The Party Of Personal Responsibility, My Ass

I've never heard of an abuser saying, "I hit you because I wanted to terrorize you into submission." Instead, he might say, "I wouldn't have hit you if you wouldn't have kept yelling and yelling and yelling at me about coming in so late." The framing conditions caused his violence. If we move this to a larger scale, how often have we heard politicians speak of the necessity of preemptive attacks on other countries (which just happen to sit atop coveted resources)? They rarely say, "I choose to invade this country." Instead, they say they've been forced into this regrettable action by those they are about to subjugate, er, liberate. The Nazis played this same card -- everybody plays this same card -- they only invaded Poland because they had no choice, they only invaded the Soviet Union because they had no choice, they only killed untermenschen because they had no choice. Sigh. It's a terribly dirty job, but somebody's got to do it.

CEOs follow this same logic. If it were up to them, they would keep factories open (not that it's a good thing from the persepctive of the planet, but within the confines of this culture, most people consider it good), pay workers livable wages, maintain solid retirement programs, and so on. But you know how things are. They have no choice buy to lay off workers and move the factories to Bangladesh, where they have no choice but to pay Bangladeshis eight cents per hour (as they themselves pull down a cool million per year, which converts to about five hundred dollars per hour, or more in one minute than they pay a Bangladeshi for a hundred hours). And, if the Bangladeshis complain, the CEOs will have no choice buy to move the factory on to Vietnam. Market pressures, you know. And these same market pressures force them to pollute, to clearcut, to overfish.

I'm sorrry, each and every one of us can say, we have no choice but to destroy the planet. It's really not our fault.

Bullshit.

~Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Volume II: Resistance