“You’ll get freedom by letting your enemy know that you’ll do anything to get your freedom; then you’ll get it…when you stay radical long enough and get enough people to be like you, you’ll get your freedom.” Malcolm X
Billions of animals suffer intense psychological and physical violence every day at the hands of the agriculture, vivisection, clothing, hunting, breeding, and entertainment industries, to name just a few interested parties, who slice, dice, and spice them for their bloody lucre. Just why exactly would they surrender their power, position, and profits to a miniscule vegan and animal rights community? Just how do we rally an ignorant, indifferent, and self-interested public to ethical boycotts in the numbers needed? And exactly why would animal defenders categorically reject the use of any tactic that could weaken industries, save nonhuman animals, and strengthen their own role as an oppositional force amidst planetary omnicide?
Francione and Hall have two reasons for rejecting the use of “violence” as a legitimate tactic of struggle, insisting that on moral grounds it is hypocritical and wrong, and on pragmatic grounds it is ineffective and self-defeating. To begin with the moral argument, both believe that the animal rights movement is unique in relation to other social movements in representing the “ultimate rejection of violence” (Francione), a peace movement deeper than anything yet conceived in that it is extended to all sentient beings, not just humans. Neither provides a careful or rigorous definition and analysis of violence beyond the conventional definition that violence involves an intentional act of causing physical harm or injury to another. Both, however, extend the definition of violence to include property destruction, threats, and harassment, and thus view the ALF and SHAC as violent groups.
Astonishingly enough amidst a rapidly escalating animal Holocaust both elevate the Buddhist ethic of nonviolence, ahimsa, to the pinnacle of ethical theories, personal virtues, and tactical imperatives. So intoxicated with ahimsa, Francione declares himself to be “violently opposed to violence.”[32] Not to be outdone in the rhapsodic pacifist department, however, Hall carries this venerated tradition – formulated over two thousand years before the sixth great extinction crisis and the ecocrisis currently convulsing the planet — to ludicrous extremes. A postmodern Jesus, Hall implicates overly harsh or critical language and enjoins us to turn the other cheek, to love human and animal oppressors, to cleanse our hearts of hostility and anger, and to see humanity as One, without spiritually fogging concepts such as “enemy.”
This absolutist position rejects violence as always wrong and admits no exceptions, including the use of violence for a “noble” cause, as they embrace the cliché that “the ends don’t justify the means.” They do not explore self-defense as the most obvious counter-example to their rigid rule, and thus do not address the question of whether animal advocates can use violence against exploiters because animals cannot defend themselves (what we call “extensional self-defense”).
If Francione and Hall were next to a baby seal about to be clubbed to death and the only way they could stop it would be to physically intervene in some aggressive and violent way, or at least to grab and throw the weapon into the sea (an act that earned Paul Watson expulsion from Greenpeace, an organization he co-founded), would they do it? Or would they stand idly by and watch, perhaps making a moral argument for ahimsa or a plea to the sealer’s inner goodness or moral conscience, as he drives the spiked club into the seal’s head, grinning ear-to-ear while proceeding to strip the skin off its bloodied but still breathing body? We wonder who the seal would wish present on the ice in those crucial moments before the club came down on its skull – a devotee of ahimsa or a militant direct activist?[33]
We consider this a case of how nonviolence leads to violence when pacifists refuse to intervene when violence is occurring, as the capitalist speciesist butchers bash in brains and carve up the planet knowing their violence is protected by the shield of nonviolence practiced by opponents with dulled instincts and a slave mentality, opponents who throw down their weapons before entering into battle. The fundamentalist pacifist argument is an ideal pertinent to communities of saints but not to a society of human beings rooted in both a social and biological past riddled with violence, murder, and genocide. Nonviolence should be the first option, but not the only option.
Francione and Hall agree with us that history is a slaughterbench of oppression, but use the same premise to reach the opposite conclusion. If violence is what brought the world to its current state, they reason, then violent means of resistance are part of the problem not the solution and the “truly radical” approach, the only answer, is to break with all past history and inaugurate a nonviolent revolution that extends throughout humans and to all species and the earth as a whole.
It is incredible, implausible, and naïve to uphold pacifism as the one and only acceptable way of overcoming the orgy of violence and brutality that is human history. If we cannot always stop violence through nonviolence, through love and persuasion, then we either adhere to rigid principles inconsistent with logic and social reality or we deploy a counter-violence to stop a Holocaust and create conditions for potential peace. The ALF does not consider their sabotage actions to be violent, and if pacifists in the movement agreed we could without undue fanfare add sabotage to the list of morally acceptable tactics to mount a much stronger resistance than with love and reasoning alone. But of course Francione and Hall block this option too, and leave us weaker than we already are in relation to the powerful animal-industrial complex.
The facts of history and human character, however, provide strong inductive evidence that animal exploiters will not abandon their blood trade without a prolonged violent struggle waged with the continued aid of the state and its police and military forces. Derrick Jensen notes: “Is it possible to talk about fundamental social change without asking ourselves questions we too often refuse to ask, such as 'What if those in power are murderous? What if they’re not willing to listen to reason at all? Should we continue to approach them nonviolently? … [W]hen is violence an appropriate means to stop injustice?’ But with the world dying—or rather being killed—we no longer have the luxury to change the subject or delete the question. It’s a question that won’t go away.”[34]
The massive gulf between social history and human nature (defined but not exhausted by a habitual use of violence) on one side and utopian pacifism on the other side invites more than a bit of skepticism, especially amidst the severe crisis situation of the present. You can’t win a fight against a much larger and armed opponent if unarmed oneself, or even with many unarmed allies, if the opponent is huge, powerful, and uses violence without hesitation or qualms.
Their second wedge against using violence to defend nonhuman animals from cruel killing and exploitation is the pragmatic argument that violence is counterproductive insofar as it leads to results such as alienating the public and inviting the blowback of fierce state repression that endangers our very right to speak and to dissent. To this we respond: it is dogmatism and studied ignorance of the highest order to deny the numerous times that MDA, and often only MDA, freed nonhuman animals and shut down their exploiters. We already described some powerful examples of effective MDA and additional instances of it are detailed in countless videos and documentaries like Behind the Mask, and are richly described in accounts through personal narratives and historical accounts (e.g., Keith Mann’s From Dusk ‘till Dawn and Best and Nocella’s Terrorists or Freedom Fighters).
There is, we admit, merit in the rejoinder that raids and sabotage actions have been effective only in the short term, such that nonhuman animals liberated from laboratories are quickly replaced and insurance companies cover the costs of smashed equipment and torched buildings. Not all ALF actions are good, intelligent, or successful, certainly, but many have been, permanently shutting down operations such as “fur farms,” vivisection labs, and breeders and have intimidated countless people from making a career in animal exploitation. Famous cases such as the liberation of Britches the monkey and the raid on the University of Pennsylvania head injury lab clinic stand as monuments to the value of a militant underground component of the animal liberation movement.
Obviously, these tactics alone are not going to end animal exploitation in a nihilistic capitalist society ruled by the profit imperative, exchange value, and a deeply inculcated speciesism and anthropocentrism. Animal liberation in a meaningful sense is not possible until we extirpate the roots of human supremacy and related modes of oppression, a revolutionary task which requires education on a massive scale. To ensure that actions against exploiters on the production end do not just lead to replacement of nonhuman animals and property, there must be an education effort on the consumption end that persuades as many people as possible to boycott and eschew any product or process involving animal exploitation. Beyond mere consumerism, education must strive to eliminate the values and attitudes of oppression, such as are rooted in contempt for difference and instrumentalizing others. But, as we are arguing, education itself is hardly adequate in the context of a cancerous global capitalism that feeds off of war, violence, oppression, and the destruction of all life.
Part of the education process is controlling the message of MDA. Francione argues, for instance, that because people perceive a need for “biomedical research” and “meat and dairy products,” attacks on these industries rile people and cause them to turn against a movement that requires as much popular support as possible. In fact, often just the opposite of the alienation effect occurs, as ALF actions have inspired many people to wake up to the human war against animals and to join the struggle on the side of the innocent, and perhaps the public is waking up to the lies of Big Pharma whose poorly designed and inadequately tested research protocols make prescription drugs the fourth leading medical cause of death in the US, exceeded only by heart disease, cancer, and stroke, killing over 100,000 people a year. Francione posits a false option between MDA and vegan education; instead of viewing them as two contrasting positions working together dialectically, Francione separates them antagonistically.
Facile statements such as “There is simply no social context in which violence against others can ever be interpreted as anything but negative” invite a thousand counter-examples (in England, for example, ALF actions enjoyed a high degree of popular support) and demands for a clear definition of violence. Such declarations assume, moreover, (1) that the media reports militant actions, which they typically don’t (partly because they happen virtually every day in some form), (2) that pacified publics care one way or the other about animal advocacy tactics and (3) that citizens’ potential disagreement or alienation matters more than the damage sabotage strikes can inflict on exploiters, and (4) that an organization like the North American Animal Liberation Press Office (NAALPO) cannot help control and shape any report or story on MDA.
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