Thursday, August 03, 2006

Yeah, it's the whole violence vs. non-violence thing again

I just read a review copy of Capers in the Churchyard: Animal Rights Advocacy in the Age of Terror, by Lee Hall. Described as a book that notes “the contradictions between the acts and claims of high-profile activists who strike the militant pose,” it’s a thought-provoking read...but I was surprised to see no mention of perhaps the most articulate proponent of the opposing viewpoint: Derrick Jensen. So, even though I obviously cannot do justice to either Hall or Jensen with a single excerpt, I decided to present the following juxtaposition and see what happens.

First, an excerpt from a recent interview with Lee Hall:

Q. The idea of living in harmony with nature is a key part of your view of animal-rights theory.
 
Lee Hall: “Indeed. And bringing that into the discussion of terrorism, we should note that arson and bombs have never been about harmony with nature. Militancy, this trendy concept that tells activists that it’s time to declare ‘war’ against the ‘animal-abusing scum’ and show no mercy - it’s the same aggressive, competitive, controlling, might-makes-right thinking that’s dragged our society into this whole mess. It made us insist, in all sorts of scenarios, that we are Us, and they are Them; that they’re outside our moral community, and we’re superior to them. It moved us to come up with the tools to make us mighty against all the other life, justified in killing off anything and anyone apparently in the way of the progress of mankind, or whatever it’s been called for the past 10,000 years since domestication began.
 
“At the core of vegan understanding is the avoidance of dreary patterns of violence, for violence underlies the very trouble that we came here to transcend. A truly vegan animal-rights movement would necessarily be non-violent, and it is no accident that Donald Watson, throughout a rich life that lasted most of a century, never wavered on this point. Watson was a conscientious objector to war. Notably, Watson never said that war could be made humane. Yet that’s exactly what most of society did in the 1940s.”

Next, an excerpt from an interview with Derrick Jensen:

Q. The issue of violence is often debated within the animal and earth liberation communities. Is nonviolence the only effective and ethical strategy available to activists, or can political violence be justified as a productive means of bringing about social change?

Derrick Jensen: “90% of the large fish in the oceans are gone. The krill populations have decreased by what I think is 30% in the last 30 years. When the krill populations go down it’s all over. I’m sorry can anyone talk to me about effectiveness? What does that mean in a world that is being destroyed before our eyes?

“Let’s talk about Gandhi for a second. The only reason that the Buddhists listened to Gandhi at all was because they’d been bled white by the Germans and Japanese. Another reason they listened to him was because there were Sikhs with guns in the hills. It’s just nonsense to talk about the Indian revolution being purely nonviolent. And if we want to talk about effectiveness, the Vietnamese certainly forced the Americans out. We could say that Gandhi had a nonviolent revolution. I would say, well that’s nice but actually the Indians lost and Monsanto won. We could also say that Vietnam had a successful violent revolution. But in that case I would say that the Vietnamese lost and that Coca Cola and computer companies won. So I have a real hard time talking about effectiveness.

“In so far as whether violence can be ethical, I have no interest whatsoever in spiritual purity. I have an interest in living in a world that has more wild salmon every year than the year before. I have an interest in living in a world with migratory songbirds and I will do whatever it takes to get there. I have an interest in living in a world that is not being destroyed. I have a friend who is an ex-con who says that dogmatic pacifists are the most selfish people he knows because they put their own spiritual purity over effectiveness.”


So, whaddya think?

(Those feeling violent, can try this.)

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Posted on 08/03 at 04:31 AM
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