Bonkers eco-terrorism article in the Guardian

[Bernie Gunther]

aaaaaand another thing...

very interesting IMO that they've picked out Earth First rather than say greenpeace, FOE, People and Planet etc. all of whom have a record of undertaking NVDA campaigns that include property damage.

Could the reason possibly be anything to do with the fact that try as they might, they can't infiltrate Earth First in the same way they have with pretty much every other major protest movement. It's not a membership based organisation, so doesn't keep records of who is and isn't a member, it's non-hierachical (as far as possible) so there's no real national leadership to infiltrate, it's made up of a loose network of locally based groups, editing the action update rotates regularly around these local groups, and most Earth First groups are deeply paranoid about being infiltrated / under surveillance and aware of counter measures to take to prevent this being a problem....

It's also probably considered an easy target as I don't think it's got anyone mandated to speak to the press on it's behalf to enable it to respond quickly to this kind of crap. Think they maybe underestimate the power of a decentralised organsation to respond when needed... could be a bit like waking up a sleeping many headed dragon (fingers crossed).

That structure also makes it wide-open to provocateur tactics I would think, of the sort used by the FBI (later exposed via FOI requests) against Earth First in the US. They don't even have to be that crude about it though.

Presumably all that would be required in this case is for some dodgy private security firm working for one of the big GM corporations to undertake, even without involving any actual Earth First members, some suitably mediapathic actions in the name of Earth First in order to provide our compliant government with an excuse to proscribe them?

Doing something like that would probably seem to them just an extension of the very dishonest PR tactics they've already been known to employ.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Now to me, the answer to such vulnerabilities is to make sure that the green movement is very broadly based, in particular that 'ordinary people' are brought along with the activists. That's why, despite having reservations about the usefulness of getting involved with a state that's been pretty much captured by corporations, I think that the Green Party is a very valuable thing. Similarly local food networks and all the rest of the 'soft' end of the green movement.

Largely I think that approach has been working and that the vast majority of people with environmental concerns remain sympathetic to almost all currently practised types of activism and recognise that equating direct action with terrorism is deeply offensive bullshit. That's probably also why from the corporate/state/cop point of view it seems to be so important to try to manufacture a case that the green movement is run by 'beardy, weirdie terrorists' ...

 

[PAD1OH]

is there an argument that NVDA can be framed as "terrorist" by the press/politic because it appears to the general populace to be inherently destructive as opposed to constructive?

 

[PAD1OH]

I mean destructive in the broadest sense.

We used to always run into the problem of only being able to define ourselves by what we opposed without being able to offer a realistic and achievable alternative/transition.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

is there an argument that NVDA can be framed as "terrorist" by the press/politic because it appears to the general populace to be inherently destructive as opposed to constructive?

I'm sure that helps, you could see fullyplumped trying that line by focussing on the property damage aspects of the case on page one of this thread.

At this point in time, it seems to me that bringing the general public along and not giving the government/police and the corporations they work for any help in demonising activists is more important than any benefit gained from smashing stuff up (there's very rarely any coherent benefit there at any time IMO)

Much better to make it as hard as possible to demonise activism by avoiding that sort of stuff in favour of weathering what looks likely to be a concerted campaign to scare ordinary people away from the green movement.

The public, particularly the segment already sympathetic to green issues, is already largely predisposed to believe that the government are a bunch of lying shitweasels and my experience talking to people about this stuff has been that once they realise that the government is trying to equate protesting hippies with people who saw heads off and blow up buses, they're completely disgusted by it and frequently angry/outraged.

So it should be feasible to make any cynical attempt by the govt/cops to demonise activists actually backfire with a bit of common sense and creativity.

 

[taffboy gwyrdd]

is there an argument that NVDA can be framed as "terrorist" by the press/politic because it appears to the general populace to be inherently destructive as opposed to constructive?

Hmm...neednt be "destructive" like monkeywrench, more likely to be "obstructive" - maybe "destroying" a process (the working of a power plant or army base) but not neccessarily destroying property.

Besides which property destruction has been accepted by juries for preventing greater crimes like Indonesia oppression or climate change.

But your point has merit. It can be interpreted the way you describe by people with something of a distorting bias.

 

[PAD1OH]

Besides which property destruction has been accepted by juries for preventing greater crimes like Indonesia oppression or climate change.

It is interesting. I don't oppose DA but I fully understand how people can misinterpret it, tabloidise it by calling it terrorism etc

Those ladies that smashed up the hawk jet were inspirational but they had a different story to tell. i.e. We broke into the RAF base, smashed a jet up because it was being sold to Indonesia where they were going to use the jet to kill civilians in east Timor. end of story.

Some people find it more difficult to draw a clear line through other actions including the Climate Change actions that saw GP activists acquitted through similar legal means.

It may be that climate change is a structural issue....

 

[boskysquelch]

It may be that climate change is a structural issue....

so what your saying is that VDA is now the ONLY option left?

 

[PAD1OH]

so what your saying is that VDA is now the ONLY option left?

well, no

I see a place for activism (as a mechanism for aspiration and empowerment) but I think our response to climate change (and all other sustainability issues) requires far more than blocking pipes and shutting down power stations. It requires a re-structuring of economies, consumption and production systems, communites, regions (and their place in global systems), individual and collective behaviours, education systems and a whole load of other exciting stuff.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

well, no

I see a place for activism (as a mechanism for aspiration and empowerment) but I think our response to climate change (and all other sustainability issues) requires far more than blocking pipes and shutting down power stations. It requires a re-structuring of economies, consumption and production systems, communites, regions (and their place in global systems), individual and collective behaviours, education systems and a whole load of other exciting stuff.

Yep, which is why I think the focus has to be much more strongly on building up a critical mass of people participating in constructive responses. With the significant probability of a deep recession coming up, a lot of that stuff will actually be consistent with family/community level self-help efforts anyway.

A lot of the strategies that seem best suited to protect communities from being arse-raped by an out of control global economy involve the same things that have to happen to address the structural sustainability issues. Governments are far more likely to hinder than help with this process because they work for the same people who are screwing the economy and the environment and when the chips are down, will always tend to act to enforce their interests on an unwilling populace (as we can see from their response outlined in the OP). So while I wouldn't consider protests aimed at changing the behaviour of governments or corporations worthless by any means, I think the only pragmatic basis for certain fundamental kinds of progress is to go around them and to do so en-masse. See e.g. http://www.feasta.org/documents/shortcircuit/contents.html

'Don't believe them, don't fear them, don't ask anything of them.'

 

[stowpirate]

It is a strange way of writing about a taboo subject.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

It is a strange way of writing about a taboo subject.

?

 

[stowpirate]

?

Ways of controlling world's growing population OP article!

 

[treelover]

David Hare anatomised the failure of privatisation in The Permanent Way; in Stuff Happens, he turned a ruthless eye on the double-think and culpable naivety that led to the Iraq war. And in his new play, Hare dramatises his final and bitter disenchantment with New Labour, the Guardian can reveal.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2008/aug/13/davidhare.theatre

Like others I think FP is one of the most condescending people on urban, she is a typical NL apparatchik, David Hare has dissected her kind brilliantly in his new play about the 'moral bankruptcy' of NL.

 

[free spirit]

is there an argument that NVDA can be framed as "terrorist" by the press/politic because it appears to the general populace to be inherently destructive as opposed to constructive?

I mean destructive in the broadest sense.

We used to always run into the problem of only being able to define ourselves by what we opposed without being able to offer a realistic and achievable alternative/transition.

this is the thing with NVDA, while it does cover destruction of property as one of the potential actions allowable, IMO property destruction (other than say painting a slogan on a wall) should only really be used in a carefully thought out way, otherwise it risks damaging the public perception of the campaign and doing more damage than it does good.

Property destruction aimed at directly stopping / hindering something from happening, eg. damaging equipment that's about to be used to chop trees down on a roads protest, or maybe even superglueing the locks of a companies head office say. Basically stuff that's easy for the public to understand, and that could be reasonably justified in court using the defence greenpeace have been using.

For example, I understand the logic behind the EF actions in support of the campaign against that quarry FP's been banging on about, but I'm not really sure that I agree with their methods in terms of property destruction at other sites that are unrelated to the actual campaign other than via ownership by the same company.

Thing is though that IMO the criminal damage law is easily sufficient to deal with any activists that do overstep the mark in this way, so there's absolutely no reason to even contemplate using terrorist legislation against us/them.

 

[free spirit]

It is a strange way of writing about a taboo subject.

Ways of controlling world's growing population OP article!

yep. I'd be willing to put large amounts of money on the police guy totally misrepresenting what any Earth Firster has actually said about the need to reduce the worlds population.

It's blatently obvious that we're currently living way beyond the earth's overall carrying capacity, and there's a very good arguement that long term the total population of the planet will need to be reduced significantly from it's predicted 9 billion peak in order to ensure the planet can sustain that number of people in the long term.

This does not however mean that anyone's actually advocating wiping out several billion people, just that we're stating an uncomfortable long term truth. Unless we're willing and able to greatly alter our current unsustainable global way of life - ie. localised production, much more careful use of resources, ending the throwaway culture etc. then one way or another the worlds population will have to be reduced substantially. If not by birthcontrol, then unfortunately it will happen through hundreds of millions of people dying from hunger, thirst, disease, hypothermia etc as there's simply not enough food, water, fuel, land, shelter etc. to cater for everyone's needs.

This is what living in an unsustainable manner actually means. It means that once you've used up all the resources you've been using in an unsustainable manner, then there'll not be enough resources left to provide for the needs of everyone. You can already see this in our unsustainable management of the fisheries. In the space of a century we've turned a fully renewable food resource capable of sustainably feeding a significant proportion of the worlds population into a rapidly dwindling resource that can only supply a tiny proportion of the food it could have had we not been so greedy.

So when environmentalists talk about population reduction, they're generally doing it because it really is an either/or equation - either we adjust rapidly to living in a much more sustainable way, or eventually the planet will only be able to support a small proportion of the people it currently can support, and billions of people will suffer and die as a result.

This is the cold hard reality of the situation in a nutshell... fuck all to do with the fwuffy ickle bunny wabbits other than the fact that we need strong levels of biodiversity in order for the world to be able to support as many people as possible - for example no bee's = much less food grown, over pollute the sea's to create a deadzone and there's no fish or sea food to be eaten from that area etc.

eta - which is why we're campaigning for us all to rapidly switch over to a more sustainable way of life, because we don't want to see billions of people dying.

 

[darkfibre]

I think it was Kunstler who summed it up well, when he commented on Bush's insistence that "The American way of life is not negotiable":

"When you refuse to negotiate, you find yourself with a new negotiating partner: Reality".

 

[darkfibre]

David Hare has dissected her kind brilliantly in his new play about the 'moral bankruptcy' of NL.

A review from today:

-- it's as if "a group of people have taken over the running of things and the rest of us are standing by, powerless, watching, like at a car crash".

This is Hare's real theme: the alienation and impotence of idealists who see the party, in which they once invested so much hope, pimping for funds and turning governance into a form of survival.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2008/nov/12/theatre1

 

[smokedout]

I think there are circumstances where a jury should be asked to decide whether serious damage to property was carried out in order to influence the government or to intimidate the public or a section of the public, for the purpose of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause, in which case it would amount in law to terrorism.

It would be for a prosecutor to decide whether to charge the miscreants with criminal damage, or extortion on blackmail, or a terrorist act.

so who chooses what they are charged with, the jury or the CPS, i think youre misunderstanding the legal system again

the CPS decides the charge, the jury decides the verdict - or are you suggesting the CPS should have charged with terrorism and let the jury decide what that actually means

not likely given the jury decided that they werent guilty because they they thought threat of global warming justifies breaking the law

so when something that could be, by the legal and your definition defined as terrorism, is rejected as legitimate protest by a jury then dont you think that there has been mistakes in the legislation - really?

 

[butchersapron]

Totally shit article WITHDRAWN.

No questions asked about guardian/observer journos operating as state conduits. Pathetic.

Note the names.

 

[treelover]

thats pretty amazing, people should still pursue it though.

 

[free spirit]

Totally shit article WITHDRAWN.

No questions asked about guardian/observer journos operating as state conduits. Pathetic.

Note the names.

good

what do we think the chances are of the observer publishing an article on say police tactics against environmental protestors over the years, or maybe an indepth investigation into the reason the police might be briefing against environmentalists in this manner..... slim I reckon, but it might help redress the balance if they did sd it's a bit hard for people to unread stuff they've already read.

 

[darkfibre]

Can anyone clarify whether that retraction was published in print - and if so, page number and position?

One of the 'comments' summed up my feelings pretty well:

syndacalist

Nov 23 08, 2:07pm

This is a reluctant retraction, carefully written to put the allegations foremost in the readers' mind rather than highlighting the unsubstantiated nature of the allegation by addressing the alleged plot first and hiding the article behind a terrible convulted title. This is not just more sloppy journalism from the Observer.

The writer has been deliberately confusing by beginning the piece with refernce to the Observer's history of environmental journalism, mentioning Waldorf Astor and Sir William Beach Thomas; the Observer's record in environmental journalism and these 2 old journalists have absolutely nothing to do with this story and mentioning this in this regard is merely an exercise in obfuscating a problem with extraneous information.

Those behind getting this story out and creating a thread of public awareness of this unsupported assertion have further succeeded with their agenda whilst the Observer has done the bear minimum to give a retraction of the story plus have allowed the opportunity to be exploited for further negative propaganda purposes.

Good spot, BTW, Butchersapron.

 

[greenman]

When is a "retraction" not a retraction?
When it is tucked away at the end of a rambling piece by the readers editor Stephen Pritchard underneath the letters on page 34.

 

[darkfibre]

Thanks, Mr. Green Chap. (for confirming my suspicions).

I notice the original arse-icle has been expunged from the interwebs... down the memoryhole with it!

Still in the google cache, though.

 

[HackneyE9]

Wow. That is a very rare, but fair and square, RESULT.