Excerpt from Endgame

False Hope (p. 325)

From chapter "Courage"

I’ve been bashing hope for many years. Frankly, I don’t have much of it, and I think that’s a good thing. Hope is partly what keeps us chained to the system. First there is the false hope that suddenly somehow the system may inexplicably change. Or technology will save us. Or the Great Mother. Or beings from Alpha Centauri. Or Jesus Christ. Or Santa Claus. All of these false hopes—all of this rendering of our power—leads to inaction, or at least to ineffectiveness: how, for example, would Philip Berrigan have acted had he not believed— hoped—God would help solve things?

One reason my mother stayed with my father was that there were no battered women’s shelters in the fifties and sixties, but another was because of the false hope that he would change. False hopes, as I’ve written elsewhere, bind us to unlivable situations, and blind us to real possibilities. Does anyone really believe that Weyerhaeuser is going to stop deforesting because we ask nicely? Does anyone really believe that Monsanto will stop Monsantoing because we ask nicely? If only we get a Democrat in the White House, this line of thought runs, things will be okay. If only we pass this or that piece of legislation, things will be okay. If only we defeat this or that piece of legislation, things will be okay. Bullshit. Things will not be okay. They are already not okay, and they’re getting worse.

One of the smartest things Nazis did to Jews was co-opt rationality, co-opt hope. At every step of the way it was in the Jews’ rational best interest to not resist: many Jews had the hope—and this hope was cultivated by the Nazis—that if they played along, followed the rules laid down by those in power, that their lives would get no worse, that they would not be murdered. Would you rather get an ID card, or would you rather resist and possibly get killed? Would you rather go to a ghetto (reserve, reservation, whatever) or would you rather resist and possibly get killed? Would you rather get on a cattle car, or would you rather resist and possibly get killed? Would you rather get in the showers, or would you rather resist and possibly get killed?

But I’ll tell you something important: the Jews who participated in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, including those who went on what they thought were suicide missions, had a higher rate of survival than those who went along peacefully. Never forget that.