"Annihilating the Hillbilly:
        by Jim G. Branscome
           page 11
The answer to the question of why mountain culture must be destroyed is to be found in the fundamental truth about the technological society:  the techniques which undergird all our institutions are assimilating all of us into, as Jacques Ellul puts it, "a society of objects, run by objects."  Institutions in the technological society --and this means not only those of the state and its welfare bureaus, but the do-good agencies which include churches, schools and colleges--can respond only by and with the techniques of the impersonalized, bureaucratic means, procedures, formulas.  Technique cannot discriminate between right and wrong, justice and injustice.  That is why the same technique that gives and takes away the health care from an ailing miner, assimilates the pious mountaineer into the five-point grading system and the Uniform Sunday School Lesson.

The meaning is clear:  institutions working in Appalachia today can work for only one end:  the extinction of the Appalachian people.  The extent to which these institutions have so far failed in the venture is the extent to which this people and culture have successfully resisted the formidable pressures of the institutions of contemporary technological society.   Why institutions--political and private, church and business, industrial and charitable--have responded and can respond to the Appalachian the way they have tells us something very important about power--and powerlessness--in the technological society.

For those of us who believe that the struggle is for the soul of man in the technological society, the resistance of Appalachian culture against assimilation into middle America demands earnest, indeed prayerful, attention.  The struggle of the mountain man against the institutions of the technological society is the struggle to deny their right to define any man by his relationship to Middle America.  The struggle--whether one believes that it comes out of resistance informed by left-wind Protestantism or opposition to colonialism and genocide -- has implications for all who question not only the possibility, but the quality and character of any resistance to the totalitarianism of the technological society.
-the end-

Jim Branscome
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