Terrorists Or Freedom Fighters?

Critical Reflections on Animal Liberation

Preface to a forthcoming book

Steven Best & Tony Nocella

              On September 11^th, 2001, when terrorists attacked the World Trade Centers and the Pentagon, the political landscape changed forever. Instantaneously, it became unpatriotic to criticize President Bush, the government, or U.S. policy on any front. Groups like the Sierra Club announced they were ending all criticism against Bush’s anti-environmental agenda. Without question, there were real enemies outside of our continent to be wary of, but from its anti-democratic agenda the government began to identify imaginary enemies within. While flags were waiving everywhere, freedoms and the Constitution were being further eroded. Nowhere was this more dramatically obvious than with the October 26^th, 2001 passage of the “Patriot Act,” which allows the government full powers of surveillance, search and seizure, and suppression of dissent.  As freedoms are being attacked in the name of “security,” and laws go beyond all measure of what is needed to combat terrorism, activists in the post-9-11 world operate in a new terrain where the term “terrorism,” like “communism” in the 1950s, is used indiscriminately, as a tool of repression and intimidation. But the tactic can only backfire, for if every dissenting group is a terrorist, none are.

               And thus the question arises who and what are “terrorists” and, conversely, who and what are “freedom fighters”? It has become imperative that we are able to distinguish between the two, and that we maintain a sharp separation between just and unjust laws, between nonviolence civil disobedience and “domestic terrorism.”

               This is a book about a new kind of freedom fighter, human activists who militate for nonhuman animals, nonviolent animal liberationists who, when necessary, steal or destroy “property” and break the law because the law has wrongly consigned animals to cages and confinement, to loneliness, pain, and the worst kind of hell. Unyielding in their commitment, these animal freedom fighters nonetheless never resort to violence and are motivated above all by the positive forces of love, empathy, compassion, and justice. They are therefore are the antithesis of the “terrorists” the repressive state apparatus tries to convince the public they are, they advance democracy and citizenship to new levels, and they redeem the vicious speciesism of human beings, no less ugly than the racism of KKK in their hooded robes, but far more murderous.

               Especially amidst the current hysteria, it is easy to forget that the United State won its independence not only by war or civil disobedience, but also through acts of nonviolent non-cooperation, including economic sabotage, or property destruction. The U.S. employed this tactic to undermine the power of the British, and to galvanize the will of the newly emerging nation, and it forever remains a part of our history and tradition. Not merely an act of senseless demolition, property destruction was and can be a cry for justice and means for its achievement. Of course, there is another tradition inscribed in heart of our history, and that is the sanctity and inviolability of property. According to 17^th century British theorist John Locke, property and land ownership are basic rights, and the land becomes one’s own private possession when one mixes one’s “creative labor” with the raw stuff of nature. Locke did not fail to add that those who make “unproductive” use of the land (e.g., the native American Indians) have no lawful ownership of it, and thus they can and should lose it to more “industrious” people (e.g., the new white propertied owners of the U.S.), to those who transform nature. U.S. citizens pray to their material God to ask for more land, a larger house, bigger profits, more sumptuous goods to consume and display as signs of status and prestige. Indeed, as Max Weber argued, capitalism might not have been born without its cultural preconditions being established by Protestantism, which not only helped establish the ideology of individualism, but also of materialism insofar as those individuals who had wealth and success were deemed to be favored by God, while the poor and needy were consigned to the unworthy and damned.

The ideology of capitalism makes a number of fundamental claims about human nature and values that are radically new in history: that individuals are not derived from society (Gesellschaft) but rather that society is the aggregate of fragmented individuals (Gemeinschaft); that these free-floating human fragments live in stark competition with one another (in Hobbes’ world where life is “brutish, nasty, and short”); that through competition a greater social good will result (Adam Smith’s mystical “invisible hand”); that hard work, thrift, and saving are divine virtues and leisure time is morally corrupt (Protestantism); and that through conspicuous consumption of goods, one can attain social prestige and status (post-Protestantism). In capitalism, the profit imperative overwhelms the moral imperative, intrinsic value is sacrificed on the alter of instrumental value, and Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” (a concept initially inspired by Thomas Malthus’ observances on the social order) becomes the regulating principle of social life.

Capitalism exerts its mighty and unprecedented powers of wealth, science, and technology against its own citizens, against all peoples of the earth, and against the entire natural world. Apocalypse now and forever. An insatiable massive machine of energy consumption and wealth accumulation, capitalism has a grow-or-die logic that demands it devour everyone and everything in its path. It is an inherently violent and unsustainable system that destroys nature, species, human lives, and indigenous peoples’ cultures in order that its own global property empire can expand beyond all boundaries and borders. Consequently, under capitalism property, inanimate objects, has become more sacred than life, than willing, feeling, and thinking beings. From this it follows that those who destroy life are called “businessmen” while those who dare to smash the property of the powerful, as a principled and nonviolent means of resistance, are branded as “terrorists.”

Thomas Jefferson told us that the people have a right to overthrow their government when it no longer represents their interests. With every day that passes, our right to that revolution, and our need for it, grows. As the U.S. once used property destruction as a political weapon, we reclaim that heritage and use the oppressors own words and tactics against them, this time to be a voice for the voiceless, the animals who cannot defend their own interests. Resistance movements of all kinds are learning that they cannot win liberation through demonstrations or politely asking corrupt politicians to acknowledge and respect their rights. Martin Luther King spoke of “the marvelous new militancy” of nonviolence. Taking this one step further, we in the animal liberation movement see this as compatible with, and in need of supplementation by, strategic acts of “theft” (freeing animals from the cages of vivisectors, fur farms, zoos, “class B” pet dealers, and the like) and property destruction. We question materialism through material acts; we challenge property by “stealing,” we undermine ownership through divestment, and we mock “scientific creativity” through creative destruction.

               We are almost amused when vivisectors cry rivers over stolen files, spray-painted walls, and smashed computers, while they calmly eat their salami sandwiches and joke as they torture animals in their laboratories. Which is the greater wrong, the torture and death of an animal, or the wrecking of lab equipment? Is the death of a human or animal comparable to the destruction of an office or building, especially when these physical objects are but torture chambers that bring forth more pain than meaningful data? If a wrong is committed against life, is the “crime” against property an equal wrong? Or is it simple a duty and a right to break an unjust law?

In the U.S., history shows that theft or property destruction is met with severe punishment. The Texas Constitution, for example, states that if a person steals another person’s horse they can be hung. If an individual destroys currency he or she can be charged with a felony and be imprisoned. Arson means a sure trip to jail. Thus, property destruction is a serious offense. And rightly so. We live in a world where the ancient concept of usufruct – common, shared resources that any member of the community uses as they need – make as much sense to us now as do the Sun and Moon Gods. Save for the rare communal living situation, most people in capitalist society seek to acquire their own property, and they want that property secured and protected from theft or harm.

But that axiom makes two key assumptions: (1) the property was acquired legitimately; (2) the “property” is not another living being that has rights. There are cases where (2) is legitimate, in the sense for instance we call our “pets” our “property,” but our culture is in a dramatic process of rejecting that language in favor of defining human beings as the entrusted “guardians” of their “companion animals.” And animal liberations repudiate the argument that scientists or industries can “own” any animal as their “property,” on the grounds that animals have rights, including the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, all of which contradict the claim of scientific or industry animal ownership.  Thus, when we liberate – not “steal” – an animal from a fur farm or laboratory, we are not committing a wrong to the scientist, but doing a right by the animal. When we “destroy” the inanimate property of an animal exploiter, we are merely razing what was never theirs to own in the first place.

               Property theft and destruction has been used by the oppressee as well as the oppressor throughout American history. During the racial turmoil of the 1950s and 1960s, the KKK and racist whites used these tactics in an effort to intimidate and demoralize African-Americans.  Blacks, of course, were hung, shot, bombed, and killed, but also their houses were set ablaze, crosses were burned on their front lawns, and bricks were thrown through their church windows. Conversely, the history of property destruction in the U.S. by the oppressed runs from the Boston Tea Party in 1773 to the Watts riots and destruction of military buildings in the 1960s, to the actions of the ALF and ELF, the smashing of MacDonald’s store windows in the 1999 “Battle in Seattle,” and the burning of genetically engineered crops by anti-biotechnology groups.

               In the 1980, a new radical environmental group – Earth First! -- was formed out of frustration with trying to preserve the environment through normal political channels. Once a Washington lobbyist, co-founder Dave Foreman realized that Congress was inherently pro-corporate and corrupt, and thereby unwilling and unable to pass the legislation needed to prevent ecological collapse. Inspired by Edward Abbey’s book, The Monkeywrench Gang, which features a motley band of environmentalists who fight their cause with explosives, Foreman and others created Earth First! and adopted “monkeywrenching” and “ecotage” as militant new tactics of struggle that by-passed the political system for powerful means of direct action. During the 19^th century, industrial workers grew so frustrated and weary from capitalist exploitation that they began acts of “sabotage” (“sabot” is the French term for “shoe”) and “monkeywrenching” literally by throwing shoes and wrenches into the capitalist’s machines to grant themselves a respite from incessant toil.  Redefined in today’s environmental context, sabotage becomes ecotage and monkeywrenching involves attacks on the machines and property of industries slaughtering animals and raping the natural world for profit, without targeting any culpable individuals. Common Earth First! tactics include pulling up survey stakes, spiking trees to make it dangerous to cut them (using clearly marked spray-painted circles to avoid injury to workers), pouring sugar or other harmful materials into the gas tanks of bulldozers, and chaining activists to equipment or trees. It is important to emphasize that while Dave Foreman has been physically attacked, Judi Barr was seriously injured by a bomb that exploded in her car, and countless activists have been threatened and roughed-up, no Earth First! actions have harmed human beings, only the property of those who destroy the earth.

The Earth First! ecotage model was quickly adopted by a myriad of environment and animal rights groups around the world that fought against capitalist domination. In the 1990s, a powerful new direct action group emerged to fight for animal rights, the Animal Liberation Front (ALF). Inspired by the Earth First! ecotage approach and the anarchist model of political organization, the ALF is an underground, decentralized group dispersed across the entire nation. There is no “leader” to capture in order to decapitate the movement, only a host of individuals and cells that spread rhizomatically. This complex structure defies government infiltration and disruption, and thereby thwarts the kind of success the U.S. government had in its infiltration of the Black Panthers, the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, and numerous other groups.

The goal of the ALF is to liberate as many animals as possible from the sundry forms of confinement, oppression, and killing. Following the nonviolent philosophy of Gandhi and the U.S. civil rights movement, the ALF believes that there is a higher law that than created by and for the corporate-state entity a moral law that transcends the corrupt and biased laws of the U.S. political system -- the best system that money can buy. When the law is wrong, the right thing to do is to break it. This is how moral progress is made in history, from defiance of American slavery to disobedience of Hitler’s anti-Semitism to sit-ins at “whites only” lunch counters in Alabama. Thoreau’s maxim that one ought to obey only one’s own conscience, and never the law, is a good start toward critical thinking and autonomy, but it can also provide a formula for a dangerous fanaticism that turns violent, such as with the militant anti-abortion people who kill for their cause. Thus, it important that the ALF and other direct action groups are guided by the belief that however righteous their anger, no human being ever be harmed in the struggle for liberation of others; rather, only property is damaged as a necessary means to the end of animal or earth liberation. When the success of ALF tactics rang throughout the land of radical peace and justice activists, many "fronts" were formed, including the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), an organization dedicated to, among other things, burning down ski lodges and destroying new housing complexes, and so on, earning them the badge of “terrorists” by the FBI.

               This is the first book to attempt a philosophical support of the ALF. Some of the writers are academics, some are activists, and some are both. Some belong to the ALF or have been members in the past. Some speak out from within the classroom, and some agitated from inside their prison walls. We all have different perspectives, but we speak in one voice in our support for the controversial tactics and goals of the ALF. None of us apologize for the tactics of direct action and civil disobedience, and all of us renounce, repudiate, and revile animal exploitation industries and the bloody stain they leave on this planet. But we do not here advocate property destruction, vandalism, break-ins, and, of course, violence. We seek to begin a dialogue of what people can and should do in a world where animals are so severely oppressed and tortured, and where the law serves to protect a few exploiters rather than the billions of exploited. The book provides background documents on the history and formation of the ALF, descriptions of some of their actions, and defenses of their rationale and agenda. We seek to dispel a number of misconceptions. It should be clear that the ALF is supported not only by “naïve” or “confused” young people, but also by experienced activists and serious academics. Additionally, we emphasize that members of the ALF are not hateful people, but are loving people who cherish all life, which explains why they cannot tolerate violence to animals and will go to extraordinary lengths to stop extraordinary wrongs.          

               In this book you will find people defending property destruction, but you will not find anyone supporting violence against any life. You will discover a group of people supporting the struggle to free nonhuman species whose oppression has reached intolerable levels in an era of advanced technology and mass production and killing. Property destruction, when it occurs at all, is never an end in itself, but only a means to the end of justice and animal liberation. Despite our the governmental blowback toward civil liberties and rights, it urgent that we focus on the question of why animal liberation is ethically defensible, and why the ALF should be considered among the great liberation movements of recent history. The ALF mission is not to be “radical” or “extremist,” it is only to liberate oppressed animals. Only when enough people join together in an animal rights movement and in nonviolently liberating animals can the shrieks and screams of our fellow species cease. Just as the civil rights movement had innumerable daily actions of mass civil disobedience, animal activists too have to multiply resistance and liberation activities throughout the nation and on a continuous basis. And just like the brave activists of the civil rights movement, when we are released from jail, we must go back and liberate more animals, until all are free.

    It is important that we provisionally define some key terms, beginning with “violence.” Strictly defined, “violence” is an act of one individual or group against another individual or group that inflicts physical harm on their bodies, possibly causing death. Some definitions of violence include the causing of emotional or psychological harm to other human beings, such as in a situation of domestic abuse. But any valid definition of violence would have to include the obscene suffering human animals as a species inflict on nonhuman animals for the most trivial of reasons. Nonhuman animals are the victims of the violence of the human species, and human beings can be the perpetuators of violence on other sentient beings. We believe, however, that the broadening of the term “violence” to include property, store windows, buildings, and assorted physical objects is without justification and trivializes the violence done to human and nonhuman animals. Depending on the motivation and act, one might call intentional damage done to property vandalism, defacement, or theft, but not “violence.” Thus we do not buy into the facile argument that when the ALF spray paints a wall, smashes computers, or wrecks a laboratory, this is “violence.” For purposes of animal liberation, it is not even vandalism, but merely destruction for a just cause, such that the means do justify the ends. Similarly, when the ALF takes animals out of a fur farm or experimental laboratory, we do not consider this “stealing” animals, for they were never anyone’s rightful property to begin with, but rather “liberating” them from their tormentors in order that they may enjoy the existence that is theirs to live. The majority of ALF actions involve defacing laboratories, destroying equipment, and liberating animals, and avoid use of explosive and arson, both of which are uncontrollable and could harm to humans or animals. In our Orwellian world, it is difficult to find truth and logic. It is not the ALF’s tactics that are questionable, but rather the animal exploitation industries that exploit animals so viciously, and the legal system that callously provides its imprimatur. The actions of the ALF are just; they seek to remedy a horrific wrong done to animals. When the industries have so much economic and political power, when the government shuts out the voices of reason and compassion, when the legal system is tailored for a daily holocaust of animals, animal liberationists often have no choice but to bypass the law and serve a higher justice. Without breaking laws in the name of the higher justice, numerous historical injustices to people would not have been corrected, and we see no reason why it should be any different for animals.

    Finally, we cannot accept the current mode of demonizing animal rights activists and liberationists. In the post 9-11 hysteria where all kinds of civil rights are under attack, it is no longer adequate to deride those who fight for animals as “wackos” or “extremists,” it is now de rigueur to brand them as “terrorists,” specifically, “domestic terrorists,” and consider them a threat to “national security”! This discourse would be amusing if it weren’t so serious, for it legitimates the unleashing of the state surveillance and repression apparatus on animal rights activists and supporters. We insist that “terrorism” mean not the destruction or theft of “property” in order to secure the ethically justified end of liberating animals from their traps, cages, and torture racks, but the infliction of violence against innocent human beings for nefarious political purposes. Indeed, if any definitional expansion is in order, it is to include in the concept of violence and terrorism those humans – namely the vast majority of our species -- who maim, mutilate, vivisect, and slaughter animals for profit, or who indirectly perpetuate these heinous acts through ignorant choices such as wearing fur or eating meat and dairy products. Thus, toward animals, the vast majority of our species are “terrorists,” and it is for good reason that Isaac Bashevis Singer said, ”In their relation to animals, all humans are Nazis.”

    One of the central ironies of our time is that within the exploitative and materialist ethos of capitalism, property and inanimate objects have become more sacred than life, such that to destroy life is legal and (to all-too many) ethical acceptable, while to destroy things is illegal, immoral, and even an act of “terrorism.”  ALF actions are done less out of hatred for animal oppressors than for love for life, and their actions are motivated by empathic identification with the needless and wantonly cruel suffering humans inflict on animals.

The ALF needs mass support by a diversity of people, and it will only receive it when people understand the motivation and legitimacy of their actions. This in turn demands widespread education about the unspeakable horrors billions of animals suffer everyday in the entertainment industries, rodeos, circuses, zoos, fur farms, factory farms, and slaughterhouses. Currently, the ALF is organized by youth from distinct subcultures (such as “straight-edgers”), and not by mainstream peace organizations. As the animal rights movement as a whole grows and matures, we envision the ALF’s influence to expand also. In the process, our culture will have an expanded definition of rights, community, and liberation itself.

    These writings are only some of the possible animal rights viewpoints on the ALF, and are only the beginning of the supportive articles that will be written about and for the ALF. We dedicate this book to all the animals who have suffered because of human greed and violence, and to a future where our species fulfills the potential it has for compassion, love, and reverence for life.