Recommended: Blame It on Fidel (2006)

I AM MORGAN

Needless to say, they’re not serious.

“If the US was serious about fighting IS, it would not only have been providing full support – both in deed and in word – to the YPG and YPJ and its sister organization, the PKK, but it would also confront Turkey on the mountains of evidence that they have in fact been supporting IS. It would demand that the borders with the Kurdish regions in Syria would be opened, and that the bombing campaign against PKK positions as well as the terror campaign against Kurdish civilians be seized [sic] immediately. Most importantly, it would take the PKK of[f] the terror list.

Unfortunately, the US’ actions have shown that it is interested in no such thing.

Rather than defeating IS, its objective is the preservation and expansion of its influence in the region. For this, Turkey is a much more valuable partner than either the YPG and YPJ or the PKK. Action speaks louder than words, and in choosing its allies the US has shown clearly where its priorities really lie: power over democracy, influence over honesty and war over peace.”

- Joris Leverink, “US deal with Turkey shows its disregard of Kurds”

Like others, I’m struck by the similarities with the Spanish Civil War and Revolution in the 1930s.

(Another good piece from ROAR.)

Quote of the day

“No se puede descolonizar sin despatriarcalizar.” [“You can’t decolonize without depatriarchalizing.”]

- Bolivian feminist and anarchist María Galindo and Mujeres Creando

More graffiti from Mujeres Creando:

“The church crucifies women every day, feminism resuscitates them. (Happy Easter)”

“Sovereignty in my country and in my body.”

“Nothing more resembles a rightwing machista than a leftwing machista.”

An interview with Galindo:



And an article about her most recent book, ¡A despatriarcar! Feminismo urgente, at Feminicidio.net.

El guión oficial del movimiento gay es el matrimonio, el guión oficial de los indígenas es la reivindicación de los usos y costumbres, el guión oficial de las mujeres es el acceso al poder masculino, y así sucesivamente. (70)

The publisher’s description:

La fundadora del colectivo boliviano Mujeres Creando y creadora de “Ninguna mujer nace para puta” nos entrega con este libro una herramienta para la acción. Teoría hecha desde y para la práctica que analiza la historia moderna del feminismo, plantea una hipótesis sobre su fracaso y promueve acciones concretas para recuperar el poder liberador y de transformación de esta concepción de la realidad, las relaciones y el poder, que involucra tanto a mujeres como a hombres.

¡A despatriarcar! Feminismo urgente es un grito que nos convoca a salir de las trampas y casilleros para recuperar la calle y la alegría de crear, junto a otras y otros, nuevos horizontes.

A bit of background on the Palmerola civilian international airport / US military base

As Nikolas Kozloff described in the wake of the 2009 coup:

Prior to the recent military coup d’etat President Manuel Zelaya declared that he would turn the base into a civilian airport, a move opposed by the former U.S. ambassador. What’s more Zelaya intended to carry out his project with Venezuelan financing.

…A couple weeks after Zelaya announced that the armed forces would proceed with construction at Palmerola the military rebelled. Led by Romeo Vásquez, the army overthrew Zelaya and deported him out of the country.

So now the coup-legacy government is going to proceed with the construction with funding from the rightwing Spanish government and continuing US military control. This (Soto Cano) is the same base, you might recall, that was used to fly the democratically elected Honduran president out of the country after he was kidnapped from his residence in his pajamas.

Tick tock?

GREECE: THE END OF AUSTERITY? from Theopi Skarlatos on Vimeo.

Syriza’s victory in Greece is potentially a huge turning point.

Anti-austerity, pro-democracy and justice movements are rising in Spain, where tens of thousands marched yesterday chanting “Tick tock” to count down the time that could be remaining for the dominance of the country’s traditional ruling parties, and it seems also in Belgium.

We shouldn’t forget that these movements represent only the most recent wave of opposition to austerity programs. These protests have been going on around the world, receiving even less attention and respect from the corporate media than those in Europe, for literally decades. Their success in Europe will hopefully contribute to the renewal or construction of links of solidarity with the millions of people in countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean who’ve been defending their rights against Structural Adjustment for so long, often at great cost.

It’s also important to remember that these struggles are not just about policies and statistics but people’s lives, their pain and their possibilities. As Paul Mason reports from Greece:

The organiser [of a Syriza food bank] tells me: “This is the opposite of charity. We’re supporting 120 families in one area, and a lot of the work we do is about isolation, mental health and shame.” You cannot get more micro-political than sitting in a small room with desperate people and talking them out of suicide. Spin becomes impossible, the trust built hard to destroy.

Austerity policies everywhere create suffering, despair, fear, and hopelessness,* and opposing them can mean healing and health. Reading about the refugees of the Spanish Civil War in Los últimos españoles de Mauthausen is a harsh reminder of what’s at stake. Victories of the Left don’t inevitably lead to perfect solutions, but victories of capital and the far Right lead to the ruin of everything good.

* And I’ll reiterate once more for the record: these are NOT failed policies. No reasonable person could possibly believe, given decades of evidence of their effects, that they represent anything other than successful attempts to achieve the real goals of finance capital and the IMF, and no one promoting or implementing them can claim otherwise in good faith.

“Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship” and the Spanish Civil War

In connection to my last post… I’ve been meaning to mention that Noam Chomsky’s incisive analysis of liberal histories of the Spanish Civil War – part of the essay on “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship” in his 1969 American Power and the New Mandarins - is included as a chapter in the recent On Anarchism:



I have problems with some of the arguments in the book, but if you’re interested in the Spanish Civil War and/or in how intellectual work is subtly shaped by politics and ideology, it would probably be worth buying for this chapter alone.

Deportados

The 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi camps is being marked in Spain by historical attention to both the Spanish deportees and the role of the Franco regime in the Holocaust. Carlos Hernández de Miguel has published Los últimos españoles de Mauthausen, which amazingly is available (only in Spanish) for Kindle for under $5:



The book draws on various sources, including the recollections of survivors. I’ve just started reading it, and my throat hurts from the rising emotions. I don’t know how I’m going to make it all the way through.

There’s a site, Deportados, where you can find more information:



The paper El Público is also running a series on the subject, featuring interviews with survivors and articles about the complicity of the Franco government with the Nazi genocide.

The necrophilous Ayn Rand, Part 1

I’ve recently started following along with Adam Lee’s insightful and entertaining journey through Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged. Reading several of the older posts in his series as I’ve caught up, I’ve been struck by how well Rand seems to personify Erich Fromm’s conception of the necrophilous character. In this post I’ll describe what Fromm meant by the necrophilous character, and in the next I’ll draw on several quotations from Rand featured in Lee’s series as evidence of her necrophilous tendencies.

While Fromm saw the necrophilous* character as loosely related to sexual necrophilia, it was primarily drawn from a critical analysis of Freud’s idea of the “death instinct” and his own understanding of the human tendency and potential for biophilia. Here’s how Fromm defined biophilia and the basic biophilic ethic:

Biophilia is the passionate love of life and of all that is alive. It is the wish to further growth, whether in a person, a plant, an idea, or a social group.** The biophilous person prefers to construct rather than to retain. He wants to be more rather than to have more. He is capable of wondering, and he prefers to see something new rather than to find confirmation of the old. He loves the adventure of living more than he does certainty. He sees the whole rather than only the parts, structures rather than summations. He wants to mold and to influence by love, reason, and example; not by force, by cutting things apart, by the bureaucratic manner of administering people as if they were things….

Biophilic ethics have their own principle of good and evil. Good is all that serves life; evil is all that serves death. Good is reverence for life, all that enhances life, growth, unfolding. Evil is all that stifles life, narrows it down, cuts it into pieces. (Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, 406; all further Fromm quotations are from the same volume)

Necrophilous tendencies, as this suggests, were the antithesis of biophilic ones:

Necrophilia in the characterological sense can be described as the passionate attraction to all that is dead, decayed, putrid, sickly; it is the passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive; to destroy for the sake of destruction; the exclusive interest in all that is purely mechanical. It is the passion to tear apart living structures. (369; emphasis in original)

Fromm didn’t believe that we have a death instinct or that the necrophilous character was innate and unavoidable. Instead, he thought people naturally had a more biophilic orientation which served human health and growth, but that its development could be blocked or subverted by childhood experience or culture. “Destructiveness,” he argued,

is not parallel to, but the alternative to biophilia. Love of life or love of the dead is the fundamental alternative that confronts every human being. Necrophilia grows as the development of biophilia is stunted. Man is biologically endowed with the capacity for biophilia, but psychologically he has the potential for necrophilia as an alternative solution. (406-7; emphasis in original)

So necrophilous tendencies are likely to develop in certain cultural atmospheres that interfere with biophilic growth.

While the definition of the necrophilous character above might seem to have a fairly narrow range, Fromm saw necrophilous tendencies as encompassing much of modern Western culture. The love of the “nonliving” could be seen not only in the direct attraction to the “dead, decayed, putrid, sickly” but also in an undue affection for the technological and mechanical, one of “the simplest and most obvious characteristics of contemporary industrial man: the stifling of his focal interest in people, nature, and living structures, together with the increasing attraction of mechanical, nonalive artifacts” (381).

While one recent biographer has suggested that Fromm was anti-technology, and some of his statements superficially suggest a hostility to science, what he in fact seemed to oppose was a particular orientation toward and conception of science and technology: one that wasn’t centered on life and growth or based in love of humanity and the world, that was alienated and alienating. After describing some examples of technological necrophilousness involving cars, cameras, and – a great word – “gadgeteers,” for example, he clarifies:

…I do not imply that using an automobile, or taking pictures, or using gadgets is in itself a manifestation of necrophilous tendencies. But it assumes this quality when it becomes a substitute for interest in life and for exercising the rich functions with which the human being is endowed. I also do not imply that the engineer who is passionately interested in the construction of machines of all kinds shows, for this reason, a necrophilous tendency. He may be a very productive person with great love of life that he expresses in his attitude toward people, toward nature, toward art, and in his constructive technical ideas. I am referring, rather, to those individuals whose interest in artifacts has replaced their interest in what is alive and who deal with technical matters in a pedantic and unalive way. (382; emphasis in original)

Fromm’s go-to example of a techno-necrophilous culture (in contrast to the more traditionalist necrophilousness of the Spanish fascists) was F. T. Marinetti and the other Italian Futurists. Quoting from Marinetti’s 1909 “Futurist Manifesto”, he writes: “Here we see the essential elements of necrophilia: worship of speed and the machine; poetry as a means of attack; glorification of war; destruction of culture; hate against women; locomotives and airplanes as living forces” (383).

So as Fromm saw it necrophilous tendencies could be expressed through both the hatred of living things and the attraction to death, destruction, and decay and the rejection of the living world in favor of the mechanical, nonliving realm of techno-driven society. Importantly, though, in this age of ecological destruction, he recognized the latter as in some sense also an expression of the former:

The world of life has become a world of ‘no-life’; persons have become ‘nonpersons’, a world of death. Death is no longer symbolically expressed by unpleasant-smelling feces or corpses. Its symbols are now clean, shining machines; men are not attracted to smelly toilets, but to structures of aluminum and glass. But the reality behind this antiseptic façade becomes increasingly visible. Man, in the name of progress, is transforming the world into a stinking and poisonous place (and this is not symbolic).*** He pollutes the air, the water, the soil, the animals – and himself. He is doing this to a degree that has made it doubtful whether the earth will still be livable within a hundred years from now. He knows the facts, but in spite of many protesters, those in charge go on in the pursuit of technical ‘progress’ and are willing to sacrifice all life in the worship of their idol. (389; my emphasis)

…It makes little difference whether he does it intentionally or not. If he had no knowledge of the possible danger, he might be acquitted from responsibility. But it is the necrophilous element in his character that prevents him from making use of the knowledge he has.

…We must conclude that the lifeless world of total technicalization is only another form of the world of death and decay. This fact is not conscious to most, but to use an expression of Freud’s, the repressed often returns, and the fascination with death and decay becomes as visible as in the malignant anal character. (390; my emphasis)

Though Fromm wrote in individual terms, he saw the necrophilous tendency as a cultural product (driven by capitalism and Cold War politics; he paid less attention to patriarchy). He didn’t claim that people could be neatly sorted into “necrophilous” and “biophilous” boxes, but that most people exhibited both tendencies to some degree and that their relative strength was influenced by experience within a given culture and age. Very few people, he argued, could be described as fully one or the other. But he did mention, notably, several individual scientists (391) whom he considered representative of biophilia, and contended that there existed “a small minority…in whom there is no trace of necrophilia, who are pure biophiles motivated by the most intense and pure love for all that is alive. Albert Schweitzer, Albert Einstein, and Pope John XXIII are among the well-known recent examples of this minority” (408).

I imagine many would question at least one person on this particular list - Fromm had an annoying tendency to idolize certain living or historical men (always men, as far as I can recall) as representatives of biophilia and as borderline messianic figures. In my next post, I’ll suggest some ways in which Ayn Rand fascinatingly illustrates the necrophilous character – in a manner that illuminates particular features of capitalism, patriarchy, and contemporary attitudes toward science, technology, and ecology.

* Fromm took the term from an angry response from Spanish writer-philosopher Miguel de Unamuno to a speech by the Francoist general José Millán Astray in 1936 which he quoted frequently (368).

** Although today the term “biophilia” connotes a relationship with the whole of the living world, Fromm’s formulation was often very human-centered. As his ideas developed, they did become more ecological (as can be seen in Anatomy and also in To Have or To Be?), but they never really came to include nonhuman animals in any meaningful way; in fact, nonhuman animals were often presented as objects or oppositional forces in Fromm’s work. This is somewhat surprising since Fromm repeatedly lists Albert Schweitzer as among those most representative of biophilia – “one of the great representatives of the love of life – both in his writings and in his person” (406). (I suppose this shouldn’t be so surprising: Jean-Paul Sartre was Schweitzer’s second cousin and he still managed to become one of the most speciesist of humanistic thinkers.)

*** The best example of the overlap between these two forms of necrophilousness, in which the attraction to the “antiseptic façade” barely conceals the desire for the “stinking and poisonous place” is in contemporary factory farming. As it grows bigger and more wrapped in mechanical rhetoric and “clean,” scientific practice, the ecological destruction becomes more and more visible – the toxic lagoons that surround CAFOs, the pollution of the surrounding water, the emissions of methane, the stench,…

Does the Spanish government know something about the Honduran elections the rest of us don't?

They've congratulated Juan Orlando Hernández on his victory before a winner has been announced.

The far Right in Spain and across Europe

A couple of recent articles discuss the state of the far Right in Europe.

The first (marred somewhat by anecdotal and unsourced claims and references) focuses on Spain, but situates developments there in the larger context. Andrés Cala describes “a rising public nostalgia for the Franco era in Spain” forming part of “a broader resurgence of extreme right-wing ideology in Europe and globally” (I’ve briefly discussed Greece and Poland):

Renewed sympathy for fascism in Spain…stirs troubling memories because the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s was an early victory for European fascism. Spain also was the last European state to cast off fascism in 1975.

Another point of concern is that nationalist, populist and fascist movements have historically found fertile ground during times of economic pain, like that felt across much of the world since the Wall Street crash of 2008. In reacting to the financial crisis – and in grappling with the public’s anger over lost jobs and lost benefits – mainstream democratic parties have seen their legitimacy questioned and their political support drained.

In Spain – and to a lesser extent in some other European countries – the immediate danger is not so much from a handful of incipient reactionary movements, but rather from the underlying official permissiveness from more mainstream conservative parties, like the Popular Party, bordering on patronage.

…[T]he severe economic recession that spread across the world after the Wall Street crash – and the EU’s austerity-oriented policies imposed in response – hit Spain especially hard with the country’s unemployment rate soaring to around 27 percent. The loss of jobs and the failure of the democratic political structure to devise an adequate response created an opening for the rightists to revive nationalistic and other traditional cultural messages that had underpinned Franco’s politics.

Though the Popular Party is generally considered conservative – not extreme right – it absorbed the pro-Franco fascist “base” after that movement lost its political representation in parliament in 1982, seven years after Franco died. That extreme right now amounts to about 10 percent of the Popular Party’s constituency, according to some studies.

The numbers of far-right members are high enough so that the Popular Party is politically unwilling to chastise fascist sympathies and thus alienate a significant portion of its support. But the party is making a dangerous bet that the pro-Franco faction will not gain effective control of the Popular Party and thus fully hoist the banner of fascism again.

Police estimate there are about 10,000 Spaniards involved in violent extreme-right groups. But the concern is not so much over these very small violent groups. These are mostly contained, experts agree. The bigger worry is that Franco’s political heirs retain significant influence within the ruling Popular Party and – amid the euro crisis – they could gain greater political clout.

…In Spain, the chief concern is that an increasingly desperate public will be attracted to the historical glow that is being created around a mythical era of successful fascism under Franco.

“It’s true that this is not Greece or France, where the extreme right has become a political power,” Félix Ortega, a sociology professor and expert in public opinion in the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, told me recently. “But you never know, especially if it seems that the PP tolerates it.”

This was especially disturbing as I read it at the same time I was beginning Paul Preston’s The Spanish Holocaust:



The second article describes a plan to unite the far-Right parties ahead of the European elections:

Europe's far-right parties are set to contest next year's European elections on a common manifesto, according to French National Front leader Marine Le Pen.

At a press conference in the Strasbourg Parliament on Wednesday (23 October), Le Pen, flanked by Franz Obermayr of the Austrian anti-immigration Freedom party, told reporters that she was hopeful of persuading nationalist candidates from across the EU to run on the ticket of the European Alliance for Freedom (EAF).

Despite the comedic frustrations of holding together an assortment of racist nationalists,* even short-lived coalitions should be a cause for concern.

In this connection, I should note that white supremacist murderer and terrorist Pavlo Lapshyn has been sentenced to 40 years in prison in Britain:

Lapshyn found Mohammed Saleem, 82, going home after praying at his local mosque. The student approached him from behind and plunged a hunting knife into him three times with such force that one wound went through to his front.

Lapshyn's campaign began in April 2013, just five days after his arrival from Ukraine, where he had won a prize to gain work experience in Britain. When the PhD student was arrested in July, police found three partially assembled bombs in his Birmingham flat.

After Saleem's murder, Lapshyn started placing homemade explosives outside mosques on Fridays, the main day of Muslim prayer.

The device he planted in July, which had 100 nails wrapped around it to maximise the carnage, was aimed at worshippers at the Tipton mosque, where 300 were people were expected to attend prayers.

Prayers that particular Friday were held an hour later, thus avoiding mass casualties. The device was so powerful it left nails embedded in tree trunks, police said.

…After sentencing, Louise Gray, a lawyer for the Crown Prosecution Service counter-terrorism division, said: "Pavlo Lapshyn is a dangerous man with a dangerous agenda. Just a day after his arrival in Britain from the Ukraine he was researching rightwing supremacist websites, including those linked to convicted racist murderers in Russia."

* The author mentions that

difficulties maintaining discipline and a failure to agree on common programmes have dogged previous attempts to unite the far-right.

The Identity, Tradition and Sovereignty (ITS) group was set up in 2007 but only lasted ten months before collapsing when three MEPs representing the Greater Romania party walked out in protest at inflammatory remarks made by Alessandra Mussolini, granddaughter of the Italian dictator, about Romanian people.”

Spiegl to Dutch parliament: Morgan is “a child of the Netherlands”

The other day, Matthew Spiegl published an open letter* to the members of the Dutch parliament petitioning them (and the Dutch people) to revisit the case of the orca Morgan and to intervene to halt the inertia of the decisions that have led to her imprisonment and exploitation at Loro Parque.

On December 3, 2013 the High Court in Den Haag will once again review the case of Morgan the Orca, found off the Dutch coast and now housed in a Spanish amusement park. But why does this issue have to be resolved by the court at all?

The Dutch Parliament has it within its power to act in the best interest of Morgan, to undo the mistake of the previous Government, and direct that she be moved to a sea pen and held in public trust for the good of all, in the hope she can one day be returned to the sea.

…The Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, Agriculture and Innovation is still the issuing CITES management authority and can - if it has the will to do so - recall Morgan from Loro Parque if the conditions there place Morgan at risk, which appears to be the case.

Morgan should not be confined to a concrete tank for the rest of her life, and the debate about her should not be confined to the pages of a legal brief or the formalities of a lengthy court proceeding or even the political procedural process of Parliament.

The debate about Morgan must be led by the people of the Netherlands - in the name of humanity - and on behalf of us all.

(It appears that Blackfish – to which Spiegl refers in his letter - will be premiering in the Netherlands in a couple of weeks, and could well have an effect on the course of events.)

To me, the most interesting aspect of the letter was Spiegl’s framing of his appeal not only in terms of national identity but in terms of an ethic of maternal care:

Morgan’s right to be free must be shouted out at the top of our voices and from the depth of our hearts, with the same passion and conviction as a mother protecting her child.

When Morgan was taken from the Wadden Sea, she became a child of the Netherlands, a ward of the Dutch people to be held in public trust by the Dutch Government until she could be released back to the sea, to rejoin her real mother.

All the world is watching, all the world is waiting, all the world knows that the fate of Morgan can change this world forever and make it a better place for all.

The maternal metaphor – with which I’m not entirely comfortable - is apt given orca social structure. But, although Spiegl is from the US, it’s almost unimaginable, in this land of anxious masculinity, that an appeal to legislators would ask them to imagine themselves and the country as the collective mother of any human or other animal. I would love to know if that’s more common or resonant in the Dutch context….

*I admit I’m a little confused about the SeaWorld documents Spiegl cites and links to and whether Morgan is among the subjects of the exchange, as he contends.

Habeas Porpoise? Really?

Oh, who am I kidding? Of course I love it.

Arie Trouwborst, Richard Caddell, and Ed Couzens, whose article about the orca Morgan in Transnational Environmental Law I mentioned previously, have a follow-up post at the Cambridge journals blog.

The Amsterdam District Court reviewed the previous decision, yet after consideration upheld the finding that Morgan’s transfer was legitimate. We consider this verdict to be demonstrably legally flawed. The Court based its determination primarily on a surprising appraisal of the ASCOBANS text, finding that a removal of an orca for rehabilitation purposes did not constitute “intentional taking” (such taking being precluded under the treaty). Moreover, the Court considered that enduring captivity was justified by the need to conduct research pursuant to obligations under ASCOBANS. This is deeply perplexing, since ASCOBANS does not consider permanent captivity for research (or any other) purposes acceptable. The judgment remains highly unsatisfactory in the light of these and other treaty obligations, while the Court seemingly ignored evidence that the facility to which the orca had been transferred does not engage in substantive research into cetacean ecology.

It must have been difficult for people to keep a straight face while arguing that Morgan’s captivity at Loro Parque was about research. It’s very obviously a theme park in which animals are exploited for human entertainment.

criminal tendencies

Eduardo Galeano has a new book out – Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History.



It features an entry for each day of the year. Here’s the one for February 15:

More Stolen Children

‘Marxism is the worst form of mental illness’, ruled Colonel Antonio Vallejo Nájera, psychiatrist supreme in Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s Spain.

He had studied Republican mothers in prison and proven that they harbored ‘criminal tendencies’.

To defend the purity of the Iberian race, threatened by Marxist degeneration and maternal delinquency, thousands of newborns and infants, children of Republican parents, were kidnapped and plopped into the arms of families devoted to the cross and sword.

Who were those children? Who are they, so many years later?

No one knows.

Franco’s dictatorship falsified the records to cover its tracks and ordered everyone to forget: it stole the children and it stole their memory.

Unconscionable by any measure

One remark in Matthew Spiegl’s piece about the recent SeaWorld IPO stood out:

“[T]o perpetuate the practice of keeping orcas in captivity is unconscionable by any measure of any standard in today's society.”

Not much more to say.

In searching for more about the IPO, I came across references to a new documentary, Blackfish.



Here are a review of the film and an interview with the director, Gabriela Cowperthwaite.

In related news, the Free Morgan Foundation linked to a legal analysis of the Morgan case in the journal Transnational Environmental Law, which the journal has made available for free.

Three Dead Animals

The joyous poem I posted yesterday in honor of National Poetry Month can’t be allowed to stand alone. I’m compelled to add my own bleak, angry offering (some background):

Three Dead Animals

The bullfighter, writer, and sportsman Ignacio Sánchez Mejías died
poetically
the morning of 13 August, 1934.

The bull Granadino died
obscurely
around that time.

The poet Federico García Lorca died
ritually
in the same era.

Unfortunate decision in Morgan case

Sending her to Loro Parque wasn't unlawful, the judge found.

Shut it down.

Last month, protesters chanting “Shut it down!” managed to (peacefully) storm the gate at Marineland in Niagara Falls, Canada. (In developments today, it’s being reported that Marineland is threatening to sue a former trainer for more than $1 million over her statements to the Toronto Star about injuries to an orca named Kiska confined at the park.)

In related news, yesterday was an important court date in Amsterdam for the orca Morgan, when more arguments were to be brought and reports submitted in favor of getting her released from Loro Parque in the Canary Islands. You can read more here, here, and here. I haven't found any updates, but I'll post them when I do.

Will Potter interviewed about repression of animal rights movement

Here are a couple of highly insightful responses from a brief interview with a Spanish collective:

...As you know, here in Spain some activists have been charged with animal liberation related stuff. They are (or were) all involved with legal campaigning. The comparison with the SHAC 7 or the Austrian activists case is inevitable. Do you think laws like the AETA can have some “copycat” laws in other countries?

Absolutely. Spain, Austria, Finland, and elsewhere are experienc[ing] similar copycat prosecutions. The corporate-led campaigns to demonize animal rights and environmental activists as “eco-terrorists” have indeed become international in scope. I would argue that this is an example of how these tactics are not “state repression,” as leftists generally describe it, but “corporate repression.” The state may be carrying out these tactics, but only because corporations are seeking to protect their profits around the world.

Which are, in your opinion, the “low points” of the movement which make it vulnerable to repressive attacks like the green scare, the AETA…?

The strategy behind the government’s tactics is fragmentation. In discussing this, I think it’s helpful to visualize social movements as having a “horizontal” and “vertical” component. The intention is to separate these movements horizontally, and create rifts between them and the broader left. Animal rights activists and environmentalists are therefore depicted as ideological extremists who, if they have their way, will stop you from eating meat and driving cars and having pets. There are of course already tensions between these movements and the more traditional left, but campaigns by corporations and politicians intend to exacerbate them. If these movements are not seen as part of a broader social justice struggle, it is easier for other leftist and progressive groups to turn their backs on their repression.

Similarly, there is a campaign to fragment these movements vertically. Aboveground lawful groups are told that they must condemn underground groups, and if they do not they will also be treated as terrorists. This two-prong strategy — breaking these movements away from other social movements, and breaking the aboveground away from the underground — isolates those who are being targeted and intensifies the repression.

So, to answer your question more directly, the most effective tactic for repressing these movements has been to turn the activists against each other, either by pressuring them to become informants or by pressuring them to publicly condemn each other....

Interlude - From The Book of Embraces

Another:

CONSUMER CIVILIZATION

Sometimes, at the end of the summer when the tourists left Calella, you could hear howls coming from the forest. They were the cries of dogs tethered to the trees.

The tourists used the dogs to relieve their loneliness during their vacation, and then, when the time came to leave, tied them up deep in the woods to keep them from following.