on the ELF, the Green Scare, and so-called “eco-terrorism”

I just ran across an article that ran in Rolling Stone last year about ‘eco terrorism‘ and the ongoing campaign of terror by the feds that seeks to portray radicals who use property destruction as terrorists, and it pissed me off. a lot. now i’m normally not a particularly angry person – i realized as part of an anger management class i took some years back that anger is a choice and it’s not a choice that I make very often because it’s usually not particularly productive. Anger is a weapon. It feels good and it lends power and force, but it clouds the mind; and I realized a long time ago that my mind is one of the best things I’ve got going for me and I’m better off to avoid anything and everything that could cloud my judgment. Still, there are some situations where anger is the only honest response, and this is one of those times.

The backstory, for folks who aren’t already familiar with what’s been going on or who don’t want to read the linked article, is that the Bush administration has completely and utterly failed to do a damn thing to crack Al Queda, and after 8 years of a “war on terror” that just plain looks bad, so they’ve decided to classify people who use property destruction as a protest tactic as “terrorists” and thereby artificially inflate the number of “terrorist” suspects that they’ve apprehended. That helps the Bushies standing with the Law & Order types and lets them trumpet what a great job they’ve done keeping America safe while completely failing to actually make anyone at all safer, since the people they’re prosecuting as terrorists have never caused physical injury to anyone.

Whatever you may think about the effectiveness or strategical utility of property destruction, the fact is that the current policy of conflating it with terrorism is absurd. If we were to accept that the two acts are one in the same we must begin by re-writing our own history and denouncing the people of colonial boston who boarded british ships and threw the tea overboard as terrorists, the moral equivilants of the people who flew planes into the World Trade Center on September 11th 2001. And that’s just plain stupid.

Now personally, I’m not really down with the ELF, mostly because I don’t think burning down buildings is an effective way to combat capitalism, but also because as a propagandist i think it tends to be counter-productive. the shit they burn down just gets rebuilt with insurance money and the feds use the opportunity to paint us all as nutjobs. That said, I’ve spent enough time in forest actions and in anarchist circles over the years to know that i’ve met people who were actively involved in that movement. (And no, to the FBI agents reading this, I don’t know any of their real names and wouldn’t recognize them in a lineup. I have a horrible memory for faces and names and they wouldn’t have introduced themselves using their government names anyway. What I remember is ideas, thoughts, patterns, conversation, arguments. the important things.) What I can say with absolute confidence is that – with very few exceptions – the people who i’ve known who’ve been most passionate in their defense of property destruction as a means to combat capitalism have been motivated not by hatred, not by anger, but by a sincere and deep-rooted love for our planet, for our species, and for all of the other species that we share our planet with. They are not terrorists. they are not monsters. Just ordinay people who have the good sense to realize that the damage being done to our planet is irreversible and that if we want to have a future we have to act in the present by any and every means available to us. Failure to do so is a crime against humanity and a crime against earth. As V points out, it is the fact that we are willing and able to stand up for each other and for our planet that makes us human, and our failure (as a culture) to do so is an affront to our own humanity. So while I may not be a huge fan of the ELF, I think it’s pretty ridiculous that it’s is radicals who stand up for the planet who are treated like criminals and not the evil bastards who are driving us all to the brink of extinction. As far as I’m concerned, that fact says everything that needs to be said about the sheer maniacal stupidity of Capitalism, the State, and – particularly – of this government.

It is a symptom of the peculiar insanity that is state power that these people – like so many generations of radicals before – are portrayed as “terrorists” and hunted down. Think on this for a second – Israeli tanks can buldoze entire villages and destroy olive trees that take a century to mature – stealing food from the mouths of Palestinian generations yet unborn – but no corporate media outlet or government would dare to call that “terrorism”. American troops can level an entire city – Falujah – and no one calls it “terrorism”. Chinese troops can kill with impunity in Tibet, Russian troops can do the same in Chechnya, but even those nations fiercest State critics refuse to call it terrorism. The CIA can even fund, arm, and train self-described terrorists all over the world, but virtually no one in the mainstream media or political establishments will openly admit that our government is the biggest sponsor of terrorism on the planet. But a group of young people who recognize the pure insanity of our cultures suicidal and ecocidal assault on all life and take a few small, largely symbolic, acts to fight it by lighting fires in the dark and destroying buildings that should not exist in the first place – harming no one – are called terrorists.

Given a choice between standing with them and standing with the Empire, I’ll side with the kids with matches every time.

A few thoughts on where The Family fucked up and how the larger Anarchist movement can learn from this and grow:

1 – If you’re going to be involved in direct action, *especially* the kind of Direct action that potentially carries long prison sentences, DON’T USE DRUGS and don’t work with anyone who does. It’s not a coincidence that the asshole informant who gave the feds their first break and allowed them to crack the Family (the affinity group they infiltrated and arrested in Operation Backfire, in the Rolling Stone article) was a heroine junky. The cops didn’t have anything on him but the fact that his name had been mentioned and he was an addict, and that’s all it took. Don’t work with people like that and don’t work with anyone who does. Addicts can’t handle their shit, if they could they wouldn’t be addicts. So don’t trust them to handle your shit. Period. The cops are not our friends and there’s no reason in the world to give them extra leverage.

2 – If you’re going to do direct actions – legal or otherwise – keep your affinity group small. 4-6 is ideal, more then 12 is almost always unworkable. If you find your group growing larger then that as new people are brought in, split the group in two and go your separate ways.

3 – Security Culture. There are a lot of good pamphlets on this so I’m not going to write one here.

4 – Consider risk and costs/benefits of every action carefully. Understand that you will be treated as a terrorist if caught destroying property and that if/when that happens your life will functionally be over. That’s a lot to risk. Don’t risk it doing stupid shit. Jeff Luers threw away his life to burn 3 SUV’s. I met him once, we caught a ride back from Oregon to California together, and he was one of the most articulate and thoughtful people I’ve ever met. We disagreed on a lot of things, then and now, but I respected him then and I respect him now for his commitment to the struggle that we’re all in. But the fact is, burning 3 cars in a car lot doesn’t do a damn thing to stop capitalism or the destruction of the earth. Burning an entire dealership, like the Family did the night before his sentencing, didn’t do a damn thing either. I’m not going to tell anyone else what is or isn’t a valid means of protest, but I would say that if you’re going to take action you need to select your targets and your tactics very very carefully.

5 – Everything is propaganda. Every fire that’s lit, every song that’s sung, every protest, every rally, every action. We are in a culture war here, a 24/7 struggle for the “hearts and minds” of our fellow humans. Don’t dehumanize them and treat them like they’re stupid. They’re not. They just have different priorities then us, priorities that make sense to them. Our only chance to win is to convince our friends, neighbors, and complete strangers reading articles written by people who hate us on the other side of the world that we are right and that they need to join the movement. Don’t do stupid shit that will turn people off to the movement for no good reason. Costs and benefits.

6 – Everyone is a potential ally. One of the biggest turning points in the Irish war for independence came when Michael Collins convinced Ned Brigh – the British agent assigned to watch him – to become a double agent and help him infiltrate and undermine the British intelligence network. Everyone is a potential ally.

7 – The opposite is also true. Everyone is a potential enemy. Lovers, friends, housemates, even that cute girl you might at the G8 Protest (and another article on the same story, can you say “entrapment”?). The Feds were finally able to crack the Family because they were able to strong-arm people into informing on each other. IF you’re going to be involved in underground actions that carry the risk of prison time or worse, the best way to make sure no one can rat you out is to make sure no one knows. If you can’t keep your mouth shut you’ve got no business doing things that could land you or the people you care about in jail. And remember, the feds don’t just arrest and murder people for things they actually did. Ask Sacco & Vanzetti or the Haymarket martyrs about that. So don’t give them any excuses.

8 – Understand that militant rhetoric won’t win a revolution. Don’t talk about guns and violence in your manifestos if you don’t honestly believe that we’re in a position to win an armed revolution. All you do is legitimize the State using their real guns and real violence to come thundering down on all of us. The last couple of ELF communiques cited in the Rolling Stone article talk about picking up the gun and fighting a violent revolution. There’s a good chance Rolling Stone made that shit up, but there’s also a damn good chance they didn’t. I’ve been an Anarchist for over a decade and spent a lot of time in what passes for a movement in North America. We’re champion shit talkers when it comes to militant rhetoric, but the fact is very very few of us even know how to use a gun and even fewer actually own one. As a movement we need to check ourselves and stop writing manifestos that we can’t live up too. We don’t need to declare ourselves pacifists or anything, but we do need to stop giving the pigs excuses to hunt, cage, and kill us.

We are in a very early stage of building a revolutionary movement in north America right now. At this point we need to get our ideas out and build our organizations and networks to the point where we can influence events in the real world and mobilize large numbers of people. If and when the time is right for armed revolution (and I think it’s entirely possible to get at least most of the way to where we want to go without having to kill anyone) we won’t need to convince the larger populace of that fact. Most people aren’t really opposed to violence, if they were it’d be impossible for the worlds armies to recruit. They’re opposed to violence against them and are more then willing to use violence to fight back against anyone and everyone that threatens them and their families. At the point where the working class majority realizes that the State is a far bigger threat to them then Anarchists are, they’ll side with us against the State. In the meantime, making threats we can’t back up actually hurts us by making us look like the bigger threat and allowing the pigs to paint us as terrorists. History shows very clearly that revolutionary movements that talk militant when they don’t have military capacity get killed off early. And we can’t afford to lose again, if only because our planet cannot survive another century of Capitalism.

9 – We don’t have to like each other. We don’t have to agree. But we do have to work together. There are a few common principles that bind our movement together: opposition to hierarchy, mutual aid, solidarity, class struggle, environmentalism, feminism, anti-racism, and the drive to empower local communities at the expense of the State. That’s more in common then Democrats or Republicans have, and more then enough to build a movement on. We CAN win, it is possible. But as long as we sit around and talk shit about each other instead of organizing it’ll never happen. Let’s put down our squabbles over the relatively trivial details that divide us and start building.

10 – Most of that building needs to be above-ground and overt. Our neighbors and friends need to see Anarchists and Anarchist organizations doing positive things in the community and treating the people around them with respect and solidarity. We have a reputation as being anti-social and violent that is not entirely our fault, but that – in all honesty – our movement has done a lot to legitimize. Putting molatov cocktails on our fliers may well make some of us feel radical and cool, but it definitely is a turn off to Jane Average who would agree with our politics if she understood what they actually are but is sure as hell not going to put her family at risk by hanging our with a bunch of terrorists. This goes back to point 8 but also goes beyond it. The best way to disprove popular preconceptions about Anarchists advocating chaos is to be organized, active, friendly, accessible, and visible. When people see organized anarchists doing positive things in their communities they get curious and come to us. That’s how movements grow. And that’s how we’ll win.

oh and one last thing (call this point 11) support our political prisoners!

Erick McDavid – http://www.supporteric.org/

Jeff Luers – http://www.freefreenow.org/

The Anarchist Black Cross Federation: Providing support and solidarity to Anarchist political prisoners worldwide: http://www.abcf.net/

Info on the Green Scare & the larger crackdown on so-called “eco-terrorism”: http://greenscare.org/

Posted: June 3rd, 2008 under culture war, ecology.
Comments: 5

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