Welcome To The Machine:
Derrick Jensen Interviewed Part 2.

Interviewed by eco-prisoner Chris ‘Dirt Blackcrow' McIntosh and Claudette Vaughan

  Welcome To The Machine: Derrick Jensen Interviewed Part 1

CV: What are your views of the uprising in the US of the migrant worker? Workers having no papers, no access to health care or welfare, are given no rights under the law of the country, move from town to town dependant on where the work is, will work from a crumb and are usually dark or dusky skinned. Sounds like slavery to me and more prevalent than any plantation or cotton field but deliberate slavery none-the-less.

Derrick Jensen: There's a really good book I can recommend and it's called Kevin Bale's “Disposable People”. He talks in there about how there are more slaves using a rigid rigorous definition, not just wage slaves but slaves, there are more slaves here today than what came across in the middle passage. And this ties back to the migrant workers who are working for a pittance but he said one of the big differences is back in the American South the average slave would cost about the same as a medium sized house as a capital expense. These days slaves in the world cost, on the average, less than $100.00 dollars. They have become not a capital expense but instead a simple expense to be disposed of. You are going to treat something differently depending on what it costs you. E.g., if I buy a car for $50,000 I am going to treat it differently than if I buy a car for $100.00 I'll drive it until it drops. It's the same thing with people.

I remember saying to my African-American friends while I was writing “A Culture Of Make-Believe”. Oh my gosh! Slavery didn't end because of the Civil War and they are like, “Derrick, What are you? 150 years behind the times? You haven't figured that out yet?”

There's a quote in “The Culture Of Make Believe” from a pro-slavery philosopher who was writing to his abolitionist friend in the North and he said, “There are social conditions where it is in our economic interests to own slaves and there are social conditions in our economic interests not too. This all has to do with access to land. If there's a lot of land and not many people the only way you can get people to work for you is by owning them at the point of a gun because access to land means access to self-sufficiency, food, clothing and shelter. If on the other hand there's a lot of people and not much land then they have to work for you because they don't have access to food, clothing and shelter. They are dependant on you which means,” he told the guy in the North, “if we could arrange social conditions like up there – a lot of people and not much land - we would let the slaves go immediately because it's a lot cheaper and that's our social conditions which are systematically created”. Systematically those in power have to deprive us of land because otherwise how the hell else are they going to get you to work for Wal-Mart? At the same time they have to destroy stocks of wild foodstuff. This culture cannot allow any form of independence from the system and that's why every indigenous culture must be destroyed because they are independent of the system. This system cannot allow any option.

That's one of the reasons. Cortez as he was marching through Mexico put a stockade around where his troops slept every night not to keep the Indians out, it was to keep the soldiers from defecting. Why did the Pilgrims have to kill the Pequot? Only because some of the Pilgrims were running off, chucking their clothes off and were dancing naked in the woods with the Indians. You can't have that so the first thing they would do is go and grap those white people and they would torture them to stop others from doing that in the future and when that didn't work the only other way is to eliminate the alternative. Once again, how are you going to get people to work for Wal Mart? You have to destroy the alternative systematically.

CV: Is the uniform of the other side the suit and tie?

Derrick Jensen: I think that's one uniform of the other side. Another is a cop's uniform. How about a military uniform? How about a white lab coat? How about the smiling face of your 8 th Grade teacher that you have to get a hall pass in order to go to the bathroom? How about the crying face of your mother as she delivers you to school on the first day of class when you're a kid. She knows what she is doing and that's why she's crying because she knows she's delivering you into prison. How about our own minds? Stephen Biko said, “The most powerful tool in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” How about the newspaper? That's another uniform. The uniform is the culture itself. The uniform can be the groovy peace/love pacifist. The uniform can be the liberal. The uniform can be movie stars and those are the stories that teach us how to live. The uniform, for that matter, can be the anarchist.

CV: In western culture this quality of unpredictability isn't tolerated and when it rises moves are made to quickly eradicate it. All must be uniform. Keeping in mind university texts, how we think and respond to sex, how history is written, how men relate to woman and the environment and also the “unpredictability” of individuals like Chris McIntosh, SHAC7 and activists in general. Is diversity destroyed because the dominant culture can't control wildness?

Derrick Jensen: Well, I think it's the same thing as what I was just saying. No alternatives must be allowed. I read the book 1984 when I was a teenager and I thought it was pretty good and I re-read it before I wrote, “Welcome To The Machine”. That book is so fucking good. But in answer to your question comes in the question itself. They are afraid of diversity because diversity is unpredictable. It's much easier to control what happens in a parking lot than what happens in a forest. That's one of the reasons why the hatred of fear and unpredictably because you can't control it.

I'd like to talk about animal rights. I'm actually opposed to animal rights.

CV” Do you mean in a dominant culture-based legalistic sense?

Derrick Jensen: Animal rights as a tactical means, sure. I don't think we should extend human rights. I think we need to limit rights. People talk about people have the right to clean water, clean air whatever. I think that is all wrong. What I think is more appropriate instead of saying, “I have the right to clean air” we need to say, “You have no right to pollute the air.” Instead of saying, “Guinea pigs have the right not to be vivisected”, we need to say, “You have no right to vivisect guinea pigs”. The difference is as long as we are saying, “I have the right to this or that…” we are keeping the focus on ourselves or on the guinea pigs etc which is not the right place because we aren't the problem, the guinea pigs aren't the problem, the fucking vivisectors are the problem, the fucking polluters are the problem. Some people think this is semantics. Whatever. I think it's a huge difference.

It's like if one is in therapy it may be appropriate on one level of one's development to say, “I have the right not to be abused”. Once again, that's keeping the emphasis on you. Feel the difference between that and, “You have no fucking right to abuse me” and that's like getting right to the point of it. It's chipping the emphasis to where it's meant to be to the responsibility.

Claudette Vaughan: I agree. The emphasis must shift if the animal rights movement isn't to be forced underground for the next 80 years because of the inability of the aboveground groups who refused, in this era, to offer resistance to the system. Animal rights people are fond of saying we are just one more animal and yes, there is more work to be done there in a Darwinian sense, however, it's a cop out and where's the responsibility in saying that in any case?

Derrick Jensen: I love the word ‘responsibility' because responsibility originally comes from the root: to give and return. The question is, To whom am I giving in return? Ultimately of course everything is coming from the land so that's what I have to get back to. I have to give and return. I think of that a lot in turns of loyalty. It's like who are I writing for? Ultimately who are I going to be responsible to? That's a question everyone needs to ask. Am I responsible to the corporation who pays my pay cheque- by the way I don't work for a corporation, but if I did would I be responsible? I'm really clear for myself that I am responsible for the land that gives me life. I am responsible to the trees around here. I am responsible to the salmon. I am responsible to all those things.

I got into a big argument because this guy was saying because I use toilet paper I am just as responsible for deforestation than a CEO warehouser. I knew that answer was kind of nonsense but I couldn't articulate it. I asked a tree that I had a relationship with and the tree reminded me of this. “Yes, I am culpable for de-forestation but not because I consume the toilet paper but because I consume the toilet paper and I don't stop the CEO warehouser from deforesting. If I use the flesh of a tree I now have to take responsibility for making sure the tree stands.

Part of the reason that so many environmentalists, and this may be true for animal rights people as well, is why we always lose is I think a lot of us don't know what we want. And we don't articulate what we want. Timber companies know what they want. They want to maximize profits. They want every last tree. As an environmentalist do we want smaller clear cuts, do we want democracy in the forest, well it would be nice to have a planet but, you know, if my baseball team wins etc. We don't know what we want. I know what I want. I want to live in a world that has more wild salmon in it than last year or the year before. I want to live in a world that has less dioxin in every mother's breast milk than the year before. I want to live in a world with no vivisection. I want to live in a world with no factory farms. I want to live in a world with no industrial forestry. I want to live in a world where there are more large fish in it than the year before etc. I want to live in a world that has tigers. I want to live in a world that has polar bears. I will do whatever it takes to get there so I think that's a question that animal rights and environmental activists should ask ourselves and that is: What do you want? And get really, really specific. I am very, very clear. I will do whatever it takes to make sure that Coho salmon are not driven extinct by the dominant culture.

CV: How do you think once revolutionary activists get infiltrated? The man that founded Greenpeace, Patrick Moore now speaks in favour of nuclear energy. Peter Singer once coined “the father of the animal rights movement” wrote a book on bestiality while not condemning the practice. What kind of person is willing to destroy the hopes and ideals of a whole generation?

DJ: We shouldn't be relying on them anyway.

CV: Well, I know that but there's plenty of people that do place their hopes in self-appointed leaders. Okay then, how do people become infiltrated over the years because the dominant culture says what happens is people get middle-aged and they no longer want to fight a system they know can't be beaten?

DJ: It can be beat. We are going to win. We are absolutely going to win and you know why we are going to win? We are going to win because the world's on our side and we need to match the other sides determination. There's a great line from Thomas Jefferson about fighting Indians and he says, “In war they shall kill some of us, we shall destroy all of them”. That's why the dominant culture always wins because there's that absolute determination and our side is like, “Well, okay so we'll win as long as we don't have to hurt anybody and as long as we don't get hurt and as long as we still get home by 5 o clock to watch the BBC Mystery”. (laughter)

What would happen if we matched their determination? You know if we go to some big protest that's exactly what the cops are all thinking. You know, if this comes to a riot they may hit a few of us but we are going to fucking destroy all of them.

People have said to me “God Derrick, people can't take out dams because they would just stop you and that would be it”. What would happen if we were to say “You know what? You can stop a few of us but we are going to take out every fucking dam”. What would happen if we were to say, “We are going to stop every fucking vivisector?” What would happen if we started having that level of determination that they already have.

Thomas Jefferson's statement is simply a statement of truth having to do with the natural world. The natural world can save industrial civilization. You may kill the passenger pigeon. You may kill the Eskimo curlews. You may kill the Great Auks. You may even kill the Hammerhead sharks but I am going to destroy every last one of you. That is simply a statement of truth. You cannot fight the natural world and win. We have the biggest ally on the world on our side. We are going to fucking win. Okay that's one thing. The next thing is I don't know why people turn.

I have had this worst, worst Crohn's disease and back in November I was actually thinking if it keeps going this way I am going to die. I have been taking various medicines over the years. I've done herbal medicines, I've done western medicine. I started taking this high tech nasty genetic engineered thing and it saved my life. I thought about that a lot and Freddie Perleman said before going in for open-heart surgery, “I can make a philosophical stand and die or I can not”. There's a bullshit line used by the pacifists alot, which I think is nonsense, but they say, “You can't use the master's tools to dismantle the master's house”. That's bullshit. You can use anybody's tools to dismantle the master's house.

We are talking on the telephone so I'm already using the tools of the system. So I didn't have a problem taking this high-tech medicine in order to stay alive knowing full well that various creatures, and it's the same with any other medicine, that various creatures were vivisected for it. That's horrible but that's part of being in the system. That doesn't alter the fact that if not taking the medicine would have brought down civilization, I would not take it in a fucking heartbeat. Me taking this medicine doesn't make modern medicine okay. It simply means that in this case, Crohn's disease, is a disease of modern civilisation. I got this disease from modern civilisation and I am going to use the tools which are appropriate.

Years ago I interviewed Theodore Roszak because he had written some great stuff before. I asked for the interview before reading his most recent book because I liked his earlier stuff then I read his most recent book. Oh my god! His most recent book at that time was how he had been wrong about industrial civilisation all these years because the truth is that modern medicine will keep people alive longer and as they get older they get wiser and things will make sense which of course is total bullshit. What was the transition for you? I asked. And get this. The transition for him was he thought industrial civilisation was bad until both he and his wife had some sort of miraculous western surgery that saved their lives. So, he changed his entire perspective on this because it saved his life. I have to be honest and say I lost all respect for him.

CV: Does everything have to revolve around the little person? There is an objective truth involved. There is a right and a wrong irrespective of the small self.

DJ: Even that. I have no problem with him doing the surgery, obviously, but the problem is universalizing that. It would be like me saying because I am taking a modern medicine that actually saved my life at that moment …

CV: …everything you have stood for, lived for, spoken about, influenced people and provided them with hope and an understanding not always available elsewhere and then you turn and kill that off.

DJ: Exactly. So that's my only experience. I don't know why how people give up the fight. People say, “God Derrick, you'll have to watch out because you are going to burn out”. I'm not going to burn out because this is my life. This is who I am. The short answer is I have no idea what causes those people to turn.

I have a good idea about what causes so many of those ‘Green Scare' people being arrested I think I know what's caused a lot of them to turn. It's a fear of facing the rest of their life in prison.

CV: Well, you've spoken before about your views on snitchers and I don't know if you have written about this before but an activist needs some substance within, some life experience, to be able to do this kind of work.

DJ: Yes I have written about this before. I had this kid come up to me after one of my talks. He's about 16 years old and he says to me, “I want to bring down a factory”. I said, “Okay, you know what? First off, this is really bad security. You don't know me. I don't know you. Second, I would never dissuade anybody from doing something that they want like that. On the other hand I want to ask you a question. Have you ever had sex? And he said “No”. Okay think about this. If you burn down a factory and you get caught you are not going to have sex for at least 20-30 years.” What I was attempting to do was actually dissuade him from doing it because he was a kid. He hadn't thought through these things yet and he was just excited and that's not right. On the other hand this guy approached me whom I knew from reputation. He was very, very serious etc etc. He was talking about it and he didn't do anything but the point is, I talk about this in Endgame, so you Fed guys listening in can go ahead and lose your tiny little erections because I am not going to say anything exciting – the point is that there's a difference between somebody who knows what they are doing, who is older and who has lived through it and who knows this isn't a game. And that's one of the things I think is really important is if there's a lesson from this whole ‘Green Scare' thing it's I am so disgusted with the people who are turning and if anything can be learnt from that it's that, once again, this is not a fucking game. Before you go underground, before you do anything like that, you need to ask yourself do you have the seriousness to go through with it and to face the consequences? And if you don't then go and fucking pay $10.00 to the Sierra Club or the Circle of Life Foundation and pretend that you have done a good day's work.

Here's another thing that just pisses me off is that working with the people at the prison and they are considered so often as scum and the lowest of the low. A lot of them are socially inept and all this other stuff but here's a story to illustrate what I'm saying and I contrast this with all these people I have no respect for the people who are turning. I don't care if you are facing life in prison because you just don't do that. I know myself well enough to know that if I was facing it there are things I wouldn't do. I would not fucking turn.

Here a story from the prison: One guy, a white guy was working at a regular prison job and he called the Blacks there “lazy niggers”. That's mistake one. Another day at work he went to sleep and of course they had not forgotten what he said so they stabbed him in the face with a nail. They didn't try to kill him. They were sending a message. Do not do this. So the point of the story is do you know what happened to the black guys that stabbed him? Nothing. You know why nothing happened? Because he didn't fucking snitch. They stabbed him in the face, he didn't say anything and lesson learnt. Done.

Once again, his guy we can look down on him for being racist. We can look down on him for being in prison. We can look down on him for being a drug addict. He had more honour, in terms of that, in his little fucking pinkie than these people that are turning in their whole bourgeois middle class bodies.

A lot of my students were so addicted to drugs, they gave up their families, they destroyed their families for drugs, they still wouldn't fucking turn. That's one thing. Another thing is we need to ask ourselves what would the IRA do about snitches? What would the Shawnee have done to a member of their community who was passing on information to whites? What would any serious group do? We need to have our seriousness called into question.

CV: There needs to be a long-term plan.

DJ: I think before we need a long-term plan we need a heart. Also a plan is supposed to accomplish something. First off, once again we have to ask ourselves what we want to accomplish and that could be true on so many levels. In that way SHAC is a really good model for a small-scale thing. SHAC is very clear. This is what we want to accomplish and this is how we are going to go about doing it. And now I think we need to do that for larger things. We need to start thinking clearly which is extremely difficult to do in a culture where you are consistently taught not to think.

CV: The controlled drug companies fund animal testing and insist that the scientists they are funding look only for ways of treating disease through drugs or technology that can be brought and sold. The world is awash with tablets and potions yet people have never been unhealthier as the drug companies measure their profits in the billions. Is everything the opposite of what it really is? Are drug companies the biggest drug pushers of the lot?

DJ: Of course they are. Oh my god! The whole thing with Ritalin and everything else, that's as scary as hell.

CV: You know the saddest thing article I read recently was a detailed description of vivisectors pulling back the penis of a beagle to test Viagra.

DJ: I wrote an article for the Ecologist on this. I said I am not opposed to vivisection under one condition which is that the people being vivisected should be the scientists themselves. Because you say this is important for medical science, okay here you go. Is it really that important? If you want to stop vivisection what you do is instead of making it be just about the scientists you make it like jury duty. So they say to you, “Okay so you are up for jury duty” and you say “Oh shit!” Then you find out it's for viagra and you say, “Yeah great!” then you find out they are going to attach electrodes to you, cut off your penis and then kill you. Yeah it's really fucking twisted. It's the culture.

CV: Tell us about EndGame, your latest book.

DJ: Another really good book was a book written by Robert J Lifton called “The Nazi Doctors”. In this book he tries to figure out why these people who took the Hippocratic Oath could then work in a concentration or a death camp. What he found was many of the doctors who worked there, not Mengele, but regular doctors were doing everything they could to help the Jews and other inmates except questioning the existence of the concentration camp itself. So they would give a sick patient an aspirin to lick or they would hide them from Selections or they would let them sleep in the Infirmary for a day or two but they wouldn't question the existence of the camp, of working the Jews to death. They wouldn't question starving them to death, they wouldn't question gassing them to death. So I feel that a lot of things are true there for a lot of environmental and animal rights activists that we are doing the best we can, we are absolutely working as hard as we can to try to save the salmon, or this wild place or to stop this particular or that particular horror – everything we can – except question the entire death camp mentality. Of course I have an interest in saving whatever wild places we can and I have an interest in stopping whatever atrocious I can but that is not sufficient. What I simply want to do is not try and make things a tiny bit better for the inmates of the camp I want to destroy the whole concentration camp. I want to destroy the whole death camp.

  Welcome To The Machine: Derrick Jensen Interviewed Part 1