As before, the state conjures up dangerous enemies everywhere, not only outside our country but, more menacingly, ensconced within our borders, lurking in radical cells. Now as then, the government informs the public that the nation is in a permanent state of danger, such that security, not freedom, must become our overriding concern. The terms and players have changed, but the situation is much the same as in the 1950s: the terrorist threat usurps the communist threat, Attorney General John Ashcroft dons the garb of Senator Joseph McCarthy, and the Congressional Meetings on Eco-Terrorism stand in for the House Un-American Activities Committee. We have entered a neo-McCarthyist period rooted in witch-hunts against activists and critics of the ruling elites. Far from backing down in the face of government repression, the militant wings of the animal rights and environmental movements have escalated their struggles and thereby provoked an intense confrontation with their enemies in the state and corporate worlds. 2 Animal rights and environmental activists refuse to ignore the plight of the natural world as the country focuses on the human costs of global conflicts rather, they emphasize the bloody war the human species has perennially waged on nonhuman species and the violence and terrorism of the human pogrom against the earth. 1 As liberty was being attacked in the name of “security,” activists in the post-9/11 world confronted a threatening new terrain where political action against the state and corporations decimating animals and despoiling the earth was suppressed and conflated with “terrorism” in order to legitimate severe political repression.ĭuring this turbulent time when the nation and its patriots called for unity-a “unity” that masks deep divisions, injustices, and conflicts inherent in the US-the war between animal rights and environmental activists on one side, and corporate exploiters and the state on the other, began to heat up as never before (see Best in this volume). Nowhere was this dynamic more obvious than with the Octopassage of the USA PATRIOT Act, which endowed the government with unprecedented powers of surveillance, search and seizure, and suppression of dissent (see Best and Black and Black in this volume). While flags waved everywhere, the Bush administration was gutting freedoms and shredding the Constitution, movingAmericaever closer to tyranny.
Animal liberation front number of members free#
The “war on terrorism“ quickly became an attack on civil liberties, free speech, and domestic dissent. Without question, there were real enemies outside our continent to be wary of, but the government exaggerated the threat as it began to identify imaginary enemies within. Activist groups like the Sierra Club announced that they were indefinitely suspending all criticism against Bush’s pro-corporate agenda as the nation tried to pull together.
Instantaneously, it became unpatriotic to criticize President Bush, the government, or US policy on any front. On September 11, 2001, the political landscape changed dramatically. “But if you have no relationship with the living things on this earth, you may lose whatever relationship you have with humanity.” Krishnamurti “The world only goes forward because of those who oppose it.” Goethe
(Introduction to Terrorists or Freedom Fighters: Reflections on the Liberation of Animals***) Behind the Mask: Uncovering the Animal Liberation Front
0 kommentar(er)
