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  During or after the assault, all the MRTA members were summarily executed. Military microphones picked up the sounds of two of the guerrillas—sixteen-year-old girls—begging soldiers not to shoot. They were, of course, immediately murdered. Other rebels, including Nestor Cerpa, were shot at point-blank range in the forehead. At least one of the rebels was led away to be tortured before his murder. One of the soldiers who participated in the slaughter said, "The order was to leave no one alive. For us, the instruction was to leave no prisoners." Relatives who went to claim the bodies of the dead were beaten and arrested at a military hospital. Nestor Cerpas aunt was allowed to view the bodies. All but two had been cut into pieces and placed in plastic bags. She counted thirty bullet holes in her nephews head. The dismembered bodies of most of the rebels were scattered in unmarked graves, and some relatives who visited marked graves were arrested.

  To stop the genocide and ecocide that characterizes—and has always characterized—our culture requires that we learn to fully internalize the implications of one very important fact: we and they—those who are destroying the world—are operating under two entirely different and utterly incompatible value systems. As Frankl said, there are those who are decent, and those who are indecent. We value life, and the living, and they value control and power. On the largest scale it really is that simple (on an individual scale it is much more complex—human rights and environmental organizations are rife with petty power struggles, and there probably exist at least a few in power who retain some level of decency). Time and again we show ourselves willing to die or to live to support ecological and economic justice and lanity, and time and again our enemies—the indecent ones, the destroyers—show themselves willing to lie and to kill to maintain control. Throughout the entire siege, members of the MRTA treated their captives with humanity and grace. In response they were lied to and betrayed. I know of no longterm activists who have not repeatedly experienced this same pattern of lies and betrayal, although for many of us in the more privileged sectors of the world, the full consequences of our enemies' behavior are yet to be brought home with such force and finality as is normally reserved for the colonies.

  I have thought long and hard not only about the siege but about what we can learn from it. Isaac Velazco's words roll round and round inside my head: "When those in power lie, the only way to conduct a meaningful dialogue with them is to have in your hands a way to force them to be accountable. Even then you can only be sure they will remain true so long as you continue to hold them tightly in your hands." This statement, and the massacre, have many implications. The first is that, ultimately, negotiations are bound to fail. You cannot negotiate with someone who systematically lies to you. If you win your points during negotiation, the agreement will be broken. Indians have seen this, as have forest activists, toxics activists, nuclear activists, antiwar activists, and so on. This is not to say we shouldn't negotiate. But to expect to be dealt with fairly by those who have shown no scruples about lying and using naked force to take what they want is to engage in magical thinking. It is delusional. It is, to speak of this as we would a dysfunctional family, like playing the part of codependent partner in a parasitic and abusive relationship. It is to participate in our own victimization.

  The bitter truth that most of us are unwilling to face is that our enemies are institutionally and oftentimes individually psychopathological. They have the cannibal sickness. The lives of those they kill simply do not exist in the minds of the killers. This is true for victims whether the Forest Service and the timber industry speak of board feet rather than living forests, agribusiness corporations speak of 10,000 "units" in confinement instead of living hogs, or the corporate media reports that United States warplanes caused "collateral damage" in Iraq—the deaths of tens of thousands of men, women, and children in apartments, buses, and bomb shelters. Thus after the assault, Fujimori stated that he was "very sorry for the loss of three human lives," meaning the two soldiers and one hostage who died in the assault (the hostage who died was a Supreme Court Justice who had voted against Fujimori's amnesty of death squad leaders; reports vary as to whether he died of a heart attack or a bullet wound; the Peruvian Human Rights organization DeRechos alleged that he was murdered by the military). The other lives that Fujimori caused to prematurely end were evidently something less than human. Representatives of the various transnational corporations with an interest in Peru's resources stated they would change none of their genocidal and ecocidal policies. Most of the transnational fully supported the decision to use force. A representative of Mitsubishi said there was "no other way" to end the crisis. A representative of Mitsui Metal and Smelting said it was "very regrettable" that one Peruvian hostage died. He did not regret, of course, the killing of the MRTA members. What was there to regret?

  Those of us in the United States, those who are at least somewhat privileged—probably white, perhaps male, possibly rich or at least not so hungry as the children of Peru—must recognize that in a world of shrinking resources it is only a matter of time until the guns are turned on us. Someone once asked John Stockwell, an ex-CIA agent whose conscience forced him to speak out against the agency, why he had not yet been killed. He said, "Because they are winning." We who are relatively privileged need to ask ourselves what we are willing to give up, what amount of security we are willing to sacrifice to change the status quo. In the wake of this action by the MRTA, and the consequent murder of those involved, we—each of us—need to question what we can do to help change things for the better, and stop the mindless destruction.

  During those four months, fourteen members of the MRTA held the attention of the world, and they held back, if only for a brief time, and if only in the so-very-tiny space of one house in one city in one country in South America, the steady march of our culture as it relentlessly destroys everything it encounters. For that brief time the world was shown an alternative of determined and fully human resistance, of people fighting for their right to be on their own terms. What if there were fourteen more, or fourteen more than that, or fourteen hundred more than that? What if we each individually began to organize, knowing full well the stakes and the potential consequences—both good and bad—of our actions? What if we each in our organizations at long last said to those who run the country, those who run the companies, those who help further the destruction, run the machine, "You shall not pass. This is where I live, and this, if necessary, is where I shall die." And what if we meant it?

  We are losing a one-sided and defensive war. If we learn nothing else from the bravery and deaths of the fourteen tupacamaristas, it is that we must take the offensive, we must struggle—never for a moment letting go of the life-affirming values we believe in—and bring that struggle to their doorstep instead of ours. We must learn also that resistance is never futile, and that we have no option as human beings but to struggle as though our lives depended on it—which of course they do—to ensure that each and every one of us is granted the right to be. Our goal must be nothing less than the rediscovery of what it means to be a human inhabitant of this world into which each of us is born. The planet is waiting for us to rediscover it, waiting to be allowed nothing more than the simple right to be. It will grant the same favor in return—anything else will bring about our completely unnecessary demise.

  The Parable of the Box

  "Tell me whom you love and I will tell you who you are." Arsene Houssaye

  SOMETIMES IN THE DARK gray of false dawn I awaken with a start. In the confusing moments between dreaming and waking I occasionally trick myself into believing none of the problems we've been discussing exist. No genocidal impulse. No wage slavery. No anthropogenic climate change. No ecological collapse. No tyranny of money. In those brief moments I believe I can walk to the Spokane River and once again see rapids get "lashed into whiteness" by uncountable salmon, salmon that—in this nightmare of the waking world—I have never seen, and never will. In those moments the awful reality of what we have done and c
ontinue to do seems so nonsensical as to be implausible. It makes sense in those moments, for example, to ask whether I dreamt or read that the government of the United States (it, too, a figment of this dreamscape) smuggled crack cocaine into slums (crack and slums are in these moments figments as well)—raising a generation of American addicts and enriching gangs that control their lives—then used profits from drug sales to kill peasants in Central America. This is all too stupid, too cruel, too absurd. It couldn't be real.

  No matter how hard I try, the morning inevitably intrudes on these reveries, and I awaken. But later, all through the day and into the evening as I now write these words, the problems I describe become no less absurd, no less cruel, no less stupid.

  A parable of this stupidity centers around a box. The box is full of salmon, and a man sits atop the box. Long ago this man hired armed guards to keep anyone from eating his fish. The many people who sit next to the empty river starve to death. But they do not die of starvation. They die of a belief. Everyone believes that the man atop the box owns the fish. The soldiers believe it, and they will kill to protect the illusion. The others believe it enough that they are willing to starve. But the truth is that there is a box, there is an emptied river, there is a man sitting atop the box, there are guns, and there are starving people.

  In the 1930s, anthropologist Ruth Benedict tried to discover why some cultures are "good," to use her word, and some are not. She noticed that members of some cultures were generally "surly and nasty"—words she and her assistant Abraham Maslow recognized as unscientific—while members of other cultures were almost invariably "nice."

  Benedict is of course not the only person to have made this distinction. The psychologist Erich Fromm found that cultures fell, sometimes easily, into distinct categories such as "life-affirmative," or "destructive." The Zuñi Pueblos, Semangs, Mbutus, and others that he placed in the former category are extraordinary for the way in which they contrast with our own culture. "There is a minimum of hostility, violence, or cruelty among people, no harsh punishment, hardly any crime, and the institution of war is absent or plays an exceedingly small role. Children are treated with kindness, there is no severe corporal punishment; women are in general considered equal to men, or at least not exploited or humiliated; there is a generally permissive and affirmative attitude toward sex. There is little envy, covetousness, greed, and exploitativeness. There is also little competition and individualism and a great deal of cooperation; personal property is only in things that are used. There is a general attitude of trust and confidence, not only in others but particularly in nature; a general prevalence of good humor, and a relative absence of depressive moods."

  Readers may more closely recognize our own culture in Fromms description of the Dobus, KwaikutI, Aztecs, and others he put into the category of "destructive." These cultures, he said, are "characterized by much interpersonal violence, destructiveness, aggression, and cruelty, both within the tribe and against others, a pleasure in war, maliciousness, and treachery. The whole atmosphere of life is one of hostility, tension, and fear. Usually there is a great deal of competition, great emphasis on private property (if not in material things then in symbols), strict hierarchies, and a considerable amount of war-making."

  Fromm also defined a third category, "nondestructive-aggressive societies," which included Samoans, Crows, Ainus, and others who are "by no means permeated by destructiveness or cruelty or by exaggerated suspiciousness, but do not have the kind of gentleness and trust which is characteristic of the . . . [life-affirmative] societies."

  Given the ubiquity of this culture's destructiveness as well as its technological capacity, there has never been a more important time to ask Ruth Benedict's question: Why are some cultures "good" and others not?

  Benedict found that good cultures, which she began to call "secure," or "low aggression," or "high synergy cultures," could not be differentiated from "surly and nasty" cultures on the basis of race, geography, climate, size, wealth, poverty, complexity, matrilineality, patrilineality, house size, the absence or presence of polygamy, and so on. More research revealed to her one simple and commonsensical rule separating aggressive from nonaggressive cultures, a rule that has so far evaded implementation by our culture: the social forms and institutions of nonaggressive cultures positively reinforce acts that benefit the group as a whole while negatively reinforcing acts (and eliminating goals) that harm some members of the group.

  The social forms of aggressive cultures, on the other hand, reward actions that emphasize individual gain, even or especially when that gain harms others in the community. A primary and sometimes all-consuming goal of members of these cultures is to come out ahead in their "dog eat dog" world.

  Another way to put this is that social arrangements of nonaggressive cultures eliminate the polarity between selfishness and altruism by making the two identical: In a "good" culture, the man atop the box from the parable above would have been scorned, despised, exiled, or otherwise prevented from damaging the community. To behave in such a selfish and destructive manner would be considered insane. Even had he conceived such a preposterous idea as hoarding all the fish, he would have been absolutely disallowed because the box was held at the expense of the majority, as well as at the expense of future generations. For him to be a rich and influential member of a good culture, he would have had to give away many or all of the fish. The act of giving would have made him rich in esteem. But he would never have been allowed to strip the river. There would have been no fear with regard to the "gift" of fish, for social arrangements would have made him secure in the knowledge that if his next fishing trip failed his more successful neighbors would feed him, just as this time he had fed them.

  It all comes down to how a culture handles wealth. If a culture manages it through what Benedict called a "siphon system," whereby wealth is constantly siphoned from rich to poor, the society as a whole and its members as individuals will be, for obvious reasons, secure. They will not need to hoard wealth. Since this generosity is manifested not only monetarily but in all aspects of life, they will also not need to act out their now-nonexistent insecurities in other ways. On the other hand, if a culture uses a "funnel system," in which those who accumulate wealth are esteemed, the result is that "the advantage of one individual becomes a victory over another, and the majority who are not victorious must shift as they can." For reasons that should again be obvious, such social forms foster insecurity and aggression, both personal and cultural.

  One of the primary problems with our system of social rewards is its tautological nature. We grant communal responsibility and esteem to those who have accumulated and maintained power; but the primary motivation for those who are responsible for decisions affecting the larger community lies in the accumulation and maintenance of power. The good of the community does not matter. In time, the community takes on the character of these esteemed leaders. This happens primarily through direct decisions, the inculcation of citizens to emulate those who receive this respect, and the institutionalization of the leaders' drive for power. Institutions—be they governmental, economic, religious, educational, penal, charitable—will mirror their founders' proclivity for domination. It's inescapable. The system of rewards guarantees that responsibility for community decisions falls to those least capable of making decisions that will benefit the community, to the indecent, to the wetikos, the cannibals, to those who would destroy. The French anarchist Sebastien Faure located two principles that govern all politics within our system: first, the acquisition of power by all means, even the most vile; and second, to keep that power by all means, even the most vile.

  At some point in the ceaseless expansion of our cultures realm of control, the notion of a community was replaced by the acceptance of communal control by distant and increasingly unresponsive institutions. The larger the institution, the more accumulated power it takes to reach the top. It would follow that the primary motivations of those at the top are founded in the acquisit
ion and maintenance of power, which means the more likely that the institution will manifest this particular form of destructive (and psychotic) behavior.

  I received peculiar confirmation of this self-evident tendency a few years ago—as well as additional confirmation that the political is the personal—when I came across a study of the sexual habits of politicians. The study grew out of psychologists Dr. Sam Janus's and Dr. Barbara Bess's work with drug addicts. Realizing that a good portion of their clients supported drug habits through prostitution, their emphasis shifted toward the study of prostitutes. Eventually their work focused on "elite prostitutes" who "catered to an entirely different type of client." Finally, they realized that the "missing link in understanding the function of the prostitute in contemporary society" consisted of an examination of the women's customers.

  The psychologists conducted extensive interviews with eighty high-priced prostitutes about their 7,645 clients. They found that sixty percent of the clients exercised some form of political power, while the remainder were mainly wealthy businessmen. The authors required two independent sources for each report on the sexual habits of the clientele before accepting it. The results are disturbing: "Very seldom (only about 8 to 10 percent of the time) does a politician ask a call girl for straight intercourse," instead primarily requesting "games of humiliation and dominance." The authors report that "the women whom we interviewed reported that their clients went much further than that, often demanding them to act out complicated scenes of torture and mortification of the flesh, involving floggings, lacerations, mock crucifixions, and mutilation of their genitals." The authors conclude, and I quote this in full because it stands so central to our culture: "To understand why so many politicians are not merely promiscuous but are addicted to sadomasochistic practices for which they need the expensive services of a 'paraprofessional sex therapist' requires a deeper look into the psychodynamics of the power seeker. These are characterized by a strong need to dominate which co-exists in precarious equilibrium with an equally intense need for submission. This psychological pattern is manifested outwardly by a drive to subjugate and control others (but always in obedience to some higher ideal), and in private by imperious demands for violently aggressive sex which upon orgasm abruptly becomes transformed into an equally sharp state of infantile dependence."