Press Action ::: The Other Side of Darkness

Monday, July 12, 2004

The Other Side of Darkness

By Mark Hand

"I’m optimistic, because never before has our whole lifestyle been revealed as much for what it is.” —John Zerzan, The Sun

"The knowledge that our culture is not redeemable had not paralyzed but energized them. These people were my models, my inspirations.” —Derrick Jensen, The Culture of Make Believe

When a transnational organization massacred thousands of people in Bhopal, India in December 1984, the government of India opted not to hunt down and smoke out the perpetrators because officials worried that such action would discourage similar organizations from operating inside their country. As an emerging industrial nation, India didn’t want to make a rash decision that could lead to international investors cutting and running, even if it meant letting the perpetrators off with only a slap on the wrist.

In contrast, when a transnational organization massacred 3,000 people in New York City, Arlington, Va., and rural Pennsylvania in September 2001, the U.S. government opted to avenge the mass murder by doing what it does best: ordering up a super-sized portion of murder and mayhem. This particular episode of U.S. debauchery included killing and injuring tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq, kidnapping hundreds of people from Afghanistan and transporting them thousands of miles to a concentration camp in occupied Cuba, and detaining hundreds of Muslims and other undesirables here in the United States.

One nation made the calculation that a passive approach in response to tragedy would be in its self-interest, while the other government took advantage of tragedy within its borders to extol the virtues of militarism and strengthen the ties between the state and its corporate patrons. Government officials in each country showed contempt for the victims by elevating their political and economic interests above the pursuit of true justice. Derrick Jensen argues in his book The Culture of Make Believe that the killings in Bhopal “need to be examined in the context of historical economics, and in the context of our long history of contempt for those who are exploited or killed, and hatred of those who stand in the way.”

Estimates range between 3,800 and 8,000 people were killed soon after 40 tons of methyl isocyanate (MIC) were released from a Bhopal chemical plant owned by one of the aforementioned transnational organizations, Union Carbide Corp. Hundreds of thousands were injured from the company’s actions.

Jensen says he’s heard the Bhopal disaster referred to as an accident. But he doesn’t see the deaths of the people in Bhopal as unintentional. “Union Carbide makes bulk industrial chemicals, many of which are poisonous, and it does so to make a profit,” he writes. “MIC is a pesticide, and therefore by definition a poison. Just how accidental is it that people are poisoned by an intentionally fabricated poison?”

Jensen believes corporations should be held accountable for their harmful actions, just like the prisoners that he teaches at Pelican Bay State Prison in California have been held accountable for their actions.

In a conversation with a scientist friend, Jensen remembers the friend asking him if he’s suggesting that engineers or CEOs that lie or provide inaccurate information about their manufacturing facilities should go to prison. “No, not at all,” Jensen responds. “I’m going to suggest a life for a life. They kill, they die. Isn’t that how capital punishment is supposed to work. … I’d think that would be a deterrent.”

Jensen’s friend tells him he’s crazy. “If they had to put their lives on the line, none of these facilities would ever be built,” the friend says.

“I looked at him and smiled,” Jensen remembers.

But Jensen’s desired type of justice for big business and governments that perpetrate terrible crimes is rarely, if ever, meted out. In India, the extent of accountability faced by Union Carbide was company CEO Warren Anderson being held under house arrest in the company’s luxury guesthouse for six hours during a visit to India soon after the killings. He was released on $2,100 bail and flown out of the city on an Indian government plane.

“Later that day a government spokesperson said there ‘never was any intention of prosecuting him,’ but nonetheless used the arrest as an opportunity to put the kibosh on rumors that India had surrendered to American (or Union Carbide) imperialism,” Jensen explains.

In 1989, Union Carbide agreed to a settlement of $470 million but “hundreds of thousands of survivors of Bhopal wait today for compensation,” he reminds us.

If corporations and those who manage them were held legally accountable for their actions, Union Carbide would have been convicted of thousands of counts of murder, its corporate charter and the charter of its subsidiaries would have been revoked, and its officers and major stockholders would have been imprisoned or executed, Jensen says. But the company remains chartered, now a wholly owned subsidiary of Dow Chemical, and its officers and major shareholders remain free.

Jensen explains that the argument could be made that Union Carbide’s officers and major shareholders have not killed people directly. The same, he writes, could be said of the 18 defendants found guilty during the main Nuremberg trials after World War II. “None of those ten executed defendants were accused of killing people directly. Not even Hitler was accused of that.”

This reasoning then leads to the question of intent. It could be argued that the corporation and the people who run it never intended to kill anyone and that they were merely trying to make a profit.

“Presumably, that statement is true, and is also central point of this book, because the same could be said for slave owners: Weren’t they just trying to make a buck?” Jensen writes.

The Bhopal tragedy and tens of thousands of other similar incidents, according to Jensen, were made possible by technology, capital and a whole economic and social way of life. “If we hope to stem the mass destruction that inevitably attends our economic system (and to alter the sense of entitlement—the sense of contempt, the hatred—on which it is based), fundamental historical, social, economic, and technological forces need to be pondered, understood, and redirected,” he says.

Jensen’s examination of how our social system allowed Bhopal to happen represents one chapter of a much larger exploration into a world of hatred and indifference. In his 700-page masterpiece, Jensen successfully scrapes away the justifications and rationalizations that governments, companies, and individuals hide behind when committing atrocities. The Culture of Make Believe represents the emergence of Jensen as one of our greatest intellectual treasures that our public policymakers desperately need to discover.

Mark Hand is editor of Press Action.

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