March
2004
Morality
Aside, is Violence an Effective Strategy?
By Michael Greger
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May 6, 2002, Volkert van der Graaf, a 33 year-old vegan animal rights
activist was waiting nervously in a parking lot outside of a Denmark
radio studio. It was days before the Dutch general elections. Inside
the studio, political candidate Pim Fortuyn swore that if his party
rose to power he would lift the ban outlawing fur farming in the Netherlands.
Minutes later, as Fortuyn was about to get into his limousine, our activist
pulled a gun out of his pocket and shot the politician five times, point
blank, in the chest, gunning him down, dead, in broad daylight. Later
he told the Court that he committed murder “guided by my conscience.”
Last year in California, animal activists claimed responsibility for
two predawn pipe bombings. Thankfully, no one was hurt—except,
perhaps, the animal rights movement.
Take, for example, the failure of right wing religious terror in this
country. Although the morally contemptuous murders of nine abortion
doctors and supporters seemed to have reduced abortion availability
by intimidating providers and their support network, most analyses
view
the terror as ultimately backfiring against the anti-choice movement
in terms of public credibility. In fact, according to the University
of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center, the percentage
of people considering themselves pro-choice actually peaked in 1994,
the anti-choice murderers’ single bloodiest year.
The animal exploitation industries are drooling to have us hurt someone.
They know that our power is our compassion. That’s why they try
to take away our power by painting us as violent misanthropes. In fact,
they’ve wanted to make us look violent so bad that they weren’t
even willing to wait around until one of us snapped. November 11, 1989,
U. S. Surgical company, a long-time target of animal activists because
of their use of live dogs in surgical stapling demonstrations, furnished
pipe bombs to a young animal activist and drove her to place them in
the company president’s parking space. In the ensuing trial it
came out that the whole assassination plot was engineered by U.S. Surgical’s
president Leon Hirsh himself. In the PR industry exposé Toxic
Sludge is Good for You, authors Stauber and Rampton write, “Normally,
of course, company presidents do not arrange their own murder, but
Hirsch
was neither crazy nor suicidal. He was trying to engineer an embarrassing
scandal that would discredit the animal rights movement.”
They want us to look like violent militants. It pushes us off our moral
high ground. This is even spelled out explicitly in the official 1988
American Medical Association white paper on how to discredit our movement.
Quoting from the report, the AMA advises corporations that people who
believe in animal rights “must be shown to be...responsible for
violent and illegal acts that endanger life.” Animal rights activists
must be seen as people who are “terrorists,” who are “opposed
to human well-being.” And this is the same advice you find in
the strategy papers of Ringling Brothers, the pork producers, the Fur
Information Council of America. I fear we are walking right into their
trap.
The corporations know that their Achilles heel is the truth. They have
to do everything in their power to keep people ignorant. A quote from
a 2004 animal agriculture textbook: “For modern animal agriculture,
the less the consumer knows about what’s happening before the
meat hits the plate, the better.” They know that hundreds of millions
of people would be against them if they only knew the truth. Everybody
is against cruelty to animals. So the industry’s only chance
is to marginalize our movement and distract the public from the real
issue.
And the real issue is the violence that goes on inside their factory
farms, their labs, their slaughterhouses. Our secret weapon, therefore,
is effective education.
What do I mean by effective education? Is screaming Compassion is the
Fashion! at passersby in our best death metal voice at a fur demo effective
education? I don’t think so. The “open rescue” tactic,
pioneered by Patty Mark in Australia, where unmasked activists openly
liberate abused animals, is effective education. Vegan Outreach’s
adopt-a-college campaign, where volunteers hand out free copies of their
influential “Why Vegan?” booklet to students, is another
example of effective education. And while preaching to the convertible
on some school campus may seem less sexy than living out our macho
fantasies,
the animals deserve no less.
In our sheltered activist circles it’s easy to forget how effective
the industry has been at concealing the ugly truth. People still simply
don’t know what goes on in factory farms. Most people, for example,
don’t even know that dairy cows are slaughtered. In the biggest
study on transitioning towards vegetarianism to date involving thousands
of high school seniors across 52 schools, only 29 percent of the young
women and 17 percent of the men disagreed with the statement “I
think meat production is done humanely.” There is much educational
work to be done.
We animal rights activists tend to live in a fantasy world. Too many
activists wrap themselves in vegan cliques and insulate themselves
from
the real world. When hundreds of animal activists on the 1996 March
for Animals were asked to guess the odds that everyone in America would
go vegetarian over the next 15 years, the average respondent predicted
that there was over a one in five chance of everyone in the U.S. giving
up meat by the year 2011! And the chances that animal experimentation
would be abolished by 2011? Forty percent. I hate to be the one to
have
to break it people, but we’re deluding ourselves. One can see,
though, how seductive political violence might seem to those under
the
delusion that the vegan revolution is right around the corner. We need
to take a step back, though, and recognize that we need to be in this
for the long haul. And that means we have to recognize that public
opinion
matters.
A few pipe bombs are not going to topple multi-billion dollar industries.
What they may do, however, is play right into the opposition’s
blood-stained hands and make our education efforts more difficult.
It
may plant a wedge and further distance society from being open to our
message.
Who cares what they think, though? Why should we care about public
opinion? Because unless we think there are enough vegans in this world,
unless
we think there are enough animal activists, unless we are content that
we have reached some kind of revolutionary quorum, then it matters
what
society thinks because we need to grow. We need to be a movement that
people want to join. We can go on and on about the victorious availability
of soy milk everywhere now, but we’re losing. We’re losing
more and more animals every single year. We need to become a mass movement.
The T-shirts of Animal Rights Hawaii quote Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kinds
of extremists we will be.” I think we should be nonviolent extremists
for the animals.
Michael Greger, M.D., facilitates discussions on
violence at the national animal rights conferences. He can be reached
through his website at www.veganMD.org.
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