Animal Rights Community Online

[Alex Melonas]

 The moral and prudent necessity of non-violence?

[Ray P.]

http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=713

[Alex Melonas]

This looks like a great interview. I'll read it in full and get back to you. Thanks!

[Alex Melonas]

Dr. Steve Best said,

"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 UK and US governments and war machines, global corporations raping and pillaging the world, vivisectors in their blood-stained coats, 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.

The ironies are all too painful. When beagle puppies are crippled and punched in the face, when monkeys are strapped into restraint devices that smash their skulls, when kittens have their brains invaded with electrodes, and when rabbits and guinea pigs are pumped with toxic chemicals until they die, we are asked to believe that this is science, not terrorism. When over 10 billion animals each year in the US alone are confined and killed in unspeakably vicious ways by food industries, we are told this is business, not terrorism. In this sick and violent society, property is more sacred than life, and thus only those who destroy property are branded as criminals while the real terrorists perpetuate the “banality of evil” (Hannah Arendt) through the daily affairs of torture and killing. For every scratch an activist might inflict on an animal exploiter, a sea of blood flows from the bodies of animals; consequently, it is the height of perversity to brand activists rather than animal exploitation industries as the ethical misfits.

Torching a research or vivisection laboratory is considered more heinous than anally electrocuting mink or conducting the LD50 tests that pour industrial chemicals into the bodies of animals until half of them die. The loss of one building is deemed more noteworthy than the devastation of rainforests or the eradication of species. Critics whine about the possibility of physical violence by the ALF but fall silent before the actuality of state terrorism, animal massacres, and environmental destruction on a global scale. They decry death threats, but never death. They deplore rare activist attacks on exploiters but never violence against activists. The U.S. is rife with volatile hate groups—ranging from neo-Nazis militiamen to right-wing Christian zealots—that have a long record of violence, including killing hundreds of people in the Oklahoma City bombing, yet the government positions the ALF above all of them as the more dangerous “domestic terrorist” threat. While Al Qaeda and sundry terrorist cells openly threaten attacks on the nation, the FBI deploys hundreds of agents and squanders millions of dollars to harass activists who rescue cats and dogs. Those who exploit human beings, animals, and the Earth are dignified with labels such as “scientist,” “developer,” or “businessmen”; others who dare attack the property of the powerful are branded as “terrorists.” It’s a game of corrupt semantics where those who monopolize power monopolize meaning.

The hypocrisies, inanities, ironies, distortions, lies, and contradictions that billow forth from a barbaric society that pretends to be civilized and humane are so massive, staggering, and outrageous that they are numbing to contemplate. In this Orwellian world where slavery is freedom and war is peace, it is difficult to find truth and logic. It is not the ALF’s tactics that deserve vehement condemnation, but rather the industries that exploit animals so viciously, the legal systems that institutionalize their interests, the media moguls that denigrate animal rights, and the states that run the whole insane asylum."

Wow! People should read the article linked above.

[panthera]

Mary Martin had a recent blog entry Animal Person "Ronnie Lee on the ALF" that linked to an Abolitionist-Online interview with Ronnie Lee.
Animal Soldiers: A Rare and Exclusive Interview with Ronnie Lee

He actually says if he were to start again, he wouldn't go to any actual labs or rescued animals. He'd go to the homes of the people involved. Which is what SHAC is famous for now.

Some fellow named Roger Yates (who IS this guy?) mentioned another type of action, where large numbers of activists would storm a lab, during daylight hours, and document everything they could. Not exactly sure how the logistics went, I guess they relied on sheer numbers to temporarily overwhelm the security. And the security was much lower in the 80's.

I had never heard of the latter. Here is a description of one of them:

Quote:

[panthera]

Ray!!! Long time no see! so good to see you!

[Dave_81]

There obviously are two separate questions re: violence in the AR movement, viz.: (1) is it empirically effective, and (2) is it morally acceptable?

Regarding the former question, I do not think that violence has had the desired empirical effects, which are, I guess, to weaken the animal use industries economically and to rally public sentiment for AF by exposing situations of abuse (by breaking into labs, factory farms, etc.). The animal use industries are driven by demand – and demand comes from the public's desire to eat animal products. So, in order to weaken the animal use industries economically, we have to eradicate demand, which in turn means that we to shift public opinion. Any economic victories that do not cause a substantial decrease in demand are, in the grand scheme of things, trivial. Yet I do not think it can seriously be claimed that the public finds AR more congenial as a result of militant actions. Militants may reply that this doesn't matter, that all that matters is that animals are liberated. I agree. All that matters is total animal liberation. But this will never happen -- it is not intelligble that it could happen -- without garnering broad public support.

Courage, especially when it is for a just cause, can be noble. But when courage isn't functional it ceases to be noble and becomes, instead, foolish. If someone drives down a motorway with his eyes closed then he is not being courageous. Now the means of violence are distributed wildly disproportionately. The vegan movement has very limited resources whereas the government effectively has unlimited resources. In short, in the violence stakes, we simply can’t keep up. But if it is not functional or practical to oppose the government and the animal use industries violently, then violence on behalf of animals isn't noble; on the contrary, considered as a macro level movement strategy, it is at best impractical and at worst foolish.

[sunkanrags]

[sunkanrags]

[Dave_81]

[Dave_81]

[Dave_81]

Post deleted

[sunkanrags]

[Dave_81]

I'm an optimist in the sense that I think it's possible for sensitive perception to discover some good in most people. But I concede that in some cases realism may force us to conclude that there is nothing in a person from which a conviction to stop exploiting animals may grow. But I don't think this matters, or at any rate, it doesn't fatally undermine the abolitionist position. The pessimist's doom and gloom depends on its being the case that so many people will reject veganism that it makes it naive to think that we can abolish animal use through vegan education. There are several problems with this.

First: if we cannot build up a solid political and economic base of abolitionists through vegan education, then neither can we legislate animal use out of existence, for the former is a precondition of the latter. The irony here is that the idea that we should seek to legislate against animal rather than engage in vegan education in fact depends on the antecedent success of vegan education.

Second: none of the empirical evidence for the claim that people won't accept veganism significantly undermines the abolitionist position. For people are not unreceptive to veganism while abolitionism is the dominant paradigm; on the contrary, they are unreceptive to veganism while welfarism is the dominant paradigm. The rational conclusion to be drawn from this is, not that people won't accept veganism per se, but rather that veganism won't be accepted while welfarism is the ideology in whose light the public views animal exploitation. Ironically, the empirical evidence which is taken by welfarists to undermine abolitionism and, conversely, to vindicate welfarism in fact undermines welfarism and leaves abolitionism untouched.

So: since a cultural paradigm shift is a precondition of a legal paradigm shift, and since welfarism conditions (as opposed to erodes) unreceptivity to veganism, it plausibly follows, I think, that the most sensible thing to do is to make vegan education our primary mode of campaigning, while at the same time trying to undermine the conditions that give rise to unresponsiveness to veganism, such as welfarism.

In short: the idea that nonviolent vegan education is the route to animal rights is as beautiful as it is sound

[sunkanrags]