A friend of mine who writes for the anarchist magazine The Fifth Estate recently sent me their headline story for Spring 2009, issue #380. The piece by Henry Reed discusses the exorbitantly long sentences given to “terrorists” who damage property as a way to protest damaging environmental policies, using the case of Marie Mason (“sentenced to nearly 22 years in prison… after pleading guilty to two acts of eco-sabotage”) as a lens for analyzing the phenomenon.
There’s a lot of interesting and scary information in the piece that highlights how much the huge penalties given reflect wounded capitalist ideology rather than actual criminal fears:
For several years I lived in an apartment building on a crowded residential street on one of the last ungentrified blocks in my neighborhood. In one year, the buildings on both sides of my dwelling mysteriously burned. In their place, condos were built. No charges were filed; the police, the courts, and the city government smiled upon these “accidental” fires. The lives of dozens, if not hundreds, of people were put at risk.
Mason and Ambrose, on the other hand, burned down an unoccupied research building in the middle of the night, far from residential housing. No one was intended to be hurt and no one was.
The difference is that their acts were an attack on the “marketplace” ‐ not on humans. Attack the marketplace and you are a terrorist in the eyes of the State. Threaten the lives of hundreds of low-income residents to build condos and you are an entrepreneur and an upstanding citizen.
But what really jumped out at me about the article was a tangent that relates to the issue at hand, but which I also felt suggested a deeper analysis:
Since when have ideas been part of a “marketplace”? Intellectual thought, at its best, has always been a deeply subversive enterprise, unconstrained by the society in which it germinates.
Situationist theorist Guy Debord declared that in modern society the commodity form had colonized all aspects of everyday life, and both Grey and Maloney’s statements illustrate this. They cannot even talk about ideas, which are free, without framing them in the language of the market. Socrates committed suicide as a testimony to the power of critical ideas to resist the social norms of society.
I found this latter quote very profound. An economy is only part of a functioning culture. It’s frightening how much everything, from human relationships to ideological pursuits, is rendered through the lens of capitalist economics. It’s frightening, and it’s unhealthy. My ideas are not a marketplace, and my personhood is not determined by my economic worth alone.
I’m inclined to ask here, what sort of research building? Because, frankly, if you burn down a research institution dedicated to human health and, in the process, destroy data that will set back cures and other important knowledge of keeping people alive and healthy … you aren’t just hurting capitalism. You’re hurting people.
I certainly don’t think that violent environmental activists who can be shown to be taking precautions against directly physically harming others should be subjected to the same punishments as homicidal terrorists. But I also don’t think that violence is a legitimate form of protest that should be protected and not punished. And not just because it makes capitalism sad.
I don’t think it’s fair to call a bombing of a university building that caused more than $1 million in damage “eco-sabotage.” Here is a link to a Michigan State news story about the attack, which also mentions a 1992 arson:
Oopsie! Mason’s wikipedia page says the office she attacked “held records related to research on moth-resistant potatoes for poor parts of Africa”. This directory of the Michigan State international agriculture institute lists some of the humans who work in Ag Hall, who might have considered the arson an attack on them. The “marketplace of ideas” metaphor, like all metaphors, has its limitations. I don’t see it as about putting a monetary value on ideas or persons, but that ideas can be exchanged and experienced by all comers (for whatever reason I’m visualizing the local Saturday farmers’ market, with people wandering up and down the lines of stalls and tables).
“But I also don’t think that violence is a legitimate form of protest that should be protected and not punished.”
People say this stuff over and over again, but it completely misses the point. No one is saying that people like Mason should not be punished.
The question is: why, when you engage in illegal acts in defense of the environment, are you punished for “terrorism” when the same acts, when done for profit, are simply “arson”?
Nowadays people are being charged with “terrorism” for all kinds of political acts: for organizing demonstrations in Minneapolis/St Paul against the RNC (the RNC8), and even, in California – and I joke not here – four people (the AETA4) are being charged with terrorism for: chalking on sidewalks; passing out flyers that contain publicly-available informtion, and for attending a legal demonstration.
That’s what the applications of these extensions of terrorism have come to: people chalking on sidewalks are being accused of terrorism under the new laws.
A brave new world, indeed.
Huh, I tried to throw an update on this last night. I guess it didn’t take? Weird. Thanks for taking care of it, Amp.
“I don’t see it as about putting a monetary value on ideas or persons, but that ideas can be exchanged and experienced by all comers ”
Okay. But you can’t really take an ambiguous phrase and say it has -only- the non-disturbing meaning you’d like to promote, especially in a culture that uses capitalist metaphors to describe most things, including human relationships. The idea that capitalism leads to a change in how people are regarded so that they’re seen as economic cogs instead of people whose worth is determined by human relationships is not exactly breaking news. I mean, this is what, 17th century philosophy, via Durkheim?
I think that if you burn down a building to collect insurance money, or for other financial gain you’re committing arson and fraud. (among other things)
I think that if you burn down a building to scare me into doing what you want you’re committing an act of terrorism. (among other things)
I think that the reason you do something has some relevance into how I (or society) should react to what you did. It’s not the only consideration but it needs to be considered.
fwiw i think the long sentences for ‘terrorism’ have more to do with politicians desire to project a certain image than with anything else. Than you get a prosecutor who will use any and all tools at their disposal and away we go. See also, tough on crime, and the drug war.
As for the metaphor I don’t think ideas are free. Many people get paid for their ideas. Depending on how broadly you want to define the word ‘idea’ this could be a small number, or every doctor/lawyer/engineer/accountant/etc working today. I think this is good. There’s a clear and substantial difference between say, my caffeine fueled musing on race or gender spoken after a minute of thought, and Rachael’s well thought out and researched paper.
Even if we are referring to ideas that were not generated in expectation of payment there’s cost. This post is a great example. I spent no money to read it (not counting the cost to get online etc.) but I gave up the opportunity to see another idea in it’s place. Or to watch TV, do my effin Taxes, get paid to carry lumber, or exercise. So in a sense, mandolin’s idea has to compete with other ideas and activities for time, attention, and consideration. The competition is not for money, but there’s still a cost of opportunity.
Because arson is a crime against a specific person. Terrorism is a crime against society, or a large group of people. Terrorism usually has a larger effect.
So, for example, “some guy is heading to my town looking for his best friend so he can shoot him” and “some guy is heading to my town so he can shoot someone with brown hair.” Same crime (killing someone), different effect.
I am not really comfortable classifying all violent protest as ‘terrorism’ though, mostly because internally i am having trouble viewing this as consistent with my pwn personal “know it when I see it” terrorism definition.
Joe wrote:
I suppose we can all have our own personal definitions of these things, but I sincerely invite you to ask yourself: do you want to place a person who straps bombs to his or her body and blows up a bus full of people together with a person who burns down a lab while taking specific precautions not to hurt anyone? Is one word, “terrorism,” which happens to be a favorite of the government and the police, really useful to you when thinking about the ethical issues implied in these two acts? Do you really see no useful difference between them simply because they are both somehow connected with changing the behavior of some other person?
As far as I’m concerned, the state wants to put the two things in one category because A) it’s having trouble finding real terrorists to round up and B) because property damage is very scary to corporate interests. Do WE gain anything from putting them together? Or are we just aping the classifications handed down to us from above?
This sounds like the argument against the categorization of certain crimes as “hate crimes” based on the motive of the defendant, and I agree with Sailorman that there’s a very good reason to punish someone more heavily for attempting to terrorize a group of people than for attempting to hurt a single person. I think our society should say to people who are considering using crime to frighten people out of interracial marriage, or research using animals, or even accepting huge AIG bonuses — basically, using crime to frighten people out of doing things they have a legal right to do — “If you do that, you will get punished more than someone who does the same thing just for profit.”
In my opinion, it is much worse to commit a crime in order to terrorize a group of people than to commit a crime for money, so long as the two crimes are otherwise equal in type, likelihood of harm to persons and property, etc.
I’m also wondering about the facts behind the anecdote that authority “smiled upon” arson that was done in order to build condos. I’m just not clear about why someone would commit arson in order to build a different building, rather than for the insurance money. There was widespread arson for that reason in the 1970s in New York (hence “The Bronx Is Burning”), but it wasn’t to achieve gentrification; it was so landlords could get money out of building that were otherwise unprofitable or a money sinkhole.
As for marketplace of ideas, it has nothing to do with the cost of ideas; it has to do with the freedom of choice in accepting those ideas. One of the popularizers of the metaphor was Oliver Wendell Holmes in cases dealing with government efforts to repress speech and other First Amendment rights. Just as capitalism theoretically allows the best goods and services to thrive (“best” being determined by consumers’ preferences for them), a marketplace of ideas allows the best ideas to thrive as determined by people’s preferences for them. The theory behind the metaphor is that government should not set itself up as the arbiter of the “good” vs. “bad” ideas; it should allow people to choose freely.
tea party,
You’re setting up a straw man. No one has said that there is “no useful difference between them simply because they are both somehow connected with changing the behavior of some other person.” Rather, some of us are saying that when you are trying to frighten people out of doing something they have a legal right to do, you are committing terrorism. Do you disagree with this as a definition of terrorism? Should terrorism no longer refer to the motive and goals of the person committing the crime, but instead to the target? (“It’s only terrorism if you are trying to physically hurt a person, so as long as you bomb the abortion clinic at 2am, it’s totally not terrorism even though you are trying to terrorize people out of exercising their rights to provide and obtain abortions.”)
Tangential comment:
While I haven’t read the fifth estate in a number of years, the older fifth estate was quite critical of “leftism.” One of my favorite writers was Fredy Perlman (who also translated the above mentioned Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle”).
I’d recommend Perlman’s “The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism” as one of the definitive critics of l anti-imperialist politics, along the lines of Orwell’s “Animal Farm”.
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/perlman-fredy/1984/nationalism.htm
Also “Antisemitism and the Beruit Pogrom” is an interesting read.
http://libcom.org/library/anti-semitism-beirut-program-fredy-perlman
Low-income people constitute societies. Low-income people are large groups of people. And how do we define a “large” effect? If it’s on the news? If national governments take notice? The article states that hundreds of lives may have been put at risk – if that’s the case, isn’t that a large enough effect to count as terrorism? If I were living on that street and two other buildings were burned down to make room for condos, I’d be terrorized into complying with the wishes of landlords and developers.
PG said:
My point was that when Joe says “all crimes intended to scare people are terrorism,” he is supporting the prosecution’s line, which puts property destruction and slaughter in the same category. He is also buying into Bush Administration language and I don’t see why anyone not on the Right has any interest in doing so. (Except maybe in the case of far-Right direct action, which often DOES target people).
Do I agree with “trying to frighten people out of doing something they have a legal right to do” as a definition of terrorism? Eh, not really—certainly not if it gives an arsonist a larger sentence than a murderer in the same society where the military murders by the tens and hundreds of thousands. At the very least distinguish between political criminals who intend to hurt others and those who don’t.
Also, we need to acknowledge that the law is often ghostwritten by lobbyists, and the U.S. has a long and proud history of extralegal activism that points to the injustice of the law. See the Boston Tea Party, which would be terrorism under your definition!
For the record, I do believe Marie committed a crime and deserves a sentence. But the one she got is excessive and opens to door to worse abuses in the future. See rnc8.org/ for one example.
emphasis mine.
I would say that if the fire was started for that purpose, or if that outcome was reasonably foreseen it would be terrorism. If I burn down my house so I can rebuild a better house (or apartment building) I’m committing arson. If I burn it down so that my neighbor will be scared and agree to sell me her house (for whatever reason) I’ve committed terrorism.
also, fwiw, the excerpt states that charges were never filed so we don’t know what the prosecutor would have charged. The writer gives us they’re opinion, (and it sounds fishy to me) but there’s more info needed.
while taking specific precautions not to hurt anyone
Everything I’ve read about the incident mentions that no one was injured or killed, but I’ve found nothing online that indicates any special precautions were taken to insure that. Granted, the arson took place a night, but that doesn’t mean anyone wasn’t or couldn’t have been in the building. Night security? Stationary engineers? Janitors? Tradespeople doing work in areas that couldn’t be worked on during the day? Who warned those people? Prior to starting the fire, did they walk through the building to make sure it was evacuated, and then lock the doors so no one could enter? Did they set the fire in such a way as to insure its almost immediate collapse, so that by the time the fire department arrived, there was little danger of firefighters being crushed while putting it out?
Mind you, I think 22 years for this type of crime is ridiculous, considering no one was hurt. Especially considering the time given to Ambrose for his turning states’ evidence. But….this wasn’t a nonviolent crime, and while Mason and Ambrose may have had strong feelings about why they felt setting the fire was necessary, the leap from arguments toward ‘people, animals and the ecosystem were in immediate danger’ to ‘can’t wait for legal means of combating this—must set fire now!’ is a biggie. And it’s why there isn’t a large public outcry over the out-of-ordinary sentence (in this case), or the label “eco-terrorist” (in general).
I mean, if I didn’t know any better, I’d think this was the work of an agent provocateur, designed to cast aspersions on the legitmate arguments and aims of the environmental movement. As it is, I think Mason was sincere but completely misguided, and Ambrose seems like a sketchy character to me.
Then again, I’m one of those people that misses the point of the ELF and similar groups. None of their actions seem to be having the desired effect, their targets cash in on insurance claims, and the only people who take the hit are the workers that show up in the morning and are sent home with two-hours show-up time (if they’re union, nothing if they’re not) because the equipment is damaged. The reaction from the general public isn’t sympathetic. These type of actions don’t make people think about how the environment is being harmed—they make people think about how other people could be harmed from these actions. Seems to me that what’s really radical is changing minds—-that doesn’t seem to be the goal here.
Because arson is a crime against a specific person. Terrorism is a crime against society, or a large group of people. Terrorism usually has a larger effect.
And terrorism has a stated political goal or aim.
At the very least distinguish between political criminals who intend to hurt others and those who don’t.
See, I think there is room for disagreement in this instance. Did Mason and Ambrose exhaust most of the legal means of combating the research at this facility prior to setting the fire? Doesn’t look like it. Was setting the fire their only reasonable option? Again, doesn’t look like it. Is it reasonable to assume that no one was injured because of pure, dumb luck? Yes, it is.
My personal assumption when I first read about this years ago was (a) must be an agent provocateur; no one would really be that stupid, and (b) bet they didn’t care about who was hurt in that fire (fires being generally uncontrollable once they get moving). ‘Nother words, it wasn’t clear at all to me that the persons setting the fire cared about anyone who got in their way.
I do agree with problems regarding the “terrorist” label though—groups like the KKK and various other white supremacist groups, along with abortion clinic bombers, aren’t labelled “terrorists”, despite their actions being designed to endanger and intimidate large groups of people for political aims.
Mason and Ambrose, on the other hand, burned down an unoccupied research building in the middle of the night, far from residential housing. No one was intended to be hurt and no one was.
If no one was hurt, it was as much luck as it was luck that no one was hurt in the probable arson fires in apartment buildings near the author’s home. The arsonists (assuming it was arson, which seems likely but unproven) in that case could probably also say that they didn’t intend to hurt anyone–it’s just that in both cases, neither seems to have really cared all that much if they happened to hurt someone by accident. Research is not a 9 to 5 job and there is almost always a graduate student (or postdoc or professor) working late in any given research building at any given hour of the night.
IMHO, arson for any reason, whether for political or financial gain, should be punished severely. And any fire which benefits the property’s owner(s) should be investigated as highly suspicious for arson, but I don’t see how that implies that Ambrose and Mason’s crime was any less serious: they set fire to a building without apparently caring whether anyone was inside it or not. My guess is that if asked (in a situation where they felt free to speak their minds) they might have said that anyone who was in the buildings deserved to be put at risk for engaging in GMO research. (How did GMO get to be ANTI-environmentalist anyway? What’s anti-environmentalist about designing crops that need less irrigation and pesticide? Eh, that’s probably a separate argument…I’d feel the same way about the act of arson even if I felt the same way about GMO research as I do about bomb making.)
tea party,
This sort of “you’re agreeing with Bush, ergo you’re wrong” logic is a lousy way to persuade anyone capable of independent thought. My family was both a racial and religious minority in our hometown for many years, and I DON’T consider the malicious property destruction we dealt with as something we’re obliged to shrug off lest we be seen as Bushies or “on the Right.” Fuck that. My father earned what we had by working his ass off and other people weren’t entitled to destroy it to express their feelings. The cowards who smashed our windows and messed up our car were people were trying to terrorize us — even if no one ever laid a finger on anyone in my family — and I’m proud that it didn’t work.
Property destruction and harm to people’s bodies can be in the same category when it comes to intent (“what is this crime intended to achieve?”) without being in the same category with regard to the action itself. I think you are using an oversimplified idea of categories in the criminal law. Someone who intentionally kills a black man for his wallet, and someone who kills a black man who moved into a heretofore all-white neighborhood in order to frighten his family and those like him from doing it again, are both in the same category of “first degree murderer.” However, only one of them is in the category “hate crime.”
Um, yeah, the Boston Tea Party was capitalist terrorism: the colonists were unhappy that their smuggling of tea no longer would be the cheapest option, so they destroyed the property of their competitors in the East India Company. The folks interested in achieving their aims peacefully organized a non-importation agreement among colonial merchants, and a boycott of foreign tea by consumers who looked for locally-made alternatives to imported tea. I’m a much bigger fan of this line of American reform — the nonviolent, non-destructive boycotts and sit-ins and so forth — than of the folks who tried to get their way by busting shit up.
The folks who blew up Stirling Hall on the UW Campus didn’t intend to kill anyone, either.
They just failed to anticipate that graduate students study really, really late into the night.
regarding the discussion of intention (ie “it’s just that in both cases, neither seems to have really cared all that much if they happened to hurt someone by accident” etc):
Mason & Ambrose’s MSU action was claimed as ELF, which has a three point protocol, the 3rd of which is “To take all necessary precautions against harming any animal — human or non-human.”
There probably been hundreds of ELF actions over the last 12+ years and no one has ever been killed or injured (including late night graduate students or firefighters). Obviously, people using fire have no way to make sure that’s the case, but clearly there is a specific intent not to hurt anyone.
You can read Mason’s own statement to the court about her commitment to the sanctity of all life (both human and non-human) here:
http://supportmariemason.org/texts/masons-sentencing-statement-feb-5-2009/
redredgreen,
Sure, and the Weathermen “took precautions” against killing anyone, but mostly they just got lucky until the day three of them blew themselves up. The Vietnam War protesters who blew up Sterling Hall were unlucky — they took precautions that proved insufficient. Unless ELF calls in a warning before it blows anything up, and provides sufficient time for evacuation, it’s risking that someone unexpectedly will be in a building at a strange hour, as happened at Sterling Hall. Did Mason and those who aided and abetted her call Catherine Ives before setting fire to her office, to ensure that neither she nor anyone else would be there?
I’m glad you’re sharing some of your personal experiences here, PG. One of the reasons I generally avoid blog debates on political matters is that I don’t know enough about the people I’m talking to to know what their experiences are and, frankly, whether they’re engaged enough to make it worth my time.
My goal was NOT to say that because it’s like Bush then it’s wrong. My goal was to question what environmentalists and feminists have to gain by adopting the state’s broad definition of “terrorism.” There might be some rewards, theoretically: The designation of anti-abortion gunmen as terrorists, for instance, could theoretically play a role as a deterrent, although I doubt it would be very effective. The designation of racist crimes as terrorism could perhaps do the same thing, although the designation of “hate crimes” seems to make a lot more sense, both for them and for the anti-abortion guys.
I take your point on intentions and crimes. Intention constitutes the difference between murder and manslaughter, for instance, and I have no issue with that. When it comes to political intentions, though, I get a little nervous, and when it comes to the word terrorism, I think we’re in very dangerous waters. Marie committed a crime as a political act; she knew she might go to prison. Okay. I don’t think the act was effective or one that I would choose to engage in. Okay. But I still oppose the sentence because it’s such a convenient bridge for coming after anybody who works to oppose anything the government wants to do.
That can include your preferred method of organizing, the boycott, as well. That’s where the whole “marketplace of ideas” thing becomes so problematic. They say you’re interfering with the market and that that’s a crime. There’s a group called Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty that ran an insanely successful boycott campaign against Huntington Life Sciences. Because they also posted the addresses of HLS employees on their website, however, the prosecution charged them with “conspiracy to violate the Animal Enterprise Protection Act” and “interstate stalking.” Perhaps the postings were a tactical mistake. But it’s an example of how they can take out an organization putting together a boycott with this terrorism enhancement stuff.
I don’t use property destruction in my own activism, PG. A revitalized labor movement in solidarity with greens is the meat and potatoes of the political near future I’d like to see. But I can certainly imagine cases where the terrorism enhancement could be used against political speech and that’s why I oppose Marie’s sentence and extension of the highly charged term “terrorism” to acts like hers.
tea party,
Interesting. What do you think of posting abortion providers’ names and addresses, as was done with the “Nuremberg Files” section of an abortion prohibitionist website? There was no call to harm the providers physically, but when one was killed, a strikethrough was put over his info. Merely political speech?
PG Writes:” Sure, and the Weathermen “took precautions” against killing anyone, but mostly they just got lucky until the day three of them blew themselves up.”
No no, your understanding of the Weathermen is all backward. The explosion in the townhouse that killed three people happened BEFORE any of the bombing campaigns. It was a planning for what I think was their FIRST action. In fact, it probably was for the best, since in their dozens of other actions later in the 1970s, they did not kill anyone. (However, Weather was not committed to not harming anyone – unlike the ELF. The ELF is a sabotage “organization” – not a group who espoused hurting or killing people, as did the RAF or Red Brigades).
“Unless ELF calls in a warning before it blows anything up, and provides sufficient time for evacuation, it’s risking that someone unexpectedly will be in a building at a strange hour, as happened at Sterling Hall. Did Mason and those who aided and abetted her call Catherine Ives before setting fire to her office, to ensure that neither she nor anyone else would be there?”
Well, really the answer to that is Yes. I do not agree with what Mason & Ambrose did. But they set fire to the office in the middle of the night, on New Years Eve. They were personally there – they did not set a bomb with a timer and leave. Mason said she was personally present at all incidents to ensure, to the best of her ability, that no one was hurt. So it would be my assumption that they cleared the building first. And since they were there in person, obviously they knew Ives was not there.
On this note, too, Mason did graduate work in Chemistry and I am sure she is well aware of the hours that graduate students keep.
I oppose Marie’s sentence and extension of the highly charged term “terrorism” to acts like hers.
What possible purpose can arson of a laboratory doing work you oppose have except for terrorism in the most basic sense–causing terror and thereby stopping people from joining similar enterprises in the future? Because burning one facility is hardly going to stop GMO research (or the DOD or whoever). Slow down one particular researcher yes, stop the research no. It is only an effective act if it creates enough fear to cause people to not be willing to work for Monsanto and other companies doing GMO work in the future. Similarly, what is the point of publishing the researchers’ addresses if not stalking or at least harassment? What would you think if a Monsanto employee infiltrated ELF, got the names and addresses of its members, and then published them on the web?
redredgreen,
I don’t think so. A timeline:
June 18, 1969 – the SDS convention, at which the organization fragments between those determined to maintain nonviolence and those willing to use violence. The latter group re-forms as the Weathermen.
October 7, 1969 – Weathermen blow up a statue in Chicago built to commemorate police casualties incurred in the 1886 Haymarket Riot
October 8-10, 1969 – the Days of Rage riots in Chicago, in which dozens of both policemen and Weathermen are injured. Richard Elrod, a lawyer for the city, is permanently paralyzed after colliding with Weatherman Brian Flanagan.
February 21, 1970 – Gasoline-filled molotov cocktails were thrown at the home of New York State Supreme Court Justice Murtagh, who was overseeing a trial of a Black Panthers, as well as at a police car in Manhattan and two military recruiting stations in Brooklyn. Murtagh’s son got his 15 minutes of fame during the 2008 election with a piece about the arson.
March 6, 1970 – the Greenwich Village explosion in which three Weathermen were killed. This was the point at which the Weathermen became the Weather Underground.
As for Ambrose and Mason’s skill and care in carrying out the arson of Agriculture Hall, according to the indictment, “Ambrose lit the fuse, unintentionally causing the gasoline fumes that had collected in the enclosed office spaces to explode. This interrupted Mason’s spray-painting, burned her hair, and prompted both to immediately flee the building as it began to burn. The ensuing fire… also required responses by the fire departments of three adjacent jurisdictions, and numerous personnel of those departments were at substantial risk of injury while they performed their duties.”
Hi Dianne,
you wrote:
You’re probably right that the action wasn’t effective in furthering Mason’s ultimate goals. I agree. But that’s not what this conversation is about, at least not for me.
While I think the law is right to take your intent in mind when sentencing crimes, I have a problem with it taking your politics in mind when doing so. And, specific kinds of politics is even worse: remember, what we’re looking at here is the Green Scare: a long and increasingly intense government campaign specifically designed to crush the radical wing of environmentalism, including highly effective groups like the Rainforest Action Network. People like Harvey Kushner are already trying to use this argument against tree-sitting in the redwood forests, and so on. They have used it against protesters at the RNC as well.
My fear is that if we just sit back and accept their attempt to put Marie Mason in the same category with Osama Bin Laden, it will come back to bite us in the ass quite soon. Perhaps it will bite us there no matter what we do, because mainstream lefties have such a hard time taking any position besides contempt toward folks like Marie Mason or Daniel McGowan that they really get their wires crossed on the larger picture.
I don’t know if you’re an environmentalist, or if you’ve read up on the Green Scare. But my message to you and PG is that allowing the government to hand down enhanced sentences for actions you don’t approve in will later evolve into enhanced sentences for actions you like. Give’em an inch, they take a mile. Eventually, they won’t leave you anything that’s effective anymore. And that scares me, so I guess I’d have to call it “terrorism.”
to Diane:
Diane is missing the point here. The point is very simply this: Arson is Not Terrorism just because it was politically motivated.
On this point, it is not just the ‘Fifth Estate’ who supports this, but many civil rights organizations do as well – the ACLU has argued against these terrorism enhancements, as has the Civil Liberties Defense Center; and the National Lawyers Guild has gone so far as to set up a special hotline to aid people charged with these crimes.
Arson is arson. Declaring arson to be “terrorism” when there is one set of motives for it (ie a particular kind of politics) vs another set of motives (ie landlords wanting to collect insurance money & build condos) is having one law for activists, and another law for capitalists.
I completely disagree with Diane’s definition of terrorism: “terrorism in the most basic sense–causing terror and thereby stopping people from joining similar enterprises in the future”
Terrorism is about KILLING PEOPLE. Terrorism is about hijacking airplanes and crashing them into buildings, killing thousands of people. Terrorism is about setting bombs in public places and killing people in discotheques and cafes. Terrorism is launching jet strikes against blockaded cities, killing hundreds of people while preventing civilians from fleeing.
Terrorism is NOT burning down empty buildings in the middle of the night, while specifying that people are not being threatened with being killed or even harmed.
“What would you think if a Monsanto employee infiltrated ELF, got the names and addresses of its members, and then published them on the web?”
Well, then would NOT be terrorism!!
redredgreen,
“Terrorism is about KILLING PEOPLE.”
So it’s only terrorism when there’s homicide? Kidnappings aren’t terrorism? Throwing a baseball through the window of a black family’s home with the message “Get out” isn’t terrorism? The baseball that accidentally shatters the neighbor’s window when thrown by an over-enthusiastic kid, and that shatters that window with deliberation and malice, must be treated the same?
I think we’re seeing a fundamental disjunction here between people who are comfortable with the criminal justice system’s charging and punishing defendants based on motive, and those who are pure act-consequentialists.
tea party,
I’ll shore up that slippery slope when we come to it. So long as it’s just a matter of enhanced penalties for things that are already crimes — arson, already a crime! regardless of motive! never legal! — I don’t really worry about someone I support getting pulled into the dragnet.
PG:
well, to briefly reply to your Weather chronology: the first action was against STATUE and i’m really sorry if i don’t take that one very seriously; and the second one has nothing what-so-ever to do with a bombing, it was a street demonstration that occurred during the brief period that Weather was still an above-ground organization; as to the third – attacking an occupied residence is a despicable act, but one act does not make a campaign. Your quote was “Sure, and the Weathermen ‘took precautions’ against killing anyone, but mostly they just got lucky until the day three of them blew themselves up.” So, as I said, the vast majority of the Weather bombings happened after the townhouse explosion.
We can probably both agree here that the townhouse explosion was probably lucky for everyone, because it made Weather very wary of killing folks at the very beginning of their career as an organization, which lasted through the 70s.
“So it’s only terrorism when there’s homicide?”
Or at least the intent of it. Yes.
” Kidnappings aren’t terrorism?”
No, kidnappings are kidnappings. Aren’t there already laws against kidnappings?
“Throwing a baseball through the window of a black family’s home with the message “Get out” isn’t terrorism?”
You know, this is an interesting topic. Some far-right types (who I personally loathe, having in the past worked with anti-fascist groups — as did Marie Mason) have expressed sympathy with my arguments, saying they oppose “hate crimes” laws for the same reason. I honestly never gave this slant a lot of thought, but I will point the main difference:
These racist acts come in the context of a long history of threats to people’s lives – the legacy of lynchings and such. “Get out” is the first message which is followed by burning people alive or bombing occupied churches or stringing them up from trees.
Environmentalists and animal rights activists have NEVER done ANY of these later things to their opponents.
The context is 100% different.
In the US, people of color and queer people and jews and muslims and others have a whole historical legacy of oppression directed against them as a group. The destroyers of the natural world and exploiters of animals suffer no such history of oppression. And therein lies worlds of differences. What’s being attacked here is corporate profits; and this is the reason that the attackers are being charged with terrorism.
“I think we’re seeing a fundamental disjunction here between people who are comfortable with the criminal justice system’s charging and punishing defendants based on motive, and those who are pure act-consequentialists.”
ack, pulling out analytic philosophy on social-historical continentals!
No, what’s going on here is an opposition to extending the laws against terrorism to specifically include environmental and animal rights actions that were previously considered illegal, but not terrorist in any manner.
Environmentalists and animal rights activists have NEVER done ANY of these later things to their opponents.
True only in the most limited sense. Animal rights activists have certainly committed crimes intended (according to their own statements) to terrify and harass reasearchers. For example, attempting to set a house on fire–without making sure it was empty or giving any warning. And there have certainly been instances of animal rights activists advocating assassination.
It’s mostly been incompetence and luck that have kept there from being deaths. So far.
Terrorism is about KILLING PEOPLE
No, that’s murder (or manslaughter, vehicular homicide, etc). Don’t we already have laws against murder? Why are some acts of murder terrorism and others not? You could argue that there really is no such thing as terrorism or that there are specific criteria that are not met by the animal rights movement, but I don’t think that this definition works.
While I think the law is right to take your intent in mind when sentencing crimes, I have a problem with it taking your politics in mind when doing so.
Ah, but whose politics? In other words, you seem to be arguing that since the end result of environmental protests involving violence or the threat of violence is a social good, then it’s substantively different from violence or the threat of violence that comes from white supremacist or other political groups whose end result is what most people woul agree is a social bad. Basic end-justifies-the-means.
How then, does one compose a law that addresses the discrepancy?
(I also disagree with the comparison between tree-sitting and burning down buildings.)
Are the “it’s not terrorism” people treating terrorism as a word describing a certain motivation that involves both comparatively minor and major acts, or are you treating it as a word which applies only to major acts?
If it’s a spectrum, then the fact that it gets applied to mass murderers as well as the weather underground would make perfect sense. If it’s a cutoff that defines only major things, then the argument is more sound.
redredgreen,
I’m not sure you’re getting the whole “overlapping categories in criminal law” thing. Something can be terrorism or a hate crime, and also an act of homicide, assault, theft, kidnapping. Homicide et al. exist in the common law of crime that we inherited from England (along with much of tort, contracts, evidence, etc., but not things like the class action device or antitrust law, which are American innovations).
Designations of an act as terrorism, hate crime and so forth are purely statutory — they did not exist in the common law. They’re also relatively recent in our legal history. Federal legislators created them in large part to provide federal jurisdiction for crimes that they thought were receiving insufficient attention from local authorities, and/or crimes that were part of a pattern that extended beyond a single jurisdiction and therefore needed a wider scope.
Politics will necessarily play a role in these concerns: local authorities weren’t good about investigating and appropriately prosecuting what are now called hate crimes because there wasn’t political support in their jurisdiction for doing so; a national political ideology such as the KKK, anti-abortion, etc. will form a national pattern of actions that can’t be overseen except by a federal authority.
Oh, so if something were once considered Not Terrorism, it never can be Terrorism in the future? Sending anthrax to abortion clinics wasn’t designated as terrorism when abortion was first broadly legalized in New York and California before Roe v. Wade, it was just illegal. Federal legislators therefore cannot consider sending anthrax to clinics to be terrorism ever in the future?
This doesn’t make sense. There’s no coherent theory being expressed here about what terrorism may be, other than “My politics couldn’t possibly be part of a terrorist act.”
When we’re talking about intent – generally, the stated intent of these kinds of arsons is not to terrorize researchers into pursuing other work. It’s to change the costs of the research to institutions like universities.
That doens’t mean it doesn’t terrorize individuals, or that it shouldn’t be illegal – but the stated purpose of most of these actions is to change the financial cost of animal and genetic research, or of building housing developments in ecologically fragile areas.
Unlike the Weathermen, or the RNC Welcome Committee, whose goal was to change people’s feelings about issues – and DEFINITELY unlike anti-abortionists who bomb clinics and shoot doctors – ELF’s property-damage work, and some of the older Earth First! property damage actions, was argued (in public) on purely capitalist grounds – make it more expensive and less of it will happen.
I agree. In fact, the most precious ideas–those about charity, generosity, ethics–earn the ideator very little.