In a soon-to-be-published essay detailing how and why he was banned from the UK by its increasingly Orwellian police state, here is Steve Best, who appears on ToO’s “hit list,” with a number of thoughts that are relevant to the ridiculous way in which ToO bandies the word “terrorist” about so freely and recklessly:
“I came out in favor of the ALF because after careful study of their history, arguments, and results, I concluded that their actions are effective, necessary, and just. Governments, animal exploitation industries, and most mass media characterize the ALF as violent terrorists, but I see them as freedom fighters and counter-terrorists. The ALF is a new justice movement defending innocent beings under attack and fighting the real terrorists who torture and kill animals without justification.”
More:
“Breaking and entering locked buildings, smashing fur store windows, torching delivery trucks — it all sounds nothing short of vandalism or even terrorism. But I believe ALF actions are defensible because (1) what happens to animals is wrong, and (2) legal channels to stop it are blocked by speciesism and corrupt governments that support the property rights of industries over the moral rights of animals.
I believe that no door, no law, no cop, no government, and no profit margin should stand in the way between an animal and its freedom. I wish that legal methods of animal liberation were adequate to free animals from their oppressors, but they are not. Governments are corrupt and speciesist and serve their corporate masters. Animals are too important a resource and commodity for corporations to voluntarily free them, and so animal liberation requires militant tactics such as raids to rescue animals and property destruction to weaken, cripple, or eliminate oppressors.”
I do not believe that social change comes about through moral persuasion or legislative initiatives, but rather through one kind of force and pressure or another. No human liberation movement has every won its cause except by using threats, force, confrontational tactics, and violence, why should it be any different for the animal liberation movement?”
And:
“It is a strange kind of terrorist who has never injured a single person, who is compassionate toward the suffering of others, and who risks his or her own freedom to save another from harm, violence, and death. It is not the ALF who are violent terrorists, but rather the British state, vivisectionists, and all facets of the animal exploitation industry. They are terrorists on the grounds that they intentionally harm and kill innocent living beings for ideological, political, and economic goals.”
And finally this profound explanation of the militant attitude and actions of many in the animal liberation movement:
“When there are compassionate people in a society, a disturbance in the animal world will inevitably bring a disturbance in the human world.”
If the rhetoric spewed by the nameless, faceless, spineless entity behind ToO were not so incitive and representative of the worldview of ultra-nationalist, unapologetically speciesist, militaristic, ultra-capitalist, dyed in the wool uber-patriots who were hard-core supporters of McCain and Palin[3], one could readily file it under nonsense and dismiss it. But in a socioeconomic environment in which the line between the state and corporations has become increasingly blurred; the legal system has become almost exclusively devoted to protecting and serving the ruling elite, corporate entities, profit, and property; and the word “terrorist” is pinned upon nearly anyone uttering words or committing deeds contrary to God, capitalism, and country, the increasing numbers of us who recognize that the “American Way of Life” is wreaking havoc on the planet, need to take ToO’s cartoonish portrayal of “America’s enemies” and calls to “target” those on their “hit list” seriously.
Members of the SHAC 7, dedicated defenders of nonhuman animals who took on a malevolent exploitative corporation, weren’t protected by Brandenburg vs. Ohio and now sit in prison—this despite the fact that they didn’t tell specific individuals to commit specific and imminent acts of violence. To ensure that the First Amendment applies equally to all, regardless of our sociopolitical persuasion, we need to demand the release of the SHAC 7 and the reactivation of the Nuremberg Files anti-abortion site or an immediate deactivation of the Target of Opportunity website.
Meanwhile, a prayer for the dying is inevitable. Question is, will it be a prayer of thanks for the demise of dominionism and capitalism, the things that are worse than the rebellion they cause, or one of mourning for the Earth and its sentient inhabitants?
NOTES:
[1] http://thomaspainescorner.wordpress.com/2009/03/28/capitalist-incarnate-my-interview-with-a-vampire/
[2] a sociopolitical system which is neither a democracy or a republic but a corporatist state ruled by the rapacious and cynical members of society that preeminent sociologist C. Wright Mills identified and analyzed so well in 1956 in his book, The Power Elite.
