The Shaklee bombing: How should the animal rights movement respond?

[Guest guest]

According to yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle,

(http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/10/01/BA\

252071.DTL), an " animal rights " group calling itself Revolutionary Cells sent an

anonymous e-mail claiming that it perpetrated last Friday's bombing at the

Shaklee company offices in Pleasanton, California as well as last month's

bombing of Emeryville, California biotech firm Chiron. Both companies are owned

by Yamanouchi Consumer Inc., which does business with Huntingdon Life Sciences,

a New Jersey research firm that experiments on animals. The Revolutionary

Cells' motive is to drive Huntingdon Life Sciences out of business by

threatening the lives of its customers' employees and their families, referred

to as " targets " by the group's e-mail. The message included a specific threat

to double the size of the bombs used in each future attack. No one was hurt in

either bombing. The FBI is investigating.

 

I am not writing now to argue against the use of violent tactics by our movement

as I have done in the past. Given that those who use such tactics push our

movement further away from those in the cultural mainstream whose hearts and

minds we must win to achieve our goals; given that violent tactics smear all

law-abiding activists with the wide brush of negative stereotyping ( " They're all

terrorists! " ); and given that terrorism will only increase the time it will take

to achieve our goals, thus costing billions or trillions of animals infinitely

more suffering, by creating an enormous backlash against our movement's goals; I

cannot imagine any situation in which violence could be justified as a

worthwhile tactic to further our goal of animal liberation.

 

The issue about which I am writing now takes the question of tactics to the next

level: What is the ethical duty of animal rights supporters who have

information about the perpetrators of such violent and counterproductive actions

done in the name of our movement? Are we to remain silent in the face of terror

tactics, which will surely, sooner or later, result in maimings and deaths that

will create widows and orphans? Are we to protect those whose tactics will

ultimately cost countless more innocent animals their lives and seriously set

back our movement's progress? Are some of us, by providing secrecy to those who

made themselves terrorists by their choice of terror tactics, ultimately

condoning such terror tactics and assuming ethical responsibility for those

violent actions?

 

Or are we, by protecting our movement's tiny, violent fringe, helping to defeat

dominionism and speciesism by protecting those whom some call heroes for

undertaking highly visible and extreme forms of activism that are guaranteed to

get media coverage?

 

It is worth remembering that, during the 1960's Vietnam War, the FBI's Project

Cointelpro used people on the FBI payroll to literally take-over anti-war groups

and steer them to violence in an attempt to discredit the anti-war movement and

divide it from the mainstream of Americans. The government understood that

turning a movement for change to violence could be the quickest way to destroy

the movement. I am not accusing those who have committed these bombings of

being government agents but, after Cointelpro, we would be most unwise to forget

that those who will benefit most from violence are those who most want to stop

us from gaining our goals. Thus, those who use terror tactics must understand

that they will find no support, comfort, respect, or friendship of any kind from

those of us who are truly committed to animal liberation, not terrorism.

 

In my opinion, when so-called " activists " attempt to gain supposedly

compassionate goals through the use of terror tactics, they choose to leave not

only the community of animal activists but the community of civilized human

beings as well. Those who use extortion enforced by violence to achieve their

goals, no matter how humane those goals, are racketeers, pure and simple.

Ethically, can those who, by their silence, implicitly condone the violence and

extortion used by these extremists be any less culpable than those who actually

perform the acts of terror?

 

I don't see how.