking to you, to be there in the moment, to pay attention to what you’re doing, and what you’re saying, you know, the way you’re coming across to people. I think that’s a very important thing, and I think that just starting with those smalls things like, hell, can I do half an hour of working out today? I don’t really like to read, but I now that reading is very good for me, I know my brain is a muscle; I need to work it, can I at least read half hour or 45 minutes a day? Just those little things I think if you stay with them long enough, and if you do them, I think they’ll have a profound impact on your life I think there’s no question about that.
Derrick Jensen : I think this is extremely important; the importance of this cannot be…
Discipline and Burnout
Vince: Oh, I was going to say… the other day I saw this clip from Oliver Stone, and it was a really good clip about his movies and I don’t even know him as a person, so if he’s an asshole person I apologize. I’m just with what he said the other day, it was the National Writers Guild Awards and the gist of what he said towards the end, and I’m paraphrasing, but he was like “look, I’ve been fighting this people who make war my entire life, and most of the time you’re going to get your ass kicked, you’re gonna get insulted, there’s people who are gonna make threats against you, and there’s gonna be even people who flatter you but, at the end of the day, if you can stay in course, and if you believe in what you’re saying then you can make a difference.”
There’s been a lot of people there over the years, Sergio and I talk about this very regularly, I would say 90 to 95 percent of people that I started doing activist work with no longer do the kind of activist work that Sergio and I are still engaged with. They might be involved in smaller level which is still good, they might be doing artistic work, which is all good, all that stuff is good, but in terms on being of the same level we were at 22, thinking we can radically change society, and we are not going to deviate from these principles, there’s very few of us who’ve remained.
Now, some of that is the toxicity of the left, some of that is life can beat you down, some of that is we’re living in one of the most fucked up economic periods on US history, and all this other stuff, I mean, all that’s true, but another large part of that is, and this from seeing people at least anecdotally, and I’d like to see a study on this, but just how many people sort of fell away because they couldn’t maintain certain level of discipline, like I have it in my head that this is what I’m doing for the rest of my life.
I’m not just blowing smoke up your ass. I’m not just saying that at the pub because we’re having a few beers. I’m not just saying that to make you happy. I’m not just saying that because that’s what I think I wanna hear. But I have seriously sat back and meditated and thought to myself… Okay, maybe meditation is the wrong word because I’m not really into some of those things, that’s another story, nonetheless sat there and reflected and thought to yourself “Is this what I’m seriously all about and why?” ‘cause it better not be for, you know, a career or book deals or to get your name in the newspaper or to appear in radio programs.
If it’s for those reasons you’re in the wrong fucking line of business, and I don’t wanna be around you and, number two, you’re gonna fall away anyway because this work, as most people who do it know, it is very difficult, it is time-consuming and it is extremely stressful, and it can beat you down. It is very, on the flip-side, very rewarding, you meet amazing people, you get to participate in very meaningful activities, you don’t have to look back as many of my friends are doing in their early 30s and asking: “God! What the hell did I do with my 20s?” or “God, what the hell did I do in the last decade?” I haven’t asked that question.
Discipline and Self-Critique
I mean are there things I would have done better? Of course, I’m not crazy, there’s plenty of things. For me part of being disciplined is not that you’re going to be always this perfect person, it’s that you’re gonna notice when you start screwing up. I know I need to get back into shape right now, I know that’s the case, I’m not in the kind of shape I need to be in. So what’s that gonna require? That’s gonna require me clamping down sort of on myself. So, you know, I just think little things like that, even showing up to stuff that sometimes you don’t want to. You know, for the activists who are out there and so on, you know, and I have to be reminded of this when I watch those old video clips, and I see someone -I need to find her name- like the woman from the Mississippi Freedom Party who was telling people, just regular rally folks dressed like they’re going to church: “you’re gonna have to put your lives on the line.” That kind of stuff reminds me, that kind of stuff inspires me, you know.
The other day when I saw clips of disabled people, people who are terminally ill being dragged out of Senator’s offices just because they need their Medicaid and their health care, that stuff not only enrages me, those images and those kinds of actions inspire me, and how can you not be the least bit inspired? How can I look to someone who is terminally ill in a god damned wheel chair and I’m sitting at home going “Man! I really don’t know if I want to go to this meeting tonight” or “I really don’t know if I want to go to this action next week” or whatever.
Now, sometimes you have to take a break so you don’t burn out, but a lot of times I think we make a lot of excuses for people, and I actually think it’s insulting. It’s not like we understand these are systemic issues, but I have had people tell me: “well, you know, they’re poor immigrants, like we can’t expect them to stand up” and I’m like “Do you understand how patronizing that is? Do you understand how offensive that is? You think there aren’t tons of immigrant families who are already standing up? How about we highlight their work, how about we use them as an example and not, you know, sit back with this goofy mentality go ‘Oh, well, you know, we can’t expect them to stand up, they’re in a position.’” It’s like no, I don’t think we should ever do that, I don’t think that’s what good organizers are, I don’t think that’s what good leaders, intellectual, cultural, political leaders do.
I think they say “hey, I understand your situation, maybe I’m even in your situation, but regardless I’m here to walk with, to work with you hand in hand and this is what we are going to do.” I’m never going to say “oh, well, you know, it’s a bad systemic problem and I don’t really expect you to do much about it because you’re in this terrible state.” I think of other situations, I think if you can resist slavery, I mean abolitionists, I mean, I just think those things fire me up. Because I think, “Man! If this people could do what they did under those circumstances, then, dammit, I can’t make excuses for myself, and I can’t run away and I can’t makes excuses for other people.” People need to take breaks, I understand that, but at the end of the day we need to be holding up these people as examples, we don’t need to be sitting back.
You know, “Derrick, he has health problems so you know I don’t expect him to write that much, I don’t expect him to do anything.” I mean, yeah, I mean a lot of us have health problems in to varying degrees we can all put in what we could put in, but I don’t think all of us including myself need people other than just ourselves to push us, and that’s why I love people like Sergio or my dad or my mom like, “hey, Vince, you know, you could be doing a little more. Hey, you could help this out more.” That to me is real friendship, it’s not just sitting there going, “Oh, Derrick, you’re the greatest person in the world and you don’t do anything wrong.” It’s like, hey, if we spend enough time around each other where we’re comfortable enough to have those conversations, that’s what good activism is, that’s what good organizing is. I mean, building trust, I think, also includes critiques and as long as they’re done with solidarity in mind and with you know good intentions, I think that’s what it’s all about I mean to me should always be critiquing and proving as much as we can ‘cause obviously we are not winning with what we’re doing now.
Discipline and Commitment
Derrick: Well we have about, we have about, oh Gosh, five or six minutes left and there’s, I wanted, we’ll save self-defense for another time.
Vince: Okay * laughs.* I’m sorry, I’ve been rambling…
Derrick: No, no, no, this is perfect, this is great, this is wonderful and another thing that you brought up that I also just want to say, but I want to save for another time because I know you’re gonna have a lot of great things to say about it is something else that’s very clear in the military, at least from reading military history which is all I’ve ever done, if there’s a war that you want to win. And I’m reading a book right now. I’m going back up and I’m going to ramble for a minute
Vince: Yeah!
Derrick: One thing having to do with the discipline: one reason I have so many books out is, surprisingly enough, because I write, you know. That’s it. It’s a cliché, but my mother’s grandmother used to say all the time “inch by inch life’s a cinch.” And so, I don’t write whole books. Like today, I have typed in edits I made, today it was 40-some pages. And I did edits over the previous three or four days of about 90 pages, and now I’m gonna print those out, I’m gonna read it again tonight, and then tomorrow I will type in those changes, and then I’m done with that 90 pages. I mean, obviously I’d written them in the first place, but the point is I do work every day.
Another thing I want to say about that, and it has to do with the whole reading thing, is one of the smartest things I did when I was a teenager is that I decided that every night, before I went to bed, I would read 10 pages of a book that was good for me, that I would never get through otherwise, and it’s pretty extraordinary that if you do 10 pages every night, which is a piece of cake, then in a year you got 3,600 pages, and that’s a bunch of books.
So I’ve read Oswald Spengler that way, the first one I ever read was Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and then I was like 20, I read all of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and it’s not a big deal it was just 10 pages a night, slow but sure, and why am I bringing all this up? Oh, the reason I’m bringing all this up is because right now I’m reading a book called “Thunder on Dnepr” (16:16) which is about the Russian defense against Operation Barbarossa when the Germans Invaded in World War II. There was a question asked early on and I will say this once, but I want to ask you this question for an entire interview sometime in the future, early on the book they’re saying a military maxim is “don’t do what you enemy expects” and I read that and I don’t really 100 percent agree with that, because if you have a very defensible position and your enemy expects you defend it you might as well if it’s defensible, if it’s the best place, instead the question I’m interested in is what does your enemy most fear? And then do that, and I asked this on Facebook I asked just people in general and it was so interesting because the responses by many of the people where things like building an alternative currency, not spending money, and there was one person who said ‘destroy the transportation infrastructure that allows the movement of resources’ and I clicked on the guy and he was ex –military.
Vince: *laughs* Yeah, that’s not surprising!
Discipline and Tenacity
Derrick: So, at some point, and I realize this the total crap thing to do in this interview when we have like one minute left, I would like for you, if you don’t mind, to think about that question, if you were in power, what you would most fear? And I would love to interview you again in the future on that question
Vince: Right on, I would love to do it
Derrick: So far as settling down today, we can’t really talk about self-defense ‘cause we only have like two minutes.
Vince: Well, there’s a quote I can give that I think encompass everything that we’re doing and it’s a good old ju-jitsu quote that it’s attributable to no one, nobody knows where it came from and the quote is very simple or the saying is very simple, it’s simply: “a black belt is a white belt that never stopped coming to practice” and all that’s all the black belt is in jujitsu. Every single day or as many times as you can go. There’s people who get it in 8 years, there’s people who get it in 25 years, but the point is just to get up and do it and do it as most as you can, and show up when you can.
In this short excerpt from the last episode of The Green Flame podcast, Derrick Jensen and Lierre Keith offer a poetic reading from a piece by C.S. Lewis, originally written in 1948, in which the author speaks of the threat of nuclear war and how to live in an age of existential threats.
“In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. How are we to live in an atomic age? I am tempted to reply, ‘why as you would have lived in the 16th century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might have landed and cut your throat every night, or indeed as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.
In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented, and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors: anesthetics. We have that still.
It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance but a certainty.
This is the first point to be made and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things: working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a a game of darts, not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies, a microbe can do that, but they need not dominate our minds.”
The Green Flame is a Deep Green Resistance podcast offering revolutionary analysis, skill sharing, and inspiration for the movement to save the planet by any means necessary. Our hosts are Max Wilbert and Jennifer Murnan.
In this conversation, we talk about making our loyalty to the land itself and making our curiosity to the land as well. How can we listen to Nature? The answer might be more simple than we imagine.
I was trying to write something from the perspective of a stream near my home [ … ] I was wondering if I could describe something not by how its borders differentiated from its neighbors such that if we talk about me then I, you know, basically end at my skin, and the couch here ends at the end of the fabric, and the cat is what’s inside this bag of skin and fur then everything outside that is not that cat. I was wondering if we could describe something not by its separations, but by its connections. I didn’t even know what I meant at the time, I was just thinking: “Okay, can we do this?” and then I was trying to write something, what would it be like to be from the perspective of the river and then it occurred to me, but “that’s actually kind of silly” because why would I try to make up what it’s like to be a river when I live, you know, I was sitting at that moment thirty yards from a stream and I could just go ask? That’d be like me trying to describe what it’s like to be you without asking you. So, I went down to the stream and I asked the question, I remember, this is a temperate rain forest here and it was misting on that day, and I went down and asked the stream what is it like to be you? And before I go on, I want to say that I realized in that moment that’s really the fundamental question of all relationships that I don’t think is asked often enough and even in relationships that we have that are long-term with humans, I don’t think we ask that often.
The Green Flame is a Deep Green Resistance podcast offering revolutionary analysis, skill sharing, and inspiration for the movement to save the planet by any means necessary. Our hosts are Max Wilbert and Jennifer Murnan.
