Endgame Vol.1 (50 page)

WHY CIVILIZATION IS KILLING THE WORLD, TAKE SIXTEEN
. Polar bears: “About half a mile upriver, I came to a very strong shoot of water, from thence I saw several white-bears fishing in the stream above. I waited for them, and in a short time, a bitch with a small cub swam close to the other shore, and landed a little below. The bitch immediately went into the woods, but the cub sat down upon a rock, when I sent a ball through it, at the distance of over a hundred and twenty yards at the least, and knocked it over; but getting up again it crawled into the woods, where I heard it crying mournfully and concluded that it could not long survive.

“The report of my gun brought some others down, and another she bear, with a cub of eighteen months old, came swimming close under me. I shot the bitch through the head and killed her dead. The cub perceiving this and getting sight of me made at me with great ferocity; but just as the creature was about to revenge the death of his dam, I saluted him with a load of large shot in his right eye, which not only knocked that out, but also made him close the other. He no sooner was able to keep his left eye open, than he made at me again, quite mad with rage and pain; but when he came to the foot of the bank, I gave him another salute with the other barrel, and blinded him most completely; his whole head was then entirely covered with blood. He blundered into the woods; knocking his head against every rock and tree that he met with.

“I now perceived that two others had just landed about sixty yards above me, and were fiercely looking round them. The bears advanced a few yards to the edge of the woods, and the old one was looking sternly at me. The danger of firing at her I knew was great, as she was seconded by a cub of eighteen months; but I could not resist the temptation.”

The author, a Captain George Cartwright, really the first person to solidly establish civilization on the shores of Newfoundland, then moved toward another part of the river. “I had not sat there long, ere my attention was diverted to an enormous, old, dog bear, which came out of some alder bushes on my
right and was walking slowly towards me, with his eyes fixed on the ground, and his nose not far from it. I rested my elbows, and in that position suffered him to come within five yards of me before I drew the trigger; when I placed my ball in the centre of his scull, and killed him dead: but as the shore was a flat reclining rock, he rolled around until he fell into the river.

“On casting my eyes around, I perceived another beast of equal size, raised half out of the water. . . . I crept through the bushes until I came opposite to him, and interrupted his repast, by sending a ball through his head; it entered a little above his left eye, went out at the root of his right ear, and knocked him over, he then appeared to be in the agonies of death for some time; but at last recovered sufficiently to land on my side of the river, and to stagger into the woods.

“Never in my life did I regret the want of ammunition so much as on this day; as I was by the failure interrupted in the finest sport that man ever had. I am certain, that I could with great ease have killed four or five brace more.
²⁶⁶

Eskimo curlews: “Hunters would drive out from Omaha and shoot the birds without mercy until they had literally slaughtered a wagonload of them, the wagon being actually
filled
, and with the sideboards on at that. Sometimes when the flights were unusually heavy and the hunters well-supplied with ammunition, their wagons were too quickly and easily filled, so whole loads of the birds would be dumped on the prairie, their bodies forming piles as large as a couple of tons of coal, where they would be allowed to rot while the hunters proceeded to refill their wagons with fresh victims.”
²⁶⁷

Wilson snipe: “The birds being only in the country for a short time I had no mercy on them and killed all I could, for a snipe once missed might never be seen again.”
²⁶⁸

Golden plover: “The gunners had assembled in parties of from 20 to 50 at places where they knew from experience that the plovers would pass. . . . Every gun went off in succession, and with such effect that I several times saw a flock of a hundred or more reduced to a miserable remnant of five or six. . . . The sport was continued all day and at sunset when I left one of these lines of gunners they were as intent on killing more as they were when I arrived [before dawn]. A man near where I was seated had killed 63 dozens. I calculated the number [of hunters] in the field at 200, and supposing each to have shot only 20 dozens, 48,000 golden plovers would have fallen there that day.”
²⁶⁹

Ivory-billed woodpeckers: As the state of Louisiana tried desperately in the early 1940s to buy the habitat of the last of these birds in the United States, the board chair of Chicago Mill and Lumber responded, “We are just money grubbers. We are not concerned, as are you folks, with ethical considerations.” The
company argued that cutting this habitat would provide jobs (where have we heard that argument before?) but they lied (where have we seen corporate executives lie before?): their labor force consisted of German POWs, who themselves were “incredulous at the waste—only the best wood taken, the rest left in wreckage.” The trees were used to make chests to hold tea.
²⁷⁰

Northern spotted owls: Just to show how much things have changed in the last sixty years, I need to say that, coincidentally, the very day I wrote the previous paragraph, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation carried a news story entitled “B.C. Court OKs Logging in Endangered Owl Habitat.” There are, it seems, only twenty-five pairs of northern spotted owls still living in British Columbia, indeed in Canada. The birds are going extinct in the United States as well. The article stated, “The B.C. Court of Appeal has upheld a lower court ruling permitting old-growth logging in the last remaining habitat for the bird, saying economic interests can be weighed against the interest of the species.”
²⁷¹

Remember that one working definition of insanity is to have lost one’s connections to physical reality, to consider one’s delusions as being more real than the real world. The judges (and other industry representatives) in this case are insane, attempting to “weigh” the needs of an intellectual and philosophical system against living beings.

Of course environmentalists are just as insane. As part of their pathetic and necessarily ineffective “defense” of these and other creatures, environmentalists have been reduced to saying, “If the logging industry gets [
sic
] a reputation for having killed a [
sic
] species, they’re not going to benefit because worldwide markets aren’t going to buy wood from B.C. if they know that B.C. logging companies are killing owls to get it.”
²⁷²

Another reasonable working definition of insanity is that it is insane to keep acting in the same way and to expect different results. Apart from the appalling stupidity of this environmentalist’s statement, it has no basis in historical fact. Destroying the habitat of ivory-billed woodpeckers obviously did not harm the U.S. timber industry. Destroying the habitat of creatures never harms corporations, or at least it doesn’t harm them because of public perception (if people within this culture loved the natural world, they would stop its destruction): corporations can certainly destroy the landbase and thus undercut their own eventual profitability, but of course by then the damage is done. Within this culture, the fantastic and ever-changing “needs” of the economic system will always “outweigh” the needs of physical reality (in exactly the same way that the fantastic and ever-changing “needs” of abusers always “outweigh” the needs of everyone else). If we do not understand this, we have no chance of surviving.

Halibut: “The fishermen of Newfoundland are much exasperated whenever an unfortunate halibut happens to seize their baits: they are frequently known in such cases to wreak their vengeance on the poor fish by thrusting a piece of wood through its gills and in that condition turning it adrift. The efforts which are made by the tortured fish to get its head beneath the water afford a high source of amusement.”
²⁷³

I have before me a photograph of—what do I call this?—a mound of fish inside a rolled up commercial fishing net. The pressure from the tons of fish inside the net forces the faces of those on the outside of the mass through the net. Their eyes bulge from the pressure, their mouths gape. In the background a man looks off to the side, presumably working the machinery that tightens the net around the wild fish. If this catch is typical of commercial catches, most of these fish will be thrown back overboard, dead.
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Prairie dogs: If you have internet access, you might do a Google search for “red mist,” or go to
www.seekersoftheredmist.com/
. You will discover that when someone shoots a prairie dog or other “varmint” with a high powered rifle, the creature explodes into fine red mist. This provides “varmint hunters” with what they call “instant visual gratification.” Oftentimes the “hunters” sit in chairs, scoped rifles attached to specially made tables, and then attempt to create red mist. They will also try for what they call “flipper shots”—also called “The Olga Korbut”—where the creature is sent flying end over end; or “the Chamois” in which the creature’s entire skin is removed with one shot; or “Hoover Time,” a head shot on a prairie dog peeking out of its den.
²⁷⁵

Sometimes the “hunters” do not rest their guns on tables. Here is an account—not unusual in the least—I saw just today: “I had to run up to the Caprock yesterday for an errand. I took the opportunity to stow the .223 and a can of ammo in the truck before I took off. I got the chance to take my 3 year old with me, so when we got in the truck, he found my earphones and played with them. I talked to him about wearing them and leaving them on, how important it was, and that he had to do what I told him. It takes about 1.5 hours to get from here to there, so we had several chances to go over the rules. When we got to the first PD town, I ordered him to put on his ears, and I rolled down the window and grabbed the gun. Those PDs must have been shot recently because that was the last I saw of them. Further down the road, we pulled over again. I checked his ears several times before I finally pulled the trigger. I was very impressed. He watched, followed orders, kept his ears on and handed me rounds, one at a time. Very cool. I didn’t feel like I had a lot of time, so I only got 7 pups and 1 barbed-wire fence (oops! Dad or I will fix the neighbor’s
fence . . . again). After a couple of hits, Gavin said, ‘Cool! Fly!’ Oh, yeah! It was a good day, even though I only got to shoot for about 10 minutes. I’ve got a ‘hunt’ planned for next weekend, so I’m excited.”
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WHY CIVILIZATION IS KILLING THE WORLD, TAKE SEVENTEEN
. My only experience of military boot camp comes from movies, and thus is fictitious. I’d probably know more about them if I had never seen these movies (all writers, remember, including writers of movies, are propagandists). Here is what a former Marine sergeant says about boot camp: “Deceit and manipulation accompany the necessity to motivate troops to murder on command. You can’t take civilians from the street, give them a machine gun, and expect them to kill without question in a democratic society; therefore people must be indoctrinated to do so. This fact alone should sound off alarms in our collective American brain. If the cause of war is justified, then why do we have to be put through boot camp? If you answer that we have to be trained in killing skills, well, then why is most of boot camp not focused on combat training? Why are our privates shown videos of U.S. military massacres while playing Metallica in the background, thus causing us to scream with the joy of the killer instinct [
sic
] as brown bodies are obliterated? Why do privates answer every command with an enthusiastic ‘kill!’ instead of, ‘yes, sir!’ like it is in the movies? Why do we sing cadences like these?: ‘Throw some candy in the schoolyard, watch the children gather round. Load a belt in your M-60, mow them little bastards down!!’ and “We’re gonna rape, kill, pillage and burn, gonna rape, kill, pillage, and burn!!’ These chants are meant to
motivate
the troops; they enjoy it, salivate from it, and get off on it. If one repeats these hundreds of times, one eventually begins to accept them as paradigmatically valid.”
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Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total: it pervades the relationship of man to his work, to the things he consumes, to the state, to his fellow man, and to himself.
²⁷⁸
Man has created a world of man-made things as it never existed before. He has constructed a complex social machine to administer the technical machine he has built. Yet this whole creation of his stands over and above him. He does not feel himself as a creator and center, but as the servant of a Golem, which his hands have built. The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which he unleashes, the more powerless he feels himself as a human being. He is owned by his cre- ations, and has lost ownership of himself.