NEGOTIATION IS OVER! Words Without Action are Meaningless!

by V3G4N

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as crazy, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. Jack Kerouac (SPEAK demo – Oct 2006)

So here we are, waiting for the debate. But the real problem with Francione and everyone who opposes violence or disagrees with Dr. Best’s defense of effective militant direct action is not just about Animal Rights, or Animal Liberation, or Neo-Abolitionism; it’s about the idea of Freedom and the struggle to see it realized. Arguing that violence for animal causes is unjustified, is like saying that all the illegal violent animal liberators are evil and should go to jail.  In these times of the Patriot Act and the Animal Enterprise Protection Act, in these times when corporate-state oppression is expanding globally, in these times when the liberation of a cow/pig/dog/chicken from a concentration camp is considered terrorism and the liberator subject to criminal penalties, whoever does not stand proudly to support this so called “terrorism”, is against Freedom and is the enemy of the Animal Liberation Movement. Times are hard and they require resistance to be harsh also.

So here are the questions: What do Francione’s pacifists believe about ALF prisoners? Are they guilty? What do they think about animal liberators and property destroyers? Should they be in prison? Are they a threat for  society? There are people inside the movement who went one step further, risking their lives and freedom, just to take the cause of Animal Liberation a step further. It is a duty to the ones who support this movement theoretically to stand proudly on behalf of those people. Now, more than ever, silence is complicity and everyone who is not clearly supporting violent direct action supports the state’s terrorist oppression. In addition to that, what do all the peace promoters think about the Warsaw Ghetto? Or about the American Civil War for the liberation of slaves? What would the peace freaks do if their mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers or their kids were mutilated and tragically killed, just because someone considered them commodities?  Would they try to educate the murderers?  Well, all the imprisoned nonhuman animals ARE our brothers and sisters, and it ’s our responsibility to react as we feel and as we should, and not to play the mister or miss nice guy role. If they ever justified violence on behalf of people and they are not justifying violence on behalf of animals, they are just speciesists.

It is illegal to do a peaceful demo outside the house of a vivisectionist puppy killer. Philosophers are considered dangerous to the public and are banned from entering countries for lectures. There are animal liberation advocates imprisoned for just running a web site for fucks sake! It is clear that the global oppressive state is seeing its interests in danger and is not willing to do the smallest negotiation about the animal issue. So why are you waiting to accept that the underground ways are the only ways working at the moment? If vegan outreach was dangerous, it would have been proclaimed illegal a long time ago. It seems that the Austrian example wasn’t understood at all. Animal Liberation is not only about going illegal, is about being effective. The Austrians became effective while being legitimate (and even welfarist as some accuse them, although their welfarism has achieved much more than some so-called abolitionists have) and we all seen what happened then. The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world (and are the ones who actually do so) —  the ones who push the human race forward — they are at the moment in the front line of the battlefield. Anybody who is not shouting out his/her full support for their actions should be ashamed.

Steve Best in his excellent essay The Rise of Critical Animal Studies: Putting Theory into Action and Animal Liberation into Higher Education, emphasizes the pitiful reality of the academic theoreticians who live in an insulated world removed from reality. The academic peace freaks are only proving Best’s writings 100% correct; they do live in another world. Francione claims that contrary to the violence that occurred on behalf of human slaves, violence on behalf of animals has no cultural meaning. This is something very strange for someone to say.  He adds that this kind of violence doesn’t mean anything to anybody because unlike human slavery, there isn’t any opposition to animal oppression. That’s another strange thing to say. The hundreds of serious AR organizations around the world (and thousands of other silly animal organizations) are proving exactly the opposite — that this war has two sides for many years now. In addition, the deaths of Barry Horne, Jill Phipps, Mike Hill and others, the imprisonment of hundreds of activists around the world (as a visit to the daily updated direct action website illustrates) are the proof of whether a real resistance exists and how far this resistance is willing to go. Animal liberation issues are gaining publicity in the papers everyday, so how can one talk about violent direct action leading to marginalization of the movement? And of course many people get involved with animal rights issues because they got inspired by animal liberators and property destroyers! How could somebody deny that anyway?!? Maybe not inside the high and mighty academic society in which Francione exists, but people in the real world really do get inspired by these acts and this is a fact. There is no doubt. The animal issue is gaining strength within society. This is another fact. If someone is too cowardly to participate in this conflict, at least he should shut up and stand aside, not try his best to degrade this conflict.

Francione, trying to construe animal exploitation with simple economic terms, claims that if there wasn’t a demand for vivisection, there would be no vivisection. Then I guess he has a very good explanation  about bullfighting in Spain, which is continuing to occur despite the fact that almost 75% of Spanish people want bullfighting to be banned. He probably also has a good reason why there is a lingering presence of U.S. forces on the ground in Iraq, despite the fact that the majority of American citizens want the troops home. The examples of situations like these are unlimited. We would all like to hear a nice explanation about the phenomenon. Further, Francione uses words like consumers, demand, supply,bla bla bla. The problem here is in the base. He just fails to realize that revolutions (he used the word) do not happen by reforming (his word again, probably one of the favorite ones), but by sedition. In addition, he fails to realize the complexity of the capitalist system. He presents this system as an autonomous, fair, and not-occupied-by-evil-doers system, which is something like an assay balance, in which you pick up from the one side some “demand” and you see from the other side some “torture” disappearing. Well, unfortunately things are not like that. I like to present capitalism as thousands of communicating vessels with thousands of safety valves between them. In the middle there are aid grants, corporate interests, bribes, clandestine deals. In modern capitalism, just reducing the demand of a product means nothing.

Francione also seems to perceive a supposed autonomy of every single human, like a being who is looking for the truth, who is smart enough not to be deceived, who knows his own good and will look passionately for it.  Yeah, right. Who are these people? The people who voted for Bush and Obama? The people who are feeding their babies cow-milk? The republicans maybe? The redneck patriots? Or even the the liberal capitalists? To be honest, I believe that groups like these have given the word “autonomous” a new meaning. Francione then asks who is the target of the AR violence and if the meat eaters should be a target. Well, maybe it’s wrong to focus on meat, but this doesn’t really mean that we should congratulate them for their murderous disgusting diet. We don’t “attack” them for two reasons: First, they are not the source of the problem, the corporate systemic institutions are and this is what we should target. Second, at the moment we don’t have the dynamic to stand in a face-to-face war versus the meat eaters. But, just a woman in a fur coat might provoke an attack in a society that largely frowns upon such a cruel fashion statement, when meat eaters are no longer tolerated by our culture, they too will come to fear displaying their murderous habits for the world.

And here is another mistake that Francione is making: Whenever he is mentioning violence and destruction on behalf of animals, he is always mentioning the impact of these actions to the public. He misses the point that property destruction is not about only raising an issue (if it is about raising an issue anyway) – it is about inflicting damages and terminating the hell holes it targets. He then claims that if an institution gets destroyed, another one will take over. Oh, really? What happened to Hillgrove in England? What happened to dozens of raided fur farms around the US? What is happening to HLS now? HLS sooner or later will be out of business. It would be  ludicrous for someone to really believe that there will be any corporation willing to go through what HLS is experiencing right now. Still not convinced about the effectiveness? This is a war, and every opened cage, every burned meat truck and every damaged vivisection lab is a battle we won. War is not about getting a message to the people, war is not about public relationships. Our war, is about saving lives here and now, and doing whatever we can to prevent future deaths.

Francione is mentioning Gandhi’s words: nothing is more powerful than non-violence. Nobody would expect something different from the man who during the World War II was asking the Jews to willingly sacrifice themselves to the Nazi atrocity, so that they would not create any further resistance than already existed. Francione with his fetishist pacifism earns the neo-Ghandhism award for 2010. Congratulations, you won the prize. But you lost the true meaning of Freedom…

Abusers in Central Florida include  Vivisectors  & Lab Animal Suppliers as well as the known atrocities that are the domain of every farming community.  Join Us — Animal Liberation CF – and Bring the Fight Home… or email me at camille@negotiationisover.com with the subject “Liberation CF”.

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