The Ghost Imagine, for a minute, the following scenario: for weeks now you’ve been volunteering your time with an environmental group that is working to document the horrifying human and environmental destruction caused by the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. Each day brings fresh evidence that the leak is much, much worse than is being admitted publicly, as well as new information about the criminal recklessness of BP’s corporate operators. You and your fellow volunteers are seeing firsthand how wildlife is being killed and clean-up workers are being sickened. Everyone is frustrated and emotions are running high.
One day you discover, quite by accident, that one of your fellow volunteers, a man who you knew to be particularly passionate and angry, is plotting to kill BP CEO Tony Hayward when he arrives back in America for another round of testimony before Congress. He has already purchased a high powered rifle, knows what Mr. Hayward’s itinerary is and seems to have a fairly good grasp of the security precautions BP has taken to ensure his safety. You have every reason to believe that he is serious about assassinating Hayward and has a legitimate chance of succeeding.
You have a choice. You can contact the FBI and tell them what you know, or you can do nothing and see what happens. You know that murder is wrong and that vigilantism is no solution, but you also have zero faith that the law will hold Tony Hayward accountable for his crimes and there is a part of you that believes he deserves whatever he gets for the horrible things he and his company have done. So what do you do?
Those three paragraphs were written by me this summer at the height of the BP oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. I wrote it after watching an online video of a baby dolphin, crying and covered with oil, being carried out of the surf by beachgoers, who desperately tried to clean the crude off of it with their bare hands before the animal rescue people showed up to take over. Of course, the baby dolphin later died. Once it hit the oil slick, with its toxic stew of petroleum and dispersants, it never had much of a chance. It was a heartbreaking video, and it had elicited some very emotional viewer responses on the website. One woman – a Dorothy from Tallahassee – wrote that, “This really makes me sick to my stomach. Seeing wildlife being smothered by oil while we STILL sit here and wait for it to be stopped. Tony Hayward doesn’t deserve to ‘get his life back’, nor does he deserve to ‘have the heat taken off him.’ He deserves to be covered in oil & tortured just like ALL the animals & sealife!”
After thinking for awhile over what I had seen, I wrote those three paragraphs at the top of this posting, and then continued to write more and more. Almost an entire article, in fact, before I gave up, abandoned the effort and let what I had wrote sit unread on my hard drive for months.
My motivation for trying to write such an article was not to advocate for violence, but to make readers stop and think about how they would react to such a hypothetical scenario, and by doing so, hopefully reach a better understanding of their own views on violence and its use in political disputes. I was attempting to challenge what I saw, which was a small but growing left wing inclination to follow the Tea Party down the rabbit hole towards armed revolution. My reason for abandoning the article before it was finished had much to do with the fact that even bringing up the topic of left wing violence is, in a sense, its own crossing of the Rubicon. As some commentators have noted in regard to the growing American/Israeli tensions with Iran, even introducing the idea of a military attack on that country into the discussion has an effect of legitimizing it as a policy option, even if the consensus reached is that a military strike would be a bad idea. For the same reasons, introducing the option of violence as a means to advance leftist causes risks legitimizing it as a course of action, even if the majority reject it out of hand. Once the idea has been introduced and allowed to germinate there may not be a way back.
That was a hard decision for me to make, because I wanted to discuss and condemn a worrisome trend that I had noticed but was afraid that giving it publicity that would risk transforming such a (pardon the pun) revolutionary idea from a fringe concept to something that a larger group of people could embrace. I realize that such fears have an inherently undemocratic ring to them. After all, where would the gay rights movement, the civil rights movement and many other progressive movements be if once unthinkable ideas had not been introduced into the discourse? At the same time, ideas that should have remained unthinkable – ideas like overthrowing Saddam Hussein and torturing terrorism suspects – were able to happen after they gained a veneer of respectability through the same process. So I decided at the time that it was best to keep my mouth shut.
Well, on Sunday morning I booted up my computer and found that somebody else had decided to broach the topic for me, and not in a way that I approved of. Dahr Jamail, a gifted scribe who spent years documenting the horrors of the Iraq occupation, has lately turned his attention to the Louisiana coast and the horrible environmental destruction that has been caused by the catastrophic BP oil leak. In that vein, he wrote an article published over at Truthout called Life vs. Productivity: “What Would You Live and Die to Protect?” The article discusses and profiles Derrick Jensen, a radical environmentalist who is not opposed to the use of violence to fight corporate exploitation and ecological destruction. Although he doesn’t necessarily consider violence to be the first tool that we should reach for, he certainly believes that very drastic action could be necessary. As quoted by Jamail, he says:
“If it was space aliens coming down and systematically changing the planet, would we appeal to them through lawsuits, take off our clothes and make peace symbols, petitions?” Jensen asks. “I was once being interviewed by a dogmatic pacifist and he felt that I wanted all activists to act like assassins. That’s not true. What I want is for all activists to act like they are serious about their resistance and that might include assassinations.”
Political violence has become a preoccupation of mine since I started blogging on Alternet earlier this year, but up until this point it has always been right wing violence that has worried me. I’ve spent time writing about the potential for a second American civil war, particularly the dangers posed by Tea Party militants and others of their right wing ilk. As one would expect, I’ve met a certain amount of skepticism. Most of the skeptics either point out the fact that the lazy, fat mass of Americans are too busy watching NFL and eating McDonald’s to rebel, or they counter with an argument that anybody who tried to start a civil war against the government would get blown away in ten seconds by the U.S. military and its capability to deliver overwhelming destruction with pinpoint precision (otherwise known as the firepower argument). Others have stated a belief that the corporate/military/media complex is so firmly entrenched that it can never be dislodged. One reader, in responding to a post of mine, shared with me a bizarre belief that corporate entities were evolving into a collective consciousness – a hive mine, as he described it – that gives it a superior intelligence to normal people and thus makes it unstoppable.
Yet the dream of the most radical Tea Party nuts – the dream of overthrowing the Kenyan/Marxist/whatever in the White House and imposing their own Talibanized interpretation of the constitution – remains frightening because it is impossible to say for sure that their monstrous ambitions can never be realized, or at least attempted. Those who believe that an insurgency against the government would be over in ten seconds because of the military’s firepower advantage should take another look at Afghanistan, where the overwhelming might of the U.S. military and its NATO allies has failed, and failed miserably, to pacify an impoverished medieval society that’s fighting back mostly with crude bombs and old Russian weapons.
Referencing his own vast experience in the Middle East during the Iraq and Hezbollah wars, Dahr Jamail adds his own experiences to his article when he says that, “In April 2004, I watched local Iraqis in Fallujah, armed with Kalashnikov machine guns and rocket propelled grenade launchers, repel the most powerful military machine on the globe when US occupation forces attempted to invade their city. In 2006, during the Israeli attack of Lebanon, I saw Hezbollah, using little more than what the Iraqis used in Fallujah, repel an invasion by the Israeli military – a military defeat Israeli smart weapons, sophisticated US-made fighter jets and drones could do nothing to prevent.”
Jamail knows very well – but fails to mention it in the article – that George W. Bush, drunk with re-election hubris and probably still feeling emasculated after his troops were forced back in the April assault, ordered the military back the following November and destroyed almost the entire city. He also fails to note the enormous physical damage to southern Lebanon as a result of the Israeli bombardment. Was victory in these two fights worth the terrible devastation that resulted? I don’t know. That’s a question that can only be answered by the people of Fallujah and the citizens of Lebanon, both of whom would probably be the first to tell you that their victory was purchased at a terribly heavy price.
So what would an anti-government insurgency look like here in America? U.S. troops sent to quell an American insurgency would have some advantages that are not present in Afghanistan or Iraq (no cultural/linguistic/religious difference, for example), but also some major disadvantages, including the very real risk that insurgents could infiltrate their ranks. And no matter how many police and soldiers the government has, no matter how many drones and satellites, it is impossible for the government to look under every tree in northern Maine, to search every apartment in Dallas or to scour every snow capped peak in the Rockies. It is impossible for them to secure every inch of the Mexican border or the Gulf Coast if Latin American criminal organizations can make money smuggling in weapons for the insurgents and it is impossible to listen in on every call or read every e-mail, even with the most advanced data mining technology.
No matter what, attempting to overthrow the U.S. government by force would be a long and costly process, most likely taking the better part of a decade to accomplish and at a huge cost in lives amongst the insurgent combatants. While the image of a victorious guerilla army marching into the capitol of some third world nation is embedded in our modern consciousness, the reality is that such scenes are rare, even for victorious insurgents. It is easy to forget that it was the North Vietnamese Army, not the Vietcong guerillas, who marched into Saigon in 1975, and even easier to forget that in countries like Rhodesia, which became Zimbabwe when its white apartheid regime lost power in 1980, the military success of the rebel s led not to the complete overthrow of the government but to a political agreement where the ruling elites were forced to make once unthinkable concessions.
I’ve written about these things before in the context of a right wing insurgency against the U.S. government. A left wing insurgency is something that I have thought about but never written about until now. It should be pointed out that Derrick Jensen is not calling for an insurgency to overthrow the government, even though he thinks some form of violence is necessary. But Jensen seems afflicted with the delusion that such violence can be kept more or less limited. Although it’s theoretically possible that the kind of violence Jensen foresees could be kept from spiraling out of control, there are no guarantees, because once you’ve taken that final step, once you’ve shot that first bullet or thrown that first bomb, you’ve added a whole new group of players who might take the game off in a different direction.
“Assassinations, sabotage and other violent acts geared toward stopping the corporate capitalist system might remove some corporate CEOs and temporarily slow ecological destruction, but the CEOs would immediately be replaced and the violence and sabotage would most certainly be used to justify draconian measures applied to the general public, thus, making further resistance more challenging,” says Jamail in a bit of his own editorializing. And that is the crux of the problem when it comes to using violence. You can assassinate an evil hedge fund manager who has been financing rainforest destruction, but the hedge fund itself remains on this mortal coil after your bullets have caused the manager to shuffle off it, and someone else will take over its running. And that someone else will very likely continue those same evil but profitable investments unless he has reason to believe that the same fate will befall him. Unless he has reason to fear for his life if he doesn’t change the way the fund does business he will not have any motivation to change. Thus violence, once it’s been introduced to the situation, cannot be simply abandoned. It has to remain as a potent and fearful threat to dissuade others from following in the dead man’s footsteps, and if others do choose to follow, the instigators of violence have to be prepared to use it again.
Meanwhile, the initial act of violence will bring the state down upon the heads of those who orchestrated it, and it will likely be brutal. If you’ve ever wondered why America’s economic and political elites have been screaming bloody murder over these past two years, going to ridiculous extremes to portray everything that might ever so slightly help someone other than themselves as fascism/Marxism/totalitarianism, then you should be aware that racism, greed and lust for power are incomplete explanations. The complete explanation includes these things, but also includes the fact that the global system that has enriched and empowered these elites, the system that has been greased with cheap energy, easy credit and international stability, has become exceedingly fragile. So fragile that even acknowledging its fragility serves to hasten the day when it will finally come crashing down. The elites know this and have fought back with everything they have to keep that reality from becoming visible. Acts of violence present an even more direct threat to that fragile system, and thus every tool of repression can be expected to be hauled out to contain it.
Dahr Jamail begins his article with a quote from Malcolm X: “It is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself, when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks.” The idea of self defense runs through all of Derrick Jensen’s arguments, and that violence against those despoiling the planet and exploiting its citizens is a form of defense. Well, when the state retaliates against you for committing violent acts that threaten the system it protects, you’re going to find yourself at the receiving end of a hell of a lot of punishment. And to defend against that you’re going to need more weapons, more people, better tactics, better leadership and all the other things that a military force has to have. And you can see the process taking place by which you go up the escalation chain. Many military men would tell you that the best defense is a good offense, and even though you may not have set out to overthrow the government you may find yourself in a situation where that becomes the only viable option for your own survival.
Despite playing the devil’s advocate to Derrick Jensen’s arguments, pointing out some of the problems that come with violence, it’s easy to tell where Jamail’s sympathies lie. “We do not have the luxury of that kind of time,” he says when discussing one of the possible non-violent approaches, citing the speeding pace of environmental collapse. But despite his obvious sympathies, Jamail never comes out formally in favor of violence, simply being content to plant the idea in people’s heads and let them think about it. For a man of his amazing courage, a man who covered the most dangerous parts of the Middle East and told the stark ugly truth about what he saw there, his current stance seems cowardly. He wants people to start taking drastic action, but doesn’t want to be the one who tells them to run out and buy guns. He lets Derrick Jensen speak, then provides arguments against Jensen’s views, then provides new arguments to counter his own arguments against Jensen. Thus he comes across as supporting violence but without generating any quotes that will put him on the record as advocating it.
This is what bothers me the most about his article. I suppose it was inevitable that someone was going to the broach the topic of left wing violence, but if Jamail was going to take the step of introducing it he could have at least had the intellectual honesty of a Tea Party wingnut and said what he really felt so that his views could be openly discussed. I wholeheartedly agree with him that we are running out of time and that something big has to happen fast. I don’t agree with violence though, and his shifty stance is even worse because he doesn’t take a firm stand that can be either attacked or defended. He’s happy to slyly put an idea in the heads of people and then let somebody else catch hell for acting on it.
