To my knowledge, I was the first person after the 7/7 bombings against whom the Home Office applied the new “rules of unacceptable speech.” The day I received my “letter of exclusion,” August 24, 2005, is the same day that the Home Office published their new list of “unacceptable behaviours.” This means that their fascist rules were first exercised not against a Muslim cleric advocating jihadist revolt, but rather against a secular Western philosophy professor militating for a peaceful society that respects the rights of human and nonhuman animals alike.
By its own newly minted legal definitions, the UK had the right to ban me, but it is the right of a closed society, capitalist killing machine, and police state psychologically and economically threatened by animal rights.
When people use the same discourse of terrorism to describe those who fly fully-loaded passenger planes into high-rise buildings as well as those who rescue our fellow animals from the most obscene, unspeakable, prodigious violence and killing on the planet, the term clearly has been drained of all meaning. When corporations and states deploy the language of terrorism, it is purely for propaganda purposes, to cover up their own terrorist acts, and to denounce in the strongest language possible anything that threatens their interests.
I define terrorism as any intentional act of violence toward an innocent sentient being in order to advance an ideological, political, and economic agenda. 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 government, 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 gains.
Industry leaders, scientists, state officials, and media figures alike never talk about the terrorism inflicted on animals in hunts, vivisection labs, fur farms, and slaughterhouses because their myopic speciesist definitions prohibit this. If animals – innocent “non-combatants” — can suffer and experience terror like humans, then those who torment them ought to be called terrorists. Nor do those who decry the animal rights movement as “violent” ever apply the term to denounce what thugs and police do to activists, many of whom have been killed while defending animals or the forests from being massacred and plundered for profit. While reporters unconsciously drop the loaded phrase “animal rights extremists,” you will never hear or read the phrase “vivisection extremists” in relation to the horrific suffering “researchers” often inflict on animals.
I absolve myself of the charges of the Home Office because I reject the premises of their arguments and the loaded definitions of their terms. I reject the speciesist assumptions whereby they see animals as mere things or property, as resources that exist for any humanly devised purpose, however cruel and unnecessary.
I do not consider breaking into laboratories to free captive animals, or even destroying property used to exploit animals, to be violence or terrorism. These actions are undertaken by freedom fighters opposing the real terrorists who murder billions of innocent animals; as such, they are counter-terrorist actions.
With their long history of war, imperialism, and violence, the UK and US are the leading terrorist states on the planet. England rolls out the red carpet for genocidal maniacs like former Chilean dictator August Pinochet (responsible for the death of tens of thousands of his own people) and Ariel Sharon (a “man of peace” who has killed thousands of Palestinians), but ban advocates of peace and justice for all animals, a prerequisite for a viable social order. The values and sympathies of this fascist police state are as clear as its repulsive hypocrisies.
Convulsions of a Failed State
“These are perilous times …Bloody scenes, I fear, are in reserve for our vision.” William Lloyd Garrison, 19th century abolitionist
The Home Office ban of US animal rights activists is ineffective, illegitimate, and the desperate measure of a fascist state incompatible with an open society and the principles of democracy. But then again, after 9/11 and 7/7 Blair said civil rights are basically a thing of the past and the UK under Gordon Brown has followed this philosophy.
Ironically, while the intent of the Home Office was to silence radical views, they gave them even wider publicity than they would have received otherwise. In the aftermath of the ban I was deluged with request for interviews from international media. London Channel 4 aired a sympathetic 7 minute documentary about my case and gave me an uninterrupted platform to describe the plight of the animals, the need for militant direct action, and the complicity of the UK state in an evil of the highest order (see the link below).
I recognize that free speech is not an absolute right and has moral and legal limits; in the US, for instance, one does not have the legal right to incite violence in such a way as to cause possible harm to others.[2] But free speech should include the right to endorse civil disobedience and sabotage if one should want, with the goal being to bring about a higher moral good liberated once exploitation stops and respect of rights begins. Under the protections of free speech, one ought also to be able to defend and even to advocate violence. Free speech should include the right to articulate the limits of persuasion itself, to critique the system and institutions that are protected by the monopolization of violence, and to espouse the means and tactics necessary to overthrow a repressive social order.
My words may be unpopular – to animal exploiters and speciesist society as a whole — but free speech rights are designed precisely to protect controversial and critical discourse, not mainstream or conformist platitudes. An open society respects and protects these rights; a closed society rejects and denies them. With parallel regimes such as North Korea, China, and the US, the UK has become a fascist, totalitarian society, a police state that attacks dissent as a body’s white blood cells goes after threats and invaders.
The Home Office has the right and the duty to prevent terrorism in the UK and to protect its citizens from attack. But I am a philosopher, not a terrorist; I carry words not weapons; I target the guilty not the innocent; I seek change for the betterment of all, not the dictatorship of a few; I draw from critical reason, not religious fundamentalism or fanaticism.
People like me are not a threat to the “public order” in the UK, the oppressors and exploiters are. We are not the cause of violence but rather the effect and response to it.
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