Antispeciesist Action Press Release: Carnival Against Vivisection

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A Specter Haunts Society: Animal and Earth Liberation
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Without question, the major conflicts of the day in many nations, such as the U.K. and the U.S., are not over gender, race, class, globalization, or even the war in Iraq, but rather the exploitation of animals and the Earth. The class struggle is over; mainstream feminists, gays and lesbians, and people of color are safely marginalized in their fragmented identity politics; and Leftists and postmodernists harmlessly conjure up esoteric theory-babble in seminars and conferences while pompously posturing as “radicals.” Meanwhile, the new ecowarriors light up the night skies with their demands to free animal slaves and protect the Earth. In the U.K., one terrorism expert claims that since the ebbing of tensions over Northern Ireland, the animal rights movement is the main source of “violence.”[2] In the U.S., the top two “domestic terrorist” groups are not the usual suspects of armed militiamen or violent hate groups who bomb federal buildings and murder people, but instead the balaclava-wearing men and women of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF).

In a revolutionary rethinking of humanity’s relationships to other species and the natural world, entirely new ethical paradigms and cosmologies are being forged. With forces of change emanating from both underground and aboveground movements, animal rights and radical environmental activists are pushing and guiding human beings to a new evolutionary crossroads through the force of legal and illegal direct action tactics. Here, humanity can either come to terms with the omnicidal nature of capitalism and the violent pathologies of dominionist identities, or it can take a rapid ride into oblivion.

The animal and Earth liberation movements are vivid examples of the escalation of conflicts over the meaning and future of the natural world: should animals and the Earth exist for their own sake or for human use? Should they thrive in wild conditions or be slaughtered, altered, colonized, genetically modified, and even destroyed by technology and invading human armies? Societies are now divided over the politics of nature as intensely as the U.S. was over the politics of race decades ago.

Because the state is so strong in its monopolization of the means of violence, this is not a war of opposing tanks and troops, but rather a guerilla war in which liberation soldiers disperse into anonymous cells, descend into the underground, maneuver in darkness, deploy hit-and-run sabotage strikes against property, and attempt to intimidate and vanquish their enemies. As shown time and time again, from Vietnam to the quagmire of Bush’s invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, guerilla warfare favors David over Goliath; it can bedevil and even defeat the mighty machines of the U.S. government. [3] Consequently, the state should not be overly confident about its ability to crush animal and Earth liberation movements, as eco-warriors in turn should never doubt their power to shake the foundations of the nihilistic, murderous, life-devouring system of advanced capitalism.

The new battlefield is a crucial testing ground for modern nation-states (can they adhere to peaceful enforcement of the law and protect basic democratic rights like free speech?) and the animal and Earth liberation movements (can they creatively exercise nonviolent approaches and refrain from harming people?). Hardly a day goes by, it seems, that the ALF and the ELF do not free animals from their cages in fur farms and laboratories or destroy the property of industries that kill animals and damage the environment. From burning biotech research labs and ski lodges to firebombing meat companies and pouring acid on SUVs, the ALF and ELF inflict substantial property damage on industries. According to FBI testimony to Congress in February 2002, since 1996 the ALF and ELF together have committed over 600 “criminal acts” that caused $43 million in damage to animal industries.[4] The toll clearly continues to mount as, for instance, the September 2003 ELF strike on six San Diego homes under construction alone wrought $50 million in damages, the costliest sabotage action to date.

With the destruction of animals and the environment on the rise, the forms of resistance themselves have become more intense, as animal rights and environmental activists do “whatever it takes” to stop the devastation of life and land. One finds clear signs of an escalating war in their rhetoric, tactics, and targets. Where once, for instance, radical environmental groups limited themselves to rural areas such as the Pacific Northwest and focused on logging issues, now the battle has moved into urban and suburban centers such as San Diego, Los Angeles, Bloomington, and Long Island. Isolated acts of monkeywrenching against logging equipment and trees to be cut has escalated to major arson and bombing. In order to target sprawl and destruction of wilderness and wildlife, the ELF has begun to torch and attack new housing developments, SUVs, and Hummers. Some (non-ALF) animal liberation groups like the Animal Rights Militia and Justice Department advocate violence (see the Introduction), and new factions like the Revolutionary Cells use explosives, declare themselves “for animal liberation through armed struggle,” and issue chilling threats that “this is the endgame for animal killers … there will be no more quarter given, no more half-measures taken.”[5] The Revolutionary Cell bombings of Chiron Corporation in August 2003 and Shaklee Corporation in September 2003 because of their ties to Huntingdon Life Sciences, signal a clear intensification of animal liberation struggles. Emergent groups that see even the ALF as too conservative are beginning to steer a part of the animal rights movement into more militant directions; they wish exploiters to sample a taste of the fear and pain they dole out to animals, and they intend to fight violence with violence.

As Rod Coronado observes, “There’s a whole bunch of disenfranchised Americans resisting the lifestyles they were raised in and they want an upswing in activity.”[6] The ELF emerged in 1992 as a radicalization of Earth First! tactics that activists felt were too timid, and the dynamics of struggle can easily advance beyond property destruction. Thus, Ron Arnold, executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, rightly asks, “What happens when the next generation comes along and gets tired that these arsonists, the ecoterrorists, aren’t doing enough?”[7] Earth First! activist Tim Ream predicts, “There is every indication that we will see more political violence. There is a war against the Earth happening today and we know the government isn‘t going to solve the problem.”[8] Rik Scarce, author of Eco-Warriors: Understanding the Radical Environmental Movement, saw a turning point in environmental defense action with the ELF torching of a Vail ski lodge in 1998, such that “a whole different scale of sabotage had become acceptable.” Scarce believes that “the environmental movement has been radicalized permanently. I don’t rule out the next step … that people will be killed.”[9]

When presented with ALF and ELF claims that no one has ever been injured or killed in their actions, critics respond, “Not yet.” But even some insiders believe that the day will come when extremists from the newest crop of ecowarriors will follow in the footsteps of radical anti-abortionists and begin to kill animal abusers at their homes or offices. “People who abuse animals deserve all they get,” says ex-ALF activist Keith Mann. “If you live by the sword, you will die by the sword.”[10] In a September 2002 communiqué, the ELF stated: “While innocent life will never be harmed in any action we undertake, where it is necessary, we will no longer hesitate to pick up the gun to implement justice, and provide the needed protection for our planet that decades of legal battles, pleading, protest, and economic damage have failed … to achieve.” Former ELF spokespersons Craig Rosebraugh and James Leslie Pickering openly defend violence as a legitimate tactic against exploiters and urge activists to go beyond the limitations of direct action in order to create an anti-capitalist movement. “We believe that a revolution is necessary in the United States of America to rid the world of one of the greatest terrorist organizations in planetary history, the U.S. government.”[11]

In turn, industries and the government has stepped up their own responses to the new militant direct action movements. Under the dictatorship of Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and John Ashcroft, the state has so far avoided the kind of murderous assaults the FBI earlier unleashed on the Black Panther Party and American Indian Movement, while intensifying the attack on other fronts.[12] For now at least, they have put away their guns (but not always their fists and batons) in order to play legal (and illegal) hardball with the new crop of radicals. Especially in the aftermath of 9/11, the Bush administration took firm measures to criminalize animal rights and environmental protests and, indeed, nearly every form of dissent. The corporate-state complex is applying old laws in new ways (e.g., using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations [RICO] act that was originally designed to stop organized crime), enforcing oxymoronic “free speech zones,” breaking up demonstrations with gratuitous force and violence, and creating new legislation such as the “Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act” and the Patriot Act that grant the state frightening powers of surveillance, search and seizure, and political repression.

Thus, in order to disrupt and destroy opposition to the prevailing economic and political order, the corporate-state complex deploys systems of intense surveillance, grand juries, witch hunts, police dragnets, and political repression. The war between activists and the state-corporate complex unfolds simultaneously on many levels: material (physical violence used on occasion by both sides), paralegal (civil disobedience by activists and unconstitutional repression by the state), legal (courtroom battles and statutes used against activists as they seek to enforce or create laws that protect animals and the Earth), and semantic (the politics of the discourse of “terrorism”).

With the Earth in grave crisis, animals dying by the billions, democracy under attack, and the corporate-state complex besieged by liberation, anti-globalization, and anti-war movements, the U.S. and other capitalist nations are torn asunder by intense social conflicts in which the politics of nature takes on an increasingly significant role. In conditions where compromise or negotiation seem ever more remote possibilities, the gloves are coming off as opposing sides assume positions of war.

NOTES

2. “Animal rights, terror tactics,”  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/902751.stm
3. On guerilla warfare, see Mao Tse tung, On Guerilla Warfare (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961) and Che Guevara, Guerilla Warfare (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985). For an excellent analysis of how low-tech guerilla warfare in Vietnam defeated the U.S. military machines, see William Gibson, The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam. Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986.
4. “The Terrorist Threat Confronting the United States,” Congressional Statement Federal Bureau of Investigation, http:www.fbi.gov/congress02/watson020602.htm.
5. For the text of their communiqué, see  http://directaction.info/news_sept30_03.htm
6. “Activists see more violence from extreme protesters,”  http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/09/06/MN258847.DTL
7. “Eco-terrorists top FBI’s list,”  http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/
O,1413,36~53~1708402,00.html
8. “Activists see more violence from extreme protesters”
9. “Eco-terror act at Vail unsolved 5 years later,”  http://www.dailycamera.com/bdc/state_news/article/0,1713,BDC_2419_2359528,00.html
10. “Death risk as animal rights war hots [sic] up.”  http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,450010,00.html.
11. See  http://www.arissa.org. For Rosebraugh’s defense of violence as a political tactic, see his book, The Logic of Political Violence: Lessons in Reform and Revolution. Portland: Arissa Media Group, 2003.
12. See Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther and the American Indian Movement. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1990.

Essay:  http://drstevebest.org/Essays/ItsWar.htm

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